Dreaming Jewels (10 page)

Her astonishment factor clicked again, this time with the thought, why haven’t I ever tried this before?

“Tomorrow night? You’ll come?” he said. “You really will?”

“What time, Ar-mand?” she asked submissively.

“Well now. Hmp. Ah—say eleven?”

“Oh, it would be crowded here then. Ten, before the shows are over.”

“I knew you were clever,” he said admiringly.

She grasped the point firmly and pressed it. “There are always too many people,” she said, looking around. “You know, we shouldn’t leave together. Just in case.”

He shook his head in wonder, and beamed.

“I’ll just—” she paused, looking at his eyes, his mouth. “I’ll just go, like that.” She snapped her fingers. “No goodbyes…”

She skipped to her feet and ran out, clutching her purse. And as she passed the end of the bandstand, the guitarist, speaking in a voice just loud enough to reach her, and barely moving his lips, said,

“Lady, you ought to have your mouth washed out with bourbon.”

H
IS HONOR, THE SURROGATE
Armand Bluett, left his chambers early the next afternoon. Dressed in a dark brown business suit and seeing alternately from the corners of his eyes, he taxied across town, paid off the driver, and skulked down a narrow street. He strolled past a certain doorway twice to be sure he was not followed, and then dodged inside, key in hand.

Upstairs, he went through the compact two-and-kitchenette with a fine-toothed comb. He opened all the windows and aired the place out. Stuffed between the cushions on the couch he found a rainbow-hued silk scarf redolent with cheap, dying scent. He dropped it in the incinerator with a snort. “Won’t need
that
any more.”

He checked the refrigerator, the kitchen shelves, the bathroom cabinet. He ran the water and tested the gas and the lights. He tried the end-table lamps, the torchère, the radio. He ran a small vacuum cleaner over the rugs and the heavy drapes. Finally, grunting with satisfaction, he went into the bathroom and shaved and showered. There followed clouds of talc and a haze of cologne. He pared his toenails, after which he stood before the cheval glass in various abnormal chest-out poses, admiring his reflection through a rose-colored ego.

He dressed carefully in a subdued hound’s-tooth check and a tie designed strictly for the contracting pupil, returned to the mirror for a heady fifteen minutes, sat down and painted his nails with colorless polish, and wandered dreamily around fluttering his flabby hands and thinking detailed thoughts, reciting, half-aloud, little lines of witty, sophisticated dialogue. “Who polished your eyes?” he muttered, and “My dear, dear child, that was nothing, really nothing. A study in harmony, before the complex instrumentation of the flesh… no, she’s not old enough for that one. Hm. You’re the cream in my coffee. No!
I’m
not old enough for that.”

So he passed the evening, very pleasantly indeed. At 8:30 he left, to dine sumptuously at a seafood restaurant. At 9:50 he was ensconced at the corner table at Club Nemo, buffing his glittering nails on his lapel and alternately wetting his lips and dabbing at them with a napkin.

At ten o’clock she arrived.

Last night he had risen to his feet as she crossed the dance floor. Tonight he was up out of his chair and at her side before she reached it.

This was Kay transformed. This was the concretion of his wildest dreams of her.

Her hair was turned back from her face in soft small billows which framed her face. Her eyes were skillfully shadowed, and seemed to have taken on a violet tinge with their blue. She wore a long cloak of some heavy material, and under it, a demure but skin-tight jacket of black ciré satin and a black hem-slashed skirt.

“Armand…” she whispered, holding out both hands.

He took them. His lips opened and closed twice before he could say anything at all, and then she was past him, walking with a long, easy stride to the table. Walking behind her, he saw her pause as the orchestra started up, and throw a glance of disdain at the guitarist. At the table she unclasped the cloak at her throat and let it fall away confidently. Armand Bluett was there to receive it as she slid into her chair. He stood there goggling at her for so long that she laughed at him. “Aren’t you going to say anything at all?”

“I’m speechless,” he said, and thought, my word, that came out effectively.

A waiter came, and he ordered for her. Daiquiri, this time. No woman he had ever seen reminded him less of a sherry flip.

“I am a very lucky man,” he said. That was twice in a row he had said something unrehearsed.

“Not as lucky as I am,” she said, and she seemed quite sincere as she said it. She put out just the tip of a pink tongue; her eyes sparkled, and she laughed. For Bluett, the room began to gyrate. He looked down at her hands, toying with the clasp of a tiny cosmetic case.

“I don’t think I ever noticed your hands before,” he said.

“Please do,” she twinkled. “I love the things you say, Ar-mand,” and she put her hands in his. They were long, strong hands with square palms and tapered fingers and what certainly must be the smoothest skin in the world.

The drinks came. He let go reluctantly and they both leaned back, looking at each other. She said, “Glad we waited?”

“Oh, yes. Hm. Yes indeed.” Suddenly, waiting was intolerable. Almost inadvertently he snatched up his drink and drained it.

The guitarist fluffed a note. She looked pained. Armand said, “It’s not too nice here tonight, is it?”

Her eyes glistened. “You know a better place?” she asked softly.

His heart rose up and thumped the lower side of his Adam’s apple. “I certainly do,” he said when he could.

She inclined her head with an extraordinary, controlled acquiescence that was almost like a deep pain to him. He threw a bill on the table, put her cloak over her shoulders, and led her out.

In the cab he lunged for her almost before the machine was away from the curb. She hardly seemed to move at all, but her body twisted away from him inside the cloak; he found himself with a double handful of cloth while Kay’s profile smiled slightly, shaking its head. It was unspoken, but it was a flat “no.” It was also a credit to the low frictional index of ciré satin.

“I never knew you were like this,” he said.

“Like what?”

“You weren’t this way last night,” he floundered.

“What way, Ar-mand?” she teased.

“You weren’t so—I mean, you didn’t seem to be sure of yourself at all.”

She looked at him. “I wasn’t—ready.”

“Oh, I see,” he lied.

Conversation lapsed after that, until he paid off the cab at the street intersection near his hideout. He was beginning to feel that the situation was out of his control. If she controlled it, however, as she had so far, he was more than willing to go along.

Walking down the dirty, narrow street, he said, “Don’t look at any of this, Kay. It’s quite different upstairs.”

“It’s all the same, when I’m with you,” she said, stepping over some garbage. He was very pleased.

They climbed the stairs, and he flung open the door with a wide gesture. “Enter, fair lady, the land of the lotus-eaters.”

She pirouetted in and cooed over the drapes, the lamps, the pictures. He closed the door and shot the bolt, dropped his hat on the couch and stalked toward her. He was about to put his arms around her from behind when she darted away. “What a way to begin!” she sang. “Putting your hat there. Don’t you know it’s bad luck to put a hat on a bed?”

“This is my lucky day,” he pronounced.

“Mine too,” she said. “So let’s not spoil it. Let’s pretend we’ve been here forever, and we’ll be here forever.”

He smiled. “I like that.”

“I’m glad. That way,” she said, stepping away from a corner as he approached, “there’s no hurry. Could we have a drink?”

“You may have the moon,” he chanted. He opened the kitchenette. “What would you like?”

“Oh, how wonderful. Let me, let me. You go into the other room and sit down, Mister Man. This is woman’s work.” She shunted him out, and began to mix, busily.

Armand lounged back on the couch with his feet on the rock-maple coffee table, and listened to the pleasant clinking and swizzling noises from the other room. He wondered idly if he could get her to bring his slippers every evening.

She glided in, balancing two tall highballs on a small tray. She kept one hand behind her back as she knelt and put the tray down on the coffee table and slipped into an easy-chair.

“What are you hiding?” he asked.

“It’s a secret.”

“Come over here.”

“Let’s talk a little while first. Please.”

“A little while.” He sniggered. “It’s your fault, Kay. You’re so beautiful. Hm. You make me feel mad—impetuous.” He began rubbing his hands together. She closed her eyes. “Armand…”

“Yes, my little one,” he answered, patronizingly.

“Did you ever hurt anyone?”

He sat up. “I? Kay, are you afraid?” He puffed his chest out a bit. “Afraid of me? Why, I won’t hurt you, baby.”

“I’m not talking about me,” she said, a little impatiently. “I just asked you—did you ever hurt anyone?”

“Why, of course not. Not intentionally, that is. You must remember—my business is justice.”

“Justice.” She said it as if it tasted good. “There are two ways of hurting people, Armand—outside, where it shows, and inside, in the mind, where it scars and festers.”

“I don’t follow you,” he said, his pomposity returning as his confusion grew. “Whom have I ever hurt?”

“Kay Hallowell, for one,” she said detachedly, “with the kind of pressure you’ve been putting on. Not because she’s a minor; you are only a criminal on paper for that, and even that wouldn’t apply in some states.”

“Now, look here, young lady—”

“—but because,” she went on calmly, “you have been systematically wrecking what faith she has in humanity. If there is a basic justice, then for that you are a criminal by its standards.”

“Kay—what’s come over you? What are you talking about? I won’t have any more of this!” He leaned back and folded his arms. She sat quietly.

“I know,” he said, half to himself, “you’re joking. Is that it, baby?”

In the same level, detached tone, she went on speaking. “You are guilty of hurting others in both the ways I mentioned. Physically, where it shows, and psychically. You will be punished in both those ways,
Justice
Bluett.”

He blew air from his nostrils. “That is quite enough. I did not bring you here for anything like this. Perhaps I shall have to remind you, after all, that I am not a man to be trifled with. Hm. The matter of your estate—”

“I am not trifling, Armand.” She leaned across the low table to him. He put up his hands. “What do you want?” he breathed, before he could stop himself.

“Your handkerchief.”

“My h
-what?”

She plucked it out of his breast pocket. “Thank you.” As she spoke she shook it out, brought up two corners and knotted them together. She slipped her left hand through the loop and settled the handkerchief high on her forearm. “I am going to punish you first in the way it doesn’t show,” she said informatively, “by reminding you, in a way you can’t forget, of how you once hurt someone else.”

“What kind of nonsense—”

She reached behind her with her right hand and brought out what she had been hiding—a new, sharp, heavy cleaver.

Armand Bluett cowered away, back into the couch cushions. “Kay—no! No!” he panted. His face turned green. “I haven’t touched you, Kay! I only wanted to talk. I wanted to help you and—and your brother. Put that thing down, Kay!” He was drooling with terror. “Can’t we be friends, Kay?” he whimpered.

“Stop it!” she hissed. She lifted the cleaver high, resting her left hand on the table and leaning toward him. Her face made, line upon plane upon carven curve, a mask of utter contempt. “I told you that your physical punishment comes later. Think about this while you wait for it.”

The cleaver arced over and came down, with every ounce of a lithe body behind it. Armand Bluett screamed—a ridiculous, hoarse, thin sound. He closed his eyes. The cleaver crashed into the heavy top of the coffee-table. Armand twisted and scrabbled back into the cushions, crabbed sidewise and backward along the wall until he could go no farther. He stopped ludicrously, on all fours, on the couch, backed into the corner, sweat and spittle running off his chin. He opened his eyes.

It had apparently taken him only a split second to make the hysterical move, for she still stood over the table; she still held the handle of the cleaver. Its edge had buried itself in the thick wood, after passing through the flesh and bone of her hand.

She snatched up the bronze letter-opener and thrust it under the handkerchief on her forearm. As she straightened, bright arterial blood spouted from the stumps of three severed fingers. Her face was pale under the cosmetics, but not one whit changed otherwise; it still wore its proud, unadulterated contempt. She stood straight and tall, twisting the handkerchief with the handle of the letter-opener, making a tourniquet, and she stared him down. As his eyes fell, she spat, “Isn’t this better than what you planned? Now you’ve got a part of me to keep for your very own. That’s much better than using something and giving it back.”

The spurting blood had slowed to a dribble as she twisted. Now she went to the chair on which she had left her cosmetic case. Out of it she worried a rubber glove. Holding the tourniquet against her side, she pulled the glove over her hand and snugged it around the wrist.

Armand Bluett began to vomit.

She shouldered into her cloak and went to the door.

When she had drawn back the bolt and opened it, she called back in a seductive voice, “It’s been so wonderful, Ar-mand darling. Let’s do it again soon…”

It took Armand’s mind nearly an hour to claw its way up out of the pit of panic into which it had fallen. During the hour he hunkered there on the couch in his own filth, staring at the cleaver and the three still white fingers.

Three fingers.

Three
left
fingers.

Somewhere, deep in his mind, that meant something to him. At the moment he refused to let it surface. He feared it would. He knew it would. He knew that when it did, he would know consuming terror.