Strand was not a man who was often caught flat-footed, slapped in the face by surprise, but when the door opened and he found himself staring squarely into the unsuspecting eyes of Mara Song, he was caught off guard.
“I’m Harry Strand,” he managed to say with deceptive equanimity. He wasn’t sure his face was playing along.
“Mara Reinhardt,” she said, smiling, a little wearily he thought. Her handshake was light, and he could feel her warmth and the slenderness of her body in the shape of her hand. He had to will his eyes to relax, not to gaze on her. “I appreciate your coming,” she said, backing away from the door and letting him in.
She didn’t have a trace of a foreign accent; she was one hundred percent American bred and born. Her eyes were just below level with his, which meant that she was a tall woman, certainly tall for an Asian. The mouth that he had seen with such effect through the moonstone water he now saw had a slight dimple to one side that gave her smile a suggestion of irony. Her dark hair was again pulled to one side and fell over the front of her shoulder. She was wearing a long saffron shirtwaist dress with short sleeves.
“I have the drawings in another room,” she said, getting right to the point. “I’ve been working in here, and it’s cluttered. Anyway, the light’s bad.”
She led Strand through a modest living room with an abundance of art books scattered about in rambling stacks. The furniture was pedestrian and told him nothing about her. He guessed that it had been included with the town house lease. As they passed through the room he glimpsed some uncommon touches here and there, a small draped table with a collection of softly burnished black pottery and three white lilies lolling in one of the lean amphorae, a rich throw glinting with gold threads tossed over the corner of the dreary sofa, an expensive and beautiful Anatolian medallion rug with predominant colors of scarlet and pollen yellow. These, he imagined, were Mara Song.
In just a few steps they had crossed a hallway and entered a bright sunroom with tall windows looking out into a small enclosed courtyard filled with potted plants. The stones in the courtyard were still wet from the morning watering. There was another sofa here and several comfortable rattan armchairs. The drawings were mounted in archival folders and were arranged in an approximate semicircle on these pieces of furniture, propped up against the backs of the cushions.
“Here they are,” she said. “They’re in alphabetical order. Balthus… Delvaux… Ingres…” She stepped slowly past them in review, her right hand, wrist up, indicating each artist by flicking a long index finger at each drawing. “Klimt… and Maillol.”
Then she stopped and turned around.
“Five men. Seven naked women,” she said matter-of-factly.
There were indeed seven drawings, and Strand was delighted to see that they were very fine examples of the artists’ work. In fact, the collection was superior, and as they talked about each drawing, he realized that even though she was not a “collector” she had an educated and discerning eye and that her appreciation for these drawings went far beyond their financial value. She had a genuine affection for them.
As he stood before the pictures, Strand’s mind was divided between the images and the woman who owned them. He remembered Truscott saying that he thought the sale of the art was being prompted by a “divorce thing,” and he assumed that also accounted for the discrepancy between her two names. The drawings were going to bring a handsome price; he guessed that a handsome price had been paid to acquire them. Since Mara Song was having to sell them, Strand surmised that she had not come out well in her divorce.
After they had talked for a while about the drawings, she took a step back, folded her arms, and looked at him.
“They’re jewels, aren’t they?” she said.
He noted the distance from her waist to the hem of her skirt, and he remembered the long legs slipping through the bright water.
“Have you owned these awhile?” he asked.
“Most of them about four years.”
Strand scanned the drawings again, his hands in his pockets as he stepped back away from them, too, beside her, surveying the group of images.
“I’m guessing that you already know I won’t have any trouble selling these,” he said. “You seem to know very well what you’re doing here. I’ll be glad to go ahead and work up appraisals and all of that whenever you’re ready.”
She didn’t say anything for a moment, and Strand turned his head slightly to observe her. She was thoughtful, but her expression was uncommunicative.
“You don’t want to sell them,” he said.
“I teach art,” she said. “I know how… wonderful these things are.” She turned to him. “Before five years ago I never in my wildest dreams imagined that I would ever own art like this myself. Then, for a while, a small window of time, I could afford them.” She shook her head. “I’m afraid if I get rid of them, I’ll never ever be able to afford anything like them again.”
Strand said nothing.
“I’m going through a divorce,” she said. “I don’t need the money, but the fact is, I’m not going to be in the same financial comfort zone that I was in while I was married. I just thought I ought to, sort of, take stock.”
“These aren’t easy choices,” Strand said. “I’ve been a dealer and collector all my life, and I have to face these choices all the time. Can’t keep them all, no matter how much you love them. I tell myself that the pleasure of just having them for a while is a value every bit as real as the profit I’ll get when I sell them. It’s a mind game. It’s really the truth, too.”
When he turned back to her she was looking at him, the beginning of a smile on her mouth. But it never quite developed. They looked at each other, and for a fleeting moment he thought he sensed in her expression a vague notion of having seen him before.
“Would you like a cup of coffee?” she asked. “I made a fresh pot about an hour ago.”
“No, I’m fine. Thanks, though.”
The filtered sun was gilding the plants in the garden behind her, outlining her gray silhouette with a thin seam of gold. She would not have been universally considered beautiful, for her features, when taken individually, could not have been described as classical. Her nose was a little more prominent than Asian features usually allowed, and there was a small rise in the bridge. She had high cheekbones, and her eyes were as much Caucasian as Eastern. But regarded as a whole, these attributes conspired to make Mara Song a striking woman. She sure as hell lived up to his memory of her from the swimming pool. She was still looking at him, her arms crossed again as before. Then with her middle fingers she lightly touched her full lower lip.
“How long have you been married?” she asked abruptly.
He frowned at her, and she tilted her left hand back and touched her ring finger with her thumb.
“Oh. It would have been four years… well, in July.”
She didn’t move her eyes or speak.
“She died in an automobile accident. Almost a year ago.”
Her face fell. “I’m sorry.” She was embarrassed.
“No, that’s all right.”
There was a pause. She was visibly uneasy.
“This divorce,” she said. “I find myself wondering how long people have been married.” She shrugged. “That’s pretty strange, I think. But that’s what I do.” Her eyes fixed on him. “I am sorry about your wife. My first husband died suddenly also, an odd heart condition. So I know…”
“It happens to people all the time,” Strand said, not wanting to talk about it anymore.
The sun had found an opening in the overstory now and was flooding the courtyard behind her in brightness. He could see the shadowy silhouettes of her long legs backlighted through the saffron summer dress, and again, in his mind, he saw her long body stretched out, in the opalescent water.
She obviously did not recognize him from those mornings at the pool a month earlier, and Strand decided to see how she would react to being reminded.
“You know,” he said, “I think we’ve almost met before.”
The phrasing was unnecessarily cryptic, and the instant he spoke he wished he had said it differently. Her reaction confirmed his mistake. She turned to him, a look of suspicion playing nervously at the corners of her
