VC01 - Privileged Lives

by Edward Stewart

  Waiters, wearing black bow ties and white naval mess jackets, began changing the dinner plates.

  Prince Ludovic scowled at the design on the soup dish. “It’s the Habsburg coat of arms—what’s Holcombe trying to tell us?”

  “Rank is rank,” Countess Marina said. “It simplifies the seating at dinner.”

  “I don’t entirely agree,” Gordon Dobbs said. “It seems to me it’s a question of celebrity who sits where. I can remember when George Plimpton and Andy Warhol were hot seats to be placed next to. Now it’s that Letterman man and Madonna.”

  Betsy Vlaminck shook her head. “You can’t go by celebrity—that’s a pure boom-and-bust market.”

  “I couldn’t be more in agreement,” Prince Ludovic said. “Look at the people on this ship. How many of them will have any social desirability at all in three years? No more than half.”

  “I doubt half have any desirability tonight,” Countess Marina said. “Holcombe’s given Tina two birthdays, and this is the B party. The A party was last month, when he flew twenty of us to his schloss in the Austrian Alps.”

  “I don’t go to B parties,” Ash Canfield said.

  “Oh yes you do, darling,” Betsy Vlaminck said. “Count the number of publicists here tonight. Tell me it’s not a tax writeoff.”

  “Holcombe’s shrewd, that’s all,” Ash said.

  At that very moment a waiter was going around the table, ladling court bouillon of lobster from a silver tureen.

  Lady Ash said “No, thank you” to a waiter offering more wine, and Sir Dunk placed his own glass at Ash’s hand. Cardozo noticed the switch, and Dunk noticed him noticing. Dunk’s eyes became pools of hostility.

  “What do you think of Jeannette Cowles?” Prince Ludovic said. “I mean, leaving her husband to marry a homosexual?”

  Betsy Vlaminck arched an eyebrow. “You mean leaving her husband to marry a man who has AIDS.”

  “He couldn’t have AIDS,” Countess Marina said. “People have been spreading that rumor for years and Oswaldo Straus puts out a marvelous collection every spring and fall.”

  “Kid you not, Oswaldo Straus has AIDS.” Gordon Dobbs raised his right hand in a Boy Scout oath. “Once a month Sloan-Kettering drains him and changes every drop of fluid in his body. They’re barely keeping the disease at bay. He’s had to have plastic surgery three times on his Kaposi.”

  “He must have contracted it from that lover,” Betsy Vlaminck said, “that boy who was smeared all over Times Square in those big hunky naked ads.”

  “No one could date the lover without getting on Ozzie’s evil side,” Prince Ludovic said.

  “No one could date that lover,” Gordon Dobbs said, “without getting AIDS.”

  “Then Jeannette Cowles is going to be the first woman in the Social Register to come down with it,” Prince Ludovic said.

  “Not quite the first,” Gordon Dobbs said. “Some ved-dee prom-i-nent ladies have already succumbed to the plague.” He named the ex-wife of the man who had founded the first radio network in America.

  “But that was from a transfusion she had five years before,” Prince Ludovic said.

  “Remarkable isn’t it,” Gordon Dobbs said, “how there’s always an alibi when it’s anyone who’s anyone. Believe me, there’s a lot more going on than the Center for Disease Control is letting on.”

  The waiters served capon suprême in ginger and raspberry vinegar sauce, with side dishes of wild rice and French beans amandine.

  Before helping herself, Ash reached for her glass, slopping it and noticing but not caring. She banged an elbow against Cardozo’s ribs and in that split second he saw that she had become someone else: the face and voice were still Ash Canfield, but something had come unbridled at the center, something defiant and loud.

  “Waiter,” she said, “would you please hold the fucking platter straight?”

  Betsy Vlaminck mentioned the duke of Windsor.

  “The smallest dick in the British Empire,” Ash said, spilling beans on the deck.

  Betsy Vlaminck stopped, eyes veering toward Ash. “How do you know that?” she said.

  “The duchess told me.”

  “How did she know?” Countess Marina said.

  Ash laughed. “Because she went down on the whole empire.”

  “Really,” Countess Marina said, not quite convincing in her disapproval.

  “The duke and duchess were no better than a couple of call girls,” Ash was saying. She was trying to cut into her capon, but it kept skidding away from her knife. “All those stories about their sending bills for coming to dinner or staying for weekends are absolutely true.”

  A not-very-convincing frown drove Countess Marina’s lips together. “That is a lie, and it was started by Helena Guest because the duke and duchess stopped going to her place in Old Westbury after she divorced Winston.”

  Cardozo shot Babe a glance. The mood at the table was getting to him.

  “Never mind that,” Gordon Dobbs said. “Why was the duchess so dotty? Was she having strokes?”

  “The problem was face-lifts,” Ash said. “After she reached age seventy-three, no responsible plastic surgeon would touch her. At eighty-five, just after the duke’s death, she imported that society surgeon from Brazil to do the job. Her eighth lift. At the last moment she told him to do the eye pouches. He had to keep her anesthetized three hours, and that’s too long at that age. He warned her, but you know Wallis.”

  “What happened?” Countess Marina said.

  “A quarter of her brain cells died and she came out partially aphasic and totally incontinent. Word was put out that she had Alzheimer’s, which of course wasn’t the case at all. What she had was necrosis of the parietal lobes. And it spread, like timber rot. She regressed. She began thinking of herself as a child again. Do you know what she wanted for Christmas? It’s so pathetic. She wanted toy trains. Can you imagine? Toy trains. Of course her retinue was absolutely terrified.”

  “Terrified of what?” Countess Marina asked.

  “You don’t know?” Ash said, looking round the table.

  Dunk poured more champagne into his wife’s empty glass. “Ash, don’t,” he said.

  “Come on,” Ash said, “everyone knows anyway.”

  “I don’t know,” Countess Marina said.

  “Well, you’re the only one who doesn’t.”

  “I don’t know either,” Gordon Dobbs said.

  “Nor do I,” Betsy Vlaminck said.

  Ash fortified herself with a long swallow of champagne.

  “Ash,” Babe said, “do you need that?”

  Ash’s eyes turned. “Get your own, sweetie.” She addressed the table. “The duchess of Windsor began life as a man.”

  “A man?” Countess Marina set down her fork.

  “A cross-dresser,” Ash said. “Who but a man of exquisite sensibility would have had Wallis’s taste in clothes? Or in interior design?”

  “But that’s ridiculous,” Countess Marina said. “Wallis married three times.”

  “What does sex have to do with marriage?” Ash said, and there was laughter. But Cardozo didn’t laugh. He was paying less attention to what Ash was saying than the way she was saying it, the way her husband was watching her.

  “Why in the world,” Ash said, “do you think Churchill and the archbishop of Canterbury were so dead set against Wallis’s marrying the king? Not because of what she had in her past—but in her crotch.”

  “How did they know?” Gordon Dobbs said.

  “They’d been to bed with her—him. Winnie was a little—you know.”

  “Did the duchess ever have a sex change?” Gordon Dobbs asked.

  Ash nodded. “During the Second World War. She and David went to occupied Denmark. They were collaborators, you know; no problem getting in or out of the Reich. She was a trailblazer—crossed over years before Christine Jorgensen.”

  The waiters brought lemon soufflé with chocolate sauce. When Cardozo passed Ash the crystallized rock
sugar for her coffee she ground her cigarette out in it.

  “Doctors can’t give a man ovaries,” Countess Marina said, “and Wallis had children when she was Mrs. Simpson.”

  “Samson was the real name,” Ash said, “and the sons were adopted from a Jewish relief agency in Palestine.”

  A sudden hush fell on the ship as Holcombe Kaiser walked to the bandstand and adjusted the level of the microphone. “Testing, testing, can you all hear me? I want to announce an absolutely marvelous artistic and historical find. After eleven years’ searching, Sotheby’s has located the original tin soldiers belonging to François Charles Joseph Bonaparte, better known as L’Aiglon, the son of Napoleon Bonaparte and Marie Louise.”

  A swell of murmurs and applause swept the deck.

  “These are the very toy soldiers that the infant Bonaparte played with at age five when he was confined to the court of Vienna. After restoration by master craftsmen from the Swiss firm of Birsch and Loewen, these soldiers will be exhibited at the Holcombe Kaiser Museum of Toy Soldiers in Hartford, Connecticut. Any of you who wish to become cofounding sponsors of the Hartford Kaiser Museum may do so by filling out the pledge cards attached to your menus; furthermore, anyone contributing one thousand dollars or more may request society’s premier troubadour, our own Scottie Devens, to sing any song he or she desires.”

  Holcombe Kaiser stepped back from the mike, bowing sideways toward Scottie Devens, already seated at the Steinway.

  “Maestro,” Kaiser cried, “commence!”

  Doria Forbes-Steinman strode through the tables. She slapped a pledge card on the music stand of the Steinway.

  Scottie Devens nodded, then angled toward the mike: “An old sentimental favorite that set grandma’s toes tapping—I’m sure you all remember.”

  He riffed an upward arpeggio and in a smooth, slightly neutered baritone began singing “Baby Face.”

  Heads reangled themselves in a wave toward the table where Babe and Cardozo were sitting.

  Cardozo felt Babe stiffen beside him.

  “She did that on purpose.” Babe’s eyes looked dark and furious against the sudden whiteness of her skin. “‘Baby Face’ was Scottie’s and my song, and everyone here knows it. Vince, I’d like to go.”

  From what Cardozo had seen tonight of what the gossip columns called society, it was no different from the street; and the one thing you didn’t do with a thousand eyes pinned on you was walk away from a challenge.

  He reached for the nearest menu and ripped the pledge card from the bottom.

  “What are you doing?” Babe said.

  “Praying the bank comes through with my home equity loan.”

  “Vince—don’t.”

  She reached for him but he was already up from his chair, making his way through the hooting and laughing guests to the piano.

  He handed Scottie Devens the card. “‘You Took Advantage of Me’—know it?”

  Scottie riffed to a new key. “Naturally.” Scottie spoke into the mike. “For Lieutenant Vincente—or is that Vincent, Lieutenant?”

  “Vincent—like it’s spelled.”

  “For Lieutenant Vincent Cardozo of New York’s Finest, an old Rodgers and Hart favorite.”

  Scottie’s amplified voice floated over the deck.

  Cardozo returned to the table and sat. “Kiss me,” he told Babe. “Right now while every buzzard on the ship is watching.”

  Babe kissed him. “You know something?” she said. “You’re goddamned wonderful.”

  Cardozo’s attention went to the reactions of the guests around them. At the exact instant that he noticed the woman at the next table, she noticed him noticing her.

  She had wide-set eyes that were green and sparkling and a little dangerous. At the back of her neck a green velvet ribbon that matched her eyes caught her long, straight, dark hair. She was keeping herself at the edge of the conversation, lifting a pale white hand to her pink mouth. An enormous ruby-and-diamond ring glittered sharply.

  There was general laughter and applause when the song ended, and then Countess Marina filled out a card and dispatched Prince Ludovic to request “I’ll Follow My Secret Heart.”

  “Who’s that woman at the next table?” Cardozo asked Babe.

  “You mean wearing the black silk, cut on the bias?”

  “What do I know from bias and black silk? The woman that’s staring at me.”

  Ash overhead. “That’s Countess Victoria de Savoie-Sancerre and that Adonis next to her is Count Leopold.”

  The count was much older than his wife, with a tanned face and hawk eyes. He was swigging bourbon neat instead of wine.

  “She’s a dyke,” Ash said, “and he’s a fag.”

  “She’s not looking at me like she’s gay.”

  “She doesn’t think anyone knows,” Ash said. “They married because he couldn’t inherit the estate without an heir. They’ve had a son by artificial insemination. She’s always thumping around in big butch leather boots.”

  For a moment Cardozo was puzzled, knowing he had seen the countess somewhere else, somewhere very different from this yacht.

  After dinner and liqueurs there was dancing on the aft deck. Babe and Cardozo stayed at the table and watched couples crowding the dance floor. Many were boozed or stoned or coked, and they turned to movement as though it was a continuation of the high. The deck swirled.

  Babe directed Cardozo’s attention with a nod.

  Sir Dunk and Lady Ash had cleared themselves a patch of floor-space, and a circle of guests was standing around clapping and cheering them on. The Canfields were either play-acting or smashed—loud, funny, with big gross motor movements—stomping around doing an odd Highland fling with complete abandon.

  A woman’s voice with a slightly French accent said, “Excuse us, darlings.”

  Cardozo turned. Countess Victoria and her armadillo count had stopped by to chat.

  Cardozo smiled hello as Babe made introductions.

  While the countess went at the gathering with her battering ram of a tongue, the count looked moodily into space, his balding head crossed with hairs and wrinkles.

  Finally the countess turned her gaze to Cardozo, giving him an easy, offhand look. “Since Babe isn’t dancing, would you care to?”

  “I’ll sit with Babe,” the count volunteered.

  Babe shot Cardozo a helpless, what-can-I-do look. “Go ahead, Vince. Please.”

  Cardozo found himself dancing tightly against Countess Victoria.

  “Tonight’s so exquisitely vulgar,” she said. “No one knows how to enjoy themselves so well as the nouveaux riches, don’t you find?”

  “You like it that much, hey?” Cardozo said.

  She said, “Yes, I like everything, food, drinking, dancing, meeting new people, Bach, Mahler, Stevie Wonder, sex, speed, coke, tequila—preferably all at once.”

  “The rich at play,” he sighed.

  She gave him a scowl. “I wish everybody would give up that silly belief that we’re so very rich. It’s not true. We lead a quite average, everyday sort of existence.”

  “Sure you do.”

  She leaned her head back, assessing him. “I like your contempt. You’re a very sexy man.”

  “I’m sexy, there’s no doubt about that.”

  “And conceited—just my type. Am I yours?”

  “Possibly. Where have we met?”

  “We haven’t yet.” She melted a little against his shoulder, then frowned. “I’ve never heard of erections in the armpit. What have you got there, a gun?”

  “Mmm-hmm.”

  “Mmm-hmm.” She snuggled closer, close enough to run her tongue over his chin. “I want to see you again.”

  “What would the count say to that?” he said.

  “The count is a man of very few words.”

  From across the deck came a whiplike crack of shattering glass.

  Cardozo turned his head.

  The music stopped and there was a second crash.

  The
crowd froze. The night suddenly vibrated and a slash of movement cut through the surrounding immobility.

  Cardozo glimpsed a figure plunging rigidly forward and then Ash Canfield came barreling out of the crowd.

  Under her frothing cap of bronze and gold curls she looked like a crazed pixie. Her breath came in short, steep gasps. She stretched her arms out slowly, arcing them up from her body, and then her hips slipped into a wild syncopation and her hands clawed the air crazily, fighting fog, slapping mist.

  “Cocksuckers!” she screamed, her voice swollen with pain and hate.

  Delighted shock whipped through the crowd.

  “You’re all walkers and pillheads!” Lady Ash collapsed onto the deck and tried to get up but fell back, her limbs suddenly boneless.

  Cardozo pushed through the crowd. By the time he reached Ash, the ship’s doctor was crouching beside her.

  The doctor was wearing rimless spectacles, and the gaze behind them was coldly professional. He raised one of Lady Ash’s eyelids, then the other.

  “What happened to her?” Cardozo said.

  “Seizure.” The doctor slipped together a syringe. He filled it from a blue cartridge. The fluid was colorless.

  The guests, hungry as a flock of TV news minicams, watched avidly. There were nudges, whispers.

  The doctor straightened Lady Ash’s arm, administering the injection into the vein. He signaled two waiters. They lifted her onto a stretcher and fastened her arms and wrists with canvas straps.

  Cardozo stood looking down at Ash. There was nothing moving in her now. She had the stillness of a dead machine. So much for his hopes of having Ash Canfield identify the figures in the photos.

  Sir Dunk came out of the crowd and hovered, hands adjusting his black satin bow tie.

  “Does that happen a lot?” Cardozo asked.

  “It’s been getting worse,” Sir Dunk said. “I can’t bear to see her when she gets like this.”

  Cardozo felt disgust. “Then don’t feed her booze.”

  Ten minutes later a helicopter lifted Sir Dunk and Lady Ash Canfield from Holcombe Kaiser’s yacht up into the fog.

  Countess Victoria flipped a look Cardozo’s way. She crossed to him, her step confident, her glance warm. “I’m not in the book,” she said. “Have you got something to write on?”