Perfect (4 page)

F  I  V  E

“Here’s David’s phone number.” We faced each other in the private compartment of the train. Thomas handed me a slip of paper and an envelope. “I know you haven’t met him, but after twenty years of working together hand in glove, I would—and have—trusted him with my life. If you need anything, anything at all, David will be right there. Please don’t hesitate to call him. He’ll meet you in Zurich—he’s a tall, thin fellow, sandy hair and blue eyes—and will help you make the connection to St. Moritz. He’ll be on your train to St. Moritz, as well. Different compartment, of course.”

“Thank you, Thomas. That’s very reassuring. It sounds as though you’ve thought of everything.”

“And this is five thousand pounds’ worth of Swiss francs for you to travel with. You do have the bank card and cell phone I gave you?”

I nodded and raised a sleeping pill to my lips and swallowed a glass of water. I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror on the back of the door. I was as pale as a ghost.

“I’m so sorry you don’t feel well, Kick. Please call me as soon as you get to Zurich. I’ll be there tomorrow—I think my flight lands about two—so I’ll be within a stone’s throw of St. Moritz. Now, here’s the phone number of the Baur au Lac in Zurich where I’ll be staying, but you know you can call my cell phone anytime.”

I tucked the paper into my pocket.

“I can’t tell you how much I appreciate your doing this—if there were any other way to make it work, I would have done it. But you’re the only one who even has a chance of pulling this off.” He checked the tiny bathroom in my train compartment, a stainless-steel work of art when it came to making maximum use of minimal space—there was even a small portholelike window in the shower. “Very nice. I wish I were coming with you.”

“So do I.”

The porter had secured my two large Louis Vuitton suitcases in a storage closet. My overnight cases were stacked on one of two overstuffed armchairs that could swivel. The compartment, like the train, was sleek and high-tech. It was paneled in burled walnut and upholstered in brown-and-gold industrial fabric in a flame-stitch pattern. There was a banquette that converted to a bed opposite the armchairs. A shiny chrome vase of yellow rosebuds sat on a table beneath the large window. Outside, the platform bustled with departure preparations.

“How’s your headache?”

“Excruciating.”

“Maybe this will help.” Thomas pulled the semitransparent privacy shades, putting the cabin in pleasurable twilight and blocking prying eyes from outside. “See if you can get some sleep—you’ve got almost seven hours.”

“I will—I’ll probably be dead to the world before we even leave the station.” I put my hands on his cheeks and looked into his eyes. “I love you, Thomas.”

“I love you, too, Kick. Thank you again for taking this on.”

We kissed good-bye.

“Remember,” he said, standing at the door, “call me anytime you want. Have a safe journey and lock this behind me.”

He disembarked and stood outside my cabin. I raised the shade enough to wave and blow him a kiss before pulling it back down. I checked my watch. The train didn’t leave for five minutes.

I dropped the sleeping pill that had been tucked under my pinkie finger back into my pillbox, and while I didn’t think Thomas would come back in, I switched on the radio in the bathroom full blast and closed the bathroom door, just in case. I also laid the cell phone he’d given me on the side of the sink. It was a British government-issued phone and I was quite certain it had a GPS beacon attached to it so he could keep an eye on me and my whereabouts. Then, I turned my black mink coat inside out, converting it to a tan raincoat, tied an uninteresting brown scarf over my hair, grabbed my canvas travel cases, and moved as fast as I could down four cars before sticking my head out the door. Thomas was still there, his back to me, talking on his phone. I put on my dark glasses, stepped off the train, and dashed through the station to the taxi stand.

“Airport,
s’il vous plait. Vîte.”

The secret of my success is that I have never had a partner, and from the moment I began to contemplate taking on this rescue project, I knew I would do it on my terms and without assistance. I appreciated all the trouble Thomas had gone to, the hotel, the train, the phone, cash and credit card, and even though I loved him more than I’d ever loved anyone and trusted him as much as I could—he was still a policeman. If I were going to commit to using my highly developed skills and signature techniques, I wouldn’t dream of putting myself in jeopardy or making myself vulnerable to capture by letting him, or anyone, see into my secret world. My secret world of Swiss bank vaults packed with stones and currency and identities. I could vanish in seconds.

In fact, I just had.

S  I  X

Thomas and I are grown, well into the second halves of our lives. Neither one of us had been married until a year ago. We were willingly, happily single—both of us spoiled by our independence and richly fulfilled by our careers, not looking to muddle them up with love, especially a love where any sort of compromise or making allowances would be required. I think to both of us, “love” and “entanglement” were synonymous. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not a man-hater. I just never had very good luck in the romance department. Actually, I gave up on love when I was fifteen.

Actually, I gave up on my life as it was when I was fifteen. It was so different from my life today, and I was so different from who I am today. Sometimes when I look back on it, which I seldom do, it all seems like a highly improbable, practically impossible transition.

My mother, little more than a girl herself, dragged her trailer, with me inside it, around the Oklahoma oil fields and made her living entertaining the roustabouts in the only way she could. I knew that wasn’t the direction I wanted to go—I would never let myself live her life. When I looked at myself in the mirror, I saw someone special looking back at me. I was going to be somebody. Unfortunately, I got off on the wrong foot, and accidentally ended up pregnant when I was fifteen. So, I did what girls in trouble did in those days, I went off to the Florence Crittenden Home for Girls in Omaha to have the baby.

I’ll never forget lying there in that clean, crisp, all-white room—having signed the papers to give away my baby, whose face I never even looked at, never even inquired if it was a boy or a girl—that I somehow had the grace to realize and accept that no matter what it took, I had to change. And I was the only one who could make that happen. I realized I couldn’t go much further down, all I could do was go up. I was also aware that no one knew who I was or where I was. I could be anything or anybody I wanted to be. I’d been offered a second chance. I got to start over. I never saw my mother again.

The Florence Crittenden people—the kindest people I’d ever met in my life—found a room for me in a safe, clean boardinghouse and a job in a department store in Tulsa. The salary was an appropriate wage for a junior clerk, but I was in a hurry. I wasn’t going to get anywhere on $1.65 an hour, minimum wage at that time. So that’s when I started stealing, and before long, I realized I really had a knack for it. I was gifted! I was onto something—not only was I good at it, but the tiny jeweled pieces gave me a wonderful, confident power and an almost erotic pleasure. They provided me with independence and more than doubled my income. Some people search their whole lives for their calling—I’d found mine with little or no effort just by being willing to take a risk, by making the best of a bad situation, by being willing to try to make lemonade from the lemons of my life.

I took just small items at first, little pins and lavalieres, but soon I had my eyes on bigger targets. I honed my skills by constantly manipulating marbles and stones in my hands, sensitizing them, making them flexible and quick. Hot goods could vanish into my pockets and bodice in the twinkling of an eye and I could sell or pawn them quickly, leaving no trace.

I got up my nerve to apply for a job at one of Mr. Homer Mallory’s Fine Jewelry stores. “I’ll get back to you soon,” he’d said. I was still within earshot of his office when I heard him and his secretary share a mean-spirited laugh. “Can you imagine hiring a fat girl like that in our business? She’s got no class.” This coming from Mr. Mallory himself, who was hairy and dirty and had boils on his face and bad teeth. Evidently they thought fat girls couldn’t hear.

Well, Mr. Mallory and his secretary receive the dubious credit for bringing clarity and righteous justification to my criminal activities, and launching my brilliant unbelievable career. Their unkind remark and arrogant white-trash attitude crystallized my vision and gave rationale to my crusade to steal things from people who were cruel to those who were less fortunate, or more corpulent. I slipped so many goods from Mallory’s Fine Jewelry stores into my overdeveloped bosom, I was able to buy myself a little yellow Corvair convertible for my sixteenth birthday. I was a one-girl crime wave. Of course, even though I thought I knew everything, I didn’t. One day I walked into his newest shop and was no more than two feet inside when they nabbed me. I was sentenced to a year in the Oklahoma State Home for Girls—a nice way of saying reform school.

I’d stay awake many nights just thinking and thinking, because I had all these big plans, but they weren’t working out. I didn’t understand. And I didn’t have anyone to ask. Certainly not the other girls in my “class.” They were all doing time for stealing hubcaps and hairspray. I intended to be someone, the best jewel thief in the world. And in order to do that, I needed the one thing Mr. Mallory—quite rightly—said I didn’t have: class. But who would show me the way?

One Saturday night—which was movie night when they would shoo us all into the auditorium where we would smoke and talk while they’d put silly movies up on the screen—it happened. The movie was
Pillow Talk
with Doris Day and Rock Hudson. I saw what I could become. She was beautiful, successful. She had her own apartment and a beautiful wardrobe. She had elegance, independence. She was her own woman, her own boss. I would be Doris Day. I even took her name as my middle name: Kathleen Day Keswick. Kick, for short. I began to work on my posture, took a jewelry-making class, put my makeup on every morning and kept my nails polished.

By the time my time was up, I’d chipped off a few of the rough edges and was awarded a full scholarship to Oklahoma State University, where I studied geology and made up an entire family history for myself, claiming I’d been orphaned when my parents burned to death trying to save their dairy herd from perishing in a barn fire. It was such a ghastly and gruesome demise, no one ever asked for further details. I pledged Kappa Kappa Gamma, and spent my spare time figuring out how I could rob my sorority sisters and their rich parents, although I never did. While it was very instructive to study their homes and habits, and the casual way they took their valuables for granted, they were wonderful, gracious girls—not a single one of them came anywhere close to meeting my criteria for being one of my victims. But, in spite of the warm welcome into their circle, and fixing me up with their brothers and cousins, deep inside, I knew I wasn’t cut out for any regular sort of country club Junior League life.

It was the late ’60s and the college put on a thirty-day, twenty-city, summer tour to Europe, which I took because I had nothing else to do and nowhere else to go. I was bored out of my mind on that god-awful, stupid, sophomoric tour, standing in endless lines of unwashed, strong-smelling foreigners, waiting to see famous paintings that were no larger than postage stamps and, in any event, were behind sheets of bulletproof glass so thick and scratched you couldn’t see through it in the first place. I couldn’t take it anymore. I had to get onto a different track. I was too busy to waste my time sitting on a hot bus in a foreign country watching people actually living.

When we got to London—it was all happening in London in the ’60s, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, Carnaby Street and “mod” everything, Twiggy and Verushka, Petula Clark and
Blow-Up
—I ditched the group and took off, leaving all my worldly possessions in the luggage compartment of the bus except for my purse, which contained my makeup, money, jeweler’s needle-nosed pliers, jeweler’s loupe and lock-picking sticks. I happily traded all my money for a psychedelic minidress, pink vinyl go-go boots, and a professional Mary Quant makeover that included bright blue eye shadow, platinum lipstick, and false eyelashes even bigger than Twiggy’s. By the time I left the shop, I was quite certain I was pretty much the sharpest “bird” on the face of the earth. Then it started to rain. And every drop of rain seemed to drill into me the complete pathetic futility of my actions. There I was, my pink-and-purple mini glued to my voluptuous body like a bathing suit, leaving nothing to the imagination, blubbering my eyes out—no money left, nowhere to go. Oh, what a mess I was. What a mistake I’d made. I wasn’t Twiggy. I was Kick Keswick from Oklahoma City and I’d really screwed up.

That was when the Rolls Royce Silver Cloud pulled to the curb. The rear door opened and a man’s voice said, “Get in, miss. Get in out of the rain.” It was Sir Cramner Ballantine. But to my eyes and ears, he looked and sounded just like Cary Grant in
That Touch of Mink.

The car took us to Claridge’s where we spent two days in a suite, at the end of which time he offered me a position in the executive suite at Ballantine & Company Auctioneers, one of England’s oldest and most esteemed auction houses, founded in 1740 by Sir Cramner’s ancestors. Sir Cramner saved my life, made my life. He bought me a spacious flat on leafy Eaton Terrace, home to tycoons and diplomats, and placed the
Pasha of St. Petersburg
around my neck: a thirty-five-carat brilliant-cut perfect diamond suspended from a gossamer-fine platinum chain. I have worn the
Pasha
every day of my life since then—it is always there, nestled in my bosom, keeping me grounded.

He educated me about the finest the world had to offer—furniture, paintings, wine, food, jewelry, clothes. He taught me refinement, poise, discretion, and discernment. He turned me into the lady I am today. I loved him until the day he died at age ninety-two, seven years ago.