A Date You Can't Refuse (25 page)

“Except for the ones I'm not supposed to be alone with.”

“Look. No system's perfect. Sometimes you have to pick a side and go with it, flaws and all. If you want to be part of something bigger than you.” Nell stood and moved to the sound system. “Beautiful, isn't it?” she asked loudly. “Heard enough?”

“Yes.” I stood too. Half of what Nell had said was too cryptic to understand and sounded vaguely cultlike. The other half of what she'd said was just scary.

I wanted to plant my bugs and be gone.

There was no one in the great room. I peeked into the kitchen. Empty. Good.

But this bug was tricky. Lendall Mains had been very clear about the need for it to be directly above the dining room table, where it would have the best chance of picking up conversations throughout the great room. The chandelier was modern, gunmetal gray. Wrought iron, with frosted glass around the little round lightbulbs. Not a bad match for the bug; much better than a crystal chandelier would've been. The problem was height. It was suspended from the mile-high ceiling. I reached up and figured I needed to be a yard taller. My heart was pounding.

Shoot. It was obvious what I had to do. I looked around and then thought to hell with it. I had to do it quick, before I lost my nerve. I took off my shoes and climbed onto a chair. This wasn't easy, as today's ensemble was a straight, knee-length skirt that didn't give me any breathing room, let alone climbing room. I had to hitch it up a bit to even get on the chair. I reached up. I couldn't even touch the metal base of the chandelier.

I climbed onto the table. Closer.

I went back down, then climbed back up, this time in my heels. Success.

I'm six foot tall and an okay weight, but I wished I hadn't eaten two baguettes the night before. Was I heavier than place settings for twelve, plus a large soup pot? Would the pale green Plexiglas hold me?

I looked down. Mistake. An unaccustomed sensation overtook me. Vertigo?

I took out my bug, peeled off the adhesive with shaking hands, beads of sweat forming on my forehead, and gently attached it to a piece of the wrought iron that hung vertically. There was no place to hang it so that it faced downward, but this would do, right?

Wrong. It needed to face the other direction, for when people were out on the deck. Shoot. Because now the adhesive was off, and the instructions had been explicit: once the bug had adhered to a surface, it should not be expected to stick elsewhere.

To heck with it. I wasn't climbing Mount Everest twice. I reached up and removed the bug. I was pressing it into place on the opposite side when I heard an intake of breath, then, “What in the name of God do you do?”

I turned too fast and looked down too fast and was already breathing too fast. The room spun. I was still holding the chandelier, but there are things one should not count on for support, light fixtures suspended from ceilings among them. I realized this as both I and the chandelier began to sway. I let go.

And fell off the table.

I
looked up to see Grusha looming over me, livid.

“Grusha,” I rasped, grabbing onto an overturned chair. “I'm okay, I just—”

“You!” Her voice was a hoarse shriek. “What is this you do?”

“I was just—”

“On my table! My table! You with your shoes!”

I struggled to find a sitting position. No bones seemed to be broken. “I'm—I will—they're actually Chai's shoes, they're— Ouch.”

“My chandelier! What do you want with my chandelier? To steal it, maybe?”

I glanced up. The chandelier still swayed, gently. “No, I—”

“Tell! What you are doing?” She spat out the words. “On my table? Horrid girl!”

“It was a stupid thing to do, I admit,” I said.

“Horrid!”

“Okay, horrid even. I was just looking for something, and I thought it might be in the chandelier.” True enough: I was looking for a place to plant a bug. “Let me just—” I tried to stand. This was tricky, given the high heels and the tight skirt, so I grabbed onto the table.

“Off,” she said, squirting her Windex bottle at the table with violence,
suggesting that it could be turned on me. “You swing from my chandelier? No. Ha. I tell this to Yuri.”

Okay, I had to do better in the plausibility department. Where was my tough-cookie character? “It happens,” I said, getting to my feet, “that my Uncle Theo has a birthday. And he is a fan of the Art Deco era, the Bauhaus movement, and if this chandelier is a Rolf Solomon or a Mies van der Rohe, then of course I can't afford it, but if it's a knockoff, from, you know, Pier 1 or Cost Plus World Market… so I wanted to find out. Do you know where it's from?”

Grusha was looking at me with lips clamped together. “No,” she said finally.

I smoothed down my skirt and made my exit at a sort of dignified trot. Maybe Grusha bought it. It wasn't the worst story in the world. Okay, it wasn't great either. I needed to get to the office fast, or the bathroom, anywhere I could close the door and be alone and decompress. Tough Cookie, her assignment ended, had retreated, leaving me shaken.

I made my way back to the office, where I closed the door and examined myself for bruises. I counted five, in the incipient stages.

“Testing,” I said once more, addressing the cubbyhole. I looked underneath it, making sure the bug was still there. “So, I guess you guys heard what happened in the dining room just now. Assuming I planted that bug properly. If I did, then that's the good news. The bad news is, I have no aptitude for espionage. I have a hard time thinking on my feet. In heels. On tables. And if Yuri Milos interrogates me, I don't stand a chance. I'm just saying. Expect no miracles.” I picked up the phone and put it to my ear, just in case someone burst into the office and wondered why they'd heard me talking to myself.

This reminded me to call my cell phone voice mail, except that I didn't know how to do that from a remote phone. The best I could do was my home machine. There were two messages. One was from P.B., asking me, once again, to bring him a copy of
Superstrings and the Search for the Theory of Everything
. The second message, like the first, contained no preamble, no “Hello, Wollie.” This was simply a name, Yusuf, and a number. I tried Haven Lane first, to talk to my brother, but got no answer. Then I called “Yusuf.”

I knew I shouldn't talk to Simon on a phone that was being monitored by his own colleagues, in a bugged room, but the message had come in only forty minutes earlier and who knew how long he'd be at that number?

He was there now. He answered.

“Yusuf,” I said. “I can only talk for a second, but I'll call from my cell in an hour.”

“Will you be there this afternoon? I need to see you.”

“No, I won't be here. I'll be in Beverly Hills, and—”

“Three o'clock. In front of Neiman Marcus.”

“I can't promise,” I said.
“And
even if I can get there, I won't be alone, and—”

“Try,” he said, and hung up.

I left the office. If I hurried, I could return to House of Blue and retouch my makeup and fix my startled hair, making me more worthy of Beverly Hills, where such things matter. Okay, to heck with Beverly Hills. I wanted to look good for Simon.

I tiptoed so as not to disturb Nell's class now convened in the library, discussing prepositions. I moved so silently, I passed Yuri and Vlad, who had their backs to me, without making a sound. I knew this because I heard Vlad say very softly to Yuri, “… much does she know?”

“Nothing,” Yuri replied. “Keep it that way. I don't need another Chai on my hands.”

There wasn't a doubt in my mind that they were talking about me.

T
he only reason I go to Beverly Hills on a regular basis is for the knife sharpener on Little Santa Monica. The cutlery shop is in Old Beverly Hills. I love the craftspeople of Old Beverly Hills, the aging artisans toiling away in rent-controlled buildings from the 1920s, the bookbinder, the engraver, the shoe repair guy. I like the history. Fredreeq goes to Beverly Hills because that's where her hair colorist is. Joey goes there to see her shrink. There are also, of course, those who go to shop, but these are people I have little personal knowledge of, people whose idea of a sale is a purse marked down from four grand to $3,500. The stores that cater to this clientele are minded by salesclerks trained to ignore riffraff like me, shoppers without the watch or shoes that signal excessive income or a face so staggeringly beautiful it has charging privileges on some Old Rich Guy's credit card. I avoid these stores. Life's too short to be snubbed by minimum-wage sales staff.

Felix's cosmetic surgeon was Dr. Eli Rosen, on Brighton Way. It was hell getting there because the Suburban was too big for the streets, and Beverly Hills is the rare L.A. neighborhood overrun by pedestrians. I found street parking, but after stalling traffic on Roxbury trying to squeeze into it and getting honked at by seven or eight cars, three of them Mercedeses, I gave it up and moved on. Relinquishing a parking
spot is a huge psychological defeat, but so is the public humiliation of having others, many in luxury cars, witness one's efforts to parallel park the vehicular equivalent of a humpback whale.

“Wollie, don't worry how people think at you,” Felix said as we hit the street after pulling into a lot six blocks away. “Jesus too, if He is living today, I believe people will honk at Him. Can He park a big car? Maybe yes, maybe no. Maybe He is thinking of other things.”

“Felix, that is comforting,” I said, leading him down Beverly Drive, “because if the entrance exam to heaven includes parallel parking, I'm not making the cut.” I paused to let a family of seven—tourists, as seen by their matching Birkenstocks and number of children—pass in front of us. “Tell me something. Does Jesus ever condone crime?”

“Yes, maybe,” Felix said, ogling a store window. “Which crime?”

I pulled him onward. “Well, stealing. Could He justify stealing? Not like a pizza if a guy's starving to death, but dealing in stolen goods?” Was I being too obvious? “Maybe to raise money for a worthy cause, or something.”

“I think this answer is no. ‘Render unto Caesar what is Caesar's and unto God what is God's,’” Felix said. “What is this store? It is so beautiful.”

“Scandia Down, which we don't have time to explore,” I said, pulling him away from the window. “Where, for the price of a down comforter, one could feed a village of hungry children.”

I instantly regretted bringing up children, as Felix's eyes filled with tears. “In my country, the orphanage, so many children, no mother, no father.”

“Was this because of a war?” I asked.

“The war, yes. Also Chernobyl. Long time ago. Still, people gets sick. Or the children. Because maybe birth defects. I learn this from Zeffie. Chernobyl heart, they call this. This is what I do with my money from my book. I save the children.”

His humanitarian zeal impressed me, even though his sadness was short-lived, giving way to a keen interest in Bijan, Yves Saint Laurent, and Pierre Deux. Affluence delighted him. He smiled at people as if the
whole neighborhood was made up of old friends. This affability accompanied us into the doctor's office.

Dr. Rosen's office was staffed by two strikingly lovely women in lab coats, who asked eagerly about Donatella, Kimberly and Yuri. And Chai. When I told them that Chai was dead, their smiles drained off their faces, leaving them curiously expressionless.

I took the clipboard I'd been handed and helped Felix with the paperwork. As I was armed with his medical records, provided by Kimberly, I now felt useful. After this, I perused the brochures in the waiting room, which told me everything about the beautifying procedures available to mankind, except for how much they cost and how much they'd hurt. Felix was there for a “full-body lift” consultation.

On impulse, I hopped up and went to the window shielding the nurses from their clients. “Can I ask, how long will Felix be in with Dr. Rosen?”

“Oh, an hour minimum,” one of the nurses assured me.

“Fabulous. Mind if I leave and come back?”

“No problem. We'll take good care of him.”

I stepped out of the office and was dialing Daniel Lavosh within sixty seconds. I left a message that Harriet Spoon would be unreachable at three, but was currently on her way to Neiman Marcus and would wait there a full hour on the chance that he might be available. I left the same message on his cell phone.

I was there in five minutes. Twenty-six minutes later, so was he.

The window displays at Neiman Marcus, on the South Roxbury side, used shiny white mannequins that appeared to have landed from Neptune. They were bald and featureless and dressed in squares of iridescent paper. It was not clear to me what they were advertising, beyond existential anxiety. I looked away from them, scanning the faces of the pedestrians, hoping to see the one I loved.

And there he was, crossing Wilshire Boulevard. Coming toward me. He was dressed in a suit but carried the jacket, as the day was hot. When
he reached the halfway point in the crosswalk, I started moving too, to meet him, legs shaky with anticipation, feet wobbly in my heels, stride short in the tight skirt.

I reached him. Without a word, he took my hand and led me around the side of Neiman Marcus, to steps leading to rooftop parking.

The roof was populated by cars, but devoid of humans.

Once I'd determined this, I turned to him and untied his tie and opened the top buttons of his shirt. Skin. Chest. The heart beating underneath. I put my hand there, the first move toward satisfying my need for touch. Then I put my forehead on his collarbone and breathed him in. His skin was hot; I tried to remember the last time I'd seen him in sunlight.

He let me do all this to him. We didn't speak. When a car drove up the ramp and passed us, we separated. Simon, his shirt still open, walked away a few feet, studying the parking lot, practicing his “situational awareness.” I took in the big picture, Saks Fifth Avenue to the east, Wells Fargo Bank to the north, jacaranda trees all around, blooming madly, advertising the color purple.

The car drove back down the ramp. We were alone again.