Sins of the Flesh

by Colleen McCullough

  A lull fell; Carmine took the moment to absorb the scene. A cool breeze was blowing gently inshore, it was a Thursday and in consequence no one was mowing lawns, the air was filled with birdsong. He put down his empty coffee mug, smilingly shook his head to the offer of another bagel, and reflected that there were worse places to be right now than here, listening to a spry old man’s story, delivered with lawyerlike crispness and some humor.

  “What happened to Angelo?” he asked.

  Jack blinked. “Typical Angelo! He married a rich woman.”

  “Poor thing! Life married to Angelo must have been hell.”

  “While it lasted, it undoubtedly was, but in 1908 there was issue—Fenella. Of course Angelo had wanted a boy whom he could call Antonio IV—the Carantonios were Sicilian and girls weren’t considered proper heirs. Fenella was born early in November, and Angelo left the house cursing his new daughter as well as his wife. He was also drunk. There were plenty of automobiles around in cities, but Angelo’s automobile was pretty rare on the back roads around Holloman. He stopped in the middle of 133 to take a swig of booze from his bottle, but it wasn’t a good place to stop because he was straddling the main Boston railroad line.” Jack shrugged, grinned. “The locomotive had a full head of steam up, and it was still doing sixty miles an hour when it ploughed into Angelo broadside.” Another shrug. “The best way to describe it was strawberry jam—automobiles were frail in 1908.”

  “Was he identified?”

  “Oh, yes. His briefcase was hardly marked, pitched a hundred yards away alongside the body of his pooch, also hardly marked.”

  “So in 1908 Antonio Carantonio III assumed responsibility for his sister-in-law and his niece,” Carmine said.

  John Junior spoke, his face angry, his eyes snapping. “Oh, no, not that bastard! He disowned them. In fact, no mention of their existence ever passed his lips, so Dr. Nell—and we, her lawyers—had no idea that she had an aunt by marriage and a first cousin by blood.”

  “That’s some brotherly hatred,” Carmine said. “What else happened between 1908 and 1925, Jack?”

  “Just Antonio III’s death in 1920. He never lived to see her graduate a doctor of medicine. His will left everything to Dr. Nell, never mentioned Fenella or her mother.”

  “What do you think happened in October of 1925, Jack?”

  Jack Senior was smiling at the antics of a very inexpert adolescent trying to get his Sunfish out of the inlet. “I do know that the Holloman PD wasn’t rich in detectives of your quality! I remember a Sergeant Emilio Cerutti at the head of enquiries—a nice enough guy, but no Sherlock Holmes.”

  Carmine’s lips twitched. “He was my great-uncle,” he said.

  “Well, not everybody who picks up a violin can play it like Paganini,” said Jack, unabashed. “Dead now, of course.”

  “Years ago.”

  “Man, I love the Carantonio case! Law is as boring as bat-shit, a fact you are aware of, so you can imagine what it felt like to be a bloodhound on a leash, straining and drooling like mad. And I’m not being fair to Sergeant Cerutti—it was hello and goodbye, no talks or interrogations.” His eyes sparkled as he visibly tensed at the memories flooding back. “Bear in mind that we had no inkling Fenella or her mother existed. After Dr. Nell vanished, all my energies were focused on finding her, as we were convinced she had no heirs.”

  Out came the pictures of Un Known with and without unmistakably blue irises. “Have you seen this man?”

  Jack Uppcott studied them pensively. “In general terms, the one with blue eyes looks like the description of the bodyguard, but farther than that I can’t go. I never saw a picture.”

  “You never encountered a surgeon or even a physician who looked like this?”

  “No, never. Never,” said Jack emphatically. “If I had seen him, I’d have sooled the cops onto him straight off. Whoever he is, he killed Dr. Nell.”

  “How did you go about finding Fenella?”

  “When the cops hadn’t turned up anything in three months, I decided to start looking at law. That meant I advertised heavily and consistently in the law journals and major national newspapers—and kept on advertising month in, month out, year in, year out. The Carantonio estate could afford the expense. I asked for any information about Dr. Nell or a Carantonio relative.”

  “You’re a bird dog, Jack,” said Carmine, grinning.

  Mr. John Uppcott Senior looked modest. “It was such a shame to see all that money and property in a legal limbo. Of course I had done—and continued to do—all the things that would make it as easy and rapid as possible to have Dr. Nell declared legally dead after seven years. But by the time 1928 had gone, I knew in my heart that Dr. Nell was dead, body or no body. My search for relatives occupied me more and more, but the thought of New York City was so daunting that in the end I hired a private detective—a guy with good references.” Jack gave a dazzling smile. “I should’ve done it sooner. He found Fenella.”

  “Bingo!”

  “I wired him his fee and a bonus, and asked him to give the extra hundred included to Fenella to cover her expenses when she came to Holloman.” He shivered. “I was so excited, Carmine!”

  “I bet. Did she make you wait long?”

  “She was sitting in the waiting room when I came into the office the next morning—so young, so beautiful, so shabby in her years-old flapper dress, a moth-eaten fox fur with a bald tail around her neck like a sansculotte draped in a dead rat. I saw her thus because she was wearing a battered bonnet like Madame Defarge, right down to a tricolor cockade.”

  “The second Nell,” Carmine breathed.

  “She was definitely that. She’d brought more than enough documentation—her birth certificate, Angelo’s marriage in a New York registry office to Ingrid Johanssen, letters from and to Antonio III and Angelo that made the whole quarrel clear, and a letter from Antonio III to the widow refusing to help her or her daughter. She had a cardboard box full of papers.”

  “What did you do with her?” Carmine asked.

  “No matter what Antonio’s opinion of his brother and his niece might have been, I had certain duties—either find Dr. Nell and restore her estate to her, or, failing that, to find her next of kin,” Jack Uppcott said with dignity. His mouth turned down. “Books by their covers, Captain! My initial impression of Fenella Carantonio was about as wrong as an impression can be. The sweet little sansculotte was Madame Defarge to the core—a bitch. Once I had assured myself that her documents were genuine and I had told Fenella what the stakes were—”

  “How did she take the news?” Carmine interrupted.

  “Knocked the breath out of her. I hadn’t told the detective there were millions involved, and I guess she and her mother were hoping for a thousand,” Jack Uppcott said, eyes back on the kid trying to sail his Sunfish.

  “I thought you said she was a wealthy woman?”

  “She was, but by the time Fenella appeared in my office, the mother was dead and her money had gone. And once Fenella had assimilated the fact that there were millions involved—about fifteen minutes—the pathetic act went out the window. Even though there were still at least five more years to wait for legal presumption of death, Fenella demanded to be maintained as the heir until she could inherit. She demanded to see Dr. Nell’s stock portfolio—what a mind for figures! Faster than I can do it on my adding machine, she determined to the last cent what the annual income was, and professed herself satisfied to be housed in Busquash Manor and paid all the income except my firm’s fees and expenses. Frankly, I didn’t think it was worth antagonizing her by attempting to block her. I just bit the bullet, and if I did, my partners took the hint. She was a tiger! No, a cobra. Dripping venom.”

  “She can’t have had an easy life, with that father, even if he did die the day she was born. The mother can’t have been much chop either. And she would have been pregnant?” Carmine quizzed.

  “She never said she was pregnant, and she didn’t show any sign of it. That was J
une of 1929, but when I saw her in July, she was showing.” His face creased into laughter lines. “No guts, no gifts! I asked if she was pregnant, she said she was, I asked if she was married, she said she wasn’t, I asked if she intended to marry, she said she didn’t, I asked who the father was, she said that to all intents and purposes it would be a virgin birth. End of subject.” He laughed aloud. “A formidable woman, even if she was only a scrawny little thing.” Reflection replaced amusement. “I daresay the disease was chewing away at her even then, and she was just the woman to be aware of it.”

  Carmine lifted the picture of Un Known. “According to legend this is the father of Fenella’s child.”

  “If he was—or is—then I’ve never seen him, and the firm still cares for Rufus Carantonio’s affairs. Nice guy, not at all like Fenella in looks or nature.”

  “Were there any hitches in declaring Dr. Nell dead?”

  “No, none. It was just very slow. The court decided in December of 1933. No reported sighting of Dr. Nell had ever been lodged, unusual in itself, and it was a kind of the final nail in her coffin. The estate had weathered the Great Depression just fine, I should add. Then the new owner decided that with all the fiscal changes F.D.R. was busy making, it was time to revamp her portfolio. Which she did herself, using brokers only as she needed them, and switching them frequently. She bought blue chip too, but blue chip of the future, in fields to do with electrical gadgets, or pharmaceuticals, or aeronautical products. Once she’d finished her revamp, she’d parlayed her fortune from two million to ten million. But that’s chickenfeed. I’d have a heart attack merely thinking what the Carantonio estate must be worth today.”

  “Interesting, that money follows money,” Carmine said.

  “Oh! Rufus and Rha’s money, you mean. True, Rufus doesn’t need Fenella’s money, but it’s also good to know that eventually it will go to better causes than maybe Fenella envisioned.”

  The kid with the Sunfish had lost the breeze and decided to cool off in the water; far overhead a contrail said someone, probably packing nukes, was flying at military heights; a family had arrived to take possession of the choicest picnic spot on Busquash Point; and Carmine suddenly wished with all his heart that Desdemona and his sons were on the one-and-only, proper coast.

  He rose to his feet, put his briefcase on the table, and tucked his exhibits back inside it. “Thanks for a very pleasant interlude,” he said, shaking hands. “I’ll call you with the news if ever I get any. You’ve been a help.”

  And I wonder if there’s anybody at home at Busquash Manor? he asked himself as the Fairlane growled down Inlet Road. When he came to Millstone Road, he made a right; he was in the neighborhood, so why not try? People who slammed the door in a cop’s face were stupid, and he didn’t think, from what he’d learned about them from Delia and Abe, that Rha and Rufus were stupid.

  He’d never had reason to call on Rha Tanais or Rufus Ingham, nor could he remember ever meeting them, probably because his was the Holloman of Chubb University, various manufacturing industries and community services; its theater and homosexual worlds were two that had not thus far professionally concerned him. Rha Tanais had genuine international fame, Rufus Ingham did not, yet Carmine knew enough to understand that the anonymous half of the duo was not merely a boyfriend/lover. Rufus Ingham contributed. Therefore he must be an interesting guy, to accept his anonymity without, apparently, resentment or expectations.

  Even stripped of four acres, Busquash Manor was imposing, a Newport-style palace with a cunningly concealed parking lot and, tucked in a far corner of the grounds with its own vista of the Inlet and Long Island Sound, a charming house that he presumed was Little Busquash. Now inhabited, he had learned from Abe, by Rha’s older sister, Ivy Ramsbottom. And what had that been all about, to try to pass Rufus off as other than Antonio Carantonio IV? Except that Abe had liked both men. As did Delia. Not bad guys, then, but what?

  Having parked his Fairlane in a slot marked for visitors, Carmine walked through a gap in the hedge that put him on a flagged path toward the mansion’s front door, one of those with a large oval sheet of beveled, part-frosted glass embedded in it. There was a bell; he pressed it.

  After a shortish wait, the door was opened by, from Abe’s description, Rufus. A knockout, was his immediate reaction, but coupled with a tinge of sadness at the eye make-up—still, there could be no doubt that even eyes that magnificent benefited from a touch of mascara and eye-liner. Though the hair, a stunning copper, owed nothing to a dye-bottle or skilled scissors, it was simply a natural head of great hair.

  “Mr. Ingham? I’m Carmine Delmonico, Holloman PD. Would it be possible to have a word with you and Mr. Tanais?”

  “The Chairman of KGB himself!” said Rufus, clearly delighted. “Come in, Comrade General, please! We’re in the theater, and almost through for the morning. Would you mind watching us put the goldfish through its last gasp in an empty bowl?”

  “Not at all, Comrade Art and Culture. It will be a change from the noises of the Lubyanka cells.”

  He was led through an extraordinary place of opulent yet bizarre furniture and furnishings, then down a curving ramp, and into the naked stage area Abe had described. Rufus’s hand eased him into one of a row of seats, nearly next to the longest pair of legs he had ever seen, clad in narrow black trousers and flung outstretched to end in feet as big as scuba flippers. The upper regions of these tree trunks were hidden in shadows, but the head was tilted back to listen to whatever Rufus whispered into one ear. Then Rufus sat down on Carmine’s other side, hemming him in. He concentrated on the stage.

  All the light percolating into the vastness was focused at the front of the stage, where a slim, middle-aged man in a gold lamé tunic and sporting a gold crown on his head was dancing and singing through a cascade of weightless gold discs the size of coins. He looked extremely uncomfortable.

  “My darling Servilia has left me

  Bereft me

  Cleft me

  In twain!

  How can I bear the pain?

  The bitterness of memory’s lane?”

  His accompaniment, an upright piano from the sound, sat out of sight somewhere; even translated by such a pedestrian instrument, Carmine could sense that the music was clever enough to make the lyrics sing reasonably and fittingly. What rendered the performer unhappy was the dance expected of him; the choreographer had blocked out a routine for someone younger and more athletic.

  “If Sid can’t manage this, Roger never will,” Rufus murmured.

  “Tell me about it!” Rha murmured. “There has to be an answer somewhere, though I refuse to ghost it with younger dancers.”

  Rufus began to sing in a falsetto that rang around the rafters.

  “Poor darling old Sid!

  You’re no longer a kid!

  At best you’re a”—he launched into coloraturas—“pra-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-prancer, never a dah-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-dancer!” The coloraturas ceased. “This hit is total shit!”

  The “shit” came out like the hiss and crack of a whip; as a way of expressing displeasure Carmine had never heard its like, and found himself grinning. The singer/dancer on stage stood smiling and nodding, while another man in the same age group erupted onto the stage radiating fury. Clearly he was a dancer.

  “Fuck you, Ingham!” the angry one yelled.

  Rha’s voice boomed, pure basso profundo. “Todo, stupid Todo, you’re an utter dodo! Not so much punch, and let’s break for lunch.”

  Rha Tanais beamed at Carmine and extended a hand. “Sorry for that,” he said affably. “Choreographers never take encroaching old age into account because they always stay fit themselves.”

  “Oh, I loved your lyrics. Extempore is an amazing gift.”

  “Not really,” said Rufus. “Lyrics are a mind-set—a part of the job, you might say. How about a bologna sandwich?”

  “We have a great choreographer in Todo Satara,” said Rha as they walked, “but right this moment he’s
battling both his temper and his inner conviction that he’s wrong.”

  They settled in a booth in the dully glowing stainless steel kitchen, he and Rha comfortably ensconced while Rufus fixed the sandwiches, which would have been banal were it not for the fresh and crusty loaf forming their basis. No supermarket pre-sliced bread here! Nor, with an English wife, did Carmine mind butter instead of mayonnaise.

  “Abe Goldberg tells me that you’ve identified four of his John Doe people,” Carmine said, lifting his glass of sparkling mineral water. “Your accountant, Mr. Greco, has been helpful too.”

  “So I should hope,” said Rha, who didn’t, Abe had told him, engage habitually in “gay” repartee. “How may we further help?”

  “By telling me more of the history of Busquash Manor. I’m taking another look at the disappearance of Dr. Nell Carantonio, who would be your close cousin, Rufus?”

  “First cousin once removed, or some such thing,” Rufus said, sawing bread. “A local socialite built the house in 1840, but it didn’t come into Carantonio hands until 1879, when Antonio II bought it. His son, Antonio III, inherited it when he died, and Dr. Nell, an only child, was born in 1899.”

  “What happened to Dr. Nell’s mother?” Carmine asked.

  “She died giving birth to Dr. Nell,” Rufus said. “It saddens me to think how many years Antonio III lived here virtually alone. The place was different in those days—gloomy and dark. Fenella and then we are responsible for how it looks these days. But Dr. Nell’s father was a misanthrope, tended to hate everyone. That went double for his brother, Angelo, and Angelo’s daughter, Fenella.