by Ruth Wind
"Gunnarsson, I assume?"
"Yes. Gunnarsson was going to cut him off. Because he was so desperate, the art dealer gave up the Katerina, which The Swede very much wanted because it was Maigny—your Paul—who wanted it.
"When he hired me to steal the jewel back, he paid me half upfront. The rest of the payment were to be the jewels in the collection."
"All of them? Jeez."
"All of them together were not worth a fraction of the Katerina, of course, but for me, it would be a simple matter to find collectors and dealers who would make me quite rich. I could not, on my own, find a buyer for a jewel so expensive as the Katerina."
"I see. And Maigny only wanted the Katerina to have it, not to sell it."
"Yes."
He sipped his tea, his eyes on the dark window, the slams of rain. "I am no ordinary thief," he said, and looked at me. "I am very, very good at what I do. In some circles, I'm—" he gave me a wry little smile that managed to be self-deprecating and deliciously seductive all at once "—quite renowned."
"That doesn't surprise me."
"For a month, I planned every detail. Had it worked, it would have been the last job I had to do."
I nodded, filing the information away. "So what went wrong?"
"I arrived as anticipated, while Gunnarsson was out. The Katerina was in a safe by itself, and I'd secured it, and was working on cracking the other safe when—" He winced, shook his head. "He returned. Too early. And there was something wrong—he was afraid, plainly. I hid, and then three men came in, garroted him, and were obviously going to come after the Katerina, so I bolted. Out the back and into the night." He laced his fingers together, touched the tips of his thumbs, point to point. "I'd planned well, so I was able to get away. I hid out in a room nearby the train station that night, trying to decide what to do. In the morning, it was reported that the police had found him dead, and seized his jewels."
A chill rippled down my spine. "So who were the men? Why didn't they steal his jewels?"
"They might not have known about them. They think it was a drug killing."
I searched my memory for details. "I don't remember a lot about the actual murder. It didn't particularly interest me at the time." But I frowned. "It all seems too convenient. You just happened to be stealing the Katerina when these guys come in and murder him and they don't even know that he collects all these jewels?"
He shrugged, and my gut said it was genuine bewilderment on his face. "I don't know. They said it was Peruvians, that he'd crossed someone."
I narrowed my eyes. "The man in my room wasn't Peruvian."
"No, I don't think so."
"Hmm." It seemed there was some answer right in front of my eyes, but I couldn't quite capture it. "I don't think it was Paul who killed Gunnarsson, either."
"Maybe it was the police?"
"That's reaching," I said dismissively.
"And when the murders happened, you were cheated of your payoff and decided to keep the Katerina?"
Luca shook his head. "No. Until I held it, I did not intend to take it back to my country."
I looked at him.
"Stupid, hmm?" he said. "But once I saw her, it was as if I had no choice. I took her back to my hotel, and I waited there, trying to think what to do. And then of course the news hit the papers, and your name was raised, and I knew of your connection to Maigny—and one thing led to another."
"And here we are."
"Yes."
We sat in the kitchen with our tea, each to our own thoughts. The tea was soothing, hot, sweet. In the silence between bursts of wind, I heard the overhead light buzzing faintly.
"Enough of all that." Luca smiled, his healthy white teeth flashing. "My grandmother is a gypsy," he said. "Shall I read your palm?"
I rolled my eyes. "Let me guess," I said. "I'm going to meet someone tall, dark and handsome."
He raised an eyebrow, his eyes twinkling. "That has already happened." With a sideways smile, he bent over my palm and spread open my fingers. It seemed somehow intensely intimate, previewing a different sort of spreading, and I found heat touching my ears, a strange, Victorianesque reaction.
He brushed the hollow and pads and rises with the very tips of his fingers, and in my weariness, I was mesmerized by the look of his fingernails, clean half moons, somehow sturdy-looking.
"Mmmm," he said, and traced a line down the middle of my hand, top to bottom. "This is a fame line," he said. "Not everyone has one. It means you will attain great reputation through your work."
"Or I'll be a pet of the paparazzi."
He flashed a quick smile. "Here the heart and life line join. You are stubborn, but felt betrayed by your family."
"I'm so not amazed that you knew that."
He went back to the perusal of my palm, and he seemed absurdly serious after a few minutes, studying this and that, lifting my hand to see more light on the palm, grunting a little.
"Will you stop that? You're scaring me."
"You have markings that are most unusual. Having one is interesting, two would be a surprise. I have not seen anyone with three." He looked up at me. "You have a very powerful destiny, Sylvie."
"Again, that's my father's mark in my life. He's the famous one."
"You will be, too, for work you do yourself. A fame line comes from your own efforts." He made an x on the pad below my forefinger. "This is a star of destiny. It's very powerful, this mark. It's the one that says you will experience greatness in some endeavor."
I gave him a half smile. "You sound so serious."
His glossy lashes did not lift. "I have never seen these marks, Sylvie, though I have heard people speak of them. It is intriguing." Again he stroked the lines. "I wonder what it is you will do?"
I didn't want destiny or anything difficult for tonight, and said, noncommitally, "Who knows?" I took a breath. "Tell me something else."
"This," he said, moving his finger, "is your heart line. It is both strong and broken at times. You will love boldly, and your heart will break. It has broken twice to now."
I must have winced or jerked, because he looked at me in surprise. "Yes? Twice?"
"Well, how hard would that be to guess? I'm old enough to have had at least two."
He pointed to the middle line, side to side. "And there is marriage here, though I do not see children." A frown pulled his brows toward that aggressive nose. He tipped my hand to the side, looking at the edge. "Ah, here. Perhaps one child after all. That's good."
"I'm not sure I'm all that interested."
"No," he said, without looking at me, "you are a woman who will find pleasure in your child. A daughter, perhaps," he added, raising his eyes, "to spoil a little, no?"
I shrugged lightly, but I liked the idea of it, somewhere deep inside of me. A daughter, yes. With my mother's thin nose and graceful hands.
Keeping his eyes on my face, he lifted my hand to his lips. I didn't pull away—I let him press my knuckles, one at a time to the heat of his lush mouth. Just beyond the angle of my knuckle was a hint of moisture, the give of flesh.
One kiss, two, three…
I was exhausted, disoriented by the shift in circumstances, and much too drawn to him. I took my hand away. "Let's not," I said.
"Are you afraid of me?"
"It would be the sensible thing," I answered, "but no."
That pleased him. His white teeth showed. "Good."
As I sat there, the world started to drag, like an old-fashioned cartoon, the sound slowing and slowing, even while I peered at him, genuinely trying to concentrate. Jet lag was starting to press into the folds of my brain like a hot towel, pressing down, ever thicker, into the creases of gray matter until all systems were buzzing with exhaustion.
"I have to sleep," I said abruptly, standing, not even caring if it seemed rude.
Automatically, I checked the locks on the doors, tugged the curtains over the stove closed, put spoons and cups into the sink. "Help yourself to whatever you need," I
said. "You can sleep in the second room, just there." I pointed out the door.
"Thank you," he said, standing. The bandage stood out in a white rectangle on his tanned forehead. A curl stuck to it, glossy black. He seemed shy as he said, "May I sleep with you? Not for sex, just to lie down with a human on such a cold night?"
"Do women really fall for that line?" I said, blinking irritably.
"Sylvie—" he said, reproach in his voice.
I shook my head. My braid swung with the movement. "I don't care what you do. Stay. Go. Whatever you want. I'm to bed."
He followed me into the room, and we crawled under the big thick coverlet, soft flannel stuffed with batting. No top sheet, just that muffling weight of cover boring down on my body. I fluffed my pillows, put one between us.
God. It felt wonderful to just stop moving, to lie down instead of sitting upright. "I am so tired!"
Luca murmured. His body warmth was like a hot water bottle, taking the chill off the bed. Near the ball of my right foot was the arch of his left. I would have to be careful not to curl up around him.
He settled his hand on my hip. "Is this all right?"
"Yeah."
I sighed into the softness of the bed. Wind buffeted the caravan, almost rocking it with gusts, and the sound of the driving rain muffled even the sound of the surf not far away on the rocks.
Somehow, the combination made me think sleepily of Paul. Because I was so tired, my usual defenses were gone, and memories flooded into my half-sleeping brain.
I thought of a Frenchman with long, elegant hands.
To distract myself I said to Luca, "If you are descended from royalty, does that mean you are royal yourself?"
"Minor."
"You are minor royalty?"
"Cousins to the royal family. Not that there has been a monarch for a long time, so it doesn't matter."
"So why did you become a thief? You seem intelligent. Why crime?"
"My father," Luca said, "was a hero. He fought the communists in my country, and he was killed. My mother, her heart was broken, and she did not last long afterward."
He paused so long that I dozed, waiting for the answer. "I became a thief to prove you have to take what you want. To prove myself," he said, his voice growing softer. "Now I would like to show that I am more the man my father was."
Fathers. Noble, or not. Honorable, or not. Available, or not. Mothers get so much of the credit and blame in our lives, but fathers leave indelible marks, too.
I thought of my own father, and of others who had wanted to prove themselves. All my unresolved issues, which had been stirred up and lurking all day, came pouring out of the box where they mainly lived under lock and key—parent issues, mostly. The usual things a girl gets snared in when her mother dies too young.
I thought, unavoidably now, of Paul.
* * *
I was twelve. A vulnerable age in a lot of ways, and a moment ripe for planting all sorts of things, and I have the usual abandonment issues that go along with sudden death.
And it was very sudden. I know now that she and my father were on the verge of divorce because of my father's perpetual infidelities, that she was back in Scotland trying to find a place for us to live when she was killed in a most prosaic car accident: a woman in a hurry to get home from work ran a stop sign, and broadsided my mother's car. My mother's head was banged just right and she died. No flames, no big spinout. Just a stupid, pointless death.
I don't remember my father being at the funeral. Intellectually, I know he was there, but I can't see him in my imagination. It was Paul holding my hand when she was buried, Paul who held me later as I sobbed and sobbed that afternoon, growing more and more hysterical until he picked me up, carried me to the bathroom of my grandmother's house and washed my face with cold water. He forced a brandy down my throat.
When I'd finally fallen asleep, he talked my father into letting him take me away for a holiday for a few weeks, just until the worst of the shock wore off. Somewhere warm, where the sun could bake away some of my slashing pain.
My grandmother—that would be Sylvie, the Frenchwoman I'm named for—adored Paul, and from that summer in Nice, knew we had a special bond. My father was absent that year, racing or drinking or otherwise trying to kill himself. I sometimes wonder if he remembers any of it.
We went to Tahiti, Paul and I, ostensibly so that he could teach me about the great painters who'd done their work in that land, the French Gauguin, first, of course, but also van Gogh. He booked a cabana on a beach, where we heard the turquoise waters swishing up on the white beaches. Wind rustled the pine trees. It was so far away. So exotic.
We swam. We studied painters—Gauguin and van Gogh, Matisse and Boullaire. We explored writers, too—Robert Louis Stevenson, a restless Scot, and Jack London, whom I liked, and Melville, who bored me. He read aloud from the journals of Pierre Loti, and I liked that, too.
Paul coaxed me to eat with papayas and mangos and delicate monkfish. He bought me rosary beads made of polished coral, to remind me that I'd always have a mother. At night, he stayed up late long after I went to bed, drinking. I don't know if he loved her as a woman, or merely as a friend, but his grief was true and deep.
There is a photo from that trip that still sits on my mantle. Paul is tall and tan, his beard grown out a few days worth on his chin. His hair is longish, lionlike. He looks thin to me, his hands too big for his wrists, his cheeks gaunt. I am leaning on his shoulder, my head sideways so my crown is against his neck. We both look haunted.
And yet, at the end of a few weeks, we returned to Nice, where my father was living. Paul went back to Paris.
And things were all right for a while. Then my father moved us to Brazil.
Chapter 10
The next most important element of the 4 C's of diamond grading is color. Color is classified by letters, ranging from "D," colorless, to "Z," yellow. The final category of color rating is "fancy", such as red, pink, blue, and strong yellow. Many are highly prized. One famous example is the vivid blue Hope Diamond.
—www.costellos.com.au
Back in the present, in the darkness of my cousin's caravan, I startled as my sleep foot took a dream step into a void. For a moment, I lay there blinking, confused over my location, the strong smell of oranges in the room, the unfamiliar—
I looked at the man attached to the hand on my hip.
Oh. Yes.
I glanced at the digital clock. We'd only been lying here maybe an hour, if that. What had startled me into wakefulness? I stared into the dark, listening, but heard only the whipping, roaring wind and rain. It must have been—
Car doors slammed. Next to me, Luca bolted upright. He pressed fingers to my lips before leaping up to peer out the window. He swung back and bent down close to whisper, "There is someone out there."
I shifted, tried to find the comfortable hollow in the bed that I'd been so enjoying a moment ago. "I'm sure it's just a neighbor. Let's sleep."
"I do not think your neighbors are carrying baseball bats, no?"
"What?" I stood up to look out the window. Rain was pouring down still, the darkness nearly absolute except for the pool of light that glowed from the caravan itself, not so much light under most circumstances, but more than enough on such a dark night to show me a small car and the three men headed our way. "Who are they? How did they find us?"
"I do not know."
I dived for my shoes, jamming my feet into them hard. "What do we do?" My mind was full of images of a drug lord garroted, his throat spilling blood down his white shirt front.
Luca turned, putting his hands on my upper arms. "Listen, Sylvie, get out of here, go back to Ayr. I'll find you."
I yanked free. "Stop with the Last of the Mohicans crap, all right?" From the hook where I'd left it, I grabbed my coat, and without thinking, put my hand over the knot in my bra, reassuring myself that the Katerina was still there beneath my left breast.
Luca saw the gesture and smiled bitterly.
"Do not let it seduce you, love."
I shoved my hands into my coat sleeves. "Don't worry. I can handle it. I'm not going to go to Ayr. I have too much family there."
"You must get away. Now. As fast as you can."
"Where, then, do you want to meet?"
I cast around in my mind. "Troon," I said. I had a cousin who'd been working the hospitality industry there. It was renowned for its golf, and boasted a famous old pub. "The Ship's Inn."
"I'll—"
There was a racket at the front door. "I'll try to come behind you," Luca said, and with a cry, he slammed his elbow into the glass of the window. It was strong, tempered or something, and didn't break. "Go!" he cried.
"Where?" I cried. "That's the only door."
From the front of the caravan came a slamming sound—maybe the door giving way. I thought fleetingly that my cousin Alan was going to kill me, but then Luca was slamming his elbow into the glass of the bedroom window.
One—slam! Two, slam! Three, slam, slam!
He swore. "It won't break!'
I looked around for something heavy. In the front of the caravan was a crashing sound. I thought I could feel the whole building rock, as if they'd bashed it sideways. They weren't in yet, anyway—they were no more successful than we were at breaking the slatted glass. That was something.
The room was tidy as a pin, but there was a trophy of some kind on the dresser. A big fish was on top—fishing trophies? Who knew?—but the base was a very heavy lead-feeling thing.
From the front room came a very loud crash and the sound of voices. The baseball bat had obviously done the trick.
I grabbed the trophy. "Get out of the way!"
Luca ducked. I swung the trophy as hard as I could into the window. It gave way with a somehow sibilant tinkling of safety glass, and the night came rushing in—soaking wet and cold.
"Let's get out!" I said in a low, urgent voice, and turned back to the door, trying to think of ways to get through that bedroom door to the kitchen where my purse—and thus, my keys—was.
Luca must have made it through the window, because I felt a gust of rain slap the back of my head as the door to the bedroom burst open. Without letting the intruder have a chance, or even getting much of a look at him, I barreled forward, swinging the trophy. It caught him squarely across the nose, the fish fins doing an admirable job of slashing his skin.
