128
most beautiful woman in the room. Her gold-blonde hair was pulled back into an elegant knot at the nape of her neck, setting off the classic, poetry-and-polo features of her face. She wore a white dress with a little cape of sheer stuff around her shoulders. Probably owns a castle somewhere, Remo thought. The Lady Griselda, raised on horseback and weaned on high tea.
The woman's eye caught his own. Involuntarily Remo smiled. She stopped where she stood, leaving the head-waiter to wend his way halfway around the room before noticing that he'd lost her. She took in Remo with a deep, studious glance. It wasn't sexual, just curious, as if Remo were an interesting exhibit in a museum.
"I'd like to sit over there," she told the impatient waiter. With a curt nod, he led her in Remo's direction.
"HeHo, Remo," she said, kissing him lightly on the cheek.
She had the most compelling eyes he'd ever seen. They were light, but beyond that, he couldn't decide on their color. The irises seemed to shift from gray to pale blue to turquoise to yellow-green and deep emerald, with a hundred shades in between.
"It's so nice to see you. Do you mind if I join you?"
She spoke with a slight accent. So she wasn't English, after all. And she knew Remo's name. He racked his brains trying to remember who she was, but nothing registered.
"Uh-I'd be delighted," he said, rising.
No, he didn't know her, he decided. There was no way he could have forgotten those eyes.
When the waiter had gone, she said, "I hope you don't mind my barging in on you like this. I hate to dine alone. Don't you?"
And a mind-reader, too, he thought. "I've gotten used to it."
129
"Yes," she said appreciatively. "I imagine you have."
The wine steward came over with a list. Remo asked the woman if she felt like something to drink, hoping she knew enough about wine to make her own selection. It had been so long since Remo had touched alcohol that he'd forgotten the names on the labels.
"I'll have vodka," the woman said.
The waiter nodded. "A martini?"
"A bottle. And a water glass."
The unflappable waiter left. Remo smiled. "We've never met," he said.
"No."
"How did you know my name?"
"I guessed."
What kind of a con is this, he thought. "What's yours?"
"What would you like it to be?"
He sighed. A call girl. "I've got fifty-two dollars," he said flatly. "That's it."
"Good for you."
He was embarrassed. "I only meant-"
The waiter showed up with the vodka and a large tumbler, which he filled to the brim.
"Have you decided on a name for me yet?" she asked, raising her glass.
"How about Sam?" he asked drily. "I knew a guy named Sam once who drank vodka by the bucket."
"Sam it is, then." She downed the glass in one draught.
"Who are you?" Remo asked.
"I thought we just decided on that."
"Come off it. My guess is you're some kind of bored society dame acting cute with the hoi-polloi-"
She laughed. "Not at all. I'm new in London. I walked in here alone, saw you, and sat down. Does everything have to be so complicated?"
"Have it your way," Remo said. "Are you hungry?"
130
"Starving."
"Figures." He eyed the prices on the menu. His fifty-two dollars might stretch as far as one meal and two bottles, all for her. Another breakfast of berries along the side of the road.
"I'd like fish," she said. "Raw."
He sat still for a moment, then leaned over toward her. "How much do you know about me?"
"Why should I know anything about you? Are you famous?"
"The fish."
"It's much better raw. You ought to try it."
Well, maybe it was just a coincidence, he said to himself. He sat back, trying frantically to remember where he might have met her before. It was useless. "All right," he said.
The waiter set down their platter of raw fish at arm's length, regarding his two customers as if he expected them to jump wildly onto the tables at any moment.
The woman sent him away with a haughty stare. She picked up a sliver of fish with her fingers and slid it delicately into her mouth.
"Do you have something against silverware?" Remo asked.
"Useless," she said, offering a piece to Remo. Her nails were short and unpainted. She wore no makeup. And those eyes of hers were driving Remo crazy.
"What color are they?" he blurted.
"My eyes?" She shrugged. "Blue. Gray. Green. They change."
"Really strange," he muttered.
"How flattering. You've encountered your share of strange people, I suppose?"
"You have no idea."
"I think I do." She downed another tumbler of vodka.
131
"Get some rice for yourself. That's what you eat, isn't it?"
He threw his napkin on the table. "Okay. Come clean. What are you doing here?"
"Calm down, Remo."
"Bulldookey!"
"Bulldookey?"
"There's no way you could have guessed my name."
"You sound like Rumplestiltskin. Eat your fish. You must be exhausted."
"1 am exhausted. But you don't have any business knowing that."
She leaned over and kissed him full on the mouth. Stunned, he felt as if his spine had just turned into an electric eel. The temperature in the room seemed to rise to the level of a pizza oven. When their lips finally broke away, he noticed that people all over the restaurant were staring at them. "What was that for?" he asked, dazed. "Not that I minded. Maybe you'd like to try it again for practice."
"Later," she said, resuming her meal.
"Later," Remo grumbled. She was playing some kind of game, but he was too tired to figure it out. And why bother, anyway, he decided. She was nuts, end of discovery. Still, kissing her beat eating restaurant rice at a table for one any day.
"I'm staying at Claridge's. Will you come with me?"
He gulped, standing up instantly. "Twisted my arm," he said.
Inside the doorway of her darkened room, she put her arms around him. He tried to gear himself up for the fifty-two steps to ecstasy, but something was different. Her touch was warm, electrifying, comforting. There was no naughty boom-boom about this girl. Even without speaking.
132
he felt as if he had known her all his life, this girl whose name he didn't even know.
Remo had loved many women in his time. And yet none of them had felt like this one. There was something sure about it, as if their flesh belonged together, and always had. But he was being an idiot, he told himself. Any woman who wouldn't even give her name to a man she was going to spend the night with wasn't exactly in the market for true love.
"1 suppose you're being so mysterious just so you can avoid talking to me if we ever bump into each other again."
She let her arms fall from around his neck. "Your ways are too worldly for me to understand," she said simply. "I cannot tell you who I am because I cannot. That is all there is to know. And 1 wish to make love with you because my body longs for you. Is it not enough?"
Strange bird. Even in the darkness he could see the changing tones of her eyes. Remo kissed her gain. "It's enough," he said. And for some reason he didn't understand, going to bed with this woman seemed to be more important to him than breathing.
He made love to her like a schoolboy, frightened, delighted, surprised at his own artlessness. He forgot everything about the sexual techniques that worked with other women, because this nameless girl was like no other woman he had ever been with. They laughed together and played and wrestled and touched each other like incalculably precious things, and Remo told her stories about the orphanage where he'd grown up, and she sang him lewd Viking songs about the glories of raping and looting in the land of the Francs, and when they finally came together, it was as if he'd never made love to anyone before.