City of War (10 page)

As Kim and I headed into our second bottle of wine over shared chocolate truffle cake with a candle in it, she gave me a mock serious look. “You know, it’d be nice if I knew something about the man I’m fucking.”

“How romantic.”

“When it feels that good, there’s no other word for it.”

“So what’s your pleasure? You still wondering how tall I am?”

Kim flicked her hair. “Couldn’t care less. I want to know about your women. What kind do you like?”

“I may not look too bright, but I know better than to answer a question like that. Unless you describe the lady you’re with down to her pedicure, you’re on your way to sleeping alone—and maybe wearing dessert.”

Kim laughed. “Spoken like a man who’s been there. That’s not what I meant.”

“That’s exactly what you meant.”

She laughed again. “Okay, okay, I surrender. So humor me. Pretend I’m Barbara Walters, and you’re a big star. Skip past the kind of tree you’d be.”

“Carly Fiorina,” I said.

I saw her eyes go blank, then it came to her. “The computer company broad?”

“Ex-computer company. But yes, I think she’s one of the most desirable women I’ve ever seen.”

She thought I was putting her on. “Isn’t she a little…” She seemed stuck for a word.

I tried to help. “Off the radar?”

“Old,” she said.

“Isn’t that a bit catty, Ms. Walters?”

“This is like unbelievable. I’ll admit, she’s attractive…in a boardroom kind of way. But what in the hell—”

“I’ll help you along. She’s a complete woman. Smart, feminine, self-assured, and most importantly, she has character.”

“Character? You know her?”

“Never been in the same room. But you can always tell by the way a person speaks. Ask a question, get an answer. No long pauses while she runs down the PR checklist. No eyes wandering around the room searching for just the right ring of truth to the lie she’s about to tell. No ten-sentence paragraphs that don’t say anything but that you know you can get away with because the media will dutifully report anything that comes out of your mouth. And for good measure, she doesn’t talk down to people or lose her temper. Oh, I’m sure her husband has seen her in a splendid red rage, and she’s probably bullshitted him a time or two, probably even stepped on his ego. But that’s what husbands are for.”

Kim sat back in her chair. “I don’t even know what to say. You’re by far the most unusual man I’ve ever met. Carly
fucking Fiorina. I’d love to tell somebody, but I don’t know anyone who would get it.”

“You did.”

“Thanks,” she said after a moment. “I think that’s a compliment.”

“It is.”

She regarded her wine for a moment, then asked, “You do anything besides help people and fantasize about chicks in business suits? Collect stamps? Maybe some hog calling?”

“A little this and that,” I answered.

“Is that what you keep in the locked room off the library? Your this and that?”

I studied her before answering. “Locked room?” I said evenly.

“Your eyes just turned to stone. Now I’m really intrigued. The room where if you go outside and look, it’s as big as the library, but the shutters are closed tight, and you can’t see in. The room Mallory doesn’t answer questions about.”

“Remind me not to leave you alone so long. Your imagination gets stuck in overdrive.”

“I’m not imagining anything. Just asking, that’s all.”

I said nothing.

“Not going to tell me, right?” she said finally.

“Nothing to tell. Just storage.”

She rolled her eyes. “Got it,” she said in a tone that meant she didn’t get it. “Okay, I’ll worm it out of you later. Right now, we’ll go for something easy. How about your mother.”

I’d have to ask Mallory to fill me in on her wanderings. I took a sip of wine. “She was from Brazil. Rio,” I answered.

“A Carioca. How exotic. How’d you end up in Beverly Hills?”

“The long way around.”

Putting her chin on her fist and leaning forward, Kim said, “So pour me another glass of wine and tell me a story.”

I did a healthy pour for both of us and began. “Her name then was Amarante Grasciosa. She was a singer and song-
writer, and she’d gotten all she could out of Rio, so she borrowed some money from an uncle and headed north.”

“Amarante,” Kim said. “Wow. What I wouldn’t give for a name like that.”

“Hey, you got Dana.”

“Watch it,” she warned, but she was smiling.

“She landed some chorus work on Broadway and sang backup on a couple of albums, but the big break always seemed to elude her. To make ends meet, she worked at a club in Spanish Harlem, where she met a Puerto Rican bartender with the unlikely name of Jerry Green. And in a moment of extreme loneliness, Amarante married him, not knowing that after a few drinks, Jerry’d hit anything or anybody. Eventually, she got tired of being slapped around and moved out, but not before she’d locked down her citizenship.”

“You’ve got to give the girl credit for making the most of a bad situation,” said Kim.

“That’s what she used to say, but I think it was revisionist history. And then she met Gabriel Navarro.”

“The Formula One driver?”

“Yes, and it was the love match she’d been waiting for all her life. They were inseparable.”

“Oh, my God, didn’t he…?”

I nodded. “At Monaco. While she watched.”

I waited until Kim finished processing. “She walled herself up in her New York apartment and cried for three months, finally deciding it was time to go home.”

“But she didn’t.”

“Like a lot of exceptionally beautiful women, Amarante was routinely asked to be an arm decoration for wealthy men. And before Gabriel, she’d occasionally done it. But she wouldn’t accept money or gifts.”

“So no sex. Just a good time.”

“Correct. She was hoping to make a music connection, plus it was a way to see things she never would have. A few days before she was supposed to leave for Rio, she got a call
from a closeted gay banker whom she’d bearded for at business functions. He asked if she’d like to go to a Christmas housewarming party.”

“How very suburban,” Kim quipped.

“Well, it wasn’t exactly your drop-by-in-a-Santa-hat affair. Limousines deposited the invitees at a private hangar at JFK, where a chartered 727 flew them to Miami. Breaking into smaller groups, they boarded shuttles to a private Bahamian Island. You might have heard of it. Clarissima.”

“Vaguely. Didn’t some really rich guy develop it way, way back?”

“A Dutch rubber baron. Built himself a forty-thousand-square-foot tropical hideaway called Heaven’s Wind, complete with a village for his staff. But after he died, the place ran through a succession of owners until it finally fell into disrepair. Then one day, a British newspaper and shipping chap, Lord James Black, rode in.”

“Ah, Lord Black. I see a picture emerging here.”

“My father-to-be bargained the price down to almost nothing, then poured in millions renovating the main house and dredging the harbor so he could dock his private ship at the front door. When the work was completed, he threw open the gates and invited the world’s rich and famous to spend the holidays.
A Heaven’s Wind Christmas
was the must-have ticket for the jet set that year. Yachts backed up miles into the Caribbean, and there wasn’t enough tarmac to park all the planes.”

Kim pointed to her glass and smiled. “And here came the beautiful Amarante hanging with a gay guy.”

I hadn’t told this story for a long time, and I was actually enjoying it. I poured while I talked. “Lord Black had recently divorced his first wife, a Windsor cousin, and his dating exploits were the talk of the London scandal sheets—even the ones he owned. As the story goes, the moment he laid eyes on Amarante, he was entranced. And when he found out she was a singer, he sent a plane to Miami to fetch an arranger.

“The second night, she performed six songs, the finale
something she had composed after Gabriel’s death. It was called “Christmas Always Breaks My Heart.” And as the story goes, it brought down the house. It also brought down the walls of Lord Black’s heart.”

Kim’s face was flushed. I assumed it was the wine, but it wasn’t. Her voice was husky. “That’s the most sensuous story I’ve ever heard. And that name. Amarante. It’s so perfect. My God, I just came.”

“Wait’ll I get to the part about my toy train collection.”

“Don’t make fun of me. I mean it; it’s never happened to me like that before.”

“So it’s true. All little girls like princess stories.”

She took another sip of wine. “Please don’t stop now.”

Tacitus broke the mood by showing up with a box of cigars. He wanted me to try one. So while Kim went off to the ladies’ room, I fired up an Arturo Fuente Opus X. Very nice.

When Kim returned, she lit a Benson & Hedges, and we sat for a moment as she blew her smoke into mine. Then I got back to my story.

“Lord Black wasn’t interested in Amarante’s singing career. He wanted her all to himself. So two months later, he threw one of the most lavish weddings outside the royal family. It was a tongue-wagging marriage. Wealthy British lords traditionally kept their working-class lovers in gilded cages out of sight. They didn’t bring them to the Queen’s Tea at the Derby.

“But Amarante was so beautiful and James so unforgiving of anyone who slighted her that, eventually, she won over enough of the upper crust that she began being invited to a few events on her own. They divided their time among homes in London, Hong Kong and, of course, Clarissima, where I was born. And where for the first six years of my life I ran wild, chasing parrots and lizards and swimming and fishing and riding my horse in the surf.”

Kim sighed longingly. “Sounds like a kid’s dream. Hell, anybody’s dream.”

“It was, but then the real world came calling. They called it school. So we packed up and moved permanently to Strathmoor Hall, our country house in Derbyshire.”

Kim looked at me with skepticism. “I’ve been to Derbyshire, and anything called a hall ain’t a country house. That’s nobility country. Let me guess, forty rooms?”

“One hundred and thirty-six.”

“Oh, my fucking God.”

I laughed. “It gets worse. I was eight before I realized not everyone owned an island.”

Kim started to giggle and couldn’t seem to stop. Finally, she got control of herself. “Wake me when this is over, will you? Where’s the goddamn wine?”

“Frankly, it took the kind of money my father had to maintain the place. A lot of dukes and earls with front-page names but street sweeper incomes have to take in tourists just to keep a turreted roof over their heads.”

“That’s why every year I contribute a little something to down-on-their-luck gentry,” Kim said, straight-faced.

I raised my glass in a toast. “And here’s a heartfelt thanks for those who can’t be here to speak for themselves. Anyway, as grand as it was, I hated Strathmoor. There was always some servant ratting you out for something. I hated school even more. Some stiff-collared headmaster whacking you with a stick if your homework was late or if you farted during morning prayers. I went into full-scale rebellion. Did you know you can herd Arabian horses with a Bentley?”

“You didn’t.”

“Oh, I did. But I wasn’t stupid enough to use my father’s car. I swiped a neighbor’s. Took three tractors to pull that baby out of the mud.”

Kim was laughing again, and I joined her. It was a good memory. “Right after that, they shipped me to the States.”

“Eastern, private and very fancy.”

“Nope, my father decided to try something different. Discipline. The Army and Navy Academy.”

“Yikes.”

“And then some,” I joked. “But you know, it didn’t take me long to get with the program. I took a page from David Copperfield and became the hero of my own life—or at least the architect. And besides, I might have been marching, but I was doing it on the California coast. It wasn’t Clarissima, but it wasn’t cold, rainy England either.”

“I think you turned out great.”

“Tall, anyway.”

“So where’s the accent? If I had your upbringing, I’d be working overtime to talk like Audrey Hepburn.”

“Right, and my classmates wouldn’t have kicked my ass three times a day. That was the first thing I got rid of. But I can slide back into it when I need to.”

“At my house, while I was packing, I thought I heard you speaking Russian to those women.”

“I’m lucky, I’ve got an ear for languages, but I’ve never been able to get that one really down. I think it’s the moroseness I’m missing. I told them you were a big movie star and wanted them to have a generous tip. It was my deal with Melvin for getting them out there so fast.”

“How generous was I?”

“Let’s just say there’s caviar with the borscht tonight.”

“I’m running up quite a tab.”

“I’ll take it out in trade.”

She smiled over her glass. “Not so fast, you’ve got a story to finish.”

I took a sip of wine. I’d come this far, so I plowed ahead. “By the time I was a senior in high school, James and Amarante’s marriage was coming apart. Her dream had been to become an entertainer, not the lady of Strathmoor Hall. She was indulged and spoiled, but hopelessly trapped. So she got a friend—vodka.

“And then one day, she told my father she was moving to Los Angeles. She’d found somebody new—a record producer—who, surprise, was going to make her a star. And besides, she said, she’d be closer to her son, which looked nice on the label but didn’t play out so well in practice. And that was that.”

“Storybook romance, dime novel ending,” said Kim.

“The good news was that my father took a renewed interest in me. He was satisfied I was becoming a gentleman, but he also wanted to make sure I became a man. So on school breaks, he took me on the road and showed me the intricacies of life—the ones that don’t come in a book.

“I played poker against men three times my age in London clubs, baccarat against sheikhs in Cairo and roulette against the house in Monte Carlo. I sat through tough business negotiations, then held up the bar with him while he celebrated or stewed. My father was also big, which is a magnet for the occasional drunken loudmouth, so more than once, we bareknuckled our way out of a place. Gave the place a ‘Black and Black,’ we called it. It was an extraordinary life, and I loved it—and him.”