Small World (20 page)

She emerged, in a loose wrapper, her skin still moist from the steam. Her hair curled all over her skull, outlining it in silvery cupid ringlets. She glanced at him without much interest and went to look out the w'indow.

‘Looks hot out, and it’s not even eight-thirty,’ she observed.

‘Yeah,’ Roger agreed. ‘It’s a bitch out.’

Dolly raised an eyebrow at him. ‘You’ve been out.’

‘ Good deduction.’ He held out his right hand, palm up. The box balanced there precariously.

Dolly stopped still, staring at the box. The uneasiness she had felt almost automatically hearing him say
it’s a bitch out
burst into black fear, like the ink out of an octopus. Roger grinned at her as if he was trying out for village idiot.

‘You’re going to love this.’ He advanced on her, pressing the box on her.

She drew back. ‘You haven’t done anything stupid. Have you?’

His face creased with rejection but she didn’t notice. She answered the question herself.

‘There’s nothing open this early. You couldn’t have.’

Relaxing visibly, she extended her hand to accept the box. It would be flowers, or a bagel, or some other little curiosity.

He presented it to her and withdrew a little ways, clasping his hands behind him and watching her. She opened the box with the air of a woman receiving a corsage, aware of an honor, but prepared to find something to which she was allergic. Then her eyes widened, the color drained from her face, her nostrils fluttered. She closed the box carefully and put it down quickly, on the nearest table.

Roger watched her fighting for control, uncertain if she was angry or so ecstatic that she had no means to express herself or was just too surprised to speak. She opened her mouth a couple of times, as if to say something, or as if to take in air before the water closed over her head, and her hands shook so that she thrust them hastily into the pockets of the gray silk wrapper. She turned away from him, slunk away to the window, and muttered at the glass.

Uneasy, Roger approached her.

‘What?’ he said.

She turned to him, her back straight and her eyes flashing. ‘You goddamn idiot,’ she hissed.

Roger blinked. He backed away and sat down on the sofa, clasping his own hands for comfort between his knees. He was too stunned to think.

‘You goddamn fucking
genius
idiot,’ she said.

He looked up blindly at the sound of her voice and caught his breath in a sob of relief.

She had taken command of herself and him. Her face was serene and smiling.

‘Got a butt on you, kid?’ she asked.

Roger wanted to jump up and shout. But he was a man of the world now. So he found her cigarettes and matches and presented them to her with a glowing smile.

‘We’ve got to get the hell out of here,’ she continued. ‘Let’s go home.’

‘Whatever you want,’ he agreed.

She took one of his hands in hers. ‘You’re a madman, I think. And I’m crazier than you are. But I’d rather be crazy than not,

right?’

‘Right.’ And he felt like a butterfly that had escaped some predatory enemy. He still had his wings, and the sun still shone.

8

It was
Lucy who informed Nick Weiler of Leyna Shaw’s disappearance. She called him at the Dalton after hearing it on the noontime radio news. It was a brief conversation, a hasty exchange of facts and plans to see one another, and then Lucy had gone off to make lunch for her family. Nick had bulled through the work on his desk before leaving at a run for lunch with an important donor and an influential senator.

Late in the afternoon, on the way home, Nick heard a repeated radio news item that brought the incident to the forefront of his thoughts. In the wake of his reconciliation with Lucy, the press of work at the Dalton, and planning a trip to England to visit his mother, it was like finding a missing lucky coin in a bank vault. It grabbed at him, puzzled him, troubled him, made him feel aimlessly guilty, and was more than he wanted to think about. He wanted to think about Lucy and very little else, and there was too goddamn much going on.

Entering the cool silence of his co-op apartment, he was greeted by the pair of ancient and oversize tomcats who had been his closest companions for an inordinate number of years. First of all, he fed them, and was dismissed from their attention immediately, as always. He stayed to watch them chow down. What came unsummoned to his mind, idling in the kitchen, was the way Dolly had looked the night of the Founders’ Day Gala at the museum when Leyna had used her private childhood nickname in a way calculated to dismiss the passion of Dolly’s middle age, her dollhouse, as childish. And Dolly was in town. But it was ridiculous.

Very likely Leyna Shaw had been kidnapped for money or political reasons. If her enemies had played any part in her vanishing, and it wasn’t just a terrorist spasm, there were dozens of others who had more compelling reasons for hating her and harming her than did Dolly. It was just that Dolly was as good at hating as her old man had been and had no softness in her that he knew. Still, he had no personal fear, so why should he think of her continually as potentially dangerous? Because she had tried to hurt him through Lucy?

He shook himself free of the whole sticky web of speculation. It was a dead end. He was going to shower off the sweat of the day and trim his beard carefully and take Lucy out to a quiet restaurant to hold hands. It was rotten to have the shadow of whatever tragedy had befallen Leyna hanging over them. But he was just selfish enough to want to cherish what he had almost lost entirely.

The following day helieard from his FBI contact that Dolly had returned to Manhattan with the Doll’s White House and her odd friend in tow. The FBI had searched the crated furnishings and dollhouse before the disappearance of Leyna Shaw. They were satisfied that Leyna had not been spirited out of the city disguised as a box of dollhouse furniture. There were many other possibilities to follow up, including suicide and French leave. For the FBI, it was destined to become an open file.

For Nick Weiler, it remained for a long time a nagging doubt, an unsettled question, buried under more engaging, urgent explorations.

A week later, he went to England. He tried to go at least once every three months, for at least a week. Sometimes, museum business took him there irregularly, and he was able to look in on his mother. This time, he could spare only three days. He went feeling guilty.

At ten in the morning, Lady Maggie was at the high point of her day, well rested, breakfasted, bathed, dressed, made up, and bejeweled, and entertaining her only kitten in the splendor of her morning room. Nick, feeling and looking more like a raffish tomcat after a night out than somebody’s kitten, lazed on an old-fashioned chaise.

His mother had her nurse pour a restorative cup of tea for him while she sat enthroned in her favorite William and Mary chair. Her expression was calm and serene but her hands trembled occasionally, showing him clearly that she was pleased and excited by his presence. Her happiness weighed on him, making the physical hangover of the long flight from one time zone to another more miserable. His mother might be queenly, in her Lalique necklace and earrings, but she was just another lonely old woman ind
that
was his fault.

When she had imparted the news of her own ever-shrinking circle, the bits and pieces of gossip she had hoarded over the past weeks to tell him in person, and they were at ease with each other i jain. she let him sip his tea in peace awhile and let the sun from the high old windows warm her.

’So how are things with you, dear?’ she asked, at last.

He smiled a secret smile. ‘Good enough, Mother.’

She looked at him critically. ‘Despite your best efforts, that last letter seemed very depressed. You aren’t conning me, are you?’ I'm seeing Lucy again,’ he admitted.

She clapped her hands together. ‘Oh, good.’

Would you like to come to Washington? I’d be pleased to have

■ ou, if you’d fancy it. You’d meet her then. If not, I’ll persuade her to come here.’

I’m afraid not,’ she laughed. ‘It’s too much for me now. I have r.ad to accept some limitations, you know.’

Nick knew. She looked very fragile, much frailer than the last rime he had seen her, three months ago. The heavy necklace >c e med to bite into her scant flesh; he thought it must be painful to - ear. But she always did, on important occasions, had for years. It glinted and flashed in the light, paled by the sun but still elegant, rarbaric, cruel.

Well, I’m relieved,’ she said. ‘I had great hopes for that connection. It was very distressing to think you’d flubbed it.’ N'ick laughed. ‘I really think the lady was more scared than angry.’

‘Of you?’ His mother’s eyebrows arched. ‘My Nickles, the ladies’ terror?’

‘Not anymore.’

‘I’m glad of that. too. I don’t know where you got the idea that making love to anyone that asked you was the only polite thing to do. Not from your father. I’m quite certain, and not,’ Lady Maggie insisted, ‘from me.’

Was that what it was, he wondered, an excess of manners? He could no longer remember any one woman, only their several parts: this woman’s shoulder, that one’s breast, another’s neck, a small greedy hand weighted with rings, including a wedding band. ‘Perhaps it was Weiler?’ his mother speculated.

Perhaps it was, but he kept that thought to himself as well. Perhaps it was old Blaise Weiler’s sweet inoffensiveness that had been his chief inheritance from his stepfather, and not the fortune Blaise had gone so far as to leave to Nick, a rogue’s bastard borne by the old man’s wife. Appropriately, Nick had accepted the inheritance only because he didn’t have it in him to offend the man’s memory. He had placed it in trust, to pass on to his children, if he ever had any, along with his stepfather’s name, not that of his natural father. Lucy’s children, he thought, I’d like that.

He reclined in the thin summer warmth of England and savored the moment. I’ll remember this, he told himself, and marked the pale, cream, silk-skinned walls, the portrait of his mother and himself as a child, painted by his father, the only picture on the walls, the delicate antique furnishings, the silver Georgian teapot, the sun-warmed air, fragrant with the smell of tea and his mother’s perfume, the clear sweetness of roses.

‘Now tell me, darling, whatever did you do to offend that lovely young woman?’

She was perhaps the only person he could tell who would not judge him, not because she was his mother, but because she was Maggie.

‘Do you remember the journalist I introduced you to a year or so ago, when I was here for the settlement of the Wilkins estate?’ His mother nodded. ‘Striking woman, if rather hard. It’s very sad, the kidnapping or whatever it is, isn’t it?’

‘Yes. Well, I . . . embarrassed Lucy over her.’

The old woman was silent, letting him condemn himself. He struggled on, just as if he were confessing to some mischief at school.

‘I was in the wrong. I nearly lost Lucy. But it brought me to my senses. I realized what I did want.’

However did she find out?’ The criticism was unspoken but he heard it nonetheless.
The least I would expect of my son is

discretion.

Why? He might have asked bitterly but he didn’t have to, because he was her son.

•Dolly.’

‘Dorothy Hardesty?’

And Leyna herself, I think. Apparently Dolly was feeling

meddlesome.’

‘You have been rather naughty too often,’ his mother chided amiably. ‘I don’t suppose you had the sense to avoid
her
clutches. ’ ‘No, I didn’t have the sense, and no, I didn’t miss her clutches, as you so colorfully put it. She knew everything because she knows everybody, has an uncannily filthy mind, and I was stupid enough to fall under her spell, though not for long, small blessing.’ ‘Silly . And your Lucy didn’t understand, did she?’

‘No. She’s rather vulnerable. Tries to be tough on herself and it spills over onto other people.’

'Just what you need.’

‘Someone to keep me in line.’

They laughed together happily.

‘Ah, well, you worked it put. She came round.’

‘Yes.’

That’s good. You know, I’d be very happy if you married before I die.’ She held up one hand to still any protest, though Nick had none to make.

I know I shouldn’t say that but I’ve done it, haven’t I? I love you and I’ve let you make your own mistakes. Perhaps I shouldn’t have.

‘You’re not a bad boy. Too pretty for your own good, for sure, and rather careless for fear of being thought cowardly. That’s what happened to your painting. You couldn’t let yourself care about it for fear it might become too important. You might start rutting your daubs before people. And then, you couldn’t help seeing most people aren’t worth a daub, are they?’

He couldn’t dismiss it. She had him, as always.

'My fault. Your father’s. I wish we’d been better people.’ Suddenly she was tired, her eyes glittering with tears.

He was too. He rang for her nurse and packed her off to bed for ^ rest, admonishing her to save her strength for a riotous dinner