Empire of Lies by Andrew Klavan Read Free Book Online

look ... you look good, Jason. You look like ... no, you look good. I mean it."
    "So do you, Lauren. It's nice to see you."
    "Yeah, you too, I mean—wow." She examined me from this angle and that. "You look like you're doing really well."
    I knew she was right. I did. When I'd gotten dressed that morning, I'd gone out of my way to look prosperous. I mean, I was prosperous, sure, but I'd gone out of my way to look it. I put on the blue button-down shirt and the tan sports jacket Cathy'd gotten me for Christmas, and the khaki slacks I'd picked up at Brooks Brothers in Chicago. It was a kind of bragging, showing off for an old girlfriend. I wanted her to see how well I'd done since we'd broken up. Petty and stupid and vain of me, I know. I told myself not to do it, but I did it anyway.
    "Thanks," I said. "You look pretty good yourself."
    That, on the other hand, was a lie. She looked like crap. Complete crap. The long straight black hair I remembered was now cut short in unbecoming curls. The thin, harsh, sensual face had become bloated, the pale skin strangely dimpled and rough. She was dressed in a baggy black sweater and a cheap straight-cut cotton skirt, dark blue, too tight around her hips. The outfit made
her body—that once-lean-and-ready body—seem as if it had gone doughy, sloppy, as if it had settled and bulged like clay.
    She looked old. Not just old: old and hard and hard-worn. Her pale brown eyes had been clear and even a little soft when I knew her. They were rheumy and narrow and watchful now. Her smile was bitter, the anger fairly twitching at the corners of her mouth.
    How did it make me feel to see her like that? Well, it made me feel sorry for one thing, sorry for whatever had happened to her to make her look this way and sorry that the attractive young Lauren I had known was gone forever. But there's no point in lying: I felt other things, too. I felt smug and triumphant—you know, glad that things had gone better for me than they had for her. I was rich and she wasn't. I lived on the Hill and she lived here. I looked okay and she looked blasted. I didn't want to feel good or smug about it. I really didn't. But I did feel like that a little, and I bet she knew I did.
    There was a box of Kents on a lamp stand by an ashtray. She scooped it up, flipped back the top, and offered one to me. Oh, yeah, she knew what I was feeling, all right. I could see her watching me as she held out the cigarette, reading my thoughts, gauging my every expression. She knew exactly how shocked and sorry and self-satisfied I was at the sight of her. She knew, and it made her bitter smile more bitter still.
    I waved off the Kent. "No, thanks. I don't do it anymore."
    She jabbed one into her mouth, fired it with a plastic lighter. "What's the matter? A little cancer scare you?"
    "I got kids now. I'm not allowed to die."
    She tossed the cigarette box down on the lampstand again. I noticed a couple of business cards lying near the ashtray: lauren wilmont, watson & mantle, paralegal. She hadn't become a photographer, the way she'd wanted. She was a divorced paralegal-slash-wannabe-artist, just like her mother before her.
    She blew out a cloud of smoke. There was something nasty about the way she did it. Even though she blew it off to the side and up over my head, it felt as if she were blowing it right at me. She crossed an arm under her breasts and propped the other elbow on it, holding the cigarette high, pinning me with a knowing and ironic look.
    "I Googled you, y'know," she said. "When I was trying to find out where you lived. Actually, that's bullshit. I'm always Googling people from my past. I've Googled you a lot."
    "Yeah, I tried to Google you a couple of times, too, but I didn't know about the name change. So you're married."
    "Was. And you're, like—what?" She gave me a great big man-eating smile. "You're some kind of right-wing Christian asshole now, huh."
    I laughed. "That's me."
    "Kind of cuts down on your S&M action,