I considered delivering the bad news by phone. If I was lucky I might be able to get away with leaving a message. Then I considered ignoring his call. But if I ever wanted to work for him again I would need to do damage control. This was presupposing that the damage could be controlled, which was highly doubtful, but I had to try.
I ran into Darcy in the stairwell as I was on my way out to Stephanopolous’s. She was dressed up for
a party and looked almost pretty. In fact, she did look pretty. Her eyes were shining, she wore frosted lip gloss, and her plastic animal barrettes had been replaced by rhinestone clips.
“Look at you,” I admired. “Where are you going?”
“Office party. I don’t know why I ever agreed. I hate these things.” She made a moue, but I thought
she looked sort of excited too.
“How bad can it be? Free booze, free snacks. And you look great.”
“No I don’t.” But she seemed willing to be convinced, eyeing me with a sort of hopefulness.
But Oz never did give nuthin’ to the Tin Man that he didn’t already have…
I said firmly, “Okay, well, here’s your mission for tonight. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to say something to every single person there.”
She looked astonished, but then she seemed to consider it. “Okay. I will.”
I nodded, turned away, and she said quickly, “James, you won’t forget about tomorrow, right?”
I faced her. “No. What time?”
I could see in her eyes that she was braced for me to bail on her at the last minute. And if I hadn’t seen that turkey and all the groceries she’d bought, I would have been tempted. And yet the idea hurt. Did I really seem like the kind of guy who would break my word? Disappoint my friends? Friend. I probably did, 64
The Dickens with Love
but I had done my best never to do either of those things. Granted, weighed against the things I
had
done, they weren’t much in my favor.
“One o’clock?”
“Sure. I’ll be there.”
“Have a great evening.”
“Oh yeah,” I said, heading off in the opposite direction.
~ * ~
The glass-walled elevator rose slowly to Mr. S.’s penthouse, offering an aerial view of lush green
tropical plants and fountains in the courtyard below. Tiny white Christmas lights were threaded through the foliage like fallen stars.
Muzak played fuzzily over my head. A troublingly familiar melody. Dear God. There it was again. “A
Christmas to Remember.”
Please remember (please remember)
Please remember (please remember)
Were those guys following me or what? What had I ever done to them that they needed to haunt me
like the Ghosts of Christmas past?
Maybe the elevator cable would break and send me plummeting to a blessed escape.
But no such luck. I arrived safely at the penthouse and Mr. S. himself let me in, which alerted me
belatedly to the fact that he was having a cocktail party.
A lot of people in the glittering city were having parties. It was Christmas Eve. I wanted nothing more than to duck out and come back later to deliver my bad news while he was alone, but he didn’t give me the opportunity.
“James. Just in time!” he exclaimed, drawing me in. “What will you have to drink?”
“Nothing. Thank you.”
I looked around the room, but while the faces were probably familiar to anyone who read the society
pages, I didn’t recognize anyone there—and that was a relief. I was only too aware that this was probably going to end unpleasantly. The Mr. S.’s of the world don’t deal well with disappointment. But then, they don’t have much practice.
Mr. Stephanopoulos snagged caviar smeared on a cracker, popped it in his mouth and asked thickly,
“Well? What did he say?”
Even if things had gone well with
The Christmas Cake
, this was not a transaction that should be discussed in public. I asked, “Is there someplace we can talk?”
The excitement and pleasure died out of Mr. S.’s face. He looked suspicious, leading me through the
elegant, half-crocked partygoers to his study.
65
Josh Lanyon
Once upon a time I’d had a study like this. Dark wood and red leather, a couple of lithographs on the
wall, a drinks cart and an illuminated globe in a wooden stand. A gentleman’s study, though I don’t know that either Stephanopoulos or I qualified.
He closed the door behind us with a slight bang. “Well?” he demanded again, and his voice was
impatient, petulant. I wondered how much he’d had to drink. His face was flushed and his eyes had the
unpleasant glitter of the mean drunk.
Drunk or angry, there was no way to delay or soften it. I spoke the truth. “He refused your offer.”
He stared at me. “You offered him two million dollars?”
“Yes.”
“He refused?”
“Yes. I’m sorry.”
His brows drew together. “Up the offer then,” he said arrogantly.
Up it?
To what dollar amount would he have been willing to go? It almost gave me a feeling of vertigo. I
said, “I’m sorry. It really is no use.”
“Don’t be stupid. Of course we must up the bid. He’s received another offer exactly as you suspected
he might.”
“No. It’s nothing to do with the money. Crisparkle knows that you’re the buyer.”
He slammed his whisky glass down so hard I expected to see the crystal shatter. “You told him? I told
you he could not find out!”
I said quickly, “I didn’t tell him.”
“Of course you told him. How else would he find out?”
I didn’t like the way Stephanopoulos lunged forward or the way he was breathing heavily as he
advanced on me. He sounded like the Minotaur finding something young and comely waiting in the Cretan
Labyrinth.
“I don’t know how he found out, but I didn’t tell him. It wasn’t any more in my interests for him to
find out than it was in yours. He had a dinner engagement last night, so maybe he talked to—”
“Who?”
“I don’t know. I’m guessing. I don’t know what happened. He was fine earlier.”
“What do you mean ‘earlier’?”
“He was fine in the morning.”
“The morning?”
I was aghast at what I’d nearly admitted. I disassembled quickly, “When I made my final examination
of the book yesterday morning, he was fine. I told him I would talk to my buyer. He was perfectly
agreeable. When I tried to reach him last night—”
66
The Dickens with Love
The memory of Sedgwick’s words was still too painful.
Whatever Mr. S. read on my face, he entirely misinterpreted. Maybe that was just as well, but he said
in a hoarse whisper, “You’re lying to me.”
Withholding facts, certainly, but not lying. I stuck to the basics. “I didn’t tell him. I don’t know how he learned you were the buyer.”
“You arrogant shit,” he said, and he was across the room in two steps. “I should never have trusted
you. I knew you couldn’t be trusted. You thought you would be clever and play both sides against each other and so you told him who your buyer was.”
I protested, “Why would I?”
Stephanopoulos had stopped listening. He grabbed my jacket collar and punched me in the face. I
went down like a house of cards. I didn’t see it coming. You’d think growing up in a place like Hollygrove I’d be quicker on the ball. But no. His meaty fist connected painfully with my left cheekbone and the next thing I knew I was scrambling out of the wreckage of a broken vintage lighted globe and its wooden stand.
“I didn’t tell him a goddamned thing,” I cried. “He found out on his own.” I wondered if he’d broken
my cheekbone. The left half of my face felt numb. I touched my nose to see if it was bleeding.
“
Leave my home
,” Stephanopoulos roared. “I personally guarantee you will never work in this town again.”
I was already going, yanking open the door to his study. I saw the astonished wall of faces in the
living room as I went out the front door.
~ * ~
In lieu of the traditional lump of coal, Santa left me a black eye on Christmas morning. I examined it bleakly in the mirror over the sink in my bathroom. It was a beaut.
I was grateful Stephanopoulos hadn’t punched me in the nose. Not so much because it would mar my
good looks as I couldn’t afford the medical costs of a broken nose.
Colliding with the giant globe and its large wooden stand hadn’t done a lot for my back and ribs.
Examining the black and blue marks over my flanks and back, I reminded myself that I was lucky I hadn’t broken anything—besides the world.
I didn’t feel lucky.
I made myself a raspberry jam sandwich and had a brandy.
I hated Christmas. The truth was, I had hated it for years. Only I hadn’t wanted to admit it to myself.
But of course I hated it. The traffic, the noise, the bustle and bother for what? For fifteen minutes of hysteria and flying papers on Christmas morning?
Any sane person would hate Christmas.
67
Josh Lanyon
And if you weren’t into Christmas what was there to do? No bookstores were open. No libraries.
Nothing useful was open.
Church was open.
Sedgwick probably went to church on Christmas. Had he gone today? A stranger in a strange land?
I hadn’t been to church in years, and it was pretty late to start now. If I’d had someone to go with…
I heard these thoughts echoing in my mind with something like shock. What was going on with me?
Church?
Seriously?
Clearly Stephanopoulos had hit me harder than I realized.
I decided to read
The Box-Car Children
and have another brandy. And for an extra special Christmas treat maybe I could splurge on a movie at the Americana that evening. One thing I was not going to do was spend the day brooding over the way things had ended with Sedgwick. I was quite determined to put all
thought of him and that book—that wonderful, magical book—out of my mind. Forever.
But it was like having a loose tooth. Once you knew it was there, you couldn’t stop pushing and
prodding it with your tongue.
I did not want to think about anyone’s tongue.
How could a vicar’s son have a tongue like Sedgwick’s?
I wondered what Sedgwick was doing. Who he was sleeping with, waking up with, spending
Christmas with?
I wondered how
The Christmas Cake
had come into his family. What was the connection between
Angela Burdett-Coutts and the Crisparkle family? Sedgwick had actually said Canon Crisparkle was his
great-great-great-grandfather. What did that mean?
I wondered what Stephanopoulos had done to piss Sedgwick off.
He almost had my sympathy because one thing for sure, Sedgwick was not the forgiving type. Better
to know that up front, right?
Not that it had ever been anything but a holiday romance for Sedgwick. I knew that. Only I’d wanted
the holiday to last longer.
Next door Darcy had turned the music on and the smells of cooking and America were wafting
through the wall.
I wondered how
The Christmas Cake
ended. I’d had to stop reading at the point where poor little Miss Dorinda Love had gone to stay with her batty Auntie Hayhem in London. I’d been hoping she might
eventually get together with the shy schoolmaster, Mr. Jasper Pennyworth. I wondered whether the
schoolboys, Benjamin or Alfred, would ever fess up to stealing the Christmas cake and what terrible
consequences would result from such a simple transgression if they didn’t, because Dickens was never
simple.
68
The Dickens with Love
Then again, neither was life.
69
Chapter Ten
At one o’clock sharp I went next door with my America concert tickets cunningly concealed in a foil-
wrapped CD case.
Darcy opened the door. “It’s hailing,” she caroled.
“Hail is not snow,” I reminded her.
Her expression had already changed to one of shock. “What happened to your face? Were you beat
up?”
“Oh.” Instinctively, I put a hand to my eye. “No. I…ran into a door.”
“No way. That’s the lamest lie I ever heard. Did someone try to bash you?”
“Yes, but not the way you mean. This was strictly personal. Anyway, don’t worry about it. I’m fine.
And on the positive side it’s even in Christmas colors.”
“Oh, James.” She spluttered an appalled laugh as she led the way into the apartment still burbling
about turkey and the snow.
“It’s going to snow. I
know
it. Everyone is saying so on the news.”
I shook my head at this insane optimism—and the idea that anyone could believe the weathermen.
Darcy fetched me a brandy and insisted I sit while she finished preparing the meal. I was surprised at how pretty and happy she looked. Her de rigueur plaid shirt was silk today and her overalls were a forest green that actually suited her very well.
I sipped my brandy and looked around the cozy apartment. Her apartment was no larger than mine but
it smelled wonderful. It looked festive and comfy too. There were dozens of greeting cards lined on the countertops and shelves. A diminutive Christmas tree was braced in a stand on a table in front of the
window looking over the street. Its tiny lights flashed on and off at regular intervals.
Best of all, a Carpenters Christmas album was playing. I could have wept my relief—and I don’t even
like the Carpenters.
Darcy finished doing whatever it was she was doing in the kitchen, and came to join me.
“I have a few things for you too,” she said gaily, as she handed over several parcels. My heart sank. I was afraid she had bought something expensive and personal, and I flat out couldn’t deal with another