...Continued Part I: molto lento
He had been wrong.
Claudia stood in his darkly paneled office and stared at the very stiff and very formal-looking cordwain leather divan that Myers was offering to her for the night. If she had been more chipper she might have laughed hysterically, haughtily. Instead, she skipped past any semblance of amusement, looked pointedly from Myers to the divan, walked out of the room, and re-boarded the elevator without a word.
Bert had to double-time to get to the lift before she pulled the brass gate closed, and he felt every footfall echo in his injured side--the vodka fix hadn't worked for long. As she grasped the lever to engage the lifting mechanism and they began to move, Myers didn't bother to ask for an explanation of her behavior. After all, it was his own fault for having forgotten Rule Number One in the care and protection of Claudia Jardine: if it's good enough for the rest of the world, it holds no interest for me.
He, himself, had spent more than a few nights comfortably enough on that divan. It beat the hell out of the floor, or even his desk--why in the old days--but then, he knew better than to pretend that Claudia Jardine was the kind of woman you could throw an old shirt and a few blankets to (maybe add your toothbrush for hospitality's sake), and still expect things to come out smelling like roses. Claudia had made her life about caviar and the Sultan of Brunei, Waterford and the Lincoln Bedroom, Harrod's and Rolls Royce--not Hanes Her Way and, 'have a beer.'
He thought about apologizing. Bert weighed in his head the potential benefit of an offered apology versus the perceived deficit should he do so, and it simply empower Claudia to open a floodgate of vocal criticism. He ran his tongue across the roof of his mouth, deciding. Claudia hadn't brought it up yet. Very well, he would let it lie.
"Now," Claudia began, as though the last few moments had not even occurred. "What's on the other floors?"
Bert knew Amanda was out of town. Originally his only desire in bringing Claudia to Sanctuary (beyond appeasing her new fear of her own lodgings) had been to keep her well clear of Nick's apartment until he could talk with the old boy. So he instinctively steered her down the hall, away from Nick's rooms, planning to show her an old storage closet he thought he remembered, and explain that this floor was used for nothing more than storing old and musty half-forgotten things--Mardi Gras decorations and the like.
He hadn't known that Amanda Montrose (or indeed Amanda Darrieux, or Amanda Le Fauve) didn't trouble her own life with locks, or that when, returning the club's original front door, she had also replaced her own apartment door with something much too elaborate to be explained away as that of a simple storage closet's entrance.
By the time Claudia was sweeping into the devastatingly cosmopolitan flat beyond that door, he was left with one hope only: that Amanda would have a guest room Claudia would find suitable.
She didn't.
Bert Myers hadn't seen the interior of Amanda's rooms since she had moved in (naturally she had called upon him and several of his men to help with transporting some of the heavier pieces of furniture she had seen fit to acquire). In the interim she had done some pretty sophisticated things with the space. Large windows lent an air of light, which she had complemented with more than a few exotic pieces of furniture and rugs in the great room.
Additionally, there were two other rooms of note: one decked out as an attractive spare bedroom, with a bedstead larger than some folks' homes, laden with carvings as though it had been the last piece of wood on earth at a whittler's convention; the other was set up as a small library/office, but was too neatly kept to lead him to believe that it got much use--either that or she was having someone come in to clean. The last room he went into—-the one where he found Claudia—-was the master (or should he say mistress?) bedroom.
It defied description. It looked (and he winced more than a bit at Amanda's blasphemy, though he was not by nature a religious man) like a cathedral. He nearly felt the need to look quickly around himself and check for backpacking tourists milling about quietly, consulting their Baedekers and snapping photos of the marble statuary, muralled ceiling, and frieze work.
"Goodness, Bert." Even the usually blasé, jaded Claudia responded in a spirit of awe. "Is this where you keep your mistress? Her hand swept over the glossy top of a bedside table as though she owned it. "And if so, where is she now?"
"Claudia, are you certain--?" he began, knowing that he shouldn't be going to let her do exactly what he knew that he was going to let her do.
"Quite," she answered. "This is just right."
Whatever had been fluttering at the top of Bert's stomach fell dully to its bottom.
"I'm sure she won't mind if I borrow something of hers--after a bath, of course."
She spoke as though she knew Amanda well enough to predict how the other woman would feel about such things. Bert speculated. Perhaps such conjecture, along with her unearned sense of entitlement, helped Claudia gloss over the fact that she was about to gate-crash into a stranger's bed.
Bert thought about opening his mouth to protest, but gave in, ignoring the warning of his gut. Her reaction caught him off guard. He hadn't heard Claudia sound this pleased about anything in recent memory. What harm could there be? Amanda wasn't coming back this morning.
"Just--take whatever you need," he offered, swallowing down on the fact that it wasn't his to dispense with. "I'll be at the bar." He pointed out the intra-Sanctuary line (the familiar, heavy gilt, turn-of-the-century phone was easy enough to pick out). "Ring 801."
"You're going to come back up."
Claudia's back was to him and she did not turn around, but it was not a question.
"Right, of course. Sure. Give me half an hour. After that, I'm posted outside your door." "Outside the bedroom door," she instructed. "On the chaise, in the dressing room."
With the lead pipe, he thought grimly, feeling the heat of pain play across his busted rib in response to the mention of the tightly stuffed, button-upholstered chaise they had passed on their way in to Amanda's sanctum sanctorum. Keeping the pain to himself, he assured his client with a lie, "My thoughts, exactly."
As Claudia flicked unselfconsciously through Amanda's sumptuous closet and drawers for something to wear to bed, Bert stomped down the hall to the giant bathroom that Nick and Amanda shared, rooting around for some painkiller. No dice. The medicine cabinet, while well stocked with any and every other thing he could imagine needing (toothpastes and powders, mouthwashes foreign and domestic, floss--waxed and unwaxed--lotions, tweezers, and Nick's septic pencil), was bone dry when it came to things pain-related. No Advil, Aspirin, Tylenol, Goodey's Headache Powders, Icy Hot. Nada.
What did these two jokers do when they got a migraine? Order out?
It particularly surprised him that Amanda had nothing lying around. He had pegged her for the high-maintenance-type dame with a permanent Valium prescription. Could he have been wrong?
Bert was careful, as he had been trained so long ago before Bert Myers' identity had been even a gleam in his eye, to replace everything he touched flawlessly back into the spot from which he had taken it. A final attempt to locate something had his hand in the drawers of Amanda's cosmetics department-stocked vanity--still nothing. And then it clicked in his head that just as he had found no analgesics, neither had he found anything prophylactic in nature. He hoped to goodness they were keeping them somewhere--that the two of them were being safe.
It was an unsettling thought, Nick and Amanda together (it didn't matter to him that they denied it, each in turn--he had eyes, and a man like Nick didn't up and cross an ocean, throw his well-regimented life into guaranteed chaos to kill a guy--a guy like Korda--to avenge (however mistakenly) a woman he only sort of, "knows"). On that note, he gave up his search, concluding that they must have some other spot in which they preferred to house such things--Nick's bedside table, perhaps. And he had no time to go ransack Wolfe's flat just now.
In defeat, Bert pulled the lift's grate closed on the sounds of Claudia drawing a hot bath, glanced quickly at his watch, and thought that it would be a piece of unexpected luck if both Nick and the good doctor had managed to appear by the time he descended to the bar.
...to be continued...
***********DISCLAIMERS: The characters in this story are not my property, never have been, and I'm just borrowing them for a few pages. No money is being made, etc.
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