02 _ Maltese Goddess, The (2 page)

“Here is a check for $2500 as an advance on expenses. You can have the shipping and insurance charges billed directly to me, as usual,” he said. “Will you do it?”

I nodded. There was no question we needed the sale. I looked at the check and capitulated totally. I called Sarah to come and do the paperwork, and then feeling slightly guilty, turned my attention to Mrs. Galea. She was now intently examining a small wooden carving, only three or four inches high, one of several we had in a basket at the front desk, a conversation piece and an inexpensive purchase for those just browsing.

“I’m Lara, Lara McClintoch, Mrs. Galea. I don’t think we have been officially introduced. That’s an Indonesian Worry-man you’re looking at. If you look closely you can see it is a man all hunched over. The idea is that you rub all your troubles onto his back, and he takes them all on for you.”

She smiled tentatively. “You’re the owner, then,” she said.

“One of them,” I replied. “Sarah Greenhalgh, who is with your husband now, is me other.”

“You have lovely things,” she said, smiling rather shyly.

At this point, her husband, his business done, turned to me and said, as if my time was now his alone to command, “Come to the house at ten o’clock tomorrow morning to see the furniture I want shipped and to pick up a set of plans.”

“Is ten convenient for you too, Mrs. Galea?” I asked, turning to her. If he wasn’t going to ask her, I was. She nodded, blushing at the attention.

Ignoring her, Galea headed down the steps to the car, leaving her to follow him out of the store. As she got to the door, I rushed after her and pressed the Worryman into her hands. If anyone needed it, she did.

“With our compliments, Mrs. Galea,” I said.

She looked surprised. “Thank you,” she said. “And it’s Marilyn.”

With that they were gone, a screeching of brakes from another car as Galea pulled away without so much as a glance at the rest of the traffic, leaving all of us, particularly Monica Perez, slightly breathless.

“Dreadful man!” Sarah sighed when Monica Perez had also left and we once again had the store to ourselves. “Imagine having a husband who flirts with other women right in front of you. That poor woman!”

“He certainly thinks he’s God’s gift to women, that’s for sure,” I agreed.

“That expression, ”God’s gift,“ implies the existence of a Being of higher consequence than Martin Galea himself, and therefore not something Galea could bring himself to support, I suspect,” Alex said dryly.

We all laughed. “I have to say I like his work, though,” Alex continued, naming several of Galea’s better known commissions. Galea did work all over the world.

I had to agree with Alex. Galea, despite his less ennobling qualities, had enormous talent to match the ego.

“You also have to agree he’s good for business, Sarah,” I said. “Monica Perez, who I’m sure was just browsing, was so entranced she bought a mirror similar to one Galea bought! With any luck, she’ll be back for more—furniture, I mean.”

“Why do you figure a man like that married a woman like that?” Sarah mused, ignoring the compliments we’d given Galea and our rather jejune attempts at humor.

“Money,” Alex replied. “McLean money to be precise,” he said, naming a well-known Toronto family. “Married while he was still an architectural student. Got him off to a good start, I’d think. Money and connections.”

“Do you think she actually had something to say, opinions and such, before she took up with him?” Sarah went on.

“We’ll probably never know,” I said. “Now, we’d better get started arranging all this. We don’t have much time. Are you sure you don’t want this one, Sarah? You wouldn’t have to deal with him directly very much, and you might enjoy having a few days in an exotic locale.”

Sarah had purchased the business from me but had asked me to come back in with her when she found she didn’t like the incessant travel it required nearly as much as she thought she might. She disliked the haggling with suppliers, the frustrating dealings with import and export officials in various countries around the world, the loneliness of being so far from home for so long.

I, on the other hand, loved it. It was why I had started the business in the first place. But I still felt a little guilty that I got all the travel while she minded the shop.

“Oh, I think learning to communicate with teenagers is about as exotic as I want to get right now,”‘ she replied. Sarah had a new beau who came as a package deal with two teen-aged sons.

“I’ll look after things at this end, while you’re over there, and we’ll ask Alex to do his usual wonders with our shippers,” she said.

I was happy with this, I had to admit. My partner in life, Lucas May, a Mexican archaeologist, had agreed to supervise a dig in Belize. He’d be off at a site in the middle of nowhere, out of cellphone range, for several weeks, so our regular time together, usually in Merida or Miami, had been postponed until he returned.

Unlike Galea, Lucas was self-effacing, equally attractive, I thought, but quietly so. A brilliant archaeologist, an ardent supporter of the indigenous peoples of Mexico, he had a way about him that I had come to find immensely reassuring. But we were both feeling the strains of a long-distance relationship, and I had a sense a bit of a break might help us sort out our feelings. I thought a few days in Malta, away from the distractions of daily life, might focus things a bit for me.

I called our shipper, Dave Thomson, and understood his expressions of dismay when I told him what needed to be done, by when.

“Money is no object here, Dave,” I said. “You know Galea. Just tell me how you want to do it. I’ll take measurements of the stuff at the house tomorrow and mark it for you.”

“Well, this is a new one for me. Can’t say I’ve ever shipped to Malta,”‘ he said. “Do they have a lot of falcons there, do you think?” he joked. “I’ll have to check into routings and costs. My favorite old movie, by the way,
The Maltese Falcon.
Humphrey Bogart at his best, I’d say. Anyway, I’ll make a few calls, find the best way to do this, and the best rate I can. It’ll be expensive, though, at least $3000, probably. But as you say, money is no object for this guy.”

After some discussion about insurance and logistics and so on, he rang off, and I relaxed a little knowing that if it could be done, Dave was the one to do it. He’d performed miracles for me more than once, starting a few years ago when he found a furniture shipment lost out of Singapore and got it to a fancy design show only hours before it opened.

I’d been the supplier to a young up-and-coming designer who’d been asked to decorate a room in the show house that was to raise money for charity. That was the event that launched his career and my business. The designer was a man by the name of Clive Swain, who after that show became my first employee and then my husband. But Dave could hardly be held accountable for that, and Thomson Shipping had been my shipper of choice ever since.

When I came out of the office, Alex had already started moving Galea’s purchases into our storage area and replacing them with stuff from our stock. Then we all surveyed the shop floor. Even with some replacements, it looked a little bare. Galea had certainly cut a swath through the place.

“I’d better get on to Dave about that shipment Lucas sent us from Mexico before he went to Belize,” Alex said. Lucas, in addition to our personal relationship, was Greenhalgh and McClintoch’s agent in Mexico. “We can fill some of the holes with the Mexican pottery and leather chairs he said he sent us,” Alex said.

The next morning I drove over to the Galea residence. It was located in a part of town which had once been thought to have charm. But now interspersed between the older, more gracious homes, were what are commonly called monster houses, those in which ostentation and sheer size have replaced aesthetics and good taste.

In such a neighborhood, Galea’s home came as something of a relief and a bit of a surprise to me, something more to the taste of Marilyn Galea, nee McLean, more old Toronto than the work of a noted modern architect. The face it showed to the street was refreshingly simple, a pleasant Georgian facade, a simple circular driveway of interlocking paving stones leading through iron gates to a European-style courtyard, and a very plain door surrounded by ivy.

The door was opened by a pleasant-faced young woman in a grey uniform. Filipina, I thought, and we were joined almost immediately by the unpretentious Marilyn Galea herself, dressed in the camel version of what she had worn the previous day. I stepped into an elegant octagonal-shaped entrance, all creamy marble. Even the flowers matched, a sumptuous bouquet of lilies arranged in a crystal vase on a table in the middle of the foyer.

Leading off the entrance toward the back of the house was a hallway, more art gallery than hall actually, with several works of modern art, a couple of them signed by Galea himself, discreetly lit from above. When we got to the end of the hall, I stepped into a large open area at the rear and the house’s secret revealed itself.

I think I actually gasped out the word “Wow!” then immediately regretted it, such an inarticulate expression certainly not in keeping with the sophisticated veneer I liked to think I projected. Neither did it do justice to what I saw.

All the houses on this side of the street back on one of the many lovely ravines that crisscross Toronto. But no others, I’m sure, made such exceptional use of the landscape. The back of the Galea house was two storeys of clear glass—perhaps two and a half, since the house was built down into the ravine at the back. The house seemed to float out over the ravine with no visible means of support. The eye was drawn into the trees, then above them, seemingly forever, to the office towers of the downtown core. Here, for certain, was the Galea touch.

I’m not certain how long I stood there, just gaping at the sight. When I looked around I found Galea himself watching, a look of amusement in his eyes. “Like it?” he said.

“It’s magnificent!” I said.

“You should see it at night, actually,” he went on. “From where we are standing, all the lights in the ceiling of the living room—there are 360 of them—light up like little stars, and reflected in the glass, they stretch out as far as the lights from the city towers.” He seemed to take a boyish pleasure in his own work and my evident admiration. “Come and have a better look.”

We descended a couple of steps into the living room, to a very elegant off-white sofa flanked by cream leather Barcelona chairs. At one side of the room was a huge marble fireplace which soared to the ceiling. Behind was the outside wall of the old house, its original red brick now whitewashed to suit its new environs in the addition of glass and steel. Most of the furnishings were antique white, and everything was done on a grand scale. Despite the proportions, however, the feeling was one of calm and contemplation, a kind of pure space.

“Would you like a tour of the house before we get down to work?” he asked.

“Sure,” I replied.

The rest of the house was also lovely, the main living spaces complemented by a palette of honey, cream, and buttermilk. Wooden floors were the color of pale straw, covered in some places with antique carpets, their colors worn to the same golden hues.

The dining room was spectacular. It also had a view of the ravine. But in a departure from the colors in the rest of the house, it featured a black lacquered table that reflected the myriad lights from a chandelier, designed by Galea himself, he assured me, which caught the light in hundreds of pieces of crystal, then burnished it and threw it back in sparkling starburst patterns on the wall, the table, and the floor.

The upstairs hallway was the upscale equivalent of a trophy room, decorated with framed drawings of some of the buildings he had designed and was famous for. Galea had attained a point in his career where he was always referred to as the award-winning architect, never just the architect, and here it was easy to see why. I recognized a town hall that had won an international competition in Milan, a grand public space in Riyadh, a concert hall in Australia. It was all very grand. Next to these were photographs of Galea accepting various prizes and hobnobbing with assorted famous people—politicians, movie stars, and the like. He pointed each of them out to me with obvious pleasure, like a little boy boasting about his exploits in the schoolyard.

After the tour was over and my genuine exclamations of admiration expressed and accepted, Galea got down to business and showed me the plans for the house in Malta. His drawings already incorporated the furniture he’d purchased the day before. “There’s one shipment of furniture already there, and some Oriental carpets I picked up last time I was working in Turkey. Marilyn knows what furniture is to go from here. She has the list. And we have a tight deadline. I’ll be there a week from Friday or Saturday.”

“I’ll get it done, Mr. Galea. And we appreciate the business,” I said.

“Good,” he said. “Now I must run. I have a meeting with the board of directors of an oil company. I’ll be adding a new dimension to the skyline of Toronto soon.” He smiled.

Marilyn Galea and I walked him to the front door. By this time he appeared to be in a bit of a hurry, but not so much that he couldn’t stop to flirt. “I haven’t mentioned how lovely you look this morning,” he said to me as he took my arm. “I feel so much more confident my gathering in Malta will go well now that you have taken the house in hand.” He started to go out the door, holding my arm until the very last moment.

“Martin,” Marilyn said quietly. He looked back.
She was
holding his briefcase and his sunglasses.

He grinned at her. “What would I do without you, my love?” he said, his arm briefly circling her waist, giving her a quick kiss on the cheek. “My guardian angel,” he said, turning to me. “I’d be lost without her.”

Then with a boyish grin and a wave, he was gone. Marilyn’s face softened as she watched him go.

It would have been a touching gesture had it not been for the fact that on his way out he brushed past me in a certain way. It is always edifying to be in the presence of greatness, but it is unfortunate that some of those who possess it are really revolting people. I turned my attention to his wife. If she had noticed the incident, she didn’t mention it “You have an absolutely beautiful home, Mrs. Galea— Marilyn. You must be very proud of it.”