“In case?”
“Just in case. A dealer and the people he sells to. That’s what I’m after, Sue. And that’s what I’d better get. We’re all equally concerned, aren’t we? I’ll be hearing from you, one way or the other, won’t I?” The smile in Rocco’s voice grew deeper.
“Sure thing. Absolutely. You can count on it. One way or the other. Oh, and thanks for calling, Mr. Cipriani.”
“It’s always nice to talk to you,” Rocco said pleasantly. “A dealer, Sue, and the people he sells to.”
Rocco spent the morning making four similar phone calls to the four other agencies who had supplied the models for the bathing-suit story. All of them did a great deal of business with CL&K. He got the same set of resolutely negative answers but by five in the afternoon he had a longer list of names than he had anticipated and behind the scenes at five agencies a lot of very worried executives were consulting each other. This sort of thing wasn’t supposed to be going on except at other agencies, they told each other. They could afford to lose CL&K’s business if it came to that, but none of them could afford a scandal in the modeling industry. They had given Rocco every name they could pry or threaten out of their male models and their bookers, as well as the names of every model they had had vague suspicions about themselves. But exactly what had Cipriani meant by a “pre-police action”? they wondered. And why had he been so uncharacteristically pleasant? So terrifyingly mild?
Two days later Rocco telephoned Maxi at her office.
“Justin’s in the clear, Maxi. I thought you’d like to know. All charges have been dropped.”
“Rocco! Are you sure? Are you absolutely sure?”
“I just had a call from Charlie Salomon. He confirmed it.”
“What did you do? How did you do it?” She was so excited that she almost dropped the phone.
“Oh, I just asked around.”
“Rocco, don’t drive me crazy. Oh shit, you’re so wonderful—”
“Cut it out, Maxi. It was no big deal. I asked around for names and I got names and figured out who the guy was from your list and I gave the name to Salomon, plus the names of some people who’d been buying from Justin’s friend and who were … urged … strongly urged, by their agencies, to agree to testify against him … nothing your average amateur detective couldn’t do if he knew where to look.”
“You’re so incredible, you’re the most marvelous—who was he?”
“Some beauty named Jon, a relatively minor-league dealer who was caught doing a little business with some much bigger fish down in Florida. He tried to cop a plea, putting the blame on Justin. He’d left his merchandise at Justin’s place, unfortunately for Justin. Jon’s not a very nice guy, basically. As Angelica would say, he has a massive attitude problem. Anyway, the cops managed to pick him up. A relatively simple matter once they knew who he was, or so I gather.”
“Why do I have the feeling that there’s something you’re not telling me?”
“You always had a suspicious nature. Too bad Justin didn’t. Anyway, that’s that. I’m glad it’s over. Goodbye, Maxi.”
“Rocco, wait! Don’t just hang up. Please let me thank you,” Maxi pleaded. “You don’t have the faintest idea of what this means to me. I’m just … I don’t know what to say …” Her words fell over each other in a cry of thanksgiving. She sounded almost childish in her immense joy and gratitude.
“Oh, come on, cool it. I did it for Angelica and Justin. And your mother, of course. Salomon’s calling her right now. Justin will be in the office sometime Monday, business as usual. He said to tell you.”
“When did you talk to him?” Maxi asked incredulously.
“A few minutes ago. I figured he should be the first to hear the good news.”
“What did he say?”
“Not much. He was relieved, naturally, but more than anything else he didn’t want to believe that Jon had been the one to set him up. He had some very serious illusions about that creep. Your brother is one of the last of the great romantics. So, if I were you, I wouldn’t act all bubbly and Mary Tyler Moore and thrilled when he shows up for work. Just try to act natural, like it’s not the end of the world or something. Make it easy for the poor son of a bitch.”
“I’ll do my best,” Maxi said softly.
“Try not to be too sloppy, O.K.?”
“Right, Rocco. Will do.” Maxi looked for something satisfactorily resistant to grind under the four-inch heels of her new Mario Valentine pumps. “Good show. Well done. The family appreciates your efforts on our behalf and there will be a turkey for you in your Christmas basket, my good man.”
All right, thought Maxi, all right, probably she had sounded as if he were Superman and she were Lois Lane tied to the railroad tracks, maybe she had let her happiness get out of control, but wasn’t it normal to be grateful? How could anybody, even someone as thoroughly crusty and grumpy as Rocco Cipriani, not want to be thanked? How did a man get so contemptible? she asked herself furiously, sitting in a lump in the middle of her bed, her chin resting on her folded hands, her elbows on her knees, unmoving, brooding, a solid mass of resentment. He never lost a chance to try to make her feel feeble-minded, even when he was doing a good deed. He had actually accused her of insensitivity, warning her how to treat Justin, as if he expected her to be gauche and goofy. He’d always had that arrogant streak, that unbending vein of sheer shitheaded vanity that made him think that his way was the only right way. His trouble was that he thought he was the center of the universe. Nothing had ever really happened to him to make him realize that he was just a pinheaded pretty face who was clever with a pencil. Humility. Rocco needed to learn humility. She said the word out loud, savoring it, tasting the sweetness of it. But, unlike him, she was not a small-minded, petty, grudging, miserly person. She was happy to see that the father of her child was good in a crisis. He had done the Amberville family a gigantic service, and he was going to be rewarded for it whether he wanted to be or not. Rewarded royally, rewarded until it made him sick!
Suddenly gleeful, Maxi reached out for her now ever-present yellow pad and started to make notes. First, an Alfa-Romeo Spider convertible. What did it matter that he wouldn’t be able to find a parking place for it and that a car like that was an invitation to vandals? She’d take whatever color was immediately available although she’d prefer black because it showed dirt faster. Next; that set of delicately etched antique crystal wineglasses she’d seen at James Robinson. Three thousand dollars and they had to be washed by hand, preferably in a rubber-lined basin, and dried with exquisite care. He’d probably break the lot in six months. What else? Why not a full set of antelope suede luggage from Loewe? The Spanish leather-goods makers had a shop downstairs and she’d been eyeing covetously their soft-sided pale gray bags, trimmed in burgundy, but of course they were too fragile for airplane travel; they’d be ruined in one trip. The smallest carry-on bag alone was almost six hundred dollars—maybe he could manage to keep that one looking decent for a while. Ah-ha, she had it, that glorious Art-Deco sterling silver and coffee set from Puiforcat. So what if it was forty thousand dollars—it had to be kept polished if it were to look like anything, just like any ordinary piece of silver. But you couldn’t say it wasn’t thoughtful.
A string of polo ponies? No, Maxi decided regretfully. They were only ten thousand each but even Rocco, unsophisticated as he was, would realize that they were inappropriate. Ponies needed a groom and boxes and regular feeding—either she’d have to throw in all the upkeep or not give them to him at all. Anyway he knew that she knew he couldn’t ride. It would be delicious to give him a small Learjet 23 but three hundred thousand dollars seemed just a bit too much to spend to indicate her everlasting gratitude. Still, the list lacked something. It was skimpy. Why not a pair of tickets for a long Caribbean cruise? It would be good therapy for a devoted workaholic like Rocco. Perhaps two, no, make it three dozen of those lace-edged bath towels she’d seen at Barney’s the last time she’d shopped retail. In bei
ge, of course, or, better yet, plain white. Not an obviously feminine color. He should be able to find a fine hand laundry somewhere, if he looked hard enough. And just to show that she harbored nothing in her heart but sincere generosity, a case of Glenfiddich, his favorite pure malt whiskey. That should confuse him nicely, Maxi thought. What she’d really like to give him would be a folio of drawings by Leonardo da Vinci. That would show him the extent of his tiny talent as nothing else could. But the Queen of England had cornered the best of them and the Morgan Library had most of the rest.
There was a tap on her door and Angelica came in.
“Why aren’t you with your father?” Maxi asked in surprise. It was Angelica’s weekend to be with Rocco. “Don’t tell me he canceled on you?”
“No, Ma, you know he’d never do that. He’s got the most awful cold in the head. He just called and said he was sure he was contagious, swarming with germs and that I should ask if he could trade weekends with you.”
“Sure you can,” Maxi answered. Angelica looked even more doleful than before. “Don’t you want to?”
“Well, actually, the Troop had planned something special for today because a lot of kids are home for spring vacations and I kind of hate to miss it. I mean, it’s happenin’ this weekend, not next weekend and anyway I’d like to have some time to myself, you know, to jam a little. Nothing bogus, Ma, just a little time raging with my people.”
“You make it sound like rape and pillage,” Maxi said, hairs lifting on her nape. “Raging?”
“I am referring,” Angelica said with dignity, “to an afternoon at the circus followed by a dim sum rage, or, as you would put it, a nice time with nice young ladies and gentlemen, including refreshments.”
“Be my guest,” Maxi assured her. She had the greatest faith in the Troop and their activities, Angelica vanished skipping in a resounding whoop of joy, free from her guilt-ridden parents who took up far too much of her private life making up to her for their divorce. Didn’t they know that everybody got divorced sooner or later?
Maxi started to get dressed for her shopping trip to buy Rocco’s thank-you presents. Maybe he’d still be home sick when they were delivered. A terrible head cold could last a week. Spring vacations? Hadn’t Angelica just said something about spring vacations? She looked out of the bathroom window and verified that spring had come to Central Park without notice, as surprisingly overnight as it had in Mary Poppins. A head cold and spring vacations. Why hadn’t she realized it sooner? The malignant Cipriani hay fever had struck and Rocco, clinging stubbornly to his traditions, had refused to admit it, insisting, as he did every year, that it was unthinkable that he should suffer from such a sissy ailment since ho Cipriani in history had ever had it. How could you get hay fever in Venice? Maxi had asked once, many years ago. She felt that the question was still valid.
Standing, rocking with laughter, in her pale lavender satin chemise, one foot about to be thrust into the right leg of a pair of sheer black stockings embroidered here and there with butterflies, Maxi was struck by a most kindly, most charitable, most openhearted impulse. She would just dart over and make Rocco more comfortable in his misery, like a higher form of visiting nurse. Indeed an angel of mercy.
She knew where Angelica kept the key to his place and she knew just the treatment for the Cipriani hay fever. There are some things you never forget. On her way to Rocco’s, Maxi speculated about his apartment. He lived barely three blocks away, in a duplex on Central Park South, but she had never deigned to ask Angelica to describe it. She remembered Rocco’s old longing for someplace monastic, austere and calm, as if he were a Japanese monk. Perhaps by now he had mastered the minimalist school of decorating, subtracting everything that made a house livable and spending all his money on fanatical detailing that nobody else would ever notice. Or else he’d gone in for hideously uncomfortable Mackintosh chairs and black-and-white tiles from the 1930s that had been ugly to begin with and hadn’t improved with age in spite of their highly touted, inexplicable Andrée Putman chic. Maybe he was heavily invested in industrial objects, steel pipe sections and neon tubing, and slept on a mat on the floor. On the other hand that was all démodé. Perhaps by now he’d gone in for the Santa Fe Calvin Klein look—a nightmare out of Georgia O’Keeffe, with three meaningful stones on the mantel whose magic arrangement must never be changed, adobe walls on which the plaster was encouraged to flake and one perfect cactus, dying slowly. Or possibly he just lived like half the design snobs she knew, with all white walls and horribly boring and expensive Mies and Breuer furniture, punctuated by the obligatory Frank Stellas and Roy Lichtensteins. It was too much to hope that he was into the truly atrocious 1950s and laminated plywood. Probably, like most old bachelors, his place was bound to be basically a mess.
Quietly, Maxi used Angelica’s key to open the front door. The entrance hall was a good-sized room she observed disapprovingly. How odd of him to have used fine old parquet, rubbed to a golden glow. What a strange place to put a life-sized Maillol torso of Venus, a powerful, darkly gleaming presence that held its own, magnificent against the melting magic, the receding rainbow tides of the two large Helen Frankenthalers on facing walls. No furniture, she noted, with the exception of a superb Regency table against the third wall, all curves and carving and unquestionably authentic to her experienced eye. Well, it’s not all that difficult to buy good art if you have the money, she thought, closing the door softly behind her, and she disapproved of the art-gallery school of decorating on theory. Maxi listened for the sound of life in the apartment but heard nothing. Cautiously she made her way into the living room. Well, Rocco had certainly developed a taste for luxury that was quite out of keeping with his mingy high-mindedness, a luxury that seemed to be set with a divine incongruity in an old barn in the country instead of on Central Park South. Sunlight poured into the two-story room and turned the walls, covered with wooden siding, into a source of subtle information on the beauty that weather can work on wood. Deep, downy, gray velvet sofas, separated by a Parsons table lacquered in Chinese red, turned their backs on each other in the center of the long room and faced the great twin fireplaces that were on each of the side walls. Old Indian cashmere paisley in tones of biscuit, red and coral covered the supremely elegant Regency armchairs; here and there on the old brick floor were scattered Chinese silk rugs in muted, rare colors that echoed the sunlight.
Maxi sniffed as scornfully as possible. The most valuable piece in the room was clearly the Egyptian sculpture she’d given Rocco for their first Christmas together, an early Ptolemaic piece, a statue of Isis almost two feet tall, made from red quartzite. You could see every detail of her body, for the Egyptian goddesses wore robes more sheer than any Bob Mackie creation and the Isis had the most delicious breasts and bellybutton, almost as nice as her own, but no head. And the Maillol Venus had no arms. Apparently Rocco didn’t like women enough to have one around who didn’t lack a part of her anatomy.
She jumped at the sound of a violent sneeze, and a smile of anticipatory relish curved her tightly appraising mouth into a dangerous weapon, the particular smile that even Maxi was not vain enough to know drove men mad.
She crept softly upstairs toward the sound of sneezing and swearing and the blowing of a nose. All ugly and swollen she knew it would be, like a caricature of W.C. Fields at his worst.
The door to Rocco’s bedroom was three-quarters closed. Inside she could see that it was dim, almost dark. He must have drawn the draperies and gone to ground under as many covers and quilts as he owned. No man had ever been brought so low by a head cold as Rocco Cipriani. Bad Dennis Brady treated them by switching from tequila to hot grogs and Laddie, Earl of Kirkgordon, simply ignored anything less than pneumonia. It was the weather, he explained. His ancestors had always had colds and what was good enough for Bonnie Prince Charlie was good enough for him.
Maxi coughed lightly to warn Rocco. There was no point in sending him into cardiac arrest when she’d come to make him feel better.
“It’s just me,” Maxi assured him. “Angelica was so worried about you that she insisted that I come over and make sure that you didn’t need a doctor.”
“Bugger off,” he snarled, sneezing deliberately in her direction. All she could see of him was a gloomy hump of Dickensian churliness.
“Now Rocco,” Maxi said soothingly, “you’re just making yourself miserable. There’s no need to act as if you’re at death’s door just because you have a little head cold.”
“Go ahead, gloat, but get the fuck out of my house.”
“Isn’t that a little paranoid? Why would I gloat over the suffering of any human being? Particularly the father of my child? I only came to reassure Angelica. However,” Maxi said cheerfully, throwing open draperies, “since I am here, I’ll do what I can to make you more comfortable.”
“I don’t want to be comfortable. I want to be alone! In the dark!”
“Typical, typical, everyone knows how men love to suffer. I bet you haven’t even taken any vitamin C,” Maxi said, eyeing the giant sprays of budding forsythia that stood in a superb Florentine jar on a table near his bed. Renaissance majolica unless she was badly mistaken. There was the source of his cold, although he’d never believe it.
“Vitamin C’s a crock. It’s never been proven,” Rocco wheezed, sliding farther down under the covers and trying to pull a pillow over his head.
“But we don’t know for sure, do we? Anyway even you know you need liquids. I’m going to make you a pitcher of fresh orange juice and leave it for you.”
“Just leave. I don’t have any oranges. Out. Out!”
Maxi disappeared, closing his door, before he could actually rouse himself to throw her out bodily. She had brought a bag of oranges from home, anticipating this deplorable state of gender-specific need. Men, in her experience, never had oranges at hand. Lemons, yes, apples sometimes, but not oranges. She tiptoed down the stairs and found the kitchen. It was, she saw at once, four times as big as her own, and much more cheerful. Of course, it didn’t have a view of the World Trade Center, she told herself while she squeezed the oranges, but it did have a highly polished eight-burner cast-iron range, a floor of golden travertine marble, a huge wooden worktable that looked Pennsylvania Dutch and a burnished bronze refrigerator full of champagne. She peeked into the freezer. As she had thought, many bottles of vodka, all frozen to that thick, glacial condition that makes it go down the throat like a kiss blown by a friendly iceberg. Thoughtfully she added three-quarters of one entire bottle to the pitcher of juice and tasted it. You couldn’t even tell it was there because of the sweetness of the fruit. She put the pitcher in the refrigerator to get colder and went in search of the linen closet. Nothing made a sick person feel better than clean crisp sheets. Well! So India wasn’t the only person she knew who was depraved on the subject of linen. Rocco had everything you could buy at Pratesi, all in solid white with severe geometric borders in dark brown, navy blue and deep purple. Did himself well, didn’t he? Pratesi could be even more expensive than Porthault although if you flew to Milan for it the trip paid for itself. She gathered up thousands of dollars worth of pure Egyptian cotton and returned to the kitchen for the juice and a big glass and made her way back upstairs.
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