“Mr. Svenson was one of the movers who schlepped all our furniture up here,” Claire said.
“You shittin’ me?” Jubal asked Svenson, nudging Claire a few inches to the side. “You mean you actually get dressed up like a Midwesterner’s idea of a New Yorker and visit all your customers days later to make sure you put the sofa in the right place?”
“Mostly, we only do that with the pretty ones.” Svenson’s smile was the same, but something had changed in his pale eyes. “I know you’re not Claire’s husband; are you her brother?”
“Closer than her brother.”
Svenson’s unblinking gaze didn’t waver, but now he seemed amused rather than angry. “Like maybe her bodyguard?”
“Among other things,” Jubal said. Claire caught something in his voice; he was afraid, but he wasn’t backing off.
“Hopefully, bodyguarding isn’t necessary,” Svenson said.
“Hopefully.”
Svenson smiled again at Claire, then nodded. “If you decide you want anything rearranged, you know how to get in touch with me.” He backed away, then turned and sauntered to the elevator, not in any rush. Everything in his body language said he was in control and unconcerned.
Claire made a move to close the door, but Jubal reached out above her and held it open. They both watched until the elevator arrived.
“Thanks again for the business,” Svenson said to Claire, and gave a little wave as he stepped inside and the elevator door slid closed behind him.
“Guy’s some creep,” Jubal said as he shut the apartment door and latched it.
“He does have a nerve,” Claire agreed, “coming back like that.”
“And he doesn’t look at all Swedish. I doubt his name’s really Lars Svenson.”
“We can’t hold that against him,” Claire said jokingly. “Your own name’s been changed.”
“That’s common among actors, but not furniture movers.”
Jubal slumped down again on the sofa and used the remote to switch on cable news. The screen was split four ways to accommodate two men and two women in severe business garb arguing about the Supreme Court. It reminded Claire of a rerun of Hollywood Squares that had gotten out of hand.
She went into the kitchen and got a fresh bottle of Windex from beneath the sink to use on the spare bedroom’s windows.
Whether he was Swedish or not, she couldn’t get Lars Svenson out of her mind, which aggravated her because she knew that was exactly what he wanted.
Well, not exactly. He was, after all, a man.
Claire realized she wasn’t really attracted to Svenson. At least not in the usual way.
She was afraid of him.
22
The woman in the mirror hadn’t been rich before, or what she’d describe as poor, and hadn’t been married before. This was quite a change. The woman was smiling.
The mirror, bolted to the wall near the door to the hall, was a leftover from the previous tenant. Reflected in it was Mary Navarre, a woman in her twenties, with her mother’s ginger hair and her father’s Spanish eyes, and what he used to call her noble nose. She was of average height and slender, dressed in a light tan Gucci knockoff she’d bought before the inheritance.
Mary turned away from the mirror and looked around the spacious apartment on West End Avenue. She began mentally placing her furniture, which was still in a rental storage building in New Jersey. She was grateful again for the inheritance, but she would have preferred to wait a few years.
She missed her mother, who’d drowned while swimming off the coast of Florida five years ago. And she missed her father, who’d died of emphysema six months ago, soon after her marriage to Donald Baines. She and Donald hadn’t thought they could make it on one salary, even though he’d received a raise along with his transfer to the New York office, so Mary assumed she’d have to find some kind of work in or around Manhattan.
However, they’d been shocked when they learned after her father’s death that Mary, his only living child, would receive almost a $1 million inheritance.
Mary’s father, Hector, had arrived in the United States in 1980, one of the Marielitos that Castro had allowed to leave in order to empty Cuba’s prisons and mental institutions. Hector Navarre had been imprisoned for killing a man in a machete duel over a woman. The man happened to be a deputy commissioner of the state. It had happened when Hector was still a teenager, but he’d been in prison for almost twenty years.
When he suddenly found himself free in Southeast Florida, he’d made the most of his situation. He saved his money and within a year had opened a dry-cleaning establishment with a partner who’d supplied most of the cash. Hector’s end of the deal was sweat equity. Within another three years, they’d opened three more dry cleaners in Miami. Hector secured financing, bought out his partner, and further expanded the business, establishing cleaners in Fort Lauderdale and on the other side of the state in Tampa. When he died, he still had much of the money obtained from selling to a franchise operator five years ago, almost immediately after his wife’s death.
It truly is a great country, Mary thought, and not for the first time. She didn’t plan to waste this opportunity provided by her father’s money. The wealth carried with it an obligation. She would delay having a child and attend New York University in the spring. Eventually she’d obtain a degree, the first in her family. Perhaps she’d go into the dry-cleaning business. Donald had no problem with any of her plans. He wanted her to succeed.
He wasn’t flawless as a husband, but he did wish her the best.
Luck in love and money, having the right parents, the right husband, being in the right place at the right time. It was what life was about, and whatever happened, you had to make the most of it, because it could also swing the other way.
The intercom rasped, startling her. Mary crossed the room to it and pressed the button.
The decorator was downstairs, precisely on time for their appointment. She buzzed him up.
They would go over preliminaries and make plans for the apartment. Mary would listen carefully to his advice, then deliberate and tell him what she preferred.
For the first time in her life, she knew exactly what she wanted.
The Night Prowler strolled along Broadway at ten that evening and ignored everyone going in the opposite direction. He didn’t like making eye contact with passersby; he wanted no connection, no relationship to take even tenuous hold. He managed his life and his time and chose his relationships carefully. All kinds of relationships. He kept his colors bright.
He paused and looked across the street to where a glowing red sign sent its brightness shimmering over diners at an outside cafe, lending a glow to the hair of the women and a satanic hue to their features. The women, caught laughing with heads thrown back, daintily dipping spoons into soup, leaning back in their chairs and smiling, raising skewered meat or salad to red lips, talking intently over coffee or dessert. Even at this distance their jewelry glinted like bright taunts attached to the softness of their flesh. The men seated across from the women leaned toward them, close to them, drawn by the timeless thing that had drawn reptilian ancestry and still lived.
Fools with their fools!
A waiter emerged from the restaurant, and diners at one of the tables stood up to leave. An oblivious bicyclist pedaled by like a haughty trespasser. The tableau was ruined and became part of past and memory.
Almost nothing in the world was perfect. For God’s sake, he, among all, understood that. But once concessions were made, choices settled, plans laid and carried out-there could be perfect moments. Imbalances in the cosmos could be shifted, measurements recalibrated, objects and colors brought into sharp focus. Colors could be felt and heard like music. Like music!
So much better than the gray buzzing, a maelstrom of all colors, a breakdown of order and control.
The universe would come to bear and press down and in, until finally pressure triggered action. Beneath the smooth flesh, bones, bleached white and beautiful, an absence of color.
Then the kaleidoscope would lurch and there would be new patterns and colors and hopes and order and
