“Not really. It was just a one-way oral deal; he didn’t want any reciprocation.” I paused, but her unsatisfied demeanor indicated that she expected to hear more. “He was in his early sixties, but in good condition, hearty. A likable guy. Friendly. He talked a lot; he told me he was retired and lived on a farm with his second wife. He said he raised cattle—”
Miss Self impatiently interrupted: “And he gave you a hundred dollars.”
“Yes.”
“Did he give you anything else?”
I decided not to lie. “He gave me his calling card. He said that if I ever felt like breathing country air, I was welcome to visit him.”
“What became of this card?”
“I threw it away. Lost it. I don’t know.”
She lit another cigarillo, and smoked it until a long ash tumbled off it. She picked up an envelope lying on her desk, extracted a letter from it, and spread it out before her. “I’ve worked more than twenty years in this business, but this morning I received a letter unique in my experience.”
As I may have mentioned before, one of my gifts is an ability to read upside down: those of us who subsist on our wits develop offbeat talents. So, while Miss Self examined the mysterious communication, I read it. It said: Dear Miss Self, I was well pleased with the amiable fellow you arranged to meet me at the Yale Club this past September 11th. So much so that I would like to get to know him better in a more gemütlich atmosphere. I wondered if it could be arranged, through your auspices, to have him spend the Thanksgiving holidays here at my farm in Pennsylvania? Say Thursday through Sunday. It would be a simple family gathering; my wife, some of my children, a few of my grandchildren. Naturally, I would expect to pay a reasonable fee, and I leave it to you to assess the amount. I trust this finds you well and in good spirit. Most sincerely, Roger W. Appleton.
Miss Self read the letter aloud. “Now,” she snapped, “what do you say to that?” When I did not readily reply, she said: “There’s something wrong. Something suspicious. But putting that aside, it stands in contradiction to one of our primary rules: a Service employee must never associate socially with a client. These rules are not arbitrary. They are founded on experience.” Frowning, she tapped the letter with a fingernail. “What do you suppose this man could have in mind? A partouze? Involving his wife?”
Careful to sound indifferent, I said: “I can’t see any harm in that.”
“Ah, so,” she accused me. “You see nothing against this proposal? You want to go.”
“Well, frankly, Miss Self, I’d welcome a change of scenery for a few days. I’ve had a pretty rough time this past year or so.”
She slugged down another double dose of the cactus juice; shuddered. “Very well, I will write Mr. Appleton, and ask a fee of five hundred dollars. Perhaps, for a sum like that, we can for once overlook a rule. And with your share of the profits, promise me you’ll buy a raincoat.”
ACES WAVED TO ME AS I entered the Ritz bar. It was six o’clock and I had to squeeze my way toward him between the populated tables, for at cocktail time the bar brimmed with suntanned skiers recently descended from Alpine holidays; and pairs of expensive tarts keeping each other company while waiting to be winked at by German and American businessmen; and battalions of fashion writers and Seventh Avenue rag traders gathered in Paris to view the summer collections; and of course, the chic old blue-haired ladies—there are always several of them, elderly permanent residents of the hotel, ensconced in the Ritz bar sipping their allotted two martinis (“my doctor insists: so good for the circulation”) before retiring to the dining room to chew in mute chandeliered isolation.
I had no sooner sat down than Aces was summoned to answer a telephone call. I had a good view of him, for the telephone is located at the far end of the bar; occasionally his lips moved, but mostly he seemed to be just listening and nodding. Not that I was really watching him, for my mind was still upstairs contemplating Kate McCloud’s loose hair, her dreaming head—a spectacle so consuming that Aces’ return startled me.
“That was Kate,” he announced, looking self-satisfied: a mongoose digesting a mouse. “She wanted to know why you left without saying good-bye.”
“She was asleep.”
Aces always carries a mess of kitchen matches in a jacket pocket, it’s one of his affectations; he lighted one with his thumbnail and touched the flame to a cigarette. “She may not seem so, but Kate’s a very knowledgeable young woman—her instincts are usually sound. She liked you very much. And so,” he said, grinning, “I’m in a position to make you a solid offer. Kate would like to hire you as a paid companion. You will receive a thousand dollars a month and all your expenses, including clothing and your own car.”
I said: “Why did she marry Axel Jaeger?”
Aces blinked, as if this was the last reaction he had expected from me. He stalled. Then: “Perhaps a more interesting question would be—why did he marry her? And an even more interesting question is—how did Kate meet him? You see, Axel Jaeger is an elusive man. I’ve never encountered him myself, only seen paparazzi photographs: a tall man with a Heidelberg sword-scar across his cheek, thin, almost emaciated, a man in his late fifties. He comes from Dusseldorf, and inherited an ammunitions fortune from his grandfather, a fortune he has astronomically increased. He has factories all over Germany, all over the world—he owns oil tankers, oil fields in Texas and Alaska, he has the largest cattle ranch in Brazil, over eight hundred square miles, and a fair share of both Ireland and Switzerland (all the rich West Germans have been buying up Ireland and Switzerland: they think they’ll be safe there if the bombs start falling again). Jaeger is easily the richest man in Germany—and possibly Europe. He’s a German national, but he has a permanent Swiss residence permit; for tax reasons, naturally. To keep it, he has to spend six months of the year in Switzerland whether he likes it or not. God, what tortures the rich won’t endure to protect a penny. He lives in a colossal, and colossally ugly, château on a mountainside about three miles north of St. Moritz. I don’t know anyone who has ever been inside the place. Except Kate, of course.
“As I understand it, he was, and is, a very convinced Catholic. And for that reason he remained married to his first wife for twenty-seven loyal years, or until she died. Even though she was unable to give him a child, which seems to have been the crux of the matter, for he wanted a child, a son, to continue the Jaeger dynasty. That being the case, why didn’t he do the obvious and marry a well-bred, wide-hipped German girl who could fill up a nursery bim-bam? Certainly a clever soigné beauty like Kate would hardly seem the ideal choice for a man of Herr Jaeger’s constrained austerity. And, so far as that goes, it’s incomprehensible that Kate would find herself attracted to such a person. Money? That couldn’t have been as issue. Actually, after I first really got to know Kate, she told me that her first marriage had been such a trauma, she never intended to marry again. And yet, within a few months, and without any signal, without ever mentioning that she even knew this legendary tycoon, she obtained a papal annulment from her first marriage and marries Jaeger in a Catholic ceremony at the Dusseldorf Cathedral. One year later the prayed-for heir arrives. Heinrich Rheinhardt Jaeger. Heinie. And a year after that, less than a year, she seems to have been dismissed from the Jaeger château, luggage et al., leaving the boy in the father’s custody—though granted certain highly limited visiting privileges.”
“But you don’t know why?”
Aces thumbnailed another kitchen match, and blew it out. “The fall-out, or whatever one may call it, was as enigmatic as the alliance itself. She disappeared for several months, and a doctor I know told me she had spent them cloistered at the Nestlé Clinic in Lausanne. But as for what happened, she’s not confided in me, and I’ve never had the courage to inquire. I suppose the only person who really knows is Kate’s maid, Corinne. And when it comes to Miss Kate, Corinne is as close-mouthed as an Easter Island monument.”
“Well. But why didn’t they get a divorce?”
&nb
sp; “The Catholic hang-up, I suppose. He would never countenance divorce.”
“For Christ sake, she could divorce him, couldn’t she?”
“Not if she ever wanted to see Heinie again. That door would be shut forever.”
“Sonofabitch. I’d like to shove a shotgun up his ass and pull the trigger. Bastard. But you mentioned danger. I can’t see where she has anything to be afraid of.”
“Kate thinks she does. So do I. And it isn’t any paranoid fantasy that Jaeger has agents following her, or gathering information on her wherever she goes, whatever she does. If she changes a Kotex, you can be sure the Grand Seigneur hears about it. Look,” he said, snapping his fingers for a waiter, “let’s have a drink. It’s too late for daiquiris. How about a Scotch-soda?”
“I don’t care.”
“Waiter, two Scotch-soda. Now, as to this offer I’ve made you—are the terms satisfactory, or would you like a few days to think it over?”
“I don’t have to think it over. I’ve already decided.”
The drinks arrived, and he lifted his glass. “Then we’ll drink to your decision, whatever it is. Though I hope it’s yes.”
“Yes.”
He relaxed. “You’re a godsend, P. B. And I’m sure you’ll not regret it.” Seldom has a more untrue prophecy been prophesied.
“Yes, it’s yes. But. If he doesn’t want a divorce, what does he want?”
“I have a theory. It’s only a theory, but I’d bet my last chip that it’s accurate. He intends to kill her.” Aces tinkled the ice in his glass. “Since the strictness of his Catholicism forbids divorce, and because as long as she’s alive she represents a threat to him, a threat to him and the custody of his child. So he means to kill her. Murder her in a manner that will look like an accident.”
“Aces. Oh, come on. You’re crazy. Either you’re crazy. Or he is.”
“On this particular subject, yes, I believe he is crazy. Hey,” he said, “I just noticed something. Where’s your dog?”
“I gave her to the lady upstairs.”
“Well, well, well. I can see you really were quite impressed.”
I walked all the way home from the Proustian-ghosted corridors of the Ritz to the rickety rat-trap halls of my hotel near the Gare du Nord. An elation lightened the journey—at last I wasn’t a deadbeat expatriate, an aimless loser; I was a man with a mission in life, an assignment; and like some cub scout about to embark on his first overnight hike, my mind childishly churned with preparations. Clothes; I would need shirts, shoes, some good new suits, for nothing in my wardrobe would survive scrutiny in strong sunlight. And a weapon; tomorrow I would buy a .38 revolver and start practice at a shooting range. I walked fast, not simply because it was cold with that Seine-damp misty coldness peculiar to Paris, but because I hoped the exercise would so exhaust me that I would fall into dreamless sleep as soon as I put my head against a pillow. And I did.
But it was not a dreamless sleep. I well understand why analysts demand high payment, for what can be more tedious than listening to another person recount his dreams? But I’ll chance boring you with the dream I dreamt that night, because in future time it came to be realized in almost every detail. In the beginning the dream was motionless, a seaside scene like a Boudin painting at the turn of the century. Still figures on a vast beach with an aquamarine sea just beyond them. A man, a woman, a dog, a young boy. The woman is wearing an ankle-length taffeta dress—sea breezes seem to be teasing its skirt; and she is carrying a green parasol. The man sports a straw boater; the boy is outfitted in a sailor suit. Eventually the picture comes into much closer focus, and I recognize the woman under the parasol—she’s Kate McCloud. And the man, who now reaches to hold her hand, is myself. Suddenly the sailor-suited child seizes a stick and throws it into the waves; the dog rushes to retrieve it, and races back, shaking itself and shimmering the air with crystals of sea water.
PART THREE
La Côte Basque
OVERHEARD IN A COWBOY BAR in Roswell, New Mexico … FIRST COWBOY: Hey, Jed. How are you? How you feeling? SECOND COWBOY: Good! Real good. I feel so good I didn’t have to jack off this morning to get my heart started.
“CARISSIMO!” SHE CRIED. “YOU’RE JUST what I’m looking for. A lunch date. The duchess stood me up.”
“Black or white?” I said.
“White,” she said, reversing my direction on the sidewalk.
White is Wallis Windsor, whereas the Black Duchess is what her friends call Perla Apfeldorf, the Brazilian wife of a notoriously racist South African diamond industrialist. As for the lady who also knew the distinction, she was indeed a lady—Lady Ina Coolbirth, an American married to a British chemicals tycoon and a lot of woman in every way. Tall, taller than most men, Ina was a big breezy peppy broad, born and raised on a ranch in Montana.
“This is the second time she’s canceled,” Ina Coolbirth continued. “She says she has hives. Or the duke has hives. One or the other. Anyway, I’ve still got a table at Côte Basque. So, shall we? Because I do so need someone to talk to, really. And, thank God, Jonesy, it can be you.”
CÔTE BASQUE IS ON EAST Fifty-fifth Street, directly across from the St. Regis. It was the site of the original Le Pavillon, founded in 1940 by the honorable restaurateur Henri Soulé. M. Soulé abandoned the premises because of a feud with his landlord, the late president of Columbia Pictures, a sleazy Hollywood hood named Harry Cohn (who, upon learning that Sammy Davis, Jr., was “dating” his blond star Kim Novak, ordered a hit man to call Davis and tell him: “Listen, Sambo, you’re already missing one eye. How’d you like to try for none?” The next day Davis married a Las Vegas chorus girl—colored). Like Côte Basque, the original Pavillon consisted of a small entrance area, a bar to the left of this, and in the rear, through an archway, a large red-plush dining room. The bar and main room formed an Outer Hebrides, an Elba to which Soulé exiled second-class patrons. Preferred clients, selected by the proprietor with unerring snobbisme, were placed in the banquette-lined entrance area—a practice pursued by every New York restaurant of established chic: Lafayette, The Colony, La Grenouille, La Caravelle. These tables, always nearest the door, are drafty, afford the least privacy, but nevertheless, to be seated at one, or not, is a status-sensitive citizen’s moment of truth. Harry Cohn never made it at Pavillon. It didn’t matter that he was a hotshot Hollywood hottentot or even that he was Soulé’s landlord. Soulé saw him for the shoulder-padded counter-jumper Cohn was and accordingly ushered him to a table in the sub-zero regions of the rear room. Cohn cursed, he huffed, puffed, revenged himself by upping and upping the restaurant’s rent. So Soulé simply moved to more regal quarters in the Ritz Tower. However, while Soulé was still settling there, Harry Cohn cooled (Jerry Wald, when asked why he attended the funeral, replied: “Just to be sure the bastard was dead”), and Soulé, nostalgic for his old stamping ground, again leased the address from the new custodians and created, as a second enterprise, a sort of boutique variation on Le Pavillon: La Côte Basque.
Lady Ina, of course, was allotted an impeccable position—the fourth table on the left as you enter. She was escorted to it by none other than M. Soulé, distrait as ever, pink and glazed as a marzipan pig.
“Lady Coolbirth …” he muttered, his perfectionist eyes spinning about in search of cankered roses and awkward waiters. “Lady Coolbirth … umn … very nice … umn … and Lord Coolbirth?… umn … today we have on the wagon a very nice saddle of lamb …”
She consulted me, a glance, and said: “I think not anything off the wagon. It arrives too quickly. Let’s have something that takes forever. So that we can get drunk and disorderly. Say a soufflé Furstenberg. Could you do that, Monsieur Soulé?”
He tutted his tongue—on two counts: he disapproves of customers dulling their taste buds with alcohol, and also: “Furstenberg is a great nuisance. An uproar.”
Delicious, though: a froth of cheese and spinach into which an assortment of poached eggs has been sunk strategically, so that,
when struck by your fork, the soufflé is moistened with golden rivers of egg yolk.
“An uproar,” said Ina, “is exactly what I want,” and the proprietor, touching his sweat-littered forehead with a bit of handkerchief, acquiesced.
Then she decided against cocktails, saying: “Why not have a proper reunion?” From the wine steward she ordered a bottle of Roederer’s Cristal. Even for those who dislike champagne, myself among them, there are two champagnes one can’t refuse: Dom Pérignon and the even superior Cristal, which is bottled in a natural-colored glass that displays its pale blaze, a chilled fire of such prickly dryness that, swallowed, seems not to have been swallowed at all, but instead to have turned to vapors on the tongue and burned there to one damp sweet ash.
“Of course,” said Ina, “champagne does have one serious drawback: swilled as a regular thing, a certain sourness settles in the tummy, and the result is permanent bad breath. Really incurable. Remember Arturo’s breath, bless his heart? And Cole adored champagne. God, I do miss Cole so, dotty as he was those last years. Did I ever tell you the story about Cole and the stud wine steward? I can’t remember quite where he worked. He was Italian, so it couldn’t have been here or Pav. The Colony? Odd: I see him clearly—a nut-brown man, beautifully flat, with oiled hair and the sexiest jawline—but I can’t see where I see him. He was a southern Italian, so they called him Dixie, and Teddie Whitestone got knocked up by him—Bill Whitestone aborted her himself under the impression it was his doing. And perhaps it was—in quite another context—but still I think it rather dowdy, unnatural, if you will, a doctor aborting his own wife. Teddie Whitestone wasn’t alone; there was a queue of gals greasing Dixie’s palm with billetsdoux. Cole’s approach was creative: he invited Dixie to his apartment under the pretext of getting advice on the laying in of a new wine cellar—Cole! who knew more about wine than that dago ever dreamed. So they were sitting there on the couch—the lovely suede one Billy Baldwin made for Cole—all very informal, and Cole kisses this fellow on the cheek, and Dixie grins and says: ‘That will cost you five hundred dollars, Mr. Porter.’ Cole just laughs and squeezes Dixie’s leg. ‘Now that will cost you a thousand dollars, Mr. Porter.’ Then Cole realized this piece of pizza was serious; and so he unzippered him, hauled it out, shook it, and said: ‘What will be the full price on the use of that?’ Dixie told him two thousand dollars. Cole went straight to his desk, wrote a check and handed it to him. And he said: ‘Miss Otis regrets she’s unable to lunch today. Now get out.’ ”