Meet Me in Venice (18 page)

Preshy sighed. “It doesn’t, Mimi. The fact is, no one asked me.” She heard her answering sigh.

“I give up,” Mimi said and went off to find Grizelda.

Aunt Grizelda got on the phone. “Darling, why don’t you get on a plane and come down here? I’ll throw a party for you,” she
said loudly. She always spoke loudly on a phone, never, Preshy believed, having gotten over the notion that the further the distance the louder one must speak. “I promise there are all kinds of fascinating people here at the moment.”

Yeah, and all of them sixty-five or over, Preshy thought, gloomily. She had to give Aunt G credit for trying though. She explained about the snow and the airport closing, and then she told her about Lily.

“You mean after all these years she’s just showing up?” Grizelda said, astonished. “But why?”

“I’ve no idea. All I know is that she said it was imperative she speak to me. And she had me book her into the Ritz—under my name.”

There was silence at the other end while Aunt G thought about it. “I don’t like it,” she said finally. “The woman’s after some-thing, trust me.”

“But
what,
Aunt G? I have nothing she could possibly want. The only thing we have in common is Grandfather Hennessy and that our mothers were sisters. Oh, and that we both deal in antiques, of course.”

“Hmmm, she wants
something,
Preshy, you can be sure of that. We haven’t heard a word from the Song family in fifty years and now all of a sudden your cousin’s showing up on your doorstep.”

“Actually, she’s not. Her flight was diverted to Frankfurt. I haven’t heard a word from her since her e-mail.”

“Well, I have no doubt you will. Meanwhile, why not forget about her and come on down here? I don’t like to think of you being alone on Saturday night.”

“You sound like Mimi’s echo,” Preshy said, smiling as she promised to think about it. Then she said goodbye, blowing her aunt and Mimi a special kiss.

Alone in the quiet apartment with the clock ticking and the snow still falling she was almost tempted to take her aunt up on her invitation, simply pack the cat into her carrier, fling some clothes into a duffel and just take off. But her little Smart car, which looked like a regular small car but with the back chopped off making it even smaller, though a dream for city parking was certainly not meant for long sorties down the Autoroute du Soleil to the South of France in the snow.

She prowled the apartment restlessly. It was too quiet. The cat, curled up on the back of the sofa, snuffled gently as she slept; a log slipped in the grate, sending a low blue flame spattering into the embers; and the radiators hissed into the silence. Preshy thought forlornly about the bread and the cheeses and the glass of wine awaiting her in her lonely kitchen. The hell with it, she wasn’t
that
French. She needed comfort food. She needed steak and fries.

She grabbed her bag, slashed on the new pink lipstick, ran a comb through her short hair, slung on Grandfather Hennessy’s ancient olive green sheepskin coat and thrust her feet into her old furry après-ski boots. Dropping a quick kiss on the cat’s sleeping nose, she headed out in search of food and . . . well, other people, she supposed.

FRANKFURT

L
ILY
was waiting at carousel 5 in the baggage claim at Frankfurt-Main. She tapped a French-manicured fingernail impatiently against the metal cart, searching the vast hall, half-expecting to see Bennett materialize.

She had the uneasy feeling of being followed, that someone’s eyes were on her. Her black Tumi bag slid down the ramp and she grabbed it. Then, tight as a drum with nerves, she hurried through the green customs light and into the arrivals terminal, wondering, since Paris was out, what to do next.

She looked at the departure destinations listed on a flickering screen. Many flights had been canceled. But she didn’t want to stay in Frankfurt in case she was right and she was being followed. She would have to go south where there was no snow. There was
a flight to Venice departing in an hour. It was the last place Bennett would ever think of looking for her. If she were quick, she could make it, otherwise she’d be spending a nervous night in an airport hotel.

Glancing nervously over her shoulder and pushing the luggage cart, she ran to departures. She was lucky, they had not yet closed the gate, and she was able to buy a ticket. Tension flowed out of her as the plane took off. She leaned back, eyes closed, thinking about the last few days. But she still didn’t feel safe.

At Venice’s Marco Polo Airport she called the Bauer Hotel. It was out of season and they were quiet, and she was able to get a room. She took a water taxi there, hardly noticing the beauty all around her because she was too busy watching a second water taxi she suspected was following her. But when she got out at the hotel, it went right on past, and again she breathed a sigh of relief.

Exhausted, she fell into bed. She would call Precious later and they would talk business.

She slept like a dead woman.

WITH THE UNEXPECTED DIVERSION AND
then Lily’s quick decision to take a flight to Venice, it hadn’t been easy for Mary-Lou. Still, by always keeping to the back of the line and many rows away on the aircraft, somehow she managed it.

She had followed Lily’s
motoscajo,
instructing the driver to go on past when Lily got out at the Bauer. A half hour later, she returned there, checked in and got a room on the same floor.

She called Bennett, who she found had been diverted to Lyon and told him what had happened and where they were. Then, exhausted, she lay on the bed thinking of what to do next.

Suddenly she sat bolt upright. She had forgotten about the gun. It was to have been delivered to her in Paris—and now she was in Venice. Without even taking into consideration the time difference, she called her contact in Shanghai. He warned it would cost her extra, and, as she knew, his financial dealings were always paid up front. Wire him the money, he said, and she would have the gun the next day.

Mary-Lou made the arrangements, depleting her savings even further, and then went back to bed. She was worn out and she knew she would need all her strength and all her wits, to pull off what she was about to do.

PARIS

L
A Coupole was one of the few places in Paris to remain open in the storm, and despite the bad memories it held for Preshy, it was a good place for a woman alone.

Snow blistered her windshield as she crawled nervously down the boulevard du Montparnasse, but for once parking was easy because anyone with any sense—and who wasn’t lonely—had stayed home.

The place was almost empty and she took a seat in a quiet corner, well away from where she had sat with Bennett. She ordered a half carafe of red and the
steak frites,
and was sipping the wine, wondering where Lily was and when she would contact her, when the waiter showed a man to the table next to her.

Of course he wasn’t Bennett, but nevertheless her stomach
did a few somersaults. Her eyes met the stranger’s briefly, then indifferent, he looked away.

Preshy sighed with relief. This man was no beautiful Bennett James. He was very tall and thin and wiry, brown-haired and brown-eyed behind gold-rimmed glasses, with a narrow face, a stubbled jaw and a bitter expression. She noticed he wore a wedding ring. Hah! No, no, no!
This
man was certainly not out to pick her up. He probably had a nice little wife waiting at home somewhere in, she guessed, the U.S.A. Chicago perhaps. Or Oklahoma. He probably worked for an international law firm and was here on business. The only thing that marked him as different from her analysis was that he wore jeans and a black turtleneck sweater under a leather jacket, and that he ordered oysters, Belons, and a double vodka on the rocks that he downed about as fast as she’d ever seen a man do before, then immediately signaled for a second.

Hmmm . . . a man pissed off at the world if ever she’d seen one. He then proceeded to order a fish called Saint-Pierre, one of her own favorites, thereby redeeming himself in her eyes for the glugging of the first vodka. The second was going down rather more slowly, though he’d also ordered a bottle of good Bordeaux, which was far too heavy for the fish and established him in her mind, part Frenchwoman that she was, as a philistine.

Looking around the almost-empty restaurant though, she wondered uneasily why he had chosen to sit next to her. But then she told herself she was being ridiculous; it was just a coincidence. After all it was a public place and anyone could sit anywhere they wanted. It was her newfound paranoia clicking in, that was all.

She sipped her wine, thinking gloomily of the icy drive back to the rue Jacob in her tiny Smart car, and her lonely apartment. She wondered again where Lily was. Taking out her cell phone she checked her messages. Zero. She tasted her steak and poured the last of the wine into her glass.

“Do you mind?” The stranger spoke. He was holding up a pack of Marlboros, a question in his eyes. She didn’t like it, but this was France and smoking was permitted, and she shrugged it was okay. Behind the glasses his eyes were dark, intense. And weary. And he
was
American. She pushed the straggling bangs out of her eyes, wishing she’d spent a little more time on her appearance before dashing out into the storm, then she asked where he was from.

“Charleston, South Carolina,” he said, surprising her, though now she recognized the soft slow drawl. She told him she was American and had gone to college in Boston.

He glanced indifferently at her. “I’m stuck here in Paris thanks to the weather,” he said. “No flights out—no flights in.”

“If you have to be stuck somewhere, Paris isn’t so bad.” She glowered at him from under the untidy bangs, resenting him for casting even an implied slur on her beautiful city.

“I should never have come here in the first place.”

He stared into space, sipping the good Bordeaux and smoking his cigarette, looking, she thought, like a man who couldn’t wait to get out of there. A silence had fallen between them and she returned to her fries, always a treat. She was definitely a carb addict. Except she also liked lobster and caviar, and then there was cheese of course . . . .

“Why are you so pissed off?” She asked the question in that direct way she had, wishing immediately, as she always did, that she had not said what she’d just said, because it was really none of her business.

“Why am I pissed off? Hah!” He laughed bitterly. “I just spent three hours sitting on a plane, on the runway, waiting for the wings to be deiced. Turned out there were insufficient deicers and by the time our turn came it was too late, a full-blown blizzard was blowing. I was disembarked and thrown out into the unwilling arms of Charles de Gaulle, along with thousands of other abandoned travelers—and all of them in search of a hotel room. Of course, there were none.”

Preshy’s “oh” was sympathetic.

“Someone gave me the name of a second-rate—okay let’s call it a
third-rate
—joint, where I finally got a room. If you can call it that. It’s no more than a cubicle really, with a plastic shower jutting from one corner and a cell containing a toilet and the smallest washbasin known to man.”

He paused and took a gulp of his wine, eyeing her. “Since I’m six three this only added to my torture. There was a kind of a bonus, however. Normally traffic would have been zooming past my window but thanks to the snow—and it’s the only thing I can thank the snow for—only a few cars and trucks managed to chug past. But there was no bar where I might have drowned my sorrows, no restaurant where I might have assuaged my hunger. So—here I am.” He looked at her again. “So much for fuckin’ Paris,” he muttered under his breath, but still Preshy heard him.

“Ohh,” she said again, a little nervously. “Well at least you found La Coupole,” she added, trying to brighten things up.

“I’ve been here before,” he said curtly. “I knew it was a place where you could get a solid drink, a decent bite and a bottle of good wine. I guessed it was open. If not, I was about to slit my wrists.”

She stopped in midbite, looking at him, alarmed, but to her relief he smiled.

“Sorry,” he said, “it’s been a long day. A long week.”

“Ohh,” she said again, busying herself with her steak, which was blood-rare, thin as a washboard and almost as tough, but that was the way the French liked it.

“So, what d’you do, here in Paris?” He asked the question as though it was a mystery what anyone did in Paris, besides, she supposed, the tourist concept of femmes fatales and fornication.

“I work,” she told him brusquely. “Antiques.”

His eyes swiveled her way. He seemed to take her in properly for the first time. As though she were actually a real person, she thought resentfully. But then she thought,
Hey, it’s okay, at least he’s not like Bennett.
But she wasn’t going to go there. Her Pity Days ended at midnight.

“I own Rafferty Antiques on the rue Jacob,” she said, suddenly chatty. Loneliness and the wine were getting to her; here she was picking up a total stranger again. “I deal mostly in early artifacts, Etruscan, Roman, Greek.”

“Then you must be quite knowledgeable.”

“I like to think so. I learned at my grandfather’s knee, you might say,” she added. Then, while he ate his fish, she went on to
tell him the story of Grandfather Hennessy and the family history, and about the Aunts, and about how she came to live in Paris. It must have been the wine talking, she thought, draining her glass, because she also told him the story of the Songs and the mysterious message out of the blue from Lily.

“So what d’you think she wants?” he asked, lighting up another cigarette.

Preshy said she had no idea, frowning as she wafted away the smoke. He apologized and put the cigarette out, then picked up the half-full bottle of Bordeaux, took a clean glass, poured the wine and set it before her. Sliding him an approving glance, Preshy thanked him. Crass smoker and vodka guzzler he might be but he was generous and at least he knew not to serve good wine in her used glass.