The Ruby Tear by Suzy McKee Charnas
“Oh, baloney,” she said. “It’s a nuisance, and I have to peel Marie off the ceiling every time one of these things happens, but at some point this jerk will get bored and move on to some other stupid mischief someplace else. I really appreciate your concern, but I’ll wait the trickster out it if I have to.”
He peered at her anxiously. “Coming through that car accident must have really toughened you up—made you brave, I mean. I know veteran troupers who’d bolt right out of a production rather than stick around for some nut to take pot-shots at them!”
Jess smiled, but she was reminded of the feeling she’d had all day that someone was following her; Marie’s mysterious man blowing on his cold hands, maybe. She thought she had spotted a man trailing her on her way to the laundromat this morning. It had been an extremely creepy feeling, and had not improved the state of her nerves, but she wasn’t going to screw up the rehearsal talking about him now.
She walked through the scene once more, losing her place in the script and missing cues. She apologized and began again. Walter helped, talking to her from the arched cellar doorway past the broken sofa that had supposedly fallen through a shell hole from the floor above, through the maze of trunks and boxes and discarded children’s toys to the crooked old wardrobe with its shattered mirror in which Eva should see her own pale, frightened face.
“We can’t give up!” Sinclair roared Marko’s lines. “We will wait out the worst they can do, and then we’ll turn the tables on our enemies and drive them underground, like rats!”
“To make rats out of human beings,” Jess replied, whirling to face him, “that is the work of our family? And you wonder why I go away somewhere, anywhere, to get away from all of you?”
“‘The mark of our family’, Eva,” Walter corrected.
“I’m sorry, damn it—‘Is that the mark of our family? And you ask why I go away—’ Hell!”
“You’re pushing it,” Anthony said kindly. “Look, everybody else is still on book here.” He gestured, indicating the other cast members with their scripts in their hands. “Try it more slowly; let’s do it by beats and go more slowly.”
But the stage manager called time; the Actors’ Equity limit for the day’s rehearsal had been reached. Jess stayed a little longer on her own, plugging away at her elusive lines, script in hand this time.
Of course she was distracted, wondering what Ivo Craggen would say about the ruined pendant and earrings. She had sent them off to a costume-jewelry expert recommended by the wardrobe mistress, but she hadn’t heard yet whether the damage could be undone. Meanwhile she was not especially looking forward to explaining it all to him.
But there could be no ducking the issue; he had probably already heard something from Lily Anderson. Her casual remarks to Marie dismissing the idea of insurance came back now to haunt her; what if Craggen held her responsible for the value of the pieces, modest though it might be? She was an actor, not an heiress, and money was always tight.
When she came out of the theater into the cloudy winter afternoon, there he was, studying the show posters that flanked the entrance. He took the steps two at a time and caught her hand, which he brought to his lips.
“Have you forgotten?” he said with mock severity. “The antique jewelry show! I invited you. You must come. Lily Anderson saw it at a special preview, and she says it is wonderful. I am sure you will enjoy it too.”
“I’ve got something to tell you first,” she said, steeling herself.
“Something troublesome, I can see it,” he said. “Come back into the lobby, then, out of the wind. Now, tell.”
She told.
His brows drew together in a frown that turned his face into a grim mask and made him suddenly appear much older.
“I see,” he growled, when she had finished.
Her heart sank. “Oh, God—don’t tell me they’re priceless heirlooms, please! Why did you ever risk them in a silly stage play?”
“The play is not silly,” he snapped, and then added more calmly, “and the foolishness was mine, not yours.”
“I can’t tell you how sorry I am,” she said, hugging her script case to her chest for support. “I should have put them in a safer place—no, I should never have accepted them at all, not even temporarily! I’ll pay you back for them if it takes forever.”
He shook his head. “You pay me back by coming with me to the jewelry show. That’s the only reparation I’ll accept, and now you can’t say no.”
Weak-kneed with relief but not inclined to a relationship of favors owed and owing, she tried to get out of it. “I don’t know—I did say yes, but it’s already been a long day for me—”
“The exhibition is close by,” he coaxed. “You look as if some fresh air and a little stirring of the blood would be good right now. Walk with me that far, and then if you still want to go home, I’ll fetch you a taxi and off you go. And it’s time you begin to call me by my given name. I am Ivo, please, not this overbearing-sounding Mr. Craggen.”
Before she had time to consider this proposition, he’d relieved her of the leather script case, tucked her hand in the crook of his arm, and was escorting her down the street.
How on earth could this charming man be the cause of Nick’s fears and weird warnings? Really, it was ridiculous!
No, it was sad. It was Nick’s craziness rearing its head again, just like after the accident. The woman on the horse had been the same, sinister kind of thing . . . it was some kind of paranoid delusion, she was sure. She was pierced by a sense of loss, the loss of Nick as he had been. She hoped her preoccupation didn’t show.
“We go on my turf now,” Craggen was saying. “Or is ‘turf’ only for gangs? I’ll be your native guide for a change, and if you’re tired listening, just say it. But you should even know a little about this before we go in, for proper appreciation.”
He gave a capsule history of how until the nineteenth century, gems and jewels had been the possessions of the aristocratic wealthy alone, often by royal law as well as economic reality. Surviving pieces from those times were now so valuable, due to their rarity and tending as they did to elaborate workmanship and showy encrustations of precious stones, as to be beyond the means of any but the richest of museums and collectors.
However, he said, decorative creations dating from the era of the Industrial Revolution, made with elements of machine manufacture as well craftsmanship, were handsome but also cheap enough for the middle class of the time. Made of more common materials, they were much more reasonably priced, and these days were still affordable for dealers and traders like himself.
“Then we’re not going to see anybody’s Crown Jewels?” Jess said. “Well, that’s hardly fair; you got me here under false pretenses.”
“Crown jewels, and indeed all the many jewels worn by the royalty of Europe in the old days,” Craggen replied, “were primarily assets to be collateral for the money lenders. A crowned monarch or even a local lord never knew when he would suddenly need to finance a campaign or a quick escape from stronger enemies. Gems are small, valuable, and easily hidden away or carried in secret, so highborn families kept their accumulated riches in that form. Many wealthy knights wore their precious stones into battle.”
“You’re kidding. You’re not? But why risk valuable property like that?”
“To be sure it wasn’t looted from the home castle while its master was away somewhere fighting wars for his liege lord,” he said in an odd, ironic tone. “We turn here. And to have wealth upon your person if you were captured in a fight and needed to pay a ransom to go home.
“Also many gemstones were considered to have magic healing and protective powers. The business of being an aristocratic warrior involved plenty of danger and wounds. And there was no penicillin.”
They entered the lobby of a block-long office building enclosing a spacious atrium that was filled with plants, like a gigantic greenhouse. Craggen laughed with delight, pausing in the entry.
“It’s like a ga
He drew her to a poster on one marble-clad wall near a busy bank of elevators.
“You see,” he said, “they have chosen this very fine necklace as the emblem of the show. The necklace in the exhibition isn’t the real one, but an imitation which the family women wore in place of the truly valuable piece. That they kept at home, safe under lock and key.”
Jess studied the blown-up photograph of an ornate golden chain with its pendants and pearls and intricately set emeralds—green glass, she supposed, standing in for the real thing.
“I didn’t think anybody did that until our own crime-ridden times.”
He chuckled, and his eyes narrowed to humorous gleams. “All times are crime-ridden, one way or another. It’s the human way.”
She looked sharply at him, chilled a little by this remark. “You’re very cynical, Mr. Craggen.”
“I am very experienced, Miss Croft, and my name, to you, is Ivo.”
He certainly played the suave, world-weary European with a becomingly light touch. A good thing, too; otherwise he might have seemed ridiculous. With his smooth cheeks and forehead, his eyes glittering with enthusiasm, he looked rather smug and no more than in his mid-twenties, a confident son of privilege brimming with irrepressible life.
Certainly not like Nick’s crazed avenger.
She turned back to the poster. “I don’t understand: why would copies like this one be worth exhibiting?”
“The first ones were made by a Frenchman named Tassie, who invented the best glass paste for imitating genuine gemstones. The workmanship and the results are so fine that Tassie’s replicas themselves—and even those of his students—are now museum pieces. This particular necklace, however, is a more modern imitation of a reproduction made for the Duc de Chancey, shortly before the French Revolution.”
“What happened to the Duke’s real jewels?” Jess asked.
Craggen cocked his head consideringly. “Smuggled out of France, broken up and sold to support his family in exile, I suppose; like with many others in bad times.”
They walked up the wide marble steps to the mezzanine level, where the exhibition was mounted. “I suppose it’s common,” she said in a subdued tone, “for old jewelry to be connected with stories of war and tragedy.”
For an instant he checked, staring at her with a sharpness that startled her.
“What do you mean?” he said.
“Well, you were just telling me—" she stopped. “Ivo, what did I say to upset you? I didn’t mean to.”
He softened into his usual demeanor. “No, no, I was thinking of something else. What you said is exactly the case. If these objects could speak—” He waved his hand, indicating the entire exhibition floor with its drift of spectators hovering at the locked glass cases, peering closely, murmuring to each other. “If jewels would speak, no one in this room would remain unmoved. Not even these grasping men with granite hearts.”
Jess glanced through the wide doorway at a shaggy-haired older man with a covetous stoop worn into his shoulders, deep in conversation with a younger companion in a pinstriped suit who looked freshly minted and polished and vastly pleased with himself.
The younger man saluted Craggen with a wave and spoke to the older one, who glanced over his shoulder and nodded a sour-faced greeting of his own. Craggen nodded pleasantly in reply, as if he had not just characterized them both as flinty misers.
“It’s an ugly stereotype, though, isn’t it?” Jess said. “The greedy hoarders of gems and jewels?”
He was quiet, and she turned to glance at his face again—a broad, almost brutally handsome face like a mask of polished ivory with lambent topaz eyes. At moments like this he looked agelessly remote, like one of those stone figures sculpted on the tomb of some youthful knight of medieval times.
He returned her look somberly and, taking her arm, strolled with her back and forth just outside the entrance to the exhibition, speaking quietly, close to her ear.
“Miss Croft, I’ve seen a beautiful woman—almost as beautiful as you, but faded with age, sorrow, and fear—I saw her enter a pawn shop and with trembling hands lay out her last treasured jewelry, on which she depends to furnish money for food and rent.
“And the man behind the counter picks up and turns and examines the handsome brooch and the matching earrings and bracelet she brought him, and informs her that they are cheap imitations, worth next to nothing.
“Perhaps he speaks gently, and suggests that she take her worthless hoard down the road to someone who deals in such trinkets, though he knows she’ll find no better answer there. But if he has been in the business for long, he may be abrupt with her because he’s angry at her for her gullibility, or he is sorry for her but he can’t afford pity if he’s to survive in his chosen business. So maybe he’s brusque on purpose.
“She leaves his shop with faltering steps and brimming eyes, her last security destroyed and all her fears set loose. He shuts the door hard after her, relieved to have her and her tragedy out of his place of business and out of his life.
“These smoother men you see here today, they’re only that pawnbroker’s jumped-up descendants, as hard as he is no matter how much better dressed. Every one of them has been approached at one time or another by a wealthy customer fallen on hard times, and has returned only half, if that, of the flat value of the materials in a piece. The enormously marked-up price at which he sold it to that client in the first place has suddenly melted away. They all deal in the difference between dreams of opulence, status, and love, and the cold costs of stones and settings.
“Gemstones are hard, and people who deal in them are harder.”
She saw the bitter set of his mouth and ventured to ask: “Are you speaking of yourself too?”
He shrugged. “A little. When you hear from others that Ivo Craggen has the hardest heart of all, remember that you heard it first from me. Shall we go in?”
Checking her script case and their coats at the cloakroom, they paid a small fee and walked inside past the two solid-looking and very obviously armed guards.
Jess was thoughtfully silent. Far from reflecting badly on him, his story of someone else’s misery belied his own estimation of himself. A truly hardhearted man would never notice the pain a dealer’s frankness caused to the poor woman whose hopes hung on worthless goods.
In fact what she felt was an increased closeness to him, as if in telling that little tale he had allowed her a rare glimpse of his own inner nature. His story and the way he’d told it had created a bridge of intimacy that she found unexpectedly compelling; more so than that strange, lingering kiss in the coffee shop, which she hadn’t ever found the nerve to bring up with him. In retrospect seemed like only a dream.
Relax, she told herself. It’s just a walk around a room full of old jewelry, not a cruise in the Mediterranean. And if he wants to kiss you again—so what? How many men are there in the world who know how to kiss a person anyway? This is one; and Nick is gone, by his own choice; so enjoy yourself, you have a right!
The fact that Craggen was younger than she was only made his attentions more flattering.
The table-high cases and the glass-fronted wall cabinets held only a few objects each, set off on beds of lush gray velvet. He pointed out a row of heavy men’s watches with their finely engraved gold lids protected by the plainer outer cases to resist wear; two long necklaces of Chinese cherry amber rubbed to a deep glow; buckles of cool gray gunmetal set with polished striped agate; gold-set cameo pendants and delicate cloisonné brooches.
Some pieces were for sale. The prices ranged from just over a hundred dollars up to no higher than a few thousand at most. Craggen smiled when she said she would have expected much higher valuations on such beautiful things.
“These are simple jewels, without great luster or history, at least so far as anyone knows. Here, this bracelet woven of human hair—yes, yes, the sable tresses of some beloved mother or sister who died—held
“It’s for some long-dead person’s sentiment that a buyer pays in this case, the sentiment that financed this excellent craft work commemorating a loss that left no other lasting mark. Like most of the pieces in this room, it’s only worth what some collector is willing to pay to own it, and the price varies with fashions in collecting.”
Fascinated, Jess barely heard the latter part of what he said. She stared at the woven bracelet of glossy black strands, repelled but unable to look away. “How can you tell that’s human hair? Couldn’t it be horsehair?”
“No, it’s human,” he repeated. “You understand, the hair itself is worth nothing, the gold content of the fittings is small, and though the enamelwork inside the clasp is exquisite, it’s not of, or by, someone we know anything about.
“The feelings, the care and craft of another era—qualities that are immeasurable—give a subjective value to the piece. Apart from that, it’s a trinket.”
“But it was much more than that to the original owner of the bracelet.”
“Exactly. I want to make clear that the pieces I sent to your dressing room are like these: not priceless treasures but minor items. Pretty enough, though, I hope, to please you. They say that people are made most happy by unexpected gifts and good luck.”
“I think that’s true,” Jess said. “And I am really sorry about what’s happened to your gifts.”
“Don’t think about it anymore. The fault was mine. We should have this very clear between us. Misunderstandings are destructive of friendships, don’t you agree?”
“I certainly do,” Jess said, thinking again of Nick, and of how differently she would be viewing this exhibit if her companion were him instead of Ivo Craggen.
Craggen said, “You’re sad. Are you thinking of a friendship that has been—injured this way?”
She turned her face aside, silent. All she needed was a stupid, emotional outburst in public over a man who no longer felt anything for her.