Baron, she thought; baron? Did any country even have those anymore?
The young baron had been seen poking around at the site of a particularly gruesome, wartime massacre on the Albanian border two years ago; and many people along the western margins of Russia clammed up completely at the mention of his name.
Except one old guy Nick met in a graveyard, who’d had a lot to say.
“Nick says this old guy enjoyed telling him this stuff. It’s got to be, oh, you know, just a tall tale trotted out to thrill the nosy foreigner. But a few other people say they’ve heard similar things, and some of the locals Nick has run into seem to really believe it. Which says as much for the stresses they’ve all been under as it does about Ivo von Craggen, obviously.”
What they said was that Craggen was the last of a noble line that had died in early medieval times, and that he roamed the world searching for the descendants of a man who had injured his family in those ancient days.
No, not just his family: he pursued the descendants of a man who had harmed him. Word was that Craggen himself was hundreds of years old, that he was the man who had been wronged in the first place. They said that Ivo von Craggen was a revenant, a living dead man from ages past.
They said he was a vampire.
Jessamyn laughed, producing an unlovely squawk. “Walter, I hate to spoil this fabulous story, but Ivo von Craggen walks around in daylight, he casts a reflection and a shadow, and I’ve seen him eat carpaccio at the Two White Cats.”
“I’m just telling you what Nick has heard,” Walter said doggedly. “And carpaccio is raw beef, right, sliced very thin? Bloody, even?”
“So now he’s a ghoul, or a werewolf or whatever, as well as a vampire? Or maybe a cannibal? I think I’ll go upstairs, Walter, this is too much for me. Thanks for the lift, okay?” Jess grabbed the door handle.
Walter caught at her arm. “Wait, Jess, please. I told Nick he should talk to you himself. He may believe this crap, a little bit anyway, but I know delirium when I hear it. Vampires, I ask you! The point is, what kind of a guy must this von Craggen really be, to inspire rumors like these?”
“Oh, balls,” Jessamyn snapped. She began to struggle with the door latch, which like everything on Walter’s car was only intermittently functional: and not at the moment, it seemed. But she had to get out of the car. It felt like a padded cell. It felt like a coffin.
She burst into a fit of helpless giggles.
“I know; it sounds crazy to me too,” Walter said. “Fact is, Jess, I’m afraid he’s lost it again, like when he told that story about some woman he saw in the riding horseback in the road before the crash. It scares me that he’s over there wandering around by himself.”
He looked at her with pleading eyes, half his face luridly illuminated by the glare of the streetlight overhead.
“That’s horse shit,” Jess said wearily. “There was nothing wrong with Nick’s mind then, and he’s not crazy now either. You think a crazy man could have written ‘The Jewel’?” Here she was, still defending someone who, capital A, didn’t even love her anymore and, capital B, might really be cracking up, for all she knew.
Walter cleared his throat and said diffidently. “I know, it doesn’t make sense. But I can’t help worrying. If I didn’t have this show on my hands, I swear I would get on a plane and go and drag him home myself.”
I have got to get out of here, Jess thought. I need to think.
Her breath misted in front of her. Her mind felt frozen. That heavy thundering in her chest was her heart.
“Walter, I—” I, what? How in the world was she supposed to respond to all this? And in the light of what Nick had said to her before he’d left—and the tale Ivo himself had told her—plus Nick’s play about a besieged family whose virtue and honor was compromised by an ancient crime—what in the world could she think and believe? What could she say to solid Walter?
She said, “Thanks, Walter; good night,” and left him before he could say any more.
It was only after she was upstairs in her own kitchen, heating a can of chicken broth and scraping mold off some elderly cottage cheese, that she allowed herself to consider the question: what if Ivo was a bad guy? People didn’t have to be vampires to be evil, manipulative, and destructively deranged.
How big a step could it be for an arrogant young man like Craggen (she could well believe that he was a baron fallen on hard times) to go from maneuvering failing families and refugees out of their possessions to trying to sabotage Nick’s play? Maybe Nick had made an enemy of this man somehow, back in Bosnia and Croatia, when he was writing about the war there.
Sunday was an Equity day off. Ivo had offered to spend the afternoon and evening running lines with her to help her with Eva’s big speech in Act One. Was she brave enough to confront him with any of this? How about merely being in the same room with him, after what Walter had said?
She took the earrings and the brooch (which she kept at home now, where they were subject only to the dangers of simple burglary) from their velvet case. She laid them out on her pillow where she could look closely at them by the light of her reading lamp: each piece was a masterwork of skilled and painstaking craftsmanship. If Ivo von Craggen had gotten hold of these lovely things as fallout from the Bosnian War, she wanted nothing to do with them.
He couldn’t make her keep them! Unless he used his vampiric hypnotic powers to make her accept . . .
Ridiculous!
Delicious, thrilling, amazing—ridiculous.
She surprised herself with the depth of anticipation she felt for Sunday afternoon.
The Alley
You can only run lines for so long before you start training in your repeated mistakes instead of the corrections. Besides, Jess found the difference between Ivo’s reading of Marko’s lines and the way Anthony Sinclair read the same lines very distracting.
Sinclair’s reading—beautifully paced and shaped, like a singer’s delivery of a poetic lyric—was “stagey,” which meant much better suited to an audience that must hear the words all the way to the back of a theater balcony. But Ivo’s approach lent an attractive level of ironic self-awareness to the material. Jess didn’t want her Eva to start responding to that quality, and then not get it to respond to in performance with her actual leading man.
And she wanted to be outside, in public, when she asked Ivo about the rumors Nick had picked up in Europe. Well, about some of them; there were limits. She was not about to ask the man if he really were a vampire.
The weather had turned warmer. It was an illusion—there would be more storms and freezing days before the winter was over—but meanwhile people moved went about their business with the buoyancy of cave-dwellers unexpectedly let out into the sun.
“A week and a half till we open,” she said, walking energetically along at Ivo’s side. “That’s why I’m burbling today! It’s the tension, which we all need. You can’t make a show go without a little bit of terror in the actors’ hearts.”
“I’m looking forward very much to the opening,” he said. “Did Miss Anderson tell you, she says she can get a small credit into the program for me, for my help with the design? She’s very appreciative. I’m quite chuffed—but you don’t say that here, do you—‘chuffed’.”
Jess said that appreciation was due, and he had every right to be feeling pleased and proud. She couldn’t help adding that she was worried by how pale Lily was looking.
Good grief, had she just asked him, in a very oblique manner, whether he’d been drinking Lily’s blood lately?
He didn’t take the bait (of course not, it was ridiculous!), responding only that working in the theater certainly could hardly be described as a healthy outdoor style of life.
She felt like an idiot. This solidly-built young man striding up the street on a bright day was nothing like those shadowy creatures of myth you saw in the movies, skulking around to avoid the sunlight that would melt them to sludge on the spot. She was damned if she would be distrac
ted any more from the delights of the day by rumors of legendary monsters and tokens of doom.
Relaxing, she talked about the play. She’d been thinking of how Eva, raised in her family’s atmosphere of self-righteous greed, power, and privilege, had been shocked by her travels (and an affair with a man of the enemy party) into a very different view of life that put her so at odds with her sequestered, arrogant relatives.
Ivo listened. He bought her coffee and little shrimp dumplings from the street vendors whose metallic carts, clustered on the corners along midtown Fifth Avenue, emitted mouth-watering steams and smokes. She leaned side by side with him on the railing of the sunken ice-skating rink at Rockefeller Center while she ate greasy, delicious street-food.
She sighed gustily and licked her flavored fingers, watching a girl in tights practice swift little jumps under the eyes of a skating teacher in a striped parka.
“What a life,” she said, grinning at Ivo. “You do whatever you like all day, look at pretty jewelry, go to the theater, stroll in the city—is that all there is to being a dealer in collectibles?”
“No,” he said, “I have items to sell, clients to contact. And other matters.”
There was something sad about the set of his mouth. She dropped the subject, ashamed of having given in to her newly sharpened curiosity about him.
“Are you homesick? You do show such interest in our play, a play about your part of the world that’s not even written by a native.”
“Oh, homesick—” He made a dismissive gesture. “The home I had is long since gone. I don’t long for what no longer exists. Everything dies and is replaced by something else; how else could the world move along? But it is a strain sometimes, living in many different places in the course of my work; now here, hoping to make a living, or perhaps at last my fortune.”
“That’s what people do in America,” Jess said. “That’s why they come.”
“So I hear,” he replied sardonically, “constantly, on your media and in your songs. Take that child down there, so solemn on her skates, dreaming, no doubt, of skating in the Olympic Games.
“And you, Miss Croft,” he added, turning to study her with a sleepy, cat’s-eye gaze, “what do you dream for your own future? Let me guess.
“I think, a move with the play to a grander theater, and a long run, and then perhaps a part in the movie, and another film beyond that. Then comes relocation to California, protestations that the stage is still your first and last love, an award or two, a marriage or two, a child or two, and then maybe a secondary career as speaker for some worthy charity. Last comes an increasing number of quiet days in a garden in Pasadena, between sessions at your computer where you write your memoirs and give interviews for your fans.”
She was speechless; he had described her mother’s ambitions for her, and somewhere beneath her own grander flights of fancy, a more realistic version of her own hopes, too. Something must have shown in her face—surprise, recognition, chagrin at being seen through so easily, embarrassment at how staid it all sounded.
“Not so far off the mark, I think,” he said, and her smile died. He had no business sounding so smug and amused.
“Not so hard to come up with, either,” she said crisply, “considering everything you already know about me.”
He backed a step and bowed slightly. “I only made a speculation, for amusement. I’m sorry—is it rude of me to ask about your own expectations?”
“No,” she said. “But it takes my breath away to have a whole future laid out for me like a cake recipe!” Come to think of it, she hadn’t liked it much when her mother had done that to her, either. She smiled at the memory.
He laughed, a rolling, purring sound, like a lion laughing. “I am forgiven?”
“Maybe. Depends on what outrageousness you come out with next.”
“You’re annoyed,” he said in a serious tone, “because I left out the most important thing, or so all your songs say. I left out love.”
“So what about these two marriages of mine? Serial ones, I hope, not side by side. Bigamy is a crime in this country.”
“Serial, of course; and in my summary, you marry for the stability you need for a life in the arts, and because these husbands are strong and sympathetic, and you love them; serially. Beginning perhaps with your leading man, Mr. Sinclair—”
She rolled her eyes. “Not Anthony, thanks, not even if he weren’t married already.”
“No,” he said thoughtfully. Not Sinclair. Here is what I think: there’s a particular man you love, someone you might change your course for if he proves himself true. That man could nudge your life into another course, if you allow it.”
“What?” she said, blinking up at him in surprise. Good God, he’s not about to propose or something, is he?
She managed a light-sounding laugh. “And you called yourself hard-hearted! You’re a wild-eyed romantic, Ivo, and you’re letting your imagination run away with you.”
“Bravely said,” he responded, “but I know better, and I can prove it, if you will permit—?”
Permit, she thought, charmed. She had considered asking questions about his past, to lay to rest Walter’s shadowy suspicions. Instead he had sailed into her future, as if it were rich with possibilities, and of course she would “permit.” She had no idea of what she would not permit. And she only knew one way to find out, although it meant risking a deepening intimacy.
Did he also feel the pull of the strengthening threads of attraction between them?
Well, he wasn’t stupid, and he certainly wasn’t inexperienced with women, and what the hell, why fight it? She was no one’s property, and no man’s fool, to be scared off by lurid tales from dubious sources.
Ivo took her hand and began drawing off her leather glove.
She pulled back. “Wait a minute, whoa. I admit that it’s an unusually warm day for winter, but it’s still too cold for taking off any clothes.”
“We’ll say, for this moment, that I have some gypsy blood. Let me read your palm, to find a different future. You won’t deny me the chance to show off a little?”
So they ended up sitting on a bench in Bryant Park, on a bench protected by a hedge so the cutting edge of the breeze couldn’t reach them. Ivo pored over her extended hand.
“See, the linkage of the heart line in love, true love that is deep and lasting and that overcomes all shallower involvements, with someone very close. You have already met the man who can reshape your recipe-life into something richer and more sustaining than cake—long, oh long before I came along; sad for me.
“I make no pitch for myself, Miss Croft. I travel, I make my living, and I can afford a gesture of appreciation toward beauty now and then, but in fact I have little to offer someone like you.
“So I envy this fellow, who—it shows here—seems to have no sense of his own good fortune but hides away from it, leaving you to the approaches of others.”
She had an urge to reach out with her free hand and touch his hair, as vivid and luxuriant as the coat of a fox. Her other hand lay lightly in his broad palm, half covering an old scar she saw there in bitter white.
“There is someone,” she murmured. “Or there was.”
“The author of your play,” he said. “Nicolas Griffin.”
Alarm bells set up a clangor in her mind. She pulled her hand away. “Why do you keep asking about Nick?”
“Please,” he said. “The hand shows love lines in the expressive zone, something to do with the arts, so I thought, a writer—”
“Like hell,” she swore, rising quickly from the bench. She felt caught off guard and cleverly used in some way. What in the world had she been dreaming of? She felt like a fool, the quintessential American naïf turned to putty in the hands of a smooth, Old World rogue.
“You’re up to something,” she accused. “I’m just your pathway to Nick, aren’t I? All this friendliness is just a ploy. I’ve heard about you—I’ve heard enough to quit playing the patsy in whatever scam y
ou think you’re running here.”
He stood too, suddenly steely-eyed. “So you have been asking questions about me? Ask them to my face.”
“Good,” she snapped. “I will. Is it true that you’re a—a smuggler and a profiteer, preying on the poor washed up from the Bosnian War?”
“What is true,” he said coldly, “is that I’m in a position to help people who need contact with buyers for what they have to sell, so that they can trade pretty objects for the necessities of life. Is this a crime?”
“Probably not, but it’s exploitation of misfortune, and the opportunities to cheat and abuse people would be tempting to a saint. Frankly, I’m starting to wonder if you’re a pirate, a liar, and a very slick operator, Baron von Craggen!”
She was transported with outrage, a burst of emotion that obliterated the fearful questions deep in her heart: was he also Nick’s enemy, and maybe her enemy too, and maybe—maybe the other, unthinkable thing as well? She had an urge to run like hell; but if she allowed her fear to show, that would be the worst thing. Predators are excited by their prey’s fear, hadn’t she read that somewhere?
He stood still, his head lowered now. “These are matters you know nothing about—the wretchedness that displaced and besieged people live in; what it means to be what you call me, ‘Baron,’ and go-between, and peddler. All of which I am, since you ask, finally. But you have no idea what any of this means.”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I may be a lightweight compared to all that, but it’s getting dark, and I have a play to prepare for in my own foolish, inadequate way. You’ll just have to excuse me.”
She walked away quickly, down Sixth. The winter sun was low now and not many people were on the streets. No buses were in sight, and the cabs were few and all fully occupied. She looked over her shoulder. She didn’t see him. Bursting with confusion and warring emotions, she walked quickly, longing for the simple, dependable walls of her own place.
Close to home, on a quiet side street grown blustery with evening wind, she passed the mouth of a delivery alley between her building and the adjacent one. A tall iron gate usually blocked the mouth of this service entry.