Party Of The Year

by Inconnu(e)

  It gave her something to do to eke out the silences which were becoming longer and awkwarder.

  “Judas Priest!” His strongest imprecation. “What do I do now?”

  To give himself surcease, he buried himself in The Legend of the di Castigliones, as if somewhere in that tangled tormented story he would find the answer to her pain, her awful silence.

  Excerpted from The Legend of the di Castigliones, Annotated

  In this saga of unremitting perversity the role of Vittorio Pietroangeli is almost refreshing in its straightforward treachery. Pietroangeli was a former henchman of Lucky Luciano who cozied up to the OSS during World War II, much later to the CIA (which is where I met him). He was totally unreliable and would sell out to the highest bidder—the CIA, KGB, or his own Mafia bosses. He had a lucrative blackmail racket on the side (the source of all those filthy pictures in his safe) that he was supposed to share with his Mob colleagues. He didn’t.

  Pietroangeli was in such bad odor in the Mob that he was about to get the chop. However, no one has ever accused Pietroangeli of stupidity. He heard the news of his pending assassination almost the moment it was decided upon and was out of Rome within the hour. He took up residence in the Windletop under his assumed name Struthers. He spoke excellent English taught him by the OSS. He rarely ventured out of the building. On a trip to the laundry, he ran into Titi and recognized her as Pieta Lavalla.

  The blackmail started immediately. The di Castiglione fortune was thus subject to two enormous drains: one from Titi and Nicki to finance their Red Wind, the other to slake the unslakeable greed of Pietroangeli (alias Struthers). That is when the art objects started disappearing from the apartment and showing up at auction rooms. Lorenzo spent many of his mysterious days off scouting artists to make imitations of the real paintings they sold.

  Struthers’s apartment was also used by Nicki and Titi to play their whipping games, of which they had been deprived in the Windletop for lack of space. Pietroangeli, of course, took pictures—one of which I found in his safe—but so consummate was Nicki’s acting that I did not recognize him either as Lorenzo or as Nicki. He was playing one of his roles. The beautiful Swedish boys were also imported by Pietroangeli, not for himself, but for Nicki. At great expense.

  The fact is that Nicki—while playing butler with skill and terrorist with dedication—had not shed all his princely vices. One of these was witnessing his wife’s infidelities by means of the camera in the ceiling over her bed. “Most of my love life was staged for Nicki’s amusement,” the Principessa confessed on her death bed. “You were a refreshment, Horatio, because there were no cameras in that room, and also because I was fonder of you than you ever imagined.” Her only words on the subject.

  • 41 •

  Cassidy had come home earlier than usual, and he caught her in the very act—scuttling up the ladder heading, much too late, for the hiding place.

  “Betrayer!” bellowed Cassidy and leaped up the skinny library ladder after her. It was too much for the little ladder which skidded off its brass rail and overturned, bringing down Lucia and Cassidy—the pages of The Legend of the di Castigliones, Annotated, filling the air like a cloud of white pigeons.

  Lucia fell headlong onto the wood floor and hurt her elbow. “Owl” she wailed.

  Her first childlike sound in many a month.

  Cassidy wrapped his long arms around her and exploded with apology: “I’m sorry! Sorry! Sorry! I was too precipitate!”

  “Ow!” wailed Lucia. And burst into tears, which Cassidy found infinitely easier to deal with than her silence.

  He kissed the elbow to make it feel better and made contrite noises and held her very tight.

  The sobs abated and presently stopped.

  Neither of them wanted to say anything for a long, long while as if words might shatter the peace.

  But they didn’t. When Cassidy finally spoke up, it was in a colloquial offhand style, as if asking about the weather.

  “How much of it did you read?”

  “I was just getting to the most exciting bit!”

  “What bit was that?”

  “Coming to New York because the Mafia was after them.”

  Cassidy rubbed his face with his free hand, the one that wasn’t around Lucia’s thin shoulders: “The Mafia wasn’t really after them. Nicki made that up.”

  “I know.”

  The barrier between them had vanished, as if it had never existed.

  “She wasn’t really my mother,” said Lucia simply.

  “No.” “And he probably wasn’t really my father.”

  “No.”

  “You really have an orphan on your hands, Cassidy.”

  “It’s the blessing of God,” said Cassidy, very Irish.

  “You don’t believe in God.”

  “Perhaps I do. Under the circumstances.”

  “I don’t want you believing in God, Cassidy, just for me.”

  “Okay. Your word. Okay. I was getting very tired of it.”

  Lucia stirred restively in his arms and screwed her face up right: “Were you in love with my moth . . . with the Principessa?”

  Cassidy exploded: “This is not a fit conversation for a thirteen-year-old.”

  Lucia giggled: “You’re a prude, Cassidy. You always were.”

  It was as if a spring had been released inside her. After that Lucia was at ease with life, unburdened by a past which wasn’t hers, and which she shed with scarcely a backward look.

  Only now and then would it bob to the surface, and then there were always surprises.

  One of them came almost two years after the Windletop massacre when Cassidy, in one of his fits of unemployment, sat on a bench in Washington Square watching Lucia skateboard in and around the guitar players and coke sniffers. She was doing triple carry-ails which scared the wits out of Cassidy. She was wearing a gray T-shirt with St. Theresa on its front and No. 26 on its rear.

  After a very scary run (a double wingover) she flopped next to Cassidy on the bench, panting hard and said—out of a clear blue sky:

  “Do you know why I really came out of the convent and back to you, Cassidy?”

  “Because you didn’t want to spend the rest of your life in a nunnery.”

  “That wasn’t it at all. I was going to kill you, Cassidy. I was going to avenge my mother and my father. That’s why I came back.”

  Cassidy ruminated about this blatant announcement, rubbing his nose. “And what made you decide against it, Mavourneen?”

  “Killing’s wrong,” she said bluntly.

  Cassidy smiled, deeply gratified she’d got that far in her education. “It’s a lousy amusement. Always was. I hope the human race will outgrow it, Contessa.”

  “I’m not a Contessa,” said Lucia. “I’m a Miss. A Miss . . . Cassidy.”

  For some reason that amused her no end. She uttered a whoop of laughter as if it were the funniest thing in the world.

  1 The most famous massacre over dinner is, of course, that by the Campbell clan of the McGregors after having served them dinner at Inverary, an inconceivable breach of good manners which took place in the seventeenth century and has not been forgotten or forgiven to this very day. It took place by torchlight. Of massacres by candlelight probably the best known is that of the Stirglesi family—father, mother, eight children including a babe in arms—extinguished in Venice in 1365 in the great hall of the Stirglesi palazzo on the Grand Canal by the light of six superb Venetian chandeliers, each bearing over 100 candles designed and made by Faschetti in 1126. The Stirglesi is still considered the most elegantly lit atrocity of its or any other day.

  2 Warfare by Candlelight, by British Major General R.L.S. Padgett (Ret.), the definitive work on this subject, estimates it would take ten men working at top speed at least five minutes to extinguish 1,000 candles and therefore half an hour or more to put out 7,000 candles. Only the British can do such military research with a straight face.

  3 My report here deviates sha
rply from the FBI’s. The FBI is, as usual, full of prune juice.

  4 The Red Wind combat team was careful to avoid martyring any true members of the proletariat, confining bloodshed to the rich and the security men, except for one Puerto Rican waiter killed by accident who left seven children in quite authentic proletarian misery.

  5 The last of Jane Atchison’s notes, deciphered by FBI cryptologists and found still clutched in her dead hand, reported that the Duchess de Angelis’ hairdo was coming unstruck from the severity of her dancing the Pendulum.

  1 “Elsa was a beacon of courage in a sea of craven cowardice,” Chantal de Niailles was quoted as saying in The New York Daily News.

  2 The FBI is slightly demented in the matter of numbers, relishing idiot statistics like fine caviar. It may well have been sixty-eight seconds or even sixty-nine.

  1 His father was invariably in the arms of one of his twenty-six mistresses, his mother in the embrace of Christ, a form of lechery far more devastating to a child than the other kind.

  2 Nicki told all this to the Principessa who told me on her deathbed.

  3 Constantine de Lesseps, a celebrated homosexual of Rome, who told me much about Nicki’s Oxford years in a twenty-two-page letter of immense erudition and horrifying obscenity.

  4 St. Edelbert’s in Sussex, an aristocratic Catholic school, which boasted of producing more homosexual Catholic intellectuals than Eton, Harrow, and Westminster put together. Many of these aristocratic homosexuals later infested both Houses of Parliament where they were renowned for advocating such enlightening measures as the death penalty for abortion, restoration of hanging, and corporal punishment in kindergarten.

  5 Evelyn Waugh became a Catholic, it is said, only to get into the better London clubs.

  1 The celebrated English nymphomaniac Fiona Le Roy whose book Passions and Perversions has two chapters on Nicki.

  2 His tutor was Simon Purefleet, an eccentric now eighty-nine, who was famous for his bad temper. He was said to be the second rudest man at Oxford, and his insults were treasured by the recipients as if he had bestowed knighthood on them. He was also the biggest snob at the University and in his last five years refused to tutor anyone below the rank of Viscount.

  3 Constantine de Lesseps tells of one in which a young girl of an impeccable Roman family had oral relations with a donkey. “The interesting thing was that we all watched the girl and the donkey, which Nicki watched us watching—a voyeur of voyeurs. He told me after the party he wished he were the donkey—because it was the only one at the party. Nicki always wanted to be alone in the crowd.”

  1 Marietta was mistaken about Nicki having no voice in his fortune. He was himself a trustee, but he was consistently out-voted by his sister Clothilde and by Monsignor Carbonotti, whose great interest was in keeping the immense di Castiglione fortune in the Vatican portfolio with the aim eventually of expropriating it altogether. Vatican larceny of this nature is apparently beyond the juridical reach of the legal systems of all countries.

  1 Inspector Francetti who was in charge of the case actually thinks Clothilde was trying to get her brother killed with all this haggling, which would leave her and the Monsignor in charge of the money.

  2 The Church’s claim to be able to sell you life everlasting is not subject to the blue sky laws which prohibit all other swindles of this nature.

  3 Maoism is even more boring than Scriptures, but not quite so boring as Marxism.

  4 Nicki could have been home in a week but for Clothilde’s haggling.

  1 Nicki and Titi had actually spent most of the $7,500,000 on their terror operations. Terror is an enormously extravagant form of amusement, requiring equipment and staff more expensive and far-reaching than polo or yachting added together, and has taken their place as the most conspicuous consumption of all.

  2 Nicki and Titi probably decided they had worked over Rome to the limit of its capacity, having slaughtered an Italian Foreign Minister and two Ambassadors and staged some truly thrilling bank robberies, which brought satisfying headlines. The ultimate headline lay in New York. If you didn’t make it on Broadway, you were still in the boondocks.

  1 Nicki was fond of quoting Baudelaire on the subject of acting as total enchantment “veiling the terrors of the abyss,” symbolism celebrating before the world “the mystery of life.” As Lorenzo, curiously enough, he got very close to Lucia. As butler he felt great affection for a girl whom, as daughter, he found abhorrent.