Masquerade (30 page)

"I'll remember," Remy said, and followed her out of the room.

Outside the sun was bright and warm, the weather atypical of the gray and damp dreariness of a New Orleans February. Yet Remy couldn't bring herself to appreciate it.

At the corner, while she waited for one of the city's many mule-drawn carriages to roll by, she looked back over her shoulder at the museum that had been another dead end in her search, her glance falling on the entrance just as the man with the grizzled beard emerged in some haste, stopping to quickly scan the street. Guessing that someone had failed to meet him as planned, Remy briefly empathized with his anxiety and frustration. She felt those things too, only in her case they were colored with discouragement as she crossed to the other side of the street.

She was beginning to doubt this feeling she'd had that she was desperately needed somewhere. It didn't appear that she was
needed
anywhere. And she was beginning to suspect that this inner compulsion was really only a desire to give meaning to her life. It made sense—a good deal of sense.

Yet there was that man in Nice, the one she'd been struggling with. Why? Over what? Who was he? The description from the witnesses was so vague that it could have fit almost anyone—including the bearded man.

Remy sighed and a second later realized how fast she was walking. She slowed her steps and looked around to get her bearings. She was on St. Ann. She glanced at the old buildings, noting the smooth plaster covering on them, chipped here and there to reveal powdery red brick beneath. Cars were parked along the curb, lining one whole side and turning the narrow thoroughfare into a oneway street. As she neared a pair of tall wooden gates, the entrance of an old
porte cochère,
she idly wondered if a courtyard could still be found on the other side.

Garbage cans and black plastic trash bags were piled in front of one of the scarred doors. A scruffy long-haired cat rummaged through the contents. He saw her and crouched low, as if to flee, regarding her with suspicious green eyes. Except for a patch of white at his throat, he was all black— and big, weighing at least twenty pounds. The tip of his left ear had been chewed off, and Remy guessed that his long hair hid even more scars.

She started to smile, then stopped, realizing, "You're Tom, aren't you? You're Cole's cat."

When she took a step toward him, the cat flattened his ears and showed his fangs in a silent hiss, then lashed the air with his tail and bounded to the top of a metal garbage can. Stunned, Remy watched as the black cat hurled himself at the old wooden carriage gates and clawed his way over the top with an alacrity a boot-camp trainee would have envied.

Was he really Cole's cat? Cole lived in the Quarter, didn't he? She was almost certain he'd told her that. And she had a vague memory that his apartment was located somewhere on St. Ann. She looked again at the old carriage doors the cat had disappeared behind. Was this the building?

A few feet away, a recessed doorway marked the entrance to it. Remy hesitated momentarily, then walked over to it and pushed it open. A wide cool hall stretched away from the door. French doors, their glass panes grilled and barred for security, stood at the opposite end. On her right, a curved staircase led to the second floor.

When she stepped into the hall, she noticed the row of mailboxes. Pausing, she stared at the first one, the one marked 1 A, the one with the smudged lettering that read C. BUCHANAN. Remy hesitated again, then crossed to the side door near the end of the hall.

There was no bell, only a large brass knocker cast in the shape of a roaring lion with a heavy ring suspended from the corners of its mouth. She studied it for a long second, then reached up. Of their own volition, it seemed, her fingers slipped inside the lion's mouth—and touched a key hidden in a hollow at the back of its mouth. As she slipped the key into the lock and gave it a turn, she told herself that she wasn't really trespassing —she only wanted to see if his apartment was familiar to her, if it would spark some memory.

The well-oiled door swung silently inward. She walked in and quietly closed the door behind her. The living room was a masculine mix of heavy, solid furniture and large overstuffed sofas and chairs, rough-textured tweeds, and smooth leathers, all in deep earth tones of brown, tan, and burnt red.

In her encompassing gaze around the room, Remy noticed a framed sporting print hung at eye level on the cinnamon-glazed wall near her. The scene depicted a boxing match held amidst an unspoiled landscape, with a throng of well-dressed spectators crowded around an alfresco ring, turning it into a sea of top hats. In the center of the ring two pugilists in tight-fitting breeches, their hair neatly combed, faced each other in the old-time upright stance. She knew immediately that it was the print that had arrived that day she'd gone to his office to take him to lunch.

She swung around to look at the other framed prints on the living-room walls. There was a foxhunting scene hanging above the heavy-beamed mantel, the scarlet red of the riders' jackets against the gleaming coats of their mounts catching her eye. And near the hallway on her right was a Currier and Ives print of a harness race.

The hallway. It led to the bedroom. Suddenly, in her mind's eye, she could see the golden gleam of brass accents on the lustrous black iron bed, the mixed blue of the striped spread, the clutter of men's things on the dresser—and Cole lying on the bed, cushioned by propping blue pillows, bare to the waist, the coverlet down around his hips.

Abruptly she turned from that image and found herself facing the far door in the living room. What was behind it? She couldn't remember. Curious, Remy walked over and gave the door a push, then swung it open wider to see more of the kitchen, with its heart-of-pine cupboards, beamed ceiling, and gleaming array of copper pots. Tucked in a corner of it was a small dining alcove with windows facing the courtyard without.

More images came to her—vague at first, then sharpening with clarity. Cole standing at the stove stirring something in a copper pot, steam rising from it, a towel wrapped around his waist. Then she was there, moving to his side, offering him some morsel and ordering, "Taste."

Obediently Cole lowered his head and let her feed it to him. "Mmmmm, good," he said, with a faint trace of surprise and a quick licking of his lips to savor every bit of it. Then, still stirring the pot with a long wooden spoon, he arched his arm and let her duck beneath it to fit herself to his side.

"I told you I knew my way around a kitchen," she chided.

"Know something else?" he said, dropping a playful kiss on the tip of her nose. "I think you know your way around the cook too."

Suddenly a noise—a scraping of metal, a click, something—shattered the image. Remy swung away from the kitchen, letting the door shut on it as the front door opened. A pulsebeat later, Cole filled the doorway, his suit jacket slung over his shoulder, his shirt unbuttoned at the throat, his tie draped loose around his neck. He saw her and stopped, still holding the door open, the key still in the lock. A sudden brightness leapt into his gray eyes, erasing the tired, drawn look. Just as quickly, it was shuttered again.

"What are you doing here?" The tightness in his low voice gave it a husky quality.

"Tom was outside. I recognized him." She felt his tension—her tension. "Then I found the key in the lion's mouth."

"I always left it there for you. You used to come here and wait for me to get home from the office." He stopped, a muscle working convulsively in his jaw. "You don't know how many times these last couple of weeks I've wanted to see you waiting for me when I walked through this door."

There was a rawness in his look and his expression, an ache that suddenly made him appear . . . vulnerable as he stood there, holding himself so stiffly, so rigidly.

"What was it like between us, Cole?" Remy took a step toward him, then halted, realizing she needed to keep the room between them. "What did we do? We shared more than the bedroom, didn't we?"

"We did, yes." His reply was clipped, almost as if he didn't trust himself to say more.

"Tell me about us, Cole," she insisted. "I need to know. I need to remember. Did we stay here in the apartment? Did we go out? Where? What did we do?"

Turning from her, he pulled the key out of the lock and pushed the door shut. "Sometimes we stayed here and tried out our culinary skills on each other," he replied with a touch of wryness as he walked over to the leather recliner, tossing his jacket over the back of it and pulling his tie from around his neck to lay it on top. "Other times we went out for the evening and had dinner at some restaurant."

"Which one? Did we have favorites?" Remy asked, pushing for a more specific answer, not at all surprised that the evening's entertainment had consisted of no more than dinner. New Orleans was a great food town. For most natives, dining out was neither a prelude nor an acillary activity, but an event in itself—something to be not hurried but relished.

"Mr. B's, Cafe Sbisa, L'Eagles—"

"L'Eagles—that was one of your favorites," she remembered, visualizing the interior of the small, classy restaurant with its deep coral walls and European country decor. "You always claimed you liked to go there for the cold crawfish fettuccine they served, but it was really the collection of antique prints that you went there to admire."

Some of the remoteness left his expression, replaced by warmth as he conceded, "It was probably a combination of both."

"Where else did we go for dinner?"

"Every now and then we'd venture uptown and eat at the Garden Room in the Commander's Palace or else at Brigsten's. Or when we got the urge for a good po'boy or a meal of red beans and rice, we usually went to Mother's Restaurant on Poydras. And of course there was always Galatoire's."

"Where we had lunch that first time." Remy smiled.

"Yes," Cole nodded, then continued, "Other than that, some evenings we'd go to a concert. Or if someone one of us wanted to see was playing at the Blue Room, we'd go there. Other nights we'd wander down to Preservation Hall and listen to them jam." He looked at her, a faint smile slanting the line of his mouth. "After the first time you heard the wail of Kid Sheik's trumpet, you became a die-hard jazz fan."

Preservation Hall—that aging and tattered building with its doors thrown open on most nights to let the unamplified music within spill onto St. Peter and Bourbon streets. Remy could almost hear the gritty notes of the trumpet growling its song in the old club's smoky atmosphere, yet—oddly—it was Cole's face she could see, "feeling" the music, "grooving" to it, letting it speak to him, move him, lift him. As she strained to recall more, it all began to fade.

Frustrated by these near memories that were little more than impressions, Remy pressed on to something else. "What about the weekends? Did we do anything special? Go anywhere?"

His eyes were on her, a reflective quality in their gray depths. "You were always dragging me off to flea markets, hoping to find some treasure among the junk. Or if you saw a notice for an estate auction in one of the outlying parishes, we'd go to it—especially if they listed porcelains among the items."

"Did I ever buy anything?"

"Once. You discovered a Meissen vase, then felt so guilty because you'd paid only fifteen dollars for it that you gave it to a charity to be sold at their benefit auction. Actually"—he paused briefly—"it usually ended up that you did the browsing and I did the buying."

"The statue of the horse/' she said suddenly. "I remember—it was that plaster of Paris kind with glitter sprinkled over it, like the ones they used to give away at carnivals for prizes." But there was more, and the memory of it drew her closer to him. "When you were a little boy, your father took you to a carnival and won you a horse like that at one of the booths on the midway. That's why you bought it, isn't it? For sentimental reasons."

"Yes."

Seized by the feeling that she was on the verge of remembering more, she didn't let him continue. "There was something else we often did on the weekends. What was it?"

Cole frowned slightly and shrugged, as if he wasn't sure what she might be referring to. "If the weather was nasty, we'd rent some movies at the video store and watch them here."

Remy took an eager step toward him. "What kind of movies?"

"East of Eden—"

"On the Waterfront"
she remembered as another scene flashed before her.

It had been a damp and drizzly Saturday afternoon in November, the misty rain gathering on the panes of the doors to the courtyard and trickling down the glass. She and Cole had been encamped on the sofa in front of the television, reclining in each other's arms, their feet propped up on the coffee table, which was already crowded with a pair of bottles of Dixie beer and a bowl of popcorn dripping with butter.

When Cole had shifted her out of his arms to get up and change the tape, he'd given her a playful swat on her behind. She had instantly retaliated with a kick in the pants and had then bounded to her feet, assuming a fighting stance, dancing around on the balls of her feet, bobbing and weaving like a boxer and throwing jabs at Cole's arm.

"Whatsa matter, tough guy?" she taunted. "Am I too much for ya?"

She threw two more quick punches that Cole fended off with the flat of his hand, his gray eyes regarding her with open amusement. "That'll be the day, kid. You've got lousy footwork."

"Lousy, eh?" She danced back, sniffled loudly, and brushed her thumb across the end of her nose. "I'll have you know—I coulda been a contender," she declared in her best Brando imitation.

"You could have been a contender, all right— for the role of Funny Girl."

"Oh yeah?" she challenged, and she hunched her shoulders, crouching down and rubbing her thumb over her nose again, "Why do boxers do that? Do they all have runny noses, or what?"

"Wouldn't you if yours kept getting bopped all the time?" His hand snaked out and sharply tapped the tip of her nose. Grinning, he immediately caught the fist she aimed at him. "Come here, you idiot."