“Oh,” Jess said. “Lily sometimes has to leave early. I’m sure she didn’t mean to stand you up.” This stranger didn’t have to know that the designer’s young son had a medical condition that required frequent doctor visits.
The stranger acknowledged her circumspect covering for Lily, inclining his head slightly, and added, “So I wandered into your theater to see what I could discover about this play for myself.”
She almost asked what he had discovered, but seeing how he studied her she thought he might say, “You,” and she just wasn’t up for suave seduction right now, no matter what package it came in.
“They’re closing up here for the day so we both need to leave, Mr.—is there some reason you won’t give me your name?”
“No. My name is Ivo Craggen.” he said. “I should have introduced myself right away, but I was distracted.”
Don’t ask “by what,” just get going, she told herself, there’s more to this than an attempt at a casual pick up. He’s an unknown quantity, and with the things that have been happening in the theater—
But the words that came out of her mouth were, “There’s a place I stop at sometimes on the way home from here. If I don’t have a small caffeine jolt, or I’ll be asleep on my feet before I’ve unlocked my door. Join me for coffee, if you like; but not for long, not today.”
She was rewarded with a smile that reminded her of purring cats—actually, Mr. Craggen had something of a feline look about him.
Am I going to regret this? Of god damn course I am; but nothing ventured, nothing gained, they say.
She strode ahead of him, propelled by something—the imagined pressure of his compact muscularity padding quietly and confidently after her?
Pride and Prejudice with Tigers, she thought. I must really be exhausted. He’d better not be a mind-reader.
“‘Night, Miss Croft,” Johnny Wagner called from the box office, which he was checking out before locking up. His friendly expression darkened as he registered the presence of her companion.
“See you, Johnny,” she replied, giving him a big smile. Poor kid, he couldn’t hide his crush on her. Her newfound escort could hardly fail to interpret Johnny’s fiery blush correctly. Jess had a feeling that Ivo Craggen’s smoky eyes didn’t miss much in any case.
The evening air was like an icy knife blade. She shivered at the first intake of freezing breath.
The man strolling at her elbow said, “You don’t dress warmly enough, Miss Croft. Won’t it hurt the production if you come down with a chill or a flu bug?”
She had to smile at the way he said “flu bug,” like a man picking up an interestingly novel but unappealing insect with the tips of his fingers.
“Don’t even suggest such a thing around here,” she cautioned. “Actors are insanely superstitious.”
“Are you?”
Hurrying along toward the Two White Cats, her favorite coffee-house, she shook her head. “Can’t afford to be. Theater is scary enough without jumping ten feet at every little mishap.”
“Like your fall on those stairs? This sounds like more than a mishap.”
She shrugged. “I can worry about the stairs, or I can worry about remembering my blocking and my lines. I’ll stick with lines.”
He touched her arm, cueing her to avoid a patch of glistening ice that had spread under a leaking standpipe.
“Your choice sounds good to me,” he said. “But then I know very little about your professional world.”
“So what do you do, Mr. Craggen?” she said. “Apart from consultations with people like Joshua Whitely?”
“I import rare objects,” he said. “I search out and gather for sale old pictures, objects d’art, antique jewelry.”
She blinked. The pendant. It was from this man, and now, as predicted, he was putting the moves on her. But he was far from Marie’s horrible “toad.” Besides, she was curious.
Nick had cut her loose, hadn’t he? Painfully and definitely. And foreign men were always interesting, as long as you made sure to keep control of the situation and of yourself. And quit, kindly, while you were ahead.
At least this one wasn’t an actor! Well, maybe he wasn’t; she wasn’t completely convinced.
She decided not to ask outright about the pendant. If Craggen had initiated some odd, secretive game with his anonymous gift, better to wait for the next move instead of rushing into behaving like a foolish, shallow American woman, all rush and surface.
She’d certainly rather spend the early evening exploring the nature of an intriguing and attractive man than lying in the tub trying not to scald her feet every time she had to turn on more hot water with her toes.
Her shoulder, she noticed, wasn’t bothering her nearly as much as it had been back at the theater.
“Whew,” she said as they ducked into the steaming, noisy heat of the coffeehouse. “Thank god. I’m so cold, I’m hallucinating coffee. You’re right about this coat. I should have worn my heavier one.”
She pulled off her hat and shook out her short, dark curls, looking around with dismay. There was nowhere to sit; the place was jammed. She checked again, hoping she’d missed an opening. She didn’t relish the idea of going back out into the icy streets and trotting from coffeehouse to coffeehouse—the area was full of them, after all, but it was also Friday night—looking for a place to sit down and pour something hot down her throat.
“Hell,” she muttered, defeated. “I guess it’s just not my night. Let’s share a cab, if we can find one.”
He touched her arm again, prompting her to turn slightly, and he nodded in the direction of a corner table far back from the draft of the street door, under a poster showing a Spanish beach. Three grubby-looking youngsters in black leather and ratty fur were making a great to-do of getting up to leave. The two boys stretched ostentatiously, swinging their arms in big gestures that just missed the neighboring patrons, making them flinch.
The girl with them, who had hair dyed flat black and arranged in sculptural points around her face, setting off the silver rings through her blond eyebrows, watched their posturing with sleepy indifference.
“Arctic winters and barbarians everywhere,” Craggen said contemptuously. “Time brings everything ‘round again if you just wait long enough.”
An odd remark, Jess thought, from someone not much older than the goth-flavored trio appeared to be.
As they approached the table the leader of the unsavory group began to shove past. Craggen stopped him with his lightly curled fist thrust against the center of the guy’s leather-clad chest.
“Give way,” he said calmly. “There is room to the side here.”
“Room for you, pal,” the scowling boy said, suddenly snapping the edge of his palm hard against Craggen’s wrist.
Craggen didn’t move at all, but his attacker’s hand rebounded, jarred as if meeting an iron bar instead of a human arm. The kid’s face registered shock and pain.
Recoiling, he turned to snarl at the two behind him, “Back off, you shit heads, you trying to run me over?”
He sidestepped, pointedly not looking at Craggen and Jess as he passed them. His spectrally thin buddy made exaggerated, ridiculous bows to them, bobbing and grinning and tugging his moussed blond forelock like a court jester. The one in the lead hurried on ahead, holding his hurt hand to his chest and not looking back as the girl stomped angrily after them.
Then they were gone, and the uneasy tension in the room flowed back into busy noise. A plump redhead with an apron tied on over her black turtleneck and tight skirt came over with an order pad. She spoke to Jess, who’d become a regular customer by now.
“I’m really sorry about all that Are you folks okay?”
“We’re fine,” Jess said. She wasn’t, not exactly. Stage fighting was one thing, but this had been starkly different. She’d been close enough to Craggen to feel the aggression radiating from him as his hand had shot out to the guy’s chest, stopping him cold. If the bully had forced a fight, he’d
have gotten a lot more than he’d bargained for.
Maybe that was what she was letting herself in for, too, unless she exerted some control here.
Two White Cats
She ordered a capuccino. Craggen asked for the same.
When the waitress had left, Jess leaned across the table and said to him in a low, firm tone, “I stop by here all the time, Mr. Craggen. I consider the staff my friends, and I don’t show my friendship by coming into their workplace and starting a fight, or bringing people with me who are crude enough to do that. Those jerks were just showing off. It wouldn’t have hurt to let them go through their stupid little routine and be on their way without playing lion-tamer in front of everybody.”
He looked back at her with a bemused expression. The silence stretched, and she flushed with unease but held his gaze.
“Lion-tamer,” he drawled contemptuously. “You think those ruffians are lions? This is a violent culture with no understanding of violence. They were performing, just as you say, for this audience of coffee drinkers. At home they practice their tough-guy faces and insouciance in front of the mirror, to the beat of their kind of ‘music’. I only offered the kind of critical comment that such people understand.”
“All the more reason that you should be ashamed,” she rejoined with spirit. “Criticism works when it teaches; pain just brutalizes people. I don’t know how you managed it, but I could see that you really hurt that guy.”
“Not enough,” he said coldly. “I should have taught him much harder. Bullies are dangerous, unless you make them scared of you.”
Oh, really—! Jess smacked the table with her palm. “What are you, anyway—some kind of martial arts nut who thinks he can get away with anything because he knows a few tricks?”
Bur why was she so incensed? Her stage training had taught her to analyze her feelings so she could use them in her work. The intensity of his reaction to the leather crew had alarmed her. Her fear had translated into anger, now that the danger was past.
Also she was still a little nervous of Ivo Craggen, and very glad to be in a public place with him, a place where some people knew her and would notice if—if what? What exactly did she imagine he might do?
That was it: she had no idea. This man with the broad face and watchful eyes and hair that gleamed deep copper was totally unpredictable. Talk about dangerous!
Dangerous and attractive (let’s not pretend otherwise), which meant doubly dangerous.
And, she realized, she had been a little afraid of him from the first moment he’d appeared behind her in the theater, helping her on with her coat. How could she have sensed danger in him without even seeing him, without him touching anything but her coat sleeve?
“I’ve studied the arts and skills of battle, yes,” he said, so quietly that she shouldn’t have been able to make out the words over the convivial din of the coffeehouse. But his voice cut right through the hubbub so that she heard everything as if he were speaking to her from the stage of a theater, and she were sitting in the front row. “Some of the things that I buy and sell are weapons—old daggers, rings with poison compartments. I learn from them. I know how to defend myself. Don’t you find that valuable, in the world as you know it to be, at least when you think dispassionately about it?”
His odd turn of phrase jarred her out of her mood. She asked, “Is there another world than the one I know when I’m feeling as well as thinking about it?”
He didn’t smile. “Of course. There have been many, many worlds before this one: the worlds of history, Miss Croft, and the worlds of other countries that you Americans ignore or dismiss. You keep yourselves ignorant and pretend to invent everything fresh, and then do as you like. But those worlds were real or are still real, and their customs and actions have real consequences in the present. You stay ignorant at your peril.
“Even right here, now. This tight-packed world of modern New York isn’t the worst, but not the best either. I keep my guard up, and so far I survive in good health.”
“Then you have more than your fair share of good luck,” Jess retorted. “That kid could have had a knife or an Uzi under his jacket, for all we knew. You could have gotten a lot of people hurt besides yourself.”
“I thought you were worried that I had hurt him,” he observed, eyebrows quizzically raised, “that posturer with his pretensions of savagery.”
“I don’t like the idea of anybody getting hurt,” she said. For a second she flashed on the exploding world of the car crash. There was too much damage in the world already.
“People get hurt no matter what, Miss Croft,” he murmured.
“Look, are you really an antiques dealer, or are you an international arts thief, or, I don’t know, a spy? And stop calling me ‘Miss Croft’ in that condescending way. You sound like a James Bond villain. Call me Jessamyn, it’s my name.”
He chuckled, that tiger-purr again. The man was enjoying her rebuke. He was appreciating it. She almost smiled, herself.
Then she reminded herself sharply that dangerous tricks had been played on her backstage at the Edwardian. She didn’t know this man, who had only been admitted to the theater today on the say-so of Lily Anderson. If that was even true!
Craggen inclined his head a gesture of concession. “I’m sorry, I teased you just a little. I come from a harsher experience of life than you’ve had, if you are lucky. And you are, living in this part of today’s world instead of others I could name.” He settled more deeply into his chair and steepled his fingers in front of him, contemplating her with thoughtful eyes.
“Let me set your mind at rest about me if I can. What Miss Anderson and I discuss is the design of a jewel motif for the scrim curtain that the audience first sees when the main curtain goes up.”
Jess frowned. “But the jewel of the title isn’t really the treasure that everybody’s supposedly fighting and betraying each other about; it’s a metaphor.”
“Really?” He blinked. “What metaphor?”
“Lily didn’t show you the script? Well, the emerald is a symbol for the true wealth of any family or country—its virtues and values, its honor and tolerance and forgiveness.”
“That’s a heavy burden of symbols.” His understated sarcasm brought defensive heat to Jess’s cheeks. Who was he to criticize Nick’s work?
“I wonder,” Craggen went on, “whether any object, no matter how beautiful or striking, can carry so much meaning.”
Jess deliberately produced a laugh instead of a riposte—she thought she had his number now. His idea of flirting was to be provocative, deliberately stirring disagreement in hopes of turning the heat of conflict into other kinds of fires.
Well, let him try; she was not so easily maneuvered. She smiled sweetly. “That is our job as actors, Mr. Craggen—to convince you.”
The waitress brought their drinks. Craggen lifted his cup in the motion of a toast. Jess touched her cup to his, gingerly; who knew what this little gesture meant between a man and a woman in his view? Other lands, other ways. And where did she want this strange meeting to lead, anyway?
“So what sort of motif does Lily have in mind?” she asked.
Craggen seemed to withdraw into himself, his eyelids lowering as if shutting himself in with his thoughts. It reminded her startlingly of how Nick had acted during her visit to his house in Rhinebeck, which was very discomfiting.
“We thought perhaps a cross,” he said slowly, as if thinking it out as he spoke, “an antique cross set with roughly cut gems like in olden times. Or perhaps a large brooch or buckle, with the emerald as its centerpiece. It must be something bold, even stark, Lily says, to capture the eyes of the audience. What would you suggest, Miss— Jessamyn?”
He looked at her now, calmly challenging.
“I don’t have any idea,” she said briskly. Maybe I should have stayed with ‘Miss Croft’. “I’m an actress, not some rich man’s trophy wife. I’m not familiar with fine old jewelry, up close. Have you thought of talking to the playwr
ight? Nick—Mr. Griffin might have had something particular in mind when he chose the emerald as a symbol.”
Craggen sat very still, his cup poised in the air. Then he tipped and emptied it in one swift swallow and set it down again. He leaned forward with his forearms planted on the table.
“I’ve tried to see him, without success. I could almost think he he’s been avoiding meeting me. Do you know where I can find him?”
He must have noticed her pulling back from the change in his manner, because he relaxed suddenly and cocked his head, pleasant and casual again.
“I don’t mean to track him down like a criminal, but I wouldn’t like to do anything to clash with his idea of the play. Lily said that if anyone can tell me where to find him, it would be you.”
Jess shook her head, suppressing an unkind thought about Lily.
If Lily had told this stranger the whole story there was nothing more to hide, was there? But Jess couldn’t help resenting the spreading of her private business beyond the limits of the play’s cast and crew.
She said, “Lily is mistaken. Mr. Griffin and I have been out of touch lately. I’m sure she’s told you about the car crash. Nick and I have both been busy putting our lives back on track since then—separately, I’m afraid. You might try talking to Walter Steinhart, our director. He’s the link between the company and the playwright, not me.”
“Ah,” Craggen said. He turned to look around the noisy room. “Would you like something to eat? I’m hungry myself, and there’s usually something on a cafe menu that I like. In fact, may I buy you dinner?”
Time out, Jess thought, accepting with some relief. Whatever he was really after, sparring with him was interesting.
She ordered a pasta Arabiata that she knew to be spicy and sweet and not too heavy. Craggen chose a double portion of carpaccio when the waitress told him that they got their aged, raw beef from an Italian source on the lower West Side.
“So,” he resumed, as Jess buttered a piece of the warm bread the waitress had brought, “are you sure that Mr. Griffin himself doesn’t have some old ring or bracelet that inspired his invention of this symbolic emerald?”