Meet Me in Venice (2 page)

‘“Twenty years later,” she said, “the revolutionary troops dynamited the entrance to Cixi’s burial chamber. The soldiers stripped the temples, looted all the treasures and opened Cixi’s coffin. They ripped off her Imperial robes and stole the crown from her head. Then they threw her naked corpse onto the muddy ground.”

Lily paused and the man’s stunned eyes met hers, waiting for what she would say next. “The body was said to be intact,” she said softly. “And from her mouth, they stole that single, massive, rare pearl. A moonbeam of light and cool as death itself.”

The man lowered his eyes to the photograph and she smiled; she knew she had his interest now.

“Yes,” she said softly, “it’s the very same one. There was, it has been said, a second pearl, this one taken from the Empress’s crown. It’s rumored that the second pearl came into the possession
of Premier Chiang Kai-shek and ended up as an ornament, along with another fine pearl, on the party shoes of his wife, the famous Soong Mai-ling. The rest of the jewels disappeared into obscurity and into hidden collections.”

She paused again, making him wait. “Until suddenly,” she said, “sixty or so years ago, a necklace surfaced, embedded with emeralds and rubies, diamonds and jade, all said to be from Cixi’s tomb. And at its center was the famous pearl.”

Smiling, she saw him take a deep breath. Then he said, “And you are telling me you have this necklace with the pearl in your possession?”

She lowered her eyes. “Let us just say I know where to lay my hands on it.” Lily understood that he knew the existence of the necklace must be kept secret, that if the authorities found out about it she would certainly be in danger.

“And the price?”

“As always, that is open to discussion. Obviously it will not be cheap. And there is, of course, always a premium on a history and provenance as sinister as this one. Many men would enjoy handling the pearl from the mouth of the dead Empress, a woman who was once a famous concubine. It would give them a special thrill, I think.” She smiled at the man, gathering up her handbag. “I’m sure we can do business together,” she said, offering him her hand.

The little birds trilled joyously as she left.

PARIS

S
IX
thousand miles away, Lily’s cousin, Precious Rafferty, was sitting in a crowded café near the rue de Buci on Paris’s Left Bank. It was ten o’clock on a rainy Saturday morning. She was sipping her café crème and nibbling on a slab of toasted baguette, watching the shoppers at the bustling street market putting up their umbrellas and walking a little faster past the piled displays of fruits and vegetables and the fragrant herbs and cheeses.

The shoppers were beginning to thin out; a rainy Saturday was not good for business, though fortunately her own store, Rafferty Antiques, did not depend on passersby for trade.

She finished her coffee and waved goodbye to the waiter who knew her well because she was a local and had been breakfasting there every day for years, then pushed her way out through the
crowded tables. She stood for a while under the awning, wrapping her blue scarf over her hair to protect it from the rain, looking at the young couple sitting at a table, braving the elements. They were holding hands and gazing lovingly at each other. She guessed they were tourists, probably honeymooners, and she thought wistfully how happy they looked.

How, she wondered, did you go about finding that kind of happiness? Where did it come from? Was there some invisible element floating in the air that you caught hold of, unknowing, and suddenly there you were, in love and blissfully happy? A couple instead of one. Whatever it was she certainly hadn’t found it yet.

Stopping at the patisserie for a raspberry napoleon to get her through the morning, she hurried back through the rain, turning onto the rue Jacob where she lived over her antiques store.

Preshy had run the business for fifteen years, ever since her grandfather Hennessy died, but it still gave her a thrill to see
“Rafferty Antiques”
written in flowing gilt script across the window. She stopped to peer inside, imagining herself a customer, seeing the once-red walls, faded over the years to a soft fuchsia, and admiring the shell-shaped alabaster sconces that added a muted glow.

The narrow room was crammed with antique pieces, bathed in a gentle aura from the special overhead lighting. There was a lovely marble head of a boy with the tight curls of youth; a small Etruscan bowl that was probably a later copy, and a life-sized marble of Aphrodite, emerging from the sea, her delicate hand outstretched.

Next to the store, tall wooden gates led into one of those charming secretive Parisian courtyards centered with an old
paulownia tree, which in spring was covered in showy flowers that dropped their white petals onto the gray cobbles.

Preshy’s grandfather Arthur Hennessy, who’d fought with the U.S. Army in France and fallen in love with Paris, had discovered the apartment in the secret courtyard. He’d bought it for a song and opened his antiques store specializing in artifacts from Italy and the Balkans that were easy to come by right after the conflict.

When she was six, Preshy’s parents were killed in a plane crash en route to a writers’ conference in a snowstorm. Her grandmother had also died young, so Grandfather Hennessy sent her Austrian aunt to San Francisco to bring her back to Paris. And it was Aunt Grizelda, the Countess von Hoffenberg, a woman of the world, eccentric, glamorous, childless and seductive, and with absolutely no clue as to the proper etiquette of child rearing. who’d brought Preshy up.

Having a small child around certainly didn’t cramp Grizelda’s style though. She simply hired a French governess and hauled Preshy everywhere with her, upping stakes every few months and moving her from the von Hoffenberg castle in the mountains near Salzburg, to her permanent suite at the Carlyle in New York, or the one at Paris’s Ritz Hotel. In fact Preshy became a sort of international Eloise, familiar with doormen, housekeepers and waiters and spoiled by maître d’s and hotel managers.

She adored Aunt Grizelda, and she also loved her grandfather, who finally became interested in her when she was old enough to attend college in Boston and visit him in Paris where she learned about the antiques trade.

Confident that she would do well, her grandfather willed her the store and the apartment over it. But within a few weeks of his death, Preshy discovered that the business was in chaos. He had let things slip in his old age and there was only the stock—and not much of that—and very little money. Gradually, with hard work and dedication, she had revamped it. She wasn’t making a fortune yet, and most of what came in went out immediately, reinvested in new stock. Still, she was making a living and she was optimistic for better things to come.

Meanwhile, she suddenly seemed to have reached the age of thirty-eight without ever committing to a serious relationship. Oh sure, there had been love affairs and even a couple of men she’d thought exciting, or romantic, for a while, but somehow none of them had worked out.

“You’re too picky,” Aunt Grizelda complained as yet another suitor bit the dust, but Preshy just laughed. Inside though, she was beginning to wonder if she would ever meet someone she really
liked.
Someone she enjoyed and could laugh with. Someone who would sweep her off her feet. She thought it very unlikely.

There was nothing wrong with her. She was a tall, lanky, attractive woman with a cloud of curly copper-blond hair that frizzed horribly in the rain, her mother’s jutting cheekbones and the wide Hennessy mouth. She didn’t care much about clothes, something that drove her clotheshorse aunt crazy, but she thought she dressed reasonably well when she had to, relying on that old standby, the little black dress. But day to day it was jeans and white T-shirts.

She was educated and charming; she enjoyed good food and
was particular about her wine. She went to the latest movies and to gallery openings, concerts and the theater with her friends. In fact she enjoyed life, but she thought sadly, she might enjoy it more if she ever found a soul mate.

She let herself into the courtyard and climbed the steps to the sixteenth-century stone apartment “over the shop.” Her home was a cozy refuge in winter, and in summer, with the tall windows flung open to the breeze, it was a cool city space filled with sunlight and the sound of the birds nesting in the paulownia tree.

The phone was ringing and she galloped across the room and grabbed it with a breathy “Hello.”

“Hi, sweets, it’s me.”

Her best friend Daria’s loud Boston twang bounced in her ear and she held the phone away with an exasperated frown.

“Isn’t it a bit early for you to be calling?” she asked, trying to calculate the time difference.

“Yeah, well Super-Kid’s been up all night. Presh, what are you supposed to do when your three-year-old has bad dreams? Take her to a shrink?”

Preshy laughed. “Stop feeding her soft drinks and candy, I’d think. Anyway, it’s a cheaper solution than a shrink. And besides, I don’t think she has enough vocabulary yet to talk to a psychiatrist.”

She was grinning as she said it, joking around as they always did. Daria’s three-year-old’s name was Lauren, but she’d always been known as Super-Kid, and she was Preshy’s goddaughter.
Daria was married to a physics professor, Tom, and she was always on to Preshy about finding “the right one.” Today was no exception.

“So, it’s Saturday,” Daria began. “What are you going to do tonight?”

“Oh, you know, Daria, I’m tired. It’s been a long week. I drove over to Brussels for the antiques fair there, and then when I got back my assistant went down with the flu—though personally I’m inclined to believe it’s a ‘man’ kind of flu.”

“Hmm, pity it wasn’t you,” Daria said smartly. “You could use a bit of a ‘man-flu’ yourself, Presh. I mean, how can a gal who looks like you, who is . . . well who is
you,
be staying home alone on Saturday night in Paris?”

“Because I want to, Daria. There’s a gallery opening I could go to, right down the street, but I simply can’t be bothered with the white wine and chatting with the artist, and besides I don’t like his work. And I’m too tired for a movie.”

“You’ve got to get a life, Presh,” Daria said sternly. “Remember, we only get to go around once. Why not come on over here and let me introduce you to some nice tenured professor? You’d make an ideal academic’s wife.”

“Me?
Oh yeah, sure. And he’d live in Boston and I’d live in Paris. Makes for a great marriage, huh?”

“Then have Sylvie set you up with someone.”

Sylvie was their other “best friend.” She was French, a chef who’d opened her own successful bistrot, Verlaine, a couple of years ago, and who was also so caught up in her work she had no time to meet men.

“Sylvie only knows other chefs, and with their hours who needs that? ‘ Preshy replied. “Anyhow, did you ever stop to think I might be quite happy just as I am? I don’t want any changes; I don’t have time for them. I have my life, I go out when I want . . .”

“With, whom?”
Daria said, leaving her no loopholes, but Preshy just laughed.

“I mean it, sweets,” Daria said with an exasperated sigh, “just leave the shop in charge of the ‘man-flu’ assistant for a week and come on over here. I promise we’ll show you a good time.”

Preshy said she’d think about it and they chatted for a while longer. When she rang off, she went to the shelf and looked at the silver-framed photo of the three best friends, aged eighteen.

Daria was in the middle, her long straight blond hair floating on the sea breeze, long slim legs firmly planted, steady blue eyes smiling as usual. Preppie personified in shorts and a polo shirt.

Sylvie was on the left, with a glossy black gamine haircut and solemn dark eyes, plump even then because she was working that summer in a local restaurant and was always tasting the food “to make sure it was okay.”

Preshy was on the right, taller than the others and skinny with it, her gold hair frizzing into a halo in the humid sea air, green-blue eyes sparkling with fun, her wide mouth open in a laugh. None of them could be called great beauties but they were young and attractive and vividly alive.

As girls, the three of them had spent summer weeks at Daria’s family’s tumbledown gray shingled cottage on Cape Cod, idling away the hours that seemed to stretch pleasantly into infinity, lathering on the sun lotion and lying full-out, intent on getting that
enviable bronze tan. They would take long walks down the beach, flirting with the college boys they met along the way, meeting up with them again as the sun went down for beer and cheese dip on the brittle peeling wooden deck. Then disco dancing as the moon came up, windswept and happy with the testosterone-high boys and themselves, sexy in short shorts and tank tops, displaying their tans.

Preshy had met Sylvie at one of the schools she occasionally attended whenever she was in Paris, and later, when she met Daria at school in Boston, she had brought Sylvie there with her because she just knew the three of them would get on. They had been best friends ever since. There was nothing they didn’t know about each other and she loved them like sisters.

Overwhelmed with sudden nostalgia for the past when they had all been so carefree, so young, with all the world and the future beckoning them on to new lives, Preshy wondered if, after all, she had made the wrong choices. But that past was gone and now all she had to look forward was becoming a successful career woman. Marriage and babies were definitely not in her stars.

Telling herself not to be so foolish and sentimental, she put the photo back on the shelf next to the one of Grandfather Hennessy and his pretty blond Austrian bride. It was taken on their wedding day and the bride was wearing a bizarre necklace of what looked to be diamonds and emeralds with a robin’s egg—sized pearl in the center. It seemed a strange piece of jewelry for a young bride to wear with her simple traditional dress, but Preshy had never seen the real thing. The necklace had not turned up amongst Grandfather’s possessions, and it seemed to have simply disappeared.