by Leslie Glass
They appeared casual, but their search for treasure was an intense and careful process. They knew exactly what they were looking for, knew which dealers they would approach and which they would not. Bouck specialized in chandeliers, but he occasionally bought candlesticks, art glass, porcelain, unusual objets d’art, small chairs and tables, mirrors, sconces.
Camille shuddered. “Not there.” She turned away from the next booth. “That woman’s a witch. She wants to steal Puppy. Get away.” She made a brushing gesture.
“Sure thing.” Bouck steered Camille toward the barn, careful not to touch her as he moved her toward the indoor booths, where chandeliers hung from rafters.
The barn had been converted years before. Now its roof was studded with skylights. Today, the sun piercing through the grime on the windows and clouded crystals of the chandeliers gave everything a radiant, almost magical cast. Light, in tiny, dancing pinpoints, reflected everywhere.
Bouck and Camille continued their easy pace, pausing here and there to admire a piece and to chat with dealers they knew. The business had its own special language and its own insider information.
“You see the Empire piece in that corner?” Bouck nodded toward the back of one of the booths as they strolled past.
“Yes, very good,” Camille confirmed. “He also has the best pier mirror I’ve ever seen. Look at the size of it.”
Bouck glanced at the booth again quickly and then away so the owner wouldn’t think they were interested. He shook his head. “I thought we agreed. Nothing too big for the Mercedes.”
“Perfect for the living room. Perfect for our chandelier. Perfect for me,” she said in a little-girl voice. “I bet you can get them both for seven.”
“Oh, do you think so. We’ll see about that.”
They continued to walk, occasionally murmuring a kind word about a piece they admired but would never buy, and passing without comment the horrors and junk that comprised most of the show. This was no place for amateurs.
Fifteen minutes later, they circled back to the booth with the pier mirror in the center and the Empire chandelier in the corner. The pier mirror was nearly seven feet high. Its age could be set at over two hundred years by the way it was made. Heavy wooden panels, crudely put together, supported the huge slab of mirror on the front, the carved and gilded frame, and complicated side panels set at an angle with many mirrored insets. Like most old pieces, the visible parts were finely detailed while the undersides and back were rough and unfinished. Camille was enchanted by the piece. She paraded back and forth in front of it, swinging her skirt and preening.
Bouck smiled indulgently and examined the Empire chandelier. Its clean lines were broken with exquisitely detailed heads of horned and bearded faces and had the classic ram finials. The dealer was a short, heavyset man in his mid-fifties, wearing an orange silk shirt over his tailored khaki trousers. He was drenched in a perfume so strong that Puppy sneezed when they entered his space.
The man looked anxiously around for the source of the sound and didn’t see it. He wore very thick lenses encased in the kind of owl-eye black plastic frames favored by architects. Milicia’s boss wore glasses just like it. Camille hiked up Puppy in her arms. Puppy sneezed again.
The owner saw it now, squeaked, “A dog,” jumping out of his chair, away from Puppy, as if it were necessary to defend himself.
Good. Camille wandered off, leaving Bouck to do business. She checked out some rococo sconces hanging on the rough wooden beams that supported the roof, took another look at the small French bergère the dealer had been sitting in when they approached. Now she could see the full shape of the chair and the delicate carving on the exposed ends of the arms.
Checking behind him nervously, the dealer was trying to concentrate on showing Bouck some small art-glass pieces in a vitrine in the middle of the booth. Camille could see Bouck wanted the vitrine and not what was in it. Good, old display cases were very hard to find. Apparently the vitrine was not for sale.
“Gallé is so difficult these days. I sell only authentic, but some dealers—” The dealer shrugged. “And it’s hard to tell if you don’t know what you’re doing. The Koreans are flooding the market with copies, you know. Here, let me show you.”
He picked up a magazine and passed it to Bouck. “Look at this, faked art glass. Daum Nancy, Gallé, Steuben, Tiffany, complete with signatures.”
“We don’t have a problem with that,” Bouck said airily, fingering the zipper on his handbag.
“I guarantee everything I sell,” the myopic dealer said quickly.
“Hmm.” Bouck pointed at the yellow bud vase with the blue-green ivy pattern, clearly signed Gallé. “That’s nice.”
“Let me take it out for you.”
The vitrine door swung open. Camille could see Bouck nodding at the way the key had turned easily in the lock and how the door swung evenly on its hinges. “Bouck?” she said.
“Yes, my angel.”
“What do you think of the chandelier?” Camille turned toward it.
“I’ll look at it in a second.” Bouck held up the small yellow vase, turning it in the light. She could see from his expression it wasn’t bad, was probably authentic. The weight was right and the edges of the pattern were not too neat, as they were likely to be in fakes.
“What are you asking for the vase?”
“Well, prices have come way down on these pieces since eighty-seven and eighty-eight. The Japanese drove the market way out of proportion and then, all of a sudden, they stopped buying. Back then this would have sold for thirty-five hundred to five thousand. Today it’s probably worth half that. For a dealer, I’d say fifteen hundred.” He hesitated as if he’d already said too much, then added, “I can do that because I bought it with a lot of other, larger pieces, from an estate about ten years ago, so I don’t have that big an investment in it.”
Bouck put down the bud vase and smiled at the dealer. “What chandelier, Cammy?”
“Oh, the Empire. That is a beauty.” The dealer trotted along behind Bouck toward the corner were Camille was standing, stroking the puppy’s head. He regarded the dog with distaste.
“You, of course, have excellent taste. That’s one of the best Empire chandeliers I’ve ever had. Unfortunately, I’ve had it only about three months, so I can’t do much on the price. But it is exquisite. Did you see the detail on the ram’s heads and Pan, of course. Ah—” he squeaked. “Don’t do that.”
Camille had reached up to take the chandelier off its hook.
“Oh, no, no, no,” he cried. “Let me do that.”
Camille didn’t wait. She lifted the chain, easing the chandelier gently off its hook. The profusion of heavy, dangling crystals swung into one another, clinking wildly.
The dealer rushed toward her, almost tripping over Bouck. “Oh, my God. That’s heavier than it looks.”
He grabbed it from her, staggering a little under the weight until Bouck steadied him. Together the two men rehung it on a lower hook, slightly below eye level. For the second time the horrified dealer backed away from Camille. Bouck smiled at his colleague’s discomfiture.
Twenty minutes later Bouck pulled the Mercedes into the parking lot of a small French restaurant Camille remembered from before. The Mercedes was old enough to have the generosity and elegance new sedans lacked, the trunk ample space for the chandelier. The pier mirror was being delivered on Tuesday. The chair in which the dealer had been sitting was comfortably nestled in the back seat. Bouck had taken it for his ritual. The display case and the bud vase remained where they were. Bouck had handed over nine thousand dollars in cash.
“I’m taking Puppy in,” Camille insisted.
“No, Camille,” Bouck said sharply. “You can see her from here.”
“I want to,” she said.
“No. You’ll have to leave her in the car.” Bouck opened the windows and poured some water from an Evian bottle into a bowl with black paws painted on it. “She’ll be fine. I promise.” When s
he didn’t move, he added, “Get out, Camille. Or I’ll show Puppy my gun.”
Meekly, she got out of the car and moved toward the restaurant door that suddenly opened for her as if by magic.
“Do you have a reservation?” the obsequious maître d’ asked, leading them to the half-empty dining room, where he pointedly consulted his book.
Bouck’s round, angelic face was serene except for a small sign of strain in one cheek, where a muscle jumped. “We’ll sit there, by the window,” he said.
“Um, that’s reserved.”
“That’s where we’re sitting. Go on, Cammy, that’s your table.”
“Oh. Well … all right.” The maître d’ followed Camille anxiously with the menus.
Bouck pushed the menus away. “I’ll have a double Glenlivet. A glass of Beaujolais for the lady.” He frowned, tapping the table with his fingertips as the maître d’ flushed and murmured, “Right away, sir.”
Bouck glanced at Camille, directing his scowl at her. She could feel the life draining out of her and clenched her fists to hold her life in.
“Don’t start, Camille,” Bouck said, hissing through his teeth like a snake. He smiled. “We’re having lunch, remember. You’ve conquered the witch Milicia, don’t let her back. She can’t hurt you now. Don’t let her creep up on you from behind.
“Come on, Cammy. I’ll let you have a nice piece of salmon, not cooked too much. Whatever sauce you want. Ah, here’s your Beaujolais.” He waved his hand at her, commanding, “Sip, sip.”
Camille reached for the wineglass as he directed, put it to her lips, did not drink. Her face was white.
“We’ve had a good day, hmmm?” Bouck drained his tumbler of single malt without flinching, then raised his hand for another.
35
Jason didn’t expect Emma to pick him up at the L.A. airport, but she was standing in the crowd of welcomers at the gate when he arrived. He was caught behind a couple with two babies who had screamed all the way across the country. Now mother and father were determinedly trying to wheel the exhausted infants, in two heavy-duty strollers, through solid matter. Their maneuvering gave him a minute to realize the beauty waving at him, dressed in the buff-colored linen trousers and mint-green blouse, with the arms of a tan nubbly sweater tied around her neck like a fashion model, was his wife.
Emma looked different. Her hair was shorter than he’d ever seen it, cut bluntly around her jawline to make her look jaunty and young. It was lighter, too. She was wearing a heavy gold necklace that was clearly expensive and a large braided leather handbag over her shoulder. The way she was put together complimented her perfect figure and fine complexion without making a big deal of either. She had a fresh healthy appearance, like the classy cover girl of Town & Country. She did not look like a woman who’d been abducted and tattooed by a madman only three months before.
A space opened up in the crowd. Jason walked toward her, stunned. He thought he was prepared for anything. Emma hadn’t been in good shape when she left New York right after an ordeal that would have turned most people into vegetable soup for quite some time. There were still bruises and burn marks on her body. Also on her feet. She had been naked and barefoot, and had to walk out of a house on fire. Weeks afterward, she was still finding it painful to cross the room.
And of course there was the unfinished tattoo. A couple of serpents curling up from her groin, stopping short just below the navel because they had been lucky and stopped the guy before he had time to finish the scenario he had planned. Emma shot him with his own gun. April Woo, the police detective on the case, shot him with hers. The bullets from both guns were found in his charred remains. But it was the fire that finally killed him.
Jason still woke up in a cold sweat, reliving the scene of Emma’s rescue. Half a block of Queens on fire, the shrieking of horrified homeowners and fire equipment. The pungent odor of two barbecuing bodies. And Emma being hustled into an ambulance, covered with soot, colored all over like an Easter egg ready for dipping, protesting all the while, calling for her own doctor. For him.
And despite it all, she grabbed her big break and headed for Hollywood anyway. Jason was still staggered when he thought about it. The man who abducted Emma had been triggered by a tattooing scene in her first film. And that didn’t put her off getting up there on the screen again as soon as possible. Not at all. Quite the contrary, Emma had been afraid the producer and director would fire her when they saw her packaging was no longer flawless.
Even though they hadn’t fired her, and she appeared to have made it through six grueling weeks of filming, Jason would not have been surprised to see any kind of deterioration in her now. What he wasn’t prepared for was the transformation three months away from him had made. The intelligent, attractive daughter of a navy meteorologist, raised on navy bases around the world, had brought herself through her own wars, just as she said she would.
As a person who prided himself on curing the sick and wounded, Jason felt the shock of having been short-circuited.
“Hi, pal.” Just barely brushing against him, Emma smiled. She lifted her lips to his cheek.
He restrained the impulse to grab her, hold her tight. Instead, he raised a finger to touch the place where she had kissed him.
“Wow, you look great. Thanks for coming.”
Now she looked surprised. “Did you think I wouldn’t?”
He shrugged. “I could have taken a cab.” He hoisted his carry-on with one hand and his overstuffed briefcase with the other.
She stared at him. “I guess you don’t think much of me.… Canyon Beach is an hour and a half away.”
“I think the world of you. But thanks anyway.”
She flushed, her eyes flashing anger for a second.
Jason didn’t know L.A., had no idea where she lived. He bit his lip, worried that he had blown it in the first five minutes. “Was that manipulative?”
“A little.” She nodded, frowning, then brightened up. “Oh, well, let’s go.” She turned toward the exit.
He followed her, relieved. Emma had never been a person to hold grudges. He didn’t know what she was like now, except that she was in a hurry. She covered what felt like several miles across the airport to the short-term parking lot at a race walk, finally stopping beside a red Mustang convertible.
“Nice.” He wasn’t looking at the car. He was watching Emma fumble in her huge new braided handbag for her car keys. He realized he missed her even more than he thought.
He shook his head at her hair. Emma always said she’d never color it. Once a rich honey-wheat color, her hair was now unashamedly movie-star blond. Her perfume was different, too. Spicy.
More winded than he liked to admit, Jason dropped his gear. He didn’t know what to make of her. It was like meeting a stranger with a familiar smile.
“Tired?” she asked.
“No,” he said quickly.
She found the keys and unlocked the trunk, looking up at him almost shyly. Showing off her car. “Like it?”
He held back a choke, managed a moderately convincing “Uh-huh.”
As he had once told his friend Charles, there wasn’t a thing not to like about Emma. Except now he no longer knew who she was.
She inclined her head modestly. “It’s leased.” She jumped in and put the top down, then turned to him questioningly, as if she suddenly remembered something.
“Any objections to my driving?”
He shook his head. How could he object?
“Good.” She pulled out, had no trouble finding her way out of the airport, and was soon speeding south on the 405.
This, also, was an adjustment. Jason had been married to Emma for five years, but even on long trips he’d never thought of asking her if she wanted to drive. Now it occurred to him that she might have minded.
He looked out at the scenery, which wasn’t impressive. He didn’t know where they were headed, and didn’t ask. They drove for almost an hour before Emma turned off onto a road leading thr
ough a small canyon that dead-ended at the Pacific Ocean. Suddenly the red Mustang was stopped at a traffic light facing a beach crowded with volleyball players. Emma turned to him with another of her smiles.
“Canyon Beach. Like it?”
“It’s great, really terrific.” He nodded. Yep, really terrific. A million light-years away from New York and definitely too far from the L.A. airport to take a taxi. This was more than the fragile male ego could take. Emma drove back up another hill and pulled to a stop on a steep incline that made him slightly dizzy.
A few minutes later she was unlocking the door to her rented house. “Come on in.”
The way her eyes were glowing with pride made Jason suddenly realize why she had wanted him out there. It wasn’t to explore new laser treatment to get rid of the tattoo on her stomach. Unh-unh. It was to show him this.
He could see the ocean from the front steps. It was just at the bottom of the steep hill. Up there, they were perched high enough for a New Yorker to get a nosebleed. Jason looked around.
It didn’t take a genius to see that the house was hanging by a few sticks from the side of the cliff. He couldn’t get the images of mudslides, fires raging down from the canyon above, huge earthquakes dumping the entire Tinker-Toy town into the Pacific, out of his mind.
To make matters worse, the house was not without charm. The living room melted into the dining-kitchen area. The bedroom was up several steps to one side in a clever way that allowed both living room and bedroom to have views of the sea. Another sleeping loft was carved out of the cathedral ceiling along the back of the living room. Below it was a glass wall that looked out on a rock garden planted with blooming rosebushes.
The furnishings were simple, in earth colors that suited Emma’s complexion. Throughout the place a southwestern feeling pervaded.
“Like it?” she asked when he had seen it all. It was the fourth or fifth time she’d made the query since he arrived.
