The Jewels of Tessa Kent (42 page)

“Oh.” She could only look at him, her lips parted in astonishment. He was blushing violently, but he held her gaze until she dropped her eyes.

“You know what?” he mumbled. “Let’s go ice skating at Rockefeller Center, this minute. You’re dressed just right. And we can tell our agents to make a deal tomorrow. Sound good to you?”

“I haven’t ice skated since I was sixteen,” Tessa stammered.

“Don’t worry, I’m a whiz. I’ll hold you up, won’t let
you go, can’t have Tessa Kent flat on her ass in front of her public.”

“Sam, I’ll be a great Cassie, I promise you.”

“I knew that years and years before you did. Jim, put this on my tab and collect my winnings. So long, guys, well worth losing five bucks, wasn’t it?”

As they left the bar in a storm of applause, whistles, and catcalls, Tessa thought that she knew what it felt like to have the soul of a teenager after all.

M
aggie settled herself, as comfortably as she ever could in a plane, and reflected thankfully that there was no one on the flight to present her with a birthday cake and wait for her to blow out twenty-three candles. No one who knew, as she returned to New York from Hong Kong, that this June day in 1993 it was her twenty-third birthday.

The previous year the ladies of the press office, led by Lee Maine, had made a big deal out of her turning twenty-two, just as they’d done for everyone’s birthday since she’d been one of them, but something in her hated the thought of having to face “Happy Birthday” again. Was it a reflex of inhabitual shyness when confronted with that perfectly awful song, an ordeal that required everyone to put on a happy face and pretend delight and surprise? It should be banned for grown-ups. Or was she merely reacting to the incredible stress that went hand in hand with the utter exhaustion that came from supervising the press on the largest sale in her career?

In any case, Maggie was relieved that her birthday would be well over by the time this plane landed. She’d
been gone two weeks, working the publicity mill for all it was worth. For a month preceding the trip she’d worked in New York with the Chinese wire services and the two English-language Hong Kong newspapers as well as with journalists from the most important of the dozens of magazines that crowded the Hong Kong newsstands. Once there she’d held a press conference attended by more than a hundred journalists, and worked without respite with writers for the score of Chinese newspapers, trying to give each one a different story angle. She’d organized every detail of the catering and flowers for the weeklong exhibition and the actual sale, held in the Regent’s largest ballroom. During the sale she’d dashed between journalists and the bank of phone bidders, finding out which purchasers were willing to let their names be used. She’d kept herself going on room-service scrambled eggs, tuna fish sandwiches, and long dawn and late-night swims with which she religiously released her tension in the Regent pool.

Although Maggie wasn’t, like Caesar, actually bringing back the spoils of war to parade them in front of the Romans, she felt as if she were leading a train of elephants loaded with booty. In addition to the commissions on the hammer price on the many millions achieved by porcelain, Chinese furniture, Chinese paintings, and the results of the jewelry sale—largely jade, watches, and the fancy colored diamonds so admired by the Chinese—she was returning with the ten percent commission on 1.7 million dollars that had been paid for a rare and extraordinarily fine jade necklace composed of 107 of the precious beads, a world record for S & S or any other auction house.

She was still in shock, she realized. If you calculated in Hong Kong currency, in which it had been sold, the price fetched was more than HK13 million. Thirteen million, two … the price of that necklace, in addition to the great success of the entire sale, had finally established S & S as a major player in Hong Kong.

Was it possible that only five years ago she’d been the
most temporary and inexperienced of temps and that now she was Lee’s chief staff officer, with three assistants to supervise and entire auctions to publicize on her own? Was it possible that as soon as she returned to the office she’d start working on her next auction, a sale of Postimpressionists for which she’d go to Geneva?

Well, why not? Maggie thought. She sipped another glass of the champagne the flight attendant kept bringing her. Five years in the auction business, she was convinced, counted for more than fifteen years in any other job. Any press officer has to be prepared to be pushed, not just to the edge, but over the edge, totally and utterly consumed by the business at hand, and auction followed auction relentlessly. Lee had warned Maggie not only that she would frequently find herself truly homicidal, for which she recommended strenuous exercise, but that she would have very little time for a personal life. Lee had been right; in fact she’d underestimated. But, Maggie thought smugly,
but
what little private time there was she used well.

She was as direct as any man when it came to sex. If there was a real attraction she not only didn’t expect courtship, she didn’t want it. Courtship took up precious time. She came to the table to play, not to look around, and she made it a rule not to accept an invitation from anyone, not even for a drink, if she didn’t have a strong suspicion that there was a good chance that she’d want to go to bed with him.

Sometimes, Maggie thought, the rapid development of her many affairs, and the unsentimental way she dropped lovers in whom she’d lost interest, even managed to shock Polly, and that took some doing.

“You’re so
frisky
,” Polly had commented recently. “Meaning what?” she’d asked. “You’re like a puppy, chasing its tail. Why don’t you settle down with one guy for six months and see how it feels?”

“Like you and Miss Jane Robinson?” Maggie had asked, laughing. “Remember, that snowstorm brought you together, so I was the inadvertent matchmaker.”

“Laugh, laugh, I don’t care, I’m a happy woman,” Polly had replied. Well, “happy” for Polly now meant steady domesticity, and that was the last thing Maggie wanted. She was simply having too much fun. She had no intention of getting married to anyone, and when men got serious about her, as, unfortunately, so often seemed to happen, she let them down firmly. It was kinder that way than to keep them dangling with false hope. She hadn’t missed all the pleasures of a college education after all, now that she came to think about it.

Of course, even with her mild disapproval of Maggie’s frenetic sex life, Polly was no longer fully privy to the details of Maggie’s private life since she’d stopped being a boarder. As she’d advanced in the press department, she’d earned more money. It still wasn’t much, public relations never paid well, but she managed to make her salary cover her brutal haircuts that were never in or out but were essential to her look, expensive Wolford panty hose that wore like iron and were a true economy, shoes she tended so carefully that they lasted forever, and a very occasional replacement to her consistently all-black wardrobe. By being fanatically careful about expenses, Maggie’d managed to rent an amazingly cheap two-room apartment one flight down from Polly. It gave her the advantage of the increased privacy she now wanted for her busy love life, and the reason to start slowly buying at auction for herself.

Maggie had never realized that she had a deep need to own her own things, always living in other people’s houses as she had, but once she learned enough about furniture, art, and objects from the friendly experts at S & S, all of them eager to educate her on the chance that she’d shine extra publicity on their departments, she’d been able to pick up a few true bargains at various sales. There were invariably days when, by sheer luck, there was little interest in a piece on which she had her eye. She’d been able to snatch up some wonderful antique textiles for Polly as well, by way of repayment for the amounts of Polly’s food she’d consumed.
Nothing could repay the permanent, deeply affectionate welcome she always found at her friend’s studio.

Her own tiny apartment was, Maggie thought dotingly, as eclectic as you could get. It was still fairly empty, but everything in it mattered to her. No matter how many shelter magazines she pored over or how many decorating editors she huddled with for her work, she’d never chosen to make a single “design statement,” which, as Polly said, was damn lucky, considering what an incredible mishmash she was creating with her magpie eye. But it was the home she’d never had and always longed for.

She didn’t entertain there and probably never would. Lunch almost always took place at a fashionable restaurant as, sometimes with Lee and sometimes alone, Maggie became friends with the many journalists a press officer needed to know: the ladies and gents of the art and antiques magazines, the fashion magazines, the general-interest magazines, and the specialized magazines for collectors. There were two magazines for teddy bear collectors alone, Maggie thought, still surprised after all these years, and small fortunes were spent on old Steiff bears in good condition.
Life
had done a big piece on their last teddy bear auction and was waiting eagerly for the antique doll sale that was coming up.

“May I offer you a little more champagne?” the flight attendant asked.

“Please,” Maggie said, holding out her glass. This stuff wasn’t getting to her, she was still too high on the last two weeks to be touched by wine.

What a fantastically international business she was in, Maggie reflected. No matter where an auction was held—New York, Munich, Lugano, London, or Kuala Lumpur or anywhere else—the bidders came from every country where people had money. If they weren’t there in person, they’d bid by mail or by phone.

You could put all the auction houses in the world on an island—something the size of Bermuda, for instance—
and as long as there were good hotels, enough sales rooms, and plenty of free meals for journalists, you could declare it the auction capital of the world. No force known to man, not even a legion of furious golfers, could keep the collectors and dealers away.

You’d need marvelous mail service for the catalogs, and an international airport, but in the end the results would be the same. Some people wanted to sell and others wanted to buy; if you had a fine enough silver service you could march off into the middle of the Sahara and knock it down for eight million dollars. You could slip a Fabergé Imperial Easter egg into your pocket, climb a mountain, and pull in three million in change.

God but she loved doing something really well, and she was getting better at it all the time. She loved her two crazy little rooms; she liked each of her lovers; she loved her friends: Polly, Lee, Jane, Hamilton, Liz.… And then there was her oldest friend, Barney, who was always there for her, Barney about whom she could never think without a deep pang in her heart, a muddled turmoil in her brain, and a peculiar longing that seemed to come from her wrists and radiate up her arms to … Never mind Barney, she was the luckiest girl in the world, Maggie decided.

An empress of China had once collected apple-green jade and tucked it away in 3,000 ivory cabinets. Where had it all disappeared to? How much per bead were 107 jade beads—or jadeite, to give it its proper name—into 1.7 million dollars? she wondered. The human desire to own was a marvel. How much per round, green, carved little rock? Maggie tried to figure it out in her head, but the amounts she arrived at kept changing as she drifted off to sleep.

On the first Saturday night in September 1993, just as business hours were ending, Maggie met Barney at Chopper Dude’s, the custom motorcycle shop he’d opened with a well-financed partner several years earlier.
Soon after his arrival in New York his alliance to his Harley had melted into total immersion in the world of handmade swingarms, skyscraper sissy bars, stretched headlights, and hand-hewn fenders; a world in which one company alone made 250 different kinds of motorcycle seats, a world in which a seventy-year-old CEO might spend four years working on his Springer, gold-plating the chrome on the shoulders, the front fork, the brake and clutch levers, the
screen
behind the carburetor faceplate, and the band behind the nitrous bottle.

Maggie and Barney had reached an agreement never to talk shop. Even the brand names of the bikes competing in the Daytona 500 remained as foreign to her as the very existence of a Philadelphia Chippendale tea table remained to him.

“Take me out of this testosterone-as-a-lifestyle pit,” she demanded. “I have something to talk over with you.”

“Where the hell have you been? I haven’t seen you for it seems like months,” Barney complained as they walked down Ninth Avenue.

“Working,” Maggie said briefly, mindful of their agreement.

“Working too hard to give me a quick call?” he asked, hurt.

“In Hong Kong,” she said tersely. It wasn’t true, but how could she tell him that something about the light of summer evenings in the city made her long for him too much to permit her to see him safely? She’d rationed herself to this casual drink tonight.