by Inconnu(e)
“Jeremy Wild,” proclaimed the Principessa, squinting at the white card. “They’ll all want him.”
Jeremy Wild was a famous novelist, playwright, and conversationalist, queer as a hatrack, who lived all over the place—Hollywood, Rome, New York, Tangier—and who went to all the parties and threw some pretty good ones. Much prized as a dinner table companion.
“I think we’d better award him to Jessica de Angelis.” Jessica de Angelis, witty and rich, was known as the Flying Duchess because she barnstormed around the world from Biarritz to Hong Kong partly to escape boredom, partly to escape her Duke, a drunken sot. She threw smashing parties.
“At her last party,” murmured the Principessa, “she put me next to Hector Lamb, having discarded him herself that very morning. Hector needed consolation and I’m not bad at consolation.”
“Jeremy Wild is no good at consolation, only conversation,” commented Phoebe Cass.
As each name was settled, the white card was slipped into a small rectangular block of wood, designating a table, each one numbered. Partygoers were seated loosely according to intellect—the stupid with other stupids, bright with bright. Sexual leanings were generally ignored in favor of conversational aptitude. In general the homosexuals of both sexes were the wittiest and most ruthless talkers and therefore had to be seated next to passives who were expected to listen and nod in the right places.
Some of the guests were asexual (as far as anyone knew) and these were wild cards, much prized by hostesses, because they fitted in anywhere. Many of these were professional partytrotters, full of the right kind of conversation which is to say reasonably literate gossip about people, plays, books, places, sex, and money—and expert at avoiding polemics on politics, sociology, and all religions, including Marxism.
The Principessa discoursed freely on the nuances of parties, trying, Cassidy suspected, to give this one some reason for existence important enough to override reasons of safety. Putting him in his proper place. At one point, she lifted her golden head and talked to him directly, smiling her thin smile.
“And what is it all about, you are saying to yourself, aren’t you, Professor? What is the point of these expensive gatherings—all these rich people flying around the world to see people they’ve seen many times before, saying the same things they’ve said before, growing older every year? What’s it all about? That’s what you’re asking yourself now, isn’t it?”
“Oh, is that what I’m asking myself,” said Cassidy, very stage Irish (because she wasn’t far wrong).
The Principessa bent over her white cards again, continuing in her thrilling voice throbbing with sex appeal. (Had he noticed before how full of sex appeal her voice was? No, he hadn’t.) “Many of us are quite fond of each other, unlikely as that seems to the non-invités. We are anxious to hear about one another’s children, husbands, and even health and money problems—just like the poor folk. The poor have their fiestas, the rich their parties, and why not? It’s a refreshment, Professor, and what is that lovely word—rededication.”
Mocking him now. Rededication!
“One remembers a great party all one’s long life. h becomes part of the tapestry of one’s existence—and an important part. I have known parties, Professor, where the conversation was so brilliant, the people so beautiful, the music so divine, the whole experience so ravishing that they have modified my life, changed my character, and shaped my personality, would you believe it, Professor?”
“No,” said Cassidy.
“That’s only because you’ve never been to a really great party. Anyone who has would know exactly what I’m talking bout because they’ve had the same experience. An hour or two of beauty and bliss and self-fulfillment, that’s what a party is for. You mustn’t underestimate parties, Professor. I have never known such happiness as I have experienced at some parties—or such despair. Because, of course, there are parties that plunge you in to the abyss—and even they must be respected for the depth of feeling they arouse. The one thing I forbid my parties to be is trivial. They can be heaven or hell—or both—but trivial never!”
She looked at him challengingly: “We are the last survivors, Professor, expiring in a shower of expensive sparks. After us, the deluge.”
“After Louis Quatorze, it wasn’t the deluge,” said Cassidy, the historian. “It was toujours la même chose.”
The golden head bent over the cards again sorting and arranging, calling out names. “Bibi Pilenski. Oh dear! Oh dear!” the Principessa was deep in revery. “She’s married so many of them. Someone should tell Bibi there are other ways of getting rid of a man. Six marriages! There should be a bag limit. Heterosexual men are a dwindling species, perhaps even an endangered one. What do you think of putting her next to George Luvacs, that garrulous Hungarian?”
“They’re both garrulous,” complained Phoebe Cass.
“Neither one listens. They can chatter simultaneously in their separate languages, deliciously at cross purposes.”
“George Luvacs,” interposed Cassidy sharply.
“You know him?” murmured the Principessa.
“I know a George Luvacs.”
“There can’t be two George Luvacs. Hungarian? Handsome in a seedy Balkan way?”
That was George all right. Sold himself to the highest bidder after the family estate was made a collective.
Cassidy said: “I don’t remember a George Luvacs on the list, Madame.”
“He called three days ago—deeply wounded that he wasn’t included. So I included.”
“Didn’t that call strike you, Madame, as propitious.”
“Professor, you must learn to curb your paranoia.”
“George Luvacs is a KGB agent, Madame, and a very high-ranking one—seedy or not.”
“I can’t believe George Luvacs is KGB,” said the Principessa. “He’s a Magyar Prince. His family goes back to 1262. Possibly even 1261. He might have dabbled in KGB once . . .”
“There is no such thing as ex-KGB—except dead ones.”
“If you are suggesting that I disinvite George Luvacs, an old friend . . .”
And lover, thought Cassidy grimly. He was taking the temperature of the Principessa’s tantrum, studying it for its sexual implications like an astronomer studying the red shift in a star.
“ . . . it’s out of the question.”
They had a flaming row, which centered on paranoia (his) and feather-headed recklessness (hers), neither of which (as both were intensely aware) was the real issue. While raging at one another’s brains—or lack of them—each was more concerned about the state of the other’s loins and, having discovered through the sheer heat of the blaze, that the other one was equally bereft, the row flamed out quite suddenly.
Both won—in a manner of speaking. George Luvacs remained an invité. Cassidy won out on reinforcements to help him police the party, something the Principessa had resisted savagely. Armpits with bulges under them, she called them. “You’ll have to find your own armpits,” snarled the Principessa, “I have no idea where to go to find armpits.”
“They’re already hired,” said Cassidy. “Four of them.”
She glared at him exasperated: “Sometimes you go too far, Cassidy. In fact, always.”
“We must get on,” said Phoebe Cass, bewildered by this charade. “We haven’t even discussed the shape of the pâté.”
“A swan,” said the Principessa triumphantly. She picked up a colored sketch at her elbow—a crayon drawing of a swan with its tail feathers fully spread. “I’ve sent for Angeli and he’s flying in from Venice. Very expensive but well worth it. He carves pâtés, Professor, into any shape you ask. This one will be a swan two feet high and three feet long, every feather carved out of a different kind of pâté. Isn’t it amusing, Professor?”
Showing him the drawing and laughing openly in his face because she knew he’d hate it.
“Sometimes, Madame,” said Cassidy, “I think I’m on the wrong side of this business.”
> “Oh, you are! Professor, you are! You’re definitely on the wrong side of the tracks.”
• 26 •
Lucia waylaid him in the corridor as he hurried to the elevator. “I wallow in ignorance! Aren’t you ashamed?”
“Mortally,” said Cassidy, “It’s this damned party . . .”
“I hate the party!”
“We all do. What are you going to wear?”
Lucia underwent a lightning change of mood: “Oh, it’s beautiful, my dress! Come see!”
“Later. When I get back.”
“You’re never here any more. How can you protect me when you’re not here?”
“I’m not even leaving the building.” Cassidy did an unexpected thing then. He put his arms around the thin Contessa and held her close for a moment, very tight. He left her there stunned by his embrace and rang for the elevator.
In Hugo Dorn’s office, Cassidy plopped himself uninvited into a chair. Hugo was on the telephone, his eyes acknowledging Cassidy’s presence with a somber gleam in which there was no hostility. Relations between the two men had gotten extraordinarily intimate since Cassidy had applied the muscle, about the only thing he’d got out of that encounter. Little that Hugo had divulged could be trusted. He hadn’t learned anything about the building and its defenses he didn’t already know (though Hugo, he was convinced, knew a lot he wasn’t telling even under torture).
What had emerged from the torment was not so much information as this extraordinary intimacy. Hugo and Cassidy now knew each other very well, had as it were, explored one another’s nature in the camaraderie of the thumbscrew. At least on the surface, Cassidy had his will of Hugo—but only on the surface. If Cassidy ever let down his guard, retribution would be swift and terrible. That was the rule of thumb. Cassidy bore it in mind always when dealing with Hugo. Hugo treated him with an outward deference, customary between torturee and torturer, but inside the man lurked something besides deference. What was it like inside Hugo’s suave, dyed, mummifiéd, ageless facade? What went on inside a man who was unhampered by any fixed goals except survival; who hedged, trimmed, changed direction, allies, principles, plans, everything at a moment’s notice, depending on who held the knife to his throat at that moment? On the outside, Hugo appeared hypercivilized, but actually he was as basic as a field mouse. Survival was the first law of nature. Winning was staying alive at all costs—including pain, humiliation, degradation. Cassidy was at sea about Hugo’s hopes, plans, wishes, aims. The only sure thing was that Hugo was unquestionably alive against all the odds, and that was not only remarkable but ominous.
Hugo was doing a great deal of listening. Cassidy strained his ears to catch some of it, but he had no idea of the sex of the person on the other end of the phone conversation.
“I regret, Madame,” said Hugo finally, “that you find our security apparatus oppressive, but I’m afraid there is no possibility of modifying it. However, if Madame wishes to discuss the termination of her lease, the management would be happy to listen . . . Thank you, Madame.”
He hung up.
Malarkey, thought Cassidy. A signal to tell the caller to get off because other ears were listening.
Hugo was silent, watching him with his velvety questioning eyes. “You wished something, Professor?”
“About tomorrow night, Alfred . . .” Always Alfred in the office . . . “I’ll have four of my own men in the building. I want there to be no confusion about that.”
“The Principessa has agreed?”
“Of course.”
“I’ll tell Robert—and alert Security. They’ll need identification.”
“I’ll get you photographs. What I expect from you, Alfred, is security at the bottom—in the foyer at street level and around the entrance. You’re in full charge down there, including any bit of sidewalk the police don’t cover, and it would help if your foot soldiers had walkie-talkies. take over the dance floor and all of the rooftop.” Cassidy didn’t want Hugo’s men anywhere near the restaurant.
“Who is going to check these people in?” inquired Hugo mildly. “The Principessa is adamant against having anything so aggressive as a check list. An insult to her guests, she says.”
“Phoebe Cass will be in the lobby to greet the guests—all of whom she knows by sight. Also, I believe, by smell.”
“Smell?”
“The rich smell different from you and me. Haven’t you noticed?” He rose. “I’ll be in the lobby during the arrival period if you don’t mind.” He had to get Jane Atchison and Alvin Feinberg past Phoebe Cass.
“I’ll want a music box, too, Alfred.” Music box was Cassidy’s name for the gadget that opened the door to the super secret subcellar. Hugo was most reluctant to part with a music box. Nevertheless he went to his office safe, got one and handed it to Cassidy. Like a genie doing his master’s bidding. It was a little eerie, this compliance.
“You wouldn’t have changed the tune on this thing, Alfred? You wouldn’t do a thing like that?”
Hugo smiled wearily: “If you’d like a test . . .”
“No.” It wouldn’t do any good. Hugo could change the tune five minutes after the test. Cassidy would have to go with it.
“I hope the Principessa has a lovely party,” murmured Hugo, his eyes fathomless. “I rather doubt it.”
“Oh, do you now?”
“My feeling is there has been too much publicity, too much fanfare, even too much security. All this fuss . . .” Hugo smiled directly at Cassidy “ . . . adds weight to a party, and that is the one thing a party should not have. A party should be light as a mousse, effervescent as champagne. This affair is heavy as lead—already.”
“I had no idea you were so full of opinion about something so trivial as parties, Alfred.”
“There’s nothing trivial about this party,” said Hugo quietly.
He could hear the laughter when he stepped off the elevator, rippling down the corridor from the nursery. A mixture of innocence, malice, and complicity. They were chattering in Italian.
He found them in front of the big nursery mirror, Lucia in her party dress which was royal blue with white lace collar and cuffs, full skirted with a flounce of petticoats that made it billow out at the bottom. It fell all the way to her heels.
“Titi says I look like something out of Heidi. She thinks I should bring a goat.” Lucia pealed with laughter, not joined in by Titi who always went farouche when Cassidy stepped in the room.
Cassidy did one of his Alfred Lunt bows: “May I have this dance, Contessa?”
“Oh, yes, please. Titi put on a record. No, not that one. The Mozart.”
“They won’t be playing Mozart at your mother’s party.”
They did a minuet, Lucia leading him through it carefully, as if through a minefield.
“You’re not very good,” she said.
“The minuet is not one of my things. I’m surprised it’s one of yours.”
“Lorenzo taught me. Lorenzo said every Contessa should know the minuet—even if she never does it,” all the while leading him through the slow stately dance, “because it would lend her grace in other things. No, the left foot, Professor. Now the right. Really, you’re as graceful as an ostrich.”
“How very true. Shall we have our lesson?”
Last lesson? Cassidy doubted there’d ever be another.
She sat in the window seat, overlooking Manhattan, Cassidy pacing like a caged lion, hands clasped behind him. “In the twelfth century, the vassals sold their fiefs as if they owned them which, of course, they didn’t. In theory, the vassal held his bit of territory only in the name of his lord, but having occupied the land for hundreds of years, the vassal simply took possession. This practice was forbidden by decree of the Holy Roman Emperor Barbarossa—much good it did. When law clashes with the facts of life, the law ceases to be observed—then as now.
“Even more piquant—in the light of our contemporary experience—was the clash of loyalties in the late Middle Ages. So tangled
were a man’s loyalties after hundreds of years of vassalage that sometimes when two knights were at war, the vassal might owe fealty to them both. He would send thirty men to one side, perhaps a hundred to the other—sons killing their own fathers. In the long cool light of history, loyalty, when followed slavishly rather than intelligently, is seen as an aberration, a form of insanity. Civilizations founder on obedience to the law, rather than the other way around.”
“What am I to deduce from all this, Professor?” asked Lucia, puzzled.
“You must review your loyalties from time to time, Contessa, in the light of changed circumstances.”
The last lesson had to be pertinent.
Titi, in her corner, glowered.
Cassidy heard the Principessa come home that night. Two A.M. Fine time to be coming home the night before her own party. Laughter light as silver bells. The murmur of voices in the sitting room. Then silence. The implications of silence rode roughshod over Cassidy, alarming him. Am I jealous? A weakness in the young, an absurdity at his age.
Worse, it was keeping him awake when he should be getting his sleep the night before The Party.
An hour of silence was too much.
Cassidy clipped on his ancient robe and opened the door. Silence gripped the apartment. Cassidy tiptoed stealthily down the corridor to the sitting room which was black and still. If there were lovers there, they were asleep or dead. He switched on the crystal chandelier. The room was empty.
He walked the corridor now without stealth and entered the Principessa’s room. Her light breathing pierced the stillness like an accusation. She was asleep. She was alone. Cassidy felt relief and shame. I’ve wronged her.
Hand on the knob.
He had difficulty leaving. The Principessa beckoned—even in sleep. No, certainly not! It would amount to rape. Or, at very least, blackmail. But then, after all, hadn’t she? Repeatedly? He had been raped, then blackmailed, finally seduced by the Madame. All the time protesting.
Now, here he was, hand on knob, in the stillness of the night quite free to go back to bed unraped, unblackmailed, unseduced. Except that he had been robbed of his free will by her continuous and repeated possession of himself—and this had corroded his resolve, his fierce sexual integrity (Irish sexual integrity was most peculiar), and his loyalty to Lucia.
