Meena thought. When will my life stop sucking?
“He looks very nice,” she lied to Miss Butterfly about Gerald. “You’re here to visit him?”
Miss Butterfly nodded energetically.
“He help me get visa,” she said. “And—” She used the cell phone to mimic taking photos of herself.
“Head shots,” Meena said. She worked in the business. She understood exactly what Miss Butterfly was talking about. And her heart sank even more. “So you want to be a model. Or an actress?”
Miss Butterfly beamed and nodded. “Yes, yes. Actress.”
Of course. Of course this pretty girl wanted to be an actress.
Fantastic, Meena thought cynically. So Gerald was her manager, too. That explained a lot about the baseball cap—pulled down so low that Meena couldn’t see his eyes—and the number of gold chains around his neck in the photo.
“What’s your name?” Meena asked.
Miss Butterfly pointed at herself, as if surprised Meena cared to discuss her as opposed to the ultra-fantastic Gerald.
“I? I am Yalena.”
“Great,” Meena said. She opened her bag, dug around the mess inside it, and came up with a business card. She always had one handy for exactly this kind of situation, which unfortunately came up all too often … especially when Meena rode the subway. “Yalena, if you need anything—anything at all—I want you to call me. My cell phone number is on there. See it?” She pointed to the number. “You can call me anytime. My name is Meena. If things don’t work out with your boyfriend—if he turns out to be mean to you, or hurts you in any way—I want you to know you can call me. I’ll come get you, wherever you are. Day or night. And listen …,” she added. “Don’t show this card to your boyfriend. This is a secret card. For emergencies. Between girlfriends. Do you understand?”
Yalena just gazed at her, smiling happily.
She didn’t understand. She didn’t understand at all that Meena’s number might literally mean the difference between life and death for her.
They never understood.
The train pulled up to Forty-second Street station. Yalena jumped up.
“Grand Central?” she asked, looking panicky.
“Yes,” Meena said. “This is Grand Central.”
“I meet my boyfriend here,” Yalena said excitedly, grabbing her huge roller bag and giving it a yank. She took Meena’s card in her other hand, beaming. “Thank you! I call.”
She meant she’d call to get together for coffee sometime.
But Meena knew Yalena would call her for something totally different. If she didn’t lose the card … or if Gerald didn’t find it and take it away. Then give her a fist sandwich.
“Remember,” Meena repeated, following her off the train. “Don’t tell your boyfriend you have that. Hide it somewhere.”
“I do,” Yalena said, and scrambled toward the nearest flight of stairs, lugging her suitcase behind her. It was so huge, and Yalena was so small, she could barely drag it. Meena, giving in to the inevitable, picked up the bottom of the girl’s incredibly heavy suitcase and helped her carry it up the steep and crowded staircase. Then she pointed Yalena in the direction the girl needed to go—the boyfriend was meeting her “under the clock” in the “big station.”
Then, with a sigh, Meena turned around and headed for a train back uptown, so she could get to Madison and Fifty-third Street, where her office building was located.
Meena knew Yalena hadn’t understood a word she’d said. Well, maybe one in five.
And even if she had, there wouldn’t have been any point in telling the girl the truth. She wouldn’t have believed Meena, anyway.
Just like there was no point in following her now, seeing the boyfriend for herself, and then saying something to him like, “I know what you really are and what you do for a living. And I’m going to call the police.”
Because you can’t call the cops on someone for something they’re going to do. Any more than you can tell someone that they’re going to die.
Meena had learned this the hard way.
She sighed again. She was going to have to run now if she wanted to catch the next train uptown. …
She just prayed there wouldn’t be too many people on it.
Chapter Three
6:00 P.M. EET, Tuesday, April 13
History Department
University of Bucharest
Bucharest, Romania
Professor?”
Lucien Antonescu smiled up at her from the enormous antique desk behind which he sat, grading papers. “Yes?”
“So is it true,” Natalia asked, grasping at the first question she could think of, since she’d completely forgotten what she’d meant to ask him the moment his dark-eyed gaze fell upon her, “that the oldest human remains ever found were discovered in Romania?”
Oh, no! Human remains? How disgusting! How could she ask something so stupid?
“The oldest human remains found in Europe,” Professor Antonescu said, correcting her gently. “The oldest human remains ever found were discovered in Ethiopia. And they’re roughly a hundred and fifty thousand years older than the remains found in what we consider modern-day Romania, in the Cave with Bones.”
The girl was only half listening. He was the sexiest of all her instructors, and that included teaching assistants. On the University of Bucharest’s equivalent of Rateyourprof.com, Professor Lucien Antonescu had been given all 10s in the looks category.
And justifiably so, since he was over six feet tall, lean and broad shouldered, with thick dark hair that he wore brushed back from his temples and a smooth, gorgeous forehead.
As if all that weren’t enough, he had dark brown eyes that, in certain lights, when he was lecturing and grew excited about his subject matter—which happened frequently, because he was impassioned about Eastern European history—flashed red.
Surely the posts on the message boards were exaggerated … especially the ones hinting that he was related to the Romanian royal family and was a duke or a prince or something.
But since taking Professor Antonescu’s class, Natalia could see why he—and his course—was so popular. And why the line of girls—and some boys, though when he showed pictures of ancient Romanian art, Professor Antonescu spoke so appreciatively of the lush lines of the female form that there was no possible way he could be gay—at his office hours was so long.
