“You’re a loser,” she said. “You’re sad and pitiful, living a dead-end life. Without Belinda, you’re nothing.”
The venom behind Gretchen’s words didn’t make them any less true. Fleur had no ambition, no plans, no pride of accomplishment—nothing but a mute kind of survival reflex. Without Belinda, she was nothing.
An hour later, she fled the photo shop and boarded the next train out of Strasbourg.
Fleur’s twenty-third birthday came and went. A week before Christmas, she threw some things into a duffel bag, picked up her Eurail pass, and left Lille to board a train to Vienna. France was the only place in Europe where she could work legally, but she had to get away for a few days or she’d suffocate. She could no longer remember how it felt to be slim and strong, or what it was like not to worry about paying the rent on a shabby room with a rust-stained sink and damp patches on the ceiling.
She chose Vienna on a whim after she read The World According to Garp. A place with bears on unicycles and a man who could only walk on his hands seemed just about right. She found a cheap room in an old Viennese pension with a gilded birdcage elevator the concierge told her had been broken by the Germans during the war. After lugging her duffel bag up six flights of stairs, she opened the door to a minuscule room with scarred furniture and wondered which war he meant. She peeled off her clothes, pulled the coverlet over her, and, as the wind rattled the windows and the elevator creaked, she went to sleep.
The next morning she walked through the Schönbrunn Palace and then had an inexpensive lunch at the Leupold near Rooseveltplatz. A waiter set a plate of tiny Austrian dumplings called Nockerln in front of her. They were delicious, but she had a hard time getting them down. There were no bears on unicycles in Vienna, no men who walked on their hands, only the same old problems that no amount of running away could solve. She’d never been the bravest, the fastest, or the strongest. It had all been an illusion.
A Burberry trench coat and Louis Vuitton briefcase brushed by her table, then backtracked. “Fleur? Fleur Savagar?”
It took her a moment to recognize the man standing in front of her as Parker Dayton, her former agent. He was in his mid-forties with one of those faces that looked as if it had been perfectly formed by a Divine Sculptor and then, just before the clay was dry, given a push inward. Even the neatly trimmed ginger-colored beard he’d grown since she’d last seen him couldn’t quite hide the less-than-impressive chin or balance out the squished-in nose.
She’d never liked Parker. Belinda had selected him to handle Fleur’s movie career on the strength of Gretchen’s recommendation, but it turned out he was Gretchen’s lover at the time and not a member of the upper echelon of agents. Still, from the evidence offered by the Vuitton briefcase and the Gucci shoes, business seemed to have picked up.
“You look like shit.” Without waiting for an invitation, he took a seat across from her and settled his briefcase on the floor. He stared at her. She stared back. He shook his head. “It cost Gretchen a bundle to settle on the modeling contracts you broke.” His hand tapped the table, and she had the feeling he was itching to pull out his calculator so he could punch in the numbers for her.
“It didn’t cost Gretchen a penny,” she said. “I’m sure Alexi paid the bills with my money, and I could afford it.”
He shrugged. “You’re one reason I pretty much stick to music now.” He lit a cigarette. “I’m managing Neon Lynx. You have to have heard of them. They’re America’s hottest rock group. That’s why I’m in Vienna.” He fumbled in his pockets and finally pulled out a ticket. “Come to the concert tonight as my guest. We’ve been sold out for weeks.”
She’d seen the posters plastered all over the city. Tonight was the opening concert in their first European tour. She took the ticket and mentally calculated what she could get for scalping it. “I can’t see you as a rock manager.”
“If a rock band hits, it’s like you’ve got a license to print money. Lynx was playing a third-rate club on the Jersey shore when I found them. I knew they had something, but they weren’t packaging it right. They didn’t have any style, you know what I mean? I could have turned them over to a manager, but business wasn’t too great at the time, so I decided, what the hell, I’d give it a shot myself. I made some changes and put ’em on the map. I’ll tell you the truth. I expected them to hit, but not this big. We had riots in two cities on our last tour. You wouldn’t believe—”
He waved to someone behind her, and a second man joined them. He was maybe in his early thirties with bushy hair and a Fu Manchu mustache.
“Fleur, this is Stu Kaplan, road manager for Neon Lynx.”
To Fleur’s relief he didn’t seem to recognize her. The men ordered coffee, then Parker turned to Stu. “Did you take care of it?”
Stu tugged on his Fu Manchu. “I spent half an hour on the phone with that goddamned employment agency before I found anybody who spoke English. Then they told me they might have a girl for me in a week. Christ, we’ll be in freakin’ Germany next week.”
Parker frowned. “I’m not getting involved, Stu. You’re the one who’s going to have to work without a road secretary.”
They talked for a few minutes. Parker excused himself to go to the men’s room, and Stu turned to Fleur. “He a friend of yours?”
“More an old acquaintance.”
“He’s a freakin’ dictator. ‘I’m not getting involved, Stu.’ Hell, it’s not my fault she got knocked up.”
“Your road secretary?”
He nodded mournfully into his coffee, his Fu Manchu drooping. “I told her we’d pay for the abortion and everything, but she said she was going back to the States to have it done right.” Stu looked up and stared at Fleur accusingly. “For chrissake, this is Vienna. Freud’s from here, isn’t he? They gotta have good doctors in Vienna.”
She thought of several things to say and discarded them all. He groaned, “I mean it wouldn’t be so bad if this had happened in Pittsburgh or somewhere, but freakin’ Vienna…”
“What exactly does a road secretary do?” The words came out of her unintended. She was drifting, just as always.
Stu Kaplan looked at her with his first real spark of interest. “It’s a cushy job—answering phones, double-checking arrangements, helping out with the band a little. Nothing hard.” He took a sip of coffee. “You—uh—speak any German?”
She sipped, too. “A little.” Also Italian and Spanish.
Stu leaned back in his chair. “The job pays two hundred a week, room and board provided. You interested?”
She had a job waiting tables in Lille. She had her classes and a cheap room, and she no longer did anything impulsively. But this felt safe. Different. She could handle it for a month or so. She didn’t have anything better to do. “I’ll take it.”