What do you think?
It won’t hurt your client list, will it, to get a full-colour spread in Vanity Fair?
Don’t forget the fundraiser at MoMA tonight. I’ve arranged a car for you. Be all tuxed up and ready to go at 7.30.
Celise
P.S. A little bird told me that the gardener’s daughter is back in town and at the Grand Hyatt, and has been there for three weeks. Now why would that be? She’s always tried to keep her claws in the countess. Wouldn’t mind betting she’s behind this whole scam.
Be careful.
Marlowe swallows a handful of powerful painkillers, fills his mug with coffee and sinks into his favourite armchair looking out over Central Park. His windows face east. He can see the lake, the boathouse, tourists plying their paddles already. Though he is not someone given to the interpretation of dreams – in fact, he has always despised gullible people who see meaning in dreams – he feels an odd sense of dread.
He is not used to feeling anything at all. He thinks of feelings the way he thinks of clouds or fantasies. They drift. They do not touch him. They have no substance. There is no proof that they exist at all. Other people claim to have them or to observe their effect but he is a non-believer.
He is never anxious. So why does he have this tense sensation of driving a car whose brakes have failed? Even if he were indeed driving a car whose brakes had failed, he could pilot his way out of the spin. He knows this. Just as tightrope walkers are born with their own unique skills, their squirrel genes – they can walk across Niagara on a wire, they can walk from one skyscraper tower to another, hundreds of feet above traffic – so he was born with the ability to remain always and perpetually unscathed. There is no crash from which he cannot steer free. This is something he knows as surely as he knows he is alive. Why then does he feel as though the steering wheel itself is utterly unresponsive, wobbling like a plastic windmill on a fairground stick?
Beyond his windows, floating above the lake in Central Park, is the toothy smile of the Cheshire Cat. ‘Stop smirking,’ Marlowe snaps.
‘Stop pretending you’re the only player who has control,’ the Cheshire Cat smirks back. ‘There are other players and you happen to be up against another Master of the Game. Get used to it.’
‘Do you mean Lilith or do you mean Celise?’ Marlowe asks.
‘That is the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question,’ the Cheshire Cat says, beginning to disappear. First the tip of the long curled tail fades away, then the rest of the tail, then the body, then the ears and the head, then the whiskers, and last of all the smirk full of teeth.
The state Marlowe is in is so far from normal that it interests him. He does believe in intuition and he does trust his gut instincts, which have, after all, made him obscenely rich. They have also made him a valuable conduit of information for which he has been rewarded with greater access to further conduits of otherwise private and even classified information, which have in turn brought him access to ever more massive influxes of fresh blood.
Fresh blood? Fresh blood money.
Dear God, Mrs Malaprop! he reprimands the chattering goblin in his head. Let us please be circumspect and keep to the rules of decorum. We are speaking of cash flow here, a neutral entity where the sole and only moral duty is to the shareholders and the investors and where any unfortunate side effects are merely collateral damage, regrettable of course, though essential to the well-oiled working of the national economic machine.
Is this current abnormal malaise an intuition about his investment business? No. He thinks not. Certainly that is a high-risk game, but he loves high risk. He is a master of any juggling act and will invariably finesse his way out, even though at this particular moment in time he must admit to himself that there is some worrying shakiness in his intricate house of cards. But his whole life has been one glorious gamble. He has always rolled the dice and they have always come up double six. He really could not bear life without that adrenaline rush.
The sense of impending disaster is something outside of all that, but he cannot quite put his finger on what it is.
Probably simply the hangover.
Perhaps the trial?
Perhaps seeing Lilith again? Perhaps her disdain? Perhaps his memory of the way she had withdrawn into herself all those years ago when McVie was first reported Missing in Action? She would not return phone calls. She would not answer the door. He had gone to the Fogg Museum and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and asked to see her and was told she had taken a leave of absence. For how long? he had wanted to know. An extended leave, he was told. How extended? he asked. That depends on the verdict of her doctor, he was told.
A month later, when he went back to the Fogg, she was in her office but acted as though nothing had happened.
‘Where were you?’ he asked.
She said politely: ‘I don’t think I’m required to file reports with you, Lucifer.’
‘Can I take you to dinner?’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘Is this still because of the anti-war demo and the Oyster Bar? Because you thought I’d stood you up?’
‘It’s because I don’t want to go out for dinner.’
‘With me, you mean. Which means you’ve heard rumours about my supposed affair.’
Lilith raised one eyebrow. ‘No, I haven’t heard rumours. They wouldn’t interest me if I had. Do you want me to ask with whom you are rumoured to be having an affair?’
‘Oh please,’ Marlowe said. ‘Disingenuousness doesn’t sit well with your IQ level. The tabloid press has been rife with rumours, so I know you know.’
‘I never read the tabloids but you very much want to be asked,’ Lilith said. ‘Okay. With whom are you rumoured to be having an affair?’
‘With the niece of your countess,’ he said. ‘Or, rather, her niece by marriage. But there’s no truth to it. Billy Vanderbilt and I have become close and I spend weekends with them in the Hamptons. That’s all there is to it. So let me take you to dinner to cheer you up.’
‘Lucifer,’ she said, ‘I’m sure that is kindly intended, but I’ve been on leave for a month. I have a lot of work to catch up on.’
He could not stop himself from saying: ‘But if McVie were asking, you’d find time.’
She said quietly: ‘McVie is no longer able to ask anyone anything. We did not part on good terms at our last meeting. I was angry with him. It’s not an easy thing to live with.’
‘Being angry with someone who enlisted pointlessly?’ Marlowe was thinking that he would love to see her angry, love to see her snarl and bite, love to take her by force. ‘You have to see it as a death wish. Why would you fret about that?’
‘Because the last chance for forgiveness has gone,’ she said. ‘It’s like a terminal illness, a final quarrel with someone you love who’s been killed.’
‘Someone you love.’ Marlowe played the words back with a subtle change of tone.
‘Sneering won’t change things, Lucifer.’
‘Okay, so it won’t change things. You still have to get on with your life.’
‘Do I? Why?’
‘Because otherwise you wallow in self-pity. Come on, I’m insisting. Dinner.’
‘Thank you, but no. I’d prefer to wallow. I’m trying to find a way to forgive myself.’
Was she telling the truth then? Is she telling it now?
Did she really not know who had sent her air tickets and arranged a hotel reservation? He knows he himself did not do it. Did anyone? Really, what does he know? What does anyone know? He himself has told thousands of lies, yet people instinctively trust him. Is it possible that Lilith is simply better at the game than he is?
Is she one of the truly great Masters of the Game?
Everyone trusts him, and yet Lilith does not, which is a challenge he cannot let go. He did not send her a prepaid round-trip Sydney–New York air ticket. He did not make a reservation for her at the Grand Hyatt on East 42nd. He did not send her a message re an Oyster Bar re
ndezvous, specific date, specific time.
Someone did send him – Marlowe – a message about a rendezvous at the Oyster Bar, same specific date, same time, quite specific about the woman he would find there.
What proof does he have that Lilith did not pay for her own airfare, did not make her own reservation, did not herself send him the message about the Oyster Bar? What proof does he have that she is not scripting herself into her own melodrama of love blasted to bloody bits in Vietnam? She will deserve at least one whole chapter in his manuscript of Masters of the Game. What proof does he have that she is not the mastermind behind the fraudulent claimant and that she has yet to play the ace up her sleeve?
Actually, he has a sort of proof: the sheer ineptness of the whole scheme. Lilith, if she were the architect, would surely have done it better.
If Lilith is not playing games with him, if she is not out-gaming him, there is only one other person who could have known where she would be staying, only one other person who could have coordinated meeting times, could have sent the Oyster Bar invitation to Marlowe by FedEx, and could have known he would take the bait. Head throbbing, Marlowe makes a few phone calls. He is well connected to multiple data nodes and has direct access.
He has one simple question: Who is the executor of the estate of the Vanderbilt widow?
In the late summer of 1968, a man named Marlowe is driving south on Interstate 95 to what is planned as a peaceful demonstration in New York. He has a camera and intends to take hundreds of pictures. These will be sent to appropriate authorities and kept on file, an activity he considers a serious moral obligation. He knows that many of the demonstrators will be naive though genuine pacifists and idealists. Others will not be.
Lilith is in the passenger seat and Marlowe has reserved a room at the Grand Hyatt for their overnight stay in Manhattan. They left Boston at eight in the morning and they expect to be in Manhattan in time for lunch. Marlowe keeps giving his passenger sidelong glances. Her window is open, her hair streaming and flapping like a flag. She appears luminous, excited by something: the demonstration? the prospect of their affair? It is a hot summer day, the atmosphere steamy, everything loose and easy. Marlowe has to force himself not to take the first exit after they cross into Connecticut. He could drive deep into the state forest that hugs the Atlantic shore. There will be curtains of conifers, oaks and maples on all sides and he could simply press the button that turns the front seats into a bed.
Better not to rush things, perhaps.
‘Can I ask a favour?’ she says. ‘Before the demo, could you drop me off at Fifth and East 72nd? I told you I’d be visiting family. To be perfectly honest, that’s why I accepted your offer.’
‘Why don’t I come with you?’ he says. ‘I’d like to meet your family.’
‘Oh. Well, they’re not exactly family, strictly speaking, but we go back a long way. To childhood, in fact. I’d prefer to have time alone.’
Marlowe is recalling, with extreme and prurient interest, the strangely obsessive conversations he has heard and reheard, the fragments of past lives, the staccato glimpses of odd personal histories, perhaps the pure inventions of Lilith and McVie, perhaps his own private embroidery of what he thinks he remembers he has heard.
‘How about you just introduce me?’ he suggests. ‘And then I’ll take off.’
‘But why?’
Of course, he is mightily tempted to say: Because I’ve nailed McVie as a Vanderbilt and I’m curious about his family and your ‘almost family’ in New York. But he says, ‘Because you matter to me, you know, and therefore your friends matter.’
‘Let me think about it,’ she says.
Somewhere in Connecticut – his memory is on the bridge across the Housatonic River – she says: ‘Well, look, the two families I’ll be visiting are French so they’re not comfortable meeting strangers the way Americans are. They’re not unfriendly, not at all – well, they wouldn’t seem unfriendly to anyone European – but they’d just find it odd … They would find it very impolite and intrusive of me to show up with someone they’ve never met.’
‘Okay,’ Marlowe says. ‘I understand. Look, it’ll be impossible even to pause on Fifth Avenue except for stoplights, so why don’t I just park in the underground lot at the Metropolitan Museum and we’ll leave the car there for the day.’
‘Okay,’ she says, relieved. ‘Okay. That’s a great idea. Thanks.’
‘And then let’s meet at the Met again,’ he says, ‘at, say, three p.m., in time for the demo.’
‘Well,’ Lilith says, ‘I’ll have lunch with my friends, so I can’t say for sure when I’ll be free. How about we leave that open and just make our separate ways to Central Park?’
‘In that case,’ he says, ‘in case we don’t connect at the demo, let’s meet at the Oyster Bar in Grand Central at six.’
‘Okay,’ she says. ‘Yes. Good idea. Because I’m not quite sure I’ll be willing to leave my friends in time for the demo.’
He raises his eyebrows. ‘What happened to your anti-war ideals?’
‘They’re intact. But I don’t think the end of the war hangs on my absence from any one demo.’
‘Okay. But I can count on the Oyster Bar at six?’
‘Well, I’ll certainly try …’ She hesitates. ‘Yes, okay, that’s a promise. I do owe you for the ride down. I couldn’t have afforded this visit without it.’
‘My pleasure. My gift. And not the only one, either, because I’ve booked a room for us at the Grand Hyatt. More or less next door to the Oyster Bar.’
Marlowe is startled by how startled Lilith is. ‘Oh,’ she says. ‘Uh … I’m sorry. But there’s been a terrible misunderstanding. I’ll be staying with my friends overnight.’
‘Ah. Well. Yes. A small misunderstanding. But are we still on for the Oyster Bar?’
‘Sure,’ Lilith says. ‘Of course. My treat, to make up for the misunderstanding.’
‘If you couldn’t afford the trip down, you can’t pick up the tab at the Oyster Bar. And it’s still my pleasure.’
When the car is safely stowed, Marlowe walks her to a high-rise on Fifth Avenue. ‘First call,’ Lilith says. ‘I’ll be here for a while. My other friends live on Madison, a few blocks away.’
‘You won’t all get together in one place?’
‘Oh no!’ Lilith cannot quite suppress a laugh. ‘No. That wouldn’t work. My friends come from two very different worlds, although they have met. In fact, they have quite cordial relations, but in France the boundary lines are very distinct and you can’t transgress.’
‘Apparently you can.’
‘That’s because I don’t count. I’m like stealth aircraft; I don’t show up on the radar.’
‘Isn’t this where the Vanderbilts have a penthouse?’ he asks.
‘How do you know that?’
‘The Vanderbilt holdings aren’t exactly a secret,’ he says. ‘You can look them up in any guidebook.’ He does not tell her that he has already nailed McVie as a Vanderbilt. He does not tell her that he and Vanderbilt/McVie overlapped at the same prep school in Massachusetts. ‘So you know the Vanderbilts?’
Lilith is visibly nervous. ‘Actually,’ she says, ‘Mrs Vanderbilt is a French countess from the village where I grew up. I’ve known her since I was a child. She’s very formal, but I’m fond of her and she’s fond of me and I have an obligation to pay my respects. She’s only just come back to New York. She spent most of her life in France.’
‘What about Mr Vanderbilt? Will he be here?’
‘I don’t think so. He has a house in the Hamptons. And, uh, I think he and Lady Isabelle prefer to live apart.’
Marlowe is immensely tempted to say, for the sheer thrill of shocking her: ‘And the countess is McVie’s mother, right?’ But he says only, ‘I really would love to meet a French countess.’
‘I just don’t think –’
‘You could introduce me and say I’ve driven you down from Boston and then I’d leave.’
> ‘But why? Why would you want to meet her?’
‘Put it down to crass American curiosity about genuine blue-blood aristocrats. I understand she’s a descendant of Louis XIV. Wrong side of the sheets, of course.’
‘Yes, she is. But how do you know that?’
‘I think you don’t understand the role of the Vanderbilts in American history, or realise just how much everyone knows about them. We own them, you know, the way we own Jackie Kennedy. I don’t think you understand that.’
‘Probably not,’ Lilith sighs. ‘I suppose I owe you. For the drive down, I mean. But I should warn you that the countess will not be amused. She will be gracious in a very formal way, but believe me, she will not be pleased to meet you. She will not like you. And she is going to consider this very bad behaviour on my part. I wish you wouldn’t ask this of me.’
‘Objection overruled.’
Lilith gives him a long puzzled look.
He smiles disarmingly. ‘When I really want something, I get it. Always.’ He shrugs. ‘Brought up to expect I’m entitled, I guess. It’s like the law of gravity. I get what I want. That’s simply the way things are.’
‘Really?’ Lilith raises one eyebrow. She laughs. ‘If that’s what you believe, I’d say beware of what you want.’
‘A dare always whets my appetite. Beware yourself. If you won’t introduce me, your pumpkin coach will disappear and you’ll have to take a Greyhound bus back to Boston.’
‘I’ve just decided I’ll do that anyway,’ she says.
‘Oh, come on. Can’t you take a joke? All I’m asking for is a sighting of a French countess and a one-minute introduction.’
The Claimant Page 11
