A Calculated Risk by Katherine Neville (best time to read books .txt) 📗

Now, as my plane circled in the famous Kennedy holding pattern, I wondered just how much this next rendezvous with Tor was going to cost me.

THE CONTRACT

If a man gives to another silver, gold, or anything else to safeguard, whatsoever he gives he shall show to witnesses, and he shall arrange the contracts before he makes the deposits.

—The Code of Hammurabi

Most Americans loathe New York City at first encounter. The filth and squalor, the graffiti and noise, the hysteria and violence, the decadence and outrageous expense—these impressions smite the sensibilities of visitors from the more orderly and well-tended cities of the west. But it’s all clever camouflage—designed to keep out the fainthearted—as any New Yorker knows. If you must live in a city, New York is the only city in the world.

“You from New York, lady?” my taxi driver asked through the speaker box in the bullet-proof partition that separated us.

“I’ve been gone a long time,” I told him.

“You ain’t missed nuttin’—it’s old, it’s new, it’s all the same. The more they change, the less they change; same old dump, but I call it home, ya know?”

I knew … plus ça change. That very quality of permanent change—that constant, violent, atom-splitting atmosphere of upheaval—produced an energy I really thrived on. Long before we reached the hotel, my biorhythms were in synch with the heart-pumping beat of the Big Apple.

I checked into the Sherry, saw my luggage to the suite, and went down to the restaurant for a late-night snack and cocktail. Sipping sherry at the Sherry Netherland was my own private tradition—it reminded me of Christmas in New York.

Sitting there alone, gazing through the frosty windows overlooking Fifth Avenue, I could see people laden with stacks of holiday packages, promenading through the snow. As I sat, warm and cozy, sipping the light, nut-flavored wine, I wondered again about Tor.

New York might be timeless, but people change. Since I’d last seen Tor, he’d become rich, famous, and exponentially more reclusive—while I had become a bankette. I wondered how he had changed, whether he’d gained a midriff bulge or lost his hair. And what would I seem like to him after all those years—years when I’d thought of Tor, oddly, more often as his calls slowly trickled off …

I looked at my reflection in the window—tall and skinny, all eyes and mouth and cheekbones. I still looked, as he’d said, like a fourteen-year-old boy playing hooky to go fishing.

I finished my snack and drink and then, about ten o’clock, went out to the front desk and picked up my room key. The clerk handed me a note with the key:

Your favorite restaurant. Noon.

There was no name, but I recognized the style. I folded the note, slipped it into my pocket, and went upstairs to bed.

My favorite restaurant in New York is Café des Artistes—across the park from the Sherry.

Like a fool, I decided to walk through the bitterly cold snow; I regretted the decision long before I’d reached the middle of Central Park South. Bracing myself against the cruel wind, I shoved my fists in my pockets and occupied myself for the rest of the miserable hike by recalling the glittering sunlight on San Francisco Bay, my winter orchids, those little white sailboats gliding across blue-green waters—and I soon found myself getting cold feet about everything to do with the luncheon I was about to attend.

Somewhere deep in my subconscious, I knew the problem wasn’t only concern over jeopardizing my already dead-end career, breaking the rules or the law by perpetrating what was essentially an honorable crime, or dragging my colleagues along with me into a scheme that might blow up in our faces. What made me nervous was being here in New York again—with Tor—though I couldn’t imagine why.

But one step inside the door of Café des Artistes brought me back to reality—what New York was all about. The café was built in the twenties, and it still resembled something from Paris during the expatriation of the literati. It was originally a watering hole for painters, whose upstairs ateliers were later converted into expensive private apartments. The restaurant walls were plastered with murals of jungles filled with parrots, paintings of Spanish conquistadors stepping from galleons, monkeys, wild flora, and nude coquettes with golden limbs, unexpectedly peeping from the dense foliage—all done in a mishmash style combining Watteau, Gibson Girl, and Douanier Rousseau—real Big Apple kitsch.

Today, a brass cart stood at center, groaning with fruits, floral bouquets, patisserie, and baskets of freshly baked breads. The rabbit pâté and decorated salmon mousse were also on display.

A few steps up to the left, where the bar angled off like a hallway, I found Tor in a private booth along the walls. If he hadn’t flagged me down first, I mightn’t have recognized him, he’d changed so much. His coppery hair now tumbled in ringlets to his collar, his skin seemed paler, his eyes more intense. Instead of the elegant three-piece suits that had been his trademark, he wore a casual fringed leather shirt with beadwork, and thin chamois trousers that revealed the taut muscles of his legs. He looked virile and healthy and ten years younger—but his wry smile remained the same.

“Did you walk here from San Francisco?” he asked sarcastically as he rose to greet me. “You’re thirty minutes late, and your nose looks like a maraschino cherry.”

“Gee, that’s a nice thing to say after ten years,” I replied, sliding into the booth opposite him. “I was just about to remark that you looked wonderful in that outrageous getup.”

I reached out and flipped the beaded fringes, and he smiled his dazzling smile—the one that set off warning signals in my brain.

“Thank you,” he said with no small amount of charm. “You’re not looking bad yourself—at least, if you’d stop dripping all over the tablecloth. Here, take my handkerchief, and try to make appropriate use of it.”

I took it, and blew my nose.

“The