East is East

with a sigh, “Oh, yes, I think I remember you now—but wasn’t your hair a different color?” It had taken Ruth a day or two to map out her strategy—and she’d been preoccupied with Hiro, anyway—but now she moved in to do battle in earnest.

Jane was a late riser—she needed her beauty rest, needed time to do her face peels and bust-building exercises, time to run a thousand brushstrokes over her pure white scalp and apply the foundation and concealer and hi-liter, the blusher, eyeliner, mascara and translucent powder that gave her that spontaneous girl-next-door- with-the-Gypsy-hair-and-outerspace-eyes look. And this was the chink in her armor. Ruth began getting up early, anticipating Owen’s knock. She dressed as if she were going on a date with a literary critic—hair, makeup, low-cut blouse, the works—and she made certain she was the first at the convivial table each morning and the last to leave. She was charming, clever and seductive, and she made as many oblique but devastating references as she could to La Shine, as they’d begun to call her. And when Irving Thalamus came down, pouches under his eyes, his face as rucked and seamed as the floor of the Dead Sea and a whiff of early-morning bourbon on his breath, she was his girl all over again. She touched him as she spoke, leaned into him, threw back her head to laugh so he could admire her throat and cleavage.

At cocktail hour, she gathered Sandy, Ina and Regina around her—and Saxby too, when he wasn’t off stalking the swamps for his pygmy fish—and formed a sphere of influence at one end of the room, while Jane Shine gathered her forces at the other. Sometimes, after cocktails, she’d take dinner with Saxby and his mother in Septima’s rooms—this was the real inner circle, after all—and then, instead of fencing with Jane Shine in the billiard room, she’d watch an old movie on the VCR or stare for hours into the glowing green vacancy of Saxby’s aquarium. She’d preen herself around Septima, conscious of her favor, and she’d think about Hiro and count the days till Jane Shine took her literary freak-show home with her.

It was at the end of the week that Abercorn and Turco showed up again, as inevitable as junk mail. Turco left his boom box at home this time—things had gotten serious and he had a new method now, infallible, couldn’t miss. He’d pitched his pup tent in a patch of scrub beyond the north lawn, while Abercorn had been given a closet- sized room on the third floor (and how he’d ever managed to sweet-talk Septima into letting him stay on a second time, Ruth couldn’t begin to imagine). Ruth was just coming up the front steps, fagged but exhilarated after working through the shank of the afternoon and making what she felt was real progress on the novella, when she spotted Turco through the foyer window. He was in his fatigues and combat boots and he had Laura Grobian pinned up against the staircase, waving something in her face. Ruth hesitated—Hiro, she thought, but then she couldn’t very well back down the stairs without arousing suspicion, and so she steeled herself and breezed through the door as if nothing in the world were the matter.

Laura Grobian gave her a frozen smile. She towered over Turco, half a foot taller at least. “—And robotics,” Turco was saying, his voice dropping to a snarl, “how do you think our Japanese friends got the lead there? They’re cagey, is all. No doubt about it. But you’ve got nothing to worry about, lady, because we’re going to get this one, I’d say within the week, maybe sooner—”

“Laura,” Ruth said, gliding through the foyer to poke her head in the mailroom before swinging round to face them, “and Mr. Turco. Back again?”

Turco released Laura Grobian and fastened on Ruth. First he shifted his head, then swiveled his torso and pivoted his legs, and Ruth couldn’t help thinking of a chameleon drawing a bead on an insect. He paused a moment, as if trying to place her, and then he took a step forward and held up the object—it was cotton, she saw, a garment of some kind—he’d been waving at Laura Grobian. “I was just telling the lady here that this whole thing with the illegal is making us look pretty bad, but not to worry—we’ve got his number now.”

The veins stood out in Turco’s neck. The camouflage shirt clung to his chest and arms like body paint and he’d obviously worked on that penetrating stare, a little man striving for an effect. Ruth couldn’t help herself. “No Donna Summer?”

A flash of anger flattened his eyes, but it passed. He took another step forward, invading her space. “Leg snares,” he said, and he unfurled the garment in his hand: it was a designer T-shirt with a chic name splashed across the breast. “And this is the bait—this and a couple pairs of Guess? jeans, maybe some scarves and T-shirts with shit like Be Happy and Keep On Truckin’ printed on them. Anything in English. The Nips are suckers for it.”

“Excuse me,” Laura Grobian whispered, and then she was out the door and into the golden embrace of the afternoon sun. Turco never even turned his head. He just stood there, inches from Ruth, veins jumping in his neck, his eyes locked on hers, “it’ll work,” he said. “Trust me.”

Ruth gave him a serene smile. Turco and Abercorn. They were incompetents, clowns, and they had about as much chance of catching Hiro as Laurel and Hardy might have had. They would be one more diversion for her, one more wedge to drive between the colony and Jane Shine, one more vehicle on which Ruth could hitch a ride. They’d poke around for a few days and find nothing. Not a trace. And each night, while Sax was engaged elsewhere, she’d bat her eyes at Abercorn, the poor idiot, and console him and sympathize with him and stick her finger in her cheek and offer all sorts of helpful suggestions. Had he looked in Clara Kleinschmidt’s closet? The sheriff’s henhouse?

“You’re right,” she said finally, “I’m sure it will.” And then, as she floated away from him and started up the stairs, she paused a moment to glance over her shoulder. “Good hunting,” she said, and it was real struggle to keep a straight face, “—isn’t that what they say?”

Yes, she could feel it, things were looking up.

* * *

And then, suddenly and without warning, everything came crashing down again.

It was the night after Abercorn and Turco’s arrival, a night that followed a day on which the artists of Thanatopsis House barely advanced their various projects. They were restive, preoccupied, unable to focus or concentrate. An easterly breeze had held steady throughout the day and the whole island seemed newly created from the sea; breakfast had been giddy, lunch forever in coming, and cocktails—people wandered in early for cocktails. There was excitement in the air, the scent of possibility and romance, the sort of incorrigible hopefulness that accrues to the prospect of a good party.

The party—organized by Owen for the dual purpose of paying homage to Septima on her seventy-second birthday and bidding adieu to Peter Anserine, who was going back to Amherst to lecture for the fall term—would feature a Savannah caterer, a dance band and an open bar. Invitations had gone out to the haut monde of Savannah and Sea Island and to members of the immediate community, as well as to each of the colonists, and Sheriff Peagler and his brother Wellie—the island’s unofficial mayor—were expected to attend, along with a spate of lawyers, gallery owners, art collectors and blue-nosed widows from Tupelo Shores Estates and Darien. A photographer was coming down from Savannah to cover the event for the Star’s society page. And the Pulitzer Prize winner in poetry, a onetime resident, was expected to phone. For Thanatopsis, it was the event of the year.

Ruth had been saving an outfit for the occasion, a calf-length black chiffon dress with a lace ruffle at the hip, and a pair of new black pumps. It was a little heavy for the season, maybe—she’d been planning to wear it in the fall—but it was late August, the breeze had cooled things down and she really didn’t have anything else—and it was a Geoffrey Beene, though she’d gotten it for a song. She’d spent the afternoon quizzing Hiro on Japan—Was it true that steak cost thirty dollars a pound? did he feel awkward using a fork? did they really pay people to squeeze you onto the train?—and then she left him early. “I’ll be back in the morning,” she said. “Lie low. I’ll bring you some treats from the party.” And to his inevitable question, she replied: “Soon.”

She took a long soak, spent half an hour on her nails. Sax and Sandy were planning to wear tuxedos—the rest would make do with skinny ties and polyester. There would be champagne—good champagne, Bollinger and Perrier-Jouet. Caviar. Lobster. Oysters from Brittany. Ruth groomed herself as if she were preparing for battle, lingering over each detail, seeking the sort of perfection that would make her impervious, invincible—and all the while she was aware that on the other side of the wall, Jane Shine was doing the same. Twice Saxby came for her and twice she turned him away. She moussed her hair, brushed on hiliter and blusher, did her eyes. When Sax knocked the third time, she told him to go on ahead without her—she’d be ready when she was ready.

The party was an hour and a half old when Ruth made her entrance. She crossed the lawn to the strains of the band playing some sort of Brazilian music—a samba or a bossa nova or something—and the crash of excited voices rose up to engulf her. The tent they’d erected over the dance floor was pitched high and it was open on all sides to the breeze, and as she came up the walk, Ruth could see constellations of Japanese lanterns slowly revolving around the big aluminum stanchions that supported it. She stepped through a bower entwined with cut