by Anne Fortier
Rebecca’s eyes widened, but I couldn’t tell whether it was because she actually believed me or because she questioned my sanity.
James turned to look at us both with raised eyebrows. “What’s wrong?”
“Oh, nothing,” I muttered, making sure my evening bag was still securely closed—the satin purse with Granny’s notebook, which I now kept close to me always. “Excuse me.”
Retreating into a strobe-lit powder room, I leaned against the marble counter and tried to calm my nerves. The feeling I had had when we first arrived—of impending disaster—was back in full force. In an optimistic cranny of my heart, I had nurtured the faint hope that Nick would attend the party after all and had primped accordingly. But … if he was really there, how would I even recognize him among so many masked people?
As I stood there in front of the mirror, a beautiful Latin woman in a tight-fitting cat suit emerged from the toilet stall. A silver pixie crop made her look old and young all at once, and I was momentarily mesmerized by the almost palpable power emanating from her body. When our eyes met in the mirror, however, the woman shot me a glare that was nothing short of venomous. Only after the door had closed behind her did it occur to me that I might have seen her before, somewhere else. There was something oddly familiar about her eyes….
When I emerged from the bathroom, Reznik was addressing his guests in fluent French. I caught only the tail end of his speech, but it concluded with a somber toast. “To Alex,” said Reznik, holding up his champagne flute, “who died a year ago today. And to justice.”
“What’s wrong?” whispered Rebecca, as music and conversation resumed. “You look as if—”
“Enough dawdling!” said James. “This is our chance.”
It required some determined elbowing to get access to our host, but once we succeeded, James was rewarded with a firm embrace. “Moselane!” exclaimed Reznik, in a clipped Slavic accent. “I am glad you are here. I want to talk with you.” He gave James a meaningful look and would likely have said more, had he not been distracted by my proximity. Glancing at me, he looked irritated at first, but then his eyes widened in appreciation. For a few breathless seconds I thought he had somehow recognized me, but his next words suggested otherwise. “Very nice,” he said, looking from me to Rebecca. “I see you share my appreciation for rare and beautiful things.”
“I do indeed,” replied James, with admirable calm. Then, after introducing us to Reznik with false names, he went on to say, “I have told these lovely ladies that you have quite a few … unusual artifacts. They are both very excited at the prospect of seeing your library.” The way James said “library” suggested he meant bedroom. “I hope you won’t disappoint them.”
I could see Reznik’s fingers tightening, ever so briefly, around the stem of his glass. Then he chuckled and said, looking first at Rebecca, then at me, “I can’t refuse the interest of one beautiful woman, much less two. If you like, I will show you my little … museum.” He cast a casual glance around the room. “But let us wait until the ambassador leaves. I will find you.”
WE PASSED THE NEXT hour in mindless conversation, pretending to enjoy ourselves. James was a natural; he had something to say about every sculpture and every other guest, and made sure we were never without champagne. “That is Reznik’s son, Alex,” he said at one point, nodding at a large marble sculpture of a young man modeled after Michelangelo’s David.
“Beautiful,” said Rebecca. “He must have been young. How did he die?”
James glanced around to make sure we were not overheard. “The police said it was a car accident, but Reznik didn’t believe them. He’s convinced Alex was murdered, and that the crash was a cover-up. Who knows? At some point Reznik has to stop chasing ghosts. This party is a good sign. At least he has taken the gun out of his mouth for a night.”
We looked at a few more sculptures before Rebecca excused herself to go to the bathroom. No sooner had she disappeared than James leaned toward me and said, with cheerful detachment, “I fear Bex is lamenting the absence of our bodyguard.”
I stooped down to study three small busts that turned out to—yet again—be of Alex Reznik, aged five, ten, and fifteen respectively. “I can assure you she was as relieved to see Nick go as you were.”
“Really?” James tried to catch my eyes. “She seems a little … pensive.”
I suspected he was fishing for my own feelings on the subject, but I was in no mood to indulge him. After two days with full exposure to James’s sparkling egotism, my patience had long since ebbed. “Bex has been under a lot of stress lately, and it’s entirely my fault.”
“Don’t be absurd.” He put a hand on my naked shoulder. “No one could have a better friend.” When I didn’t react, James stepped in front of me, blocking my view of the busts. “I mean it, Morg. You’re very special to me.”
As he stood there in his sagging Aladdin turban, for a moment James actually looked as if he meant it—as if he truly wanted to be in love with me. When I didn’t respond, he smiled uncertainly and said, “We’ve both been playing the long game, haven’t we?”
His expression was so hopeful I couldn’t help feeling sorry for him, not just because I didn’t love him anymore, but because he seemed completely unaware of the fact that he didn’t love me, either. In his rush to defeat Nick he had assumed a role of protector, and now—rule jockey that he was—James felt obliged to speak the lines that came with the part, forgetting to ask himself whether he really meant them.
“I always knew you were a keeper,” he went on, taking my hand. “Queen material. I just didn’t want to start something and then … mess it up.” When I still didn’t respond, he continued, almost angrily, “I love you, Morg. You know I do. Why else would I come to rescue you?”
“Rescue me?” I pulled back my hand. “Who told you I needed rescuing?”
James flinched, perhaps just then realizing how upset I was. “Katherine Kent. Why would she say that if it wasn’t true? What have you told her?”
I was so baffled it took me a moment to produce a reply. “Nothing,” I said at last. “I left her a message in Algeria, but I haven’t spoken to her at all since I left Oxford. Not a word.”
James frowned, clearly irritated that our conversation had been sidetracked by such a minor concern. “You must have told her something. How else could she know you’d be arriving in Troy on Friday or Saturday?”
Just then I saw Rebecca making her way back toward us, looking more than a little frazzled. But I was so preoccupied with James’s revelation of Katherine’s knowledge and interference that it took me a moment to regain my senses and pay attention to my friend’s dramatic account of a pickpocket apparently working the crowd and a woman being carted away by ambulance after an allergic reaction.
Half-listening, half-not, I became aware of someone staring at me across the room. Looking up, I saw a man in a dark suit, no tie, standing by himself against the far wall. When our eyes met, a current of warm excitement ran straight through me, from head to toe.
It was Nick.
But instead of greeting me or coming toward us, he turned around and walked up the stairs to the second floor.
“Excuse me.” I handed my glass to Rebecca. “I’ll be right back.”
Gathering my skirts around me, I hastened across the room to follow Nick upstairs, only to see him disappearing, yet again, up glass steps to the next level. Slightly out of breath, I, too, continued to the top floor of the house, half of which had been laid out as a rooftop garden. Seeing Nick nowhere inside, I stepped tentatively through the open panoramic door, trying to spot him among the potted plants and trees.
Only a few other guests had found their way to the dark terrace—men mostly—and they were all silently smoking, taking in the dazzling nightscape of the only city in the world with one foot in the West and another in the Orient. It didn’t take me long to determine that Nick was not there, and I felt myself drooping with disappointment. He had seen me all right, b
ut for some reason he didn’t want to talk with me.
I turned to go back inside … and there he was, standing right behind me.
“You!” I exclaimed, shocked and relieved at the same time. “Why did you walk away like that?”
Instead of replying, Nick pulled me into the shadows. A firm hand behind my neck, another around my waist … and then his lips fell on mine with unstoppable voracity. Long gone was all his levelheaded languor, or any pretense; what he wanted was perfectly apparent. And I wanted it, too. The moment he let go of me, I took him by the lapels and drew him right back in.
We had been too close for too long, and something had to give, starting with the chastity belt that had girded my passions ever since a certain fencing master had cut me to the quick and cantered back to Barcelona. If Nick was indeed, as Rebecca had predicted, horseman number four, then—I decided then and there, with a scorching gush of exaltation—I was more than ready to straddle the apocalypse.
“I like your costume,” I whispered after a while, realigning his lapels.
To which Nick replied, his voice ragged, “I’m not dressed up.”
“You are always dressed up.” I looked him in the eye, trying to guess his game. “What’s going on?”
He pushed a renegade wisp of hair behind my ear. “You didn’t really think I would leave you just like that?”
“I wasn’t sure—”
“Brave, beautiful Diana.” Nick leaned his forehead against mine. “Goddess of the hunt. Will you tear me to shreds now? Isn’t that what happens to mortal men who get too close?”
The question made me laugh despite myself. “Only when they see the Goddess naked. Which you haven’t. Yet.” That little extra word jumped out, all by itself, before I could stop it, and it made Nick pull me right back against his chest and bury his face at the crook of my neck, as if he was going to take a bite of me.
“I think I just did.”
We would undoubtedly have stayed on the rooftop terrace for a small eternity, unable to call any one kiss the last, had not James and Rebecca eventually come looking for me.
Nick saw them stepping through the glass door before I did, and managed to pull me further into the shadows before James called out, “Morg? Are you here?” Seeing there was no answer, they soon gave up and left, their voices babbling with confusion as they headed back downstairs.
“Oh dear,” I whispered, my gloved fingers pressed against my mouth. “This is all so terrible.”
“Why?” Nick let go of me. “You don’t love James. Isn’t it time to put him out of your misery?” When I didn’t reply, he reached into his inner pocket and took out a checkbook. “When you make up your mind,” he said, scribbling an address on the back of a blank check, “you can find me here.” He tore the check in half and handed it to me.
“For how long?”
“Until tomorrow morning.” He put the pen and checkbook back in his pocket. “That’s when I get new orders.” He smiled wistfully. “The boss thinks I’ve been enjoying myself too much lately. Time to pull for the team again.”
I stared at the handwritten address, not really seeing it. “Could I reach you through the Aqrab Foundation? … If I don’t catch you before you leave?”
Nick’s smile disappeared. “This is it, Diana.” He put an arm around me and pointed toward one of the illuminated bridges over the Bosphorus Strait. “The narrowest point between our worlds.”
“I appreciate it,” I said. “But—”
He kissed my temple softly, right where the old bruise was hiding beneath the serpentine glitter paint. “Go back inside, find your friends, and get them out of here.”
“Wait!” I tried to hold on to him, but he backed out of my embrace.
“I mean it,” he said. “Leave now. There will be trouble.”
I FOUND JAMES AND Rebecca on the second floor, waiting outside one of the guest bathrooms. “There she is!” exclaimed James, taking a step back at the sight of me. “We were worried about you.”
“This house is very confusing,” I replied, hoping my face was not as flushed as it felt. “I’ve been looking for you two everywhere.”
“Well, here we are,” said Rebecca, not meeting my eyes. There was something about her tight lips and one raised eyebrow that told me she suspected exactly what I had been doing and with whom. From where she stood, I realized, she would have had a perfectly unhindered view of Nick returning downstairs … preceding me by no more than half a minute.
“Wonderful,” I said, taking them both by the elbow. “Come, let’s get out of here. We’re obviously wasting our—”
I was silenced by a hand on my bare shoulder. “James. Ladies.” Reznik looked at us all with the gamesome gravity of a haunted house usher. “The ambassador has left. Are you ready?”
Reznik’s little museum, as it turned out, was right on the other side of the concrete wall. A humble and utterly ignorable metal door served as gateway between the two worlds—one public, one private. Through the evening, I realized, I had walked right past the door several times thinking it was just an emergency exit.
“Normally, this entrance is electrified,” explained Reznik, reaching into his trouser pocket. “But, of course”—he produced a small bundle of keys, held together by a golden chain—”I don’t want to electrocute my guests.” He tested the door with a fingernail before unlocking it. “Excuse me for going first.”
We followed him into the darkness and heard the door drop shut behind us with an inauspicious clunk. Then a small green light came on as our host stopped to punch in a code on a wall panel. With increasing impatience, he did it three times before exclaiming, “Chyort voz’mi! I just upgraded the alarm system. Idiots!” Reaching out abruptly, he flicked on the ceiling lights in what turned out to be a narrow room—apparently a sort of air lock chamber between the two sides of the house. “Strange,” he went on, waving his hand before a wall-mounted sensor. “It says it’s on but it isn’t. Oh, well.” Perhaps reminded he had an audience, Reznik turned toward us with a forced smile. “In the old days, things worked. You know what I mean?”
We all nodded. I guessed from Rebecca’s pallor that she, too, was reminded that to this hardened Marxist, culture and the arts went hand in hand with theft and coercion.
Frowning with apprehension, Reznik opened another door and walked ahead of us into a perfect replica of an old-world London townhouse, complete with brass chandeliers and a carpeted staircase going up all the way, I assumed, to the top floor.
Every piece of décor suggested that, by walking through the two fortified doors, we had stepped back in time one hundred years. Paneled with dark wood and lined with glass cabinets full of antiques, the room where we stood had the air of a gentlemen’s club; the only feature missing was a stony-faced butler in white tie and tails, asking whether we should like to take our tea in the library as usual.
Alarmed by the dysfunctional security system, Reznik trotted ahead, giving us a quick tour of all the artifacts on display on the first floor. One cabinet held a gilded samurai costume surrounded by four swords, and on his way past, Reznik stopped to take out one of them. “Just to be safe,” he said to us, giving the impression that he was only too accustomed to walking around like this, armed against potential foes. “So far nothing is missing. I think we are okay. Come with me.”
We followed him up the first flight of stairs, and as we walked, Reznik said to James, “While I remember, I want to talk with you about a friend of yours, Diana Morgan.”
I was not the only one who jolted at the sound of my name; Rebecca shot me a grimace of pure panic and nearly tripped in her long skirt. Fortunately, Reznik was walking ahead and didn’t notice. The first to recover, James said, “What about her? I haven’t heard from her for a while.”
“Huh,” said Reznik, as if he sensed James was lying. “Do you know where she is?”
Coming up the stairs we found ourselves in a library that took up the entire second floor and framed the grand stairwell
with a gallery of built-in bookcases. “What a magnificent room!” exclaimed James, doing his best to change the subject. “How many volumes do you have here?”
But Reznik did not even register the question. Rushing across a large Persian rug, he lunged himself at a bookstand with a yelp of outrage. “No! The bitches!”
Beneath a green velvet cushion, illuminated by miniature spotlights, was a brass sign that read P. EXULATUS: HISTORIA AMAZONUM. The cushion itself, however, was empty.
EVEN THOUGH THE ALARM system was down, a dozen strategically positioned surveillance cameras were apparently still operative. They were all controlled from a computer on the windowless top floor, which turned out to be a Louis Seize bedroom, complete with a colossal painting of Marie Antoinette as well as a miniature guillotine for cutting cigars.
Judging by the stale, rather sour smell of the place, this dark cave was where Reznik slept, and I couldn’t help feeling we shouldn’t be there—that we were quickly becoming too intimate with a capricious tyrant.
“I’ve got you,” muttered our host, excavating the mouse from a pile of paper. “I’ve finally got you. Satan’s bitches. Very clever—distracting my boys with the pickpocket and the ambulance. But ha! I have you on tape!”
While we stood behind Reznik, not sure what to do, Rebecca nudged me and nodded agitatedly at two mannequins in the corner. One was dressed in a chain mail bikini, the other in a short snakeskin tunic; judging from their weapons and furry boots, this was how Reznik imagined Amazons.
Except … both had lost their right hands. And it must have happened recently, for the two eerily realistic pieces of plastic lay discarded on the floor. Looking at Rebecca, I realized we were both thinking the same thing. Those mannequins had lost their jackal bracelets.
Just then, Reznik made a sound of great consternation, and we were all drawn to the computer screen. “Who the hell is that?” he exclaimed. Freezing the image, he zoomed in on the person caught on camera, then said, even louder, “Can someone please tell me who that is?”