by James Brady
“I have the suspicion this evening was arranged entirely to get us here,” Alix whispered over cocktails. She was wrong, I knew, but it was curious that we’d been placed at Warrender’s own table, set by the pool amid lighted tapers. He and I were hardly friends and Alix was an outsider, though in an ankle-length floral silk sheath bought off the rack at St. Barth’s on Newtown Lane, surely a welcome one. The other guests, all perfectly respectable WASPs, might have been sent over by central casting as representative of the Episcopal Church and Brown Brothers Harriman. At least that’s how impeccably well-bred they looked; the impression a stranger might get.
At dinner (our table numbered eight), Alix was placed at Royal’s right at the head of the table. The conversation was good, the sort of table talk that makes a party. Hannah’s death figured in it, of course, plus hurricanes and the upcoming film festival, which most agreed had been artificially created by local merchants to hype business in slow October. “I don’t see why we need a festival at all,” Miz Phoebe complained, “if there’s one at Cannes and another at Paul Newman’s place out west (‘Robert Redford’s,’ someone hissed), why must East Hampton be plagued?” There was considerable debate on this. “They’re not the A-List, I admit. But hardly riff-raff … except maybe for that Felton man, with his twin doxies.” Pam Phythian thought the O’Leary sisters good for East Hampton. “Some of us, and I include myself, are at risk of becoming terminally stuffy. A roue like Felton and a couple of tarts make for a nice change of pace.” Miz Phoebe and several others harumphed at this astonishing notion.
Also hotly debated, if a really major hurricane, a category five, say, hit our coast today, what would go; what would survive?
Warrender was pretty good on this. “Take my place. Built 1910 or so. Fairly well constructed but awfully close to the dune. I suppose if the ocean came full across the dune and not just spray and wind, but actual big waves, nothing would stand up to it. Not my place or Phoebe’s or the (he may have hesitated imperceptibly) … the Cutting house. But if it’s just wind and not solid green water, well, we might lose shingles or a brick chimney or two, maybe lose the whole damned roof. But I think the houses would stand.” He paused. “They did in ’38.”
There were many theories about what happened to Hannah, none of them terribly convincing. I noticed Royal offered very little.
An odd thing. Claire Cutting was there at another table. But then, why not? She wasn’t a Maidstone member but owned property along Further Lane and such folks were asked as well. With her, looking surprisingly smooth in a rental shop tuxedo, Leo Brass. He avoided my eyes but Claire was gracious. She, at least, hadn’t been trespassing on my lawn the other night and perhaps Leo had. Except when doing his James Cagney impersonations, I could take Leo or leave him and preferred the leaving. I liked Royal Warrender the more we all drank, the later the evening wore on. He had manners, bearing, brains. Would make a helluva Fed chairman. Could he have been involved in Hannah’s death? Or the theft of her book? What possible reason could there have been that …
“Stowe.”
“Yes?”
“You and Lady Alix, we’ve had a good talk over dinner about this part of the world. Would it amuse her to see another of the old Further Lane cottages? She’s been asking about my place.”
“That’s fine, yes.”
Warrender was being uncharacteristically expansive. He and I were standing a bit apart from the others waiting for Alix to get back from the ladies’ room. Then, getting swiftly to the point, and talking low, almost in a whisper, and not at all that chummy, “You’ve been asking a lot of questions. You and Jesse Maine. You have him on the case now, too, don’t you? You and Lady Alix. I want to know what you’re up to…”
“We could talk about it right here, do it tonight,” I said, not going to be bullied.
“No, not tonight. Not in front of everyone. Let’s talk at my place. Where there won’t be interruptions or eavesdropping. Call me in the morning. We’ll set something up before the damned hurricane hits. If that’s what we’re in for.”
After Royal dangled that tease about calling tomorrow to set up a tour and a full and frank face-to-face, Alix and I went dancing. By now much more talk of Hurricane Martha. Perhaps it was the hour, perhaps the growing tension, perhaps the drink, or the coming storm, but when we got home she asked if I’d take her swimming.
“Will you take me swimming?”
“Now?”
“Yes.”
We changed into swimsuits and walked down over the spindly catwalk to the stairs and the beach and dove into the black ocean and a surf already building before sprinting back up the beach to grab big terry towels and wrap ourselves against the chill to hurry to the gatehouse. Then, without bothering to shower, Alix Dunraven and I made love for the first time.
“Golly, Beecher, let’s do that again,” she said with unfeigned enthusiasm.
“Why, yes, let’s.”
Except that she tasted of salt and the ocean, the touch and the feel of her was everything I’d imagined.
She liked my bedroom better than hers, she said, and before I was awake had moved her things in from the smaller room she’d been using. Only trouble with that was that Mignonne came along, the poodle, who didn’t at all like my being in the same bed with her (temporary) nurturer and growled menacingly. I began to feel like Roland the bartender’s dog, Little Bit, and wondered if I were about to be attacked.
“Speak to her in French, Beecher,” Alix suggested. “She so enjoys your accent.”
So I murmured a few lines of the old Française and wasn’t bitten so maybe Alix’s theory was correct. And we felt sufficiently secure about it to go right ahead with what we were doing without fretting over Mignonne’s frame of mind.
Sunday morning Alix got into her car before I woke and went up to Dreesen’s for doughnuts and the Sunday papers. I began seriously considering a declaration of love.
I called Warrender to arrange our visit but there was no answer so I took Alix to the local Episcopal church, not so much for the praying and all that, but to show her the place and because that’s what people on Further Lane do Sunday mornings; they go to church and buy the Times. You heard about sex orgies and cross-dressing and such in the Hamptons but the reality was the Sunday papers and buying Dreesen doughnuts and going to church. By now even the preacher was asking for a prayer that we be spared the hurricane.
The exodus from East Hampton and much of coastal Long Island began in earnest Sunday afternoon. I watched the NFL on television in the den while Alix curled up next to me on the couch in what proper people call dishabille, smoking my cigarettes and doing delightfully distracting things. Jesse Maine came by and she scampered to put on a robe.
“You ever consider a lasting relationship of some kind with the aristocracy, Beech?”
“I barely know her, Jesse.”
“Yeah, well…”
He said they were boarding up windows in all the big houses along Further Lane, the windows fronting on the ocean.
Alix, back and discreetly covered, asked if that meant the hurricane was truly coming. “That’s what The Weather Channel says, that it made the turn and it’s coming,” Jesse told her. She grinned, delighted that her theory about Native Americans’ predicting the weather was turning out to be accurate. Maine had a few other matters to report. “Leo Brass is out there in his boat, pulling his lobster traps. Claire Cutting’s with him. She’s got strong arms, that girl, pulls a lobster pot well as a man. And you know it’s gonna be bad when lobstermen like Leo pull their traps. Too damn much work putting them out to respond to false alarms.” There was another thing. “Royal Warrender’s evacuating his people, the servants and such. Says he’ll ride it out.”
Royal told us that over dinner the night before. Except he didn’t say he’d be there alone. Alix looked at me. I guess she was thinking what I was, that here was a man with a damaged heart and he was sending away anyone who might be able to help if and when …
I did whatever battening-down chores seemed sensible both at my father’s house and my own little gatehouse, storing patio furniture, taking down hanging plants that in a high wind could become projectiles, closing windows, clearing the rain gutters of muck and dead leaves that might clog the drains, that kind of thing. Alix pitched in and afterwards we went to The Blue Parrot, where they were rigging for a hurricane party, with surfers coming in exhausted but exhilarated by the waves and the promise of even bigger and better surf to come. Lee the owner told about surfing at home in Hawaii and bought rounds of drinks while jolly waitresses fetched bowls of tortilla chips and salsa. Roland’s dog, that hangs around there waiting for a drunk to feed her a chip or two, did a sort of dance atop a barstool and we all cheered and got tipsy. “Good thing we left Mignonne home,” Alix said. Only Billy Joel was missing. “I had so hoped he’d be there,” she complained, “you claimed he practically camps out, pounding at that piano virtually every night.” So I took her down to the beach as a treat for what might be a last walk before the hurricane. The wind was blowing harder now but it was the ocean that was dramatically up, lapping at the base of the old dunes that guarded the beachfront “cottages.” In the dusk a few surfers were still out there on their boards. Way out, nearly half a mile out. Crazy. But try telling them …
The eleven o’clock news was all hurricane. See, Alix said, Jesse was right!
We slept together again but by two or three in the morning were both awake, the house shaken by the wind, the first rain showers slashing against the shingles, the hurricane still hundreds of miles away but putting out warnings. About four-thirty I gave up the effort and got out of bed and pulled on khaki pants and topsiders and a faded sweatshirt. Alex got up then too and went into the kitchen to make coffee. She didn’t do it very well, there were probably people who did that sort of thing for her at home, but she looked awfully good trying.
“Maybe you ought to put on some clothes, Alix,” I suggested.
“Oh, quite.”
The electricity was still on and would be for a while, thanks to the East Hampton’s fathers’ insistence power lines be buried rather than strung. I tapped the old barometer hung on the wall of the kitchen and it read 28.60, which was low. And it was trending lower. I put fresh batteries in a couple of flashlights and left the portable radio on in the kitchen so if the electricity went we’d have the news. WCBS was saying the storm was still tracking up right along the coast with its eye off the Delmarva peninsula. This was not encouraging. By now Alix was in jeans and sneakers and a big old Brooks Brothers shirt of mine worn shirttails out, smoking a cigarette and quite contented.
“I imagine it must have been like this in London during the Blitz. Except here you don’t go down into the Underground and the Thames is hardly the ocean.” She considered phoning Random House to check in with Mr. Evans but thought better of it. “It’s too early and anyway, he’ll just natter at me about the missing manuscript and I’m rather running out of lies.”
There was room in my dad’s garage for her Jag so we rolled it in there, getting pretty wet. The rain wasn’t steady but came in bursts. The wind was stronger and some good-sized limbs and plenty of small branches were down all over the lawn. Whatever else Hurricane Martha brought, there was going to be a hell of a cleanup. The poodle didn’t seem jittery or anything. So much for vaunted canine intuition and barking just before earthquakes struck and such. Mignonne just curled up with us on the old leather chesterfield while Alix played around licking my ear and I stroked her hair and other pleasant parts.
And then she said, “You know, Beecher, all the men I know, or most, are so smooth and smug and sleek. And you’re not. You’ve been, I dunno, bruised a bit. I don’t mean to sound critical, and is ‘bruised’ an appropriate term?”
She was kissing me in various places, licking them clean before she did, and I was understandably distracted but tried to maintain a cogent conversation.
“Quite appropriate. But last thing you were telling me what a hard case I am. Now I’m damaged goods. You ought to make up your mind.”
“Maybe you’re both.”
“And?”
“I like it that you are. I know a little about the Algiers business. I called it up on the Net. You did something heroic rescuing that woman but you don’t go about striking poses or affecting a limp and wearing the old DSO in your buttonhole.” She paused, thinking of something. “Do you know your great man William Faulkner was in training for the air corps or something at the end of the First War and never even got to France, never mind the fighting, and ever after walked with a limp and claimed he had a silver plate in his head?”
I didn’t know but liked having her tell me things like that (and also being licked) and so now that she’d asked again and for no other good reason whatever except that I tend to dramatize myself a bit during times of impending crisis, I decided to go ahead and tell her about Algiers.
And what happened to me there.
TWENTY-SEVEN
I could no longer see the bright pink Chanel suit …
As perhaps you know, the place to take your sweet morning coffee in an Algiers March with a north wind whipping off the Med is on the sunny side of the Place. People think Africa is hot. Try Algiers in a windy March. I was there outside one of the three good, or otherwise so-so, cafés they have there with their comfortable big wicker chairs at a small, matching table with barely enough space for an ashtray and matches. The French newspapers hung on rattan sticks to be read but not stolen, and when the early plane is in, sometimes that morning’s London papers are there as well. The café I liked best and on this morning was patronizing was Boulevard’s.
“Mr. Beecher, a fresh cup?”
“Yes, Ahmet.”
It was shortly after nine on a Tuesday and I sat with my Figaro and the Paris Herald-Trib and a day-old Times of London (there were headwinds and the morning plane from Heathrow was late) sipping sweet and scalding coffee and rooting the sun higher above the bank tower and other buildings on the far side of the place so we would get more of its warmth. The rush hour was ended and but for the usual idlers and beggars and would-be guides, there were mostly local businessmen and very few tourists lounging there in the early sun and having coffee. Tourism was down badly, and why shouldn’t it be, with all the craziness?
It was why I was here—the “craziness”—why Newsweek sent me.
Algiers—and what was happening here—scared even old hands who knew North Africa and its people and admired its ways and culture and could get along both in French and pattering the local patois. Islamic Fundamentalism was a mighty force channeled for good or bad. Here in Algeria a ferocious struggle was playing itself out between a beleaguered government, only marginally effective but moderate or relatively so, and a rebellious zealotry, whipped into passion by the younger and more militant mullahs. Latest arena in the confrontation was fashion!
Algerian women, and even foreigners, not wearing the traditional veil had been harassed in the city’s streets. Several had been stoned. One woman was beaten, raped, and then murdered as, or so it was reported and believed, mullahs looked on approvingly.
“Ahmet.”
I mimed signing a check and tugged out the Gitanes from a shirt pocket and lighted up. At the next table four Japanese tourists took turns shooting videotape of themselves and the colorful passing street crowd. Fools! I was here on assignment, paid to be here; what was their excuse? Maybe they were making a TV documentary. The videocam was big enough.
“Allo, allo!”
Ahmet was there with the check on the little tray but was looking past me out into the place through a gap in the parked cars to where a knot of idlers and passersby had gathered about something, the way children are drawn to an injured bird. I asked what it was.
“Not good, Mr. Beecher.”
It was then that I saw the mullahs. Then that I saw the woman in the pink Chanel suit.
The knot of idlers exploded into a small mob, as scores
of men, perhaps a hundred, came running toward the idlers, the crowd of them growing all the time. At its hub a woman I could see only intermittently as the mob swayed and pressed in, then fell back. I could no longer see the bright pink Chanel suit.
“Ahmet! The police. Call the…”
I looked about. Ahmet, the faithful one, the best waiter at Boulevard’s, had vanished. So, too, the local businessmen. These days Algerians smelled trouble and got out quick. The smart ones. Over to the side near the tabac, a lone policeman stood watching. Making no move toward the growing fury. Only the Japanese tourists, stunned, remained, witnesses to what was now a brutal scrimmage in which a woman, nearly naked, was being systematically pummeled and kicked.
“Quick! I’ll need your camera,” I shouted at the paralyzed Japanese, leaping to my feet and without waiting for a response, snatching the videocam and sprinting into the open Place toward the mob, knocking aside two applauding mullahs as I went.
“Attention! Attention!” I shouted in French as I ran. “Say Enn Ennnn! Say Enn Enn!”
I worked for a magazine but here in the Third World, CNN was more instantly recognized than any magazine or newspaper.
“Say Enn Enn!” I cried again, holding high the video-cam, and shoving my way through members of the mob closest to and assaulting the now naked and bloody woman.