Free City of Light (City of Mystery) by Kim Wright Page B

past the makeshift
ceiling of the first platform, through layers of steel and cables and yet she
did not stop.  Rayley knew he couldn’t look down.  The sight of the floor below
him, the ground yet farther beyond that….if he stopped he knew he would never
start again.  He would die, just here, on this staircase, with the hips of
Isabel Delacroix bobbing above his head.
    And then, suddenly,
light and air. They had broken through the layers of construction to the base
of the second platform.  And Isabel stopped. 
    “Astounding,” she
said, and this time she made no effort to conceal the gasp in her voice.
    Rayley turned his
head slightly and saw that she had used the perfect word.  The city had grown
even smaller, the details even less visible than from the platform below.  Paris
becoming an impressionistic jumble of shadow and colors, worthy of its greatest
artists.  If the view from the first platform made you feel like a giant, this
vista turned you into a god.  He thought of Graham’s remark that being so high
was like dreaming, but Rayley had never been granted a dream as grandiose as
this.
    Isabel twisted and
sank down to one of the steps, squeezing as much of her hips onto it as she
could.  Rayley kept his arms braced against the center pole and the handrail,
leaning forward, and it occurred to him that this would be the perfect position
in which to kiss her.  If he ducked his head only a few more inches, their
faces would be brought together.  But she might refuse, perhaps even scream.  God
forbid, maybe even push him.  
    She belonged, after
all, to another man.
    “Shall we climb
higher?” he said. 
    He would spend the
rest of his life wondering why he had said this.
    She shook her head. 
Her hat had gone askew in the efforts of her ascent and small wisps of hair
were coming loose from beneath the brim.  There was a flush in her cheeks and
even – impossible to ignore at such proximity – a glimmer of perspiration on
her upper lip.  “I don’t understand the aerie,” she said, when she had caught
her breath. “This is the perfect view.  To go yet higher would be…a waste.”
    “Yes,” he said. 
“You would see less and less of the earth, only more of the clouds.  A man
would climb higher only so that he could say that he had.”  He looked down at
her.  “Or a woman,” he added.
    “Or a woman,” she
echoed softly.
    “So are you
suggesting that if Gustave Eiffel ever invites Isabel Delacroix to his aerie,
she will decline the chance to see his Whistler?”
    He said it lightly,
his second attempt at gay banter, for even if she was simultaneously in his
grasp and beyond his grasp, he wanted to know that in this rarified moment he
had been able to flirt with her.  That he had momentarily escaped the caged
confines of his detective’s brain.   That she had taken him, so to speak, to
new heights.
    But she frowned,
turning her chin away from his.  “A Whistler?”
    With her connections
to society, Rayley was surprised she hadn’t caught the reference. The man’s
name was in all the papers. “James Whistler,” he said.  “A portrait painter of
some renown and an exhibiter in the American pavilion.   Rumor has it that he’s
gifted one of his pieces to Gustave Eiffel in tribute. Tribute for the Tower,
that is, and I suppose everything.  Everything Eiffel has done.”
    “Ah,” she said.
    “It was meant as a
jest,” Rayley said weakly, for he knew that if one had to announce that a
remark was humorous, this rendered it no longer so.  “I’m sure there’s no way
Eiffel would put a truly valuable painting in a place where no one would ever
see it.  No one except certain guests of a certain sort, that is, ladies who he
–“  
    To his relief,
Isabel turned her face back to him, saving him from having to say more, or of
making an even more disastrous conversational error.  She wears powder, he
realized.  Lip rouge, and a dark line of some sort, drawn very fine