02 _ Maltese Goddess, The Read Free Page A

I’d say. Anyway, I’ll make a few calls, find the best way to do this, and the best rate I can. It’ll be expensive, though, at least $3000, probably. But as you say, money is no object for this guy.”
    After some discussion about insurance and logistics and so on, he rang off, and I relaxed a little knowing that if it could be done, Dave was the one to do it. He’d performed miracles for me more than once, starting a few years ago when he found a furniture shipment lost out of Singapore and got it to a fancy design show only hours before it opened.
    I’d been the supplier to a young up-and-coming designer who’d been asked to decorate a room in the show house that was to raise money for charity. That was the event that launched his career and my business. The designer was a man by the name of Clive Swain, who after that show became my first employee and then my husband. But Dave could hardly be held accountable for that, and Thomson Shipping had been my shipper of choice ever since.
    When I came out of the office, Alex had already started moving Galea’s purchases into our storage area and replacing them with stuff from our stock. Then we all surveyed the shop floor. Even with some replacements, it looked a little bare. Galea had certainly cut a swath through the place.
    “I’d better get on to Dave about that shipment Lucas sent us from Mexico before he went to Belize,” Alex said. Lucas, in addition to our personal relationship, was Greenhalgh and McClintoch’s agent in Mexico. “We can fill some of the holes with the Mexican pottery and leather chairs he said he sent us,” Alex said.
    The next morning I drove over to the Galea residence. It was located in a part of town which had once been thought to have charm. But now interspersed between the older, more gracious homes, were what are commonly called monster houses, those in which ostentation and sheer size have replaced aesthetics and good taste.
    In such a neighborhood, Galea’s home came as something of a relief and a bit of a surprise to me, something more to the taste of Marilyn Galea, nee McLean, more old Toronto than the work of a noted modern architect. The face it showed to the street was refreshingly simple, a pleasant Georgian facade, a simple circular driveway of interlocking paving stones leading through iron gates to a European-style courtyard, and a very plain door surrounded by ivy.
    The door was opened by a pleasant-faced young woman in a grey uniform. Filipina, I thought, and we were joined almost immediately by the unpretentious Marilyn Galea herself, dressed in the camel version of what she had worn the previous day. I stepped into an elegant octagonal-shaped entrance, all creamy marble. Even the flowers matched, a sumptuous bouquet of lilies arranged in a crystal vase on a table in the middle of the foyer.
    Leading off the entrance toward the back of the house was a hallway, more art gallery than hall actually, with several works of modern art, a couple of them signed by Galea himself, discreetly lit from above. When we got to the end of the hall, I stepped into a large open area at the rear and the house’s secret revealed itself.
    I think I actually gasped out the word “Wow!” then immediately regretted it, such an inarticulate expression certainly not in keeping with the sophisticated veneer I liked to think I projected. Neither did it do justice to what I saw.
    All the houses on this side of the street back on one of the many lovely ravines that crisscross Toronto. But no others, I’m sure, made such exceptional use of the landscape. The back of the Galea house was two storeys of clear glass—perhaps two and a half, since the house was built down into the ravine at the back. The house seemed to float out over the ravine with no visible means of support. The eye was drawn into the trees, then above them, seemingly forever, to the office towers of the downtown core. Here, for certain, was the Galea touch.
    I’m not certain how