I stared at the card, wondering how it had come into my possession. Appleton? A long swallow of gin brightened my memory. Appleton. Of course. We had a Self Service client, one of the few I could recall pleasantly. We had spent an hour together in his room at the Yale Club; an older man, but weathered, strong, well-built, and with a handshake that was a real bone-cruncher.
A nice guy, very open—he had told me a lot about himself: after his first wife died, he had married a much younger woman, and they lived on the lands of a rolling farm filled with fruit trees and roaming cows and narrow tumbling creeks. He had given me his card and told me to call him up and come for a visit any time. Embraced by self-pity, emboldened by alcohol, and totally forgetful of the fact that it must be three in the morning, I asked the bartender to give me five dollars’ worth of quarters.
“Sorry, sonny. But we’re shutting down.”
“Please. This is an emergency. I’ve got to make a long-distance call.”
Counting out the money, he said: “Whoever she is, she ain’t worth it.”
After I had dialed the number, an operator requested an additional four dollars. The phone rang half a dozen times before a woman’s voice, deep and slow with sleep, responded.
“Hello. Is Mr. Appleton there?”
She hesitated. “Yes. But he’s asleep. But if it’s something important …”
“No. It’s nothing important.”
“May I ask who’s calling?”
“Just tell him … just say a friend called. His friend from across the River Styx.”
BUT TO RETURN TO THAT winter afternoon in Paris when I first met Kate McCloud. There we were, the three of us—myself, my young mongrel dog, Mutt, and Aces Nelson, all clumped together inside one of those little silk-lined Ritz elevators.
We rode to the top floor, disembarked there, and as we walked along the corridor lined with old-fashioned steamer trunks, Aces said: “Of course, she doesn’t know the real reason why I’m bringing you here …”
“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
