“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.”
“What do you call him?”
“Hot. Did you see that pasodoble he did? I trust we will still see his tango tonight.”
Oh, no. Females are so shallow. “The show must go on,” I say sourly.
She stops and turns. I find I have trailed her to the theater area, where yellow crime-scene tape warns off all comers.
Topaz walks under the streamers, tail high. I follow.
“No, Louie. ‘The Shoe Must Go On.’”
Yikes! Has she been talking to my Miss Temple lately? What is it with these females and fancy footwear?
I soon discover what. The area is deserted while the forensics people are back at the lab doing CSI: Las Vegas film montage tests and things to music. Who would ever imagine major network viewers would be seduced into watching science how-to films in the name of crime drama? Mr. Wizard would have been proud. Bill Nye, the PBS “science guy” would have been begging for cameo roles.
Miss Topaz trots through the empty audience seating and onto the wooden set floor, bold as old gold. She stops by the velvet curtains backing the stage above the set of four risers.
I can see where the curtain has been torn and dusted for prints. Blood runs down the velvet in an ugly dark snake of color to the floor, where it has dried to a carmine color.
I come from a hunter breed. Normally blood is no big deal, even though I have not had to eat live game in years. But when it is the blood of someone you know. . . .
“He could have bled to death.”
“I know,” Topaz says. “But it is lucky he bled here.”
I eye the many drops. I know the forensics people numbered and photographed each one. We should not be leaving pad prints on the scene of the crime. I am about to say so when Topaz darts to the side of the stage.