Small World (19 page)

‘Strange. Dolly may be getting peculiar, change of life or whatever. Collecting odd hangers-on.’

Lucy giggled. ‘He certainly was odd. She said he was writing a book about miniatures, but he didn’t seem very interested in them. Poked around my tools mostly, and acted bored.’

‘They put up at Dolly’s favorite hotel together. I don’t think he’s writing anything either.’

‘Really.’Lucy seemed genuinely startled. ‘I was joking. I didn’t think he was the sort of man she would be interested in.’

This was delicate ground, the subject of Dolly’s taste in men. Nick thought carefully before he spoke.

‘He isn't, so far as I know. Although there’s no accounting for taste in sex.’

This drew another rueful glance from Lucy.

He continued. ‘But he may toady or something. Supply her with wicked cocaine. It’s impossible to guess, Dolly being Dolly.’ ‘How do you happen to know all this?’

‘A friend at the FBI. A funny thing happened in New York.’ ‘What?’

‘You remember the collection of dollhouses at the Borough Museum?’

‘Sure.’

‘One of the dollhouses was stolen, apparently at about the same time that Dolly was in the museum.’

‘Jesus. I missed that one.’

‘She was surrounded by people, she couldn’t have done it. In fact, it’s a bit of a mystery, how anything that large could be removed from the premises with no witnesses. In the middle of the day, yet. And of course, there were other things taken from the Borough’s collection of gold and silver.’

‘So it looks like some kind of extraordinary coincidence?’ ‘Indeed. Except she’s Mike Hardesty’s daughter, and he never stopped when he wanted something. It’s in her blood.’

Lucy leaned forward on her hands, thinking. ‘I’m flummoxed, Nick. All of a sudden there’s a big black cloud of confusing activity from Dolly. I mean, this guy, what’s his name?’ ‘Tinker.’

‘Tinker. And stopping the projects she had going with me, and now this crazy theft from the Borough Museum, just when she’s there.’

‘Dolly’s always been unpredictable. Just how much work did she have contracted to you?’

‘The grounds project, the newest and most extensive. The scenic wallpaper in one of the reception rooms, odds and ends and doodads. A lot of what was left was going to be subcontracted to other people, anyway. China and paintings. And we talked very casually about some dolls someday.’

‘To whom would she be taking the work?’

‘She could deal with the subcontractors directly, of course. Save my fee. I don’t know, really, about the other things. The grounds.’ ‘You do know.’

Well, I can guess. But I don’t want to know who’s doing it.’ Nick slipped one arm around her and drew her close.

‘Got attached to it, didn’t you?’

‘Ummm.’

‘I’m sorry for that.’

‘Me too.’

Lucy pushed him away and stood up. She gathered up the small containers of dough and went into the house, returning almost

immediately.

‘I told Pop I’d be in the workshop. Do you want to see those

things?’

‘Of course.’

He followed her around the edge of the garden. The view from a few paces behind her was disturbing but too exciting to abandon. He reflected, not for the first time, that Lucy brought out the seventeen-year-old in him. He had had so many years of careful discreet sex that this outburst of passion was as uncomfortable as it had been in his teens, when the sex drive had been so great as to be painful.

The fluorescent lights in the workshop flickered on. Insects seemed to spontaneously generate around the long bluish bars of light. Lucy left the glass doors from the garden open, and the smells of the vegetation followed them in, to mingle with the workshop’s own peculiar woodsy perfume.

She showed him a tiny fruit crate filled with bunches of bananas, a silver fruit bowl piled with assorted delectables, a minuscule cherry pie. He was delighted with them. The small perfections, the sensual smells, fed their pleasure in being

together again.

Next he received a small box, about the size a pound of butter might be packaged in. He opened it to find a curious puzzle composed of pieces of wood. Reduced to its components, it was revealed as a miniature dining room suite. From another, identical box, he turned out a puzzle that reduced to a bedroom suite: bed, dressing table, nightstand, and a tiny wooden thunderjug and lid, which formed the core.

‘How fast can you turn these out, Lucy?’ he asked, examining them closely.

‘Myself and Pop? Two or three dozen a week, if we didn’t do anything else.’

‘They’re just what I want for the museum shop. Something identified totally with the Dalton.’

‘We can do another that’s all designed. It’s a kitchen. I have an idea for the bathroom. Eventually I should have an even half dozen choices, six small roomsful.’

‘Marvelous. I knew you could do it. How long have you been at this?’

‘Off and on, since you first asked for something.’

Her flace glowed with pleasure at his approval. He put down the toys and seized her happily by the shoulders.

‘You deserve kissing for this.’

‘Oh, oh,’ she began to protest, but with such a teasing note that he drew her tighter. Good intentions vanished like the moths around the lights. He found himself eye to eye with her, willing her desperately not to turn away or close her eyes. She leaned into him slowly, with a small sigh, like a deflating balloon.

‘I missed you,’ she admitted.

He stroked her hair. Abruptly she broke their embrace. Nick caught his breath and leaned back against the worktable. Lucy began pawing at the pile of carpeting remnants that were heaped a few paces away. She flung them onto the tiled floor near the garden doors. For a second, Nick wondered if she had gone beserk. Then he realized what she was doing and, with a sudden bark of laughter, joined her in the task.

There were more than enough pieces to make an acceptable bed. They closed the doors halfway, but the smell of tomatoes on the vine, onions, the musk of squash leaves, invaded still. A night bird chirped nearby and dogs barked in the neighborhood. Lucy put out the lights, so that only the moon gave them a gentle light. They knelt down together. She reached out, hesitantly, to touch his face.

‘Good enough,’ she said. ‘Good enough.’

Nick reached for her. She had said all that needed saying.

In a king-size bed in Washington, Captain Kirk, a.k.a. Roger Tinker, romped with an alien adventuress from Alpha Centauri whose name was unpronounceable by human lips but who answered, in other dimensions of time and space, to the name of Dorothy Hardesty Douglas. The fantasy was disturbed at a crucial moment by the clanking thunking descent of several almost empty bottles of Dom Perignon from the foot of the bed to the carpet, where they dribbled fragrant foamy dregs.

Just after dawn, the view from the hotel was of the Potomac and a stretch of sidewalk along the embankment of the river. There were concrete planters filled with red and yellow flowers dividing the slick silver surface of the water from the gray concrete of the walkway. The night had not broken the heat; the atmosphere was muggy and a little misty so close to the water. Roger sat on the balcony in his shorts and studied the small patch of the world below him. He heard a dog yapping happily in the distance. Joggers passed, singly or paired or in small flocks. A straggler from one group huffed by, damp, and red in the face. The barking dog shot by, an Irish setter, a pretty patch of color, pursued by an old man with white hair who moved as easily as the dog. Then a woman. The woman’s hair was loose, floating as she ran. Roger stirred in his webbed chair. She was a big girl, and there was something familiar about her.

He leaped to his feet, possessed by an irresistible urge to go running.

She had gotten her stride, moving effortlessly and almost thoughtlessly. If she thought anything at all, it wasn’t about her politics or her career or what she was going to do about the husband she saw once a month. She thought, if it was a real thought defined from the delicious flow of sensation, that she was almost flying.

Her route was elaborate and changed each day. This day she ran by the river and then turned through the city to the Mall. Once around the Mall only, instead of two or three times as she sometimes did, and back to her apartment, a precisely clocked ten-mile run.

She waved to a jogging senior congressman headed in the other direction from her, toward the Capitol. She didn’t really look at anything, so often had she run the route that it was as familiar and uninteresting to her as another woman’s kitchen might be to the lady working in it. Levna’s kitchen was a bar and a miniature fridge, stocked with fruit juice, yogurt, and eggs. If she couldn’t make a meal out of that, she went out.

It was early yet, but the sun was beating back the haze. Early commuters were out, and a scattering of tourists. She didn’t pay any attention to the sweaty-looking tourist with the camera slung across his chest. People took pictures of her nearly every time she ran around the Mall. She made her living having her picture taken. Why notice the little man unstrapping his camera as she drew up to him?

‘Miss! ’ he shouted and she had time to think that that wasn’t the usual greeting. ‘Leyna!’ they shouted, as if they had her in to cocktails regularly. But this man shouted a cheerful ‘Miss!’ at her and she looked his way. Just a smile, and she’d have another fan for life. Little grains of sand, but that’s how beaches got built.

She turned her elegant neck and flashed her expensive, almost perfect, teeth at him. A red light popped. A flashbulb in this sun, she thought, the picture would be overexposed. And then it hit her, a wave that knocked her backward, breaking her seven-mile-an-hour momentum.
I’ve run into something. Something’s hit me
flashed through her mind and she was angry at herself for not looking where she was going and angry at the tourist for distracting her. She thought
Now he’ll sell me ass over teakettle.
She didn’t have a chance to imagine what it would be like in
Newsweek
, or
Time
or
VIP.
A joke if she were mildly injured. A scoop if she were killed. The pain hit her, and an awful cold penetrated all through, and then
thank God
she didn’t feel anything at all.

Roger was there with two quick strides and had scooped her up in a handkerchief and turned away, stalking as fast as his short legs could carry him across the Mall. He passed a few people who ignored him in their own haste to get to work or to breakfast or just because he wasn’t very interesting. In two minutes he was headed down a side street. The Mall was swallowed up by the big buildings all around until it was just a wedge of green behind him.

He had dumped the minimizer hastily into the camera case and slowed down to shift it around so it fit properly. Roger didn’t like even as many people around as had been there, but it was a hell of a big Mall, it was, and it shrank the early visitors down to a riskable size. He hoped she was okay. She was so beautiful, with her hair flying out in great glossy wings. It was like snatching a rare and beautiful butterfly in flight.

When he entered the hotel suite, Dolly was having her morning shower. Making a bed of tissues in one of Dorothy’s fancy soapboxes, he placed the tiny form of Leyna Shaw in it. It was a relief that she was still breathing, but her color was a little off. He wondered about the possibility of shock. And then he had to chuckle, thinking how this would set Dolly on her can.

The water thrummed on the floor of the shower and flowed over Dolly’s shoulders and down, to make two little waterfalls off the tips of her breasts. It sheeted down her back and over her bottom. She lathered soap, her own, not the insulting little paper-wrapped squares the hotel deposited, like nasty candy, in likely places. It reminded her of how much she loved individually wrapped pieces of candy. The wrapping added a measure of hesitation, delay, and then a small surprise, to the sweetness of the treat. But there should be candy inside the wrapper, not soap, especially not the kind of soap the godly preferred for washing out the mouths of naughty children.

She lathered patiently, shoulder to toe, according to routine of some years standing. Then she rinsed, and stood squeaky clean in the spray. When she took up her soap again, after a second’s pause to set her mood, she only lathered between her legs, and while she lathered, slipped from a standing position to a crouch. It took only a minute or two to bring herself off. And she would admire herself in the mirrors when the steam had begun to dissipate. It did so much for her color.

Roger, poking needle holes in the soapbox with great care, heard the water stop its seemingly everlasting drumming. Dolly took the longest damned showers. His mother’s Sunday soaks took at least an hour, but it was only once a week and perhaps just before special occasions, like Mother’s Day. She seemed so pink and happy afterward that he couldn’t resent being locked out of the bathroom for so long. But Dolly spent literally hours in the bathroom, most of it, to judge by the sound of running water, in the shower. He didn’t mind her smelling of the fancy soap she carted around with her in its own handy box. That was okay. Mostly he wondered if she wasn’t washing healthy germs off her skin, but just looking at her, she looked so good that that couldn’t be. Just after the showers, she glowed. He suspected that women were supposed to smell like something besides soap and had heard rumors that their natural smell was either wretched or wonderful, depending on who was mongering the rumor, or which sex book he consulted. It was the kind of thing he couldn’t ask his mother about. Or Dolly.