Answered Prayers (14 page)

“If it comes to that, neither do I!”

“All I said was that I’d found this wonderful masseur. You see, for the last year she’s been suffering from a back ailment. She’s gone from doctor to doctor, here and in America. Some say it’s a slipped disc, or a spinal fusion, but most agree it’s psychosomatic, a
maladie imaginaire
. But the problem is …” His voice hovered.

“Is?”

“But I told you. Just now. While we were having drinks in the bar.”

Segments of our conversation replayed inside my head. At present, Kate McCloud was the estranged wife of Axel Jaeger, a German industrialist and allegedly one of the world’s richest men. Earlier, when she was sixteen, she had been married to the son of a rich Virginia horse breeder for whom her Irish father had worked as a trainer. That marriage had ended on very well-founded grounds of mental cruelty. Subsequently she had moved to Paris, and over the years, became a goddess of the fashion press; Kate McCloud on a bearhunt in Alaska, on a safari in Africa, at a Rothschild ball, at the Grand Prix with Princess Grace, on a yacht with Stavros Niarchos.

“The problem is …” Aces fumbled. “It’s as I told you, she is in danger. And she needs … well, someone to be with her. A bodyguard.”

“Hell, why don’t we just sell her Mutt?”

“Please,” he said. “This isn’t humorous.”

Those were the truest words old Aces had ever spoken. If only I could have foreseen the labyrinth he was leading me into when a black woman opened the door. She wore a smart black pants suit with numerous gold chains twisted around her neck and wrists. Her mouth was loaded with gold, too; her denture looked less like teeth than an investment. She had curly white hair and a round, unlined face. Asked to guess her age,
I would have said forty-five, forty-six; later, I learned she was a child-bride.

“Corinne!” exclaimed Aces, and kissed the woman on both cheeks. “
Comment ca va?
”

“Never felt better, and never had less.”

“P. B., this is Corinne Bennett, Mrs. McCloud’s factotum. And, Corinne, this is Mr. Jones, the masseur.”

Corinne nodded, but her eyes concentrated on the dog tucked under my arm. “What I want to know is, who is that dog? No present for Miss Kate, I hope. She’s been muttering about getting another dog ever since Phoebe—”

“
Phoebe?
”

“Had to put her down. Same as they will me someday soon. But don’t mention it to
her
. It’ll just set her off again. Have mercy, I never saw a grown person cry that bad. Come along, she’s waiting for you.” Then, lowering her voice, she added: “That Mme. Apfeldorf is with her.”

Aces grimaced; he looked at me as if about to speak, but there was no need; I’d leafed through enough
Vogue’
s and
Paris-Match’
s to know who Perla Apfeldorf was. The wife of a very racist South African platinum tycoon, she was as much a figure of the worldly milieu as Kate McCloud. She was Brazilian, and privately—though this was something I discovered later—her friends called her the Black Duchess, suggesting she was not of the pure Portuguese descent she claimed, but a child of Rio’s
favelas
, born with quite a bit of the tarbrush which, if true, was rather a joke on the Hitlerian Herr Apfeldorf.

The apartment snuggled under the eaves of the hotel; the rooms, all dominated by large round dormer windows overlooking the Place Vendôme, were identical in size; originally they had been used as individual servant’s rooms, but Kate McCloud had strung six of them together and decorated each for a particular
purpose. The effect, overall, was like a railroad flat in a luxurious tenement.

“Miss Kate? The gentlemen are here.”

And, magically, there we were inside Kate McCloud’s bedroom. “Aces. Angel.” She was perched on the side of a bed brushing her hair. “Will you have some tea? Perla’s having some. Or a liqueur? No? Then I shall. Corinne, would you bring me a drop of Verveine? Aces, aren’t you going to introduce me to Mr. Jones? Mr. Jones,” she confided to Mme. Apfeldorf, who was seated in a chair beside the bed, “is going to drive the demons out of my spine.”

“Well,” said Mme. Apfeldorf, who had slicked-black hair shiny as a crow’s and a voice with a crowlike croak, “I hope he’s better than that sadistic little Japanese Mona sent my way. I’ll never trust Mona again. Not that I ever did. You wouldn’t believe what happened! He made me lie naked on the floor and then, in his bare feet, he
stood
on my neck, walked up and down my back, positively danced. The
agony.

“Oh, Perla,” said Kate McCloud pityingly. “What do you know about agony? I’ve just spent a week at St. Moritz and never saw a pair of skis. Never left my room except to visit Heinie. Just lay there munching Doridens and praying. Aces,” she said, handing him a silver frame that had been standing on a table near her bed, “here’s a new picture of Heinie. Isn’t he lovely?”

“This is Mrs. McCloud’s son,” Aces explained, showing me the picture in the frame: a chubby-cheeked solemn child muffled in mufflers and a fur coat and fur hat and holding a snowball. And then I noticed that placed around the room, there were really dozens of pictures of this same boy at varying ages.

“Lovely. How old is he now?”

“Five. Well, he’ll be five in April.” She resumed brushing her hair, but harshly, destructively. “It was a nightmare. I was
never allowed once to see him alone. Dear Uncle Frederick and beloved Uncle Otto. The two old maids. They were always there. Watching. Counting the kisses and ready to show me the door the moment my hour was up.” She threw the brush across the room, which made Mutt bark. “My own baby.”

The Black Duchess cleared her throat; it sounded like a crow gargling. She said: “Kidnap him.”

Kate McCloud laughed and collapsed against a heap of Porthault pillows. “Odd, though. You’re the second person who’s said that to me within the past week.” She lit a cigarette. “It isn’t quite true that I never went out in St. Moritz. I did. Twice. Once to dinner for the Shah, and another night some crazy fling Mingo had at the King’s Club. And I met this extraordinary woman—”

Mme. Apfeldorf said: “Was Dolores there?”

“Where?”

“At the Shah’s party.”

“There were so many people, I can’t remember. Why?”

“Nothing. Just rumors. Who gave it?”

Kate McCloud shrugged. “One of the Greeks. The Livanos, I think. And after dinner His Highness pulled his old stunt: kept everybody sitting at their table for hours while he told tasteless jokes. In French. English. German. Persian. Everybody howling with laughter, even if they hadn’t understood a word. It’s painful to watch Farah Diba; she really blushes—”

“Sounds as though he hasn’t changed much since we were at school together in Gstaad. Le Rosey.”

“And I had Niarchos sitting next to me, which was no help. He had enough Cognac in him to pickle a rhinoceros. He started at me, very belligerently, and said: ‘Look me in the eye.’ Well, I couldn’t—his eyes were unfocused. ‘Look me in the eye and tell me what makes you happiest in the world?’ I told him sleep. He said: ‘
Sleep
. That’s the saddest thing I’ve ever heard. You’ll have
thousands of years to sleep. Now I’ll tell you what makes me happiest. To hunt. To kill. Prowl through the jungles and kill a tiger, an elephant, a lion. Then I am a peaceful man. Happy. What do you say to that?’ And I said: ‘That’s the saddest thing
I’ve
ever heard. To kill and destroy, that seems to me a very pathetic thing to call happiness.’ ”

The Black Duchess inclined her head, agreeing: “Yes, the Greeks are dark-minded. The rich Greeks. They bear the same resemblance to humans as coyotes do to dogs. Coyotes
look
like dogs; but of course they aren’t dogs—”

Aces intervened to comment: “But, Kate, you like to hunt. How do you account for that?”

“I like to
play
at hunting. I like the walking and the wilderness. The only thing I ever shot was a Kodiak bear, and that was in self-defense.”

“You shot a man,” Aces reminded her.

“Only in the legs. And he deserved it. He killed a white leopard.” Corinne appeared with a small glass of Verviene, and Aces was right—the liqueur matched perfectly the ultra-green of her eyes. “But what I started to tell you about was this amazing woman I met at Mingo’s fandango. She sat down next to me, and said: ‘Hello, honey. I hear you’re a Southern girl, and so am I. I’m from Alabama. I’m Virginia Hill.”

Aces said: “
The
Virginia Hill?”

“Well, I didn’t realize she was all that famous until Mingo told me. I’d never heard of her.”

“Nor I,” said Mme. Apfeldorf. “Who is she? An actress?”

“A gangster’s moll,” Aces informed her. “The Most Wanted woman. The F.B.I. have pictures of her posted in every post office in America. I read an article about her, it was called ‘The Madonna of the Underworld.’ Everybody’s after her, not only the F.B.I. but most of her old gangster chums, too: they figure if the F.B.I. ever catch her, she might talk and talk too much.
When things got too tough, she fled to Mexico and married an Austrian ski instructor; she’s been holed up in Austria and Switzerland ever since. The Americans have never been able to extradite her.”

“Mon Dieu,”
said Mme. Apfeldorf, making a sign of the cross.

“She must be a very frightened woman.”

“Not frightened. Despairing, even suicidal perhaps; but she wears a jovial mask very convincingly. She kept putting her arm around me, squeezing me and saying: ‘It sure is good to talk to somebody from down home. Hell, you can take the whole of Europe and cram it up your shithole. See my hand?’ She showed me her hand; it was wrapped in plaster and gauze, and she said: ‘I caught my husband in bed with one of these ladeda bimbos, and I broke her jaw. I would’ve broken his, too. If he hadn’t jumped out the window. I guess you know all about my troubles stateside; but sometimes I feel I’d be better off to go home and get it over with. I can’t be more in a jail there than I am here.’ ”

Aces said: “But what was she
really
like? Is she beautiful?”

Kate considered. “Never beautiful, but pretty, cute, like a cute little carhop. She has a nice face, but two chins to go with it. And I can’t imagine what her tits weigh—at least a couple of kilos.”

“Please, Kate,” complained the Black Duchess. “You know how I dislike those words. Tits.”

“Oh, yes. I always forget. You were educated by Brazilian nuns. Anyway, what I started to say was, suddenly this woman pressed her lips against my ear and whispered: ‘Why don’t you kidnap him?’ I simply looked at her; I had no idea what she was talking about. She said: ‘You know all about me but I know quite a lot about you. How you married that Kraut bastard and how he kicked you out and kept the kid. Listen, I’m a mother, too. I have a boy. And I know how you feel. With his money,
and these European laws, the only way you’re going to get that kid back is by kidnapping him.’ ”

Mutt whined; Aces jingled some coins in his pocket; Mme. Apfeldorf said: “I think she’s quite correct. And it could be done.”

“Yes, it could,” said Aces. “A damned dangerous business. But it
could
be done.”

“How?” Kate McCloud shouted, pounding her fists into the pillows. “You know that house. It’s a fortress. I could never get him out of there. Not with old-maid uncles always watching. And the servants.”

Aces said: “Still, that part of it might be accomplished. With exemplary planning.”

“And then what? Once the alarm was sounded, I’d never get within ten miles of the Swiss frontier.”

“But suppose,” croaked Mme. Apfeldorf, “suppose you didn’t try to cross the frontier. By car, I mean. Suppose you had a private Grumman jet waiting for you in the valley. All aboard, and off we go.”

“To where?”

“To America!”

Aces was excited: “Yes! Yes! Once you were in the States, Herr Jaeger would be helpless. You could file for divorce, and there’s no judge in America who wouldn’t give you custody of Heinie.”

“Daydreams. Pipedreams. Mr. Jones,” she said, “I’m sorry to have kept you waiting so long. The massage table is in the closet over there.”

“Pipedreams. Perhaps. But I’d think about it,” said the Black Duchess, rising. “Let’s have lunch next week.”

Aces kissed Kate McCloud on the cheek. “I’ll call you later, darling. Take good care of my girl, P. B. And when you’re finished, look me up in the bar.”

While I was setting up the massage table, Mutt jumped on the bed and squatted to peepee. I started to grab her. “No harm. Many worse things have happened in this bed. She’s so ugly she’s adorable. I love her black face with those big white circles around her eyes. Like a Panda. How old is he?”

“Three, maybe four months. Mr. Nelson gave her to me.”

“I wish he’d given her to
me
. What’s her name?”

“Mutt.”

“You can’t call her
that
. She’s far too charming. Let’s think of something more suitable.”

When I had the massage table arranged, she rolled off the bed and dropped a gauzy short negligee, underneath which she was nude. Her pubic hair and her shoulder-length honey-red hair were an exact color match; she was an authentic redhead, all right. She was thin, but her body needed not an extra ounce; because of the perfection of her posture, she seemed taller than she was—about my height: five feet eight inches. Casually, her perky breasts scarcely quivering, she crossed the room and touched the button of a stereo phonograph: Spanish music, Segovia’s guitar, relieved the silence. Silently, she approached the massage table and reclined there, letting her fascinating hair fall over its end-edge. Sighing, she curtained her brilliant eyes; closed them as though she were posing for a death mask. She wore no makeup, and required none, for her high cheekbones had a warm natural coloring and her pleasingly pouted lips a pinkness of their own.

I felt a stirring in my crotch, a stirring that stiffened as I gazed along the length of her healthy, sculptured body, her succulent nipples, the ample curve of her hips, and her supine legs extending toward slender feet flawed only by skier’s bunions on both her little toes. My hands were unsteady, damp, and I cursed myself: Cut it out, P. B.—this isn’t very professional of you, old boy. All the same, my prick kept pressing against my fly. Now,
nothing like this had so spontaneously happened to me before, though I’d massaged, and more than massaged, a fair share of arousing women—though none, admittedly, to compare with this Galatea. I wiped my wet hands against my trousers, and began to manipulate her neck and the upper regions of her shoulders, kneading the taut skin and tendons as though I were a merchant fingering costly fabric. At first she was tense, but gradually I induced suppleness, an easing.