by Nora Roberts
Her hair was shades lighter than Malachi’s, more a gilded red than chestnut, and her eyes were a softer, mistier green. They were long-lidded and balanced a wide and stubborn mouth in a face more given to angles than curves.
Behind the eyes was a sharp, clever and often impatient brain.
She’d campaigned hard to be the one to go to Helsinki and make initial contact with Tia Marsh. She was still fuming at being outvoted in Malachi’s favor.
“You’d have done no better with her,” Malachi commented, reading her mind easily. “And sex wouldn’t have been an option, would it? In any case, we are better off. She liked me, and she’s not, I’d say, a woman easily comfortable with people. She’s not like you, Becca.” He moved around the table as he spoke, tugged on his sister’s long curly hair. “She’s not adventurous and bold.”
“Don’t try to soften me up.”
He only grinned and tugged her hair again. “At your slowest pace, you’d have moved too fast for her. You’d’ve intimidated her. She’s a shy one, and a bit of a hypochondriac, I think. You wouldn’t have believed the stuff she had. Bottles of pills, little machines. Air purifiers, white-noise makers. It was a wonder when we went through it all for the cops. She travels with her own pillow—some allergic matter.”
“Sounds a dead bore to me,” Rebecca replied.
“No, not a bore.” Malachi remembered that slow, sober smile. “Just a bit nervy is all. Still, when the police got there she pulled herself together. Went through the report, steady as you please, every step of it, from the time she left the hotel to go to her lecture until she walked back in again.”
And hadn’t, he remembered now, missed a single detail.
“She’s got a brain in there,” he mused. “Like a camera taking pictures and filing them in a proper slot, and a spine under all the worry.”
“You liked her,” Rebecca said.
“I did. And I’m sorry to have caused her the trouble. But, well, she’ll get over it.” He sat again, and dumped sugar in the cup of tea he’d let go nearly cold. “We’ll let that end simmer a bit, at least until she’s back in the States and settled. Then I might take a trip to New York.”
“New York.” Rebecca sprang to her feet. “Why do you get to go everywhere?”
“Because I’m the oldest. And because for better or worse, Tia Marsh is mine. We’ll be more careful with step two since it appears our movements are being watched.”
“One of us ought to go deal with that bitch directly,” Rebecca said. “She stole from us, stole what had been in our family for more than three-quarters of a century, and now she’s trying to use us to find the other two pieces. She needs to be told, in no uncertain terms, that the Sullivans won’t stand for it.”
“What she’ll do is pay.” Malachi leaned back. “And dearly when we have the other two Fates and she only the one.”
“The one she stole from us.”
“It’d be hard explaining to the proper authorities that she stole what had already been stolen.” Gideon held up a hand before Rebecca could snap at him. “Eighty-odd years in the past or not, Felix Greenfield stole the first Fate. I think we could come around that, legally, as there’s no one to know it save us. But on the same point, we’ve no real proof that the statue was in our possession, and that someone with Anita Gaye’s reputation would steal it from under our noses.”
Rebecca gave a little sigh. “It’s mortifying she did, as if we were little woolly lambs led dancing to the slaughter.”
“Separate, that statue’s worth no more than a few hundred thousand pounds.” Because it still grated, Malachi put aside how easily he’d been duped out of the little Fate. “But all three together, that’s priceless to the right collector. Anita Gaye’s the right one, and in the end, it’s her wool that’ll be fleeced.”
Sitting in the cheerful butter-yellow kitchen with his granny’s chintz curtains at the window and the smell of summer grass dancing through them, he thought of just what he’d like to do to the woman who’d stolen the family symbol out of his foolish hands.
“I don’t think we should wait to take step two,” he decided. “Tia won’t be back in New York for a couple weeks yet, and I don’t want to show up on her doorstep too soon. What we need to do now is work on unraveling that thread to the second statue.”
Rebecca shook back her hair. “Some of us haven’t been spending their time kicking up their heels in foreign parts. I’ve done quite a bit of unraveling in the last few days.”
“Why the hell didn’t you say so?”
“Because you’ve been blathering on about your new Yank sweetheart.”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake, Becca.”
“Don’t take the Lord’s name at my table,” Eileen said mildly. “Rebecca, stop deviling your brother and preening.”
“I wasn’t preening. Yet. I’ve been searching on the Internet, doing the genealogy and so on. Day and night, by the way, and at great personal sacrifice. That was preening,” she said with a grin to her mother. “Still, it’s a big leap, as all we have to go on is Felix’s memory of what he read on the paper with the statue. The dip in the ocean washed the ink away, and we’re counting on him being clear about what he read before what had to be the most traumatic experience of his life. More, we’re counting on his veracity,” she decided. “And the man was, after all, a thief.”
“Reformed,” Eileen put in. “By the grace of God and the love of a good woman. Or so the story goes.”
“So it goes,” Rebecca agreed. “With the statue was a piece of paper, with a name and address in London. His claim that he committed it to memory as he thought he might stop by one night and ply his trade seems reasonable enough. More reasonable when I roll up my sleeves at the keyboard and find there was indeed a Simon White-Smythe living in Mansfield Park in 1915.”
“You found him!” Malachi beamed at her. “You’re a wonder, Rebecca.”
“I am, as I found more than that. He had a son, name of James, who had two daughters. Both married, but the one lost her husband in the second great war and died childless. The other moved to the States, as her husband was a well-to-do lawyer in Washington, D.C. They had three children, two sons and a daughter. They lost one son when he was just a lad in Vietnam, the other hightailed it to Canada, and I haven’t been able to get a line on him. But the daughter married three times. Can you beat it? She’s living in Los Angeles. She had one child with husband number one, daughter. I tracked her down, too, on the information highway. She’s living at the moment in Prague, with employment at some club there.”
“Well, Prague’s closer than Los Angeles,” Malachi replied. “Couldn’t have just stayed in London, could they? We’re taking a leap of faith here, that the man White-Smythe had the statue to begin with, or knew how to get it. That if he had it, it’s been kept in the family, or there’s a record where it went. And that all being the case, we can finagle it out of their hands.”
“It was a leap of faith when your great-great-grandfather gave his life jacket to a stranger and her child,” Eileen put in. “To my mind there’s a reason he was spared when so many were lost. A reason why that little statue was in his pocket when he was saved. Because of that, it belongs to this family,” she continued with her cool, unshakable logic. “And as it’s part of a piece, the others should come to us as well. It’s not the money, it’s the principle. We can afford a ticket to Prague to see if there’s an answer there.”
She smiled serenely at her daughter. “What’s the name of the club, darling?”
THE NAME OF the club was Down Under, and it escaped the sloppy slide down to dive due to the vigilance of its proprietor, Marcella Lubriski. Whenever the joint would start to waver, Marcella would kick it back up to level by the toe of her stiletto heel.
She was a product of her country and her time, part Czech, part Slavic, with a drop of Russian and a whiff of German in the blood. When the Communists had taken over, she’d gathered up her two young children, told her husband t
o go or stay, and fled to Australia, as it seemed just far enough away.
She’d had no English, no contacts, the equivalent of two hundred dollars tucked in her bra and, as her husband had opted to remain in Prague, no father for her babies.
What she’d had was spine, a shrewd mind and a body fashioned for wet dreams. She’d put all of them to use in a strip joint in Sydney, taking it off for the drunk and the lonely and ruthlessly banking her meager pay as well as her substantial tips.
She’d learned to love the Aussies for their generosity, their humor and their easy acceptance of the outcast. She saw that her children were well fed, and if she occasionally took a private job to see that they also had good shoes, it was only sex.
Within five years, she had enough socked away to invest in a small club with partners. She still stripped, she still sold her body when it suited her. Within ten years, she’d bought out her partners and retired from the stage.
By the time the wall came down, Marcella owned the club in Sydney, one in Melbourne, a percentage of an office complex and a good chunk of a residential apartment building. She’d been pleased to see the Communists ousted from the land of her birth, but had given the matter little thought.
At first.
But she’d begun to wonder and, to her surprise, to yearn to hear her own language spoken in the streets, to see the domes and bridges of her own city. Leaving her son and daughter in charge of her Australian holdings, Marcella flew back to Prague for what she assumed would be a sentimental journey.
But the businesswoman in her smelled opportunity, and opportunities were not to be wasted. Prague would once more be a city that mixed Old World and New, would once again become the Paris of Eastern Europe. That meant commerce, tourist dollars, and getting in on the ground floor.
She bought property—a small, atmospheric hotel; a quaint, traditional restaurant. And, out of that sentiment for both her homelands, she opened Down Under.
She ran a clean place with healthy girls. She didn’t mind if they took private jobs. She knew very well that sex often paid for the extras that made life bearable. But if there was a hint of drug use, employee or customer, the offender was shown the door.
There were no second chances at Down Under.
She developed a cordial relationship with the local police, regularly attended the opera and became a patron of the arts. She watched her city come to life again, with color, with music and with money.
Though she claimed she intended to return to Sydney, years passed. And she stayed.
At sixty, she maintained the body that had made her fortune, dressed in the latest Paris fashions and could spot a troublemaker at ten yards in the dark.
When Gideon Sullivan walked in, she gave him one long stare. Too handsome for his own good, she decided. And his gaze scanned the room rather than the stage, looking for something other than pretty, bouncing breasts.
Or someone.
THE CLUB WAS slicker than he’d expected. There was plenty of bass-heavy techno music blaring, and lights flashing in concert. Onstage a trio of women were performing some sort of routine on long silver poles.
He supposed some men liked to imagine their dick as the pole, but Gideon could think of better uses for his than having a woman hanging upside down on it.
There were plenty of tables, all of them occupied. The ones nearest the stage were jammed with both men and women sipping drinks and watching the naked acrobatics.
Hazy blue smoke fogged in the light streams, but the smell of whiskey and beer was no more offensive than in his own local pub. A lot of the clientele wore black, and a lot of the black was leather, but there were enough obvious couples to make him wonder why a man would bring a date along to watch other women strip.
Though the place was somehow more middle-class than the dive he and Malachi had spent one memorable evening in on a trip to London, he was glad his mother had sent him, over Rebecca’s furious objections, rather than his sister.
This was no place for a young woman of good family.
Though apparently Cleo Toliver found it suitable enough.
He moved to the bar, ordered a beer. He could see the dancers, down to G-strings and tattoos now as they swung in unison on their poles, in the mirrors behind it.
He took out a cigarette, struck a match and considered his best approach. He preferred the direct route whenever possible.
As applause and whistles broke out, he gestured to the bartender. “Cleo Toliver working tonight?”
“Why?”
“Family connection.”
The man didn’t respond to Gideon’s easy smile, but only mopped at the bar, shrugged. “She’s around.” And moved off before Gideon could ask where.
So I’ll wait, Gideon thought. There were worse ways for a man to spend his time than watching well-built women peel off their clothes.
“You looking for one of my girls?”
Gideon turned from the performer who was currently crawling over the stage like a cat. The woman who stood beside him was nearly as tall as he was. Her hair was Harlow blonde and coiled in complicated, lacquered twists. She wore a business suit, without a blouse, and the milky tops of her rather amazing breasts spilled out between the lapels.
He felt a twinge of guilt for noticing them when he looked at her face and realized she was more than old enough to be his mother.
“Yes, ma’am. I’m looking for Cleo Toliver.”
Marcella’s brows lifted at the polite address, and she signaled for a drink. “Why?”
“Begging your pardon. I’d rather speak to Miss Toliver about that, if it’s all the same to you.”
Without glancing at the bar, Marcella lifted the neat scotch she knew would be there. Might be handsome as sin, she mused, and have the look of a man who could handle himself in a fight. But he’d been raised to be respectful to his elders.
While she didn’t necessarily trust such niceties, she appreciated them.
“You cause trouble for one of my girls, I cause trouble for you.”
“I’d as soon avoid trouble altogether.”
“See you do. Cleo is the next act.” She downed her scotch, set down the empty and strolled away on her ice-pick heels.
She made her way backstage, through the smell of perfume, sweat and face paint. Her dancers shared one room lined on both sides with long mirrors and communal counters. Each made her own nest out of a section, so that the counters were a messy sea of cosmetics, pasties, stuffed toys and candy. Photographs of boyfriends, film stars and the occasional toddler were pasted to the mirrors.
As usual, the room was a gaggle of languages, of bitching, gossip and complaints. Complaints ranged from cheap tips, cheating lovers and menstrual cramps to aching feet.
In the midst of it, like a cool island, Cleo stood putting the last pins in her long, sable-colored hair. She was friendly enough with the other girls, Marcella thought, but not friends with them. She did her work and did it well, collected her money and went home alone.
So, Marcella remembered, had she in her time.
“There is a man asking about you.”
Cleo’s eyes, a deep, dark brown, met Marcella’s in the mirror. “Asking what?”
“Just asking. He’s handsome, maybe thirty, Irish. Dark hair, blue eyes. Well mannered.”
Cleo shrugged shoulders currently covered in a conservative gray pin-striped suit jacket. “I don’t know anyone like that.”
“He asked for you by name, told Karl you were a family connection.”
Cleo leaned forward to slick murderous red over her lips. “I don’t think so.”
“You in trouble?”
She shot the cuffs of the tailored white shirt she wore under the jacket. “No.”
“If he gives you any, just signal to Karl. He’ll show him out.” Marcella nodded. “The Irishman’s at the bar. You won’t miss him.”
Cleo slipped into the spike-heeled black pumps that completed her costume. “Thanks. I can handle him.”
/> “I think this is so.” Marcella laid a hand on her shoulder briefly, then moved on to break up an argument between two of the dancers over a red-spangled bra.
If she was concerned someone had come in and asked for her by name, Cleo didn’t show it. She was, after all, a professional. Whether dancing Swan Lake or peeling it off for Euro-trash, there were professional standards for a performer.
I don’t know any Irishmen, she thought as she clipped out to wait for her cue. And she certainly didn’t buy that anyone remotely connected to her family would trouble themselves to ask about her. Even if they’d tripped over her bleeding body in the street.
Probably just some asshole, she decided, who’d gotten her name from another customer and thought he might wrangle a cheap boink from an American stripper.
He was going to go home disappointed.
As her music came up, she pushed all thoughts but her routine out of her head. She counted the beats, and when the lights flashed on, Cleo erupted onto the stage.