Vienna (33 page)

I think I see the pattern. This one sounds like real trouble. You're going to need plenty of legal advice before this thing is over. And my first advice is that you should rent a very fast car with no top and get the hell out of L.A.

Sweaty anxiety crawled inside her. Get the hell out. It made her not want to tell Justine anything. And Thompson kept talking.

This blows my weekend, because naturally I'll have to go with you—and we'll have to arm ourselves.

 

25

Vienna

Adelina had modified Justine's reservations at Hotel Sacher Wien to accommodate Vienna. She'd also arranged for airport pick-up via a larger than normal limo. Justine couldn't decide if the car was supposed to be a publicity boost, or one of Adelina's arcane social comments. Vienna loved it; spying through tinted windows. “Look! That woman walks funny.”

How quickly celebrity makes us assholes.

Justine stopped the limo six blocks from the hotel; shooed Vienna out in front of her.

She realized her mistake even as the hulking car pulled away to deliver their luggage. In the face of what should have been a constant reminder, she'd forgotten the city's murky temper.

Paris and New York and even Rome, in the end, had been bridled by fast food and case-lots of cheap jewelry. They were denizens of the flat earth, anchored to stale shoals of brand names and the bland expectations of tourists. But Vienna remained separate.

The glittering display cases were here, clotted inside the tourist-rich vein linking St. Stephens to the Staatsoper, but they never coalesced into anything beyond shades of glass and light. Step into a narrow side street after sunset and a thread of hoary magic remained. Wagner breathing from the stones. Echoes of empires fallen to darkness. Goths and Vandals and Magyars and Franks.

Justine lifted her gaze to a dark strand of green to the west. The trees of the Wienerwald pushing tight against the city. She imagined a scream cut off by a single shot. Prince Rudolph under the trees, his lover already dead, his gilded world soon to follow. Powerless to do anything beyond pen an epitaph for a dying age.
You are now rid of my presence and annoyance.

The forest seemed to lean over the city. A serrated loop of history cut free by the Star of Memphis. She saw Vienna, somehow already dead under arched branches. Tangled hair across fallen leaves, tawny eyes empty.

For a breathless second, she couldn't look. “You okay, Vienna?”

“Yes.” Vienna stuttered her stride to make certain she stepped on each crack in the sidewalk. Justine heard her counting under her breath. “One-one, two-one, four-two, eight-three, sixteen-five, thirty-two-eight…”

The nightmare vision twisted through Vienna's compulsive counting, spreading to places that were nothing more than dates on the BlackBerry's calendar: the Hot Dragon promo in Thailand and the accessories show in Madrid.
I see her with me.
Walking under Buddhist chedis of Ayutthaya or through the Real Jardín Botánico.
I've written her into my future.
When had that happened?
I can't lose her now, not when there's so much yet to share.

“Vienna?”

The girl stopped. “Yes?”

“After Clay to Flesh is over, we have to buy you new clothes for Spain.”

The expected pause. A frown. “Vienna?”

“It has to be green for Spain.”

Justine wondered at the logic behind the proclamation, but didn't doubt it was perfectly valid. “We can do that.”

The frown deepened, and Vienna whispered to herself. Justine waited. “What if I lose my toothbrush and call to the desk and everyone finds out we're in the same room?”

“We'll just have to hope your reputation remains intact.”

A short laugh and a whisper that sounded like “Warm feet.” Vienna turned away and continued her broken-step counting.

I am in her future, too.
Justine looked beyond the city's stone ramparts, up to the watercolor overcast.
I won't sit by like Prince Rudolph did.

The blunt geometry of Hotel Sacher's interior lay in wait to ambush Vienna. But Ghost Girl was folded inside herself, not accepting input from anything as trivial as reality. She floated on small steps, passing through the warm browns and deep reds of the lobby.

Only when Emily Holt appeared around a marbled corner did the girl look up. “Hey!” Emily said, “My favorite dysfunctional couple.” She gave Justine a European cheek kiss and shot Vienna a cross-eyed look. Vienna glanced at Justine before breaking into a stifled gasp of laughter.

“What are you doing here?” Justine asked.

“Technically I'm at Moana Beach, Bora Bora, helping my brother photograph a gaggle of freakishly rich Barbies.” She paused as if considering something. “The weather is nice and the men are very tan. Altogether a great place to be.”

“And who got stuck in Austria, braving the chill breeze?”

“That would be Michael Flores. Pegged for shooting the last chapter of the much anticipated Clay to Flesh folio.”

“So I remember being told.” Something was wrong. “And your brother?”

“Never pays attention to his schedule. Anyway, he likes working with you. He goes on about catharsis, ‘strictly in the Greek context of overwhelming emotional empathy.'”

“I make him cry?”

“Or get sexually aroused. Hard to tell with men.”

Justine lowered her voice. “We need to talk.”

“Yes, we do.”

Justine's suite had a balcony overlooking Philharmoniker Strasse and the Staatsoper. “The opera house got terrible reviews when it was built,” Emily said as they sat. “One of the architects was driven to suicide.”

“Eduard van der Nüll,” Vienna said. “He hanged himself in 1868. His design was called a sunken box.” Vienna's pupils slid side-to-side as she tracked a new source. “It's an early Renaissance design, influenced by French architectural elements.” She looked at Justine. “I don't think that's important.”

Justine took her hand. “Not everything has to be important to be worth hearing.”

Vienna nodded. “The original centerpiece of the foyer was an orrery by Franz Linz. It showed the planets, covered in hammered metals to represent their ancient alchemical affiliations. Copper for Venus and iron for Mars.” Her eyes opened a fraction wider. “For Mercury—which would have required quicksilver—Linz was going to use nickel polished to high reflectivity. But it was too expensive, and the project was canceled. Linz went on to design…” Her voice trailed off in a blush.

Emily clapped. “She's amazing. I'll buy her from you. I have information to trade.”

“Deal.”

“Heather!” Vienna's voice quivered.

“Vienna, this could be important.”

“You would give me away?”

“Well, not so much ‘give.'”

Emily interrupted before Vienna could break into full storm. “Vienna, did you notice how Justine was walking with you?”

A long pause as Vienna tried to follow the shift in topics. “What do you mean?”

“She was a few inches off your shoulder. It's not the way friends walk.”

“It's not?”

“It's a particularly effective piece of body language, though we rarely notice it on a conscious level. She's telling the world that you're spoken for—that she's your lover.”

“I don't care. It was a mean joke.”

Emily shook her head. “I'll share a secret with you.”

“Okay.”

“Justine has two older brothers. She adopted a masculine form of affection display: she teases. You have to accept her quirks. Whatever your perception, there has to be trust beyond the simple parsing of words.”

Justine looked at Emily. “A bit of a psychologist, are we?”

“Master's in Applied Behavioral Analysis, Cornell. And to answer your next question, my brother needs me and I love traveling.”

“Which brings us to why you're here instead of a tropical beach,” Justine said.

“Sometimes my insomnia and I look through my brother's e-folios late at night. Would you like to know what his pictures show?”

“I would.”

“A brown-haired man with dark sunglasses mirroring the world. He was at our departure gate at Heathrow as well as San Francisco International. He turned up in the background of your London photo shoot no fewer than three times.” Emily reached into her purse and pulled out five photos. All showed the same man; one photograph had him in black motorcycle boots that must have been auctioned by an '80s hair band. “You wouldn't know him, would you?”

Justine shook her head. “This is why you traded places with Flores?”

“Humans are the only animals that run toward danger instead of away from it.”

Justine exhaled softly. “Back in Brussels, I saw Sinoro snapping pictures of the crowd. I bet he was looking for this spook.”

“We'll never know. But Mr. Sunglasses was following us and all I did was talk to you.”

“Still, if he was with you, he wasn't in Iceland to kill Haldor Stefansson.”

“Already thought of that. He's nothing more than hired help, which means a good deal of money is being spent keeping track of you and your acquaintances. I would bet Sunglasses has your room number, your itinerary, and probably your room service bill by now.”

“Great.”

“There's more.” Emily gathered the photos. “The owner of the Vienna manikin is a huge fan of yours.”

“I remember James saying she wanted to meet me.”

“Like the ocean wants to meet the shore. She has every picture ever published of you, each one painstakingly cut from magazines and dry mounted in scrapbooks.”

“How do you know this?”

“I spent three hours yesterday talking to her. She's an ex-pat, San Diego born and raised. Heiress to a fortune made in organic produce. She moved to Vienna seventeen years ago, after her husband died. The core of her Justine Am obsession dates to when she put her daughter up for adoption. She thinks you're her.”

Justine closed her eyes. “Can this get any better?”

Emily brushed it aside with a backhand wave of her hand. “Her condition is more deserving of pity than anything. But she refuses to let anyone other than you have access to the manikin. She's wealthy enough to make it stick. I counted five video cameras panning her estate and I'm no security expert. I doubt she'll share Haldor Stefanssons's fate.”

“Doesn't sound like it,” Justine said. “When I offered to quit back in Brussels, Igor Czasky doubled my pay. He needed me to gain access to the last manikin. Vienna guessed it was something like that from the very start.”

“Where might Czasky be found these days?”

“Kvaisi. As long as he avoids the Georgian political mess—he's wealthy enough to—he's out of reach.”

“Still, he must have connections here. You suspect Lord Davy?”

“Davy is of the right social strata, he has plenty of money, and he was in contact with my dear departed boyfriend.”

The sky went acrylic purple, releasing a flurry of cold rain. Vienna ran inside. Emily tilted her head a fraction of an inch, silently asking Justine to remain. Justine opened the parasol in the center of the table.

“Do you remember the ‘JD' initials in Sinoro's notebook?” Emily asked. “Julian Dardonelle. A talented and recently deceased sculptor, coincidently seen talking to Vienna after you left her apartment.”

“You possess a great deal of information.”
An impossible amount.
Was Emily part of this?

“One of Vienna's Lower Town neighbors was a sour old widower. He keeps a diary of suspicious characters—meaning everyone. It describes Julian spot on. Dardonelle handed Vienna a piece of paper, which she threw away the moment he was gone. The police would very much like to know what was on said paper, but Vienna is being protected from high up. No warrants have been issued.”

“Emily, how do you know all this?”

“I'm sleeping with a Scotland Yard detective.”

“And here I was assembling Machiavellian plots. At least that solves the mystery of your access to Sinoro's police file, as well as his cryptic doodles. I won't ask how this romance came to be.”

“It's no secret. He has a tight ass and abs like sand ripples on the bottom of a fast stream.”

“Cheers to that.”

“My turn to ask about your love life.”

Justine smiled despite herself. “I guess you'd have to say she has a tight ass, too.”

“So I imagine. And in bed?”

Justine crossed her eyes, sending Emily into a fit of laughter. “Sorry about that,” Emily said. “A photo I showed Vienna from your London shoot. You were looking at something that almost caused your eyes to cross—probably a fly or bee buzzing too close. You see that sort of thing more often than you'd think when you look at hundreds of pictures. Still, here was the beautiful Justine Am caught looking like a dork.”

“You made her laugh,” Justine said,”which is no mean feat. I've seen plenty of embarrassing rejects. It happens.”

“Not to high-end fashion models it doesn't, at least not that most will admit.”

“Ex-fashion model.”

“You've decided to quit after all?”

Justine slid her fingers over the table. “It's just so … I mean, where can we go from here? Lipstick lesbians are two girls faking it on the couch for the next line of coke.”

Emily leaned back. “She's left a hole in your confidence, if nothing else. My brother spotted that. He says your new vulnerability makes you more beautiful. You marginally topped his A-list a few weeks ago; now he thinks you're miles above everyone else.”

“Small price for sleepless nights.”

Emily shook her head. “You know George and I had an older sister? Married for three years before black eyes and bruised arms starting showing up. A year after that, she smashed her kitchen window and jammed a shard of glass in her neck. Scored a direct hit on the trachea.” Emily took a deep breath. “You can't always choose where your love falls. You made out all right.”