Too Damn Rich (56 page)

"Couldn't you just drop one of them—" Zandra
hicupped "—and keep the other?"

"That's the trouble. I can't make up my mind.
When I'm with Charley, it's as if he's the only guy in the world.
And when I'm with Hans, I feel exactly the same way!"

"But, surely there are other things besides
just looks and sex? I mean, one of them must have some trait you
can't stand."

"That's Charley," Kenzie said. "Egotistical
and chauvinistic."

"Then drop him."

"God knows, I've tried. But then, when I see
him ... oh, damn! Why does life have to be so fucked up and
complicated?"

"You're asking me?"

"Whoops! Sorry. I forgot. Mr. Smirnoff's
fault."

"Speaking of whom," Zandra said queasily, "I
think I'm t-t-totally smashed."

And with the extreme concentration and
overcautious movements of the truly inebriated, she got slowly to
her feet.

It was a mistake. The instant she was
standing, the room began to spin around her. She swayed
dangerously, regained her equilibrium by windmilling her arms, and
then held them straight out from her sides, like a tightrope
walker.

"D-d-darling, this isn't a revolving room, is
it? Like one of those b-b-beastly rooftop restaurants catering to
t-t-tourists?"

"Nope, 'fraid not."

"Didn't think so. Fuck. Must have
c-c-consumed more than my limit."

Arms still extended, and brow furrowed with
concentration, Zandra applied herself to negotiating a few wary
steps.

"Here. Better lemme give you a hand," Kenzie
suggested.

She got up, and although she knew she wasn't
on a boat, the deck abruptly listed beneath her feet.

"Uh-oh," she said. "Seems Mr. Smirnoff snuck
up on me, too."

She staggered over to Zandra, who looped both
arms around her neck.

"D-d-darling, you've been an absolute angel,
not to mention one d-d-devil of a b-b-bartender," Zandra said, with
pie-eyed love. "D-d-don't know whether to kiss you or c-c-curse
you."

Kenzie, the slightly lesser soused, took the
initiative. Still, it was almost, but not quite, a case of the
blind leading the blind, or to be more precise, the drunk leading
the drunk.

Weaving unsteadily toward Zandra's room, she
got the door open and managed to drag Zandra inside.

And just in the nick of time.

Zandra's arms went slack, and she toppled
over backward, falling diagonally across the bed.

She was out like a light.

Kenzie didn't bother undressing her—it was
all she could do to make it to her own room and collapse.

From somewhere far, far away in the land
beyond sleep, the telephone was ringing. Zandra moaned and rolled
over. She buried her face deep into the pillow and pulled another
one over her head and held it there until the ringing ceased.

The next thing she knew, Kenzie was shaking
her roughly.

"Yo! Sleeping Beauty! Wake up! You've got a
phone call."

"Go 'way."

"Zandra! Yoo-hoo. Zandra! Wake up!"

Kenzie clapped her hands, then flickered the
lights, turning them on and off, on and off.

"Up, up, up!"

"Wha-wha ... ?" Zandra muttered thickly.

"You don't get up, you're going to find
yourself in Betty Ford!" Kenzie threatened. "Enrolled in a
twelve-step program!"

"What time is it?"

"Six in the morning. Now get on the phone.
It's about your brother, Rudolph."

Rudolph! The name pierced Zandra's
grogginess. Her eyes snapped open and she sat up, instantly
regretting the sudden movement. Splinters of pain shot through her
skull.

Kenzie picked up the extension phone and
thrust it at her.

Zandra fumbled with the receiver; banged it
against the side of her head. More splinters shot through her
skull.

"Rudolph!" She could barely contain her
excitement.

"Zandra?" It was a female voice.

"Yes. Who is this?"

"Penelope Troughton, darling! You know, nee
Gainsborourg? We met again in New York—"

"Oh . . . Penelope. Gosh. Hello. What's this
about Rudolph? Did you see him? Talk to him? Please, you've got to
tell me!"

"Actually, I didn't see him. Alex did."

"Alex?" Zandra repeated blankly.

"Alex Troughton. My new husband."

"And?"

"Rudolph's been taken to hospital."

"Hospital!" Dear God, Zandra prayed, it can't
be true. Tell me it isn't true!

"I do so hate being the messenger who brings
bad news."

"Penelope! Please. Is he—"

"He's alive, if that's what you want to know.
But he's in bad shape, darling. Very bad shape. From the way he was
worked over, Alex says it's a miracle he's even alive!"

The walls seemed to close in on Zandra from
all sides.

The way he was worked over. The words
reverberated like thunder in her ears. A miracle he's even alive
... Rudolph ... bad shape ... worked over ...

Oh, God, she prayed, please, let him be all
right.

Three-and-a-half hours later, stomach
churning and head still splitting, Zandra was over the Atlantic on
a British Airways jet, bound for London.

Weatherwise, that Sunday was a 3-D day:
dreary, depressing, and dark.

Prince Karl-Heinz's mood was just as somber.
Soon after Zandra's departure from Becky V's, he had left also,
returning to Manhattan and his Auction Towers penthouse.

There, he had spent the longest night of his
memory.

He had tried sleeping, but all he'd been able
to do was lie there, as though marooned on that huge giltwood bed
as if on a desert island, his mind full of painful reflections and
self-reproaches.

He had tried reading. Listening to music.
Watching a movie on video.

Useless. Nothing distracted him. No amount of
escapist entertainment could detract him from his pain; even the
anesthetic of alcohol was unable to fill, however fleetingly, the
empty spot in his soul. Over and over, his mind replayed that
appalling scene on the snowy rise, when those lamentable words had
burst from his lips:

"And if love's got nothing to do with it ...
surely you know about the von und zu Engelwiesen criteria for
inheritance ... could you find it in your heart to marry me
anyway?

He winced each of the hundreds of times he
relived that ghastly moment.
Gott im Himmel!
No wonder she
had fled! If their positions had been reversed, he would have done
the same.

How he could have been so stupid ... so
preoccupied with himself, his desires, his inheritance ...

Um Gotteswillen
, but I'm an idiot! he
thought. No—worse. At least an idiot's blunders can be forgiven.
Mine cannot—

—and so he had forfeited Zandra. Forfeited
her forever ...

With excruciating slowness, the endless night
had stretched into morning, and daylight, weak and disspirited,
revealed a low, uniformly gray blanket of cloud.

But even this was too much light for the
bleakness of his mood, the aching emptiness in his soul. Darkness,
he sought, the stygian blackness of night; the welcome amnesia of
nothingness.

Pressing the button beside his bed, he rang
for Josef.

His valet, who was up before the crack of
dawn, answered the summons at once.

"Your Highness?"

Karl-Heinz gestured to the windows. "Close
the curtains," he said listlessly.

Kenzie called Charley at noon and spoke to
his machine. "I don't suppose you want to take your rain check this
soon?" she said. "But if you do, just whistle."

Fifteen minutes later he called back,
whistling.

"I think I get the message," she told
him.

"What about your roommate?"

"She was on the nine-thirty British Airways
flight to London."

"This mean we'll be alone?"

"No, I'm expecting my Aunt Ida from Altoona,"
she said sarcastically.

"Knowing you, it's not that impossible. Okay.
When?"

"Soon as I hop out and get some
radicchio."

"Tell you what. You put on the soft music,
I'll bring the radicchio."

"How romantic. Are we going to do for
radicchio what Last Tango in Paris did for butter?"

"I don't suppose," he said, "that you saved
any of that champagne?"

"You don't mean yesterday's champagne?"

"Yeah, I do."

"All gone."

"Ouch."

"Ouch yourself. Everyone knows champagne
doesn't keep."

"Don't you have one o' them special
gizmos?"

"Gizmos?"

"You know. Those chrome corks you flip open?
Seals it airtight?"

"Oh, one of those," Kenzie said dismissively.
"Yeah, but it's still not the same."

"Shit. And today would be a Sunday. All the
liquor stores are closed."

He paused.

"Lemme see what I can do."

Kenzie hummed as she bathed and put on navy
blue leggings and a vintage football jersey which reached to her
knees. It was khaki, with navy blue stripes on the sleeves, and
sewn-on pads at the elbows. Chopin on the CD player, a spritz of
Chanel No. 19 on her person, and she was ready to break hearts.

Charley arrived with another bottle of Dom
Perignon. "And for Pete's sake," he said, "don't ask where it came
from."

She pecked him on the lips. "Well? Where did
it come from?"

"My favorite restaurant. The liquor authority
finds out, it's liable to cost them their license. And speaking of
costs, don't ask what I paid for it, either."

"I wouldn't give you the pleasure! Awwwww.
Just look at you." She ruffled his hair playfully. "My big spender.
Guess I'll have to make it worth your while, huh?"

Why was it, Zandra asked herself as she
wandered the bleak Victorian hallways in search of Rudolph's room,
that hospitals the world over always had to smell like hospitals?
And why, more often than not, did they have to be housed in what
looked like intimidating old armories?

This one in particular was a direct throwback
to Charles Dickens— grimy brick on the outside, grim and
institutional on the inside—just what you'd expect from a
nineteenth-century lunatic asylum. That this wasn't a mental health
facility, and that the sick and the infirm were helped and healed
here, rather than imprisoned, was somehow difficult to
reconcile.

Room 432 ... 433 ...

Zandra's heels clacked on the worn, concave
granite, echoed resoundingly from the vaulted ceiling and bare
walls. In one hand, she was carrying her weekender, still stuffed
with the balled-up clothes she'd never unpacked from the weekend;
in the other, she held a drooping, pathetic little bouquet of
overpriced chrysanthemums she had bought at the airport.

She felt as wilted as they looked, if not
worse. The royal hangover she still nursed, despite having thrown
up on the plane, stabbed her head, made it feel as though, it were
a confection of fragile spun glass and would, at any moment,
shatter or splinter, breaking up into tiny, murderous pieces.

Room 447 ... 448—

There! 449!

Unoiled hinges squeaked in protest as she
slowly opened the heavy door.

"Rudolph?" she crooned softly.

One look inside, and she fell silent: it
wasn't a room, it was a ward. Metal-framed beds of chipped,
yellowed enamel seemed to stretch to infinity, and the buckling
linoleum, waxed to a mirror finish, reflected the beds lining both
sides, giving the illusion they were stacked bunks. At the far end,
rain pelted the Gothic windows with the force of thrown
pebbles.

Whatever the sun was, or was not, up to on
the other side of the Atlantic, she had landed at Heathrow to fog
and rain; had arrived in London to see it at its absolute
worst.

Welcome home, she thought grimly, quietly
shutting the door and making her way down the aisle.

Her eyes scanned the facing rows of beds—all
occupied—her gaze darting constantly from left to right, left to
right, in search of her brother's familiar, handsome
countenance.

What if I can't recognize him? she fretted.
What if his face was so badly damaged, or is so bandaged, that I
won't even know him? What if—

—her heart gave a symphonic surge. There he
was! Sallow and pale, eyes closed. Her brother!

So thin he looked. So gaunt and drawn. So
ill, hooked up to the IVs.

And what were those machines with LED
readouts doing at the foot of his bed? And those tubes snaking out
of it and into those huge black leather and Velcro Robocop-looking
things, like fat futuristic legs with calipers at the knee joints,
which covered both his legs from crotch to ankle?

Good Lord! What's been done to him?

Her footsteps quickened as she rushed over to
his bedside.

"Rudolph!" she whispered, dropping her
weekender and tossing the bouquet on the nightstand. "Oh, darling,
I was out of my mind with worry—couldn't imagine what had
happened—"

He slept on, dreaming a deep, painless
morphine dream.

Oh, how the sight of him hurt her. How the
sight of her dashingly handsome brother reduced to this pierced her
heart.

How could I have deserted him when he needed
me most? she wondered guiltily. Why didn't I try to help him?

Tears flooded her eyes as she bent over the
bed and kissed his stub- bled cheek.

His eyes opened slowly, but they were remote
and unfocused. Narcotized.

"Rudolph," she whispered, placing her cheek
against his. "Darling, it's me, Zandra."

"Zan ... dra," he murmured, his lids drooping
shut again.

She straightened and looked around. I have to
talk to his doctor, she thought. Or at the very least his nurse. I
must find out what, exactly's, been done to him.

"Rudolph," she repeated gently. "Darling, can
you hear me at all—?"

"Doubt it," said a cockney voice from right
behind her.