The Charmers: A Novel(8)
Chad Prescott
The flight from Paris’s Charles de Gaulle to Nice’s C?te d’Azur was delayed. That was what Chad Prescott was told when he disembarked from his third flight in twenty-four hours, starting out in a small and very ancient Fokker biplane in a jungle airstrip in the Amazon that took him to Manaus, and from there, on a six-seater Lear to S?o Paulo. Which was where he had started out to begin with, several months ago.
It seemed longer than that, he thought wearily, taking a seat at the bar in the first-class lounge and downing a beer, his first in a long time. Well, his first cold beer. He’d had others but those he’d drunk in locations where refrigeration was erratic, if not completely unknown. He had the generator in his truck, of course, but that was used for medical situations, its energy not to be wasted on simply chilling a beer.
He ordered a ham-and-cheese sandwich. It came on a soggy roll but still tasted better than anything he recalled eating recently. There had never been much time to think of anything other than the job at hand.
Chad was what he’d always termed a “medical man.” Born in Chicago, where he later attended med school, to a French mother and a U.D. engineer father, who had died together in a train crash in Europe, he was used to international travel from childhood, to calling the place he happened to be at that moment, “home.” He was a surgeon specializing in facial reconstruction, which is what took him twice a year to South America, Africa, the Congo—you name it—and where he operated on children with cleft palates, or without noses, or whose jaws were malformed. Job satisfaction rated high on his list, especially when he saw the amazed joy on the young patients’ faces when they looked at the results in the mirror. He might not be able to give them beauty, but he gave them normality. It was enough.
His other job was as a consultant at a top Paris hospital, where he kept an apartment on the Left Bank. In Paris he needed to be near the river Seine, to keep it somehow always in view or at least around the corner, a walk from the Rue Jacob, or Bonaparte, or the Café de Flore. Sometimes he thought he lived on the terrace at the Flore; he couldn’t count the hours he must have spent in those uncomfortable faux-cane chairs, sipping a glass of wine or a coffee, just watching the world go by. The contrast to the jungles of his other life—his real life as he thought of it—was extreme and he relished it.
Now though, he was heading for the place he loved best of all: his villa in the South of France where he was fortunate enough to own several acres—hectares as they were called—that protected the privacy he needed. Plus, he now owned the villa next door and its land, left to him by his old friend and neighbor, Jolly Matthews, who’d sent him a letter to that effect a couple of months before she died so violently, so tragically. He’d liked the old girl, they’d enjoyed many a pleasant evening together, conversation and the wine flowing, her tales of the past, of the famous musical star, the beauteous Jerusha, and life as it was then, before the crowds and the airports and the hustle and bustle.
He planned to invite guests to his villa, old friends, not many but enough; bistros would be visited; a swim in the cool blue Mediterranean of an early morning; good hot French coffee; a croissant rich with butter; perhaps even a mango from the tree he’d planted himself five years ago, if mangoes were in season. He wasn’t sure. Out there, in the jungle villages, he kind of lost track of how the seasons passed, unless it was the rainy season and he found himself engulfed in mud. That was the way life was, but his work gave him the energy, the strength to go on. Still, it was good to be going home to perfect peace and quiet.
His flight was finally announced and they boarded. He was thankful he had spent the previous night in a hotel where he’d had the opportunity to take a proper shower and shave, though his hair badly needed cutting. He chopped at it himself every now and again. It was dark blond, floppy, thick, and dead straight.
He was tall, six-two, perhaps overly lean, but with a tight body gained from hard work and the deprivation of the jungle locations where he spent a great deal of his time, often forced to operate in the flickering light from a generator that sometimes went out completely.
He was respectable enough now, in his khakis and a white polo shirt picked up in the airport shop, his trusty Nikes, and a backpack so ancient it was certainly not recognizable as coming from Loewe, the prestigious Spanish leather company. His face was lightly tanned, well-seasoned he called it, laughing at himself, which made the lines around his dark blue eyes crease up and a furrow appear across his brow. He did not consider himself good-looking, and had no vanity. He was a medical man first and foremost.
Twice a year he allowed himself to “come home.” The villa had been in his family for five generations, and was smaller than might be expected, never added to, never changed. It was basically still the simple white farmhouse it had always been, though now with modern comforts, like showers and electricity and a swimming pool. And a sort of beauty because Chad was a civilized man who hung his paintings on the walls and spent many an hour admiring them, and who filled his library shelves with rare editions as well as with paperback detective stories of the old-fashioned kind, which he found entertaining.
The villa itself was built from local stone for the first floor, and white painted wood for the second. There were no dormers and only a single chimney, venting the fireplace that divided the living area from the kitchen, an odd arrangement he found completely satisfactory because it saved time and effort. Log fires needed fueling and in winter he’d often fall asleep in front of the flames, drawing back his energy, his life.