Renée promised to show her the state of California. She drove like a truck driver in her Mercedes, straight down the middle of the freeways as fast as she could get away with. Delilah had expected they’d see a lot of museums, but they never went close to one except once, when they got lost and ended up in L.A. by the La Brea Tar Pits next to the Los Angles County Museum. No operas, no concerts. And the international wonders—the giant sequoias and the coast at Big Sur—were never on the agenda. They did drive to Yosemite Valley one Saturday, parked near an old apple orchard by a campground. Delilah started to get out to look for the waterfalls. “Don’t,” Renée said, looking at her watch, “you’ll ruin it,” and they headed back to S.F. after five minutes.
It was the freeways Renée loved: the physical act of driving up and down the state on black macadam was her idea of exploring. They’d shoot up 5 heading who knew where. Delilah stopped asking, because all Renée said was, “You’ll see.” Renée could keep on driving for seven or eight hours. They’d reach some destination—Yreka, say—and spend the night. If there was a good restaurant in the town, Renée would find it. They’d barhop or walk somewhere. Renée could strike up a conversation with anyone. They got invited to a potato farmer’s home for tea. Joined an Audubon Society tour of a sewage treatment plant at which forty-three different species of birds had been counted. They rented bikes in Clover-dale and rode them all afternoon. They rode up 101 and switched to 1 to see Fort Ross and Gualala.
She had been feeling so much better lately—focused. Being around Renée was like taking a tonic that made you’s tronger. Renée was not only smart; she kept current: she didn’t own a TV or computer, but newspapers and magazines were stacked all over her place in Sea Cliff. She was never patronizing when they talked politics, never used her longevity as a lever. Thanks to Renée, Delilah was clear finally on the difference between communism and socialism: one collapsed; the other was thriving in Scandinavia and Canada. Renée said that while most wealthy people were Republicans because they benefited most from the party’s policies, there was no rational explanation why anyone making less than fifty K would ever vote for that party, but she was no limousine liberal: when pressed, she denounced all parties, and when pressed further, said she was an anarchist. “Laws are like broken stoplights; you have to drive through them,” she said.
They were in the dining car of the Coast Starlight from San Luis Obispo to L.A. when Renée said that. And when Renée continued by saying, “The Pacific Rim. The West Coast, dear, is where the future lies,” Delilah sat back for the lecture that was sure to follow.
“The East Coast is still dominated by Western Europe. We may be the sole superpower now, but it’s not only because we are being led by a twit that we get all this disrespect from Europeans about the Mideast. We’ll always be a stepchild there. The Russians are in the same boat. It’ll take another two hundred fifty years before we can stop revering European culture and think for ourselves. The West Coast, however, shares nothing with the Far East but capitalist greed. Look at Japan today. Look at China. We will never understand Asia, but that’s a strength. We’ll use each other forever. And that assures the future. If it’s true that New York City is the capital of the world, California is the first nation-state of that same world. The place is its own mythmaking machine, and the whole world wants to be part of that myth, wants to come here. Who wants to live in New York? Just people from Indiana and Minnesota.”
“Since I get to benefit from your wisdom, I get to pay for dinner,” Delilah said. Renée was a check-grabber. The food was so-so; they ordered another bottle of wine. Renée was talking about a paper by her late husband, the paleontologist Sonny. Would she ever be able to say Wayne’s name so easily? She understood she had loved Wayne too much. That’s why she couldn’t let go. When Renée talked about Sonny, it was never in detail. He never came alive.
She’d been telling Renée work stories, and when she brought home a CD with evaluations of Singapore’s current financial position relative to South Asia, Renée wanted to see what it looked like. When it came up on the screen it had to be incomprehensible to a layman, but Renée still watched the screen as if she understood what she was seeing. “This reminds me, I’d like to visit your office sometime, Delilah,” Renée said. “I’d like to loan you a painting, a Ray Strong landscape I bought a few years ago, but I want to see how it will fit there.”
“It wouldn’t be possible, Renée. No visitors. It’s the most security-conscious place in the city. It takes an employee ten minutes to go through all the controls.” She hated to see that look on Renée’s face, but there was nothing for it.
Then, the next day at her desk, it came to her: she could take Renée to the firm’s Christmas party. Pass her off as her grandmother. Renée would be insulted: she liked to say they were like sisters and seemed not to be kidding; she was so vain she wouldn’t allow herself to be photographed. But she’d like the fact that they were breaking the rules. The photo was a problem, though. She’d never get Renée near the place without a company ID tag with photo.
She was patient, and a couple of days later she snapped a photo from across the street as Renée stepped out of her hair salon. It caught her in a half-s mile, her storytelling face. Delilah hoped she’d look half so good herself at Renée’s age.
Renée was full of surprises. She phoned on Friday night to say, “I have an outing planned, dear. Wear warm clothing. I’ll pick you up at four A.M.” Delilah had schooled herself not to show surprise, but it was hard not to when they drove down to the wharf and boarded a party boat and went out trawling for salmon under the Golden Gate Bridge toward the Farallon Islands. Typical Renée outing. Picnic lunch. Bubbly, good Napa champagne. Everyone calling each other by their first names. Renée won the boat pool for biggest fish with her thirty-four-pound salmon.
They made a day of it, met for dinner that night at the Argentine restaurant. Went to a couple of neighborhood bars with names like Tiny’s and neon outlines of martini glasses. Delilah drank too much. But she knew she could relax around Renée, be herself. At two A.M. they ended up in a Chinese restaurant on Clement Street. They ordered General Tso’s chicken. Hunks of deep-fried chicken with sweet-and-sour sauce. She had to concentrate with her chopsticks if she wanted to get any food close to her mouth.
She started talking about Wayne. Not maudlin or full of sorry-I-didn’t-do-this-or-that. When Renée, who she hadn’t thought was listening, asked, “Delilah, where is Wayne?” the question didn’t catch her by surprise. She wanted to explain to her friend that she didn’t know. But she heard herself say, “Somewhere in Asia, maybe.” He’d been all over China and Mongolia as a boy; his father took him by horseback to clinics way up in the mountains. Had actually ridden a camel on the Silk Road. Had a story about the old Orient Express that left Moscow and ended up at the Sea of Japan. He’d bring out maps sometimes to show her where he’d been, saying the names of places in Chinese and then in English. “Here”—they were lying on the rug on their stomachs in front of the fire—”is the most interesting place in the world. A Shangri-la. It doesn’t have a name. But it’s not far from the city with the statue of the lifesaving duck.” They had met the old woman again at the Hunan restaurant the night he said that.
“But why take all that money just to live in some primitive place like Outer Mongolia?” Renée wanted to know.
She had to think about that. She must chew the food in her mouth first. She didn’t know. She shrugged her shoulders.
“Surely he gave some hint where he planned to go. He spoke Portuguese. Brazil? Mozambique?”
She had thought about it, of course, going over every word he’d ever said. He had no family that she knew of. His parents were dead. She slowly moved her head back and forth.
The more she considered it, she thought later in her flat, brushing her teeth, the more she realized Wayne had loved her. She was sure of that part. I’ll never let you go, he told her once. He hadn’t used her; he could have taken even mo
re money if he had asked her to help. Was he waiting for things to cool down and then he’d send for her? She’d go in a minute. That was wishful thinking on her part. A pretty picture, Renée would say. They were only together eleven months: how well can you know someone in that time? The General’s chicken had been one of Wayne’s favorite dishes.
Delilah was at work in her office when two uniformed armed guards came through the door, followed by her supervisor and the senior vice president. “Ms. Winslow, we’d like you to come with us.” She tried not to look surprised. When she stood up too quickly, one of the guards rested his hand on his pistol.
For the next five hours she sat in a comfortable chair and answered hundreds of questions put to her by the head of security. They gave her coffee and bathroom breaks and lunch. She signed a waiver that both her office and apartment could be searched and her finances audited. She cooperated completely until they asked if she’d submit to a lie-detector test and a body search. Then she exploded. “Hey, wait a minute; explain to me what I’m supposed to have done.” Someone standing behind her said, “Ms. Winslow, you’re in a heap of trouble.” A screen came down the wall like a shade and the lights went out. A police photo of Renée came on the screen, with numbers on the bottom. “This is an Interpol mug shot, after she did Lloyds of London out of forty-lhree million pounds. Insufficient evidence. She’s been thieving for over forty years.”
“You don’t think…?”
“We don’t know what to think. You were passing her off as a relative to breach security. You tell us.”
“I was just trying get her into our Christmas party. That’s all.” Be careful, she told herself. This is serious. Serious. Serious. “Let me remind you, in case you have forgotten,” she said as loud as she could, “I’m a lawyer. If you don’t intend to charge me, I’m going home.” Still no one spoke. She stood up. The light went on. Her eyes adjusted to the light, but Renée’s photo stayed on the screen like a ghost passing through the room.
“Do you want to continue working here?” the senior vice president asked.
“After this, why would I want to? Unlike yourself, I’m capable of other things.”
“We are going to require your help, Ms. Winslow.”
“I’ll be in my office at seven A.M. as usual. We can discuss it then.”
Once she got to her flat she found herself going over everything that had transpired since she’d met Renée. Had she been duped again? Or had she duped herself both times? Believed what she wanted to believe? She had to think this out. If Renée was wanted by Interpol, why hadn’t they picked her up? And her job, why had she felt devastated at her first thought: please, don’t fire me. It might have its moments, but it was an awful place to work: a bunch of moneychangers. Bottom feeders.
She was up at her usual time, five A.M. Went for her run. The dark streets were full of people doing the same thing, getting some exercise before sitting down indoors all day. It might have been her imagination, but a woman across the street had seemed to turn the same corners she did. Imagination. Once she got to work, it was as if nothing had ever happened. She spent the morning in her office. No one appeared. Had lunch at her desk. The firm didn’t forget things like this. Something would happen. But nothing did, not by five o’clock anyway. She went home. No messages from Renée, which was not so unusual. Tomorrow was Wednesday; they’d meet for lunch. She’d wait.
Nothing happened at the office Wednesday morning either. She thought of what Wayne had said to her once: “People pretty much do what other people expect them to do.” That couldn’t be true. Was that true?
Nothing from security: she should stop worrying about it. Concentrate on what she was going to say to Renée. What was there to say but goodbye? How could Renée have made up all those elaborate stories? But wasn’t that what Wayne had done too? Maybe it was all fantasy about his life in China. Had any of that been true? For some reason she felt confident, as though she was going to make the right decisions now. She had changed—thanks to Renée, she had to admit to herself. It was almost physical, as if she’d developed a third eye and could see better.
Renée wasn’t at the restaurant. She sat at their table half an hour before ordering. Ate her lunch and decided against dessert. Draining the last of the water from her glass, she saw through its thick base a distorted image of Renée approaching the table. She was so surprised she kept the glass to her mouth, watching, until Renée was seated at her place. She dreaded this part, she realized. “I didn’t expect to see you,” she said. “I thought you were going to miss this time.”
The waitress came to take Renée’s order. She was taking her time over the menu. Watching her, Delilah didn’t feel angry so much as puzzled. “Here,” Renée said, handing her a jewelry box. “This is for you.” Inside was an old-fashioned silver brooch with a stone she couldn’t identify. Renée had never given her anything before.
“It’s beautiful,” she said. “Thank you.”
“It’s a gift. Humorous, I hope. It’s from one of the first specimens I was taught to identify in the field. Mineralized dinosaur droppings. I found it going through some things in an old trunk. I like the medieval name for these, fumets. The specks of blue are fossilized plants, probably—”
She interrupted. “Were you ever in South America, Renée?”
The woman didn’t change expression, stirred her coffee, one, two, three times around. “In fact, I was. It was my father who was the paleontologist, and I spent one summer with him in Patagonia. It was my first life lesson. That was while my mother was traveling by ocean liner back and forth to Europe, fleecing unwary wealthy travelers. Marrying some of them. She was a bigamist many times over. I inherited my propensity for larceny from her. I loved my mother more than I could say.” Renée was getting that dreamy look; she could go on for hours.
“Why should I believe anything you say? I’ve heard too many inventions. You were going to use me, Renée.” She’d said it too loud. People were looking their way.
“Let me remind you, my motives may not have been pure, but where would you be without me, Delilah?”
“I wouldn’t be a suspect in a scheme to rob my firm.”
“They won’t do anything. Stand up for yourself.”
“What I don’t understand is why, at your age, are you still doing this? You must have more money than you will ever need.”
“At my age? You’re missing the point, dear. There’s no better buzz than making a law or breaking the law. Ask any politician. Or lawyer, for that matter. Judge. Priest. Thief. I’m not trying to justify stealing in a moral sense. But at my level it’s an art form. The movement of a decimal point. The timing of a bank transfer. Insider information. Corporations do it every day.”
“You must spend all your life looking over your shoulder. What a burden.”
“I’ve never found it so. You’re not grasping the fact that some people don’t mind that. Thrive on it, in fact. Come on, Delilah. It’s not as if you’ve never known another person of my sort.”
She didn’t catch the last bit, went on with what she wanted to say: “So being a thief is more rewarding than living a normal life?”
“Oh my, have I failed completely, dear? Did I waste all that time on you?”
Then it registered. The other person was Wayne. There was something wrong with this. Renée was acting the same as always, but this was a conversation within a conversation. She needed to listen more carefully. She looked for an opening. “They are going to lock you up, Renée.”
“Don’t believe everything they tell you, dear. That’s law enforcement’s great secret: rarely do they ever catch anyone unless they get an accomplice to turn snitch. Or trick someone into confessing. Those old charges they have against me: worthless. You don’t think I know what they know? I have never spent a night away from my own bed.”
The waitress brought Renée her lunch. This was not going the way Delilah had anticipated. Renée was too clever for her. “What would you have done if I’
d cooperated?”
Renée looked unsurprised. “Did they talk you into wearing a wire, dear?”
For some reason the idea of a tape recorder was so preposterous, so funny, that Delilah started laughing out loud. Renée stopped eating and examined her face as if looking in a mirror, then dropped her left eyelid in a slow wink. Delilah understood who was wired then.
“It would have been a small fiddle, Delilah. Maybe ten, no more than twelve million. Petty cash for them. Nickel and dime. Some foreknowledge from you, and I take it from there. Your end is, say, eight or nine percent. Euros, of course. Nothing like what your husband got away with.”
“Husband?”
“You’ve never divorced him, have you? You still use his last name. Now that man should have his picture in the dictionary at the word thie f. He could give me lessons. He disappears, no trace, not a photo or a fingerprint left behind. The perfect crime. Except he left you behind, his true love. It’s a real mystery.”
The customers in the restaurant had thinned out; it was almost two. “How will Wayne contact you, Delilah? A man who works for the firm for nine years before he makes his move, phenomenal planning, timing, waiting for the perfect moment. Just between us. It’s been sixteen months. He must be getting lonely, wouldn’t you say?”
She finally understood. It takes a thief to catch a thief. The firm had come up with all this to get their money back? What was Renée really, a retired high school teacher, an amateur actress? Or maybe she’d always worked in law enforcement. Whatever she was, Renée was lobbing a ball over the plate for her to hit.
She spoke slowly, so every word would be recorded. “Renée, you surprise me. To even consider I could betray the people I work for…” She tried to sound sincere. She couldn’t read Renée’s expression. “And as for Wayne, if he were ever to contact me, I’d turn him in in a second. Refuse the reward, of course, but I’d have to turn him in. It’s a basic life lesson: you always try to do the right thing.” She stood up to leave, and Renée reached across the table and squeezed her shoulder. She was going to miss Renée.
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