Having sat down again after his conventional words of welcome, Teldi said: “Now, dear Emile, before we go into the library, I’d like to thank you for having given me one of the most moving experiences of my life.”
With a conspiratorial gesture, he opened his jacket to reveal the white corner of a love letter that Pitou had sold him before dinner. The sale had gone smoothly. There had been no need to bring out the heavy artillery of his bargaining skills. An odd fellow, Monsieur Pitou. There was something alarming about the way his froggy mouth was smiling back at him now, displaying a magnificent set of teeth. It had been a bit too easy to buy that curious love letter signed Oscar Wilde. And the price was very low. Could his guest have tricked him? “I want you, I trust you, I am coming to you . . .” The handwriting was indubitably Wilde’s, and the date proved that it had been written three years before the author had used the same sentence in one of his most famous plays. It was really quite a find, as long as it wasn’t a fake, of course. But I’m being paranoid. No one’s going to try to cheat a dealer of my reputation . . . my current reputation, that is, he thought uneasily, remembering the letter scribbled in green ink sitting on his bedside table. Then he thought about how in the hard world of art dealers a little scandal, a little indiscretion, was enough to label you as one more shady businessman. Imagining the worst, Ernesto Teldi saw himself transformed overnight into one of those pathetic individuals, those ridiculous has-beens stripped of all respect, fair game for any scam. Perhaps it was happening already. Pitou was an intuitive dealer with a gift for anticipating the market. Had he guessed somehow that Ernesto Teldi’s reputation was not so unimpeachable after all?
Monsieur Pitou was sitting there in front of him with his toadlike eyes, smiling. What Teldi saw as he looked at him, however, was not an amphibian but a more insidious and harmful creature. Filthy leech! If my reputation is ruined, it will be your fault, he said to himself, thinking of Nestor, not for the first time that evening. Again and again as he chatted with his guests and played the charming host, a question kept nagging at him: What the hell am I going to do about this leech? The toad poked out a very long tongue, as if he were trying to catch a fly, then pulled it back in with a smile.
“Are you feeling all right, Teldi? You’re looking thoughtful.”
And Teldi, having slipped the unexpectedly cheap love letter back into his breast pocket, where it would be safe and warm, close to his heart, told himself there was no way he could allow that blackmailer, that leech in the kitchen, to ruin his career or in any way diminish his hostly charms. I should just squash him and be done with it, stop him from interfering with my life. But how? How? Maybe there’s a way . . . yes, I think I can see a way . . . but he can wait.
“This way, this way please, Monsieur Pitou,” said Teldi to the collector of love letters, taking him by the arm. “Let’s go to the library and have a glass of cognac. I want to introduce you to Mr. Stephanopolous.”
ERNESTO TELDI’S LIBRARY is so renowned that it hardly needs to be described. Anyone who reads House & Garden, Architectural Digest, or other such magazines is bound to have seen a photograph of it: a room that testifies to its owner’s exquisite taste and passion for unique pieces. The whole is perfectly harmonious, not dominated by one or two features clamoring for the visitor’s attention. Often, in collectors’ houses, objects are piled up as in a Turkish bazaar. Not so in the library at the Lilies. The visitor is not overwhelmed by abundance. There is a certain artlessness to the arrangement, as if, over many years, the objects made themselves at home, each in its place. On the right, for example, a little Manet hangs on the wall, watching over the entrance: a bust of the model whose naked presence in Le déjeuner sur l’herbe caused such a scandal. Here, however, elegantly blending in with the other paintings, she could easily be overlooked by all but the finest of connoisseurs. Across the room, an Art Deco statuette of a faun keeps watch over Manet’s model, by happy chance it might seem, yet the symmetry is deliberate. And so it is with the other magnificent pieces, none of which are ostentatiously displayed, while comfortable seats of various kinds—chesterfields, chairs, little poufs—invite the lucky guests to sit back, make themselves at home, and let their five senses be delighted. The discreet harmony of the whole is in no way disturbed by the glass case containing a small but intriguing collection of tin soldiers or by the panoply of knives, daggers, and stiletti.
“I sold that dagger with the red handle to your husband last year, Mrs. Teldi,” said Gerassimos Stephanopolous to Adela. “Since then, its value has tripled. And do you know why, my dear? Because last month Time magazine published a photo of Atatürk, I should say Mustafa Kemal, wearing the very same dagger in his belt. What a stroke of luck! He has such good business sense, your husband, but I don’t mind him getting the better of me, truly. I’m a great admirer of your husband . . . and of his taste,” said the Greek, looking at Adela as if he were mentally valuing an exquisite object.
But Adela was immune to flattery that night. She had spent the whole dinner being mechanically pleasant, a skill she had acquired over many years of tedious social obligations and could now exercise without mobilizing a single neuron: Yes . . . No . . . really? But how extraordinary! Adela was expert at keeping a conversation going on autopilot with these rudimentary but effective interjections and pursuing her own train of thought while her face and gestures gave the impression that she was fascinated by what her guests were saying.
“Really, Mr. Stephanopolous? Do tell me more! I’d love to hear all about Mustafa Kemal and his red dagger.”
The collector was only too happy to launch into a long speech, during which in Adela’s mind the founder of modern Turkey and his youthful exploits were mixed with thoughts of quite a different nature.
“As I’m sure you know, in 1912, when Mustafa was still a boy . . .”
(Where was her boy, Carlos? Where could he be? wondered Adela. During the meal he had served the tables farthest from hers and she hadn’t been able to catch his eye even once. But the time for digestifs had come, and watching Karel and Chloe move among the guests, offering them Cava, armagnac, and malt whiskey, brushing against them as they went back and forth, Adela hoped she could exploit the mingling to touch Carlos surreptitiously. She wanted to stroke his arm as if by accident, caress the back that she would kiss later on, when the dinner was over, when all these people have gone, she thought, when there are no more faces to smile at or conversations to pay attention to.)
“But that’s incredible! Is that really how it happened, Mr. Stephanopolous? How fascinating!”
“Exactly as I told you, my dear, and I’m delighted you appreciate the irony of it. If not for that incident, Mustafa Kemal would never have come to be called Atatürk.”
(Where are you? Where are you, my love? Come closer, I want to smell you, I want our bodies to touch in front of all these people, Teldi and his friends. A sweet foretaste of tomorrow, when I will be through with this life and we won’t have to steal glances across a crowded room.)
“Metaphorically speaking, one might say our hero belonged to the tribe of dreamers,” Stephanopolous was saying, encouraged by a “You don’t say!” that Adela had thrown in to keep the conversation moving along. “But whether or not he was a dreamer, the fact is the young Mustafa played his cards so well that he was able to bring Turkey into the twentieth century. Although it did mean giving up certain things, traditional customs and so on . . .”
“How fascinating,” Adela remarked adroitly, which was all the encouragement he needed to go on for another three minutes, allowing her to concentrate on looking for Carlos among the heads of her guests, wreathed in smoke. He wasn’t there. For a moment she imagined him in the kitchen, hearing what she most feared Nestor would tell him. The thought made her wince with pain.
“Awful, isn’t it?” said Stephanopolous, noting Mrs. Teldi’s reaction to his account of one of the bloodier episodes in Turkish history.
(No, Adela, you needn’t worry about tha
t. The cook isn’t likely to tell him tonight. And by tomorrow you will have talked with Carlos and told him everything he needs to know about your past. But . . . wouldn’t it be better to silence that interfering cook for good?)
“And that, my dear, is where the dagger with the red handle comes in. As I’m sure you’ll appreciate, a dangerous situation like that called for expeditious, one might even say sanguinary, measures.”
“Indeed, quite, absolutely, Mr. Stephanopolous,” said Adela, on autopilot while the nonmechanical part of her mind thrilled at the sight of Carlos over near the door, making his way toward her across the crowded room with a trayful of tall glasses. She smiled inwardly.
What took you so long, my love?
MEANWHILE, CARLOS WAS thinking: There’s Adela. At last I can be near her. And he made his way across the room, drawn as if by gravity, longing to touch her in the midst of the crowd, in front of everyone, as platonic lovers touch, as secret lovers thrill to the merest hint of a caress. Maybe I could even kiss her shoulder when I offer her a glass, he thought.
“Excuse me, madame. I didn’t mean to . . .”
She smiled. She was so beautiful.
“Is this champagne or Cava?”
“Cava, madame. May I?”
And as he leaned forward, drawing closer still, his waiter’s eye, accustomed to picking out singular features by which to identify people, noticed a green jade cameo that Adela was wearing as a brooch.
“Atatürk’s objective was to show that Turkey was ready to enter the modern world, like any Western nation, but of course . . .”
(The gold setting, the green stone . . . My God, it’s the cameo from the painting, the one the girl is holding. And, as if he were seeing Adela for the first time, Carlos searched for an explanation in her face.)
“Of course, daggers have come back into fashion now, and not just there, but right through the Muslim world. A remarkable development, as I’m sure you appreciate. And who could have predicted it? I certainly didn’t. Did you?”
(It’s her; it has to be. The Cava in the glasses began a weird dance to the rhythm of Carlos Garcia’s trembling hand. The bubbles rose to the surface and burst, each exclaiming: My God, how is it possible? How can I have kissed her a thousand times and loved every inch of her body without realizing that she was the woman I had been searching for all along?)
Now Carlos couldn’t stop looking at the stone, and the cameo’s green gleam recalled other childhood memories: the silhouette of his grandmother Teresa playing solitaire in the yellow sitting room (“You’re mistaken, young man, there’s no woman in an armoire here. I don’t know where you got that idea from”); himself as a child, his finger caressing the delicate curve along which, twenty or so years later, he would plant his kisses.
“No! No! The worst of all, my dear, was not the discovery in itself, however terrible it may seem, but the fact that, ironically, we have never really seen their faces. We look, but we don’t see. It’s absurd, but that’s the way it is, you know, all the more so with Turkish women, who are obliged to wear a veil, however beautiful they are . . .”
(That was why it all seemed so familiar: the Lilies, which was so like Number 38, the platinum blond hair of the girl in the picture, just like Adela’s hair, despite the difference in age . . . )
“Are you listening, my dear? You look tired.”
“Not at all, Mr. Stephanopolous. Do go on, please.”
The brooch on Adela’s dress glowed, prompting a thousand questions. Yet urgent as those questions were, they would have to wait until the party was over. Then I’ll be able to get it all straightened out, thought Carlos while the rocking glasses, like a drunken oracle, reminded him of something Nestor had said earlier that afternoon: “A word of advice, cazzo Carlitos. There are times in life when it’s best not to ask questions, especially when you suspect you’d be better off not knowing the answers.”
“And what, might I ask, is your problem, young man?”
Mr. Stephanopolous had interrupted his historical disquisition, surprised by the way Carlos was standing there, too close to Adela, as if he were participating in the conversation, a waiter with a trayful of glasses brazenly listening in on the guests.
“We have our drinks, young man, and no doubt you have other guests to attend to. So off you go.”
At the sound of Stephanopolous’s voice, Carlos snapped out of his reverie. He hardly dared look at Adela, as if he were frightened the others would guess his secret. Apologizing, he began to move away, but as he did, he noticed a miniature green scimitar in the dagger collector’s buttonhole, facing Adela’s green cameo like a reflection in a pond. Of course it might not be the same cameo. What if it was just a coincidence, another one of old Madame Longstaffe’s tricks? They say there’s always a catch to her prophecies.
Carlos walked away, trying not to look back, but his incredulity got the better of him. He stole a glimpse of Adela chatting with the knife collector, and even from a distance he could see the two pieces of jewelry, the cameo and the scimitar, face-to-face, precious and cold, like the insignia of an opulent world that for him was full of enigmas. You’re such a hick, he said to himself. Maybe in the old days jewels were unique pieces, but now they’re mass-produced. You idealize these rich people because they live in a world that is foreign to you, but there must be hundreds of green cameos and hundreds of green scimitars like the one that snooty Greek is wearing.
Carlos swung around. The glasses clinking on his tray, some full, others half empty, put an end to his reassuring reflections. Don’t be a fool. It’s her; it has to be. The resemblance is too strong. What I have to do now is find out what the link is between her and Number 38. I wonder if she knew my grandmother. Or my father? Nestor will be amazed when I tell him. It’s weird. Like destiny was winking at me or something . . .
AT THAT VERY moment, Chloe was being subjected to a bit of winking, not by destiny but by Liau Chi, the collector of ghost stories.
“Come over here for a minute, young man,” she said, and commandeered Chloe, steering her into a corner of the sitting room.
“What’s your name? How old are you? What’s your star sign? Aries? Or maybe Capricorn? Do you like ghost stories? Do you believe in reincarnation? Did you know that those who die young always find some way of coming back to earth and living out the part of their lives that destiny denied them?”
Uh-oh, off the planet, thought Chloe, trying to slip away. She was feeling hot under the tight collar of the waiter’s uniform, and the madwoman from the East thought she was a guy and was trying to make a fucking pass at her, when all she wanted to do was look for her brother.
All through the meal, as she was serving the guests, Chloe kept trying to find Eddie’s eyes in the various mirrors at the Lilies, the eyes she thought she had glimpsed for a moment in the bathroom mirror when she was getting dressed. She searched for them unsuccessfully in the tall mirrors of the dining room, a round mirror in the entrance hall, and any shiny surface she could find. Between dessert and coffee she even disappeared for a few minutes, bounding up the stairs to her room over the garage, hoping that she might be able to relive the experience of a few hours before.
Eddie, are you there?
The face looking back at her from all the mirrors was certainly similar to Eddie’s, but the eyes were hers, as blue as ever.
What the fuck did you expect? You’re losing it, girl. You’re not going to find Eddie around here, so stop being an ass, she told herself. Yet on her way back to the party, she kept looking in all the mirrors, and in every one she was alone.
IN THE LIBRARY, Chloe stopped to stare into the mirror on the console beside the fireplace, trying to catch even the faintest glimpse of those dark eyes, but all she could see was the pale face of Liau Chi, expert in ghost lore.
“Don’t think I’m going to let you slip away this time, now that I’ve found you again, young man. Are you listening to me? I have something very important to tell you, but before getting int
o astrology, I need another whiskey. So go and bring me one right away, will you?”
On the way to the kitchen, Chloe continued her futile search, peering into still more mirrors. She begged the mirror in the entrance hall: Please, let me see something, a shadow, even if it isn’t real. And she lingered in front of the dark glass of the windows, hoping their vague, deceptive reflections, so conducive to illusion, might grant her what the other mirrors had refused.
“Psst . . . psst, Miss Trias.”
Only one person in the world ever called her that. Still searching for her brother among the reflections, she recognized the face of Nestor Chaffino, who was standing at the swinging kitchen door, gesturing.
The cook retreated, then reappeared a moment later, beckoning with an air of urgency. It isn’t good form for a cook to leave the kitchen, except for the ritual of greeting the guests and being congratulated on the meal. Nestor had just been through that formality, so now he had to stay at his post; but he needed help.
“Come here. It’ll only take a second, then you can go on with what you were doing.”
Chloe was happy to escape from the guests, a bunch of weirdos. It’s like a madhouse here, she thought as she walked over to Nestor with her trayful of empty glasses.
“How can I help you, Nestor?”
They went into the kitchen together and Nestor pointed to the cool room, or rather to a very high shelf above its metal door.
“Some idiot had the bright idea of putting the detergent up there. Can you see it? Bring a chair over and get it down for me, will you.”
Up she went. The metal door reflected the silhouette of a girl on a makeshift stepladder.
The unreachable shelf was filthy. Old rat-bait boxes, bottles of turpentine, and various cleaning products were stacked there in disarray, under a dense mat of spiderwebs that anyone would have thought twice about disturbing: it looked like the refuge of something sinister. Shifting a bottle, Chloe saw a scurrying multitude of those little black creatures she remembered from her childhood: when you touched them, they would roll up into balls. Thousands of tiny legs, and round, moist-looking carapaces running for cover in some dark corner while one, blinded by the light, boldly climbed up Chloe’s hand, heading for the darkness of her cuff. But none of this, neither the musty smell nor the cold tickle on her skin, seemed to bother her, because on the way up to that shelf, when she glimpsed her reflection in the shiny surface of the Westinghouse cool room, for a fraction of a second Chloe thought she saw the dark flash of her brother’s gaze. And she shut her eyes, trying to hold on to that vision.
Little Indiscretions Page 20
