Chapter 3
NAOMI
By eleven the Lido has stopped pretending to be a place where people swim.
The pool is lit from underneath now, a sheet of blue glass nobody touches, and the loungers are gone the way furniture disappears in good clubs, without anyone visibly carrying it.
Candles in storm sleeves down every rail.
The DJ they bring in is famous, per Bianca, and the bass is no longer music so much as tide, you feel each wave arrive through the tile a half second before you hear it.
The terrace smells like the afternoon’s sunscreen getting overwritten, perfume, tobacco, prosecco that’s finally, actually cold.
The kitchen must have caught up. Someone down there deserves a raise.
I’m in the green thing.
The green thing turns out to be silk, cut like a slip, priced like a verdict, and Bianca zipped me into it with the satisfaction of a woman loading a weapon she’s been cleaning all year. She was right, and she knows it. It fits like it was sewn on me for a bet.
“Terms,” I remind her at the rail. “One drink I actually drink. Home by two.”
“Two thirty.”
“Two.”
“You’ll thank me at two fifteen.” She’s half listening, tracking her boat man across the terrace like harbor radar.
He’s tall, tan in the way of people whose whole year is August, laughing at somebody’s joke with all thirty-two teeth.
“Look at him. He has no idea I’ve already decided.
It’s like watching a fish admire the boat. ”
“Does the fish get a vote?”
“The fish gets the best night of his summer, Naomi. Show respect.”
The laugh is still in my mouth when the room changes.
I feel it before I locate it, a draft in a sealed building, and I start checking doors.
Conversations don’t stop, nothing so dramatic, they dip, a half tone down the whole terrace, the sound a crowd makes when it’s deciding whether to be nervous.
The velvet-rope girls by the stair straighten like they’ve been graded.
Two waiters reroute mid-stride, no collision, no signal I can see.
Then I find the door, and the reason.
He comes in with no announcement at all, simply there, moving like the room was already his and he’s only walking the floor of it.
Tall, taller than this crowd’s version of tall, built with a weight the linen jacket makes no attempt to argue with, the shoulders filling the cloth so it hangs in one line to his hands, no strain, no tailored bragging.
Open collar, no chain, no rings. Dark hair pushed back off his face, going its own way at the temple.
A few days of beard, worn like it grew there on purpose. Under the club’s blue wash his skin holds its own color, olive gone darker with sun that wasn’t recreational. His hands come next, wide through the knuckle, quiet at his sides, hands that make the glass in mine look like doll furniture.
On the left wrist, a watch with a plain pale face on a leather band, older than everything else in this club including the cliff. The watch is what finishes it. Every other wrist on this terrace is shouting. His is keeping the correct time.
He isn’t handsome the way the terrace is, all brochure.
He has a face with decisions in it, deep-set eyes I can’t call a color from here, a nose that’s been introduced to something hard at least once, a mouth that gives nothing away for free, all of it assembled around a stillness that makes the rest of the room look like it’s auditioning.
My body votes before I’m consulted. Heat, low and specific, my heart going like I’ve climbed stairs I don’t remember.
I’m the one who watches rooms. That’s the job, that’s been the spine of my whole adult life, I stand at rails like this one and take places apart while they perform for other people.
Nobody watches the watcher. Except his eyes cross the terrace once, unhurried, taking attendance, and then they stop.
On me.
It isn’t the swimsuit-triangulation the afternoon was full of.
He looks at me the way I look at buildings, down to what’s actually holding the thing up.
Then he doesn’t smile, doesn’t lift a glass, doesn’t perform anything at all.
He puts whatever he’s concluded away behind those eyes and lets me watch him do it.
I turn back to the rail with my pulse conducting itself in my throat and take a drink I don’t taste. So. That’s what it feels like from the other side.
“Madonna,” Bianca says, materializing at my elbow. She’s abandoned the boat man mid-decision. “Finally.”
“Don’t.”
“Don’t what? I said nothing.” She takes my glass, sips it, hands it back. “I only observe. The most looked-at woman on this coast just walked into a wall with her face.”
“I have no idea who he is.”
“Nobody has an idea who he is. That’s how you know it’s the real thing.” She’s watching him without watching him, a skill I assumed I’d invented. “He came in with the gray one, there, cold eyes, off-the-shelf suit, that’s staff. They took the corner cabana. He’s facing the whole terrace.”
For most of an hour he doesn’t move, and I hate every separate time I check, which is often enough to embarrass my whole profession.
He watches the terrace, not me, some spot near the far tables I can’t make anything of, and the crowd keeps adjusting around his corner like furniture rearranging itself for a wall.
Dario finds us on his third orbit of the night. I’ve marked every pass, because Bianca told me to keep track and now I can’t stop.
“Ladies.” Tonight he’s in white, head to foot, a man dressed as his own yacht. “The booth’s still open. Last call on generosity.”
“We’re flattered,” Bianca says, in the voice she uses for hotel checkout desks.
“You’re stubborn.” His attention comes back to me with that flat patience from the pool, charm fitted over it like a sheet, and his hand arrives on the rail an inch from mine, staking territory. “One dance, then. The floor’s mine too, technically. Everything here after dark is.”
And then something new happens, which is nothing.
The performance I’d normally put on, the pleasant no, the cheerful unbreakable wall, I can’t find it.
The whole time Dario is talking I can feel the corner of the terrace where a man is sitting still, and Dario has gone two-dimensional, a promoter-shaped card blocking my view of the problem I want.
“No, thank you,” I say. Flat. Unrehearsed.
Dario’s smile does its recalibration, the same one I watched at the pool, and he opens his mouth to pour more charm on me.
Then he stops.
I watch it happen with interest. His eyes go past my shoulder, toward the corner, and something behind his face closes like a till.
He straightens his jacket with both hands, needlessly.
“Enjoy the night, ladies,” he says, to a point in the air between us, and he’s gone, sideways into the crowd, greeting somebody he suddenly urgently knows.
Bianca exhales through her teeth. “That was a look.”
“I didn’t see any look.”
“You weren’t meant to. It went over your head at man-altitude.” She drains my glass and sets it on a passing tray. Her eyes have gone bright, which historically precedes my worst decisions. “He’s coming.”
I have four seconds to decide who I am at this rail, and all four go to failing.
He doesn’t crowd. He arrives at a courteous distance and stops.
Up close the size of him resolves into detail, the beard kept shorter at the throat, faint sun creases at the corners of his eyes, and the eyes themselves turn out to be gray, the pale kind that make being looked at feel like being read aloud.
“Your friend abandoned a full glass to come and watch this,” he says. Low voice, no rush anywhere in it, an accent under the English like stone under moss. “I thought I’d give her something worth the trip.”
It isn’t shaped like anything I’ve fielded all day, and my mouth, traitor to the crown, wants to smile.
“She’s easily entertained. Set a low bar.”
“I don’t intend to.” He glances at the rail where Dario’s hand staked its claim, then back to me. “You said no to the man in white.”
“I say no to most things.”
“I watched. You enjoy it.”
“Saying no?”
“Meaning it.” Something moves through his face that isn’t quite a smile, more like the space where one would go if he ever authorized it. “Everyone here says yes all night and means nothing by it. You’re the only person on this terrace doing real business.”
“And what business is that?”
“Quality control,” he says, without missing a beat. The laugh gets out of me before I can stop it, sudden, real, and I watch it reach him. His eyes drop to my mouth for exactly one second, then come back up, and the terrace is suddenly a much smaller room.
“Naomi,” I say, because someone had to.
“Khristofer.”
No surname. I notice the absence like a missing rail on a balcony, and I don’t ask. Asking would mean admitting I’m memorizing him for later, and there isn’t going to be a later.
He lifts two fingers, barely, and a waiter who wouldn’t have stopped for anyone this afternoon changes course.
“She’ll have the drink she actually wants,” he tells him, “not the one that arrives on trays.” Then, to me, “You’ve been holding that same glass for an hour.
Warm prosecco is a crime in this country. ”
“You’ve been watching me an hour?”
“I’ve been watching the terrace an hour. You kept being on it.”
“You’ve been watching the far tables,” I say. His eyes come back to mine with a new weight in them, interested and level. “You face the room, you drink slowly, you sit where the sightlines are. Everybody else came here to be seen. So either you’re security, or you’re the reason security exists.”
“And you built that from a chair and a frosted bottle.”
“I assess venues for a living. You’re the most interesting thing in this one.”
“That’s the saddest review this club will ever get.” He says it perfectly dry, and the laugh takes me again, easier this time. Something in his shoulders gives up a centimeter of guard. “Logistics,” he offers. “Shipping. Things that need moving get moved.”