“You know the custody arrangement!” Ellen said angrily.
“Tell me!”
“Alternative weekends,” Ellen said. “Vacation by arrangement.”
“So Billy was with his father last weekend?”
“No,” Ellen admitted tightly.
“And the time before that?”
“No.” Tighter still.
“Why not?”
A shrug.
“Why not!”
“Patrick’s got problems; he got laid off.”
“From the loan company?”
Ellen shook her head. “That was the job before last. He was working on commission, with a group of guys, trying to sell apartments in a renewal development downtown.”
“But he got laid off?”
Ellen nodded.
“When?”
She shrugged uncertainly. “I’m not sure. Three months ago, maybe four. I’m not sure.”
Jill had been listening, her head moving backward and forward like a spectator’s at a tennis match. She said abruptly, “Honey, we’ve been up here twice in the last four months! Why didn’t you tell us?”
“My business,” Ellen said, little girl again.
“No, honey,” Jill said gently. “Our business.”
“It was all right at first. He kept seeing Billy and …” she trailed away.
“And what!” demanded O’Farrell, guessing already.
“And the payments,” Ellen finished.
“How much is he behind?”
There was another uncertain shoulder move. “Two months.”
“Alimony and child support?” O’Farrell pressed.
Ellen nodded. “Actually it’s three months.”
“And when did he last want to see Billy?”
“It’s not that he doesn’t want to see him! He and Jane have two kids of their own now; he’s got a lot of priorities.”
“You and Billy are his prior commitments!” O’Farrell insisted. “He married you first. He had Billy first. He owes you first.”
“He asked me to give him a little time, just to sort himself out. Jane’s still jealous of me, he says.”
“She’s jealous of you, for Christ’s sake!” Jill erupted. “She was his mistress for a year before she became pregnant to make him choose between the two of you. And you’re doing her favors! Come on!”
“Leave it, Mom. Please leave it!”
“You could have died in that car,” O’Farrell said. “Been badly hurt at least.”
“I was saving, to get it done. But I didn’t want to fall behind with the mortgage.”
“Have you?” O’Farrell asked. He’d put up the down payment for Ellen for the apartment, believing she could manage the monthly installments.
There was a jerking nod of her head. “Only this month.”
“You still make the same?” O’Farrell asked. Ellen worked as a medical receptionist; she’d cut short her training to be a physiotherapist like her mother in order to marry Patrick. Billy had been born nine calendar months later.
“It averages around a thousand a month; sometimes I work overtime and it comes to a little more.”
“You can’t afford to live here on a thousand a month!” Jill said. “You can’t afford to live anywhere on a thousand a month. You’ve got to get Patrick’s payments going through the courts, like you should have done in the first place.”
“You can’t get what’s not there.”
“How do you know it’s not there?” O’Farrell asked.
“I know.”
‘Tell me something,” Jill said. “You surely don’t think there’s a chance of you and Patrick getting back together again, do you? He’s got two other children by her!”
The girl’s shoulders went up and down listlessly. “I don’t know.”
“Would you get back together if he asked you?”
Another shoulder movement. “I don’t know.”
O’Farrell and Jill frowned at each other over their daughter’s head, shocked by the lassitude. Each tried to think of something appropriate to say and failed.
It was Jill who spoke, with forced briskness, trying to break the mood. “Why don’t I make supper?”
Without asking either woman O’Farrell fixed drinks for all three of them. Jill took hers without any critical reaction and didn’t comment or even look when he made himself another before they sat down. Largely for the child’s benefit, they made light conversation during the meal, and afterward O’Farrell played spacemen with Billy while the women cleared away. The boy was allowed to watch an hour of television, and while Ellen and Jill were bathing him before bed O’Farrell made a third drink, a large one, and kept it defiantly in his hand when Jill came back into the room. She didn’t appear to notice it.
By unspoken agreement Ellen’s problems weren’t raised again during the evening, but the subject hung between them, like a room divider, all the time.
That night, in Billy’s bed, lying on her back in the darkness, Jill said, “Christ, what a mess!”
“It’s not too bad, not yet,” O’Farrell said, trying to be realistic.
“It’s not too good, either.”
“I tried to talk to Billy at lunchtime about drugs.”
He felt her head turn toward him in the darkness. “And?”
“He spoke about it,” O’Farrell tried to explain. “This little kid tried to speak about it like he knew what we were talking about and all the time he was playing fucking Star Wars!”
“She’s got to go to an attorney, get the proper court payments set up,” Jill insisted. “I don’t give a damn how bad his own situation is. I don’t see why Ellea and Billy should suffer because of it; he created it all.”
“Yes,” O’Farrell agreed.
“She married too young,” Jill said abruptly.
“The same age as us.”
“I got you; she got a bastard.”
What words would she use if she really knew? O’Farrell said, “Maybe we were wrong, making it possible for her to buy the apartment. It’s a hell of a drain on what she earns.”
“What can we do, apart from pressure her about a lawyer?”
“I don’t know,” admitted O’Farrell.
“What about money? Couldn’t we make her some sort of allowance?”
Not if he went to Petty and said he wanted to quit. “Yes,” O’Farrell promised. “If we can get her to accept it, we could make her an allowance. We’ll definitely do that.”
“I love you,” Jill said.
Would she if she really knew? he wondered again.
CIA surveillance picked up the Cuban ambassador the moment he left High Holborn. The alert that he was probably making for London airport was radioed from the trailing car when the official vehicle gained the motorway and confirmed when it turned off onto the Heathrow spur. The observer risked following closely behind Rivera at the check-in desk, to discover his destination, but it was the driver who took over to purchase a ticket and board the plane to Brussels, to avoid any chance recognition. Before the aircraft cleared English airspace watchers were already assembling at Brussels, waiting: the CIA officer from London headed back immediately upon arrival, again to avoid possible identification.
Rivera took a taxi into the center of the capital and went through an effort at trail clearing that earned the professionals’ sneers, it was so amateurish. They kept him easily under observation until he entered Pierre Belac’s nondescript office. The Agency had not risked installing any listening devices there. Had they done so, they would have heard Belac ask for a downpayment of thirty-five million dollars and Rivera agreeing without any argument, with an added, entrapping assurance that if Belac had any additional expenditures in excess of this advance sum he would be immediately recompensed. Even with a listening device, they could not have picked up Belac’s reaction, a repeat of his earlier and intense irritation at not having pitched the demand higher at their embassy meeting.