Cat In A Topaz Tango

Last Tango in Zurich

Humid warmth wafted from the small-by-American-standards bathroom when Revienne opened the door thirty-five minutes later, her pink skirt and the suspected black garter belt over one arm.

Max’s automatic inventory was part investigation, part self-indulgence.

The black camisole was really a thigh-brushing teddy. If she’d ever worn a bra in this escape escapade, it wasn’t on her now. Not that she needed one. Probably never had worn one. She was French. Whew.

“I can’t stand another moment in that suit! Okay with you?” she asked.

“I’m sometimes an idiot, but not now.”

“You Americans. All for sex but so ignorant of sensuality. I suppose you will stay fully dressed, wearing that tight belt, although it is Versace, those nice new shoes, that silk tie with the subtle but expensive tack.”

“Good tailoring is as comfortable as pajamas.”

“Well said. I know you are rich, but rich Americans usually go for the obvious. How did you escape that?”

She settled in the other upholstered chair, like Venus curling into her clamshell, her bare legs tucked under. They were shaved, but a slight stubble caught the light. Whether there was anything under that slip of a skirt was up to the imagination of the beholder.

“Is seduction a part of your therapeutic technique?” he asked.

“Not usually, but thank you for noticing. I have been through hell for you, Mr. Randolph. I am going to enjoy the first few decent hours I’ve had in days. I am clean, I am not wearing the same clothing, I have a cool drink coming and a handsome man hanging on my every . . . word. I plan to enjoy it. I also plan to strip your psyche down to the bare neuroses, whether you intend to let me or not.”

“Fair enough.”

He settled into his chair, enjoying sinking his bone-tired frame into a cradle of goose-down upholstery. This psychic striptease was not going to be a one-way street. His chair was placed to observe both the door and the windows. And even if there was any “consummation devoutly to be wished” tonight, he’d be fully clothed and ready to fight, flee, or some other appropriate f word.

“I’ll buy you some new clothes in the morning and a ticket to wherever you need to go,” he told her. “I owe you much more, but that’ll have to wait until I’m far away from your friends in the Mercedes and their ilk.”

“They weren’t very friendly.”

As she lifted a hand to push back her dampened hair he saw the bracelet of bruises on her pale wrist.

“I see that.”

“What?” Her eyes followed his gaze. “Oh.” She turned the wrist and looked at the other one, also marked. “Didn’t know that showed. I didn’t just hitch a ride, as you put it, with them. Although, once they produced their firearms I admit I cooperated. I wouldn’t make a good Bond girl, would I?”

“In that outfit, maybe. But you’re too cerebral.”

“Cerebral?” English wasn’t her first language and some words weren’t in most textbooks.

“Smart.”

She raised an eyebrow. “You like that in a woman?”

“No.” He’d surprised her, as he’d meant to. “I require that in a woman.”

“‘Require.’ That is a demanding word. Are you demanding, Mr. Randolph?”

“Of myself.” He stirred uneasily.

“I see you don’t like that in yourself.”

“What? Why? How?”

“Your restless body language.”

He laughed. “My ‘restless body language’ isn’t giving away my inner state. It’s because my ‘banged-up’ body can’t stand any position for too long at the moment, no matter how cushy.”

“You can’t stand?” She sat forward, alarmed. “Just a few minutes ago you did, and walked quite well.”

“‘Stand’ is an expression. It means I can’t tolerate”—she still looked blank—“endure”—she nodded—“the same position long.”

A soft knock came on the door. “Room service,” he said, starting to struggle out of the chair softer than quicksand.

She leapt up to anticipate him.

“You can’t answer the door in that,” he said. “That’s why I stayed fully dressed.”

“I can, but I’ve a feeling you wouldn’t . . . stand . . . for it.”

He threw her a grin. By then he had used the cane to get him to the door. He nodded to the bathroom, and she ducked inside.

He used the peephole, then opened the door to admit a waiter rolling in a room service cart. He laid the cane atop the cart as he signed the bill and indicated the tip. His curled left hand concealed a roll of coins from a money exchange kiosk in the street, his only weapon besides the cane.

The balding waiter murmured “Danke sheine” and left.

Max double-bolted the door and swept the cane under the cart’s tablecloth, ensuring no assassin lurked beneath the snowy linens.

“You are suspicious.” Revienne spoke from the open bathroom door.

“And you’re not, after what you went through?”

“Of course. But I’m also suspicious of you.”

“Me?”

“Obviously, you are a tough guy. Who knows what you’re capable of?”

“Why don’t you see what goodies are on the table here, before turning it on me.”

“Sometimes you speak nonsense.”

“English idioms. Figures of speech. I can use German. Or French, if you prefer.”

“In bed, yes. Both.”

“I don’t think either of us is ready for bed yet,” he said dryly. “Regardez.”

“Mon Dieu!”

She picked up the champagne in its silver bucket to read the label, then the bottles of red and white wines. She eyed him, mischievous.

“You must surely bear a platinum card from a titan of industry.” Under the silver domes she lifted in turn lay croissants, a huge salad for two, salmon and pommes frites—the original French fried potatoes, as thin as angel-hair pasta—fruit and cheese and small candied sweets.

“This is a feast,” she said.

She looked at him leaning on his cane, slipping his homemade set of brass knuckles into his pants pockets, not that she knew what he was doing.

“Now you do as I say. Sit. On that hard chair, where you will not sink like a stone.”

She was right that he needed support now, not wallowing comfort. He couldn’t assume they wouldn’t be traced here and attacked in the night.

“I will serve you,” she decided, rolling the table to his chair and handing him an elaborately folded serviette.

He took it, watching as she lifted the cart’s side extensions, pulled a chair to her side of the table, selected the red wine for the salad, poured it. He watched her bare arm muscles shift with purpose under her creamy skin, her breasts ebb and flow against the thin silk netting them, tender and pink as the salmon.

She understood the show she was putting on, of course, but that only made him feel free to enjoy it.

When she sat and pushed the salad plate toward him so they could eat off both sides, she suddenly gasped in surprise. Her white linen napkin was in the shape of a graceful swan, not the formal roll that had come with the service.

“You do napkin origami!”

Surprising her in this small way gave him an unexpected bolt of pleasure, completely nonsexual. She quickly turned the moment to the more adult.

“I’d noticed what long, agile fingers you have.”

She gave him a Princess Diana smile, head cast down, eyes cast up, shy and seductive at the same time. Now he remembered her very well, the late, unhappy royal wife. He washed some of the exquisite wine over his tongue and resolved to enjoy every nuance of both the drink and the woman.

Was she seducing him for some undercover purpose? Or was she just a woman who’d survived an arduous mountain trek that had stripped every scintilla of womanliness from her?

They began forking pieces of romaine lettuce, walnuts, blue cheese, and caramelized pear slices into their mouths, not speaking, just savoring the enjoyment of a leisurely fine meal, sipping wine between every bite.

If he knew the French, this dinner would take at least an hour. No bolting the food American-style. He supposed his butt might go numb on this hard chair by then, but numbing the nether regions was probably a good idea right now. He didn’t want to be swept away before he knew more about her than she knew about him.

“Why did you become a psychiatrist?”

She looked up, surprised. “It’s a good profession. I meet interesting people.” She tossed him a smile and a bow of her head. “I help them.”

“And you make a lot of money.”

She shook her head as she sipped wine, not quite able to answer. “I do now. That wasn’t my motive. Actually, your generous contribution for my services here in Switzerland will help me meet with my Algerian patients in Paris.”

“You’re an altruist.”

“Pardone-moi?”

“You try to help mankind, not just . . . man.” He returned her smile with the bow of his head as he sipped wine. Great stuff! Great verbal fencing too.

“I believe everyone who is blessed has an obligation to serve those unlucky enough to have been unblessed.”

“So amnesiac millionaires who fall off mountains are just a charity case for you?”

Her gray eyes warmed with appreciation. “So you have . . . turned the tables on me now?”

“You catch on fast.”

“You didn’t fall off a mountain, Mr. Randolph. You are not the type to climb cold, hard Old World mountains.”

“Then how did I fall?”

She sipped wine, shut her eyes, tilted her head. “I see you climbing . . . a skyscraper.”

He raised an eyebrow.

“You are one of these urban daredevils. You are in New York City. You reach the eightieth floor before the police can arrive and you snap a line to an opposite building. You will wire-walk over the urban chasm while everyone below gets stiff necks watching and waiting for you to fall. You won’t fall, but you will get arrested at the end of your stunt, and a great deal of publicity. When you have your press conference, you will present the lovely lady from Channel Five with a flower shaped like a dove, and take her to bed later.”

He laughed, longer and harder than he thought he was capable of.

“Will the lovely French psychiatrist the court orders me to see take me to bed also?”

“That depends how much she likes her swan-shaped flower.”

Revienne daubed her lips with the limp corpse of his swan napkin.

“That’s a wonderfully inventive scenario, but it still doesn’t tell me why you became a psychiatrist.”

She sipped wine again, setting aside the demolished salad plate and uncovering their plates of salmon.

“I’ll tell you after we eat the main course.”

So they ate in silence, flake by savory flake of baked salmon, crunch by crunch of the tiny strips of potato, sip by sip of the white wine until the bottle was gone.

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 . . .