Phoenix Falling (40 page)

"I figure you'll tell what you want me to know when you're ready to talk about it. If you ever are." She hesitated, then said slowly, "One possibility that occurred to me is that you were a runaway teenager who turned some tricks to keep from starving. A lot of kids do that. The lucky ones escape."

He closed his eyes, drifting in limbo, so detached that the horrors of his childhood seemed to belong to someone else. That made it easier to speak, since Rainey deserved to know the truth. "Not a bad guess, but more charitable than I deserve. I was exactly what Nigel Stone claims: a gay whore."

After a long silence, she asked, "For how long?"

"Five years. From age seven to age twelve."

She gasped. "Dear God, that isn't prostitution—it's child molestation! How did it happen?"

"My mother was born somewhere in rural Scotland. Around age seventeen, she ran off to London. She might have been pregnant already, or maybe that came later. There's a lot I don't know about her."

"Do you know who your father was?"

"Haven't the foggiest."

She laughed without humor. "Something we have in common."

"Among other disasters we both suffered." He finished his first drink and went for another, this time filling the glass with ice first.

As he took his seat again, she said, "I've never seen you drink so much."

"If the plane were equipped for it, I'd run the alcohol directly into my veins."

He pressed the icy highball glass against his forehead, remembering his mother. She'd been tall, dark-haired, and green-eyed. Beautiful, and terribly, terribly fragile. "My mother called herself Maggie Mackenzie, though I suspect that wasn't her real name. Since I look like her, only God knows what paternal genes might have been involved."

"So Nigel Stone's birth certificate for James Mackenzie is legitimate?"

"Quite possibly."

"You said there was no evidence tying you to Stone's accusations."

"He can't prove I'm the person listed on the certificate. There isn't a shred of documentation on me from the time Jamie Mackenzie was seven and dropped out of a London council school and when Kenzie Scott started at RADA eleven years later. I didn't exist." He didn't really now. His whole life had been smoke and mirrors.

"How did you go from being the child of a single mother to...? "Her voice faltered. "...to prostitution, then studying at the world's most famous drama school?"

"Whoring was the family business. My mother didn't have any other skills," he said bluntly. "She raised me the best she knew how, even after I started school and the teachers told her I was retarded.

"Of course, by then she was hooked on drugs so maybe she simply didn't care that I was hopeless. Drugs are expensive, and there was only one way she could afford them. She had a pimp boyfriend called Rock. He supplied her with drugs, took her money, and beat her up. When I was seven, I think one of the drugs he supplied must have been contaminated or more potent than usual." He drew a ragged breath. "It killed her."

"Did... did you find her body?" Rainey asked, her voice trembling.

"I watched her die, and couldn't do a damned thing about it." He drank more whisky, thinking this was easier than he'd thought it would be, because he felt nothing. Nothing at all. "Rock came several hours later to beat her for not working. He was quite casual about finding her body. It probably wasn't the first time he'd lost one of his girls to drugs. He took care of everything very efficiently. I don't know where she was buried. There was no funeral service. She was just... gone." But not forgotten.

"Did the pimp take you to the authorities so you could be put into foster care or whatever the English equivalent is?"

"Rock was too sharp a businessman to waste an asset. I was a nice-looking boy, and there's a market for those. He explained that he'd take care of me, but because my mother owed him money, I had to work to pay off her debt. And he knocked me across the room to demonstrate what would happen if I didn't cooperate."

Jamie had been terrified of the pimp, but the fear was less paralyzing than the knowledge that he was stupid and worthless, and deserved whatever punishment Rock chose to inflict. He'd been the perfect, obedient slave, never imagining his life could be any different.

The first step in creating a slave was to break the will.

"The family business." Silent tears ran down Rainey's face. "He forced you to be with pedophiles and perverts and God knows what."

"It was the best training in the world for an actor. I learned how to cower in terror from johns who liked that, and how to be seductive. I learned how to pretend affection, and how to abuse those who wanted to be hurt. RADA was child's play by comparison."

Rainey swallowed hard, imaginative enough to understand all that he wasn't saying. She'd never be able to think of him the same way again, which was perhaps best. "Did you live with Rock?" she asked.

"He preferred to keep his private and business lives separate, so he set me up in a flat with a rotating list of his whores. They made sure I was fed and had clothing and took baths. Some of them were even rather kind."

"How did you escape? Did you run away?"

Rainey didn't—couldn't—understand how completely hollow Jamie Mackenzie had been. No will, no soul, no hope. Hollow people didn't run away. "As I got older, I realized that I was definitely straight, so it became harder and harder to pretend I was a passionate little hustler. One day when I was twelve, I snapped when I was with a German who came to London regularly on business. He liked playing rough. Instead of going along with it as usual, this time I provoked him. He beat me bloody. Enjoyed it so much that he left twice the usual fee."

After the German left, young Jamie had lain weeping on the bed in the sleazy hotel room, racked with agony, and bitterly disappointed that he was still alive.

Face ghostly pale, Rainey asked, "Then what?"

"I was passive to the end. Another regular client, Trevor Scott-Wallace, was scheduled to come an hour after the German. He was a decent old duffer who'd always treated me kindly. The German had left the door unlocked, so Trevor came in and found me battered and bloody.

"Being the responsible sort, he took me to a hospital instead of running away. I was delirious, and started babbling about my life." Jamie had pleaded for death, which had horrified Trevor most of all. "When he realized that I was basically a sex slave rather than a willing whore, he took me home and kept me, like a stray dog."

"You were adopted by a pedophile?" Rainey's voice shook with revulsion.

"It was... more complicated than that. Trevor was a professor of literature, a Shakespeare specialist with an international reputation. We never had a physical relationship. He paid for my time and watched me while he quoted poetry and masturbated. My role was to look enthusiastic and ardent."

Rainey kept her composure despite the weirdness of what he was saying. "Was that better than having him touch you?"

"A little. Enough so it was possible to live under the same roof. He told people I was a distant cousin with no other relatives, so he'd taken me in." He poured more Scotch. "Trevor and Charles were former lovers who'd stayed friends. Trevor was comfortably off but not rich, so it was Charles who paid for the surgery. He had the kind of offhand generosity that didn't think twice about spending tens of thousands of pounds for procedures that weren't covered by the National Health."

Rainey pressed her hand to her mouth. "Surgery?"

"The German had been very thorough. The broken bones of my face needed to be rebuilt, which is how I became the unutterably handsome Kenzie Scott." Bitterly he touched the faint, perfectly sculpted cleft in his chin, then traced one of his high, dramatic cheekbones. "This beautiful face the camera loves, the subject of countless gushing journalistic words, isn't mine. It's as much a lie as everything else in my life."

"No wonder you have no vanity," she whispered.

"How can I be vain about something that isn't mine?" The stranger's face had been his mask, and his shield against the world. People saw the chiseled, too-handsome-to-be-real features, not the hollow core.

"Did... did Trevor make you continue to act out for his sexual fantasies?"

"Luckily, he was wise and kind enough to realize how destructive that would be. Besides, even more than a lover, he wanted a son. Someone to love and be loved by." It was another role the young Jamie had learned well. And if simple filial love had been impossible, there had been genuine affection and profound gratitude. "He took care of me, and in return, I kept the secret of his pedophilia, since that would have disgusted most of his friends."

"Secrets and lies." She closed her eyes for a moment "Did you lead a normal life after you recovered, or was it too late for that?"

"There has never been anything 'normal' about my life." He finished his second scotch. "Trevor was appalled to learn he'd taken in an illiterate, but he was an educator, and realized fairly soon that I was dyslexic. One of his academic friends was a pioneer in the study of learning disabilities, so between them they created a private tutoring program that helped me overcome my weaknesses and learn to use my strengths."

Trevor and Charles had been part of a circle of aging, highly cultured gay men. All had grown up in the days when homosexuals stayed deep in the closet, and they preferred to stay there even when society became more tolerant. The plastic surgeon, one of the best in Britain, had been part of the same circle. They'd delighted in giving their battered boy a perfect face.

They'd probably thought they were doing him a favor.

Living quietly at the edge of Trevor's life, listening to the talk of clever, well-educated men, young Jamie had learned how to behave. "I ended up with a patchy but decent education, and the ability to fake being well-bred. Trevor died just before I turned eighteen. Charles Winfield had been encouraging me to study acting. He pulled some strings to get me an audition to RADA. I was admitted, and with a little fudging of the records, Kenzie Scott was born."

"How did you manage that?"

He shrugged. "One of Trevor's friends was high up in the government security establishment, and I presume he knew where to find the best forgers. I'm not sure exactly what he did, but I ended up with a passport in the name Kenzie Scott, and RADA got records that satisfied the bureaucrats."

"What an incredible story." Her brow furrowed. "That's why you think no one could connect you to your past—because you didn't grow up with the usual paper trail, and your appearance had altered enough so that no one who knew you as a child prostitute would recognize you now?"

"Exactly. Nigel Stone, known as Ned, knew me then. A pity my eyes are a distinctive color. If they'd been generic blue, he'd never have figured it out."

"So there is a connection with Stone! Was he another hustler?"

Kenzie thought back to the first time he'd seen that sneering face. "He was the son of Rock, my mother's pimp."

"Rock—Stone. I see." Looking ill, Rainey asked, "Did his father force his own son into prostitution, too?"

"No, even Rock wasn't that depraved. Or maybe he thought his son wasn't attractive enough to be worth selling. Ned lived with his mother, who was a couple of steps up the social scale, but sometimes Rock would use him to run errands—collecting money, delivering drugs, things like that. Ned was several years older than I, and mean to the bone. I think he felt some weird kind of sibling rivalry because he thought his father cared more for me than him, the real son. He might have been right—I was more valuable. Luckily, we saw each other very seldom, because he did his best to make my life miserable when he had the chance."

"And once he guessed that Kenzie Scott was the boy he'd hated, he tried to destroy you," she whispered.

"Not just tried." He closed his eyes, contemplating the shattered remnants of his life. "Succeeded."

Chapter 32

"But he hasn't," Rainey said, wanting to erase some of the bleakness from Kenzie's face. "While you were sleeping, I talked to Barb Rifkin and Marcus Gordon, and they're already taking steps to quash Nigel Stone's story. No one seems to believe there's a word of truth in it."