Party Of The Year

by Inconnu(e)

  “Not much. She lost me so professionally that I’m very curious to know who taught her that trick. One minute we were going together—me fifty steps behind—but well in view, down the inside pathway to the Park. The next minute she’d vanished from the face of the earth. A very good trick. I would like to know it.”

  Cassidy was neither surprised nor displeased. “Tell me exactly where?” A map of the park he’d squirreled out of the Park Department was spread out on the bar. “This is Fifth Avenue and here is the Seventy-second Street entrance. Now just where?”

  The Gypper pointed to the spot and Cassidy drew an X there. “You sure you had the right girl?”

  “I took a few pictures for your collection.” He handed them over. Titi all right—without her scarf and with big glasses, unmistakably her—striding along under the falling brown leaves of Central Park.

  “That’s her,” said Cassidy. “How about the prints I gave you?”

  “Zilch,” said the Gypper. “Whatever transgressions she’s committed—and I’m willing to bet she’s committed a few—she’s kept out of sight of the FBI and the police. She’s got no record at all. Why don’t you get the Principessa to fire her?”

  “Because I haven’t a thing on her except my suspicions. I was hoping you might come up with something I could lay on her.”

  “Sorry, old boy. Perhaps next time . . .”

  “We’ve run out of time. The party is three days away. Titi won’t have another day off before then.”

  “Then I most earnestly advise you to keep a sharp eye on the lady,” said the Gypper.

  Back in his room, Cassidy read for an hour from the book he’d got out of the library that very day, The World Beneath The City, “where you will find sewers, stores and subways, men, mains and even alligators.” One of the first things he encountered in the book was the dismaying news (he’d rather suspected) that there was nothing resembling a master map of underground New York. There were thousands of specialist maps showing where the telephone wires, the TV cables, the subways, the water mains, and the steam pipes were, but he didn’t have time to peruse that many maps even if he could find them.

  Fascinating stuff, but it didn’t solve his problem and it was twenty years out of date. The Subterranean New York changed every year, sometimes drastically, and always for the worse. Cassidy turned out the light.

  He was awakened in the darkness by the familiar rustlings of silk mixed with the faint whisper of her breath.

  Mockery and lust, mockery and lust

  Go together like ashes and dust.

  This time, no. She was in bed with him naked as a Botticelli, but her opening line—Let’s-fuck-We-can-talk-later—was missing. In its place, a kiss. Tendresse, reluctant on both sides, crept into the embrace, perhaps because of the darkness and the lateness of the hour. Their bodies assumed the usual postures with the sweetness and—yes, softness—of familiarity. The embrace contained a certain tristesse, in place of the usual expertise. The Principessa was not altogether in control of that supple body as always before she had been.

  When it was all over, she sighed, as if dying. Not her style at all.

  No words passed.

  Emotionally devastating, Cassidy found it. He lay back on the pillow, uncertain how to procede under this new circumstance.

  He raised his arm toward the lamp anticipating her iron grip, her fierce resistance. There was none. No response at all. He hesitated because he was going into new territory here. The rules had changed with this new . . . situation. In the end he had to force himself—and it took some doing—to turn on the light because it was the next move in their unceasing chess game and it had to come some time. Therefore . . .

  The Principessa was asleep, an unprecedented surrender.

  It was a face he’d never seen before. She lay in the pool of yellow light wrinkled, vulnerable, as old as the earth. She’s as old as I am, thought Cassidy, older; he found that touching. The steel in her had been washed away by slumber. In sleep she looked forlorn and lost, a little girl grown old, now even—and this he found shocking—beautiful.

  He gazed four seconds too long.

  The Principessa awoke. A shattering experience.

  The violet eyes flew open, luminous with outrage, as if he, Cassidy, had perpetrated a deed so base as to be mentioned only in whispers till the end of time.

  “You . . . bastard!” she said, spinning the You into a long throbbing curse.

  This was followed by a most extraordinary sight. The Principessa reassembled her features into youth—well, absence of age, at any rate—and beauty. By sheer force of character, wrinkles and weariness were banished. By titanic will power, the Principessa assumed beauty, adorning herself with it, as if it were her prerogative, donning it like raiment. All in a magical moment.

  Then—aaah, then—the face contorted with hatred, beautiful but malignant. Now she was the Witch of Endor.

  She opened her mouth to utter the scream that would bring the household running—Lucia included. Cassidy closed the furious mouth with both strong hands while holding the flailing body in a scissorlock, and whispering into a most unwilling ear. “You cannot afford that scream. You are in the most awful peril of your useless life, Principessa!”

  He couldn’t tell her the whole story—even if he knew it—not with her struggling like that with her strong muscles, her white teeth, and her furious will.

  With infinite reluctance, Cassidy played his top card: “She isn’t your child, Elsa, and if you force the issue I’ll have to tell her.”

  First time he’d ever called her Elsa.

  The Principessa went limp as a dead fish. The furious face turned to stone, eyes forlorn and distant as stars.

  Cassidy turned out the light.

  A terrible minute went by.

  The Principessa slipped out of his bed, into her clothes, and out of the room.

  BOOK TWO

  The Party

  They came by Concorde, by private jet, in their own yachts, silent as snowfall—the Big Rich and the ordinary Not-Big-But-Old-Rich and some not at all rich but deeply established internationally, all of them as at home in Paris and New York and London as in Buenos Aires or Madrid or Athens. These were the people who always get out just before war. Or revolution. The money safely in Switzerland. Their homes, alas, temporarily occupied by the Nazis. Before that, Genghis Khan. Before that, the Visigoths.

  Always. In the nick of time. These are the monied who remain monied, no matter what, temporarily inconvenienced by massacres and other social upheavals but not quite losing their heads. Somebody else’s head rolls, perhaps even a cousin’s, but not theirs, and they survive—slim, beautifully dressed, all knowing one another intimately . . .

  “Darling Elsa . . .”

  “Bibi, how very, very . . .”

  “Have you seen Sacha? So awful about Sacha! . . .”

  And so forth. They were coming for Elsa’s party which all of them had gone to for years. Once Nicki and Elsa’s party. But then that terrible thing happened, never mind, it was all so long ago . . .

  They came from Rome, Lisbon, Hong Kong, London, and they opened the New York flats which remained closed and empty eleven months of the year (but dusted and ready in case Paul came over for les affaires). The moment they arrived they were on the phone to darling Gigi whom they haven’t seen since Deauville August or to Bibi whom They haven’t seen since Venice.

  “So much to tell you, darling! And how is Gerald? Not really! How perfectly ghastly!”

  And so on.

  The Party was three days away.

  • 23 •

  Cassidy was inspecting the doors of the rooftop restaurant starting with the big plexiglass one leading from the elevators to the entrance landing where the guests assembled to face Robert, the maitre d’ with his lists and his scornful smile, standing behind the velvet cord which kept the unwashed in their proper place.

  All except Cassidy who had the run of the place by order of Alfred the
Great. Robert didn’t like it, but there was absolutely nothing he could do about it.

  “Let’s go through the drill,” said Cassidy gently. “Let’s say someone pulls a gun . . .”

  “We lock the door.” As if explained to a child.

  “With your foot,” said Cassidy. Robert had hated to part with that information. That was his little secret—or had been his little secret—that foot-operated lock.

  “Let’s see you do it, Robert, just for the thrill of the thing.”

  Robert demonstrated. The inch-thick bolts shot into the four inch thick plexiglass door, bullet resistant, as they said now because few things were bulletproof. “Very impressive,” said Cassidy. “What happens if someone sets off that elevator, all dressed up in his dinner jacket, well-shaven, and all that—and then pulls a gun and shoots you right through that scornful smile, Robert? What happens then? You fall down, all bloody and very dead, that’s what. Before you get your foot on that thing.”

  That was the trouble with this drill. It would work fine against bank robbers or rapists or ordinary murderers but not against Carlos or Greta or any of the other more modern terrorists who simply blew away the man at the gate in what was once called cold blood. Even professional hit men were not quite so indifferent about mowing down the innocent and, in fact, the men with contracts on them were not at all innocent usually. There was a reason for killing them. For the terrorists it was reason enough if you got in the way. Blooie . . .

  Cassidy went from the plexiglass door to another door to the left of the elevator—this one of steel and locked against all fire regulations.

  “In case of fire, we unlock,” said Robert frostily.

  “Who’s we—you and God?” asked Cassidy. “I want a key to this door, Robert, of my very own until after the night of the party. Then you and God can have sole access again. Let’s look at the backstairs.”

  Same story there. The backstairs, which also served the Windletop, were next to the service elevator which brought up food and waiters from the outside world. The door was of steel and kept locked. “I want a key to this one, too.”

  “What do you want these keys for, Professor Cassidy,” said Robert haughtily. “To let people in? Or out?”

  “Maybe both,” said Cassidy. “Would you mind opening the door?”

  Robert minded very much, but he did as he was told. Cassidy gave him a wolfish smile and started down the steps, Robert watching with his fishy gaze. “Those doors are locked all the way to street level, Professor. Fifty-five stories down. A long walk.”

  Cassidy disappeared around the stairwell. After a moment lie heard the clang of the steel door as it closed, locking automatically. Then there were only his footfalls echoing down the dismal gray stairwell, Cassidy thinking sad thoughts.

  There had been no more nightly visits from the Principessa. He had never thought he would miss them, certainly not so badly as he did. Still, there it was. He missed his nightly carnality very very much, and what was one to make of that, eh?

  Clomp. Clomp.

  He felt guilty, himself a man who didn’t believe in guilt. Especially over so trivial a matter. What did I do? I turned on the light. It was she who invaded my sanctum, raped me, seduced me, so why do I feel guilty? But he did. He’d blundered in where he had no business.

  The TV cameras were probably watching him, as he went down. But then the cameras were no threat to him any longer, so compliant was Hugo now that Cassidy had used the muscle. Clever Hugo. Giving out just enough information to stop the agony. But by no means all. Hugo, Cassidy was sure, had hoarded a bit for rainy days, for other perhaps more profitable betrayals.

  At the thirty-ninth floor, Cassidy paused for a very long time, listening at the steel door. According to Hugo, none of Struthers pretty boys was in residence. If one trusted Hugo. Cassidy didn’t.

  He pulled out the set of gretchels, fifty of them which made an unsightly lump in his pocket. He selected one, A-25, and tried it on the lock. Too thick. He tried another; this time the steel stairwell door opened inward. Now he was on Struthers’s private landing on the backstairs. The rear service elevator was to his right, Struthers’s backdoor straight ahead. Cassidy strained his ears. Nothing. But then his ears weren’t what they’d once been. Nothing was. Ears, legs, cock. Desuetude settling in all down the line.

  Struthers’s rear door lock was a very tough proposition. An Odheim from Germany, one of the best locks around. Cassidy selected the thinnest of gretchels and tried it. Too thin, too wide. He picked another. It was wrong too. Still another. Also wrong. It was ten minutes—it seemed hours—before the Odheim yielded.’ Cassidy stepped into Struthers’s kitchen, pumping adrenalin. Perhaps he’d have to take this up for a living. The corridors of government were closed to him, the halls of academe almost shut. The Principessa could queer him forevermore as tutor to the well born. Cassidy grinned. The situation contained a certain desolate humor, no two ways about it.

  All the while, listening, poised, ready to scuttle if there’d been a sound.

  No sound. Struthers had no servants, except that bodyguard who was queer as a treeful of owls. Struthers trusted few people. In fact, no one. The bodyguard would be with Struthers. Wherever that was. Struthers went out very little and then with an excess of caution that made the rest of the folk at the Windletop seem positively reckless. And for good reason. His name wasn’t Struthers.

  Cassidy moved swiftly out of the kitchen. Now he was in a long wide corridor—the layout wasn’t all that much different from the Principessa’s apartment—and he traversed it rapidly on tiptoe, catching glimpses through apertures of a sitting room heavy with walnut furniture, much of it carved into excruciatingly medieval corkscrew legs, claw feet, demons’ faces on the knobs of chairs, all looking like the sort of furniture Henry VIII might have had. The apartment was bathed in a peculiar unhealthy light stemming from stained glass windows in improbable places—in interior doors, as well as exterior windows. Cassidy couldn’t escape the feeling he was 100 feet underground rather than on the thirty-ninth floor.

  The master bedroom was at the end of the corridor—a corner room like the Principessa’s. This one had stained glass outside windows as well as inside windows, throwing splashes of purple, red, pink, and blue light all over the Bokkhara carpets. All very expensive and in what Cassidy thought perfectly awful taste—but that meant only it wasn’t his taste. There was no such thing as good or bad taste, just different fashions at different times. This place would have been the last word in Milwaukee in 1905. Put into a super-efficient skyscraper apartment in Manhattan in the late 1970s it was very odd.

  Also German. Not modern German, God knows. They went for the most contemporary art and architecture of all, a deliberate turning of the back on the past. No, this was old pre-World War II German, perhaps even earlier.

  In the center of the room was a vast circular bed. In the ceiling of course, a mirror exactly as round as the bed. Also in the ceiling, heavy-duty hooks, strong enough to support a body or two. The whips would be around the place somewhere. All very interesting. Was this where Struthers entertained those beautiful young Swedish boys?

  It was all out of key. Struthers hadn’t looked capable of that sort of exercise. Anyway, it wasn’t his thing. Cassidy was sure of that.

  No time for speculation. Work to be done. Cassidy cased the whole room for possibilities and then started on the vast, heavily carved, locked, oak door. His sense of room layout told him that behind it must lie a closet. Who locked closets? Unless there was something to protect. Booze?

  Again an Odheim; and very tough, even tougher than the one on the back door. It was as complicated as a chess problem and, in any other circumstances, fulfilling. But Cassidy was in a hurry. Inside was a walk-in closet hung with clothes, some heavy tweedy stuff, some very formal pin-striped business clothes. Struthers was a very formal fellow.

  Cassidy felt behind the clothes carefully, inch by inch. This would be the place for it. He hoped.

>   Aah!

  Cassidy pushed the heavy formal suits out of the way, exposing the thing. Jupiter Jehoshaphat! Another Odheim. The man must have stock in the place. A triple knob job. Cassidy had never even seen one except in color photographs. He didn’t know whether the Stemmler could handle it.

  He pulled it out of his side pocket. A bit of loot from the CIA. The scope went into his ears with some reluctance because it meant he couldn’t hear what was going on—or not going on in the rest of the apartment. No time to worry. He adjusted the oscilloscope, and pressed the starter. The needle fluctuated wildly, then steadied at ten millitres. Cassidy rubbed his fingers on his trousers hard, then turned the lead knob ever so delicately to the right. The lead should be right turn, second lead left turn, third lead right again. If not, he was in trouble. With each twist the needle gave a leap, then settled back to 15. In his ears, a steady hum. Slowly, slowly, Cassidy turned the knob 20, 30, 40. At 45 the needle leaped to 85 and the hum in his ears turned to a high squeal.

  Cassidy turned to the second lead knob. Before dialing, he took the scope out of his ear and had a good listen for sounds in the apartment. Struthers was a very dangerous fellow, and here he was with his hands full of Stemmler. If the queer bodyguard showed up at the closet door, Cassidy would be half a minute dropping the Stemmler and getting his gun out.

  The second knob was a poser. Cassidy went around twice, very slowly, before deciding that he was going the wrong direction and reversed the twist. That did it. The high squeal and the dial coincided within minutes.

  On the third knob he mistook direction again, wasting minutes, before he discovered it was a right turn like the second lead.

  The handle to the safe turned easily and Cassidy reached his arm into it. He brought out a packet of letters. In Italian. How nice! The names meant nothing. He fished again. This time he got a thick manila envelope full of photographs.

  Aaaah!

  The photographs were solid pornography. All the homosexual positions, including a few postures Cassidy had never suspected. But then Lucia was right. He was a prude in these matters. He didn’t suspect the right things. A few heterosexual attitudes thrown in for good measure. Or bad measure.