by Inconnu(e)
“This is relevant to guarding the little girl?” inquired Fingertips with his bland smile that took the edge off this kind of impertinence. (That was why he was so good at investigation. He could ask the most intimate questions as if he were talking about the time of day.)
“I don’t know anything, Fingertips,” said Cassidy, “Except something is very fishy. Who have you got in Italy?”
“Fabrizio. In spite of that name he hails from Brooklyn. Returning to the land of his ancestors.”
Cassidy explained what he wanted to find out.
“Rumors about a playboy are likely to be wishful,” said Fingertips. “You’ll hear what you want to hear.”
“I can check them with the facts I have. I’m not so much interested in what is true as in what isn’t. A lot of what I’ve been told makes no sense. You understand?”
“No,” said Fingertips.
“Good. Let’s keep it that way.”
Jefferson Lee was produced by Lorenzo two days later. He was superbly muscled, impassive as a bronze statue and he looked, thought Cassidy, as if his name ought to be Malcolm X, not Jefferson Lee.
Cassidy marched him in to see the Principessa who was in bed doing her pre-breakfast face which Cassidy found most beautiful of all her faces. The finished face was a little too studied.
“Mmm,” said the Principessa, glancing at Jefferson Lee’s muscular outline. “Where have you cooked?”
The atmosphere reeked of sexuality.
“Mr. and Mrs. Halford in Savannah, Georgia. Faw yeahs.” He spoke pure molasses candy, and Cassidy distrusted that as well as everything else. “Real nice people, the Halfords.”
A real tame nigger, thought Cassidy. I thought they’d been repealed by the Race Relations Act.
“Then I was in Washington with the Flemings. He was in the Commerce Department, economic assistance, somethin’ like that, but he’s gone back to Iowa.”
“Where in Iowa?” asked Cassidy flatly.
The Principessa smiled her waxen smile: “The Professor likes to know all the details.”
“Hornung,” said Jefferson Lee immediately.
“Shall we try Mr. Lee on an experimental basis, Professor?” asked the Principessa, working with the eyebrow pencil on the left eyelid.
The question was not meant to be answered, just assented to.
Cassidy spent an hour on the telephone that night. There were no Halfords in Savannah, information told him. As to whether there had ever been any Halfords in Savannah, she didn’t have that kind of information. “We have fourteen Flemings in the book,” said information in Hornung, Iowa. Cassidy tried them all. Yes, there had been a Fleming who had worked for the Commerce Department and was now in India for OECD. He got this from a cousin. No, he couldn’t be reached by telephone.
Alison was very interested in Jefferson Lee. “Get a photograph and some prints. We think he’s a live one.”
“If he is, we want him out of there,” said Cassidy.
“We’ll keep an eye on him,” said Alison smoothly. “See who he sees.”
“I’ve got a twelve-year-old to protect,” explained Cassidy. “Suppose he puts a gun to her head, holds her hostage?”
“That’s what you’re there to prevent,” said Alison. And hung up.
Cassidy was left sitting on the edge of his bed with a dead telephone in his hand. “The son of a bitch is also a lousy cook,” said Cassidy into the dead telephone.
Noon the next day, Cassidy found the Principessa pouring a thin stream of water on the hyacinths in the conservatory.
“His credentials are bogus, and he’s a lousy cook,” said Cassidy.
“Those are not grounds for dismissal any more,” said the Principessa.
She looked radiant—and sad. A peculiar combination. But very becoming, thought Cassidy.
“Have you tried firing a black man in New York State recently,” said the Principessa. “It’s against the law.”
“Even if he’s a terrorist?”
“Come, come, Professor,” said the Principessa wearily. “What evidence for that could you give the Equal Opportunities Board, to say nothing of the Race Relations Commission and the NAACP? The first two would investigate me, and the last would file suit.”
“He’s a liar,” said Cassidy. “There are no Halfords in Savannah.”
“They’ve moved to Europe,” said the Principessa, snipping a dry leaf from the hyacinth.
“Where did you learn that, Madame?”
“Jefferson told me.”
Jefferson. Cassidy had been there a month and a half, and he’d never been addressed by his first name.
“You’ve been doing your own security, have you, Madame?”
The Principessa put down the watering can and turned her violet eyes on him. Large, luminous, and furious. He’d overstepped his bounds. But then so had she. She had no damned business discussing his security checks with the cook. If he was a cook.
Cassidy strode back through the apartment—through the enormous sitting room in which no one ever sat, through the music room with its burnished satinwood piano no one ever played, through the stately library stuffed with books no one read, past Donatello’s David . . .
Which wasn’t there.
Cassidy brought his cadaverous frame to a swift halt. The red marble pillar stood in its accustomed spot but the bronze statue was gone. Cassidy rubbed his cheek sardonically. In his mind’s eye he saw the rippling black muscles on the David and they brought to mind Jefferson Lee’s superb musculature. Perhaps Jefferson Lee didn’t like the competition.
In the nursery Lucia was playing gin rummy with a sullen Titi, a poor gin player who always lost.
“We’ll go to the park,” said Cassidy.
“Did Mama say we could?”
Cassidy scowled at his hands (like Lady Macbeth in the sleepwalking scene) and sidestepped the question. “Titi,” he barked, “this nursery is a disgrace to western civilization. Clean it up.”
Titi threw him a look of purest malevolence. She’s brighter than she makes out, thought Cassidy. Malevolence of that order requires a bit of brain.
“You didn’t get Mama’s permission,” stated Lucia with a quiet smile. “Oho!”
She got her new, gray, fall coat out of the closet and put it on.
“You’re the first tutor I’ve had who has faced up to Mama,” she said.
• 12 •
The elevator was driven by Security 3 who was Welsh and taciturn to the degree that Cassidy wondered if his tongue hadn’t been torn out altogether. Cassidy and Lucia were the only occupants until the thirty-fifth floor. Then the elevator stopped to take on the Comtesse de Lourdes, a formidable French lady, whom Lucia called the Countess of Smell because she had founded and run a perfume empire, first from Paris, later from New York, where the big money was. With her was her bodyguard, a beefy redneck from Georgia.
Cassidy nodded at him and he nodded back. All the bodyguards were on a nodding acquaintance. They recognized each other instantly by their clothes, their watchful air of unease, the bulges under their armpits. Above all they spotted the stigmata of the unmonied. In the old days, the poor stank of poverty. In more recent times, the rich had the smells—leather and tweed and good perfume—above all cleanliness and newness. The unmonied reeked of the absence of money.
On the twenty-sixth floor, the elevator stopped again, this time for a square cut Belgian industrialist and his bodyguard, another Belgian. Nobody spoke and nobody except Lucia sat on the red plush seat under the mirror. Lucia lounged on the plush with the insolence of childhood, staring boldly at the adults who hadn’t the temerity to stare back. Everyone else took refuge in looking at the back of Security 3’s neck.
In the lobby, they lined up dutifully and waited to be cleared like airplanes. From the mezzanine watch post Security 1 and 2 scanned Fifth Avenue for suspicious cars or people who had been loitering too long without clear purpose. If there was to be a snatch, this was the time, close to the entran
ce the moment they stepped out from the protection of the bulletproof glass. Security 1 looked north, Security 2 south; then the Windletop rich were escorted quickly one at a time by the Front to the waiting limousines which whisked them off (changing routes every day as the manual dictated).
There was no waiting limousine for Cassidy or Lucia. “My protection,” Cassidy told Alfred the Great (alias Hugo Dorn, the Good Nazi), “is Werner Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. Never the same day, hour, or weather.” Alfred hated the absence of plan.
Cassidy and Lucia strolled out the door, ducked across Fifth, and then ambled down the parkside footpath south under the big plane trees.
Half a block from the Windletop was a large metal obstruction bearing a sign which Lucia read aloud: “A new crosstown subway is being constructed in this area. When completed this new line will be a vital link in the MTA’s overall program, adding over forty miles of new subway to better serve New Yorkers. It’s signed by the Mayor.”
“Which Mayor?” grunted Cassidy. “They’ve been digging that subway for years. It was started several Mayors ago and it’ll outlast the present one and perhaps the next one after that before they get it open.”
“I’ve never been in a subway,” said Lucia wistfully. “Will you take me on a subway some time?”
“If we wait for that one, you’ll be an old lady.”
They stopped for a little while to ogle the Temple of Dendur in its new glass cage at the end of the Metropolitan Museum. Then Lucia took Cassidy by the hand and led him to the great bronze sculpture by Barzini of a lion leaping on a terrified horse, her favorite statue in the whole park. It wasn’t Cassidy’s favorite because there were too many bushes which could conceal terrorists. He inspected each of them before sitting next to Lucia. The two sat a moment enjoying the sunshine and the freedom.
“Titi hates you,” said Lucia primly.
“I know,” said Cassidy.
“Jefferson Lee hates you, too.”
“Jefferson Lee hates all white people, including you.”
“I don’t think he hates Mama,” said Lucia thoughtfully. “On the other hand, I think Mama hates you. That leaves only me who doesn’t hate you.”
“Why don’t you make it unanimous?” asked Cassidy.
“Because you’re the first tutor I’ve had who is more interested in me than in Mama.”
Cassidy chewed on that bit of information in silence.
“Mama says you’re not really interested in me. You just want an audience to prance around in front of.”
“Prance?” said Cassidy. “Did she say prance?”
“Yes, she said prance.”
“Well, perhaps she’s right.” He grimaced. “I’m trying, in my prancing fashion, to teach you a set of rules to live by which is all that education can do. But the rules are changing so fast that it’s difficult for a man of my age to teach one of yours with any degree of confidence that the rules of civilized behavior have not already changed.
“In the Middle Ages, the lords of the manor had all the privileges, and this was never questioned. When a knight went hunting—which they did all the time when not at war—they trampled over the peasant’s garden, trampling down the foodstuff that was to keep him alive. If the peasant complained about this, it was the peasant who was considered barbarous rather than the knight destroying the man’s livelihood. This was fashionable behavior for hundreds of years.
“But morality is accelerating. When the Americans colonized the west, they shot Indians as you might shoot wolves. In my lifetime, one of these settlers has remarked openly that he didn’t know shooting Indians was wrong. We are very close to a time when duck hunters will proclaim they didn’t know shooting ducks was wrong and by the time they say it, shooting ducks will be considered as barbarous as shooting Indians. Eating ducks is already considered immoral by some vegetarians.”
There were ducks on the lake below the ledge on which they sat. A small boy and his mother were tearing up a loaf of bread and scattering it on the water for the ducks who were already too overfed to care.
“It won’t end with the ducks,” said Cassidy. “Being rich will be considered as immoral as shooting Indians—in fact, it already is. You are an endangered species, Contessa, an over-privileged child.”
“Over-privileged?” said Lucia sadly. “I haven’t even a bicycle.”
“Where would you ride it—in the corridors?”
“Why not here? In the park?”
It was out of the question, a security risk he didn’t dare take.
“I haven’t even a friend.”
“You have Titi.”
“Like having a pet mouse,” said Lucia contemptuously.
Not quite, thought Cassidy. Titi was not anyone’s pet mouse.
“My father was kidnapped and killed because he was . . . over-privileged, and I, an over-privileged child, have no Papa.”
They came back through the rear entrance, an unobtrusive opening between two towering buildings on Madison Avenue marked Service, Windletop. A steep ramp led to a little rear courtyard where the delivery vans from Bendel’s and Van Cleef and Arpels and Bergdorf’s deposited their expensive packages. When the Windletop had been remodeled for the modern age of fear, an immensely expensive gate of filigreed steel had been added to bar the entrance way.
Cassidy and Lucia stood in front of the gate to be inspected by the TV monitors, after which the filigreed steel vanished upward. They walked down the ramp, the steel gate closing behind them.
“Enjoyin’ the splendid sunshine,” sang out Rooftop from his glass booth. “How very nice!”
No one on earth was less suited to his occupation than Rooftop. He loved letting people into the building and hated keeping them out which, as Cassidy pointed out to Alfred the Great, was not the right attitude for his profession. Love of his fellow man was a fatal weakness in a guard, and Rooftop overflowed with it.
“How’s your mother, Rooftop?” asked Lucia, who was very fond of the black man (as was everyone).
Rooftop’s mother was a chronic invalid, and Rooftop shared his concern about her health with one and all. “She’s up and down. Up and down,” caroled Rooftop. “One day this, the next that. All don’t know what to say.”
He had already clicked open the door at the foot of a flight of steps leading into the building. Theoretically Rooftop was supposed to inspect his visitors one more time before admitting them. If he suspected trouble, he had a button on his cubicle wall which sounded the alarm at the Holmes Protection Agency. An even more sinister device was in his pocket—a little box the size of a cigarette pack which was connected to the nearest police station by radio. A push of the button in his pocket, and the radio cars would race over to see what was the matter.
All very foolproof except for Rooftop’s indefatigably sunny good nature. Already he was halfway out of his bullet-proof cubicle, his white teeth gleaming with welcome. If I were a Red Wind I could shoot him through my pocket from here, thought Cassidy gloomily.
Rooftop personally escorted them up the concrete steps to the rear elevator—one of the four rear elevators in this preposterously over-equipped building. Standing there waiting for the elevator was the most beautiful young boy Cassidy had ever seen. Huge blue eyes firmly fixed on the floor, behind long curly eyelashes.
Cassidy, Lucia, and the beautiful boy, who looked about fourteen, stepped into the elevator. Lucia stared at the young man so intensely that a slow flush crept up his neck and suffused his entire beautiful face.
At the thirty-ninth floor, the elevator door opened, and the young man got out. The elevator door had scarcely swung shut when Lucia cried gleefully: “Struthers is at it again!”
Struthers had a reputation for liking beautiful young boys. Had them shipped in from Sweden—so the word went—and delivered to his backdoor like bonbons, a different one each week. It was one of the more lurid sex scandals of the building, which had many.
“Who told you that?” asked Cassidy.<
br />
“Titi. She heard it in the laundry. What does Mr. Struthers do to them exactly? I mean how does he . . .”
“Never mind,” said Cassidy.
“You keep saying I have to learn sometime,” argued Lucia. You tell me terrible things about Jesus Christ and Karl Marx, and yet you clam up on sex.”
It was true.
“Titi says he sticks it in their mouth, or they stick in in his mouth . . .”
“Titi ought to get her mouth washed out with soap,” said Cassidy.
Lucia burst into giggles. “You’re a prude, Professor,” leveling her finger at him and giggling. Cassidy scowling.
That’s how they entered the backdoor, Cassidy opening it with his key—Lucia having a fit of giggles, Cassidy’s mouth drawn down like the tragedy mask in Greek Theater.
Gathered in the kitchen were all the others—the Principessa, Jefferson Lee, Titi, and Lorenzo. The atmosphere was thunderous.
“Where have you been?” asked the Principessa in tones of purest ice water.
“We’ve just taken a walk in the park, Mama!”
“You might have told someone. We were very worried.”
“Titi knew!” protested Lucia.
“Titi says she wasn’t told anything. You spoke English and you know very well Titi’s English is not very good.”
Titi’s English wasn’t all that bad, thought Cassidy. But he couldn’t say anything like that. Instead he said: “I’m sorry, Principessa.”
All this in front of the others. Jefferson Lee leaned against the great stove, arms folded, his chef’s hat jauntily over one ear. Lorenzo stood, head bowed, his fingertips pressed judiciously together, eyes averted, as if pondering some deep legal problem. Titi wore her customary sullen look, eyes on Cassidy.
“Lucia, go to your room,” said the Principessa. “Professor, I would like a word with you.” Biting off each word.
In the conservatory, they faced off like duelists. The onslaught came from an unexpected direction: “What three men have caused more suffering and murdered more people than any others?” spat out the Principessa.
