Cheyney Fox (24 page)

Walking down the marble-stepped street on her way to meet Lala and Roberto, it occurred to her that, much as her friends wanted to hear every last detail about her part in their art deal, there was only one person who would truly appreciate her experiences with Acton Pace. Kurt Walbrook. It was then that it came to her. And, once the idea came into her head, she knew it had to be true. Lala and Roberto’s mystery client for Acton Pace’s paintings was Kurt Walbrook. Why wasn’t she surprised?

Chapter 23

A
cton Pace lay back in the old bentwood rocker, his left foot on the floor with his right leg crossed over it. Only his fingertips touched, raised as if in some abstract form of prayer.

He was as if mesmerized by the painting on his easel. He sensed his body as something light, ethereal, being drawn toward it. Acton Pace felt himself dissolve into his latest painting. He and the painting merged, became one. They shared the same life, the same acute awareness of everything around them.

Sharpness and detail; everything vivid and alive. He could hear the tiniest note of the smallest bird as if it were sitting on the rim of his eardrum. Outside the wall of window glass, scrubby pines sunk deep in the sand dunes trembled in the wind. The ink-blue waves of the Atlantic crashed coldly on the deserted shore under a bright sun.

Forty feet across the room, behind him, the walls where his paintings were stacked in neat rows. Bin upon bin to the forty-foot ceiling above. In the middle of that wall a door — and what lay behind it: the fine beige crystalline sand that slips into the sides of your shoes as you both sink and walk across the dunes the quarter of a mile to the barbed-wire fence with its gate and rusted padlock. There a sign on the fence signaled P
RIVATE
P
ROPERTY
, K
EEP
O
UT
U
NLESS
I
NVITED
. Neat, chromium-red print.

He could hear voices from the terrace above him. A dull but steady hum and rumble. His wife, his dealer, and his oldest
friend, Simon North. They had arrived with a man, a lawyer named Judd Whyatt. He knew what they were talking about and he wasn’t interested. He figured his wife and Mr. Whyatt were the hums, his dealer, Rowena Sicle, and Simon North the rumbles. He knew what Judd Whyatt wanted, and that Simon, Rowena, and his wife Reha could handle it. They had no need of him.

Simon was just as famous an Abstract Expressionist painter as he was. The testimony on their kind of painting that Judd Whyatt sought from him would be erudite. It would serve. Simon was good with words but great with paint.

Pace listened. Words, words, rumbles. They had come to hear what Acton Pace had to say. Why? For years he had been telling them he had nothing to say. Still they asked for words. Were his paintings not enough? Would they ever be enough?

His wife Reha and his guests would press no further for him to join them. They would be sensitive to his mood and smart enough to leave him be. “Only if you want to help us out,” they said, “We’ll be upstairs. We won’t disturb you again,” they said. Considerate of them. So why didn’t they all go away? Why all the rumble, the hum, why?

Now he saw himself pass into the painting, slip through the thin film of oil paint. The moment his body first touched the surface of the canvas he saw himself change form, flatten into a flesh-colored wash of pigment, covering every inch of the canvas. He felt and saw in the same instant the painting’s colors and forms absorbing him.

Acton Pace felt himself a five-by-seven piece of linen canvas, stretched taut, painted, and signed by the body sitting in the rocker. He looked out from the easel he sat upon and started his daily dialogue with that other Acton Pace sitting in the rocking chair.

“Made your farewells to anyone?”

“No.”

“Not even your wife?”

“No.”

“Any regrets about that?”

“No.”

“Listen.”

Again, very loud and clear, the twittering of many small
birds. To a background of waves and rustling pines. Over all this, dimly, the hum and rumble from the terrace above.

“There’s some artists would try a good-bye to the sights and sounds of the life around them.”

“Not me.”

“I say only, go with care, Simon, and you, too, Rowena, but go without me. Support Abstract Expressionism causes with all your verbiage if you like, Reha, my dear wife, I love you. But you are my enemy because you insist on defending my life and my work when it needs no defense.

“Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock and Willem De Kooning, and, yes, even me, Acton Pace. Our paintings are not threatened by Pop Art. Just challenged to a contest created by the likes of you.”

End of dialogue. Acton Pace felt himself separate from the pigment and found again the self rocking in his chair. He listened to the sounds of life around him. His eye took in his painting. He rocked to and fro, again and again, his gaze traveling to the painting, up to the ceiling, back down to the painting.

Sometime later he rose from the rocker and went to the cupboard. With the rope that was there he made a noose. He placed a box exactly where the rocker had been. He did what men have to do in order to hang themselves successfully.

Judd Whyatt and David Rosewarne, two men living in quite different worlds except for their profession. Two men who thought so differently about most things in life. Their only knowledge of one another was that they were adversaries in a courtroom exercising their abilities. One defending Barry Sole, the other prosecuting him. One would win and one would lose. They would then return to their own worlds, more than likely unchanged by the experience, and never to meet again unless in another courtroom. Or so they thought.

Yet the strands of a net of circumstance were thickening to hold them closer than they could have expected.

Take today, for instance. Judd Whyatt was flying in a small plane with a man called Simon North, a famous American painter, to Provincetown, Massachusetts, to meet another famous American painter, Acton Pace.

Approximately twenty miles outside Provincetown the pilot swooped down low over the bays and beaches. They passed over a picture-postcard bay, one that was almost a closed circle. It was surrounded by a scrubby, windswept golf course on the cliffs above it.

Almost dead center in the circular bay was an elegant black sloop with burnt-orange-colored sails. Two boys were handling the boat and a man was reclining on cushions reading.

That man was David Rosewarne; the papers in his hand, the Barry Sole brief. The particular page he was reading, a list of artists likely to give evidence against his client. Acton Pace, Provincetown, was what he read as the plane flew over the boat.

David Rosewarne looked up. He watched the plane climb and circle the golf course. Judd Whyatt asked the pilot to make another low pass over the black sloop, then wondered why he had made the request. When the plane swooped down for the second time, David Rosewarne stood up to have a better look. He kept his eyes on the plane until the sky was empty.

“That was a nifty four-seater Cessna, Dad. I sure would like one like that.”

David Rosewarne eyed his son Joshua and said, “Sure you would, Josh. It must be going to Provincetown.”

Hours later, Judd Whyatt was helping to cut Acton Pace down from his studio rafter. It was just about the time that David Rosewarne looked up at the, sail and yelled over to his son Calvin, “For God’s sake, Cal, how many times have I told you to be neat? What do you think ‘shipshape’ means, son? Look at that rope swinging in the breeze. Good heavens, boy, that’s how accidents happen! And what’s a noose doing on the end of the rope?”

They found him hanging from a rafter of his studio. His back was turned to his last painting. Judd Whyatt was deeply shocked by the suicide of Acton Pace. He could not but think he was in some way a part of that tragedy. All the time he had been sitting on the terrace right above the man, dealing with words and issues, Pace was acting out what he felt about those very words and issues. Had he not said, “Do something definite and absolute about the manipulations of art and the artist, or
shut up?” Well, what Acton had done was undeniably an absolute response to manipulation.

Judd Whyatt had never seen a hanged man before. The thing that stuck in his mind the most was the weight of the man when he had cut him down, and the fear that he might drop him.

Judd Whyatt had wanted to lay him down gently, carefully, because, although the act was such a violent one, there was an enormous calm over the studio and its corpse.

The moment he touched the cold, stiff body, Judd Whyatt had known that Acton Pace had left only the shell of his self there in the form of his body. The essence of the man was alive everywhere in the room. It looked out at him from the painting on the easel.

The powerful presence of Acton, so vibrant and alive, and the feel of Acton’s cold corpse in his arms was a lesson in life and death that Judd Whyatt would be forever grateful for. Tears brimming in his eyes, his heart bursting with compassion for the dead man, he had the most overwhelming desire to kiss Acton Pace good-bye.

They had met only once for a few hours, that two weeks before, when he had acted as legal adviser to Cheyney Fox on the completion of the sale she was negotiating with Acton Pace. And then, he had been alone with the artist, at Acton’s request, for no more than fifteen minutes, because Acton insisted that Cheyney Fox should have three paintings, a gift to her from him, which she had refused. Acton could not accept her claim that she had to decline his generous gift because Lala and Roberto’s client, and indeed Roberto and Lala, might think there was a conflict of interests.

Acton Pace had been in total command of his faculties and knew exactly what he wanted and what he didn’t want. He had been even more than that. He had been shrewd enough to make it legal and binding. Together Judd and he had worked it out. The paintings, which he had already selected for Cheyney, were to be sent to storage in Boston and would be delivered to Cheyney upon his death, along with a document signed by him. The document stated that she had the right, if she so wished, to purchase from his own private collection twelve paintings over a period of twelve years, at the cost of one hundred thousand dollars a painting. She could then exercise
the right to keep or sell them on the open market. Acton had, indeed, never forgotten that, with Cheyney Fox, part of himself had sprung to life, like a second coming.

Judd remembered vividly when Acton’s wife had been called back into the studio and read the document. She ranted and raved, and kept repeating, “What will Rowena say? And this man is not even our lawyer. And all that to a woman! You’re giving all that to a woman who betrayed the Abstract Expressionists? Have you forgotten who thought of Campbell’s soup cans? I won’t have it.” He had answered, “You will have it, and you will abide by it. And you will say nothing to anyone about it, and you will give your word on that, or you will have nothing but that check in your hand. I will burn every last one of my paintings unless you do.” She gave her word. She had to. There were more than a hundred completed paintings in the studio’s storage racks alone.

Judd rarely came across such tragic and emotional circumstances as he found himself in. He was a high-powered, international, corporate lawyer, not a family lawyer, not a criminal lawyer. In order to accommodate two of his firm’s wealthiest clients, he found himself dragged into the art world with the Barry Sole litigation, one of the great art sales of the decade. And now, this tragic death.

The artists’s wife, his best friend, and his dealer were devastated by the hanging. The tears, rage, despair of losing Acton so shattered them that it fell to Judd to take over the immediate things that had to be done. Down to him to find the doctor, to call the police, to insist Reha call her own lawyer at once. It had also been Judd who, filled with compassion for the corpse he had held in his arms, covered it with a sheet of linen canvas and silently blessed the man and wished him a bon voyage.

Everyone was upset. The art world registered shock but no surprise. Rowena Sicle, his dealer, bought his last painting for herself from Pace’s widow not too long after the funeral. The dealer purchased it with many tears and much emotion. Had she not been, after all, his devoted dealer for twenty-six years?

When art had duly canonized its latest suicide, the Vatican
Museum blessed Rowena Sicle for offering to sell it to them. Dry-eyed now, she accepted a dozen times the widow’s price for this last relic of Acton Pace.

How he would have hated that.

Chapter 24

C
heyney did not hear about Acton Pace’s death until six weeks after he had committed suicide. And then it was under the strangest circumstances.

That night in Athens, when she and Roberto and Lala met to celebrate their obtaining the paintings their client wanted, Cheyney stated that she would never work for the couple again unless she knew who their patron was. That put both Roberto and Lala into a flutter of protests. And ensured that Lala would tell all, or as much as she could without getting into trouble with Roberto and Kurt.

“I am under oath not to disclose his name,” a flustered Roberto had said. “But I will ask him to change his mind.”

The two women’s eyes met. They had known each other for too long not to understand what that look meant: “I’ll give you the hints. You stitch them together.” Lala wasted no time.

“Cheyney, I’ve been meaning to ask you, any new divine man come into your life lately?”

“Yes, as a matter of fact, a man called Kurt Walbrook.” Roberto choked on his drink. A drop splattered over his tie. Lala handed him a napkin. Her shins happened to be out of range of his foot. He was tolerant beyond belief, but not stupid. He knew how women communicated. He wanted to leave the table but daren’t.

“You don’t happen to know him, do you?” continued a mischievous Cheyney.

“Yes, actually. We’ve met him, on and off, socially for years. We have on occasion helped him find things he wanted.”

“Lala!” Roberto’s foot had abandoned its probing beneath the table.

“Yes, darling. All right, I promise we’ll stop the girly gossip right now, so we can hear all the details of the deal.”

Later, on the way to the restaurant, when Lala whispered in Cheyney’s ear, “I’ll tell you all the gossip about him when we’re alone,” Cheyney had whispered back again, “No, I don’t want to know. Leave it alone, Lala.” She gave Lala a look that silenced her.

The following day Cheyney surveyed her apartment and her wardrobe. She was able to look at them now with a more moneyed eye and the frugality of her life quite shocked her.

Cheyney could afford to go on a shopping spree, and that was what she intended to do. A cup of tea, and the realization that she no longer had to live with nine orange crates and a borrowed mattress on the floor, made her also take stock of her way of life. She could afford more than a few dresses and a box spring to put the mattress on. There could be a few more luxuries in her life and possibly a widening of horizons. A holiday, a real holiday. Kurt Walbrook had whetted her appetite for Egypt, and long before him, Lawrence Durrell and Cavafy and Napoleon, who had once conquered it, and Shakespeare, whose words kept Cleopatra and her Anthony alive, and every Pharaonic art object and artifact she had ever seen.

A phone call to make certain Zazou’s favorite dog-sitter could move into the apartment, one to the museum in New York to say she would be shipping from Egypt, if they were interested. They were. She had no intention of changing her life-style just because she had earned some real big bucks. She was off on the afternoon plane with Lala and Roberto for Rome. There could be no better person in the world, no better place — well, possibly New York or Paris or London — for her shopping spree. Rome would serve.

Cheyney had planned to stay in Rome for ten days. That became impossible for her. It was a case of too much, too soon, too rich, too fast. Or some such pleasurable dilemma.

She bought Missonis and Valentinos and Gucci handbags and luggage, and the most glorious handmade shoes she could find. Six pairs of them. Jewelry from Bulgari, even a piece of silver from Buccellati. A Fendi sleeveless jacket of leather and sable, mostly dark, honey-colored leather.

After the simplicity and antithesis of chic in Athens, she plunged now into Roberto and Lala’s ultrachic Rome with its parties, balls, beauty and style, money and success, and the evenings of tittle-tattle and serious gossip. Cheyney was not so much bored as overindulged.

There was something else. Rome was a city where flirtations were an occupation. Here Cheyney had a problem. She had been looking too long at men as people and not men. She found playing the flirt exhausting. A handsome new Italian escort every night, and a string of them waiting for dates. She was simply not in training for it.

Cheyney had forgotten how hard Roberto and Lala could laugh and play. She looked and felt beautiful, ravishing, even, and was amusing and charming and fun. The old Cheyney was back in town, and everyone wanted to know her.

She had no idea how or why it happened, but a huge wave of sadness overpowered her. And she realized how frivolous she was being. Frivolous and extravagant. It was, as usual, Lala who snapped her out of it in a second by saying, “Cheyney Fox, frivolous? So what? Extravagant? Don’t lay that number on me. You can afford it. For God’s sake, Cheyney, good times are here to roll.” She handed Cheyney a long, slim joint, and looked over her shoulder to make sure Roberto was not in the room.

Cheyney knew that she had made a mistake picking up the telephone before she even put the receiver to her ear. She really didn’t want him to have to give up his game. He recognized her voice at once.

“Sheyney?”

Her name flowed off his tongue, as if in letters of liquid honey. She liked the sound, just hearing his voice. She imagined the piercing blue eyes, the sensuous lips. Or had he closed them, as he did when he spoke with emotion? She stretched her imagination that little bit further and saw his long, thick
eyelashes. Just his presence on the other end of the telephone made her feel sexy, think of his mouth, his kisses.

“Yes, Kurt.”

“Then you know?”

“That you are the client whom Roberto and Lala are working for? Yes. I guessed that after my return from the States.”

“I thought you might have. I am extremely pleased with what you have done for me, Sheyney. It’s only the beginning. Together we will build a museum for the collection. You have managed one of the great art sales of the decade. How proud you must be. I want to hear all about it when we meet. Darling?”

“Yes, Kurt.”

“Does it matter to you that we keep this art transaction a secret, at least until I have worked out what I want to do with the collection?”

“No.”

“Good. Oh, by the way, I received your note of thanks for the bits and pieces I sent from Cairo. How clever of you to send it through the German embassy. Do you have a pencil? Write this phone number down. You are to use it if you want to find me. We will see each other soonest I am back from Rio. I fly there in a few hours. I love you, Sheyney.”

He gave the telephone number, and the voice was gone. Cheyney yet again realized they had not asked a single personal question of each other. They hadn’t even thought to. She was aware of how free she felt, how much better that was than being in that “in-love” state, where those dozens of possessive questions come into being. The where are you? who are you out with? where did you go? are you happy? when, where, will I see you? Free and just sort of in love, not a bad feeling.

She dressed in her new togs, packed her Gucci bags, and thought herself shamelessly elegant. With a list of the
right
people to know in Cairo and Alexandria stuffed in her new handbag, she kissed a pouting Lala, and the ever-understanding Roberto good-bye, and took the next flight from Rome to Cairo.

Grant Madigan and his crew had been in Cairo waiting around for the call for three days. It had come and this was the day. Now it was a matter of the time and location for the
interview. They would be contacted. That was why they happened to have been at the Gezira Sporting Club, playing bridge and drinking nothing but lemonades for the last five hours. A
sufragi
interrupted their game to announce that two army officers were at the entrance to the clubhouse ready to escort Grant Madigan and his crew to their meeting.

At last. The cards were at once abandoned on the table, chairs were scraped back, jackets retrieved, the air of bored marking time gave way to adrenaline, enthusiasm, action. The
sufragi
was sent to the pool to fetch posthaste the other two crew members, who were not swimming but chatting up two Cairo beauties.

They were on their way to a well-kept secret. President Nasser was ready for his interview with Grant Madigan. Grant and his crew were leaving the clubhouse when he saw Cheyney Fox for the first time. Or so he thought. She was with three of Cairo’s most attractive hostesses. All women in their early middle age, beautiful, wealthy, socially chic. He had had a short liaison with two of them. But his eyes were only for Cheyney. It was an instant carnal desire for her. She was the dark-haired, fair-skinned, sensuous, vibrant kind of woman he most liked to bed. But in the case of this woman there was something in the face. A kind of completeness of beauty that comes from hard living, not the beauty that is merely conjured from the face-cream pot. Here was a woman who had been through something more than Elizabeth Arden’s red door.

Cheyney’s own feelings were not far off his. She did something she had never really believed happened to people. One look into his eyes and she fell in love, and with it came an overwhelming awareness of a person as someone other, separate from herself.

They took a step toward each other. But they were blocked from even a smile, an introduction. One of the army officers strode up to shake hands with Grant. One of the women in Cheyney’s party called to him, “We expect you to dinner. See you then.” And Cheyney was swept away.

He never showed up. After the first course, his chair was removed from the dinner table, the place setting cleared away. The
sufragi
, when changing the plates for the next course,
rearranged the two settings flanking the absent guest’s place. Grant Madigan’s space vanished.

So much for seeing a man as a man, thought Cheyney, more disappointed than she really wanted to think she was. From the time she had seen Grant Madigan earlier in the day, she could not get him out of her mind. She remembered those few short minutes when they had been in a taxi together years ago. She had been quickly attracted to him, but Christopher was such a great part of her life then, that she could not have been seriously interested in any other man. Over the years Grant Madigan had come into her thoughts, though, and she had wanted him, his warmth, his sex.

She tried to shake Grant Madigan from her mind with her feelings for Kurt. She and Kurt Walbrook, so perfect together. She had become whole in his arms. The most exciting man who had ever entered her life and possessed her with sex, his grasp for living and fun, and who shared with her his grand passion, art. That same obsession she once had and lost and found again under his tender care. Kurt, who loved her but allowed her to remain her own independent self. A man who wanted her and pursued her relentlessly, offering her marriage and love and security and an exciting life-style that she could share with him that stretched her own special creative self. Every day she grew to love and respect him more and flower in their relationship. It was all there, but, what she felt for Grant Madigan was something else. A natural, inexplicable chemistry that can happen between two people.

How was it possible to fall for a man with nothing more than a look to go on. Childish? Teenage, romantic love? She thought she was long past that by now. Cheyney dropped her fantasy of having sex with him. She put right out of her mind a look he had given her that suggested a thrilling carnal love affair, if nothing else. She distanced her passion for Grant Madigan by involving herself with the other guests.

Grant Madigan’s session with the president went on for hours. Then there had been a postmortem of the filming with the crew. That was how he happened still to be drinking malt whiskies in a corner of the darkened lobby of his hotel at three o’clock in the morning. His way of unwinding.

The first he saw of her was when the night attendant unlocked
the front door of the hotel, and she tried to say good night to her escort there. He hadn’t been sure it had been her until she entered farther into the hotel’s entrance. The man was not taking the all-too-obvious hint, he followed a few paces behind her. Grant watched her deftly sidestep the velvety advances of an Italian diplomat. Once, twice, she stopped and unwound his arm, removed his hand. He had staying power, this young lover, right up to the concierge’s desk. Persistent buggers, those Italian lovers, thought Madigan, greatly amused to see her practically frog-march him back out of the hotel. Back at the desk, she received her key from the night porter and, as she handed the man several bank notes, he heard her say, “This is for you,
not, no
, to give him the key to my room. Do you understand?” As if he did not quite understand such un-Mediterranean ways. The man agreed, smiling in a way that was not encouraging.

She slapped several more notes in his hand, and he said, “I understand.” Language was not the problem.

He heard her mumble to herself, “Thank God for that.”

Grant thought, Am I looking at a woman who knows how to take care of herself? He liked that in women. He gave her half-ironic applause from deep in the shadows of the room. She swung around. She could barely see him in the dim light, as he walked toward her still clapping his hands. The night porter bent forward and whispered, “That’s Mr. Madigan from America. He makes movies and is in the television. He and his crew always stay with us.”

“You did that nicely. But I would have been very disappointed if such a romantic ham had outplayed you.”

“Me, too. When in Rome, do as the Athenians do.”

He offered his hand for her to shake: “Hi, I’m Grant Madigan.”

“Yes, I know. We almost met this afternoon at the Gezira. We almost dined at the same table this evening. I’m Cheyney Fox.”

“Good name, Cheyney Fox. It suits you. Well now, Cheyney, what should we do?”

“Do about what?”

“About us.”

“Is there an us?” answered Cheyney. His approach lacked elaboration.

“Isn’t there?”

Direct, but also more than that. An intensity in his gaze that told her she was not alone in that overwhelming awareness of him she had felt earlier at the Gezira Sporting Club. That intense desire for intimacy united them. Each of them sensed it. The heart had its reasons even if reason itself wasn’t having any. Come in, Pascal, she told herself. To feel so deeply, almost violently, and so quickly for another was at once thrilling and frightening, not to mention awkward. Yes, awkward, if the feeling was not to be reduced to something less than what it was, to something vulgar. Because what she felt for Grant Madigan was a deep passion that knew no rules, put up no bars. There was nothing merely vulgar about that.