Claudine (13 page)

“I’m asking once more, pleading with you. Please tell me who you told about the orphanage.”

Jewel replied with a sly smirk, touching a hand to her perfect hair. “We’re finished here, I think.”

Maria walked out of the room without saying another word.

One of the fedoras Milne liked to wear had been casually tossed on the Prince George table in the hall. She hadn’t noticed it on her way in, distracted by the maid and preoccupied with
having to face Jewel. If Milne had truly been away, the maid would have carefully tucked it away or faced Jewel’s wrath at leaving things “untidy.” So her adoptive mother had lied about him too.

Milne had been an attorney in Providence and Jewel married him shortly after she adopted Maria. The family moved to New York when Jewel was offered a partnership with a high-profile law firm. As a small-town lawyer, Milne quickly found himself out of his depth and when she was on the warpath, Jewel would fling his failures in his face.

As she pressed the elevator button, Maria heard the door behind her open. She glanced back and saw Milne in the hallway. If Jewel had changed little, Milne looked as though he’d aged for both of them. His hair was snowy white and wrinkles creased his face. He gave her a quick hug and stood back. “Hello, pet. You look wonderful. She doesn’t know I came out here so I can’t talk for long.”

Maria melted at the sight of him and threw her arms around him. “I’m glad you did; it’s been so long since I saw you. I didn’t know you were here.”

He pushed her away gently. “I know. I heard everything. That’s why I came out. She was pretty upset.”

“It felt like she’d just stored up nine years of rage and let it loose on me.”

“Neither of us has lived up to her expectations, pet. She doesn’t take that very well. But she’s kept some of your things, you know. Your artwork, poems you wrote in prep school.”

“I tried to get through to her, Milne. What else can I do?”

“She’ll stew about your argument today. I know she will. Just
give it a little time and she may come around. Don’t forget. It’s been years since we’ve heard from you. That’s hurt her too—more than you might think.”

Nothing had changed. Even after all these years, Milne was still trying to bridge the canyon between them, play the peacemaker. His efforts always failed. She took his hand. “Do you have any idea who Jewel might have told about my background in Romania? I need to know.”

He shook his head, and Maria noticed a tremor in his movements. “We share the same living quarters. When she’s home I tiptoe around, trying to stay out of her way. She wouldn’t tell me.” He glanced nervously at the door. “I better get back. It won’t do you any good for her to see me here.”

When he gave her a warm kiss on the cheek, she caught a faint whiff of whiskey on his breath. “Take care of yourself, Milne.”

He padded back down the hall in his old slippers.

On her way home she thought about another mother. Her first one. Her dearly beloved. A dark-haired woman with a warm heart. How at this time of year they’d spend hours in the garden. Her mother would make little trenches in the rich brown earth; Maria would follow behind, carefully dropping seeds in place. She recalled her mother’s low melodious voice, the way she laughed approvingly at how precise Maria was, making sure every seed was spaced exactly so many inches apart.

Once, a kid had bullied her and Maria ran home crying. She begged her parents not to send her to school anymore but they insisted. The next afternoon a pet kitten was waiting for her at home, a furry tabby with green eyes. “Like your beautiful ones, Maria,” her mother said. “Remember. When a person tries to
harm you, if you find someone else to love, the hurt will go away.”

It had been a happy home until the Romanian Securitate police broke through their front door. Ceausescu kept the largest secret police force in the Eastern bloc, notorious for its brutality. Maria’s father was a highly regarded officer in the Securitate. As a communist satellite, Russia and Romania were, on the surface, friends. In the last year of Ceausescu’s reign, when the regime was clearly tottering, Russian intelligence kept a close eye on him. Her father, who’d despised Ceausescu, had been instrumental in passing information along to them. Predictions of Ceausescu’s demise were sent back via her father. Ceausescu heard the rumors of betrayal and murdered her father and mother.

Maria was sent to the orphanage. She knew her parents had been executed but not why. On her recent visit to Romania, she’d learned the details. Her mother was raped repeatedly in front of her father. Not to make him talk. They knew everything. As punishment. It had been a bitterly cold morning when the strangers took her to the orphanage, making the bleak landscape surrounding it seem even more like a wasteland. She’d worn her little white coat with a fur hood, and the red dress and princess shoes her parents had given her for Christmas. One of the orphanage caretaker’s first actions was to remove her clothing. She had no lice but they used a soap harsh with lye to scrub her and sprayed disinfectant on her hair. She resisted them in the small, ineffectual ways of a child. Shouting at her didn’t work so the caretakers tied her right wrist to the crib and let her wail.

And before long the Blackbird came. Always at night, crank-ing
down the crib railing, waking her up from a fitful sleep, putting his hands on her body in places they didn’t belong.

Lillian was out on an overnight visit with a friend when she reached home. The tears she’d held back flowed the minute she walked in the door. She flung herself down on her bed and wept.

CHAPTER
14

GENEVA

She always felt freer away from home and this time, traveling to Europe would give her some much needed distance from the confrontation with Jewel a week ago and the abrasive memories it revived. What better place, she thought, than the picture postcard city of Geneva, a mountain Riviera cradled by two landmarks, Mont Blanc and Mont Salève. She loved that one of city’s best-known features was ephemeral—a fountain, the world’s tallest water plume. The air was crisp and clean and Lake Geneva itself had been restored to the pristine beauty of centuries ago.

Marcus Constantin had hired her to pose as La Grande Odalisque, a living reproduction of one of the most famous nudes in the world, Ingres’s painting of a harem concubine. She would be featured at the launch of his new art show. In Geneva, a magnet for the global wealthy and influential, museums and galleries were as common as secret bank accounts. Constantin specialized in neoclassical art, and his gallery had earned a place
among Europe’s most respected establishments. After her public performance, he’d requested an after-hours session alone.

Marcus’s gallery was in the old city, a gothic ramble of ancient buildings and picturesque cobbled roads. She wished she had time to wander those streets, browse through the boutiques and museums, or saunter along the waterside promenade before her assignation.

T
ransforming Claudine into a living Odalisque was a big creative challenge for Lillian. She could not rely on costuming or extreme makeup. The transformation called for a very subtle hand with cosmetics. She began working on Claudine at noon even though the doors to the launch wouldn’t open until six
P.M
. She’d refused to use a print as a guide because even the better reproductions were notoriously “off” when it came to representing a painting’s true colors. Instead, they’d hired a French photographer to snap a photo of the original in the Louvre and mail it to them.

“It’s impossible to get your body to look like that,” Lillian said, exasperated, as she bent over Claudine, who lay upon the portable massage table. “Why is the woman’s figure so odd?”

Claudine regarded the photo. Pictured with her neck twisted to look over her shoulder, and painted from the rear, the concubine had an elongated back and pelvis that experts speculated would only be physically possible with five extra vertebrae. Her right arm and leg too were much longer than the limbs on her left side. The concubine’s body almost seemed to flow, as if no bones supported her flesh. It reminded Claudine of the sex doll splayed on her hotel bed and she shuddered.

“It’s a seductive posture, but not blatantly so. You see her bottom turned almost fully to the viewer. The artist makes you desire to see more. That’s truly erotic.”

“And the concubine’s skin looks like it was made from moonlight,” Lillian said. “I wonder how Ingres created that effect.” She brushed a pearly iridescent powder over a patch of Claudine’s pale skin. She stood a few feet back, squinted her eye and nodded, satisfied with the effect.

After powdering every inch of her, Lillian fitted her with dark contacts and carefully applied gray-brown shadow into the creases to deepen her eyes. Lillian checked the photo of the painting and then dipped into her palette of colors with one of her smaller brushes to adjust the look. A touch of blush on the flat of her cheeks and pastel lipstick to color and shape petallike lips completed the image. In the painting, only one baby fingernail showed, but Lillian buffed and polished all her nails anyway. It took a whole half hour to hide the feather scar. By the time she finished, the real courtesan had virtually disappeared; Lillian had created the painting anew using Claudine’s body as a canvas.

Lillian adjusted the brunette wig last, then packed up the case and helped her on with a wraparound sleeveless dress while Claudine slipped her feet into a pair of flats.

“How about something to eat?” Lillian asked.

She shook her head.

“You can’t go all afternoon and through the event with nothing in your stomach.” She gave Claudine an energy bar packed with almonds, raisins and chocolate.

Andrei, unwilling to let Claudine out of his sight after the experience in San Francisco, stationed himself on a chair just
inside the entrance of their hotel suite while Lillian worked on her in the bedroom. As an extra precaution, he paid an off-duty hotel security guard to stay in the suite while they were at the launch. He was used to seeing Claudine in dramatic costume, but she startled him when she emerged from her room. “You’re a completely different woman,” he said. “Lillian, you’ve outdone yourself this time.”

Andrei drove them to the gallery. He refused to let Claudine out of his sight for a minute. She found his concern for her touching and thanked heaven she had him on her side.

Before she went in, Claudine watched people pass by. A handsome older couple, arm in arm, paused every few minutes to gaze at store windows; teenagers in private school uniforms, high on the knowledge summer break was coming soon, paraded down the sidewalk laughing loudly; businessmen, heads down, phones out, strode along determinedly.

Is he among these businessmen, incognito but in full view, laughing at me because I have no idea who he is? she wondered. She gave herself a shake and trailed Lillian through plate glass doors into the gallery. Andrei took a quick glance around at the street before following them inside.

All the threats and the violence had occurred in America, she reminded herself. It wasn’t likely she’d been followed to Europe. Before they left, Andrei had installed a sophisticated hidden camera system in her apartment; it would catch anyone who tried to break in. And yet a niggling worm of doubt coiled and uncoiled in her mind. The fear of it left a trail that she tasted as surely as the raisins and chocolate chips lingering on her tongue.

Marcus Constantin greeted them effusively, with a double
kiss for Claudine. A debonair man in his early seventies, he had longish silver hair combed straight back off his forehead and wore a black jacket and pants, with a black Armani cashmere crew underneath. He ushered them over to the raised platform Claudine would occupy for the duration of the launch, while two art students arranged the rich indigo, gold and white drapery depicted in the painting. In one corner of the room, caterers set up drinks and appetizers on a long table covered with a spotless white cloth. They seemed oblivious to the small fortune in artwork surrounding them—Ingres drawings and prints, a painting by David, sculpture by Antonio Canova and Thorvaldsen.

Claudine climbed onto the platform. Lillian fixed her gold-braided and tasseled turban and slipped on the shimmering bracelets while Marcus and his assistants helped her to assume the concubine’s position. She grasped the bejeweled peacock feather fan they gave her. Under Marcus’s watchful eye, they moved the oversized gilt frame in place, an exact copy of the one hanging in the Louvre.

Marcus stood back to admire her. “Marvelous! What I love about this idea is that the painting is suspenseful. It toys with us, makes us wonder what the concubine looks like from the front. Ingres only gives us hints. This evening, for the first time, people will see what the painting keeps hidden.”

A rather crass attempt to hog the limelight to be sure, but it worked. At six, the crowds surged in. Marcus, an adept publicist, primed the media well with sound bites and they rushed over to the tableaux like aggressive geese, snapping pictures, circling with television cameras.

By eight
P.M
., with all the wine gone and not even a shred of
the appetizers left, “sold” stickers on the catalogue entries of almost every work of art offered, Marcus declared the evening a huge success. Claudine, who’d remained motionless for the entire two hours of the launch, clambered off the platform and nearly fell. Her muscles had locked and cramps shot up her legs when she tried to move. Lillian helped her into her wraparound, then bent down and massaged her calves rigorously.

After Lillian left and Claudine was sufficiently recovered, Marcus led her to his private apartment upstairs. A light dinner had been laid out: cold jellied salmon, white asparagus, salade Niçoise. He handed her wine, a crisp Swiss Fleurie, and tipped his glass toward her. “A toast to you, petite. You were remarkable.”

“My pleasure, Marcus. It was fun. Although my legs feel like they’ll be crooked for the rest of year.”

“Yes, but your picture will be on the front entertainment pages of every paper in Europe tomorrow. It’s fabulous publicity for you.” She inclined her head to thank him. Word would spread rapidly about the performance and bring in more business for her.