“It’s enough just to enjoy the grace of it,” he said, looking still absorbed. “They are playing celestial nymphs, and they are dancing for the pleasure of the gods.”
The music began again.
“They are dancing in the traditional way . . . as my mother used to do,” Lucien said.
A male dancer, in a golden mask carved like a snarling demon, leapt up onto the stage. The female dancers drew back, as if threatened, while the demon waved a red wand in the air.
“This guy I recognize,” Hallie said, in a low voice. “I went out with him once.”
Slowly, methodically, the demon, with huge round eyes and long fangs, circled the wary maidens, until he had succeeded in singling one out. He spun in circles, around and around her, while she seemed to melt into the ground; the other two retired behind a painted scrim. With his victim secure, the demon, whose mask was attached to another, and equally horrible, face that clung to the back of his head, did a solo dance of victory.
“That is Rāvana,” Lucien explained, “the thousand-headed demon . . . his name means, ‘He who makes men cry out.’ ”
“Who’s his date?”
“Sita . . . the wife of Rama. The demon is carrying her off to the island of Lankā.”
The man in the mask was pacing from one end of the stage to the other, with high and deliberate steps, conveying the notion of a long and arduous journey. The woman remained still, as if in a swoon, the pointed tip of her headdress touching the wooden stage. With her face obscured, and her costumed body arranged in the traditional posture, Lucien might almost have imagined her to be his own mother . . . if his mother had lived through the Khmer Rouge.
All that day, Lucien had been in Pattaya again, talking to Sri Halim; he hadn’t even told Hallie he was going there. With Halim, he had discussed the latest news, and rumors, from just across the border, in Cambodia. And, as he had done so many times before, he’d pressed Halim for any possible news of his twin sister, Lisette . . . lost to him since the holocaust in 1975. Halim had simply shaken his head, his hands spread wide. “I ask many people, my friend, but no one can say. With so many millions dead, and so many years gone by, no one can say about one girl.” Lucien had urged him, nonetheless, to continue the search.
Kevin Molloy had been moved, over Dr. Chom’s objections, and Halim’s too, to a private clinic run by the Catholic Church. There were several such outposts in the region, founded and supported by Catholic charities in an effort to alleviate the great suffering in Southeast Asia, and Lucien felt such a place would be best suited to minister to Molloy’s grave needs. The mutilation of his body, awful as it was, was no more painful to him than the danger in which he felt his soul had been placed. He was obsessed with the memory of Skolnick’s death . . . and the human flesh he had eaten to survive himself. His body would mend, Lucien believed, only if his spirit could do so too.
Before getting back into the helicopter with Hun, Halim had taken Lucien by the arm and asked if “the Yang situation has been cared for.” Lucien assured him that his representative had paid the required bribe, at Yang’s office in the maritime ministry, on the day after their meeting. Halim nodded his head, but still looked unconvinced. “Why do you ask?” Lucien said, and Halim just shrugged. “I like to know everything,” Halim said. “Why did you ask?” Lucien repeated, over the whirring of the helicopter blades.
“Because we went to the boxing together, that next night,” Halim said, “and he did not seem rich and happy. I thought he would seem rich and happy.”
“Perhaps he thought he should have held out for more.”
Halim smiled, showing the teeth stained pink from betel nut. “Should he have?”
Lucien shook his head. “He got only what he deserved to get.”
Halim narrowed his gaze, as if unsure what to make of this, then patted his ample stomach and wished Lucien adieu. The helicopter rose up into the sun, like some monstrous clattering dragonfly, and flew off toward Bangkok.
From the stage, there was a loud crashing of cymbals and a pounding of drams. The two women who had gone behind the scrim emerged again, wearing masks this time. One was costumed as a warrior, with a noble visage; the other had on a monkey’s tail and face. Both carried golden swords, with curved blades, made of what looked like painted wood.
“These are the good guys?” Hallie asked.
“Yes . . . the one dressed as a soldier is Rama, come to rescue his wife. The other is his ally, the leader of the army of the monkeys, named Sugrīva.”
“He used monkeys?”
“In the Ramayana—and this is part of that story—all of Creation is called upon in the struggle between good and evil.” His eyes held Hallie’s for a split second longer. “In the great war between good and evil, any weapon at all can be used.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” Hallie said, with a nervous smile, wondering why he was telling her this with such gravity. There were times, she thought, when she started to believe in all that stuff about astral planes, because there were times, like right now, when Lucien Calais seemed to occupy one.
The forces of good and evil were circling each other on the stage now, brandishing their respective swords and wands. Occasionally they would strike a well-choreographed series of blows, their wooden weapons clacking against each other, then retreat to opposite sides of the platform; Sita, the captive goddess, had raised her head, and at least seemed aware now of the battle going on around her. For the moment, it seemed to Hallie, the demon Rāvana was getting the better of his opponents; he was capering around the center of the stage, with his red wand over his head, while Rama and Sugrīva licked their wounds and regrouped in the corner. But she had to believe things weren’t going to stay this way; it reminded her, she was ashamed to admit, of the professional wrestling matches she sometimes watched on late-night TV. The villain, with a name like the Iron Sheik, or the Moscow Monster, always won the opening minutes of the bout, just to get the audience worked up and worried, before the good guy—Captain America, or the Masked Marine—lifted himself up off the mat, and inspired by the strains of “The Star Spangled Banner” or the sight of a virtuous maiden, rallied his strength and went on to carry the day.
This showed all the same signs.
Rama and Sugrīva came out of their corner, with renewed vigor and a fresh strategy, and attacked Rāvana from two sides; the demon twirled in place, catching the sword of first one and then the other, until he was sufficiently distracted that Rama was able to spirit his wife away, behind the protecting scrim. With his captive gone, the demon did an elaborate dance of anger and frustration, then folding his arms in an attitude of continued defiance, suddenly disappeared through a trapdoor in the floor of the stage. There was a puff of blue smoke, a crashing of cymbals, and the lights came up on the stage; the restaurant guests gave the performers a lengthy round of applause.
“I take it this battle is resumed at some later time,” Hallie said, “at some other spot in the universe?”
“Yes,” Lucien said, still clapping his hands and looking at the stage. “In one way or another, it is always being waged.”
A waiter pushed to their table a tinkling trolley of after-dinner liqueurs, and Lucien asked Hallie what she would like.
“What are you having?” she asked Lucien.
“Brandy.”
“I hate brandy. I think it tastes like lighter fluid.” She surveyed the brightly colored array of bottles and decanters. “Oh, good,” she said, tapping the top of a familiar amaretto bottle, “I’ll have some of this, please.”
When the waiter had finished pouring their drinks, Lucien placed on the table a small, black velvet jewelry box and said, “A memento—only that—of your first trip to Bangkok.”
Hallie looked at Lucien, then down at the box, then back at Lucien.
“Go ahead. Open it.”
She gently raised the lid of the box; inside, there was one of the most beautiful and unusual rings she had ever seen. It was cone-shaped
, and reminded her of the ornate crowns the female dancers had just been wearing; it was set with not one stone, but many, all of them winking and gleaming in the light of the candle.
“It’s gorgeous,” she breathed.
“It’s called a ‘Princess Ring,’ ” Lucien said, “and no girl should leave Thailand without getting one.”
“What are all these stones?”
“There are nine . . . and they go in a precise order.” He leaned forward, so that he could show her each one. “There’s diamond, here at the top, then cat’s eye, ruby, emerald, sapphire, topaz, moonstone, garnet, and zircon.” He leaned back again. “And all of the gemstones are from mines I own in the north country.”
She slipped the golden band onto her finger. “It fits perfectly.”
“Of course it does. I had it made for you.”
“Well, you did a perfect job of it. I love it, Lucien.” She held her hand above the tablecloth, so that the various stones caught and reflected the candlelight. “I love it . . . and I love you.”
The words had slipped out before she knew it, and now they seemed to hang in the air—the warm, sultry, flower-scented air—around them. Why had she said that? She knew, from the tone in which they’d been uttered, that they could not be passed off as just a grateful effusion, or an idle phrase. She’d said it, she’d meant it—and Lucien was too smart not to know it. She was afraid to raise her eyes to him until he’d said something in reply.
She saw his own hand slide across the table and enclose hers. The ruby ring on his finger glowed like a live coal.
“Hallie . . .”
She looked into his eyes.
He looked troubled . . . not happy.
“ . . . I don’t know what to say to you . . .”
Not a good start.
“You must know . . . how much I care for you.”
Even worse.
“You must know . . . that I . . .” And he trailed off completely, into silence.
This is what you get for laying your heart on the line, Hallie thought . . . embarrassment and rejection.
And yet, she didn’t honestly feel rejected. Unless she was just reading what she wanted to see into Lucien’s eyes, or hearing what she wanted to hear in his few stumbling words, she believed that he did love her . . . but that there was something holding him back, something he wasn’t telling her that, in his own mind, made all the difference.
For herself, she knew what she felt . . . even if she had simply blurted it out. And awkward as it may have made things, she wasn’t about to take it back.
She slipped her hand out from under his. “Listen—you just gave me a beautiful present. I’m not looking for anything more. You know how I feel about you. But so what? You had to have known that anyway. It’s not exactly a state secret.”
“Yes, but I want you to understand . . . I want you to know that I . . . I do care . . . and that if certain things were not as they are, if I were not who I am—”
“If you were not who you are,” Hallie interrupted, “I wouldn’t give a damn about you.” She laughed, a little harshly. Now she was mad. “Listen, Lucien, I’m going to tell you something that maybe even you don’t know. You know what it is? You love me. I don’t know how I know that, since you’ve never said it, not even now, but you do. And whatever it is that’s holding you back—a wife hidden away in the hills somewhere, or a terminal disease, or an ancient Cambodian custom that forbids a man to reveal his true feelings—whatever it is, one day you’re going to have to get over it. One day you’re going to have to let me in on this terrible secret of yours, and let me deal with it in my own way. I’m a big girl—you’d be surprised at what I can handle. But until you let me try, we’re going to keep going around and around in this same little circle. That’s okay, for now, but it won’t be okay forever. You love me, Lucien, like it or not, and the sooner you own up to it, the better off you’ll be.” She leaned back in her chair, like a lawyer finished with the summation to the jury, and folded her arms.
Lucien was sitting quite still, just as he had done all through her outburst. But now the corners of his mouth began to curve upward, in a small smile, and his eyes began to shine. He looked pleased, satisfied, with what she’d said . . . as if, now that she’d said it, he could simply let it stand, and by not denying it, have it affirmed. But Hallie wasn’t about to let him get off that easily.
“And don’t think you can just smile your way out of this. It’s a nice smile, but it’s not that nice.”
That only made him smile all the more; in fact, he started to laugh. Which was rare for Lucien; he was as reserved as he was self-sufficient. Seeing him so amused finally got to Hallie too, and she started to smile.
“I like the ring,” she said, “so why don’t we just leave it at that? Thank you.”
Lucien tilted his head toward her. “You’re welcome.” But he had stopped laughing, and was gazing across the table at her now with evident emotion. “You are right in what you say.”
Hallie wondered what part.
“And if the day comes when I can tell all that I know, it will be you I tell it to.” He looked away, not just across the restaurant, but across a great gulf that Hallie could detect in his expression. “And it will be you,” he continued, “that I will ask to believe.”
The waiter, perhaps thinking that Lucien had been looking for him, came to the table. Lucien took a second to register his presence, then asked him for the check. He paid it with a thick wad of baht, the Thai currency, then turned his attention once again to Hallie. There were many things, they both knew, that were still left unsaid . . . but for now, they were both content to leave them so. They both knew there would be plenty of time in the future to get around to them.
“Back to the boat?” Lucien said.
“But not back to the hotel. I’m not ready yet to wind up my last night in Bangkok.”
Lucien appeared to be weighing something. “Would you like to see some of the harbor, from the water side? You can see, perhaps, one or two of my own ships.”
To Hallie, it seemed like more than a simple suggestion; unless she was doing her usual number, and reading more into it than Lucien intended, it seemed like a concession of sorts . . . a first step toward revealing himself, and another part of his life, to her.
“Yes . . . I’d like to.”
From the satisfied look on his face, she thought she’d guessed right.
They climbed into the same boat, with the fringed canopy on top, that they’d come in, and Lucien gave some instructions, first in halting Thai, then English, then French, to the captain, who seemed to be able to piece it all together from fragments of all three. At least he nodded and smiled—a toothless smile—a lot, and seemed to know where he was going. A skinny old man with a deeply lined face, he was wearing, incongruously enough, a Pittsburgh Pirates baseball cap. But over the past few days, Hallie had gotten used to such sights; Bangkok, as all of the hotel brochures had assured her, was “a city of contrasts.” And this was just one more of them.
Others could be seen on the river, where their little boat chugged along between speedboats that sent up plumes of white spray and ancient sampans that glided silently along, propelled by a solitary figure with a single, long oar. Hallie felt as if she’d stored up, in a matter of days, a whole lifetime’s worth of images, things she couldn’t have seen anywhere else in the world, things she couldn’t have imagined . . . including that horrible nightmare on board the plane.
Forget it, forget it, forget it, she told herself. Forget it, or you’ll never have the nerve to fly anywhere else again.
Her thoughts flew forward, to her assignments in Milan. She knew she had some runway work to begin with, for Gianfranco Ferré, and then a magazine shoot. She wondered who the other girls would be; she hoped it might include a couple of her friends, Aline and Lisa, or maybe Denise. The photographer, Claude Bis, was a funny little Frenchman who always kept everyone laughing—which was just as well, because as every mode
l knows, the glamorous world of international modeling can also be deadly dull. There were times, when there was trouble getting the lighting quite right, or the dress needed to be ironed for the tenth time, or the wind machine was blowing too hard, when you just wanted to scream and stomp off the set and never again have to stare provocatively into an empty lens. But right now, even though it meant separating from Lucien, she was kind of anxious to get back to work.
They had already sailed past the dock of the Oriental Hotel, and were heading south, where the Chao Phya opened wider, allowing for a better harbor. Hallie could see, looming up on the western shore, the great black bulk of trading vessels—steamers and barges and freighters, though she couldn’t have necessarily told them apart. She just knew that these were serious ships. And that one of them—maybe more—belonged to Lucien.
In Thai, and then again in French, Lucien gave the captain his instructions. The captain nodded, the brim of his baseball cap bobbing up and down, and turned the wheel; they were drifting closer to the row of still, dark hulls. They reminded Hallie, a country girl at heart, of a stable of horses, each in his own box, asleep on his feet. They gave her that same sense of size, and strength, and silence.
Lucien tried out some more of his Thai this time, and the captain seemed pleased and chattered back. Lucien pointed at two of the monstrous hulks, and the captain steered his little boat into the narrow passage between them. It was as if the moon had suddenly gone behind a cloud; the dark sides of the ships rose up like cliffs on either side of them, huge and high and gently curving. The captain guided his boat to one side of a loading dock, raised on fat round pillars of cement, and cut the engine as he bumped up against one of them. With surprising agility, he scrambled up onto the bow of his boat, and then onto the dock itself. He gestured to Lucien, who leaned forward, picked up the mooring rope, and tossed it to him. The old man looped the rope around a pylon, then reached down to give Hallie a hand up.
Private Demons Page 13
