The Ruby Tear (12 page)

Collectibles

T
he re-blocked Scene Two was a problem. Jess had trouble replacing the old cues with new ones. Her continual blowing of two crucial lines was not improving her temper.

The theater was icy because repair work that could no longer be put off was being done on the old boiler in the basement. Jess rehearsed in her coat, which made her feel heavy and clumsy where she needed to be light, almost ethereal: she was the idealist (and perhaps an ideal herself) in Marko’s grasping family and represented their redemption, if they had any.

She needed to fly, but felt only able to clump around flubbing her lines right and left like a stage novice.

Anthony Sinclair was little help at first. He had been touchy and absent-minded since that brief meeting with his wife outside the theater. The story of the glued jewelry had gotten out, of course, and he seemed particularly upset over it, although he clearly also had other things on his mind too.

In the first break he went to the office to talk to Nell, he said, something about the payment schedule. Jess hoped he wasn’t spending his paycheck wildly on something that was leaving him strapped and in need of advances on his salary. There were tales of Anthony hiring detectives to watch Sally when they were apart, but also of his suddenly buying her some incredibly expensive gift as part of the campaign to lure her back to him.

He was also upset because the theater trickster had struck again that morning, filling Jessamyn’s bottle of Evian water (kept handy for between-scene refresher sips) with some sort of ammoniac solution.

Marie had discovered the substitution right away—you could hardly miss the ammonia smell so it had hardly been a serious attempt at injury, but still, what a spiteful thing to do! This whole thing was just getting wilder and meaner, and Jess knew it was wearing her down and clawing her memory to shreds just when she needed it most.

Maybe they were right—the production staff who were talking about calling in some help—the police, hired guards, even a private detective had all been suggested.

But—the show; the publicity; costs; the delays and interruptions; and a hundred other objections had divided opinion and obstructed action so far. Jess hated to be the cause of a ruinous uproar, pitting members of the company and their feelings and ideas about who was guilty, against each other. She certainly didn’t want to be blamed or stuck being labeled a Jonah, liked or even loved by her friends—but unemployable in her profession.

And it wasn’t all that bad, really.

Better to tough it out, as long as she could, anyway. And unless anybody else in the company became a target too. That would be the last straw, and the police would have to be told. But it hadn’t happened yet.

Anthony returned from Nell’s office looking worried. He came over to Jess. “I told Nell about the ammonia. My God, how childish! But dangerous, too. Are you sure you don’t want to try rehearsing somewhere else? My place, Walter’s, even, or over at Anita’s apartment. Just for a few days, to make life more difficult for this joker, if you can call him that! We need a more obvious way of closing ranks against him, and this would be a clear communication.”

“Him or her,” Jess answered evenly. “We need to start getting the feel of our moves here on the stage, Anthony. Johnny’s watching everybody now. He may be a stage-struck kid, but he’s smart too. He’ll catch the bastard sooner or later, which he can’t do if we’re working in somebody’s apartment. Thanks for offering, though.”

“Well, I’m worried for you,” he said. “The world is full of crazies these days.”

“Oh, baloney,” she said. “It’s a nuisance, and I have to peel Marie off the ceiling every time one of these things happens, but at some point this jerk will get bored and move on to some other stupid mischief someplace else. I really appreciate your concern, but I’ll wait the trickster out it if I have to.”

He peered at her anxiously. “Coming through that car accident must have really toughened you up—made you brave, I mean. I know veteran troupers who’d bolt right out of a production rather than stick around for some nut to take pot-shots at them!”

Jess smiled, but she was reminded of the feeling she’d had all day that someone was following her; Marie’s mysterious man blowing on his cold hands, maybe. She thought she had spotted a man trailing her on her way to the laundromat this morning. It had been an extremely creepy feeling, and had not improved the state of her nerves, but she wasn’t going to screw up the rehearsal talking about him now.

She walked through the scene once more, losing her place in the script and missing cues. She apologized and began again. Walter helped, talking to her from the arched cellar doorway past the broken sofa that had supposedly fallen through a shell hole from the floor above, through the maze of trunks and boxes and discarded children’s toys to the crooked old wardrobe with its shattered mirror in which Eva should see her own pale, frightened face.

“We can’t give up!” Sinclair roared Marko’s lines. “We will wait out the worst they can do, and then we’ll turn the tables on our enemies and drive
them
underground, like rats!”

“To make rats out of human beings,” Jess replied, whirling to face him, “
that
is the work of our family? And you wonder why I go away somewhere, anywhere, to get away from all of you?”

“‘The
mark
of our family’, Eva,” Walter corrected.

“I’m sorry, damn it—‘Is that the mark of our family? And you ask why I go away—’ Hell!”

“You’re pushing it,” Anthony said kindly. “Look, everybody else is still on book here.” He gestured, indicating the other cast members with their scripts in their hands. “Try it more slowly; let’s do it by beats and go more slowly.”

But the stage manager called time; the Actors’ Equity limit for the day’s rehearsal had been reached. Jess stayed a little longer on her own, plugging away at her elusive lines, script in hand this time.

Of course she was distracted, wondering what Ivo Craggen would say about the ruined pendant and earrings. She had sent them off to a costume-jewelry expert recommended by the wardrobe mistress, but she hadn’t heard yet whether the damage could be undone. Meanwhile she was not especially looking forward to explaining it all to him.

But there could be no ducking the issue; he had probably already heard something from Lily Anderson. Her casual remarks to Marie dismissing the idea of insurance came back now to haunt her; what if Craggen held her responsible for the value of the pieces, modest though it might be? She was an actor, not an heiress, and money was always tight.

When she came out of the theater into the cloudy winter afternoon, there he was, studying the show posters that flanked the entrance. He took the steps two at a time and caught her hand, which he brought to his lips.

“Have you forgotten?” he said with mock severity. “The antique jewelry show! I invited you. You must come. Lily Anderson saw it at a special preview, and she says it is wonderful. I am sure you will enjoy it too.”

“I’ve got something to tell you first,” she said, steeling herself.

“Something troublesome, I can see it,” he said. “Come back into the lobby, then, out of the wind. Now, tell.”

She told.

His brows drew together in a frown that turned his face into a grim mask and made him suddenly appear much older.

“I see,” he growled, when she had finished.

Her heart sank. “Oh, God—don’t tell me they’re priceless heirlooms, please! Why did you ever risk them in a silly stage play?”

“The play is not silly,” he snapped, and then added more calmly, “and the foolishness was mine, not yours.”

“I can’t tell you how sorry I am,” she said, hugging her script case to her chest for support. “I should have put them in a safer place—no, I should never have accepted them at all, not even temporarily! I’ll pay you back for them if it takes forever.”

He shook his head. “You pay me back by coming with me to the jewelry show. That’s the only reparation I’ll accept, and now you can’t say no.”

Weak-kneed with relief but not inclined to a relationship of favors owed and owing, she tried to get out of it. “I don’t know—I did say yes, but it’s already been a long day for me—”

“The exhibition is close by,” he coaxed. “You look as if some fresh air and a little stirring of the blood would be good right now. Walk with me that far, and then if you still want to go home, I’ll fetch you a taxi and off you go. And it’s time you begin to call me by my given name. I am Ivo, please, not this overbearing-sounding Mr. Craggen.”

Before she had time to consider this proposition, he’d relieved her of the leather script case, tucked her hand in the crook of his arm, and was escorting her down the street.

How on earth could this charming man be the cause of Nick’s fears and weird warnings? Really, it was ridiculous!

No, it was sad. It was Nick’s craziness rearing its head again, just like after the accident. The woman on the horse had been the same, sinister kind of thing  . . . it was some kind of paranoid delusion, she was sure. She was pierced by a sense of loss, the loss of Nick as he had been. She hoped her preoccupation didn’t show.

“We go on my turf now,” Craggen was saying. “Or is ‘turf’ only for gangs? I’ll be your native guide for a change, and if you’re tired listening, just say it. But you should even know a little about this before we go in, for proper appreciation.”

He gave a capsule history of how until the nineteenth century, gems and jewels had been the possessions of the aristocratic wealthy alone, often by royal law as well as economic reality. Surviving pieces from those times were now so valuable, due to their rarity and tending as they did to elaborate workmanship and showy encrustations of precious stones, as to be beyond the means of any but the richest of museums and collectors.

However, he said, decorative creations dating from the era of the Industrial Revolution, made with elements of machine manufacture as well craftsmanship, were handsome but also cheap enough for the middle class of the time. Made of more common materials, they were much more reasonably priced, and these days were still affordable for dealers and traders like himself.

“Then we’re not going to see anybody’s Crown Jewels?” Jess said. “Well, that’s hardly fair; you got me here under false pretenses.”

“Crown jewels, and indeed all the many jewels worn by the royalty of Europe in the old days,” Craggen replied, “were primarily assets to be collateral for the money lenders. A crowned monarch or even a local lord never knew when he would suddenly need to finance a campaign or a quick escape from stronger enemies. Gems are small, valuable, and easily hidden away or carried in secret, so highborn families kept their accumulated riches in that form. Many wealthy knights wore their precious stones into battle.”

“You’re kidding. You’re not? But why risk valuable property like that?”

“To be sure it wasn’t looted from the home castle while its master was away somewhere fighting wars for his liege lord,” he said in an odd, ironic tone. “We turn here. And to have wealth upon your person if you were captured in a fight and needed to pay a ransom to go home.

“Also many gemstones were considered to have magic healing and protective powers. The business of being an aristocratic warrior involved plenty of danger and wounds. And there was no penicillin.”

They entered the lobby of a block-long office building enclosing a spacious atrium that was filled with plants, like a gigantic greenhouse. Craggen laughed with delight, pausing in the entry.

“It’s like a garden inside a very big, very shiny cloister!”

He drew her to a poster on one marble-clad wall near a busy bank of elevators.

“You see,” he said, “they have chosen this very fine necklace as the emblem of the show. The necklace in the exhibition isn’t the real one, but an imitation which the family women wore in place of the truly valuable piece. That they kept at home, safe under lock and key.”

Jess studied the blown-up photograph of an ornate golden chain with its pendants and pearls and intricately set emeralds—green glass, she supposed, standing in for the real thing.

“I didn’t think anybody did that until our own crime-ridden times.”

He chuckled, and his eyes narrowed to humorous gleams. “All times are crime-ridden, one way or another. It’s the human way.”

She looked sharply at him, chilled a little by this remark. “You’re very cynical, Mr. Craggen.”

“I am very experienced, Miss Croft, and my name, to you, is Ivo.”

He certainly played the suave, world-weary European with a becomingly light touch. A good thing, too; otherwise he might have seemed ridiculous. With his smooth cheeks and forehead, his eyes glittering with enthusiasm, he looked rather smug and no more than in his mid-twenties, a confident son of privilege brimming with irrepressible life.

Certainly not like Nick’s crazed avenger.

She turned back to the poster. “I don’t understand: why would copies like this one be worth exhibiting?”

“The first ones were made by a Frenchman named Tassie, who invented the best glass paste for imitating genuine gemstones. The workmanship and the results are so fine that Tassie’s replicas themselves—and even those of his students—are now museum pieces. This particular necklace, however, is a more modern imitation of a reproduction made for the Duc de Chancey, shortly before the French Revolution.”

“What happened to the Duke’s real jewels?” Jess asked.

Craggen cocked his head consideringly. “Smuggled out of France, broken up and sold to support his family in exile, I suppose; like with many others in bad times.”

They walked up the wide marble steps to the mezzanine level, where the exhibition was mounted. “I suppose it’s common,” she said in a subdued tone, “for old jewelry to be connected with stories of war and tragedy.”

For an instant he checked, staring at her with a sharpness that startled her.

“What do you mean?” he said.

“Well, you were just telling me—" she stopped. “Ivo, what did I say to upset you? I didn’t mean to.”

He softened into his usual demeanor. “No, no, I was thinking of something else. What you said is exactly the case. If these objects could speak—” He waved his hand, indicating the entire exhibition floor with its drift of spectators hovering at the locked glass cases, peering closely, murmuring to each other. “If jewels would speak, no one in this room would remain unmoved. Not even these grasping men with granite hearts.”