Elsinore (12 page)

“She's his daughter, Swiss. Did he ever mention Judith Church?”

Bruno crumpled one eye and winked at the piano player again. “Of course I heard of Judith. She's the love of his life.”

“Well, Mrs. Vanderwelle is the child they had between them.”

“Not a chance, Holden. Howard couldn't have kept a secret like that. A mystery child born out of nowhere. I can't believe it.”

“She's been ruining Phipps.”

“He could sack her, Holden, daughter or no daughter. The man's not an imbecile.”

“He's an imbecile when it comes to little Judith Church … that's her real name.”

“What can I do about it? You're president of Aladdin and I have to suck my fingers to stay alive. I mean, you were my ace. I could collect any debt with you in the house. All I had to say was ‘Holden.'”

“What's stopping you? You can still mention my name.”

“Not when you're president. I'd look foolish.”

“Then I'll write you a letter on Aladdin stationery. One sentence. ‘Be kind to Bruno.' But I want to know more about Phipps. What kind of man was he when you met him in the middle of the ocean?”

“A born detective. There was a little family of duchesses and dukes on the paquebot. But no one could figure them out. They didn't gamble or flirt. They weren't nosy. They sat at the captain's table. And I swooned, Holden, looking at their medals and the mustaches on the men, with every hair in line. The duchesses didn't talk like ordinary humans. Each little sentence was a song. And while we were all delirious over them, ready to lick their feet, Howard sent a couple of cables. A launch arrived and took the whole bloody nation off the boat. They were pickpockets and jewel thieves, sizing up customers during the voyage. They would have had every nickel on the paquebot before the week was done. That's when I started worshiping Howard, the billionaire with Pinkertons in his blood.”

“He was a cantor long before that.”

Bruno started to laugh. “Howard singing in a synagogue? It must have been a scam.… Holden, I'm tired.” He took Frog's hand. “Stay here and listen to George.”

George was the piano player, and Holden didn't like that silent buzzing between him and Bruno Schatz.

Bruno trotted out the door. George smirked from his bench near the window and Holden could have tossed him through the glass, but the president of Aladdin couldn't afford a scandal at the Plaza-Athénée. Bruno had told him nothing at all. Holden didn't care how many jewel thieves Phippsy unmasked. A cantor had to be behind that image of the billionaire. A cantor, not a Pinkerton man.

Holden sat and watched the piano player. There was a curious duel between them. Frog was the only customer in the house. The waiters had receded into some dark closet. The barman disappeared. Holden heard the clack of piano keys, the noise of some tune that could have drifted off a paquebot when Bruno Schatz had been a boy. He could feel the blue mark of a skirt from the corner of his eye. Andrushka had arrived from the heart of the hotel. She was like some big ripe cat in a blue skirt, sitting beside him.

“Holden,” she said.

His knees didn't quake. He couldn't love that ripe cat.

“Does Swiss still have a suite at the Plaza-Athénée for his best clients?”

“No. He had to give it up.”

“But you didn't come in off the street. You used the hotel door.”

“That's because I booked a room for tonight.”

“I don't get it. I thought Swiss likes to be the last man out of the piano bar.”

“He does.”

“Then why am I sitting here with you?”

“It's a memento, Holden, a memento of our marriage.”

“I see. Then the room is for us.”

“The one you always liked.”

“With the gold sink?”

“Yes.”

“And a silver angel on the armoire?”

“Yes.”

“Our old room.” He wanted to slap her, but he couldn't. Now he understood the piano player's role in this business. George was Bruno's lookout man. He'd signaled to Bruno when Andrushka had come down from her room and stood near the door, waiting to give herself to the Frog. They were their own Manhattan Mimes, Andrushka, Swiss, and George. “What's Swiss afraid of? I didn't come here to hurt him.”

“But you can. You're close to Howard Phipps.”

“Tell me, Andrushka, did you ever meet Phipps during the time we were married?”

“I don't remember.”

“Did you meet him or not?”

“Once or twice.”

“Swiss introduced you?”

“I think so.”

“And where was I?”

“God knows, bumping people in Alaska or Maine.”

“I was never in Alaska,” Holden said.

“Does it really make a difference. You were gone.”

“And what did Phipps tell you?”

“That I was wasting myself … that I ought to live in Paris.”

“With the Swiss?”

“He didn't say that.”

“But it comes to the same thing,” Holden said. “And now you're scared. Because suddenly I'm the new man in the palace … Andie, get the Plaza-Athénée to give you a refund. And go back to the Swiss.”

Holden got up, kissed his lost bride on the mouth, walked to the entrance of the piano bar, looked at George, and went out onto the avenue Montaigne.

10

He spent the night at a small hotel on the Place St. Sulpice, where no one could track him down. His room didn't have a gold sink or silver angels hovering over a closet. But Frog was as anonymous as any commercial traveler. His phone rang at five
A.M.
He roused himself from a merciless sleep. He couldn't have a proper dream in Paris, not after that city had swallowed his bride.

“Sid, is that you?”

Frog couldn't escape that old ungodly god of a man. “Phippsy, how'd you find my address?”

“It was in my file.”

“I haven't stayed here that often.”

“Often enough. You should have warned me you were going to France. That wasn't nice. How's Swiss?”

“Didn't you speak to him?”

“No.”

“Then Andrushka told you about my trip.”

“Your little bride? Haven't had a word with her, Sid. Gloria caught your name on one of my screens. Can't leave the country without Gloria hearing of it. You're plugged into our network, Sid. Part of our life.”

“What else is on that screen? Where Gloria was raised? Who her mother was? All the synagogues her daddy played in?”

“Shut your stinking mouth.”

“And Andrushka? Pretty chummy with her when she was in New York, weren't you, old man? Did you take her to restaurants while I was doing piecework for Aladdin? Plant a little kiss in her ear? Tell her about Paris and what she was missing by remaining with me?”

“I don't have that kind of power, Sid.”

“I'll bet.”

Holden heard a whimper. Then there was silence and the old man said, “I couldn't lie … she was better off with the Swiss.”

“I would have bumped you if—”

“Careful, Sid. Can't tell who's monitoring us. It's an international call.”

“Bruno should have been more ambitious and sent me after you. I still might come out of retirement for a job like that.”

The old man hung up and Frog went back to bed.

He was tired of rescuing Phippsy from phantoms he knew little about.

Holden was president of a company that never even marketed the coats it produced. His nailers and cutters bent over their boards with a poisonous energy that felt like the beginning of some plague. He signed the checks for their salaries and each shipment of sables and minks. Aladdin was one more Howard Phipps enterprise, a company that was losing blood. But none of Holden's checks ever bounced. Every month a gang of truckmen arrived and removed the coats. And that was the last he heard of Aladdin's wares.

Whenever he tried to stop the truckers and question them, they simply walked away from the job. Then other truckers arrived, and they wore Holden down with that same sullen silence. He let them keep the coats. But he knew he'd have to become his own Pinkerton man or remain the shadow president of a shadow firm. He followed the truckmen to a warehouse at College Point, a few miles from Elsinore, that haunted asylum where he'd met Dr. Herbert Garden and his own fiancée. He stalked the truckers, waited until they delivered their goods, and then broke into the warehouse, using a little pocketknife to dig under the windowguard. He climbed into a strange fort that held Aladdin's inventory of the last nine months, buried among an enormous pile of costumes and stage sets. Half the world could have been reproduced in those false rooms, with walls that went nowhere, windows that opened onto nothing but windows, so that Frog felt he was looking into some endless infernal box, where devils might have danced with their own children.

He didn't like that catalogue of Aladdin's coats, but he could have lived in this warehouse, felt comfortable among the costumes and different stages. Then he happened to turn his head. He saw five or six of the truckers with their own arsenal. The guns they were carrying might have been props, because Holden couldn't recognize the make or the caliber of a single piece. But he was all alone. And the truckers were big enough to beat him into the ground.

“I'm president of Aladdin,” he said.

“You aren't welcome here. You shouldn't have come.”

“Then tell me why you're stockpiling all my coats.”

“We have orders to deliver, we deliver,” their spokesman said. He had the tinniest gun of them all.

“Those orders didn't come from me.”

“We don't work for you, Holden.”

“But I'm president of Aladdin,” he had to say for the second time.

“Presidents mean nothing to us. Can you imagine how many presidents we meet in an afternoon?”

“Let's kill him, Rob,” one of the spokesman's accomplices said, a wiry man with enormous shoulders. “For the pleasure of it. Just for fun.”

“You shouldn't have used my name.”

“But if we kill him, Rob, it wouldn't matter.”

These weren't bumpers. They jabbered too much, like infants out of an acting school. “Yes, Rob,” Holden said. “I think you should kill me. Just for fun.”

The truckers scattered with their arsenal of guns. And Holden saw Mrs. Vanderwelle in the wake of their shadows on the wall. She had another bow in her hair. And Frog still couldn't understand why he felt so uncertain around little Judith. Did he desire her or not? She had all the aromas of a woman he might have adored.

“They're actors,” he said. “Members of the Manhattan Mimes.”

“They work on a truck.”

“This is God's own warehouse, isn't it? And I'm little Hamlet inside a cuckoo clock. I want my coats back, Mrs. Vanderwelle.”

“And what would you do? Stack them in your office?”

“I have salesmen. I see them around. Why aren't they out selling the coats?”

“It's the slow season,” she said.

“You're using Aladdin as a dumping ground. You throw in cash, and nothing comes out.”

“You get your salary. Aren't you satisfied?”

“No. I didn't become president of Aladdin to preside over its ruin.”

“You can always complain to Howard.”

“He won't listen. You have him in a trance. I'm not even allowed to mention your name.”

“That doesn't leave you with very much, Mr. Holden.”

“Maybe. But I still want my coats.”

The same truckers returned Holden's inventory. His salesmen resigned within a week. Holden advertised for new ones. But the fur market was closed to him. No one would come to Aladdin. The cutters left. No new skins arrived. The nailers had nothing to nail. Holden sat with his inventory. He wasn't discouraged. He was like some mad emperor of sable and mink.

He sent the nailers home. And then he stalked Mrs. Vanderwelle. But she wouldn't go near the Manhattan Mimes. And Holden felt as if his own life were spinning backward, spiraling in upon itself, so that he was pushing toward his boyhood on the plains of Queens, a boyhood with a dad who was hardly ever there. Mrs. Vanderwelle inhabited some of Holden's empty spaces. She shopped. She worked. She went to the movies, always alone. She was too pretty not to have a boyfriend. It had to be her own design. She was Howard Phipps' secret daughter. She could have had any banker in the business. But Phipps despised bankers, Holden recalled.