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?”
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
EVERY 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.