Swindlers (4 page)

I could taste the lipstick on my mouth.
Danielle’s scent was all around me.

“I just came out a few minutes ago.”

A trace of disbelief, or so it seemed to my
guilty eyes, edged its way across his face. He offered me a
cigar.

“Oh, I forgot – you don’t smoke. Neither do I
- just these.” He lit the cigar and with a practiced movement of
his slender wrist made the match go out. “You say you haven’t seen
her.” His gaze roamed the distant shore. “Must have been mistaken,”
he said as he puffed on the cigar. “Sound carries out here. She’s
probably down below.” His gaze, shrewd, knowing, and, if I was not
mistaken, sad with disappointment, moved slowly back to me. “Down
below with one of my guests, probably in bed.”

I felt an emotion I clearly had no right to
have, a sharp twinge of jealousy, not because of what she was doing
with someone else – I knew very well she was not doing anything –
but the sinful, taunting knowledge that it was the kind of thing
she had done before.

St. James puffed on his cigar, his eyes
glistening with something very close to regret. He leaned both
elbows on the railing and flicked away an ash, and then, a moment
later, stepped back and threw his cigar as far as he could,
watching as the faint red glow grew fainter still and finally
died.

“She had that talent, you know; that talent
some women have. Even when she’s being unfaithful, even when you
know it, she can make you believe that she still belongs to you.” A
smile that beneath its cynicism seemed oddly sympathetic drifted
across his mouth. “You must have felt that, those few moments she
was out here, alone, with you.”

And then he turned and walked away and did
not look back, and for the first time in a very long time I felt
something close to shame.

I tried to blame it on the alcohol. I had not
had that much to drink, but the others had, and the rules of
conduct had been forgotten in the late night sensuality of men and
women who could not think but only feel. It was the worst excuse I
had ever heard, blaming my misbehavior on someone else’s state of
mind, like a burglar blaming his victim for leaving the doors
unlocked.

The night was getting cooler. I pulled my
coat close around my throat and started walking, trying to clear my
head. The sky was full of stars, a shining audience to the brief
drama – comedy or farce? – that had just unfolded: the husband with
the faithless wife who, given half a chance, would be forever
faithful to a man she had only just met; a man with whom, had the
scene lasted just a little longer, she might have run away and
never once had occasion to regret it. I felt a kind of triumph, not
because I thought it might really have happened, but that I was
capable of imagining it. She was married, but what did the rules
mean to me? But then, why that feeling of a guilty secret betrayed
when I realized that St. James had known?

Twice around the deck and I was through. Like
an actor leaving the stage, I waved my hand at the watching stars
and went below. The dining room had been abandoned, empty glasses
scattered on the table, some of what had been in them spilled on
the chairs. Gold-rimmed plates tumbled against one another,
half-eaten desserts crushed and melted into shapeless blobs of
sugar. The silence was everywhere, eerie and absolute, as if the
passengers and crew, grown tired of the voyage and of each other,
had left me there alone. But then, as I passed the door of the
yacht’s master suite, I thought I heard a muffled noise. I stopped
still, listening intently until I was certain what I heard. It was
St. James all right, shouting at his wife. I could not make out
what he was saying, the door was too thick for that, and if
Danielle was saying anything, none of it, not even the sound of her
voice, came through. It was none of my business, I told myself, but
the taste of her mouth was still on my lips, and I knew that they
were arguing about me. I started to walk away, but suddenly the
door opened and Danielle came running out.

“I don’t care if I ever -!” she screamed over
her shoulder just before she turned and saw me. The look of anger
on her face changed to something close to panic. Spinning around,
she faced St. James and cried in an injured tone, “Do you think I
want to sleep with every man I talk to?” And then, closing the door
behind her, she went back inside.

I thought about that question, that last
thing I had heard her ask, as I lay in bed and tried to sleep; not
whether she wanted to go to bed with every man she talked to, but
whether she wanted to with me. If we had been somewhere else, where
there was more privacy and where, with her husband gone, there had
been more time, would it have happened, would we have forgotten
everything except each other and what we wanted? It was no question
at all. That kiss had answered that. I tried not to think about
her, but I could not think of anything else. Laying there, in the
middle of the night, I laughed out loud at how easily I could play
the fool, mesmerized by a woman I could never have and, once this
short cruise was over with, would never see again. Strangely, or
perhaps not so strangely, I did not feel bad about it. It was
vanity, and I knew it, but I liked knowing that for a few stolen
moments Danielle had wanted me. In the secret recesses of my
uninhibited heart I was Don Juan, but in heaven, not in hell. There
may have been a smile on my lips when I finally fell asleep.

“Who’s there?” I demanded as I woke up with a
start. The shadow moving toward me moved more swiftly at my
voice.

“Quiet, not so loud,” whispered Danielle as
she pressed her fingers on my mouth and sat down on the edge of the
bed. She was wearing a silk nightgown that did not quite come to
her knees. “He’s asleep, but when he’s angry….I’m sorry you heard
that, sorry that -” But before she could finish I pulled her down
to me and started to kiss her.

“No,” she protested. “We can’t – not here,
not like this.”

I couldn’t help myself, I wanted her too
much, and I tried again.

“It’s too dangerous,” she said with a look in
her eyes that seemed ready to chance it. “Too dangerous,” she
repeated as if to remind herself what she stood to lose. “You don’t
know him; no one knows him the way I do. He’d kill us if we got
caught.”

For a moment, neither of us said anything. In
the moonlight, filtered through the window like a silver screen,
her face was as lovely as any I had ever seen. It held me captive,
unable, unwilling, to look away. She was almost too beautiful to
want, a painting in a museum too beautiful to touch.

“I shouldn’t have come,” she said finally,
gently stroking my hair. She smiled at the look of hopeful
disappointment in my eyes. “I had to see you again, one more time
alone.”

The excitement, the confidence, the sense of
being always at the center of things, watched by everyone whenever
she entered a room, all of that was gone. In its place was
something sad and wistful and far away.

“You don’t remember me, do you? I knew it as
soon as I saw you, as soon as we started talking. You didn’t
recognize me; you don’t remember anything about me. And I was
always so certain that you would.”

Without another word, without telling me
anything of what she meant, she kissed me on the side of my face
and vanished into the night.

CHAPTER Three

It made me a little crazy, trying to remember
a face that was impossible to forget. I could not have known her,
despite what she said. Perhaps we had met at some gathering, a
large party, in San Francisco or New York, where I did not know
anyone and, to hide my awkward self-consciousness, I had had too
much to drink. But she had meant more than that, more than some
chance meeting that had lasted only a few, brief seconds. We had
known each other well enough that I would have remembered – should
have remembered - things about her, not just her face. I lay there
in the darkness, searching through my past, wondering why I could
not find her, how she could have vanished. The next morning, when I
went up on deck to join the others, I could almost hear the
laughter in that silky voice of hers, telling me all about a memory
I did not share.

The motor launch was heading toward the
shore. Sitting next to her husband, Danielle, a white scarf
whipping in the breeze, was looking back over her shoulder, trying,
as it seemed, to catch one last glimpse of what she had left
behind. I thought she saw me, and I thought she smiled.

“Mr. and Mrs. St. James had to fly back to
New York.”

I turned and found myself under the watchful
gaze of Blue Zephyr’s captain who immediately offered his hand.

“Mustafa Nastasis. We haven’t met. I’m
acquainted with the other guests, but this is your first time,
isn’t it?”

There was something out of place about him,
something that did not feel right. His manner was too formal, too
studied, everything too perfect. His dark gray hair was cut just
right, his black mustache trimmed with precision. His
double-breasted blazer gleamed like a dinner jacket, and his
tailored flannel slacks broke at exactly the right angle across a
pair of soft Italian loafers. He spoke English with the meticulous
pronunciation that a native speaker never uses.

“Greek,” he explained in answer to the
question he read in my eyes. “On my father’s side; my mother was
from Istanbul. They usually hate each other, the Greeks and the
Turks, but my parents did not care for politics, only each other.
They had nine children.”

His eyes, shrewd and observant, moved past me
to the motor launch, barely visible in the morning haze.

“Are they coming back?”

“To Blue Zephyr?” His glance was full of
meaning, or rather the suggestion of one, because there was
something enigmatic in his look. A smile of cheerful malevolence
suddenly started across his mouth, but then he shrugged his
shoulders and made the vague remark, “Always, but when, or
where….”

“They decided to leave rather suddenly. They
didn’t say anything about it last night.”

His gaze turned inward, as if to shut out the
question, or any other inquiry about what Nelson St. James might be
planning to do next.

“Tomorrow, in Los Angeles, a plane will take
you back to San Francisco.”

“That’s very kind of Mr. St. James,” I
replied, “but it won’t be necessary.” With an expression as
enigmatic as his, I added, “I have other plans.”

I was telling the truth. I did have plans of
my own, something I had been meaning to do for a long time. Tommy
Larson was just about the only friend I had. Though we lived only
an hour’s plane ride apart, he never seemed to get to San Francisco
and I almost never went to L.A. We talked on the phone once in a
while, usually after I had won a case and he called to complain
that, thanks to me, the streets were now less safe than they had
been and all the women were in danger, but I had not seen him in
nearly a year. A lot had happened and not all of it was good.

Tommy had moved out of Los Angeles, from
Pasadena where he had lived for years, since shortly after
finishing law school, to a small town an hour’s drive north, not
far from Santa Barbara and a dozen miles inland. Ojai was a place
to grow oranges and avocados, and a place to hear yourself think.
The Thatcher school was the other side of the orchards on the east
end of town, and there were other shady private schools spread
along the oak lined approach. Gurus and mystics, disciplines of
eastern religions that taught the path to inner peace, had
flourished here, and Aldous Huxley, back in the 1950s, had often
driven up for long discussions about what it all meant. There was
still some of that, though it more often took the form of classes
on yoga and other, stranger, meditations, but now the famous people
who came here were mainly interested in having a place to hide.
Celebrities walked around, or sat in small restaurants, dressed in
shabby clothes, and for the most part no one noticed. Tommy had
been famous once, but that was not the reason he had moved.

I followed the long straight palm-lined
street up into the foothills until I reached a one story Spanish
style house that looked as if it had been here for years, since
sometime in the 1920s when some now forgotten movie star had wanted
a place where he could escape the prying eyes of tourists and,
depending on whom he was with, a jealous husband or an overzealous
cop. It was barely visible from the road, hidden behind a tangle of
reddish orange bougainvillea and clumps of cactus with exotic
purple flowers. Low rock walls, three feet thick, rocks piled by
hand on top of each other, rocks taken when the land was cleared
and the house was built, marked the boundary of the property and
both sides of a long narrow drive. It was Los Angeles a hundred
years ago, before the movies made it famous and anyone who was
anyone had to live in a mansion.

Tommy was sitting on the front porch in a
faded gray t-shirt and a pair of tattered khaki shorts. The straw
hat on his head had seen better days and one of his leather sandals
had a broken strap. With a familiar grin he watched while I parked
the car, then he stretched his arms and slowly rose from the
stiff-backed chair.

“As you can see,” he announced as he ran his
hand across the heavy stubble on his face, “I’ve gone to a lot of
trouble getting ready for your visit. What are you laughing at?” he
demanded with a gruff, half bent grin. “Hell, I even got dressed,
sort of; not like you, all pressed and buttoned up, but good
enough. At least as good as I ever do anymore.” He clasped my hand
and with his other hand held my arm steady. “I hate to say it, but
it’s good to see you. What’s it been – at least a year?” He seemed
dazzled by the thought of it, that that much time had passed.
“Funny how that works. Wasn’t that long ago, I saw you every
day.”