Cheyney Fox (33 page)

Thanks to the wise and intelligent Kurt Walbrook, and his
close relationship with his stepson, the boy grew up happy with the father who was present, and waited with ease and minimal anxiety for the time when he felt he was ready to meet the father who had never been there. Taggart was a handsome, quick, intelligent child, who grew up with few of the insecurities of a child born out of wedlock — because, in any sense of the phrase that mattered, he wasn’t.

Chapter 30

T
he year that followed Taggart’s birth, they pursued their remarkably cultured and cultivated existence, but with doubled happiness. Three months after Taggart was born, Cheyney became pregnant again. Their sexual intercourse became an even greater focal point in their marriage. Cheyney found herself rising to Kurt’s every sexual demand, no matter how adventurous and unusual. He still had that mesmerizing effect on Cheyney that drew her into loving him and expanding herself through his obsessive love for her. Her appetites for a more exotic erotic life were now as sharp as his, her urge to satisfy them no less compelling.

Her second baby boy was born in the Schloss Garmisch-Konigsberg, after another long and difficult birth. Cheyney was thrilled to be able to give Kurt Walbrook a natural heir, a gift of thanks for all the love he had bestowed on her and Taggart. Soon after Andrew Charles was born, Cheyney sensed a subtle difference in Kurt’s attitude toward their baby from that he had toward Taggart. There had always been in her mind a nagging little worry that Kurt, with a son of his own, might lose interest in Taggart. But quite the opposite seemed to be happening.
Though she said nothing to him about it, quite quickly it became obvious to everyone that he favored Taggart. Stepfather and son seemed to share an exceptionally close love relationship.

His attitude toward baby Andrew, although it hurt Cheyney’s sensibilities, seemed to make no difference to the relationship between Kurt and Cheyney. As soon as they were able to resume their sexual life, she was assured that all was well by his tremendous ardor for her. She convinced herself he would come around to love Andrew as much as he loved Taggart. Shortly after Andrew was born they went to Egypt to visit Albert Semanan, a trip which she was not especially happy to make. She always found him a cold, sinister personality, but she had no intention of letting Kurt down. With them, at Kurt’s insistence, they took a nanny and Taggart.

Cheyney very much resented having to leave Andrew behind. It would have been just as easy to take him with them, since they were flying to Egypt on a private jet directly from Vienna to Albert Semanan’s own airstrip in the desert. Kurt wouldn’t hear of it.

Since the time Taggart was born, they had taken him with them on their travels. A precocious twenty-month-old child, he was as always a joy to have with them. During their week with Albert, because Taggart was there, Cheyney was able at least to relax and enjoy the luxury of living among an unpleasant man’s most pleasing works of art.

When Cheyney was not riding with Kurt in the desert, or visiting temples close by, her greatest joy had to be seeing Taggart playing with Kurt. Which happened most of the boy’s waking hours. Kurt even took the boy with him when he was in private conference with Albert and Albert’s friends. Seeing the genuine bond between her son and Kurt, she could forgive her husband anything. For mother-love instructed Cheyney that love and security, a happy family life for Taggart and Andrew, came before all else.

The second night they were there, Kurt slipped something new into their sexual life. Another woman. Kurt, never short of charm, of casting an irresistible seductive net, ensnared Cheyney into the sexual threesome in such a way that made it impossible for her to resist. They often liked to have intercourse with both of them lying on their side, Cheyney’s back against
his chest, her bottom tucked tight against him. He could then slip a leg over one of hers and enter her between her legs. Penetration was deep and the angle seemed to touch her most sensitive spots. On that particular night he delivered her into sublime sexual ecstasy that had been especially thrilling. Cheyney was not a selfish lover, he knew that she would do anything to give back to him the pleasure she was experiencing. Breathless, she came in a long and exquisite orgasm and whispered in the dark huskily, “Now, it’s my turn. I want to make you come in a passionate frenzy, the way I have been coming.”

She tried to ease herself around in his arms, but he held her tight and thrust deep inside her, pinning her to him with his penis. She relaxed in his arms. He kissed the back of her neck, her shoulder, caressed her breasts with his hands and sucked and bit hard on a nipple. He felt her tighten with the pain he was causing her and so he released the nipple and licked and kissed it before he said, “Good. That’s what I want, too.” And he moved in and out of her with a newfound zest. Then he switched on the light and, never stopping the sexual rhythm, he kissed her on the ear and said, “Isn’t she lovely? I have bought her for us for the night.” And he kissed Cheyney hard on the lips and moved faster and faster in and out of her, and the beautiful, tall, slender Chinese girl who appeared soundlessly and as if by magic lay down and took Cheyney in her arms and began to kiss and caress her and Kurt with hands and lips and her cunt. And it was there at Semanan’s house that more bizarre sexual adventures became a part of their life.

In the sun by the pool the following day, Cheyney had to come to terms with the fact that her husband had slowly, cleverly, yes, Svengali-like, corrupted her. What was so dreadful about the realization was how much she enjoyed it. After their third night of sensual debauchery, Kurt dismissed the woman and the man who had been added to their sexual games. He confessed to Cheyney that he loved her more because she fulfilled every fantasy that he projected onto her, and more. And that he loved her son Taggart as he never dreamed he could love a child. He hardly mentioned Andrew. Kurt then presented her with a necklace of emeralds that he had purchased from Albert, telling her, “They were once offered by King Carol of Romania to his mistress. They’re yours, for giving me Taggart
and Andrew. But the Botticelli is mine. I have waited thirty years to get it away from Albert. It’s mine, and when I die I will leave it to Taggart.”

She wanted to say, Is this what being friendly with all these decaying fascists is all about? Waiting to pick up their treasures for yourself? But how could she be so churlish to a man who had just presented her with such a gift of words and jewels? And there was another reason she couldn’t say anything. Her assumption touched areas where Kurt would tolerate no probing.

It galled Cheyney that a man like Albert Semanan should possess even the smallest work by such as Botticelli. That a man like the one in Paraguay from whom she had bought the Van Goghs, who positively radiated evil, should own two of the finest paintings in the world. Again that question niggled. How did they come by these magnificent treasures in the first place? Why no competition for Kurt from other collectors for the works of art he pursued? It was not a thing she could ask him about. Previous experience silenced her. She recalled the sharpness of the speech he had made to her at his mother’s birthday ball.

A mystery enfolded her husband. Cheyney nursed a desire to unfold it. But any inquiry would have to be subtle, because Kurt never answered questions. Not hers or anyone’s.

She relegated that mystery to the back of her mind. There were other things to occupy her. A still-fascinating, somewhat complex husband, two children, the soon-to-be-opened gallery in Boston for the Acton Pace collection, two exhibitions she was organizing, one at the Museum of Modern Art in Amsterdam, and another in Dallas, Texas.

To all the world as it crossed Cheyney’s path, she seemed to have a charmed life. She could do no wrong, and luck was with her. That was true, but Cheyney and Kurt had their share of pain, too. They buried their child, Andrew, before he was four months old. The only natural child Kurt and Cheyney would ever have.

An articulated truck swerving out of control crushed Andrew Charles Walbrook to death in his carriage. It propelled the nanny into a coma and onto life-support machines, condemning
her to a nonlife until someone had the courage to pull the plug and leave her to die a natural death.

They were crossing the road ten blocks from the family house in Vienna when the truck hit. The enactment of a parent’s nightmare. Kurt and Cheyney were at home waiting for Andrew and the nanny to return. When the hours began to slip by, Cheyney panicked. The hospitals came up with no records suggesting the nanny and baby had turned up there as accident victims. In the police and hospital logs for that afternoon only a woman was recorded as having been run over by a truck. The police were called; everyone’s first thought was a kidnapping.

At midnight, one of the Walbrook servants saw the accident reported on TV news. He recognized one of Andrew’s teddy bears that had been thrown from the wreck. No baby had been recorded on entry into any of the hospitals because, until the TV cameras found the teddy bear, no one knew that the baby and carriage were lying somewhere within the twisted wreckage of the truck.

The nightmare. Kurt Walbrook contacted the police chief. The man did what he could to double the effort to lift the wreckage and try to save the baby. There was no baby left to save. Not even enough of Andrew to allow Cheyney the luxury of a last look at her dead child, to be able to kiss that beautiful baby good-bye.

The sudden bludgeoning of a baby out of their lives: no parent could ever forget. Cheyney and Kurt had no stronger defenses against that than any other parents. Although their relationship was as solid as ever, the death of Kurt’s only natural child sent a shiver through their marriage. The loss of the child sent Cheyney into a state of deep grief. For months she was inconsolably unwell. It was appalling for her to come to terms with such a devastating loss, But she finally came to accept it, and the fact that, for whatever reason, Kurt did not feel the loss quite as she did. Nothing could possibly make Cheyney forget Andrew, not even time. With brave faces and a void in their hearts, Cheyney and Kurt resumed their life, and Cheyney grieved silently for Kurt and Taggart’s sake. But grieve she did for her baby every day of her life. Kurt managed his grief in his own way, becoming more devoted than ever to
Taggart. Not quite to the point of obsession, but certainly after the baby’s death he drifted away from Cheyney toward Taggart — more so every year.

With Taggart growing, the greatest pleasure Cheyney had in her life was to see him flower into a stable and secure child, bright, and quick in mind and body. A mischievous, happy boy; curious about everything and everyone. A boy who had a natural aptitude for art, and a love and respect for his surrogate father. Taggart treated Kurt Walbrook as his first and real father. Every day Cheyney could see the best of her sophisticated, Viennese-aristocrat husband, with his faintly mysterious past and his current fame as art collector and patron, imprinting itself on the boy. He was the husband she would have chosen had her sole aim in marrying been to find a father for her child.

Through the turbulent seventies, Cheyney’s marriage to Kurt became increasingly a partnership in art collecting and dealing. For her it was an education in the ways of the artistic world, a final rending of the veil of idealism from her childhood dream of art. As she journeyed with her husband, and when possible with their son, from one artistic milieu to another, they became even more involved as partners in the business of art. Cheyney came to know people whose involvement with art dated with sinister exactitude from the final years of Hitler’s war. In the castles and houses they visited in Europe and South America, in Egypt and Syria, there were breathtaking art treasures in abundance, all suddenly acquired at that time by the families from whom Walbrook wished to prize them, by his charm and his money, without asking whence they came.

The realization was like a worm gnawing within the otherwise supportive structure of their marriage. Kurt seemed unaware of it, so far as Cheyney could tell. She gradually had to recognize the probable sources of her husband’s own collection and wealth. And once that fixed in her mind, she had to brace herself and confront Kurt with her concern. Questions, asked by her with increasing precision and alarm, were brushed aside. Finally the topic was specifically banned. And she realized that already, from opportunities created by him for her, she had unknowingly compromised herself by the tempting deals she engaged in. She knew success as a dealer of modern art again, but she knew the gnawing remorse of lost integrity.

Cheyney began to feel they were becoming increasingly estranged as lovers, even as art partners. But their closeness as sexual partners and as a family remained strong, its cornerstone always her husband’s love for her and Taggart. She nudged that feeling away, pretending it to be only real in her imagination.

Cheyney’s marriage to Kurt had been founded partly on his mesmeric attraction as a suave older man offering her immediate successful reentry into the world of art where she had previously encountered defeat and humiliation; partly on the security he offered her and her child because he had planned it that way. Because he was certain that was the life they both wanted. The mix had in the end been irresistible to her. She had for years enjoyed the sexual life he gradually introduced her to, not only for her own pleasure but largely because of his. By this time in their relationship, she endured the sexual demands he made on her. The sex was not the problem, he was too clever not to make sure she enjoyed, not just enjoyed, but craved it. It was more that the years with Kurt, as wonderful as they had been, were soulless. Not for one second had their souls come together and made love. She still, with all he was able to give her, missed that oneness with another human being that she had had with Grant Madigan and knew she would never have again. Kurt’s sexuality was now irreversibly entwined with his own psychological needs, which she must serve. It was for his pleasure first, her pleasure, and because her child’s well-being came before all else that she loved Kurt and forgave him his lost soul. Slowly she grew to realize that this match was making a subtler but still more corrupting demand upon her than she was comfortable with. The strain on her was enormous.

“Irving Kirshner!”

“Jesus, Grant Madigan!”

Irving Kirshner rose from his chair. A thump on the back for Grant. Hands warmly grasped.