Authors: Suzy McKee Charnas
His eyebrows arched again, all injured innocence, as if no thought of profit for himself had ever entered his head.
“You began,” she reminded him, “by talking about commercial considerations. The idea of payment must have crossed your mind.”
“I’ve decided against it,” he said. “I’m honored to have a small part in presenting a serious exploration of the turmoil in my poor, war-ridden part of the world, and of the concept of ages-old grudges and revenge.”
He’d gotten that much from the rehearsal? How long had he been watching from the shadows, anyway? Her questioning glance found no clue in his face.
“Nell will be very glad to hear that,” she said. “Maybe she’ll put you in touch with Nick, if she thinks it’s necessary.”
“Or you could,” he said, “couldn’t you?”
He was an unsettling person to deal with, and on top of a grueling rehearsal session plus the fall on the stage stairs, she was beginning to feel that she couldn’t handle much more of his company tonight.
“Look,” she said, “I don’t like to step on Lily’s toes, or Nell’s either. But if I talk to Mr. Griffin I’ll mention your concerns.”
“That’s all I ask,” he said. “You might tell him also that the themes of his play are of great interest to me. I’d welcome the chance to ask how he came to choose such a subject.”
“I wouldn’t bring it up with him, if I were you,” she said. “He doesn’t like to talk about his work. He wants it to speak for itself.”
“Then I’ll make sure to stay with the matter of the design,” he said. “You’ve been very helpful. I wouldn’t want to annoy Mr. Griffin by some ignorant trespass on forbidden ground.”
He leaned forward and touched his glass to hers, his gaze unreadable. Now she noticed that in the bright lights of the cafe his eyes appeared no longer dark but a hazel topaz. It was the irises, black as wet basalt, enlarged in the dimness of the theater, that had made his eyes look so black before.
She sipped her Amaro, and suddenly things seemed to come together.
“I didn’t understand before,” she said with a rush of sympathy. “You’re from Bosnia, aren’t you—or someplace in that area. Their history is your history, that’s why you’re so curious about the play. That’s why you talk about violence the way you do, too.”
For an instant his eyes widened, giving her a fierce, flat stare. These were the eyes, she thought, of someone who looks into the abyss and, while having no hope of escaping the long fall ahead, doesn’t blink.
She was the one who blinked, and when she looked at him again he had veiled his glance and sat sipping his drink in that ruminative quiet that made him seem so much older than he looked at first blush.
Then he said, “You’re right. The history of that area is alive to me in a way that it wouldn’t be to you — that’s your good luck that I mentioned before. I may be a barbarian myself. It’s true that people who suffer barbarism tend to become barbarized themselves. Will that possibility make you get up and leave me to end my meal alone?”
“I am not afraid of you,” she said boldly, although her heart was beating uncomfortably hard. In a strange, exciting way, afraid of him was exactly what she was; afraid, and angry at him, too—for frightening her, and for trying to use her to get to Nick.
“That’s good,” he said. “We never know how we appear to others unless they tell us.”
“Then let me say,” she answered, “that I think it’s a little
barbaric
for you to come on to me with all this Old World charm, when what you really want is to get hold of Nick Griffin and talk Central European politics and family heirlooms with him. Or did you have some more of your rather physical style of criticism in mind? Maybe you’d like to knock some better understanding of violence into him personally.”
He turned his glass slowly in his hand and said nothing, waiting for her to continue.
She did. “You didn’t have come to the theater and take me to dinner to get to meet Nick, Mr. Craggen; and it hasn’t done you any good to try it. I don’t know what he’s up to these days, or how long it’ll be before he comes into town again. And if I did know, I’m not at all sure I would tell you.”
“Because?” he said.
“Because I don’t like this. You scraped up an acquaintanceship with Lily Anderson so you could get into the theater today and try to use me to get to Nick so you can try to pry something valuable loose from him, right?”
“No, not right,” he said. “I came to the theater to ask you to come with me to an exhibition of antique jewelry next week. We can look for something that might serve as this motif. Lily made some suggestions, but I’m still looking for ideas.
“Oh, and of course—” He slipped from his pocket and held out to her a small velvet-covered box. “I meant to give you these, to wear with the matching piece in your play.”
He put the box down on the table between them.
She guessed what she would find inside, and her guess was good. Nestled in the cotton bedding were two teardrop-shaped earrings, made of delicate black filigree that glinted with tiny silver stars and rosettes. These pretty pieces were obviously the complements to the pendant left for her in her dressing room.
She looked up, framing an angry refusal—what was he doing but trying to buy her complicity in—in something she couldn’t even see clearly? But he had risen and stepped around the table to her side, and he leaned down and without putting a hand on her or saying one word more, kissed her startled face.
It was a strange, slow, thoughtful-seeming kiss, starting at the corner of her eye and drifting down her cheek, a quiet, concentrated, browsing of warm lips over her skin.
Astonished, she sat still. People were watching. She could feel their eyes on her and hear the sudden quieting of conversation nearby, someone whispering, someone giggling nervously—
She blushed, turning her face, but his mouth closed on hers, pressing her parted lips with the full shape of his own mouth. His unhurried tasting of her had the feel of a privilege exercised, as if in his mind there was no need to rush; all could be savored at leisure, for who would dare to interrupt?
The background faded. She felt as if she were a new bud unfolding within the scarred but sturdy flower of her old self, opening hotter, bolder petals than showed on the outside, reaching upward toward the heat that stooped to envelope her.
What kind of flower blooms at night?
she thought, and then it ended. He stood beside her, straight again, his hand on the back of her chair and his face averted from hers.
“Well, well,” he said, so softly that she almost missed it.
He stood quietly while she found her breath, her balance, and her cool. The plump waitress at the pastry counter, glancing covertly in their direction.
Craggen reached for his coat where it lay shrugged onto the back of his chair. He said distantly, “Please excuse me for this. If not, say so, and I won’t trouble you again.”
She cleared her throat. “I’m going home,” she said.
What the Hell?
she thought.
What just happened?
Messages
T
he light in Jessamyn’s window was out the next time Nick limped past her building. He wanted to stop and watch awhile, creating in his imagination a protective shield of invisible energy that beamed from him up to her, safeguarding her night’s sleep. Better yet, go up to talk with her, late as it was.
There was so much to say; but he couldn’t trust himself to just say it and leave. Like a lover in a ballad, he missed her so much that his heart was sore and sick. He felt too strongly to simply talk, not touch, not hold.
This was not a temptation he could allow himself. So he turned his back on the wind knifing eastward from the Hudson and walked toward Broadway, his hands in his coat pockets, his chin and mouth buried in a thick woolen scarf. The cold made his bad leg ache. He ignored the pain and turned south on Broadway, toward his hotel.
In his right hand he gripped the red stone, center of bad news, token of god damn doom. He hated the thing. He wanted throw it into an open dumpster and keep walking, preferably forever. But what if that turned out later to have been a crucial mistake? He couldn’t count on impulse, not with this enemy. He must keep his options open, think and be patient instead of just exploding with pent up feelings.
Everything had shifted when he’d sighted the enemy, he was sure: that solid, broad-backed guy who had seen Jess to her door an hour before.
A man who had kissed her hand, dismissed their cab, and strolled away—but not until he’d stood waiting a few minutes, head tipped back, to see Jess’s light go on in the front room of her apartment. Then he’d gone, walking swiftly down West End Avenue.
I should have followed him
, Nick thought.
He’s the one, he has to be the one who sent that pendant.
This man (ghost, demon, whatever) had the rolling gait of a fighter, keeping the center of gravity low and even. Nick knew men who had come back from Vietnam walking like that, men his uncle Rob had hung out with.
Christ; he should have followed the guy and confronted him!
But with what, for what? He was in no position to do that. He had bad news yesterday; terrible news. His fingers convulsed on the object in his pocket as he limped through the crowd spilling out of Lincoln Center, shouldering his way past them.
Which of the Griffin men had done it?
he wondered blackly; which of his ancestors had destroyed any chance he might have—the chance any succeeding Griffin male might have!—to deal honestly with the enemy, and maybe even settle it all peacefully?
He felt now that he himself had miscalculated badly. His plans were a shambles, his future a wreck, his hands basically empty against his foe. Clearly, he had underestimated the man he’d baited out into the open with “The Jewel”: the bastard was toying with Jess, instead of sniffing, as planned, along Nick’s own trail.
Schoen had come up with more leads on his identity, but they pointed toward Europe. To follow up, Nick would have to leave Jess in the company of an enemy she didn’t even know was an enemy. But if he stayed here, waiting helplessly for the Other to make the next move, what good would that do?
The need to know more was absolutely imperative. When the moment came, he needed a prepared response, armed with everything he could muster. Impulse wouldn’t do it, cleverness had just made things worse, and he could no longer depend on the reflexes of his athletic body.
The gamble was enormous, but he couldn’t see a better path than to go overseas while his leads from Schoen were fresh, and dig till he found the monster’s weakness. That would be his best weapon, maybe his only one.
Like father, like son—hadn’t Charles Griffin done the same, bolting for Colombia in hopes of finding some way, far from his own family, to bring the enemy down? Charles Griffin had never come back. But he’d never seen the bailiff’s story. He couldn’t have known nearly as much as Nick did now, about the enemy and about the red stone.
Stop churning it over: you didn’t lose your balls in that accident! Don’t just stand here, waiting for him to decide to reach out and take you, the way he’s taken other Griffin men, and you with nothing to use against him.
Nick stepped into the steamy redolence of an all-night deli and went to the back to use the pay phone next to the stairs. She answered on the third ring.
“‘Lo?”
“Jess, I need to talk to you.”
“‘Nick? Where are you calling from? It’s so late.”
“I know,” he said, closing his eyes and leaning against the wall. He saw her so clearly in his mind’s eye, blinking and yawning amid her scattered pillows. Four pillows, five pillows—extras to elbow carelessly onto the floor and still have one to sleep on, her modest idea of luxury. “I have to talk to you. I don’t want you to hear this from anyone else.”
Her voice became alert. “Hear what? Are you in some kind of trouble?”
“Don’t worry about me, just listen. Are you awake now?”
“Of course I’m awake. I’m talking to you, aren’t I? Nick, what’s going on?”
He was silent for a moment, tongue-tied by the finality of what he meant to say. A waiter rushed past behind him, bawling a warning at the swinging kitchen doors.
Maybe there was a way to get her to whisk herself off the stage of this battle and just not be there while he was gone; just in case . . .
Nick hunched the phone closer against the side of his face, cupping the speaker in his hand. “I heard you had an accident this morning.”
“I was the target of a hostile, childish prank,” Jess said. “Nothing important.”
“Jess.” He stopped. She waited, breathing lightly into the phone. “Some one’s been going after you at the Edwardian. Please, you’ve got to leave town, leave the production.”
“I’m in,” she said strongly, “whether you like it or not. You had your say, and I had mine. The Board liked mine better, so you’re going to have to live with it. It’s pretty crummy of you to come around now trying to wheedle me into backing down when we’re two weeks into rehearsal.”
‘No, Jess—something is going on here. These damned accidents—those broken stairs—somebody’s got it in for you, and you need to take that seriously. Damn it, I
said
I didn’t want you in this show, but you wouldn’t listen!”
She said, “The whole crew is on the alert about this. I’m not the only one who could get hurt here. It’s petty and malicious mischief, but I can handle it. Go on your trip. You don’t need to tell me about it. We’re not in that place together anymore, you’ve made that very clear. So go take your trip, and don’t bother being so dramatic about it. That’s my department, not yours.”
Swallowing an angry retort, he stood clutching the phone in silence.
Wrong approach, all wrong
; he had blown it again. “Do what you like, then!” he said, savage with anger at himself. “You’re on your own. I’m closing up the house and going to Europe.”
“What? Where?” She sounded alarmed. “Not the Balkans again!”
“Thereabouts, yes, but don’t worry about me. The war left lots of lame men there,” he said harshly. “I’ll be invisible. I’ll get a chance to go places I never got to before, see things nobody from outside has seen. There’s interest from the New Yorker in anything I write from there.”
“You could get killed!”
“The fighting’s over,” he said.
“The hating isn’t,” she retorted. “War could start again any time.”
“I’ve made up my mind. I just didn’t want to leave Walter Steinhart the job of telling you.” He chuckled. “He’s not exactly the soul of tact, our Walter.”
“I wouldn’t say you were a star in that department either,” Jess said in a muffled tone.
Nick tried again. “I have nothing to do here. The play is shaping up, Walter’s happy without any help from me. I need to get moving. But first I need to get through to you, Jess.”
He hesitated; but he had no choice but to warn her, at least.
She was crying, he knew, though it sounded as if she had the mouthpiece partly covered with her hand.
He swallowed and went on as calmly as he could: “Somebody left some jewelry for you to wear in the play.”
Silence. Then she said flatly, “God damn it. Walter’s a double agent, isn’t he? He tells me about you, and he tells you about me.”
“Of course not,” he lied. And she probably knew it. “But I am worried, and that—that present you got is part of the reason. I can’t explain the whole thing now, not over the phone, but it’s a sort of—a sort of danger signal, all right?”
“No,” she answered irritably. “Not all right. What the hell is this all about?”
How much did he have to tell her? Tentatively he began, “This will sound strange, but you’ve got to believe me. God, I sound like an actor in a very bad play, don’t I?”
She snorted. “Yup, a real stinker. I’m going back to bed.”
“Jess, wait.” Nick took a deep breath and plunged, trusting his instincts to put the proper limits on what he was about to say. “I’ve got an enemy. That is, my family’s had a problem with somebody for a long time. It’s like—think of it as a kind of a feud that crops up every now and then, an old quarrel that just won’t go away.”
“This sounds like the people in your play. I’ve said the lines often enough: the family fortune comes from ‘an ancient crime that has to be paid for’.”
God, she knew so much already, without knowing that she knew it! He faltered, realizing that he had somehow included hints of the bailiff’s story in the background plot of the play long before he’d ever heard of the Burch collection.
He shook himself back into the present (which smelled powerfully of juicy corned beef and chicken soup). “I’m talking about reality, Jess. Listen to me, please. I never thought this old problem would interfere in my own life, and I certainly never imagined you could be involved. My God, if anything happens to you—”
“Nick, stop! Are you in some kind of trouble with—with the mob, or something?”
He knew his laughter sounded wild and he choked it off. “No, no, nothing like that. It’s a personal thing. It’s to do with the car crash.”
He heard the little catch in her breath, and then the forced patience in her voice as she began to recite the old, useless reassurances.
“The police checked everything at the time, Nick. The brake fluid was low—”
“No, you don’t understand.” He leaned heavily against the scarred plaster. The odorous kitchen heat was making him sweat under his heavy coat. Leave the crash out of it, that was a mistake—the harbinger at the junction that he had seen but she hadn’t—it was too far fetched for her to believe.
“Let’s just say, some members of my family have died young and violently. When you look at our history you can’t help noticing a kind of really crappy luck dogging us—something willful and deliberate, even.”
“Nick,” she answered, “just talk to me; don’t tell me horror stories.”
“Listen to me!” he shouted over a racket of crockery and silver crashed somewhere in the kitchen, followed by shouts and cursing. “Before my grandfather died—that’s Grampa Griffin, the one who started as a strikebreaker and ended up head of United Electrocom—he found a ring in his coat pocket one morning, a nasty sort of novelty piece. It had a little skeleton etched into the ring stone, laid out as if in a coffin, the most morbid thing—and there are rumors of other tokens like that in earlier generations, presents from our enemy. Warnings. A week later he died in a boating accident.”
She didn’t say anything, but he could hear her breathing.
“These things turn up, and then one of us gets hurt—” He couldn’t bring himself to say,
whichever man is current head of the family gets more than hurt. He gets killed.
He hurried on, filling the silence. “You see why I’m worried? I think you’ve been given one of the Griffin warnings.”
“This is going much too fast for me,” Jess muttered. She paused, then added rather plaintively, “What I got was a lovely thing, really, a sort of filigree locket.”
“I don’t mean you’re the target,” he added quickly. “The warning is meant for
me
. The bastard is taunting me through you, because— well, it wouldn’t be hard to find out that you and I were close once. So you have to watch out for yourself, Jess. Don’t take anything for granted, don’t take any
one
for granted, do you hear me? Especially people you don’t really know.”
“I said,
hold it
!” she yelled into the phone. “Are you seriously warning me not to talk to strangers? What
are
you, my mother?”
This was just not going to go right, was it.
“Jess. I think the jewelry is a token meant for me. I think someone just used you as a kind of message-drop. But I don’t want you in the middle of this—this problem of mine. If you got hurt because of it—Jess. Do you know who sent you that pendant?”
“Yes,” she said. “You do too, don’t you. You’re trying to warn me off him. Nick, are you
jealous
? Because you have not right to be, all right? Not anymore.”
Was he? Yes, a little; but above all, he was afraid for her.
“Just be really, really careful. I don’t think this guy would try to hurt you—it’s me he’s after. But he’s very dangerous. Please be very, very careful.”
“Oh, hell, I’m too tired for all this. I’ll call you in the morning.”
“I’ll be gone by then,” he said.
“What about your dogs?”
“I’d give them to you if I could, to look out for you while I’m gone.”
Another pause. Then she said, “Go, Nick, if that’s what you need to do. And you be careful too.”
Then there was just the dial tone.
He hung up the phone.
“About time,” growled a fat little man in a huge tweed coat, shoving past him to get at the phone. “What a town, you can’t even make a phone call without having to listen in on somebody’s crazy soap opera first!”