Solo - Jack Higgins [38]
She was an angular, olive-skinned, awkward girl with grey-green eyes and black hair inherited from her mother, a Polish Jew from Warsaw, when she went to UCLA. She majored in psychology in 1962, researched in experimental psychiatry at the Tavistock Clinic in London, and took her doctorate at Cambridge University by 1965.
She went to Vienna to the Holzer Institute for the Criminally Insane to follow her particular interest, the psychopathology of violence. It was here that she first came into contact with that startling phenomenon of our times, the urban guerrilla. The terrorist from the middle-class home.
During the years that followed, she pursued this study, interviewing her subjects in most of the major cities of Europe, working, where she had to, for the State authorities involved, although this was not a situation she was happy with.
She kept the closest of contacts with her father, returning home at least twice a year. He visited her in Europe, mainly when the developing Italian film scene took him to Rome and new opportunities. Once again, his name appeared on the credits. He won screenplay awards in Berlin, in Paris, in London. And then, in 1970, he collapsed with a massive heart attack at the San Fernando Valley farmhouse.
She was in Paris at the time, at the Sorbonne, and flew home at once. He hung on, waited for her, so that when she entered his room at the Cedars of Lebanon Hospital, the blue eyes in the strong tanned face that was suddenly so old, opened instantly. She took his hand. He smiled once and died.
They all came to the funeral. Directors, actors, producers, front-office men who hadn't spoken to him during the bad years. Who'd turned and walked the other way when they saw him coming. Now he was dead, there was even talk that the Academy was considering a special award.
As a Catholic of the old-fashioned variety, she had him buried instead of cremated and stood at the cemetery, shaking one hand after the other as they all filed past, hating every coward, every hypocrite there.
Afterwards, she fled, back to the farmhouse in the Valley, but that was no good - no good at all with memories of him everywhere.
There was no one to turn to, for in one respect he had never been able to help her and that was in her relations with the opposite sex. Her dealing with men had always been brief and unsatisfactory emotionally and therefore unsatisfactory physically also. The blunt truth was that she had never found anyone who matched up to her father.
When she was close to the final edge of things, salvation appeared in the shape of an airmail letter with an English stamp postmarked Cambridge which dropped into her mailbox one morning. It contained the offer of a fellowship at her old college, New Hall and she grabbed with both hands, fleeing to the only other refuge she had ever known in her life.
And things had gone well for her. It was like coming home. There was the work, there was her book and there was Cambridge in all its glory, particularly on that beautiful April morning in 1972, when she first met John Mikali.
She worked all night on the proofs of the fifth edition of her book, the publishers wanting them back by Friday. Instead of going to bed, she followed her set routine. Put on a tracksuit, got out her bicycle and rode down towards the centre of the city, clean and calm and beautiful in the morning.
Fifteen minutes later, she was running on the footpath along the Backs, the lawns which slope down to the River Cam. She was thoroughly enjoying herself, pleased with the night's work, relishing the keen morning smell and then she became aware of the sound of someone overtaking her and Mikali appeared at her side.
He wore a very simple navy blue tracksuit and running shoes. A white towel was wrapped around his neck.
'Nice morning for it,' he said.
She recognized him at once, could hardly fail to for posters of