The Maestro's Butterfly (14 page)

The conversation went on like that for several more moments, until it was nearly time for the show to start.

“Would you like something from the bar?” Claudio asked her.

Miranda shook her head. “I think I had enough at the restaurant,” she said. “You know a lot of people.”

“It pays to be well-liked,” he said. “Especially when you are as I am.”

He patted her hand and led her to the door to the left, and the little black-walled auditorium, then guided her up to the second row. No one was sitting in the first row.

Miranda stole glances around the auditorium, but didn’t see anyone she knew, which made her feel suddenly and inexplicably alone, and glad that Claudio was sitting beside her. She decided to turn her attention to the stage, where all was dark.

Diagonally at stage right, she could make out the black outline of a desk piled high with papers, and what looked like a tall filing cabinet against the wall. At stage left, also diagonally, stood a door frame. A girl with braided hair, dressed in a dark T-shirt, sweatpants and sneakers sat on the edge of the stage with a stack of large posterboard cards on her lap.

A series of pops and cracks sounded over the PA, and then some slow, cool period jazz began to play. A spotlight shone on the desk. A man stepped smartly from the shadows of stage right and sat behind it. A couple of sheets of paper fluttered to the floor. Miranda’s heart pounded.

Claudio’s brother was not in pinstripes this evening. Instead, he wore a solid gray suit, well-fitted on his lithe frame, and a fedora cocked just so, his face covered in white stage makeup, his lips darkened. He put his feet up on the corner of the desk, knocking down more papers in the process, and reached into a drawer to pull out a cigar, which he then lit. He inhaled deeply and blew smoke rings as the lights came up slowly, casting a dim glow.

100

101

A moment later, a gum-chewing blonde woman in a short gray overcoat, fishnet stockings and black stilettos walked to the doorway and paused to pat her hair and freshen her makeup. She tugged down the edges of the overcoat, then thought about it and hiked up the coat again, drawing appreciative chuckles from the audience.

It was in black-and-white, Miranda realized.

The woman stepped seductively through the doorway and raised her eyebrows suggestively at the audience. Several members laughed again. Finally, she slinked toward Victoire’s character, stopping at the edge of his desk, her body turned toward the audience, giving them her profile as she turned her face toward him.

Noticing her all at once, he dropped his jaw and bugged his eyes, then leapt out of his seat to retrieve a chair from the shadows, which he placed beside her, turned slightly toward his desk. Then he stepped back and motioned that she should take the seat.

She did so and thanked him with her body language under the music of the jazz record, leaning forward, placing a hand on her bosom and mouthing the words, “Thank you.”

Victoire readjusted his suit and sat on the edge of the desk. Miranda noticed that he wore gray-and-white spats. It occurred to her that the past clung to the brothers like cologne or cobwebs.

When he opened his hands, the braided girl on the edge of the stage held up a dialog card that read, “Spill the beans, dollface.”

The woman pulled a jar from her purse and stood. He moved out of the way so the audience could watch as she poured out its contents—a pile of dried beans—onto his desk. He stared at it for a moment, then turned to the audience with a wide-eyed look, drawing more laughter.

With affected gestures, and the help of the dialog cards, she explained she was looking for her long-lost sister, but didn’t have any money, which she proved by holding open her empty purse over his desk.

100

101

“I don’t work for free,” his dialog card read.

“I wasn’t suggesting you work exactly for free, mister,” her dialog card said.

She gave him a wicked smile and took off her gray coat, revealing a short red dress.

The audience expressed its approval with enthusiastic applause.

It turned out to be the story of a private investigator who falls in love with his client, who is actually searching for her sister because the sister ran off with the client’s fiancé. The woman in the red dress plans to shoot them both.

As Victoire’s character became more and more impassioned, his body language became more domineering, culminating in a fight scene with his beloved. He pulled her to him forcefully and held her there. She relented and relaxed in his grip as his hand moved to the back of her head, reminding Miranda of her first kiss with Claudio.

The woman waited as Victoire lowered his head to kiss her. During the kiss, however, something happened. The actress stiffened just a little as he moved against her and lowered his hand to her rear. Then she began moving with him, and threw her arms around his neck and Miranda could tell the kiss had ceased to be a stage-kiss and that Claudio’s brother had slipped his tongue into the woman’s unsuspecting mouth.

The audience cheered.

“Was he supposed to do that?” Miranda asked.

Claudio shrugged.

The play ended with Victoire carrying the girl off the stage in his arms.

“Your brother’s a mime,” Miranda said as the audience filed from the little black auditorium into the bar.

“My brother is many things,” Claudio said.

“Well, it looks as though you du Fresne boys always get your girl,” Miranda said. “What happens if you’re both after the same one?”

“My brother is many things,” Claudio repeated, “but he is no match for me.”

Victoire soon joined them at the bar, still in his stage makeup and gray suit. He didn’t seem quite as scary now that he had a name.

102

103

“So this is the new one,” he said appreciatively, his eyes no longer lascivious as they had been the night of Claudio’s recital. “Victoire du Fresne,” he said, sitting on Miranda’s other side and extending his hand to her. “But you can call me Jack.”

In fact, she decided, he seemed like a friendly enough guy.

She smiled. “Jack? How do you get Jack out of Victoire?” When she placed her hand in his, he turned it around and pressed his lips to her knuckles. “You’re Claudio’s brother all right.”

“The King of Jacks, at your service,” he said with a flourish. “I took it as a stage name years ago, so that’s just what people call me. Except for Claudio here. Have you told her how you got that name, by the way?”

Claudio lowered his lids and shrugged.

Victoire leaned on the bar. “Hey Doug, can I get a Jim Beam double? Thanks.”

He turned to Miranda. “See, my brother here, being French, grew up with a French name. Louis Claude-Michel du Fresne,” he said importantly. “Then when he was, what, nineteen? Twenty? He went on a tour of Europe and fell in love with a gypsy.”

“Is that true?” Miranda asked.

Claudio nodded, once.

“The beautiful Katarina,” Jack continued. “Anyway, she was an older woman, and had spent most of her life in Italy. So she called him her little Claudio. When he became the man he is today, he renounced his old life and his old name, part of it anyway. So nothing, not even my brother, is at is seems. Don’t ever forget that, toots.”

As if on cue, a professorial-looking man with a sculpted face and thick, longish hair set a half-full rocks glass on the table. “Great show, Jack,” he said and headed for another patron.

“Thanks,” Jack said, and drained the glass in one shot.

“I won’t,” Miranda said. “Forget, I mean. About people not being what they seem.” She glanced at Claudio, who looked for all the world like a bored noble at a soirée he wanted to escape.

102

103

Jack set down his glass and picked up Miranda’s wine, then sniffed it. “Whew. I have much better stuff than this back at my place.”

Claudio raised his brows. “Your place?” he asked.

“You know what I mean,” Jack said, looking around. “Where is that girl? I told her to meet me out here right after the show.” He stopped a plump young woman passing behind him. “Have you seen Katie?”

“I think she’s still in there,” the girl said, pointing toward the auditorium.

“Be a doll and tell her Jack says it’s time to go.” When she had gone, he leaned in toward Miranda, conspiratorially. “You just can’t get good help nowadays,” he said with a wink.

Miranda giggled. Claudio put a hand on her arm. The urgency of his touch froze the laughter in her throat.

Jack noticed. “Oh, my brother,” he said, teasing the tip of his finger along Miranda’s bare arm, making her shiver. “Don’t forget – you promised me a sample of this one later.”

104

105

Victoire-cum-Jack was staying in a grand old house on Winter Street that belonged to an outside feeder of his who put him up whenever he was in town.

“She’s on a business trip this weekend,” he said, returning from the bathroom, where he had removed most of his stage makeup while the braided girl, a young auburn-haired Goth in a tight black tee, black panties and black-and-white striped knee socks, poured Scotch-and-waters for everyone at the little bar in the corner. Jack took his without a word, and went to lounge on the couch with his bare feet up as the girl took a glass to Claudio, the metal ring on her leather collar jingling as she moved.

Claudio thanked her graciously and sat in the easy chair, then watched her return to the bar for the remaining two glasses, which had cocktail straws in them. Miranda tried to catch her eye, but the girl kept her eyes down and would not look at her until she handed her a drink. Even then, it was only a cursory glance.

There was a welt like a mosquito bite just above the collar. Miranda suspected there was a matching one underneath.

Jack did not acknowledge her as she took the remaining glass and went to sit on the floor next to him and sipped through a tiny straw, holding the drink in both hands.

When Claudio sat in the easy chair, Miranda started to sit on the end of the couch near him, but he nudged her toward Jack. “Say hello to my brother,” he said. “In a way he will enjoy.”

Miranda opened her mouth to protest, but he raised his brows at her, a gesture which conjured memories of what had happened in his dining room that afternoon.

Swallowing, she turned to Jack. He put his feet on the floor, put his drink on the coffee table and patted the spot beside him.

“Let me get a look at you,” he said.

For a moment, she didn’t think she would be able to slide across the two feet of 104

105

couch that separated them. After all, she felt exquisitely aware that this was the strange man who had been a frightening phantom in her imagination since she had been at Claudio’s estate. He motioned with his head and gave her an encouraging smile.

“Come on,” he said playfully. “I won’t bite.”

Miranda caught her breath.

Jack widened his eyes and gave her a look of exaggerated sheepishness. “Oops,”

he said. “I really have to stop saying that.”

He was attractive enough, she noticed, and in much the same way Claudio was, though his features were more angular. Jack looked younger than Claudio, more thirtysomething than fortysomething, and his jet-black curls, slicked back in a 1940s-style look, were only collar-length. A stray squiggle flopped onto his forehead as he took Miranda’s chin in his graceful hand, turning her head this way and that. She knitted her brow and found it difficult not to pull away. Desperate for something else to look at, Miranda stretched her eyes toward the Goth girl, who poked her straw into her ice repeatedly, and seemed oblivious to the scene playing out nearby.

“This is a good one,” Jack said suddenly and turned Miranda loose to prop one arm on the back of the couch and cross his legs. “So submissive. You’ve had her how long?”

“Since the night of the recital,” Claudio said.

“I’m impressed.”

“I am never wrong,” Claudio continued. “She needs the guidance of a strong hand. And she enjoys very much the touch of a vampire.”

Hearing them talk about her as though she were an animal at the market made her face redden the same way it had in high school when much older boys had teased her sexually. Then, she had felt angry that the humiliation aroused her, and hoped she would grow out of it. Tonight, she understood that would never happen. Even though she thought she should probably stand up and demand they stop it this instant, she could only manage to lower her eyes and try not to tremble too badly.

106

107

Unlike the boys in high school, however, these men knew ways of ensuring her compliance. She put her straw to her lips, but the smell of the liquor made her stomach lurch.

As Jack openly inspected her body with his eyes, she watched his fangs lengthen through slack lips. He lowered his lids and lifted his chin just a little, working his nostrils and inhaling.

Oh God,
she thought,
he’s smelling me.

“Why don’t you sound French?” she asked suddenly.

“I’m not French anymore,” he said. “I don’t know why Claudio here doesn’t make more of an effort to blend in.”

Claudio chuckled. “Tell me that when you have seen a mirror.”

Jack waved one hand dismissively while the other caught a strand of Miranda’s hair between his index and middle finger. “You know what I mean. This is for the stage.”

“Then you are always on the stage,” Claudio said. “Because you always look like you belong to a World War II-era mob.”

“It’s called image branding,” Jack snapped, a bit crossly. “How long have you been doing this fop thing now? Two hundred years?”

Miranda glanced at Claudio just in time to see him smile and shrug. “Women adore a man who is openly sensual, and beautiful.”

“Everybody thinks you’re gay,” Jack said.

“Not everyone,” Claudio said. “Only the young men I fuck.”

Miranda’s jaw dropped. She hoped he was kidding. Then decided he probably wasn’t. This was too much information and too much adrenaline at once. She felt as though she would be sick.

Jack leaned toward Miranda and lowered his voice, brushing the side of her face with his warm, whisky-scented breath. “He’ll fuck anything he can catch. How does that make you feel?”