Set This House on Fire (30 page)

“You’ll do nothing of the kind,” he replied. “You’re going to forgive me for being a bastard. And you’re going to stay here with your old pal.”

“What did you mean, saying you were going to
stomp
me?” I said. “What’s gotten into you, Mason? What have I done? I’m not a criminal, a bum you can talk to like—”

He ran one hand nervously over his brow. “I—I don’t know, Peter. I’m sorry. That girl. She’s been robbing me blind. Just lifted a pair of Rosemarie’s earrings. I was upset, that’s all. I dunno, I got so exasperated I thought everybody was trying to side with her. Crazy of me! Look,” he pleaded, “say you forgive me! I really didn’t mean it, I swear. Soon as I said it I felt like a worm.”

Incorrigible to the end, I allowed nostalgia and sentimentality to win out. I averted my eyes and gripped his hand, saying: “Well, O.K., Mason, O.K.” All my life I’ve been addicted, in such situations, to weird self-implication. I added: “I’m sorry, too. It was half my fault, I guess.”

This seemed vaguely to cheer him up. “Right,” he said vacantly, “let’s call it bygones and to hell with it. We all make mistakes. Look, wait here a minute while I go up and put some clothes on, and I’ll show you around the plant.” And as I stood waiting there while he vanished up the stairway I was left feeling—like one bamboozled in an old familiar con game—that it was he who had pocketed
my
apology.

He was gone for five or ten minutes. During that time I wandered aimlessly around the deserted room, puffing at a cigarette; I still felt nervous and rattled, especially troubled over the girl he had chased down the hallway, and whom he had obviously molested in one way or another. I think that for a while it must have drizzled outside, for as I lingered, peering again up at the melee on the ceiling (the Huntress this time, harpooned squarely through the navel by a latter-day electrical conduit) I heard voices buzzing below as the poolside crowd began to disband and made their way back up through the garden and into the palace.

When Mason returned he had on a white jacket and freshly creased Bermuda shorts, and he wore a preoccupied look. “Come on, Petesy, let’s look over the plant.” His voice and manner were terse; nonetheless, he was trying hard to please and impress me. In the next half-hour or so he showed me his den, a leathery relaxed place done up like a whiskey ad, with elephant guns, books, bullfight posters, an ottoman made from the foreleg of a rhinoceros, and the head of an African buffalo he claimed to have slain —a rather pathetic beast that gazed down from the wall with the sweet, dumb, glassy expression of a Brown Swiss cow. This was a new phase of Mason’s, I reflected—the sporting life—and here in the den we lingered for a while, drinking brandy, while he told me of his friendship with various flashy matadors, showed me his great bullhide-bound volumes on tauromachy, which is the word he used, and, lastly, with an effrontery and shamelessness advanced even for him, described in detail the safari he had made through Kenya with a sensitive Canadian blonde. She had taken her Ph.D. at the University of Toronto, on Baudelaire’s imagery … but I won’t go into it: such a rich amalgam of jackals howling in the night, and nerve-racking trails of blood spoors down draws and gullies, and bwanas and memsahibs, and petrifying waits for a wounded beast to come plunging from the brush, or bush—all of this laced with
Fleurs du mal
and strong draughts of fornication on the veldt—a romance the likes of which you never heard. I think I must have feigned interest but my mind was far away; all I wanted to do was to make an escape from this palace and go to sleep somewhere. Next he took me through the rest of the “plant,” showed the basement with its General Electric oil furnace—trucked over from Naples, he said, at great expense and effort—the frozen food locker, and then the stainless-steel kitchen complete with Frigidaire, an expanse of cabinets, ovens, and ranges whose buttons, controls, and indicators glittered in multicolored ranks. I looked around. At a gleaming sink two local scullery maids toiled in a cloud of steam, scraping plates for the nearby dishwasher, which grumbled and hummed like an idling Diesel engine; beyond them in one corner old Giorgio, stripped to his galluses, was moodily amusing himself with an electric knife sharpener that sent a spine-chilling wail through the air.

“I got everything wholesale at the PX,” Mason said. “Well, what do you think of it?”

“Mason,” I said, “I think it’s just grand. But tell me something —how did you get PX privileges?”

“There are ways,” he said inscrutably. And then he led me into a nearby alcove and showed me a newly developed American fire extinguisher, the extinguishing element of which—a type of gluey foam—he claimed you could actually eat.

“Fantastic, Mason,” I said. Culturally he had shifted his poles, that was plain to see; he seemed no more self-conscious over this sudden display of pelf than he had been before over his forays into the demimonde. “Tell me,” I went on, “how come you’ve got a Cadillac now? Isn’t that rather square?”

“Oh, sports cars,” he said. “They’ve become such a cliche.” I should have known.

Then we returned to the kitchen and were confronted by Giorgio, looking this time sour and mournful as he gave Mason what appeared to be some kind of note.
“Da Francesca,”
said Giorgio.

“Francesca?” Mason exclaimed, his eyes growing wide. “Where is she?”

“Dov’è, signore? Non lo so. Ma credo che sia giù, nella strada”

“Speak up!” he said excitedly, then to me: “What’s he saying, for Christ sake?”

“He said he believes she was downstairs, on the street.”

“What does he mean, ‘believes’?” he said, tearing open the note. “Doesn’t the old fool
know?”

“Se n’èandata”
Giorgio said with a shrug, spreading his hands wide. “Finish.”

“She’s gone, Mason,” I said.

“Well, tell him to go find her.”

I told him. More knowledgeable, apparently, than Mason knew, he shuffled away, mumbling resentfully that he was nobody’s fool. I began to fidget. Mason in the meantime, digesting the message in a glance, had turned scarlet; puckering his lips up as if to spit, or to blurt out some blasphemy, his face became redder and redder, and he let the note fall to the floor, his eyes bugging out and looking wild as, finally, he found words to speak. “The little slut,” he said in a low, mean voice, “the unspeakable, filthy dago slut.”

“Mason,” I said hastily. “I think I’ll go on up to the Bella Vista. I’m really quite beat and—”

“They’ve got the minds of criminals, I’ll swear to God,” he said. “Every goddam one of them are filthy, sneaking thieves. It’s born in them, I’ll swear, Peter, with the same predestination that makes the Germans born with blood-lust. They’ve got robbery and embezzlement in their
bones.
No wonder they’re so goddam poor. They must rob each other blind!” As of yore, he had begun to gyrate his miserable shoulder.

“Look, Mason,” I said, “all this is very well and good, but it’s not true and I don’t want to talk about it. I’m dead tired and I want to go to bed—”

“Jesus Christ!” he said, paying me no attention. “To think that filching little bitch would promenade right under my nose for two —no, three whole months, robbing me baldheaded—at the wages I pay her, too!—robbing me with no more compunction than if she thought I was a gibbering idiot. Wiggling her criminal little twat around the house as if she owned the place—” And as he stood before me there in the steaming, grandiloquent kitchen, he sailed away upon a harangue so absurd and so mad that I actually thought for a brief moment he was joking: had I not heard, for Jesus sake, of Willie Morelli and Tough Tony Anastasia and such thugs as The Dasher Abbandando and Bow-legs Sarto—not to speak, for Jesus sake, of Luciano and Costello and Capone? Was that not proof enough, if proof was needed, that the principal contribution of the Italian people to America if not to all humanity (and
please,
Peter, he knew all about the Renaissance) was a thievish and corrupt criminality so murderous, so immoral, that it was unrivaled in history? “Jesus sake, Peter!” he said angrily, as if he sensed my silent rebuke. “Use your head!” Didn’t I know that Murder, Incorporated—that vicious mob of professional assassins —was made up almost wholly of Italians and that moreover gangsterism in America was totally controlled by a wicked pack of dope-sellers and connivers in Italy? (Dear old Italy.) I had heard that, but I didn’t see that—
’Jesus!”
he cried. “Use your head!” And then he indulged himself in one final, flamboyant, pathetic lie (the last of his I was ever to hear): about a young friend of his, a Harvard-bred assistant district attorney so brilliant that his name had been bruited about New York as candidate for mayor, who, having declared a personal war on the mobsters, went out bravely incognito among them, only to be found slain one night in a vacant lot in Rego Park, Queens, mutilated so horribly that even he, Mason, was loath to tell about it (but he would: a hot poker rammed up his bowel; his genitalia … etc.). I made my mind a blank. “And the Mafia had branded their mark on his chest!” he concluded, shaking with fury. “A bunch of miserable Italian thugs with the mentality of beasts. Look, you know I’m not a—a
xenophobe,
of the lunatic fringe. But isn’t that proof enough that the Italians have become degraded to the point of
bestiality?
Do you see why I might be peeved,” he asked, with a heavy load of sarcasm, “when this dirty little twat of a housemaid has the temerity—the gall—to walk out beneath my nose with practically everything I own? Can’t you see how I might be
vexed,
to say the least? Well, can’t you?”

I said nothing. I couldn’t even bring myself to look at him, as he stood there panting and heaving. Then all of a sudden he smacked one fist into the palm of his hand, startling me, forcing me to look up at his face. And as I stared at him, he muttered beneath his breath something which made no sense to me at all: “So it’s a lot of lowbrow diddling, that’s what it is. A cheap smelly roll in the hay.” Then he paused again, the sweat pouring off his face, smacking his palm. “Well, we’ll see about
that!”
he exclaimed. He turned on his heels then and charged back through the door past the fire extinguisher, his shorts flapping around his knees as he hotfooted it down the hallway.

I picked up the note he had let fall to the floor. It was in English, but in a messy, lacerated scrawl so splintered that it was barely legible.
Youre in deep trouble,
it read,
Im going turn you in to bait for buzards. C.
I thought it some sort of joke.

I pocketed the note, then I trailed after Mason, despondent but curious. I followed his gaunt and hustling vision, multi-reflected, down the mirrored corridor; breezing into the foyer, past the marble bench upon which I had so lately tumbled, he made no sign or word of recognition to the scattering of guests returned from the pool, who had gathered there, but threw open the door to the stairway of the courtyard and raced out onto the balcony. I followed in his wake, passing through the foyer too, where I had a brief glimpse in the distance of several people dancing and the black indefatigable face of Billy Raymond as he pounded the piano. And when I reached the balcony I saw that Mason was leaning over the stone parapet, bawling down into the courtyard.

“Cass!” he shouted. “Hey, Cass! Come on up!”

But from the green door down in the shadows below there was no stir, no answer.

“Cass!” he yelled again. “Hey, Cass! Come on up here!” His voice, oddly, had none of the anger nor the agitation his recent movements would have led me to expect; it was instead only rather blunt, peremptory, as if it expected to be heard, and obeyed, and it echoed in hollow waves around the dark and lofty courtyard. “Cass!” he cried again, but there was still no answer from the door; he turned to me with an exasperated look, saying,
“Now
where the hell has he gone to?”

“I wouldn’t know, Mason,” I said, utterly baffled.

Some emotion shivered and shook him as he stood there—God knows what emotion it was. He trembled, ran his hand again across his sweaty brow. I thought he was going to burst into tears. “The jerk!” he said in a choked voice. “The miserable jerk!” And then, brushing past me, saying in a voice that was almost like a gasp for air, “I’ll bet Giorgio knows!” he flung himself back through the doors and into the palace.

My mystification was complete.

Now was the time to go. And I would have done so, no doubt—my foot even then poised in liberating descent upon the stairs—had not the green door opened at that very moment down below, sending a shaft of light across the courtyard and causing me to draw back like some hooligan (such was the infection of Mason’s personality) into the shadows of the balcony. Two figures emerged from the door—Cass Kinsolving and a girl. I heard a soft sobbing noise from the girl, exhausted, infinitely touched with grief, and saw Cass half-stumble against the wall; then, as they moved on slowly out into the rectangle of light, I saw that the girl was none other than the black-clad servant girl who had fallen to her knees before me in the
salone.
I heard them talking in low unhappy tones—indistinctly, spiritlessly—their voices rising and falling alternately and then in unison in a curious, small threnody of distress, and rent at intervals by the girl’s soft, remorseless, heartbroken sobs. Irresistibly, I leaned out over the parapet. I saw Cass stagger and slump against the wall, almost toppling down, and heard the girl’s voice again, as she appeared to clutch out for him, in a renewed surge of half-hysteric grief. For a long moment, leaning there against the wall, they melted together in a tormented embrace. At last I heard the single word
Basta!
Then one of them said
Ssss-ss,
and their voices died to whispers, and for a long minute I heard no more until with a soft pitipat of bare feet the girl scampered across the courtyard, still weeping, and was gone.

Alone, Cass stood at the doorway, swaying back and forth. At last with a sudden clumsy motion he turned about and pressed his cheek against the wall, clutching at the gray stone with his hands, as if trying to embrace it. I thought I heard him groan; then the sound died and all I could hear was his heavy breathing as he stood there, the noise sibilant and greedy and agonized like that of a distance runner at the end of a race. And at this moment the door burst open once again behind me, and Mason flew to the parapet, leaning over.