“Why is it that the smaller the thing you ask for the less likely you are to get it? Why is it so hard to find somebody who gives one small goddamn? Not my mother—who only cares about all those orphans—or Cady who only cares about her smug Baptist God who sends people to Hell for even thinking about being like me.
“(She knows. I know she knows. I could see it in her eyes at her Divinity School graduation.)”
Knows what? Cady leaned forward, as if she could somehow glean Regina's secrets from hearing Helen's small voice more clearly. She tried to remember Regina at her Harvard Divinity School graduation.
She might have seemed smug to Regina, having just earned her degree in spite of helping Roy run the bakery, after losing Mama and Leroy. She vaguely remembered Regina being at the ceremony, but she had no idea what deep, dark secret Regina imagined she 'knew.' There had been talk of a drug overdose for the two weeks when Regina disappeared, but in those days, drug use was hardly shocking.
Helen read on:
“So, fine. I figured out that nobody gives a damn; nobody at all. So I split. I packed my bags, checked out of the hotel, took a taxi to the train station, bought a ticket to Amsterdam—and here I am. Where I have family. Family my Papa kept alive by cooking rats in the attic when the Nazis came.
“And I'm going to find them.
“I'm gone, Arthur. Gone from your life—gone from modeling—gone from starving myself into hideous hag-hood and taking drugs that won't let me sleep. I never wanted to be a model. I was supposed to be a pianist.
“I wanted people to treat me with respect, but you know, nobody gets less respect than a model. Nobody. I'm a goddamn coat hanger.
“So here's the plan: tomorrow I go find my mother's relatives and get access to a piano and find a good teacher. I'm going to immerse myself in music; music and chocolate. They have such wonderful chocolate here—dark and almost black: bitter and hard when you bite into it, but creamy and sweet and smooth when you savor it in your mouth. How long has it been since I savored?
“Last night I got here about 8 p.m. and checked into a cheap hotel near the station, went out and bought a huge Droste bar and this touristy little notebook and some black hair dye. I went back to my room and dyed my hair in the sink, put on some jeans and went out walking—just walking. Nobody recognized me. I took my pills with me, and I was going to throw them in a canal, but then I remembered the hell I went through going off them before, so I guess I'd better cut down slowly.
“So I went into a bar where kids in jeans from all over the world were smoking joints and drinking beer and I was just like one of them. I even got asked on a date—he's a big blonde Dutch guy named Wim. I'm going to meet him tomorrow night. He thinks I'm a music student from Boston.
“I met him on the way to the bathroom; there was just the one, unisex, at the end of a skinny hallway. On the walls were all these happy little graffiti from students everywhere saying how groovy it was to be there—like yearbook autographs from Woodstock or something. One struck me funny, because it was in English, all misspelled:
“'If you small at me I will understand because that is sumthing every buddy does in the same language'
“I sat there spacing out, feeling like I was part of something cosmic and normal and sort of sweet at the same time, when somebody pounded on the door, saying 'Verboten! Pas du heroin! Other people have to piss. No shooting up. It is forbidden!'
“So I washed my hands fast and when I opened the door, there was this huge guy blocking the hallway. He was about six-four, with beefy arms and shaggy blonde hair, sort of a cross between Hans Brinker and the Incredible Hulk.
“I said I was sorry, but he kept yelling at me in three different languages. I tried to squeeze by, muttering how I'd been working in Paris.
“'So don't dump on me,' I said. 'I've been shat upon by the best.'
“He smiled. 'You work in Paris? I am sorry for you. Those people, they are like this;' He held his nose in the air, 'I am from Pa—ree. You are a bug.'
“I smiled back. 'I don't like being a bug.'
“'Welcome to Amsterdam,' he said. He flattened his body against the wall to make room for me to get by. I laughed when I realized what we were doing.
“'We're smalling at each other,' I said, and pointed to the scribbling on the wall.
“He ended up buying me a beer, and invited me to meet him tomorrow night. He says he'll have the money then for a fancy dinner.”
Helen paused, and Cady lay back on her pillows trying to put the diary's words together with what she remembered about that summer of 1974. Regina had vanished on the eve of a big Paris couture show, and everybody thought she must have been kidnapped, or died from an overdose. But later it turned out the whole thing was staged for the headlines—or was it?
“Shall I go on?” Helen said.
“Please do.” Maybe Regina's “disappearance” in 1974 held some clue to Regina's disappearance now.
“August 1
“I can't believe it. They're gone. For a whole month. The whole family. I spent all morning taking trams and getting utterly lost until I figured out this town is designed like a spider web, not a grid, so all the streets go in a circle. When I finally found Aunt Wilma's house, this cranky old neighbor tells me they're gone. Somewhere by the sea.
“'Nobody stays in town in August,' she said.
“So here I am. I don't know whether I should write to Mother for a loan or what. The agency has all my pay for the summer, and they're not going to want to give it to me since I skipped out on my contract. I've probably got about five hundred dollars in francs, and that's it. Not exactly a down payment on a picturesque little flat overlooking the Amstel.
“August 2—Wee Small Hours—5 a.m., maybe.
“Okay. Calm down. No point trying to sleep. I've got two hours before they're going to pick me up. We're going to drive to Greece. Me and the Sybils. Well, two of the Sybils: Freebie and Pinkie and—HIM. Him, Mick Mikhail or whatever his name is, my dream man: my Dr. Zhivago. How did this happen?
“Wim. I went to meet Wim at the bar. He turned out to be a jerk-faced pig. A dead jerk-faced pig, but I'm getting ahead of myself.
“I waited in the bar for over an hour, and it was getting weird. A bunch of Israeli soldiers were being rowdy, except for this one gorgeous guy who kept staring at me. That's when Wim came in—with a bunch of Arabs. He was drunk and high and immediately started pawing me. He said he was going to buy a couple of keys of red Leb. hash and then we'd go back to his place and 'screw our brains out'—his exact words.
“So I said I didn't think so and started to leave, and suddenly he grabbed me and I guess I fell.
“The next thing I knew, the Israelis were coming to my rescue and the Arabs were fighting them, and there was an insane barroom brawl going on over my head. Wim fell on the floor next to me, and there was blood everywhere, and I guess I passed out.
“Then somebody helped me up and sort of carried me out of the bar—the gorgeous Israeli who had been staring at me, and he seemed to know my name—too weird. Somehow he got us into a taxi, and said 'Hilton Hotel', and the next thing—I looked up and there were—the Sybils.
“Of course I wondered if I was hallucinating, but there was a cold pack on my face and somebody who looked like Freebie was holding it and someone awfully Pinky-like was trying to get my blouse off me, because it was all sticky with blood.
“Above me, my beautiful rescuer was standing like a warrior-angel, with a glass of water saying 'Drink.'
“I drank. I would do anything this man told me.
“'Oh, thank God,' Pinky said. 'You were fading out there for a minute. We don't want to have to take you to a doctor. Then the police will ask you all kinds of questions about the dead guy and it will take forever. And we have to leave for Greece tomorrow. Sybil D-D is meeting us on Mykonos on the sixth. She's coming on her new boyfriend's yacht.'
“'Dead guy?' I looked at the blood on my clothes. Wim; was he dead then?
“'Mick?' I looked up and that's when I realized where I'd seen the man before: he's Dr. Zhivago from the dorm that night; that perfect chin, the dark, sexy eyes. 'Aren't you the guy who was supposed to be my blind date all those years ago?'
“He looks younger and kind of sweet when he smiles.
“'Yes. My name is Mikhail. Mick for short. I am sorry I could not help you that night. I thought you went with those men because they were rich.'
“'But it's okay,' Freebie piped up. 'They got blown up the next day. Did Cady ever tell you that? Those rich boys who had been kidnapping girls from the college for weird sex orgies—they set their mansion on fire in some drunken accident—they both died.'
“Franz and his cousin—dead. 'Wim…' I said. 'Is he dead, too? What happened?' People seemed to have a habit of dying around this Mikhail.
“'I'm sorry about your friend Willem Verhaard,' Mikhail said. 'But he was a very stupid man. You do not do business with terrorists and live a long time.'
“'He wasn't my friend.' I touched the bruise on my face where I'd fallen when he grabbed me.
“'Isn't it lucky that Mick was there?' Pinky said. 'He always shows up at the right time. Sybil ran into him in Venice, and told him to look us up. He helped us buy a VW camper to drive to Greece. You are coming with us, right? It'll be a little cramped, but we can squash ourselves in.'
“Everything was soooo surreal.
“'Please come, Regina,' Mikhail said, looking right into me with those incredible velvet-brown eyes.
“'You're going with them? To Greece? Tomorrow?' I couldn't even think of not seeing him again. 'Sure,' I said. 'I won't take up much room. I'll small myself.'“
Helen stopped reading as the roar of a helicopter drowned out her voice. Someone was knocking on the door.
“Nurse Helen,” Fatima said. “The doctor wants to talk to you. Mr. Jones left us his cell phone.”
Helen jumped up. Fatima came near the bed.
“Power wants me to tell you to hang in there, Reverend,” she said. “I just talked to him. And the doctor says no visitors; even us.
And no TV. Not that you're missing anything. All they're showing is our front gate—on just about every channel. They keep saying how there's some Middle Eastern terrorism going on; something about Israeli spies.
Except on Fox. Fox has a special about how Princess Regina got abducted by a UFO and taken off to Michael Jackson's ranch to be with Elvis. Did you know Elvis was alive and fat and living on Jacko's ranch? Athena's watching this stuff down there. That woman will not stop laughing.”
“Out. Everybody out.” Helen fluffed Cady's pillow and adjusted the neck brace. “You should sleep, Reverend. That's what the doctor said.”
“Could you sleep with everything that's going on around here?” Cady said. “Why don't you read me some more of that diary?”
The diary about the mysterious Israeli that—how had Regina put it? “People had a habit of dying around.”
Chapter 38—Cady: Join the Jamboree
As Helen resumed reading Regina's diary, Cady listened intently, hoping to get some answers to the questions piling up in her mind.
Who was this Mikhail who was “always there at the right time”—this “warrior angel” as Regina called him—who seemed to have a habit of leaving the corpses of unpleasant people in his wake? Was he some sort of Israeli James Bond? And if so, why had he attached himself to such frivolous creatures as the Sybils? Could he—after all this time—have anything to do with this “terrorist” talk surrounding Regina's death; or whatever it was?
She tried to recall the facts of Regina's disappearance that summer of 1974. When the news first broke, she had been genuinely worried, and she and Astrid had exchanged many frantic phone calls. Astrid had even tried to arrange for someone to take care of the foster children—she was caring for at least ten by that time—so she could go to Paris to help with the search.
But Regina had resurfaced; as mysteriously as she had disappeared; on someone's Mediterranean yacht, claiming to be suffering from amnesia after an accident. She'd emerged somehow healthier, even more beautiful and, of course, a much bigger star, thanks to all the headlines about her disappearance.
There'd been talk of plastic surgery; drug rehabilitation; a staged publicity stunt, but Regina had never wanted to talk about it.
In fact, Regina had talked to Cady very little in those years. It was not much later that Regina was declared the ubermodel of the decade, after launching the whole designer jeans fad as the icon of Prince Max's “to the Max” blue jeans. She'd moved to Europe soon after that, and then, of course, had come her engagement to the Prince.
Cady had actually been surprised to receive her invitation to the royal wedding.
By the late 'seventies, Cady was nothing but an impoverished ghetto minister, an unglamorous thirty pounds overweight, still buried in student debt, with a bankrupt bakery on her hands. She'd bought her gown for the wedding at a resale shop in the Back Bay, which she was rather proud of; until that Titiana, the cook, or whoever she was, had been so nasty about the fact the dress was a cheap knock-off of a Prince Max original.
Titiana. Cady couldn't say exactly why she had disliked the woman so much. Everyone else talked about Titiana's kindness and efficiency. She certainly was a superb chef. Maybe Cady had simply been jealous of the woman who became Regina's new best friend.
She had to stop the thoughts. Helen had resumed reading:
“August Something, Macedonia
“I love the sound of that—Macedonia. Home of Alexander the Great. Only if Freebie calls him Alexander the Grape one more time I'm going to get violent.
“They're sweet, the Sybils, but three days with them—is it only three?—is getting to be an ordeal. Luckily neither of them seems the slightest bit interested in Mikhail, so I get to flirt with him all I want.
“But he never makes a move. I can't figure it out. I think he likes me. In fact he treats me like royalty. Which he says I am. Really. Just like Papa used to say. After we went through customs in Yugoslavia, Freebie was handing us back our passports—for some reason Mikhail makes her do all the talking to the authorities, although he speaks Croatian and Greek and God knows what else. Also, even though I thought he was Israeli, he has a Canadian passport and a maple leaf sewed on his backpack.
“Anyway, he said how it's nice I'm using Papa's real name—Rakoczy von Zemplen. I have no idea how he knew that was my papa's name; I can tell it's better not to ask too many questions. So I told him—I'm just Regina professionally, so why use Ingram, which was a phony name in the first place? He smiled and gave me a fancy bow and called me 'Your Highness'. Then he turned to the Sybils and said, 'We have here a Magyar princess.'
“It turns out his mother was Hungarian, so he knows all this Hungarian history, and some Prince Rakoczy from a place called Zemplen was a big eighteenth century hero—sort of a Bonnie Prince Charlie of Transylvania.
“Your Highness. I love that.
“August Whatever, Mykonos, Greece.
“Ohmygod mygod, my GOD. It happened. With Mikhail. Thanks to the island being way overcrowded with tourists and the fact that the Sybils turn out to be lesbians.
“Luckily Sybil D-D's travel agent booked two rooms for us in some Greek family's house. Tuesday night we came in on the ferry and I moved into the big room with the Sybils, and Mikhail slept in the other one. But last night; after a lovely day of sun and shopping and eating langouste with our bare, buttery fingers and drinking lots of ouzo after dinner, I started to go into our room and Pinky said gee, she and Freebie would kind of like to be alone because they were feeling romantic and would I mind bunking with Mikhail. (Why didn't it occur to me? I can be so dense.)
“So I knocked on his door and t
here he was wearing nothing but tiny shorts and all those perfectly tanned muscles. On the bed. The only bed. But what was I supposed to do? So I said, 'look, I just need a place to crash' and I started to crawl in the bed with him.
“He gave me this weird, scary look and said, 'no'.
“Before I knew it he'd grabbed his jeans and a blanket, and was out the door.
“Then I felt awful, so after a minute, I followed him. I found him out on the beach, which was still pretty crowded. A bunch of hippies were singing around a big campfire, and there were quite a few couples in sleeping bags who looked like they were settling in for a cozy night. I watched Mikhail walk as far away from everybody as possible and spread out his blanket.
“He sat and stared at the harbor, where a gorgeous sailing yacht was coming in. It looked too romantic for words with its sails all silhouetted against the dark blue of the sky. I thought of Adam Troy and that TV show I watched when I was a kid.
“'There she is,' he said. 'Your friend Sybil. She cannot come ashore until the customs inspectors board the ship in the morning. Not that they do much inspecting when there's royalty aboard.'
“'Royalty?' I had no idea why we had to talk about this right now.
“'Prince Maximus of San Montinaro,' he said. 'Monarch and fashion designer. Your Sybil is trying to marry him. She does not realize what a nest of vipers she has got herself into. I wonder if she has found out yet that he is broke, or how he is financing his new fashion design house.'
“Mick wasn't even looking at me. He was staring out at that boat.
“'Is it because I'm fat?' I said finally. I couldn't stand it anymore.
“'Is the Prince of San Montinaro broke because you are fat?' Now he was laughing at me. 'I do not think so.'
“He said I was fat. So it was true. I felt like he'd hit me.
“'I'll go back on the pills. I'll double the dose. I can take off five pounds in a week…'
Six Pack of Sleuths: Comedy Mysteries Page 96