Sleeping in Flame

"LEGO? What do you do with that?"

"Didn't Nicholas tell you? That's what I work with. I do LEGO constructions. I build cities with them. LEGO, balsa wood, sometimes papier-mвchй. I'll show you sometime. I build my own cities for a living and people actually buy them."

"Do you show in galleries?"

"Oh yes. I had a big one in Bremen a while ago; sold almost everything. It made me so happy and lazy that I didn't do anything for two months. Then I realized I had run out of money and it was time to start working again. Unfortunately, that's when Luc started in on me."

"Maris, do you have any free time today? Can I treat you to a coffee or lunch?"

"I was going to ask you the same thing."

"Really? Do you think we could do it now? I waited breakfast, hoping you'd say you were hungry."

We met a half hour later on the Graben. One of Vie

As I was coming out, I saw her bustling down the street toward Saint Stephen's Church, our designated meeting place. I watched her for a moment. An idea struck me, and I moved fast to catch up. When I was about ten feet behind her I slowed, wanting to see other people's reactions to this tall woman in a red hat.

I wasn't disappointed. Men watched admiringly, women gave two looks: the first of recognition, the second a quick up-and-down appraisal to see what she was wearing, or what she'd done with her makeup or clothes.

I touched her elbow from behind. Instantly, she touched my hand with her own before turning to face me.

"It must be Walker. Ha, it is you!"

"You're pretty trusting. What if it hadn't been me?"

"If it hadn't been you? It had to be you. Who else do I know on the Graben today?"

"But how can you be so trusting after all that craziness in Munich you've been through?"

"Because I want to keep trusting people. If I become scared and suspicious, then Luc really has won, even when I'm so far away from him. Where should we eat? Is the Cafй Diglas still alive?"

To my surprise, she was thirty-five years old, much older than she looked. Her father was one of those trouble-shooting engineers who carts his family around the world with him while supervising the building of a university in Paraguay or an airport in Saudi Arabia. There were two children in the family: Maris, and her older brother Ingram, a disc jockey in Los Angeles.

She had gone to international schools in six different countries before entering the Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia at eighteen to study painting and sculpture.

"But the school and I were like oil and water. From the begi

"I was working in a bar called Il Giardino, which was where all of the models and photographers in Hamburg hung out after work. Right in the middle of our busiest time, around eleven-thirty one night, a man came up and asked me to hold a bouquet of white roses. Actually, he didn't ask, he just sort of handed them to me and walked away. I had a giant tray of empty glasses in one hand and suddenly all these beautiful flowers in the other. I didn't know which to put down, so I stood in the middle of the floor and started laughing.

"The man came back with a camera and started taking pictures of me. I hammed it up and posed like Betty Grable, or as best I could with all the glasses and flowers! When the guy was done, he handed me a card and told me to come to see him the next day. It was the photographer Ovo. You've heard of him, haven't you? Well, the most shocking thing was, I discovered the next day Ovo was a woman! When I got to the studio, there she was right in the middle of all her assistants and models, and it was so obvious she was a woman . . . I felt terrible for ever having thought otherwise!"

Maris went on talking about her modeling career, about three months spent in Egypt, about living with a famous German opera singer. There were enough experiences and adventures for three separate lives. Her thirty-five years were so full and consummately interesting that it struck me, more than once, that she might be lying. I had known great liars before and had enjoyed their tales. But if this were true about Maris York, then it was both heartbreaking and dangerous. Had her Luc attacked her the day before because she was a beautiful psychopath who couldn't distinguish between what was and what she wanted things to be? Even worse, had this Luc even attacked her in the first place?

Proof came in a sexy way. While talking about life with her opera singer, she casually mentioned that he had asked her to prove her love for him in a bizarre way: He wanted her to be tattooed on the small of her back with a single musical note. She said she'd asked him which note, and then gone right out and done it.

Nervously, I asked if I could see it. She smiled at me, but it wasn't a particularly friendly smile. "Are you a music lover, or do you just want proof?"

"Maris, your life sounds like a nine-hundred-page Russian novel. It's all just too much. I mean –"

Before I finished, she leaned forward and jerked her black sweater up and over her head. She was wearing a white T-shirt underneath, and this she rucked up just a little to show her back. And there it was – one bright purple musical note against the white smoothness of skin.

A long silence followed between us for the first time that morning. I thought it was because she was angry at me for doubting what she had said. She began to put the sweater back on, at the same time saying, "You know, you saved my life yesterday."

I didn't know what to answer.

"It's quite true, Walker. The next time I saw him, he would have killed me."

She knew Vie

"He has been my lifesaver more than once, as you can see. I wish there was some way I could repay him, but he gets very grumpy when you say thanks for anything he does. Years ago, I made a city for him and filled it with characters from his movies. He liked it a lot, but that's the only thing he's let me do in return for his kindness. What a strange man. He wants you to love him, and that's so easy, but when you show it, he doesn't know how to handle it; it's a hot potato for him. Do you know the German phrase, 'You can steal horses with him'? It means a person you can both make love with all night, passionately, then wake up with the next morning and be completely silly. And he never makes you embarrassed or self-conscious about anything you do."

"That sounds like the perfect lover. Is that the way things are with you and Nicholas?"

"No, oh no. We've never touched each other. I have a little fantasy in the back of my head that maybe things would be like that if we were together, but neither of us has ever made the slightest movement in that direction. I think we dream about each other, but never want to go beyond that dream. It'd be too horrible if we tried something in real life and it was bad."