“I remember that,” she said in dismay. Then happy, relieved, she added, “Yeah, I
do
remember that. We swam together for about two weeks and never spoke a word.”
Strand smiled.
She laughed, now even more relieved. “That was you?”
“Odd, isn’t it?”
“Well, it
is
odd. Did you know who I was when you came here today?”
“Not until you opened the door. You used a different name.”
Slightly suspicious again. “You knew the name I used at the swim club?”
“When you stopped coming, I asked about you.”
“Why?”
“I wanted to know who you were.”
There was a moment when her face registered the unpleasant possibilities that must have suddenly sprung into her mind. Then in an instant she realized the innocence of it all, and she began to laugh.
He grinned. “Why did you stop coming?”
“Oh, long story.” She was still smiling.
They sat at her kitchen table next to the sunroom and talked, the seven drawings still propped on the cushions of the chairs and sofa, the reflected brightness of the sunny courtyard cheering the uncheerful sobriety of the tired town house. With only a few gentle questions from Strand, she pliantly, though not eagerly, talked a little more about herself.
She told him of her first marriage. She and her husband both had been art teachers at the Farnese Academy in Rome, and after his death she had stayed on there. In a few years she had met and married Mitchell Reinhardt, and for four years she had endured a marriage that from its consummation never found its balance, wobbling on unsteadily until it had become so shaky that no ballast could steady it, and she had filed for divorce.
“It was a sorry end,” she said, reaching over to a vase of geraniums sitting to one side of the table. She picked an orange red flower and toyed with its petals. The strong fragrance of geranium spilled into the room when she broke the stem.
“I’ve tried to sort it out for four years,” she added. “I take some responsibility. He deserves some. It was so wrong it could never have been right, and I do blame myself for not realizing that sooner.” She shrugged. “I quit wailing and throwing sand and ashes in the air a long time ago. Self-indulgence really isn’t of major interest to me.”
She stopped, looking at the flower, thinking of something. He watched her fingers as they felt the velvety petals and then plucked one and placed it alone on the tablecloth.
“Then you’re living here now?” Strand asked.
She looked up. “Oh, no, I’m just here for a few months. Mitchell’s lawyer—well, the one handling the divorce, anyway—is here. It’s easier if I am, too. The papers are complicated.”
“Where will you go, after it’s all over?”
“Back to Rome.”
“To teach.”
“That’s right.” She hesitated. “The thing is, I got a good deal in the divorce. Mitchell’s been wealthy all his life, and he’s used to defending his net worth. I knew he was prepared for a battle. I didn’t want a battle, and I didn’t want his money, certainly not bad enough to make a career out of getting it. I just wanted it to be over. He did have one thing I wanted, a home in Sallustiano in Rome. I told him I’d walk away from the usual financial fracas if he’d give me the seven drawings and the Sallustiano house with enough money in a trust for its upkeep and to pay the taxes on it for the rest of my life. He could be free of me with just a couple of straight, flat-out transactions. No strings.”
She sat back and looked at Strand. “He agreed.”
Strand studied her. She was turned aside from the table, her legs crossed at the knees under the saffron skirt, leaning slightly forward, her arms crossed on her long thigh, hands dangling limp. Her expression was open, frank.
She leveled her dark eyes on him. “I still have the teaching job. I was getting along just fine financially before he came along, and I was paying rent.” She smiled a little. “I sure as hell wasn’t living in a villa.”
Then she straightened her back, a gesture that said she had had enough of talking about herself.
“As for the drawings”—she looked over at them—“well, they just suddenly seem like such an extravagance now that I’m no longer in that league. I don’t know.” She puckered her mouth to one side as she looked at the drawings.
“My part of it will take some time,” Strand said. “I don’t know what kind of timetable you’re expecting, but I’ll need a few weeks at the very least to work up an appraisal. And then some more time to contact potential buyers. I expect they’ll sell fairly quickly.”
“I should be in Houston for another month or two,” Mara said. Her hands were folded in her lap now, and she was looking into the courtyard, presenting her profile to Strand.
“And you want the drawings sold by the time you go back to Rome.”
“I think so.”
“Okay, then,” Strand said, taking one of his cards out of his pocket and handing it to her. “Whenever you’re ready. I’d like to have the drawings while I’m working up the appraisals. I have very good security. They’ll be safe.”
She swung her leg a few times, looking at his card as she touched her bottom lip with her middle fingers, thinking. She made no move to end their conversation, no subtle gesture to indicate they were through. She idly flicked the bottom corner of his card with the fingernail of her little finger.
She looked up. “When could you begin working on the appraisals?”
“Whenever you want.”
She dropped her hand to her lap and laid the card on her long thigh, looking at it.
She looked up. “What about tomorrow?”
“Okay.”
“I have some letters, bills of sale, other items of provenance on some of them. They’re still in the bank. I’ll pick them up and bring everything to you in the morning. What would be a good time?”
“Same as today? Ten o’clock?”
“Sure. That’s perfect.”
“Good, I’ll look forward to it,” he said, standing.
“This has been kind of you,” she said. “I appreciate it very much.”
“My pleasure.” He smiled. “It’s good to be reunited with a misplaced mirage.”
Dennis Clymer had been in Brussels forty-eight hours. It was his third trip to the city in as many weeks, and it was his last stop before returning home. In the past month he had spent time in most of the capitals of Europe, carrying his black Hermés briefcase to meetings in glass office towers in London, to elegant old-world restaurants in Prague, to the shady terrace of a pale ocher villa overlooking Monaco and the hazy Mediterranean, to a stolid dacha deep in a forest outside St. Petersburg that smelled of woodsmoke and
shchi
and was filled with objets d’art.
Clymer was at home in all of these places. Unlike the stereotypical American, he was eminently adaptable. He was fluent in German and French, but he conducted business only in English. Four times a year he made these hectic trips, usually a two- or three-week period during which he shuttled from one European country to the next, crisscrossing his own path, doubling back, retracing routes he had traveled two days or ten days before. Though he routinely stayed in small, exclusive hotels, he rarely stayed in the same hotel in succession in any city in Europe, and only recently when he was in Brussels did he ever make a predictable diversion from a schedule that was otherwise fast paced and seemingly random.
Dennis Clymer was forty-three years old, had a master’s in economics from Stanford University and a law degree from UCLA. He lived in the tony Brentwood section of Los Angeles. He and his second wife had two children, daughters from her first marriage. Clymer had a son by his first wife who lived with his mother in the San Fernando Valley. He had visiting rights with the boy but often had to cancel his visitations because of his busy schedule. He paid little attention to his family. His business took up most of his time.
As Clymer walked out of the Métropole Hotel in the center of Brussels, he had come to the end of a hammering schedule. Mentally he suddenly shifted gears. He had two nights in Brussels before he returned to Los Angeles, and he planned to spend both of them in the same place.
After returning to his own rooms in the Copthorne Stéphanie on the fashionable Avenue Louise, he bathed and changed clothes. The long afternoon meeting in a suite at the Métropole was with a slow-speaking Londoner who smoked dark Honduran cigars and a woman from Lyons who favored a particularly nasty kind of cigarette. His California lungs were screaming for fresh air. Just as dusk was settling over the city, Clymer left his hotel and walked out onto the avenue.
The lights were coming on all over Brussels, and the spring air was crisp, the sky deepening from peach to amber. He turned right on Avenue Louise and headed toward a large boulevard that lay just ahead. He was in the heart of the city’s most exclusive district, which exuded luxury in its public and private residences and sparkling shops.
At the Avenue de la Toison d’Or/Guldenvlieslaan, Clymer crossed to the other side, where it became Boulevard Waterloo/Waterloolaan, and once again turned right, walking in the failing light past posh jewelry shops and art galleries and chic boutiques filled with designer clothing. Smartly dressed shoppers strolled unhurriedly along the boulevard, among them Dennis Clymer, feeling very much pleased with himself for having once again negotiated nearly a month’s worth of complex transactions for his clients. He anticipated the evening with the satisfaction of a man who was using his considerable intellect to make tons of money. To him Brussels never seemed more charming, and his place in it never seemed more deserved or appropriate. Everything was just as he wanted it.
He turned into Rue du Pépin/Kernstraat and made his way past a string of boisterous nightclubs, entirely oblivious to their allures. Beyond these he turned left to the Place du Petit Sablon, a quiet square with a beautiful formal garden in its center, and to one side, its front door illuminated by the green glow of lamplight reflected off the boughs of a sheltering chestnut, was his favorite restaurant, Chez Marius en Provence.
Clymer had made reservations in the name of Paul Franck. He was shown to his table—he had asked for a quiet corner—and immediately ordered a bottle of Bordeaux, a Premier Grand Cru Classé from St.-Emilion. He had just finished his first glass when he saw her smiling at him past the shoulder of the maître d’ as she allowed herself to be shown to the table.
Clymer beamed and stood as she approached. The maître d’ withdrew, and Clymer took her hand and kissed her gently on the offered cheek, catching the familiar scent of sachet.
“It has been an endless week,” she said, showing no hint of being tired as she sat down. Dennis Clymer relished every accented syllable.
She was one of over five thousand translators employed by the European Commission, which had its headquarters buildings only a few kilometers away. Clymer had met her on his last trip to Europe two months earlier. In fact, his present trip could have waited another quarter, but the memory of her had made it seem more urgent. During the past three weeks, Clymer, whom she knew only as Paul Franck, had managed to spend one night of each week with her.
The affair was a surprise to Dennis Clymer. He was not the kind of man who had a roving eye, though his travels frequently put him in situations of opportunity. He was, primarily, interested only in business, and the clients he represented used him for precisely this reason. They did not indulge miscalculations, and though Clymer was reaping stunning profits for his services, which he wisely invested and did not squander, he was cognizant of the fact that a failure to perform could very well have more serious consequences than a loss of income.
In short, he was a man who was under a good deal of stress, though it was a point of importance with him never to show it. He was on a very fast track, and for a long time now the money he was making was the only seduction to which he allowed himself to succumb.
She was nothing like the women he usually met when he traveled. Some of his clients always had beautiful women hovering about, and any of them happily would have indulged Dennis Clymer’s requests. But Clymer was wary. Not only did he not trust these gorgeous, tightly fleshed creatures, but he didn’t want to appear to his clients as having a weakness that possibly could be exploited. He kept his mind on his business and his hands on his black Hermés briefcase.
He had met her, however, in a situation unrelated to his business and well away from the people he represented. The absolute unpredictability of their meeting was what made him comfortable with her. He had been walking through the chic Galerie Louise, one of the several elegant shopping arcades in the center of the city, when he impulsively stepped into a leather goods shop. The place smelled richly of oiled leather, and he wandered around a corner to the briefcases where a woman was trying to decide which attaché to buy for her boss, a busy man who had asked her to get one for him to replace an old one. Unable to decide among the dozens there, she saw Clymer standing nearby and asked him his opinion.
She was not a stunning beauty, though she was quite pretty in a fresh, uncalculating way. She did not have the sleek, self-aware figure of the women he studiously avoided: she was a little hippy, though pleasantly so. Her hair was butter blond, and she wore it pulled back in a practical style vaguely reminiscent of the 1940s. She wore a smart, working woman’s suit. Clymer noted that she had a quick, genuine smile and a charming way of knitting her brow when he offered a bit of sensible advice about briefcases. After a few minutes she chose one of his recommendations. As she was paying they chatted. When he told her he was from Los Angeles, she brightened with curiosity and asked if he knew any movie stars.
They ate an early dinner together at a little sidewalk café a few doors from the leather shop, and he told a few movie star stories, embroidering a little on his personal familiarity with a few famous names. She told him about her work as translator with the European Commission, about how she had studied languages in Paris, how she had worked for a while for IBM in Berlin before coming back to Brussels.