“Hello?” she called.
It was too dark. It was too quiet. It smelled like a cathedral. She felt a creeping sense of impending doom. From the hall, she saw a flickering blue light. It took her a second to identify it as the fluorescent in the closet.
“There’s nowhere to sit on this side, I’m afraid. And the other side is off limits.” The prince stopped on the threshold. His black suit fit well enough, but Laura could tell it was made with five-thread overlock and home-drawn patterns. Brunican workmanship again. The toes of his shiny shoes were at the very boundary between the room and the hall.
“That’s okay,” Laura said.
“You’re his daughter?”
His? “Yes. Joseph Carnegie is my father. I... um. I didn’t really know him.”
“You’re the younger?”
“Not by much.” The conversation had nowhere to go but down, so she might as well get on the spiral. “Can I ask what this is about? I mean, I do have things I’m doing, and you know, it’s America, so we don’t actually have to trot all the way uptown just because a prince leaves a fancy envelope at the door.”
He turned slightly to the left, and Laura saw both sides of his face for the first time. He was in his mid-sixties, handsome, and well-kept, with a flaw that clarified why he’d been in profile on the TV. The left side of his face was deeply scarred from the half-closed eye to the corner of his mouth in a long line, as if from one stroke of a sharp blade.
“Then why did you come?” he asked.
“I’m a curious idiot.”
“Indeed. What are you curious about?” He smiled, but only one side of his face made the change completely.
She cleared her throat. Had he dragged her all the way uptown to torment her? “Why you’re dropping envelopes at my door and if you’ve ever done that before. Like this past Monday maybe? Did you have my father write some stupid notes and leave them?”
“I did not. However, we followed him to your house, and we made note of where you lived. Then we lost him.” He looked away as if thinking of something for the first time. “Do you like it here? In New York?”
“I love it here.”
“It’s very difficult to find someone. Very crowded. I can’t breathe. I can’t think. How do you think?”
“Quite clearly, thank you.” She started for the door. The guy was creeping her out, and she started to feel a tingle of uneasiness.
“You’re wearing her shoes,” Salvadore said.
Laura tilted her heel. Was it a bad idea to wear Philomena’s shoes? Had she just added insult to injury? “I don’t think Philomena wore them more than once. They’re brand new.” Her vision had adjusted to the light, and she could see pretty clearly that his eyes narrowed.
“That’s Princess Philomena to you.”
“She was beautiful.”
“I have her dress,” he said. “I understand you’re looking for it.”
He’d waited for her to be halfway out the door before showing his hand. He must have known she’d do just about anything to get the dress back. “What do you want?”
The high prince stepped into the room. Laura took half a step back. His move wasn’t threatening, but she wasn’t ready to have him so close. Not when his relationship with her father had likely been fraught with betrayal. Not when that scar remained unexplained.
“The dress,” she said. “I know what the interior should look like now. So I’ll know if you’re passing me another fake.”
“We destroyed the form you saw. If you told anyone, they wouldn’t believe you.”
“I’m not telling anyone. At least not anyone who would care to tell everyone.” She paused and said, “Philomena was more woman than I am if you want to know the truth.”
The prince seemed pleased with her comment. “I never saw anything like her in my life. I knew exactly what she was, but right down to the size of her shoes, she was perfect.”
He looked at her with meaning, as if she knew something she wasn’t supposed to know, which she guessed she did. He didn’t want to say it out loud. He didn’t want to speak the loaded, multisyllabic words: transvestite or transsexual or whatever it was that went on under her dress.
“I understand,” she said, trying to put the same set of unsaid things in her voice as he had in his face.
“I had never seen a more perfect thing than she was. Did you know how we met?”
“I heard she was Argentinian.”
“She was a tour guide at the Museo Nacional in Buenos Aires. My father took us on a trip. I was a boy in my twenties. She was, well, you’ve seen her. But to know that I could be what I was, and she could be what she was. Together. I never had to tell my father.”
He seemed shorter to her then, and pear-shaped. She knew nothing about the man’s father, but apparently he would have been difficult to come out to, difficult enough to stay in a glass closet.
“Even years later,” Laura said, “it was too late to come out. You’d already done so much lying.”
He took another step into the room, out of range of the fluorescents, letting the darkness take over. “She was fed up by the time she went to New York. And she brought your father back. Joseph. She was whispering his name when I found them in the staff kitchen on my inauguration night. I almost killed him.”
“I’m sorry,” she said. Then she did something as if she were someone else, someone taller maybe, and more confident, someone who wasn’t terrified of monarchs and rich people. She reached out and touched his face. “My dad did this?”
“That night.”
“Why didn’t you kill him?”
“My wife agreed to stay with me if I didn’t. But she’s dead now.”
She’d known from Soso’s conversation that the high prince was looking for Dad, but she hadn’t known why. Until she looked at the high prince’s blue-cast eyes, she hadn’t understood the lengths he’d go to find her father. “It happened twenty years ago,” Laura said.
“No. It’s been happening since. And right under my nose.” Salvadore leaned on one leg and tilted his head. “I don’t want to hurt him. When she died, I just… I stopped caring so much about the past. I remarried. Your father acquired more than a few of my wife’s things over the years, not just the dress, and I want them back.”
“I don’t know where he is.”
“But he knows where you are. And if he sees me with you, he’ll come out.”
CHAPTER 19
Laura didn’t believe in God. She didn’t even believe that people had a tiny spark of the divine in them. She never described herself as “spiritual, not religious,” and she wasn’t a seeker of meaning. She believed she was meat, and her personality, skills, and everything that made her Laura was the product of complex neurotransmitter and myelin patterns in her brain; patterns that could not be replicated from person to person, that were determined by a combination of her genetics and the very specific things that happened to her in her life. She respected the beauty of that. She respected life. She didn’t want anyone to get hurt.
But when the high prince of Brunico revealed that he was going to use her to bait Dad, she considered prayer. She even tried it but found it difficult to manage without a God to pray to. She did imagine herself talking to Mom, but Mom just gave her a hug, which was not what she needed.
“We discovered your father escaped by boat,” the high prince said. “My wife’s boat. He stole it. He has no passport to travel. We’ve alerted the authorities that he’s here, and he’s a murderer.”
“He’s a what?”
“Who do you think killed Princess Philomena?”
Laura felt her jaw drop, and she snapped her mouth shut.
The prince just smiled. “You thought I did it? You thought I killed the love of my life and left him whole?”
“You did. You needed to marry a woman… with female parts, so you could make an heir.”
“I didn’t.”
“I don’t believe you.”
He put his hand
on her arm and leaned down as if he wanted to express his complete sincerity and openness. “We’re not going to hurt you or your father. I wouldn’t want to run afoul of the law here. It would be inconvenient. You need to be seen with my entourage. We need to announce a plan to go to Brunico. Maybe you’ll make another gown there.”
“Fat chance.”
“He’ll find you before you get on a boat.”
“Your plan stinks. He ditched me twenty years ago. Why would he come and find me now?” She figured a quick call to Cangemi from the bathroom and it would all be over. She’d be at Jeremy’s side, wondering how to tell him Sheldon Pomerantz was in the process of drawing up a contract.
“He’ll find you because you’ll be with me.”
“You’re not high prince here. You’re nobody. You can’t tell me to do anything I don’t want to do.”
“I believe your boyfriend put up some sort of bond for the dress? Maybe you want it back undamaged? We’ve replaced the interior, and the shell is stunning. So it can be returned to its owner any time.”
The choice was between Dad and Jeremy. Between the man who left her twenty years ago and the man who could tomorrow. She wanted to tell them both to go to hell. Men were trouble, and she didn’t need it. She should just go back to Mom, say goodnight, and take the train home to Brooklyn. But then, if the high prince’s plan worked, she’d get to meet Dad, and though she didn’t know what she wanted out of such a meeting, she still wanted it. And she might get the dress back for Jeremy, who might rise above her expectations and stay with her even if she resigned. The odds of things going that well were slim, but she couldn’t resist taking the chance that they might.
“I drink gin,” she said. “Good gin. Don’t try and slip me anything from the well.”
The high prince held out his hand. “Your phone. You can give it to me, or we can take it away.”
“My sister’s coming. No sister, no deal, and you can burn the dress for all I care.”
Salvadore paused, looking down at her with his good eye. “Of course. And you will tolerate Soso Oseigh and a few others.” He held his hand closer.
“Another entourage,” she said, handing over her phone. “Nice to know nothing changes.”
**
Ruby put her hands on her hips. She’d been stuck in the lobby, sitting on the leather couches, for half an hour while keeping company with Soso, Poly Print (whose name was Hector, apparently), Construction Boots (better dressed and named Arturo), and Catherine, who was in her early thirties, lovely, and about five months pregnant with the heir to the throne. If, of course, the heir was a boy.
Laura pulled Ruby out of earshot. “They want to flush Dad out, and they want to use us to do it. Personally, I think it stinks, but I don’t feel like we have a choice. If we don’t go, I lose the dress, and we won’t get the chance to warn Dad what’s coming for him. And before you say anything, he didn’t earn us helping him out. I know that. But he’s Dad, and I have a heart.”
“I have something to do tonight,” Ruby said, as if to make it perfectly clear that she didn’t have a heart.
“No, you don’t.”
“Do you know how hard it is to get seats at this fundraiser?”
“Do you know many nights I’ve put off Jeremy, including the night before he left for China and tonight, because of this whole mess? Do you know how many international calls I missed?”
“These sound a lot like your problems.”
Laura saw a look on her sister’s face that she didn’t like, not one bit. It was a look that implied none of this affected her. “If that dress is lost, Jeremy loses his bond, and in case you forgot in that sieve of a brain of yours, he’s your backer, which means his financial health affects the financial health of your little company. We’re not going to make a dime for him for another couple of seasons. So believe me, if he has to cut us loose to save his own ass, he will, and I’ll still sleep with him after that because it’s business. And unlike everyone else in my life right now, I am not confused about what that means. Are you understanding me?”
Ruby chewed on that for a second before saying, “You’re being bossy.”
“You coming or not?”
“This had better be the most fabulous night out I have ever experienced.”
“I promise nothing. I don’t think these people get out much.”
**
The first order of business was being seen, but not by just anyone. They needed to be seen by someone who immediately tweeted, Facebooked, and posted photos to a blog, because they weren’t flush with time on the whole drawing-Dad-out thing. Salvadore was quite clear that it was tonight or never if she ever wanted to see the dress again.
“Lanai it is then,” Laura said, and Ruby concurred.
The new entourage loaded into two limos and went downtown to the hip Polynesian place. Catherine stayed at the Iroquois, which seemed wise considering Laura intended to get lit up like a Christmas tree and didn’t want to knock over a pregnant woman accidentally while wearing said woman’s husband’s late wife’s shoes.
Hector and Arturo got into a smaller limo while Laura, Ruby, Soso, and Salvadore sat in the back of the bigger car. The seats faced each other, so she had a perfect view of Soso, whose legs stretched clear across the floor in black leather pants.
“So,” Laura said, “now that I’m trapped in a car with you, can you tell me what you expected you’d do with Philomena? She couldn’t make you heirs, and there’s no male to take your place anywhere on Brunico. What was the plan? Were you going to expose her as a man and pass the title to her if you died?”
Soso glanced at the prince, who only had an eye for Laura.
“He knew,” Laura replied, then said to Soso, “you knew.”
“Of course, but we don’t talk about it outside the circle.”
“We found out the hard way,” Ruby muttered.
“My first wife was a woman where it mattered, in her heart.” Salvadore punched his chest. “The Brunican people would never accept her any other way.”
“Maybe they’d accept a woman on the throne?”
He sighed, shaking his head. “The high prince must sign any changes to the constitution.”
“And you never would.”
“Never.”
“What if your new wife is carrying a daughter?”
“She’s not.” He said it with such confidence she knew he must have gotten some sort of invasive test done.
The next logical question was, “Is it yours?” quickly followed by, “And how did you conceive it?” However, she wouldn’t ask either of those because not only was it rude, she also really didn’t want the answer after knowing she had been conceived by a man who wasn’t attracted to her mother in the right way.
“So you couldn’t divorce Philomena because your citizens would run you out. Obviously, you killed her so you could make yourself an heir.” Even as Laura said it, she knew it wasn’t true, but she had to walk the blind alley and touch the back wall before she could turn around and back onto the street.
“Your father set that fire. It was days after his release. Why do you think I’m looking for him, young lady?”
She looked at him for a long time. He believed Dad had killed Philomena, and she saw the logic of it. He got out, and in a fit of anger against the people who put him there, for drawing him away, for tricking him into a political situation, for making him build a nation he hated, he lashed out at the person responsible. But first, he acquired the dress and shipped it to Barnabas’s sister. And for what? Insurance money? Possibly, considering Dad had probably left Brunico penniless and pissed off.
“You Americans think your way is the only right way,” Salvadore said. “Brunico has been the way it is for as long as it has been ruled. We are stable, except for one incident. Our jails are nearly empty.”
“Except for my father, who probably built the prison before you put him in it.”
“Really?” Ruby looked away from the window long e
nough to fling a sarcastic jibe. “Can we get to the part where you tell me he had it coming before I die of suspense?”
Salvadore smiled. As Laura watched the exchange between him and Ruby, she saw not her annoying sister but someone’s daughter, the daughter of the man who had caused the high prince pain and who had been the victim of that prince’s anger. Because if Dad hadn’t been trapped on Brunico for twenty years, he would have come home to his children. Yes, it would have been uncomfortable, and he would have taken long trips, but he would have existed to them. And the beautiful, cranky girl sitting across from Laura wouldn’t have been the victim of Salvadore’s sense of entitlement but instead whatever she would have been without the fistfights and struggles.
“Yes, Salvadore,” Laura said, “you stole our father from us for twenty years. You might want to explain yourself.”
“That’s an impertinent accusation.”
“Big word,” Ruby said, shocking Laura into a half-second of silence. The man was royalty, for whatever that was worth, and their elder, and… a complete dumbass, actually.
“To be clear,” Laura said, “we said we’d come with you, but we didn’t say we’d be nice. And you can hold the dress over me if you want, but the fact is you don’t even have it. If you did, it would have been on the truck, but you only had the form to store it on once you got it back. My father has it, and that’s really bugging you, because he can use it to expose you.”
They pulled up in front of Lanai, behind the limousine carrying the rest of the entourage. Laura figured the Prince wasn’t going to be in an enclosed space alone with the two sisters again, which was good. She didn’t like him, or his scar, or his expectations of deference. She didn’t like the fact that he’d thought nothing of stealing her father, and she didn’t care for his reverence for backward laws, even if they only affected twelve hundred Brunicans.
Dionne Frescan stood outside, bouncing up and down in her faux-fur scarf and the usual matte-black bomber jacket. She held a cigarette with one hand while tapping on her phone with the other and holding court with her snide mouth and easy laugh.
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