Looker

by Michael Kilian

  They also included a few men. Calculating that Washington’s highly stressed, power-obsessed, overworked males would be receptive, and ultimately addicted, to her uniquely soothing ministrations, she opened her salon to men one evening a week and at other times by special appointment. Some wives who found out about their husbands’ visits to Zoé presumed she was functioning as the manager of some sort of extraordinarily expensive massage parlor, but there was no sex involved in her services, only the sublime serenity that came from lying under a warmly moist facecloth in a softly lit room, while Zoé’s skilled fingers worked the tension from one’s neck and shoulders.

  A.C. had met her at a party at the French Embassy. On a whim, he’d taken her up on an invitation to try her treatment. He’d become a regular, and they had grown to be friends.

  Delighted, if surprised, to hear from him, she immediately arranged a special appointment, bumping a woman customer whom she said she’d turn over to an assistant.

  A.C. felt he was at last taking a step on the right road. A salon like Zoé’s would have been a vital resource for a beauty like Camilla. He guessed Camilla would prefer Zoé’s to Arden’s or one of the other salons. Zoé was French.

  As he lay in the chair, Zoé’s fingers gently working against his temples, he let their conversation follow a natural course, Zoé telling him of business successes and plans for expansion, of a failed love affair and a new man in her life, of a recent trip back to Paris. He told her of his life in New York, of happy things about his wife and children and their house in Westchester, leaving out the dreadful matters of the past week. He did not question her directly about Camilla, as a policeman might. Zoé was his friend, but she was reflexively discreet. People relaxing in her private treatment rooms often felt moved to confession or the sharing of secrets, and it was abhorrent to her to break any confidence, to allow anyone else to pry.

  So he approached his goal obliquely, casually.

  “I met a woman in New York who I think knows you,” he said. “A model, named Camilla, Camilla Santee.”

  “A model? Named Camilla Santee?”

  Her fingers moved to the sides of his neck.

  “That’s her professional name. She also goes by Camilla Delasante.”

  “Ah oui. Camilla Delasante. She’s a famous beauty, yes? I saw not long ago a picture of her in Elle. Yes, I knew her. She used to come here. But that was many years ago. How is she?”

  “Fine. She was just visiting. I think she’s living in France.”

  “France.” She pronounced the word with enthusiasm. “France would be a very good place for her. She loved everything French.”

  “Have you seen her recently?”

  “No. Not for some years. She came to me when she was a model here. I was one of those who convinced her that she should go to New York. She was much too beautiful for the work they had for her here.”

  “She lived here?”

  “Yes, for a time. Not in the city. Out in Virginia somewhere. She was a rider. Equestrienne. She rode in those races, les grandes courses, you know, over fences? And in horse shows.”

  “You don’t know … where she lived?”

  “Why do you ask?”

  “I was wondering if I had met her before. It seemed to me. I had, when I met her in New York.”

  “I don’t know. One of those little towns out past Middleburg.”

  She lifted the facecloth, felt his skin, and then replaced it.

  “She’s very lovely,” A.C. said.

  “Yes. You are a little smitten, A.C.? I told her she should give up this riding. It’s so bad for the legs. It makes the ankles less trim, n’est-cepas?”

  “Her ankles seemed fine.”

  “She took my advice. She did not like it much living out there, I think. She was with a man—a relative, a lover. I don’t know. She left him and went to New York. I was so happy to see her do so well. Si gentille, that one.”

  “Yes.”

  “But you are still happy in your marriage, yes?”

  He paused. “Yes.”

  “Then you should stay away from great beauties like Mademoiselle Delasante. Your wife will not understand.”

  He left Zoé with a promise he could not keep, to have lunch with her soon. His next stop was a car rental agency. Out of habit, he took their most expensive available car, a Buick Park Avenue.

  In a few minutes he was out of the city, heading west on Interstate 66 into the rolling Piedmont of Virginia’s famous horse country.

  Alixe Lovelace Percy was an essentially attractive woman who had unfortunately become not really fat but too large, as much through constant, vigorous exercise as through her considerable appetite for Italian food and Southern whiskey. She had light brown hair going to gray, brown eyes, sun-browned skin, wide cheekbones, a wide smiling mouth, a hearty laugh, and an Old Virginia dialect, spoken in her family since the first Percys had arrived at the Jamestown Plantations after the Revolution of 1688.

  Her horse farm north of Middleburg had belonged to her family since an ancestor had bought the property from Lord Fairfax in the late eighteenth century. Alixe had learned to ride at age four and had owned, raised, trained, and bred horses all her adult life, competing in horse shows and point-to-point races since the age of ten. Her father’s family was Old Dominion. Her mother’s family was Philadelphia Main Line—very Main Line.

  The Washington area was largely a region of the professional upper middle class. Alixe was one of its rare landed, moneyed, hereditary aristocrats. There were horse farms nearby owned by people much richer, but most of them had earned their money in manufacturing and trade and had acquired their Virginia estates as trappings. With the Percys, there had seemingly always been money and always been horses. It was their unstudied and comfortable traditional way of life.

  Alixe was not really a snob. She liked or disliked people as they came, judging them by their individual qualities as much as she did horses. But she was keen on blood lines. She could quote listings from the Social Register, the Washington Green Book, and the membership rolls of the Colonial Dames of America and Daughters of the Confederacy as freely as a fundamentalist preacher might spout verses in the Bible.

  A.C. had written about her once in an article for Town and Country. He’d been fair but honest, recounting her boisterous parties, free-flowing bar, and taste for the lusty story. She’d loved every word and had become his chum. He’d always suspected that she would like to become more.

  She had to meet him at the gate, as she kept it locked. Three nasty Dobermans had the run of her property outside the house proper and the stable area. All of them came bounding and snarling up as soon as he opened his car door. He got back in and shut it quickly, and honked the horn, remembering to slip his .45 automatic under the seat.

  Her screen door slammed. The dogs fell silent when she bellowed at them. Then she descended the wide steps of her white-columned porch, striding briskly toward him, hastening her pace when she saw who he was. She was dressed in muddy boots, fawn-colored breeches, and a white shirt with sleeves rolled all the way up. She was very tan.

  “God Almighty, it’s A.C. James himself. I do own a telephone, don’t you know.” She undid the gate and swung it open, motioning to him to drive inside.

  He obeyed, parking as close to the house as he could. The dogs came up and sniffed his white shoes when he got out.

  “I can’t stay long. I wanted to see you.”

  “You can stay long enough for a glass of Virginia Gentleman, can’t you?”

  She led him up to the porch, shouted instructions through the screen door to a servant, then eased herself heavily into a wicker chair, propping her boots up on the large round table in front of her and lighting a cigarette. The servant, a pale, thin girl with lank blond hair, wearing a billowy cotton dress but barefoot, soon backed out of the doorway with a silver tray bearing a large bottle of whiskey, two glasses, and a pitcher of water. Alixe hated ice. The cold affected the taste of whiskey, she said.


  She poured, filling both glasses half way.

  “It’s damned good to see you, A.C. Are you still married?”

  “Yes.”

  “Heard you’re separated.”

  “You haven’t seen me in three years, and you’ve heard that?”

  “Gossip travels faster with horse people than anyone else. I have a friend in Westchester who owns the stable where your daughter is learning dressage.”

  “Kitty and I are having some problems. I hope they won’t last.”

  “I hope so, too. She’s got good form, your Kitty. You two could found a hell of a family. So why are you here? You’re not dressed like someone who wants to buy a bloody horse. Or are you selling paintings? That De Glehn nude I bought on your advice? I sold it for two hundred thousand last year. You want a commission, dear heart?”

  He shook his head and took a drink of his whiskey, then added a little water to his glass. Alixe was not bothering with that nicety.

  “I’m looking for someone,” he said. “A friend. Someone I think you might know.”

  “Man or woman?”

  “A woman. Her name is Camilla Santee. She’s a model in New York. She used to live somewhere near here. I think she used to ride on the show circuit.”

  “Camilla Santee, née Delasante. I remember her very well. Hell of a rider. Took two firsts at the Upperville show. You actually know this girl, A.C.?”

  “Yes. We’re friends. Not for very long, but … I know her, Alixe. I need to find her, and soon. Have you seen her, in the last couple of days?”

  Alixe squinted at him. “You look alarmingly serious, dearie. She can’t be the problem you and Kitty are having?”

  “No. She—’s a problem I’m having.”

  “Well, golly Moses. You’re quite the gentleman, to be sure, A.C., and a Van Peet on your paternal grandmother’s side, but you’re certainly not in Camilla’s class. Of course, I’ve never met anyone who was.”

  “What do you mean? She’s a fashion model.”

  “She’s real bloodstock, A.C. If she were a horse, not even Sheik Maktoum could afford her. She’s from what we call ‘good family’ around here. And we call most people trash.”

  “The Delasantes are good family?”

  Alixe looked at him as though he had said something vastly amusing—or imbecilic. “Not the Delasantes. They’ve got some very trashy edges, that lot, and I daresay a murky past. No, dear, I’m talking about her mother. She’s a Beaugerard and connected to the Hayneses, which makes her very haute Charleston right there. And she’s a Wellfleet, and they came to Jamestown before my folks did. But she’s also a Dutarques, and that Dutarques blood puts her right at the very top. She’s not all that active socially, but she might as well be queen of Charleston—as much worshiped as God and John C. Calhoun. Some like to call her ‘the whitest woman in America.’”

  “You said Charleston?”

  “Yes, love. Charleston.” She drawled out the city’s name, putting great emphasis on the first syllable. “The most aristocratic city in America. Compared to it, don’t you know, Boston is just a city of fishmongers. And New York a den of thieves and money lenders.”

  “I’m not very familiar with Charleston.”

  She took a big belt of her whiskey. “Have you ever heard of the St. Cecilia Society, A.C.?”

  “I think so,” he said. “They hold an annual ball.”

  “No, A.C. They hold the annual ball. I mean, my dear, the Mayflower Ball at the Plaza? Compared to the St. Cecilia, it’s a public-school sock hop. Any asshole can be in the Mayflower Society, as long as they’re descended from that boatload of antiroyalist religious rabble that landed at Plymouth. Laborers and artisans they were, mostly. Did you know there wasn’t a single Mayflower man who could sign ‘Gentleman’ to his name? Not one.”

  A.C. shook his head in ignorance.

  “The St. Cecilia,” Alixe continued, “was founded by aristocrats—Charleston aristos—in the early 1700s. It was started as a concert society, but they began holding balls in the 1820s. The reason you don’t know much about it is that they don’t want anyone to. They’d sooner let the Reverend Jesse Jackson through the door than any kind of reporter.”

  “Camilla is a member of the St. Cecilia Society?”

  Alixe shook her head. “The members are all men. It’s run by men. Very Old South. But once you’re a member, all the women in your household are put on ‘the list’—the invitation list for the annual ball—and you stay on the list for life. It’s the closest thing to being a grand duchess in this country, A.C.” She drank again, and lit another cigarette.

  “Other women can be invited to the ball,” she said, “but only if they’re ‘off’—if they live away from Charleston—and their family passes a background check. If they move to Charleston, though, they can no longer be invited, unless the male head of household is allowed to become a member. Girls will move to Charleston and then leave after eleven months, so they can still attend the ball. And if a girl should be so foolish as to marry a man who’s not a member of St. Cecilia, she can still come to the ball, but her husband and children can’t.”

  “Camilla’s father was a member?”

  An odd look came over Alixe’s face. “Camilla and her mother are on the list because of Camilla’s late grandfather. He was a Beaugerard and a Dutarques.”

  “Alixe, I’m looking for Camilla, not her ancestors.”

  “I’m just telling you what I think you might want to know, old dear. Shit. Are you sure Camilla’s not the problem you have with Kitty? Camilla’s the sort of beauty who can make other women hate her just by walking by their husbands.”

  “I need to find her, Alixe.”

  “She’d never marry you, you know. I would. Doesn’t bother me you’re a penniless Van Peet from the Mohawk Valley. But Camilla … have you ever heard of the La Ligue de La Vallière? Of course you haven’t. But that’s my point. A few people have heard about St. Cecilia. No one knows about the Vallière League. It’s that exclusive.”

  “Alixe, where’s Camilla?”

  She waved her hand at him, an irritated teacher with an unruly pupil. “La Ligue de La Vallière, dearie, is very, very small. It’s members are all Carolinians, all descendants from a group of French Huguenot colonists, who took their name from their leader, a direct descendant of Louise de la Baume le Blanc, Duchess de La Vallière, first maitress of Louis XIV.”

  A.C. could barely control his impatience. But what could he say? Hurry up, Alixe, I may be wanted for murder?

  “The Vallière League holds two gatherings a year, one on the anniversary of their arrival at Charleston and the other on the birthday of Louise de La Vallière. No one knows what goes on at them. I don’t suppose it matters. What matters is that an invitation to either one of those events would mean more to a Charleston society matron than thirty St. Cecilia balls. I mean, my dear, people would kill for one.”

  She paused, eyes twinkling.

  “Camilla’s mother,” Alixe said, “is the head of La Ligue de La Vallière.”

  She sat back with great finality, as though she had just explained everything with that one sentence.

  A.C., still uncomprehending, leaned forward. “Are you trying to tell me I should look for Camilla in Charleston?”

  “All I’m telling you, boy, is that you shouldn’t expect Camilla to marry outside the Vallière League.”

  “Alixe. I don’t want to propose. I just want to find her. Desperately. I think she’s in the area. She took a flight to Washington direct from Bermuda.”

  “I haven’t seen her, A.C. Haven’t heard from her in years.”

  “She used to live around here, right? Where?”

  “Over in Dandytown. If you don’t remember it, it’s on the Berryville Road. It’s her brother’s place. It used to be one of the best farms in Clarke County, but in the last year, he’s sold off all his breeding stock. Keeps a couple of jumping horses, but everything else is gone. Money troubles, I hear.
Ruinous money troubles.”

  “Tell me about him.”

  “Jack Santee? Dangerous son of a bitch. Absolutely crazy. I saw him kill a horse on a timber jump in the Gold Cup. Got another mount and finished second in the next heat. Handsomest man on the show circuit, and not one of the queers. He’s fucked every woman I know, including, if I may say so proudly, me. He has eyes as black as the devil’s. Hardly know he was Camilla’s brother, except he’s so damn good-looking.”

  “I want to talk to him.”

  “No you don’t, dear heart. You may think you do, but you don’t. In any event, no one’s seen him around in weeks.”

  “How do I get to his farm?”

  “I’ll be happy to tell you, but if you plan to go up there, you sure as hell better have another whiskey. Dealing with Jack Santee’s never a pleasant experience, especially if you’re someone who’s been screwing around with his sister. He’d kill for Camilla, A.C.”

  He had that second whiskey, quickly. He felt no trepidation, not any longer. As he drove out through Alixe’s gate, he was ebullient. By the time he reached the Dandytown Road, he was close to euphoria.

  His luck had changed. He felt he’d as good as found Camilla, and it had involved nothing more than contacting old friends. He was really rich in friends. Blessed. He would never come to harm, he would not fail, as long as he had such friends.

  Dandytown was a small, neat crossroads village appearing suddenly at the end of a long curve in the highway. There was a country inn, a service station, a general store, and a post office, as well as a few tall stone houses of Civil War vintage. It was a village like a hundred others in Virginia, except that the per capita worth of its inhabitants probably rivaled that of Beverly Hills.

  On the other side of the town, he took a wrong turning, and then another, compelling him to double back. Finally, he made sense of Alixe’s directions, and got himself on the narrow country road that matched her description.

  It made a sharp turn to cross a stone bridge, then climbed a hill. At its summit, he slowed as he saw the house on the next rise.