Кэрол Дуглас - Cat In A White Tie And Tails

“So you’ve been in Las Vegas before?”

“Don’t know,” he lied.

“As you had been in Zurich?”

“Zurich? No. That was a first.”

“As with me.” She glanced down to her glittering petite purse, slowly opened the jeweled clasp, and slipped out a slim gold compact to apply a nearly colorless gloss to her lips.

Whew, Max thought. Frenchwomen lived up to their seductive reputation, even when they were half-German.

“It’s so dry here in this climate.” She snapped the lip gloss compact shut.

Now that she’d invoked memories of their impulsive rendezvous in Europe, Max figured she found him sufficiently drugged, web-bundled, and ready for devouring. The question was whether she worked for the Real IRA or the old IRA, or some other interested international entity. Max wondered if it was necessary to play cat and mouse with her, but he supposed it would exercise his brain, if nothing else.

They ordered boutique martinis while scanning the menu.

“I hope, Miss Schneider, our necessary detours in Switzerland didn’t interfere too much with your forthcoming academic obligations here in Las Vegas.”

“No. Quite the contrary, Mr. Randolph. It was a very existential romp. Who am I? Who is he/she? Who is trying to kill us? Will we kiss or kill each other? Or both? Believe me, for a woman with a challenging but never lethal psychological practice, it was quite invigorating.”

“Exactly my response.” Max toasted her with his martini. “I’m not surprised that you’re in international demand.”

“Nor I, you.”

“I didn’t know the local university had such a prestigious psychology department,” Max observed.

“Sadly, you must have only availed yourself of the gaudier features of Las Vegas on previous visits.”

“Remedial classes are not on my schedule.”

She shrugged. “We all can improve on past performance.”

Clever. She was trying to egg him into topping himself. He recalled their previous engagement perfectly. Too bad. It had been intense, but he was pretty sure he’d been confused, haunted, and hurting more than he had ever allowed himself to be with a sane mind. More vulnerable, ugly word. She’d never believe it, but if he had it to do over again, he wouldn’t.

“I mean your memory, of course,” she said.

“Of course. I didn’t realize your work would take you to the United States.”

“Hugo, Herr Professor Gruetzmeyer, is a mentor of mine originally from—please don’t laugh—Vienna, home of Herr Freud and my father. Also, I can fly to Los Angeles easily from here to work with teen anorexia there. California is very hard on women’s self-esteem. Many female performers are on the ‘cigarette and cocaine’ diet, and of course, women young and old face the same issues.”

He should have remembered, a common thought for him nowadays, that her older sister had committed suicide because of anorexia when Revienne was only twelve or thirteen. That she had shared that personal trauma with him, at a time when he was all trauma, all the time, might explain their strangers-in-the-night connection.

Without thinking, he said, “You’re an extraordinary woman.” Even if she was an enemy.

“Why do you say that?”

“I know it’s hard to lose a sibling young.”

“You never mentioned any family.”

He shrugged. “We lost touch.”

“Over that sibling death?”

“Yes.”

“Who blamed whom?” she wondered.

He suddenly knew. “Everybody tried not to blame anybody and it went horribly wrong from there.”

They were silent as waiters danced around them, refilling, removing, replacing. The act of eating would have been an almost weightless, timeless process, except that their conversation obliterated everything, even the fountains.

“My first boyfriend,” she said, attending to whatever was on her plate, “was a radical Socialist.”

He laughed at the radical change of subject.

“I know. It’s ridiculous. So goes politics in France. I thought it was so … cool. We were in the student protests. I don’t remember over what, just the marching and singing and dodging the police. I took him for a hero, but it was all about him being a big shot, as you say.”

“So Frenchmen are really like the notorious DSK? Lord, that sounds like a rap star name. It’s true they’re into assault?”

“‘Into’?”

“An expression. Prone to.”

She made a noise of dismissal. “They are selfish and think Frenchwomen should feed their egos. Unlike in the Muslim countries; women are beaten up in the press only if you speak out against their indignities. So the women shut up and starve themselves. Simplistic, but that’s why I work with young women.”

“Gratis.”

“Gratis?”

He’d forgotten English was her third language. “You don’t take pay for that work.”

“Yes. Do you do anything gratis?”

“Just my whole life,” he said, appalled to realize it was true. Everything was to make up for his cousin’s Sean death. Just as everything evil Kathleen O’Connor had done was to make up for her mother’s utter rejection by her time and society.

“You are an extraordinary man, Mr. Randolph.”

The use of Garry’s surname brought him back to reality.

What was he doing? Getting vulnerable again with the possible enemy. Or she might not be. No, had to be; just the fact of her being here proved it. No sense kidding himself.

Dessert was descending on them and he couldn’t remember what they’d ordered. Relapse. So many more important things were coming back. Or maybe this moment was important.

Revienne was beautiful in the reflected light from the illuminated fountains dancing like aurora borealis across the Strip. Max turned around to view the fiery blue green water show in front of the spotlighted Bellagio palace façade, with Caesars Palace towering over it all. This was magic time, as he’d so carefully arranged it.

“The view over your shoulder is glorious,” she said. “Quite as lovely as Paris at twilight, more so, because of the mountains, which I love. They are so lonely and strong. Impassive sometimes, it seems, but they are always shifting under the surface, changing in the light.”

“My only official memories,” he replied, “of the Alps, are not as enthusiastic.”

She laughed as their coffee and liqueurs arrived. Baileys Irish Cream, as he’d always had with Garry.

Work on the road, lonely, ironic, never make personal connections.

“You know I’ve never trusted you,” he heard himself say.

“You shouldn’t. I know I’ve never before met a man as wary as I myself am.”

“So. How many patients have you slept with? A rough estimate will do.”

“It matters?”

“Male ego. You must have learned about that in school.”

“Let me burnish yours, then. None. That is totally unethical and I would never, never do such a thing.”

“What do you call me ?”

“My dear Mr. Randolph, you were no longer my patient the moment you forced me to ‘escape’ with you from the Swiss clinic. Thanks to my unwilling association with you, my nails were broken, my shoes destroyed. I had to beg for food from farmers along the way and saw off leg casts, as well as tend a stubborn delusional stranger who was quite possibly insane but the gutsiest, cleverest person I have ever met. I was kidnapped by brutal men in a fast car, fought over on the most expensive street in Zurich, made love to in the most innovative positions of my life and wined, lunched, designer-attired, and dumped on the street outside the Zurich train station. I have never had such a wonderful time in my life.”

“Why me?”

She actually thought that one over, then gave a very French shrug. “Questioning such things is counterproductive. I found it refreshing that your memory loss meant you had no romantic, what they say here, ‘luggage.’”