Meet Me in Venice (20 page)

It was a dark little cave of a place. The wooden door opened onto a small black-and-white-tiled foyer with a pair of swagged red velvet curtains sheltering the dining room from the drafts. Old blackened beams crisscrossed the low nicotine-yellow ceiling
and clumps of fake red roses topped tables that were covered with sheets of white butcher’s paper. Small-paned windows had red velvet pelmets and a fire blazed in a big rough-stone chimney. It smelled of roasting lamb and wine-rich gravy and was as welcome on a freezing Sunday as Santa at Christmas.

It was the kind of place where a bottle of the house red already waited on the table and to Preshy’s surprise, Sam did not send it back and request a wine list. Instead he poured it into their glasses without even tasting it first. “Remember, I’m trusting you,” he said with a smile as they clinked glasses. She watched him anxiously as he took the first sip. The responsibility was weighing heavily.

“Almost as good as the Carolina red,” he said, making her laugh.

The proprietor, small and pale and skinny and not at all a good advertisement for his food, bustled forward with the daily menu. “You must have the soup,
madame, m’sieur,”
he said. “It’s lentil with ham, very good for a cold day like this. And then I recommend the lamb, the whole leg roasted à
point,
until it’s just pink with the juices flowing. Of course it comes with
the flageolets,
the little flat green beans, and a
tian
of potatoes
forestière,
cooked with garlic, onions and mushrooms in a little stock.”

Sam’s eyes met Preshy’s. “Let’s do it,” he said and she nodded enthusiastically.

The soup was as good as the owner had promised and sent little squiggles of heat from her mouth all the way down to her toes, and even to the tips of her fingers. She could feel her cheeks growing pinker and she took off the muffler and put it on the chair next
to her bag. She looked at Sam, still with a question in her mind. “So, you know all about me,” she said. “Now, how about you?”

“What do you want to know?”

“Hmmmm . . . well, who you are.”

“You already know that.”

“No, I don’t. I know what you are, what you do. But I don’t know
who
you are.”

He gave her a withering look. “And you’re telling me I really know who
you
are, Precious Rafferty, antiques dealer with a Paris apartment and Grandfather’s coat, a cute haircut and a pair of aunts who sound like Auntie Mame in duplicate?”

Of course he was right; she hadn’t told him
who
she really was. After all, they were practically strangers. “Maybe I was getting too personal,” she admitted. “But you know where I live. Can’t you at least tell me about that house on the beach where you drank Carolina red?”

He sat back as the proprietor removed their empty soup dishes. “I’ve owned that house for ten years,” he said. “It was love at first sight and I bought it with my first royalties. It’s outside of a small village—I guess you’d call it a small town—one of those strings of little places that line the coastline. The house is kind of isolated, set back on stilts above the dunes in a patch of saw grass and sea pinks, sheltered from the wind by a shaggy border of the tamarisk trees I planted myself, and that are now ten feet tall. It’s just a gray-shingled cube, fronted with glass to catch every nuance of that ever-changing sea, and with a wraparound covered porch for long lazy summer evenings.”

He fell quiet and Preshy thought he must be feeling homesick.
“You speak like a writer,” she said. “The house is coming to life as you tell me about it.”

But when he looked at her, his eyes behind the glasses were sad. “The house is as simple inside as out,” he said. “Bleached wood-plank floors, pale rugs, a comfortable sofa or two. A giant urn filled with twisted branches stands in the fireplace in summer, and in winter, like here, the fire seduces you into sitting before it, watching the flames instead of its rival, the ocean, that you can hear pounding savagely on the sand while the wind whistles through the tops of the trees. The house is like an island,” he added softly, “my own personal island, where everything is perfect and nothing can ever go wrong.”

“And did it?” As usual, the question was out before she even thought about it. She apologized hurriedly. “Sorry, you just described it so evocatively, I felt as though I was in the middle of a story.”

“You were, though it’s not a story that will ever be written.” He refilled their glasses as the proprietor bustled back with their lamb, then returned to the kitchen and came quickly back with the steaming dish of potatoes and a sauceboat of
jus.

Looking at Sam’s wedding ring, Preshy was dying to ask about his wife, but this time she had the sense not to. If he was such a devoted husband he would have mentioned her by now.

Sam tasted the lamb. He looked up and smiled at her. He was a different man when he smiled. “This is wonderful,” he said.

“Didn’t I promise you?”

“I can see you’re a trustworthy person, Even the beans are good, and I was a kid who hated vegetables.”

“But now you’re all grown-up you’ve got more sense.”

He laughed. “Looks like it. But you know what? I forgot to ask about Lily.”

Lily’s name came at her out of the blue and Preshy was surprised to find she had also forgotten about her. “Haven’t heard a word,” she said, tasting the potatoes under their thin golden crust and smiling with delight. “I have no idea where she is. She might at least have called, Frankfurt is not exactly a million miles from here. But she was so mysterious anyway, I wouldn’t be in the least bit surprised if she never showed up. Except . . .” She thought for a moment. “No, that’s not true, I
would
be surprised if she didn’t show. She said it was urgent. That she
had
to speak to me. It was something that involved me, she said.” Preshy shrugged. “Though since we’ve never even met, how it could be anything involving me I simply don’t know.”

“It’ll be some family thing,” Sam said. “She’s probably heard you inherited Grandfather Hennessy’s coat and wants to get her hands on it.”

They laughed together, really laughed this time, clinking wineglasses again across the table.

“I’m enjoying this.” Sam glanced approvingly at the now-crowded little room. “It’s real, not at all like that big ‘Paris’ out there.”

“But that big Paris is made up of hundreds of little places like this. It’s like your Outer Banks, you have to know it to appreciate it, other than just its beauty of course. And you can’t deny that my city is beautiful.”

He stared at her across the table, taking in her flushed cheeks,
the steep slide of her cheekbones, the light eyes under the tangled golden fringe that was beginning to curl slightly in the heat. “I admit, Paris is beautiful,” he agreed.

“And when you finally get a flight to New York, will you go directly to the beach house?”

To her surprise, he lifted a dismissive shoulder and said, “I haven’t been there in years.” Then he signaled for a second bottle of wine, changing the subject abruptly to what they should order for dessert.

“There’s only one thing,” she exclaimed. “The apple tart, of course, with vanilla ice cream. I happen to know they get their ice cream from Berthillon, right here on the He St. Louis. It’s simply the best.”

They enjoyed another glass of wine and their apple tart with the best ice cream in the world, though Sam said, personally, he was a Häagen-Dazs fan, then they lingered over rich dark coffee into which he poured enough sugar, she said, to stand a spoon in.

A
while later, they shook the beaming proprietor’s hand, promising to return, then wandered out into the gray light of a chilly late afternoon. This time they didn’t linger on the cold bridge but hurried back through the maze of small streets to Preshy’s apartment.

She stopped at the courtyard door and turned to look at him. “Thank you for a lovely lunch,” she said. “It was fun.”

“Surprisingly, it was. Thanks for coming, Rafferty. You were good company.”

“Good company for a lonely man,” she said, recognizing that, in fact, that was exactly what he was. He gave her a long bleak look, then he turned and walked away.

Again, she had said the wrong thing and, feeling bad, she called
after him. “Look, you can’t just go back and spend the evening in that awful hole of a hotel. Why not come on up? We’ll have some more coffee, play some music, maybe watch a little TV. Whatever you need to pass the time in Paris until your flight.” He stood, looking at her, obviously undecided. “No obligation,” she added, giving him a winning smile, hoping he would come because she was lonely too.

He walked back to her. “Thanks,” he said.

As they crossed the courtyard the concierge emerged from her ground-floor lair. “A package came for you, Mademoiselle Rafferty,” she said. “Special courier delivery. And on a Sunday. It must be very important,” she added with a sniff. “Anyway, I told them to leave it outside your door, and naturally I signed for it.”

Surprised, Preshy thanked her. She wasn’t expecting anything, but there was the parcel, actually a crate, about three feet by two, addressed to her. There was a lot of Chinese writing on the labels and she saw it came from Song Antiquities in Shanghai.

“It must be from Lily,” she said, opening the door as Sam hoisted the crate and carried it inside.

He deposited it on the kitchen floor and Maow came running to see what it was. Crates and boxes were the cat’s specialty, new places to jump into, to curl up in, to hide. She sniffed it suspiciously, then sat back on her haunches looking expectantly at Sam, waiting for him to open it, while Preshy rummaged in a drawer and came up with a screwdriver.

“I’m dying to know what’s in it,” she said.

Sam got busy with the screwdriver while she fixed the coffee, setting out cups on a black lacquer tray, remembering he liked
sugar, pouring milk into a little jug. She went into the living room and put a match to the fire, watching the smoke curl from the blackening paper, waiting for the kindling to catch before putting on a log. She thought it was quite the little Sunday domestic scene. She heard the crate crackling under Sam’s onslaught and hurried back to the kitchen. He’d gotten it open and was removing a brown-paper-wrapped parcel.

“Oh, do hurry,” she cried, excited. “This is like Christmas.”

Sam peeled back the brown paper, uncovering yet another layer, this time a padded blanket. “Must be something special,” he said.

It was a terra-cotta figurine and Preshy saw instantly it was a fake, a direct copy of the famous ones in Xi’an, China. She ran a hand over it, seeing the telltale marks of the commercial mold it had been cast from.

“Why would Lily bother to send me something like this?” she asked, puzzled. “They sell them in tourist shops around the world. In fact I’ll bet you could even get them here on the boulevards where the North Africans sell all this kind of stuff. The expense of shipping it alone was more than it’s worth. Oh well.” She shrugged and picking it up, carried it into the living room, where she cleared a space on the shelf for it. She shoved it to the back where it didn’t look too terrible. Then, glancing along the shelf of photographs, she frowned.

“That’s odd,” she said, lifting each one and looking behind it. “Where’s Grandfather’s wedding picture? It’s always kept right here, next to Aunt Grizelda and Mimi.”

“Did it have any value?” Sam asked.

“Only to me. The frame is silver, but only my housekeeper comes in here, and she’s been with me for years. I trust her completely. Of course it’s not something I look at every day. I mean it’s just sort of . . . there. I didn’t even notice it was gone until now so I’ve no idea how long it’s been missing.” She shrugged, putting it temporarily out of her mind. “Oh well, I daresay it’ll turn up. Anyway, let’s have our coffee, shall we?”

She carried in the tray while Sam prowled her living room inspecting the works of art scattered casually around, with the cat sniffing suspiciously at his heels. When he went and sat on the sofa she jumped onto the arm, fixing him with an unblinking blue stare.

He eyed it warily. “Is it always like this?”

“You mean
her.
And her name is Maow. Remember?”

Preshy set the tray with the coffee things on the tufted leather ottoman in front of him. It was already getting dark and she drew the curtains shutting out the frigid gray sky, then poured the coffee.

“I take it you don’t like cats?” She offered him a dish of pastel-colored macaroons from Ladurée, the famous pastry shop just down the street. “Try them, they’re good, as well as world-famous. And try to be nice to Maow. She’s just not used to men.”

Sam noticed her blush when she realized she had left herself wide open to further questioning as to exactly
why
there were never any men in her apartment, but she was saved from his questions by the phone ringing.

“I’ll bet it’s Aunt Grizelda to see why I’m not already in Monte Carlo,” she said, answering it. But it was not. It was Lily.

Preshy didn’t know whether to be glad or just relieved. “Lily!”
she said. “At last.” Amazed, she added, “I was beginning to think you didn’t exist.” There was silence at the other end. “Lily?” Preshy asked, puzzled. “Are you still there?”

“Why did you say that?” Lily demanded, sounding upset.

“Say
what?”

“That I didn’t exist.”

“Well, first you didn’t show up, then you didn’t call and I’ve never even met you.” Preshy laughed. “But now you’re here so it’s okay. Now I know you
do
exist after all.”

“Precious, you don’t understand. Soon I might not
‘exist.’
I’m being followed. Somebody wants to kill me.”

“What?”
Preshy’s voice was pitched so high she could have sung soprano at the Paris Opéra, and both Sam’s and the cat’s ears pricked up. The cat stared at her while Sam pretended he wasn’t listening.

“Here kitty.” He held out a hand in an attempt at a diversion, but the cat eyed him disdainfully, then turned her head away as though she knew she was being used. “Smart cat,” he said, just as he heard Preshy say.