A Hamptons Christmas (19 page)

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Authors: James Brady

BOOK: A Hamptons Christmas
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The Danube, ferocious mit cannons, und Turks! Dose bastards!
Considering Christmas and other distractions (Her Ladyship in residence for one; burying Reds and then welcoming him back from the dead; the blizzard; aiding and abetting Emma's schemes, including a phantom “day” spent with her missing parents at aquariums that didn't yet exist; negotiating a cease-fire between Sis and the Bonac Boys), I marvel that I got anything at all done, cutting and editing my
Parade
magazine pieces into something resembling a book.
But by waking early and slipping out of bed before Alix stirred (and stirred me!), I got in a couple of hours at the computer most mornings. Once Alix came down and started to read over my shoulder, issuing pithy commentary and offering constructive criticism based on her double first at Oxford (“Oh, Beecher, the subjunctive in that sentence? Mightn't the conditional be more appropriate?”), getting anything done was a challenge. Especially since she continued to be clothing-challenged and habitually edited naked, leaning against my back, tousling my hair and licking an ear before tiring of her copy-reading chores and going off to shower and dress. All of which left me pondering the literary advantages of a monastic life, where there are very few naked women hanging about.
I began to understand how Thomas Merton, once he became a Trappist (more precisely a Cistercian Monk of the Strict Observance), was able to write so many fine books so swiftly.
And now at last, on top of everything else, Dick and Nicole Driver actually arrived in the Hamptons. Not a “virtual” visit this time invented by their kid but a genuine one, though it took the connivance of Sis Marley, the most respected merchant banker on the Street, and two private eyes to get them here.
Nicole and Count Vlad (in deference to the seashore, even out of season, he was gotten up in a double-breasted navy blazer, with an ornate crest of sorts, and a yachting cap) arrived first, landing in a chartered executive jet at East Hampton Airport. It was here that Odets, still lurking, picked up their trail and tracked them into Sag Harbor, where they checked into a chintz-covered suite just down the hall from their private eye, Madamoiselle Javert, registered as Sister Infanta de Castille. Before they'd unpacked, Odets had reported in by cell phone to his client, Driver, in Manhattan, and Dick was soon speeding east on the Long Island Expressway, being chauffeured out in one of his limos in something of a frenzy. Could he allow Nicole and the Impaler to appear more Christmas-spirited than he, to register prior claims of doting on their daughter, while he remained in Manhattan bilking clients? Don't be absurd. Driver's secretary called ahead for rooms at the Meadow Club in Southampton.
“Are you a member, Mr. Driver?” she thought to ask her boss.
“They'll certainly know who I am. Tell the club to check with Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt or one of the Whitneys if there's any question.”
Wasn't Mr. Vanderbilt dead? And which Whitney, and were they members? the secretary wondered but was too intimidated to ask. Though by then, Dick was out the door and bundled into the limo with cell phone at the ready.
Meanwhile, Sister Infanta briefed the “anxious” mother and her boyfriend, telling them about us, the Admiral and me and Her Ladyship, and about the Further Lane house in which, ever since
her disappearance, Emma seemed to be staying with a quite unsettling contentment.
“Get those people on the phone,” snapped Nicole.
The Admiral took the call and was very cold. Quite nearly frigid by the time he hung up.
“You deal with these wretched people, Beecher,” he told me. “You know when I don't like the cut of a man's jib, I can't help showing it.”
Nicole had apparently attempted to throw her weight around. And in so doing, issuing instructions and demanding information, never bothered to inquire after the well-being of her only child.
But of course I
did
know how my father got. In fact, it had long mystified me that he'd been so effective a spy. Espionage was, after all, a métier where one was forever running into people the cut of whose jib one didn't like! So I agreed to phone Nicole Driver as the go-between and find out what she and the Impaler were up to. Maybe I could even shame her into some sort of maternal gesture toward her own kid before Emma flew back to Switzerland and the Brides of Christ.
After making the call, Alix (at the controls) and I drove up to Sag Harbor over snowy roads for a talk with the former Mrs. Driver, but before we could reach them, there was something of a dustup with Sister Infanta de Castille onto which we would shortly stumble.
Mademoiselle Javert had spent half her life, and successfully so, as a private investigator, though in rare moments of introspection, she permitted the odd self-doubt to creep in. A week of enforced inactivity here in the Hamptons, kept on a short leash by clients she'd barely met in Paris, and she'd begun to lose patience. And wasn't patience the policeman's greatest ally?
So that when Nicole Driver got into her hectoring mode, Mlle Javert took it for only so long. Did she really need this? She'd been a “nun” for only a week, but already she found the religious vocation so enriching, so emotionally satisfying, so … significant: praying at the winter ocean for dead fishermen, grief-counseling
his comrades, welcoming back from the dead a man who arrived in a police car at his own funeral, all to the accompaniment of inspired tears and raucous laughter.
As Nicole railed about Dick and about her daughter's mischievousness, and these East Hampton people named Stowe that she was going to have to deal with, Sister Infanta de Castille cried
“Assez
!
Basta!
Enough!” Pacing dramatically up and down the oriental carpets of the American Hotel's best suite, she had her little say.
“Might I remind you, Madame Driver, that my illustrious ancestor Javert, an inspector of the police, was the very official who pursued that career criminal Jean Valjean through the stinking sewers of Paris, tirelessly, damply, never flagging or giving up, unmindful of the stench or what was happening to his best suit and good shoes. And what reward does he get? First that rabble-rouser Victor Hugo pens his pot boiler, and then Lloyd Webber, that little cretin, comes out with his absurd musical! There's a pair for you! Turning an open-and-shut case of petit larcency into a screed against the flics. A bestseller,
not
with an honest policeman as hero, but with a villainous Valjean! The crook who stole the loaf of bread in the first place. And the great Javert, a man of law and of probity, wading through
merde,
cruelly castigated and portrayed as the heavy! And his best shoes ruined!”
Alix and I had slipped quietly into the room halfway through this ferocious soliloquy and stood silently listening as the Impaler in his yachting cap, who frightened easily, fell back several paces into an overstuffed chair. That Madamoiselle Javert was fully togged out in the religious habit, leather belt, rosary beads, medals of Our Lady and the usual nun shoes rendered her fury more impressive. Even Nicole, of sterner stuff than her lover (you could see where Emma got her spunk), eyed Mademoiselle warily, edging away from her.
Alix, incapable of prolonged silence, broke the tension with vigorous applause, clapping and crying out: “Oh, I say, Sister, well done, well done indeed. So jolly to see you again. And to assure you I'd never previously thought of Inspector Javert in such a
positive light. Perhaps someone ought do a revisionist Les Miz and put that scoundrel Valjean firmly in his place.”
“Cayenne!” thundered Sister Infanta, “the prison colony. That's where the fellow belongs.”
The Impaler, easily swayed, nodded his great, handsome, if empty, head. “Ja, duh Devil's Island for those bums, okay? Teach the fellow to be stealing breads!”
As for myself, it had not previously occurred to me to think of Victor Hugo as a cop-bashing Reverend Al Sharpton.
I made the introductions. Nicole, when she tried, could be charming, and as she was somewhat awed when faced with an authentic English aristocrat, she fell back on tradition. “Tea, milady?”
“Gutt gutt,” said Count Vlad, who presumably spoke Romanian, or Transylvanian, but no
known
language, grinned his agreement (my own Romanian, I must admit, is limited to “Magda Lupescu” and “King Carol”).
When the tea had been ordered from room service, Nicole got quickly to the point.
“Of course Mr. Driver (I'm sure I speak for him at least in this) and I are most grateful to you for having taken in our mischievous daughter.”
“A lovely child,” Alix remarked. I kept quiet, having learned that was the best way to get people talking. Nicole didn't hesitate.
“The problem is that Mr. Driver and I are engaged in somewhat adversarial litigation over terms of the divorce, custody, child support and the like, and while my concern is purely the well-being of our daughter, that son of a bitch seeks financial and other advantage.”
“Oh, dear,” Alix murmured, lowering her eyes but nodding imperceptibly toward the “nun.”
“Sorry, Sister,” Nicole quickly riposted, though she of all people, since she had retained her, knew that Sister Infanta wasn't a nun at all but a private eye.
“Of course, no offense taken,” the “nun” said demurely as Nicole resumed.
“Properly to appreciate my position, you realize that after I left the Icecapades and my darling child was born, there were all these latent, pent-up energies. Not even the authorship of best-sellers and subsequent fame was sufficient to fill my life … .”
I could see Alix's lovely eyes start to glaze.
“ … and I threw myself unstinting into good causes, much in the spirit of the third Mrs. Steinberg, Gayfryd. Even
U.S
.
News
&
World Report
took note when I picked up the fallen torch of our tragically lost Princess Di.”
“Which was?” Alix asked, who had actually known Diana.
“Land mines.”
Her Ladyship goggled.
“You don't say.”
“But I do,” responded Nicole. “Bianca Jagger and I are in the very forefront of the antipersonnel mine movement. Do you know how many million land mines there are?”
Nicole shook her head at the thought.
When we remained mute she half-whispered, as if only to herself and Bianca. “The risks we took …”
“Did you dig them up?” I asked, “the two of you?”
“No, we raise awareness and draw up petitions. The digging-up follows automatically.”
She had other causes as well. The Newport Jazz Festival, Dutch Elm disease, and Esperanto. Then, swiftly getting back on point, she demanded:
“Has Dick Driver been in touch with you at all, Mr. Stowe? Or with your father, the general?”
“Admiral. Annapolis man, in fact. Class of forty-eight.”
“I vuz myself in the Coastal Guards, a sous-officier,” Count Vlad said proudly in the hodge-podge of lingos he seemed to feel appropriate to his audience, “Royal Romanian Coastal Guards, very elite corps. Mostly gentlemens of gutt family, classy top-society folks, you understand, plus a few ruffians.”
“Mmm,” said Her Ladyship, “I wasn't aware Romania had a seacoast. Isn't it rather tucked away there in the hills and forests,
dotted with picturesque if somewhat gloomy castles and charming stone villages?”
“Der Block Zee, don't forgot nor overlooking der Block Zee,” the Impaler urged. “Many great naval battles ober der Block Zee, I swear to Gott. Odessa and der battleship
Potemkin,
for one. Also the Danube, ferocious mit cannons, der Turks, dose bastards, many horrors and brave gentlemens, dround-ed und sinking down.” He shook his head sadly at the very memory of bloody sea battles long ago.
“And despite these horrors, Count,” Alix asked, “you still sail? I noted the yachting-club escutcheon on your blazer.”
“Ja, mit der speeding boat. All mahogany, I swear to Gott genuine, not der plastics. Christ-Craft, a fine brand, endorsed by der Vatican for de commercial use of Gott's name.”

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