Too Damn Rich (41 page)

She glanced desperately at the heroically
scaled doors.

He took her hand in his. "I know you have to
get back to work," he said. "But don't be a stranger. Okay?"

Zandra's nod was ambiguous, its two meanings
cancelling each other: the first that his words registered, the
second that she agreed. It was all a matter of interpretation.

But she knew she had to say something. They
couldn't just part in silence.

She thought: He reaches too deep inside me.
For both our sakes, I have to keep my distance. Somehow I must make
certain we'll never see each other again.

Aloud, she said, "I'll be in touch."

The fiction was convenient and harmless; a
necessary white lie. But her smile would have left Troy up ship's
creek.

"See you," she added.

And she was like quicksilver. Here one moment
and gone the next.

Lila Pons owned an apartment in River House,
arguably the single snootiest and most exclusive address in New
York, if not the entire world.

She'd moved in during the summer of 1954,
thirteen years after the FDR Drive had been built, and until then,
the sedate dowager of a building had fronted directly on the East
River, where it had even boasted its own yacht mooring. That, like
so many other things, had changed as time had passed, but River
House itself had not.

Built on the heels of the 1929 Crash, it had
symbolized optimism and confidence in both the city and the
country's economy, and from the beginning, had been home to many of
the city's—and indeed the world's— richest, most prominent, and
most socially acceptable residents. It still was, and being
accepted by the co-op board was something akin to passing the
scrutiny of the CIA, the Stalinist-era KGB, J. Edgar Hoover's FBI,
MI5, the Morgan Bank, and the Social Register.

To the casual observer, the towering brick
and stone edifice gave off an aura of pre-war stability and
solidity, and looked as if it had always been there and would
remain there forever.

Like some legendary memorial. Or a monument
to its most famous and reclusive resident, Lila Pons.

Before reaching East Fifty-second Street,
Kenzie ducked into a doorway on First Avenue, untied her Reeboks,
stuffed them into her shoulder bag, and wiggled her feet into her
best shoes.

She checked her watch. She still had six
minutes to go. Good. Time enough to reach the building right on the
button.

River House was the very last building at the
cobbled end of East Fifty-second Street. Its U-shaped facade had a
canvas awning, and on the ground level, wall-mounted stone faces
stared at each other across the recessed entrance, the mouths of
which, in warmer weather, streamed water into scallop-shell basins,
and which now gaped dryly, like idiots. The doorman was outside,
enjoying what weather he could in the deep, lengthening shadows of
the afternoon. He wore the requisite uniform and peaked cap and
looked as though he'd been there since the creation.

"May I help you, ma'am?" His reedy voice was
extremely polite.

"Yes. I have an appointment to see Ms.
Pons."

She could have sworn his face—eyes, mouth,
even nose and ears— went totally blank. "There's no one here by
that name, I'm afraid."

Kenzie wasn't deterred. She said, "I'm from
Burghley's, the auction house, and Ms. Pons called us to appraise
her art. Here's my card." She unbuckled her bag and passed him
one.

He took it and held it mere inches from his
eyes. It was European style, larger than the standard American
size, and thick as fiberboard:

BURGHLEY'S

FOUNDED 1719

721 Madison Avenue MacKenzie Turner

New York, New York 10021 Expert-in-Charge

Old Master Paintings and Drawings

(212) JL5-5000 (212) JL5-5121

He scratched the engraved letters with a
thumbnail, sighed, and said, "If you'll wait here, ma'am, I'll be
with you shortly."

Kenzie smiled. "Thank you."

She watched him shuffle inside to use the
house phone and took the opportunity to look around at the too-tall
buildings lining this short narrow block. Glancing out over the FDR
Drive, she saw a tug nosing a barge upstream against the swift
current of the East River. Then, turning in the opposite direction,
she had to squint and hold up a hand to shield her eyes from the
grit-filled blast of wind shooting through the vertical canyon from
across the Hudson in New Jersey.

Hearing the doorman's discreet cough, Kenzie
faced him with a smile. He looked sincerely apologetic. "I've
spoken to the housekeeper, ma'am," he said with gravity as he
handed Kenzie back her card. "She asked me to tell you that Miss P.
is currently in Japan."

"Japan!" Kenzie frowned. "That's rather
peculiar, isn't it? I mean, if she's overseas, why should she have
called us?"

"I'm sorry, ma'am," he said ever-so-politely,
something in his manner conveying that they were both merely the
victims of some higher power's whim. "I am only conveying what I
was told."

Kenzie hesitated before shrugging
philosophically. "Well, it's not your fault." She took several
backward steps and raised a hand to sketch a friendly wave. "Thanks
all the same."

He seemed grateful that she didn't pry any
further. "Anytime, ma'am," he said, doffing his cap.

She started retracing her way back toward
First Avenue when something ... a sudden premonition, perhaps? A
kind of sixth sense? ...caused her to slow down and glance up at
the building's blank windows. Abruptly she stopped walking.

Was it her imagination?

Or had her eye caught—what?

She wouldn't swear to it in a court of law.
Nor even to herself. But by some keen intuition she had
glimpsed—was it an hallucination? just wishful thinking on her
account?—a curtain behind a closed fifth-floor window twitching
furtively aside, and a ghostly face materializing before darting,
swift as quicksilver, back into the shadows?

Kenzie, a shiver rippling up her spine, stood
rooted to the spot, unable to keep herself from staring up at that
window. It was dark and mysterious; the curtains still. Nothing
moved. Nothing stirred.

Chiding herself for letting her imagination
run amok, she walked reluctantly on, but not without giving that
casement window one last upward glance over her shoulder.

It was just another blank window among
countless multitudes, she told herself. So what if a curtain had
moved? It could have been anyone's apartment; God alone knew how
many tenants occupied a building of that size.

Fleetingly, she wondered whether this errand
had been someone's idea of a bad joke.

Or had Lila Pons really wanted her collection
appraised ... but then changed her mind at the very last
minute?

Perhaps time would tell. And then again,
perhaps it would not.

Either way, Kenzie knew she would not easily
forget this particular wild-goose chase.

The very idea of calling upon one of the
greatest screen legends of all time—especially one who had become a
mysterious aged recluse living behind locked doors—only made this
errand, in vain though it might have been, that much more
fascinating.

Under her breath, Kenzie said softly, "I vant
to be alone."

God, she thought in self-disgust. How
unoriginal can I get?

"Tell whoever it is that I'm in ...
Japan!"

Now, that was original, all right!

Especially when you wished upon a star.

And the most nebulous star, at that ...

The instant Dina Goldsmith hit home, she let
Julio know that she was not—repeat, not!—under any circumstances to
be disturbed. With that decree, she repaired to her silk-walled
boudoir, secure in the knowledge that she could spin her web in
absolute privacy.

There, presided over by Sargent's elegant
Countess of Essex and no less than two languid Boldini beauties,
Dina slipped off her crocodile pumps and made herself comfortable
on the plump-cushioned, Louis XV duchesse brisee, once the property
of none other than that most celebrated connoisseur of French
eighteenth-century furniture, Mrs. Charles (Jayne) Wrightsman. The
very same Mrs. Wrightsman whose bequest of a series of
Versailles-like rooms formed the nucleus of one of the Metropolitan
Museum's major collections, the Wrightsman Rooms.

Humming softly to herself, Dina lifted the
brass telephone off the table beside her and placed it on her
lap.

There. Now she was all set.

But before getting on the horn, she permitted
herself a moment's reflection.

The pair of full-length Boldinis, time-frozen
survivors of an extinct, pre-war species, drew her eye. Tilting her
head slightly, she perused them as fondly as she had on a thousand
other such occasions.

Whenever her self-assurance faltered, she had
only to come in here to draw strength from them, so powerful were
their auras of complacent confidence, of leisured tranquility. She
often wondered what kind of alchemy empowered them to reach out to
her from within the gilded frames, what sort of magical osmosis
took place that enabled them to give her self-esteem the necessary,
vicarious boost.

Dina's thoughts turned to the task—the
intrigue she and Becky V had so carefully and brilliantly
devised.

Mentally reviewing each step of the process,
she allowed herself the pleasure of self-congratulatory
excitement.

Three months. Three long months. That was how
long it had been since the party at the Met, when the idea of a
match between Zandra and Karl-Heinz had first struck her. But it
had remained exactly that, a mere idea. It had taken Becky V to
help crystallize it into a tangible reality.

Now, with Becky having successfully completed
Phase One, corraling Karl-Heinz into the scheme, Phase Two was at
hand—literally in Dina's hands!—and she savored the triumph to
come.

Because it will come! she reiterated to
herself. It must!

Not only was the timing right, but Dina knew
it could never be more right.

It's now or never, she told herself.

If there was anything as heady or
intoxicating as playing matchmaker for a real-life prince and his
future princess, she had yet to run across it.

After all, a marriage between Prince
Karl-Heinz von und zu Engel- wiesen and Zandra, Countess of
Grafburg, would hit countless birds with a single stone. Not only
would it validate and consolidate Dina's own importance and power;
it would, in one fell swoop, cap off her dizzying winning streak of
social triumphs and put Karl-Heinz and Zandra firmly into her
debt.

Careful, she cautioned herself. It's
dangerous to celebrate prematurely.

Without changing position, she moved her gaze
from the Boldinis and rested a hand lightly atop the telephone. She
had procrastinated long enough. It was time to stop daydreaming.
Time to get busy. Time her fingers did some walking!

And lifting the receiver, she punched Sheldon
D. Fairey's private number at Burghley's.

Lunch had left a warm, convivial glow as
Sheldon D. Fairey returned to work, the savory, full-bodied
smugness of having pulled off a major coup. Eyes beaming like
headlights, he bestowed a sunny smile upon his secretary, the
sharp-featured, formidable Miss Botkin.

Without hesitation she rose from behind her
desk to take his coat, scarf, and gloves.

He basked in her fussy, wifelike
ministrations. No feminist, she. Not by a long shot.

Miss Botkin—she insisted upon being addressed
as Miss, not Ms.— was one of the last of the old-fashioned
holdouts. Not only did she pride herself upon bringing her boss a
cup of coffee, but trusted no one but herself to grind the beans,
brew it just so, and then serve it, using the big formal silver set
and creased linen napkins and fine china.

Elsewhere standards might have slipped, but
not in this office. Nor would they while she was alive. Miss Botkin
clung to her inflexible, Victorian values with a rectitude that was
as amazing as it was outdated.

Fairey patted the sides of his silver hair,
straightened his tie, and then strode victoriously into his inner
office, shutting the door so he might savor his triumph in
private.

He had gone to lunch anticipating the very
worst.

He had returned feeling downright
euphoric.

And with good reason. Leonard Sokoloff,
producer of mind-numbing, tooth-grating television sitcoms, it
turned out, was not your stereotypical Hollywood ego who collected
art as an investment or because it was fashionable.

Shrewd, articulate, and sharp as a tack,
Sokoloff had one finger on the pulse of the nation's couch
potatoes, and the others on a whole variety of subjects ranging
from politics and philosophy to business and art. Particularly
modern art.

Thus, courting the producer—or rather, wooing
his collection of contemporary art, which was soon to go under the
hammer—had turned out to be a highly agreeable experience for
Fairey. But what had astonished him the most was Sokoloff himself;
the man showed a genuine passion for his Mondrians, Klines,
Lichtensteins, and Klees. He'd talked about them as affectionately
as if they were his children.

Unfortunately, he'd have been better off
showing the same kind of passion to his wife. If he had, the
collection might have stayed intact. As things were, it had fallen
victim to one of the "Three Big D's" of auctions—death, debt, and
divorce—and was going on the block because of the last.

Fairey shook his head in commiseration. Just
as there were two sides to every coin, so too was one man's misery
another one's gain. The ultimate loser in this case was Sokoloff.
The big winners would be the divorce lawyers, who'd haul in
outrageous fees; Sokoloff's soon-to-be ex, who was raking him over
the coals; and Burghley's, which would earn a hefty commission on
the sale of his art.