Gus studied the look on Peter’s face and immediately realized he didn’t want to know whatever news his lawyer had to impart. There was a tremendously awkward sort of expression taking hold as Peter opened his mouth to speak.
“Gus, these two men Perla hired—well, they’ve told Win Burch a very distressing story about you. I’m embarrassed to have to repeat it to you.”
Gus felt a lump forming in his throat.
“What?”
“They said some documents have come into their possession that allege you molested a young boy when you were staying at the Hôtel du Palais. Supposedly there is a maid who says she walked in on you.”
Gus, stunned, stared at Peter. “But that’s not true,” he said quickly. “No such thing happened. No such thing has ever happened. That’s based on an old rumor that someone tried to start about me when he didn’t like how he was depicted in one of my books. It never got off the ground because it was so absurd. That’s exactly the kind of ruinous story that Perla Zacharias would spread, and she’s got enough money and power to make people pay attention this time around.”
Gus could feel the adrenaline rushing through his body. His fingers began to tremble.
“I know it’s not true,” Peter replied immediately.
“It’s not,” Gus repeated.
“Listen, Gus—I think Win Burch knows it’s not true, but he’s going to bring it up in the deposition, which is being videotaped and will be available to the media.”
“Dear God,” said Gus, covering his face with his hands. “This is the sort of story you can never live down.”
Collecting himself, Gus sat upright. His defeated expression was replaced with a new one of determination. He recrossed his legs and crossed his arms smartly.
With each thought Gus grew angrier.
“Call the manager of the Hôtel du Palais. His name is Valentino Piazzi. He used to be at the Ritz in Paris. He knows me. Ask Valentino if a maid made a report on this incident to the manager of the hotel at the time. Or has she just suddenly remembered this?”
Peter waved down Gus’s directives.
“It’s a form of extortion,” he said calmly. “They think you’ll settle quickly rather than go through the deposition, knowing that the story will be out.”
Then Peter paused for a moment, leaning back in his leather chair.
“Gus, there’s other gossip about you. Gossip that, unlike this preposterous story, might be closer to the truth. You must know that.”
Gus sighed, looking down at the striped tie that he’d bought for himself at the Turnbull & Asser shop just a few days earlier.
“I do, yes. It’s very old gossip, however.”
The room grew silent but for the distant sound of cars honking on the streets below.
“Probably true, whatever you’ve heard,” Gus added as casually as he could.
“Heard?” Peter inquired.
“Oh you know, that I’m deep within the closet.”
Peter shifted uneasily in his chair and nodded.
“Well, maybe I am … in the closet. So what? What you haven’t heard is that I’ve been celibate for almost twenty years. Such a relief, celibacy. That should read well in Toby Tilden’s column after Win Burch plants it.”
“Gus, you didn’t have to tell me all this,” said Peter.
“Yes, I did. Actually, I feel quite relieved having said it. I’m beyond eighty, you know. Mustn’t have any more secrets. Can’t die with a secret, you know. I’m nervous about the kids, even though they’re middle-aged men now. Not that they don’t already know. I just never talk about it. It’s been a lifelong problem.”
Gus got up and walked to the window of the small conference room where they were meeting. He looked down at the street twenty-seven floors below. Peter could see that he took a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his eyes. All his life Gus had dreaded leveling with his children on that topic.
“You have no idea how wonderful my sons have been,” he said, tearing up. “If I still drank, I’d order a martini right now. Straight up with a twist. And I’d light up a joint at the same time.”
“Gus, I’ve always heard great things about your sons. And your sexuality should have nothing to do with this extortion plot. Please don’t lose sleep over it. Do you want to postpone this rehearsal for the deposition?” asked Peter.
Gus turned around and managed a smile.
“No, let’s get back to work. There’s no way I’m going to be blackmailed into a settlement.”
“I thought you always wanted to settle from the beginning.”
“I did, but not this way,” said Gus. “I’ve gotten tough in my old age, Peter.”
“I like to see you pissed off,” said Peter. “It adds color to your face.”
CHAPTER 24
THAT NIGHT GUS ARRIVED HOME FROM PETER Lombardo’s office and pulled his laptop from the other side of his bed to write in his diary before he went to sleep.
It’s really very strange that Perla Zacharias should turn up as she has, in yet another area of my life, in conjunction with the lawsuit for slander that was brought against me by former congressman Kyle Cramden. So odd that her investigators should give false information about me to the man who is suing me.
One of the things that stands out most in my mind about Perla is how she emerged triumphantly from the courthouse after the American nurse, Floyd McArthur, was found guilty of setting the fire that caused the deaths of Perla’s fourth husband, Konstantin Zacharias, and one of his eight nurses, Flora Perez, who perished with him from smoke inhalation. Like the superb actress that she is, Perla stopped briefly for the photographers, as Simon Cabot had instructed her. Her face was solemn. She deflected the questions of the reporters with a sad smile and shake of her head, as if the tragedy was too painful to discuss, indicating that she would not be taking any questions. When she turned to signal her secretary to alert her chauffeur to pull up the SUV, her eyes met mine for an instant. That was when I became a participant in the story, not just a reporter. I was standing in the crowd of reporters staring at her. For a brief moment her eyes hardened. She hates me, I thought. It was I who made her famous. Famous is what she has always wanted to be. Actually, I suppose I made her infamous.
GUS TELEPHONED the real estate tycoon Maisie Verdurin, who was having another of her famous dinner parties for sixty, where nearly every guest was a person of accomplishment in the world of media and money in New York.
“Maisie, it’s Gus.” Years earlier, way back in the fifties when they were all young, before she had become a full-fledged real estate agent, Maisie had found Gus and his late former wife, Peach, their first apartment in New York after their marriage. Years later, after Gus moved back to New York following his Hollywood career, he became a regular at Maisie’s dinner parties.
“You’re not calling to back out on me again, are you, Gus? I’m going to be furious with you.” said Maisie. “Last time I had you seated next to Baroness de Liagra from Paris, and you backed out at ten minutes of eight, as I remember.”
“No, Maisie, I’m not backing out. I’m coming. I promise. Best conversation in town is at your tables. But I need a favor from you,” said Gus.
“What?”
“Who are you seating me next to?”
“I’m just doing the place cards now. I can’t give you the baroness again. She’s in Paris.”
“I hear she wears a monocle,” said Gus. “Very Violet Trefusis.”
“Who’s Violet Trefusis?”
“A famous lesbian of her day.”
“Let’s not have that conversation,” said Maisie, and they both laughed.
Suddenly Gus’s voice turned serious. “Listen, Maisie. Is Lil Altemus coming?”
“I always have Lil,” said Maisie. “She classes up the joint.”
“Will you seat me next to Lil and put Addison Kent on the other side of her and somebody’s wife with no glamour or chitchat next to him, so that Addison will ignore her and overhear
a story that I’m going to tell Lil about Perla Zacharias?” asked Gus.
“May I ask what this is all about?” asked Maisie, her curiosity piqued. If she was going to rearrange her table for him, she felt it was only right that Gus Bailey tell her exactly what he was up to.
“Lil’s getting a little hard of hearing, so I can raise my voice. I want Addison to repeat the story to Perla. It’s very important to me that Perla hears, and Addison will probably go directly into the bathroom and call Perla on his cell phone.”
“As the hostess of the evening, am I allowed to know what the story is all about?” asked Maisie.
“It has to do with some letters in my possession that Perla wrote in English in her own handwriting to her mysterious third husband that no one talks about,” said Gus. “One letter in particular could be very embarrassing.”
“I’ll go along with that. I found Perla a buyer for her villa right on the Bay of Biscay in Biarritz, which she put up for sale after the trial. I got her seven hundred million. At the time, it was more than had ever been paid for a house in that area,” said Maisie. “Richest man in Russia.”
“What happened?”
“She didn’t want to pay me my commission. She thought the honor of selling her villa would bring me a lot of real estate publicity. All that money and she’s trying to cheat me out of my commission. I screwed it up for her. I told my Russian billionaire buyer that it was a bad-luck house, that everyone who had ever owned it had come to a bad end, which wasn’t altogether untrue. I sold him another house, just as big, in Cap Ferrat. Yes, of course I’ll seat you next to Lil, who’s getting deaf, and seat Addison Kent next to Lil. It’ll liven up the party. Now I have to figure out whose wife has no glamour or chitchat for the other side of Addison. Oh, Mrs. Luby. Sylvia Luby. She’d be perfect.”
“See you at eight,” said Gus.
“OH, GUS, I’m so happy that you’re seated next to me,” said Lil. She was wearing her Van Degan pearls that she could not bear to sell, even though she needed the money so badly. “Maisie is so good at seating her tables. It’s nice to have an old friend like you.” She whispered into his ear, “I’m wearing a new hearing aid for the first time, and I don’t want anyone to know. What scandalous thing are you writing about now?”
“I’m in possession of photocopies of sixteen love letters Perla wrote in English in her own handwriting to that third husband of hers, the mystery husband no one knows anything about, the one she paid to marry her as a ruse to get Konstantin Zacharias to pursue her again after his brothers talked him out of marrying her the first time.”
“Be careful to my left,” said Lil, pointing her head in Addison’s direction. “Biggest mouth in town and Perla’s walker.”
“The actual letters are in a safe-deposit box in New York, which only I and one other person have access to. I didn’t seek out the letters or pay for them. I never met the third husband. Some very revealing things come out in a few of them.”
“Like what?
“Like what her baby brother—her half brother that she doesn’t want anyone to know about, by the way—told the counselor at the drug rehab center in Johannesburg she put him in about the mysterious death of her second husband, from whom she inherited two hundred and thirty million of her first fortune. That is certainly going in my book. You know they ruled it a suicide, but he was shot—twice in the heart. This is just another thing I need to investigate.”
“Gus, you do lead such an interesting life. Secret letters. Being followed. And that man in the gray flannel suit in your room at Claridge’s whom you told me about over dinner some months back.”
“I keep thinking of that guy too. Wondering what he was doing in my room,” said Gus. “Maybe he was after my laptop, or maybe he was planting some drugs to get me in some kind of media trouble.”
“Didn’t you tell me you saw that same man at the auction of Perla Zacharias’s Fabergé eggs at Boothby’s?”
“Yes. I believe he’s in her employ. I’ve become quite fearful of him.”
Addison, leaning in close to Lil to listen to her conversation with Gus about Perla’s letters, accidentally knocked over his glass of red wine.
“Addison, for god’s sake!” exclaimed Lil, her hands thrown up in disgust. “You spilled your red wine all over my dress. Why are you leaning in so close to me?”
“Oh, Lil, I am sorry,” said Addison. “Just leave your dress in a shopping bag with your doorman and I will pick it up in the morning. I know exactly the right cleaners for red wine. You’ll never be able to tell.”
“This dress is practically falling apart, it’s so old,” said Lil, dabbing futilely at the stain with her napkin. “It’s from Bill Blass’s last collection. I offered it to the Costume Institute at the Met, but Anna turned it down, and now it’s ruined.”
Addison shook his head in a feigned display of sympathy and then, after a few respectful beats, he shot out of his chair, nearly knocking it over in the process, and ran to find a private spot from which he could call the third richest woman in the world and update her about these disturbing developments.
CHAPTER 25
RUBY RENTHAL SAT IN A CORNER OF ELIAS’S HOSPITAL room on the VIP floor of the Adele Harcourt Pavilion reading the latest issue of Park Avenue magazine, with Gus Bailey’s article on Adele Harcourt’s funeral, while Elias, still in a comatose state, slept on. From the beginning of his coma, she had talked to him and read to him from the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times. “Of course he can hear me,” she said over and over to the nurses, when they expressed their doubt that Elias could hear anything she was saying. If it’s about money, he can hear it, she thought, as always, but no longer said aloud. Only Tammi Jo, her favorite nurse, agreed with Ruby that Elias could hear and understand, even though he was in a coma. Tammi Jo, fat and funny, always managed to work it into the conversation that she had gone to nursing school with Floyd McArthur, the male nurse in prison in Biarritz for killing Konstantin Zacharias. “Oh, I knew Floyd McArthur,” said Tammi Jo, after reading Gus Bailey’s article on the trial in Biarritz. “Strange guy, but kind of a healer in a way. He had this magical touch with sick babies. No way did he kill Konstantin Zacharias.” Ruby loved that news and couldn’t wait to tell it to Elias after he came out of the coma. Tammi Jo was the only one Ruby told that the best dry cleaner on the Upper East Side of New York couldn’t get the asparagus and urine smell out of the sable cuffs on her brand-new eleven-thousand-dollar Karl Lagerfeld suit that she had only worn once, at Adele Harcourt’s funeral on the day of her husband’s stroke. Baroness de Liagra was going to take it back to Paris so that Lagerfeld could replace the sable on the cuffs. Tammi Jo was spellbound by stories of Ruby’s kind of life. She didn’t even mind when Ruby complained that she felt it necessary to carry her packages in plain shopping bags, as some of the women in society were doing these days so as not to flaunt their wealth too much while the country was sobered by a recession: “What’s the point of having it if you don’t get to flaunt it? I’m helping the economy by buying ridiculously expensive things!” Tammi Jo knew a good gig when she saw one. She wanted to leave the Adele Harcourt Pavilion and go to live in the big mansion on East Seventy-eighth Street during Elias’s long convalescence ahead and eat Gert’s gourmet dinners and fig mousse in the servants’ dining room, along with Jenny, Ruby’s secretary; Blondell, her maid, who had previously worked for Adele Harcourt; Jacques, her chauffeur; and George, her butler, who had been Adele Harcourt’s butler.
Ruby called over to Elias whenever she read something she thought he would be interested in. “You won’t believe this, Elias. It’s a good thing you’re still out of it, I suppose. Gus Bailey writes in his diary in Park Avenue about Adele Harcourt’s funeral. He quotes ‘New York aristocrat’ Lillian Van Degan Altemus saying, ‘That ex-convict ruined poor darling Adele’s funeral, after she gave her fortune to the city of New York.’ That’s so typical of Lil, isn’t it? She’s broke, you know. She takes the Madison Avenue b
us these days. Her stepmother got all the Van Degan money. The stepmother, who’s twenty-five years younger than Lil, lives with a gayette who works in a funeral parlor. Oh, how the mighty have fallen. Elias and I know a thing or two about the mighty falling.”
“Go on reading Gus Bailey’s article to Mr. Renthal,” said Tammi Jo. “That should wake him up.”
Ruby glanced over at Elias.
“‘All of the great names of New York society gathered on the stairway of the Butterfield Club to watch the financier Elias Renthal be taken out on a gurney.’ I wonder how Gus knew how much your suit from Huntsman on Savile Row cost. He writes that you urinated all over your brand-new six-thousand-dollar suit when you had the stroke in the men’s room of the Butterfield. He writes that he just happened to be in the men’s room at the same time.” She read on to herself with a surprised look on her face. “Hey, Elias. I never knew you pointed your finger in Gus’s face and kept saying, ‘They’re going to get you. They’re going to get you.’ No wonder you had a stroke! I didn’t know Gus put towels under your head when he went to find me. I didn’t know he covered your privates, so you wouldn’t be embarrassed when they photographed you. I know you don’t like Gus Bailey, but he never once wrote that we crashed Adele Harcourt’s funeral reception. He said there was a mix-up on the list.”
There was a knock on the door and an orderly carried in an enormous orchid plant. There was no space large enough to put it down. Tammi Jo, who always had a solution, knew of a metal medical table near the ladies’ room down the hall and directed the orderly where to find it before someone else took it. Ruby knew even before she opened the card who had sent the orchid plant from Brucie’s flower shop in the rear of the Rhinelander Hotel. She even knew it cost a thousand dollars.
“Elias, I wish you could get a look at the size of this orchid plant that Perla Zacharias has just sent you. It’s like something they’d have at a memorial service at St. Ignatius Loyola.”
Too Much Money Page 20