Party Of The Year

by Inconnu(e)

  • 20 •

  “The Principessa would like to see you,” said Lorenzo. He was polishing the great silver and gold meat tray, which was large enough for half a cow.

  “She’s back?” said Cassidy. “Since when?”

  “In the conservatory,” said Lorenzo, ducking the question.

  The Principessa was snipping dead leaves, standing as always very straight, slim as a pencil. She was in a pale pink blouse over which she wore a heavily textured vest of pure gold and around her slender bottom a dove gray skirt with huge pockets and lots of pleats. All of it tidy as a bowstring. Her pale gold hair had been cut in a new way, close to her skull, giving her a boyish look. It made her extraordinary eyes even bigger.

  The first meeting since bed.

  “Nice trip?” inquired Cassidy.

  “Not very,” said the Principessa. She looked at him through eyelashes too long to be quite real. “Haven’t you another suit, Professor?”

  “What’s the matter with this one?”

  “Everything. You’re to take us to lunch at the Windletop Club. I was hoping we might clean you up a bit for public display.”

  “Many have tried, Madame.”

  “You look like an abandoned warehouse, Professor.” Snip. Snip. It was a stunning arrangement of colors—her pale gold hair, violet eyes, and the deep green of the foliage. “It doesn’t matter. We can place you at the window against the light where no one can see you.”

  “Under the table might be even better,” said Cassidy. “Might I ask, Madame, why I am to be given the great honor of accompanying the Contessa and the Principessa to lunch?”

  “Must I have a reason for everything, Professor?”

  “You always do, Madame?”

  The Principessa smiled: “I had no idea my life was so structured, Professor. I’ve been called a butterfly.”

  “They don’t know you as well as I do.”

  She rebuked him with her eyes for that one. “Some of them do, Professor,” she said very distinctly. Snip. Snip. “Actually, there is a reason.”

  I thought so, said Cassidy. Not aloud.

  “I thought you might—during lunch—in the intervals of what I devoutly hope . . .”

  Snip. Snip.

  “. . . will be exquisitely amusing conversation . . . study the restaurant for security reasons. I’m thinking about my party.”

  Cassidy put his hands behind his head, walked to the window and stared out, rocking on his heels. The Lights Are Going Out All Over Europe, said the Foreign Minister: Who was it who played that part? Not Paul Muni. He let her wait for it. She was snipping away.

  “I think the party should be called off.”

  Snip. Snip. Long pause.

  “Why?”

  Cassidy wheeled on his heels and faced her solemnly: “Because it has attracted too much attention. Stories in the Post and the Times. Now they’re all doing it. Fenella de Hartung has called it The Party of the Year in her column.”

  “Fenella de Hartung is a cretin.” Snip. Snip. “The same mildewed people—all of us getting a little more so—doing the same things, and saying the same things, as at a hundred other parties. Only the clothes have been changed to protect the innocent—as if there were any.”

  Snip. Snip. She didn’t look at him.

  “This party would have been harmless if it had taken place like all your other parties, as a sort of fashionable get-together known only to the insiders on the chic scene—or even the outsiders. It’s got way beyond that. The publicity has made you and your party a very inviting target—the very symbol of bourgeois decadence.”

  He couldn’t have selected a worse combination of words: “Decadent, perhaps,” snapped the Principessa. “Bourgeois never!”

  A mistake, Cassidy swiftly saw, and one that could hardly be rectified by any more arguments along that line. There were much deeper arguments for abandoning the party. A power hungry Number 2 man who needed a boost in the hierarchy and was throwing a little bread on the waters to get it (and never mind who got hurt). He might have told her about Alison and about Jefferson Lee, and later—in The Legend of the di Castigliones, Annotated—Cassidy admitted he’d made a great mistake. It was the only argument that would have swayed her at this point, and he should have used it. He didn’t because there were powerful reasons for not telling the amateurs what the professionals were doing. The professionals were a race apart, and many of their concerns and their activities were almost unexplainable to the amateurs. There were very great precedents for silence. In almost every case in which candor had been attempted, disaster had followed.

  It wasn’t discipline, Cassidy was to write later, that kept him silent. It was bad habit.

  Snip. Snip. The Principessa’s exasperation had vanished, and she was again radiant.

  “Do wash your hands, Professor, like a good boy.”

  The Windletop Club was rarely crowded, which was part of its panache. Usually ten servitors were in evidence to every club member. Bartenders waited at the empty bar, waiters stood expectantly in a restaurant almost devoid of diners.

  Lucia was wearing a red velvet dress with gold buttons, looking Victorian and demure, unlike her nursery appearance. Her face had been scrubbed pink, and she was very subdued.

  “I feel threadbare,” said Cassidy.

  “I’m overjoyed to hear it,” said the Principessa. “Hurry along. We don’t want to display you any longer than necessary.”

  The rooftop restaurant was unusually full of beautifully dressed club members, engaging in the ritual of lunch in which food played the smallest role. The important thing was how you looked and how the people around you looked and who they were with and who you were with. And why? And did her husband know?

  The tables were covered with heavy pink linen tablecloths, bright with flowers, and awash with silver, glasses, the club’s own red and white bone china and, on one of those plates, butter in round serrated balls resting on ice. Busboys poured water and dreamed of being waiters—perhaps even authors.

  “Not the usual table, Robert,” said the Principessa. “That one by the window. We’re trying to keep the Professor out of sight.”

  Robert placed Cassidy in front of the plate-glass window, his back to Manhattan, a good place to study the diners. They all looked rich and harmless, but then that was the new technique among terrorists—dress well and look intensely bourgeois.

  The Principessa was studying the menu, an enormous one written in French and printed in huge block type. “Lucia, you must have the trout. You look low on iodine.”

  “I’d rather have the child’s menu, Mama. You get crayons with the hamburger, don’t you Robert?”

  Crayons, Cassidy was thinking. Sometimes Lucia acted six. Sometimes sixty.

  “Robert, might Lucia have crayons with the trout?”

  “Certainly, Madame.”

  Lucia looked mutinous: “And Captain Marvel, too, Robert.”

  “Captain Marvel!” The Principessa’s voice fluted with astonishment.

  “You get to color Captain Marvel whatever you choose.”

  “Coloring Captain Marvel! At twelve!” Deep in the menu, the Principessa threw the line away.

  “It’s for Titi, Mama,” Lucia was not going to let her mother get away with throwaway lines.

  “Even less excuse for Titi. She’s eighteen.”

  Titi coloring Captain Marvel, Cassidy was thinking, was a very droll idea. More likely to play Captain Marvel.

  “No one knows how old Titi is,” said Lucia.

  “Eighteen,” said the Principessa. “I can tell by her teeth. Professor, what is your thinking about lunch?”

  Cassidy rubbed his nose plaintively: “If you’re ordering for all of us, Madame, I’m deficient in magnesium, zinc, and most of the lesser metals—lithium, for example.”

  The Principessa’s gaze shifted from the menu to Cassidy but her tone of detached irony didn’t change a bit. “Omelette aux fines herbes for the Professor, Robert—and thr
ow in any magnesium, zinc, and lesser metals that happen to be around the kitchen.”

  “Yes, Principessa.”

  “And for me, spinach—the usual way.”

  Robert picked up the menus and handed them to the floor waiter. He took the wine menu from the captain—the table teemed with servitors as befitted a princess—and handed it to the Principessa. Just here the Principessa became very feminine and old world and handed the wine card to Cassidy. Cassidy didn’t even open it. He handed it straight back to Robert, barking: “Château Montrachet, Robert. Only wine in the world that goes with spinach.”

  Spinach. No wonder she looked like a pencil.

  “Spinach abounds in metals, Professor,” said the Principessa demurely. “It adds steel to one’s determination.”

  As if you need any more of that, said Cassidy to himself. He couldn’t say things like that aloud in front of Lucia.

  Lucia had detached herself from the conversation. She was gazing over Cassidy’s head out the window at the Empire State Building shimmering in the distance, mouth agape, deep in her secret child’s glee where adults couldn’t follow. She loved restaurants, Cassidy guessed, loved every minute outside the apartment.

  Cassidy fell to counting the exits. The one nearest them led to the kitchen; another on the highest bank led to a small garden with flagstone paths, green plants, and a countrified air (fifty-five stories up) for those who wished to take the air (few did, though the little garden cost a bundle to maintain). Straight ahead of him was the small landing where Robert held forth—and that led to the elevator which brought the guests up from the street. There was a service elevator next to the kitchens that complicated Cassidy’s problems unbearably.

  “This place will be dangerous no matter what we do the night of your party,” said Cassidy.

  “I’ll tell the guests,” said the Principessa brightly. “It’ll add a little spice to the affair which, God knows, needs something like that. It’s gone on a little too long—the di Castiglione party.”

  “If that’s the case, why not call it off?”

  The Principessa turned the full candlepower of her violet eyes on him reproachfully as if he’d emitted a bad smell: “How can you even suggest such a thing, Professor? Call my friends and tell them not to come to my party! Why, they would inquire? And what should I say to that—that I am a coward? That I’ve gone senile? That I have succumbed to your irrational fears that something might happen when, quite clearly, it is far more likely it might not.”

  The violet eyes blazed with passion. Over a party! The gulf between them yawned like the Grand Canyon.

  She was smiling mockingly at him now: “We decadent bourgeois cannot abandon a party simply because revolutionaries are underfoot. We are chained to behavior patterns as fixed and changeless as the mating habits of fish, Professor, and to us just as important.”

  Blowing her trumpet defiantly for this idiotic party, as if civilization itself were at stake, as indeed her civilization was. If you took away the parties, the gathering together of the international rich to celebrate their uniqueness, their glitter, their charm, then you didn’t leave them very much. Cassidy doubted the Principessa had thought this through exactly in those terms. She was reacting instinctively, spreading her feathers in the only way nature would permit her. Cassidy felt a sinking in his spirits. If the revolutionaries studied Marighela—and they studied Marighela like scriptures—they would certainly zero in on this fixed incapacity of the international aristocracy of the rich to change its habits—and make its plans accordingly.

  “My dear Professor,” the Principessa was nibbling on her spinach delicately, imbibing iron for her soul, “my friends are coming from London, Paris, Rome, Brazil. They’ve already ordered their shoes for my party.”

  “Their shoes!” said Cassidy hopelessly. “Their shoes!”

  “You didn’t think they were coming barefoot,” said the Principessa.

  Cassidy tucked into his omelette aux fine herbes and sipped the Montrachet. Lucia and the Principessa were chattering in Italian, Lucia’s little hands waving gracefully in the air. Her personality changed altogether when she spoke Italian. She became European—deeper, older, more cultivated. In the American language she was a tomboy; In Italian she was all female. Also she was closer to her mother. He felt out of it.

  “We’re discussing Mr. Struthers,” said the Principessa. “The reason we’re talking Italian is because Lucia . . .”

  “Mama!” wailed Lucia.

  “. . . thinks you’re sexually naive.”

  “Which one is Mr. Struthers?” asked Cassidy.

  The Principessa leveled her eyelashes at a boney, hawk-faced, white-haired man who lunched alone three tables away at the window.

  “Professor! You’re staring!” said Lucia. “It’s rude!”

  Cassidy was remembering that it was on Struthers floor, the thirty-ninth, he’d encountered Hugo Dorn, the Good Nazi. Well! Well!

  “You are staring,” commented the Principessa. “Do you know Mr. Struthers?”

  “A nodding acquaintanceship,” said Cassidy. “Many years ago.”

  When his name wasn’t Struthers.

  As Fingertips had said, the Fabrizio material was gamey and there was an enormous amount of it. Cassidy read it all swiftly, picking, choosing, putting some bits aside, underlined for later study, making his own judgments. He was in his pajamas on the bed at midnight.

  Elsa has been pictured as a grasping scheming divorcee only interested in becoming a Principessa. Or as an adventuress madly in love with Nicki who was the most beautiful man in Rome. Or as a nymphomaniac who needed an indulgent husband to condone and conceal her lusts . . . she was none of these really. I knew her very well. She was almost a mother to Nicki, taking care of him—and God knows he needed taking care of—trying to keep him out of trouble and out of the headlines . . .

  Fabrizzio had got that from an English lady of advanced years (and somehow credibility increased with age in gossip like this) who had known the di Castigliones very well.

  Now why do I pick that bit out, thought Cassidy, examining his motives. It clashes with almost every other bit of information about Elsa. Is it because I want to believe it? Or is it because it fits the facts better than other more lurid, more sexual, more accepted, gossip about Elsa. Because it was a difficult mosaic to fit together. Why had this Prince of depraved habits married a woman much older than himself and comparatively penniless?

  His father Augusto was an even bigger swinger than Nicki, one of the great hell raisers of the early 1900s. It was said that Nicki was always trying to overtake his father’s reputation for depravity and that he’d never manage it.

  Fabrizio had crammed in every last bit of gossip. He’d got some out of the papers and much of it from friends who didn’t know they were being interviewed, who thought the conversation was just private gossip mongering and who had therefore opened up with all they knew. Which didn’t make it any more reliable.

  Cassidy read on for an hour.

  The whisper now all over Rome is that the Mafia infiltrated the kidnapping and made off with the money. This is so popular a theory that I wonder about it. Next year there will probably be another rumor. The new twist is that one man ran off with all the money, and now the Mafia is looking for him because he was their man . . .

  Cassidy turned out the light. His head was beginning to split with the possibilities.

  She slipped into his room that night just after 2 A.M. when she returned from whatever party she’d been to. This time Cassidy didn’t reach for the gun. Even half awake in the blackness, he recognized the rustlings, the faint feminine exhalations.

  “This is to become a regular thing then, Principessa?” A whisper so as not to wake Lucia—or anyone.

  “Why not?” The voice light as a moth.

  “Droit de Principessa?”

  “You have a nasty tongue, Professor.”

  She was climbing into his bed as she said it, the voice husky with
lust which she made no effort to conceal.

  “Principessa . . .” emitted Cassidy pushing at the naked body feebly. A token protest in the name of his integrity.

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

  Same line. Cassidy wondered if she used it on all her lovers.

  This time it was very different from the first time. Then it had been subtle and delicate, full of touchings and nuances. This time—total abandon; panting and exertion and little choked cries. To his chagrin, Cassidy found himself this time participating more than he wished. Also wishing more than he wished to wish, desiring more than he desired to desire. The Principessa was a force of nature devoid of taboos.

  Except one.

  Afterward they lay in silence uncovered. Cassidy had an urge to see the Principessa’s body naked and unadorned. He reached for the bedside table. Quick as a fox, she grasped his arm and pulled it away.

  “Never!” Exploding like a champagne cork.

  “Afraid, Madame? Of what?”

  “The light, Professor.” She was out of bed now, putting on whatever she had taken off.

  Swiftly.

  “You’re very expert at dressing in the dark.” He was as affronted by her swift abandonment as by her uninvited assault. “How do you manage?”

  “Practice,” said the Principessa. “Auf wiedersehen, Horatio.”

  She was gone.

  Horatio.

  We’re on a first name basis, thought Horatio P. Cassidy. Next thing you know we’ll be exchanging recipes.

  She came every night. Always after dining out or partying or whatever she did on her ceaseless social round. Each visitation Cassidy greeted with a fresh mockery, feeling that, if he didn’t, her very identity would be permanently altered.

  “Why don’t you invite your escort in for a drink,” he’d say as the silken rustlings of her discarded clothes pierced the darkness. “He could listen. That’s the latest thing—listening.”

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