Cat in a Topaz Tango

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  Matt looked around at the empty plastic water and energy drink bottles on the long makeup dresser tops. “Constantly. Even the makeup lights are hot, and we rehearse until we sweat like overhydrated pigs. Then there’s the stress of waiting for your performance results.”

  “The police will test all the empties they find. Okay,” Rafi said, glancing at Temple in the mirror. “That crazy mixed-up kid you want to marry has come calling. I think you two can have some face-to-face time in the hall.”

  Matt’s warm brown eyes seemed black in this artificial light as they met hers. He stood, knocking his chair back a little. After all the complicated dance-floor moves, he suddenly seemed awkward.

  Having your partner pass out in your arms on live TV might be a bit disorienting, Temple thought, not to mention the uncertainty about Wandawoman’s condition.

  They went down the hall far enough so they couldn’t hear the murmur of investigators, and the investigators probably couldn’t hear them.

  “You all right?” she asked.

  “I’m fine, and you heard Nadir say Wandawoman will be too. This competition is looking more ‘killer’ by the moment. What did you get me into?” he added mock ruefully.

  “This major sexy costume,” she said, pasting herself against it and running her fingers down the deep front V of the transparent mesh shirt. “Pardon my pawing, but I’m standing in for all the women in the audience.”

  “Yeah?” He smiled down at her. “You’re the only one I care about.”

  “And aren’t I lucky? Matt, how did you manage that amazing transformation? Danny said you outmachoed José. It can’t be just Tatyana’s whip hand.”

  “You know, this ‘acting’ stuff that you talk about, and that Tatyana is trying to drag out of me by hook or by crook, has given me some new insights. Is it supposed to work like that?”

  “Ye-es. Acting forces you to inhabit other people’s skins and that’s very enlightening. Sooo?”

  Their embrace stayed close as he combined almost kissing her with a dutiful recital of his recent epiphany.

  “I knew I had to commit totally to this competition, even the parts of it that made me uncomfortable. Tatyana loved my swimming physique, but, unlike fencing, it’s not a very passionate or romanticized sport and you don’t learn drama doing it. So I thought about the dance, the pasodoble. The love-hate aspects. Didn’t help me much. I’d been working on the ‘love thy fellow human’ part for years and even purged my hatred of my rotten stepfather once I found him here and saw what a pathetic weasel the bane of my childhood was.”

  Temple cuddled closer, needing a romantic interlude after the anxiety and hurly-burly all around them.

  “You’re gonna laugh,” he warned. “I knew I had to take charge and sling Wandawoman around like a seventeen-pound matador’s cape, all the while feigning passion. So . . . I imagined I was dancing with Kitty the Cutter.”

  “What brilliant Method acting, Matt! No wonder you were so relentless, so powerful, so passionate. You were dancing with the Dev il. The classic attraction-rejection dance with evil incarnate. Kathleen O’Connor was a perfect embodiment of that.”

  “When I let out my anger at Kathleen O’Connor for cutting me, in a way I became her. I felt the pent-up rage that makes a person so destructive. And, thinking about her attack, I realized for the first time, maybe because I’m different from then, because of, you know, us.”

  Temple nodded. “Us” was a first and only sexual commitment for Matt, and it had been hard-won.

  “This may sound sick.”

  “The truth often can.”

  “I sensed for the first time, thinking back as I had to, something sexual about her rage and her attack. I don’t think of women as sexual predators, but I believe she was.”

  Temple nodded again, solemnly. “You were fresh out of the priesthood when you encountered her, so you didn’t get her underlying motives. I think you’re right. You remember the story of Max and his cousin Sean visiting Ireland as a high school graduation present?

  “Yeah. Sad story. Could make a modern opera out of it. I get Max’s guilt. I’ve always understood that about him, even when he was being his most caustic. It must have been hard on you.”

  “Only when he was in those Irish melancholy moods, and that was seldom. Max helped nail the bombers. He got revenge, for what it was worth, and went on to prevent a lot of awful acts of terrorism from happening. Sean’s loss was there, but it was old news. But I don’t think you understand just how innocent they were, those boys.”

  “Catholic high schoolers? Back then? Sure. Trust me.”

  “And eager. This was their first time unsupervised, in a foreign country during perilous times, and yet it all looked so cheery and all pub songs and ale and no one carding them. Kathleen O’Conner was older, in her early twenties. She was a woman, and the game the boys played competing for her was semiserious. They were virgins and here was a free woman who seemed to want to change that, and they’d be scot-free, never likely to see her again. No risk, all gain.

  Max won, he thought. He didn’t have to be embarrassed about being a seventeen-year-old virgin ever again and his cousin Sean wouldn’t hold it against him that he’d gotten there first. That apparently literal roll in the hay saved Max’s life but cost him his peace of mind.”

  “I know he came to believe that Kathleen was allied with the IRA and knew the pub would be bombed. What a sad, sick woman,” Matt said.

  “He also came to believe that Kathleen knew Max would meet his cousin at that pub, afterwards. To brag a little, and celebrate. He believed that she picked him, and so picked him to live, so that his first act of love turned an act of trifling boyish betrayal into a mortal personal loss. That’s why I call her ‘Kitty the Cutter.’ She existed to mess up other people’s lives with whatever it took on her part, sex or violence.”

  “You’re describing a psychopath.”

  Temple nodded. “She tainted the lives of the only men I’ve ever loved.”

  Matt was silent, accepting the simple truth of Temple’s love for both of them.

  Then he sighed. “My God, I never thought I’d be glad someone was dead. Or that someone deserved to die, or to be stopped, anyway. Max was there? He was sure?”

  “She was still chasing him, chasing his car on that demon’s motorcycle of hers. After all these years, she was furious that he was alive and happy and free of her. It was a single-vehicle accident. She gunned that motorcycle off the road into a fiery crash. He stayed around long enough to search for a pulse in her broken neck. There was none.”

  They kept silent, their close embrace and mutual mood completely turned from triumph to a sober clinging.

  Matt pulled Temple away to see her face finally, looking roguish, deliberately lightening the mood.

  “Tragic story. Like I said. I got off lucky,” he commented.

  “You mean the wound she gave you was only physical?” she asked.

  “I mean I got away from that homicidal man-eater still a virgin.”

  Temple laughed through the unacknowledged sheen of sorrow in her eyes.

  She let herself be swept back into the arms of the sexiest pasodoble dude on the planet. Well, in Las Vegas, anyway.

  Paso de Deux

  In the Hummerbar, all heads turned as she entered, as if a prima ballerina had just spun onto the stage.

  Disheveled, distracted, Revienne remained a femme fatale.

  Max, meanwhile, calculated all the amazing coincidences that could have led so quickly and incredibly to their reunion. And if he could get her into bed tonight. He’s the knight-errant, after all, the guy left behind who soldiered on and caught up with the girl. He’s had a lot of pain, no gain, and he so needs a lay.

  Does it always come down to this? Naked need? Probably.

  In a vague sense, he understood what he needed more: Garry Randolph is the man who knows who Max is and why he ended up here in this condition, and what he really needs. But Garry is a figment now.
Revienne is real, and she needs a martini.

  “Mein Gott, Michael! Those . . . monsters. They grabbed me off the street in Alteberg, held me overnight in a filthy, dark warehouse. Why? What have I done?”

  Her gray eyes narrowed over her Gray Goose vodka gimlet. Nice combo. “What have you done?”

  Not enough with you, lady.

  That was the trouble with lust. It was utterly unreliable. Secret agents like himself must deal daily with the unreliable, yet must crave the reliable. That was a delusion. God, his left knee ached. The left knee of God. God must have had them, because so many of His devotees kneeled . . . .

  Max didn’t believe in luck, in kneeling, in Gods who demanded both, or in good women who turned up fortuitously in bad places. Maybe he didn’t need to get laid that bad.

  “Was that the village’s name, Alteberg?” he asked.

  “Yes.” She gazed at him over the glittering rolled rim of her martini glass. “I’d gone out for breakfast. You were comatose.”

  “Not like in the clinic.” He had dropped the Irish accent. Sounded like himself, whoever that self was.

  “No, just from food and wine and . . . overstimulation.”

  Her massage.

  “You were dead to the world.”

  All too much so.

  She shrugged. She had wide shoulders for a woman. He didn’t find that unattractive. She must work out hard on her upper body strength. Why?

  “That’s when you were kidnapped,” he prodded. “Do you know who? Why?

  “No more than you do.” She waited.

  He waited.

  She ran the tip of her tongue over the cocktail glass rim.

  The muscle in his right calf jerked. Overstimulated. The more seductive she was, the less his mind wanted her.

  This was a game of cat and mouse. The roles hadn’t been assigned yet. He’d thought he’d needed to find her, to make sure she was safe. He’d thought he’d needed to find her, to prove he could. And he thought he’d needed to find her to seek shelter, to find out for sure if she wasn’t to be trusted.

  Now it was all too easy. You’d think a man with a short-term memory loss and two bum legs would want it easy. But he didn’t. Hell, he was Irish. He knew that much. Some people thrive on adversity, and he was one.

  He rose from the dim table in the storied bar. Tossed a ten euro tip on the varnished surface.

  “I’ve reserved a room in your name. You should be able to rest and freshen up there. I doubt those men will bother you further.”

  Her gray eyes flashed fury.

  “I’ll be gone before you are in the morning,” he said. Threatened. “Thanks for your help.”

  “That’s it?” she said before he could take up his cane and walk. “I nearly break my own ankles walking down half an Alp and I get a drink and a . . . what is it called in the American movies? A kiss-off? You don’t even want to know what happened to me, what those men wanted?”

  “Do you know what they wanted?”

  Her anger ebbed as she sat farther back into the leather club chair, reassured that he wasn’t leaving quite yet.

  “They took me, but they wanted you. It seemed they were sure you would follow. They drove down the mountain slowly. Stopped for lunch! All the while holding a pistol on me.”

  “What kind?”

  “Black, sleek, how do I know what kind? I am a psychiatrist, not a policeman.”

  “And they came straight to Zurich?”

  “It’s the biggest city at the bottom of the northern Alps. Anyone leaving the clinic would have to go through Zurich.”

  “How did they come across you? Know you? Know you were with me?”

  “From the clinic.”

  “And they didn’t force you to take them to me in the village?”

  Her eyes grew evasive. “They didn’t want to cause a fuss in that little town. They said they’d make their move in Zurich.”

  “In what language?”

  “English,” she said, surprisingly. “But not American, as you speak. It had a more musical sound.”

  “An accent?”

  “I suppose so.” She frowned as she sipped again, more deeply. “It wasn’t British English. I’ve heard that on the BBC. Maybe English wasn’t their native tongue. Maybe they were Latvian. I don’t know!”

  “Maybe what you don’t know is a safeguard.” He’d slipped back into a soft, nonstagy Irish brogue.

  Her eyes widened like a child’s. “Yes! They spoke exactly like that.”

  Max smiled, although he didn’t feel like it. The IRA was defanged these days, of its own volition. Why would Irish muscle still be after him? Unless it was the rogue branch, and even then, such a connection was ridiculous. Yet, the accent had enveloped him like a second skin when he’d wanted one to cloud his identity.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “You haven’t heard a Celtic accent before?”

  “Celtic? You mean Scottish?”

  He didn’t correct her because she seemed sincerely puzzled.

  European countries could be insular, despite being closer cheek by jowl than most American states. She’d probably heard a bit of a brogue in passing, but had never bothered to assign it to any particular foreign country. The French were almost fanatical about preserving their language from creeping Americanisms. Her ignorance of other accents seemed reasonable.

  “You have come up in the world, Mr. Randolph, since we parted.”

  He mentally shook himself to attention again. She meant his upscale new clothes.

  “Same method of shopping?” she said.

  “I haven’t won the lottery in the past twenty-eight hours.”

  “Only twenty-eight hours? You counted. Is that all it’s been?” Her sleek features sagged momentarily.

  “I take it you prefer my company to your friends in the Mercedes.”

  “They are not my friends! Oh, they didn’t hurt me beyond worrying me to death, and you were as much responsible for that as they were.”

  “I was?”

  “You are my patient, infuriating and uncooperative as you are! I am responsible for you.”

  “For my mind and emotions, maybe, but this is no longer a therapeutic situation.”

  “Actually, it is.” She was all business now, as when she had first visited him in the clinic room, but she didn’t stop sipping the cocktail. Emotion and alcohol were warming her cool blond cheeks, and him by proxy.

  “You have made an impossible physical recovery in the past few days. I daresay running for one’s life could now be recommended as excellent physical therapy. You laugh? I’m dead serious.”

  “But you were being sarcastic, even funny. You’ve never been funny before.”

  “I am not amusing. I am angry, rightly so. It’s clear that you have also recalled some survival strategies that indicate you have a most interesting history, professional or personal, I am not sure which yet, but I mean to find out.”

  “And if I don’t mean you to?”

  “Given the progress you have made in these last few days, if we had a few solid hours of consultation, you might make a real leap. Then you would know who these men are who tried to use a hypodermic to silence you, and who kidnapped me off the cobblestones of innocent Alteberg to use me as a hostage and lure. Why did they think I would be valuable to you? Why did they even bother with me?”

  If she truly was the innocent bystander she claimed, that was an interesting question.

  He felt his face flush. Going after her when she’d vanished, in his condition, with the distrust he harbored, was idiotic. Apparently, someone who wanted to kill him—or maybe someone else who wanted to use him—knew that he would be just that idiotic. Was he a fall guy for a pretty face? Or someone with an overactive sense of responsibility?

  In a way, only time and maybe Revienne would tell. She was the sole link he had now to his past, both for what she might be able to do for him as a psychiatrist and how useful she might be as an ally, or a secret enemy
.

  Either way, having taken all this trouble to find her, it was even more idiotic to let her go.

  “We can discuss this in your room,” he said.

  Her pale eyebrows raised as she lifted her martini glass to finish it off.

  “I ordered a bottle of champagne,” he added.

  She lowered the wide-mouthed glass without drinking, eyeing him with approval. “A nice thought, but that is too . . . sleepy-making for the work we have ahead of us tonight. This is an occasion for unconventional methods. Martinis would be better to loosen up the unconscious.”

  “Mine, or yours?”

  “Let’s try it and see what happens.”

  “You said a ‘room.’ ”

  Revienne’s tone was accusing.

  It would be called a junior suite in the United States. It had a small refrigerator, nice postmodern furnishings, a hair dryer and jetted tub in the bathroom for rich Americans used to excess.

  “Ah, divine.”

  She sat to yank off her boots and the nylons inside, now pocked with holes. She snapped them free at the thighs of a garter belt he’d never suspected she wore.

  His pulse jumped. In America, garter belts were cheap or expensive sex accessories. Bought sex. From somewhere, he remembered that European women were different. They might not shave their legs or underarms, but they might just shave a more intimate area. They might just wear garter belts and hose daily, but skip panties.

  My God, he’d been on the run for several days, around the clock, with a woman who wore no underwear and he hadn’t known it. Luckily, she hadn’t noticed his juvenile curiosity and even more infantile excitement.

  “First, I bathe,” she decided. “You order me another martini and appetizers.” She unbuttoned her jacket to reveal a black lace camisole under it and threw it on a chair, disappearing into the bathroom, drawing the door shut behind her.

  He heard the lock turn and smiled. She had her suspicions too.

  The boots had been ruined; the hose too. He picked up her jacket. It was a light wool-silk weave, lined in silk crepe, hand-sewn with silken tape covering the seams. It would feel smooth as a cloud on, as his new designer clothes did.