Текст книги "Privileged Lives"

Автор книги: Edward Stewart

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Текущая страница: 25 (всего у книги 37 страниц)

39

“SOMETHING OR SOMEONE,” CARDOZO said, “links you to the Beaux Arts killing. I’m betting it’s someone you know but don’t know you know—some little memory that got erased when you were in coma. We’ve compared the names in your address book with our case files. There are a few matches, but they’re people we already know—socialites on the periphery. They don’t lead us anywhere new. What we need is someone who has your memories of seven years ago—intact.”

“Well, that obviously isn’t me,” Babe said.

They were on the flagstone terrace behind the town house. Cardozo was standing there just looking at her.

“Did you ever keep a diary?”

Babe smiled. “Never.”

“Can you think of any close friends, anyone who traveled in the same circles, someone who knows as much about you as you do about yourself—and who’d be willing to help?”

Babe’s throat was suddenly scratchy as steel wool. “I would have said Scottie, but obviously not.”

“No one else?”

“Well, Ash Canfield—I don’t have a secret in the world from her. We made it a policy never to be stoned at the same party. In case one of us had to take the other home.”

“Then let’s ask Ash to look over these photos. How do we get hold of her?”

Babe had graduated to a cane, and she was able to climb the ramp to the Minerva, industrialist Holcombe Kaiser’s two-hundred-foot yacht, without Cardozo’s help. As they reached the deck, noise and lights hit them.

The black-tie extravaganza—one of the hardest-to-wrangle invitations of the season—was in full swing. The masts wrapped in furled sails soared three stories high.

Cardozo was aware of people looking at Babe with hungry ogling eyes, whispering speculations, and he was aware that some of the speculation was spilling over onto him.

He held out the Tiffany-engraved vellum invitation for Beatrice Devens and Escort, and a young, elegantly uniformed butler steered them toward the reception line and called out their names.

Holcombe Kaiser, their billionaire host, greeted his guests with the brisk dispatch of a ruling monarch. “Haven’t seen you in a while, Babe.”

A camera flashed as Kaiser’s lips touched Babe’s cheek.

“Too long,” she said. “This is my friend Vincent Cardozo.”

“How do you do, sir.” It was that faintly ironic use of the word, from superior to inferior. “Thanks for bringing Babe.”

Cardozo knew Kaiser only from news stories, knew he had spent a lifetime piling up dollars and publicity into the Holcombe Kaiser legend, carving himself a conspicuous place in a conspicuous society. Gray-haired, gray-bearded, radiating self-satisfaction, he looked Cardozo impersonally in the eye. “Please meet my good friend Edmilia Tirotos.”

Kaiser had been a widower for over half his life, and Edmilia Tirotos, the four-foot-nine wife of the deposed Indonesian dictator, stood beside him, performing the duties of hostess. Olive-skinned, dark-eyed, her face-lifts giving her a weirdly young smile that she seemed powerless to alter, she wore a diamond tiara that must have accounted for over half the foreign debt of her former fatherland.

“Where the hell are we going to find Ash Canfield?” Cardozo whispered. “This place is worse than a lockup cage.”

“Let’s try the bar,” Babe said.

It was not an easy task. There were open bars fore and aft, and a dozen strikingly handsome waiters circulated with trays of champagne.

At eight thirty the Minerva cast off, its motors churning the Hudson to vanilla mousse. The sun was setting, turning the Manhattan skyline amber.

Babe and Cardozo pried their way through the usual crowd going through the intricate steps of the celebrity gavotte, with amplified dance music played under a striped canopy by Scott Devens and his twelve-piece orchestra.

Inside the ship’s saloon the crystal prisms of a ballroom chandelier scattered tinkling rainbows across oyster damask and walnut paneling, dappling the pink marble fireplace with a Rubens painting above it

Babe found Ash Canfield on a silk sofa, a fair-haired woman in a scoop-bodiced silver gown, eyes sparkling with bold gaiety.

“So this is the famous Lieutenant Vincent Cardozo.” Ash spoke in a whispery, out-of-breath, society-girl voice.

“I didn’t know I was famous,” he said, “but thank you, Mrs.—what do I call you—Lady Ash or Lady Canfield?”

“It’s not a proper title, I’m only Lady Canfield, but why don’t we drop the Lady and you can call me Ash. And yes, you’re very famous among the inner circle of Babe’s friends.”

“Ash,” Babe suggested, “come see the view.”

“I’ve seen that filthy harbor. You forget, Babe, I was born in Doctors Hospital, right on the shores of Manhattan, just like you and every other little girl who ever went to Spence. Rather like Moses in the bulrushes, don’t you think, Lieutenant? Or do I call you Vincent?”

“Call me Vince.”

Ash linked arms with them both. “Now that we’re all cozy, let’s look for a bar. I’m famished for an olive.”

They worked their way out of the saloon. Ash threw out greetings, chatty and frivolous, hyper-radiating giddy good humor.

Cardozo pried them a path down the corridor, through a tumult of celebrity hugs and giggles and pushing.

Babe stopped suddenly in the middle of the corridor. Her eyes had locked on a woman in a strapless gray silk gown and Cardozo wondered what her mind was telling her that he wasn’t tuning in on.

There was a tangible arrogance to the straight set of the woman’s mouth and thin Roman nose and cool wide-spaced green eyes. It took Cardozo an instant to recognize Doria Forbes-Steinman, and it took him an instant longer to realize that Babe was staring not at the woman but at the dress she was wearing.

“Hello, Doria,” Babe said.

Doria Forbes-Steinman turned, standing there behind a wisp of smoke, finishing her cigarette. Her eyes went from Babe to Cardozo to Ash. “Why, Babe, what a surprise. No one told me you were invited.”

“Obviously not,” Babe said. “That’s my gown you’re wearing.”

Doria Forbes-Steinman smiled. “Hello, Ash. Hello, Lieutenant,” she said.

“If you’ve let the others out at the hips and shoulders as badly as this one,” Babe said, “I don’t know whether to sue you for theft or for butchery.”

“I know exactly what to sue you for, darling—libel.”

“Please do. And say hello to Scottie for me.”

Giving Babe the finger, Doria Forbes-Steinman eased herself into a wave of celebrities that was sweeping down the corridor.

“If you want to sue,” Cardozo said, “sue your parents, not her. It was their job to say no.”

“How did she do it?” Babe said.

“Ted Morgenstern.”

“It’s beyond belief. Beneath belief.”

Cardozo found an empty stateroom and herded Babe and Ash inside and closed the door behind them. It was a comfortable rosewood-paneled room, hung with soft blue paintings all bearing the powerfully legible signature of Picasso, as recognizable as the trademark on a Coke bottle. There was a single Monet, which Cardozo had the feeling was Holcombe Kaiser’s way of remembering where he had hidden the safe.

“She has my husband,” Babe said, “and she has my gowns.”

“Let it go,” Cardozo said softly. His hand reached and squeezed Babe’s.

She squeezed back, gratefully, and then she opened the writing board of an antique carved French walnut secretary. She spread the three-by-five-inch photo reductions on the seamlessly inlaid surface of marble and boxwood.

Ash stood there, a wondering stare fixed on her face. “What’s this, lotto? Am I supposed to pick a winner?”

“In a way,” Babe said. “Would you look at these photographs and tell us if you know any of the people?”

For a second Ash seemed to have to process the request, and then she settled herself, a wobbly wisp of Chanel-scented elegance, onto the corner of the blue chintz sofa. She sneaked her glasses out of her purse. Guiltily. The lenses had thick middles to correct the far-sightedness that came with middle age, and Cardozo could see from the way she put them on that she hated wearing them.

She picked up the photos. She stared silently at each one, eyes mechanical, remote, as if she were arranging cards by suit in a hand of bridge. She separated one photo from the others. Her glance turned diagonally across the writing board toward Babe.

“This one.”

“Family snapshots?” The door had opened soundlessly. A man stood in the doorway, then sauntered into the room. Snow-blond brows and lashes made his blue eyes deep and startling. He moved quickly next to Ash and put his arm around her shoulders. “May I peek?” He had the look of an overripe Nordic god, slightly inflated, the blond curls singed in gray. His plaid cummerbund did not manage to disguise the comfortably thickening waist of the tennis player at forty.

He spread the photos out side by side. “Let’s see, our summer vacation in Europe—no, our summer vacation in Billi von Kleist’s lobby. What dreary photos—who’s collecting snapshots of big Mack trucks?”

“Dunk,” Ash said, pushing his fingers away from the photos and tamping them into a neat stack, “this is Vince Cardozo, Babe’s friend.”

“How do.” Dunk Canfield sized up Cardozo in an unimpressed glance.

Cardozo had read up on Sir Dunk: he had grown up in the world of the British formerly wealthy; family connections had gotten him admission to Harrow and a scholarship to Oxford and he looked like a lump of laid-back complacency who had never doubted his right to a life of serious unearned luxury.

Babe smoothly lifted the photos from Ash’s hand and tucked them into her purse.

Sir Dunk stared at Babe with an almost childish annoyance. “Not going to let me look?”

“You wouldn’t be interested,” she said. “And what’s all that noise upstairs?”

“The guest of honor’s arriving,” Dunk said. “Care to greet her?” He offered Ash his arm.

On the surface at least Dunk and Ash Canfield were a matched pair: good dressers, terrific smilers, bronzed and well-born and handsome. Babe and Cardozo followed them up to the deck.

Motor roaring, blades throwing out a blast of whiplashing wind, a silver Martin-Marietta custom helicopter was touching down on the landing pad at the stern of the Minerva. Crewmen had herded guests back beyond a perimeter of red velvet ropes.

The copter door swung up and out stepped Baron Billi von Kleist—relaxed, grinning, instant master of the space around him. A blitz of flashbulbs caught him in his tails and Legion d’honneur.

With knightly consideration the handsome European aristocrat turned and held up a kid-gloved hand. It was grasped from inside the copter by the black-gloved hand of the guest of honor.

Tina Vanderbilt stood scowling in an elegant Fortuny scarlet silk evening gown that she could have worn a half-century ago.

Edmilia Tirotos and Holcombe Kaiser stepped forward. There was a ménage à trois of kisses. Tina Vanderbilt’s dress turned out to have a large, detachable necklacelike collar of fabric roses sprinkled with silver paillettes. Edmilia deftly detached it and handed it to a waiter.

Holcombe Kaiser sprang open a Cartier’s box.

Edmilia lifted out a rope of diamonds and gold and placed it around Tina’s neck.

Flashbulbs went off like fireworks.

Society applauded.

With surprising nimbleness, Tina Vanderbilt curtsied to the crowd.

A whisper whipped around the deck—“three thousand carats!”

Scott Devens and the portable members of his orchestra formed a semicircle around the guest of honor. Scott gave the downbeat: saxes and violins and accordion broke into “Happy Birthday to You.”

Tina Vanderbilt stood smiling politely, firmly, in the middle of a churning circle of photographers, flashbulbs, and newsmen.

Somebody said she was ninety-six and tonight was her fifth annual eightieth birthday.

There was ten minutes more dancing before the ship’s horn sounded an all-hands alert, summoning the guests to dinner.

The swaying couples gradually abandoned the dance floor. The circular white tables, each set and name-carded for eight, had centerpieces of red roses floating in amber water. The air sizzled with the tart smell of champagne and hot chafing dishes.

Babe and Cardozo found their table. Ash was already there, sitting alone with a bottle of champagne and a half-full glass, looking cheerfully wobbly.

“Aren’t you keeping bad company?” Babe said.

“What company?” Ash said.

“That bottle.”

Ash lifted the bottle. “Are you kidding, doll? Piper’s the best. Pull up a glass.”

A Countess Marina of the Ukraine arrived on the arm of a Prince Ludovic of Serbia. They both had dyed blond hair and facelifted skin that gave them the agelessly smooth look of Slavic Barbie and Ken dolls. When they introduced themselves they spoke with incongruous Hispanic accents.

Gordon Dobbs introduced Betsy Vlaminck, an imperious old fashion magazine editor in an aqua turban, and Dunk Canfield—carrying two more bottles of champagne—took the seat next to his wife.

Cardozo listened as Ms. Vlaminck lamented the whole Hamptons scene and said Oscar and Annette and Lock and Steve and Happy were moving their summer retreats to Rhinebeck, and wouldn’t it be just what the Hamptons deserved if real estate values plummeted.

“Poor Lee Radziwill,” Sir Dunk said. “Why she wouldn’t be able to rent out that phony colonial anymore for fifty thousand the season.”

Waiters, wearing black bow ties and white naval mess jackets, began changing the dinner plates.

Prince Ludovic scowled at the design on the soup dish. “It’s the Habsburg coat of arms—what’s Holcombe trying to tell us?”

“Rank is rank,” Countess Marina said. “It simplifies the seating at dinner.”

“I don’t entirely agree,” Gordon Dobbs said. “It seems to me it’s a question of celebrity who sits where. I can remember when George Plimpton and Andy Warhol were hot seats to be placed next to. Now it’s that Letterman man and Madonna.”

Betsy Vlaminck shook her head. “You can’t go by celebrity—that’s a pure boom-and-bust market.”

“I couldn’t be more in agreement,” Prince Ludovic said. “Look at the people on this ship. How many of them will have any social desirability at all in three years? No more than half.”

“I doubt half have any desirability tonight,” Countess Marina said. “Holcombe’s given Tina two birthdays, and this is the B party. The A party was last month, when he flew twenty of us to his schloss in the Austrian Alps.”

“I don’t go to B parties,” Ash Canfield said.

“Oh yes you do, darling,” Betsy Vlaminck said. “Count the number of publicists here tonight. Tell me it’s not a tax writeoff.”

“Holcombe’s shrewd, that’s all,” Ash said.

At that very moment a waiter was going around the table, ladling court bouillon of lobster from a silver tureen.

Lady Ash said “No, thank you” to a waiter offering more wine, and Sir Dunk placed his own glass at Ash’s hand. Cardozo noticed the switch, and Dunk noticed him noticing. Dunk’s eyes became pools of hostility.

“What do you think of Jeannette Cowles?” Prince Ludovic said. “I mean, leaving her husband to marry a homosexual?”

Betsy Vlaminck arched an eyebrow. “You mean leaving her husband to marry a man who has AIDS.”

“He couldn’t have AIDS,” Countess Marina said. “People have been spreading that rumor for years and Oswaldo Straus puts out a marvelous collection every spring and fall.”

“Kid you not, Oswaldo Straus has AIDS.” Gordon Dobbs raised his right hand in a Boy Scout oath. “Once a month Sloan-Kettering drains him and changes every drop of fluid in his body. They’re barely keeping the disease at bay. He’s had to have plastic surgery three times on his Kaposi.”

“He must have contracted it from that lover,” Betsy Vlaminck said, “that boy who was smeared all over Times Square in those big hunky naked ads.”

“No one could date the lover without getting on Ozzie’s evil side,” Prince Ludovic said.

“No one could date that lover,” Gordon Dobbs said, “without getting AIDS.”

“Then Jeannette Cowles is going to be the first woman in the Social Register to come down with it,” Prince Ludovic said.

“Not quite the first,” Gordon Dobbs said. “Some ved-dee prom-i-nent ladies have already succumbed to the plague.” He named the ex-wife of the man who had founded the first radio network in America.

“But that was from a transfusion she had five years before,” Prince Ludovic said.

“Remarkable isn’t it,” Gordon Dobbs said, “how there’s always an alibi when it’s anyone who’s anyone. Believe me, there’s a lot more going on than the Center for Disease Control is letting on.”

The waiters served capon suprême in ginger and raspberry vinegar sauce, with side dishes of wild rice and French beans amandine.

Before helping herself, Ash reached for her glass, slopping it and noticing but not caring. She banged an elbow against Cardozo’s ribs and in that split second he saw that she had become someone else: the face and voice were still Ash Canfield, but something had come unbridled at the center, something defiant and loud.

“Waiter,” she said, “would you please hold the fucking platter straight?”

Betsy Vlaminck mentioned the duke of Windsor.

“The smallest dick in the British Empire,” Ash said, spilling beans on the deck.

Betsy Vlaminck stopped, eyes veering toward Ash. “How do you know that?” she said.

“The duchess told me.”

“How did she know?” Countess Marina said.

Ash laughed. “Because she went down on the whole empire.”

“Really,” Countess Marina said, not quite convincing in her disapproval.

“The duke and duchess were no better than a couple of call girls,” Ash was saying. She was trying to cut into her capon, but it kept skidding away from her knife. “All those stories about their sending bills for coming to dinner or staying for weekends are absolutely true.”

A not-very-convincing frown drove Countess Marina’s lips together. “That is a lie, and it was started by Helena Guest because the duke and duchess stopped going to her place in Old Westbury after she divorced Winston.”

Cardozo shot Babe a glance. The mood at the table was getting to him.

“Never mind that,” Gordon Dobbs said. “Why was the duchess so dotty? Was she having strokes?”

“The problem was face-lifts,” Ash said. “After she reached age seventy-three, no responsible plastic surgeon would touch her. At eighty-five, just after the duke’s death, she imported that society surgeon from Brazil to do the job. Her eighth lift. At the last moment she told him to do the eye pouches. He had to keep her anesthetized three hours, and that’s too long at that age. He warned her, but you know Wallis.”

“What happened?” Countess Marina said.

“A quarter of her brain cells died and she came out partially aphasic and totally incontinent. Word was put out that she had Alzheimer’s, which of course wasn’t the case at all. What she had was necrosis of the parietal lobes. And it spread, like timber rot. She regressed. She began thinking of herself as a child again. Do you know what she wanted for Christmas? It’s so pathetic. She wanted toy trains. Can you imagine? Toy trains. Of course her retinue was absolutely terrified.”

“Terrified of what?” Countess Marina asked.

“You don’t know?” Ash said, looking round the table.

Dunk poured more champagne into his wife’s empty glass. “Ash, don’t,” he said.

“Come on,” Ash said, “everyone knows anyway.”

“I don’t know,” Countess Marina said.

“Well, you’re the only one who doesn’t.”

“I don’t know either,” Gordon Dobbs said.

“Nor do I,” Betsy Vlaminck said.

Ash fortified herself with a long swallow of champagne.

“Ash,” Babe said, “do you need that?”

Ash’s eyes turned. “Get your own, sweetie.” She addressed the table. “The duchess of Windsor began life as a man.”

“A man?” Countess Marina set down her fork.

“A cross-dresser,” Ash said. “Who but a man of exquisite sensibility would have had Wallis’s taste in clothes? Or in interior design?”

“But that’s ridiculous,” Countess Marina said. “Wallis married three times.”

“What does sex have to do with marriage?” Ash said, and there was laughter. But Cardozo didn’t laugh. He was paying less attention to what Ash was saying than the way she was saying it, the way her husband was watching her.

“Why in the world,” Ash said, “do you think Churchill and the archbishop of Canterbury were so dead set against Wallis’s marrying the king? Not because of what she had in her past—but in her crotch.”

“How did they know?” Gordon Dobbs said.

“They’d been to bed with her—him. Winnie was a little—you know.”

“Did the duchess ever have a sex change?” Gordon Dobbs asked.

Ash nodded. “During the Second World War. She and David went to occupied Denmark. They were collaborators, you know; no problem getting in or out of the Reich. She was a trailblazer—crossed over years before Christine Jorgensen.”

The waiters brought lemon soufflé with chocolate sauce. When Cardozo passed Ash the crystallized rock sugar for her coffee she ground her cigarette out in it.

“Doctors can’t give a man ovaries,” Countess Marina said, “and Wallis had children when she was Mrs. Simpson.”

“Samson was the real name,” Ash said, “and the sons were adopted from a Jewish relief agency in Palestine.”

A sudden hush fell on the ship as Holcombe Kaiser walked to the bandstand and adjusted the level of the microphone. “Testing, testing, can you all hear me? I want to announce an absolutely marvelous artistic and historical find. After eleven years’ searching, Sotheby’s has located the original tin soldiers belonging to François Charles Joseph Bonaparte, better known as L’Aiglon, the son of Napoleon Bonaparte and Marie Louise.”

A swell of murmurs and applause swept the deck.

“These are the very toy soldiers that the infant Bonaparte played with at age five when he was confined to the court of Vienna. After restoration by master craftsmen from the Swiss firm of Birsch and Loewen, these soldiers will be exhibited at the Holcombe Kaiser Museum of Toy Soldiers in Hartford, Connecticut. Any of you who wish to become cofounding sponsors of the Hartford Kaiser Museum may do so by filling out the pledge cards attached to your menus; furthermore, anyone contributing one thousand dollars or more may request society’s premier troubadour, our own Scottie Devens, to sing any song he or she desires.”

Holcombe Kaiser stepped back from the mike, bowing sideways toward Scottie Devens, already seated at the Steinway.

“Maestro,” Kaiser cried, “commence!”

Doria Forbes-Steinman strode through the tables. She slapped a pledge card on the music stand of the Steinway.

Scottie Devens nodded, then angled toward the mike: “An old sentimental favorite that set grandma’s toes tapping—I’m sure you all remember.”

He riffed an upward arpeggio and in a smooth, slightly neutered baritone began singing “Baby Face.”

Heads reangled themselves in a wave toward the table where Babe and Cardozo were sitting.

Cardozo felt Babe stiffen beside him.

“She did that on purpose.” Babe’s eyes looked dark and furious against the sudden whiteness of her skin. “‘Baby Face’ was Scottie’s and my song, and everyone here knows it. Vince, I’d like to go.”

From what Cardozo had seen tonight of what the gossip columns called society, it was no different from the street; and the one thing you didn’t do with a thousand eyes pinned on you was walk away from a challenge.

He reached for the nearest menu and ripped the pledge card from the bottom.

“What are you doing?” Babe said.

“Praying the bank comes through with my home equity loan.”

“Vince—don’t.”

She reached for him but he was already up from his chair, making his way through the hooting and laughing guests to the piano.

He handed Scottie Devens the card. “‘You Took Advantage of Me’—know it?”

Scottie riffed to a new key. “Naturally.” Scottie spoke into the mike. “For Lieutenant Vincente—or is that Vincent, Lieutenant?”

“Vincent—like it’s spelled.”

“For Lieutenant Vincent Cardozo of New York’s Finest, an old Rodgers and Hart favorite.”

Scottie’s amplified voice floated over the deck.

Cardozo returned to the table and sat. “Kiss me,” he told Babe. “Right now while every buzzard on the ship is watching.”

Babe kissed him. “You know something?” she said. “You’re goddamned wonderful.”

Cardozo’s attention went to the reactions of the guests around them. At the exact instant that he noticed the woman at the next table, she noticed him noticing her.

She had wide-set eyes that were green and sparkling and a little dangerous. At the back of her neck a green velvet ribbon that matched her eyes caught her long, straight, dark hair. She was keeping herself at the edge of the conversation, lifting a pale white hand to her pink mouth. An enormous ruby-and-diamond ring glittered sharply.

There was general laughter and applause when the song ended, and then Countess Marina filled out a card and dispatched Prince Ludovic to request “I’ll Follow My Secret Heart.”

“Who’s that woman at the next table?” Cardozo asked Babe.

“You mean wearing the black silk, cut on the bias?”

“What do I know from bias and black silk? The woman that’s staring at me.”

Ash overhead. “That’s Countess Victoria de Savoie-Sancerre and that Adonis next to her is Count Leopold.”

The count was much older than his wife, with a tanned face and hawk eyes. He was swigging bourbon neat instead of wine.

“She’s a dyke,” Ash said, “and he’s a fag.”

“She’s not looking at me like she’s gay.”

“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?”