Party Of The Year

by Inconnu(e)

  The expense account, thought Cassidy. Alison would be asking something in return for getting him the job.

  Alison put the menu on the bar and turned his smooth round WASP face to Henry: “Do you think I might have just a very large shrimp salad with a crabmeat cocktail with no dressing at all to start. Might that be possible?” Alison had been station chief in England for two years, and he’d picked up the might-that-be-possible routine there. To Cassidy he said: “Iodine rich.”

  “Oh, yes,” said Cassidy gravely, “Iodine rich.” Alison always embraced the latest diets before anyone else had even heard of them and abandoned them before the hoi polloi got there.

  “Always the needle,” complained Alison.

  “Needle?”

  “To my continuing prosperity,” said Alison, his round pink face aggrieved. “Now that was a needle, Horatio. You know it was.”

  “I was toasting your success,” murmured Cassidy. Alison’s uninterrupted climb to the corridors of power in the Company, his four-hundred-dollar suits, his Ferraris (or whatever was his latest hot car), his rich wife (who bought the Ferraris), his diets, had always been targets of ridicule tinged with envy. Alison, the joke had been, could give lessons to a chameleon. In his day he’d been a Roosevelt liberal, a Truman pragmatist, a Kennedy idealist, a Lyndon Johnson hardnose, changing his spots, his ideology, principles, prose style, even the way he wore his hats to whatever wind blew at the moment.

  He left no trail and no incriminating documents. It was impossible to pin down how he’d stood on the Bay of Pigs, the Tet Offensive, the Castro assassination plot, or anything else because it was impossible to remember exactly what he’d said twenty minutes later. He never signed anything except in disappearing ink. The complete modern public servant, changing his ethos with his underwear, and with every administration.

  “The fettucine,” said Cassidy to Henry, putting down the menu. To Alison, he said: “I’m already so iodine-rich I glow in the dark.”

  “Always the needle,” complained Alison. “How does the Principessa put up with it?”

  “We don’t see that much of each other.”

  “And the little Contessa?”

  Cassidy didn’t want to discuss Lucia with him. There was a point beyond which you didn’t return favors. “Lucia’s all right—if you like twelve-year-old girls.”

  The restaurant was empty of all but waiters and themselves. Alison had specified early lunch because he had to get back to Washington. They sat at Alison’s favorite table at the back wall.

  “Tea for two is it?” asked Cassidy pleasantly.

  “No jokes,” said Alison. “Not even here.”

  Tea was for Terror which was where it was all at in the CIA these days. Covert was out. The fashionable department was Terror and Alison was Number 2 man. He hated being number two. Tea for two was a very unfunny joke to Alison.

  “We’d like a little help with the Windletop,” said Alison.

  “Everyone wants a little help with the Windletop,” said Cassidy. “The New York Times, the CIA. Any day now I expect a call from the President. Can I get him invited to the Principessa’s party—and I doubt it.”

  “How impregnable is it really?”

  “Nothing’s impregnable. You know that, Hugh. It depends on how badly they want to get in.”

  “They want to get in very badly.” Alison threw it out between bites so casually that Cassidy knew that’s why he’d come. All the way from Washington. Well. Well. It would give him bargaining power. He ate in silence, letting Alison run with the ball.

  “They’ve done it to themselves,” said Alison bitterly. “The damned place has such a reputation for impregnability. The guerillas know it was just rebuilt to keep them out—and that’s like waving a red flag at a bull. Some of the biggest sons of bitches in the whole wide world live there—Kaspar, that German swine who owns half the coal mines in the Ruhr. The di Castigliones who own the Vatican and most of Rome. That prick from Peru who owns the Andes. These people cry out for kidnapping. Or assassination. Asking for it. If you were the Red Wind, wouldn’t you?”

  “Speculation,” said Cassidy, dismissing it.

  “We’ve got to speculate. We can’t just let it happen like the Olympics. Anyway, it’s not just speculation.”

  “Hard rock.”

  “Hard sand.” Cassidy doubted it. The intelligence organizations of the world—German, Japanese, American, Israeli (not the British who had more sense)—had tried hard to infiltrate the terror organizations, which had just got a lot of good agents (frequently the best) killed. So far as Cassidy knew (and he knew a lot) no one had managed even a toehold.

  “New York,” Alison was saying, “is ceasing to be an American city. It’s the capitalist headquarters of the world—French money, Belgian money, Italian money, British money, Arab money. All the white Americans have left New York.”

  “I haven’t left yet. But then I have a black grandmother. She runs a whorehouse in Harlem. One-legged lesbians are the specialty of the house.”

  “Horatio!” protested Alison.

  “What do you want of me, Hugh? Let it all hang out.”

  “McGregor is on my ass to find a weakness in the building.”

  McGregor was Number 1 in Tea.

  “Steal the plans.”

  “We already have. The parts we want to know about are missing—for very good reasons.”

  “I’m confined to quarters,” said Cassidy. “I’m not only the little girl’s tutor, I’m a bodyguard; that doesn’t leave much time.”

  Alison laid down his fork, creating a meaningful silence. “Horatio you are the greatest scholar of medieval fortifications in the western world.”

  “Bullshit,” said the scholar.

  “The Windletop . . .” Alison leveled his pale eyes at him, “has all the trappings—the walls, portcullis, the inner fortifications, the self-sufficiency. The place is a medieval castle. It has everything but a moat.”

  Cassidy grunted: “Chivalry it also hasn’t got.”

  Alison looked annoyed: “These people—the Italian Red Brigade, the Japanese Red Army, the Red Faction of Germany, even the American wildeyes like the Weathermen—have all been trained in Lebanon by Palestinian terrorists whose ancestors were Saracens.”

  “Jupiter,” said Cassidy. He didn’t think Alison had that much imagination. “That’s very good, Hugh. Very good.”

  “If you were training a terrorist how to take the Windletop, what would you teach them?” Alison whispered it.

  It was all in the books. Alison might just have done a bit of reading—but that was less nourishing than an expense account luncheon. Cassidy leaned across the table conspiratorially: “I’ll want a little something in return.”

  “Like what?” asked Alison suspiciously. Cassidy had an awe-inspiring reputation as a scrounger.

  “Files on some guys.”

  Reluctantly: “Well, okay.”

  “And four thousand dollars.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake, Horatio . . .”

  “Out of your contingency fund. It’s not very much and it’s not for me. I want to get Fingertips to do a little legwork because I haven’t time. Fingertips can’t handle it alone so I’ll need the Gypper to help out.”

  “I’m not running an employment bureau for all your old pals.”

  The Gypper and Cassidy had been friends and colleagues in the Company for thirty years. The locales of their capers ranged from Bulgaria to Korea. Fingertips had been involved in, not all, but some.

  “Maybe even Jacoby and Freddie if the operation gets out of hand.” Cassidy used the well-known ploy of expanding his demands to win quick acceptance of a lower earlier demand. “After all, I’m up to my ass in the nursery, Hugh, I can’t go running around town.”

  “Four thousand. No more.”

  Only then did Cassidy tell Alison some stories—how invaders had broken into Richard the Lionhearted’s Château Gaillard through its weakest point, the toilet; how Count Bal
dwin’s men disguised themselves as peddlers to get inside two gates where they stuck knives into the guards; how Edward I’s spies found out Simon de Montfort’s warriors planned a night on the town and surprised them in bed with the girls—bare-assed and unarmed—medieval tales of duplicity. and wickedness which Alison listened to, frowning.

  “I’m disappointed in the Middle Ages,” said Alison. “We’ve done all those tricks ourselves. Every last one.”

  “They invented most of them. We haven’t improved on them.”

  Alison lit a Romeo y Julieta (the CIA always had the best Cuban cigars). “I’ve got to write a position paper, Horatio. Give me your best thinking.”

  “You wouldn’t know what to do with my best thinking, Hugh. It’s so high minded as to be impractical. I’ll give you my second best thinking—low cunning.”

  Alison let it pass. “If you were to try to take the Windletop, how would you go about it?”

  Cassidy turned on his most spacious Irish smile: “Treachery is quickest, cheapest, most effective, and most reliable.”

  “Reliable treachery. Only you would think of something like that, Horatio.”

  “Oh, no,” said Cassidy. “I’m sure they have, too.”

  “That widens the field quite a lot.”

  “Very wide field—treachery,” agreed Cassidy. “There’s a lot of it around.” Treachery wasn’t the whole of it. You had to combine it with tactics and those he kept to himself. After all, he had to keep a little for future bargaining with Alison.

  On the way out Henry called Cassidy to the bar and confided. “Sophy called. I told her you were in Brazil.”

  “Brazil’s nice,” said Cassidy. “Tell her I got eaten by the piranha.”

  “I only tell Sophy good constructive lies. I’ll tell her you sent your love all the way from Brazil.”

  “She’ll never believe that. Sophy only believes bad destructive lies.”

  • 9 •

  “If you’re worrying about how well I sleep at night . . .” The Principessa was in ribbons and flounces and ruffles covered by spring flowers in pastel colors. The dress soft and pliant covering the hard slim body and steely mind. “I should rather toss and turn than yield my fuchsia walls and my Tiepolo ceiling . . .”

  “Tiepolo!” Cassidy was flummoxed, eyes darting upward. Tiepolo! Damned if it wasn’t! The di Castiglione’s had somehow smuggled out of Italy this masterpiece of late Renaissance fresco and affixed it to the ceiling of the entrance hall. Probably worth half a million.

  That was the issue—the entrance hall. The elevator opened directly into the apartment, once a status symbol, one’s very own elevator, now a security risk. Gunmen could pour out of the elevator, shooting.

  “My dear Professor, “the voice trilling with exasperation, “security is downstairs, out of sight. That is where security belongs. That is why I am in this building—so I can decorate my flat as I damned well please.”

  “Madame,” Cassidy pulled at his earlobe, standing straight, head slightly bent, face El Greco-esque which is to say stylistic or decorative agony as opposed to the real McCoy, “doing what you please is not possible in the climate of modern terror. Particularly for the rich.”

  Orchestrating his argument slowly and carefully. He had a big finish, and he intended to build to it through a series of steadily mounting climaxes.

  The Principessa’s eyes were on the ceiling: “I selected this ceiling, this particular Tiepolo—one of four in the palazzo in Rome—for this foyer.” She turned her violet eyes (with their magnificent makeup) on Cassidy, caressing his angularities with her soft glance like moonlight on hard stone. “This entrance hall, Professor, sets the tone for the whole flat.” (Anglicisms like flat crept into her speech as did words and phrases of Spanish, French, and Italian—the international rich contributing little flecks of color to each other’s vocabularies.)

  “The mood of the visitor is ineradicably set the moment he steps off the elevator by these fuchsia walls, the exquisite modeling of those angels with their slightly underripe reds and purples—topped off by that splendidly rococo and altogether marvelous settee.”

  Cassidy cracked his knuckles: “The question, Madame, is your daughter’s safety next to which the mood of the visitors—especially considering we never have any visitors . . .”

  He trailed off, thinking he’d gone too far.

  In the month he’d been there, there had been no visitors or anyway, none he was supposed to know about. No child or adult visitor entered the closed world of the Principessa, the Contessa, Lorenzo, Titi, and Cassidy in the daytime. Nighttime was something else. The Principessa had a hyperactive social schedule. She went out every single night—never, so far as Cassidy could make out—wearing the same thing twice. Sometimes she was in a superbly simple long evening dress, sometimes in informal cottons, once even in jeans to some disco or other where jeans were what was worn and the Principessa, always in tune, wore them.

  She returned long after everyone else was in bed. Cassidy, a light sleeper, heard the murmurings, the laughter, and wryly noted the time-2 A.M., 3 A.M., 5 A.M. He had no idea who her companions were. Lover? Or lovers? She had a monumental reputation as a swinger even at her age, but one never knew how accurate the gossip was. Anyway, he was not supposed to know about these things. To cover up his slip, he threw in quickly: We need a second line of defense, Principessa. Maybe even a third and fourth.”

  Her glance had hardened and grown thoughtful. She hadn’t liked that crack about no visitors.

  “In a medieval castle,” said Cassidy, “the invaders had to fight their way through one defense after another—the barbican, the portcullis, the bailey, the keep, the inner castle itself.”

  “This is not a medieval castle, Professor.” The voice just short of exasperation. “It’s a very sophisticated modern building. By turning a key in that elevator, it’s impossible for anyone to make it stop on this floor.”

  “Impossible for jewel thieves perhaps, Madame. Not for well-heeled modern terrorists. They have their own electronic experts who could neutralize that elevator in twelve minutes. Then they would be inside this apartment. What I’m trying to provide is a second line of defense to slow them, not necessarily stop them. In the Middle Ages, despite insurmountable defenses, castles were taken and its knights seized and imprisoned and later, if they were lucky, ransomed. Just like today.”

  She regarded him with passionate dislike. “Professor, you are not seriously asking me to replace my fuchsia walls with steel gates?”

  Cassidy smiled: “You can paint the steel fuchsia, Madame.”

  “My soul revolts at the thought of steel in my foyer. I will not have it.”

  “Then, Madame,” Cassidy strode to the double doors which led from the foyer to the rest of the apartment and flung them open, one with each hand, then pivoting on his heels to face her, “hire someone else to protect your daughter. I resign.”

  He bowed. His short bow, not his big courtly bow. A rapier thrust slap-in-the-face sort of bow like those John Barrymore did in some of his more foolish costume movies. Then he turned his back and swaggered off toward his room. His big finish.

  It was a risk, and a week earlier he’d not have been so inflexible. He’d have left some avenue of retreat open for her. But the time had come to make a stand. Anyway he was fairly sure of his ground. He had divined from things she’d said and Lorenzo had said that the Principessa intensely disliked changing tutors. Lucia had forced her hand on the other two. (Why? That he didn’t know, but he intended to find out.) She would lean over backward to avoid having to find another tutor (and protector, the job being what it was) but whether to the extent of losing her Tiepolo . . . He hadn’t realized Tiepolo would get into this.

  “Oh, come on, Professor!” The Principessa’s voice fluted up the scale. “Must we have these theatrics!”

  Cassidy paused in his flight. She’s as theatrical as I am, he was thinking, but of a different, more naturalist, school. He swung aroun
d and gave her his sidewise glance from under heavy lids. (Walter Matthau used that look with stunning effectiveness having stolen it from Rex Harrison who stole it from Alfred Lunt who taught the whole lot of them.)

  “How much will it cost?” asked the lady.

  “A great deal,” said Cassidy.

  In the nursery, the problems ran deeper. Cassidy was groping in the darkness, feeling his way in the jungle of child psychology. He’d never been a father (why hadn’t Maria managed a child to fill his long absences?) and sometimes felt he’d never even been a child. I must have had a childhood, he said to himself in the mirror while shaving. It’s been stolen from me like Peter Pan’s shadow.

  In his single month, Cassidy had progressed from the Pleistocene through Babylon and into Greece. “You must know man’s chronology,” he said to Lucia, “or you will understand nothing.”

  The two girls sat cross-legged before him as he paced back and forth, doing what he called his deposed archduke bit, hands behind his back, face working, stressing each syllable, pounding it into her little skull, Lucia’s eyes black as ink and as unfathomable. Was he getting through? Titi sat next to her, dark and vengeful. Titi had begun by falling asleep at his lectures (which Lucia never did), but lately had stayed awake. This was worse because she was a disturbing force.

  “All mankind’s great leaps forward have been accidents over which he had little control and almost no understanding. We have evolved upward, as thinkers and as civilized human beings, through a series of blunders that can be understood only in the long clear light of history.”

  Then came the explosion, most unexpectedly, out of Titi.

  “Erragh!”

  Or words to that effect. A sound that was derisive, angry, scatological, and very, very positive. That alone—that positivism—stopped Cassidy in his tracks. It revealed in Titi an editorial sense he didn’t know she had. This little forest creature was supposed to be learning vocabulary, not expressing opinion.

  “Cose, Titi? Cose ?” exclaimed Lucia, angrily.

  Italian poured out of Titi like molten lava. That’s what these two did to him when they wanted to talk behind his back, talk Italian at great speed where they lost him entirely.