Highlander - Donna Lettow [35]
According to Monday morning’s paper, which MacLeod read over a leisurely pot of coffee and a fresh baguette smothered in grapefruit marmalade on the deck of his barge, the previous day’s negotiating session had been relatively undramatic. No fistfights had broken out over minor points of protocol. No one had walked out in a fit of pique over some slight, imagined or otherwise. No one on either side had threatened to pick up their toys and go home. But, once again, for the seventh day of the Israeli/palestinian talks, only an impasse had been reached. No agreement. No understanding. No movement toward a peaceful resolution of the fate of East Jerusalem, which the Palestinians envisioned someday as the capital of their new autonomous nation, and which the Israelis viewed as an inviolate part of the Holy City.
MacLeod spent most of the day on the barge, washing her glass, touching up her paint, polishing her chrome, and getting her ready to embrace the spring after a long, hard winter. Puttering, really, though he probably wouldn’t admit that to himself. It was the first day of Passover for the Israeli delegation, there would be no negotiations that day, and he worked with half an ear toward the phone—but Maral’s call never came.
Later that night, as he settled on the couch in front of a cheerful fire with a snifter of brandy and a copy of Joyce’s Ulysses, he tried to see her in the back of his mind. Alone in the sumptuous appointments of the Lutétia, picking over a first-rate dinner delivered on a room-service tray. A beautiful bird in a gilded cage.
It had been a long time since he’d been this infatuated with a woman, a long time since his waking thoughts were preoccupied with the image, the touch, the smell of a woman. Probably not since that day he’d leapt onto Tessa’s tour boat not far from the spot where his barge was now moored on the Seine. But with Tessa, even from their first meeting, he knew it was more than simple infatuation, more than pure physical attraction that brought them together like two halves of a broken locket. Beautiful and intelligent as she was, Maral wasn’t Tessa, could never be Tessa. There would probably never be another Tessa for him, even if he lived a thousand years.
Still, there was something to be said for physical attraction. If she didn’t call tomorrow, he would find a way to contact her.
Tuesday morning dawned with the threat of showers, but by midmorning, the clouds had fled and the sun shone bright off the waters of the Seine. A promising knock on the barge door after lunch had proven only to be the international courier service, bearing the box containing Karros’s sword from the States. Wearing a pair of jeans with a T-shirt under his brown leather jacket, MacLeod started off for the museum with the sword case under one arm.
As MacLeod passed through the massive wooden doors into the marble hall where the Hostes Romae exhibit was installed, he realized the gallery was awash in rugrats. Three young boys played an impromptu game of tag in and out of the columns of the Arch of Titus, their voices shrieking above the martial music their antics in the Arch kept triggering, over and over again.
There were children everywhere. He moved into the exhibit rooms and found them punching all the buttons, climbing on the equipment. He stopped for a moment as he sensed Constantine at the far end of the marble hall. Two little girls careened into MacLeod at great speed, jolting him from his reverie, both armed to the teeth with Ned swords and cardboard bucklers, whaling away at each other—and MacLeod—with great abandon, like extras in a gladiator film. He man aged to disentangle himself and move away quickly, leaving them to their own private Circus Maximus.
“Marcus!” he called out over the din of young voices and chattering displays as he neared the end of the exhibit, and Constantine poked his head out of a side cubicle.
“In here, MacLeod.”
MacLeod followed him into a room with a large glass case on a dais, its top removed while Constantine fiddled with the contents. “What in