A Calculated Risk

by Katherine Neville

  “For how long?” I asked him. “You couldn’t expect it to be forever?”

  He thought about that for a moment.

  “For a year and a day,” he said cryptically, not looking at me.

  “‘The Owl and the Pussycat’!” I exclaimed. “I remember that poem: ‘They took some honey and plenty of money …’”

  “‘Wrapped up in a five-pound note,’” Tor said, looking up pleasantly surprised.

  “‘And they sailed away for a year and a day, ’neath the light of the silvery moon,’” I finished.

  “It would seem—mature and seasoned banker that you are—you still recall your fables, my dear little pussycat,” said Tor with a smile. “Who knows—perhaps you’d enjoy losing this wager to me far more than winning it.”

  “I wouldn’t bank on it,” I said.

  There was only one thing that made Tor uncomfortable about the wager he’d dragged me into. In order to carry out his part of the bet, he needed an accomplice. Though he knew everything there was to know about computers, there was one necessary skill he himself did not possess.

  “I need a photographer,” he told me, “and a good one.”

  By coincidence, I happened to know one of the best photographers in New York. I agreed to take Tor over there the very next morning.

  “Tell me about this friend of yours,” he said as we taxied uptown on Sunday. “Is he trustworthy? Can we tell him the truth about our plans?”

  “He is a she, and her name is Georgian Daimlisch,” I said. “She’s my best friend, though I haven’t seen her in years. I can assure you, she’s totally trustworthy—but don’t believe a word she says.”

  “I see,” he said. “The picture you paint is much clearer—we’re about to meet a reliable schizophrenic. Does she know what we’re coming to see her about?”

  “I’m not sure she knows we’re coming at all.”

  “Didn’t you tell me you spoke with the mother?” Tor said.

  “Lelia? Yes, of course—but that doesn’t mean anything.”

  Tor was silent the rest of the trip.

  It had always been hard to describe Georgian, though she’d been my best friend for more years than she’d permit me to reveal. When she lived anywhere, it was at her mother’s apartment on upper Park Avenue. But Georgian never settled anywhere for long; she was a butterfly of a rare breed, and wildly independent.

  Georgian wasn’t independent financially—or, I should say, no one knew exactly how much she had. As a photographer, she traveled around the world, stopping at châteaus and palaces that were far beyond ordinary means. On the other hand, she usually dressed in tattered jeans and T-shirts, and wore so many gold rings she seemed to be sporting brass knuckles.

  Most of her acquaintances thought she was frivolous, sex-crazed, extravagant, and more than slightly batty; I found her serious, reclusive, and a brilliant business manager with a mind like a steel trap. How could one person engender such diverse impressions in the minds of so many? Simple—she was unique, her own creation. She’d become a photographer to fashion her own universe, and then live in it.

  I saw her rarely, because when I did, she expected me to do likewise.

  As soon as I’d agreed to introduce Tor to Georgian, I began to have reservations. They had a lot in common: both were highly possessive of me and thought they could fix whatever was wrong with me—but their ideas of how to achieve that fix were incompatible. Tor wanted to introduce me to reality; Georgian wanted to strike the word from my vocabulary. I feared they’d hate each other on sight.

  The lobby of Lelia and Georgian’s building looked like a fancy auto showroom; it lacked only the Cadillacs scattered about the floor. Enormous chandeliers hung from the ceilings like bunches of frosted grapes; a number of deep red, flocked-velvet divans were scattered across the floor, and brass cuspidors were, for some reason, placed beside each. There were forests of marble pillars—more than at Pompeii—and plastered on each wall, white fenestrations lavish with gold. Enormous black funerary urns were stuffed with rainbows of silk flowers, and over the elevator bay a plaster cornucopia spilled over with fruits that tumbled down to lodge with festive abandon between the doors.

  “Whatever happened to good taste?” Tor mumbled, wincing as we crossed the vast floor.

  “Wait till you get a load of Lelia’s place,” I said. “Her tastes run to French Decadent.”

  “But you said she was Russian,” Tor said as we reached the elevators.

  “White Russian—raised in France,” I explained. “Lelia can’t speak her native tongue too well—or any other, for that matter. She’s sort of a lingual potluck.”

  “Goodness, if it isn’t Miss Banks!” said Francis, the elevator operator. “How many years has it been? The baroness will be delighted, ma’am—does she know you’re in town?”

  This was Francis’s discreet way of saying he should phone upstairs to announce us. I told him to go ahead.

  On the twenty-seventh floor, Francis unlocked the elevator doors with a key and we stepped into the large marble foyer, where the maid greeted us with a little curtsy and ushered us through another set of doors into the great hall—a vast marble corridor mirrored like Versailles at either side.

  When she went off to find our hostess, Tor turned to me and whispered, “Who’s the baroness?”

  “That’s Lelia,” I said. “I think it’s an affectation—like being a Romanoff: who’s to say whether you are one or not?”

  As we waited there in the hall sounds reached us from several rooms away—a good deal of female shrieking, and doors banging shut. At last, a door was slammed with finality, making the crystal wall sconces tinkle.

  One of the mirrored French doors flew open, and Lelia popped out wearing a long teal satin kimono with tendrils of marabou wisping about as she moved. Though it was nearly noon, her honey-blond hair was tousled as if she’d just rolled out of bed.

  Clutching me, she pressed her face against mine once at either side, in the French manner, then gave me a big Russian bear hug, her marabou tickling my nose.

  “Darlink! Happy happy happy! Too bad you must do the waiting, but Georgian is très mauvaise today.”

  To compound the confusion of Lelia’s borscht-bouillabaisse lingo, she often forgot in midsentence what she’d been talking about, replying to something you’d asked on a different occasion. When she said Georgian’s name, it came out “Zhorzhione,” causing many to think she was describing an Italian dessert.

  “I’ve brought my friend Dr. Tor to meet her,” I said, by way of introduction.

  “Ce qu’il est charmant!” cried Lelia with sparkling eyes, appraising Tor.

  She extended her hand to him, and damn if he didn’t kiss it!

  “This beautiful man you are bringing—like a statue of gold he is. Vi nye ochin nrahveetis—and his costume, très chic—the finest Italian cut!” She touched his sport coat delicately, as if admiring a piece of art. “Always I am despairing for you, my darlink; you are working so hard—no time for the young men—but now you are bringing this handsome—”

  “Stop despairing, Lelia,” I told her. Though Georgian might be difficult, I’d forgotten that Lelia was downright dangerous when it came to comments about my private life—not a subject I was eager to broadcast. Not that I had, in her terms, a private life. “Dr. Tor is a colleague,” I hastened to add as she accompanied us along the hallway.

  “Quel dommage,” Lelia commented sadly, glancing at him like a trout that had gotten away.

  “We’ve business to discuss with Georgian,” I explained, peeping into a few rooms where the mirrored doors were ajar. “What’s keeping her?”

  “That one!” huffed Lelia. “Impossible! She dress like for driving the truck—but to change for the guests? Quel enfant terrible. What should a mother do? You go sit; I will make something nice to eat. Zhorzhione, she comes soon.”

  Lelia settled us behind the louvered doors of the Blue Room—her favorite color—thus indicating that Tor
had met with her complete approval. Lelia classified everyone by color. She kissed me, patted my hair, took one more approving look at Tor, and departed.

  A few moments later, the beribboned maid reappeared bearing a little tray with a decanter of vodka and two crystal shot glasses. Tor poured us each a glass, but I motioned mine away. He downed his own in one gulp.

  “Stolichnaya,” he said, licking his lips.

  “Some judge you are,” I told him. “That’s Lelia’s home brew—it’s two million proof. You’ll be out cold if you do another like that.”

  “It’s the correct way to drink vodka,” he assured me. “And it’s highly inhospitable to refuse a drink in a Russian home.”

  When the maid returned to tell us that “Mademoiselle” would see us, Tor quickly polished off the vodka in my glass, too—no doubt so our hostess would not take offense—and accompanied us to the “Plum Room,” at the end of the hall.

  The Plum Room had been a music room, and the walls were mirrored above the wainscoting. Everything else I remembered had been changed.

  The old Bösendorfer piano was shoved into a corner across the room, all the upholstered chairs around it were draped with sheets, and the peach, mauve, and gray Aubussons, which had once graced the travertine floors, were now rolled up, tipped on end, and standing like pillars against the far wall.

  Now the floor was spread with dark green tarpaulin, and scaffolding spanned the vast space like a huge jungle gym. Beneath the structure stood three angular mannequins draped in satin, sequins, and sprays of white feather; they were frozen in their poses and scarcely breathing.

  High above, sprawled over the scaffold like a spider in a web, was Georgian, cameras hanging from her neck and others mounted on the bars all around her. Big klieg lights glittered everywhere, beacons in the otherwise darkened room.

  “Hip,” Georgian said. A model moved her pelvis forward a few inches. “Naomi, I can’t see your thigh—good, that’s it. Birgit, your nose is in the feathers—chin up, right angles—stop.” Click. “Phoebe—shoulder back, right foot out.” Click. “Shoulder down—lift those feathers, there’s a shadow. Good.” Click.

  Tor watched everything intently in the darkness: the placement of lights, Georgian’s position on the scaffolding, the trajectory from her cameras to the models, who moved like automatons below the twelve tons of steel and equipment. Finally, he looked down at me with a smile.

  “She’s very good,” he said softly.

  “Silence on the set!” snapped Georgian, then went on with: “Head down, lift arm, good.” Click.

  After nearly half an hour of this mystical staccato code between Georgian and her prey, she pulled her head up from the steel matrix, hung her cameras and loose lenses by their straps over the scaffold pegs, and swung herself down from the ceiling like a monkey.

  “Lights,” she called as from somewhere the draperies were pulled back to let the harsh glare of cold winter light flood the room. The models looked suddenly strange and grotesque, disrobing right there—stripping down to their panty hose and rubbing cold cream on their faces, as if no one else were present.

  “Good Lord! You’ve come back!” cried Georgian, rushing to me across the room, and ignoring Tor and the others.

  She planted a big, wet kiss on my mouth, then hooked her arm through mine, and glanced briefly at Tor. “Don’t mind us—we’ll be right back,” she told him, bustling me through the doors.

  “Where on earth did you find him?” she whispered just outside. “For a girl that doesn’t get about much—I’m amazed—he’s sex on a stick!”

  “Dr. Tor is a colleague—my mentor, in fact,” I explained, somewhat stiffly. Georgian and Lelia were carrying on as if he were a Greek god.

  “I’d like to have a few colleagues like that,” Georgian assured me. “All of mine are the type that stick their pinkie out when they talk to you. Has mother seen him yet?”

  “You bet; he kissed her hand,” I told her.

  “She’s probably out in the kitchen right now—baking strudel. She doesn’t miss a trick. As opposed to you,” she added, touching my many-layered yardage of clothing as if it were diseased. “You look like a panzer tank in drag. Have I taught you nothing in all these years? Drama—that’s what you’re missing. Introducing him as ‘doctor’ indeed. Doesn’t he have a first name? Philolaus or Mstislav—something sexy, I bet. Or Thor! Thor Tor!”

  “It’s Zoltan,” I told her.

  “I knew it—I’ll bet she’s making piroshki, too.”

  “Who is?”

  “My mother, who else?” said Georgian. “Come with me; I’ve got something I need to do.”

  She dragged me off through the maze of rooms to her suite at the back, muttering all the way.

  Everything about Georgian was dramatic. Her sculptor’s hands with those long, graceful bones—her huge blue-green eyes and wide cheekbones, that chameleonlike face—funny or tragic—flickering with her moods, and her wide, expressive, sensual mouth with rows of straight, white teeth. “With teeth like that,” her mother used to say, “I could have eaten up half of Europe.”

  Back in Georgian’s boudoir—a room that seemed designed by a six-year-old, all gingham and ruffles and porcelain—she plopped me down before the dressing table and started brushing my hair and pulling out the pins that had held it in place.

  “You’ve got a lot of nerve, criticizing my clothing,” I said, looking at her torn T-shirt. Those holes seemed placed for maximum effect.

  “I’ve got plenty of panache—for a deadbeat.” She laughed.

  She was glossing my lips and brushing strange things on my face, from the messy assortment of bottles that littered her table. “If you had my style, you’d have them all eating out of your hand.”

  “Somehow, I don’t think gold lamé and sparkly pumps would go over at the Bank of the World,” I pointed out. “I’m an executive, not a jet-setter like you, and I simply cannot comport myself—”

  “Comport? To hell with that goddamned bank,” she said. “Do they send spies around, to monitor your attire? You come in here, dragging that gorgeous golden hunk—everyone faints on the floor in a sexual frenzy—and you keep calling him your colleague! Your mentor! He wasn’t looking at you just now as if he wanted to teach you all about corporate profit margins, I can tell you that, but you just refuse to see it. Be honest, when was the last time you leaped out of bed, threw open the window, and said, ‘Thank god I’m alive! This is the most glorious day, and today I’m going to do something so fabulous it will change my entire life’?”

  “You mean … before coffee?” I said, laughing.

  “You’re insane!” cried Georgian, ruffling my hair and pulling me to my feet. “You know I love you. It’s just that I want you to stop thinking your way through life—and start feeling.”

  “What’s the difference?” I asked her.

  “That’s the point—precisely,” she told me, pursing her lips.

  She went to the closet, pulled off her T-shirt, and pulled a fluffy pink sweater over her close-cropped, silvery blond hair.

  “Can you honestly say you’re not attracted to him?” she asked seriously.

  That question was one I’d avoided even asking myself. Tor was my mentor, even my Pygmalion—but no one ever told the story from Galatea’s point of view! What happened inside her, after she—Pygmalion’s perfect creation—turned from stone to living flesh? With all the problems I already had in my career and my life, I wasn’t ready to solve that one—not by a long shot.

  “If you’re not interested, my friend,” Georgian was saying, “I’d be happy to take him off your hands.”

  “Be my guest,” I shot back at once, wondering why my voice sounded brittle even to me.

  “Ha-ha!” cried Georgian with a devilish grin. “Rather quick on the trigger, wouldn’t you say?”

  Suddenly, I deeply regretted having brought Tor here at all. Whenever Georgian got that look of hers, it meant something terrible was about to happen.
I didn’t even want to imagine the possibilities.

  “I want you to control yourself,” I told her sternly. “He is my colleague, and you’re not to turn this project into your usual three-ring circus.”

  “I’ve got a project of my own now,” she said cryptically, “and I know wherein my duty lies. As usual, you’ve been lying to yourself, but this is very stimulating to me: correcting people’s impressions of themselves happens to be my forte.”

  She tossed her arm across my shoulders and walked me back through the maze, humming a cheerful tune, as I cringed inwardly. When we reached the wide hall, we could hear the murmur of voices from the Blue Room.

  “Are these pictures of your family?” Tor was asking as we came in.

  “Nyet,” said Lelia. “My family, they are all dead. These are my dear friends: Pauline, who made the costumes, how you say couturière—Pauline Trigère. And this is Schiap, another costume maker, dead also. And this is the Contessa di—”

  “What are you boring our guest with, Mother?” asked Georgian, coming up to take her arm.

  “Who’s this old fellow?” asked Tor. “He looks familiar.”

  “Ah … that is Claude, my very dear ami. He was so sweet, how he loved all his flowers. But unhappily he was, how you say, hard of seeing. I would go to his gardens at Giverny, and explain how the flowers were looking to me—and then he would paint them on his canvas. He says I am his young eyes.”

  “Giverny? This was Claude Monet?” Tor glanced at Lelia and then at us.

  “Da—Monet.” Lelia looked at the photo wistfully. “He was very old and I was very young. There was one flower that I loved so much—you remember it, Zhorzhione? He made me a little watercolor of it. What was the name of this flower?”

  “Water lilies?” suggested Georgian.

  Lelia shook her head. “It was a very long flower—poorpoorniyi—the color of raisins, what you call grapes. Purple—is that a word?”

  “Long and purple like grapes?” I said. “Maybe lilacs?”