by Ruth Wind
I wasn't about to let him get me all tangled in this again. "No, Luca. The Romeo is right over there," I said. "I'll drive."
"Very well. I will park."
As calmly as I was able, I crossed the car park and opened the Romeo's driver-side door. Luca was parking by the lamppost, and I got in the car, started the engine and pretended to be waiting for him.
Just in case, I leaned over and checked the door locks. Good.
Seat belt, good.
Rain, starting to fall again a little—even better.
I backed out of the parking space, and spied Luca crossing the gravel lot with his head down. I put the car into first gear—
And peeled out. In the rearview mirror, I saw Luca run for his own car. Good luck, buddy, I thought, and pulled out onto the A-77.
He was behind me in moments. The roads were wet and dark once we pulled out from town a little way. I thought of my father, coaching me on the high mountain roads around San Francisco. My body settled into the seat, my limbs melding into the organic nature of the car around me, not a thing made of metal and glass, bolts and rubber, but an entity of breath and beauty, power and life.
We moved, the pair of us, into the night, like horse and rider dashing over the fields. The car hugged the road, smoothly, climbing and turning, responding without a quiver to my every command. We'd come to know each other, this little car and I, and in spite of my exhaustion, I felt a surge of exhilaration.
Admirably, Luca mostly stayed with me, lagging a little behind, then catching up. He cornered marvelously well, a driver who had some mountain time on him, I'd guess. That was generally how a person came by that clear sense of the center of the road.
Intriguing. I thought of him at the table, reading my palm. Thought of his kiss, so surprising and hot, delicious mouth and skilled, probing tongue. I thought of his hands in my hair, his thumbs on my face. A cradling gesture in which some tenderness lurked.
Minor royalty. What did that mean? I imagined him in a formal blue outfit, with a red sash, his hands in white gloves. And there was me, next to him, a gossamer vision in a ball gown in some giant, gilt-finished room.
The rational part of my brain threw a large stop sign up, and had to chuckle. How ridiculous!
Remember, said that rational side, he's a criminal. A criminal who had set me up and used me and landed me in more hot water than I'd encountered in a long time.
He flashed his lights at me. Once. Twice.
"Forget it, buster."
I sped up. Time to shake him. I stepped on the gas, hard, and headed around the bend. He clung for a little while, then started to slip behind, no match for the Romeo and me.
I had his headlights in view when they sailed crazily to the left, out of control, as I'd been earlier. I swore, and slammed on the brakes, pulling off to one side. Luca's car slammed to a stop against what appeared to be a boulder, hard enough I saw sparks fly out of the body. Maybe, I judged, a broken axle.
Good. I stepped on the gas, headed toward Ardrossan and the ferry in the morning.
But I had not driven even a kilometer before guilt began to eat at me. What if he'd been injured?
He deserved it, argued a voice in my head.
Yes, but I'd witnessed the accident, and therefore shared some responsibility.
Not if he's chasing you with the intent of stealing the jewel again.
Sylvie, said my mother's voice, you know what you should be doing.
With a sigh, I turned around. If he bled to death out there, I'd never forgive myself.
The car was exactly where I'd left it, the headlights aimed crazily toward the sea, illuminating the falling rain. With a sense of dread, I suddenly wondered if he'd been killed.
Sliding the Spider into a narrow spot next to the dark blue—Audi? Fiat?—I jumped out of the car. Rain immediately soaked my hair and face and shoulders, and the crash of the sea against some rocks lent a sense of dark drama to the scene. The car engine made no sound, but as I came closer, I could hear it ticking as it cooled. Though the window, I saw Luca's head, still resting against the driver window.
"Luca!" I cried, and yanked open the door. He tumbled out sideways, and his limp body would have fallen into the mud at my feet if I hadn't caught him. I grunted, catching the dead weight of his shoulders on the strength of my thighs.
His face was smeared with blood, but it was unclear whether it was from the earlier wound, which had lost its bandage, or some other injury I couldn't see.
"Luca?" I said more gently. Rain washed the gore away from those lovely cheekbones. His eyelids quivered. I touched his neck, feeling for a pulse, and found it. Not dead, then.
"Luca?" I lightly slapped his face. "Luca, come on, you have to wake up."
He came to with a shuddering, flailing gasp. I caught him before he threw himself by accident over the cliff. "Take it easy!"
He fell on his knees, choked, grasped my wrist. "What happened?"
"You wrecked the car."
Wincing, he looked at the car. Then at the sea. Then me. "You came back."
I nodded, let go of a breath. "Don't ask me why."
"It does not matter," he said. "Thank you."
The car—I could see it was an Audi now—was smoking and obviously not drivable. One of the wheels was cocked at a bad angle.
"What now?" Luca said.
"Let's go. I'll give you a lift to Ardrossan, but then you're on your own."
He nodded, still bent over. "Thank you."
"No argument? Nothing?" I didn't trust him for a second.
He turned away from me, and without drama, vomited. He held up a hand. "I am not feeling well."
I scowled. Didn't vomiting like that mean something? I couldn't remember. "You might have a concussion, but I'll be damned if I know how to check."
"I will be all right," he said, and made his way heavily toward the Spider. "Some day I would like to again have dry clothes."
"Ditto. Let's get out of here."
In the car, I had a moment of foreboding. He put his head back against the seat, and it showed his throat, the elegant cut of his mouth. Even through the damp, I could smell him, a phenomenon so odd I didn't know what to do with it.
He reached out with one hand and captured mine. "Why did you run from me, Sylvie?"
"I don't want to be part of this anymore."
He nodded. One eye slammed closed, as if he had a stabbing pain. "I see."
For a moment, what I wanted to do was smooth a hand over his brow, brush his hair away from his face. My fingers knew how thin the flesh on his cheekbones would feel, how arched and strong the bridge of his nose. There were prickles of dark hair showing across his upper lip, and across his chin, and I imagined what that roughness would feel like across my throat, over the delicate skin of my breasts.
Get a grip. He was just another in a long line of men I'd label Big Mistakes. Hadn't I had enough of this sort?
Grimly, I started the car. All I had to do was ignore the lure of Luca for another hour or two, and then we'd part company for good. No freaking way I was going to head down the road to a fresh broken heart.
And a little voice, the cynical observer, knew none of this was about Luca anyway. It was all about Paul.
It was always about Paul.
* * *
Luca fell asleep, and in the darkness, I drove, thinking again of the summer I spent in Paris after my father fell apart.
After picking me up at the airport, Paul took me home to the apartment he kept in the Marais, that section of Paris left untouched by Napoleon's sweeping modernizations. The rooms I knew so well—for we had stayed there often—took up half the fourth floor, and all of the fifth, in an old building, with rooms tucked under the ribs of the old beams. The dormers looked out to a secret courtyard full of roses that were tended by a fierce woman who rarely spoke.
It was a place I had loved from the first moment I'd stepped within, and "my" room, the guest room that opened onto the roofs of Paris, was
my favorite of all. When I lay in the bed to read the afternoons away, pigeons cooed along the edges of the roof, and sometimes a giant gray cat wandered in through the windows, sleepy from his hunting. He'd sleep on my knees, purring if I even moved a toe. I never did find out who actually owned him.
For the first few weeks, I withdrew into the deep, soft splendor of my bed, and ate whatever the housekeeper, Brigitte, a thin, sharp older woman, brought to tempt me: little cakes from her oven, cheeses as ripe as noon, eggs shirred and stirred and scrambled and fried, rich cream soups. I would emerge and eat, then dive back into my cocoon again.
My father called, dutifully, every day. He apologized, over and over and over, until I wearied of it and told him to stop or I would not talk to him anymore. I heard Paul reprimand him, as well, a gruff order to pull himself into some reasonable shape.
Finally, when I'd rested a little, Paul pried me out of the room beneath the dormers, and we began a regime that would last the summer. Mornings, rain or shine, we wandered out to a tiny open café no larger than a matchbox. The counter was black with age, the proprietor a ruddy-faced man with a thick mustache. The customers were an assortment of people from the neighborhood, a white-haired old gentleman who looked as frail as spun glass and his tiny, wizened wife; a pair of men who were obviously gay; a pretty career girl with long legs and an impressive bust who brooked no flirtation.
In that little café, we drank café crèmes and ate chocolate croissants carried from the bakery. As I sat at the tiny bar and listened to the flow of French around me, I watched the vendors set up their produce—plump blueberries and strawberries as big as my hand, piles of spinach leaves and fresh mushrooms. "Why does it all look so much more delicious here?" I asked Paul.
He lifted one elegant shoulder. "It is Paris. Everything is more beautiful here."
"The women are beautiful," I said, "but not as beautiful as in Rio."
When Paul laughed and repeated my English words to the others in French, they laughed with him. I did not look at them, did not care about their opinion. These women were thin and dashing, it was true, but the women in Rio—
"The women in Rio have more passion," I said, in French.
"Ah, no, cherie," said Paul. "There are no more passionate people in the world than the French."
I shrugged. "It does not concern me. Passion is for fools."
Paul looked at me for a long moment. "My poor Sylvie," he said at last, and brushed my cheek with his fingers. "You have been wounded young. As was I."
"You were?"
He inclined his head, straightened. "A story for another day, no? Let's find our pleasure for today."
In the afternoons, we would take in a museum or walk in a park or through some neighborhood or another.
As the weeks ambled by, all in the same easy rhythm, it seemed there was nothing for Paul to do but ferry me to museums, to old houses, to little shops where he bought me baubles and scarves and toys. I had not played tourist in France, and he took delight in showing those sights to me—we went on field trips to Versailles, to Giverny to see Monet's gardens, to Normandy, where soldiers had come ashore, one of them my grandfather, so long ago.
Or so it seemed to me. Paul was amused. "Ancient history, no?"
"It is a long time ago," I said.
He stood on the beach and looked down the long, once-bloodied stretch of it. "When I was a boy, they still spoke of the war all the time. In every village church were the names of the men who had died. In every square was a plaque telling the story of some villager who had been in the Resistance and been killed by firing squad."
"How sad!" I cried.
"If we do not remember what such a war costs," he said, touching my nose, "we are doomed to repeat it, no?"
The only flaw in the ointment that lazy, healing summer was Mariette, Paul's mistress, a woman as sharp-limbed as a grasshopper, with enormous dark eyes and yards of dark hair. She wore scarves artfully, carelessly draped around her neck or shoulders, and smoked cigarettes ceaselessly. Had I been a few years younger, she could have fussed over me, done my nails and hair, bought me training bras. As it was, I was emerging—too quickly—into my womanhood, and my tall leggy body was more from my American father than my French-Scottish mother.
Mariette did not like my living in the apartment. She pouted and protested. She said it was unseemly.
I tried to woo her. It wasn't as if I didn't know how to do it. My father had had, by then, a dozen or so mistresses. It made my life easier if I worked my way into their favor. Sometimes I asked to brush their hair or wished aloud to be as pretty as they were, as well-developed.
Mariette could not be wooed. She was threatened and jealous and made my life miserable in dozens of tiny ways.
When I think of her now, I realize what a small-minded person she was, but then, all I knew was another slam, and she saw to it that I felt betrayed by Paul.
It happened this way. The last week before I was to join my father, who had finally dried out, cleaned up and was living back in San Francisco, Paul made it a point to spend as much of each day with me as he could take from his businesses.
We picked our favorite spots and visited each one—the French crown jewels in the Galerie d'Apollon, and then to a café across the way that had the very best hot chocolate on the planet, served in china cups in a room so bright with gilt and mirrors that one could barely look at it. We ate crepes—mine chocolate, Paul's ham and soft Gruyere—from a stand nearby Ste. Chapelle, a church with splendid stained glass, on a bench on the Ile de Cite, where we watched tourists and housewives march along with their shopping on their arms and the businessmen in good suits annoyed with them both.
The evening before my departure, Paul meant to give me a lovely evening out. I would be sixteen soon, he said, and it was time I had the pleasure of a fine dinner on the town. My birthday was in August; Paul said he and my father would take me to supper as the young lady I was becoming, and then my father and I would return to our base in San Francisco.
I didn't want to go back with my father. For the first time since my mother's death, I had been very happy. I determined there must be some argument I could find to convince everyone that it would be a good idea for me to stay. As the date neared, I thought carefully.
In the meantime, Paul had other activities planned. First, he took me shopping for a dress. Mariette offered to do it, but he refused and I was secretly very pleased.
It was that outing when I began to understand how my feelings had shifted over the summer. We had been shopping. Late summer light turned the bricks of the buildings a rosy golden shade, and there tourists and youths crowding the streets. I carried a tiny handbag made of knotted antique ties.
We paused to join a crowd gathered around a mime performing with two cats. It was astonishing and delightful—the man was clearly fond of his tabbies, and they of him. Who knew cats could be trained? I was amazed by them, and so was Paul, and we were laughing and laughing at them. He put his arm around me, in a friendly way, and gave a little squeeze to my shoulder, pressed a kiss to my temple, as he had a thousand times before.
And—who knows why—it was different. I was suddenly, acutely conscious of his hand on my arm, of his lips against my temple, of a sudden, irrevocable shift of life as I knew it, as if everything on earth had abruptly slid to the left.
I closed my eyes against it, my face flushing. I'd known this feeling. I was nearly sixteen, after all, and had had my fair share of crushes and "boyfriends" here and there. I'd even kissed some of them, and there had been one in Rio, a protector, who had kissed my throat, then my breasts, and I'd enjoyed it very much.
So the sudden flush of awareness toward Paul alarmed and upset me. I tried to block it out. He did not seem to notice anything awry, and there were only a few days left until my departure. I was shocked and ashamed.
And conversely, as hungry to spend time with him as I ever was. I read aloud to him in the evenings as he sorted through paperwork and orga
nized his collections. I ate with him as always, each morning running down the stairs to the bakery for croissants.
I wanted our dinner for my birthday. In my own mind, even if it was wrong, I could have my little fantasy of a handsome prince taking me to the ball.
I'd given up many things in my life.
Not this.
Chapter 14
The popularity of diamonds surged during the Middle Ages, with the discovery of many large and famous stones in India, such as the Koh-I Noor and the Blue Hope. Today India maintains the foremost diamond polishing industry in the world.
—www.costellos.com.au
What felt like a dozen years later, my arms and shoulders were burning with exhaustion as I pulled into the grim industrial town of Ardrossan. It was quiet, though not entirely shut down for the night. Maybe feeling the slowing of the car, Luca sat up, blinking. "Where are we?"
"Androssan," I said. "End of the line for you."
He grunted, pressed fingers to his right eye.
As we passed through the center of town, I spied a filling station that was still, by some miracle, open. "I have to get some petrol. We'll see about hotels there."
He nodded.
I pulled into the station. A man in a plaid jacket was filling the tank of what was obviously a work truck. He looked done in. Tugging the emergency brake, I glanced at Luca, thinking about asking him to fill the tank while I went inside, but one glance was enough. He looked awful, his skin the color of egg whites, his cropped dark hair clumped with dried blood.
Maybe it was dangerous for him to have come anywhere near the Katerina. He wasn't even holding on to it and he was getting pretty battered. "I'll be right back."
I looked the car over, wincing at the long scratches on the right, the dent on the left fender where I'd smashed the side of the hill when I spun out. Mud splatters marred the red paint, and the driver's side window was smashed from Frankenstein's fist.
Vaguely, I thought again, where were these guys coming from? Who sent the thugs?
