The Jewels of Tessa Kent (57 page)

“Almost eighty. Tessa, did you get a second opinion? You’re much too young, there’s something wrong … it’s simply not possible …”

“I’d get a second opinion, if it would make you feel better, but I’ve had ultrasound and computerized tomography and a biopsy and a consultation with a top oncologist and there’s no doubt. It’s inoperable and I refuse to have treatment that would eat up whatever good time is left. It’s very early, Sam, I have at least a year and maybe more, maybe even two … yes, just hold me, keep holding me, don’t ever let me go.”

“I won’t, my beautiful girl, I won’t.”

F
iona Bridges, who had been in New York for two days of the last week in March, leading up to tonight’s auction, perched on the seat Tessa had reserved for her, one of the best in the house, in the middle of the main auction room where she could see all the action. As she waited, Fiona clutched her bidder’s paddle, on which she was relieved to note that the numbers were a good eight inches high. She was free to tug her ears, pull her nose, and make any facial or body movement she pleased. Only the paddle, raised above her head, would be considered a bid.

Roddy Fensterwald, sitting in another reserved seat next to Fiona, had repeatedly reassured her of this very fact, but until she had actually received her paddle from one of the dozen young women sitting behind the long tables in the entrance, where hundreds of carefully selected people brandished their invitations and lined up to identify themselves and register as bidders, she hadn’t been quiet in her mind about it. Unlike Roddy, who collected antiques and frequented auctions, this was her first such event.

At the Oscars, Fiona was so accustomed by now to
the status of the placement of her seat, just a few rows behind the nominated stars and far forward of the nominated technical people, that she took it for granted. Her last five independent productions had all been solid box-office hits, and for a woman in Hollywood that was powerful medicine. But the mob on Oscar night, black-tie though it was, seemed pitifully small-town and inbred, she observed, compared to this luxurious and fevered assembly of the chirping, squealing, waving, kissing, and preening international ultra-rich who were now crowding excitedly into the high, wood-paneled auction rooms. Fiona craned her neck in every direction, grateful to Tessa for inviting them and producing these seats.

“I feel like an utter hick,” she whispered to Roddy.

“Me too,” he responded. “I don’t think there’s ever been anything like this … of course I wasn’t at the Duchess of Windsor’s sale, but that was held in Geneva, out-of-town is out-of-town, darling, no matter what. This auction’s electrified New York. That’s all people were talking about wherever I went today, even the taxi drivers.”

“I didn’t dare tell anybody I had a reserved seat, I knew they would have torn me apart in sheer envy.”

“Especially since you’re not in the market for any of the jewels.”

“And you
are
, Roddy?”

“At these prices? But I couldn’t resist getting a paddle anymore than you could. It looks as if I’m here to pick up a little something for you, love. How many of these women do you think are going to be bidding for themselves? Almost none, I bet. It’ll be the men who’ll actually bid, egged on by the women, and it’s the men who’ll pay.”

“Have you realized that it’s eleven whole years since that night when Tessa, looking like Titania in
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
presented the Best Picture award?”

“Eleven years! Jesus, Fiona, you’re right. It was
eighty-two. Missing won, didn’t it, or was it
E.T.
? I never can remember.”

“
Gandhi
, and how you can forget is beyond me.”

“My inner feminist says it should have been
Tootsie
. Were movies better then or were we younger?”

“Both,” Fiona responded fervently, “both.”

“I still don’t understand at all why Tessa’s having this auction,” Roddy mused. “It isn’t as if she couldn’t afford to keep her jewels in their vaults, quietly letting them appreciate in value. No matter how dowdy and academic her life’s going to be with Sam, she’s still going to have years and years of major movie star appearances at which to wear them.”

“I think the real reason is no more mysterious than what she wrote in the Owner’s Note’ in the beginning of the catalog, where she said that she felt the resources tied up in the jewels would be better spent now in creating a foundation for cancer research. As simple as that.”

“Is our Tessa bucking for sainthood? That’s never been her style,” Roddy said thoughtfully. “Her jewels are so much a part of her that selling them is as if she’s saying good-bye to her past. And that doesn’t make sense. It makes me feel sad—and old.… I suppose I simply don’t like to think of them belonging to other women. ”

“Maybe this is some sort of sign that the eighties are really over.”

“What a terrible thought! Fiona, never, ever say that again! Don’t even think it!” Roddy said, aghast.

“Sorry, darling. The eighties will last till the year three thousand, never fear.”

“You’re sure?”

“Positive,” Fiona said wryly. She’d just had alterations made on all the shoulder pads in her large and expensive wardrobe of power suits, yet not one of the jackets looked quite right anymore. There was no way out, she’d have to spring for totally new Armani, the whole nine yards, or forget about the industry lunch.
There was no such thing as investment dressing, and the people who edited fashion magazines were touts. Whatever was changing, and
something
damn well was, she didn’t have the handle on it yet. Nevertheless, with her job, she needed to stay well ahead of the curve.

“Where’s the private box Tessa’s sitting in?” Roddy asked.

“Up there, behind you,” Fiona said, turning and pointing to the upper level of the huge room. “See those windows that are almost hidden by the paneling? There’s a viewing room up there from which the owners or heirs can witness the auction without being stared at.”

“What if …”

“What if what?”

“Well, suppose Tessa suddenly changed her mind about a certain piece, couldn’t she just bid on it, like everybody else? Maybe through a special telephone?”

“It seems that’s illegal, once it’s been consigned.”

“How do you know so much, when this is your first auction?” Roddy asked suspiciously.

“Tessa told me when we had lunch yesterday.”

“And how come I wasn’t invited?”

“Girl talk, Tootsie.”

Andy McCloud, who had returned home early to be present at the auction of the jewels of Tessa Kent, stood at his privileged place under the raised podium at which his uncle was about to begin the auction, and marveled at the scene. Every seat they had been able to cram into both auction rooms was filled with bidders from all over the world, many of them people who had never come to S & S before, reserving their custom for Sotheby’s or Christie’s.

Throughout the Western Hemisphere, in Beverly Hills, Chicago, Boston, Dallas, Miami, San Francisco, and Palm Beach, as well as in Toronto, Montreal, Mexico City, Sao Paulo, Rio, and Buenos Aires, S & S
offices had rented hotel ballrooms that had a direct audio feed to Hamilton Scott’s podium, so that the people sitting in those cities could hear the auction as it took place. In each of those ballrooms, as here at S & S, the individual jewel being auctioned was shown, in a vastly enlarged photograph, on a giant screen that hung several feet above the auctioneer’s head, while an electronic board, just under the photograph of each jewel, would display the current bid in all major currencies.

There was a bank of twenty-five telephones, both here and in the other rooms, each one of which had its own line and its specially trained operator, who would take phone bids from people who either found it inconvenient to travel to the auction or, in many cases, choose to remain at home, in order to maintain their privacy.

Right now, Andy thought, his excitement mounting, there were people everywhere, in every time zone, in both hemispheres, up all night, sitting by their phones, eyes trained on their catalogs, waiting for the call from their particular operator that would notify them when the lots on which they had requested telephone bids were about to come up. The operator would repeat the latest price as quickly as the auctioneer said it, allowing this global network of invisible bidders to participate fully in each sale. The hammer would not fall on a single jewel as long as somewhere in the world there was someone still willing to raise the bid, one anonymous phone bidder prepared to duel with another anonymous phone bidder until one of them carried the day.

And no one in the world, Andy told himself, would know who had won, except for the three people who would go over the auction in detail tomorrow: Uncle Hamilton, Aunt Liz, and finally, after all these years, himself. Even then, many of the most important purchases would be made by someone bidding for someone else, whose identity even they would never know. Jewels were, as they had always been, the most reliable form of international currency, a traditional hedge for the very
rich against everything but total destruction of the earth and its population.

What a fabulous business! As much as he was captivated by his porcelains and his ceramics, he had to admit that nothing except a great painting auction could equal the fascination and violent excitement of a great jewel auction. He could positively feel the ebb and flow of the financial structure of the world, as if it were an underground river that tonight had chosen to flow just below the floorboards of S & S.

He had no official job here, unlike anyone else who worked for S & S. “Just observe closely,” Aunt Liz had said, “and remember everything.” Did she mean to include the sight of Maggie Horvath Webster, Andy wondered, Maggie who looked—and it seemed impossible—even more sexy, even more irresistible pregnant than she had as a virgin? It was, Andy found to his surprise, rather more bitter than sweet to realize that he was the only person in the room who was entitled to make that precise judgment. After all, his wife, Lady Clarissa, had her own much-appreciated charms, all of them delicately blond, delicately boned, delicately bosomed, delicately smiling, delicately—just plain delicate, damn it. How could Maggie, who was all boldness and blossom, all belly laughs and noticeable belly, seem somehow, bewitchingly … more … feminine? Absurd.

He watched her closely as she was busy greeting and seating the dozens of journalists of every description who were important enough to be invited tonight, so that tomorrow the auction would live a vast second life in the press. Cameras weren’t allowed inside the auction rooms; no one wanted to risk being photographed in the act of buying millions of dollars worth of jewels, but certain journalists were welcome, and those rare bidders who didn’t object to publicity could discreetly arrange for their names to be released through Maggie or one of her corps of press officers, all of whom had adopted Maggie’s maternity uniform of a long, widely flaring black turtleneck tunic over very slim black pants and
ballet slippers. Or
were
they all pregnant, Andy asked himself. Perhaps she’d started a new fad?

God knows, it would be understandable after the job she’d done on this auction. She and Tessa Kent. Odd, decidedly odd that Maggie had never seen fit to mention that she was Tessa Kent’s sister, back when they were together. Could it be that she hadn’t trusted him? Hardly likely, he reflected, all things considered. There must have been another reason. After all, a woman tells her first lover everything—at least she should. Clarissa had, revealing all of her delicate, innocent, girlish little secrets, like a scattering of tiny, unopened buds.

However, be that as it may, he had to admit that there had never been such a formidable team in the history of preauction publicity as Tessa and Maggie, airlifted in the past months from one center of wealth to another. How, he wondered, did that fellow, Webster, feel about having his wife jaunting about, from Tokyo to Lugano, in her present condition? And who was the guy, anyway? A devastating biker chap, according to Aunt Liz, who’d been at the wedding. Rode a Ducati, apparently. Must be some sort of playboy. Well, whoever he was, he hadn’t waited long to get his wife pregnant, had he? Not even until the nuptials. Face it, old chap, Andy told himself, as he forced himself to turn his yearning eyes away from Maggie, she’d been a pushover.

Polly Guildenstern, dressed in her one concession to the 1990s, a dark green, high-necked velvet dress that was starkly modern in cut, sat breathlessly attentive, waiting for the auction to start, one row in front of Fiona and Roddy.

She was in a fluster, Polly realized. She hated the East Side of Manhattan, garish, loud, and horribly nouveau. She chose to spend her time alone in her high, peaceful studio, cooking and working on the few commissions for miniatures that came her way, just enough to provide
a frugal but decent living. In her free time, hand in hand with Jane, she enjoyed occasionally dipping into the predictable confines of their own, discerningly chosen, bars and discos. But this place! She hardly knew what to make of this overwhelming mass of exuberantly perfumed, gossiping, kiss-blowing, overdressed femaleness, punctuated by the dark blue and dark gray suits of their escorts.