by Inconnu(e)
“No, I didn’t,” said Feinberg. “Did I?”
“Where is she, Feinberg?”
Alvin Feinberg buttered a piece of bread and then chewed on it reflectively, letting Cassidy wait. He sipped his wine. He wiped his mouth meticulously with his napkin.
“It was, of course, the second identical burial in the same bronze casket. There had been a body in that casket for years. Whose body? The police say they have no idea. The police are lying. This time, they took fingerprints. They know very well who that is but they’re not saying for reasons I can only guess at, all of them discreditable. Now who was it, Cassidy, who lay in Nicki’s tomb all those years?”
“Gianini Gennaro,” said Cassidy negligently. You had to give a little to get a little.
Feinberg slammed his napkin down on the table. “That’s who I thought, too, but I didn’t know. Gennaro! The guy the Mob thought ran off with all the ransom money. They’ve been looking for him ever since. The Principessa knew the whole bit all along and she told you . . .”
“Listen, you bastard, if you mention my name in connection with any of this, I’ll cut your balls off and eat them in front of your very eyes. I’m not even an unnamed source. These are your own sleazy speculations.”
Feinberg’s eyes glittered in triumph behind the gold-rimmed glasses. He’d found out what he’d come for. He’d have liked a little more, as what journalist wouldn’t, but this was enough. He felt generous.
“I owe you a little something, Cassidy,” said Feinberg, “and no one has ever said I’m not generous in victory. I’ve been talking to the lawyers—this is for your ears only, Cassidy, until my book is published—and they told me . . .”
“There’s not a lira left of the di Castiglione fortune,” said Cassidy wickedly. “What hasn’t been already stolen the lawyers will steal, so in effect it’s all gone.”
It took the wind out of Feinberg’s sails. He sighed: “Cassidy, you never fail to amaze me.”
“Don’t forget, my friend, I have been on this case longer than you and it has been my sole preoccupation while you and the other Times editors have had the rest of the world on your shoulders.”
They both ate in silence, each pursuing his own quite different ruminations.
“Where is she, Feinberg?” Cassidy asked.
“I was told not to tell you.”
“By Aunt Clothilde—or Lucia?”
“Both.” Feinberg’s eyes were deeply sympathetic. It was brutal, that word both, but Cassidy deserved the truth. He’s bleeding inside, thought Feinberg.
Cassidy grimaced in pain: “I’ve got to know, Alvin. It was the Principessa’s dying wish. You can’t hold out against that.”
Feinberg thought it over. “She’s in the Convent of the Holy Sepulchre above Siena.”
“I feared as much,” whispered Cassidy. “Thank you.”
“It won’t do you any good, Horatio. I had a few words with Lucia. She’s bitter.”
The waiter was standing there with the check in his hand. Cassidy plucked it from him and handed it to Feinberg. He smiled his Irish blarney smile: “It’s not only the di Castigliones who haven’t a dime to their names. It’s the Cassidys, too. The Principessa died owing me two month’s salary.”
Excerpted from The Legend of the di Castigliones, Annotated
I should have thought of that 1920s railroad station that lay under the Windletop long before I did, if only because it was so exquisitely attuned to the rest of the story—a relic of the past—surfacing in the 1970s in a way never intended and causing havoc to a generation unborn when it was built.
The wall had long since been bricked up and the railroad station abandoned, actually with a private railroad car still sitting on a siding. It was an ornate little railroad station, with a great vaulted ceiling of ornamental brick interlaced with multicolored tiles, the whole confection looking a little like a Romanesque Church of the late Crusades.
Long abandoned. But not by everyone. Bums knew it was there and slept on its resplendent stone steps. They got there from the Grand Central tracks under Park Avenue. New York teems with abandoned underground stations (most of them old subway stops) and the underground hobo population knows them all. That’s how the Red Wind got into the Windletop—by blowing a hole in the wall at the precise spot Titi told them to.
They got into the tunnel (as so many do) through the many manholes on Park Avenue and most of them left that way and got clean away.
• 34 •
Under the beneficent foliage of Georgetown’s trees, Cassidy lurked for a full hour, choosing the nearest parking space to Alison’s house. Alison would have trouble finding a parking place for the little Julietta, his latest extravagance. Georgetown was very short of parking and when other motorists zeroed in, Cassidy had to leap out from the shelter of his oak and wave them away peremptorily.
The parking space was a good two hundred yards from Alison’s front door, which would give him time to present his case. Alison arrived, cruising slowly in the Julietta (whose roof was only four feet from the ground, a very sexy car that went 175 miles an hour and was at the moment going three). Cassidy stayed well out of sight behind his tree until Alison locked up the little sports car and started walking.
Cassidy fell in step beside him: “You’ve not returned my calls, Hugh. That’s very short-sighted,” said Cassidy.
“Go away,” said Alison not looking at him. “You’re an embarrassment Cassidy.”
About to become even more so, thought Cassidy. Aloud he said: “I want to talk about Lucia, a small child whose life you’ve wrecked.”
“She’s all right. She’s in a convent.”
“She hates it. I’ve had a letter.”
A lie.
“We can do nothing. She’s in the custody of her aunt.”
“Her aunt has disowned her. She’s imprisoned in a convent. Once one of the richest heiresses in the world, penniless. Have you no heart, Alison?”
“Go away,” said Alison picking up the pace.
They were two blocks away from Alison’s Georgian residence which, he liked to tell friends, he’d bought for $30,000 (with his wife’s money) and was now worth in the neighborhood of $500,000.
“A very simple request. An airline ticket delivered to her personally and in private because they open her mail. And a passport not in the name of di Castiglione which would set the hounds of hell on her trail both in Rome and here.”
“You’re out of your mind!”
Alison was almost running now, but he couldn’t afford a full run because his neighbors had eyes and they talked. So Cassidy had a little time to lay it all out.
“She’ll get out of that convent by herself. She’s a very resourceful child. If she has some place to run to . . .”
Alison stopped dead and faced Cassidy. “Cassidy, it’s finished! You know that! Why are you talking this gibberish?”
“A mother’s dying wish, Alison.”
“Eh!” said Alison—and resumed his walk, faster than ever. “She’d never get out of Italy. She’s twelve years old, for God’s sake!”
“Thirteen now. I’ve got friends in Pan Am who owe me some favors. They’ll take care of her, get her on the plane—if she gets to Rome. They want no part of that convent. That’s where you come in, Alison. You’ve got to come up with the bread for the ticket because I haven’t got any. And a passport in some name besides di Castiglione.”
“No!” said Alison, “I’m in enough hot water as it is!”
Almost running now.
“You’d be saving the child from a living death!”
“No!” Alison was heel-and-toeing it now as if he were in the Olympics, Cassidy dog-trotting beside him. They were close to the house now and once there Alison would slam the door in his face—and that would be that. Cassidy threw his rabbit punch.
“Alison, it was you personally who let twenty-two terrorists slip into this country deliberately so that the Terror Section would get a lot more money and more i
mportance. You did it to beef up your own job over there at Langley . . .”
Alison had again stopped and faced Cassidy, his face wild. “Cassidy, I truly think you’ve gone over the edge this time. Who do you think would listen to these ravings?”
“Alvin Feinberg is writing a book,” said Cassidy sweetly. “The untold story behind the Windletop massacre. He’s on my ass every twenty minutes to give him a few more juicy tidbits for a book that is already Book-of-the-Month though not yet finished. I lunched with him just yesterday and told him nothing much, but I could change that. Feinberg is a most respected journalist, and he knows his way around the laws of libel as well as any scribbler in the business. He could blacken you from head to toe without leaving an inch for the lawyers.”
“You don’t know my lawyer.” Alison resumed walking, face working furiously. He’d been hurt, but not put out. “My lawyer would tie up Feinberg so that book wouldn’t see publication until he’s dead.”
That left only one card to play and Cassidy played it.
“Now, about that black bag job you admitted committing over your own clear signature, Hugh.”
That stopped Alison in his tracks. Cassidy had pulled out his Xerox copy of Alison’s letter, and thrust it under his nose. The black bag job was a pretext, as you know. We all did them in the old days and, when I authorized yours, I couldn’t foresee Watergate, could I?
“It would never hold up in court.”
“It would hold up to MacGregor.”
A long silence.
“All I’m asking, Hugh, is a plane ticket from your contingency fund and a little American passport from the printing department.”
“What name do you want on the passport?” said Alison dully.
“Cassidy is a very nice name,” said Cassidy.
• 35 •
The weeks stretched into months with no word, no anything. Alison had done the business--or said he had. Nothing at all happened.
Cassidy was teaching part time now at the New School for Social Research, a short walk from his house. The rest of his time was passed writing The Legend of The di Castigliones, Annotated. When he wasn’t writing it, he was researching it.
It filled the days but not the nights.
Excerpted from The Legend of the di Castigliones, Annotated
I dwell on the boyhood because Nicki is impossible to explain without reference to those early years when he roamed the vast palazzo with its 223 rooms looking for his adored mother and father who were rarely there (1) and avoiding his detested Nanny who rarely caught him. (Only Nicki knew where all the secret passages were.)
“Nicki! You come out of there or you’ll be sorry,” was the battle-cry of the detested Mrs. Storch, an English Nanny who considered both boyhood and Italy obscene.
Nicki would climb the narrow circular staircases behind the walls to one of the many huge empty baroque rooms in the upper stories whose ceilings and walls were alive with cherubim and seraphim and painted plaster satyrs and goats and maidens—and Nicki would play with these painted and sculptured characters by the hour, never quite losing sight of himself in the many mirrors. In all his life, Nicki never saw anything so beautiful as that boy. (2)
Nicki’s imagination peopled the rooms with imaginary characters, fairies, nymphs, satyrs, grotesques, and he never again found companionship quite so interesting. Sometimes Nicki would disappear for half a day, and only Clothilde, his elder and formidable sister, was clever enough to track him down.
“What are you doing, you naughty boy?” she would cry because she found Nicki in all respects inexcusable.
“Oh, Clothilde,” he’d say. “You’ve interrupted the mysteries!”
“What mysteries?” she would say crossly, for she was always cross. “There’s no one here.”
“Not any more,” he would say. Nicki had no childhood friends until he went to secondary school in England (3) at the age of fifteen. At St. Edelbert’s (4) he was introduced to homosexuality, whipping, cold baths, and the peculiarly Calvinist Catholicism of England where Papism is worn like a plume as evidence of aristocracy (5) (as opposed to the United States where Catholicism is regarded in upper class circles as a superstition largely harbored by waitressses).
From St. Edelbert’s Nicki went to Oxford, which civilized him in other ways, many disastrous. His great friend the Marquis of Finisterre said of Nicki that he was “the most beautiful object outside the Bodleian Library,” and this, in addition to his wealth and lineage, attracted women as well as men. Although by now his sexual nature was fairly well established, he was besieged by beautiful women, and one of them bedded him successfully. (1) It was she who first noted that to Nicki sex was something better experienced passively. Better yet witnessed. He was not alone in this form of amusement at Oxford.
It must not be deduced from all this that sex was his only preoccupation. Actually it was one of his lesser activities. Nicki was a passionate fencer (said to be the narcissist’s favorite exercise), wrestler, and body nut of all sorts (including jujitsu and other eastern fads just then coming into fashion), wit, bon vivant, and celebrated host. The parties in Nicki’s rooms were sumptuous and remembered today for the erudition of his guests as well as the wit and charm of the host. Nicki himself was a scholar not of the first rank but well up in the second, “a man of immensely original mind but without tenacity of purpose or, in fact, any purpose,” according to his tutor. (2)
He was also an actor, but he made little of this great talent which was a great pity. Oxford, then as now, abounded in drama groups, drama experiment, theater of all kinds in which student actors could try their wings. Nicki’s great flaw—although many would not call it that—was that he wanted to be the whole show (actor, author, director, stage designer, everything) and he was accustomed to getting his own way. Theater is above all a collaborative enterprise, and Nicki wouldn’t and couldn’t collaborate. (As we will discover, he could submit—but that is something else again. Collaboration he didn’t understand.)
When he returned to Rome from Oxford, Nicki was beautiful, rich, aristocratic—and twenty years old. As do so many who have had lonely childhoods, Nicki surrounded himself with too many people—snobs, intellectuals, revolutionaries, amusing people in general, and also those who liked to be outrageous as a form of amusement. He was very restless and some of his parties were wicked indeed. (3)
• 36 •
An eternity of silence came from Rome. Cassidy had no way of knowing what was going through Lucia’s thirteen-year-old mind but no way of stopping the speculations that were going through his.
He had battered that little skull with anathema against the Church. “Never trust a man who says his is the True Church. He’s telling you an untruth.” And so forth and so on. He had heaped contempt, derision, and withering sarcasm on the Church and especially on its Holy Orders but how much of it had penetrated?
He had prided himself that his teaching had become, as it were, too much gospel for her to embrace The Gospels without bursting into laughter. Or tears. Still, there it was: Lucia was still in the convent even after Cassidy had pried it open a crack.
In his mind’s eye he saw Lucia on her knees in a chapel full of flickering candles and nonflickering nuns, praying for . . . what . . . deliverance? Or acceptance? Religion is the opiate of the people, especially powerful on little girls. But she wasn’t such a little girl any more. Thirteen? The age of reason? Or the age of hysteria?
Meanwhile, silence from Rome.
Excerpted from The Legend of the di Castigliones, Annotated
There were tremendous pressures on Nicki to get married from the other two trustees, his sister, Clothilde, and Monsignor Carbonotti (1), one of the Vatican’s most trusted financial pirates, but the last person in the world they wanted Nicki to marry was a divorcee who was apparently permanently childless. As Marietta had pointed out, these two trustees desperately needed an heir to keep the fortune from slipping into the hands of a Turin industrialist whose first ac
t would have been to toss them out on their ears.
Clothilde had done everything possible to push Jenny Feathers into Nicki’s bed and tried hard to push Nicki into matrimony with her. But, as we know, Nicki didn’t want a wife, he wanted a mother, and he personally picked Elsa for her childlessness. Thus, he never would have a rival for her maternal affections.
He was horrified when Clothilde told him Jenny Feathers was pregnant by him. His sexual relations with Jenny had been nebulous. Jenny Feathers gave birth to Lucia, June 23, 1966, three months after Nicki and Elsa’s marriage, and died in childbirth—an unlikely story since she was healthy as a peasant. At my suggestion Italian police exhumed her and performed an autopsy. She had been poisoned by cyanide.
We hastily pass over who would do such a dastardly deed to get at the fact that Clothilde—now that the mother was out of the way—bore the child triumphantly to Nicki and thrust an heiress down his reluctant throat. He refused to have anything to do with the child, who was banished to the upper reaches of the palazzo and literally never saw her father. Lucia’s stories about a marvelous father who taught her to ride and to swim and sang her songs were the fantasies of a child who wished they were true. Thus the palazzo had a second lonely child wandering through its vastness.
Nicki might have ended his life as a rich dilettante, collecting jade or some other harmless idiocy, but for the kidnapping. Almost everything said or written about his kidnapping is wrong.
• 37 •
When the call came, it wasn’t what he expected. “She’s on Flight 212 from Rome. It landed twenty minutes ago,” said the Pan Am man, a stranger to Cassidy.
“Why didn’t you let me know?” shouted Cassidy.
“Because she told us not to. She didn’t want you meeting her.” The Pan Am voice was neutral, not wanting to get into the rights and wrongs of this in any way. “The limousine will deliver her to Thirteenth Street in about an hour and a half. Customs is backed up to the rafters—so it might even be longer than that.”
