Eighty Days Amber (4 page)

He suddenly turned to face me.

And I realised that I was holding my breath.

2

Dancing in the Moonlight

I didn’t see him again for a week, and then he came back, wearing a sharp anthracite-coloured business suit, this time with a companion. They sat in the same place by the window with their backs to me, Chey and his fat friend in the zipped-up cream jacket who ordered a second pastry and another cappuccino and stared at the line of my breasts as I served them to him.

‘Waitress,’ he said, snapping his fingers in the air, as though I would have trouble noticing him only a few feet away and they being the only customers in the store.

As I brought his drink, his hand shot out to the sugar jar, right in line with the tray as I set it down on the bench, knocking his cup of coffee sideways and down the front of my white blouse. I yelped and leaped back as the hot liquid scalded my skin, barely managing to keep my cool and avoid cursing at the pair of them.

The fat man picked up a napkin and moved forward to lunge at me and dab at my breasts, until Chey stood up and pulled him forcibly back onto his stool.

‘That’s enough,’ he said, and his companion had visibly wilted, all the bravado seeping out of him like air from a balloon.

He had spoken in Russian.

The next day a parcel was delivered to the store,
couriered all the way over from Macy’s, with a note that simply read:
Apologies. For your blouse
.

It was pure silk, with a fine lace collar, much more beautiful, and no doubt more expensive, than the functional one that I had stained. The French owner raised an eyebrow at me as I tucked the parcel next to my coat and handbag, and made no mention of sending it back. Chey’s friend had been rude, and I would accept this gift in return.

A week later, I turned twenty, and he asked me out to dinner.

‘How did you know it was my birthday?’ I asked him when he came into the store that afternoon to check that I had received his package. My tone was accusatory. The last thing I needed was a stalker – particularly one with clumsy friends – even if he was handsome.

‘I didn’t,’ he replied, smiling. ‘Happy birthday. I hope that it fits, and is a fair replacement for the one my friend ruined.’

‘Oh. Yes, of course. It’s beautiful. Thank you. There was really no need . . .’

‘You’re very welcome,’ he replied.

He was about to leave the store when my curiosity got the better of me and I asked him in my native tongue, ‘Are you Russian?’

The question fell between us like a stone, weightier than I had intended. I felt like a fool, and a nosy one at that. Prying was a quality that I disapproved of in others.

‘No, I’m not,’ he replied in English. ‘I speak just a few words. But only for work.’

‘That’s a shame,’ I replied. ‘Sometimes I am homesick for my own language.’

He paused, as if mulling something over. I regretted
being so honest with a perfect stranger. I had no close friends in New York and I’d been starved of company for too long, and now I’d made a fool of myself in front of this man. The doorbell remained silent, no matter how hard I wished that another customer would enter the shop and save me from my embarrassment.

‘Can I take you to dinner, Luba?’ he asked after a long silence. He’d caught my name from the badge that was pinned to my apron. ‘I won’t speak Russian to you, but I can keep you from being lonely, for an evening. I know what it’s like to be new in a city. And it is your birthday, after all.’

I’d been told Americans were more forward than folk in other parts of the world, but Chey was my first sign of it. If a good-looking and pleasant man was going to ask me out to dinner then I would not turn him down without good reason. I accepted.

We ate at Sushi Yasuda, on East 43rd Street, surrounded by bamboo walls and bamboo tables, as if we had stepped into a temple, a world away from the dreary rush of Times Square only a few blocks over. It was the first time I’d eaten raw fish. I wore his blouse, of course, and a simple black skirt with a pair of low kitten heels that I had once bought to attend job interviews. His attire matched mine in formality, which was a relief; just a simple but well-cut white shirt and a pair of jeans.

Chey showed me how to mix wasabi into the soy sauce and I told him about my life growing up in the Ukraine. He told me about his own in return.

His father had served in the army and, consequently, he’d grown up in military bases all over the world, which was where he had learned to speak a few words of Russian, as
well as a little German, some Spanish and fluent French and Italian.

He now made a living trading jewellery as an amber merchant, which afforded him many opportunities to practise his Russian, speaking to the dealers in Kaliningrad. Both of his parents were dead, like mine. His father was killed, not in combat but in a bar fight when Chey was fifteen, and his mother had committed suicide shortly after.

Chey had run away from the boys’ home in New Jersey that the State had planned to relocate him to until he came of age, and he’d begun working in a pawn shop. A knack for business and an appreciation as keen as a magpie’s for jewellery had led him to international trading in precious stones. Later he focused on amber.

I asked him why he’d chosen fossils over other prettier, more popular and surely more valuable gems, like diamonds and rubies, and he told me that the first time he had seen a piece of amber that a Latvian woman had traded in his store when he was sixteen, he had felt as though he’d caught hold of a piece of the setting sun, its colour was so golden and its feel so smooth and silky. The piece had a tiny creature trapped inside, perhaps thousands of years old, and the young Chey had wondered how it felt to be cast inside a prison of light. So his love affair with the gem had begun.

The way he told me the story of his life sounded somehow poetic to my ears, and colouring slightly at the thought, I recalled someone telling me once how poets had nicer (or was it longer?) cocks. I couldn’t deny that I was attracted to him. I felt drawn to him, the magnetism of his eyes, the square angle of his shoulders as he leaned forward and spoke to me with an almost confidential air. We sat in the booth and sometimes our knees touched or his fingers
brushed against my sleeve as I stretched my hand out to pick up the soy sauce or the water. This was a real man, complex, charismatic and, a small voice inside my head kept on reminding me, potentially dangerous, and I was orbiting around him like a moth to a flame.

When he walked me to the street and paid a taxi driver to whisk me safely home so I didn’t need to suffer the discomfort of a late-night subway journey home to Brooklyn, I had waited for him to make his move, to lunge at me and take payment for the meal or his kindness in the way that I was used to men wanting a kiss or more in exchange for their gifts. But his hands didn’t stray across my buttocks and neither did his eyes drop below my own, searching to see what secrets I might have hidden under the blouse he had bought to replace the one his friend had intentionally ruined.

Chey kissed me gently on the cheek, politely held the taxi door open and promised to call me, and I went home disappointed, rejected and a little angry with him. I was used to men wanting me, and being more overt about the fact. Over the years, I had come to realise that dating was a transaction, and anyway, the thought of giving him a blow job would not have been an inconvenience – far from it. Chey’s cool chivalry left me empty handed, bereft of the usual weapons that I would employ to ensnare his favour.

I became more irritated when I found myself looking out for him in the shop, jumping each time that the bell rang, rushing to get to the counter in case he was the next customer.

Two days later he phoned the patisserie while I was dusting powdered sugar onto the choux Chantilly, careful to tap the sieve very gently so the pastry shells were lightly
and evenly dusted, not overpowered and sickly with too much sugar on top.

Would I see him again? I agreed and this time he took me to the movies at the big multiplex off Union Square. I expected his hand to touch my knee or his arms to wrap themselves around me during the film, but he was a proper gentleman and I sensed he wouldn’t approve of groping a woman in the dark on a second date.

We had a coffee on University Place after the performance and when we left he pulled me to him and kissed me softly on the lips, not long and lingering, but with feeling. When he pulled away he smiled and raised his arm at a passing cab. He handed me in and shut the door, paying the driver to return me to Brooklyn. I was slightly disappointed, hoping that after that kiss he might have taken a step further.

My impatience continued to rise steadily over the next fortnight as we enjoyed a further two dates and again he did not make his move. It was as if he was quietly observing me, judging me, orchestrating the steady rise of my desire. Of course, I didn’t wish to appear overeager, but then again my frustration was building. I liked him and it was obvious from his flirtatious manner and soft, sensual kisses at the end of each date that he was attracted in equal measure to me.

It was then he dropped the bombshell.

He had been called away unexpectedly on business in the Dominican Republic, he told me over the phone.

And he wanted me to join him.

When I confessed that if I left the country I would most likely never be able to get back in again, he advised me that he sometimes had a private jet at his disposal and that
airport officials would pose no problem. I presumed that this meant he planned to bribe the airport staff who monitored these things into falsifying their records to indicate that their passenger had the appropriate paperwork in order. Both on departure and on arrival.

So I discovered, in one fell swoop, that Chey was a man of wealth, power and influence, to an extent that I hadn’t fully realised during our dates.

Naturally, that should have been my first clue that his business in the amber markets was neither as humble nor as law abiding as I had automatically presumed. But I grew up with the black market, in a world where bribing the police was simply a part of life. As for the money, Chey was so casual about it that it was easy to overlook. Day to day, he rarely flashed his cash, always dressing well but in understated fashion and never orchestrating unusually expensive dates. If he had wealth hidden away that he took for granted, then I could not find a way to hold that against him. Or to ask him how it was that he came by the money. An inheritance, perhaps, a successful investment or even a lottery win. Whatever it was, I resolved to remind myself that he had never lied to me about his income, and if it turned out to be more than I had expected, then that could only be good news for me.

I was not about to let an opportunity for an overseas holiday escape. Unless I managed to secure a Green Card, or intended to leave the States for ever, I might never get one again.

So it was that I accepted his invitation and arrived in La Romana with just a few belongings in a carry bag. I’d used some of my meagre savings to buy a swimsuit – a tiny gold bikini that glittered in the light – and a pair of sandals with
a thick wedge. I had a cotton dress, a skirt and the white blouse, and if that wasn’t enough for me to fit into whatever ritzy establishments that he had planned, then he’d need to buy me more things.

A car and driver appeared to collect me at the airport. Chey was apparently in a business meeting and unable to come in person. I sat alone in the back seat of the sedan with the window open, enjoying the warm air brushing my skin and the sweet smell that wafted on the breeze from the sugar factories as we raced along the wide streets lined with palm trees towards his private villa on the resort, which was so large that when we pulled in I had thought the ring of airy white stone buildings with their thatched roofs by the oceanfront comprised the entire resort, where we would have one bedroom. In fact, the driver explained that all of this was Chey’s and mine, at least for the next few days.

I was shown upstairs by a uniformed maid who led me silently to a vast unoccupied room overlooking the villa’s private beach with its endless shore of golden sand. I dumped my bag on the king-size bed and briefly admired my surroundings.

The floors were marble, polished and shiny, and the balconies offered a perfect view of a glittering ocean on one side of the villa, and an oval-shaped pool on the other. I had never come across such luxurious surroundings before and almost felt as if I didn’t belong here. The fittings were elegant and devoid of ostentation, but spoke of taste and wealth.

I stripped off in one of the expansive bathrooms, revelling in the feel of the cool slate tiles against my feet. I washed away the dust from my travels, donned my bikini, and made my way downstairs to the pool. I ordered a fruity cocktail
from a barman who had seemingly come out of nowhere the moment I appeared. Drink in hand, I pulled my book from my bag and settled in to wait by the pool, marvelling at the strangeness of life and how a girl from Donetsk had ended up in a place like this.

Chey arrived just as the sun was setting: an enormous orange orb that had flung its flame-like tendrils into the sky as if in an attempt to stop itself from falling. Shades of pink and tangerine as bright as the mango that had decorated my drink glowed brightly against the deep blue of the ocean.

I didn’t see him come out to the pool, but I felt the warmth from his skin as he perched on the side of my deckchair, leaned forward and kissed my cheek. I looked up. He was shirtless, dressed in just a pair of cream board shorts and sandals. His skin was a rich bronze colour, no doubt the result of several days lounging in the Caribbean sun before I had arrived.

‘Would you like to go for a ride?’ he asked.

Without waiting for my reply, he threw me the loose cotton dress I had hooked over the back of the chair and took my hand, leading me out to the front again, where a scooter was parked on the grass. He climbed on and I slid up behind him, wrapping my arms around his strong, muscled waist. I hung on as we sped down to the seafront at La Caleta, passing a row of ugly concrete buildings that contrasted strangely with the straw-thatched roofs and colourful painted walls of nearby tropical-themed bars and shop fronts where bunches of bananas were piled alongside fishing gear and signs advertising various tourist activities.