The Ruby Tear

by Suzy McKee Charnas

  Jess turned the gift-wrapped little parcel speculatively in her hands. “You don’t suppose it’s from Anthony Sinclair. He’s known for wooing his leading ladies.”

  She was afraid to say what she hoped: that this might be a peace offering from Nick.

  “Anthony Sinclair is way too old for you,” Marie said.

  “I don’t care about age, Marie, but he’s a married man.”

  “You still have a lot to learn about the theater if you think that makes a difference,” the dresser said.

  Jess hid a smile. Marie plainly had a fannish crush on Sinclair, though she would die rather than admit it.

  In the box, inside the wrapping, was a teardrop-shaped flat pendant in dark metal with brilliant silvery ornaments, tiny rosettes and stars, highlighting the fine black filigree work. The pendant was strung on a delicate chain of the same black, wiry swirls and turns, like exquisite, miniature wrought-iron work.

  Jess was impressed. The pendant wasn’t flashing with diamonds or dripping pearls, but she knew fine workmanship when she saw it.

  Marie stood back with her hands on her hips. “Well, that certainly doesn’t come from Mr. Sinclair. That’s an antique piece.” Marie collected costume jewelry. She knew what she was talking about. “The dark part is ‘Berlin iron,’ cast and lacquered, and the bright bits are cut and polished steel. Turn it over, you’ll see that it’s put together with tiny rivets—see there?”

  “Is it valuable?”

  “I’d say so,” Marie said, a covetous gleam in her eyes. “Of course at the time it was made it was the kind of jewelry marketed to comfortable bourgeois who couldn’t afford the rubies and emeralds of the rich. Collectors would drool all over this, but it’s not museum grade.”

  “Good,” Jess said. Not from Nick, then, who was a wealthy man. In a present from him, rubies and emeralds—small ones, maybe, but precious gems nonetheless—would be more likely. “Something really expensive would make me nervous.”

  Marie added shrewdly, “I didn’t say it wasn’t expensive. These days that kind of thing is still pretty valuable for its beauty. Look at the delicacy of the work.”

  “It had better not be from Anthony!” Jess said with a laugh. “His wife would come down here and shoot me, and she’d be right, too.”

  “Sally Sinclair would more likely shoot him. But don’t worry. The only way an actor can afford fine Victorian jewelry is by having a sideline in bank robbery.”

  Marie was strictly theater people, with little admiration for screen personalities. To her, an actor did live performance, and, accordingly, never got rich.

  “It couldn’t be fake, could it?” Jess said. “A reproduction, maybe?”

  “No. That’s old work.” The dresser peered sternly at Jess. “Be careful, Miss Croft. I don’t know who left it, but you can bet he’s got something more in mind than watching you from the audience.”

  “Well, so what?” Jess said. “He could be tall, dark, handsome, and rich enough to hand out antique jewelry as trinkets, and what would be wrong with that?”

  “In my experience,” Marie observed, “the kind of man who sends jewelry looks like a toad and treats women like flies.”

  “Erk!” Jess fitted the lid back onto the box. “You’re probably right. And I don’t have to accept it.”

  “Not if you can figure out who it came from and give it right back.”

  “Look, can you take it to the office safe later, Marie? Just until we know more about it. I’d hate to have something happen to this beautiful thing and then not be able to replace the value of it to whoever sent it.”

  The dresser nodded, took the little package, and secreted it somewhere on her person so quickly that Jess couldn’t tell where it was. In earlier days, people said, Marie had done a stint as a magician’s assistant, among many odd theatrical and circus jobs. She knew a few tricks herself and amused herself by showing them off.

  Anthony Sinclair came sweeping in to collect Jess for the Angels’ party.

  “Time to get going!” he announced. “Mustn’t keep the investors waiting! Actually, this the ideal theater celebration—a party before you open, while everybody’s still full of hope and cheer!” He smiled his famous, fetching, crooked smile, radiating expansive warmth.

  Could he have sent the pendant? No, of course not—Marie was right. The man was a talented performer and he seemed to like Jess in a collegial way. But if he could lay hands on such a lovely object as this, he’d probably use it woo his wife back again.

  The Sinclairs were famous for their long-lasting but wildly stormy marriage. At the moment they were in the fourth month of another separation. Sinclair had always taken back his beautiful Sally when she could be persuaded to return. He would undoubtedly do so again.

  Jess wondered if she would ever find such a devoted life partner for herself (not Nick, of course; she must give up that idea once and for all). Suddenly she couldn’t wait to leave the cramped dressing room.

  She rode uptown with Sinclair, preparing mentally to dazzle the subscribers and maybe help squeeze a little more out of them in contributions to the theater’s expenses. The party was on the penthouse floor of an apartment building on Central Park West. All the way there Sinclair told her theatrical stories of disasters and saves, ruins and triumphs. He complimented her on what she had done so far with the character of Eva.

  “Thanks for the encouragement,” she said. “I don’t feel that I’m really up to speed yet. I’m blowing lines that are right there on paper in front of me, for God’s sake—”

  “That’s only to be expected, Jessamyn,” Sinclair said. His voice, a deep baritone that could effortlessly reach the back of the largest theater in Manhattan, lowered even more with disapproval. “Though I don’t think Walter’s constant carping helps.”

  “No, he is being helpful,” Jess said. “Everybody is.”

  “Everyone except our author,” Sinclair said. “My bet is that he won’t even show up on opening night.”

  Jess sighed. “Don’t blame him. The accident hurt him a lot more than it hurt me.”

  “Well, he doesn’t deserve to have you sticking up for him,” the actor said warmly. “I know you and Griffin were an item, but I have to say it anyway and hope you’ll forgive me: maybe he just doesn’t have the nerve for the opening of his first stage play.”

  “Anthony, don’t be unfair,” she responded. “It took nerve for Nick to sneak medical supplies through the lines at Sarajevo. And then to come back and write about it all so vividly—not just to live through the bombardments and the sniper fire and the deaths of people around him, but to relive it all for the script—”

  “But who’s taking the risks now, may I ask? Who’s actually preparing to go onstage in front of everyone, armed with nothing but someone else’s words and her own native wit and talent, to be cheered or jeered when the curtain comes down? You, my dear; you, and me.”

  “And Billy Calthorpe, and Anita MacNeil, among others,” Jess reminded him, amused to see Sinclair’s actorly egotism obliterating the lesser members of the cast.

  “Jessamyn Croft,” he said with a sigh, “I wonder how you’ve come this far in the theater—and believe me, you have come far—without losing your sweetness and generosity.”

  She blushed and began to deny any special virtue, but Sinclair touched her lips with his forefinger to stop her protestations. “As one who long ago lost his own best qualities, I know whereof I speak; and I know how important it is to be reminded that one can be both a fine performer and a decent human being.”

  She was suddenly very aware of his physical presence beside her on the bench seat, the deep and supple voice flowed, the barest pressure of his thigh against her own.

  Good grief, this was all she needed: advances from an attractive man, an accomplished man—a married man, no matter how rockily. She had to work with him, closely, for an unspecified length of time. Besides that, she liked him. What could she say to preserve the necessary distance between th
em without ruffling his feathers?

  There was a considerable gap in their ages, and if she felt it he certainly must. Actors are sensitive about age, and with good reason. Then there was the production to think of. Backstage romances had a way of causing more trouble than they were worth (just look at her and Nick, starting out besotted with each other in “Barefoot in the Park” and look at them now).

  The cab halted and a uniformed doorman opened the door. Upstairs in the foyer of the penthouse apartment, Walter met them, drink in hand, his beard bristling and his eyes glittering with energy.

  “Jess!” he cried, turning away to call out to the crowd. “Here she is, everyone—our Eva in the making, the benchmark performance!”

  He left Sinclair with Jess’s coat in his hands and drew her quickly after into the thick of the mob, introducing her to strangers, many of them bohemian friends of members of the company. Some of the dramatically turned out women, with stark makeup and outrageous clothes, looked more like performers than Jess did. And not just the women; the men too.

  She glanced covertly at a handsome poet with a dramatic tattoo and hair shaven to a fine fuzz all over his scalp. He was deep in discussion with someone with an impressive, ram-like nose down which he gazed with heavy-lidded eyes like a Byronic laudanum addict of the nineteenth century.

  The room was large and high-ceilinged, paneled and plastered with old-fashioned opulence. It was already crowded to bursting, hot and noisy. The waitstaff had to eel their way through the crowd, performing unnoticed prodigies of balance to avoid tipping drinks and finger food down the guests’ collars.

  Jess had done more than one stint working for a caterer before her first theatrical successes had made that unnecessary. Now she felt for these hired servants, at the same time hoping fervently that she would never be reduced to that kind of work again.

  Walter, who had been waylaid by their host Joshua Whitely—a heavy, round-faced man wearing a rather endearing expression of dazed delight—caught her eye and beckoned to her. Jess foresaw entrapment in one of those awkward situations where she would be introduced to someone she should flatter and charm so that he (it was usually a he) would write a check for a new computer, or additional lights, or a replacement for the worn stage curtain, or whatever was at the top of the theater’s current wish list.

  She was an actress, not a saleswoman; she couldn’t work up any enthusiasm for the effort. She let some people step in front of her so Walter wouldn’t see her slip out through the French doors and onto the terrace.

  Cold air only lightly flavored with cigarette smoke refreshed her. Several people stood by the wrought-iron railing at one end of the terrace, arguing about unions and ticket prices. They were mere silhouettes against the brilliantly lit buildings of the mid-Manhattan skyline, which glowed under a few washed-out stars.

  Glad to stop smiling for a moment, Jess walked to the other end of the terrace and relaxed against the iron railing. It was too cold to stay out long without her coat, but she was grateful for a moment of relief. From here the conversation inside sounded like the insane babble of an asylum in revolt.

  So much hope, so much excitement—and so much of it riding on her Eva. She should get herself home as soon as possible, make hot cocoa, and curl up in front of the television. If she stayed around here somebody might offer her something stronger than wine, and she might be tempted to accept.

  Emotional extremes were part of the performer’s job, and at its best acting was a thrilling job like no other. According to a person’s nerves and nature, there could be a heavy price to pay for taking the roller-coaster ride. She didn’t condemn colleagues who indulged in recreational substances to relieve the stress, but she steered clear, herself.

  So, go home.

  But home was empty. Nobody here but us chickens. She began to find something attractive in the idea of slipping away for a nightcap with Sinclair, who for the moment had no loving wife to go home to—any more than Jess had someone of her own.

  Dumb idea. Jess had once fallen hard for a married man. It wasn’t an experience she wanted to repeat.

  Better just get out of here, she told herself; but how to get through the crush inside without being endlessly diverted and detained? If only that airplane droning overhead were a flying saucer that would drop a transport beam down for her, she could slip away from all this uproar without having to first plunge back into it.

  “Excuse me, but you will spill your drink,” said a male voice quite close by. Startled, she did spill the drink, splashing cold vodka and tonic across her instep.

  “God, you scared me!” she exclaimed.

  “May I take your glass?” said the stranger, from the shadow of a tall shrub in a wooden planter. He reached out to lift the glass from her fingers and set it down at the base of the evergreen. “Someone will retrieve it later, don’t you think?”

  The shadow of the bush beside him seemed to stretch to cloak the man in its darkness. She could just make out the line of his cheek and the shine of his eye. His English was accented in an unfamiliar way. Curious, she cast around for some comment that would draw an answer from him. Accents were part of her professional interest.

  “Thank you,” she said. “I’d forgotten that I even had a drink in my hand. I might have dropped it on some poor passerby’s head down there.”

  “Ah, well,” replied the other, his quiet voice shaded with humor, “an accident of life in the great city. This is part of the excitement people look for here, isn’t it?”

  “Only a newcomer to New York would think so,” she said. “Mostly what people crave is peace, quiet, and not to get mugged.”

  He leaned one elbow on the terrace railing behind him, his face still shadowed. “All milieus have their dangers.”

  His voice was a youthful tenor, liquid with a curious, uninflected intimacy. It was as if she knew him so well that he didn’t need to stress his feelings for her to know what they were. It threw her back to the early days of her relationship with Nick, who had simply opened his heart to her as if even on such short acquaintance she couldn’t mistake his meaning.

  “Believe me,” she said, “if there’s one thing New York has too much of, its dangers. And you are—?”

  “Someone with a taste for theater but a small tolerance for large, noisy parties,” he answered. “From your tone, I think I have somehow offended?” He made a sharp little bow with his head, a European gesture. “I beg your pardon if I have annoyed you.”

  Who was this guy? Jess felt a little thrill of interest.

  “Are you a friend of the Whitelys?” she asked.

  “Mr. Whitely asks me to consult about his collection.”

  Jess thought of the various items she’d glimpsed on display in the apartment—Japanese kimonos spread flat like animal hides to show their designs, South American pottery that ran to goofy-looking little clay people doing uninterpretable things, exquisitely framed historic photographs of old New York.

  “Which collection?”

  “Most of them,” he answered. “My expertise is broad.”

  “Are you a collector yourself?”

  “Ah, no,” he said. “A traveler must keep his possessions light, isn’t that what they say?”

  At that moment Sinclair hailed Jess commandingly from the open doorway; she spotted his aquiline profile silhouetted against the brightness inside. “Jessamyn Croft, what are you doing hiding out here? Come in and laugh at my stories; none of these stuffy young people will!”

  As she turned to answer, Jess felt the hidden stranger stepped past her with a murmured apology—his breath stirred the hair of her temple, he passed so close—and she saw a man hardly taller than herself, broad-shouldered and elegantly tailored, cross the terrace and slip by Sinclair. In two strides the stranger had vanished into the crowd.

  Her blood seemed to buzz as if she’d had something very odd indeed to drink. She wished she’d been able to see the stranger’s face.

  Warnings from the Past
>
  Nick woke with a gasp and lay staring at the ceiling: bad dreams again, leaving him—where?

  The elaborate plaster work around the base of the ceiling light fixture was alien, the mattress too soft, some kind of freshener in the air—everything was strange and disorienting. His leg ached and his heart was heavy with anxiety left over from his dreams.

  No sign of dawn yet; he could only have been asleep for a couple of hours, after returning to the hotel from shadowing Jessamyn and her actor-escort to Joshua Whitely’s party. Ridiculous behavior, like some fifth-rate Bogart imitation in a crude noir film! He was no investigator, and no actor either; he ought to leave such shenanigans to puffed up stage personalities like Sinclair (who, to be fair, was a very good actor; Nick had seen him onstage before and had been impressed).

  At least Jess hadn’t been wandering around all by herself in the middle of the night. And Sinclair was probably a more welcome escort than Nick would have been. He had worked pretty damned hard to open a gulf between himself and her, hadn’t he? That much of an actor he was.

  But he couldn’t just leave Jess to the protection of others, people who with the best will in the world still had no idea of the danger she might be in; any more than she did herself.

  He groaned and threw his forearm across his eyes. It had seemed so simple, when he had first made his plans. Stalking the woman he had meant to spend his life with instead of turning that new and happy page! It was a poor exchange. But he confronted another fate now, as the head of his family. What was unavoidable had to be accepted, didn’t it? With good grace, if possible.

  The whole weird situation made him feel a thousand heavy years older than his true age. Older than he had been before the accident, that was certain.

  If only he had an ally in all this; if only his father were still here.

  His mind, counting his losses, came as always to his father, Charles Griffin.