My Lady Lipstick

by Karin Kallmaker

  She tried one last plea. “Can’t you just go home? Leave me to clean up the mess I’ve made? Just…go?”

  “I won’t even consider it unless you tell me the truth.”

  “It would be for the best.” I’d probably never see her again, Diana thought, and was stunned by how much the idea pained her.

  “Maybe the best for you.” Paris spread her hands. “How can I trust you? You won’t tell me the truth.”

  The words tumbled out of her. She simply couldn’t hold them back. “He has something I want.”

  “What?”

  “I can’t tell you. You shouldn’t know, I mean, it would make you an…”

  “An accomplice? Great. That’s great.” Paris ran one hand through her hair, making the tantalizing locks that curled over her forehead stand on end. “So you’re planning to rob him?”

  “No! Yes. It’s complicated.” Diana quelled the urge to reach across the table and smooth Paris’s hair back into order. There was a screaming in her ears. She was blowing it big time. Idiot, it is impossible to tell the truth and lie at the same time. “He has something that’s not his. I mean it’s his on paper. But still isn’t his.”

  “So…” Paris’s pallor had increased and her eyes were like liquid rock. “A family heirloom? Something to save the family farm? Your father’s honor?”

  “No, it’s—”

  “Don’t tell me the plot of one of my own books!”

  “I’m not!”

  “So what’s the truth? What is this thing you’ve got to have back?”

  Diana whispered, “It doesn’t belong to me either. I want to send it home.”

  “Your parents need it?”

  “No, I mean—to its own home. Or the most appropriate place I can think of. Probably a museum in California.” She closed her eyes and plunged over the cliff’s edge. “Without anyone realizing it’s gone, at least for a while. Long enough for the museum to establish provenance and stewardship.”

  There was a silence long enough to make her risk opening one eye. Paris was staring at her and Diana could almost see the whir of brain gears and wheels turning.

  “You mean… Like a tomb raider, but in reverse?”

  She blinked in surprise. “I guess. Yes, I suppose, yes.”

  Of all the things Diana had expected Paris to say, it wasn’t, “That sounds like the coolest game idea ever.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  Paris stared out the window, her brain in a whirl. “So you give people a plausible front, they see what they want to see, and then you pounce.”

  Diana looked outraged. “It’s not a game. Not something I play at for a few hours that doesn’t have any real risk.”

  “Yes, yes, I know that,” Paris said crossly. Her head was starting to hurt in earnest. “Can we eat before the soup gets any colder?”

  “Nothing is stopping you.” Diana had become snappish, which Paris didn’t understand.

  “All I’m saying,” she said after a sip at the tepid but still tasty soup, “is that the idea of raiding for artifacts in order to put them back where they came from is a really great game idea.”

  “It’s not a game,” Diana repeated. She mopped the bottom of her bowl with the last of her sandwich. “It’s scary and illegal and I could go to jail. In the real world. Not a cyber-jail. Not one where I can push a magic brick or whistle the right tune and escape.”

  “I’m trying to understand.” She was also trying to file Diana’s activities into a mental realm where she didn’t expect cops pounding on the door any minute.

  “Well I don’t think you do.” Diana was openly pouting now.

  “I’m compartmentalizing. It helps me think.” The grilled cheese, now lukewarm, was still pretty good. She dipped it in her soup the way Diana had, but took great care not to drip any on her new shirt. A happy part of her brain was thinking about how a game like that would work, and what kind of quests would deal with actual lost artifacts. How to make matching artifact to the right historical timeline part of the Experience Points. How to invite First Nation cultures into the storytelling, music and graphics development. Avatars, gear, even character arcs. Five years ago she’d have been scribbling madly on paper and pinning the sheets on her cubicle wall. “I’m trying not to panic because you’ve gotten me involved with this…this…criminal enterprise.”

  Diana ran both hands over her head, scrubbing at her scalp until her soft after-shower hair stood up in spikes. “I didn’t ask you to show up.”

  “This. Is. Not. My. Fault.” Paris took a huge bite for emphasis and focused on the adjacent roof garden. She couldn’t afford to fall further under Diana’s spell. This Diana, even in nothing but a hotel robe, could still be a fake. It did nothing for her composure to think about how close to naked Diana was. Or to consider how adorable the tiny smear of cold cream just under her left eye made her.

  “Fine,” Diana muttered. “You’re not cut out for a life of crime.”

  “You know, most people aren’t. But you’re a zebra not horses kind of person, aren’t you?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “If I hear hoofbeats I think it’s probably horses not zebras. You’d be the exception.”

  “I’m not a horse.” Diana gave her a stony look. “Or a zebra. Or anything equine for that matter.”

  Paris gritted her teeth. “It’s. A. Meta. Phor.”

  “My life isn’t a metaphor. Or any of your other fancy words.” Diana shifted in her chair with a grimace.

  Paris laughed against her will. “Don’t play dumb. That’s not going to work.”

  Diana’s ill-humor seemed to diminish. “You’d be surprised.”

  “Exactly how long have you been doing this?” Even as she asked the question, Paris considered that maybe she didn’t want to know the answer. Surely the smart plan was to pack up all traces of herself and go home. Instead she wondered if she’d look back on this moment and think, “And that was when I decided prison was okay with me.”

  Diana busied herself dabbing at a red splotch of soup that had trickled down the front of her robe. “Long enough.”

  “There is no way forward if you won’t tell me—” Her breath caught in her throat as a pulse of hot anxiety burned through the nerves from the back of her skull to the base of her spine. It surprised her, though it shouldn’t have. If anything, it was overdue. “If you won’t tell me the truth.”

  “Sure there is.” Diana spread her hands and Paris did her best not to stare at the smooth palms and manicured, elegant fingertips. “We play out the weekend and we both head out of here at the soonest possible opportunity. I already told them Anita is deathly afraid of public speaking.”

  Very quietly, trying to hide the shake in her voice, Paris said, “You want to gamble with everything I have. I will not cooperate if you don’t tell me the truth.”

  “The truth right now is that I’ve got food in my stomach so it’s time for more—”

  “Stop it,” Paris couldn’t help her rising voice. “Enough with the distractions—do you think I’m an idiot?”

  “Lord, no.”

  “Then stop making me play Twenty Questions only you never answer any.”

  After a pause long enough to make Paris think Diana was going to go on stonewalling her, Diana muttered, “Ten years.”

  More lies. “You were twelve when you embarked on a life of crime?”

  Diana brightened. “I’m twenty-seven, but thank you.” She glanced at Paris’s face before dipping the edge of her napkin into a water glass to continue worrying at the soup stain. “I started young. With my father and for completely immature reasons.”

  Paris let out an exasperated huff of air. “You’re going to blame this on your parents?”

  “No, just my father. And I’m not blaming him. He inspired me to do it.”

  “He’s a thief too?”

  “Depending on your perspective.”

  The woman wasn’t capable of yes or no answers. Maybe that�
�s why Paris found her so frustrating—conversation with her was full of conditional logic. “What was your perspective when you launched into a life of crime?”

  “That he was a brute to my mother. I’d just crashed and burned in the sport I’d devoted every spare hour to from the age of six, and he demanded that I do something meaningful with my life because up until then I’d done nothing but sponge his money.”

  “So he really did want you to be a dental hygienist?”

  “No—he wanted a solicitor for a daughter. Or a politician. Someone he could make more use of than a gymnast.”

  Paris blinked. “You were a gymnast?”

  “Yes.” Diana tapped her shoulder where the telltale bump was. “War wound. I told you.”

  “You said something about many nations.”

  “The European Games. In Sweden that year. I broke my clavicle in three places and that was that.”

  “You never said it was gymnastics.”

  “Of course I didn’t get specific. I met you in a bar.” Diana waved her fingers as if it all made sense.

  Paris could feel a vein throbbing in her neck. “And you were planning to impersonate me, so sure, secrets.”

  “Yes secrets.” Diana’s tone was growing increasingly waspish. “I had finished a job and was getting ready to head for home and your letter dropped into my lap. Like my father, Reynard has many objects that don’t belong to him and I’m after only one of them.”

  The gold fainting couch and red curtains were going gray. She flexed her fingers, but that wouldn’t help for long. “That makes it all better. After all, it’s a reduced sentence if you only take the Hope Diamond and leave the Star of India behind.”

  “It’s nothing like that. My father had a bowl I thought was an ashtray. He treated it like one.”

  “And it wasn’t?”

  “It was a shallow carving from the Sami people that’s anywhere from three hundred to eight hundred years old. I was listening to him tell me again how worthless I was and watching him stub out his cigar. One of our off-practice outings in Sweden had been to a museum. And the carving looked familiar, like something similar in style that I’d seen there. So I did some research and that artifact had gone missing during World War Two. Turned up in an auction and my father ended up with it. As if it didn’t belong to someone else.”

  Seesawing back and forth between frustration that was infuriating and a grudging admiration, Paris was completely at a loss. The audacity of it, for one thing. It wasn’t something she would have ever thought to do, let alone actually undertake. “So you just took it?”

  “When he was away. As far as I know, he’s never missed it. All I had to do then was figure out who to send it to. I didn’t want anyone to give it back to him. I found a professor of Nordic Studies, dressed myself up as a messenger and dropped it off at his office at Oxford. I’m guessing he was more invested in finding out where it had originated rather than who the most recent so-called owner was. Because about eighteen months later it showed up as a museum asset in Sweden. I’ll visit it someday.”

  “And you kept doing it?”

  She turned her head, but not so far that Paris couldn’t see a deeply satisfied smile. “I kept doing it.”

  Paris had a horrifying realization. “So I helped you mail stolen property, didn’t I?”

  “You showed me where a box was. You didn’t know I was avoiding cameras at the post office—no point in tempting fate that way. It was a brooch of red rock and turquoise, and it was in a photograph from the 1870s. I liberated it from a woman who was wearing it on her scarves. Not a drop of indigenous blood in her, it was just something unusual and cultural and didn’t that show how hip she was? She wasn’t even trying to take care of it…” She turned her gaze back to Paris finally. The brown depths were shining with what Paris thought was genuine emotion. “Now a native-run cultural archive in Utah has it. It arrived in the mail, out of the blue. It wanted to go home so I sent it there.”

  A hard ache of longing tightened Paris’s throat. Longing for home, the familiar sounds and smells, the “right” air to breathe. She wished that someone could wrap her up safe and sound and send her home.

  “I know it’s silly. They’re only objects. But they’ve been moved all over the world, handled by people who don’t know or don’t care to know what they are. After the bowl I spent time using my eyes in places I was visiting anyway. I started scanning through elite auction listings. If you know where to look, there are a lot of little objects far from home.”

  “Aren’t there laws requiring things like that be returned to their original owners?”

  “They rarely apply to individuals. I thought seriously about going into antiquities repatriation law, but it didn’t take long for me to realize that kind of thinking, the logic of it, is not in my skill set.”

  Paris snorted.

  After a long narrow look Diana continued, “I don’t have the patience. I didn’t want to spend ten years getting back one painting, like that Austrian woman reclaiming the Klimt stolen by the Nazis.”

  “So it’s been ten years and…?”

  “Twenty-two minor items have been returned home. All from settings like my father’s.”

  Twenty-two times. Paris looked down at what was left of the soup. “So taking them doesn’t make you any money—what do you live on?”

  “My wits.”

  Paris sighed.

  “That was a joke.”

  The overhead light was suddenly too bright and Paris squinted across the table. She was running out of time for this conversation. Now that Diana was opening up, however, she didn’t want to break it off. “Seriously.”

  “I’m sorry,” she muttered. “My grandmother left me a trust fund. Decent of her after raising such an awful, awful son.”

  “Your father, who inspired you to embark on a life of crime?”

  “It’s not a life of crime. It’s months of acting and minutes of crime.”

  “You’re right about not having the mindset of a lawyer.”

  “I need to take some Nurofen,” Diana said abruptly. Her Hollywood accent had been replaced with the one that sounded like actors at the Royal Shakespeare Company. At Paris’s blank look she added, “Advil, Motrin, whatever you call it. My back is ramping up again.”

  “You hurt your back too? In gymnastics?”

  “Everybody hurts their back in gymnastics. There isn’t one former gymnast who isn’t walking crooked.”

  Paris was left to flail in a whirlpool of thoughts and feelings too chaotic to sort out. Not the least of which was the fact that she was anxious on multiple fronts now. They would get caught. Reynard Media Group would tell the world where to find Paris Ellison. Diana would end up in prison. The strangest of all was a sense of grieving: she couldn’t see a future where she and Diana ever meant anything more to each other. Not even friends, let alone…

  She pushed away the feeling before it could take on a name. But the sharp pulse of yearning for something out of reach grew stronger when Diana took her seat again across the table from her.

  “These jobs are like…like the balance beam,” she said quietly. “At some point you have to back flip. Where your feet are going to land—you can’t even see it when you jump.” She lined up the silverware and then pushed it away. “The fourth time, I was after a so-called letter opener. It was in Ottawa at a real estate company some venture capital heir ran as a hobby. I made deliveries of flowers a couple of times to get the feel for it, and when they advertised for a new receptionist I sent in a picture and a résumé.” She grinned. “I think the picture did the trick.”

  Remembering how sensual Diana had looked in the first Anita outfit at Mona Lisa’s, Paris agreed. “I can just imagine.”

  “I really was thinking I’d get the job, find what I was looking for and be gone before they seriously checked my identification. But there it was. The handle was sticking out from under a pile of papers, like he’d forgotten it was even there. He left the inte
rview just long enough for me to put it down my blouse. I hope he thought it got lost in the papers and thrown away—he’d only have himself to blame.”

  “So nobody noticed you’d snatched it?” It had taken Paris everything she had just to show up to a meeting where she had nothing planned other than telling the truth. “And you walked out with it?”

  “If nobody thinks something was stolen, nobody looks for a thief, right? I’m sure he searched everywhere for it when it didn’t turn up after a couple of days.” A ghost of a smile crossed her face. “I gave the silliest interview ever. And the whole time I could feel that I’d cut myself with the thing down my blouse. It was a sixteenth century Romani throwing knife and still had an edge. Now it’s in the Czech Romani Museum.”

  “What happens if he ever realizes where it is?”

  Diana’s eyes were shining with triumph. “He’ll have a hell of a time extracting it. I’m careful about what I choose. Once an item has been returned to the descendants or caretakers of its closest cultural origin it’s going to stay there.”

  Paris had to close her eyes for a moment. She was approaching information overload.

  “That’s all there is to it, most of the time. I float in the background until I see an opportunity. Patience, planning, and Bob’s your uncle.”

  Given how the situation with Reynard was going, Paris thought, she was surprised Diana hadn’t been caught. “What exactly does Reynard have?”

  “A very old ceremonial gift, a hammer that was used to strike a wooden drum. It was made out of bone and obsidian by a tribe that still exists.” Diana’s voice went quiet and low. “So what do you want to do?”

  “I don’t know. I have to think.” She got up to look at the view again, shaking her hands and visualizing anxiety and stress falling from her fingertips. Her head throbbed. She needed to sift through all the data and break it into smaller pieces where only a yes/no answer was needed, but she had to find some quiet and calm first.