Deceptions (13 page)

'You look fine. We're not going anywhere until tonight.'

'Tonight?'

'There's a play and then a party to meet the author and the cast.'

'Sabrina, I can't go; I haven't anything to wear.'

'You can borrow one of—'

'Not any more. Once I could, but now I'm two sizes too big/

'We'll find something. I thought you'd like to meet my fiiends and see some of London.'

'Oh, I would. But—'

'Stephanie, we'll do whatever you want. Let's eat and then we'll talk about it. But first, tell me more about last year; what else happened?'

They walked downstairs. 'It was an odd year. Nothing felt right and 1 guess I just let go. I didn't realize how far, though, until now.'

Sabrina hesitated. 'And Garth?*

Stephanie shrugged. 'What about him? He's all wrapped up in his lab, he's on some kind of faculty committee, he counsels students and at night he goes back to the lab.'

In the drawing room, on a round table beside a window, Mrs Thirkell had set out oyster bisque and salad, white wine and winter pears. 'You don't need Garth for tennis,' Sabrina said as they sat down. 'Or to have your hair done or just to take time for yourself. Can't you think about yourself more?'

'What difference does it make? I mean, of course I don't like the way I look, but we never go anywhere that I need to dress up for-just to fiiends' houses or sometimes a movie.

And if you really want to know about Garth, I can't remember when he last looked at me. And Penny and Cliff - oh, ten- and eleven-year-olds are so wrapped up in themselves. I'm like a piece of furniture they dodge around when they're dashing out to see their friends. What do they care whether I'm overweight? I'm sorry, I shouldn't whine; I've got a family I love and a home that's a lot happier than most. We almost never fight. But as far as how I look, Sabrina, the truth is, nobody cares. And it doesn't seem worth the effort of diet and exercise and new clothes.'

'I care,' Sabrina said. 'Because you're not being fair to yourself. If Garth is crazy enough to ignore you, shouldn't you pay twice as much attention to yourself?'

Stephanie looked at her sister and shook her head wonderingly. 'I get so involved at home I forget how wonderful it is to be with you. Why did I wait so long to come to London?'

'Money, you said, and you wouldn't let me buy your ticket.'

'No, I could slip into the habit of lettingyou buy me things, and that would be bad all around. But if Garth would accept more invitations to European conferences, I'd be here all the time, tagging along at half-fare. In fact, I just might move in. I did tell you, didn't I, that you've brought my fantasy house to life?'

'Excuse me,' Sabrina said to Michel Bernard as Brian handed her a list of messages. She skimmed it. 'Yes to Olivia Chasson; no to Peter and Rose Raddison; yes to the duchess, but tell her I can't begin the job until next month, possibly not until August; no to Nicholas and Amelia Blackford, but say I'd love to come for a weekend next month when things calm down. And Antonio says eight instead of eight-thirty? All right. After you take care of these, why don't you go home? I'll lock up.' She turned back to Michel. 'Where were we?' 'Talking about my one newspaper stoiy. You make me feel like a sloth. Do you always have a dozen projects going at once?' 'Lately. Incredible, isn't it?'

•You're incredible. You know, we've been researching this stoiy all over Europe, and we hear about you and Ambassadors wherever we go.'

Sabrina took a deep breath. Dear Michel to tell her that. A good friend, going back to college when he and Jolie Fantome, already living together, made her part of their small family whenever she was lonely. Now they wrote together and drifted in and out of Sabrina's life as they roamed the world for stories. She had not heard from them in months until Michel called to ask for background information on their investigation into the recent international wave of art forgeries involving small galleries.

Jolie and Michel were Sabrina's only friends who had to work for a living, as she did, and she relaxed with them, letting her enthusiasm show as she could not with wealthy customers and friends who expected her to be as casual about money as they were. 'You've really heard about Ambassadors in other countries? I wondered; I had calls last week from Paris and Brussels. Oh, Michel, what do you do when all your dreams start to come true at once?'

'Revel in it. You've earned it. You did it all yourself.'

'But sometimes I'm afraid it's happening too fast. Do you know there's an old Chinese superstition that if you look directly at something beautiful it will disappear? You can sneak a sideways glance but you mustn't stare, because beautiful things are fragile and fleeting and a hard look could destroy them. I feel that way about my life. If I talk about it, or look too closely, everything might collapse.'

Michel shrugged. Superstition had no place in modem journalism. 'You've made yourself one of the most successful, talked-of women in London. That isn't likely to collapse. Who's Antonio?'

'What?'

•Antonio. Eight o'clock instead of eight-thirty. Or am I piying?'

'Oh. A friend.'

'Ah. I am prying. Well, leaving aside romance, you have success, fame and, no doubt, a handsome income. What more could you want?'

'Work. And I've got that, too. My own work that I love, and that I'm good at. That's the best thing.'

'The best thing/ said Jolie, coming into the ofBce, *is independence. Especially after being led around by that little dictator you married. *

'The best thing is money/ said Michel. Try buying groceries with independence.'

'Oh, God, here we go a—'

'Don't let me stop you,' Sabrina said, getting up as the doorbell chimed. 'Just don't throw things until my customer leaves.'

In the soft lights of the showroom, Rory Carr was admiring a tapered French pedestal clock, its round face surrounded by porcelain angels. 'Very fine, my lady,' he said, bowing low over her hand. 'From the Comtesse du Verne's estate, perhaps?'

Sabrina smiled. 'You always impress me, Mr Carr. I did not see you at the auction.'

'I have known the family for years, my lady. In fact I saw them last week in Paris, and the young Count sends you his regards. But today I am here on business, to show you something very special. If I may?* As Sabrina nodded, he lifted a leather case to the table and opened it. Lifting out a large parcel, he unwrapped it with slow, sweeping gestures. Sabrina admired his sense of drama. Impeccably dressed, with silver hair and soft pouches beneath his eyes, he was a showman, but he knew art, and in the past year he had sold her six superb eighteenth-century porcelains. Unlike some works that lingered in her shop, they had sold almost immediately.

Reverently Carr stood a chinoiserie group on the table: a pagoda-like summerhouse with a curved staircase and four young boys wearing straw hats and carrying butterfly nets and baskets of berries. The boys were dressed in white and yellow; the pagoda, with latticework and beading on the roof, was in brilliant primary colors. 'Luck,' Sabrina murmured. Long ago, in a Berlin museum, Laura had shown her and Stephanie groups made by LUck and other artists for the Frankenthal porcelain factory in the 1750s. Sabrina lifted the

group to see the Frankenthal mark, a crown above a Gothic F, baked into the underside.

'The owners?' she asked. Carr handed her a rolled-up document and she skimmed it. 'Only three?'

'So it seems, my lady. I would imagine it was sold only in dire circumstances. As you see, it is extremely fine.'

Sabrina studied the group. 'How much?*

'It's a bit dear. Four thousand pounds.'

Not a muscle moved in Sabrina's face. 'Three thousand.'

'Oh, my lady, I really ... Well, for you, thirty-five hundred.'

'I'll send you a check tomorrow,' she said.

He bowed. 'Admirable Lady Longworth. Would that everyone made decisions so decisively! I wish you good day.'

'Sabrina,' Michel said as the door closed behind Carr. 'Do you deal with him often?'

She turned. 'A few times in the past year. Do you know him?'

'Rory Carr, right?'

'You know him.'

'We've come across him.'

'Lately?'

He nodded. A chill touched Sabrina. She ran a finger over the cold porcelain: superb color, fine shading in the delicate construction of the little house. 'How have you come across him?'

'His company. Westbridge Imports. High-class stuff from all over the world, new and antique, sold through small galleries like Ambassadors. And, it turns out, some bad apples in the barrel.'

'Forgeries?'

'Seven so far that connect at some point to Westbridge -that's confidential, by the way.'

'But that doesn't mean Rory Carr—'

'Right. He could have been taken in. But he's no fool, and he's the liaison with galleries. We'll know more when we find the moneyman behind Westbridge and some other impon firms we're watching in America and Europe. All we

know now is that Westbridge is owned on paper by a guy named Ivan Lazlo.'

Sabrina repeated the name. 'I've heard it, but it was a long time ago. France? Italy? I can't remember.'

'Well, if you remember, let us know. And keep an eye on what Carr brings you. What about the stuff he's brought so far?'

She closed her eyes. 'They had certificates of ownership. The ceramic marks were genuine. I always - as you put it -"keep an eye" on what I carry. I wouldn't survive a week if my customers doubted my judgment.'

'Hey, I didn't mean—'

'My lady.' Brian stood in the ofBce doorway. 'Senor Molena is on the telephone.'

'The j&iend.' Michel kissed Sabrina's cheek. 'We'll be off.'

Antonio Molena made dozens of telephone calls a day-in Brazil, running his businesses, or in London, talking to his managers in Brazil and arranging meetings in Europe with financiers, fiiends and mistresses. A self-made millionaire with the ruthlessness of his Portuguese father and the mysticism of his Indian mother, he had waited fifty-one years to find the right woman to grace his empire. When he met Sabrina at a New Year's party at Olivia Chasson's country home, he made up his mind in ten minutes as 1978 gave way to 1979 - the year, he decided, in which he would marry and have his first son.

He banished his mistresses with appropriate gifts and swooped upon Sabrina like the great bird of prey he resembled, pursuing her for five months with the single-mindedness that had made him master of vast coffee plantations in Bahia province and cattle ranches in the interior province of Serro de Amambai. By now he had expected to be married, with Sabrina running their home in Rio de Janeiro and awaiting the birth of their son. Instead, he was forced to tany in London and fit himself to her schedule until he could compel her to accept him.

Because she could not make up her mind.

Her friends said he was everything a woman could want: enormously wealthy and powerful, a modem prince who flew his own plane, but scattered through his conversation

ancient folktales from the tribe of his mother and grandmother. 'It is better that you do not love me yet,' he told Sabrina. The Guarani gods say love is the last thing, not the first. It grows slowly through sharing and creating. When you live together and build a family, love will come.'

Society was waiting for Sabrina to marry again. At every party she was paired with someone new in the tireless round robin of matchmaking. Antonio stood above them all with his determined courtship, his certainty about their future, his powerful and mercurial personality - mystic and practical, businessman and playboy. He and Sabrina were seen at many of the playgrounds Denton had proudly shown her, but he worked as hard as he played. Between film festivals and auto races, balls, derbies, hunts and country weekends, he would fly to Brazil to work twenty-hour days, or shut himself in his London apartment to make marathon telephone calls and dictate long documents for his staff of secretaries in Rio.

And each day he called, to remind Sabrina he was waiting.

But she was wary. 'After all,' she told Alexandra, 'I thought marrying Denton was a good idea.'

Alexandra snorted. 'You were young and innocent. Dependent. Now you're on your own, with a business, a house and me to advise you.'

'All right, advise me. Why should I marry Antonio?'

'Because, like all of us, you're happiest with a man around.'

'Any man?'

'Honey, Sabrina Longworth doesn't have to settle for any man. Your Antonio is a very rare bird.'

He was working on a plan to build villages, hospitals and schools for the peasants in the Brazilian provinces he dominated. His purpose was to keep them from organizing against himself and the other landowners, but publicly he said only that he wished to give dignity and coniforts to the poor. It was important work that Sabrina would share. In addition to supervising the raising of their children and acting as his hostess, she would help him improve the lives of thousands of people.

'King Antonio the First/ Sabrina joked to Alexandra, but not to Antonio. He was so serious, and how did she know those thousands of peasants wouldn't be better off with him arranging their lives?

'It's just that I don't want him to arrange mine,' she said to Alexandra.

The first time she went to his bed, in his apartment in London, he surprised her with his gentle hands, caressing slowly, steadily, in a sensual rhythm as insistent as his courtship, until she was so open and longing she pulled him inside her. And when he let her lead him with her body, instead of forcing her to follow as Denton had done, he finally satisfied the arousal Denton had numbed. For the first time Sabrina understood what sexual gratitude meant.

'But if I many again.' she told Alexandra, 'it won't be for gratitude. It will be for love.*

She knew what love was: it was sharing. She had learned that with Stephanie. In her years of living alone, she had looked for someone who desired a companion, not a beautiful ornament; who would soothe her fears, not simply applaud her skills; who wanted caring, not the status of her poise and position in society; who would cherish her, not demand that she mold her life to his. She knew what sharing was, and it didn't seem to fit Antonio.