by Inconnu(e)
Jupiter, thought Cassidy. So that’s what’s making her mad!
“You told my daughter the three most destructive men in history were Jesus Christ, Karl Marx, and Sigmund Freud. What kind of thing is that to teach a twelve-year-old child?”
“I was trying to make her think, Madame,” said Cassidy. “I was trying to get some answer to that question a little less brainless than Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan, and Adolf Hitler. I was trying to show that ideas were more murderous than swords and they lasted longer. I am still endeavoring . . .” coming down hard on that word to shut off the Principessa in whom he could see protest rising, “to teach your daughter self-reliance in these dangerous times. God will not take care of rich little girls nor will socialism nor will psychiatry. She must look to herself for salvation and survival.”
“You’re turning my child into a monster.”
“An educated and self-sufficient monster, Madame.”
It was hot in the conservatory, the sunshine pouring in through the heavy plate glass. The place smelled of ozone and damp earth. The Principessa was wearing an oriental costume, trousers and tunic with heavily stitched scenes of parrots and poppies and trees in brilliant red, green, and gold which fitted her taut little body as if embroidered there. She was expressionless, only the molten eyes betraying the anger. Underneath the anger, Cassidy thought he detected despair. So many tutors. Nothing worked. She had never looked more beautiful nor more frightening. He wished she’d scowl just once but she never did. Cassidy wondered if perhaps she’d had so many facelifts she couldn’t.
“I think, Professor Cassidy,” she was hissing a little like a goose, “you and I have reached the end of the line. If you care to resubmit your resignation . . .”
That’s as far as she got.
“No! no! no! no! no! no! no!” A wilderness of noes from Lucia who had been standing at the conservatory entrance for God knows how long. “No! No! No! No!” a ferocity of noes. A whole new aspect of Lucia, this ferocity, this determination, this fury. “No! Mama! No! No! No!”
Mother and child faced each other now, both blazing.
Cassidy felt superfluous. He was the issue, but he had no voice in the matter. Both mother and child were acting as if he weren’t there, and that being so, Cassidy quietly made himself scarce.
The storm between mother and child broke as he crept down the corridor, but they were speaking Italian. Cassidy couldn’t understand Italian spoken at that speed.
Where had the Principessa learned what he was teaching Lucia? Cassidy had long since closed down the little gadget that eavesdropped on the nursery. That left only Titi who claimed to know so little English she couldn’t understand they were going to the park but managed to comprehend a question about Marx, Freud, and Christ.
Not only comprehend the question but get mad about it to such a degree she reported it to the Principessa. Cassidy had questioned the divinity of three great names—Jesus Christ, Karl Marx, and Sigmund Freud. Which one of the three was so sacred to Titi that she went bellowing to the Principessa about it? Certainly not Freud.
Christ?
Or Karl Marx?
Cassidy sat on the edge of his bed and ran his fingertips over his brow, trying to sort it all out. Who called the tune in the di Castiglione household anyway? The Principessa said it was the trustees without whom she could do nothing. But it was she who had passed on him and could easily have passed him over. Lucia stood in awe of her mother and in most things was scared to death of her. Yet it was Lucia—so everyone said—who had seen to it those two tutors were fired, and it was Lucia who was now forcibly intervening to prevent his being fired.
Why was she doing that? Cassidy was deeply pleased, and he knew he shouldn’t be. I’m getting emotionally involved with-these people—and not only with Lucia but also Lorenzo, Titi, and the Principessa—and that was very dangerous because it interfered with a clear cold assessment of the situation. Anyway, it was self-defeating. When the job was over, it was over.
• 13 •
FIRONI SILVER BRINGS $185,000
Cassidy didn’t usually read the auction news, but the headline had caught his eye. Fironi?
He was alone in the kitchen with the Times and his breakfast coffee.
Fironi?
A silver and gold coffee urn made by the seventeenth-century Italian silversmith Fironi brought the top price of $185,000 yesterday at an auction of silver at Sotheby’s. This is one of the highest prices ever paid for silver in this country.
The Fironi urn is a massive bit of silver and gold ware with a spout carved into the shape of a mermaid. The mermaid’s arms are the handles. The base of the urn is a clamshell with gold flutings . . .
Oh! That’s where he’d heard it.
Cassidy rose from the table, ears cocked for Lorenzo who was last seen in the sitting room polishing furniture and Jefferson Lee who spent most of his time in his room looking at color television. No sound.
The silver was kept at the rear of the huge pantry in its own cedar cupboard, which was lined in green baize. Each of the big silver pieces had its own niche in the green baize. The Fironi urn wasn’t there.
Cassidy closed the cupboard swiftly and went back to his coffee.
Lorenzo had entered the pantry wearing his leather apron over the di Castiglione livery, carrying his polishing cloth. Cassidy sat down at the pantry table, picked up the Times and turned the page, folding the auction news out of sight.
Lorenzo was divesting himself of his furniture polish and cloth.
“Do you miss Italy, Lorenzo?” This provoked so long a silence that Cassidy looked up from the Times to see if Lorenzo was still in the room. He was standing before the drawer where the polishes were kept contemplating Cassidy with his finely etched smile, thinking it over. Lorenzo was not one to rush into things.
When he spoke, the voice was far away: “I am sometimes dismayed by how little I miss Italy. I tell myself this is a betrayal, and yet I do not convince myself this is so. Italians are so Italian, signor, they don’t need Italy—they are Italy. Italians in America are more Italian than they are at home.”
“Do you have many Italian friends here?”
Lorenzo’s hands described a parabola: “A man needs only one friend.”
Lorenzo’s comings and goings were a mystery to everyone. He left the apartment Thursday after noon and returned Friday at 10 A.M. That was his day off. Where he went, no one knew. Anyway, Cassidy didn’t.
He hadn’t a clue about Lorenzo’s politics either: “Italy is being torn apart by terrorists,” said Cassidy, to see what that would produce.
The response was immediate: “No, signor, it is not being torn apart. Italy is much tougher than you Americans have ever realized.”
“Aldo Moro . . .” said Cassidy.
“ . . . is dead,” finished Lorenzo. “Many others will die before it is over. Sometimes it is necessary to die in order to live.”
Whatever that meant.
Cassidy went back to his room down the long corridor past the Gabrieli painting of Henry IV (a distant cousin of the di Castigliones), past the bronze head of Cardinal Constant (a di Castiglione on his mother’s side). Would these treasures follow the Donatello and the Fironi? Cassidy doubted that the Donatello had been sold at auction. That would have caused an international uproar.
In his room Cassidy dialled Henry at the Spumi. “Two messages. One guy don’t leave no name. He just says Brandy, makes me repeat it—Brandy—and hangs up, says you’ll know.”
Alison playing games. Damn! He’d have to go to the oak tree in the park where the drop was. Why didn’t Alison send a letter? Because he loved all the paraphernalia of espionage, that’s why—the mystique, the cloak-and-dagger symbolism. A drop meant a courier from Washington. Very expensive—and that was half the fun.
Or perhaps he was being unkind. For all his love of trappings, Alison was a good agent. He was up to his ass in Terror, and just maybe he knew something that could be conveyed safe
ly no other way.
“The other guy,” said Henry “was a character named Feinberg—wants you to call please.”
“Anything else?” asked Cassidy.
“Sophy was in. I sent your love all the way from Brazil.”
“I’m not in Brazil any more. I went back to Turkestan.” He hung up and called The New York Times.
“I want an invitation to the Principessa’s party,” said Feinberg.
Cassidy exploded: “Jupiter Jehoshaphat! The man who interviewed Adolf Hitler, the first man to figure out what a shit Chiang Kai-shek was and what a great man Mao was—now a social climber. Aren’t you ashamed?”
“It’s not for myself,” said Feinberg in tones of deepest courtesy. (Feinberg was always at his most dangerous, someone had said, when he got very polite.) “We are very anxious to cover this party for many reasons.”
Cassidy’s nostrils flared like a rutting stallion: “What reasons?”
Feinberg sidestepped: “We have a girl in Society as highborn as any of those wastrels invited to the Principessa’s party. Her name is Atchison like Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe.”
“Impossible,” said Cassidy. “Sometimes I do the impossible, but the price is always very high.”
“Would you like to know why Prince di Castiglione was killed,” said Feinberg silkily. “And how?”
“I’ll be right down,” said Cassidy.
“Don’t forget that invitation,” said Feinberg.
The invitations were in the Principessa’s Venetian desk with the bronze claw feet and the inlaid rosewood, a gem of late eighteenth-century furniture that rested in the library. Two hundred and twenty-five people were coming to the Principessa’s party, all invited on beautifully engraved stiff white cards with gold edges bearing, also in gold, the di Castiglione crest. Cassidy had already protested to the Principessa that she was a bit careless with those precious bits of cardboard which ought to be locked up. He pointed out they were a pass into the Windletop.
“Only to the Windletop Club,” the Principessa had said absently.
She had been seated at the desk on the high-backed Tuscan chair with its glowing red and gold painted arms, making out invitations to her friends, who all seemed to have nicknames like Dee Dee and Poo Poo and Gigi and Jojo. They were a tight little group of mixed nationalities—Spanish, French, English, Italian, American, Peruvian, Bolivian—all of whom seemed to have houses in Cap Ferrat and Paris and London and New York and sometimes Venice, too, and who fluttered like birds of passage from one house to another depending on the seasons—June in London, August in Deauville, October in New York for the parties and the plays, November in Madrid for the shooting.
The Principessa was having a dinner for eight in her own dining room in the apartment, after which they would join the others at the rooftop restaurant for the ball and midnight supper and much later breakfast at 5 A.M. for those who lasted. Oh, it was going to be a very good party, as well it ought to be, thought Cassidy savagely, considering that the guests were flying in from Buenos Aires, Paris, Rome, Rio de Janeiro, and Hong Kong. A long way to come for scrambled eggs at 5 A.M., but then that was a large part of the mystique of the di Castiglione party—the distances people traveled to dance till dawn.
On the edge of the precipice, as it were.
Always there were parties, Cassidy the historian reflected, before the cataclysm. The ball at Waterloo the night before the engagement. The one at Moscow, the courier interrupting the waltz to say Napoleon had crossed the frontier. To horse! To horse! The Count de Castellone’s great feast, the servants parading the roast peacocks at the very moment the ram’s horn had sounded the alarm, signaling that Henry II’s men had stormed the barbican and were racing to the moat. To arms! To arms!
Why did the Times want to attend so frivolous an affair as the Principessa’s party? Unless the Times knew something . . .
Cassidy skulked down the hall, feeling his criminality to his very toes. He’d done his share of black bag jobs, but he’d never succeeded in enjoying the work (as so many others did). The Principessa was asleep. (She had come home at 4 A.M. Cassidy had checked on his watch, had listened to the distant laughter, the murmur, the silences.) Lorenzo was in the pantry, Jefferson Lee in his bedroom, Titi? He hoped she was in the nursery, but you could never tell with that imp. She slithered around the apartment on her little cat’s feet to pop up in most unexpected places.
Cassidy tiptoed into the library. Quickly because it was always best to do these things quickly. The beautiful desk with its yellow and green lacquered rolltop stood next to one of the great windows. Cassidy pushed up the rolltop and felt in the mahogany alcove where he’d last seen them. They weren’t there.
He opened the beautifully curved desk drawer with its bronze handles shaped like acanthus leaves. The stiff white cards were scattered carelessly all over the drawer. Cassidy slipped one into his pocket, closed the drawer, and rolled down the top. He turned around . . .
Lucia was standing at the entrance door, very straight, very solemn.
“I saw you,” she proclaimed.
“There’s very little you don’t see,” complained Cassidy. “Are you spying on me, Contessa?”
Trying to throw her on the defensive. It didn’t work.
“You don’t have to steal invitations to Mama’s party. She’s going to insist you be there anyway. She told me so.”
Cassidy chewed on the side of his cheek: “You don’t eat enough, Contessa. Everything about you is undernourished—except your eyes.”
“What are you going to do with that invitation?”
“Invitation?” said Cassidy. He plucked it from his side pocket, held it with the left hand while doing the Baskt flourish with his right hand, leading Lucia’s dazzled eyes astray. Then the old Ferraldi switch—and the white card disappeared.
She giggled. “Do it again!”
“Let’s take a walk in the park before your mother wakes up,” said Cassidy.
“Goody!” said Lucia. “I’ll get my coat.”
In his room, Cassidy slipped the invitation out from his sleeve, wrote Jane Atchison in bold script across the upper face and put it in his inside breast pocket. He pulled the silencer .22 from under the mattress and slipped it in his side pocket, just beating her entrance.
“Come on,” said Cassidy.
• 14 •
The oak was in the northernmost thicket of the park, an area so dense even the rapists avoided it. Cassidy walked rapidly, forcing Lucia into a run to keep up. “Why must we go so fast?” wailed Lucia. “I’m dying.”
“You’re living,” corrected Cassidy. “Have I told you of the vigil demanded of your squires before they became knights?”
“Every day!” squealed Lucia. “I’m bored with that story! Anyway, I’m not a squire, I’m a girl.”
“You’re a contessa, and therefore I demand more of you.” Cassidy picked up the pace, provoking a thin squeal of outrage from Lucia. What he was trying to do was lose her, if only for a moment, to get the letter out of the oak before she got there.
He didn’t succeed. She was still at his side, panting, but in better shape than he was when he reached the oak. Cassidy leaned against the tree, blowing like a whale. She leaned against him, laughing triumphantly. “You were trying to get rid of me. I know! You were running away so I’d get lost and die of hunger and thirst in this wild forest.”
Cassidy wrapped his long arms around the bony body: “I wouldn’t do a thing like that, Contessa. Your Mama would dock my pay if I lost you.”
“Money! That’s all you’re interested in!” The lament of rich little girls since the beginning of time.
“Look there,” said Cassidy. “A hawk.” Pointing south. “In that big tree.”
“Where?” said Lucia who had very good eyes.
Because there was no hawk.
Cassidy had already reached into the oak and got the letter. “It’s gone.”
“It was never there,” said Lucia, loving
the game. “You were tricking me.” Wrestling now, her little hands all over him. “You got something out of that tree.” Rapturous with the adventure, little hands feeling every inch of him.
“Contessa! Contessa!” Cassidy was fighting her off as best he could, but he was still winded and off balance. “What will people say?”
He tripped and fell over, Lucia on top of him, laughing like the child she so rarely was, the hands exploring him, looking for the letter.
She didn’t find the letter. She found the silenced .22.
“Golly,” said Lucia, a new expression for her. (Usually it was Ecce.) She held the long weapon in her hand, eyes round as basketballs. “Is it real? Does it go off?” She pointed it at a tree.
Cassidy took it away from her.
Lucia turned beet red, her mouth sagged open, and the round eyes were terrified. “You’re going to kidnap me! You’re going to kill me!” Little screams followed by an outburst of tears. She struggled in his arms like a demented ape, biting his wrists. “Murderer! Murderer!”
Cassidy wrapped her up in a Murphy, his left arm over her mouth.
“Silence, you idiot child!” he hissed into her ear. “I’m your protector! Your bodyguard! My job is to prevent you from being kidnapped!”
Lucia went limp as a cloth doll. Her eyes were forlorn, exhausted.
Neither of them said anything for a very long time. Sunshine filtered through the leaves in hot splashes. Three joggers in blue wool sweat suits huffed and puffed down a distant footpath. The city sounds were muffled and far away.
The terror of her, Cassidy was thinking. He had never seen a truly terrified child before. There were deeps in her terror beyond adult imagining. The terror of her was itself terrifying.
“Bodyguard!” said Lucia, making it contemptible. thought you were my teacher.”
“I’m both—teacher and protector.”
“Mama’s idea, I suppose.”
Cassidy said nothing.
