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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 Vienna because she had often come with her opera singer when he performed at the State Opera. On one of those visits she'd met Nicholas and Uschi. The three of them became close friends. After her affair with the singer died, Nicholas asked her to come back to Vienna to work as a set designer on one of his early television shows.
    "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."
    She looked sadly at her hands. "I've always loved that phrase, 'You can steal horses with him.'
    Do you think it's possible to find someone like that?"
    "It's like Halley's Comet."
    "Halley's Comet? How?"
    "It comes around once every seventy-five years or so. You have to have a big telescope to see it, and be in exactly the right place."
    "And you think it's that way with love?"
    "Yes, genuine, twenty-four-carat love. I think it's easy to find the _ingredients_ for love, but then it depends on how you mix them. There's so much work Page 16

    involved." I counted things off on my fingers as I cited the different points. "First you have to understand and accept. Then, you have to be best friend, always. Work on overcoming what they don't like in you. Be bighearted when it's so much easier to be small . . .
    "Sometimes the spark for real love is there from the beginning. But too many people mistake that spark for a flame they think will last a long time.
    That's