“My-oh-my, it’s a—”
“Wonderful day?”
“Excuse me,” Ed said, flustered again.
“Never mind. Listen, where’s the nearest bar, Jack? If I drink any more coffee I’ll piss in my pants.”
“But the interview…”
“Don’t worry, I’ll be back.”
“Yes, but…”
“But what, ace? You’re worried I’ll come back juiced, is that it?”
“No, I, er, well, it’s just around the corner, actually. It’s called Billy’s Long Bar. Perhaps I could join you.”
“Perhaps you could join the Moonies. See you in an hour, slick.”
Well-Read Ed watched her spectacular derrière slinking out of the door, his face even redder than before.
“No wonder your books are so shit, bitch,” he said as the door closed behind her.
The woman took a seat at a table at the farthest end of the bar and settled down with a vodka and tonic. It was quiet and peaceful in there at that time of the day. She was glad. She was tired—bone weary. Her mind came back to the same question that had been dogging her for what seemed like forever. When did she start feeling like this, and why? How did she get like this? Where had she taken a wrong turn? Her life was like a ring with a stone missing. Unless you looked closely you would think it was perfect, but the stone that was missing somehow devalued all the others, and made a lesser of the whole, and although she had all the other stones, her life had become a search for the one that was missing, the one that would make her complete. Except, how can you search for something if you don’t know what it is?
Her reverie was interrupted by a large black woman who approached the table shyly. She had a very pretty, jovial face, but she wouldn’t have gotten much change out of two hundred pounds. She was wearing an old-fashioned dress and had a flower-pattern bandana tied around her head. She looked like a refugee from a Clark Gable movie.
“Excuse me,” she said, “I don’t mean to bother you, but I was late for the signing. I missed my bus. I’m a huge fan.”
Can’t argue with you there, the woman thought.
“I wonder if you’d mind signing my book, and I’ll leave you in peace. I would be so grateful.”
The woman smiled. The black lady looked so earnest.
“Sure, hon, have a pew. Care for a drink? I’m just about to get a refill.”
“Why, yes. That would be lovely. Thank you. I’ll have a mimosa, if that’s all right.”
The woman smiled again and went to the bar. When she came back with the drinks, there was a copy of The Spy Who Gloved Me on the table. It was wrapped in clear plastic.
“What’s with the cellophane?” the woman said.
“Oh, this is a first edition. It’s going to be worth something one day. I’m keeping it in pristine condition.”
The woman held back a sigh. She knew she should be thankful. She handed the black lady her mimosa, then took up the book and studied it. How long had it been? Ten years, eleven? What happened to the girl who wrote it? Where did she go?
“I’m sure you hear this all the time,” the black lady said, “but where do you get your stories from? They seem so realistic.”
The woman looked up. She held the other’s eyes. She just shook her head. She reached into her purse for a pen. “Whom shall I sign it for?”
“Lucky.”
“Lucky?”
“Yeah,” she said with a shy smile. “It’s what people call me. Lucky.”
***
It’s not easy to turn heads at a White House cocktail party. If you wanted to show those jaded birds of paradise something they’d never seen before, it would have to be Oprah Winfrey, butt naked in rubber boots with a live octopus on her head and a picture of Jimi Hendrix tattooed on her left tit.
But the lady in question managed it. She was a real show-stopper: a dusky, voluptuous Asian lady in a shimmering silk sari, emerald green and ruby red, with eyes as dark and dirty and mysterious as the Ganges at midnight.
The bash was in honor of some eastern big shot, the hereditary prince of some benighted mangrove swamp somewhere, and since the sale of a few F15s and a missile or two was definitely in the cards, the boys on Capitol Hill had pulled out all the stops, and their wives had had their tongues sharpened for the occasion.
The princeling, who was also the supreme commander of the armed forces, was rocked up with so many medals for imaginary campaigns pinned to the lapel of his uniform that he was walking with a five-degree list to starboard, and his wife had a string of rubies the size of onions draped around her scrawny regal neck that were worth the GNP of her country.
Naturally, the princess became the center of attention, and senators’ wives, fussing and flapping like underpants on a clothesline on a windy day and as green as the grass they were standing on, were queuing up with their cutie-pie smiles and nuanced comments. Although the princess was entirely unaccustomed to North American social convention, you don’t get to be a princess in the Orient by being a sucker in a catfight, and she knew a jealous gold-digging ex-cheerleader when she saw one, and even if her English was not so hot, a barbed comment is a barbed comment in any language. So she slapped a look of self-evident superiority on her painted potentate puss and sat smiling graciously and suffering the slings and arrows of outraged envious bitches, happy in the knowledge that pangs of jealously are infinitely more painful than any remark, and happy in the knowledge that her baubles were the talk of the lawn.
Especially when they got swiped.
A couple of days later, a red phone rang on a big oak desk in Langley.
“Hey, chief. What’s up?”
“The word has come down from the top.”
“The Pentagon?”
“No, higher.”
“The White House?”
“No, higher.”
“The First Lady? What happened?”
“Seems the First Lady is embarrassed because the mama-san of some big-noise zipperhead guest at the party the other night had her gewgaws snatched. Wants us to put one of our top people on it, ASAFP.”
“Well, with all due respect to the presidential pussy, that ain’t exactly a national security issue, there, ace.”
“This is top priority, hoss.”
“What, she thinks she can use the agency as her own private Boy Scout service?”
“Why not? Nixon did.”
“Yeah, guess so. All right. I’ll put someone on it. I got just the person.”
***
The year is 1908. The place is the gentlemen’s smoking lounge at the Hôtel du Palais, formerly the Villa Eugénie, in Biarritz. One section of the room is cordoned off with red ropes and guarded by two soldiers in elaborate uniforms. Under a big bay window overlooking the sea, two men sit smoking cigars, drinking, and playing chess. One is King Edward the Seventh, of England. The other is his nephew, Czar Nicholas the Second, of Russia. They are both more or less rat-arsed.
The chess set that they are using is unique. It is made of cut crystal with gold filigree and rubies embedded in the pieces. It is worth more than the GNP of Belgium. It has been personally crafted by Carl Fabergé for the czar. Each piece is an actual drinking glass. The color of the pieces is determined by the contents. The czar, being Russian, is drinking vodka, and therefore playing white. The king is technically playing black, but his pieces are actually green, because they contain absinthe. The idea is that whenever someone captures another’s piece, they chug the contents. The contest is fairly even because, although the czar is Russian and therefore a pretty good chess player, and the king can’t play chess worth shit, old Eddy can drink Nicky under the table any day, so it kind of balances out. Due to the nature of the game, and the circumstances, a certain formality is absent from the conversation.
“Check, you Russian twat!”
“My fucking borzois play chess better than you, kuritsa brain. Uncheck.”
“Bollocks. Knight takes rook.”
“Cossacks.
Queen takes knight. Check, shashlik-face."
The king pondered his position, coolly considering his next move. He blew a huge cloud of cigar smoke into the czar’s face, and switched the position of his bishop behind the smoke screen. When the smoke cleared, the czar stared blankly at the board. Because the board now had one hundred and twenty-eight apparently revolving squares, he failed to notice the switch.
“Bishop takes queen. How’s that for a fucking King’s Gambit, you Slavic shithouse?”
As the king was downing the vodka from the czar’s queen, the czar reflected upon the fact that the king now had him by the yarbles, and upon how it falls to royalty to make difficult decisions in a crisis. He booted the board over.
“Oh, fucking marvelous. I’ll take that as a resignation. I win.”
“It vas accident. Just like you, you fat bastard. Victoria tell me whole story. Albert get spurs stuck in bed linen and no can pull out in time.”
“Well, shit. I guess that means we’ll just have to drink cognac.”
The king made a regal gesture, and a squadron of lackeys and minions came racing to clear up the mess and bring the brandy.
“Careful with the chess set, my good man. It has set our friend here back a ruble or two. It’s a Fabergé, you know. I say, that gives me a capital idea.”
“Vhat iz that?”
“Fabergé. Your mate, Fabergé.”
“Vhat about him?”
“Well, maybe he can help me out?”
“How?”
“Well, I’ve gone and gotten myself into a spot of bother with the queen, see? I had a little fling with this American actress gal, and the old biddy found out about it.”
“You iz dirty old bastard. Good man.”
“Yes, quite. But things are a bit frosty at the palace at the minute. If your man Fabergé could knock me up a bit of jewelry, it might help the job along.”
“Like vhat? Necklace, brooch, bracelet, earrings, vhat?”
“Oh, I don’t fucking know. What bloody difference does it make? Just tell him to make something with loads of jewels in it that she can shove into her box.”
“Vell, how big?”
The king held out his two hands in front of him, palms up, as if to say, you tell me. “Oh, I don’t know. Just tell him to make sure it’s big. The bigger the better.”
Czar Nicholas the Second nodded sagely. “Okay. I see vhat I can do. Nazdarovya.”
***
The woman sat at her favorite corner table at Broussard’s in the Quarter, talking to an obviously bedazzled young man half her age, who was busy shoveling oysters into his face. As she spoke she was toying with her champagne glass, moving her elegant hands slowly up and down the stem with delicate hypnotic movements. The glass reflected the delicate azure of her long nails. Her face was framed with hair the color of old honey in sunlight, fastened at the nape of her neck with a golden pin in the shape of a leopard, her eyes were a striking deep violet, and her full, classically Grecian lips were as glistening and shapely as a Stradivarius, the perfect instruments of whispers and kisses.
She was at that age when women of a certain appearance enter their final bloom of loveliness, like the rose just before it fades, which adds a certain sunset melancholy to their beauty and makes them even more desirable than they were in the full flush of youth. There were the faintest wrinkles beginning to form around her eyes, but only the most jaded connoisseur of women could find fault with her beauty. Her turquoise dress was designed to show her décolletage to perfect advantage, and the young man was having serious difficulty in keeping his eyes off the swelling, slightly freckled breasts and on his bivalves.
With a barely perceptible movement of her head and a gracious smile, she summoned the waiter who refilled their glasses with Bollinger Vieille Vignes Françaises ’69. She raised her glass and gazed directly into the young man’s mesmerized eyes, which caused him to splatter an oyster onto the front of his new cream-colored Old Navy chinos. The woman watched him desperately trying to clean his trousers with a serviette, flushed and embarrassed. A man-child, athletic, handsome in a boyish Kennedy kind of way, his locker room confidence and repertoire of rewarmed movie star poses fallen to pieces in an instant, destroyed by the accidental dropping of a shellfish. A wave of sadness welled up out of nowhere and washed over her.
What am I doing? What am I doing here? What do you want? I want to be touched. Physically? Yes. Yes. I need that. To be held, to be opened up. I need that. Tonight? Always. So? It’s not enough. So what is it? I want more. Love? No. Companionship? No. What then? I want to be touched. You said that. No, touched. Inside. Moved. I want to feel something. Something I’ve never felt before. So what is it? I don’t know. So how do you know it exists? Because I want it, therefore it exists. Are you sure? No.
The woman stood up.
“I’m sorry,” the boy said, attempting to rise, “it was an accident. I didn’t mean to…”
“I know you didn’t. It’s okay. It wasn’t that.”
“Then wha’d I do? Wha’d I say?”
The woman shook her head sadly, and walked away.
***
Consider, then, the woman as she sat in the garden at the Sainte Marie in New Orleans, in the early hours of the morning, sipping a highball. A storm was coming. The night was overcast and heavy and the smell of rain was in the air. The insects were loud, and there was the sense that there would be lightning soon. She was deep in thought, and very still. Although she rarely spoke it anymore, on that occasion, she thought in the old language. Somehow, it felt right. She was a mystery to herself: a multifaceted diamond that bent the light according to the point of view of the beholder. She thought about the elusive desire that tormented her. She thought about the nature of desire. She thought of her lovers.
She had a great many. Considerate, virile, tender, subtle, raw, sophisticated, crude—but somehow, never enough. No matter how long it lasted, or how many times she rippled with orgasm, she would find herself overcome by a feeling of emptiness, a haranguing sense of something unfulfilled, that left her restless and confused. And sad.
The woman thought of where she was, and where she came from. She thought of what she had done, and of what she was about to do. She no longer did things because she had to. She did them because she wanted to.
She was a writer, and a thief, and an addict.
Her novels made her a lot of money. But she didn’t really need it. She had all the wealth she needed. She stole it—specifically jewelry. She was daring and audacious and infamous and arrogant. After every heist, she left her calling card: a cat-shaped candy bar, handmade for her by an ancient wizened crone in Geneva. That was why the press and the cops called her the Caramel Cougar. And she was about to embark on the most dangerous blag of her career.
But she didn’t care about the money. It was the danger she needed. She was addicted to danger. Not the wild-horse racing-car jumping-out-of-airplanes kind of danger. Sophisticated danger. High wire acts of tension and suspense, the risk of being caught. But like any addiction, it grows, feeding off itself, creating the need for ever-bolder acts of bravado, with the consequences of failure ever more severe. To get the same rush, she needed to push the envelope and push her luck. And she was pushing her luck, and she knew it.
She was heading to the point of critical mass, where guile and skill would confront the frontiers of impossibility and challenge the laws of probability, and in the end it would all come down to the toss of a coin. But that was the point. If she stepped back now, it would be over for her, like the gunfighter who loses his nerve and backs down. She knew whom she was going up against. She had heard the stories, and knew they weren’t just stories. The man was cruelty personified, a soulless, conscienceless beast who thrived on the pain of others and whose black desperate heart, if he even had one, was nourished by cries of pain and anguish. She even admitted herself a little anxiety. It was good. It heightened the senses and let off a little static, so that when the moment came,
she could enter into the tantric realm of absolute serenity that was necessary.
So the woman sat very still, under the advancing storm, and thought. In the old language. Her name was Fanny Lemming.
Chapter 4
Crispin had been in seventh heaven. He was swaying on a hammock slung under a magnificent magnolia, wearing a beautiful peacock feather-pattern silk dressing gown that the charming Lord Lundi had given him as a gift and sipping ice-cold Chablis from a silver goblet. The scent of the flowers in Lord Lundi’s garden was divine, and he was cool in the shade of the trees. He could look up from his book and see the curtains billowing out of the shutters of his corner room of the chateau in the gentle afternoon breeze. Lord Lundi had given him the best room in the house, and he could see out over the Quarter to where the boats sailed up and down the wide lazy river. He was reading Diamonds Aren’t For Everyone by Fanny Lemming, and it was a cracking good read about a lady who stole jewels.
When a waiter in a crisp white uniform brought him two dozen oysters, a platter of king crab legs, and a mint julep, he moved into eighth heaven. When the string quartet set up on the lawn next to him and began playing slow ballads, and the young man with the divine falsetto began to serenade him while he ate lunch, he shipped out for ninth heaven. When a lithe, muscular Negro with the body of Adonis appeared carrying a folding massage table, and mimed the act of Crispin disrobing and climbing onto it, he set sail for tenth heaven. When the Negro laid his hands upon him and began to knead his corpulent, yielding white flesh with just precisely the right amount of pressure, Crispin flitted across twelfth heaven and proceeded directly to thirteen. When the massage concluded with the Negro giving him the best, slowest, most excruciatingly thrilling blow job he’d had in thirty years, he ran out of heavens to go to and exploded into bliss before slipping into the bosom of Elysium with the deepest, most contented sigh imaginable. Goodnight, sweet prince!
The Chameleon Fallacy (Big Bamboo Book 2) Page 7
