by Inconnu(e)
Copyright © 1979 by John Crosby
To Anne and Arnold
BOOK ONE
Windletop
Among the shards of rumor and hysteria, there were a thousand disagreements. The Earl of Canossa, a beautiful young man of twenty-six, caught the first bullet. Some said His Lordship, dressed in black velvet, was dancing the gallop with feline self-absorption when the .375 caliber (Russian make of inferior quality) tore into his throat sending a thin stream of hot scarlet all over the white lace of his shirtfront. Splashes of scarlet encarnadined the Princess Paola de Bruxelles, a lovely and passionate girl of twenty-two, the Earl’s companion in the dance, herself shot a few moments later through her lovely breasts (her most stunning feature) which had been perhaps too conspicuously displayed in black chiffon. The burst of machine pistol fire almost cut her in two. This was only one version of the beginning.
Each survivor had a different encapsulation of the opening moments in this terrible ballet, each adding his little extra touch to the larger picture, illuminating the tragedy like a flashing strobe light with little bits of personally observed detail. “Jessica de Angelis plunged headlong into the pâté de foie gras which had been carved into the shape of a swan,” said Jeremy Wild, the distinguished author and playwright, as quoted the next day on the front page of The New York Times. He was speaking of the Duchess de Angelis, known as the Flying Duchess; she was pulled from the pâté by the police, who found—after they’d wiped her off—an expression of duchessy disdain imprinted on her dead features. So said The Daily News who got it from a police sergeant.
Twenty-six dead. Everyone agreed on that, but there was considerable initial disagreement about how many of these were the terrorists. These days, snapped Joie de Printemps, the gossip columnist, it was difficult to tell the duchesses from the terrorists, the way people dressed. The columnist was especially bitchy because she had NOT been invited to the party and she was furious. Joie de Printemps was actively wooed to attend many big parties, but she had not reached the eminence of being invited to the Principessa di Castiglione’s bash which had been termed (by every other social columnist except Joie de Printemps) The Party of The Year.
None of this party of the year clamor was the Principessa’s doing. She was known to loathe publicity and never spoke to journalists. In light of this, it was considered odd and even sinister that two journalists, both from The New York Times, were actually at the party. One was Jane Atchison, of the Times society staff, who was one of the twenty-six dead. The other was Alvin Feinberg, an assistant foreign editor of the Times, and everyone was asking what on earth a foreign editor was doing at so glittering and so trivial a function as The Party of The Year.
Feinberg, a veteran of twelve wars, including Indochina before it was called Vietnam, had survived because he had combat sense enough to keep his head down until the firing stopped. When he got back to the Times city room, covered with the blood of others, he was acclaimed as a hero by his fellow journalists, not because he had survived the affray but because he had managed to crash the party in the first place. He refused to say how.
The Times editorial the next day was superbly unequivocal. Something Should Be Done. “How did the terrorists get into the best-guarded apartment building in New York? Besides its elaborate security apparatus, which had been designed by Israeli experts to prevent just this kind of thing, the Windletop was guarded last night by an extra detail of forty New York patrolmen. It had been reliably reported that both the CIA and the FBI had advance word that the Red Wind would attempt a coup. Why wasn’t something done about it? How did the Red Wind get into the building, and how did it get out?”
Questions everyone was asking. Because he had been on the scene and because he’d known the Principessa many years earlier, Feinberg’s was easily the best newspaper recital of them all, but even his story was full of holes, as Feinberg was first to admit.
“Only Cassidy knows the whole story,” said Feinberg to his editors, “and he won’t tell.”
• 1 •
Cassidy approached through the park, skirting the lower lake where ducks swam and children whooped. On the other side of the lake was the bronze horse and naked rider by Horloge, and there the Windletop sprang into his view. Fifty-five stories of black glass—severe, funereal, ultra-modern—surrounding a stone fortress that had been built originally in the 1920s. Sunshine splashing off the polished surface like sparks.
Impregnable. Cassidy bared his yellow teeth in a ferocity of a grin. My ass. Impregnable was a mockery of a word. Unmusical. Almost unsayable. Calling anything impregnable was simply an invitation to pregnate it. Cassidy stood chewing his lip, hands thrust deep in the worn black coat, looking at the Windletop’s topmost story, his mind ablaze with imagery.
The walls at Acre had been 100 feet high. Impregnable. Like the Maginot Line. The Saracens had stormed Acre, blue and gold pennants flying in the air, the great ram horns sounding—killed every Christian knight in the city, sold the women and children into slavery—and that had ended the thing after 300 years.
Cassidy crossed Fifth Avenue, scowling.
“He’s crossing,” reported Security 1 on the Telefax. “A peeper.”
Peepers were not considered to be menaces. Just nuisances. Everyone wanted to get into the Windletop. Just to say they’d done it.
Security 1 resumed his post at second floor control which had a clear sweep of Fifth Avenue from north to south.
“A scarecrow,” observed Security 2, watching Cassidy through the black glass which rose from floor to ceiling, imprisoning the warmth. Impermeable to outside stares. Or bullets.
“Whom do you wish to see?” asked the Front in his even-tempered British voice which harbored neither welcome nor hostility. The Front stood almost eight feet tall if you counted his immense, cockaded top hat, and you could hardly fail to count it since it loomed over intruders like a portcullis.
He stood under the canopy, barring the way. Visitors had to explain themselves to the Front before they were admitted even to the lobby.
“Princess di Castiglione,” barked Cassidy through yellow teeth.
The great name bounced off the doorman as if unspoken. He stared at Cassidy, sizing him up. That overcoat must be twenty years old. Spotless but threadbare. The man thin as a blade. Bony face, fierce and watchful.
“The Principessa di Castiglione,” murmured the Front, putting her in the right country. (The Windletop had a Principessa, two plain Princesses, and one Princesse—highest ranking of all—from France.)
“Whom shall I say is calling?”
“Cassidy. Professor Cassidy.”
Much good it did. The Front picked up the Telefax and relayed the title as if it were a curse.
“A Professor Cassidy to see the Principessa.”
“Not a Professor Cassidy,” Cassidy snarled. “The Professor Cassidy. The academic world does not teem with Professor Cassidys. There’s only one, my good man, and I am himself in person.”
“Indeed,” murmured the Front. He had been imported from England especially for his attitude and impassivity, but also because he could say “indeed” as if he meant it.
Cassidy was inspecting the setup professionally. He was still outside, standing next to bronze doors probably backed by steel. You couldn’t even look in to case the place. When the click came, opening the bronze door, Cassidy and the Front entered a small vestibule shielded from the lobby by plate glass Cassidy guessed was at least four inches thick, proof against anything up to .50 caliber. The terrorists hadn’t got quite to .50 caliber yet.
Trapped in the vestibule between the bronze outside doors and plate glass inside, Cassidy was inspected by a man called the Desk, a solemn, pince-nezed fellow surrounded by all the latest wiza
rdry—audio-visuals, teledynes, Comptoflax—that would be outdated in five years by later wizardry. The desk itself was of black marble and stood in an acre of mirrored, marbled carpeted lobby.
“If you’d just state your name again, for the Voice Printer,” said the Front politely.
“Professor Cassidy,” barked Cassidy, “to see the Principessa di Castiglione.”
The plate glass swung open, and the Front marched Cassidy past the Desk to the elevator which was oval like the President’s Office, wainscoted with curved mirrors on its rear walls, and curved red plush seats for those too weary to stand during the elevator ride.
“The Principessa is on the forty-ninth,” said the Front and pushed the proper button, as if Cassidy might get it wrong. He withdrew. The door closed and Cassidy shot up alone, staring at himself resentfully in the curved mirror. A face to frighten horses, he was thinking.
There was no corridor. The elevator sprang open at the forty-ninth floor, directly into the Principessa’s apartment.
That will have to be changed, thought Cassidy.
The butler was Italian, ivoried with age, a man of immense courtesy, deep set, wide-sad eyes, wearing blue and yellow livery with authority. He was standing—clearly forewarned and waiting—just inside a small exquisite entrance hall, oval like the elevator, with fuchsia walls and a frescoed ceiling in which pink angels in blue robes blew gold trumpets.
The butler inclined his head in not quite a bow, his hands clasped before his liveried chest. “The Principessa is on the telephone,” he said, giving the statement importance, as Europeans do to small matters. “I think you had better wait in the Conservatory.”
This statement invited Cassidy’s compliance. He was not being told where he must go; he was being asked if this were agreeable.
They proceeded down a huge corridor (wide enough, Cassidy noted, to house his entire apartment), their heels clanging sharply on black and white marble floors, past the library (books to the ceiling, leather bound, looking unread and unreadable), the sitting room (vast and huge with tapestries; who had tapestries any more?), a dining room of stately dimensions with crystal sconces set in walls of painted red and gold wood. The corridor inside was hung with paintings of Italian aristocrats and their hunting dogs standing on idealized landscapes that clearly showed the palazzo in the background, Flemish paintings of serving girls bearing milk pitchers, and a few English portraits that looked Gainsborough. The long hall was full of furniture—Directoire tables bearing ormolu clocks over which hung gilt mirrors that looked French eighteenth-century, great chests of lacquered wood with Japanese scenes painted on them, and one bronze David, naked except for his hat and sword, standing one foot on Goliath’s head, looking pensive, as if wondering: After this, what’s left?
The place looked like Sotheby’s—before a big sale.
The Conservatory was something else. Sunshine blazed through windows that ran from floor to ceiling. Plants gushed from everywhere, the ceiling, the floor, the walls—in bronze pots, oak casks, wicker baskets, copper receptacles. Unlike the rest of the apartment, it was informal. The wicker chairs, painted and scuffed, looked as if they had been actually sat in. A wicker table was covered with plant trimmings, seedlings, and a scissors.
The butler took Cassidy firmly by the arm and guided him to a white wicker chair with green pillows. Also a footrest. “This is the most comfortable chair in the house, sir,” he said and seated him into it with his long slender hands which looked not unlike those hands in the paintings outside.
“Some coffee, sir.” Breath whiffling out of him like wind on silk. He spoke excellent English.
“Nothing, thank you.” It was better not to have anything in your hands. It spoiled the posture.
“The Principessa will be along presently,” said the butler. “She takes rather a long time on the telephone.” He smiled a crafty old man’s smile, the face breaking into a thousand fine lines, and bowed himself out.
Cassidy decided he liked him very much.
Eyes roaming the plant room for cues. Green plants, with few blooms and those of discreet heliotrope and lavender. No orchids. Mostly forest plants of strong character. That should tell him something about the owner. Nothing so flighty as a flower.
Far back in the corridor one of the ormolu clocks struck ten. The hour of the appointment. Cassidy could hear no other sound. Where was the child? Why wasn’t she making a noise? Laughing? Crying?
It was getting too warm in the conservatory and Cassidy rose from the chair and removed his black coat, dangling it from his wrist flamboyantly. There was a little flamboyance in all his movements, even alone. Especially alone. In the long run—so thought Cassidy—acting was striking a pose against the Fates themselves and one hardly needed an audience for that.
Cassidy walked on the balls of his feet, holding the coat negligently in his right hand and wrist, to the wall of glass and tried to look straight down. Impossible. He could see out across the park and down Fifth Avenue but the sidewalk below him was concealed by the building itself.
I know too much about fortification, Cassidy was thinking. A weakness. You stopped learning when you knew too much, and the situation was always changing.
“You’re older than I thought.”
Like a shot across his bow.
Cassidy directed his scowl straight down forty-nine stories, his back firmly to the voice. American voice. Principessa, my ass. Let her wait.
He transferred his worn black coat from right to left wrist and from his front to his back, then pivoted on the balls of his feet, gracefully and slowly (he’d seen Osgood Perkins do this bit once and never forgotten), finally bending his searching gaze on her as if she were applying for a job, rather than the other way around. The kind of arrogance that had got him fired more than once—including the last time.
The Principessa wore blue and gold Chinesey trousers, tunic, and slippers, everything matching. Slim as a rod. Pale gold hair in a long swept-back bun. Wideset eyes like Lillian Gish’s. (Another man might have said Lauren Bacall, but Cassidy reached farther back than that for his images. Who but himself even remembered Osgood Perkins who was Anthony Perkins’ father and a much better actor than his son?)
She gazed at him out of radiant violet eyes set in a masklike face of indeterminate age, unmoved—untouched even—by his brusqueness. She was, Cassidy conceded, beautiful. Or had been beautiful. He found it hard to know what tense to use with the Principessa.
“I think you’re too old.” American rich, that accent. New York born. English cadences but Yankee timbre.
“Then I’d better leave.” Cassidy was insouciant. (He barely had the subway fare back to Greenwich Village, and he bloody well couldn’t afford insouciance, but it was at times like this it gave him greatest pleasure.) He swung the ancient black coat around his shoulders and would have performed his best Alfred Lunt exit (The one Lunt had done so magnificently in Reunion in Vienna.)
She was blocking the door.
“So sit down, Professor Cassidy,” she said, firm as a rock in face of his truculence. “In that white wicker chair, the most comfortable chair in the place. Lorenzo must have liked you very much, or he wouldn’t have put you in this room. When he doesn’t like visitors, he puts them in the sitting room directly under the air-conditioning where they catch a chill. When he despises them, he leaves them standing in the foyer—sometimes for hours. Do sit down.”
“After you, Madame.” Cassidy turned on the Irish charm following the Irish bellicosity. He could be as changeable as she was.
She sat on the white wicker settee, tucking her legs under her, the violet eyes thoughtful. “You come highly recommended.” The voice was dry now, skeptical.
“You’ve been talking to the wrong people,” said Cassidy harshly. “I’ve been fired from my last three jobs.”
“Why?” Absently.
“For tellin’ the truth though that’s not what they’d say.” Facing her, the black coat hanging down in front of him s
traight, like a shield.
“What are you a professor of?” she asked unexpectedly.
“Medieval literature.”
“Where?”
“Currently unemployed. New York is awash with unemployed professors of medieval literature.”
“Medieval literature,” said the Principessa dryly, “is almost the only subject my daughter doesn’t need. She’s already steeped in it. Can you teach anything else?”
Cassidy turned on the Irish charm again. He needed the job, dammit. “Anything you can name, Madame, Greek, Latin, grammar, logic . . . ”
“Logic? An Irishman?”
Cassidy gave her his pixie scowl: “We learn it, Madame, like an elephant learns to stand on his hind legs. Awkwardly, but well enough to open the circus.”
The Principessa smiled faintly: “If I may ask a rude question, why is such an all-around wunderkind unemployed?”
Cassidy snorted right back: “If I may ask an even ruder one, why don’t you send the child to school?”
The Principessa withdrew into herself, her personality diminishing into a faint absence, like the Cheshire cat. “I’ll answer your question if you answer mine,” she said after a silence.
Cassidy considered. He had many answers to that question (which was frequently asked). “Employers object to my . . . visibility,” he said finally. Visibility was a nice word for it.
“Oh,” said the Principessa, amused, “visibility. Not alcohol, or embezzlement, or rape. Well, I don’t pretend to understand my daughter, Professor. She has ferocious likes and dislikes—like any child—except the thing she likes you’d expect her to loathe—and vice versa.”
Silence in the plant room, smelling of verdure and ozone.
“Why don’t you send her to school?” Saying it gently this time.
“I’m afraid.”
The Principessa rose from the chair and busied herself with a green fern, lifting it from its brass potholder and setting it on the wicker table, where she picked up the scissors and cut off the brown tendrils, talking meanwhile in her dry tone: “They kidnapped my husband—and killed him.”
