Invasion of Privacy

that he’s an actor, not entirely comfortable with a new role he’s playing.” We reached a door that stood ajar, what sounded like chamber music coming from behind it. Loiselle bumped the door open with her right buttock. “Welcome to the Dostoyevsky Museum .”
    Inside the unit, a short corridor had a carpet runner of a design I’d never seen before, brocades of red and gold. The corridor walls had been scooped out, shelved in, and glassed over, with indirect lighting above exotic bric-a-brac that I didn’t have time to catalogue.
    Loiselle led me into a living room decorated from top to bottom in the most striking taste I’d ever seen. Orange drapery over the windows, pulled and tucked in a sequence that drew your eyes first upward then outward to the an tique prints of armored warriors and dancing women and the not-quite-Catholic icons on the walls. There were deli cate chairs and heavy tables, some with marble tops. Fes tive, folkish dolls sat or stood on open shelves around a magnificent fireplace, other shelves holding books, spine out, with Cyrillic lettering on them.
    Two loveseats opposed each other in front of the fireplace, a hand-carved, black wood coffee table between them. On the table stood a fluted glass, white wine filling a third of the bulb. The fireplace wall was painted a deep green that matched my guide’s gown so well she looked like a floating face and shoulders in front of it.
    Loiselle gestured toward one of the loveseats. As I went to sit, she said, “Drink?”
    “How close are you and Ms. Evorova on time?”
    “Time?”
    “For the opera.”
    “Oh. An hour yet. Olga’s still getting dressed, but I’ve hired a car.”
    “Then yes to the drink, whatever’s easiest.”
    “We have a nice chardonnay open.”
    “Half a glass would be great.”
    “Done.”
    Loiselle moved to a linoleum area, the kitchen visible through a pass-through hole in that wall. The loveseats were upholstered in silk, strands of shining red and gold thread embroidered into the fabric, reminding me of the carpet runner in the hall. The music sounded like a crying piano, and I thought I recognized the piece.
    Loiselle returned with my glass, a little more than half full, but close enough. After setting the wine on the coffee table, she sat down across from me.
    Raising her own glass in a mock toast, Loiselle said, “To whatever you’ve discovered about the Horse’s Ass.”
    I tried the chardonnay. Vanilla and oak, nicely blended and not so cold the flavor couldn’t come through “Excellent.”
    “Ought to be. That Bonny Doon’s thirty dollars a bottle.”
    “I’ll sip it slowly.”
    The lopsided grin again. “I didn’t realize private investigators were so easily offended.”
    “We’ve gotten more sensitive over the years.”
    “I could tell right away,” said Loiselle.
    “Tell what?”
    “That you weren’t a clod.”
    “How?”
    “From the way you reacted downstairs.” She tilted her glass, allowing the wine to slide around and coat the inside, then sniffed it without drinking from it. “When I mistook your ‘not what I expected’ remark and came on like a chip-on-the-shoulder lesbo, as one of my dear departed colleagues used to call me.”
    “Departed.”
    “After he said that to me once, I dedicated the next month to undermining him, and he was gone two more after that.”
    I nodded.
    “Anyway,” said Loiselle, “you took my shot in stride and just turned it around on me. I do the same thing to others often enough myself.”
    “What kind of banking are you in?”
    “Commercial lending, and deadly serious stuff it is, too. Say you want to develop a shopping center or office building, but you need a hundred million or so in construction financing. I’m the one you have to make happy.”
    “And does it make you happy?”
    “Sometimes.” Another nip at the wine. “Not often, actually. But it lets me own a house down in Provincetown and my version of this place, with Melissa Etheridge instead of Tchaikovsky on the stereo.”
    “I think it’s Rachmaninoff.”
    Loiselle stopped. Then she stood up and moved to the stereo stack in the corner, reaching under something to pull out a compact disk cover. Coming back to the love- seat, she said, “You didn’t look at this, did you?”
    “The CD case?”
    “Right.”
    “No, I didn’t.”
    “Then how did you know...?”
    “Took a music appreciation course back in college. You happened to be playing the one piece I could