Party Of The Year

by Inconnu(e)

  Cassidy studied them all very carefully because he wasn’t interested in the bodies but the faces. Some very interesting faces—beautiful, cruel, despairing. Ultimately this sort of thrill was an exercise in despair. Or was that Cassidy The Prude talking?

  When he found it, it wasn’t what he was looking for at all. So surprising, so unexpected was it that it shocked him to the core. For a full minute, he stared at the photograph, the implications in his brain fluctuating as wildly as the needle on the Stemmler. He couldn’t believe it, didn’t want to believe it! The evidence of his own eyes.

  When he came around to belief, it unloosed something even more painful. If the photograph told the truth—and how could you argue with a photograph?—what in hell did it mean?

  Every theory Cassidy possessed went out the window.

  From far away in the apartment came the sound, a soft implosion. Cassidy felt it on his skin rather than heard it. A barely perceptible shudder, the kind of shock wave a heavy front door makes when it closes.

  Cassidy thrust the photograph into his inner breast pocket, closed the safe and spun the three knobs. He closed the heavily carved oak door and locked it with the gretchel. It was a full thirty seconds before he succeeded in getting out of the bedroom and into the corridor. There were two exits to the apartment—the front door and the kitchen—and from where he stood he was blocked from both.

  He had to make up his mind in a great hurry. Already the murmur of voices was drawing Gloser. Next to the bedroom stood a doorway. Cassidy stepped into it for lack of anywhere else to go, and flattened himself against the wall. There was no door, only an aperture.

  In the corridor, the voices approached, speaking . . . Italian! That made everything even more confusing because Cassidy expected the language to be German. All his theories were undergoing intensive revision, even as he flattened himself against the bookshelves. It was a kind of library he was in. Bookshelves stretched from floor to ceiling, but it was a very small room, especially in light of the size of all the other rooms there. It had only a single window of stained glass which made the light mercifully dim. If someone walked in, Cassidy had no protection at all. His gun was in his waistband and he dared not risk the noise of pulling it.

  The voices were passing him now, two or three feet away. The silky smooth catarrhs of Hugo Dorn, the Good Nazi, talking excellent . . . well, unhesitating and very confident Italian. Cassidy’s Italian wasn’t good enough to tell whether it was excellent Italian or not or even to understand what they were talking about. He caught only one word.

  Paura was the Italian word for fear. One of Hugo Dorn’s favorite words, fear, in all languages. Wealth and fear are the two common denominators here, Hugo had said. Cassidy began to revise his estimates of Hugo Dorn. Fear, he thought, was perhaps less a common denominators of the Windletop than of Hugo Dorn himself. It was a constant preoccupation of the Good Nazi, his constant companion and what did that mean except that Hugo lived it every second of his lite? He was an expert on fear was our Hugo.

  Just as they passed the aperture, Struthers’s gravelly voice spoke up. Cassidy comprehended only a name which floated out through the gravelly Italian. Gianini Gennaro.

  Gianini Gennaro? Where had he heard that name? Or read that name?

  Where was that queer bodyguard? With them in the bedroom? The murmuring voices had passed and entered the bedroom. Cassidy heard the bedroom door close.

  What were they going to do in there—look at dirty pictures? Or make some?

  Cassidy pulled out the silenced .22 and stepped into the corridor, chancing the presence of the bodyguard because he had no choice.

  The corridor was empty. Cassidy walked swiftly down the corridor and turned into the kitchen—gun at the ready. Just in case.

  There was no one there.

  He slipped out the back door and leaned against it, uttering a long, noiseless, sigh of relief.

  I’d thank God—if I believed in the fellow. I don’t even really believe in Jupiter whom I invoke all the time, but I like that particular deity because he’s so human—which so few humans are.

  • 24 •

  Alvin Feinberg’s hands were behind his head and he was leaning far back in the old-fashioned swivel chair, eyes on the ceiling, his best posture for reminiscence.

  “Vittorio Pietroangeli,” he was saying, “was way out of the usual run of Mafiosi. An intellectual, of all things. He’d actually read Karl Marx. Hated the man and his teachings, but at least he knew what he was hating. A very interesting and unusual old crook. I met him once—in Milan.”

  “So did I,” said Cassidy.

  Feinberg straightened up with a great squeaking of his ancient chair, and leveled the intelligent eyes behind the gold-rimmed glasses on Cassidy with a penetration that Cassidy found very discomforting: “Oh, did you now, Cassidy? And how did you happen to know so eminent a Mafiosi as Vittorio Pietroangeli?”

  “We used him in the OSS—him and Luciano and some others during the war.” Cassidy was sure Feinberg knew all this. It was difficult to find anything Feinberg didn’t know.

  “Why are you bringing him up now?” asked Feinberg softly.

  The old fire horse smells smoke, thought Cassidy. Damn!

  “I wondered what had become of him.”

  “He’s been dead for twelve years, didn’t you know?”

  “No,” said Cassidy. “I didn’t. Tell me about it.”

  “I gather he was holding out on the boys. He was always exceedingly greedy. He went his own way—which is a dangerous thing to do in the Mafia—and they gunned him down in Milan.”

  “If it made the papers, I must have missed it.”

  Feinberg was still bending that inquisitive stare at him. , “Horatio,” he said softly, “you didn’t come all the way to Forty-third Street to discuss a dead man, now did you?”

  “No,” said Cassidy, “I didn’t. I want to know the name of your informant about the death of Prince di Castiglione. The life of a twelve-year-old child might depend on it.”

  “Balls!” said Feinberg emphatically. He rose, a small, tubby, figure of a man, and took short mincing steps around his little glassed-in cubicle as if to shake his thoughts loose. “What are you playing at, Cassidy? You’re hired as a bodyguard, not an investigator.”

  “The two things go together!” cried Cassidy. “I’m trying to get her to call off this damned party. It’s an invitation to homicide.”

  “Why don’t you go to the police?” asked Feinberg.

  “The police are not interested in calling off the party. They promise protection!” Incredulity in his voice.

  “And you don’t think they can provide it? Are you serious, Cassidy? Yes, by God, you are!”

  Jupiter, Cassidy was thinking. I want him to be concerned but not that concerned.

  “I’ll make a deal!”

  Confirming Cassidy’s worst fears.

  “Deals!” barked Cassidy as rigid as George M. Cohan would have played the scene, focusing attention squarely on the événement. “A child’s life is at stake and you talk . . . deals!”

  “Yeah,” said Feinberg, tough as bootleather. “I’ll be Jane Atchison’s escort at that damned party.”

  “That’s not possible,” said Cassidy. “I can’t steal another invitation.”

  “Then no deal.” Feinberg wore a cherubic smile on his little round face. He hadn’t been the greatest newsman in the Far East without learning a few trading tricks, one of which was to know when you’re ahead. He leaned back in his revolving chair and contemplated the ceiling. “I’ll tell you something else you’re not going to like. I’m going right along with you when you see her because I want to hear the questions you’re asking.”

  “Oh, it’s a her!” said Cassidy.

  “You’re opening all sorts of doors that should remain decently locked.” Everything she said contradicted what she really meant, thought Cassidy. She’d dying to open doors. “The 1960s in Rome! Oh, my dear! Such marvelous fun and
laughter! It’ll never be like that again. Well, you were there Alvin! You know.”

  “We were younger then, weren’t we, Marietta?” Feinberg leading her on, opening her up like a can of sardines.

  Marietta looked used up. “How beautiful Nicki was in those days! Like one of the statues on the Via Attica. Hands on his hips, that scornful smile on his face.” She placed her hands on her hips mimicking. “A beautiful boy!”

  “Much good it did you girls,” said Alvin.

  He was giving her the needle and she responded like one of Pavlov’s dogs. “Alvin, that’s not so! Nicki was as interested in girls as he was in boys.” A wave of her hand. “I speak with authority.”

  “I’ll bet you do,” said Feinberg.

  Cassidy had stayed well out of it, letting Feinberg run with it, but he couldn’t stay out much longer.

  “I might have married Nicki—but for those damn Trustees.”

  Cassidy jumped in right there. “Who are the Trustees, exactly?”

  Marietta bent her gaze on Cassidy, coldly, as if wondering what he was doing there. “Clothilde,” she said distinctly, “his sister, was the chief Trustee.”

  “She was older than Nicki, wasn’t she?”

  “Oh, my God, she was old the day she was born. She hated everything about Nicki—the fact he was getting the money, the life he led. She spent most of her life on her knees—like her mother. She disapproved of everything.”

  All very good stuff. Cassidy had never before heard anything about the mother.

  “Mama was the bride of Christ,” said Marietta dripping female venom, “which didn’t leave much for Nicki.”

  “Aaah,” said Cassidy. That explained a lot of things.

  “Trustees?” said Feinberg, getting her back on course.

  “They ran the fortune, you know. It was Nicki’s, but Nicki had about as much control over his own money as I did. Or you. The Trustees told him what paintings to buy—and what to sell. They passed on his house, his horses. They could turn off the money like that.” Snapping her fingers like Edward G. Robinson. “Several times they did. I tell you Nicki was so hard up once, he borrowed money—actually—from me! They ran him absolutely!”

  Feinberg zeroed in, journalist that he was. “You mean they Pound Elsa for him.”

  “Oh no no no no no no no.” Marietta spewing out No’s like the chorus in No, No Nanette. “Elsa was around, you know. She’d left that cowboy she married. She was available in Rome and,” here the soubrettish face darkened, “beautiful if you like that sort of thing. I find it cold.”

  It was late in the afternoon, and the sun was long gone from the east-facing windows of the old Broadway apartment building which, on the outside, was turretted, recessed, crenelated and adorned with spiky towers and corniced windows.

  “Oh, the Trustees didn’t find Elsa. Elsa found Nicki, if you know what I mean. The Trustees were only interested in finding a Principessa. There had to be a Principessa, don’t you know?”

  Marietta laughed viciously in the fading afternoon light.

  “You know why there had to be a Principessa? The Trustees needed an heir. Nicki couldn’t have cared less. He would have gone on indefinitely screwing the girls—and the boys—having his little parties. But the Trustees needed an heir because if he died without one the estate would have gone to some cousin in Turin and they’d be out on their fat behinds. That’s why. They wanted marriage. He didn’t. Marriage, said Nicki to me. Just like that! Scornful! Marriage! he said. A wife, he said. An heir, he said. What a bore, he said.”

  She fell back in the over-stuffed armchair, exhausted with the exertion of playing Nicki. The whole apartment was overstuffed, looking a little like a barbershop of 1922—potted palms, great leather armchairs studded with brass nails, mother of pearl magazine racks. The place looked like a waiting room for men to make themselves comfortable while waiting their turn.

  “What was he like as a lover?” Feinberg’s question stunned Cassidy because it was a question he wanted to ask and didn’t dare. But why was Feinberg thinking along those fines?

  “Oh, Alvin! You are a naughty boy to ask questions like that!” Clearly no one had asked her such a thing in years. “Well, what they all said—and all the girls said it—was absolutely true. You had to do everything for Nicki—if you know what I mean, and I think that you do. The girl had to do all the work. Not that we minded because he was so beautiful. But there’s no denying, Alvin, that Nicki was the prince of narcissists—in love with himself, as they all are.”

  Cassidy leaped in with the question he’d long wondered about. “Why did so beautiful a man have so plain a daughter?”

  “I’ve never laid eyes on Lucia, but I have heard that she looks just like him—and in spite of it is not beautiful at all. Well, sometimes that happens. A little bit off here.” Tapping her nose. “A little bit off here.” Tapping the mouth. “And beauty becomes,” an expressive wave, “plainness, don’t you know.”

  Brushing crumbs from the cake she’d served Cassidy and Feinberg into the palm of her band, her eyes absent. She rose, putting a stop to the interview, picking up teacups, busying herself with the tea tray. They were being dismissed, as if they’d gone too far, and the memories of the 1960s were too precious for the likes of them. The face was sad and remote now, as if she’d opened cupboards she wished she hadn’t.

  Now they were standing in the big old-fashioned hall next to the immense front door, Cassidy still peppering her with questions she was increasingly reluctant to answer. “Who was the last girl before Elsa? Was it you?”

  An impertinence to shock. some sort of answer out of her. He knew it wasn’t Marietta.

  “No no no no no no, we’d parted long before.” Not he left me. But we parted. “The last girl . . . so many, you know . . . was . . . yes, little Jennie Feathers, an English girl. She died the summer Nicki and Elsa were married, and some said she committed suicide but I don’t believe it. Not Jenny. She was so smart she’d have found another man in a month. I’m sure she died of something else.”

  Childbirth, said Cassidy. To himself.

  They shared a cab, Feinberg insisting on dropping Cassidy at the Windletop which was miles out of his way.

  This scenario is trapped in the past, Cassidy was thinking. What has been has been like something out of Ibsen, forming the present and shaping the future, but it doesn’t matter a tinker’s damn what I do or don’t do. It’s going to happen anyway.

  Cassidy became aware that Feinberg was speaking.

  “ . . . not a single known link with any American extremist organization. Not the Weather People, not the Black Panthers, not any of them.” Feinberg’s round intelligent eyes twinkled behind the gold-rimmed glasses. “All I’m trying to tell you is that it’s got to be all foreign talent—if there’s a shootout at the Principessa’s party. Not local talent at all. How is so much firepower to get into the country without being detected?”

  “Perhaps it’s been detected,” said Cassidy. “Even encouraged. There are depths to this perfidy undreamt of in your philosophy, me boyo,” Cassidy swung out of the taxicab at the Windletop’s front door. “Journalists around to the rear, me lad, with the serving classes.” Feinberg was staring with frank journalistic curiosity at the Front’s huge top hat. “That’s where the party enters, back there. Mind you come properly dressed, you ink-stained wretch.”

  “Black tie and shoulder holsters,” said Feinberg.

  Jupiter, thought Cassidy. The day The New York Times starts packing guns, on that day civilization begins to glimmer in the West. He stood on the sidewalk, ignoring the bullet-proof door held open by the Front, and looked at the sun-drenched towers of Manhattan on the Central Park skyline, seeing them in his mind’s eye in ruins. Not new ruins, centuries old ruins, grass growing in the foyers, and trees bursting their buds through the lower windows.

  Rome in the Middle Ages had fallen to a population of twenty-five thousand. New York would do the same one day. Cassidy was sure of it
.

  • 25 •

  “Count Otto is a talker in German and French. Not very much English,” said the Principessa. “He must be put next to a listener in one of those languages. Have we one? So many talkers in the world. So few listeners.”

  The Principessa was arranging the tables with the help of the plump Englishwoman who acted as her social secretary when she needed one. A round-faced, smiling, English lady down on her luck, name of Phoebe Cass, who had once been invited to parties like these—until the money ran out. Now a social secretary. Still smiling, though, thought Cassidy. He was on the scene as advisor on security—and not smiling. Two hundred twenty-five guests. He wanted to know who they all were and where they would be sitting.

  They were in the immense sitting room, the Principessa and Mrs. Cass seated at her red and gold desk, Cassidy leaning against the painted woodwork. The Principessa would select a white place card on which a name was written in Phoebe Cass’s beautiful eighteenth-century calligraphy and expatiate on the guest—wickedly, telling Cassidy all the things he didn’t want to know and little of what he did.

  “Chantal de Niailles,” she was proclaiming now. Princesse de Niailles, Cassidy noted from the guest list in his hand. “Poor Chantal has lost Hubert Casals to Jennifer Honeycutt and has not found another lover, poor sweet. She turned forty last week—the witching point at which she must learn pursuit and capture—she who was always pursued . . .”

  “And always captured,” said Phoebe Cass dryly.

  “It’s not easy for one so beautiful to learn to do her own hunting. Let’s put her next to John Spaulding.”

  “A bore!” complained Phoebe Cass.

  “A clay pigeon for her to practice on,” commented the Principessa.

  Was this aimed at Cassidy, all this pursuit and capture talk?