The Chelsea Girl Murders (18 page)

En route, the train was stopped and commandeered by anti-Nazi partisans, who took the loot for themselves. There had been no reports of the icon since then.

The icon was painted in the fifteenth century with egg tempera on birch wood by a famous icon painter, Andrei Rublev.

It was known as “the Baby” because it depicted the baby Jesus in the arms of his mother. Now I really was worried about Nadia. Apparently, she was bringing the baby Jesus icon to Gerald to sell. She must know Gerald through Tamayo, I thought. He was dead, she was missing, and the icon was God knows where. It began to piece together, bit by bit. Nadia was going to meet someone “on business.” Unable to wait any longer for Rocky, she went up alone to meet with Gerald and Miriam Grundy, an art collector. This meant that sweet elderly dame I liked and admired so much was holding out on me.

But Rocky claimed he knew nothing about a “baby.” Either he was holding out on me too, or Nadia was doing this deal without him. The latter made more sense, since the kid was pretty useless. Couldn't even make his bed, let alone conduct some shady art deal.

It was almost dawn when I finally crawled into bed with Louise Bryant. At noon I was supposed to meet Maggie to track down Edna, the switchboard operator, but first I wanted to speak with Dame Grundy.

chapter eleven

“Miriam is not here,” Ben, her assistant, said, in an affected monotonous way that masked all emotion. It had taken him almost ten minutes to answer the door, and then he didn't invite me in, leaving me standing in the hallway. Behind him, I saw three very tall men, evidently auditioning for Miriam's big bash.

“Where is she?” I asked.

“She's with her spiritualist,” he said. “She'll be gone most of the day.”

“Where is this spiritualist? I have got to talk to Mrs. Grundy.…”

“You can't interrupt her when she's with Sylvia. It's more sacred than her shrink appointment,” he said dryly.

At this, he tried to excuse himself, but I wasn't about to let him go. I wanted to know everything about Nadia's meeting with Miriam, if she'd come to sell Miriam a valuable piece of art, and if Miriam now had this piece of art. Nadia had come empty-handed, he insisted, and she didn't bring up any deal.

“If she'd wanted to make a deal, she forgot to tell Miriam,” he said.

“Are you sure? Because I think Gerald Woznik was killed because of an icon Nadia possessed.”

“Grace Rouse killed Woznik. She was insanely jealous and terrified he was going to leave her,” Ben said. “She's insane. Period.”

“What about the icon …”

“The girl, Nadia, didn't have any painting with her when she came to visit Miriam. Have you seen this icon? Are you sure it exists?”

“I haven't seen it. But—”

“Miriam is a rich, generous woman, and an avid collector. Artists are always asking her for money, and many of those are scam artists.”

“You think Nadia was scamming Mrs. Grundy?”

The very tall men were getting restless. Ben turned from me and said to them, “I'll be with you in a minute. I promise.”

Then to me, he said, “I don't know what Nadia was up to. All I know is, I didn't like her and didn't trust her. She came alone and empty-handed. Was Gerald killed for some apocryphal painting? More likely, he was killed for betraying everyone who ever tried to help him or love him. Excuse me.”

He shut the door.

According to Maggie, the one person who knew damn near everything that went on at the Chelsea was Edna the switchboard operator. “My secrets die with me,” she had said, but Maggie Mason seemed to think we could coax them out under the right conditions. One of those conditions was that Maggie be present. Edna knew Maggie. I was an outsider in the Chelsea.

“It's important to schmooze Edna,” Maggie Mason said when I picked her up. “Let me warm her up. I've known her awhile.”

Edna the switchboard operator was married to a merchant seaman near retirement off to sea at the moment. It was her day off, and on her days off, according to Maggie, she spent her time at the movies and at the El Quijote bar.

When we got down to the bar, Edna was not there, but she was in the restaurant. The hostess told Maggie that Edna was in the ladies', so we sat at the bar to wait.

“White sangria, Antonio,” Maggie said to the bartender, who was, like all the men in this bar and restaurant, a proud-looking Spanish gent in a crisp linen shirt and short black waiter's jacket. “Robin?”

“Vodka neat … no, Coca-Cola,” I said. It was only lunchtime and I needed to keep my wits about me, as I had only been able to snag a few hours sleep.

“I love this place,” Maggie said, staring up at some of the hundreds of Don Quixote figurines that lined a shelf above the dark bar. “Don Quixote—how appropriate this place ended up in the Chelsea Hotel. There are a lot of artists in the place with that quixotic spirit.”

I couldn't quite figure out the decor of El Quijote, a wellknown Spanish seafood restaurant in the Chelsea Hotel. It was dim, with rich red tapestries and red-fringed lamps that gave off a rosy glow and an Ottoman brothel feeling. Backlit glass etchings of lobsters glowed pale blue on each side of the bar. The red leatherette banquettes in the main dining room and the woodwork added some Rat Pack lounge flavor. Above the bar was a narrow brick-red canopy, with rounded, red-brown tiles, looking like a Spanish roof eave. A moving windmill rotated slowly above the entrance to the Cervantes room, while the Dulcinea room was flanked by a huge portrait of a flamenco dancer, whom Maggie identified as “Carmen Amaya, flamenco legend.” A sixties-style jazz piano cover of “Black Magic Woman” played low on the sound system.

It was eclectic but refreshing, what with the proliferation of chain restaurants, theme restaurants, and overly designed, hip joints. In contrast, this place looked like an accidental shrine to the passions—crustaceans, Cervantes, and thick brocade—of its owner.

When Edna came back out, she saw Maggie and waved her down to the end of the bar. Edna had what looked like a manhattan or a whiskey sour in front of her—some darkish drink with a maraschino cherry in it—and one of the local tabloids was open in front of her on the bar. It was turned to a story about Gerald Woznik and Grace Rouse. I'd read it earlier. There was nothing new in it. If you believed the
News-Journal
, Grace Rouse had already been tried and convicted.

“Hi, Edna,” Maggie said, giving the woman a kiss on the cheek.

“Hi ya, Maggie,” Edna said. She had a lot of silver hair, worn loose today and down her back instead of up, as she usually wore it when she was on the job.

“Do you know Robin?” Maggie said.

“Robin, Tamayo's friend, right?” Edna said.

“Yes.”

“How is Tamayo?”

“Good as far as I know,” I said.

“Tell Edna that story you told me about Tamayo,” Maggie interrupted.

Tamayo stories are great icebreakers, so I told Edna how Tamayo had been writing a book about her adventures among the Americans for a Japanese publisher. The publisher had put Tamayo and her monkey up in the Okura Hotel, a five-star joint, sent a minder to watch her, to make sure she stayed in and got the book finished. It was really overdue. Tamayo played her music really loud while she wrote, and I guess the monkey was a real nuisance, so the management moved her into the children's wing of the hotel. With her minder.

It was a zoo. She was living in this overgrown child's room, with her monkey and her minder, who was at the end of his rope. When I got to Tokyo, I stopped by the Okura to visit. We had a very civilized light lunch in the room with the minder, who hadn't shaved in a couple of days. At the end of lunch, the minder said it was time for Tamayo to get back to work. Naturally, we locked him in the bathroom and went out drinking. There was a phone in the bathroom, but by the time he was able to call down to the concierge and get someone up to free him, we were gone, leaving just a pile of yen for him and a note from Tamayo: “For God's sake, go out and have some fun today.”

Tamayo and I then hit some of her favorite bizarro spots in Tokyo, drank too much, made spectacles of ourselves. I had a dinner meeting later with some Japanese TV executives, but Tamayo reassured me: “It's okay to be drunk at Japanese dinner meetings. It's almost mandatory!” This, in fact, is a myth, though the very sober TV executives seemed to find me mildly amusing, until I made that little joke about the emperor, a noted ichthyologist, and his little red snapper. Jokes about resident royal families are frowned upon in many countries, I've learned.

I was going to leave that last part out, but Edna liked that. She warmed up.

“That Tamayo,” she said, clicking her tongue and nodding. “What will she be up to next?”

“Evidently, she's running some kind of underground railroad for persecuted girls from other countries,” I said, figuring Edna already knew this.

She did. “Yeah, great, ain't it? Did that girl who was staying with you meet up with her guy?”

“Nadia? Not yet.”

“That's a shame.” Edna waved to the waiter, holding up her glass and tapping it slightly to indicate she wanted another.

“Do you know anything about that?” Maggie asked.

“Buy me lunch, girls?” Edna said.

“Sure,” Maggie said, looking at me, the woman with the expense account.

I nodded. Edna evidently needed further finessing before she'd tell us anything. We moved to a booth on the dining side of Quijote and ordered paella.

“Robin is interested in the hotel,” Maggie said. “I was telling her some of the stories and I thought, Edna really needs to tell some of these tales.”

“You know I'll die with my secrets,” Edna said.

“Not the secrets. Just the legends. Edna lived next door to Bob Dylan for a while.”

“I lived next door to Dylan Thomas,” Edna corrected. “I knew Bob Dylan though. He had a baby here. I knew 'em all. Jim Hendrix once took me for coffee and cherry pie at the Horn and Hardart automat at Seventh and Twenty-third.”

“The Chelsea's a magic place,” Maggie said.

“How times have changed,” Edna said. “Used to be hotels like this all over the circuit—”

“Circuit?”

“Burlesque circuit. I was in burlesque in its dying days in the 1950s. Do you know burlesque? We didn't take all our clothes off. We didn't need to. In burlesque, the art is in tickling the imagination.” She winked and made a clicking noise, then took a sip of her drink. “We'd travel all over the country. Every city had a hotel for show people—Chicago, San Francisco, Pittsburgh. You know, a place where the touring companies would stay—actors, dancers, musicians, jazz bands. Respectable hotels wouldn't take us. The Chelsea was one of the hotels that took in show people here in New York. It's the only one left of that old breed, now that the Hotel Vincent has been turned into condos.”

“Edna can recite the names of just about every artist who has ever stayed in the Chelsea,” Maggie said. “Show her, Edna.”

Edna took a deep breath.

“Sherwood Anderson, Nelson Algren, Jake Baker, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Brendan Behan, Sarah Bernhardt, Richard Bernstein, William Burroughs, Gerald Busby, Henri Carrier-Bresson, Edward Caswell, Henri Chopin, Christo, Arthur C. Clarke, Leonard Cohen, Gregory Corso, Hart Crane, Quentin Crisp, Robert Crumb, Arthur B. Davies, Willem de Kooning, Benicio Del Toro, Bob Dylan, James T. Farrell, Jane Fonda, Milos Forman, Herbert Gentry, Eugenie Gershoy, Maurice Girodias, Oliver Grundy, Jim Hendrix, Gaby Hoffman, John Houseman—”

She took another breath. “—Herbert Huncke, Clifford Irving, Charles Jackson, Charles James, Jasper Johns, Janis Joplin, George Kleinsinger, Robert Mapplethorpe, Edgar Lee Masters, Joni Mitchell, Arthur Miller, Moondog, Vladimir Nabokov, R. K. Narayan, Nico, Ivan Passer, Edith Piaf, Deedee Ramone, René Ricard, Diego Rivera, Larry Rivers, Edie Sedgwick, Sam Shepard, John Sloan, Grace Slick and Jefferson Airplane, Julian Schnabel, Harry Smith, Patti Smith, Donald Sutherland, Philip Taafe, Dylan Thomas, Virgil Thomson, Mark Twain, Arnold Weinstein, Tennessee Williams, Thomas Wolfe, Sid Vicious, Viva. Did I forget anyone?” she asked, the words rushing to a breathless stop, followed by a huge intake of breath.

“Robert Flaherty, who made
Nanook of the North,”
Maggie said. “Dennis Hopper, O. Henry, Claes Oldenburg, and Robert Oppenheimer, father of the A-bomb. Though he's not an artist per se.”

“Lily Langtry lived a couple doors down,” Edna said. “Used to take tea here when the lobby was a dining room.”

Most of these had been long-term tenants, Edna went on, some came for the durations of shows in New York, or between marriages, some for a few days, a few weeks, whenever they were in the city. A few lived elsewhere but conducted their love affairs here. Some of them I'd only heard of in passing, a few I'd never heard of at all.

“The second-class survivors of the
Titanic
stayed here,” Edna added. “And European refugees were housed here during and after World War Two, just after Mr. Bard's father, his partners, and their stockholders bought the hotel.”

“Impressive,” I said. “How did you memorize all that?”

“I had a lot of plumbing problems one year,” Edna said.

Maggie laughed. I didn't get the joke.

“Every time I complained to Mr. Bard, the manager, he'd remind me of all the luminaries who lived here,” Edna explained.

“It's his way of putting our complaints in perspective,” Maggie said.

“When burlesque died he put me on the switchboard and put me to work here so I could pay my rent and have some spending money,” Edna said. “Yeah, this is a great place. I used to wonder why so many creative people came here. You know why?”

“Why?” I asked.

“Privacy, tolerance, freedom, history, and magic. But this place wasn't set up to be a home for artists, it just happened.”