Palace Council

by Stephen L Carter

  “No. Sorry.”

  “I would pay well for their return. Perhaps you might ask his friend Belt.”

  Eddie felt himself bristle. What had he said, that this man should assume him so mercenary? “You could ask him yourself.”

  “I cannot,” said the German.

  When he said nothing more, Eddie asked, “Have you tried the widow? She moved down south.”

  Emil twisted his face in disapproval, as if Eddie had committed a second faux pas. “The matter is complicated,” he said.

  “I’m sorry, but—”

  “If you did manage to help me, you would find the materials in a large pink envelope, with a penciled number in the corner, seventeen or eighteen.”

  “I really don’t think—”

  “I would pay well,” Emil repeated, handing him a business card. “Consider my offer.”

  “I can give you my answer now,” Eddie began, but Emil was halfway across the room. Eddie watched him go.

  Gary came and stood beside him. “Who was that?”

  Eddie explained.

  His friend waved to Mona Veazie, who was departing with a clutch of girlfriends. “Have I mentioned that I knew Phil Castle a little bit?”

  An indulgent smile. “A time or two.”

  “His firm represents the Hilliman family trusts. Phil did a little work on some corporation we were buying”—this casually—“and, well, he and I got to know each other.” Gary gestured with his glass. “Anyway, I went sailing with Phil and his wife and kids one day. Four kids.”

  “So?”

  “So—this Emil guy told you that he took photos of Phil’s sons for a Boy Scout ceremony. He wants you to get the proofs back.”

  “Right.”

  “Did you wonder why he picked you?”

  Eddie shrugged. “Somebody saw me with Joseph Belt. Emil thought I was a friend of Castle’s.”

  Gary shook his head. “Phil Castle didn’t have any shortage of friends. There isn’t any reason Emil had to come to you. And, whatever he wants you to recover for him, it isn’t photos of a Boy Scout ceremony.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Because Phil Castle only had daughters.”

  CHAPTER 4

  Willed Imagination

  (I)

  AURELIA HAD KNOWN LIFE with a Garland would be different but had no idea just how different. Kevin Garland was nine years her senior, an executive at his father’s small investment firm, with a lovely smile, a warm sense of humor, and considerable liquid assets. Naturally, the leading clans had pointed their daughters his way, but Kevin seemed happy on his own. The Czarinas could not fathom such a phenomenon. Behind cupped hands, they speculated on whether he might be one of those. Aurelia changed everything. From the first month of her arrival in Harlem, Aurie had attracted a coterie of suitors, and Kevin, along with Eddie Wesley, had led the pack. Eddie was smarter, Kevin was more fun. Eddie was always serious. Kevin loved to tell little jokes. Eddie was a terrible dancer and not terribly romantic, but he could teach her things about history and politics. Still, she could learn the same things from books if she wanted. Kevin sent her flowers at least once a week and danced like a dream. Unlike Eddie, he never talked down to her. He knew everybody, and could show her places no book could describe. True, Kevin tended to like things the way they were, but he could also provide for her like royalty, bringing to life the foolish dreams of childhood.

  One evening during their courtship, Kevin said he had a surprise for her. They took a taxi to a fancy hotel on Central Park South, the sort of place Negroes dared not enter, even in the absence of a formal color bar. Kevin crossed the lobby as if he owned it. They rode the elevator to a suite overlooking the park. A pair of guards stood before the door. Inside, Kevin introduced Aurelia to Richard Nixon, the Vice President of the United States. Nixon made an awkward fuss over her. He told her that the Garlands were wonderful people, that they were in the front rank in the fight against the Red menace. He clapped an embarrassed Kevin on the back, and pronounced him a future leader of the Negro people. Nixon was in the city to address the United Nations, where America at this time was feared and envied but not yet hated. He had a sad, shy, jowly face, a flat-footed walk, and a way of dropping his head without hunching his shoulders and still watching you. He smiled like a man not sure just why.

  “We don’t want to take too much of your time, sir,” said Kevin.

  “Your husband’s a hero,” said the Vice President, waggling a finger. “One day the story will come out.” Nixon winked. Kevin looked at the floor.

  “He’s not my husband,” said Aurelia. Seeing Kevin’s crestfallen face, she felt constrained to add, “Not yet.”

  “Well, hold on to him. He’s rich.” The Vice President was famously not rich. His suit was relentlessly inexpensive. A few years earlier, he had deflected an influence-peddling scandal by assuring the nation in a televised address that his wife, Pat, wore a cheap cloth coat. “And a good man. Remember that.”

  “Thank you. I will.”

  “Hear great things about you.”

  “About me?”

  “Column you write. Fans everywhere.” The shy smile as an aide appeared to say it was time for the Vice President to depart. Shaking their hands, he reminded Kevin to call him any time he needed a favor.

  Kevin glanced at his beloved, then dropped his voice. But Aurelia’s ears were exceptional. “There’s only one favor we need,” he said—later, Aurelia was adamant that Kevin had said “we.”

  Nixon’s smile faded. “None of my people have turned up a clue.”

  “We would be grateful if you would keep looking, sir.”

  “I’ll do what I can.”

  Out on the street afterward, Kevin raised a hand. A blocky yellow cab stopped at once. No Negro could get a taxi in midtown Manhattan, especially at night, everybody knew that, but for elegant Kevin Garland the rules were different. Aurie shivered, though not with cold. Kevin did not ask where she wanted to go. He told the driver they were heading for Brooklyn Heights, where he kept what he called his bachelor pad, but the cabbie had somehow guessed: although a stalwart of the salons, Kevin just didn’t look like Harlem.

  Heading downtown, Aurelia asked how he knew Nixon.

  “Through my father.”

  “What did he mean about me having fans everywhere? I write gossip in a tiny little colored newspaper.”

  Kevin grinned. “Dick’s a politician. It’s his job to flatter you.”

  “I couldn’t do a job like that.”

  “Don’t I know it.”

  “Meaning what?” she asked, ready to get hot.

  “Meaning, you’re not much of a flatterer.” His grin widened. “But I guess I don’t need much flattery. I do my own.”

  Aurelia let this pass. “I heard what you and Nixon were talking about.”

  “Mmmm.”

  “What’s he looking for? What’s the big secret?”

  “He used to do business with my father.”

  Her eyes sparkled at this intelligence. “And how does your father know him? Nixon?”

  Kevin was a long time answering. “Remember the big scandal back in ’52? When Nixon was accused of having this secret fund to smear his opponents? Paid for by a bunch of his millionaire friends from California?”

  “No,” said Aurelia, truthfully.

  He patted her hand. “Well, not all the millionaires were white.”

  (II)

  OVER A LATE DINNER, Kevin regaled her with stories of his father’s years in California right after the war, one crazy moneymaking scheme after another.

  “Some of them obviously worked,” said Aurelia.

  “And some of them should have landed him in jail.”

  She spent the night with Kevin—the first time—but was up for hours afterward, weeping. He was too much of a gentleman to ask why. He rubbed her back instead. When he asked her a few days later to marry him, Aurelia replied that she would need time. Kevin hid his disappointmen
t and offered, gallantly, to let her have as much as she needed.

  She returned to Harlem. Eddie took her to dinner. She let him kiss her good night but no more. She compared the two men. Kevin thrilled and pampered her, but Eddie touched a softness that Aurelia had never suspected was there. She sat in the apartment she shared with two other women and looked at the array of gifts Kevin had given her over the past year. The following night, she shooed her roommates away and cooked dinner for Eddie. She dropped every hint she knew how to drop, but all Eddie wanted to talk about was his writing. That was perhaps the largest difference between the two men. Both loved her, but Eddie loved something else just as much: their life together would be a ménage à trois.

  The next afternoon, she surprised Kevin at his office. He left a meeting to welcome her. She could not help wondering whether Eddie would have done that. “Why do you want to marry me?” she asked.

  At first he seemed not to understand. They were in the bullpen, the clerks all watching. “I love you,” Kevin said, hand over his heart, playing to the gallery, but adorably. She remembered Eddie that night at Scarlett’s: We shall be conspicuous. Kevin liked being conspicuous with her.

  “But what do you love about me?”

  “Everything.”

  Their engagement was announced two days later. Kevin wanted to visit her parents in Cleveland to ask formally for her hand, but Aurelia dissuaded him. “They can be kind of difficult,” she said. “I need to handle them myself.”

  “When do I meet them?”

  “At the wedding.”

  Alas, the Treenes were unable to attend: her father took that tumble. Kevin suggested a postponement, but his mother would not hear of it. Neither would Aurelia.

  (III)

  THE HONEYMOON was a six-week European tour. The loving couple stayed in suites at the finest hotels in London, Paris, and Rome, cities she knew only from picture books borrowed from the library. They also visited towns she had never heard of, in Tuscany and the south of France. Kevin knew people everywhere. The hotels treated him like royalty. For a week they were inseparable. Then the strangeness began. Men drew her husband aside for whispered conversations in hotel lobbies, and afterward he would look grim. Envelopes were delivered to their room, and Kevin would shake his head and sulk for hours. Now and then he would kiss her gently and say he had to go out for a while, then vanish into the starry night and not reappear sometimes until morning, cold sober and looking worried. He apologized but never gave account of himself, except to say it was business. Aurie had not been trained for this role. She did not know whether to ignore his transgressions, reproach him, or offer to help. One night, in Paris, Aurelia decided to follow him, but the doorman of the George V took so long to find her a cab that Kevin got away. Only later did it occur to her that the man’s seeming incompetence had been prearranged. In Athens, she managed to grab a cab at a rank, but when her driver realized into which corner of the city her target was vanishing, he refused to take her any farther, and gave her the choice of returning to the hotel or being dumped on the corner with the rest of the whores. Aurelia went back. When Kevin walked into the suite at three in the morning, his wife was prepared to give him a really hard time, but he showed no signs of dishevelment and, later, when their activities gave her the opportunity to inspect her husband’s body, she found no telltale to suggest that he had been with another woman. The next evening, to make amends, Kevin arranged a private tour of the Acropolis after it had been closed to tourists. The guide told them how the entire adult male population of Athens, thousands and thousands of men, used to assemble here to vote on important decisions. For some reason Kevin grew annoyed and distant once more. In the car on the way back to the hotel, he told her that the problem with democracy was that everybody was entitled to a say.

  “Isn’t that what we’re fighting for? So our people will have a say?”

  Her husband’s frown only deepened. “There’s people and there’s people,” he muttered.

  In bed that night, Kevin told his wife he expected her to quit her job. When Aurelia lost her temper with him for the first time in their brief marriage, he softened and backed down. “I only meant you don’t have to work. It’s embarrassing for me. People will think I can’t support my wife.”

  “You’re a Garland,” she shot back. “Nobody will think you can’t support me. They’ll just think I’m odd.”

  They foxed around, finally agreeing that Aurie would return to the Sentinel half-time, assuming it remained open, and only until they had children.

  “When the female brain stops working,” she wrote the next day in a letter to Mona Veazie.

  Their final stop was London, and that was where Kevin left her alone for three days, this time warning her in advance, and explaining patiently, as she threw a poorly aimed hairbrush, that it could not be helped. The staff of the Dorchester would meet her every whim, he said. When she threatened to return to the States, Kevin dropped his eyes.

  “You can do that. The concierge will fix your ticket. But I need you here.”

  “Need me? You’re leaving me alone!”

  “I mean, I need you here. In this suite. Please.” He touched her face. “I’m sorry, honey. I can’t trust anybody else just now.” He kissed her. “After this, it’s over. I promise.”

  He did not say what it was.

  Aurelia stayed, and seethed, shopping recklessly and having the bills sent to the hotel. But she always hurried back, because Kevin had said he needed her in the suite. The mound of parcels mocked her. She had bought more than she could carry home, but she would arrive at their new apartment on Edgecombe Avenue as the most fashionably dressed woman in Harlem.

  At least that was her plan.

  Aurelia had always hated waiting, but waiting alone in a hotel was hell. The suite overlooked Hyde Park. She went for a walk, but everybody else was walking a dog. A couple of gentlemen tipped their caps, but most people ignored her. Back upstairs, she stalked the suite’s three rooms like a madwoman. The furniture was old and heavy. The maids were subservient and never met her eyes. She wondered what they made of her. There were no other Negroes, guests or staff, in the building. She worked the Times crossword, getting better each time. She went sightseeing. She went to the zoo. She went to Westminster. The second day of her husband’s absence was Sunday. Aurelia put on her best jewelry and attended services at Saint Paul’s. Everybody gawked at her. She felt overdressed, but it was better than being underdressed. She wrote a letter to Mona on the hotel stationery. She wrote a column for the Sentinel, datelined London, and had the concierge send it as air freight. She wrote a long letter to her parents, but failed to post it. Instead, she left it atop the desk where anyone might see, and, every now and then, added a line or two. On the third evening, the porter appeared with a large envelope, tightly sealed. Kevin’s name was on the outside. To Aurie’s surprise, she was required to sign for it. She put the envelope on the dresser. The only one he could trust. Well, she would see about that. If Kevin was not back by lunch, she would open it herself.

  Maybe sooner.

  But Kevin was back at the Dorchester by breakfast. He slipped into the suite right behind the waiter. Aurelia leaped to her feet. Her husband’s eyes were red. His clothes were dirty. “They almost didn’t let me in.” He rapped out an order to the waiter, then took his wife’s hands and tried to kiss her, but she turned her face and made him go wash.

  “This envelope came for you,” she said when he returned.

  “Good,” he said, and kissed her. He picked it up and glanced at the flap. “Did you open it?”

  “No.” Kevin looked at her. “I didn’t, honey.” He just kept staring. She thought she would scream. “Where did you go?” she finally asked. “What have you been doing? Can’t you tell me?”

  Kevin sighed and shook his head, his delicate face pinched with exhaustion. “Phil left a mess behind.”

  “Phil Castle?”

  “He did business with my father’s firm.”<
br />
  “In Athens? In Tuscany?”

  Her husband barely heard. He was riffling through the pages from the envelope. “It’s a long story,” Kevin said, and she knew he would never tell it and regretted what he had said already.

  That night, they went to dinner at the home of a baronet, and Aurelia so charmed their host that their hostess made excuses early. In the hansom cab back to the hotel, Aurelia asked her husband how on earth he knew such a man.

  “Dad knows everybody,” he said.

  Aurelia was a little tipsy. “He can’t know everybody,” she said, giggling. “It’s a physical and psychological impossibility.”

  “Everybody,” Kevin repeated, sounding glum. “Well, you’ll see.”

  In bed that night, when she reached for her husband, he turned away. An awkward silence. Then, always feisty, Aurelia asked what was wrong.

  “The honeymoon is over,” he said.

  A beat.

  “Kevin?”

  “Yes, honey?”

  “Is it me?”

  “Don’t be silly.”

  A longer interlude, Aurelia wishing he would at least turn and face her in the darkness. “Did you find it?” She wished her voice would tremble less.

  “Find what?”

  “Whatever you were looking for.”

  “Not yet,” he said, and slept.

  The next day, they embarked for New York aboard the Queen Mary, in the Winston Churchill Suite, second-finest on the ship. Kevin spent the voyage in the telegraph room, exchanging cryptic and very expensive messages with his father.

  Aurelia spent the voyage wondering whom she had married.

  (IV)

  SOMETIMES AURELIA DREAMED of Sister Dorcas, a stocky, somber nun from the school of her youth, who used to warn at least twice weekly that lying was a sin against God’s wonderful gift of speech. Once, the eight-year-old Aurie stole a cookie from another girl’s lunch tray, then lied about it. Dorcas forced her to admit her double sins—stealing and false witness—before the whole class. Aurelia thought she was headed straight to Hell, but when Dorcas sent her to see Sister Immaculata, who was in charge of discipline, the elderly nun, who was said to be from Russia or Australia or one of those places where they spoke with accents, only gave Aurie a scolding and made her memorize a couplet by George Herbert about daring to be true because nothing could need a lie.