Party Of The Year

by Inconnu(e)

  He ran into the steel wall at the end of the room with his nose.

  Mankind’s great glory is his unpredictability. Sainthood is only one step away from foolishness. From deviltry, only an inch. His head ringing like a great bell.

  Feeling his nose and listening for sound behind the steel wall.

  Cassidy tucked the .38 in his waistband of his trousers at the front. (The Gypper’s .44 was in his waistband at the back.) He stuffed the flashlight in his side pocket and drew out the music box. He had two now—the one the late Hugo Dorn had given him and the one he’d taken from the seam of Hugo’s trousers.

  He tried the first one. Just in case.

  Three musical notes: pong, ping, pang.

  Nothing at all happened.

  He put the box carefully on the floor at his feet, took out the second one.

  Put his ear again to the steel door just in case he’d not listened hard enough the first time. Or perhaps just stalling. If the door opened, life was going to be very perilous indeed for the next little while.

  Cassidy sighed. A luxury in the blackness.

  Here goes one unemployed medievalist locked in a twentieth-century fairy castle about to enter the dragon’s lair to rescue the fairy princess.

  Three musical notes—the steel door sank into the concrete floor.

  Cassidy went down on his belly fast, head up.

  Ahead of him the circular stone steps, lit by two faint light bulbs, stretched, curving down and out of sight.

  A murmur of voices drifted up the stairs, insubstantial as air. He couldn’t even make out the language.

  They couldn’t get a little girl in a Heidi-like blue dress out of the building without attracting attention. On the other hand, they couldn’t stay even in so secret a hideout as this indefinitely.

  Whatever it was they had figured it out long in advance, and I’ve got thirty seconds to make up my weak wits.

  Thirteen steps to the curve of the wall which concealed him from them. From there until the steps ended in the brick room with all its dials and computers and switches would be another ten steps in which he would be fully visible.

  To proceed cautiously, poking his head round that treacherous corner, trying to size up the situation, perhaps pick off a few on his belly while himself making only a smidgin of a target . . .

  Or to rush guns blazing into a situation he knew nothing about. Not even how many there were there or whether Lucia or the Principessa was with them . . .

  The first was just a cautious man’s way of getting killed by inches and at snail’s pace and what was the virtue of that?

  The second was the speedy way of getting himself killed and perhaps Lucia, too.

  To a man of his age and sagacity both courses were recipes for disaster. Not worth consideration, much less . . . Yet he had no others.

  Meanwhile, assembling the hardware. The .38 in his right hand, .44 in his left. No accuracy at all, two-fisted firepower, that was all. He deplored it. But, after all, the rush tactic had succeeded at Entebbe and at how many other spots where nothing else had?

  The murmurings in the control room were split in half by a shrill cry in unmistakable tones of twelve-year-old fear and fury, the two so evenly blended he couldn’t tell which emotion was uppermost.

  In his stocking feet Cassidy ran down the twelve stairs around the curve of the wall and into full view of the control room and at that very instant he let loose a roar of sound from his lungs (a noise bomb would have been better if he had had one, but he didn’t). “Eeeee-iiiii-o-o-o-eeee-aahhh-tii”—a Saracen cry that had terrorized the Christians when the walls of Acre tumbled down around their ears and the Saracens came charging in with their curved scimitars, a magnificent cry to curdle the blood of the infidel . . .

  BOOK THREE

  Lucia

  In all the speculations, indignations, denunciations, and explanations that exploded in the press, pulpit, and street theater everyone agreed on only One Thing: even the Super-Rich shouldn’t be massacred with Russian weapons. Wielded by Germans and Italians. What was the matter with good old American weapons? To say nothing of good old American assassins? We’d always been pretty good at massacre. Had we grown so soft we had to import it?

  What on earth had gone wrong?

  Cassidy missed most of this uproar because he was in a police station not answerMg questions. The police asked many questions about the dead and the living and Cassidy, who knew his rights as well as any lawyer, answered as few as he could.

  The police gave him a very bad time. No one gave him a good time.

  • 32 •

  Excerpted from The Legend of the di Castigliones, Annotated

  This is written in retrospect—as what isn’t—and it’s not what happened (as what is?) because time has blurred the fine edges. Reason has tried to sort out an essentially unreasonable—one is tempted to use the word insane—action. And made a mess of things, as reason usually does when it messes with the irrational.

  The first part was by the book.

  I hurtled down into the Control Room shrieking a Saracen war cry to freeze the blood of the New Infidels (not bad, the New Infidels, because that’s what they are), and as I hit the light, I went down and to the right which meant to their left. As the Good Book says, always go to the left because it’s harder to track a moving target left than right.

  The scene, even after three months, four days, some hours, remains vivid and pointilliste in memory. I’ve tried not to add anything that wasn’t there, and it’s not easy, so creative are we with our most painful and precious recollections, to avoid adding a few touches that should have been there but were not.

  Let us freeze the action for a moment and sketch the scene in full color. A scene from grand opera. Second act curtain with the full cast and chorus on stage, all singing at the top of their lungs. In her Heidi-like dress Lucia dominated the center of the stage, struggling in the arms of a Titi who seemed to have grown in stature and certainly in viciousness.

  Nearby stood three Red Wind, weapons at their sides. The Principessa stood near them under no restraint—at least no physical restraint. She stood there in her sapphire blue velvet sheath, as always erect, but for the first and only time since I had known her, in despair. Defeat was writ large all over that beautiful graven image of a face, a defeat she’d held at bay for twelve years.

  Titi was trying to force Lucia through a hole blown in the rear facing wall. This was the exit I’d been looking for from the moment I saw that room, and had questioned Hugo closely about under the Vivaldi. Hugo had resisted the blandishments of the Vivaldi (no relation to the composer) simply because he didn’t know. (Or perhaps he did. There are some things about Hugo we shall never know. So finely grained was his duplicity, he kept secrets from himself.)

  I digress.

  My Saracen war cry achieved one unexpected bonus. Designed to freeze (if only for the tiniest moment) all the participants (and it did that to some degree), it had the opposite effect on Lucia, who had been struggling against the bigger Titi. The war cry—eeeee-iiiii-o-o-o-eeee-aahhh-tii—gave Lucia just that extra bit of strength she needed to toss Titi over her shoulder in the back Motherwell I’d taught her.

  I changed my shriek from Saracen to plain English. “Dire emergency! Dire! Dire!” Directed to Lucia. Meanwhile I shot from a crouch the three Red Wind warriors in their file clerk suits, moving all the time as the Good Book directs.

  Lucia drew the .22 strapped to her thigh in the nick of time because Titi came out of her tumble with a gun in her hand, pointed at myself in what you might say was the final manifestation of a disapproval that had marked our relationship from the very beginning.

  Her’s was a pretty good shot, missing only because I was moving left and downward. Mine would have taken her out clean but the .44 jammed (they always do, invariably at the worst moment) and it was Lucia who shot Titi, directly in the face, rolling as I’d taught her to the left.

  Still firing.

&nb
sp; As I’d instructed her.

  Perhaps too well instructed her.

  “No! No!” shrieked the Principessa. “He’s your father.”

  For Lucia was still rolling, still firing at someone to my right outside my vision. The Principessa had thrown herself directly into the line of fire, whether deliberately or not—things being as they were—we’ll never know.

  I saw Lorenzo now, for the first time. He’d been at the console that controlled everything in that building, turning the lights back on in the Windletop (a clever ruse designed to keep the police from looking for the control room by obviating the need) when I had come hurtling in.

  Lorenzo had caught Lucia’s bullet directly in the heart—as if I’d marked an X there as I had marked those X’s on the trees in Central Park—and he crumpled neatly into a small compact heap like a circus clown, playing it for laughs.

  “Your Papa! Your Papa!” said the Principessa carefully, trying to undo mortality.

  “Papa!” screamed Lucia and flung herself on the body as if she’d been looking for him all her life—as indeed she had.

  The Principessa sat down slowly, the sapphire blue dress stained now with a shade of red she’d never have worn with that dress.

  “I killed my Papa! I killed my Papa!”

  The rage directed at me because, of course, I’d taught her. These things never work out quite as you plan.

  Pointing the gun at me, directly at the heart.

  Again, exactly as I’d instructed.

  Click.

  “I told you to count your shots,” I said to her. “You had only nine.”

  • 33 •

  Cassidy and Feinberg were lunching in the back room of the Spumi, each giving away as little as possible.

  “Intelligence,” said Cassidy at his most mellifluous, “is filling the function once so ably performed by journalism. You journalists have grown rich, respectable, and even famous, and with it has come sloth, greed, and layers of avoirdupois, whereas we in the intelligence profession . . .”

  “You’re no longer in that profession,” commented Feinberg.

  “ . . . are poor starvelings, despised and misunderstood by the populace . . .”

  “For very good reason.”

  “ . . . our wits sharpened by deprivation, our bodies driven by hunger . . .”

  “Balls!”

  “ . . . to uncover the sordid corruptions you journalists so persistently ignore—or worse—don’t see at all, your myopia ripening into ignorance and eventually superstition which you inflict as news on your sycophantic readers who rival you in stupidity, greed, and impotence.”

  “Cassidy,” said Feinberg with his cherubic smile, “you are a driveling idiot who has swallowed a dictionary. You mistake words for intelligence.”

  “I’m Irish,” said Cassidy. “Words are the national pastime and idiocy our congenital weakness. How is the canneloni?”

  “Adequate,” said Feinberg.

  “You sound like a drama critic,” said Cassidy, “which is not a profession but an epithet.”

  Jabbing away to prevent Feinberg, a very good journalist, from asking all the questions Cassidy didn’t want to answer.

  Like trying to keep a hog from rooting.

  “Why,” said Feinberg, returning to a question Cassidy had twice sidestepped, “should Nicki expose himself in that restaurant in full view of people who had known him very well—people he’d been hiding from for years?”

  “Freudians,” said Cassidy, “would call it a cry for help.” Followed by a three-minute disquisition on the lunacy of Freud, Freudians, and most modern literature. Feinberg bore it all with his implacable good nature (which had reduced many world statesmen to a bonhomie they later regretted when they read his dispatches), boring in finally with:

  “I knew Nicki very well, and I looked at Lorenzo several times. It never occurred to me that was Nicki even though he looked like Nicki—an older ravaged Nicki. Now why was that, do you suppose?”

  “You didn’t expect to find a Prince of ancient lineage working as a butler. Function changes personality. She Stoops to Conquer in modern dress. Also you thought he was dead.”

  “Lorenzo looked older than Nicki would be, older than God really. How did he do that—makeup?”

  “Acting,” said Cassidy. “Nicki believed himself into old age so passionately you believed it, too. Zero Mostel didn’t transform himself into a rhinoceros with makeup. He bulged out his eyes and pawed the ground. Inside himself he was a rhinoceros—so outside he was, too.”

  A stunning bit of acting, thought Cassidy, himself the connoisseur of acting that he was. He had himself seen many photographs of Nicki and never suspected it was Lorenzo. Then there was the other photo he’d taken from Pietroangeli’s safe—a naked Titi whipping a naked Nicki. Cassidy had not recognized the whippee until after it was all over and done with as either Nicki or Lorenzo. Truly, Nicki was a man of many faces who changed personality—also character—at will. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, as it were.

  Feinberg was boring in again with a question Cassidy had no intention of answering: “How did Nicki get into livery in the first place?”

  “Aaaah,” said Cassidy with his expansive Irish smile.

  “That’s hardly an answer,” complained Feinberg silkily.

  The cards were by no means all in Cassidy’s hands. Feinberg had the entire news-gathering machinery of The New York Times at his elbow. He had a lot of information Cassidy badly wanted and he was not about to give it up for nothing. Also, Feinberg had been to Italy for the funeral. Cassidy couldn’t afford to be too flippant. He needed Feinberg as badly as Feinberg needed him.

  Feinberg picked at his canneloni patiently: “You were alone with the dying Principessa for the last hour of her life. The only one she would speak to, Horatio. Now why was that, do you suppose?”

  “I would love to hear your speculations about that, Alvin,” said Cassidy. “Your skill at putting words into other people’s mouths is world renowned.”

  Feinberg smiled his cherubic smile: “Well then, hear this. Remember I knew Elsa before you did and just as well . . .”

  Cassidy felt a stab of jealousy to his very toes. Ridiculous. Being jealous of the Principessa was liking being jealous of the sun for shining on everyone.

  Feinberg was continuing with great calm: “Elsa would not like the legend of the di Castigliones to die untold or misunderstood. At the same time she would not like the story told now when so many of the living could be hurt. Therefore she would not tell me, a journalist, and she would not tell anyone so unreliable as the police. That left you.”

  “Oh, did it now?” retorted Cassidy. “The Principessa’s friends were numbered in the thousands, few of them journalists or police.”

  Actually Cassidy knew very well why he’d been summoned to the bare room in New York Hospital into which the Principessa had been thrust too fast for Alison or his crew to mike.

  “Sit down, Horatio, and shut up.” In a thin whisper of a voice which was all she had left. She looked every minute of her age—and what was her age, fifty?—and she wanted no one but Cassidy who’d already seen her in her nakedness to see that ravaged face.

  “Cherchez la mère. Pas la femme, la mère,” she whispered in that spidery voice. “Nicki’s mother was on her knees in all of Rome’s 2,000 churches. I gave him what he wanted—a mother—what he’d never had. I was too indulgent a mother, too loving by miles, but then I’d never had a child before, you know. He was my only child—and spoiled.”

  Even in the extremity of circumstances, Cassidy couldn’t forbear the raging question: “Why didn’t Lucia recognize Lorenzo as her father?”

  “Lucia had never seen her father. He wouldn’t allow her in the room. He was horrified by paternity. A little boy who won’t grow up can hardly have a daughter, can he now?”

  She told him only carefully selected things he had to know, some of which he’d already guessed (but guessing wasn’t knowing) and many of which he
hadn’t guessed at all and which astonished him.

  Even if she had time, and she hadn’t much, she wouldn’t have told him everything. She was too subtle, too intelligent, and too feminine to tell all. She left selected holes in the air which had to be filled by other voices. But Feinberg was dead wrong in thinking she gave a damn about the di Castiglione legend. She had no interest in posterity. Only in Lucia. There was a good reason for every crumb of information she gave him. Those facts that didn’t need divulging were not divulged. Cassidy was still digging them up elsewhere.

  There were very good reasons for keeping the legend quiet now. There was Lucia, who had not spoken a word to him since that terrible night.

  Cassidy turned on the Irish charm to get at what he so desperately needed to know. “Tell me about the funeral.”

  “Now why should I do that,” said Feinberg, “when you have been so unforthcoming about everything else?”

  “Because the whole story has already appeared on the front page of The New York Times.”

  “I must confess I enjoyed writing about the di Castiglione tomb.”

  The tomb in which reposed four hundred years of di Castiglione bones was one of Bernini’s masterpieces, an immense edifice of marble and bronze that loomed over the Tuscany hills like a benison. That’s what Feinberg had written.

  “It was a beautiful day for a funeral,” said Feinberg, telling Cassidy all the things he didn’t want to know which is what Cassidy had been doing to him for the whole luncheon, “sunny and warm. There were enough high Catholic clergy to elect a new Pope but not many di Castigliones.”

  “There are not many left,” said Cassidy. “How did Lucia look?”

  “Solemn—but then she was always a solemn child.”

  She wasn’t. Thought Cassidy.

  “She was with her Aunt Clothilde—a wizened crow . . .”

  Poor Lucia.

  “Dressed in black.”

  Lucia hated black.

  “Where is Lucia now? You didn’t say in your article,” said Cassidy sweetly. His letter had been returned. Recipient unknown.