Mistress of the Runes

by Andrews

  I could stay only a few moments longer because I had to race back to the office, gather up my laptop and briefcase, and meet the car that was picking me up to take me to the airport. I had to be in L.A. that night for the grand opening of our new studios.

  “So you’re leaving shortly,” Liz stated quietly.

  “I am.”

  “We’ll all miss you. Please fly safely.” She turned and walked away, neither of us knowing how to say good-bye.

  *

  I got back to the office in time to learn that a rumor had leaked to the press that A-Media Entertainment was being sold to Baron, Inc. The proposed name change from A-Media Entertainment to Baron Entertainment, Inc. generated much discussion.

  “Brilliant, we sound like a dried-up company unable to conceive,” I remarked to Hugh.

  “Did you see it?” Hugh asked in disgust, referring to the press release in the morning paper and displacing Jane as he paced up and down in my office, not unlike Hlatur on his IV line.

  “Did you know this was coming?” I countered.

  “There’s been talk about it for months, but I didn’t think it was anything serious. Half a dozen companies have wanted to buy us.”

  “So if the deal goes through, our new board of directors, according to the trade press, will include an Austrian banker and someone from Madrid? Well, they can’t be worse than a guy who spends every waking hour figuring out how his direct reports can help get him laid.”

  “Walter asked you to get him laid? I didn’t know that.” He paused. “You suppose he scores?”

  “He’s got teenage hormones and middle-aged money—every young girl’s dream.”

  “Well, at least they’re getting something out of it,” Hugh said. “That’s gotta make you feel better.”

  “Makes me feel swell,” I said sarcastically. “Gotta catch a plane. See you in L.A. tonight.”

  *

  The grand opening of A-Media’s new studios in Los Angeles was a gala event designed by a huge corporate-events team. Months of corporate-wide planning and arguing and budgeting had served up this delectable night, billed as All Eyes on A-Media.

  Celebrity ice carvings and twenty-thousand-dollar gift baskets were themed with eyes. John Wayne had been overdubbed to make it appear that he was saying, “The Eyes of Texas are upon you, A-Media. Congratulations,” from a giant LCD screen. Tight shots of Bette Davis’s face slashed across the screen in time to “She’s Got A-Media Eyes.” KISS’s famous tongue shot had been cleverly reanimated to make it appear that the lead singer’s eye, and not his tongue, flew into the lens, intercut with Roger Rabbit’s eyeball-out-of-socket animation, all rocking to a new rapper track.

  Guests ate sushi hors d’oeuvres made to look like eyelashes and stared down into their soup at crystal paperweight eyeballs that stared back at them, and starlets dropped their evening shawls to reveal eyeballs tattooed down the prominent bones of their spines. It was the kind of bacchanalian orgy that did Walter Puckett proud.

  Although Robert Baron was scheduled to take over, this was Walter Puckett’s night—he was still very much in the game and on the court, having managed to secure a place on the board, to the chagrin of many board members—in particular, Michael Kaloff. While Walter Puckett would no longer be CEO, he would still hold sway. He was so ecstatic this evening that he was hitting on LaTisha, our T&A talent, in full view of the press.

  We watched as Walter danced the lithe and beautiful LaTisha over to the buffet table within a shish kabob’s length of us.

  “How are you, my dear?” He blew kisses at me. “I have talent!” He giggled and pointed to LaTisha with one hand while pinching her buttock with the other.

  She jumped but kept her smile intact.

  “As a newly appointed board member, remember all eyes are on you,” I quipped as a shutter flashed and we were digitally dogged by the press.

  “Then they’ll get an eyeful, won’t they?” And he rolled his eyes up in his head in a mock scandalous gesture and danced off with her.

  Maxine shook her head. “He’s something else.”

  “Are they all sleeping with him?” I inquired.

  “Only the ones he asks.” Maxine shrugged. “They’re young and want to get ahead and, let’s face it, he can take them places.”

  Like the hospital, I thought, but didn’t say it. Michael Kaloff had confided in me earlier in the evening, after enough stiff martinis that he wouldn’t have been able to distinguish me from a Rottweiler, that Walter had once tried to slam-dunk his girlfriend through a car window.

  I spent the evening talking to clients and well-wishers, everyone happily heralding the beautiful new studios and state-of-the-art postproduction facilities that spoke to our commitment to our networks. I didn’t get back to the hotel lobby until almost one in the morning, heading for the elevators to my room.

  Hugh slid across the marble lobby floors, skidding to a stop in front of me. “He is in trouble up to his thematic eyeballs.”

  “He he?” I said, making sure we were talking about Walter Puckett.

  “Yeah. A guy in the hotel has digital pics of Walter in bed with two hookers—maybe double-teaming or, hey, rim shots. They’re all naked from the waist down, but from the waist up they’re wearing T-shirts that say A-Media Entertainment. If one of those photos gets into the tabloids, it’s all over!”

  I couldn’t stop laughing. “Omigod, who took the photos?”

  “A disgruntled husband, we think.”

  Maybe Walter had groped his wife and he was taking revenge. It wouldn’t be hard to get two hookers to trick Walter into putting on the T-shirt, then arranging for someone to burst into the room. Whoever did it had struck with the precision of the Israeli army.

  But somewhere in the back of my mind was the not-altogether-unpleasant thought that Anselm had trapped Walter Puckett like a lizard traps a fly—silently outwaiting the Megan Stanford inquisition, patiently setting the trap at this Hollywood gala—then, with the speed of a lizard’s tongue, snatched Walter Puckett right out of his board seat.

  I went to my room giggling over the image of Walter, the two women in corporate T-shirts having sex with him, and the photographer in the doorway.

  Standing by the bedside table, I stared at the phone, wanting to call Liz. We’d spent so many nights together, been through so much—It’s natural that I miss talking to her, and I need to check on Rune and Hlatur. I nervously dialed her, which I’d never done on a business trip. Suddenly I realized that for Liz it was three a.m., but I wasn’t able to hang up before she answered.

  “I’m sorry, I woke you,” I said, somewhat embarrassed over having done it.

  “You can wake me any time.”

  Her voice was so soothing I thought I could fall asleep on it. I just sat still, enjoying that response. What a contrast to my calls to Clare. But then my calls to Clare had been an interruption to Clare’s infidelity.

  “Are you awake?” Liz teased the silence.

  “I am. I called to tell you a funny story. First you must swear it’s off the record, since it would make a great news story,” I said, and she swore.

  With every image of Walter and the hookers, Liz laughed louder and begged me to fill in the details. Who caught him, where, when, what was said, who’d reported it? We fantasized about all the delicious possibilities that could come as a result: published Internet photos, blackmail, his having to resign from the board days after being appointed.

  Our prurient interests spent, silence finally ensued.

  “Isn’t this a bizarre way to while away my life—watching assholes like Walter Fuck-it get themselves in trouble for boffing young women?” I sighed, then Liz sighed empathetically. “So how are the horses?” I finally asked.

  “I gave them a big hug for you. They miss you already. Do you have a nice room?”

  “I do. Room 1111. So weird. I notice that all the time—everything has ones in it. I wish I knew what it meant—maybe just that I’m crazy.”

&n
bsp; “What are you doing right now?” she asked, ignoring the ones in favor of just the two of us, her voice changing to sultry.

  “Getting ready for bed.”

  “If I was there, and you were as mellow as you sound, I’m betting you’d be coming on to me right now,” she whispered.

  “I think you have us confused.” I was smiling and couldn’t help myself.

  “Since you’re safely a thousand miles out of my reach, is it okay for me to say I’ve been thinking of you tonight?” Liz’s voice was so soft it was creating twinges of electrical current from my heart down to my groin and up to my brain, then repeating that circular pathway until I reverberated.

  “You haven’t been thinking about me. You’ve been in bed asleep.” I tried to change her mood.

  “Especially when I’m in bed. Are you still bent on never having a relationship with me? Because I would love to have you calling me at night saying sexy things.”

  “Oh, Liz, if we have a relationship, then I lose a lover and a friend. My track record is four years…that’s all. The chase, the catch, the finding a way to fit into each other’s lives, homes, work, the distancing, the end. I call it finding, fooling, fucking, forgetting, and it’s guaranteed ‘over with’ in four years.”

  “I have a different program. It’s called the wild attraction, the consummation, the laughter, longing, loving, the merging, the forever.”

  “I can’t have one more relationship that goes south.”

  “Maybe your relationships go south because you pick people already headed in that direction,” Liz said. “You don’t want to let your lover in, so you pick a lover who doesn’t want to get in. I want in, Brice. I want to be your lover. I am your lover. You know it in your heart.”

  “I’m working on it.”

  “In this lifetime?” Liz prodded lightly, then told me good night and hung up.

  I threw myself backward onto the bed moaning. I couldn’t remember any of my other relationships ever driving me to this kind of distraction. In fact, I hadn’t really been physically attracted to anyone like I was to Liz, and now I was in a state of constant arousal. I loved her voice, and her looks, and the way she was built, and the way she smelled, and the way she moved, and even the way she flared up and got mad at me.

  But I would never let Liz see that in me. Just as I’d kept corporate America from ever seeing under my strong veneer. Just as Rune kept me from ever seeing a soft, loving look in her eye. She and I were all business.

  I picked up the phone and rang Madge.

  “She’s been thinking about me,” I said sullenly.

  “Well, now I am too. Thinking why in the hell you’re waking me up in the middle of the damned night. It’s nearly four a.m. Are we talking about Liz Chase? You can run a great big corporation and you can’t outrun one little blond woman.”

  “Go to sleep,” I said and hung up, wide-awake now, alert with the alcohol wearing off. In all my life, I couldn’t remember Madge ever being so unhelpful.

  Chapter Sixteen

  The next morning as everyone slept in, nursing their hangovers, I got up early and decided to take in the JP Getty Museum.

  I hadn’t slept well. Liz was on my mind. I could envision her soft, blond head of curls on the pillow next to me and imagine how good she felt. To wrap around that small waist with one arm and slide my hand down… I squeezed my eyes shut and clamped my knees together, warding off this thought. I need to get out of this bed, out of this hotel, perhaps even out of my own skin.

  I slung the covers back, hurried into the bathroom, and took a cool shower. I dried off, blow-dried my hair, threw on some makeup and a pair of slacks with a nice shirt and a loose sweater, and caught a cab, sinking back into the thin, torn black leather seats, for the first time in my life not telling the cab driver the route to take or to slow down. An hour later, I was wandering through the echoing corridors of the museum soaking in the artifacts and artwork.

  At the end of the last corridor, as I rounded the gargantuan arches leading into a dimly lit room, a massive painting overpowered the wall, and me. The canvas perhaps twenty feet long and twelve feet high, an elaborate battle scene, gripped me with a force that obliterated the paint and brushstrokes of the castle compound and made the painting real, as real as the clan of men who beckoned me now to take up arms and fight.

  In the foreground, elevated above the rabble, was the huge image of a red-bearded warrior, hoisting a blond queen up behind him on his horse. Other horses trailed behind him, the whites of their eyes wild in terror, as men, hundreds of them in great detail, battled among the fires and flames. I was as frozen in time as the image on the wall, the adrenaline from a thousand years of warring still pumping in my chest, as I struggled to whisper, “Oh, my God, it’s real!”

  I walked up to the painting in disbelief and read the plaque beside it: “The Battle. Painted in 1642 in Iceland by the last living Mistress of the Runes. Donated to the museum by Edward S. Samuels, San Francisco.”

  The name that was on the postcard given to me by the woman at the Yakima River! How can that be? It’s too bizarre to be a coincidence. So I’ve been dreaming about a painting that actually exists? Maybe I saw it years ago and it stuck in my mind. I sat down on the bench in front of the painting. It was early morning and the room was empty. I know the feel of the folds of the woman’s garment, like the down of a bird’s breast or a mare’s soothing breath. Does the painting convey that to me or did I touch that fabric, run my hand across it, hold it between my fingers, and lift it to caress what was beneath?

  I rose and approached the painting, getting as close to the image as possible. The red-bearded warrior: muscles taut, brow furrowed, sweat beading on the tan, rugged skin of his neck where the leather cord with the stone hung, and a symbol that looked like the letter “M” carved in it. The warrior looked exactly as I had dreamed him, and his queen, blond and blue-eyed, looked exactly like…Liz Chase. Goose bumps raced up my arms, over my shoulders, and down my spine. What was I looking at? What did this mean?

  I don’t know how long I stood there soaking in the painting. It was a religious experience—an awakening—a realization that life embodied some sort of continuity, some pattern or cycle or rhythm that couldn’t be summed up in a banal paragraph about joining God in heaven. Something or someone larger than myself existed out there—Who can paint! I joked in my head to keep myself from falling to my knees and sobbing.

  Leaving the room silently as if from a chapel service, I maneuvered the length of the museum to the gift shop to inquire about a copy of the painting. The woman behind the counter ran a search based on title and said they didn’t have a painting by that name.

  I found a docent outside the gift shop, a tiny, wiry, frail old lady who looked like she was asleep on the bench outside the glass door. Should be called a doze-nt, I thought as I bent over to ask her if she could get someone to take a digital photo of the painting, or if someone in the building knew more about it. She was unable to recall the painting and walked back down the corridor with me to the room.

  I rounded the huge support arches and entered the gallery where across the room, on the wall, hung a totally different painting, this one of a massive forest filled with large old fir trees and pine-needle trails that wound through them. The canvas was the same size and in the same frame, but it wasn’t The Battle.

  “This is the room, but this wasn’t here,” I explained to the docent as I pointed at the large expanse of forest. I was confused now; where was the painting?

  “We do change the artwork around from time to time,” she said kindly. “How long ago were you here?”

  “Twenty minutes.”

  “Oh! Well, I can assure you that the room hasn’t been changed over the last twenty minutes!” And she laughed lightly. “Is it necessary to find just that painting? Or would you be interested in looking at others of that period?”

  “No, it has to be that painting. It’s, uh…”

  “Your dream painting?
” She filled in the sentence. “Yes, people fall in love with certain works of art. Well, I know you’ll find what you’re looking for, if you just keep searching. And I would be more than happy to help you.” She had a lilt to her voice, and she cocked her head and stared at me with piercing blue eyes.

  “I…just need to see that painting.”

  “Would you like to leave an address, in case I come upon it?”

  I hesitated, then thought why not. “Okay.” I took a card out of my wallet and handed it to her.

  “So you’re a corporate…” She tried to read my title.

  “Warrior,” I said without thinking, and wondered where that word had come from. It had been resounding in my head for some time, but I’d never spoken it aloud before. It crystallized who I was—living in a different world now still filled with kings and killing, in the context of well-defined corporate rules.

  The docent laughed. “Of course, warrior. Plenty of battles still to fight, aren’t there?”

  Her eyes twinkled at me, but I was ignoring her. My mind was processing in terabytes. How could the painting just disappear? I turned my back on the docent and retraced my steps a corridor at a time, scouring the museum, looking in every room, down every possible wing; but the painting was gone.

  I saw it! I pleaded with myself. So where is it?

  “You’re asking questions I can’t answer right now.”

  The docent was still at my side, and somewhere in the back of my mind it registered that she was answering questions I hadn’t yet verbalized, but had only thought.

  “But continue to ask. Answers do materialize, I will say that. But twenty minutes, you say…” She seemed to be musing over something. “Of course, suppose there’s no time, because of course time is man-made. Then if there’s no time, there’s no distance, because getting from here to there no longer takes time. And if there’s no time or distance, then everything ‘there’ is here and everything ‘then’ is now, including your painting. So it simply must be here!”