Crowned Heads (7 page)

Certain information had not got into the papers at all, and though rumor became blatant, nothing was printed until an incident at the Nice airport, where Fedora was detained by customs, then charged with illegal possession of drugs. The scandal occurred during the filming of
Mother Russia,
which was being shot on the Dalmatian coast in Yugoslavia. She was eventually released and permitted to finish the film, but word of the incident had got around, and finally the Rome publication
Oggi
picked it up. Other incidents followed, and though many people attributed her difficulties to alcohol, insiders knew that she was taking hashish and cocaine, which she had easy access to in Tangier, and it was now whispered that she had become addicted.

She continued making pictures, each worse than the last, and by now she was considered a risk; few producers would take a chance on her. She was replaced twice, her career faltered again, then failed altogether, and
The Dying Summer
was not completed. She never made another film. She resumed her royal progresses, but gradually receded into or was absorbed by that anonymity she had sought; not that she could ever be anonymous—her face was too famous; she was still
La Déesse
or
La Scandalosa—
but she was treated like exiled royalty, to be talked of and pointed out, a little eccentric, a little bizarre, rather melancholy, continuingly baffling, and what was now saddest, passé. The high hat had become old hat.

The evening was so pleasant that Marion and Barry walked back to his apartment. He put on some records while Marion visited the bathroom, combed her hair, and freshened her make-up. When she came out he had his shoes off and was lolling in the club chair. He pointed to the sofa and she sat.

“Where now?” she asked.

Barry smiled. “To the end, I guess. It’s about time, don’t you think?”

Marion looked at the clock. It was after midnight; she hadn’t even noticed the hour. “You’re really not going to let me use it?”

“Marion, I don’t think you’ll want to,” he replied seriously.

“Why not?”

“You said you need twenty minutes’ worth. You couldn’t do this story in two hours.”

“All right,” she said. She lit a cigarette, drew in smoke, exhaled, and waited.

“It began—and ended—with a trip I made to Europe almost two years ago. My novel had just come out in London and my British publishers asked me over to do some publicity. There I came across an old friend, Viola Ueberroth. I was in Harrods, signing copies of my book, and up she popped. She’d just flown in from Greece, she said, and insisted on having a first edition, and when I offered to autograph it she said no, thanks, and gave it to the salesgirl to be wrapped. We talked for a few minutes while she paid for the book, but when she left the store I thought she’d forgotten it, since she hadn’t taken it with her. I asked the salesgirl and found out it was being mailed; not to herself, but to the Countess Maria Lislotte Sobryanski, on Crete.

“It was only an idle notion at first, but I had some free time and I conceived the idea of going to Crete to see if I could talk to the countess—beard the lioness in her den. It happened that I had another friend—also a writer—who has a small house on a nearby Greek island. I cabled him, asking if I could come and visit. He agreed, and I flew to Patmos. Peter knows the region well, but when I questioned him about the Sobryanskis, he could tell me very little. John and his wife still alternated among their several residences, and it was known that Fedora was still a not infrequent visitor both to their houses and at the countess’s villa as well. I stayed three days with Peter, we said goodbye at the boat dock, and I embarked for Crete. The weather is still fine in late September in that part of the world, but the greatest blessing is that most of the tourists have gone home. I found immediately a small hotel to my liking in the port of Iraklion. My first inquiries at the hotel brought results. I learned that the Sobryanski villa was in a nearby village. I rented a car and drove over late on my first morning.

“The village climbed a mountainside, wooded and wildly overgrown and accessible only by a narrow twisting road which overlooks the Aegean, a truly spectacular view, and it was at the end of the road that I had been told I would find the villa. It was there, all right, a yellowish-pinkish stucco affair with tiled roofs and chimneys, and that was about all I could see, because there was a high stone wall, and the only entrance seemed to be a small wooden door cut into it. The few visible signs of life were a battered gray Citroën parked in the gravel turnaround, and some goats chewing on the weeds. I wasn’t about to pop in on the countess, but I had written a note, introducing myself, giving my credentials, and adding that I was the friend of Viola’s whose book she had recently sent, and asking if it would be convenient for me to call sometime. No one answered when I banged the knocker; I’d decided to mail the note from the hotel when suddenly I heard someone on the other side of the wall. The gate was thrown open and there was this fellow standing there. He looked like a thug. Everything about him was thick and rough, and I guessed this probably included his brain—he had a really stupid look about him, menacing, too, and I backed away several steps. When I spoke the countess’s name, he only went on glowering, so I held out my letter. He took it, blinked at it, and then shut the gate in my face. I got in my car and started back down the road.

“Around the first turn there was another house, which I stopped to investigate—hardly more than a cottage, with the windows boarded up, but with a magnificent view. I went around to the back, which faced the sea, and to my right, up across a gully some six hundred yards away, I could see one side of the villa, with a terrace behind, built out onto the hillside. There was a low stone balustrade bordering the terrace, with some statues on pedestals and decorative urns at the corners, and red flowers in boxes. Part of the terrace, likewise facing the sea, was protected from the sun by a striped canopy swooping out from one blistered wall, and under the canopy sat a figure in a wheelchair. Ah ha, I thought, the countess in the flesh; I could make out her knot of white hair and a knob-headed cane, and I recalled the magazine photographs of her leaning on a cane after her accident at the Camargue ranch. Now she used it to shake it at the servant, who came out and handed her my note. She snatched it from him and he went inside again. She held the envelope in front of her, inspecting but not opening it, then rang a little bell at her elbow. It wasn’t the servant who replied to her summons, but another woman. The countess handed her the envelope, from which she extracted my note and read it to her. The countess’s hand came up, she snatched the paper, crumpled it, and tossed it up so the breeze carried it over the balustrade. Ah ha, I thought, so much for my interview with Countess Sobryanski. The second woman pulled up a chair and sat close to her, reading aloud from a book, and I could hear music from inside the house. Next there was a loud crash, and what sounded like an angry shout, then a third woman came through the French doors onto the terrace. She was like a character in a play, her entrance was so floridly theatrical, with volatile, dramatic gestures, and I saw at once that it was Fedora herself.

“It was totally unexpected, pure coincidence, yet somehow completely natural that my real quarry should also be in residence. No wonder the countess had tossed my note away. She’d thought I knew beforehand that Fedora was there and was trying to obtain entrée under false pretenses. Now Fedora came up to the second woman, who rose and relinquished the book, and Fedora took her chair and began reading to the countess. Was this how she was living out her years—reading to the old woman? Some time later Countess Sobryanski rang her bell, the manservant came to wheel her inside, and Fedora followed them, letting one hand trail negligently through the red flowers as she walked by the boxes.

“I decided the second woman might be her companion, Mrs. Balfour, though I couldn’t be sure. I went down the hill to the village and stopped in the hotel bar. The hotelkeeper’s son spoke English and I encouraged him to talk about the villa, but didn’t learn much. When I asked about the smaller house, he said it originally had been the caretaker’s cottage, but was now owned by one of the large olive-growing families in the village. He took me around the corner to a café, where I met the patriarch of the clan, a fellow named Vasos, with huge white brigand’s mustaches and the most worn-out but the cleanest shirt I’d ever seen; it was darned and sewed and patched in every conceivable spot. I asked if I could stay in his cottage for a while, and he thought that was funny. I explained through the boy that I was a writer craving solitude, so Vasos went away and spoke with his wife. She came and looked me up and down, and after a discussion of price, the boy interpreting, we struck a bargain. Vasos would unboard the house and have it put in habitable order. I paid in advance, went back to Iraklion, stayed the night, then checked out the following day. A taxi brought me back to the village, where I was supposed to pick up someone to go with me to the house, but the hotel barman told me the person had gone on ahead. During my talk with the boy the previous evening I’d noticed a small brass telescope—a nautical spyglass, actually—in a little rack behind the bar, and I asked the bartender if he’d sell it to me. He wouldn’t, but I might borrow it if I chose. He gave me a wink and said something about the girls on the beach.

“The taxi took me up the hill and dropped me at the cottage. Another, younger, Mrs. Vasos was there, cleaning; the boards had been taken down and the place put to rights. The furniture wasn’t much, but enough. There were views from the windows on all four sides, one largish room and a smaller one for sleeping. The kitchen facilities were minimal, but there was a small gas stove and even a refrigerator—I had found out that the house was wired for electricity when power and telephone lines had been run up to the villa. The bathroom plumbing was even more primitive, but the whole thing suited me fine. Mrs. Vasos would come up on her bicycle late each afternoon and bring me food, which she would cook. I would lunch on bread, cheese, and fruit, and since I don’t eat breakfast it was all simple enough. I’d brought up a good supply of local wine, which was unresinated; it tasted like Frascati, not bad at all, and there was ice, so I didn’t seem to need anything else.

“When Mrs. Vasos left, I did my unpacking. I put the books I had brought with me on the table, then went out and picked some asphodel, which grew all along the roadway. I put the flowers in a pitcher and set that on the table with the books, and that was about as homey as I could make the place. There were two doors, one at the front, beside the road, another at the back, where a rustic arbor had been put up. It was well covered by a grapevine—at least I thought it was a grapevine, though there weren’t any grapes. Beneath this arbor was a small flagstone terrace. The view, as I said, was stupendous. To the left was a jutting headland, around whose sloping tip lay Iraklion. Directly at my feet, below the terrace, the ground fell away to the gully, with an overgrown path winding from the cottage and around the foundation of the villa terrace above. Beyond this was a sheer drop of several hundred feet, then some barren spaces, neat apple and olive orchards, and small garden plots attached to smaller houses. Way below was a narrow plateau ending in a rocky shelf that went into the water, and while Homer may have called it the wine-dark sea, this day I found the Aegean wildly blue. I waited with my spyglass for a peek at someone on the terrace, but no one came or went. When it started getting dark I saw lights go on at the windows. Sitting in the arbor, I suddenly had the feeling that not all the terrace figures were inanimate, that someone human was lingering among the statues, watching. It was only a feeling, because I couldn’t see anyone. I’d brought a portable cassette player, and I put on some music, I ate, read for a while, and finally went to bed. Later, I thought I heard music again, and got up and looked; but there was nothing, only the dark statues on their pedestals, picked out in moonlight.

“Next morning I rose early, went out to the arbor, pulled up a chair, and sat with my spyglass handy. Around nine o’clock I saw the second woman come onto the terrace with a basket and clippers and begin snipping the growth in the urns and the flowers in the boxes. It
was
Mrs. Balfour. She didn’t look that much different from when I’d seen her at the Louvre, though her hair was considerably grayer. I wasn’t being too careful and she must have noticed me observing her, because she ducked behind one of the urns, then hurried inside. I was more careful with my spyglass after that. I drank my coffee, listening to my cassette player, but remained screened behind the grapevine while I kept watch. Pretty soon I heard the sound of a broom and the servant was out, in a white jacket, sweeping the terrace. Next he had a hose and was watering the plants in the urns, then the flowers in the boxes, and when he finished he coiled up the hose and went inside. Then more music. Mine clashed with it, so I shut off the cassette and waited.

“Just at eleven, Mrs. Balfour came back on the scene, talking to someone behind her, and immediately the servant appeared, pushing the Countess Sobryanski’s wheelchair. I trained the glass on her as she moved in profile; she was very old, and thin. Her white hair was done up in a tight little pug on top, giving her head a skinned look. Her coloring was not the paleness of the aged, but rather dark, as though she took the sun, though her chair was placed exactly where it had been yesterday, shaded by the canopy. She laid the cane across her lap and sat close to the balustrade, facing the sea below. Mrs. Balfour had a book; she sat and read aloud to the countess for about an hour, and at noon Fedora appeared, in a white blouse and dark-blue shorts and a straw hat. She took Mrs. Balfour’s place with the book and read to the countess while Balfour went inside. Then at one o’clock I heard the bell ring. Fedora shut the book and got up, the servant came to wheel the countess, and they all went in—for lunch, I assumed.

“I had my own bread, cheese, fruit, and some wine, and ate in the arbor, still watching, and listening to Strauss’s
Ein Heldenleben
on the cassette player. After lunchtime the villa was quiet and I presumed the women must be napping. I had a doze myself, and when I woke up it was after three. My cassette had stopped. I flipped it over, raised the volume, and went into the bathroom to shave. Then I heard an awful racket, a torrent of music blasting down the hill from inside the villa. I went out to the arbor again and saw Fedora at the terrace balustrade, ringing the countess’s bell for all it was worth. Obviously my cassette player was disturbing her and she was turning the tables on me.