by Inconnu(e)
“Bodyguard! Like that fat nitwit who guards that awful Belgian!”
She looked at him with solemn eyes: “You’re much too intelligent to be a proper bodyguard. I bet you’ve never fired a gun in your life.”
She had to be reassured about that. Cassidy didn’t want to see the terror in those black eyes ever again. Without a word, he rolled over on his stomach and leveled the silenced .22 at a smooth-barked plane tree. He squeezed off nine shots, the bullets forming a slightly wobbly L. With a flourish of arm and hand, a magician seeking applause, he presented the feat to Lucia “Anyone can carve his girl’s initials with a knife. It’s more difficult with a gun.”
Lucia was enchanted. “Do it again!”
“The Park Department wouldn’t like it.” Cassidy loaded the weapon again and put it away in his sidepocket. He took Lucia’s little pointed chin in his hands and looked deep into her black eyes. “Lucia, no one should ever be as frightened as you were about anything at all.”
“Sorry,” said Lucia. As if she’d been found wanting.
“I want you to be careful but not fearful.” Asking a lot of a girl whose father had been kidnapped and killed and who had been brought up in the climate of modern terror. “Fear will eat your life up in little bites. You must die only once, not every day.”
He pulled her to her feet. “I’ll take you home now.”
“I don’t want to go home now,” said Lucia. “If you’re going to protect me, protect me.” She was being willful now, chattering gaily, as if the terror had never happened.
“I’ve got an appointment, Lucia. It’s very important.”
“It has something to do with that invitation you stole from Mama’s desk, hasn’t it?”
“You’re not invited, and polite little girls don’t go where they are not invited.”
“I’ll tell Mama what you did!”
“Blackmailer!” said Cassidy scowling.
“Thief!” said Lucia.
Standing straight as a pole and expressionless as a wax dummy (he’d seen Albert Finney do this bit in a curious Spanish Play the National Theater had done in London), Cassidy performed the introductions.
“Contessa, this is Alvin Feinberg, once one of the most distinguished foreign correspondents in the whole world, now reduced to excising adverbs from other men’s reportage. Mr. Feinberg, this is the Contessa di Castiglione.”
They were in Feinberg’s little glass-enclosed cubicle, Cassidy in his worn, black coat, Lucia in her new, gray, fall coat. “How do you do, Mr. Feinberg,” said Lucia, round-eyed. She dropped a curtsy, well brought up European child that she was.
Feinberg was flummoxed as Cassidy intended him to be. He leaned back in his creaky swivel chair and scratched his bald spot, staring through the gold-rimmed glasses as if the little girl was some kind of freak show. “I hadn’t expected the Contessa.”
“I’ll bet you hadn’t,” said Cassidy rubbing his nose, flaring his eloquent eyebrows, holding back on the argument until he got full attention: “I thought you should meet the girl whose safety . . .” his voice rising with the big speeches, singing them really like Olivier, “you are endangering so thoughtlessly in pursuit of a news story,” the voice dropping to a whisper now, “which—besides being a flagrant intrusion on privacy—is also of such blithering triviality as to be totally beneath the dignity of The New York Times.” Straightening up for his big finish, voice ringing like a bell. “And, for that, you would imperil the life of this poor child!”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake, Cassidy,” Feinberg’s fist hitting the desk. “I don’t give a damn about the party!”
“Why do you want an invitation?”
“They want it!” Jabbing his thumb straight down. “Downstairs. They want it because the Washington Post already has a big story on it.” Feinberg threw the paper at Cassidy: “Don’t you read the papers?”
“Not this one.” Cassidy was horrified. Three columns spread all over Page 3. INTERNATIONAL JET SET WILL CONVERGE ON MYSTERY APARTMENT said the headline. Followed by two thousand words on how rich and useless and altogether socially fascinating was this little group of partygoers who flew from continent to continent in the private jets (while millions went hungry). What made this particular jet set party intriguing (said the Post) was that it was taking place in the Windletop, the mystery building about which little was known but much suspected. The writer laid out in full rich prose all that was suspected, while disavowing most of it. The story, Cassidy noted sourly, mongered scandal, rumor, and class consciousness while radiating social disapproval.
“Hypocrisy,” roared Cassidy, “thy name is journalism.”
Feinberg ignored this (though he found it hard to disagree with). “I’m being pressured because I once knew the di Castigliones. I can’t persuade anyone down there that I have not laid eyes on Elsa di Castiglione since she moved to New York. They want to cover the story because—and only because—they’re afraid the Post will be there. Otherwise they wouldn’t touch it if the Principessa went down on her knees and begged them to come.”
“The Post is not going to be there. I went over those invitations myself.”
“You can’t tell which one of those creeps is a source. A big party like this gets to be ‘news, and then everyone leaks—the guests, the waiters. We can’t afford to stay away. That’s the way things are.”
Cassidy knew. A story had been created out of nothing. These international parties happened all the time in a dozen countries. This one had been singled out by a famous newspaper because it was taking place at the Windletop, which was a fortress for the rich and highborn. That gave the party an extra glamour. Now that the Post had waded in they’d all have stories—the Post, The Daily News, the foreign press—full of speculation, gossip, scandal, each trying to outdo the others—the whoppers getting bigger as the great day approached—and it was still three weeks away.
An open invitation to terrorists to come in and share the limelight, which they treasured above the collected works of Lenin.
Cassidy laid the invitation on Feinberg’s desk. He was standing behind Lucia and therefore concealed it from her. He Jabbed his thumb down in the direction of her head, shaking his own head at the same time, indicating they couldn’t talk under the circumstances. “Put it in a letter,” he barked. “At the old address.”
“The old address?”
Cassidy gave him the address of the Spumi.
“Come on, Contessa,” said Cassidy. “I’ll take you to the Aquarium. They have a fish there that glows in the dark all red and green like a Christmas tree.”
“Will you take me on a subway?”
“That, too. We’ll be as irresponsible as seagulls.”
Feinberg blinked his round intelligent eyes behind the gold-rimmed glasses. Cassidy had, after all, once been chief of station in Belgrade. Anyway, he owed him one for that crack about excising adverbs.
“You do this sort of thing for a living now, Cassidy?” he asked sweetly.
Cassidy was already at the entrance of the cubicle. “A higher calling than yours, you ink-stained society columnist.”
• 15 •
Cassidy was reading Alison’s letter in his room with the door locked. Feet up on the bed. Two A.M.
. . . the terrorists import hit men from all over the place for specific assignments totally unrelated to their own grievances. The Lod massacre was done by Japanese Red Army people for the PLO which would have had trouble getting in there. The thing that ended at Entebbe was pulled off by a conglomerate of terrorists—Baader-Meinhof, Carlos and his bunch, the PFLP with unofficial help from Libya, Uganda, and even South Yemen, all of whose Palestinian interests were tenuous.
Cassidy farted—a form of protest. This was old stuff. When was Alison going to get to the point?
We were very happy to get the prints of Jefferson Lee. The FBI’s prints, taken by Chicago Police after the uproar at the Democratic National Convention of 1968, accompanied the name of Tancred O. The FBI sa
ys he’s a member of the 6th of July movement, a splinter of the Weather Underground who were altogether white (though they deny racism, of course). We think 6th of July has links in Amsterdam with Baader-Meinhof, Japanese Red Brigade, Red Army Faction. If so, Jefferson Lee’s an advance man. The Windletop is definitely a target, though of undetermined priority. Anyhow we’re very anxious to keep an eye on Jefferson Lee so don’t rock the boat. He’s the only link we have . . .
That’s as far as Cassidy got. The scream split the still night air—E over High C, a child’s scream—coming from the direction of the Principessa’s bedroom.
It kept coming, a high sustained screech that Cassidy, galloping down the corridor now in his pajamas and bare feet, the .38 in his fist, past the Pope Constant painting, past the empty pedestal where the Donatello had once stood, divined as a scream of fury, not one of fear.
Reassuring but not so reassuring that Cassidy didn’t burst into the Principessa’s bedroom without knocking (feeling, even in this moment of high emergency, unmannered and out of costume so powerful are the social embarrassments grained into us by the rich and powerful).
The overhead light was on in the painted, mirrored, intensely rococo bedroom, and that in itself was peculiar because the Principessa rarely used the overhead light. Lucia—her face contorted with rage—was astride her beautiful mother on the bed, beating her with her little fists, screeching pure outrage, pure in the sense it contained no words in any of her four languages, simply animal sounds.
Her mother was fending her off without expression, routinely, as if this sort of thing had happened before, perhaps many times, the little girl’s fists landing on the Principessa’s hands, her elbows, everywhere except her beautiful face.
The Principessa was wearing very little, but she was covered by a sheet of blue percale with the di Castiglione crest in white lace, under which the thin muscular body writhed and strained in this combat, sensual as a bit of pornographic film. Cassidy tossed the .38 into the winged armchair—the same one he’d been invited to sit in by the Principessa—and grasped the child by both shoulders, pulling her backward away from the Principessa. Lucia was in her woolen nightie with forest scenes of bears and deer and birds imprinted in soft autumnal colors—its innocence almost obscene next to her mother’s nakedness.
“Lucia! Lucia!” Cassidy was astounded at the pain in his own voice. He pulled her off the Principessa and picked her up into his arms, trying to deflect the fury toward himself. There was no need. The rage had ended. Lucia burst into tears flooding his shoulder with wetness, burrowing her face into his chest.
It was an intimacy he didn’t want, not with the Principessa looking at him that way, the violet eyes furious. She wasn’t angry with her daughter, she was angry with him—for being there, for witnessing this humiliation. Relieved of her daughter, she had slithered under the blue sheet like a snake taking cover in forest leaves, still gazing at him as if this terrible scene was all his fault.
“I’ll take her back to her bed,” said Cassidy.
The Principessa said nothing.
Cassidy turned toward the bedroom door, and there he found Lorenzo, in a long dressing gown that reached to his heels, impassive as an Indian. Next to him was Titi in her wool bathrobe, saturnine as always.
Everyone but me, thought Cassidy, took time out to put on something before chasing down the hall. I’m just a boor. Or perhaps not. Perhaps this scene has happened before so often these people don’t take Lucia’s screams very seriously any more.
Lucia still sobbing against his chest.
“You forgot your gun,” said Lorenzo. The butler retrieved the gun from the winged chair and put it into Cassidy’s right hand protruding from underneath Lucia’s buttocks.
Where was Jefferson Lee? Everyone in the household was there but him.
It was a long walk from the Principessa’s bedroom past the paintings, the sculpture, the objets d’art to the nursery, and long before he got there, the sobs had stopped. When Cassidy laid Lucia in her bed, she was already asleep, face washed clear of ferocity, innocent as a fawn.
As he stared down at her, Titi crept in and put herself in her own bed, malevolent as a spider.
Cassidy didn’t return to his room immediately. Instead, he went into the immense unused sitting room, his eyes going from one object to another, cataloguing, counting. The silver and crystal chandelier from a sixteenth-century Medici palace was in its place. So was the Fabergé egg with the little lapis lazuli door that sprang open revealing the sadfaced Tsarina painted on ivory inside (an Easter present from the Tsar). It was in its glass case against the wall alongside of the enameled armband from an eighth century Holy Roman Emperor, the carved ivory fan from the Tsu dynasty—everything in its place . . .
No, not everything.
The little ten-inch-high four-thousand-year-old urn from Carthage, with its incredible perfection of symmetry—Cassidy’s favorite of all the di Castiglione treasures—was missing. It normally stood in the place of honor (as well it should) in the very center of the glass case.
The di Castiglione loot of four centuries was slipping away. The best pieces, too. Cassidy bared his teeth in his satyr grin. All very appropriate—the looters looted—and none of his business really since he was there solely to guard Lucia.
Still, what was Lucia doing in her mother’s room at that hour?
Feeling the richness of the blue and gold Aubusson under his barefeet. Then the cold marble of the corridor.
Alison’s letter lay on the floor where he’d dropped it. He picked it up and read on:
Much of the financing of the left wing terrorists now comes from East Germany and even the Soviet Union. Many of these commandos are trained in East Germany by—knowing you, you’ll find this droll—ex-Nazis. We have no information that Hugo Dorn is in any way involved, but a lot of these ex-Nazis know one another. Therefore, he’s vulnerable to blackmail. What makes this situation dangerous is that not only are the various terrorist groups—PLO, Red Army Faction, Weather Underground, and all the rest—sharing arms, money, training, et cetera—but also information. They are putting together the germ of their own CIA—and it’s worldwide.
Destroy.
Cassidy cut the letter into small pieces with his nail scissors and flushed them down the toilet of Orosco marble with finely veined red traceries. Too good for excretion, Cassidy was thinking. I ought to hang my ass out the window and shit straight down forty-nine stories.
He brushed his teeth in a bowl of the same marble as the toilet, with gold faucets in the shape of dolphins, wondering if corruption was infectious like disease, if he could catch it by touch.
He went to bed and through his brain flashed the image of a lovely Principessa struggling expressionlessly with her furious child. In a flash of afterglow long after the event, it struck him that the very absence of emotion was itself a kind of despair beyond the ability of facial muscles to express.
He thought about that for a long time. Then he thought about Alison. Why was Alison telling him all this? Alison never did anything that didn’t, in some way, push the career and good fortune of Alison ahead to some minute degree. He was not trying to tell him something but to sell him something.
• 16 •
Eleven A.M.
Sun streaming through the Venetian blinds, all over the brilliant blues and reds of the Persian carpet. Cassidy hunched himself out of bed dismayed at the hour and hurtled into his clothes. Eleven A.M. Damn!
In the corridor outside his room, he encountered the Principessa, fully dressed, an event of such magnitude it stopped him in his tracks. It was the first time ever she’d been up ahead of himself.
She was in a gray wool suit, not so tight-fitting as most of her clothes, and she was putting on a little gray, matching, cloche hat, looking at herself in the gilt Louis XV mirror that hung over a small marble-topped table. Their eyes met in the mirror, Cassidy’s and the Principessa’s. Just for a moment a smile hovered on the Principessa’s
face, like a sunbeam.
This was so unlikely that Cassidy didn’t know what to make of it. She never failed to rattle him, he was thinking, because always she did the unexpected. A smile!
“A bit late, Professor, aren’t you?” The voice mocking and playful (which was the last mood in the world he expected her to be in after the scene of the night before). She looked fresh as a teenager and Cassidy, catching a glimpse of himself in the gilt mirror, thought himself looked a hundred and two.
“I’ve been neglecting m’ duties,” said Cassidy. He swept her his d’Artagnan bow, the one Douglas Fairbanks, Sr., did in The Three Musketeers. “I’m very sorry.”
“You apologize charmingly, Professor,” said the Principessa. Then very lightly to take the sting out. “But underneath all your apologies I always detect some intention or other quite at variance with what you’re apologizing for.”
Yes, and underneath all your smiling banter is always some intention quite contrary to what you’re sayin’, said Cassidy to himself. Aloud, he said: “Charm, Madame, is a weakness of the Irish. They mistake it for integrity.”
“Good heavens!” said the Principessa. “Aphorisms so early in the morning!”
She passed down the hall in the direction of the foyer (with its new steel doors guarding the elevator), her back to him as carefree as a sparrow.
Cassidy took himself to the kitchen where he found Lorenzo in a light overcoat, slipping on a pair of leather gloves. At sight of Cassidy, Lorenzo’s face crinkled into its leathery Florentine smile. “Signor, I am desolate, but I must leave you. Might you get your own breakfast this morning?”
Everyone going out. Very peculiar.
“Where’s Jefferson Lee?” asked Cassidy.
“Gone,” said Lorenzo, working the leather gloves with his fingers to see that they lay on his fingers totally straight. “Dismissed,” working out a wrinkle with great care, “you might say.”
Jupiter, thought Cassidy. Alison will be furious. He’ll say it’s my fault.
