The Ruby Tear (9 page)

Two White Cats

S
he ordered a capuccino. Craggen asked for the same.

When the waitress had left, Jess leaned across the table and said to him in a low, firm tone, “I stop by here all the time, Mr. Craggen. I consider the staff my friends, and I don’t show my friendship by coming into their workplace and starting a fight, or bringing people with me who are crude enough to do that. Those jerks were just showing off. It wouldn’t have hurt to let them go through their stupid little routine and be on their way without playing lion-tamer in front of everybody.”

He looked back at her with a bemused expression. The silence stretched, and she flushed with unease but held his gaze.

“Lion-tamer,” he drawled contemptuously. “You think those ruffians are lions? This is a violent culture with no understanding of violence. They were performing, just as you say, for this audience of coffee drinkers. At home they practice their tough-guy faces and insouciance in front of the mirror, to the beat of their kind of ‘music’. I only offered the kind of critical comment that such people understand.”

“All the more reason that you should be ashamed,” she rejoined with spirit. “Criticism works when it
teaches
; pain just brutalizes people. I don’t know how you managed it, but I could see that you really hurt that guy.”

“Not enough,” he said coldly. “I should have taught him much harder. Bullies are dangerous, unless you make them scared of you.”

Oh, really—!
Jess smacked the table with her palm. “What are you, anyway—some kind of martial arts nut who thinks he can get away with anything because he knows a few tricks?”

Bur why was she so incensed? Her stage training had taught her to analyze her feelings so she could use them in her work. The intensity of his reaction to the leather crew had alarmed her. Her fear had translated into anger, now that the danger was past.

Also she was still a little nervous of Ivo Craggen, and very glad to be in a public place with him, a place where some people knew her and would notice if—if what? What exactly did she imagine he might do?

That was it: she had no idea. This man with the broad face and watchful eyes and hair that gleamed deep copper was totally unpredictable. Talk about dangerous!

Dangerous and attractive (
let’s not pretend otherwise
), which meant doubly dangerous.

And, she realized, she had been a little afraid of him from the first moment he’d appeared behind her in the theater, helping her on with her coat. How could she have sensed danger in him without even seeing him, without him touching anything but her coat sleeve?

“I’ve studied the arts and skills of battle, yes,” he said, so quietly that she shouldn’t have been able to make out the words over the convivial din of the coffeehouse. But his voice cut right through the hubbub so that she heard everything as if he were speaking to her from the stage of a theater, and she were sitting in the front row. “Some of the things that I buy and sell are weapons—old daggers, rings with poison compartments. I learn from them. I know how to defend myself. Don’t you find that valuable, in the world as you know it to be, at least when you think dispassionately about it?”

His odd turn of phrase jarred her out of her mood. She asked, “Is there another world than the one I know when I’m feeling as well as thinking about it?”

He didn’t smile. “Of course. There have been many, many worlds before this one: the worlds of history, Miss Croft, and the worlds of other countries that you Americans ignore or dismiss. You keep yourselves ignorant and pretend to invent everything fresh, and then do as you like. But those worlds were real or are still real, and their customs and actions have real consequences in the present. You stay ignorant at your peril.

“Even right here, now. This tight-packed world of modern New York isn’t the worst, but not the best either. I keep my guard up, and so far I survive in good health.”

“Then you have more than your fair share of good luck,” Jess retorted. “That kid could have had a knife or an Uzi under his jacket, for all we knew. You could have gotten a lot of people hurt besides yourself.”

“I thought you were worried that I had hurt
him
,” he observed, eyebrows quizzically raised, “that posturer with his pretensions of savagery.”

“I don’t like the idea of anybody getting hurt,” she said. For a second she flashed on the exploding world of the car crash. There was too much damage in the world already.

“People get hurt no matter what, Miss Croft,” he murmured.

“Look, are you really an antiques dealer, or are you an international arts thief, or, I don’t know, a spy? And stop calling me ‘Miss Croft’ in that condescending way. You sound like a James Bond villain. Call me Jessamyn, it’s my name.”

He chuckled, that tiger-purr again. The man was enjoying her rebuke. He was
appreciating
it. She almost smiled, herself.

Then she reminded herself sharply that dangerous tricks had been played on her backstage at the Edwardian. She didn’t know this man, who had only been admitted to the theater today on the say-so of Lily Anderson. If that was even true!

Craggen inclined his head a gesture of concession. “I’m sorry, I teased you just a little. I come from a harsher experience of life than you’ve had, if you are lucky. And you are, living in this part of today’s world instead of others I could name.” He settled more deeply into his chair and steepled his fingers in front of him, contemplating her with thoughtful eyes.

“Let me set your mind at rest about me if I can. What Miss Anderson and I discuss is the design of a jewel motif for the scrim curtain that the audience first sees when the main curtain goes up.”

Jess frowned. “But the jewel of the title isn’t really the treasure that everybody’s supposedly fighting and betraying each other about; it’s a metaphor.”

“Really?” He blinked. “What metaphor?”

“Lily didn’t show you the script? Well, the emerald is a symbol for the true wealth of any family or country—its virtues and values, its honor and tolerance and forgiveness.”

“That’s a heavy burden of symbols.” His understated sarcasm brought defensive heat to Jess’s cheeks. Who was he to criticize Nick’s work?

“I wonder,” Craggen went on, “whether any object, no matter how beautiful or striking, can carry so much meaning.”

Jess deliberately produced a laugh instead of a riposte—she thought she had his number now. His idea of flirting was to be provocative, deliberately stirring disagreement in hopes of turning the heat of conflict into other kinds of fires.

Well, let him try; she was not so easily maneuvered. She smiled sweetly. “That is our job as actors, Mr. Craggen—to convince you.”

The waitress brought their drinks. Craggen lifted his cup in the motion of a toast. Jess touched her cup to his, gingerly; who knew what this little gesture meant between a man and a woman in his view? Other lands, other ways. And where did she want this strange meeting to lead, anyway?

“So what sort of motif does Lily have in mind?” she asked.

Craggen seemed to withdraw into himself, his eyelids lowering as if shutting himself in with his thoughts. It reminded her startlingly of how Nick had acted during her visit to his house in Rhinebeck, which was very discomfiting.

“We thought perhaps a cross,” he said slowly, as if thinking it out as he spoke, “an antique cross set with roughly cut gems like in olden times. Or perhaps a large brooch or buckle, with the emerald as its centerpiece. It must be something bold, even stark, Lily says, to capture the eyes of the audience. What would you suggest, Miss— Jessamyn?”

He looked at her now, calmly challenging.

“I don’t have any idea,” she said briskly.
Maybe I should have stayed with ‘Miss Croft’.
“I’m an actress, not some rich man’s trophy wife. I’m not familiar with fine old jewelry, up close. Have you thought of talking to the playwright? Nick—Mr. Griffin might have had something particular in mind when he chose the emerald as a symbol.”

Craggen sat very still, his cup poised in the air. Then he tipped and emptied it in one swift swallow and set it down again. He leaned forward with his forearms planted on the table.

“I’ve tried to see him, without success. I could almost think he he’s been avoiding meeting me. Do you know where I can find him?”

He must have noticed her pulling back from the change in his manner, because he relaxed suddenly and cocked his head, pleasant and casual again.

“I don’t mean to track him down like a criminal, but I wouldn’t like to do anything to clash with his idea of the play. Lily said that if anyone can tell me where to find him, it would be you.”

Jess shook her head, suppressing an unkind thought about Lily.

If Lily had told this stranger the whole story there was nothing more to hide, was there? But Jess couldn’t help resenting the spreading of her private business beyond the limits of the play’s cast and crew.

She said, “Lily is mistaken. Mr. Griffin and I have been out of touch lately. I’m sure she’s told you about the car crash. Nick and I have both been busy putting our lives back on track since then—separately, I’m afraid. You might try talking to Walter Steinhart, our director. He’s the link between the company and the playwright, not me.”

“Ah,” Craggen said. He turned to look around the noisy room. “Would you like something to eat? I’m hungry myself, and there’s usually something on a cafe menu that I like. In fact, may I buy you dinner?”

Time out
, Jess thought, accepting with some relief. Whatever he was really after, sparring with him was interesting.

She ordered a pasta Arabiata that she knew to be spicy and sweet and not too heavy. Craggen chose a double portion of carpaccio when the waitress told him that they got their aged, raw beef from an Italian source on the lower West Side.

“So,” he resumed, as Jess buttered a piece of the warm bread the waitress had brought, “are you sure that Mr. Griffin himself doesn’t have some old ring or bracelet that inspired his invention of this symbolic emerald?”

“I think it’s not that literal,” Jess said, flooded with a mixture of relief and—
oh dear
—let-down as she finally understood. “Are you trying to find out if Nick has some precious old family jewelry hidden away, something he might be interested in selling? I don’t know for certain, but I think it’s pretty unlikely. Nick’s family is—well, it was, there’s almost nobody left now—they were English farmers originally, what they used to call yoemen, not rich people from the Continent.”

“Farmers turned soldiers in summer,” he said, “in those days. And there is such a thing as booty brought home from war.” He smiled, a spasm of the lip more like a snarl, she thought uneasily.

“Generations ago, of course,” he continued. “I mean the spoils of looting too ancient to be considered a
crime
nowadays. These robberies become accidents of history, or exciting tales of the faraway past to make into movies. Yet there’s often some truth in them.”

They were way past superficial conversation now, and she began to think that he wasn’t just some sharp-eyed hustler.

She sighed. “Mr. Craggen—Ivo—believe me, the Griffins made their money on stocks, bonds, and buy-outs, not wartime loot. According to Nick, they were business buccaneers, not pirates with cutlasses. One reason that he got interested in theater was a desire to break the family pattern of hard-driving commercialism.”

She remembered that she hardly knew Ivo Craggen and stopped there, embarrassed to have spoken so freely about Nick’s family.

“So,” she finished, irritated to have had to explain Nick when Nick could have perfectly well have explained himself instead of dodging the man, “no matter how extensively you help Lily with her motif design, she can’t pay you with a tip on some fabulous piece of antique jewelry in the Griffin family vault. Now, a couple of comps, that’s a different story.”

“Comps?”

“Complimentary tickets to the show, when it opens.”
God, Lily didn’t promise him a cash fee, did she?
she thought with dismay.
Nell will kill her
. “We’re theater people, Mr. Craggen, and we’re off-Off-Broadway at that. Can I give you a little economics lesson?”

“Of course,” he said drily, “a businessman like myself can always use financial information.”

Sticking to a businesslike tone herself, she explained that the Edwardian stayed solvent, just
,
through subscriptions, contributions from supporters like the Whitelys and their friends, and in the case of mounting this play, some financial backing from Nick himself.

“Usually, we have no money to spare for outside consultants, and among ourselves the only jewelry we see is cheap stuff that our props and costumer picks up at flea market or thrift shop. She works on other people’s castoffs to make them look expensive, at a distance. Or she uses things of our own that we lend to a specific production. We do for ourselves as best we can. Good costume jewelry is expensive these days.”

Craggen turned to signal the waitress with a peremptory gesture. He ordered aperitifs.

“Thank you for explaining,” he said, turning back to Jess. “Of course I’m always on the lookout for interesting pieces. Maybe I did have some expectations.

“Now that the economic situation is clearer I think it’s even more important that I speak with Mr. Griffin personally, to get his impressions of the kind of design he had in mind and think about what might fit the need and the budget. I hope it can be inexpensive, but also good. Lily suggested that whatever motif is used on the scrim can be used also in the printed program and in advertisements. When the play moves to a larger theatre—”

“
If
the play is successful enough to move to a larger theater,” Jess amended.

“—when the play moves, the use of this design can go onto T-shirts, mugs, posters—who knows? All extra income.” He smiled. “There are a few things that I already know about economics.”

Jess laughed, accepting his mild chiding in the spirit in which it was offered. “Talk to Nell Clausen first. She’s on the staff of the Edwardian, and she deals with anyone who handles merchandising work for them. She knows all about the details—terms, copyright, royalties, and so on.”