Highlander - Donna Lettow [8]
MacLeod nodded his understanding. “I should go.” He stood and started for the great revolving door that was the lobby’s entrance.
“Duncan, wait,” she called out to him as he walked away. He turned. “Will I see you again?”
“Dinner tomorrow?” Despite their rocky start, he found himself looking forward to spending some time one with this woman.
Maral beamed, flattered he would consider seeing her again after such a debacle. “I’d like that very much.”
“Great. What about your friend?” He gestured toward Assad.
“I think I can arrange to give Assad the night off.” She laughed as she walked MacLeod to the door. “After your little display today, I don’t think I’ll be in much danger with the mighty Duncan MacLeod protecting me.”
“But who will protect you from Duncan MacLeod?” he teased, with a raised eyebrow and a wicked grin.
Maral gifted him with an alluring smile as he headed out the door. “Who says I want to be protected?”
Chapter Two
Paris: The Present
The Musée National des Antiquités had risen up from the remains of a thousand-year-old abbey gutted and looted by the same misguided crowds who had stormed the Bastille. The corridor, whose granite paving stones eerily amplified the sound of MacLeod’s footsteps, was once the cloister-walk surrounding a garden where generations of monks had tilled the earth. Now the walk was enclosed in glass and the garden planted not with medicinal herbs but with sculpture that would have scandalized the poor monks—Grecian youths at play, a nymph and a shepherd boy celebrating the beauty of the human form, some of those lusty busty women Rubens and his crowd had been so partial to nearly two thousand years later. Centuries of human history frozen in time under the chisel of human genius.
MacLeod always felt that museums after hours took on the air of a crypt, a pregnant silence as if waiting for the dead to arise. As his steps rang down the hall, MacLeod half expected the shepherd boy to come to life, or the monks to return to claim what once was theirs. Irrational, he knew; but, then, not everything in life was rational. He approached the entrance at the end of the corridor, two massive wooden doors hand-carved and blackened with age that once separated the garden from the monks’ quarters. Wary as he was in the eerie atmosphere of the deserted museum, he was not prepared for the ancient doors to spring open on their own as he reached out to touch them.
MacLeod stepped back quickly, waiting until the doors had opened fully. As he did, he sensed the presence of another Immortal. He stepped through with caution. Most likely Constantine, he thought, but it never paid to drop your guard until you were sure.
“Marcus?” he called out, looking around. There was no response.
The old monks’ quarters had been completely destroyed in the violence following the Revolution and in its place the Musée National des Antiquités had created an immense hall of marble in the Classical style, part of nineteenth-century architecture’s sad attempt to recreate the splendor of the ancient world. MacLeod had trouble envisioning a display of Monet’s works installed in this room, or the paintings of Georgia O’ Keeffe—although, come to think of it, there were a few of Henry Moore’s more amorphous sculptures he thought might feel at home here.
For Constantine’s new exhibition, however, the room was perfect. Two Corinthian columns secured a large banner bearing the name of the exhibit in precise Latin lettering: Hostes Romae—Hostiae Romae. Rome’s Enemies—Rome’s Victims.
Passing under the banner, MacLeod approached a freestanding stone archway built in the style of the Roman triumphal arches he remembered from his days in Italy with Hugh Fitzcairn. He smiled, remembering the morning after the duke’s wedding, waking up barely clothed on the top of one such arch near the ruins of the Forum, Fitz nowhere to be found and him with one hell of a headache, wondering how the devil he’d managed to get up