VC01 - Privileged Lives (51 page)

“She doesn’t think anyone knows,” Ash said. “They married because he couldn’t inherit the estate without an heir. They’ve had a son by artificial insemination. She’s always thumping around in big butch leather boots.”

For a moment Cardozo was puzzled, knowing he had seen the countess somewhere else, somewhere very different from this yacht.

After dinner and liqueurs there was dancing on the aft deck. Babe and Cardozo stayed at the table and watched couples crowding the dance floor. Many were boozed or stoned or coked, and they turned to movement as though it was a continuation of the high. The deck swirled.

Babe directed Cardozo’s attention with a nod.

Sir Dunk and Lady Ash had cleared themselves a patch of floor-space, and a circle of guests was standing around clapping and cheering them on. The Canfields were either play-acting or smashed—loud, funny, with big gross motor movements—stomping around doing an odd Highland fling with complete abandon.

A woman’s voice with a slightly French accent said, “Excuse us, darlings.”

Cardozo turned. Countess Victoria and her armadillo count had stopped by to chat.

Cardozo smiled hello as Babe made introductions.

While the countess went at the gathering with her battering ram of a tongue, the count looked moodily into space, his balding head crossed with hairs and wrinkles.

Finally the countess turned her gaze to Cardozo, giving him an easy, offhand look. “Since Babe isn’t dancing, would you care to?”

“I’ll sit with Babe,” the count volunteered.

Babe shot Cardozo a helpless, what-can-I-do look. “Go ahead, Vince. Please.”

Cardozo found himself dancing tightly against Countess Victoria.

“Tonight’s so exquisitely vulgar,” she said. “No one knows how to enjoy themselves so well as the nouveaux riches, don’t you find?”

“You like it that much, hey?” Cardozo said.

She said, “Yes, I like everything, food, drinking, dancing, meeting new people, Bach, Mahler, Stevie Wonder, sex, speed, coke, tequila—preferably all at once.”

“The rich at play,” he sighed.

She gave him a scowl. “I wish everybody would give up that silly belief that we’re so very rich. It’s not true. We lead a quite average, everyday sort of existence.”

“Sure you do.”

She leaned her head back, assessing him. “I like your contempt. You’re a very sexy man.”

“I’m sexy, there’s no doubt about that.”

“And conceited—just my type. Am I yours?”

“Possibly. Where have we met?”

“We haven’t yet.” She melted a little against his shoulder, then frowned. “I’ve never heard of erections in the
armpit.
What have you got there, a gun?”

“Mmm-hmm.”

“Mmm
-hmm.”
She snuggled closer, close enough to run her tongue over his chin. “I want to see you again.”

“What would the count say to that?” he said.

“The count is a man of very few words.”

From across the deck came a whiplike crack of shattering glass.

Cardozo turned his head.

The music stopped and there was a second crash.

The crowd froze. The night suddenly vibrated and a slash of movement cut through the surrounding immobility.

Cardozo glimpsed a figure plunging rigidly forward and then Ash Canfield came barreling out of the crowd.

Under her frothing cap of bronze and gold curls she looked like a crazed pixie. Her breath came in short, steep gasps. She stretched her arms out slowly, arcing them up from her body, and then her hips slipped into a wild syncopation and her hands clawed the air crazily, fighting fog, slapping mist.

“Cocksuckers!” she screamed, her voice swollen with pain and hate.

Delighted shock whipped through the crowd.

“You’re all walkers and pillheads!” Lady Ash collapsed onto the deck and tried to get up but fell back, her limbs suddenly boneless.

Cardozo pushed through the crowd. By the time he reached Ash, the ship’s doctor was crouching beside her.

The doctor was wearing rimless spectacles, and the gaze behind them was coldly professional. He raised one of Lady Ash’s eyelids, then the other.

“What happened to her?” Cardozo said.

“Seizure.” The doctor slipped together a syringe. He filled it from a blue cartridge. The fluid was colorless.

The guests, hungry as a flock of TV news minicams, watched avidly. There were nudges, whispers.

The doctor straightened Lady Ash’s arm, administering the injection into the vein. He signaled two waiters. They lifted her onto a stretcher and fastened her arms and wrists with canvas straps.

Cardozo stood looking down at Ash. There was nothing moving in her now. She had the stillness of a dead machine. So much for his hopes of having Ash Canfield identify the figures in the photos.

Sir Dunk came out of the crowd and hovered, hands adjusting his black satin bow tie.

“Does that happen a lot?” Cardozo asked.

“It’s been getting worse,” Sir Dunk said. “I can’t bear to see her when she gets like this.”

Cardozo felt disgust. “Then don’t feed her booze.”

Ten minutes later a helicopter lifted Sir Dunk and Lady Ash Canfield from Holcombe Kaiser’s yacht up into the fog.

Countess Victoria flipped a look Cardozo’s way. She crossed to him, her step confident, her glance warm. “I’m not in the book,” she said. “Have you got something to write on?”

Cardozo shook a business card loose from his wallet. It turned out to be Melissa Hatfield’s.

Countess Victoria took out a small lipstick brush and wrote her phone number across the back of the card. “Call me. I give divine head.”

40

E
VERY DAY BEFORE WORK
, Babe practiced two hours. She lined up chairs at three-foot distances and struggled from one to the next without support. When she could manage three feet, she respaced the chairs four feet from one another, and then five and then six, evaluating her every step in the mirror. Eventually she dared to risk a turn to the left, a turn to the right, and finally she pushed the chairs to the wall and at long, long last—after fall-downs and stumbles and uncounted hesitations and swayings—she walked with no help or hesitation whatsoever from one end of the room all the way to the other.

Babethings was showing its new line of cruisewear the first week in September at the Park Avenue Armory; Babe had made it her goal to appear at the event without her cane.

She chose her ensemble for the event carefully—a black crepe suit that she had designed herself and a single piece of jewelry, a large emerald brooch that her grandmother had left her. The brooch had brought her good luck years ago, all the times she had showed her line at the Pierre, and tonight she kissed it before pinning it on.

Billi arrived for her at quarter to eight. She met him in the ground floor hallway. Luckily—because she might just need a little help with the steps at the armory—Billi did not intend to spend any of the show backstage. Instead he would sit in front, getting the pulse of the audience.

“Don’t you look ravishing, Babe.” Billi, whose eye rarely missed a detail, didn’t notice the absence of the cane. That fact gave Babe confidence—it meant she was moving naturally, not showing her nervousness.

Billi kissed her on the cheek and held the front door. The black Mercedes limousine stood idling at the curb, eight feet away.

A pulse of uneasiness beat in Babe’s throat as she took her first unsupported step on concrete.

The driver touched a gloved hand to the brim of his cap and swung the passenger door open. “Good evening, Mrs. Devens.”

She turned to smile at him. In that instant of inattention one leg shot out from under her. She slammed painfully against the door. Momentum propelled her forward, and a split second later she had landed on the floor of the limousine.

The driver quickly helped her up. She stood blinking, angry and humiliated and not quite believing what had happened.

“My God, Babe, are you all right?” Billi possessed an aristocracy of face that usually hid whatever was going on in his mind, but at this moment, concerned and solicitous, he was watching her with undisguised pity.

Babe shook her head. “I’m fine.”

Billi bent to help her brush off her skirt. “No rips, no tears on you or the suit?”

“I’m fine.”

“No wonder,” he exclaimed. “You forgot your cane!”

“How foolish of me.” Babe’s vision was filming and she did her best to hold tears at bay.

Billi snapped his fingers. “Carlos, be good enough to get Mrs. Devens’s cane? It’s in the house.”

On the approach to the armory, the car had to maneuver around clots of stopped limousines. Gawking crowds pushed against police sawhorses. Police patrolled on foot and on horseback, struggling to keep order.

Searchlights mounted on wheeled platforms strafed low-hanging clouds, and as Billi took Babe’s hand to help her to the curb, dozens of flashbulbs popped. “God save us from New York’s brigade of professional event watchers,” Billi shouted.

With his help and the help of her cane, Babe climbed the red-carpeted steps.

Inside, extraordinary-looking women milled about with their escorts. They had obviously dressed to make a statement, but the clothes Babe saw struck her as loud and careless, probably overpriced as well, and they made her feel like a limping refugee from a time capsule.

People swarmed to Billi in flurries of adulation. “You remember Babe Devens,” he kept saying, “my partner.”

Yes, they remembered Babe.
Hi, Babe.
But they loved Billi.
Billi, phone me and let’s set up that lunch… Billi, when are we going to have dinner? … Billi, you owe me a Michael Feinstein after that hideous Lohengrin!

Kiss kiss.

Darling
’s and
chéri
’s and
caro
’s peppered the cooing and shoving. Babe kept smiling and nodding, fighting to keep her balance and fighting to keep the fight from showing. To reach their seats Billi had to pull her through wall after wall of fashion hangers-on.

By the time they found their places in the center bleachers, Babe’s breath was harsh and hurting in her chest.

She had reserved the seats next to them for Ash, but Dunk arrived with Countess Vicki instead.

“Ash is still in detox,” Dunk shouted. “She can’t even have visitors yet.”

“So you’ll just have to put up with me.” Countess Vicki planted a kiss on Babe’s cheek. “You look glorious, Babe, as always, and so sweet and sentimental in that frock.” She leaned across to scream at Billi,
“Also liebe Billi, der Tag ist jezt, nicht wahr?”

Billi smiled.
“Ja, ja.”

When the building lights dipped, a wild wind of applause gusted through the armory. There was a moment of darkness and stiff silence and then, with a thirty-speaker blare of recorded music, banks of stagelights came up, flooding the runway.

The first mannequin came strutting out, hands on hips.

“Billi!” Countess Vicki screamed. “Su-
blime!”

Babe frowned. The mannequin was wearing an outfit of skintight blue satin pants with passimetrie swirling around the buttocks. She had pump heels, a low-cut lavender silk blouse with four oversized loops of oversized fake pearls and a big scoop-brim blue fedora squared over her eyes. She was wearing craters of black eye shadow and too much lipstick, and her hips moved with a hard, angular syncopation to the fender-beat music.

A creamy-voiced British actor delivered the amplified voice-over.

Applause mounted as the mannequin strutted to the end of the runway.

Before she had even turned, the second mannequin bounded out onto the runway. On her pencil-thin red-stockinged legs, swathed in yards of fuschia boa from her neck down to her ripped-off gray sweatcloth exercise tights, she looked like a pair of burning stilts holding up a cloud of acid rain.

Once the fifth mannequin strode onto the runway, Babe found that the dresses and ensembles overlapped in a discordant blur. Though tradition had it that you viewed only one mannequin at a time, Billi put as many as twelve on the runway at once. For Babe the effect was bewilderingly like a Broadway show—too much movement, too many lights, too much music.

She squirmed as Billi’s eighty-five mannequins filed on and off the runway, their outfits progressively more hostile and aggressive, and it all began leaving her with a taste of mega-hyped insincerity.

The big outfit of the line—the one that got the greatest applause and that seemed to be the clearest statement of the house’s esthetic—was a chartreuse blazer of crumpled silk linen. The jacket had been loaded with beading and more passimetrie than a Turkish dress uniform, and it was falling off the mannequin’s shoulders, too big even to be called oversized. The dress underneath, shocking pink, was much too tight and almost pornographically short, and the heels on the black pumps were four inches—far too high.

By some miracle of luck or coordination, the mannequin was managing to keep her balance. Incredibly, she was chewing gum, and her face was set in a theatrical sneer.

“Well. Babe,” Billi cried over the mounting applause, “what do you think of our little girl?”

It took Babe a moment’s shock to recognize that the mannequin was her own daughter. “Well, Billi, you certainly have turned things inside out.”

“What the hell else is tradition for?” he laughed.

The one tradition he had stuck with was to close the show with a wedding gown.

The lights dimmed suspensefully and came up again on a runway that was, for the first time since the evening had begun, empty. The speakers blared an eerily electronic Bridal Chorus.

Billi’s tallest, skinniest mannequin slithered into the light, glistening as though she were oiled.

Babe sat rigid, not moving. What she saw went through her brain like a knife.

A sheath of black leather—cut tight down to the pelvis, flaring into a skirt below the knees—covered the mannequin from neck to ankles. Around her throat she wore a diamond-encrusted ankh, fastened upside down to a platinum-link chain. Billi’s designers had studded the gown with steel zippers and outcroppings of black crow’s feathers. For the veil they had used miles of black illusion, for the boots, black-dyed baby lamb.