The Butler(47)

“It’s a little bit like Cain and Abel, isn’t it?” she said pensively.

“Yeah. A little too much so.” They turned to other subjects then and went back to work. By the end of the following week, things felt normal between them again, except that Olivia was still waiting for the report on him.

She was surprised to hear from Jean Beaulieu that week, Audrey Wellington’s decorator friend who had come to tea. He was giving a dinner party on Saturday and invited Olivia. She was grateful for the invitation. She still wanted to meet people in Paris and hadn’t yet. He said he was having twelve people over for dinner.

    “It won’t be as elegant as your place, with your fancy butler,” he teased her. “But I have a pretty good cook I hire for parties.” She wanted to find one too that she could have cook for dinner parties, once she met some people. She accepted Jean’s invitation with pleasure. It was her first step into a Parisian social life.

She wore a simple but sexy black dress when she went to his dinner party. He had a very fancy apartment on the avenue Montaigne, with a view of the Eiffel Tower. His apartment looked like a yacht since that was most of what he did. But the people were interesting and pleasant. She was seated next to a very charming architect, Charles de Prex. He spoke excellent English and was mesmerized by her. Jean told him about the chateau she was renovating and decorating and he was impressed. He appeared to be at the dinner on his own. And just before the party ended, he asked her if she would have dinner with him sometime. She had enjoyed his company all evening.

“I’d like that very much,” she said, and meant it. She’d had a very good time talking to him, and he was clearly very taken with her. He hadn’t left her side all night. It was only when they collected their coats that a very pretty redhead in a short black dress sidled over to him, and told him to stop misbehaving, it was time to go home. She was his wife. He looked mildly embarrassed but not very, and Jean told her after they left that he was a bit of a player, but a great guy. His wife was a very successful attorney and they had four children. Olivia was incensed by how misleading he had been. He had never once said he was married or mentioned his wife. And what was he going to do about the dinner invitation he extended? Just take her out and cheat on his wife?

    She took a cab home, which was how she’d arrived. And Charles, the infamous cheater, called her ten minutes after she got home. She had given him her number when he invited her to dinner.

“I’m sorry about that little unpleasantness when we left the dinner,” he said smoothly. “Normally she’s quite good about these things. We have an agreement. She has the occasional fling too.”

“How nice for her,” Olivia said icily, furious that she had fallen for it and been duped all evening. “I’m afraid I’m a little more straightforward than that. I don’t get involved in other people’s ‘arrangements.’ I’m not interested in that.”

“You sound so charming when you’re angry, Olivia. I would kiss you if I was there. Americans are so funny about these things. This is Paris. The city of love.”

“Actually, if you were here, you wouldn’t kiss me because I wouldn’t let you. I think cheaters are disgusting. You’ll have to find someone else to play with,” she said and hung up. He called two more times and she didn’t answer. She was furious at herself for getting fooled, even for the length of a dinner party. And his wife was gorgeous. Why cheat on her? All she could think of with men like that was George Lawrence and how he had ruined her mother’s life. Olivia had never gone out with a married man, and she didn’t intend to start now. She knew where that path led. She had seen it firsthand. She would have preferred to be alone forever than to date a married man. But it was disappointing. He had been so handsome and intelligent and seemed so nice. She’d enjoyed meeting him and been excited about dinner with him.

    She was still angry about it on Sunday, when she got an email from Eric Parks, her lawyer in New York, with a large attachment. It was the criminal report on Joachim that she’d been waiting for, and she could see that it was long. She didn’t know what to expect and was almost afraid to read it. But she couldn’t avoid it any longer. She climbed into bed with her laptop, opened the attachment, and began reading.

It began at the beginning and said that his father was the heir of an aristocratic family in Buenos Aires, and had been a banker at a respected financial institution owned by his family. His mother, Liese, was born in Germany. Her mother, Joachim’s maternal grandmother, was killed in the Allied bombings of Germany, and Liese’s aristocratic father had moved from Berlin to Buenos Aires with Joachim’s mother after the war. She was five years old at the time. She had grown up in high social circles, married, and gave birth to twin boys at the age of thirty-nine. Joachim and Javier were mentioned by name.

It then went on to say that Joachim’s maternal grandfather, who had enjoyed high social standing in Buenos Aires for thirty-four years, and had a considerable fortune, was exposed four months after Joachim’s birth as a Nazi war criminal. Further investigation had revealed that in exchange for secrets, information, and documents relating to other war criminals of the German High Command, he had made a very lucrative deal with both the Americans and the British, who had paid him a very large sum, and allowed him to leave Germany on the condition he never return to Europe or the United States. And he had been allowed to take several very valuable paintings as his personal spoils of war. The agreement had been top secret, and he was discovered and exposed by a well-known hunter of Nazi war criminals. His agreement with the Allies was disavowed and rendered null and void, and he was extradited to Germany at the age of seventy-three, where he was convicted, served eight years of his fifty-year sentence, and died in prison. Joachim and Javier were four months old at the time their grandfather was extradited. Their grandfather’s fortune and art collection were reclaimed and sent back to Germany. Within weeks afterward, Joachim’s mother had been abandoned by her husband, Alejandro Canal. He gave up all legal rights to their twin sons. They were divorced within a year, with no financial support for her or the twins. Joachim’s mother had been left penniless, with no remaining family, other than her father in a German prison, where he died several years later. Joachim’s father remarried a year later, another local socialite, and he was subsequently killed in a polo accident when Joachim and Javier were three years old. And according to their sources, Joachim and his brother had never known or seen their father after the age of four months.