Be nervous, the grin says as it vanishes.
Marlowe is nervous.
But two can play this game, he thinks. He knows it is too late to save his kingdom of smoke. The die is cast, the vault empty, but he can take Celise down before he goes and he can save Lilith. One day, perhaps, Lilith will thank him. As to Vanderbilt or McVie or whoever he really is, Marlowe is indifferent, but it’s clear that Celise is convinced that McLew is the real McCoy, the real Vanderbilt thing, and Celise doesn’t leave any loose ends.
One day, perhaps, Lilith will understand what Marlowe has done for her, done for them, what he has given up.
He begins drafting and sending out from his laptop anonymous tips to contacts who will pass the message on. He knows the tabloids and FOXNews will gorge on these snippets as alligators gorge on rotten meat.
UNCONFIRMED RUMORS SUGGEST POLICE IN NORTH CAROLINA ARE REINVESTIGATING COLD CASE. REPORTED ACCIDENT AT BILTMORE MAY HAVE BEEN MURDER.
DID CELISE VANDERBILT HIRE HIT MEN?
REAL TRUTH ABOUT SOCIETY HOSTESS CELISE VANDERBILT: MOTHER WAS PROMISCUOUS HOUSEMAID, FATHER AN UNKNOWN ONE-NIGHT STAND.
UNCONFIRMED SOURCES REVEAL THAT A TROVE OF INCRIMINATING CORRESPONDENCE BETWEEN CELISE VANDERBILT AND HER LAWYERS HAS BEEN MADE AVAILABLE TO THE PRESS BY A RELIABLE ANONYMOUS SOURCE …
EVIDENCE OF LAVISH BRIBES PAID OUT TO GENERATE FALSE STATEMENTS TO PRESS AND COURTS.
LEGAL FIRM WORKING FOR CELISE VANDERBILT NOTORIOUS FOR MAFIA CONNECTIONS …
Marlowe pours himself one last mini-bottle of Scotch. He dreams of tomorrow’s headlines. He dreams of the late breaking news on FOX and is falling asleep with a smile on his face when his bedside telephone rings. ‘Package delivery for you,’ the receptionist on the front desk says.
‘Give me a few minutes,’ Marlowe says. He stuffs things back into his overnight bag and heads for the parking lot. He leaves Asheville behind him, but November snow and black ice have slicked the roads. He is nervous. He brakes going into a curve but brakes cautiously, and although he knows that the brakes have been cut he steers into a snowbank as deep and soft as a feather pillow.
The last thing he sees before the ambulance arrives is the explosion at the Holiday Inn and the smile of the Cheshire Cat.
EPILOGUE
CHRISTOPHER FARM
On the five-hour flight across the country from New York, Cap is fixated on the front page of the New York Post, which leers at her from the seat pocket of the woman in the seat next to hers. Unsolved murder from 1960 … Vanderbilt claimant may be killer … Female accomplice … subversive activity … Interpol alerted … Arrests expected in Australia …
Cap has decided what she will do. At Los Angeles, she will make a phone call to Marie-Claire in St Gilles and she will call the Mother Superior at the convent in Tours. She will ask them to contact the police. She will say she is willing to give sworn testimony that she witnessed a bloody fight in the woods of St Gilles in 1960. The fight was over Chantal Monsard, the butcher’s daughter. She saw her own brother kill his rival from Tours, a man named Olivier, and she saw Michel Monsard, son of the butcher, kill her brother. When she returned with her father, the bodies had disappeared. She will ask that the gendarmerie from Tours interrogate the Monsard family and search for evidence of skeletal remains in the woods and in the butcher’s establishment. If bones are found, DNA can identify the dead.
Cap calculates the time-zone change in France. She will not be able to make the call from Los Angeles because in France it will be somewhere between midnight and dawn. She will have to wait until Sydney.
She does not dare to leave the LAX transit lounge in spite of the long weary wait – four hours – and in spite of being on East Coast body-clock time. If she has to go through security again, the risk of being detained on some pretext is too high. Nervously, she scans the magazine and newspaper stands in the transit lounge. The front pages of two tabloids display the same stabbed body, the same headlines. Cap watches as various people, their wheeled carry-on baggage parked at their ankles, pick up the papers and thumb through them and put them back. Their eyes have the glazed airport look of all travellers with long layovers. They are bored. They glance at corpse and ‘claimant’ and turn the page. This is old news. If you have seen an image of one stabbed body, you have seen them all.
She moves to her gate for the flight to Sydney. She is subjected to FOXNews, hardwired into every airport-lounge ceiling.
‘We have late-breaking news,’ an announcer says. ‘There has been a surprising twist, an astounding U-turn, in the Vanderbilt case.’ The screen image splits: announcer on the left half, Celise Vanderbilt on the right. Cap is riveted. ‘A trove of legal documents and photographs has been anonymously delivered to this channel. It seems that society hostess Celise Vanderbilt has been paying a high-priced legal firm to disseminate false information to the press. The firm of Willson Williams and Walter is notorious for its service to organised crime. The documents suggest that Ms Vanderbilt may have bribed and murdered her way into the highest social circles … Police investigations are underway and Ms Vanderbilt has gone into hiding.’
What a difference five hours can make! Cap marvels, travelling from dread to delirious disbelief at the speed of a penthouse elevator whose cable has snapped. Down, down, down, she drops into peaceful exhausted sleep and has to be shaken awake when her flight is called. Before she sinks back into sleep on the fifteen-hour flight to Sydney she wonders: but how was the evidence that damned Celise found? Who turned it in?
At Sydney airport, after clearing customs and immigration, she calls Brendan at the Dayboro pub. She has to leave a message on the answering machine. ‘Brendan, it’s Cap. I’m in Sydney. I haven’t even got to the domestic terminal yet, but I’ll take the first flight to Brisbane and rent a car. You can expect me in a few more hours. Get a message out to Ty-Lew that I’m on my way. And tell him, there’s nothing to worry about. It’s all over except for the shouting and the party. No one is going to bother him again.’
Cap parks under the green awning of the Moreton Bay fig. She takes the veranda steps two at a time. At several tables on the veranda, farmhands are having lunch and Cap waves to them and they wave back. In the murk of the bar she can see a few shapes huddled over their beers, four men at the pool table. She can barely see Brendan behind the bar. She is still sunblind, but she says to him: ‘Come out from behind there, Brendan, so I can hug you. Did you get my message? Is he on his way?’
‘Cap,’ Brendan says. ‘Cap, I have something to tell you. I have a letter for you.’
‘A letter?’
‘Here, have a drink first. Drink’s on the house.’
‘Is he on his way?’
‘You better read the letter.’
The letter, addressed simply to Cap in Ti-Loup’s handwriting, is in a sealed envelope. ‘Got a knife, Brendan, so I can slit this open?’
‘Before you read it, Cap … You gotta understand the place has been swarming with reporters, cameras, telescope lenses, tabloids throwing money around. He couldn’t stand it, Cap. He just couldn’t stand it. He’s gone.’
‘Gone? Gone where?’
‘Who knows? Any place where he can’t be found.’
‘Until when?’
‘That’s the question, isn’t it?’ Brendan says.
Cap sits on the veranda of Christopher Farm, looking up at the Southern Cross. The night is warm. She can hear the murmuring of the herd down by the river. Somewhere, she knows, perhaps in Queensland, perhaps in the Northern Territory, perhaps somewhere along the Birdsville Track, Ti-Loup is looking up at those stars, those same stars.
The note in the envelope says only:
Dearest Cap, Sorry about this. I’ll be back. Love, Ti-Loup.
She beams a message up to the Southern Cross. She believes it will be ricocheted back to where he is, wherever he is. She imagines him lying in his sleeping bag under the splendid sky with campfire embers and billy tea at his side. Sweet dreams, Ti-Loup, sh
e says. You have proved you are not who you are. I will be waiting here when you get back.
Author’s Note
The Claimant: Behind the Gates
I first heard of the Tichborne Claimant in a colloquium on Victorian Literature at an academic conference in the United States. One of the scholarly papers focused on England’s late nineteenth-century epidemic of anxiety about fraud: financial fraud, speculative stock-market fraud on a Bernie Madoff scale, the adulteration of food, the watering of milk, art forgery, overseas real-estate swindles, cunning imposters with the theft of more than identity in mind. It was in this final category that the Tichborne Claimant showed up. I was stunned to realise that in spite of having taken an undergraduate course in Australian History at the University of Queensland about a century ago, I had never even heard of the butcher from rural New South Wales who might or might not have been heir to an English title and an English estate.
I promptly discovered that a finely written and exceptionally well researched study of the Tichborne affair had been published by Text in Melbourne in 2002 and quickly obtained a copy of Robyn Annear’s The Man Who Lost Himself: The Unbelievable Story of the Tichborne Claimant.
All my novels begin with the collision of a visual image and an intellectual/moral riddle that I feel a compulsion to solve or explore. Obviously the riddle was this actual historical conundrum, a cause célèbre and a tabloid sensation in both England and Australia in the closing decades of the nineteenth century. ‘The Case of the Tichborne Claimant’ – so labelled by both the press and the courts – took years to wind through the legal labyrinth in a manner reminiscent of Dickens’s Jarndyce v Jarndyce. The colliding visual image, made so graphically apparent to me in Robyn Annear’s book, was of a sad little waif of a boy half-suffocated by his French mother – she was bewitchingly beautiful, of aristocratic descent, neurotically and hyper-devoutly Catholic – and equally intimidated by his coldly distant English father, lord of large estates, an earl who despised his effeminate son.
The boy’s parents separated soon after his birth. His mother returned to France where little Roger Tichborne spent his wretchedly controlled and confined childhood. His father yanked him out of the maternal cocoon when he reached puberty and packed him off to a British boarding school to make a man of him. The frail boy, whose English always sounded foreign and French, was bullied mercilessly and ran away to sea as soon as he could escape from both parents. His ship sank off the coast of Brazil in 1854 but there were rumours that some survivors had been picked up by an Australian vessel and had made their way to Melbourne.
At this point the desperate grief of the mother (the boy was her only child), speculation, rumour, and the scent of financial advantage for hangers-on took over. As the Melbourne Argus advertised:
A handsome reward will be given to any person who can furnish such information as will discover the fate of Roger Charles Tichborne. He sailed from Rio Janeiro on the 20th of April 1854 in the ship La Bella, and has never been heard of since, but a report reached England to the effect that a portion of the crew and passengers of a vessel of that name was picked up by a vessel bound to Australia, Melbourne it is believed. It is not known whether the said Roger Charles Tichborne was among the drowned or saved. He would at the present time be about thirty-two years of age, is of a delicate constitution, rather tall, with very light brown hair, and blue eyes. Mr. Tichborne is the son of Sir James Tichborne, now deceased, and is heir to all his estates.
Roger Tichborne, whose first language was French and who was ‘of a delicate constitution’ could hardly have been more unlike the claimant, an obese shambling hulk of a man who apparently could remember no French at all, and yet his devoted mother (now returned as dowager to the Tichborne estate in England) recognised him instantly. No other member of the Tichborne family (all of whom had a financial interest in the inheritance) saw anything but an oafish swindler. After the death of Lady Tichborne, the claimant lost his only powerful ally and witness in the courts. He was found to be a fraud and was sentenced to prison, and yet there remains a sliver of doubt.
For some time after that first Australian advertisement and before he sailed for England, the claimant made no attempt to claim anything and resisted the urges of others who believed they detected his true origins and who sniffed financial advantage. (It was known, for example, that the butcher was originally from England, but had reached Australia via Brazil.) Australian supporters (outraged at imperialist British snobbery which sneered at the idea of an Australian butcher being a member of the House of Lords) raised the money to send him to London. There, the claimant’s behavior was such that either he was ludicrously and conspicuously not descended from British aristocracy or – as a psychiatrist might posit – he was dedicated to proving that he was not who he was. Perhaps he was a shape-shifter who had never wanted to be himself.
Thus the riddle presented itself to me: What if the claimant really were the heir but didn’t want to be and wanted to prove he was not? This is a question that should, I hope, eventually have a definitive DNA answer. The claimant did have children. There was a Tichborne cousin and her descendants who did inherit the estate. I do hope that some dedicated investigative historian will gather enough DNA material to confirm or contradict the legal verdict.
From the outset, I knew I had zero interest in writing a historical novel. For one thing, neither Roger Charles Tichborne nor the claimant (whether or not he was the heir) was sufficiently interesting or intelligent to engage me. I needed fictional substitutes. I also wanted to situate the issue of someone in flight from himself in a contemporary context, and at this point a here-and-now manifestation miraculously fell into my lap. Oddly enough, it was weirdly close to home – that is, to my present place of residence – and involves a young woman who is currently serving time in a South Carolina prison. The case of ‘The Girl Who Conned the Ivy League’ seems strangely reminiscent of the case of the Tichborne Claimant. Here was the true story of an ‘ordinary girl’ (Esther Reed, born in rural Montana, the youngest of nine children from her mother’s three marriages) who conned her way into the Ivy League (as Brooke Henson, born in South Carolina, missing since 1999 and presumed murdered) and lived on the run for eight years by serially assuming the identities of missing people. Esther Reed, in flight from her own unhappy childhood, had no monetary or harmful intentions, though harm to others did ensue and she was caught and convicted in February 2009.
In the same months, the American press was saturated with details of another kind of fraud of gargantuan proportions and another instance of a bifurcated self. In December 2008, Bernie Madoff, long considered the most successful investment broker of all time, was exposed as the greatest con man of all time, a devious and manipulative genius who devised a Ponzi scheme that fleeced the rich and famous, that fleeced his own relatives and friends and deceived even his own sons. Bernie Madoff never changed his name but he had two selves, a public one and a profoundly encrypted one. He was split down the middle. He was a chameleon, a dissembler, a charmer whose personality changed as often as light and shadow change on water.
By this time, my thinking about the novel had morphed into a meditation on the slippery nature of identity and the reasons for which people change their names or their identities or their personalities. These days, when identity theft is rampant and is a constant threat to our financial safety and our privacy, the reasons for shape-shifting would appear to be overwhelmingly criminal in intention.
This very month, August 2013, brought fresh news of a shape-shifter who initially seemed innocent but turned out to be sinister:
A chameleon of a con man who posed as a Rockefeller heir to insinuate himself into society circles was sentenced Thursday to 27 years to life for murdering his landlady’s son in 1985.
Christian Gerhartsreiter – a German national unmasked as a fraud after kidnapping his own daughter in 2008 – was convicted in April of killing John Sohus, 27, of San Marino, Calif., and burying him in the backyard
.
Gerhartsreiter, 52, lived in the Sohus family’s guest house in the 1980s. When they went missing, so did he, and Sohus’ bones weren’t found until 1994. By then, Gerhartsreiter had created a new identity and life for himself. Posing as ‘Clark Rockefeller’, an heir to the nation’s most gilded dynasty, he married a business executive in 1995, had a child and befriended the wealthy and well-connected. When the marriage soured and his wife realized he was a fake, he snatched their 7-year-old daughter and took off for six days, sparking a manhunt that ended with his capture. Sentenced to five years for the abduction, he was in prison when authorities who decided to re-examine his link to the Sohus family charged him with murder.
(Tracy Connor, NBC News, August 2013)
Gerhartsreiter has not been the only fake Rockefeller. In the 1990s, a con artist who claimed to be a French member of the Rockefeller family, Christophe Thierry Rocancourt, scammed his way through three countries (France, USA, Canada) and made millions by milking those all too willing to bootlick the apparently rich and aristocratically linked.
Almost everyone knows of a relatively benign manifestation of the imposter from the movie Six Degrees of Separation, in which an African-American con artist, David Hampton, assumed the identity of Sidney Poitier’s son and suddenly gained access to the homes of the rich and famous. In 1983, he was arrested, convicted of fraud and imprisoned.
A century earlier, the putative illegitimate daughter of Andrew Carnegie (she was born Elizabeth Bigley) was skimming millions from the gullible rich with faked promissory notes bearing what appeared to be Carnegie’s signature. The American press and the wealthy American social set were entranced. The information about the secret sin of the famously strait-laced Andrew Carnegie leaked to the financial markets and banks rushed to offer deals. For the next eight years Carnegie’s ‘illegitimate daughter’ obtained loans that totaled somewhere close to twenty million dollars. When her scam was exposed, she was arrested and the trial was a tabloid sensation. She died in jail.
The Claimant Page 52
