Кэрол Дуглас - Cat In A Topaz Tango

He thought over Revienne’s imagined high-wire act.

He’d felt in that position often during his stay at the clinic and later escape. It was an apt metaphor for what he knew of his life these last few days. He watched his hands with the exquisite Christofle sterling flatware. His fingers were indeed long and strong, as his legs would be again. As other parts were rehearsing for being again.

This escape, this idyll, was almost over. He was sorry about that.

He was startled from his reverie when she poured from the opened bottle of white wine into fresh glasses, and swept the empty dinner plates together and to the side.

He took sliced fruit and cheese from the desert plate, and sat back.

Revienne nibbled on a wedge of pungent white cheese. “Why I became a psychiatrist.” She sighed. “How could I be anything but, after Sophie.”

He waited.

“My younger sister. Do you have brothers and sisters? We don’t know, do we, Mr. Randolph? I had the one sister. There were four years between us, enough for me to feel superior. Cruelty, indifference must be educated out of the young, I believe. They are greedy, self-centered, and frightened.”

He said nothing, the best way to keep a story being told, but he wondered if she was obliquely referring to him in his amnesiac state.

“Sophie trailed me and embarrassed me in front of my cool new friends. She still had baby fat, while I had breasts and boys. Her skin was unfortunate but my parents assured her that she’d be just like me someday. Frankly, I would not want to be like I was then, vain, selfish, and stupid.”

There was nothing of the seductive woman in her now, just the voice of truth and self-disgust.

“She lost a great deal of weight. No one suspected bulimia. Her skin got worse, but she was thinner than I was. She had no breasts and she never would. I came home one day when our parents were away to find Sophie outside the third-floor mansard, poised like a diver.

“I called to her from the street, begged her to wait, to hang on.

“‘I can fly,’” she told me. “‘I am finally light enough to fly.’”

I screamed for the neighbors to call the police and ran up the four flights to the roof. While I ran up step after step until my legs shook, she took flight. I arrived where she had been to see her on the street below.”

She crumpled the napkin into a tight ball in her hand.

“My God.”

He felt an odd kinship with her. Had he failed a brother? He felt a wave of anger and guilt, and then fury with his fled memory that forbid him responsibility for his past.

“I shouldn’t have asked,” he said.

“It was a long time ago. It gave me purpose. The public was ignorant then of the suffering of young people. I’ve specialized in trauma cases, but I work gratis with the young from poor families in Paris. Don’t weep for me. I make a lot of money on my celebrity cases to underwrite my charity work.”

“I’m a celebrity case?”

She smiled. “Presumed so. You have the money to afford the clinic and my exclusive time.”

“This has been more exclusive than I’d imagined.”

“It’s been . . . invigorating for me, in a way. You are difficult. I like the challenge.

“Will I ever fully remember, do you think?

She assumed her professional face. “These cases are unpredictable. The added pressure of someone trying to kill you might choke off your memory even longer. Your best course is to reunite with your uncle. Once I put myself together again and return to the clinic, I can contact him, direct him to where you’ll be. It’s time you had another keeper, Mr. Randolph, and you know it.”

He nodded.

“Why did you pursue me when I vanished instead of going your own way?”

“A number of reasons.”

“Yes, Mr. Randolph?”

“I panicked. Yes, I did. You were indeed my keeper. I needed you. And, I knew you wouldn’t have vanished like that of your own will, unless you had an underlying motive. I needed to know why you had disappeared.”

“You still don’t trust me, Mr. Randolph.”

“No, Dr. Schneider, I don’t. Until I have my memory back, I won’t trust anyone. And even then it’ll be dicey. Difficult.”

“And if you never do recover your memory?”

“In time, I might find people to trust. But I have to make sure I live that long.”

“I don’t envy your future.”

“I don’t envy your past.” He refilled their glasses. The wine glowed.

“What of our present?” she asked.

“That’s ours to determine.”

“If someone doesn’t kill you first.”

“Apparently I’m harder to kill than someone counted on.”

“I knew you were an extraordinary man five minutes after I entered your room for an interview.”

“I look good in a hospital gown?”

She smiled. “You looked like hell, but you still were—let me find the exact English words. You were wary. Proud.” She made a fist, searching for the right idiom. “You were prickled, like a land mine of the mind.”

“Prickly, I think you mean.”

“Hard to get close to, to see into. Mental spikes all around you. Lightning snapping.”

He laughed. “This from a head case with no memory and bum legs?”

“Yes.”

“Am I still so prickly?”

“Yes . . . and no. So—”

She leaned forward to push him into the chair back so quickly the cane fell to the floor. His muscles automatically tensed for an attack and it was one.

She knelt before him. Looking down, he saw the gaping camisole barely supporting her rounded breasts under taupe aureoles and rose tips. Just.

She looked up, easing off his Bally slip-on ankle boots. “This is my restaurant. No shoes—”

She rose, her breasts pressed against his thighs (oh, God) . . .

“No belts, unless you have any kinky after-dinner notions—”

. . . to loosen and pull away the narrow Bally snake of smooth leather.

“No tie—”

Her torso pressed his as she arched upward to undo the tack and the silken Ermenegildo Zegna knot and draw them away.

“. . . allowed.”

He caught her hands in one of his, put his other at her nape and pressed her face to his for a long, luxurious, five-star kiss. Or several. He liked the appetizers at her restaurant already.

His free hand slipped the camisole straps off her lovely, strong shoulders, one by one. She shrugged them farther away. Seducing and being seduced felt like the most civilized parlor game in Europe.

He felt the physical and mental pain of the past six weeks melting like marzipan after-dinner sweets into the sour landscape of his soul. It wasn’t just the sex, it was breaking the touching barrier. He’d needed comfort more concrete than words. This had been coming for some time, and would be worth it no matter the cost.

Mostly.

Maybe.

Oh, baby . . .

On the Topaz Trail

Since it is Miss Topaz’s hotel, as she puts it so firmly, I am forced to let her lead.

Ordinarily I resist a subservient position on principle, but I am not a fool.

Ordinarily an extraordinarily svelte and attractive lady of my species is not walking, tail high and swaying, directly ahead of me.

I am already checking out the surroundings for romantic rendezvous spots, but Topaz’s lively mind is on other matters.

“The moment I noticed the hotel security forces converging on the theater, I knew something fishy was up.”

“‘Converging’? ‘Something fishy was up’?” That is usually my line. Why has the lithe Miss Topaz started talking like an ungodly combo of Miss Lieutenant Molina and Sam Spade?

“The perp was gone,” she goes on, “and your mistress’s significant other required lifesaving treatment. However, I concluded his attacker must have been somewhat attacked in turn, or he would not have ceased to harass Mr. Matt, as you call him.”