“As I said, it is safe, and we’re tracking the descendants of the family that owned it in Hungary to return it to them, quietly. With a thing like that, that people fight over and kill for, it’s best for it to be in a private collection, with someone who truly loves it for what it is.”
“You’re sure you don’t know where Nadia is?”
“Very sure.”
The facial person poked her head in, and grimaced when she saw Miriam’s costly mud mask all peeled off.
“Reapply the mud, will you, Vera?” Miriam asked, leaning back into the chair. We were dismissed.
“Shit,” I said to Maggie in the first of our two cabs home. “We’re never going to get these two brats together, Rocky is going to be stuck out at the convent for God knows how long, some crazy terrorists are after us, and Gerald Woznik’s killer is walking around free.”
“And your apartment burned down,” Maggie added. “You know, when Tamayo gets back, you could possibly stay in my apartment.”
“Where are you going?”
“To Paris for a few months.”
Paris. That word just set me off. “Just like that? How long have you known this … what’s his name?” I asked.
She smiled. “Long enough.”
“You’re my age. You’ve been around, right? How can you believe in love after all you’ve seen so far?” I asked meanly. “It’s a madness brought on by hormones. Your biological clock is ticking.”
“I don’t think so, but whatever it is, it’s fine with me.”
“Sure, until the day you wake up from the madness and realize that this guy, whoever he is, is romancing and seducing other women behind your back, and what he feels for you isn’t that special.”
“Pardon me, but is my love life any of your business?” she snapped. “This is why I won’t discuss him with other women. Mother of God, you’ve got nerve. Did the last one really burn you and sour you on men?”
Technically, the last one was Pierre, and before that an actor, Gus, who hadn’t burned me, I’d burned him. Michael O’Reilly and I had burned each other.
“Hey, we’re both still single. We haven’t been able to find Mr. Right so far,” I persisted. “What makes you think this one will be any different? I’m genuinely curious.”
“Who put the pepper in your knickers? You are the anti-Cupid. You tried to discourage Nadia and Rocky, you’re dumping on me now.…”
“Nadia and Rocky are fools, and their so-called romance has got us in a heap of trouble. As for you, you’re a woman of the world. I think you can handle a reality check. Any man you can get with the deceit and manipulation outlined in that book Man Trap you’re so high on is probably deceiving you too, and possibly himself.”
“Well, I feel bad for you. You’re bitter,” she said, and turned away to stare out the window.
Bitter. This from Maggie Mason.
The pouting silence between us was broken by my cell phone tweetering. It was Lucia. She’d found two numbers called from Tamayo’s phone the day Nadia arrived, Grace Rouse’s number and an overseas number. I wrote the latter number down, and punched it in, though I had no idea where I was calling.
After a few rings, a woman answered in a strange language.
“Do you speak English?” I asked, “My name is Robin Hudson, I’m a friend of Tamayo’s.…”
“Robin?” said the woman. “This is Tamayo’s friend, Eva?”
“Eva?”
“Of Eva and Joe? I would hope you’d remember us. You stayed with us not long ago on your way through Prague.”
“Eva!”
At the beginning of my two-month road trip, I’d seen Eva in Prague and stayed with her and her husband and daughter at the funky little inn and cafe they ran in Prague’s Old City.
“What can I do for you, Robin?”
“I’ve been staying at Tamayo’s, and this girl came through …”
“Oh yes. Juliet.”
“No, different girl.…”
“Same girl. Only one girl came through here on her way to Tamayo’s apartment. Juliet is the nickname I gave her.”
“Nadia, you mean?”
“Is this phone line safe?”
“I think so.”
“Yes, Nadia. Did the brat meet up with her lover man?”
“No, and she’s gone missing. I wondered if you had heard from her since?”
“Yes, twice. She called me when she arrived to let me know she got there safely.”
“What did she tell you?”
“There was some snag in the elopement, but she didn’t tell me what it was. She was quite upset,” Eva said. “She called me again a day or two ago, unhappy with the widow she was staying with.”
Eva had provided another contact.
“Excuse me for being coy, but Nadia said it was a dangerous situation,” Eva said. “The people you want are the ones who run the place where Tamayo showed that short film, the one involving a quarter glued to the sidewalk outside the New York Stock Exchange. Do you know the one I mean?”
I didn’t, but I repeated this to Maggie, and she knew.
“That would be Tamayo’s friends Caroline David and Arnold Scott, who run a multimedia performance space called The Town of Wahoo,” Maggie said.
When Maggie called The Town of Wahoo, Arnold Scott told us that he did not know where Nadia was, but his wife, Caroline, did. Unfortunately, Caroline was at a funding meeting with a benefactor and wouldn’t be back for an hour. He suggested we call back.
“Thank God,” Maggie said. “We’re almost there. We’ve almost got Nadia.”
“Not yet we don’t. I won’t be happy until I see her in the flesh. Let’s go to The Town of Wahoo and wait for this Caroline David person.”
The phone rang again. It was Phil.
“I’m on my way out to visit Dulcinia Ramirez. Anything you want me to bring the boy or tell him?”
“How are you getting out there?”
“I’m driving.…”
“This is perfect timing, Phil. Want to pick us up first?” I asked. “It looks like our mission is nearly complete.”
PHIL PICKED US UP where we had the cab drop us, in front of the Port Authority bus terminal on Eighth Avenue, where there was usually a huge crowd of people and we could lose ourselves in case we were being followed, though we’d taken such great pains not to be. Better safe than sorry.
Maggie hopped in the front, and I took the backseat. Once we were on our way to Brooklyn, I called Rocky at the convent.
When he heard my voice, he let loose with a litany of complaints.
“You’ve got to get me out of here. Mrs. Ramirez is making me insane. And I’m not the only one.…”
“Rocky,” I said. “I think we’ve located the thing you were looking for. We’re on our way to meet someone to take us to her, then we’ll come get you.”
“Get me first and take me to her!” he demanded.
“Rocky, that’s out of the way. Jesus. You’re so selfish. And we don’t know where she is yet. We’re going to meet someone who is supposed to take us to her.”
“Pick me up,” he said.
We were going through a tunnel and the phone sputtered and then cut off. When we came out of the tunnel, the phone tweetered.
“Come get me!” he demanded.
“We will, in due time. Sit tight,” I said, and hung up. “What a brat. He wants us to go all the way to the convent, fetch him, then come all the way back to get Nadia. He’s so hotheaded.”
“He’s anxious to see his girl,” Phil said.
“All the more reason to let him chill awhile,” Maggie said. “We don’t want any complications now that we’ve come this far.”
When the phone rang again, two more times, and I heard it was Rocky, I hung up and turned it off.
“This is exciting,” Phil said. “The lovers are just about reunited.”
He was gleeful. There is nothing that guy likes better than fixing things for other people. Unlike most fixers, Ph
il usually makes things better, not worse.
“Love is grand, isn’t it?” Maggie said. “You have a special somebody, do you, Phil?”
“My gal, Helen. Over two years now. And you?”
“Yes,” she said.
“Is he an artist?”
“No, he’s a professor,” she said. For someone who didn’t want to talk about her boyfriend, she sure brought him up a lot.
“Oh, Robin’s—” Phil began, but I caught his eyes in the rear-view mirror and shook my head.
“Robin?” Maggie repeated.
“I forgot what I was going to say,” Phil said.
Thank you, Phil, I thought. It was bad enough she and I were probably in love with the same guy. I didn’t need to be dealing with her vengeful pranks for the next five years on top of that.
Maggie and Phil talked to each other on the drive into Brooklyn, which worked out well, as I was not feeling overly conversational. All this talk about “love”—what a laugh. I kept thinking about Pierre, and how this bitch Maggie had probably got him with her manipulative ways. And gee, I wanted him. Even though I knew it was impossible, what with the language, cultural, and etiquette barriers, not to mention a little thing I like to call “The Atlantic Ocean,” I still wanted him. I harbored a hope that somehow this crazy little romance would take off between him and me. It’s like Nora Ephron says, deep down all cynics are secretly hopeless romantics.
Before I met Pierre, I’d pretty much given up on feeling any kind of romantic passion again, and had been glad for its absence. The actress Jeanne Moreau said in a 60 Minutes interview, and I’m paraphrasing here, that she didn’t miss the romantic passion of her younger years, that it was a great relief to be free of it. I hear you, sister, I’d thought at the time. That’s how I had felt … relieved, free, not an active part of the whole man-woman thing anymore, just a big, neutered ape in a tree, off to the side, scratching my head and puzzling about the strange behavior of male and female human beings.
Pierre came along and whammo—the next thing I knew, we were making out beneath the Arc de Triomphe … and in the Luxembourg Gardens … and by the old-fashioned carousel near the Eiffel Tower … and behind the crypt of a nineteenth-century French postmaster general in Père-Lachaise cemetery. Whoa! I remembered. I’m a heterosexual woman.
Maggie, on the other hand, had no doubt followed the Machiavellian Man Trap plan of playing hard to get, tempering the tyranny of her “friendly indifference” with occasional indulgence whenever he was about to give up, not giving in sexually until the man was willing to “kill to get at it,” and then not enjoying it too much the first few spins between the sheets, so that the man would feel slightly inadequate and the woman would have the advantage. (When consummation comes, you see, it is then “less of a male conquest and more of a female capture,” according to Man Trap, plus, you’ve convinced the man of your relative virtue, which is synonymous with lack of sexual enjoyment in women.)
It didn’t help that Maggie was a few years younger than me, a glamorous artist who had once modeled in Paris. More annoying still, he was evidently calling her, but aside from a phone message left at work, he had only sent one quick E-mail to me, explaining he was busy with his experiment.
Yet, it wasn’t Maggie’s fault. She was an innocent party in this. She obviously didn’t know about me and Mike either, so she was an innocent party in that fiasco as well. Here I was, in a stereotypical cat fight over a man. It made me feel crummy. Oh, who was I kidding, anyway? It was hopeless. What kind of relationship can two people have when the only way they can communicate clearly is in writing? Not to mention all those other ways, in which Pierre and I were grossly incompatible. If experience had taught me nothing else, it had taught me that some of us are just too crazy for love. Better I should give up this STUPID love stuff now, and set my sights on becoming a grande dame, on being an inspiration to future drag queens, like Miriam Grundy.
“You okay, luv?” Phil asked.
“Huh? Yeah, fine,” I said.
“We’re here.”
“Oh. Great.”
The Town of Wahoo was a “space” at the corner of Water and Adams Streets in DUMBO—Down Under Manhattan Bridge Overpass, an area of warehouses, buzzing electrical transformers, and industrial clutter on the Brooklyn side of the East River, between the Manhattan and Brooklyn Bridges. The area had a German Expressionist feel to it—lots of shadows, sharp silhouettes, sooty buildings, and machinery. Huge spaces at low rents had attracted a lot of artists.
Across the street from the “space,” on the dingy brick wall of a boarded-up warehouse, someone had painted a big cartoon balloon that asked the question “Are We Famous Yet?”
We parked and looked around for other cars. There were none. We hadn’t been followed. So far, so good.
After we explained on the intercom who we were, Arnold Scott told us to take the elevator to the second floor, and buzzed us into the old factory building.
The second floor opened to a loft apartment. A large tree branch and part of a tree trunk stuck out of a faux break in the bright red wall in the curved hallway, as if the tree had pushed its way through the wall to grow into the apartment.
“Nice tree,” Maggie said.
“It’s a hat rack. To preserve it, we used a specially mixed matte shellac to approximate the natural texture of the tree,” Arnold explained. “The children wanted a treehouse. We have two children, Lynn and Ray.”
Another, smaller branch from what looked like the same tree came out of the kitchen wall. It was hung with pots and a red mesh bag of onions. In the living area, where we all sat down, another large branch emerged near the top of the wall and snaked against the ceiling.
“I have to finish sewing Lynn’s duck outfit for the spring pageant at her preschool. You don’t mind if I work while we talk?” he asked.
“Not at all,” I said. “Where are your kids?”
“At preschool,” he said.
He told us Nadia was supposed to help out with the kids while she stayed here—she claimed to love children—for a couple of hours every night during performances.
“But it turns out Nadia does not have a way with children,” he said, pinning a bill to the fuzzy yellow duck suit.
“What happened?”
“We left her with them for two hours last night. When we got back, Nadia was watching some stupid TV show, and the kids had locked themselves in the bedroom and pushed a toy chest up against it to keep her out. They were terrified!”
“Why?” Maggie asked.
“The kids wanted to watch the Rugrats video—they’re both preschoolers—and Nadia wanted to watch cable. There was an argument, and Nadia threatened to smother the children with pillows while they were sleeping and throw them down the garbage chute if they didn’t behave. Scared the kids so much they went into the bedroom and barricaded the door to keep her out. We asked her to leave immediately, of course.”
“Caroline knows where she went next?”
“Yes, I think so,” he said.
“Did Nadia say anything about her fiancé or the trouble she’s been through or … ?”
“No, she barely talked, other than to threaten the lives of our children. She harumphed a lot. She cried a little just after she got here, but she wouldn’t say why. We helped another girl and one young couple on Tamayo’s railroad and had no problems. They were great kids. But this one …”
“Yeah, I know,” I said. “You should meet her young feller. He’s worse. But at this point, we just want to reunite them.”
“I understand,” he said.
The deadbolt on the door clicked, and a tall woman with short-cropped blond hair came in.
“Caroline, Maggie and some friends of Tamayo’s are here looking for Nadia,” Arnold said. “You know where she is?”
“Yes. Hi, Maggie,” she said. “Nadia’s in Red Hook. I’ll give you the address.”
chapter fifteen
Red Hook used to be one of the poorer
and rougher New York neighborhoods. Located between the Brooklyn Bridge and the Atlantic Basin, it sits on a knob of land surrounded on three sides by water and known for the sprawling Red Hook housing projects and for its piers at the endpoint of the Brooklyn promenade. It had been revitalized in the last few years by the arrival of artists looking for low rents.
Phil waited downstairs in the car while Maggie and I went in. The building we were going to was downwind from a pier for garbage barges, heaped high with rotting food and diapers, big black trash bags, and scavenging seagulls. The smell was overpowering.
The “safe house” was not a house at all, but the old Brooklyn Secure Shippers, Inc. warehouse, restored by the New York Council for Artists’ Housing to studios and apartments for poor artists. The freight elevator we rode up in was bigger than my office at WWN. Kyra, the woman who was now sheltering Nadia, had a huge studio and not much furniture. Amid the fabric pieces, quilts, and tapestries she was working on were about three dozen air fresheners.
“Sorry about the odor,” Kyra said. “It’s the garbage barges. They’re closing that pier next month. Usually it’s not that noticeable.”
She nodded toward a door to her left, and said, “Nadia’s in the back room. Is she really leaving now?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Thank God. She’s a real pain. If she’s not bitching, she’s weeping,” she said, going into a kitchen area, leaving Maggie and me to give Nadia the news.
We went in without knocking.
Nadia was now in weeping mode, and looked pretty pathetic sitting in the middle of a pile of tissues, chocolate bars, empty soda cans, air fresheners, and newspapers, on a futon covered with a quilt. A soap opera was on a fuzzy TV with rabbit-ear antennae. I was tempted to ask her if she was crying because of Rocky, because of something on the soap opera, because of the way the wind was blowing from the garbage pier, or because she didn’t have cable. But then I remembered my human duty, and gave her the good news.
“Nadia, we’ve found Rocky. You can get married, if you really, really want to,” I said.
She looked up and said, “Rocky?”
“Yeah. He showed up at the Chelsea and we stashed him somewhere safe. Grab your stuff, we’ll take you to him, and you can tell us all about the Baby and Plotzonia.”
The Chelsea Girl Murders Page 18