Party Of The Year

by Inconnu(e)

  “The Principessa thought Jefferson Lee’s cooking lacked esprit,” said Lorenzo mildly.

  “I recognize the Principessa’s prose style,” said Cassidy pleasantly. But what happened to all those reasons for not firing Jefferson Lee—the Equal Opportunity Commission, NAACP, and all the rest of it? Aloud, he said: “I just ran into the Principessa in the corridor. I’ve never known her to be up and dressed so early before.”

  Lorenzo’s smile was purest Florentine silk: “The Principessa is going to confession, Signor. Always on Thursday.”

  Cassidy puffed out his cheeks ruefully. No wonder she was in such a good mood. She was going to lay her baroque, ultra chic sins at the feet of the proper authorities who would take them off her hands and mind and soul.

  “Who hears the Principessa’s confession, Lorenzo?”

  “The Cardinal, Signor. He is an old friend from Italy.”

  Confessing to a Cardinal was even better than having a Titian in the back hall, as status symbols went.

  “What do you suppose they talk about, Lorenzo? Not sin.”

  “Oh, no!” said the Lorenzo with his fine smile. “The aristocracy doesn’t sin, signor. It makes mistakes.”

  “Has the Principessa made any lately?”

  The hooded look closed down on Lorenzo’s remarkable face: “I bid you good morning, sir.” He went out the rear door, which lead to the rear stairs and elevator in the Windletop, closing the door behind him.

  Cassidy made himself a cup of coffee, chewed on a stale croissant left over from the Principessa’s breakfast, and thought about Jefferson Lee.

  Later he poked his nose into the nursery. Lucia was taking her piano lesson from the formidable French lady named Madame Frontenac. The child was playing a Chopin Étude savagely—which was not how Chopin intended it to be played. “Pas du tout!” the French lady was saying. Cassidy caught a sidewise glimpse of Lucia’s face. That was all he wanted—a glimpse. She looked triumphant, like an Amazon who has just chopped off a head.

  Cassidy closed the door without anyone seeing him. Twenty minutes later he was on a bar stool at the Spumi reading Feinberg’s letter.

  Don’t ask me where I got this because if I told you I’d never get any more. I can’t even vouch for its authenticity beyond saying it fits the facts, as I know them, and came from someone who is not unimpeachable (who is?) but very intelligent and knowing, especially about Nicki.

  Nicki di Castiglione was—as so many of the people in his thoroughly depraved circles were—bisexual, but his real inclinations ran to men. When he did it with women, he frequently did it with another man watching or sharing. Nicki was also deeply masochistic, and it was whispered among his sexual companions (which numbered, as I say, both men and women) that the act of marrying Elsa itself was a form of masochism. She resembles a whip in many ways, and she could both be one and use one. So it was said. Her infidelities, which were legion, were not only forgiven by Nicki but actually demanded by him as Masoch who gave his name to the game did with both his wives.

  Cassidy put down the letter at that point and tossed the Wild Turkey down his gullet to help digest the information he had just read. He sat there a moment, feeling the whiskey. keeping his mind open. It was a quarter to twelve, his favorite hour at the Spumi. No one was there but Henry and the waiters. The tables were neatly laid, and the place smelled of fresh flowers and cleanliness. Restaurants, he was thinking, were at their best before the customers wrecked the place with their eating and drinking and smoking and noise.

  He read on.

  As you know, Nicki was kidnapped and kept prisoner for many months while the ransom demands were haggled over by his sister Clothilde. During this time his captors indulged Nicki’s sexual tastes. Bondage itself Nicki found to be sexually gratifying—and right here I should say the information becomes a little suspect. One wonders who got all these details, but they were given to me with such positiveness as to carry weight. Anyhow . . .

  Nicki adored being tied up and constantly requested new and different bondages, positions that were very painful, being suspended upside down, the whole bit. One day his captors went too far. They tied him in some complicated way and left him—because part of the thrill was being tied up and abandoned—and when they returned, Nicki had strangled himself. Inadvertently.

  With seven and a half million dollars at stake, naturally they carried on with the negotiations and, when the demands were met, delivered a dead body. Aah, but you say, Nicki wasn’t strangled, he was shot. Here comes the black comedy. The kidnappers were—as you know—radical ideological terrorists kidnapping rich folk for lofty revolutionary groups, who are very puritanical about sex, especially such decadent bourgeois sexual perversions as practiced by Nicki di Castiglione. If it had become noised around the radical underground that they had indulged Nicki’s curious sexual habits, the kidnappers would have lost face and perhaps even been tossed out of the lodge altogether. Therefore they shot the dead body and left it on the city dump. This was a perfectly respectable radical revolutionary deed, just as allowing him to strangle himself in pursuit of perverse sexual pleasure was a thoroughly disreputable, counter-revolutionary and therefore utterly impermissible deed.

  I hope you relish the joke as much as I do.

  Cassidy was not amused. A good joke—but on who? Self-strangulation of that kind was a Mafia trick and the Mafia was not left wing but very right wing. Someone had infiltrated the left-wing revolutionary kidnapping and just possibly turned it into a right-wing old-fashioned kidnapping and murder for fun and money. Very funny indeed but the joke was on Feinberg. Someone had sold him a bill of goods.

  “You look awful,” commented Henry. “Your liver?”

  Like a lot of Europeans of his age Henry traced everything to the liver.

  “I never discuss my liver in public, Henry,” said Cassidy gently, “because of the biofeedback, you know.”

  Henry let it go. “Sophy was in. She’s terrified about you being in Turkestan. She says they got brigands there. That’s what she said—brigands.”

  “They had brigands in the seventeenth century. Now they got hoodlums like everyone else.”

  Cassidy clambered off the bar stool and went up the brownstone steps to his apartment.

  The place looked as if a hurricane had struck it. The books were piled four feet high on the floor, and the shelves were empty. The mattress had been slit open from top to bottom. The place had been ransacked from floor to ceiling.

  Cassidy made a little clown face and did a slow clog dance—for the hidden cameras. You had to give them something. Afterward he sat on a pile of books and thought about things.

  He was supposed to go directly to the hiding place to show the hidden cameras where it was. But Alison’s letter was somewhere in that pile of books—and there were a lot of books. Anyway, he had another copy in the bank. If that’s what they were after....

  Cassidy left the place just as it was, simply walking out the door and locking it behind him. If they wanted Alison’s letter, let them find it themselves.

  • 17 •

  He awoke with dread, predecessor of fear. The room was almost black with only the faintest glow of light on the ceiling. Someone was in the room—that he knew—while pretending sleep, breathing slowly, regularly, trying to control the heartbeat.

  Rustlings of pure silk against flesh. An exhalation light as a butterfly’s wing. Cassidy clutched the silenced .22 underneath the pillow, but already he knew this peril lay beyond bullets. He was still wildly considering his course of action when he felt her lips against his, mocking, unmistakable, the two hands grasping his face, centering for the firm tongue which split his lips in short, sharp, stylish strokes.

  “Principessa!” He got it out, all four indignant syllables, as best he could against those lips, that tongue, which dismayed speech at its source.

  “Let’s fuck, Professor. We can talk later.”

  The obscenity in the darkness loomed large. As Lucia had divine
d, Cassidy was a prude in matters sexual and especially in sexual language, a man to whom Jupiter Jehoshaphat was the strongest expletive allowable, an old-fashioned man. The Principessa seemed to have guessed it as well as Lucia and had used the pungent Anglo-Saxon word to stun him into immobility as she climbed into his sheets, her body—his protesting hands informing him—as naked as a moth’s.

  “No! No!” protested Cassidy, straining away from her, his mind seething with the implications.

  “Hush, Professor,” whispered the Principessa, laughter lurking in the whisper as if the joke were devilish—a joke on him as indeed she was on him rather than with him.

  As he still pushed at the supple naked body, she delivered the fatal sting like a wasp paralyzing its victim. “Hush now! We wouldn’t want to wake Lucia, would we?”

  Wake Lucia!

  Cassidy lay back robbed of volition. Wake Lucia! To find him in bed with her mother!

  “Rape!” said Cassidy furiously—but softly so as not to wake Lucia.

  “If you like!” Unbuttoning the pajama top, untying the pajama trouser cord, all very expertly and swiftly, as if having committed these invasions against how many couchant males while her husband watched hungrily?

  “You don’t leave a lady much choice, Professor.” Laughter n the voice now thickening with naked lust.

  “I’m old!” moaned Cassidy. “Too old for these games!”

  “Oh, no, Cassidy, you’re not too old at all!” Her tongue and lands fluttering all over his ancient nudity with the expertise of confident aristocrat that harbored no sexual timidities. She played his maleness like a violin, teasing his reluctant body into a lechery that aroused and unmanned him simultaneously, because, in this affair, she was altogether the aggressor, taking possession of him as if by seigneurial right. She mounted him and—only after she had played with him with hands and tits and lips to the utmost of her extraordinary sexual gifts—fucked him with overpowering agility. Even as he was coming into her, he sensed the laughter in her as if laughter was her form of orgasm, her kind of release, as if sex was her revenge.

  Cassidy dozed and dreamed. Of barbicans stormed and oveverrun. Of watch towers crumbling. Defeat, everywhere defeat, and himself left flat on the ground, stripped of his armor . . .

  He awoke in the darkness, feeling her nakedness next to him. He could sense her awakeness like a current of electricity. He said nothing, testing if she was as aware of his awakeness as he was of hers. She was.

  “Three A.M., Professor.” The voice languorous and sad. “The hour of despair.”

  “Speak for yourself, Madame. I am not so familiar with the hour of 3 A.M. as you.” A bitter remark. Actually Cassidy wasn’t bitter but curious. She was not the kind of person who went about raping for no reason. She was a rapist with purpose. At least he thought so.

  The Principessa’s voice was reflective and gentle, lust and mockery gone. It made her sound wistful: “I stay up too late much too often to have company, Professor. I’m without a husband now. I don’t like to be alone.”

  “Alone? With your legion of lovers?” Jeering at her, which he would never dare in the daylight.

  She didn’t get angry. Instead, she sounded amused: “Legions of lovers! At my age, a lady’s escort kisses one on the cheek—and rings for the lift.”

  He didn’t believe her. Still, it was best to play along if he were to learn anything. “So, Madame, it was the absence of alternatives that caused you to cast yourself on my ancient, wrinkled, reeking body.”

  That brought out her low throaty laugh: “It’s just possible I take pleasure in ancient, wrinkled, reeking bodies. There are brothels in Paris that have only seventy-year-old whores, appealing to some tastes.”

  How far were her defenses down? “Someone is stealing the silver, Madame, and the statuary.”

  He heard a swift intake of breath. He’d penetrated the armor of her playfulness. Presently he felt the bed move, and she left him. In the darkness he could hear her slipping on whatever she had taken off earlier. The door to his bedroom opened, letting in a triangle of light from the corridor.

  “Good night, Principessa.” Trying her out. He wanted very much to test the tone of her response for anger of fear. The reply was none of those. It was dry and jeering: “Buona notte, my ancient, wrinkled, reeking lover!”

  The door closed behind her.

  He lay awake wondering. It wasn’t the attraction of his body certainly. She was a woman of cool determination, whose every act seemed precisely reasoned (if not always reasonable), a woman of logic, order, and precision. She did few things on impulse, certainly nothing so demeaning as raping the servants.

  It was all part of some cool calculation, and Cassidy felt he knew exactly what it was.

  The next morning Cassidy ate his croissant, sipped his coffee, and then sprang it all on Lorenzo. He didn’t really expect to get an answer out of Lorenzo, but he wanted to test the temperature of the water on the butler. You could find out a lot of things by a man’s face.

  He spoke harshly, positively: “Lucia caught Mama in bed with that black stud, Jefferson Lee, and that’s why we had all that uproar in the middle of the night. That’s also why those two tutors got fired—because Lucia won’t stand Mama’s going to bed with them.”

  Lorenzo said nothing. He was in his leather apron, polishing silver as always. He would, Cassidy felt sure, have protested eloquently, maybe even angrily if these accusations were pure libel. Instead the turtle eyes narrowed, the mouth pursed, the fine lines around the temples deepened. The atmosphere reeked of disapproval, not at the deeds themselves (Lorenzo’s servitude was unquestioning: the actions of a mistress might be confusing or frightening, never wrong) but at voicing these actions. That was wrong, giving tongue to these dark deeds.

  So.

  She had slipped into bed with him because she feared his hold on the little girl. Any time she wanted to get rid of him she’d just have to let it be known in the nursery that an amorous relationship existed—and that would just be that. Lucia would scream in the night, beating her little fists on her mother’s flawless features, while her mother held her off without expression, as if she’d arranged the whole thing—as indeed she had.

  But how did she go about letting the news be known in the nursery? She certainly wouldn’t go in there and announce it.

  Titi?

  • 18 •

  Cassidy crept down the back stairs like a decrepit cat, joints creaking. At each landing he listened to the echoes of his own breathing. Severely purposive, these stairs. No marble or chrome. Cement and steel painted dull gray. Nobody was supposed to go on these stairs, according to the dictates of Alfred the Great (otherwise known as Hugo Dorn, the Good Nazi). If no one was supposed to use them, what were they for? The stairs at the Windletop, front and back, were put there by the dictates of the fire laws that had been superseded by the alarms of modern terrorism. Whether it was better to be burned alive in your bed—or massacred there—that was the question.

  Cassidy was circling down, counting as he went—forty-nine, forty-eight, forty-seven, his footsteps sending hollow booms clear down the stairwell. He was thinking of those circular stone stairways in medieval castles—the last defense line of all. If the invaders got into the castle proper, the resident knight fought his way up the front stairs, then down the back stairs, each stairwell designed so as to favor his good right arm and hinder the good right arm of the invader.

  Forty-six, forty-five, forty-four . . .

  At the thirty-ninth floor he ran square into the Security Chief (alias Alfred the Great, alias Hugo the Good)—clearly waiting for him, lips smiling disapproval.

  “We’ve been following your descent on television,” said Alfred almost apologetically.

  Television.

  Cassidy noticed—as he should have noticed much earlier—the round black bulges at the corner of each landing. The boob tube. Trust Alfred not to overlook TV monitors.

  “One wonders,” said Alfred
negligently, “exactly what the Contessa’s bodyguard is doing, tiptoeing down the backstairs.”

  Cassidy sat on the cement stairs and blew on his hands irritably. “Reconnoitering,” he said harshly. Normally he didn’t believe in telling the truth to good Nazis, but there were moments when you couldn’t avoid it. “One wonders,” said Cassidy, mimicking the Good Nazi, “where the exits are and how well guarded and so forth and so on. One is paid to wonder these things.”

  Alfred pulled at his earlobe thoughtfully. “Mr. Cassidy, might I invite your attention to Windletop Security Regulation 522 forbidding personal use of these stairwells except in dire emergency.”

  “Might I invite your attention to the fire regulations of the city of New York which decree complete access and information about fire exits to every resident.”

  Alfred the Great studied his fingernails: “The Fire Commissioner and I have gone all over this, Mr. Cassidy. The Windletop is permitted certain exceptions in view of the extraordinary nature of its problems and its clientele.”

  “You mean the rich are exempt from the fire laws? Perhaps even fire itself?”

  Alfred smiled a weary smile: “The elevator is right here, Mr. Cassidy. Might I put you on it? You’ll find it easier than walking—at your age.”

  “Leave my age out of it,” snarled Cassidy—and then let him have it right between the eyes. “Hugo.”

  The name bounded down the stairwell—Hu-go, Hu-go, echoing away like a sound effect. Hugo’s eyes went blank, and the silence in him deepened to infinity. He ran his fingers over his temples, as if smoothing the dyed hair into place.

  “There are at least twenty-six Jewish residents of the Windletop who . . .”

  That was as far as Cassidy got. He had meant to say “who would be interested in your true identity” but Hugo Dorn’s hand brushed his mouth and shut it up. All done as if accidentally, brushing against him that way, the eyes indicating the black bulge in the stairwell.

  Cassidy closed up. Blackmail wasn’t any use if everyone knew it. He rose from the steps: “Let’s walk down, shall we? A little exercise alters the point of view. After you . . .”