We landed in a dark corridor, and I kept banging into boxes and abandoned bedposts; we must have stumbled upon Kensington’s secret storage bin. The detective had his own flashlight, his little torch, and he led me on a merry chase until he stopped in his own tracks, knocked on a door, said, “It’s me, Ma’am,” and let me into a room as large as a barrack, but this barrack was cleared of debris. It had Chippendale dressers and chairs, armoires and mirrors laden with chinoiserie, and a bed with pink pillowcases and a pink coverlet. The princess sat on this coverlet in a black silk slip. She was biting into her black cigarette holder while she stared at the vault-like ceiling of her own royal barrack. Her skin was deliciously pale, her arms plump as a white peach. But I wasn’t blind to the purpose of this place. It was where Ma’am held all her trysts. The princess couldn’t rent a room in Notting Hill or Earls Court to meet her lovers. But why had I been summoned here? We weren’t in the midst of some splendid, impossible passion. We hadn’t even begun the least little dalliance, except for the fact that she had rubbed my cheek under the royal tent.
Finally she looked down from the ceiling. Her blue eyes were dead.
“Dickie, is that you?”
“No, Ma’am,” muttered the detective. “Dickie’s in Argentina. You sent him away, remember? He stole from you and your niece, cropped a necklace from the Queen Mother. I had to dislocate his shoulder to get it all back.”
She laughed, and her eyes grew alert with a sudden wisp of memory.
“Yes. ‘The loot,’ you called it. ‘We have to get back the loot.’ But you never smile, Burroughs. Not even when we have our victory. And whom have you brought, Mr. B.? Some stud from Sadler’s Wells? A professional gigolo you found in the street?”
“No, Ma’am. It’s Little Ian. You asked for him yourself.”
“Archie Diggers’ boy?” She clapped her hands. “I command you, Burroughs. Bring him here, else you’ll forfeit life and limb.”
“Why not forfeit my life and limb?” I asked, without moving an inch closer to Margaret.
We were far enough away from the bed so that Burroughs could whisper, “Careful, my son. Ma’am has one of her migraines.”
He seized the scruff of my pants and carried me like a parcel over to the bed. The spectacle must have amused her.
“Burroughs, you may go now. I’m sure to be safe around Little Ian.”
“But suppose he steals the crown jewels, Ma’am?”
“I’m his crown jewel,” she said. “And Little Ian has my permission to steal me.”
The detective sulked and crept like a panther out the door.
“I won’t bite,” Ma’am said while beckoning me to sit beside her. Her bed was strewn with books. And it was no light summer reading list. I recognized Lolita, Mrs. Dalloway, and Being There.
“Ma’am, did you fall in love with Mr. Chance?”
Her eyebrows knit, royal eyebrows that had never been plucked or penciled in. She bit into her black holder; there wasn’t even the trace of a cigarette at the other end. I must have puzzled the princess. Her eyebrows knit again.
“Don’t jolly me, Little Ian. I’m not in the mood. I cannot recollect meeting Mr. Chance.”
“He’s the gardener in Kosinski’s book.”
“Glorious,” she said. “That Mr. Chance. Lilibet lent the book to me. She has no time to read. She has to hunt deer in her favorite forest and meet with the prime minister. She’s always conspiring with her ministers. I have my own spies at Windsor, you know, even if I am a penniless princess who has to rely on Lilibet for her allowance. And what am I now? A harlot, with poor Burroughs as my pimp.”
Ma’am reached over and slapped my face.
“Don’t you dare pity me. I will not allow it. . . . I told Lilibet about that gardener, said she would have a few jollies reading the book. But you are fiendishly clever to ask, Ian. I do have a terrible crush on the gardener. Both of us grew up behind a glass wall, watching other people cavort. When I married Tony, I rode to my wedding in a glass carriage, the little girl of glass who could watch Lilibet’s subjects watching me. I wished to God that I could shatter before the wedding took place. . . . Are you appalled that Mr. Burroughs kidnapped you?”
“He didn’t kidnap me,” I said.
“He most certainly did. Those were his exact instructions. ‘Uproot Ian from wherever he is and bring him to the slut of Kensington Palace. Discretion advised, but use force if necessary.’ I am shameful, Ian, am I not?”
“Yes.”
“I ought to be spanked. Will you spank me, Ian?”
“No,” I said. “I will not spank you, Ma’am.”
“Will you make love to me, then? It’s purely medicinal. Rutting with a man is a remedy for migraines.”
She looked away from me during that little speech. Her lower lip was trembling. I wanted to touch her, take Ma’am in my arms, drink the salt from her eyes, but I didn’t dare. I had no silly dream of riding in a glass carriage and becoming the duke of Kensington Gardens. I’d been in love with this royal wench since I was a child and saw her in the movies with her gas mask. But it wasn’t so simple a matter to rut with Margaret Rose for medicinal purposes.
“Damn you, Ian. Do I have to beg? I fancy you. Isn’t that enough?”
Margaret slid out from under the straps of her slip—Lord help us, she was white as milk. Ma’am never moved once, never stirred, as I rose above her. Then her eyebrows suddenly knit, her entire torso swayed, she screamed like a little girl startled by the sound of her own delight, licked my face once, and fell fast asleep.
BURROUGHS WAS WAITING for me outside Ma’am’s door in his bowler hat. We plunged into the bowels of Kensington Palace again, and exited from a different gate. He had no more sympathy for me than he might have had for a worm.
“If you show up at the front gate asking for Ma’am, my son, you’ll not have a very long life. You are to forget about this excursion, remove it from your mind.”
I had to devil him, get under that smug mask of his. “What if Ma’am should ever ask for a repeat performance?”
He snorted at me. “Ma’am never asked for you. You were the first available lad I could find. She’s in a haze when she has her headaches. I was pleased that she could come out of it long enough to remember your name. And if you try some funny stuff, like extortion, my son, Special Branch will put you on the next plane. Show me your pockets.”
That miserable detective patted me down smack in the middle of the palace garden. I felt like a convict.
“Tell me what you’re looking for, Burroughs, and I might be able to help.”
“Duke of Verdura diamonds,” he said. “The last one of Ma’am’s admirers stole a Verdura brooch in the shape of a camel’s back. Took me a year to track it down. But I wouldn’t expect an uncouth lad of your nature to comprehend the duke of Verdura. He was an aristocrat from Palermo who never designed for Philistines, never sought fame. When you wear a Verdura, you wear it for life.”
He delivered me to the Dorchester in Ma’am’s Rolls-Royce and sent my carcass out the car door.
— 5 —
I MIGHT HAVE RUN TO THE PALACE and shouted “Margaret, Margaret” from the princess’s lawn, but it was Sellers who saved me. He had read in some London rag that Ma’am Darling had listed Chauncey Gardiner as “the most delightful character I have ever met in a novel, after Mr. Micawber and Sancho Panza.”
And so he dispatched me to the States to meet with Jerzy Kosinski and convince him to offer Pete the chance to play Chauncey Gardiner. It was like a curious game of cat and mouse, where I was the mouse who had to court Kosinski. Every time I called, he said, “You again? The pest who belongs to Inspector Clouseau.”
But after the fifth or sixth call, he took some pity and gave me an appointment. He lived near Carnegie Hall in a two-room flat that was like an animal’s lair with a bit of light. And I wasn’t startled at all to discover that he resembled a dapper bird of prey, with piercing dark eyes and a prominent beak.
/>
I hadn’t been idle. While he kept me on a string, I devoured The Painted Bird, the novel that had helped create Kosinski. It was utterly removed from Being There, a book with a disembodied voice that could have crept out of a machine. Being There was a perfect vehicle for Mr. Chance, who lived in another man’s hats and suits and had no discernible history other than the reflection in his eyes from flickerings on a little screen. But the anonymous boy who narrates The Painted Bird is awash in the muck of human history. His voice has a cruel, relentless beat. He’s six years old at the beginning of the novel. It’s 1939, and we’re in an Eastern European country that has just been occupied by the German war machine. The little boy comes from a large town, where he had a privileged life, with a nanny and lots of books. His parents have sent him to a remote village away from the war. But the woman who was meant to care for him dies after two months and the boy is suddenly adrift. He looks like a Gypsy, or a Jew, with his dark eyes and olive skin, but is surrounded by blond, blue-eyed peasants who cannot read or write and call him “the Black One,” akin to the devil.
The boy endures a pandemonium of punishments as he wanders from one remote village to the next. He’s beaten many times, left to drown in an ice hole, hung from the rafters of a barn, with a murderous dog baying at his feet; petrified after being thrown into a manure pit, he loses the power of speech. The only ones who are ever kind to him are monsters of a sort, outcasts like himself, the disfigured and the damned: a half-witted bird catcher; a voluptuous giant of a woman, Stupid Ludmilla, who lost her reason after being raped by a gang of drunken peasants; and Ewka, a skinny farmer’s daughter with a goiter growing on her neck, who reveals to him all the curious perfume and spit of lovemaking; but the boy feels betrayed by Ewka, after he catches her coupling with a goat.
Yet this goiter girl’s fascination with a goat troubled me far less than the image of a painted bird. Lekh, the bird catcher, who was in love with Ludmilla, liked to paint one of his prize birds in all the colors of a rainbow and send it back into its flock; the other birds would stare at this decorated creature, refuse to recognize it as one of their own, fall into a rage, and peck it to death. The little boy also sees himself as a changeling who has to avoid being pecked to death by his own kind.
And so when he is reunited with his parents at the end of the war, they feel as foreign to him as the blue-eyed peasants. He has remained a bird-boy, a freak, with savagery as his own real education; he himself is forever secretive and cruel, with cunning as his protective color. And the Mr. K. I met in his dark Manhattan lair was a grown-up replica of that bird-boy.
The lucky ones, like Kosinski, had survived the war through subterfuge and by adopting the cruel tricks of their tormenters until it was a kind of second skin. And this was the skin that Kosinski chose to wear with his blue blazer. The author of The Painted Bird greeted me with the cockiness and clipped accent of an SS captain.
“Tell your master that Mr. Chance is all mine—who are you? What do you want from me?”
“Nothing,” I said. “I’m a fool on a fool’s errand.”
“Where are you from?”
“Nowhere,” I said.
His voice softened, and the SS captain suddenly went into hiding somewhere. Mr. K. invited me to sit down, but there was precious little place to sit. His lair was cluttered with cameras and tripods and other paraphernalia. He offered me vodka from his fridge but wouldn’t drink with me, and I had to slurp my Stolichnaya all alone.
“Alcohol is poisonous to my system. The first drink could be fatal. You’d have to call an ambulance. . . . Tell me your name again.”
“Little Ian.” That’s what Pete and Princess Margaret and her detective in the bowler hat loved to call me.
But the bird-boy in the blue blazer was a whole jump ahead of Pete.
“Little Ian Diggers, whose grandfather was the holy terror of the London docks.”
I began to stutter, and I had never stuttered before.
“My grandfather isn’t even known in the United States. Who t-t-t-told you about him?”
“Peter Sellers,” he said like a mountebank, or a hissing snake that had delivered me into a trap. “Your master was quite explicit. He phoned me twice yesterday, talked about your esteemed grandfather, said you yourself were homicidal when you did not get what you wanted. You’re Sellers’ slave . . . and his attack dog.”
“Like Judas,” I said.
Kosinski smiled; that smile was much more sinister, and much more cold, than the carapace of an SS captain. Judas was the name of the devil dog that had nearly bitten off the little boy’s legs in The Painted Bird.
“Comrade, I can see that I’ll have to be twice as careful with you now, or you’ll use my own words against me. But your master was clever in his own stupid way. He’d roused my interest, not in him, or his obsession with Mr. Chance. My gardener is a gaunt man, not a fat, four-eyed comedian. But I had to know if you had inherited your grandfather’s violence. My hand was shaking when the doorman announced you. Not out of fear, but excitement. I wanted to learn what our chance encounter would bring.”
“Then I’ll probably disappoint you,” I said. “I’m not violent, and I’m not sure that my grandfather was. I think he used violence as a technique to stun his enemies on the docks into obeying his commands. He killed when he had to kill. I suspect he was rather cerebral.”
“As real assassins are. They kill with economy. The rest are commonplace, and not worthy of our time. But I’d be willing to bet that you have the complicated clockwork of a killer. And if the right occasion arose . . .”
I didn’t have a minute to catch my breath. He invited me to a cocktail party given by Senator Lionel Jaspers, the last great liberal Republican in Manhattan’s sea of sharks. Without the Democratic machine to bind him up in corrupting cables and cords, he had the aura of a saint. Besides, he had a wife who could dazzle most men. She was a Polish Scheherazade from the Lower East Side who had been born into great poverty and had married a political prince. Together, Jaspers and his beautiful witch of a wife ruled over Manhattan’s high culture. There wasn’t an emerging young playwright, dancer, novelist, painter, architect, or musician who hadn’t been celebrated at their table. They had a penthouse on Park Avenue that was the most selective salon in Manhattan. Annabelle (née Anita) Jaspers was seldom seen at Senator Jaspers’ Georgetown “palace.” She preferred the electrical storm of Manhattan; and the senator, despite his brutal schedule, preferred to be with his Scheherazade.
I wasn’t surprised that Annabelle had adopted Jerzy Kosinksi, had welcomed him into her entourage. No American novelist could ever have had Kosinski’s éclat. He owned the authentic stink of Mittel Europe, had survived the Holocaust as a bird-boy who had lost the power to sing or fly. But I didn’t belong at Annabelle’s salon.
“I’m Sellers’ slave. You said so yourself. Annabelle’s butler won’t even let me through the door. And I have nothing to wear. I’m not dressed right for a band of cultural barracudas.”
“Shush! You can be my date.”
He disappeared into a closet and came out with a double-breasted Prince of Wales coat that must have cost a fortune. He insisted that I wear the coat.
“You’ll be smashing,” he said.
I looked in the mirror and all I saw was another bird-boy.
— 6 —
IT WAS THE MOST EXCLUSIVE ADDRESS on the planet: 740 Park Avenue, so exclusive that sometimes it was masked by another address, 71 East 71st Street, where the building had another entrance. Jacqueline Kennedy had spent her childhood here, together with a cornucopia of tycoons. When it was no longer fashionable to have a mansion on Fifth Avenue, millionaires moved their “mansions” indoors to 740 Park, with fountains and marble staircases and duplexes with twelve full baths and twenty-five rooms, according to Kosinski.
He puffed out his chest and boasted that he had once lived at 740 Park. I didn’t believe him. I couldn’t reconcile his bat cave with some apartment as big as a b
owling alley. But when we got there, the building’s slew of doormen accosted him as if he were their own lost king. Not one of them called upstairs to Scheherazade: they didn’t have to announce the coming of Jerzy Kosinski.
And he was greeted like a king by Annabelle and her guests, half of whom had the hawkish look of hunger artists. I tried not to stare at Annabelle. My awkwardness must have amused her. Scheherazade smiled. She was succulent in her black dress. There was no other way to describe her. She had curly brown hair, with ringlets over one eye, and a sultry, pouting look reminiscent of Claudia Cardinale. But the senator’s wife reminded me of someone else—Stupid Ludmilla in The Painted Bird, before she had been raped by a gang of louts and lost her mind. Annabelle and Ludmilla had the same ripe flesh, I imagined, with a musk that could dizzy a man.
But Scheherazade had guzzled too much champagne at her own salon; she swayed in front of us while she squinted at me.
“Jurek,” she growled, “who is this boy?”
“My Boswell,” Kosinski said.
Nothing registered in her enormous myopic eyes. “Which Boswell? Does he dance for Balanchine?”
“He’s my biographer, Nita darling. He’s writing a book about me. I met him at Yale. Professor Diggers. But you mustn’t flirt with Ian.”
“Flirt?” she said with a ferocious laugh. “I never flirt.”
She stole me from Kosinski and plowed across the living room with her arm around my waist, and paraded me like some magnificent monster from Yale, where Kosinski himself had been made a fellow at one of the colleges, a few years after The Painted Bird was published.
“Meet Jurek’s Boswell,” she said. “A famous biographer. He’s working on a book about our dark-eyed wonder. He’ll crucify me, I’m sure, turn me into a notorious nymphomaniac, and poor Lionel will be drummed out of the Senate.”
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