by Morris West
All of which careful stage-management fell apart when Anne-Marie arrived with Ed Bayard in tow. Mather was furious, but managed to damp his anger down to a frigid politeness.
‘It’s one drink, I’m afraid, Ed; then I throw you out. Anne-Marie and I have a lot of business to discuss and I have to face the arraignment and police interviews tomorrow.’
Bayard was clearly embarrassed.
‘I didn’t want to intrude, Max, but Anne-Marie insisted. I really do want to apologise for my conduct when you called from Zurich. I was caught on the hop – a difficult conference, shocking news, your assumption that I could pull defence counsel out of the hat. Anyway, I’m sorry it happened. If there’s anything I can do…’
‘Thank you, no; but George Munsel seems a bright man.’
‘I’m afraid I didn’t choose him. My secretary did.’
‘Then I’ll call and thank her.’
‘She’d appreciate that.’
There was an awkward pause, then Anne-Marie made a stammering request. ‘Max…Ed was wondering whether he could look at the material my father gave you.’
‘I’m afraid that’s impossible; I don’t have it.’
‘Where is it then?’
‘In Switzerland.’
‘Max, I hate to insist on this,’ Bayard was trying hard to be polite, ‘but my wife’s papers are part of her estate, of which I am the executor. I must ask that they be returned to me.’
‘Two answers to that, Ed. First, Hugh Loredon claimed they were given to him by Madeleine. If that is true, he had a perfect right to give them to whomever he chose – in this case, me. Any other claim would have to be proved in court. Second answer: in your own house I suggested there might be material like this floating about and that you should contemplate buying it in. You said, if I remember rightly: “I’m damned if I’ll be the buyer!” I then told you that I would pick it up on my own account – my exact words…Do you remember that conversation?’
‘I do now, though I had forgotten it. So in effect, you are claiming that Madeleine’s papers are now your property?’
‘No longer. They have passed out of my hands. If you wish, I can put you in touch with the attorneys who represent the present owners.’
‘That won’t be necessary. You’ve obviously studied the papers, otherwise you could never have written that portrait of Madeleine for Belvedere.’
‘I’ve studied them, yes.’
‘What…what sort of picture do they give of me and of our marriage?’
‘It’s very intimate,’ Mather said quietly. ‘Intimate and, I have to say, damaging.’
‘Do you or the present owners have any intention of publishing them?’
‘I do not. The present owners may have, but I don’t think they will. However I think it’s entirely likely they will be subpoenaed as evidence for the defence. George Munsel has already discussed that with me.’
‘Have you seen or do you know what Hugh Loredon wrote to the police?’
‘I haven’t seen it. I only know what he told me in Amsterdam, and that I am prepared to disclose only to Anne-Marie.’
‘I want him to hear it, Max!’ Anne-Marie cut swiftly into the talk. ‘He has a right. Everything that happens now touches him. I’m selling his wife’s pictures. I represent his collection. My father’s testimony affects his life…Madeleine’s papers were given to you.’
‘To me. Exactly.’ Mather was suddenly hostile. ‘So whom I tell is my choice. I don’t recognise Ed Bayard in this transaction – only you. What you tell him afterwards is your affair.’
‘That’s silly and obstinate.’
‘No, my dear.’ Bayard was himself again, measured and urbane. ‘Max is being perfectly reasonable. It was a mistake for me to come. I’ll call you in the morning at the gallery.’ He set down his glass and moved towards the door. ‘I must say, Max, you’ve changed since we first met.’
‘It’s been a painful process.’ Mather’s smile had little humour in it. ‘I’m obviously a late developer.’
The door had hardly closed on the unwelcome guest when his control snapped and he rounded on Anne-Marie.
‘What the devil do you mean, bringing him here without warning, without permission? This is my house, for Christ’s sake! You’re a guest. You’re a friend I’m trying to help. Bayard’s bad news. You’re stuck with him. I want him at arm’s length.’
‘He just wanted to apologise…’
‘The hell he did! He wanted to know what I found out in Amsterdam, what’s in Madeleine’s papers, what sort of mess he’s in. No way! He set the ground rules when he wouldn’t lift a finger to find me an attorney for Leonie Danziger. He wanted to maintain an arm’s-length position. Well, by the Lord Harry, he’s got it. Now, why don’t you fix us both a drink while I get dinner.’
‘I don’t want dinner. I want to talk to you.’
‘Then I’ll eat alone. You can talk while I’m cooking.’
‘Max, this is too serious to fight about.’
‘You’re right. It’s death and disaster. So why did you bring Ed Bayard into my living room? To make it worse?’
‘I’m sorry. It just seemed natural and useful at the time. Max, please don’t scold me any more. You don’t know what it’s been like, with Hugh dead and you away and the whole weight of everything pressing down on me. Today, for instance. Everything seemed to be going well. I’d got through a lot of work…your Tolentino stuff went out, the invitations to the opening. I’d coped pretty well with the press, I thought. Then I decided to walk through the place from top to bottom. It looks good, Max, it really does. The workmen have done a fine, clean job. Your apartment looks lovely. And it was while I was there that the horror hit me. That it was there it had all happened. The place seemed to change before my eyes. It was as if Madeleine were there clutching at me, trying to tell me something. I panicked, I ran downstairs and called Ed. He promised to come down right away. I went over to Negroni’s and waited until he arrived. Then we walked around the place together and everything was normal again. So when he suggested I bring him to see you, it seemed the most natural thing in the world. I’m tired, Max. I’m scared of everything. You could sell me the Brooklyn Bridge if you just talked gently to me.’
‘All right. Get the drinks, then sit up here on the stool and keep me company…I’ll talk sweet and tender.’
Which wasn’t an easy promise to keep when her first question was so basic and brutal. ‘How did my father die?’
‘He was terminal. He couldn’t face a painful end so he opted for mercy-killing in a Dutch clinic. I offered to be with him. He wanted to be alone with the doctor who did it.’
‘How was it done?’
‘By injection.’
‘I can understand why he didn’t want me there. What did he write to the police?’
‘I don’t know; I’m guessing that it’s very much the story he told me.’
‘I have to know, Max.’
‘You have to be patient while I explain the background, the kind of life Madi lived, the private world she constructed in that place.’ He worked as he talked. The mechanical processes of preparation – the washing, chopping, mixing – gave distraction from the sombre line of the narrative, but try as he might he could not avoid his own grim conclusion: Hugh Loredon had denounced Leonie Danziger for a murder he had committed himself. He dared not put it into words, but he had the odd feeling that Anne-Marie had already understood.
It was a strange little tableau: Mather in a butcher’s apron behind the servery counter, holding a chopping blade, Anne-Marie perched on a stool opposite him, pale and still as a stone sculpture.
Finally, she said in a small distant voice, ‘I hear what you tell me, Max but I can’t…I can’t take it all in. I want to, but I can’t. May I have another drink?’
‘Sure. And you can pour one for me.’
She paused with the bottle in her hand and the glass still empty, to ask:
‘Is this all…I mean, are you go
ing to say all this in court?’
‘I must.’
‘So you’re the real executioner, aren’t you? You’re the one holding the chopper, because nobody else knows as much as you do.’
‘You expect me to let an innocent woman go to prison?’
‘That’s the problem, Max. Nobody’s innocent. Everybody had a hand in Madeleine’s death – Bayard, Hugh, Madi herself and all those nameless lovers. Everybody, Max, except you and me. But now, because I’m selling Madi’s pictures, I’ve stirred up all the mud again. And because my father told you truths and lies in the same breath, you’re the man with the power of life and death.’
‘But not over your father. He’s out of it now.’
‘What do you think is going to happen to Ed Bayard?’
‘I don’t know. I can’t understand why Hugh didn’t point the finger at him too. He was so much against your marrying Bayard that he would have done anything to break it off.’
Anne-Marie poured the two drinks and handed Mather his. She still seemed sunk in puzzled reverie, almost talking to herself.
‘Ed Bayard’s a sad man. He has no lightness, no laughter in him. Being close to him is like standing outside a prison and watching a face – a gentle, kind face – that peeps through the bars and then disappears. But my father’s the one who escapes me utterly. I knew him and I loved him as the dashing, feckless, romantic fellow who stood up on the rostrum and sold things worth millions at the tap of a hammer. He bought me extravagant presents and made me understand what it meant to be flattered and courted as a woman. If you’re a girl that’s what fathers are meant for, Max. But this other side of him – the frightened one, the dark, vengeful, intriguing one – I don’t know at all…I don’t know how to place it in my life.’
‘You don’t try,’ said Mather firmly. He began working on the food again, trimming the veal, flattening it with a mallet, making deliberately florid gestures. ‘You have your future to think of and that’s bound up in the gallery. You and I are going to take on this town – the press, the critics, the buyers. We’re going to turn these goddamn disasters into a triumph. I’m going to the arraignment tomorrow. After that, I’m available full-time to work with your PR and advertising people and take media interviews. We both have dead to bury. Let’s put ’em underground, say a prayer and leave ’em to God.’
‘And what about the living, Max? What about Ed Bayard?’
‘You’re the one he’s in love with. How do you feel about him?’
‘Protective, grateful…impatient!’
‘I don’t hear eager, passionate, sexy…’
‘Of course not!’
‘Then you’re playing games, aren’t you? You’re using him as a life-raft. He’s not going to be happy with that for ever. He’s been there before with Madeleine. And remember that your father’s last message to me was to make sure you never married him. What more can I say? You’re a big girl now.’
‘You could say you loved me and it would be nice to be back in Florence right now, drinking cocktails on the terrace and watching the sun go down behind the bell towers.’
‘I could,’ said Max Mather quietly. ‘But it wouldn’t be true. I’m hoping to get married.’
‘My God!’ Anne-Marie choked on her drink. ‘That’s one for the book – Max Mather getting married. Who is she, Max? She has to be rich. How old is she…do I know her?’
Then all of a sudden she was weeping uncontrollably, and when he tried to hold her she beat on his breast with her fists and thrust him away and rushed into the bedroom, locking the door behind her.
Mather was shocked by her outburst of emotion. His notion of his own worth had been so diminished and eroded by the traffic of casual affairs, even by the affectionate ease of this one, that he accepted and expected to be taken for granted as a piece of furniture in Anne-Marie’s life. She could move it, sell it, give it away and no complaint would lie against her. He was reminded of the old Browning piece ‘On a Toccata of Galuppi’s’: ‘what was left of soul, I wonder, when the kissing had to stop.’
For the first time, Mather began truly to understand what was happening between himself and Gisela. This was no lightning-strike. Rather it was a slow and steady flowering of a kind of love which was new to him. Gisela was demanding more of him than any other woman had done. The kissing and the passionate coupling were fine, but not enough. She was reaching far beyond and inward to touch and hold his heart and his will.
For his own part, Mather was aware of new dimensions in himself. He was combative about the woman. He was jealous of the attention other men paid her. Her tough-minded scholarship challenged him to higher levels of personal accomplishment – and, he had to admit, to shame for his too facile conscience about life and loving.
He was fond of Anne-Marie. He hated to see her hurt or threatened. But with Gisela he was a lover and in love, a suitor eager to prove himself.
When he called Anne-Marie for dinner an hour later she was calm again, her hair tidy, the tear-stains wiped away. She was ready to shrug away the outburst.
‘I needed that, Max. You understand, don’t you?’
‘Sure.’
‘You haven’t told me about your wife-to-be.’
‘For a good reason: I haven’t asked her yet!’
‘Who is she?’
‘She’s my lawyer in Zurich, Gisela Mundt. She’s young, she’s bright, she’s pretty. She also lectures in law at the university. She’s wakened both my heart and my sleeping conscience. What’s more to tell?’
‘That says it all, I guess. Does she know about your lurid past?’
‘I haven’t offered her a recital of the full score. But yes, she knows.’
‘Where would you think of settling?’
‘On the Continent – Zurich or Florence.’
‘Which means we could keep on working together?’
‘Of course.’
‘Tell me about this syndicate of yours.’
He told her. Then she told him about Bayard’s request for an exhibition of Cornelis Janzoon. Mather was furious.
‘God, how I hate to be managed like a riding-school hack! Trot, canter, gallop. I’ll have no part of that nonsense. On the other hand, I’d advise you to put in a bid for Janzoon. He’s in the great genre tradition of the Dutch masters.’
‘I can’t afford any more outlay yet, Max. Right now we’re absolutely dependent on the Bayard exhibition.’
‘So let’s talk about the campaign. What happened yesterday with the press?’
‘Mostly it was phone calls – people trying to get a hook on a twelve-months-old story. I told them to call Ed Bayard, who has a very good defence system at his office. As far as we were concerned, I told them we’d hold a press conference as soon as you were back and have a special press preview at which further questions would be answered. You’ll have to handle those functions, Max.’
‘It’s not going to be as easy as that. You may be quizzed about your father and his association with Madeleine Bayard. How will you answer?’
‘My father lived his own life. I’m living mine.’
‘Good. Now tell us, Miss Loredon, where does Ed Bayard fit into your life?’
‘He’s my landlord. I am selling his late wife’s pictures and I represent his personal collection.’
‘No special relationship?’
‘None.’
‘He says he’d marry you at the drop of a hat.’
‘It takes two to do a hat-dance. Ed Bayard is a good friend and, as I hope he will tell you, I’m a very good art dealer…How am I doing, coach?’
‘Great. Just hold that line.’
‘Now what’s your contribution to the interview, Max?’
‘I feed in the market information: strong overseas interest, offer of new artists and, of course, Niccoló Tolentino. I’d like you to consider letting him open the show.’
‘With all those Manhattan piranhas? They’d eat him alive.’
‘Don’t count on it. This
is a very rare man who’s spent all his life in the company of the great masters and can still weep at the wonder of them. I don’t think the piranhas will even snap at him.’
‘Let me think about it. People expect a fairly standard routine at an opening.’
‘I know. Grab the grog and a canapé and a catalogue, wander round looking wise, making smart-ass comments and hoping somebody’s looking at you instead of the pictures. Let’s give ’em something a little different. Whether you like it or not, it will be different anyway.’
‘I’m scared of doing a freeze, Max.’
‘We won’t let that happen. We may get people there for the wrong reasons, but we’ll get people. How are you placed financially?’
She gave him a swift searching glance. ‘That’s not a question I’d expect from you, Max. Why do you ask?’
‘Bear with me a minute. Did your father carry life assurance?’
‘Yes. About half a million worth.’
‘Which I presume comes to you?’
‘I’m told so. Why?’
‘Because if the manner of your father’s death ever became public, the insurance company might – just might – institute an action claiming it was suicide, and then your claim could be in dispute.’
‘Is there any reason why it should become public?’
‘I’m the reason. I’m a witness for the defence in the trial of Danny Danziger. I have to answer whatever questions are put to me. This one may not come up; but if it does you may be damaged by the answer.’
‘Well, it’s still not quite the end of the world. Surprisingly, there is a trust fund worth about a quarter of a million. I didn’t know of its existence until a couple of days ago when I got a letter from Lutz & Hengst, the attorneys who are trustees for the fund. Apparently I’m entitled to the income from it. The capital can only be touched with their consent. However, it’s the cushion if I need one.’
‘I think you may have to budget some larger funds for advertising and public relations.’
‘I’ve thought of that. I’m prepared to spend if we have to.’
‘Who set up the trust?’
‘My father. About twelve months ago – which must have been about the time he first knew he was threatened. You and I were in Europe then. Your Pia must have fallen ill about the same time.’