Tar Baby

Jadine walked over to a large straw chest. As she left the Karastan her gold-thread slippers clicked on the tile. After rummaging awhile she pulled out a fashion magazine with her face on the cover. When she handed it to him he sat down at the desk and made a flute sound between his teeth. And then another as his eyes traveled from the crown of her head to the six centimeters of cleavage supported (more or less) by silver lame. Her hair in the picture was pressed flat to her head, pulled away from her brow revealing a neat hairline. Her eyes were the color of mink and her lips wet and open. He continued the flute sounds and then opened the magazine. After flipping the pages for a few seconds he came to a four-page spread of her in other poses, other clothes, other hair, but always the same wet and open lips.

“Goddamn,” he whispered. “Go-oddamn.”

Jadine said nothing, but she held on tight to the leashes. The look on his face made her smile. He examined the pictures closely, whispering “shit” and “goddamn” softly to himself at intervals.

“What does it say?” He put the magazine flat on the desk, turned at an angle so she could read and translate the text.

“Oh, it’s just stuff about me.” She leaned on the edge of the desk facing him and the magazine. “Where I went to school. Things like that.”

“Read it to me.”

Jadine leaned over and translated rapidly the important parts of the copy. “Mademoiselle Childs…graduate of the Sorbonne…an accomplished student of art history…a degree in…is an expert on cloisonne, having visited and worked with the Master Nape…. An American now living in Paris and Rome, where she had a small but brilliantly executed role in a film by…” She stopped. The man was tracing her blouse with his forefinger.

“This,” he said, lifting his finger from the picture to point at the caption beneath, “what does this say?”

“That’s just a description of the dress. Natural raw silk…honey-colored…”

“Right here it says ‘fast lane.’ What’s that about?”

“Oh, they’re trying to be hip. It says, ‘If you travel as Jade does in what the Americans call the fast lane, you need elegant but easy-to-pack frocks.’ Then it goes on about the jewelry.”

“What about the jewelry?” Now he traced the heaps of gold necklaces above the honey-colored silk.

“The total worth of it is—” she calculated quickly from francs into dollars—“thirty-two thousand dollars.”

“Thirty-two thousand?”

“Um-hm.”

“Shit. And the earrings? Do they talk about the earrings?” He was looking at a facing close-up of her, from the nose down to the first swell of her breasts, which featured earrings, a sculptured piece around her throat and again the wet and open lips.

“Lovely, aren’t they? Antiques. They belonged to Catherine the Great.”

“Catherine the Great. A queen, huh?”

“Empress. The Empress of all the Russias.”

“She give them to you?”

“Stupid! She’s been dead for almost two hundred years.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“Yeah.” She drew out the word and made it as flat and American as she could. But she was smiling at the same time.

“They must be worth a lot, then.”

“Quite a lot. Priceless.”

“Nothing’s priceless. Everything has a price.” He was tracing again, circling Catherine’s earrings with his forefinger. Jadine felt her earlobes prickle as she watched him.

“Well, half a million, certainly.”

“Half a million? Shit.”

“Don’t you have any other word to express awe?” She tilted her head and fastened her big minky eyes on him.

He nodded. “Goddamn.”

She laughed then, and for the first time there was no tension in it at all. He merely smiled and continued fingering the photograph. “Are these your clothes or did they just let you use them for the pictures?”

“They’re mine. Some were given to me after I was photographed. A kind of payment.”

“And the jewelry? They give you that too?”

“No. That was mine from before—except the earrings. They were on loan from the Russians. But the rest is part of my own collection.”

“Collection, huh?”

“Why? Are you a thief?”

“I wish I was. Be a lot easier for me if I could steal.”

“If? What do you call what you were doing in this house for days? Or were you planning to give Ondine back her chocolate?”