It had not occurred to Gus, in his anticipatory thoughts about his night visit, that Constantine de Rham would gossip with him about an approaching society wedding. From another room, the sounds of a television drama could be heard.
“Yvonne is watching Dynasty,” explained Constantine, with a tolerant smile. He pronounced dynasty “dinasty” in the British manner and indicated with a head gesture that Gus should follow him. They walked down a hallway into Constantine’s den, and Constantine closed the door behind them.
On one dark red wall, over a deep tufted sofa piled high with damask and tapestry pillows, was a large painting of a stag being torn apart by hounds. On another Gus’s eye was drawn to a bookcase full of tall slender volumes, bound in red Moroccan leather with gold lettering, that appeared to be privately printed: aristocratic biographies of aristocratic de Rhams: Casimir, Stanislaus, Edouard, and Thierry, the revered ancestors that Constantine claimed as his own. “The guillotine played havoc with my family during the Terror,” de Rham said, watching Gus look at the books, “but enough members survived to perpetuate the name and reclaim the estates.”
Gus turned from the books and looked up into the eyes of the tall man whose gaze was boring into him, daring him to disbelieve his ancestral claims. In the close quarters of the den a scent of not-quite-fresh perspiration clouded the air. It occurred to Gus that perhaps Constantine de Rham was not an everyday bather. Inwardly Gus asked himself why he was in this man’s house, on this rainy night, and for an instant he considered flight. Instead, needing him, he fought his distaste and admired the elegant French desk behind which de Rham seated himself. The desk was, de Rham explained, signed by Boulle. He passed his long fingers lovingly over its highly polished ormolu-encrusted surface.
“But surely you have not delayed going to Mary Finch’s dance to come crosstown on a rainy night to discuss a Boulle desk,” said de Rham.
“No.”
De Rham rose and pulled the velvet curtains closed on the two windows behind his desk. When he turned around, he made a show of surprise, by raising his eyebrows, that Gus had already seated himself, as if he had expected him to remain standing until he had been invited to sit.
“No, not there. Sit in the Regency chair,” Constantine said, pointing to a black lacquer chair with a cane seat that looked considerably less comfortable than the club chair that Gus had chosen. “I can see you better there.”
Gus complied, understanding that Constantine needed to be in charge.
“Now, how can I help you, Mr. Bailey?” asked de Rham.
“There is a man who will be coming up for release from prison,” began Gus, cautiously.
Constantine de Rham again raised his eyebrows, in an exaggerated grimace of amazement. “Yes?”
“I would like to have this man followed.”
“I find it utterly extraordinary that you should come to see me on such a matter.”
“I was told that you knew people who could lead one to other people who performed such services.”
“Am I supposed to feel flattered by such a reputation?”
“Please let me finish.”
De Rham shrugged, as if the matter were of complete indifference to him.
“I want this man followed,” Gus repeated.
“You’ve already said that.”
Gus, sweating a bit, wished he had not come.
“Starting when?” asked Constantine, surprisingly.
“From the day of his release.”
“Where is the prison?”
“California.”
“Where in California?”
“Vacaville.”
“How long will you want him followed?”
“Indefinitely.”
“That sort of thing can prove very expensive.”
“I don’t care.”
“Have you thought of the police?”
“I don’t want the police.”
“Perhaps a private detective would be more what you wanted.”
“I don’t want a private detective either.”
“Is it possible you have something more in mind than merely following him?”
“Perhaps.”
“That sort of thing can be arranged from within.”
“I don’t want it to be arranged from within,” said Gus.
“What is the name of this man who haunts you, Mr. Bailey?”
“I didn’t say he haunted me, Mr. de Rham.”
“You didn’t have to, Mr. Bailey. I know an obsession when I see one.”
Gus laughed. “Hardly an obsession.”
“Hmm.” Constantine de Rham folded his arms and waited for Gus to answer.
“Flint. Francis Flint. He is called Lefty Flint,” said Gus, quietly, but a movement of his shoulders belied the sound of his voice.
“Even the sound of Mr. Flint’s name seems to upset you, Mr. Bailey.”
Gus looked at Constantine for a moment.
“What has this man done to you?”
Gus shook his head and waved his hands to indicate that he did not wish to discuss the matter.
Constantine watched him and then rose and walked toward the window. He pushed back the red velvet curtain he had just closed and looked out at the rain coming down on Sutton Place.
“I think I know someone who might be able to lead you to someone, as you put it.”
Constantine de Rham unlocked a drawer of the Boulle desk and withdrew a worn leather address book that he carried to the sofa, settling himself. As he slowly looked through the pages, he seemed interested only in a piece of skin on his thumb, which he tried first to twist off and then to bite off.
Yvonne Lupescu opened the door and entered without knocking. Her satin-and-lace negligee revealed the cleavage between her breasts.
“Finally Alexis Carrington has gotten her comeuppance!” she said, referring to the television series she had been watching. Both men turned to look at her, and she turned from Constantine to Gus, as if she had been unaware of his presence. “But, Constantine, I didn’t know you had a guest,” she cried, crossing her hands modestly over her breasts.
Gus rose to his feet. It was the first time that he had seen Yvonne Lupescu with her blond hair hanging loosely about her shoulders. They looked at each other.
“An unexpected visit, my dear, at this late hour. Mr. Bailey. Baroness Lupescu,” he said, making an introduction. “You remember, Yvonne. Mr. Bailey was not friendly toward us at Maisie’s parties.”
“Yes, yes, I remember. He and Matilda Clarke were speculating about me across the table,” said Yvonne.
Again Gus blushed.
“Ah, look at him, Constantine. He blushes. How smart you look, Mr. Bailey. Now let me guess: you’re going on to Mary Finch’s dance,” said Yvonne playfully.
“Correct.”
“Of course, we weren’t invited.”
“I’ve explained that to Mr. Bailey.”
“I don’t know Mr. Bailey’s first name, Constantine.”
“It’s Augustus,” said Gus.
“And, of course, they call you Gus. Or is it Gussy?”
“Gus.”
“That’s what I’m going to call you. Now, Gus, before you go off to Mrs. Finch’s, come into the library and drink a glass of champagne with Constantine and me.”
“No, no, thank you. I don’t drink, and I must be off, Mrs. Lupescu.”
“Leave your address,” said Constantine.
Gus leaned over and wrote it on a pad on the desk.
“I’ll see Mr. Bailey to the door, Constantine,” said Yvonne.
Mrs. Lupescu preceded Gus down the corridor.
“Tigers’ whiskers,” she said.
“Tigers’ whiskers?” repeated Gus, not understanding.
“Chopped very fine and mixed with food. The victim dies a few days later, and nobody can detect the cause.” She turned to him and smiled.
Gus realized she had listened to the conversation.
“Ah, but where does one fin
d tigers’ whiskers?” he asked, as if they were sharing a joke.
“That, of course, is the problem,” said Yvonne Lupescu. “Once, in Albania, my grandmother, who was the mistress of King Zog—”
Gus’s coat and umbrella, dried, had been left in the hallway. He again turned to the mirror and straightened the bow of his black tie.
“That’s not the way to tie a black tie,” said Yvonne, interrupting her story.
“What’s the matter with it?” asked Gus, fingering it on both sides.
“It’s entirely too lopsided. See? Too much tie on the left. Not enough on the right. Here, let me do it for you,” Yvonne said, untying his tie and standing close to him while she held each end, looking him squarely in the eye. “You start this way, with both sides even, and then you make a half bow on the right side, like this, and then you wrap the left side around the half bow, like this, and then you pull it through this hole, like this. Voilà.”
She moved even closer to him. Her breasts had become more exposed in the tying of his tie. Gus, embarrassed, blushed again.
“Do you want me to take care of that hard-on for you?” she whispered, smiling at him.
“No,” whispered Gus, looking back toward the door of Constantine’s den.
“Danger’s half the fan, Gus,” she said.
“I’m late.”
“What I have in mind won’t take a minute and a half.”
“That’s incredibly kind of you, but no, thank you,” said Gus, heading for the door.
“What do you want, Mr. Bailey?”
“I’d like to hear about King Zog and your grandmother some time,” said Gus. He opened the front door and left.
15
It was the same conversation that was going on everywhere for the few weeks that people were discussing the breakup of the Edward Potter Manchester marriage and the romance of Loelia Manchester and Mickie Minardos. It did not rivet Gus Bailey the way it riveted those who knew the principals better than Gus knew them, but by now Gus understood that these people were more interested in talking about themselves than any other topic.
“You see, it was all so well disguised, Gus. No one suspected a thing,” said Lil Altemus, settling back into her chair at Clarence’s. “I certainly didn’t and I, after all, am one of Loelia’s very best friends.”
Michael, the waiter with the ponytail, who was everyone’s favorite waiter at Clarence’s, came up to them and told them the specials. Lil never spoke directly to a waiter if she was dining with a man. “Tell him I’ll have the chicken paillard with some sort of green vegetable. Nothing first, and perhaps some of that marvelous Chilean wine, whatever-it’s-called, that they have here. Tell him to ask Chick Jacoby the name. Look, there’s Ezzie Fenwick.
“Anyway, Mickie Minardos made Loelia laugh. Mickie was a marvelous dancer, all that sort of thing, and we all know how Loelia loves to dance, and Ned, Ned always had two left feet when it came to dancing. But no one suspected for an instant that a romance was involved. Least of all poor Ned. Did you know that Ned was a cousin of mine on the Altemus side?
“But then, in Egypt, in Luxor, where they went to hear Aida sung at the pyramids, with people from everywhere who knew them, it was obvious to anyone with half a brain that they had progressed from giggling best friends to romantic lovers. It was my friend Gertie Todesco, poor Gertie, never could keep a secret, who spread the word, and what Loelia did, to make matters worse, was call Ned from Cairo, with a bad connection, and ask him for a divorce, after twenty-two years. Can you imagine? Is it any wonder that Ned is put out?”
Although Loelia Manchester was a rich woman in her own right, the bulk of the Somerset fortune, which was considerable, was controlled with an iron hand by Fernanda Somerset, Loelia’s mother, and Fernanda Somerset was fond of saying about herself that she understood money management like a man.
Loelia and Fernanda had always enjoyed the closest of mother-daughter relationships, and it was no secret that Fernanda took great pride in Loelia’s social accomplishments. She was, furthermore, greatly attached to her son-in-law, Edward Potter Manchester. Even though she found his constant talk of sport dull at times, she admired his country ways, especially as she spent more and more of her own time in the country, so she could be near Ned and Loelia’s children, on whom she doted, especially Bozzie, their teenage son.
Fernanda and her daughter lunched that day at a table set up in a corner of the room Fernanda called her garden room, with its antique bamboo furniture, orchid plants, and blue-and-white porcelain garden benches. A René Bouché portrait of Fernanda arranging flowers, wearing trousers and a straw hat, that had been painted thirty years before in this same room, dominated the wall behind her, reminding Loelia of how beautiful her mother had been. The topic that was the purpose of this country lunch had not been broached, although Loelia knew when she was summoned from the Rhinelander, where she now lived, by a note from her mother delivered by her chauffeur that the conversation she dreaded was at hand.
“Have you had another facelift?” Fernanda asked her daughter.
“Don’t you think it’s a good one?” Loelia replied.
“You didn’t need it.”
“Oh, but I did. It’s a new way Dr. James does it. He cuts up here on the scalp and then pulls it all back, and your hair covers all the scars. Too marvelous.”
“Your eyes look like they’re popping out of your head.”
“They do not!”
“They do. And your hair is much too blond.”
Loelia’s hands went to her hair, defensively. “Mickie likes it this color,” she said.
“I’m sure,” said Fernanda. “Stop taking food off my plate.”
“I’m not taking food off your plate.”
“You’ve taken two shrimp, half my roll, and now you’ve scooped up a spoonful of my cheese soufflé.”
Loelia, nervous, pushed back her bamboo chair from the table, and it made an unpleasant screeching sound on the terrazzo floor of the garden room. “Mother, why are you being so cranky with me?” she asked. For an instant she thought she was going to cry.
“Let’s get down to brass tacks, Loelia. What is going on in your life?” asked Fernanda.
“I’m going to marry Mickie Minardos,” said Loelia.
“What a grotesque announcement,” said her mother.
“I didn’t think I’d hear that from you, Mother!”
“Yes, you did. You knew perfectly well that was what you were going to hear from me. Isn’t this man younger than you?”
“Yes.”
“How many years?”
“Ten.”
“He’s a gigolo.”
“He is the most successful shoe designer in the world.”
Fernanda shook her head impatiently. A shoe designer was not a person who was going to impress Fernanda Somerset, no matter how successful he was.
“Someday he is going to design for the theater and the ballet,” insisted Loelia.
“A lady can take her chauffeur to bed, but she can’t take him out to dinner, Loelia,” said Fernanda. “I’m surprised you of all people don’t understand that.”
“How incredibly unkind that is, Mother.”
“You’re going to be kicked out of the Social Register if you marry this man.”
“You know that means nothing to me.”
Fernanda looked at her daughter, whose greatest achievement had been as a figure in society, and disbelieved her.
“What do you know about his family?”
“His father is a banker,” said Loelia proudly, playing her trump card, to prove that her fiancé was not a fortune hunter.
The flowered uniform on the maid who came in carrying demitasse cups matched the flowered tablecloth and the flowered napkins of the luncheon table. “Just leave the coffee there, Adoración, and don’t bother to clear,” said Fernanda to the maid, waving her off.
“You know, Loelia. There are Greeks and Greeks, and none of the Greeks we know, like Stavros an
d Christina and Alecco, have ever heard of the family of Mickie Minardos.”
“I don’t care,” said Loelia quietly.
“I do,” replied her mother, just as quietly.
Fernanda Somerset was not an impractical woman. She understood the callings of sexual desire and recognized it as that in her daughter’s attachment to Mickie Minardos. She had herself briefly enjoyed a discreet indiscretion during the time her husband had engaged in his affair with Matilda Clarke. When the affair ended, after Sweetzer came out of the alcoholic institution in Minnesota where he had lingered for six months, both marriages resumed into the companionship that all successful marriages become, with neither the children having to suffer the trauma of divorce, nor the Somerset fortune having been dissipated as it would have been by divorce.
“Take a trip with your Greek,” said Fernanda. “And when it’s over, as it will be over, come back to your husband and children. Ned will wait for you. He loves you.”
“I’m going to marry Mickie Minardos.”
“You have crushed your family.”
“Help me, Mother.”
“No, I won’t help you, Loelia. And there is something else I have to remind you of, though I had hoped that I would not have to.”
“Money, I suppose,” said Loelia, picking up her things, as an indication of leaving.
“Yes, money. What you have is all you’re ever going to have, if you go through with this, Loelia.”
Loelia Manchester was horrified when she learned from her lawyer a week later that Ned had asked for half her fortune before he would agree to the divorce she wanted so much, so that she could be free to marry Dimitri Minardos. Ned Manchester was already rich, although not as rich as Loelia, and it was uncharacteristic of him to ask for money from a woman. In the years of their marriage, he had never shown any sign of avarice. Loelia knew immediately that her mother had joined forces with Ned to block the divorce, as neither he nor her mother wanted Loelia to leave him.
Loelia had countered with an offer of half as much as he had asked, but Ned, again through the lawyers, had turned down her offer and declared that he was sticking to his guns. All her friends told Loelia that Ned was acting the way he was because he was so hurt and didn’t want a divorce at all and certainly didn’t want her money, but none of that information was of any comfort to Loelia. She had given herself up to a passion she had never experienced before and wanted to marry Dimitri Minardos more than anything else in the world. Of course her children had to be considered and proprieties to be observed. She had moved out of the beautiful Manchester apartment, leaving behind everything but her clothes, and moved into a large suite in the Rhinelander Hotel, where everyone they knew who was getting a divorce moved. Her friends consoled her with lovely baskets of flowers, and needlepoint pillows, and scented candles, and pieces of china to use for ashtrays to make the suite more homelike, and Lil Altemus, who didn’t even approve of the romance with Mickie, lent her pictures to hang on her walls after she confessed to Lil that she found the hotel pictures too dreary for words.
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