Cat in a Topaz Tango

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  “Me?”

  “Obviously, you are a tough guy. Who knows what you’re capable of?”

  “Why don’t you see what goodies are on the table here, before turning it on me.”

  “Sometimes you speak nonsense.”

  “English idioms. Figures of speech. I can use German. Or French, if you prefer.”

  “In bed, yes. Both.”

  “I don’t think either of us is ready for bed yet,” he said dryly. “Regardez.”

  “Mon Dieu!”

  She picked up the champagne in its silver bucket to read the label, then the bottles of red and white wines. She eyed him, mischievous.

  “You must surely bear a platinum card from a titan of industry.” Under the silver domes she lifted in turn lay croissants, a huge salad for two, salmon and pommes frites—the original French fried potatoes, as thin as angel-hair pasta—fruit and cheese and small candied sweets.

  “This is a feast,” she said.

  She looked at him leaning on his cane, slipping his homemade set of brass knuckles into his pants pockets, not that she knew what he was doing.

  “Now you do as I say. Sit. On that hard chair, where you will not sink like a stone.”

  She was right that he needed support now, not wallowing comfort. He couldn’t assume they wouldn’t be traced here and attacked in the night.

  “I will serve you,” she decided, rolling the table to his chair and handing him an elaborately folded serviette.

  He took it, watching as she lifted the cart’s side extensions, pulled a chair to her side of the table, selected the red wine for the salad, poured it. He watched her bare arm muscles shift with purpose under her creamy skin, her breasts ebb and flow against the thin silk netting them, tender and pink as the salmon.

  She understood the show she was putting on, of course, but that only made him feel free to enjoy it.

  When she sat and pushed the salad plate toward him so they could eat off both sides, she suddenly gasped in surprise. Her white linen napkin was in the shape of a graceful swan, not the formal roll that had come with the service.

  “You do napkin origami!”

  Surprising her in this small way gave him an unexpected bolt of pleasure, completely nonsexual. She quickly turned the moment to the more adult.

  “I’d noticed what long, agile fingers you have.”

  She gave him a Princess Diana smile, head cast down, eyes cast up, shy and seductive at the same time. Now he remembered her very well, the late, unhappy royal wife. He washed some of the exquisite wine over his tongue and resolved to enjoy every nuance of both the drink and the woman.

  Was she seducing him for some undercover purpose? Or was she just a woman who’d survived an arduous mountain trek that had stripped every scintilla of womanliness from her?

  They began forking pieces of romaine lettuce, walnuts, blue cheese, and caramelized pear slices into their mouths, not speaking, just savoring the enjoyment of a leisurely fine meal, sipping wine between every bite.

  If he knew the French, this dinner would take at least an hour. No bolting the food American-style. He supposed his butt might go numb on this hard chair by then, but numbing the nether regions was probably a good idea right now. He didn’t want to be swept away before he knew more about her than she knew about him.

  “Why did you become a psychiatrist?”

  She looked up, surprised. “It’s a good profession. I meet interesting people.” She tossed him a smile and a bow of her head. “I help them.”

  “And you make a lot of money.”

  She shook her head as she sipped wine, not quite able to answer. “I do now. That wasn’t my motive. Actually, your generous contribution for my services here in Switzerland will help me meet with my Algerian patients in Paris.”

  “You’re an altruist.”

  “Pardone-moi?”

  “You try to help mankind, not just . . . man.” He returned her smile with the bow of his head as he sipped wine. Great stuff! Great verbal fencing too.

  “I believe everyone who is blessed has an obligation to serve those unlucky enough to have been unblessed.”

  “So amnesiac millionaires who fall off mountains are just a charity case for you?”

  Her gray eyes warmed with appreciation. “So you have . . . turned the tables on me now?”

  “You catch on fast.”

  “You didn’t fall off a mountain, Mr. Randolph. You are not the type to climb cold, hard Old World mountains.”

  “Then how did I fall?”

  She sipped wine, shut her eyes, tilted her head. “I see you climbing . . . a skyscraper.”

  He raised an eyebrow.

  “You are one of these urban daredevils. You are in New York City. You reach the eightieth floor before the police can arrive and you snap a line to an opposite building. You will wire-walk over the urban chasm while everyone below gets stiff necks watching and waiting for you to fall. You won’t fall, but you will get arrested at the end of your stunt, and a great deal of publicity. When you have your press conference, you will present the lovely lady from Channel Five with a flower shaped like a dove, and take her to bed later.”

  He laughed, longer and harder than he thought he was capable of.

  “Will the lovely French psychiatrist the court orders me to see take me to bed also?”

  “That depends how much she likes her swan-shaped flower.”

  Revienne daubed her lips with the limp corpse of his swan napkin.

  “That’s a wonderfully inventive scenario, but it still doesn’t tell me why you became a psychiatrist.”

  She sipped wine again, setting aside the demolished salad plate and uncovering their plates of salmon.

  “I’ll tell you after we eat the main course.”

  So they ate in silence, flake by savory flake of baked salmon, crunch by crunch of the tiny strips of potato, sip by sip of the white wine until the bottle was gone.

  He thought over Revienne’s imagined high-wire act.

  He’d felt in that position often during his stay at the clinic and later escape. It was an apt metaphor for what he knew of his life these last few days. He watched his hands with the exquisite Christofle sterling flatware. His fingers were indeed long and strong, as his legs would be again. As other parts were rehearsing for being again.

  This escape, this idyll, was almost over. He was sorry about that.

  He was startled from his reverie when she poured from the opened bottle of white wine into fresh glasses, and swept the empty dinner plates together and to the side.

  He took sliced fruit and cheese from the desert plate, and sat back.

  Revienne nibbled on a wedge of pungent white cheese. “Why I became a psychiatrist.” She sighed. “How could I be anything but, after Sophie.”

  He waited.

  “My younger sister. Do you have brothers and sisters? We don’t know, do we, Mr. Randolph? I had the one sister. There were four years between us, enough for me to feel superior. Cruelty, indifference must be educated out of the young, I believe. They are greedy, self-centered, and frightened.”

  He said nothing, the best way to keep a story being told, but he wondered if she was obliquely referring to him in his amnesiac state.

  “Sophie trailed me and embarrassed me in front of my cool new friends. She still had baby fat, while I had breasts and boys. Her skin was unfortunate but my parents assured her that she’d be just like me someday. Frankly, I would not want to be like I was then, vain, selfish, and stupid.”

  There was nothing of the seductive woman in her now, just the voice of truth and self-disgust.

  “She lost a great deal of weight. No one suspected bulimia. Her skin got worse, but she was thinner than I was. She had no breasts and she never would. I came home one day when our parents were away to find Sophie outside the third-floor mansard, poised like a diver.

  “I called to her from the street, begged her to wait, to hang on.

  “‘I can fly,’” she told me. �
�‘I am finally light enough to fly.’”

  I screamed for the neighbors to call the police and ran up the four flights to the roof. While I ran up step after step until my legs shook, she took flight. I arrived where she had been to see her on the street below.”

  She crumpled the napkin into a tight ball in her hand.

  “My God.”

  He felt an odd kinship with her. Had he failed a brother? He felt a wave of anger and guilt, and then fury with his fled memory that forbid him responsibility for his past.

  “I shouldn’t have asked,” he said.

  “It was a long time ago. It gave me purpose. The public was ignorant then of the suffering of young people. I’ve specialized in trauma cases, but I work gratis with the young from poor families in Paris. Don’t weep for me. I make a lot of money on my celebrity cases to underwrite my charity work.”

  “I’m a celebrity case?”

  She smiled. “Presumed so. You have the money to afford the clinic and my exclusive time.”

  “This has been more exclusive than I’d imagined.”

  “It’s been . . . invigorating for me, in a way. You are difficult. I like the challenge.

  “Will I ever fully remember, do you think?

  She assumed her professional face. “These cases are unpredictable. The added pressure of someone trying to kill you might choke off your memory even longer. Your best course is to reunite with your uncle. Once I put myself together again and return to the clinic, I can contact him, direct him to where you’ll be. It’s time you had another keeper, Mr. Randolph, and you know it.”

  He nodded.

  “Why did you pursue me when I vanished instead of going your own way?”

  “A number of reasons.”

  “Yes, Mr. Randolph?”

  “I panicked. Yes, I did. You were indeed my keeper. I needed you. And, I knew you wouldn’t have vanished like that of your own will, unless you had an underlying motive. I needed to know why you had disappeared.”

  “You still don’t trust me, Mr. Randolph.”

  “No, Dr. Schneider, I don’t. Until I have my memory back, I won’t trust anyone. And even then it’ll be dicey. Difficult.”

  “And if you never do recover your memory?”

  “In time, I might find people to trust. But I have to make sure I live that long.”

  “I don’t envy your future.”

  “I don’t envy your past.” He refilled their glasses. The wine glowed.

  “What of our present?” she asked.

  “That’s ours to determine.”

  “If someone doesn’t kill you first.”

  “Apparently I’m harder to kill than someone counted on.”

  “I knew you were an extraordinary man five minutes after I entered your room for an interview.”

  “I look good in a hospital gown?”

  She smiled. “You looked like hell, but you still were—let me find the exact English words. You were wary. Proud.” She made a fist, searching for the right idiom. “You were prickled, like a land mine of the mind.”

  “Prickly, I think you mean.”

  “Hard to get close to, to see into. Mental spikes all around you. Lightning snapping.”

  He laughed. “This from a head case with no memory and bum legs?”

  “Yes.”

  “Am I still so prickly?”

  “Yes . . . and no. So—”

  She leaned forward to push him into the chair back so quickly the cane fell to the floor. His muscles automatically tensed for an attack and it was one.

  She knelt before him. Looking down, he saw the gaping camisole barely supporting her rounded breasts under taupe aureoles and rose tips. Just.

  She looked up, easing off his Bally slip-on ankle boots. “This is my restaurant. No shoes—”

  She rose, her breasts pressed against his thighs (oh, God) . . .

  “No belts, unless you have any kinky after-dinner notions—”

  . . . to loosen and pull away the narrow Bally snake of smooth leather.

  “No tie—”

  Her torso pressed his as she arched upward to undo the tack and the silken Ermenegildo Zegna knot and draw them away.

  “. . . allowed.”

  He caught her hands in one of his, put his other at her nape and pressed her face to his for a long, luxurious, five-star kiss. Or several. He liked the appetizers at her restaurant already.

  His free hand slipped the camisole straps off her lovely, strong shoulders, one by one. She shrugged them farther away. Seducing and being seduced felt like the most civilized parlor game in Europe.

  He felt the physical and mental pain of the past six weeks melting like marzipan after-dinner sweets into the sour landscape of his soul. It wasn’t just the sex, it was breaking the touching barrier. He’d needed comfort more concrete than words. This had been coming for some time, and would be worth it no matter the cost.

  Mostly.

  Maybe.

  Oh, baby . . .

  On the Topaz Trail

  Since it is Miss Topaz’s hotel, as she puts it so firmly, I am forced to let her lead.

  Ordinarily I resist a subservient position on principle, but I am not a fool.

  Ordinarily an extraordinarily svelte and attractive lady of my species is not walking, tail high and swaying, directly ahead of me.

  I am already checking out the surroundings for romantic rendezvous spots, but Topaz’s lively mind is on other matters.

  “The moment I noticed the hotel security forces converging on the theater, I knew something fishy was up.”

  “‘Converging’? ‘Something fishy was up’?” That is usually my line. Why has the lithe Miss Topaz started talking like an ungodly combo of Miss Lieutenant Molina and Sam Spade?

  “The perp was gone,” she goes on, “and your mistress’s significant other required lifesaving treatment. However, I concluded his attacker must have been somewhat attacked in turn, or he would not have ceased to harass Mr. Matt, as you call him.”

  “What do you call him?”

  “Hot. Did you see that pasodoble he did? I trust we will still see his tango tonight.”

  Oh, no. Females are so shallow. “The show must go on,” I say sourly.

  She stops and turns. I find I have trailed her to the theater area, where yellow crime-scene tape warns off all comers.

  Topaz walks under the streamers, tail high. I follow.

  “No, Louie. ‘The Shoe Must Go On.’”

  Yikes! Has she been talking to my Miss Temple lately? What is it with these females and fancy footwear?

  I soon discover what. The area is deserted while the forensics people are back at the lab doing CSI: Las Vegas film montage tests and things to music. Who would ever imagine major network viewers would be seduced into watching science how-to films in the name of crime drama? Mr. Wizard would have been proud. Bill Nye, the PBS “science guy” would have been begging for cameo roles.

  Miss Topaz trots through the empty audience seating and onto the wooden set floor, bold as old gold. She stops by the velvet curtains backing the stage above the set of four risers.

  I can see where the curtain has been torn and dusted for prints. Blood runs down the velvet in an ugly dark snake of color to the floor, where it has dried to a carmine color.

  I come from a hunter breed. Normally blood is no big deal, even though I have not had to eat live game in years. But when it is the blood of someone you know. . . .

  “He could have bled to death.”

  “I know,” Topaz says. “But it is lucky he bled here.”

  I eye the many drops. I know the forensics people numbered and photographed each one. We should not be leaving pad prints on the scene of the crime. I am about to say so when Topaz darts to the side of the stage.

  She has zeroed in on the last tracked blood drop of Mr. Matt, no doubt on the perp’s Cuban heel, because it is moving toward the aisle to the exit.

  “He stepped in Mr. Matt’s blood as he was leaving
,” I say, shuddering.

  “Now, Louie. I know you are emotionally involved, but we must keep a clear head.”

  “‘We’ must keep a clear head? You were not in the heat of battle, rushing into the churning size-twelve footwork of two men fighting to the death. You did not take the body blows that I did, the kicks that spun me almost into the aisle. I am black and blue all over, except it does not show.”

  “Poor Louie,” she purrs, polishing my indignantly heaving sides with her close-cropped satin coat.

  Not bad.

  “No doubt you are too distracted to notice the significant difference in this particular blood drop.”

  I put my eyes to the floor. The light here is horrible. “The blood mark sinks in the middle.”

  “It does not sink. The heel has a flaw. It marks the floor with a small depression, and the blood drop is uneven.”

  I look again. Sure enough, the heel has left a small dent in the floor. I sit. And think. I lash my tail about for effect. Miss Topaz watches me, her vibrissae shivering with anticipation.

  “Mr. Matt said he was drawn onto the stage by the stamp of flamenco heels that he took for Miss Tatyana in Spanish mode,” I finally say. “But the stamping sound was made by a man wearing Cuban heels. Those heels sound so sharp and loud because pounded-in nail heads pave the bottom surface. During his frenzied stomping, a nail must have been vibrated loose, and . . . bent back into the heel from the pressure of the next stomp, producing—”

  “A lovely little dent that will follow him wherever he goes.”

  “Yes. I take it you have explored that direction.”

  “Down the aisle and out into the carpeted casino.”

  “Carpeting.” I frown, fearful.

  “A bent nail head leaves an indent there too, but we must hurry, Louie. Foot traffic is fierce out there and could erase the trail.”

  “Would a Zorro in retreat not attract attention?” I ask.

  “Yes. But you say he left the sword behind and likely took the hat and gloves away in a—”

  I glance at the empty bandstand to the side. “An empty guitar case would do it.”

  “Brilliant!” she coos. “Let us make our own tracks.”

  So we do the feline hustle out of there and into the noisy casino, where we must dodge the constant kick of tourist shoes to follow the trail of the bent nail.