Cat In A Topaz Tango

Black car. Zurich license plate, pulled up to the curb, pulsing there with a muted Mercedes purr. A blond woman in a pink wool suit was pushing out of the open back door as if her skirt was too tight (it was), her boot heels too high (they were) . . . and the pale pink leather was shriveled up the heels as if they had been thrust repeatedly down into resisting dirt. (They had been.)

Revienne! Trap or lucky break? That was the price of amnesia, constant second-guessing.

She struggled upright, glancing around wildly, staggering away from the car.

He bounded forward (ouch!) to grab her elbow in a gentlemanly way.

“Need help, miss?”

Her stricken eyes met his without recognition, only panic.

He pulled her away from the car and behind him. Right. Like he and his game legs were any kind of wall. But this street was Tourist Central.

Two beefy men poured from the car, one from the front seat, the other from the opposite back door. He felt Revienne shrink against his back.

He lifted the cane.

“Hey!” An American GI on leave, probably from some hellhole, was making this his fight. “This guy is handicapped and this woman wants out. What’s going on, buddy?”

Now three American Army buddies gathered around, the word buddy needing no translation.

“Michael! Is it you?” Revienne breathed in his ear like an answered prayer.

So just right. So suspicious. But the cards were all falling his way. Play them.

She eyed the instant rescue party and spoke in English. “I don’t want to go with these men. They separated me from my husband. Call the police!”

The three GIs had brawny bodies and three months of boot camp behind them, marine-tough expressions and, if you looked very, very close, far too young eyes. He knew their breed well. They form a wall much better than he can.

“Until the police come, we’ll do the policing,” one announced.

By now a crowd had clotted around them, a cross of casual tourist class and well-heeled Swiss natives enjoying an expensive night out on the town.

American soldiers on leave weren’t necessarily a rooting-for entity in Europe these days, but attractive women fleeing obvious muscle had propelled many a movie plot and was always box office magic.

One thug reached for a firearm against the eager young soldiers.

Max used the cane like a sword to ram him in the stomach just before the trio swarmed him. Whirling, he used its length to trip the other man as Max spun Revienne hard into the custody of his free arm. Backstepping with long strides abetted by using the cane for leverage, he saved Revienne from tripping on the cobblestones and clasped her close to his hip while he watched the incident’s last act.

The firearm never appeared because its owner was clasping his cane-punched gut as the two middle-aged thugs retreated before three young jaws jutting outward, fists leading, and witnesses well able to testify. They vanished back into the car as quickly as they’d appeared and it glided away into the teeming traffic.

Revienne had arranged herself artfully against Max’s side but stopped leaning on him and pulled herself upright, for which he was grateful. He wasn’t quite ready for dance partners, not even in a sexy pasodoble.

“Thanks, mates,” he told the three American soldiers.

“Aussie?” they asked.

“Irish,” he answered.

“Same diff.”

What did they know, at this age? Maybe more than he did.

The men from the Mercedes had vanished like all bad guys do when foiled. Max didn’t believe in happy endings but Revienne was clinging to him, smelling like freesias, keeping him upright in more ways than one, and he didn’t want to argue right now with fate or connivance. He could learn from both of them.

“Thanks, fellas,” he said with a grin.

They grinned back and swaggered away. He led the prize, Revienne, back to the Hotel California, where you can never leave. Or never want to. Revien.

It means, in French, “I return.”

Revienne.

It means, in English, “I’m an idiot, but I wonder, and I burn to know more.”

Chef du Jour

Instead of urging her fiancé to find his inner Zorro for Tuesday’s pasodoble, Zoe Chloe should have been worried about her upcoming patter as emcee tonight, when the quickstep ruled.

Instead she was watching the huge flat-screen TV in the greenroom. It was nerve-wracking for the kids of the cast to have to sit here nightly watching the adults flash their footwork while they had all evening to get nervous before their own big moments. So Zoe Chloe had come in to keep them company.

Each dance lasted less than two minutes, but the hour show was expertly managed to reap the most major commercials and milk Crawford Buchanan’s oily chitchat over the mike and with the judges.

Meanwhile, the young performers’ nerves felt no mercy.

Sou-Sou’s mother had her off to the side under her literally protective wing: a filmy bat-wing tunic. The girl’s foot injury seemed to have subdued her adult-encouraged air of superiority. She looked smaller, more human now. Humbled.