Matt beat her to it by abstracting a small, black satin box from somewhere. It was almost as magical a manifestation as some paper bouquet from Max.
He held it under the flickering crystal gaze of the mythical bird that had died in flame and ashes and risen from them hard, diamond-bright, invincible. Reborn. New. Fresh. Real.
Temple took the box in her hand. Licked her lips.
Opened it.
Glanced away from the laserlike fire.
Lasers healed, lasers struck dead. Lasers dazzled.
“Matt.”
She finally focused past the blinding glitter. The bling. A ring of diamonds massed in the mechanically graceful assemblage of curves and angles that screamed Art Deco. Art Deckle. Not even a dead man could push himself between this view and her understanding of it. “Fred Leighton,” the inside of the satin lining declared in subtle letters. Estate jewelry. True vintage. Amazing beauty of shape and line, of time and history. Of understanding what called to her.
“This,” she said, “is truly Red Carpet bling. It’s exquisite. My God, I’m Julia Roberts!
“This is a ring,” he said. Corrected. “You’re you. It’s really two guard rings. It comes apart, see? The band is rubies, for . . . later. I saw it and saw you. That’s all.”
Temple was agape at the clever way the two halves of the ring separated to admit a band. A band of rubies for a wedding ring. What an exquisite thought, an exquisite execution, the epitome of every reason she loved vintage things, but Fred Leighton, jeweler to movie stars . . . that was way too much.
She said so.
“Listen. I’ve given triple that to African famine and Gulf Coast flood relief. You can wear it in good conscience.”
Of course he would have; that was why she’d always had to spur him into springing for the basic little comforts of American consumer life. But for her, he needed no encouragement. He went big.
Temple bit her lower lip (on which she should have reinstalled lipstick for this truly Kodak moment).
Beauty, the poet had said, is truth. Truth, beauty.
Who was she to deny the perfection of a beautiful gift, a beautiful moment, a beautiful mind, a beautiful heart, a beautiful hope?
“I don’t know quite what to say,” she said. Anyway.
She held up the corona of light, in her right hand, poised somewhere over her left third finger. Apparently, it was a Kodak moment to someone other than Matt and herself.
A flash exploded around them both, an aurora, a star going nova.
“Photo, folks? Visiting Las Vegas to celebrate an engagement and tie the knot? Your friends and family will treasure this moment as much as you do.”
Temple rather doubted that.
“Just twelve dollars.”
Matt didn’t doubt that at all but reached for his wallet. It was his night to pay, all the way. To pave the way.
The tiny elevator at the Circle Ritz was all theirs at this hour. The Midnight Hour. Monday night. Matt’s one night off from his late-night radio shrink show.
The shrink was in.
His finger was poised over the round black buttons with the white floor numbers mostly polished away by other fingers over many more years than they’d been on this planet.
“Floor two or three?” he said lightly. Temple still heard the strain in his voice. It was a momentous decision and it was all hers.
“Three,” Temple said. “I’ve got an aunt cluttering up my living room and a cat claiming my bedroom.”
“I’ve got a brand-new bed and no aunts or cats.”
“I know.”
“Is there a reason you’re huddling in the corner of the elevator?”
“I’m scared?”
“You’re scared?
“It’s a lot of responsibility.”
“Don’t I know?”
He took her elbow, steered her out of the small elevator car into the deserted hallway and down the short cul-de-sac to his door. Where he got lukewarm feet.
“Maybe some place more . . . unusual. Without a past. A hotel?”
“This is fine,” Temple said, trying not to zone out on the way the sidelight fell on his hair, making a blond halo of it.
Angels. They didn’t do carnal things like sex.
“Are you—?” he asked.
“Protected? Yes. Is that a sin?”
“That’s the way you are. You’re perfect. I’m not. Remember? I don’t want to hurt you. For what you are or for what you aren’t. You’re all I want.”
“Funny, I feel the exact same way about you.”
Inside the apartment, there wasn’t a soul around. Not even a cat.
Temple eyed the sculptural red fifties designer sofa she’d found for Matt at Goodwill. Danny was right that it had cost something to give it up to him, to insist he have it. She’d always kinda maybe thought in her wildest dreams they’d make it someday on that sleek suede surface. She’d always kinda maybe thought a lot of inadmissible things, inadmissible evidence, about Matt Devine. Before she’d known he’d been a priest.
And, heck, even after.
She sat on the red sofa knowing her peony of a purple taffeta skirt made her look like a human mushroom. She looked at her left hand with the movie-star-level estate diamond ring on it.
“I don’t know if I’m ready for this,” she told him.
She didn’t tell him that the day after the black dress interlude she’d hied herself off for testing. A small card that declared her free of HIV and other STDs now lay hidden in her seldom-used scarf drawer. She knew Matt came shrinkwrapped, so to speak, and didn’t want her virgin would-be bridegroom thinking about ugly realities on such a momentous occasion as first sex. She’d figured she was safe and had sniffled a bit when she read the results, pretty solid proof of her conviction that Max had never been unfaithful.
Matt was still trying to be supremely accommodating. He sat beside her. “If the ring’s too much or too much pressure, forget it.”
Temple knew that visible symbol of commitment would mean a lot to his conscience.
She stroked his forearm with that hand, watching the diamonds throw out serious sparks. “No, it’s beautiful. It just should be our secret for a while.”
She touched his lips with a forefinger.
He was watching everything she did with such dreamy pleasure she thought she could die happy right that moment. She’d forgotten what first love was like, but Matt was bringing it all back to her.
“I feel responsible,” she said.
“For what? Yourself? Me?”
“I’m the one who knows. I’m the brazen hussy. You’re the innocent virgin. I can take. You can only give. It’s not fair.”
He stood, took her hand, the right one, and drew her up against him as if they were dancing.
“Frank Bucek called me. I didn’t know he was in town.”
“I ran into him when he was here for crime business at the New Millennium.”
“He told me that you’d talked.”
“He told you we’d talked? I thought he had to abide by some confessional binding thing or something.”
“He only mentioned you in passing.”
“What I said . . . oh, no!”
Matt smiled. “Now I’ll really wonder. No, he just gave me two words of advice.”
“And—?”
“Nobody’s perfect.” Matt was looking down at her as if he didn’t believe that, as if he believed she was really, really perfect.
“I know I’m not. I’m confused. I’m a . . . worldly woman. I’d have an ex, that isn’t an easy, cut-and-dried thing, Matt. It’d be messy.”
“He wasn’t talking about you, Temple. He was talking about me. And I suddenly realized, in all my twisting and turning to do the one right thing, that I didn’t have to be perfect or do the perfect thing. That thinking like that was a kind of hubris. Selfish. That I only had to love you, as I have since almost the minute I met you, that I only had to want you, as I have since almost the day I met yo
u.”
“What took you so long on the ‘want’ part?”
“So you were faster?”
“Oh, yeah. It was simultaneous, on my part.”
“Really.” He pulled her closer. “From my book, I understand that that’s the best way. Simultaneous.”
“Oh, Matt. There are so many ‘best ways.’ ”
“I want to have them all, with you.”
“Even if I’m not ready for marriage right out of the box?”
“I figured something else out, brilliant solver of other people’s problems that I am. If I do what’s best for you, I can’t hurt myself. I’ve been searching for some overarching spiritual love all my life. And it’s there. In other people. Person. Don’t be guilty, Temple. I’ve wasted way too much of my life on that.”
He pulled her close enough that she could tug his tie loose.
He was undoing her back zipper, short as it was on her halter-top prom dress.
She was back there again, in Jon Bon Jovi prom night country, two American kids in the Heartland. A virgin again. Feeling true love again.
And having it all.
“I’ve always,” Matt said, his voice husky, “pictured us on this sofa.”
He swooped her down like a pirate, stripped her as slowly as a Latin lover, and took her to passionate heights she’d never imagined even in those wildest dreams. She hadn’t hardly to do a thing to aid and abet in unleashing years of self-denial, just be there and be willing to be swept away. The resulting emotional and sensual tsunami took their breaths away. He was the most perfect imperfect lover in the world and she wept with the joy of it.
They lay in Matt’s new bed in the heart of darkness inside the Circle Ritz.
“This is just us, isn’t it?” he asked.
Temple pillowed her head on his shoulder. His bare shoulder.
“Yes.”
“No . . . interference from what I was, you were?”
“No.”
“What we’ve figured out we want, what we need?”
“Yes.”
“Only us. Only tonight?”
“Yes.”
“And tomorrow?”
“Only us, only tomorrow.”
“Are you sure?”
Temple took a deep breath. Midnight Louie was the only sure creature she knew on the planet. People were a lot more handicapped. But she and Matt had come damn close to feline certainty.
“Yes.”
No wonder Scarlett had swooned before being swept up that fateful staircase, Temple thought. No way was tomorrow going to be just another day after a night like this.
Maxed Out
Max had literally hung himself out to dry on a line high above the light-stabbed dance floor far below. He balanced unseen in the dark, a wire walker who understood that he was seriously overextended. In all senses of the word.
To the audiences at Neon Nightmare, he was the Phantom Mage, the masked wall-walking, bungee-jumping illusionist who capered nightly above their sound, synthetic substance, and alcohol-dazed heads.
To the Synth, a group of disgruntled traditional magicians who hated those who revealed their tricks, like the Cloaked Conjuror, and who met in a maze of rooms burrowed into the nightclub’s pyramidlike structure, he was an ex–Strip magician who’d performed as the Mystifying Max.
To them, he was also a raw recruit, assigned to prove his loyalty by ripping off the art show at the New Millennium and bringing down the Cloaked Conjuror and his illusion-destroying show, a show repped by Max’s long-time love, Temple Barr.
And then he was just Max, up to his black turtleneck in a scheme with his mentor and partner in counterterrorism, Garry Randolph, to betray the Synth and uncover the web of international money laundering and mayhem they believed it fostered.
Somewhere in there, he’d hoped he had that relationship with Temple to preserve, for his own self alone, for the dream of having a personal life beyond his brushes with the Irish revolutionary Kathleen O’Connor, who had snagged his teenage heart while engineering his innocent cousin’s political death.
Kitty was dead now, but he was convinced her activities in Las Vegas had been part of a larger plot that extended to several unaccounted-for deaths in the past two years. Whatever had been, and was still going on, was big.
“Oh, what a complicated web we weave,” said Sir Walter Scott, “when first we practice to deceive.”
The Scottish poet had been right enough to remain quoted for the ages. Deception, like magical illusions, took practice. So did stealing rare art objects.
Max smiled to envision the unexpected end he’d engineered for that caper. They would all be flummoxed. It was something the Synth could have never anticipated and, worse, couldn’t fault him for, given that it didn’t violate the terms of their agreement, although it would sure as heck violate their intentions.
He frowned to consider that nasty tank trap Molina had laid for him. There was no way a fingerprint of his could be found in her house, not even from his recent, lightning personal appearance, suitably Mephistophelean, he hoped. He grinned grimly at that escapade, running the bungee cords through his hands, automatically checking for fraying, breaks, weaknesses in the mechanism, as he did before every performance, every plummet into the widening funnel of neon-lit darkness and noise below him.
When he dove, the dancers parted with ooohs of delighted fright. He swooped so low, so close to their frenetic level, that he almost met his own black shadow in the gleaming mirror-black floor.
What a rush. Screaming hordes jousted for the leis of fluorescent flowers he looped over them as the cord pulled him away. They leaped up after him the way people sprang to capture cheap plastic beads at Mardi Gras. Life was a cabaret along the Strip, and Max had to caper for their attention like any Mardi Gras babe seeking plastic beads.
He checked his safety belt, his spandex-gloved fingers pulling on the steel fasteners to test them.
Him. Leave a fingerprint in Molina’s house? Never! None had existed on any official record until she’d raided Temple’s rooms. This was police harassment. The plan was to destroy Temple’s unshakable faith in him, and it had worked. A little.
Max knew her faith in his innocence would never waver. Her faithfulness was another thing. Don’t guard what you’ve got, and it’s gone. He shut his eyes for an instant. If he hadn’t come back from his forced disappearance several months ago, he knew that Temple would be where she probably was now: with Matt Devine. He had only delayed the inevitable. You usually can’t save the world, even one little corner of it, and your love life too. And for that he also blamed Molina’s relentless opposition.
With all he had going on, juggling his various personae and infiltrating the Synth and the Millennium heist turned boobytrap, the last thing he needed was another of Molina’s pathetic games distracting him.
The music paused, then revved into the overblown intro for the Phantom Mage.
No time to dwell on loss or anger, on what he had unwillingly given up and what interfering others had taken from him.
Max leaped off the tiny platform like a diver into darkness. Showers of sparklers sprayed from his figure as the cloak spread out like wings, revealing a lining of leaping flames.
The pale faces gazing up at him drew nearer, grew features . . . O’s of open mouths and wide eyes. For a moment, he was stronger and more enrapturing than anything they could drink or smoke or sniff or inject, a dark angel falling to earth, spewing gaudy fire.
He knew the instant the bungee cord failed to tauten for the fast flight back up, knew at once it had failed completely. Hadn’t he run the entire length through his hands? While his mind had gnawed at the irritation of phantom fingerprints, maybe his hands had missed a weakness in the line.
Was this a mere snag, or a fatal flaw?
Below him the awe-stricken holes in people’s faces enlarged into horror. He saw them scattering and did a full body twist to send him away from landing dead-on-down to the floor, away toward t
he side wall where no one could be hurt. No one but . . .
The bungee cord snapped like a rubber band. He had a split second to—
He hit with astounding force and then had nothing more to worry about at all.
After Max
“Look!” Miss Louise cries softly, but no less urgently. Sometimes she can mew like a Miss Muffet, although most often she screams like a Wicked Witch of the West.
So I look up. And there is the dark glittering figure, falling. Like a bird. I am almost tempted to leap up, to meet it and bring it down. But I understand this is a giant bird-man, and I am not the size of predator that could contain it, much less kill it.
Besides, I have retired from the predator biz. Now, I track them.
“Oooh,” breathe the people above us and all around us.
“Aaaah,” they sigh.
And then the flying man plunges to the ground, the invisible leash not tightening and jerking him back into the upper air.
Louise howls. People scream and scatter. Rafi Nadir’s motorcycle boots crack hard across black Plexiglas, which shatters as if he wore seven-league boots made of lead.
And the Phantom Mage swings full-frontal-first into a wall of concrete sheathed in mirrors and neon.
Rafi Nadir is defending the perimeter. He sometimes works security here.
He has already dialed 911 with his cell phone. Now he fights to keep hysterical people from rushing the fallen form with a mad conjoined instinct of horror, compassion, and curiosity.
That leaves room for Miss Midnight Louise and me to slink in close.
“Bast!” Louise breathes in my ear. “Is he dead? Let me smell.”
“Back, kit. I know his scent better than you.” I push my nostrils toward the hidden neck, searching not only for scent, but for the telltale mouse-like flutter of a pulse. I pick up a trace of Brut, sweat, sulphur, and rosin. And my Miss Temple’s perfume, called “Delicious.” I sense no movement at all.
Cat in a Quicksilver Caper Page 33