by Inconnu(e)
Always the same line. But there was precious little talk later. After a brief exchange, all of it barbed, she left.
“I feel like the male spider,” he said sotto voce, always mindful of Lucia. “Having fulfilled my function, I expect one day you’ll eat me.”
Her response was immediate. She bit him.
“Ouch!”
“You taste,” all the time slipping out of bed and into her clothes, “like a lapsed Catholic. Bitter.”
The mockery was brazen on both sides.
“You’ll find a little something in an envelope on the mantelpiece,” he said once.
“The other girls at the nunnery say you very stingy, Signor,” she said, taking him up on it. “Good lay, lousy pay—they say.”
Time and again he tried to turn on the light. For the pleasure of her panic. The only thing that panicked her. Each time she grabbed his arm in a surprisingly iron grip and stopped him.
“There are certain sights a woman of sensibility should be spared,” she hissed at him once. “One of them—you.”
He accused her of shameless class distinction. “It’s all right to fuck the lower classes. To let them see you naked might give us ideas above our station.”
“All your ideas are above your station, Horatio.”
Always Horatio. In the dark.
• 21 •
In the daylight, their relationship and their speech was rigorously correct. She summoned him along with Lorenzo to the foot of her bed, as she breakfasted, to confer about The Party, as it was now capitalized not only in the newspapers but in their own minds. Everything now centered on The Party. All other considerations, including Lucia’s education, were secondary.
The newspapers called every day and were turned over to Cassidy who said the Principessa was out and he knew nothing. Click. When inadvertently the Principessa found herself on the telephone with a reporter, she forgot all her English and lapsed into Italian. Fishwife Italian.
Over party policy they clashed sharply. Cassidy wanted to stay in the apartment with the Contessa during the festivities. The Principessa wanted him upstairs to keep an eye on things.
“The target,” said Cassidy, “is the Contessa. I don’t give a damn if they kidnap all the 225 guests.”
“How about me?” inquired the Principessa.
“Your ransom potential is zero, you said yourself.”
“You don’t think Lucia will be safe behind all those steel doors you put in at such vast expense?”
“No.”
Lucia settled this one by announcing flatly that she intended to go the The Party. “I’m twelve years old, and I’ve never been to one of your parties. I can sleep all next day.”
“Did you put her up to this, Professor?”
“Lucia is quite capable of reaching these decisions by herself.”
The Principessa assented to this, largely because it settled where Cassidy should be stationed—at the rooftop restaurant.
The locksmith came unexpectedly one morning when the Principessa was still asleep, ushered in by Lorenzo.
“He says you sent for him, Signor,” said Lorenzo reproachfully. “I told him we have already changed the locks once.”
“This locksmith is simply to check the work of the other locksmith—a routine precaution in high security, Lorenzo.”
There was no such routine precaution in high security, but Cassidy hoped the old man wouldn’t know about such things. Lorenzo looked doubtful and retreated to his pantry, muttering in Italian under his breath.
“Abadu,” said the locksmith—the agreed word—if it was a word.
“Yeah,” said Cassidy. He took him down the corridor, keeping an eye out for Titi. Or Lucia. “If someone comes, just make for a lock—any lock.”
“I know.”
First, Cassidy showed him the Tintoretto in the library—Helen and the golden apple she’d won in fair fight. The art expert disguised as a locksmith took less than thirty seconds. He shook his head.
The portrait of Pope Constant in the corridor took a little longer—three minutes. The Fragonard took five minutes. The Titian a minute and a half. After each examination, the art expert whose name was Stamm shook his head.
“You’re sure?” asked Cassidy.
“Absolutely. They’re not even very good fakes. You can do much better than that. Good fakes need X rays. Not these.”
Good enough to fool clucks like me, thought Cassidy. Or the Principessa?
Meanwhile, there was Lucia. She had developed suspicions. Or perhaps, thought Cassidy, it is I who suspect her of suspicions. My guilt about a relationship with her mother that is totally concealed. At least I think totally concealed. Who knows what a child knows. Always a dark brooding child, Lucia had become more open under his teaching, more American, less European. Recently she had reverted to her brooding, her Europeanness. Her dark eyes constantly searched Cassidy’s these days for . . . what? Did she suspect? Or am I making it all up?
Guilt, thought Cassidy, who didn’t believe in guilt.
That day he tried to slip out of the apartment because Alison had dispatched another letter to the tree drop. He found Lucia standing beside the steel gates in the no-longer fuchsia foyer.
“I’m going with you,” she announced darkly. “You’re neglecting my education.”
Cassidy rang for the elevator: “I never thought I would live to hear a twelve-year-old girl complain about that.”
She faced the elevator glumly: “One day I’m going to have to be an adult and have immense responsibility on my shoulders, and I must be trained to exercise them. Your very words.”
Coming home to roost, thought Cassidy. A teacher is a time bomb. Who knows when his words will blow up in his face?
In the park, she guessed instantly. “We’re going to that same tree. I’ll race you.”
“Jupiter Jehoshaphat,” yelled Cassidy. “No!”
Because she was faster than he was. She was off already, swift as a deer, Cassidy puffing along behind. She beat him to the tree by ten feet and got the letter out of the hole. He rescued it before she could open it and thrust it into his inside jacket pocket, panting indignantly: “You shouldn’t read other people’s mail.”
“Who’s it from?”
“My girl friend.”
“You’re too old to have a girl friend. Your woman friend.”
Anyone over eighteen was middle-aged to Lucia. The Professor was older than middle age, older than antiquity. She sat on the grass, knees pulled up to her chin, solemn as a catacomb.
“Why didn’t you ever have any children, Professor?”
“I never had time.” An inadequate explanation.
“I don’t think you like children.”
“You’re groveling for sympathy.”
She was not to be deterred. “I don’t think anyone likes children very much. They just have them because they make love, and they can’t avoid it.”
“There are many ways to avoid it.”
“Well then, they have children because they think they want them and when they arrive, they don’t want them. Or anyway, they don’t want the ones they get.”
This was becoming a Freudian nightmare. “If you feel unwanted, Lucia, just come out and say so.”
Passionately. “All children feel unwanted.”
“That’s a little sweeping: Any sentence that starts—all children, all men, all women, is immature.”
“I’m only twelve!” she blazed. “Do you expect maturity?”
“Yes,” said Cassidy calmly, “I do.” For some reason, that remark pleased Lucia to her very bottom. She smiled a secret smile, as if she’d been fishing for just that remark and had got it. “How nice!” she said. “You really are the most marvelous man, Professor, because you don’t treat me like a child. Not ever!”
“That’s because I don’t know how to treat a child,” cried Cassidy. “Because, if you must know, you’re the first child I ever had any dealings with. Come on, I’ve got things t
o do.”
“Wait,” she begged. “Just a little while.” They sat awhile, listening to the birds.
“Have you got your gun, Professor. Let’s fire it. Can I fire it? Please? You always said I should learn to defend myself.”
She never forgot anything he said, and whenever she could she turned it against him. Lately he’d been teaching her a little basic Kung Fu. Weaponry? He was against it on principle. Certainly for a child. The trouble was this affair was beginning to shape up very badly. So many imponderables, and so many forces at work, all pulling in different directions. In the middle of it all—Lucia. If she wasn’t rich, she wouldn’t be in this predicament, wouldn’t be a prisoner in her own apartment, wouldn’t be sitting there with him. Victimized by her own money.
Cassidy peered about him. They were deep in the park, in the northernmost third of it which was the wildest bit, screened by heavy bushes and trees, an area shunned even by rapists. “It’s very much against the law,” said Cassidy. Nevertheless, he pulled out the silenced .22. It lay in the palm of his hand, ominous as evil. She stared at it, fascinated and a little scared.
“Very, very dangerous,” said Cassidy. “You are never to use a gun except in the most dire emergency, Lucia.”
“What is a dire emergency?”
“You’ll know,” said Cassidy gloomily, “when it comes.”
He explained about the gun, the safety, the loading clip, the trigger.
“Roll over on your stomach. Now line up the rear sight and the front sight on that big tree. Aim dead center.”
“How can I miss a tree that big?” said Lucia squinting down the barrel.
“That’s why I picked out a big one. So you don’t miss. Otherwise you could kill a bystander on Central Park West. Now squeeze—slowly, slowly, slowly . . .”
She hit the tree dead center.
“Kill or be killed,” said Cassidy savagely, almost to himself. “An idea whose time has come—if it ever went away. I hate it! But I don’t know what to do about it.” Arguing with himself. “I’m in a quandary. I don’t know whether what I’m doing is right or wrong.” Talking to himself. Lucia staring at him as if he were demented. He leaned over her and slipped on the safety catch. With the .22 in his hand he walked to the tree and with his knife marked it at head level, shoulder level, crotch level—using his own dimensions as a model. In the upper third where the heart would be he slashed an X.
“When danger looms,” said Cassidy, playing Hamlet now. Even with Lucia there, it was still a soliloquy.
“What danger?”
“You’ll know—when it comes. And when it does, hit the ground! Don’t wait for anyone to tell you to hit the ground! Hit it! Go flat as you are now! Aim where I put that X.”
“The heart!” said Lucia gleefully.
“Yeah.” Handing her the gun. “Hold it in both hands—that’s right, just like Kojak. Aim! Steady! Squeeze! Slowly! Slowly!”
She hit the X first try.
“Now roll—arms outstretched—with gun in them. Roll.”
“I’ll get my fall coat filthy. Titi will be furious.”
“Never mind Titi. Roll! Now fire!”
Under Cassidy’s tutelage she squeezed off nine shots, rolling after each one, and achieving a quite respectable score.
Her accuracy should have pleased him; instead it filled him with foreboding. Cassidy didn’t believe in God, but no Irishman has ever successfully extricated himself altogether from demonology. The fates had a terrible way of reversing a man’s precautions so that in place of protecting you, they hit you in the face, he thought.
• 22 •
“Golly,” said Lucia.
The apartment was as he’d left it—books helter-skelter on the floor, mattress ripped open, screaming disorder. “I like the place to look lived in,” said Cassidy.
“Oogh!” Lucia had discovered the moving stepladder that ran around the bookshelves. She pushed it the length of the room standing on the bottom rung, using it like a scooter, after which she ran up it like a monkey. On the top rung she sat down and picked up a book.
“This Plundered Planet,” she called down to Cassidy who was heading into the bathroom where he could read Alison’s letter in peace.
“Very good book,” said Cassidy. “Read it.”
He locked the bathroom door and dug out the code book from the little floor safe underneath the bathtub. Decoded, Alison’s message was brief: Fourteen man combat team RAF RW RA trained Iraq mockup patterned windletop in Amsterdam believed emplaning next week usa where from knows nobody apple.
RAF meant Red Army Faction from Germany. Very bad news because they were very efficient. RW was the Red Wind from Italy who were so good they were believed not to be Italian at all. RA was the Red Army from Japan, also very hot commandos at terror operation. As for the where from knows nobody, Cassidy took the liberty of doubting it. If they had that much Information, they probably had the rest of it, too. So why didn’t they stop the operation in its tracks? Because they didn’t want to stop it in its tracks is why. An ambitious man at Langley needed a little shootout to increase his prestige, enlarge the office staff, and perhaps jump up a step on the slippery ladder of Langley.
On the other hand—if he wanted it to happen, why was he warning Cassidy at all? Because Alison didn’t dare not do something, that’s why. If there were a later investigation, he needed a little communication on file—and God knows this was little enough. Enough to scare you half to death and not enough to go on. No names, no guesses as to method. Nothing.
Cassidy deposited Lucia on a bar stool at the Spumi, Henry wailing: “You know it’s against regulations, Cassidy. She ain’t eighteen.”
“Actually she’s twenty-six,” said Cassidy reaching for the bar phone. “She looks that way because she’s a Contessa. This is Henry, Lucia, a Teuton knight who has been unhorsed.” Dialing all the while.
Alison answered with a simple: “Yes.”
“I’m very unhappy with this message, Apple.”
“Gung ho,” said Alison—and rang off. Cassidy was left with a dead telephone in his hand at which he scowled as if it was its fault. Gung ho meant action stations which was very serious indeed. Or it meant he had somebody there and couldn’t talk. Or it meant only that Alison didn’t want to be bothered and was throwing sand in his eyes.
“Your woman hung up on you,” guessed Lucia. “Oho!”
“His woman don’t hang up on him.” said Henry. “He hangs up on her. Sophy was in last week. She’s broke. Some fellow ran off with her purse on 42nd Street.”
“What was she doing on 42nd Street?”
“Seeing Deep Throat. She says it reminds her of you. Sophy says she’s the only one who goes to Deep Throat and cries.”
“She read it somewhere,” said Cassidy exasperated.
“Give her some money, Henry.”
“I already gave her some money.”
“Put it on the bill.”
“I already did.”
“You’re a good friend, Henry—with a keen sense of double entry bookkeeping.”
“Can I have a Coke?” asked Lucia.
“By all means,” said Cassidy rubbing his hands over his face. “Give her a Coke, please, Henry.”
The Red Army faction were the only ones with skyscraper experience. They could take the Windletop if they wanted it. Why did they want to? Because it was there. That was such a comfortable theory that Cassidy doubted it very much. There were other darker forces at work here. Somebody wanted him to think—or everyone to think—that this was an ordinary terror operation. But it wasn’t all that simple. In fact, it was so complicated it was beginning to give Cassidy a severe headache.
It was Marlborough who was first to sidestep the fortresses (which the French had made close to impregnable) and take the cities. You don’t have to assault the fortresses, said Marlborough very sensibly. Capture the cities and let the fortresses rot. Fortresses hadn’t amounted to much since Marlborough’s day, includ
ing the Maginot Line. Now people were thinking in fortress terms again. Lunacy. There was no ideological sense in assaulting a fortress when all you wanted was headlines. Or cash—both available elsewhere. There was no point in assaulting the Windletop unless that wasn’t the point at all, unless there was something else they wanted, and the ideology was just a smoke screen.
He led Lucia out of the Spumi and into a taxicab and gave the address of the Windletop.
“Back to prison,” snarled Lucia.
“We all have our prisons,” said Cassidy. “Yours is no worse than most.”
“Oh, yes it is,” cried Lucia. “You don’t know!”
No, thought Cassidy. He didn’t, but he was trying, against a very great pressure of time, to find out. He deposited Lucia in the hands of her fencing teacher, each exceedingly reluctant to share the other’s company—and slipped out.
The Gypper had been waiting at the Ariadne for a very long time and the ruddiness of his face showed it. “How many have you had?” growled Cassidy.
“Aah, here comes Mary Poppins now,” said the Gypper in his teddibly British accent. “We’re conducting a temperance crusade, are we? The nursery has had a deplorable effect on your tolerance, dear boy.”
“Stuff it, you bloody Limey,” said Cassidy feeling, as always in the Gypper’s presence, a glow of fellowship that warmed his bitter heart. His relationship with the Gypper, which stretched over thirty years, was one of those obsolete friendships of the old-fashioned sort, not relevant to modern life—at least not in Manhattan. (”We waste each other’s time,” the Gypper used to say cheerfully, “neither of us furthering the other’s career by so much as a hairsbreadth.”)
“Give this nurseryman a slosh of Wild Turkey,” said the Gypper to the bartender. “Tell me about life among the twelve-year-old set. What are you teaching the poor child?”
“Decency, honor, loyalty, integrity,” said Cassidy, studying the bourbon in his glass.
“God save the mark,” murmured the Gypper. “You’ll ruin the child for all practical purposes.”
“What luck did you have?” asked Cassidy.
