Cat In An Alphabet Endgame

38

We’ll Always Have Paris

“What’s happening in Las Vegas?”

“Do you really want to know?”

Kathleen tilted her head over the lip of the wineglass she held in her saw tooth-nailed almost-to-the-quick grip. No manicurist could restore those cuticles and nails without a two-month grace period, at least. He pictured Kathleen clawing at every exit from her captivity minute after minute, like a wild thing with only raw desperate persistence on its side. It had been cruel to let them imprison her, but he’d had no choice. He’d had to win her ransom and settle affairs at home before going abroad again.

The candlelight glanced off the epee-thin white cat-claw scars on her left cheek. It was hard for a woman to claim they were four dueling scars contracted at Heidelberg University as a “badge of honor”, as heroes did in operettas.

“Midnight Louie” was an intriguing name, but it didn’t sound like one that belonged to an unmasked Zorro.

He was amazed to realize that Kathleen’s eyes were really green, not vividly green, but a sad, fatigued, pale, old-grass green, without the lurid surprise of the blue-green contact lenses she had worn while wreaking chaos on everyone he knew in Las Vegas.

“Temple Barr has married Matt Devine,” he finally told her, “and they’re hosting a locally filmed national TV talk show together,” he said.

“Married, are they? Happy, are they? Where does that leave you?”

“Not unhappy.”

She started laughing low in her throat. The harsh merriment gradually got louder, until people turned around to see what was so horribly funny. “A wishy-washy state for you. Their joint new career sounds as improbable as us doing the same thing. What will you do now?”

“I don’t know. Not a another show, per se.”

“You still have the Max Kinsella magic. You took those Irishmen for a ride.”

“A last gasp. With Garry gone—”

“Oh, Unholy Mother of God. I burned his…your house down, didn’t I? I was crazy mad, wasn’t I? Don’t take that as an apology.” But she looked uneasy.

“If you need to know you significantly impacted anyone’s life, you can take credit for me.”

“And you reward me with a stunning new black dress at the hotel boutique and dinner at the Paris Ritz. You must admit I made your life…interesting.”

“And what have you made of your life?”

She lifted her hands as if washing them free of herself. “Revenge has kept me alive since I was a toddler. It’s let me down. You’ve let me down. You won’t be the motive for my manias any longer, you can’t stop me from recognizing that I cannot fix what other people did to me. I thought if I could break you, or yours, it would justify my past, my failures. I just wasted everybody’s time and you all go on, whole, while I continue to break apart. It isn’t fair.”

“No, it isn’t. You’re right. I was a little in love with you and it could have been a lot, if not for the IRA bomb and my missing cousin. What can you be, Kathleen? Besides what you are? Think about it.”

He reached into his suit pocket and took out a small, square black-velvet box. He knew she’d conned many men into such a gesture for years since they’d met so long ago, but she’d never conned the boy he had been, or who had tried to be a man then. Like Molina, she was approaching forty, a dangerous age for a woman, a single woman. As a young woman, she’d underestimated her strength and saw only weaknesses. Hers. And his.

“It was an unforgettable moment, Kathleen, and still is.” He opened the box to show two-karat diamond ear studs dangling emerald green shamrocks.

She gasped. “You swore to Liam.”

“Ninety-nine-point-five percent true. I had to save something out for you.”

“For me?”

“For what you suffered. ‘Her eyes, they shone like the diamonds…’”

“‘You’d think she was queen of the land,” she continued. “And her hair hung over her shoulders, tied up with a black velvet band.’ That’s how you always thought of me?”

“How could I not? You were a woman. I was a clumsy kid. I’m not a poor man, even with a burnt-down house, Kathleen. What do you want? Could you be a memoirist, a historian of the Magdalene asylums? Write your own Philomena? Join the Magdalene protesters trying to reunite severed mothers and children? An artist? I could send you to the Sorbonne. To any university.”

“To psychiatrists?”

“Only if you wanted to frustrate them. Anyway, I ‘liberated’ something else.” He produced a second black-velvet box, this one holding a pendant, a small but magnificent emerald teardrop edged by pavé diamonds.

“For your daughter Iris. From you.”

She folded her hands at her breastbone, as amazed as any sixteen-year-old prom queen.

“Thank you for this, and for this.” She looked around the grand, gilded restaurant and out onto glittering Paris. “Will you keep an eye on my daughter?”

“Of course. I found her. Iris will do fine, Kathleen. You did the right thing.”

“Perhaps the only right thing in my life. I know you can manage to give my daughter my gift without letting her know it’s from me.”

“You’re still young, and beautiful. You can have a life not caged by the past.”

“You make me see there is only one thing that sets my heart and soul aflame, that has ever done so. Sadly, it is no longer you. I was that far successful in banishing my first obsession. I need to look elsewhere for a reason to live. So you’re right. My hatred needs a new home. And it isn’t Paris. And your self-hatred?”

Max shook his head, regretful. “What a terrible twist of fate that the few, possibly redemptive moments of our lives were so quickly followed by the worst years.”

“Hmm.” Her eyes gazed into some bottomless sinkhole he’d never seen. “No. I’ll never be normal. When hatred is the only thing keeping you alive and in one entire piece for so long, happiness seems like torture.

“The nuns hated our ruinous beauty, my mother’s and mine,” she mused. “That crazy cat did me a favor by marking my cheek. I feel I can no longer tart myself out for a cause gone by. So I’m a lost cause who needs another to pursue.”

“Then,” Max said, “I have someone I want you to meet. But first, a last, just dessert?”

She decided swiftly on chocolate.