The woman looked faintly surprised. "But I did take your advice," she said. "I left all of my best pieces at home."
"You just put that lovely necklace and earrings in your purse, honey," Susie said. "When we get to the hotel, that Bear place, what's it called?" she asked, turning to me.
"Taberda," I replied.
"Whatever," she said. "You can put your jewelry in a safety deposit box, honey, so you won't have to worry. Now, did I tell you about the cruise I took down the Nile? Have you been down the Nile?"
Inwardly I groaned. The two women, while traveling solo, had indicated that if possible they'd like to share a room, Susie to save money, and Catherine, presumably, for the company. We'd put the two of them together, but already I was wondering how bad an idea this was going to be.
"I thought Muslims didn't approve of homosexuals," another of our fellow travelers, Jimmy Johnstone from Buffalo, said, elbowing his wife, Betty, and pointing toward two men across the row from them.
"Don't worry," one of the men said cheerfully. "We won't hold hands in public." The "we" referred to were Benjamin Miller, a large teddy bear of a man, with a reddish beard and thinning hair to match, brown eyes that crinkled at the corners, and a handshake to be reckoned with, and the speaker, his traveling companion, Edmund Langdon, tall, thin, dark, and devastatingly good-looking, with long, curving eyelashes to die for, a man about ten or fifteen years Ben's junior.
"Stone them in public squares, I've heard," Jimmy went on without noticing.
Group bigot, I thought. It had taken me only minutes to realize that Jimmy would spend his entire vacation dissing everything and everybody even a little bit different from his comfortable world at home. With about twenty years in retail, I consider myself a pretty good judge of character, able to size up almost anyone at a glance. I shouldn't do this, of course, but, experience being a painful teacher, you do learn to spot the customer who can be cajoled into a purchase and the one that needs to be left alone to decide, or, more negatively, the visitor who is likely to shoplift, or the one whose check will bounce sky-high. As unfortunate as this tendency to categorize may be, I've found I'm right about ninety-five percent of the time. The other five percent, that is when I'm totally and utterly wrong, I attribute to a fluke of some sort. Having said that, while Jimmy might have leapt to some conclusions about the two men's relationship, the sleeping arrangements, to which I was privy as the group leader, were inconclusive. The men had requested single rooms, and Ben had told me, when he'd signed up for the tour, that Ed was his nephew.
"I'm tired, Mummy," Chastity Sherwood pouted. Why do parents do that to their children, I wonder, giving them names like Chastity? Chastity was about fifteen, I'd say, and, in addition to being whiny, was one of those people who haven't yet acquired a sense of their personal space. She had a very bad habit of swatting anyone in the vicinity with her backpack every time she turned around, and although people had known her for only eight or nine hours, they were already diving for cover when they saw her approach. "How much longer do we have to wait in this stupid place?" she said in a petulant tone.
"This stupid place" was the transit lounge at Frankfurt's airport, an admittedly dreary spot. The tour, which we were billing as an antiques and archaeology excursion, started in Toronto, where eight of our group had gathered: Chastity and her mother, who went by the sensible name of Marlene; Jimmy and Betty, Canadians who had moved across the lake to Buffalo twenty years earlier and never come back; Susie, Catherine, and the two men, Ben and Ed, who hailed from Boston, but who had opted to join the group in Toronto.
In Frankfurt, my task was to find the rest of our fellow travelers, someone by the name of Richard Reynolds, a businessman from Montreal, whom I'd only spoken to briefly on the telephone; Emile St. Laurent, a colleague from Paris, who'd been a late addition to the trip, having signed up only three days previously, and a couple who seemed certain to up the glamour quotient of the trip: Curtis Clark, a professional golfer from California, and his wife, whose name on her passport read Roslyn Clark, but who was far better known as Aziza, one of those models of one name only who are regularly featured in the fashion pages of numerous magazines and on the runways of the haute couture houses of Europe.
And indeed the couple was easy to spot, he with the even tan, beautiful teeth, and the shock of blond hair so familiar from the sports pages and CNN, and she, taller than he at about six feet, with gorgeous toffee-colored skin, elegant long neck and high cheekbones, a beautifully shaped head, accentuated by very, very short dark hair, and graced with a regal bearing that left the men she met drooling, and the women suicidal. There was no question about it, she was lovely. But then again, so was he.
Curtis, as far as I knew, had never won a major tournament of any kind, and might well have gone unnoticed forever, were it not for the fact he'd snared Aziza, thereby making himself the envy of half the world's population, but also because of his ability to be charming on television, a skill he was given the opportunity to demonstrate once he'd married Aziza. As a result, he snagged some very lucrative product endorsements, and his dazzling smile was much to be seen. He also functioned as her manager, if the stories in the tabloids were true, there having been some dustup with her former manager, which had been the subject of juicy speculation for a period of time. Why they were on this tour, when they could afford to travel first class, just the two of them, I could not imagine, but the fact they were had the potential to bring us some wonderful publicity. Clive had told me about a hundred times to make sure they enjoyed themselves.
Emile St. Laurent I had met on several occasions, and so I found him easily. He was seated near the gate, reading an antiques magazine. He was about sixty, with a nice head of gray hair, dressed in gray flannels and a polo shirt, with a houndstooth sports jacket over his arm, stylish in a lovely Parisian sort of way. He looked decidedly fresh and unrumpled, after what surely had been a decent meal and a good night's sleep, something the rest of us, having endured airline food and cramped seating on the transatlantic flight, were sorely missing. The truth of the matter was that, despite my annoyance with Chastity's complaining, I, too, was very tired, having just finished a stint at a design show that had kept me up till all hours and required a great deal of packing and unpacking of merchandise. Then there were all the last-minute arrangements for the tour, and hours of boning up on various subjects so I could be the expert Clive had envisioned. Even though I knew a fair amount about the part of the world we were going to see, I still felt I needed to do a lot of study before we left. Just looking at the neat and squeaky-clean St. Laurent made me feel even grubbier and more tired.
"Lara McClintoch!" he exclaimed, rising from his seat and extending his hand. "How nice to see you again."
"Nice to see you, too, Emile," I said, as he kissed my hand rather suavely. "Glad you'll be joining us."
"I'm delighted, too," he replied. "I found there was a space in my calendar after a business trip fell through, and I thought I'd just call up and see if you had room for one more at the last minute. This antiques and archaeology tour of yours is an inspired idea! Nice concept for a trip, and the publicity won't hurt business at all, will it? Gets the McClintoch and Swain name around internationally. Wish I'd thought of it first."
While Curtis and Aziza were the celebrities of our group, in some circles St. Laurent might have arguably been considered even more famous. Emile was a numismatist, a coin collector. This occupation might be a hobby for most, but for Emile it was a serious, and in his case, very lucrative, business. We'd first met about twenty years earlier, when I was just getting into antiques, and was beginning to go to antiquarian shows. Emile, too, was just starting up then; now, he was considered one of the most successful coin dealers on the planet, and his company, ESL Numismatics, had an international reputation. I doubted that in his business, at least, he needed the publicity he was referring to.