Lady of Fortune (2 page)

He looked down at his white-spatted ankles, and then said, ‘I used to think that money was for big houses and a Packard twelve-cylinder and booze and dames. That was the be-all and the end-all of it. But the more money I made, the more I
began to rub shoulders with people who had more money than me, but didn't seem to think that houses and Packards and dames were all that interesting. So what did they find so interesting? What do you find so interesting? You've got a secret there, Effie, and it's something I don't understand but I want to. It's something you could share with me, Effie. You know, something you could teach me.'

Effie reached out and gently tugged at his sleeve. ‘What are you trying to say to me, George?'

‘I'm trying to say this,' George mumbled. 'I'm trying to say that I've fallen for you – you know, completely. I'm in love with you. And I'd like it very much – I'd what do you call it, deem it,
deem
it a great favour if you'd consider – well, marrying me.'

He licked his lips, and then he added, ‘Being Mrs George Sabatini, if you get what I mean.'

Effie took him that night up to her bedroom. The jugglers and the fire-eaters and the sixty-piece orchestra were given chicken legs and beer in the kitchens, and then sent home in their buggies and their runabouts and their noisy charabancs. Effie watched them leave from the bedroom window, their lights sweeping across the lawns and the trees and the urns of trailing lobelia.

George was sitting on the edge of the bed in his shirtsleeves. He said, ‘I don't want you to think wrong of me, Effie. I don't want you to think that I'm taking advantage.'

She let the drapes fall back into place. ‘I don't,' she smiled.

She released the bows that held up her bodice, and uncupped her breasts from it as if they were cool white blancmanges she was releasing from their moulds. Her nipples were very wide, and vividly pink. Her waist was so slim that when she approached George, her skirts whispering on the Indian rug, he could almost close his two broad hands around her. He kissed her navel, with careful reverence.

‘I'm a woman of forty-three, George,' she said, quietly. I know my own mind, and I know my own body. I'm still beautiful, although I'll never be pretty again. I want you tonight just as much as you want me.'

George looked her up and down, his hands still resting on her hips. ‘I never felt this way about any woman, Effie. You're the ritz. You know that? You've got class coming out of your ears.'

She bent forward and kissed his forehead. She could see herself on the other side of the room, in the mirror, an elegant woman in a high white fairy-tale wig, naked to the waist except for a single strand of diamonds around her neck, her slender body rising like the neck of a swan from her spreading crinoline.

They lay naked on the curtained bed, on the soft flower-patterned comforter, illuminated only by a single globe light which was held up by a chromium art-deco nude. George was narrow-waisted, olive-skinned, and far more muscular than he had appeared in his formals. Dark curls peeped from under his arms, and grew thickly around his penis. On his left shoulder, there was a six-inch white scar, thick as a zipper. Effie touched it, but said nothing about it. She knew that George had fought his way to the top, and in New York that meant fighting relentlessly and viciously, and never turning your back on anybody, not even your friends.

Effie herself had the body of a woman ten years younger. She was slim, and fair-haired, with wide-apart blue eyes; eyes as blue as Virginia day-flowers. There was the slightest splash of freckles across her nose and her shoulders, but her neck was smooth and white from years of careful massage and expensive night-creams, and her breasts were still firm. Every year she spent two weeks at the Sky Mountain private health resort, exercising and dieting away the stress of the other fifty weeks.

George ran the flat of his hand across her bare stomach, until it rested on the fine gold fuzz on her mound of Venus. ‘You're like something out of a story,' he whispered, hoarsely. He was staring straight into her eyes with an expression she couldn't interpret. Admiration? Wonder? Or plain disbelief? And yet, still staring at her, he crooked his long middle finger, and gently opened her up. Her moist lips made the faintest sound, like a sleeping lover opening his mouth in the middle of an utterly silent night.

He said nothing more. He was a silent lover. But his muscularity made it possible for him to express his passion for her in a kind of sexual ballet. To penetrate her, he lay back on the comforter, and lifted her right up over him, so that she sank slowly down on his hard upright penis with all the grace of the Swan Maiden in
Swan Lake
. She gripped his shoulders and winced and shook and sighed with pleasure, and with a
little pain, too, because in that position he could enter her more deeply than almost any other.

They made love at the same balletic pace for over half an hour. At the end of that time, they lay back with their bodies shining with perspiration, their arms intertwined. Neither of them had sought or achieved a climax. They had instead been exploring each other, discovering each other's rhythms, learning the delights of each other's bodies.

Effie said, ‘You made me forget myself for a while, Mr Sabatini. You made me forget the whole world.'

George kissed her, with extreme tenderness. ‘You are a queen,' he murmured; and the words sent a strange shiver of recognition through Effie, as if by making love to her so deeply, George had also plumbed the inside of her dreams.

‘Would you like a drink?' she asked him, sitting up in bed.

He watched her, his head resting on his hand. ‘You won't stop calling me George, will you?'

‘To have a lover called “Mr Sabatini” sounds far grander. Especially in this
foie-gras faubourg
.'

‘What the hell's a
fwuh –?
'

Effie leaned over and nuzzled up to his shoulder. ‘A ritzy suburb, I think you'd call it.'

They stayed awake until dawn. They drank Silver Stallions in iced highball glasses, a mixture of chilled gin and vanilla ice cream. They played
Night After Night
on the gramophone, and watched the dawn rise over the misty width of Great Peconic Bay. Effie wore a white negligèe, trimmed all the way down to its spreading train with old Belgian lace. George wound himself in a towel. She kissed him and said he looked like Ali-Baba.

The sapphire-blue Hudson limousine arrived for him at six. He had a meeting downtown at eight-thirty. He had dressed by then, in a plain grey double-breasted suit, and while he was eating his breakfast he wore his small wire-rimmed spectacles, which made him look oddly vulnerable. Effie reached across the pale blue tablecloth and touched his hand. He put down his forkful of egg and maple syrup, unwound his eyeglasses, and smiled at her. She said, ‘You are somebody quite considerable, Mr Sabatini. I hope I'm not falling in love with you.'

They kissed goodbye on the steps outside. George's
chauffeur was waiting beside the car, patient and smart. He could afford to be both, when you considered what he was being paid to betray him.

George reached up and wound one ringlet of her fair hair around his finger. ‘I don't want to say much,' he told her. ‘It's just that I don't want to leave you without saying thank you. I'm not an easy guy to like, you know; and I guess that must make me even harder to love. But you've been willing to listen, ever since the beginning. You're real special, Effie. One in a million.'

The butler, Bolton, appeared from the hallway. ‘I'm sorry to interrupt, madam. But there's a telephone call for you. Mr Walter Winchell, from the
Evening Graphic
.'

Effie squeezed George's hand. ‘There you are,' she smiled, ‘We're famous lovers already. First, Antony and Cleopatra. Then, Romeo and Juliet. Now, George Sabatini and Effie Watson.'

She looked over her shoulder at Bolton and said, ‘Tell Mr Winchell that he can print whatever he cares to; provided that he lets me sue him for as much as I want to.'

Effie watched George's Hudson disappear around the curving driveway, her hands clasped in front of her; too happy and too content even to think of waving. He would soon be back, and waving had always seemed to her to be the saddest and most hopeless way of saying goodbye. She turned back into the house, still smiling and she smiled even more when she saw how rigidly Bolton was keeping in check any hint of disapproval.

‘It's all right, Bolton,' she said. ‘I don't mind if you express your objections out loud. Everybody else has, including my attorney.'

‘I'm only thinking of your personal safety, madam,' said Bolton. ‘Mr Sabatini is, after all, a hoodlum.'

Effie nodded. ‘I know. He's a very tough one, too. And that's why I always feel safe when I'm with him.'

‘Yes, madam,' said Bolton, with the kind of pursed-up face he always put on whenever one of their guests picked up the wrong fork, or sneezed into the caviare.

Effie said, ‘You can make me another Silver Stallion, while I dress,' and then she went upstairs, singing
Night After Night

‘
Night after night
…

You're near me
.

Night after night

You endear me
…'

The news arrived with the late afternoon papers. A limousine had been found abandoned in Massapequa State Park, about a mile off the Merrick Road, containing the headless body of George Marcello ‘Spats' Sabatini, the 41-year-old crime boss. It was understood that he had been returning to New York City after visiting Mrs Effie Watson, America's only woman bank chairman, the ‘golden fist in the velvet glove.' A friendship between the two of them had long been hinted at in the gossip columns, despite the fact that Sabatini was a known racketeer and extortionist. Dorothy Dey in the Morning
Telegraph
had called it, ‘the love that knows no law'.

Sabatini, surmised the newspapers, had probably tried to push himself too far and too fast into the dockside territory of Giancarlo Eustachio, a scarred old walrus of a Sicilian who had once said that he had never murdered anybody, at least not during Lent. Sabatini had not, thankfully, been tortured. His murderers had simply taken his head off with a garrotte of very fine steel wire.

Effie was unavailable for interviews. The Saturday after the killing, she was taken by seaplane from Long Island to Massachusetts, and from there to a secret retreat in New Hampshire. She did, however, send flowers to Sabatini's funeral: a hundred white roses, with a handwritten card saying, ‘Only one tenth of what you did for me.' Louis Sobol, the famous society columnist of the New York
Journal
somehow acquired the card and reproduced it next to his daily article. ‘If you've ever thought that bankers are the last people to conceal secret passions,' he wrote, ‘just take a look at Effie Watson's last sentimental goodbye to slain mobster George ‘Spats' Sabatini. What Sabatini actually did for Miss Watson that was ten times greater than a hundred white flowers, we shall never know! But we may guess that there was an unholy bond between them which only death could break …'

Effie, walking with her friend Margaret Shaw on the shores of Lake Winnipesaukee, on an afternoon that was already beginning to smell like early fall, spoke of business, and how she was going to redecorate her apartment in London, and whether she ought to sell her portfolio of Daumier etchings. But she never once spoke of George Sabatini, nor of the night that had been ‘Versailles'; and the only way that Margaret Shaw could tell how sad she felt was by the way she turned her head when she spoke of Long Island, and the tears that filled her eyes when she turned around again.

‘But weren't you frightened of him?' the woman reporter asked her, on a blurred afternoon fifty-four years later, in Malibu, as they sat over China tea and tiny pâté sandwiches by the pool. ‘I mean, the consequences of loving a gangster could have been catastrophic, couldn't they? Emotionally, and careerwise.'

The old woman sitting opposite her on her basketwork chaise-longue, her face obscured by veils and by the violet shadow which was cast by the wide brim of her Italian straw hat, said drily, ‘Of course I was frightened. Love is always frightening.'

‘But didn't you care what your friends thought? Or how the people at the bank might have reacted?'

‘I wasn't in the habit of referring my lovers to my stock holders. I wouldn't do it today, if I still had any lovers.'

‘Do you think you might have married him?' asked the woman reporter. She had been shown by the butler to a seat in which the sun shone directly in her eyes, and in which, even in her red cotton sundress, she was uncomfortably hot. Every time the pool rippled, dazzling reflections of light crisscrossed her face. But she was determined to brave this interview to the end. She was the first journalist to have talked face-to-face with Effie Watson for twenty-two years.

Beneath her veils, Effie whispered, ‘I can't say. He asked
me. He said, ‘I want you to be Mrs George Sabatini.' But his days were numbered, from the very day of his birth. He led such a violent life that he couldn't possibly have survived for long. Yet, if he hadn't led such a violent life, he would never have become so rich, and I never would have met him. So he was always caught in the dangerous circle of his own life. Those could be very vicious days, in 1927. I knew several men who were killed by gangs, and not all of them nicely.'

‘Is there a nice way to die?' asked the woman reporter.

A clock chimed, somewhere behind the white lace drapes which rose and fell in the languid afternoon breeze.

Effie said, ‘Time has tricked me, you know. I feel so young at heart, and yet I look at myself in the mirror and know that I am only three years away from being one hundred years old.' She allowed herself a wry, almost invisible smile. ‘Perhaps I should stop taking ginseng. But I can't tell you how terrible it is, to have a mind like mine, trapped inside such a futile body.'