Chapter 8
Pei-Sze and Mikaela were waiting for us outside the airport with a minivan.
We drove in silence to a beautiful, freestanding stone house, almost a chateau, on the outskirts of Paris.
I’d never been to France before, and this building was very high-end, well restored but hundreds of years old, with artfully subdued landscaping.
“Oh my,” said Brock, as we put our bags onto the white pea-gravel drive.
“I usually hate old houses,” said Timothy, “because of ghosts. But this is fancy.”
“Is it a hotel?” I asked.
“It’s a private home,” said Pei-Sze, and Mikaela added, “It’s been in the same family for generations. Every broker was after it, but we have the listing.”
“It’s for sale?” I said, as Reggie moved quickly into the house; he was working on correcting the airplane betrayal. He wasn’t the sort of person to pause and admire architecture, because he was after results.
Inside, the place was breathtaking, with large, pale, high-ceilinged rooms furnished with a mix of antiques and modern leather-and-chrome classics.
My social media profile was skimpy, and my Instagram had only two personal photos, one of me on my first day of pre-K wearing a Hello Kitty sweatshirt (which I stopped wearing after the other kids kept saying, “Hello, Kitty”), and another of me as a twelve-year-old Nathan Detroit in Guys and Dolls.
I’d have posted shots of my swanky French surroundings, but Reggie had discouraged identifiably Tuxedo Society images. “Is anyone living here?” I asked.
“It’s been fully staged,” said Mikaela. “The owner’s things were falling apart, and the plaster was crumbling, so we freshened everything up, especially the plumbing. It was a wreck.”
“We start showings next week,” said Pei-Sze. “For right now, it’s a safe house.”
Pei-Sze and Mikaela were severe and always chicly turned out.
Their profession was aspirational, so the women presented themselves as luxury objects and connoisseurs, so buyers would trust they were in the finest, kidskin-gloved hands.
Pei-Sze was the financial authority, today in a creamy wool pantsuit without a blouse, for an air of sexual dominance, while Mikaela was the aesthetic component, whose slim tweed skirt and nipped jacket spoke of her exquisite design sense.
The women radiated an aloof tastefulness, with a dash of Charlize Theron appearing in one of those ad campaigns that are so elegant, you can’t tell what the product is.
“There’s a bedroom for everyone,” Pei-Sze said. “But don’t make a mess.”
Was she looking at me?
Brock walked me to my room, with its large, canopied, ironwork bed and the walls outlined with molding in tones of white and charcoal; I might’ve stepped into an art film where a gorgeously alienated couple would do coke, have hate sex, and leave each other without a word.
But I couldn’t spend time appreciating the Egyptian cotton sheets and stacked pillows, because I’d caused so much harm aloft, and Reata was waiting for the diamond.
“That wasn’t on you,” said Brock, as I slumped on the bed. “Even Reggie didn’t see it coming. Once those imitation officers were boarding, Timothy and I tried to get in their way, to give you more time. You were doing great.”
“I was getting beaten up by an old lady. And why does everyone guess that I don’t have a boyfriend?”
“Because you never brag about having one, like those guys who are constantly saying, ‘Well, Roger and I hate kombucha,’ or ‘When my partner and I took a place on Nantucket…’ ”
Brock didn’t have anyone either, but that was the case only for brief spells.
Men are always after him, as if he’s for sale beside the $3,000 Navajo-patterned bathrobes at Ralph Lauren.
His good looks are a challenge, so rich guys pursue him as a trophy.
His type, however, is more often a difficult, flat-broke Argentinian painter or a self-absorbed museum director wearing one of those absurdly tight, bare-ankled, shrunken-schoolboy Thom Browne suits that almost no one can get away with.
As Brock once said, “I go for someone who’ll give me trouble, but at least they won’t bore me. ”
I’d met Brock at another friend’s birthday party a few years ago, where we’d gotten drunk, headed for the maid’s room Brock rented in a rich lady’s brownstone, and started to make out, until we realized we were having way more fun dishing about everyone else at the party.
Brock and I had an instant familiarity, from shared references (such as whether Passion is Sondheim’s greatest show or an arid downer, and why not both) to a get-over-yourself outlook when people start becoming too intense about whether cashews consent to being eaten.
Brock’s pecs and jawline can be intimidating, but he’s loyal and always willing to analyze my behavior.
There’s a restlessness to him, which the Tuxes might be answering.
He loves fashion and retail but disdains becoming another Manhattan gay-about-town.
His aptitude for risk and crisis management was pulling me along.
“Can we fix this?” I asked, doing what I’d always promised myself I’d never do, which was beg for sympathy.
“We’ll see what Reggie comes up with. But you didn’t embarrass yourself. And even that zit on your chin seems like a choice.”
Later that evening, Reggie brought the core group into the living room, where I tried not to accidentally knock over the decorative ostrich egg mounted on a brass stand.
Reggie opened his laptop for a Zoom with Marcus, who said, “Here’s what I know.
The LeMotes have the diamond, but there’s more to it.
The diamond is one of three precious gems that belonged to a legendary crown called the Diadem of Apollo, which was supposedly commissioned by Nero.
Each stone represents one of the Moirai, meaning the three Fates who controlled everyone’s destiny in ancient Greece.
The gems are rumored to have individual powers, but whoever can assemble all three, and return them to the Diadem, that person would, so the story goes, be able to change the fate of the world. ”
Okay. The Tuxes’ mission had just ballooned. We weren’t just officially sanctioned jewel thieves. Reata’s urgent distress was understandable.
“Is there any proof?” asked Reggie. “Or is it all just nonsense, like the curse of the Hope Diamond?”
“Well, the Hope Diamond,” said Marcus, “according to certain historians, had been the eye of a statue of the goddess Sita. It was stolen from New Delhi and changed hands many times. Some of the people who owned it or even touched it died on the guillotine, or were torn to pieces by wolves, or went bankrupt and hanged themselves. It depends on which accounts you believe. But the Diadem of Apollo is way more mysterious and valuable. If intact, it’s estimated to be worth billions.
But Pierre LeMote especially wanted the Clotho Diamond, because Clotho was the Fate who oversaw every human being’s birth, starting the thread of their lives on her cosmic spindle.
LeMote’s daughter is pregnant, so he’s convinced that the diamond will give him a qualified and even a supernaturally gifted heir to continue his empire.
A dream that doesn’t sit all that well with the baby’s mother or Pierre’s son Luc, who’d both be kicked to the curb. ”
“How did Reata get involved?” I wondered.
“I’m not positive, but she may want the complete diadem for the Smithsonian, or she’ll have it returned to Greece.
She included the Diadem in her master’s thesis on archaeological conundrums. She’s caught the collector’s fever that surrounds the Diadem—people are obsessed. Especially if the legend is true.”
From our glimpse of her office, Reata wasn’t content with her role as First Lady.
She’d spent years in the field, especially in the temptingly well-preserved ruins of Pompeii.
She’d also been instrumental in negotiations to bring the Elgin Marbles back to Athens.
The Diadem was exactly her wheelhouse. Was Pierre LeMote behind the assassination attempt, to keep Reata as far from this highly sought-after, and conceivably paranormal, artifact as possible? Who wouldn’t want it?
“So the diamond’s our first step,” Reggie surmised, “in assembling the complete Diadem. If we can gain access to the LeMotes. Tell us about the son.”
“Luc LeMote is thirty-two and a French tabloid called him ‘the most eligible gay man on the planet.’ He helps run his family’s corporation, but he doesn’t get along with his father.
He’s also one of the few Frenchmen who work out.
Gym culture isn’t big over there, but Luc’s a regular at a place called La Salle de Sport, because he likes cruising the hotties. ”
Reggie interrupted: “La Salle was founded by a navy buddy of mine, who was discharged a few months after me—he got fed up and left the country, and brought his Navy SEAL training routines with him. He’s one of the original Tuxes, so he’ll be happy to pitch in.”
“I love this,” said Brock, as we sipped from cobalt-blue bottles of a bubbly French water I’d never heard of, in the chateau’s kitchen at midnight. “A diadem with a past.”
“That NYU professor I told you about,” said Timothy, “he said the three Fates were scary, like three witches or three female gang members in prison.”
“Women can be amazing in threes,” I said.
“Dreamgirls. The First Wives Club. These three girls I knew in high school who were named Caitlin, Caitlynne, and Catleen. They had a major Kardashian fangirl thing, so they wore thick pancake makeup, skinned their hair back, and shaved their eyebrows off and drew them back on. Caitlynne liked me because we’d talk about Kourtney’s exes and if Khloé’d had one nose job too many. ”
“It happens” said Brock. “For the Kardashians, plastic surgery is like potato chips. Sometimes I want to slap their hands and say, ‘Leave some in the bowl for everyone else.’ ”