He’d been in Paris, she remembered, and hearing her flat tone, he’d flooded the wires with his unique brand of sunshine. “It sounds as if it’s raining in New York. You’d better come to Paris,” he’d said, as if it was as easy as catching an uptown bus. “I may be able to get you something with Givenchy. I hear he desperately needs a new première d’atelier flou… you know, the key pair of hands in charge of fluid fabric, as opposed to the tailoring type. I’ll check it out, call you back and help you get a ticket.” He hadn’t called back, not until now, and, of course, no ticket had materialized.
She was growing up; she hadn’t given Alex’s suggestion more than two seconds’ thought. She’d given up expecting miracles from anyone, but especially from Alex. Nevertheless, there was still no one who could change her outlook on life so immediately.
Before she could reply to his rapid-fire questions, he asked another one. “What are you doing on Monday?”
“When is Monday?”
“The day after this Sunday, little donkey head.” His warm, wonderful chuckle came over the line so clearly, she bit her lip, realizing how much she missed hearing it. “Are you busy?” he went on.
She was rarely busy, except at work, but ironically only yesterday she’d been asked for a date on Monday, when the wizard of Oz had arrived in the showroom without an appointment.
“Just passing by… hear such great things about you,” he’d said, and then, like his most powerful lens, he’d looked her over. She’d been half amused, half flattered that for whatever reason he still had a thing for her. Later that afternoon, he’d called to say he was covering a fancy charity event on Monday and would she like to join him at the press table?
She’d said no automatically, regretted it, thought about phoning to say she’d changed her mind, then in the frenzy surrounding the changes to 854 had forgotten all about it until now.
“Well?” Alex’s impatience was loud and clear. “Well?” he said again. Aunt Lil had proudly told her mother he was so successful now, he wasn’t prepared to wait for anything. “If he wants something, he wants it NOW.” What else was new? Alex had always been like that.
“No, I’m not busy,” Ginny replied slowly. “Why? Where are you? D’you still want me to fly to Paris? To see Monsieur Givenchy?” She laughed, but there was a tinge of sarcasm in her voice. Alex didn’t seem to notice.
“No, I’m in London, leaving tomorrow. I have to go to a black-tie charity ball in New York—for DIFFA, Design Industry Foundation for AIDS. Not your usual old boiled-chicken-on-a-plate Plaza do. It’s downtown, but strictly A-list. I want to show you off to the kind of chic, original women who’ll have their tongues hanging out when they see your clothes. Get busy with the old needle and thread, Ginny, m’dear. You must really look fabulous. I’ll call you when I get in tomorrow.” Ginny stifled a giggle. Was she still daydreaming or did Alex now have a distinctly British accent?
“Are you still there, old girl?”
Old girl? This was hilarious.
She couldn’t wait to see what Alex would be wearing to match his new hoity-toity vowels. Spats? Plus fours? A monocle? Nothing would surprise her, but whatever he wore, he’d still outshine everyone.
For five minutes after she put the phone down, Ginny was ecstatic; then reality socked in. Was this one of the few promises Alex was going to keep? Why should this call be different from any of the others?
Ginny flicked through her limited wardrobe. She didn’t have anything anywhere near resembling a ball gown, let alone a fabulous one. She could devote her weekend to creating one, but would she really have an opportunity to wear it? A ball gown was one article of clothing she didn’t need on her beat.
For the first time in months she thought about Poppy Gan. Poppy had never called her after their strange meeting at Mr. Chow’s and she’d had much too much Ricardo on her mind to think about calling Poppy.
Somewhere a delicate shoot of ambition stirred, like a tender perennial bud breaking through after a hard, cold frost. Perhaps Poppy Gan would be at the A-list DIFFA benefit. Perhaps not, but there would be other Poppy Gans there, perhaps even Vogue’s editor in chief, Anna Wintour, who was known to like downtown more than uptown.
As pessimism alternated with optimism about Alex keeping his word, Ginny forgot she’d ever been exhausted. She liked to nibble during the early stages of a design, so she went to the fridge. There were only two shriveled oranges and a bottle of witch hazel inside. It didn’t matter; her mind was turning so fast now, she didn’t have time to be hungry. She was remembering something special, hanging with other Gosman relics in a storage cupboard at 554, near where the lugubrious sample pattern maker, Moses Akkaroff, stood making muslin sample patterns all day long.
In minutes Ginny was in a cab on the way back to Seventh Avenue. Was it still there? The old Gosman copy of a Christian Dior sheath in Halloween pumpkin-colored sateen? It had to be—and it was.
To hell with Alex. To hell with DIFFA. Whether she went to the ball or not, this was a fascinating project. She stayed up working all night, having more fun than she could remember having in a long, long time.
Alex confirmed the date the next evening. He sounded jet-lagged and irritable. “What are you putting on your body?”
She described the dress, adding just to provoke him, “I went into Axman’s, the tony butcher’s shop around the corner, and—”
“What the hell for?”
“I asked if I could buy the huge cream-colored paper chrysanthemum hanging in their window, just above the baby lamb chops in their little paper cuffs…” Ginny paused dramatically, imagining the look of disbelief on Alex’s face. “I thought I’d wear it on my head at the ball. It’s exactly the right shade and—”
“Absolutely not,” Alex roared. “Not with me as your escort you don’t. Ostentation is O-U-T. I thought you knew that.”
“From brass to class?” asked Ginny innocently. She’d just read the phrase in Women’s Wear Daily.
“Yes,” Alex replied grudgingly. “The word to aim for is—”
“Civilized,” they said together.
He allowed himself a short guffaw. “All right, Ginny. So we’re both reading the same trades now. So you know you don’t go around looking like a lamb chop, or a spring chicken either.”
He was in a very different mood when he arrived to pick Ginny up. “Ravishing.” He appraised her thoroughly, front and back. “Absolutely gorgeous, Gin, my dear. Now, I wonder what your mentor has brought you to wear instead of a paper flower. Shut your eyes.”
He guided her to face the papier-mâché mirror over the fireplace (which Mr. Landlord from Dublin warned could never receive a fire unless she wanted the place to burn down). Ginny felt Alex’s cool fingers on her neck. For a second they were Ricardo’s fingers and a rush of sex blazed between her legs. It went as soon as she opened her eyes, gone with the sight of the astonishing necklace, fitting like a collar, around the high neck of her Walker-Gosman-Dior triumph of a dress.
Diamonds, they looked like diamonds, but, of course, they couldn’t be.
“Oh, Alex, I’ve never seen anything so beautiful, but you shouldn’t have—they look incredibly ex—”
“On loan, Ginny, m’darling, so don’t get too attached to them. They’re on loan from Harry Winston. I want you to show them off tonight; no one could do it better.”
He twirled her around and she felt radiant, ready for anything, as full of anticipation as, not so long ago, she’d felt all the time. How wonderful it was to have Alex back; how beloved the necklace made her feel.
For a second Johnny thought Dolores had come to join him after all. Through the crowd he caught a glimpse of a tal
l, slender, dark-haired girl, laughing up at a tall, handsome guy with English-looking sideburns.
As he moved toward her, he realized it was a hopeful figment of his imagination. This girl, in such a sweet, decorous, unlike-Dolores dress, didn’t look like his wife at all; she didn’t even have any bosom to speak of.
He smirked when the girl turned her back to him. What a perfect dress to describe a woman… two-faced, misleading, totally deceptive, because while the front was pure Miss Goody Two-shoes, pearl-buttoned to the neck, the back, so low-cut it only just missed the crease in her behind, was straight out of a bordello.
Johnny yawned. He was tired, that was his main problem, tired because of too many restless nights after too many rows with Dolores, tired of slammed doors, locked doors, empty apartments, let alone empty refrigerators. When and where was it going to end?
Although nowadays he often turned up alone at events like this one tonight, he’d noted he was rarely asked, “Where’s your wife? Where’s Dolores?” the way most people began a conversation when one half of a couple appeared without the other, particularly a relatively newly wed couple. It disappointed him and, for some reason, tonight added to his depression.
How long had they been married? Not even eighteen months. He swallowed a sigh. There was no sign of Dolores getting pregnant again, if—and it was an if that troubled him more and more these days—she ever had been pregnant that January of ‘93, when he’d proposed and promised to help take care of her debts. She’d lost the baby because of all the stress, she’d said, stress caused by people clamoring to be paid, not willing to be patient. He’d believed her then. Did he believe her now? He didn’t know what he believed anymore.
He would feel guilty for the rest of his life that his mother had managed to wheedle out of him what a financial hole he was in, trying to persuade him to delay the wedding. He would forever feel that in tying the knot, in some way he’d hastened her death. Adding to his guilt had come the shock of learning she’d left him virtually everything, to make sure that with Dolores on his back, he wouldn’t sink like a stone.
To his horror, he felt his eyes misting over. He missed his mother, much more than he ever dreamed he would. She’d been his anchor, and from her letter, written to him just before she died, he knew now that for years he’d been hers.
“Like your column, Johnny… going to write about us tonight?” A stranger was grinning expectantly at him, as if they were lifelong friends. Who “us” referred to, he didn’t know or care. He grinned back and moved on.
People he didn’t know were accosting him more and more these days, not in the awed, respectful way he’d seen strangers approach his father, but as if they knew him and liked him because they read his column. He liked that. He liked that a lot, providing they didn’t want to enter into a discussion about why they did or didn’t agree with his point of view.
Thank God, he liked his job, was crazy about it, in fact; although with his mother gone, it appeared he had no one to tell who would be remotely interested.
So far Next! seemed to like him, too, although at the last lunch with Steiner, his boss, he’d implied he was looking for a big cover story from him “one of these days.” Steiner and he both.
He hadn’t taken the bait, hadn’t even blinked an eyelid to give away the fact that at last he thought he might be on to something. He was far too cautious even to admit it to himself. One step at a time… Rosa Brueckner style.
At least he could thank Dolores for Rosa, or Rosemary, to use the name she’d been christened with. Working on a story about modern-day heroines for Next!, just for the hell of it, he’d persuaded Dolores, on one of the days they weren’t snarling at each other, to try Rosa’s old number in California. To his amazement the number still worked and the next day she returned the call.
Dolores had reluctantly introduced “her husband” over the phone; he’d congratulated Rosa on the Time piece, said he wanted to include her in something he was working on for Next! and in February, when Rosa, now using her real name, Rosemary Abbott, had business that brought her to New York, they’d met.
“How come your number still rings in Beverly Hills?” was his first question to her.
She’d laughed, but there’d been no laughter in her eyes. “The trials from my job are still grinding on. It’s going to take years before it’s all cleaned up. That’s why the DEA keeps the number operating. It’s incredible, but despite the publicity, traffickers still call, hoping they’ve come to the best place to do their laundry.”
“Aren’t you scared?”
“Sure, sometimes, but if they wanted to kill me, they would have by now.” She’d spoken in a matter-of-fact way, as if she was discussing normal working conditions. “There’s a lot of macho behavior out there, guys who don’t want to believe they were outwitted, double-crossed by a woman…” She’d smiled an understanding smile as he’d shaken his head in dazed admiration, adding, “I come from a law enforcement family. Both my parents were detectives and my husband’s with the DEA. It makes a difference.”
He’d never told Dolores about the meeting. He didn’t hide it from her. He just didn’t tell her, and at the time she’d been away, skiing in Aspen with Ash, one of the quartet of empty-headed, too-rich-for-their-own-good young women Dolores liked to hang around with; although in her case, Johnny was the one who ended up paying the bills.
But why hadn’t he told her? Because despite being older than he remembered from their brief meeting in the Hamptons—about forty, he’d guessed—and wearing unattractive steel-rimmed glasses and a dowdy woolen suit, Rosemary Abbott was still one gorgeous hunk of woman, and Johnny knew there was no way Dolores would ever believe that after only five to ten minutes, Rosemary’s looks were the last thing on his mind.
She was an avenging angel, burning with a passion to “rid the world of drugs, destroyers of humanity.”
“Can I help?” It had seemed a natural thing to ask.
She’d looked at him long and hard. “Maybe you can.” That mirthless laugh again. “You certainly come with good credentials.” She knew about his Next! column; she probably knew everything there was to know about him, and then she’d admitted she’d only agreed to see him because she was such an admirer of his father and all he was doing to bring to justice those at the top in the drug business. “I would love to meet him one day.” What else was new?
He’d been pissed off, but he didn’t think he’d shown it. It was the cross he had to bear; and if it produced contacts like Rosa-Rosemary, he told himself, it was worth it.
“D’you know what I mean by Trace magazine?” she’d suddenly asked him. He did not.
“It’s an international showcase of stolen property, circulates in about a hundred countries to alert would-be buyers not to touch. The new reality is, by the time it’s stolen, it’s already too late for any alerts.”
“I don’t… I don’t get you.”
She’d looked carefully around the restaurant on the Lower East Side, where she’d suggested they meet. It was empty except for a forlorn-looking girl waiting for somebody by the window. “There’s been a spate of major thefts in Europe during the last couple of years… masterpieces, art, artifacts, jewels… expertly planned, no arrests, nothing to date retrieved. Trace issued photographs and gave details of about eighty million dollars’ worth. Nothing turned up because the thieves weren’t out there looking for buyers. These things were stolen to order—by order of the drug czars.”
“My God, but why?”
All business and factual a moment before, suddenly Rosemary had changed, become vague, quiet, as if she’d said too much. “I’ve got to go,” she’d said, although their main course had just arrived before them.
Why had she changed? Startled, Johnny had looked around, not seeing any reason for alarm. The forlorn girl had been joined in the window by another, equally drab-looking, that was all, but Rosemary had started to stand up. He’d insisted on getting her a cab and in the end they’d traveled up
town together.
Again asking her what he could do to help, before getting out on East 80th Street, she’d told him, “Keep up to date with stolen property—through Trace and the Art Loss Register, you know that international data base…”
He didn’t, but he soon would.
“Then keep your eyes open. You go to all these fancy parties with Dolores. Every so often the ego of these guys gets the better of them and they can’t resist flaunting something that will give them away. London’s still the clearinghouse for this international fine-art loot, but New York’s not far behind. What about that Long Island break-in over Christmas on the North Shore? A Goya, a Flinck, and what else? It’s been two months and not a peep… where d’you think the robbery squad is now?”
He knew he’d looked baffled, but she’d provided the answer. “Nowhere, my friend, absolutely nowhere. They’re still waiting for the ransom note, which I can tell you will never arrive. Check it out and keep in touch.”
He went back to his office after that to get the Brueckner Time piece out of the file and reread it. One paragraph chilled him, thinking of how suddenly Rosemary had shut up in the restaurant.
“The woman in money laundering is a very important phenomenon in Colombia,” he read. “The men are running the cartel, but women, professional women, are in control on the money end. For this reason Rosa Brueckner was perfect, able to develop a woman-to-woman trust, rather than the male macho thing.”
Johnny thought of the two women in the window, so nondescript he couldn’t remember a single thing about either of them. But something had alerted Rosa or, he corrected himself, Rosemary.
He hadn’t heard from her since, although he’d called and left a couple of messages. She’d been right, of course. There was a veil of mystery surrounding the North Shore burglary of Stimson Court Place, once the home of a Vanderbilt.
He’d gone to play cards with Freddy Forrester, an old-time bachelor cop friend of his father’s, something he’d been doing since he was a teenager, so Freddy didn’t suspect that during the game Johnny hoped to learn something—and he did.