The Ruby Tear

  “Demon, shmeemon,” Marie muttered despite a mouthful of pins, as she worked on a troublesome snag that made Jessamyn’s dress gape in back. Jess wondered how many pins Marie had swallowed in her career, and if she had a stage-magic method of making them harmless to her insides. “He’s got more trouble with his wife. Poor Mr. Sinclair, you can’t help but worry about him.”

  “How could there be more trouble?” Jessamyn whispered. “Don’t tell me she’s found some serious new guy! Anthony would be heartbroken.”

  She felt a small twist of regret that she hadn’t helped him to be the one to break free first, if that was what was going on, by being “someone else" for him—even if only for a short time. He was a fine-looking man even in the offending tie, and she sometimes felt a stab of absurd jealousy when she saw him flirting with Anita MacNeil.

  “Oh, it’s been new ‘guys’ all over the place for both the Sinclairs,” Marie grunted, half in disapproval, half admiration. “It always is, when they’re going through one of their ruptures.”

  Jess whispered, “So it’s rupture or rapture with them, is that it?”

  Marie sighed. “Never mind; they’ve been one of the solidest teams in the business. No matter how bad it looks, nothing’s serious for those two but each other. No, it’s a professional problem: her show is closing, she’s out of work starting next week. Haven’t you heard?”

  “No!" Jess said. “Oh, crap.”

  Marie made a wry face. “Crap is right. Sally Sinclair is a—difficult person, let’s say. Roles don’t just come rushing up to her begging for her to do them, you know. Oh, here, before I forget—these came back yesterday.”

  She fished a little velvet box out of her kit and handed it to Jess.

  The pendant and earrings were nested inside, cleaned up and parted from their gluey tangle.

  “Are they okay?” Jess said, lifting the pendant with her finger. “I don’t think the finish has come out exactly the same.”

  “Turn,” Marie said. “Little bit to the right; there. Of course it’s not exactly the same, but close enough. Nobody except an expert would ever notice.”

  “But Ivo Craggen is an expert, Marie!”

  “An expert maybe, a damn fool for sure,” the dresser said, her quick fingers nibbling at the back of the dress like persistent mice. “No sensible person would have sent you those pieces in the first place. Of course he’s a young fellow, and you never know what they’ll do when they’re smitten with a girl.

  “Now, if I were you I’d get these things back to him right away. Or give them to Lily; he’s been looking in every day to see how the scrim painting is coming along. She’ll probably see him sooner than anybody else around here.”

  “I’m not letting that jewelry out of my hands until I can give it all back to him personally,” Jess said firmly.

  “Well, I’d lock the stuff up someplace off-site until then, if I were you,” Marie said. “Johnny spotted your Mystery Watcher—at least we think it was him—hanging around a Three-Card-Monte game up at the end of the block this afternoon. I went over to get a better look, but he slipped away into that bookstore across the street. I sent Johnny in after him, no dice. It’s a rabbit warren in there, you know, with all those floors and little rooms full of books.”

  “You’re sure it was him?”

  “Nope, but I think it was. All furtive looking, if you know what I mean. Up to something. And he looked familiar, somehow, even though his outfit was different this time—a big duffle coat, jeans, high tops, one of those Maine wool hats with ear flaps.”

  Jess frowned at her anxiously. “Be careful, Marie, you and Johnny both. We still don’t know who we’re dealing with here. I hate to think of you running after some character who could turn out to be really dangerous.”

  “Oh, I can take care of myself,” Marie said airily. “I know a few disappearing tricks of my own, you know.”

  Jess glanced anxiously at her. “Just don’t get overconfident, okay? I’m not sure stage magic is enough to handle a real villain, if it comes to it.”

  “A real villain?” Marie jeered. “In a hat with ear flaps?”

  It was useless. The dresser had clearly enjoyed the brief pursuit of the lurker.

  “Come on, now,” Marie said, “that’s enough gossip and rumor for today. Let’s get this finished. Nancy’s beginning to lose focus; you know how she gets. This sleeve pulls a bit at the seam, here. All right, I’ve marked it.”

  “At least you don’t have to cope with shoulder pads,” Sinclair grumbled, scowling at himself in the mirror as Marie turned to him now.

  Nancy, the costumer, was a dreamy-eyed woman who somehow never heard criticism let alone showed any sign of being wounded by it—at least not so far as Jess could see. It must be nice, she thought, never to get rattled by things.

  “A little short in front,” Nancy murmured, talking to herself as she turned Sinclair first to one side and then another, like a mannequin she was studying in the glass.

  He snapped into a robotic imitation, swinging stiffly and all of a piece at every guiding touch. Nancy worked on, talking to herself, oblivious. Sinclair’s glance met Jess’ over the costumer’s head and he offered a comical moue of resignation.

  He really did look wrung out. Jess couldn’t help feeling that he might be on the verge of getting really sick, a worrying thought. She could manage with Sinclair’s understudy, if need be. But she valued her rapport with Anthony Sinclair, as she depended on his warmth and professionalism to carry her over her own fears about the play.

  Face it: she’d become fond of the older actor, and grateful to have his shoulder to cry on if she needed it.

  Like earlier today.

  She had come in to find xeroxed pages of the script, stained with what looked like blood, glued to the makeup mirror in her dressing room. The effect had been truly horrible, a gesture of obliteration aimed directly at her in a most personal way, through the physical manifestation of the play itself: the script, torn apart.

  It was particularly upsetting to consider that the person who had committed this weird, ugly assault might well be the mysterious watcher. The thought of Marie and Johnny chasing after somebody with such a sick mind worried her. She could handle the threats to herself, but danger to other people around her as well was too much.

  She found herself sneaking glances at the other cast members, particularly Anita MacNeil in her slinky beige gown, and wondering how they really felt about it all. On the surface, anyway, everyone had adopted the tactic of more or less ignoring these nasty incidents, or at any rate refusing to discuss them.

  This had been Anita’s idea, actually.

  “If it’s somebody messing around here,” she had said, “let’s not give them the satisfaction of seeing us fluttering like a flock of panicked parakeets over their asinine behavior.”

  Yet Jess still could not completely discount the possibility that the culprit could be Anita herself, angling for a chance to take over the part of Eva. Jess had not missed the understudy’s assessing look at Eva’s costume, judging how the cut and color would suit her in Jess’ place.

  It could be anyone, that was the frustrating thing. Members of the cast and crew wandered in and out of the Edwardian at all hours. Johnny couldn’t be on the lookout all the time; he had other duties. Making a fuss would only taint the production with bad luck. They were just going to have to withstand the attacks and soldier on through.

  I weathered the crash and, worse, the hospital and the therapy afterward. I can weather this, she told herself grimly.

  Walter hurried in late, fighting with the jammed zipper of his old bomber jacket. While Nancy fluttered at him, fixing it, he checked the look of the costumes, praised Nancy, and still managed to make several suggestions for changes in her handiwork. As usual, the costumer blinked, adjusted her inner vision, and sailed off on these new tacks with scarcely a tremor.

  Hell, maybe she should be playing Eva!

  When the session was over
, Jess found Walter in her dressing room, watching one of the apprentice crew work on the mirror with rags, solvent, and a razor-blade scraper.

  “It’s almost worth getting a new mirror,” Walter growled, “but I put some money into a lock on the costume-shop door instead. Nobody has keys but Nancy and me. I don’t want any of this crap going on there.”

  Jess bit her lip, turning away from the mirror. The unsightly clumps of glued, stained paper made it look as if something had been killed there, leaving dried and crusted traces of the carnage. For the first time, her conviction wavered.

  “Walter,” she said, keeping her voice low, “this is getting—well, ‘serious’ doesn’t do it justice. Menacing is a better word. Tell me the truth: do you think I should drop out? If my being here has become a real threat to the whole production—”

  “Equity contract,” Walter said at once, “no dice. And anyway, I can’t think of anybody else I’d accept in the part.” He grabbed Jess in an irresistible bear hug. His sympathy was so welcome Jess almost burst into tears.

  “Don’t let it get to you, Jess.” He patted her back clumsily. “Listen, I’m driving you home tonight. Just to get the message out there. We take care of our own, and any creep who messes with one of us has all of us to deal with.

  ‘So me or Jack Nelson will take you home from late rehearsals from now on, and I don’t want any arguments.”

  Nelson, the lighting chief, lived on the upper west side. Jess thought of objecting that Jack would have to drive out of his way every night that he took her home. The sound of the scraper juddering across the encrusted mirror made her rethink that idea.

  Walter stared at the mirror and added, “This evil moron is a real glue freak, isn’t he? Or she. Whoever it is, they better watch out; if I catch them, I’ll personally glue them shut all over and then come and laugh at them every day they get to spend in the hospital afterwards.”

  * * *

  Rehearsal went rockily. They were doing the big quarrel scene in which the two major factions in the family came to blows over conflicting claims to the emerald, while the enemy bombardment increased. Clearly the choreography of the conflict had become too complicated, resulting in one broken chair and a nasty bruise on Anita’s knee before they were finished.

  In a somber mood, Jess climbed into Walter’s beat-up Dodge, which only made it into town on very rare occasions. It smelled of cold smoke, plastic, and metal, which tonight she found oddly comforting.

  “Heard from Nick?” the director said, as they swung out of the parking lot into Friday-night traffic.

  “No. I’ve been concentrating so hard on Eva, I haven’t even checked my messages or my mail.”

  “Well, I’ve heard from him.”

  Walter sounded troubled. Jess glanced aside at his blunt profile. His gaze was fixed on the sea of flaring brake-lights ahead. The traffic stream had to negotiate a maze of heavy machinery, striped warning cones, and temporary steel plates in the street that made a vast obstacle course of this stretch of Eighth Avenue. He didn’t seem inclined to expand on his news without prompting.

  “Okay, I’ll bite,” Jess said, over the thumping of her heart. “What’s he say? Where is he?”

  “Well, this is a little awkward,” Walter was scowling, but it might only have been frustration at the cab that had just cut in front of them with inches to spare.

  “Don’t tell me he’s got revisions, so far into rehearsals!" she exclaimed. “Nothing doing. If he wants changes at this point, he can play Eva himself.”

  “I told him to get in touch with you directly,” Walter said, “but he said no. He called from Zagreb. It’s not about the play, you see. It’s more—personal. About this Ivo Craggen who’s been consulting with Lily; and maybe with you too, Jess?”

  A sudden suspicion dawned. “Zagreb? Nick’s not doing journalism anymore, so what’s he doing in eastern Europe? Walter, it’s too much! If he went over there just to get some dirt on Ivo Craggen, I don’t want to hear it.”

  “You and Nick should get married right away!" Walter exclaimed. “You’re reading his mind and he’s not even here. Look—you want to stop for a drink or something?”

  “And park where, for heaven’s sake?” His hesitation fed her impatience. “Keep going, this is fine. So what’s he got to say, our shy playwright who can’t even stay in the country to see his own play mounted? And how does he know that Ivo’s been hanging around, anyway?”

  Now Walter glanced at her, his homely face sagging into a reproachful expression. “Nick always asks about you. As for Craggen, his name came up in connection with the scrim design. I told Nick how great it’s looking, and he said who did the design, and—”

  “But how does he know Ivo’s name in the first place?”

  “Because he’s heard about him,” Walter said with a sigh, “over there. In Europe. Our generous consultant has a very old and murky reputation, it seems, and it’s not for generosity.”

  Jess slumped against the passenger-side door, bowed under a weight of dismal foreboding. She had been having odd, uneasy dreams lately, something she’d always been prone to when a role really began to take hold. Her sleep suffered. Probably she looked almost as worn out as Sinclair did, but nobody dared say so. One thing was sure: she was too tired for this discussion.

  The heater in Walter’s car was broken. Her nose and ears felt numb. She wished she had taken a cab.

  Virtue would of course refuse to listen to whatever Nick had dug up on the foreigner. But it wasn’t Jess’s staunch and virtuous side that was engaged by the mention of Craggen’s name. It was her curiosity about an interesting man.

  If there were things to be known about Ivo Craggen, good or bad, she meant to know them.

  “Well, spit it out, then,” she said. “Just what kind of a reputation are we talking about here?”

  “Ever see a movie called ‘The Third Man’?” Walter asked.

  “Walter, every actor has seen ‘The Third Man.’ Postwar Vienna, nice Joseph Cotton gets tangled up with rotten black marketeer Harry Lime, played by Orson Welles before he got fat. Harry Lime is scum who deals in penicillin and other critical stuff for his own profit.”

  She stopped and stared straight ahead, feeling a flush of anger rising in her neck. “Walter. You’re not telling me that Ivo Craggen is a modern-day Harry Lime!”

  “Well, I wouldn’t go that far,” Walter said, drumming unhappily on the steering wheel with as they waited out a red light. He peered ahead at the Columbus Circle traffic.

  “But Nick would? He thinks Ivo Craggen is some kind of smuggler of historic objects for profit?”

  At the next red light, which was always a long one, Walter sat back with a sigh. “Nick said to please talk to you, because I told him Craggen’s been coming around the theater so much. Folks are saying Lily’s really gone on him, but people with their eyes open know it’s you he comes for now, not Lily. Did you see him watching you rehearse today, from the back of the theater?”

  “So what did Nick say, exactly?” Did everybody in the theatre today but her know that the man had been watching? She flashed on the touch of Craggen’s muscular fingers, and his explorative, arrogant kiss in the coffee shop. No wonder she’d felt nervous doing that scene today—as if somebody besides the familiar members of the company was studying her performance and registering every misstep and every verbal flub.

  Damn Craggen anyway, for insinuating himself into her work situation like this! It would serve him right if—if what? If she found out that he was some kind of criminal? But that would be a problem for her, not for him, surely! He must not mind being a Harry Lime, if he was one. The knowledge would only be painful for her.

  She felt swamped by a wave of resentment, not against Ivo but against Nick. How could he stoop to sniffing around in another man’s past, out of jealousy over a woman he didn’t even want for himself?

  He couldn’t. It was impossible, at least for the Nick she knew.

  But what Walter said ne
xt reminded her forcefully of the Nick she didn’t know.

  Walter was driving east on Fifty-seventh with the hair-raising élan of an old-time cabbie.

  “According to Nick, they say the guy is a—a sort of scavenger. He makes trips over there looking for people with antiquities and family treasures to sell. Then he buys cheap and runs the stuff out to high-end Western markets, where he sells at inflated prices and pockets a huge profit.

  “Nick compared him to a tomb-looter, trading in the national heritage of people hungry for money. It’s not a rich part of Europe. What they have to sell are priceless antiques and art objects that were frozen under communist rule for decades, and then hidden away during the ethnic cleansing wars. Even icons and church vestments from inside Russia itself—well, what used to be Russia—are up for grabs.”

  Jessamyn said heatedly, “And everywhere Nick goes people come running up to him and telling him these stories, right? Gossip about somebody Nick has never met, and most of the gossipers haven’t either. You know how that works, Walter. It’s pretty disgusting.”

  Walter shifted his big hands on the wheel. “Look, I’ve got nothing against Craggen. As far as I’m concerned, he’s done the production a big favor, donating his time and his talent for the scrim—oh, drive your damn car, will you up there?

  “But there’s more. Nick sounded really worried, and to tell the truth, he’s got me worried too. There’s some other stuff that’s more—well, scarier, Jess. He just wants to make sure you know.”

  “So,” she said with a bravado she did not really feel, “tell me.”

  Once he had turned off into her street and double-parked outside her building, he told her. Baron Ivo von Craggen was said to have had a hand in the disappearances of several people, among them three young women from Budapest.