Кэрол Дуглас - Cat In A Sapphire Slipper

His face felt red too, as if he was a green boy again. Had he ever been? He recalled an old riddle about what walked with four legs in the morning, two legs at noon, and three legs in the evening . . . He could remember stupid riddles, but not the riddle of himself.

“I’m glad you’re feeling better,” she said. Primly. “Now. We must go and do what you said you would know how to do when we were among people again.”

If he remembered what that was.

Revienne was devouring half of a roasted chicken across from him, wiping her mouth with a linen napkin and gulping white wine, then pulling meat from bones a moment later.

An accordion was playing in the background. An accordion! He hadn’t heard an accordion in decades, if ever. As far as he knew. Red-faced, stout people were drinking beer and wine and eating all around them at the small bistro adjoining the village’s central, and only, inn. The language flowed like the wine and beer, soft and fluent. He caught words, some English and German, and something different. Swiss-German.

Revienne’s loosened blond hair was catching in the chicken grease at the sides of her mouth. No skinless fowl here. He’d eaten three pork chops, sauerbraten, dumplings, and cooked greens until he felt gorged. He’d ordered beer, not because he craved it, but because it would put weight on him faster. He’d lost a lot; he could tell. Odd, he knew how the man he really was should feel, but not who he really was.

He knew who Revienne Schneider thought he was.

“You must be a very bad man,” she’d said through her first, ravenous bites of chicken and dumplings and thick brown bread. Her eyes glittered at him like a wild animal’s. “An adventurer. Utterly no scruples. This is very good.” She paused for breath and to wipe her mouth. “You have no conscience at all. Pass the butter. Please.”

It was white as snow and as soft as whipped cream. He knifed off a glob to put on his own rugged loaf of bread before he handed it over to her and she took the whole mound.

“They’re tourists,” he whispered over the board heaped with varieties of cheese between them. “I’m only using each card for one item. I’ll ditch the one for dinner and lodging tomorrow. Literally bury it. It will cost the man a minimum of euros. He’ll get a notice and change the card number. We must eat and rest.”

“Yes.” She drank more wine, pulled the hair back from her face. “I need a bath. And of course you would not put two rooms on the poor tourist’s card, so we shall have to sleep together.”

Her eyes were as fevered as her face. Her tone was half accusation, half something more interesting.

“I don’t think I could heft this body into a bed tonight, princess. You’ll have it all to yourself.”

“‘Heft’? What is this ‘heft’?”

“Lift.”

“Ah.” She looked around. “We must look like savages.”

“They’re too absorbed in their own dinners to take much notice of us.”

“You’re sitting.”

“Yes.”

“That is an improvement.”

“My hips ache like the very Devil. Why do you think I’m chugalugging so much beer?”

“Chuga?”

“Swallowing fast.”

She nodded. “I’m hungry still. I’ll give you a massage tonight.”

She was back on the subject of his legs. And hips.

“I have very good hands. Strong hands.”

He drank some more beer, wanting to put on weight, feel no pain, forget about her hands on his legs and hips. She was a possible enemy. Of course she’d offer . . . things. His job was to forget his own pain and confusion, and not take any wooden nickels.

Where did that expression come from? It sounded as old as the hills, which were alive with the sound of music . . . which was not Austria, but Switzerland, which was not where he belonged.

Where did he belong? He remembered the song he’d been whistling earlier. Something about a minstrel boy and a war? Ireland. Did he belong there? He felt another deep throb of recognition, accompanied by a surge of mixed sensations: love, hatred, anger, guilt, pain. Man, the real him must be some dysfunctional bastard. Though that didn’t seem right, either. Garry Randolph didn’t seem to think so.

Revienne ate some cheese, then stuffed some into the backpacks they’d bought on the stolen credit card.

“Come,” she said, whispering across the table. “I don’t want you unsteady on your feet with too much beer. After all those meds it could hit you hard, and I’m not strong enough to get you up the chalet stairs to our room.”

He grabbed his new cane, hand-carved tourist bait that leaned against his rush-seated chair. He didn’t bother to tell her he’d been off meds for some time. Still, the stairs took two turns, there was no elevator, and the new walking shoes made his gait clumsy. He was exhausted by the time she turned the key to their room.

He leaned against the wall just inside the door while she turned on the lamps—no overhead lights in the boonies—looked into the empty freestanding wardrobe and under the double bed piled high with a down comforter.

“The bathroom is down the hall,” she said. “This is not the American Plan part of the world. But don’t worry.” She hoisted a deep white pot from under the high bedstead. “There are emergency accommodations. Mike, don’t look like that! You’re still an invalid; you must take the simplest route. I am a medical doctor, you know. I’ve seen everything.”

Yes, but not his “everything.”

“You use the bathroom first,” she decided. “I’ll help you to and fro. Once you’re in the bed, I can use it.”

It took them an hour to accomplish their separate turns at the simple room with a bathtub, toilet, and sink. It was early, so they had no competition. Max used a cloth to wash off the three days of sweat and outdoor elimination, and donned the beige shorts from a village shop with relief. Luckily Swiss mountain men wore the equivalent of short shorts in the summer, almost as good as boxers. He felt like Tom Selleck in Magnum, P.I . shorts, but at least he could dump the hospital jammies in a knapsack for burying farther down the road.

The black, long-sleeved spandex turtleneck top was as silky as a second skin. The moment he put it on, he felt more relaxed. Something to his taste, apparently.

It didn’t make sense to struggle into the new, baggier jeans the stolen credit card had bought as well. Not for sleeping. Re-vienne would just have to see his pale legs, with the dark hairs rubbed off by the cast. He recalled her threat of a massage and chose to consider it a promise. He was, as she’d pointed out, an invalid.

The bedsheets were Egyptian cotton, maybe a thousand-thread count. Smooth as a baby’s cheek. The foot-high comforter was the only blanket or coverlet, and all that eiderdown was housed inside another silky, high-count shroud.

Max took deep, satisfied breaths. His stomach was full, his magic fingers knew how to lift a tourist’s credit card so smoothly no one would ever notice, the beer was making him drowsy, and he was going to let Revienne’s strong doctor-trained hands massage his abused legs.

He was half-asleep when she finished in the bathroom. She came back smelling of freesia soap and began running her hands over his aching leg muscles all the way up to the place where his butt began, where it hurt so good. . . .

This person named Max didn’t trust many or much, but tonight he fell asleep in the cradle of civilization.

Woman.

Warm.

Endurance Vile

After all and sundry have had a couple days to recover from being cooped up together in a residence high on bedrooms and low on other creature comforts, I amble up the Strip to visit my partner in Midnight Inc. Investigations.