Spider Dance (69 page)

“We did what we must . . . .” Irene began.

“But it was all unexpected. You are all totally surprising. Baron Alphonse can find a dozen men like myself: astute at business, wealthy, well connected. We serve him, and ourselves, well. We try to keep this fractured old world on an even keel, for the affairs of first families in any part of the world go better without chaos. But we’re rather predictable. You, on the other hand, make things happen because you are not. I salute you.”

With that he lifted his glass. Godfrey and Irene followed suit, and I quickly seized my water goblet.

“To you all,” Mr. Belmont said.

“To the Rothschilds,” said Godfrey.

“To the unpredictable,” Irene said, predictably.

“To . . . Consuelo,” said I.

“Indeed,” Mr. Belmont said, and downed a swallow of brandy.

We all drank, and then Irene set down her brandy glass and leaned forward. The candlelight played hide and seek in the highlights of her hair and danced off the diamond pin of a key and a musical clef Godfrey had given her, which nestled as a hair jewel near her temple. She looked beautiful enough to tempt an archangel from heaven, and now was the moment she had waited for during the entire evening.

“There is something we need to know,” she told Mr. Belmont

“Ask anything.” He sounded as though he meant it, poor bedazzled man.

“Consuelo’s kidnappers wanted something the Vanderbilts have, but we’re not sure what. Of course most of their wealth must be in bank vaults, but are you aware of any other places of possible safekeeping?”

He sat back to consider. “Alva has enough jewels to be queen if America ever adopts a royal family. I assume the house Hunt built her on Fifth Avenue must have several internal
safes or vaults. One for the silver, of course. And several for her jewels. Is that the kind of thing you meant?”

“Possibly,” Irene said. “Do you know of any specifically large private vault?”

“Besides the Vanderbilt bones interred in the family mausoleum built into a hill on Staten Island? Hardly. As for the existence and location of vaults for valuables within another’s domicile, that’s not the sort of thing one wants known, even among one’s own circle. All those Fifth Avenue houses on Vanderbilt Row and surrounding it are palaces and fortresses built by the richest families in the country. Why not just ask Willie Vanderbilt about this?”

“The actual owners take their holdings, and the precautions to safeguard them, for granted,” Irene said. “I like testimony from uninvolved sources. Often I glean an intriguing idea.”

“Well, all I know is that the Millionaires’ Row mansions on Fifth Avenue together must contain dozens of vaults to hold assorted priceless valuables, enough to entice the most accomplished of thieves. You will notice the owners hire security forces to protect their houses.”

“Mostly Pinkertons,” Godfrey told Irene. “Your former associates.”

“Really?” Mr. Belmont looked surprised. “There haven’t been any female Pinkertons in ages. That is, you must have been a child when you started, Mrs. Norton. Not that you are old by any means now. . . .”

It was fun to watch a Belmont stutter while an Adler smiled seraphically at his befuddlement.

“I grew up in New York City,” she said, releasing him from his faux pas at last. “I started almost everything I’ve ever done at an early age.”

Fortunately, she didn’t mention such specifics as target-pistol shooting, jig dancing, and hypnotism.

“You think,” Mr. Belmont said, “Consuelo’s kidnappers knew about the riches hidden in the house, and wanted them in exchange for the child?”

Irene nodded.

“And that they might make another attempt to take the prize?”

She nodded again. “And I intend to beat them to it.”

“I wish you luck,” he said.

“Living up to a reputation of being unpredictable isn’t a matter of luck,” she told him. “It’s a matter of expecting the unpredictable in others. But I’ll take your wishes and luck, gladly, and you’ll soon hear how it all turned out. Or perhaps not.”

Mr. Belmont laughed uneasily and caught Godfrey’s eye. Godfrey just shrugged, and within minutes the two attempted to debate the disposition of the bill.

“Nonsense,” Mr. Belmont said. “Compliments of Baron Alphonse. He’ll be most intrigued by your adventures in the New World when next I dine at Ferriéres.”

We returned to our rooms in a mellow mood, well feted and well fed.

No sooner had the door shut upon us than Irene turned on Godfrey and myself like Messalina the mongoose on an intruding garden snake.

“I hope that Mr. Vanderbilt is as impressed with us as Mr. Belmont, for we must ask him to make a great leap of faith as soon as possible.”

“He doesn’t seem a man of much faith,” I cautioned her.

“We have every possible recommendation,” Godfrey pointed out.

Irene stalked around the room, thinking while she removed her white satin gloves, her silver-printed scarf, her black lace cape, and tossed them down on the furniture like sloughed snakeskins.

“Well, I’m soon going to make an impossible recommendation. We’ll see what he makes of that”

A Romanesque chapel patterned after the Chapel of St. Giles at
Arles in the south of France won Mr. Vanderbik’s approval.
It would be embedded in the hillside on three sides, with,
commanding views from the front steps all around Staten Island
and of every steamship coming into New York Harbor
.
—STATEN ISLAND ADVANCE

I’d now read so much about the Vanderbilts, especially the unpolished Commodore, that associating with his grandson, William Kissam Vanderbilt, was always unnerving.

The so-called Willie was a genteel, even a mild, man.

He met Irene, Godfrey, and me at the rear of his immense Fifth Avenue establishment with nary a demur the next night.

“Mr. Vanderbilt.” Godfrey offered his leather-gloved hand.

“Mr. Norton.” As Godfrey nodded, the millionaire went on, breathlessly. “The Rothschilds have vouched for you in the most flattering terms possible. Even so, this is quite an . . . unusual request.”

“A hidden fortune in gold isn’t unearthed every day.”

“American gold. Why do the Rothschilds care?”

“This isn’t a world of separate continents anymore, Mr. Vanderbilt. What impacts one landmass impacts another, eventually. The roots of this search lie, for instance, in Bavaria.”

“I don’t see what Vanderbilts have to do with it.”

“Yet you contacted the Pinkertons for an extra crew tonight, I hope.”

“Yes. Of course. The men I’ve set to guard the house remain here. Ludicrous as it seems, you indicated the abduction of my daughter was part of this . . . scheme. I’m not sure that we need ladies along on such a midnight expedition on a clearly criminal matter—”

Godfrey couldn’t allow the women in his life to be dismissed as mere ladies. “My wife and Miss Huxleigh have assisted on assignments from London to Prague to, er, Transylvania.”

“Why have you settled on this particular site?”

Irene spoke up. “Because of the character of your late father, William. He always kept his dealings ‘close to the vest,’ even in regard to the provisions of his will. I sense that he, like the Commodore, his father, would have kept a secret close to him also.”

The current Mr. Vanderbilt frowned. “He indeed did much damage by concealing the division of his wealth through his last will and testament. Why are you so interested in the old Dutch cemetery at New Dorp on Staten Island, where my grandfather is buried?”

“And was only buried there twelve years ago,” Irene reminded him. “What is the nature of this plot?”

“The Commodore is buried in the Dutch cemetery at the moment. However, my father, William Henry, had taken me and my brother Cornelius out to Staten Island about, oh, five years ago. He’d told us that, despite the Commodore donating the cemetery fifty adjoining acres and my father himself building a chapel on it, the trustees would only sell several acres for a family mausoleum at ‘Vanderbilt prices.’

“My father refused to pay a premium for the land and bought fourteen acres on an adjoining hilltop. He decided to use the architect who had created Alva’s . . . our . . . city chateau here at Six-sixty Fifth Avenue to design a hilltop mausoleum.”

Mr. Vanderbilt chuckled.

“What’s so funny about the family mausoleum?’ Irene inquired with a smile.

Willie K. Vanderbilt shook his head. “My father was something of a sobersides. He and Hunt never did understand each other. Asked to design the mausoleum, Hunt offered a plan as grandly European as the masterpieces he created for Alva.”

Mr. Vanderbilt shook his head and lit another cigar. At this rate, the man must consume a box a day!

“Hunt told me my father’s reaction to his first plan and we had many a laugh over it. My father wanted something simple. He said we were plain, simple, unostentatious people. This was after Alva had this house built, of course. Do you know how much my father was worth when he died?”

We shook our heads. I personally thought it was none of our business.

“Two hundred million dollars,” Mr. Vanderbilt went on. “More than twice what the Commodore had made. My father had been a good shepherd. One of our family bankers explained it by saying that if this sum were converted into gold it would weigh five hundred tons and require five hundred workhorses to pull it from the Grand Central Depot to the subtreasury in Wall Street. If it had all been in gold dollars, it would have taken my father more than thirty years to count it, working eight hours a day.”

“And yet your father stinted on a family mausoleum?”

“No. He wanted it ‘roomy and solid and rich.’ Hunt’s second design was built into the hill on three sides overlooking Staten Island.”

I’ve never understood the need to give the dead an earthly view.

“Roomy and solid and rich,” Irene repeated. “That sounds quite a bit like your father himself.”

The son nodded. “Construction began shortly after he took me and Neily out there, early in ’85. He visited in early December to see the twenty tons of bronze grating being installed to keep intruders out. The mausoleum was half-completed. He dropped dead of a stroke on December
eighth and on the eleventh was taken down Fifth Avenue in a cortege of a hundred carriages to the old ferryboat at the Forty-second Street wharf. Twelve pallbearers carried his casket up the hill to the vault, where his casket was placed near the Commodore’s, until the building was finished.”

Silence held among our party, partly in respect for the dead, partly in awe at the tale of so much unthinkable wealth, yet it still all came down to death. Whether William Vanderbilt in his “roomy and solid and rich” mausoleum on a hill overlooking the harbor or Lola Montez with her one small headstone in Green-Wood Cemetery engraved with an almost-anonymous name.

“ ‘Roomy and sohd and rich,’ ” Irene repeated again, like a bell tolling, a passing bell for the dead, making a sustained, lovely note of each word.

Oh, no, Mr. Hunt, this will not answer at all. We are plain,
quiet, unostentatious people, and we don’t want to be buried in
anything as showy as that would be
.
—WILLIAM VANDERBILT ON SEEING RICHARD MORRIS HUNT’S FIRST
DESIGN FOR THE FAMILY MAUSOLEUM