Lovers and Liars Trilogy Read Free Page A

wariness, once necessarily acute, still remained.
    Reaching across, he rested his hand on the parcel lightly. He ran his fingers across the surface of the paper, feeling for ridges, for the telltale presence of wire.
    He could detect nothing. He turned the package so the edges of the wrapping paper faced him. The overlap was unsealed but taut. He hesitated, then picked up his sharpest kitchen knife. He prised the seals loose first. He cut the string in four places and eased it off.
    Nothing. He was already beginning to feel foolish, to see his suspicions as exaggerated. Yet why a stenciled address? He looked at the stains of developing fluid on his fingernails. He frowned at the parcel, and thought of the photographs packed in his briefcase, awaiting delivery.
    To obtain those pictures he had donned camouflage clothing and crawled five hundred yards through the outlying scrub of a Provençal estate. He had carried with him a 1200mm telephoto lens that weighed more than twenty pounds, and a special low-level tripod made to his specifications. Together these insured that he could take clear, unblurred portraits at a range of three hundred yards from his unsuspecting quarry while lying on his belly like a snake. Once upon a time he had been a war photographer. The lessons and techniques learned then were now applied in other ways. What was he now, he wondered, still looking at the parcel. A paparazzo—not a man worth injuring anymore, not someone worth the damage a letter bomb could inflict. He felt a second of self-loathing, a familiar shame. Then with a quick movement he unfolded the brown wrapping paper and eased the lid from the box.
    Inside the foldings and interleavings of tissue there was no note, no accompanying card or message, just a crumpled black shape that he took at first to be a scrap of material.
    He drew it out, and found to his surprise that the material was leather, the finest, softest black kid, and the object was a woman’s glove.
    A left-handed glove, and brand-new—unworn, he thought at first. Then he noticed the faint creases across the palm, as if a hand had worn this glove, if briefly, and that hand had been tightly clenched. He examined it more closely. It was narrowly cut, made to fit a delicate hand. An evening glove. Against a woman’s arm, he estimated, this glove would encase from elbow to fingertips.
    He stared at it, trying to decipher its message. Was it meant to be seductive or threatening? Was it a clue or a prank? He was about to toss it back in its box, when a lingering curiosity made him examine it more closely. He pressed it against the back of his hand and felt it slip easily against his skin as if it had been oiled. Then he raised it to his face, and sniffed.
    The glove had a pungent and disturbing scent. He could detect the odor of a woman’s perfume, and beneath that, imperfectly masked by ambergris, civet, and damask, another, earthier smell. Fish, blood—something like that. Suddenly the supple glove disgusted him.
    He threw it down. Late, he thought, checking his watch one more time; that damned parcel had delayed him. He grabbed his briefcase, his camera cases, and the small battered valise of inexpertly packed clothes. As he opened the door, his daughter’s voice floated up to him. A week until the next visiting day. He felt a surge of love and protectiveness so painfully sharp that for an instant it immobilized him.
    He stood on the landing, staring out unseeingly at a view of roofscapes, a pale, drab leaden sky. Rain today, rain yesterday, rain the day before that: endless winter. Spring, he thought with a sudden and passionate longing; and there, for a brief second, he glimpsed it, even sensed it on his skin, all the springtimes of his boyhood, the optimism and elation that accompanied them. He could see and smell the fields, the vineyards, the oak woods of his childhood. Across the endless gold of the long afternoon he heard his mother call to him, and watched the river