‘I can play dumb with anyone,’ Sean said. ‘And I can manage the herd and the farm.’
‘I don’t want to hide in Sydney,’ Ti-Loup protested. ‘And I’m not leaving my dogs.’
‘We can take the dogs with us,’ Cap said.
‘I’d rather take off for the back of beyond – Alice Springs or Channel Country or Tennant Creek or Katherine. I’ve worked all those cattle stations. No one asks questions or ever asks for ID, and if any reporters show up from Sydney or Melbourne, they’d probably get themselves shot.’
‘Please,’ Cap begged. ‘You’ll be invisible in Sydney and the harbour is just one block from my apartment. We can be together until this blows over and you can take the dogs running along the foreshore every day.’ Privately she reminded him: ‘We don’t want anything, we’re not challenging anything, so why would Celise even bother? Let her have what she wants and then she’ll forget we exist.’
Six months in Sydney seemed interminable to Ti-Loup. He called Brendan every day. ‘Sean’s doing okay,’ Brendan assured him. ‘Four calves. Two heifers, two bullocks. Sean will look after the castrating. Of course, with you not here to do the butchering, the Brisbane orders are falling behind. Customers notice the difference.’
When Cap received a very strange FedEx envelope in early October, Ti-Loup made up his mind. ‘I’m going back to the farm,’ he said. ‘I think it’s blown over. And if it hasn’t, then I’ll leave the dogs at the pub and disappear into my safe house until the cameras give up. They won’t get any copy out of me.’
‘Someone anonymous,’ Cap said, ‘has sent me round-trip air tickets to New York and reservations at the Grand Hyatt. Sent to my Sotheby’s office with no explanation. It’s probably a billionaire collector working under the radar, but the trip coincides with the wrapping-up of the trial, so who knows?’
‘Who cares?’ Ti-Loup said. ‘Just don’t be gone long. And come back.’
‘I promise,’ Cap said.
BOOK VI
IDENTITY: A MELODRAMA IN MULTIPLE ACTS
1.
In espionage, as in con games, there are unwritten rules, though both spies and con men have always felt free to break them. Nevertheless, ironically, they are stunned and outraged when others transgress. They are always taken by surprise. They never see penalties coming.
Listen to this.
A man named Marlowe is reading the New York Times over breakfast. Oh, for the Cold War when life was simpler, he reads, when spies and spycatchers played by unwritten rules as formal as the structure of a sonnet. The piece is by foreign correspondent Tim Weiner, who won the Pulitzer for his book on the CIA.
‘I see the Vanderbilt fraud is no longer front-page news,’ Celise says. She is across the table, nibbling at toast. She has another section of the Times – the arts section – tucked under her plate.
The lives of today’s spies are more like free verse, Tim Weiner writes, defined by Robert Frost as playing tennis without a net.
Marlowe reads that the foreign intelligence service of the former USSR is accusing the US of entrapment, of breaking the rules by giving a visa to Vladimir Galkin and then arresting him as soon as he arrived. Galkin is a former KGB spook who had nutted out certain Pentagon secrets and squirrelled them off to Moscow, something the FBI knew very well when they gave him a post Cold War visa. They were waiting when he stepped onto American soil. Entrapment! Russia is outraged. The Americans, they say, have breached the code of behaviour of espionage and Russia is ready to retaliate against current and former agents of the CIA. There was a time, the Russians say, when the unwritten rules were followed. If an American agent was caught in the act in Moscow, he lost diplomatic immunity and was expelled. He was not arrested and shipped to the gulag.
But now? Honour among thieves is no more. Let the ensnarers beware!
‘Have you noticed?’ Celise asks.
‘Sorry. Noticed what?’
‘The claimant has practically dropped out of sight, though I have to say this new scuttlebutt from the butcher in France is going to open up a whole new can of worms.’
‘What scuttlebutt?’
‘FOXNews just aired an interview with the butcher’s son. Through a translator, of course. He has photographic evidence of a murder, he says.’
‘Yes?’
‘Committed in 1960, the very year the gardener’s son vanished. The butcher is willing to swear under oath that the claimant is the gardener’s son and he can prove that the claimant was the killer.’
‘How much did FOX pay him for this statement?’
‘And the gardener’s daughter may have been his accomplice. This’ll bring the story back to page one.’
Like a spent skyrocket, Marlowe thinks, merely one week after the verdict, the trial has smouldered its way right through the paper from front page to demoted back sections like Lifestyles. Minor revelations are still being ferreted and filed but readers are losing interest. That could suddenly change, of course. There will be meteoric spikes and plummeting dips in mass fixations, it always happens.
‘Your absence at the MoMA fundraiser was noticed,’ Celise says. She extends the folded paper to show him a photograph. ‘If you keep abandoning me at gala events, you’ll set tongues wagging. Do you see who I’m with?’ Marlowe makes an indecipherable sound. ‘Gianni Versace,’ Celise says. ‘He’s invited me – well, us – to visit him at his South Beach mansion. I accepted, but I told him I wasn’t sure we could count on you. I told him you’d been rather preoccupied lately. But it’s against the rules, you know, not to show up when we’re sponsors and on the fundraising board.’
Marlowe thinks of asking: Since when did you care about rules?
‘Are you listening to me?’ Celise asks.
‘Gianni Versace,’ Marlowe says, playing back her words in his head. ‘You’ve been invited.’ All the chickens do come home to roost, he thinks, watching her watching him. Eventually. ‘He’s invested with me, did you know?’
‘I didn’t, but he mentioned it, and of course I wasn’t surprised. He asked if there was anything to these rumours he keeps hearing – securities investigations, possible irregularities, that sort of thing. I told him of course not. Jealous rival firms, I said. They propagate smears. But Gianni said he was thinking of pulling some of his money out anyway, spreading the risk.’
‘Always sensible to spread the risk,’ Marlowe says smoothly. ‘But Versace has nothing to complain about. I’ve given him higher returns than he could possibly get anywhere else.’
‘That’s why I thought it was diplomatic to accept. Good for both of us, don’t you think? And if I can coax him into hosting a fundraising gala at his mansion, well … Should I go? Without you, I mean, if you can’t spare the time?’
‘Why not?’ Survival rule number one for spies as for con men is Don’t tip your hand. Keep your cards close to your chest.
Rule number two: Find your target’s Achilles heel.
‘You promise you won’t sulk if you see photos of me and Gianni and some of his guests – I mean the famous ones who aren’t gay – in Vanity Fair?’
‘When are you thinking of going?’
‘Gianni suggested this weekend. Will that be all right?’
Marlowe reaches across the table and takes her hand. He raises it to his lips and kisses her fingers. ‘I will bury myself in work while you’re gone. Go and raise tons of money and tons of attention, my dear.’
Marlowe knows that the place to start is with the Boykins of North Carolina. If his wife’s first husband had been Tom Boykin, a groundsman on the Biltmore Estate, then Marlowe knows very well that there will be many other Boykins – both closely and distantly related to Tom – who are still living in Asheville NC and in Buncombe County and indeed throughout the Carolinas. There will be black Boykins and white Boykins. That is the way it is in the South. There were slaves in Marlowe’s family too. Everyone has slaves in the family tree and the descendants of slaves still carry the name of the master (who was, af
ter all, often enough, the biological patriarch).
Listen to this.
A man named Marlowe flies to Asheville, North Carolina.
He will start with the white Boykins and he will start with the Biltmore Estate, all eight thousand acres of it, all two hundred and fifty rooms in the chateau, because the estate has always kept meticulous records on employees and has also kept remarkably detailed accounts. Thus he is able to follow a trail to the auto body repair shop of Jeremiah Boykin in the township of Sandy Mush, north-west of Asheville and close to the Tennessee line.
‘Tom’s my brother,’ Jeremiah Boykin says. ‘Was.’ There is an odd echo to his voice which booms out from under a car in his workshop and bounces back from the workshop walls. He lies on his back and Marlowe can see only his legs which project crab-like on the concrete floor. The feet begin crab-walking and Jeremiah Boykin rolls himself out from under. His flat wooden platform has swivelling corner castors and as his whole torso becomes visible he executes a couple of full-circle spins, perhaps just for the fun of it, perhaps because he needs the momentum to push himself up. He takes a couple of seconds to regain balance and leans against the side of the car. ‘Back then, when Tom was alive, I was working on Biltmore too, as a blacksmith. Making iron cartwheels with tourists watching. They like to keep the Old World alive at Biltmore. But after what happened to Tom, I quit.’
‘What exactly happened to your brother?’
‘Tractor accident, they said. Personally, I believe she bumped him off.’
‘Celise, you mean?’
‘Celise? Who’s Celise?’
‘Tom’s wife. Your brother was her first husband.’
‘Yeah? Well she wasn’t Celise back then. She was Alice Brownwell. Her mother was Sarah, one of the Biltmore maids.’
‘And you think Alice Brownwell killed your brother?’
‘Not something I’d ever be able to prove and anyway she wouldn’t have dirtied her own hands. But she had this way with men, you know? Strange, really, because she wasn’t attractive, but there was something … She seemed dangerous, and that turns some men on. They trotted after her with their tongues hanging out. Tom sure did. He would have died for her. Well, he did die for her.’
‘How did they meet?’
‘On the estate. We all grew up in Biltmore Village and we all worked on the estate. Our father was in charge of machinery, landscape machinery – you know, mowers, tractors, backhoes – and we lived in a cottage just outside the grounds, close to the gatehouse. The whole village was close to the gatehouse.’
‘And who lived in the village?’
‘Everyone. Gardeners, plumbers, electricians, housemaids. Biltmore Village was built for tourists and staff. Built by the Vanderbilts. Ever been there?’
‘Not for years. But yes, often actually, when I was young. My family’s connected.’
‘With upstairs or downstairs?’
‘Both.’
‘Well then, you should know. We all lived in each other’s pockets. We were all a stone’s throw from the gatehouse. We were always on call.’
‘And everyone in the village worked at Biltmore?’
‘No, not everyone. Some worked as staff in the guesthouses and hotels in Biltmore Village. There were droves of tourists, you know, famous people, New Yorkers, aristocrats from Europe, movie stars. Sarah, Alice’s mother, was a chateau maid not a guesthouse maid and she made sure you knew it. It wasn’t a picnic, being a Biltmore maid. It wasn’t easy work, cleaning and dusting and scrubbing and polishing the silver every single day before the next day’s tourists arrived. My mother was a Biltmore maid but she lived in the village. Worked long hours and came home dead tired, but she did see a lot of famous people and she heard plenty of gossip.’
‘What kind of gossip?’
‘Well, you know, hundreds of rooms and thousands of acres, a lot of hanky-panky could happen. We weren’t supposed to socialise with visitors. If you got caught, you got fired, but there are always ways and means. Sarah set her cap at anyone who might be her ticket out of domestic service. No one knew who Alice’s father was, there were so many candidates. But Sarah told Alice her father was a lord or a prince or some such thing. The details kept changing. Sometimes he came from New York, sometimes London or Paris. No matter how many times Sarah contradicted herself, Alice believed her every time. Sarah was smart enough never to name a name because she had sworn, she said, not to betray a gentleman and because she got money every month for staying silent.
‘Alice always believed she was a cut above everyone else. She might have been a plain Jane, but she knew in her bones she was an aristocrat, she was entitled. Our daddy knew that was bullshit. Alice’s father was an axe man, a lumber man, one of the Biltmore forestry crew. Daddy saw him and Sarah going at it in the sawmill, mid-winter, and he counted nine months from there. Aren’t no famous guests at Biltmore in mid-winter. But what do you know? Alice’s daddy got killed by a tree that fell the wrong way so he wasn’t around to contradict.’
‘How old were Tom and Alice when they married?’
‘Alice was sixteen, Tom was twenty. By twenty-one he was dead. Like mother, like daughter. Alice was cheating before and after the wedding and everyone knew except Tom. His body wasn’t cold in the grave before she took off for New York.’
‘Didn’t that raise eyebrows?’
‘Oh, it sure did. Most of us put two and two together.’
‘What about the local police? Weren’t they suspicious?’
‘They questioned everyone. Alice was serving High Tea to tourists when Tom was killed.’
‘So why do you think she’s responsible for the … you know … tractor accident?’
‘I saw her with one of the mechanics in the machine shop a few days before. He was just a kid, that age when it’s exciting to have sex on a workbench with the smell of machine oil in the air. I wasn’t the only one who saw. One of the other blacksmiths whispered to me, If I were you, I’d warn Tom there’s a raven perched on his shoulder. But what could I do? Plenty of friends had already told Tom she was cheating and he wouldn’t believe them.’
‘So you think the kid in the machine shop …?’
‘My bet is he did something to the brakes on the tractor, favour for favour. But the reason she ran off to New York was because of a one-night stand with a movie star. We heard he wasn’t thrilled to be chased all the way back to the Big Apple and he sent her packing. But can you believe she sued him for seducing a minor? There was an out-of-court settlement. She wouldn’t sell her story to the tabloids if he set her up in the style to which she believed she was entitled. Anyway, that’s what we heard on the grapevine. She was just plain Alice when she left here. Well, Alice Brownwell Boykin, but everyone knew the last names wouldn’t stick. They’d wash off in the shower. She was still Alice to everyone here. So now she’s Celise, gone fancy. I’m willing to bet she landed on her feet and found another sugar daddy very fast. What’s your interest, anyway? Are you writing a book?’
‘I’m the last of her sugar daddies,’ Marlowe says. ‘Third husband. And I think I may be writing a book.’
‘Holy shit! Good luck with that. I’ll lay bets you won’t be her last mark. If I were you, I’d watch my back.’
‘I am watching my back,’ Marlowe says.
‘Do you know who her second husband was?’
‘He was a Vanderbilt,’ Marlowe says.
‘A Vanderbilt! Hah. That figures. Should have seen that coming, I guess. What happened to him?’
‘He died in the saddle. Literally. Horseracing accident. On the hurdles.’
‘Surprise, surprise.’
‘Where’s Sarah now?’
‘Dead and buried.’
‘Natural causes?’ Marlowe asks.
‘We all thought so. No one raised any questions at the time. You might want to talk to Sally-Lee Stapleton. She lives in Asheville. She knew my sister-in-law from when she was still Alice Brownwell, daughter of a Biltmore maid.’
Sally-Lee Stapleton lives in a modest brick bungalow in Asheville. ‘Funny thing,’ she tells Marlowe. ‘We were both born in the chateau itself, Alice and me. Our mothers were housemaids and housemaids still lived in the servants’ quarters back then. We had nice rooms. We both had a free education, a good one, in the Biltmore school and I’ve never stopped being grateful for that. It wasn’t just us white kids. The Vanderbilts were the first family in the South to educate their black domestics’ kids. They built schools for them on the estate.
‘But Alice … she never knew for sure who her father was.’
Sally-Lee proffers for examination a framed photograph on the sideboard: two women, two girl children. ‘This is us,’ she says. ‘These are our mothers. I think we were four or five when that was taken. She destroyed my mother’s life, Alice did, and mine too for a while, and yet I owe her everything. That’s what I think, looking back. I can still see her with her hand on her hip, I can still hear her: Just because this is the way things are doesn’t mean they have to stay this way. We could be Vanderbilts, Sally-Lee. We could be Rockefellers. We could be whatever we want.
‘And she was right,’ Sally-Lee says. ‘If my mom hadn’t been fired, if we hadn’t been turned out of the estate, I would never have gone to community college in Charlotte. I would never have come back to Asheville to teach. I would never have met Anson, my husband. I wouldn’t have three children and one grandchild so far. I’ve had a good life. I’ve been lucky. That’s not what Alice intended but I owe her just the same.’
‘When your mothers were maids and you were children together …?’
‘The rest of us kids called her Alice Malice,’ Sally-Lee says. ‘Or we called her Alicious Malicious. Not to her face, of course. We all knew better than to mess with Alice.’
‘What would happen if you did?’
‘Nothing you could ever pin on her, but things would go missing, not valuable things but things that mattered. For example, one Christmas my mother gave me a crystal necklace I’d been hankering for ever since I saw it in the Sears catalogue. Every night, I used to wrap it up in a handkerchief and put it in the top drawer in my dresser. When Alice came to play, I showed her where I kept it. Every morning I’d take it out and put it on. One morning it wasn’t there. Of course, at first I kept asking myself: Did I put it away last night? Did I take it off before my shower? Did I leave it in the bathroom? Did the clasp break when I was mopping the floor? Did it fall into the bucket of dirty water and get thrown out? Anyway, I never found it again.
The Claimant Page 50
