Small World (14 page)

Other than those minor matters, Roger had little to think about except Dolly, what she was doing to him, and his absorption into her life. She continued to teach him about dollhouses and miniatures and to educate him about the other people in her life. There were the people who did her hair, her clothes, her apartment, who taught her dance and tennis. There were the people who were the closest thing she had to friends, like Nick Weiler, and these she avoided, saying she was bored'with the precious little mandarins.

And then there was her daughter-in-law, and the two grandchildren. Dolly talked with her grandchildren several times a week by phone. A pair of silver-framed photographs of them hung on her bedroom wall, along with a picture of her dead son. Outside of the five minutes occasionally spent on the phone, and the family photographs, Dolly never mentioned her raggle-taggle family. Roger figured she didn’t want to and that was fine with him.

Having no friends himself, he didn’t find the isolation of Dolly’s life unusual. He presumed he was in love. If it was possible to love one’s fairy godmother. He did not allow himself to consider whether she was in love with him. She might care for him the way she did for a shabby old dollhouse that wanted restoring. It was enough for him that she allowed him into her bed.

She was so excited about the Carousel that he determined to do something else for her, soon. Perhaps in Washington, where she would have to go in the near future, to retrieve the Doll’s White House from that museum. He found himself included in her plans for that trip. It was necessary that he hang around long enough to see what he could do about that dollhouse, for Dolly.

In the meantime, in the odd hours that were his own, he wandered through the shops of Manhattan and the city’s art galleries and museums. The museums were laughably undersecured. The shops varied. Some of them exhibited rampant paranoia. Some of them should have displayed signs reading
Help Yourself.
Roger practiced a little basic thievery from time to time, lifting a scarf here, a pair of socks there. But most of the shops fell in the middle, resorting to enough mirrors to make a funhouse. This gave him the opportunity to admire himself frequently in duplicate. The way the new regimen had trimmed noticeably in such a short time. TTie cut of his new duds. The roses in his cheeks. He patted the camera case that hid the minimizer. He looked, he thought, prosperous. Well laid. Lucky.

The day they were supposed to drive a rented truck to Washington to pick up the dollhouse, Roger invited Dolly to visit a downtown museum with him. It was one she knew well, and where she was known, as it housed a small and precious collection of dollhouses and their furnishings.

A quick look at him, and she started to dig in her handbag for cigarettes.

Really?’ Excitement shook her voice.

‘We’ll have some fun.’

Her eyes sparkled and she drew hard on the butt. She offered him one, which he took. She smoked nervously. He smoked because he liked it. He enjoyed it to the last drag.

‘I want you to stir up a stink when you go in.’

‘Be the famous lady, you mean?’

‘Sure. I want to poke around across the hall while you look at the dollhouses. Give me fifteen or twenty minutes, in case there are people there.’

‘Then what?’

‘You’ll leave as soon as I come into the room. People will be paying attention to you, I hope.’ i’ll see to that,’ she promised.

He went in before her and drifted into the gift shop on the left of the lobby. A trio of elderly women preceded her; she waited graciously for them to negotiate the steps, push through the wheezing, old-fashioned doors, and traverse the length of the lobby. The woman at the lobby information desk took one look at her and reached for an in-house phone. Half a minute later, a balding gentleman with official written on all his wrinkled features in triplicate appeared, and the fuss Dolly had promised began in earnest. Roger slipped away up the central staircase to the reedy trumpeting of the official.

‘Mrs. Douglas! How good to see you again!’

Heads turned. Roger grinned. Dolly was a class act; she could handle the show.

He moved casually to a Y-shaped room at the same end of the second floor as the room where the dollhouses were displayed. This room, across the corridor from the dollhouses, was lined with glass cabinets. More glass cases filled the floor space, leaving only narrow aisles to walk through. It was rather badly lit, but within the glass cases, a collection of silver, gold, and vermeil objects glinted righteously.

Roger had been there once before. He knew what he wanted. First, though, he wanted to be the only person in the room. Normal traffic here was never very heavy. With any luck at all, he should have, sooner or later, five, maybe ten minutes to himself.

He waited for a middle-aged man clutching a cold pipe to peer at some of the specimens. The man was driven out by a noisy gang of schoolchildren, under the unsteady hand of a young teacher. The children, too, passed almost immediately out of the room, with announcements that they were bored. Roger breathed a sigh of gratitude to Loki, the god of thieves, and picked at the camera case strapped to his chest.

He was disappointed when a woman with a stroller full of sleeping baby entered. He stared unseeing at his own reflection in the glass over a batch of coffee and tea pots. The woman left quickly, looking as if she’d gotten the wrong room.

Outside, Roger heard the museum official burbling, Dolly laughing politely, and the whispering and shuffling of a goodly number of people. She was playing Pied Piper. Her entourage should be entering the room across the way. He slipped the minimizer from the case.

The glass cases were locked, by the kind of locks that look like small cylinders and are fitted into the frames. Roger focused the minimizer on one of the locks. A tinkling sound recorded the impact of the lock with the floorboards. Where the lock had been, there was now simply a cylindrical hole in the wood. Roger stooped down and scooped the tiny lock from the floor. He dumped it into his pocket.

Looking up to check the doorway, he saw no one. The noise from the dollhouse room was steady. A considerable hullabaloo, as his mother would say. He pushed gently upwards on the glass. It slid away a few inches. Plucking a card of four rings, he dropped it into his pocket and closed the case.

He moved quickly to the next case, a wall display. After zapping the lock, he minimized and removed a silver-backed hand mirror, handled brush, handleless brush, button hook, shoe horn, and a small round dish suitable for the holding of hairpins, faded

rosebuds, and lovenotes. Roger was sweating heavily. He wiped his forehead with his handkerchief and stepped to the back of the room.

There he unlocked another case. His prizes this time were an early Victorian coffeepot, creamer, and sugar bowl. He popped that lot into his pocket, the minimizer back into his camera case, and strolled out.

Slowly, he worked his way through the crowd into the dollhouse room. Dolly saw him and looked straight through him. It was faintly disquieting. He had to admire her acting. It was just nerves that made his stomach flutter and his head hurt.

In another two minutes she was leading baldy out at the head of a parade of children, elderly ladies, and young mothers trailing after her, whispering. She caught the anxious eye of a child autograph-seeker and summoned the kid with a quick melting smile and an outstretched hand. The kid pressed a sheet of notepaper and a sweaty pen into her hand. The dam broke, and the crowd flooded around her, begging for signatures. A jam developed just outside the doorway, where she had stopped, so that no one could get into the room of the dollhouses and no one still in could get out. The few left inside were much more interested in the goings-on in the corridor than in the displays. For all practical purposes, Roger had the room to himself.

It took very little time. He pushed his way rather rudely through the now-thinning crowd around Dolly and left the museum. It was extremely hot for so early in the spring and Roger thought he might melt. He bought an orange drink from a street vendor and it tasted like sugared piss. He drank it anyway. It was wet.

Dolly found him slumped wearily in her car.

‘Too much,’ he said, smiling weakly.

She slipped in next to him. ‘Show me.’

He shook his head. ‘Let’s get the hell out of here.’

She pouted but drove off anyway. At least the air conditioning was on.

When she saw the dresser set and the coffeepot and its mates, she whooped and jigged. For no reason he could articulate to himself, he held back the card of rings, the only part of the loot he had not yet minimized. He was startled, though, when her first delight quickly clouded over.

‘Jesus, Roger, I didn’t know you were going to do that.’ She had the little house in the palm of her hand. She put it down as if she thought it was one of Great-aunt Helen’s favorite knickknacks. He wondered, without daring to say it, what the hell she thought

he had been proposing.

‘Don’t you see?’ she went on. ‘I was there. There’s bound to be suspicions that I had something to do with the disappearance of the dollhouse and this other stuff. Just because they’re all gone together.’

Roger shrugged. ‘What are you sweating? The point is everybody in that whole creepy old tomb was looking at you. You obviously didn’t have it under your arm.’

Dolly turned the silver pieces over and over.

‘You may be right. But no more risks like that, please. I don’t want to be publicly near anything like this again.’

Roger patted her hand. ‘Let me get you a drink.’

A small grateful nod from Dolly. She was weary, he could see, from her Great Performance, but was going, valiantly, on. And
on.

She allowed them each one glass of wine a day, taken at odd moments to fill the silences, or to mark small events. Roger hummed to himself as he poured. Her song. The little merry-go-round piece. He wasn’t ever going to care for the aftertaste of wine, a taste of rot, he thought, but he could at least tolerate it now. She called it her little glass of civilization. He called it relief.

It wasn’t a bad thing for Dolly to get the wind up. She was uncomfortably interested in the minimizer. It would be better if she put some distance between herself and its use. Better if he kept control of the thing. It was
his,
after all. It was fine with him if she wanted to play innocent.

‘We have to start for Washington,’ she told him, when he gave her her glass. ‘We’ll need a good night behind us to get through the packing tomorrow.’

‘Here’s to a good night,’ Roger said.

‘I can’t wait to see my babies.’ Dolly leaned against him comfortably.

Roger could wait to see her babies. Her grandchildren. The wine washed down his throat in a cool oily rush, they’d managed very nicely to avoid each other’s families. Tomorrow he was going to have met not only the little darlings, but their mom, and much more appallingly, another Dolly, their grandmother. What might happen to them he could only fear. He braced himself.

It would be better to be out of town for a few days, especially on a trip planned weeks in advance. The police could search the apartment all they pleased. They would not find Dolly’s safe, into which Roger had shoe-horned the Carousel. They would not find the other things, because they would be looking for the wrong size.

And perhaps today’s take would come along to Washington with Dolly and Roger, to be lost in the numerous furnishings of the Doll’s White House.

Well, whatever happened, the trip would be interesting. Meeting some new people, seeing some new things and places. That was one of the great virtues of his entanglement with Dolly. Life was almost always interesting.

6

‘Mrs Douglas
is here,’ Roseann told Nick via the intercom.

He abandoned the work on his desk and rose to greet her. If he was surprised to see that she was not alone,.he didn’t show it.

She had changed subtly. It was as if she had stripped away ten years since the Founders’ Day Gala, when he had last seen her. She had been brittle; now she was soft and pliant, blooming. He was reminded of the young woman she had been. It was suddenly only last night’s nightmare, that piquant interlude of theirs, after her husband’s suicide.

He kissed her cheek formally, and breathed in her familiar perfume. It too was a little clearer, a little more essential. Wounds he had thought were merely scar tissue opened inside him. He was grief-stricken but for Dolly, or Lucy, or himself, he could not say.

‘Nick, this is Roger Tinker,’ she introduced the man who had entered with her.

Nick met Roger’s uncomfortable eyes. ‘Roger,’ Dolly said, ‘this is Nick Weiler, the director of the Dalton.’

The two men shook hands politely and looked each other over. It was immediately clear to each that there was no hope of a civil relationship.

Roger saw a tall, bearded blond man, who wore his expensive clothes too well. A man who, all his life, had had all the money, women, and power that he had ever wanted. The sort of man, exactly, that Dorothy Hardesty Douglas might have, so much more logically than the likes of Roger Tinker, as a lover.

The man who put up Nick Weiler’s well-mannered hackles was painfully out of place. He wore his new suit and his new haircut as if they itched. He didn’t know, and his body spoke it, what to make of this well-appointed office, in this overblown statement of