The House That Jack Built

by Graham Masterton

  Harry went across to a cluttered rolltop desk, picked a cigarette out of a pack of Camels, and lit it with a book match. 'So many people suffered at the hands of Jack Belias - so many people were ruined or humiliated - that it was considered bad luck even to mention his name. And you know how superstitious gamblers are.

  'When I came out of the service in 1946 I started writing articles and books about gambling and gamblers, and one name kept on cropping up: Jack Belias. I tried to talk to my father about him but he didn't want to know. I tried talking to some of the big names of gambling - men who used to play baccarat with Belias in the twenties and the thirties. What did I get? The complete loss of memory, that's what I got. All I had to say was, "Tell me about Jack Belias", and instant amnesia set in.'

  He blew smoke, coughed, and looked around him. 'You want to sit down?' he suggested. 'How about some coffee. You may not believe it, but I make excellent coffee. With chocolate flakes.'

  Effie cleared a sheaf of papers from a green upholstered armchair, and awkwardly sat down. Pepper managed to find a dining-chair with no back to it.

  'Are you the lady who's bought Valhalla?' Harry asked Effie.

  'It was my husband's idea, more than mine. I don't really like the place at all.'

  'If I tell you what happened there, do you think you're going to be upset? I mean, I don't want to put you off living there.'

  Pepper said, 'She needs to know, and I do, too. Listen, you don't know what's been happening in that house. Eflie here had a kind of waking daydream that she was dancing on broken glass, and when she came out of it her feet were all cut up. Another time she heard a woman crying in one of the upstairs bedrooms, and she's seen a strange man going downstairs. I went there myself, and I saw the whole place like it used to be, with furniture and mirrors and everything.'

  She paused, and then she said, 'While I was there, I truly believed that I was Gaby Deslys, the dancer; and that Jack Belias and me were lovers. But I wasn't Gaby Deslys and Jack Belias wasn't Jack Belias. He was Effie's husband Craig.'

  Harry smoked and nodded, and then he found himself a wheelback chair and dragged it up close. 'It's just like I always said. Jack Belias never died. Not in the way that ordinary people die. Jack Belias left his automobile next to Bear Mountain Bridge because he wanted people to think that he had done away with himself. But did he shit. All he did was leave one time and step into another; and the only reason he left that automobile next to Bear Mountain Bridge was because he couldn't take it with him, not where he was going. He was trying to get into the future… be immortal. And he was looking for somebody who was weaker than him, somebody who needed what he had to offer, which was strength, you understand me? Strength, and a total lack of scruples, didn't care who he hurt, or how badly, or whether it was justified or not. Not only that, virility. Jack Belias was a very virile man, he needed sex like most people need to breathe, and he used his virility to dominate people, too.'

  'So what did happen at Valhalla?' asked Effie. She couldn't help thinking of Craig, in the days after his 'accident'. What had he needed more desperately than strength and virility? If Harry Rondo could be believed, the influence of Jack Belias had caught him at his lowest ebb.

  Harry said, 'If you want to understand what happened at Valhalla you have to understand who Jack Belias was. What shaped him, what motivated him. I spent years traipsing from one side of the Atlantic to the other, trying to find out everything I could about him. In the end, it didn't amount to very much more than a few proven facts, a hundred guesses, and a thousand assorted riddles. Like I told you, the only real evidence lies here in my gut.

  'You want the proven facts? He was born John Henry Belias in the winter of 1897, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. His father was Walter John Belias, also known as Jack, who worked for the First National Bank of Pittsburgh, as chief teller. His mother Annette Belias doted on him, and spoiled him so much that his father threatened to send him off to boarding school. But Annette Belias died in 1906, when Jack was nine, from complications following the birth of a daughter, Lily. From what I gather, Jack never forgave his sister for killing his mother; and hr never forgave his mother for betraying him by having another child. From that time on, it seems that his opinion of women in general was very low.'

  'Do we have any evidence of that?' asked Pepper.

  'Oh, sure we do. Reports from the Pittsburgh newspapers of 1919 and 1922, when one Jack Belias was accused of kidnapping and torturing prostitutes. In the first case he was alleged to have abducted a prostitute called Mary O'Hagan for seven days, and nailed her nipples to a kitchen table. In the second case he forced an empty gin bottle into a prostitute called Georgina French, and filled up the bottle with boiling water.

  'Oh, my God,' said Pepper. 'Oh, my God it doesn't bear thinking about.'

  'He did worse than that to other women, so they say; but these are the only cases that are backed by evidence. As it turned out, he was found innocent on both charges; although there were several accusations of jury-rigging, especially from the state's attorney Nathan Tidyman. Tidyman was found dead four weeks after Jack Belias' last acquittal, in his overturned automobile, with his neck broken.

  'Jack Belias' father had never liked him - and after the court cases he cut him off completely. When he died he gave over $3 million to charity, and Jack Belias got nothing. I believe that's what gave him his special taste for bringing rich men low.

  'In 1923 he was appointed a junior accountant at Penn Textiles. He wasn't liked, but he was such a whiz with figures that he saved the company hundreds of thousands of dollars in his first six months; and at the end of his first year he was appointed chief accountant. He took over the running of everything, right down to buying the raw cotton on the Memphis cotton market. By the spring of 1925 he was appointed to the board, and by the winter of 1925 he virtually controlled the whole corporation. He pressed ahead with all kinds of experiments with synthetic fibres, and in 1926 he produced Fresh-Press, which wasn't a trufe synthetic fabric, not like nylon, but it was a chemical-treated cotton that didn't crease anything like as badly as natural cotton.

  'He made a fortune out of Fresh-Press. That particular textile dominated the world market until 1938, when W. H. Carothers discovered nylon. Penn Textiles went out of business in three years; but by then, of course, Jack Belias was what you might call dead. Or moved on. Depends which definition you prefer.

  'By 1927 Jack Belias was worth more than 11 million dollars. He started to travel, and to gamble; and he became a regular visitor to Deauville and Monte Carlo and Biarritz. He didn't set out to win money. He set out to ruin people. That was what turned him on. He treated women like dirt and men like potential victims. I never talked to a single person who knew Jack Belias and wasn't afraid of him. He nearly bankrupted Nick Zographos, of the Greek Syndicate; and there were dozens more gamblers who weren't so skilful and weren't so lucky. He desecrated their wives and he took their money.'

  'He married, though, didn't he?' asked Effie.

  'Sure. He married a French movie actress, Jeannette Duclos. She was beautiful, I can tell you. There were no two ways about it.'

  'She died, didn't she?' asked Effie.

  Harry crushed out his cigarette into a crowded ashtray emblazoned Hotel Ritz, Paris. 'Yes, she died. In mysterious circumstances, that's what most of the books will tell you. But I went through the medical records and there was nothing mysterious about it, nothing at all. The only mystery was that Jack Belias paid a large sum of money to the coroner to testify that it was anything else but what it was.'

  'And what was it?' asked Pepper.

  'You really want to hear this?' asked Harry.

  'If we don't hear it, we'll never know what we're up against.'

  'Well, your funeral,' said Harry. 'She died by setting her head alight.'

  'She did what?' asked Pepper.

  'Belias wanted children. He wanted a son and heir, somebody to carry on his name. You've seen his coat of arms, and that motto of hi
s, Non omnis irwriar - "I shall never completely die". He couldn't accept the fact that he was mortal. He believed that he could live for ever, if he used all of the right rituals and prayed all the right prayers. But he still wanted a son and heir, in case the rituals and the prayers didn't work.

  'What he didn't know was that Jeannette Duclos had had an illegal abortion at the age of thirteen and had never been able to have children.

  'He was always ranting and raving at her. I have several eyewitness accounts of how he slapped her and screamed at her at the Golf Hotel at Le Touquet. He shouted at her again in the Palm Court of the Plaza, in New York, and called her a sterile, ugly bitch. I'll tell you who heard him say that: Harold Ross, the guy who founded The New Yorker. It's in one of his diaries.

  'Less than a month after that, Belias held a big gambling party up at Valhalla. Just about everybody was there. They had dancing, fireworks, a whole thirty-piece orchestra. Eyewitness reports say that Belias spent the whole evening with Gaby Deslys, the dancer. Then halfway through the evening, Jeannette walked into the ballroom and it looked like her hair was wet. Nobody realised it, but she had dipped her whole head into a pailful of gasoline. She walked across the ballroom, faced up to him, and then she struck a match.'

  Harry lit up another cigarette. 'The police came but everybody said they were out of the room when it happened. "I was having a smoke in the library". "I went to the powder room". "I was making a telephone call to my Great Aunt Matilda". But I talked to some of the people who were there. They don't all tell the same story, but some say she ran around the ballroom screaming, and others say she danced, she actually did a dance for him, with her head on fire.'

  Pepper said, 'What about Gaby Deslys? What happened to her?'

  'Oh, well, she was pretty fortunate. Belias went through a long run of bad luck on the tables, and spent so much time gambling that they kind of drifted apart. After that, he went through a whole string of mistresses. I've talked to some of them, even though they're pretty old now. They all said how cruel he was. He loved to hurt them; and of course some of them were young and stupid and drugged up, and they let him do whatever he wanted. He kept horses. Some of them even did it with horses, while Belias watched.'

  Effie pressed the back of her hand against her mouth. She hadn't eaten breakfast this morning, and she was almost choking on Harry's cigarette smoke.

  Harry said, 'I'm sorry. I don't mean to disturb you. But you wanted to know, and this is more or less what happened, so far as anybody can tell.'

  'How did it end?' Effie asked him. 'Why did Jack Belias have to disappear?'

  'There are rumours about this; and there are counterrumours; and it's very difficult to know what to believe. But one thing's certain. In the spring of 1937, Jack Belias invited eleven of his friends up to Valhalla for a non-stop weekend of baccarat. He had one every year, and it was quite an occasion, because he always held the bank and he always did what the Greek Syndicate used to do at Deauville, and allow tout va - that is, "anything goes", meaning there was no limit on what his guests could bet.'

  'I'm surprised he had any guests, from what you've been saying about him,' said Effie.

  'Don't you believe it. He had more gamblers wanting to play against him than Valhalla could accommodate. Almost every baccarat player on both sides of the Atlantic wanted the chance to break Jack Belias, and every year he gave them the opportunity, and he wined them and dined them, too, and every year he ended up richer. That man may have been Satan, but he could play baccarat like God.

  'Nobody knows who all of the eleven guests were that year, but Nico Zographos and Val Castlerosse certainly were, as well as Michael Arlen and Remy Morse and Karl Marjorian and Douglas Broughton. Most of them came because they wanted to settle old scores, win back some of the money that Belias had taken from them during the past year. But Broughton needed more than that. In the summer of 1936, Belias had taken him for over a million pounds sterling, which Broughton had been forced to borrow from his own company, Broughton Steelworks. He had been forced to sell his country house in England, his chateau in France, and his apartment on Fifth Avenue. He wasn't just looking for revenge. He badly needed to win his money back, or else he was facing bankruptcy.'

  Harry crossed the room and lifted a framed photograph off the wall, which he handed to Effie to look at. It showed a bluff, handsome man of about fifty-five sitting in a garden. He was wearing a wide-brimmed hat and an expensive three-piece suit, with spats. He had a white moustache and a white goatee beard; and rings on his fingers. He looked as if he had just said something which he considered to be terribly droll. Sitting on a low wall next to him, swinging her legs, was a very much younger woman, with dark hair perfectly cut in a long, shining bob, and wide dark eyes. She was nothing short of beautiful -and she had the extra allure of looking as' if she were unconscious of her beauty, a dreamy erotic innocence. She wore a short white low-waisted dress, with a large bow at the hip, and white stockings. She, too, was smiling, but for some reason she didn't look to Effie as if she were smiling at what the man had just said, but at some secret amusement of her own.

  'Is this Douglas Broughton?' asked Pepper.

  'That's right. And the woman sitting on the wall is his wife Gina. She was twenty-three years his junior when they married. Miss Pittsburgh, 1923. He saw her picture in the newspaper when he was visiting the US Steel Corporation in Pittsburgh, and he sent his chauffeur around to her home with two dozen roses and an invitation to dinner. Hard line to resist, wouldn't you say?'

  'She looks like a child, compared to him,' said Effie.

  'That's right. On first meeting, most people used to think that Gina was Douglas Broughton's daughter. But she was very much in love with him. She was absolutely devoted. Even when he lost his money and they had to sell all their houses and their cars, she still stood beside him, and did everything she could to cheer him up. For his part, Douglas Broughton believed that Gina always brought him luck, and that the only time he lost money at the tables was when she wasn't there. So that was why he took her to Valhalla that spring.'

  He squashed out his second cigarette. 'It was the worst thing he ever did in his life.'

  'What happened?' asked Effie.

  'They played baccarat, of course. Val Castlerosse won almost eight thousand dollars in the first few hours, and for a while it looked as if luck was running Douglas Broughton's way, too. By midnight on Friday he was up sixteen thousand dollars and according to Michael Arlen he was really hot. But he was playing by the Martingale system, which means that every time he lost a coup he doubled his stake in an attempt to get his money back. The Martingale's terrific if luck's running with you; but if it isn't, it's a very quick way to dig your own grave. It wasn't even two o'clock on Saturday morning before he was into a hole for eleven thousand, and most of the others were well down, too. It seemed like Jack Belias was unbeatable.' He reached for another cigarette, but as he did so he paused and listened, almost as if he were expecting to hear someone entering the front door.

  'Are you all right?' Pepper asked him.

  Just had one of those feelings.'

  'One of what feelings?'

  'It's always the same when I talk about Jack Belias. Maybe I'm just spooking myself. I always feel that he's right outside the door, listening to me.'

  Pepper said, 'I don't feel anything.'

  Harry listened a moment longer, and then shook his head at his own edginess. 'Stupid, I guess. But it's always the same. I started to write a magazine article about him once, and my typewriter keys kept jamming. I finished about half a page and then I gave it up as a bad job.'

  He lit his cigarette very carefully and then dragged at it with as much relish as a man who hasn't smoked in a week. 'I don't really know what I've got to be afraid of. But then I don't want to find out, either.'

  Effie said, 'The baccarat… did Jack Belias win all night?'

  'By dawn the others had lost so much money that they were threatening to quit the table and
cut short the whole weekend. So Belias came up with a suggestion. If they were real gamblers, they should each of them bet the one thing in their lives that they prized the most… the one thing that they couldn't bear to lose.

  'None of them were interested at first, but then Belias himself said that he would stake Valhalla and everything in it, and that was more of a temptation than any of the others could resist. I don't know what Val Castlerosse staked, but Michael Arlen offered the copyright to The Green Hat, which was his bestselling novel, Remy Morse staked his yacht, and Karl Marjorian put up his favourite racehorse. Douglas Broughton had no yachts, no racehorses, no houses, nothing. All he had was his percentage share in the family steelworks, and his wife Gina. She wouldn't hear of him gambling away his livelihood, so she offered herself. Three nights and three days, for the winner to do with her whatever he wanted.'

  'I can't believe it,' said Effie.

  'I've seen gamblers stake more than their wives,' said Harry, waving smoke away with his hand. 'Maybe it seems unbelievable now, but you have to remember that Douglas Broughton was desperate, almost suicidal, and that Gina would have done anything for him. She was that kind of a woman.'

  He paused. 'I don't exactly know how they arranged the game. I guess they agreed that each player would be allowed to lose a certain number of coups before he had to surrender his prized possession. As it is, it took Jack Belias less than an hour to win everything, Gina Broughton included.'

  'And she really stayed with him, for three days and three nights?'

  Harry coughed, and shook his head. 'She stayed with him for eighteen months. Nobody knows why. She followed him everywhere he went, and yet he treated her worse than a dog. Whenever he held a party, he used to show her off; show how obedient she was. Whatever he asked her to do, she always did it. Once he dropped a spoonful of caviar on to the end of his shoe and made her kneel down in her evening gown, in front of all of his guests, and lick it off. And another time he made her do exactly what happened to you - he made her dance barefoot on broken champagne glasses. He probably did far worse things to her, but if so he did them in private.'