A Trip to the Stars (49 page)

For all of these reasons—but especially Samax’s stroke and Calzas’s departure—I changed my plans at the last moment with regard to college. Thanks to Labusi, I had passed my entrance and equivalency exams at sixteen and been accepted at Stanford; this would have been my first extended time away from the hotel, and though I had mixed feelings about it at first, I was excited about attending. Samax, who had never gone to college, had always spoken of my attending Stanford, a dream of his own as a young man, shattered first by his being drafted and then by his legal battles with his brother. But in the end, over his objections (though I sensed that deep down, with the pressures he had come under, he was relieved) I stayed in Las Vegas and in an accelerated program attended the University of Nevada, to which I could commute. So it was that in the spring of 1975, six months before my twentieth birthday, I would take my degree in architecture.

What exactly was going on again between Samax and Vitale Cassiel at the time of all these other crises, and what had transpired in the past, was first told to me in snatches by other people, especially Calzas before he got married and Desirée. As I got older, Samax himself filled me in more on what he would not tell me in the greenhouse the night of his stroke. The stroke hastened this; he had said that I would learn the whole story one day, but I don’t think he imagined it would be so soon.

Nearly fifty years had passed since Vitale Cassiel had engineered Samax’s imprisonment at the Ironwater Federal Penitentiary. At seventy-seven, Vitale Cassiel was two years older than Samax. But it was as if the wound left after all those years had never healed—never been allowed to heal. The source of Samax’s resentment was obvious to me from the start: disinherited, betrayed, framed, and jailed for a year in the prime of his youth, he had plenty to be angry about. But the ongoing virulence of Vitale Cassiel was more difficult to fathom. Especially since he had so clearly come out ahead all those years back, effectively funneling all of Samax and Nilus’s assets into his own pocket. What was Vitale Cassiel’s gripe? I asked myself.

Finally, one evening when we were sitting in the dining room drinking maté tea from black bowls, Calzas clued me in on some of the events
after
prison that Samax had never gotten around to in our breakfast or after-dinner conversations. For starters, Calzas told me that as soon as Samax had made his fortune on that land he stumbled on, he set out to exact revenge on Nilus and Vitale Cassiel. By then, Nilus was very much the junior partner in all their ventures. While Vitale Cassiel wheeled and dealed, Nilus was relegated to paper shuffling at their home office in San Francisco; for this, he was paid a fat salary that enabled him to carry on a full-time social life in the high-blown style of his father. So long as the money rolled in, this arrangement suited Nilus fine. As the years went by, Vitale Cassiel primed him with just enough cash to keep him happy, always but a fraction of the overall profits. Following in the family tradition, Nilus was a collector—not of rare antiques, like his brother, but of beautiful women, like his father. He never married, but instead lived with a succession of mistresses, among whom were the mothers of his daughters Bel and Ivy. For, outdoing himself, Nilus Samax in a single year, 1937, fathered his daughters on two different women.

Bel’s mother, Astrid—my grandmother—was the orphaned daughter of a doctor and his wife who perished in a Colorado mining camp during a typhoid epidemic. Astrid died within a month of Bel’s birth. Ivy’s mother, the other object of Nilus’s affections, gave birth to Ivy three months later. Her name was Stella, and she lived with Nilus less than a year before running off with another man, leaving Nilus with both his daughters.

The other man was Vitale Cassiel. Nilus apparently never knew
this, but Samax, who had kept tabs on both men through private detectives, was fully aware of their activities, including Nilus’s amazingly chaotic domestic circumstances—the lifelong bachelor suddenly bequeathed, through death and desertion, two infants—and the fact that Stella and Vitale Cassiel lived briefly in San Francisco before moving to Reno. It was there that Stella gave birth to a boy, Vitale Cassiel’s son, twelve months after Ivy was born. Thus within a two-year span, like a mirror image of Nilus, Stella had two children by two different men. And so Ivy had a half-brother, whom I had never heard mentioned before. When I asked Calzas who and where this half-brother was, he couldn’t answer on either count; he knew nothing about him, and he had never heard Samax or Ivy speak of him.

It was also in Reno, Calzas told me, that Vitale Cassiel had begun setting up VC Enterprises, the sprawling company that would eventually control a large chunk of Nevada real estate, from office buildings and shopping centers in Carson City and Reno to the insignificant ghost town of Hydra where Auro and I burned down The Hotel Vega. How could we have known that it belonged to Auro’s grandmother’s onetime lover, much less that the seed money for VC Enterprises had come from the cash proceeds of our great-grandfather’s hat business? For while keeping Nilus busy, Vitale Cassiel not only snatched away his mistress, but transferred all the remaining assets of their partnership into the accounts of the company he was forming. This final transfer was accomplished gradually, secretly, and above all—on paper—legally, for Vitale Cassiel was nothing if not a crack attorney, skilled at perverting the law in order to commit a crime, whether it was framing an innocent man or embezzling his fortune. The upshot of all this was that when Nilus Samax died of cardiac arrest one rainy spring morning, slumping over in a taxi en route to an assignation after a breakfast of oysters Rockefeller and champagne, he had no idea that for all intents and purposes he was bankrupt. Leaving an estate so bare—for a man who lived so extravagantly—that it stunned everyone but his personal attorney, Vitale Cassiel. This was when Samax intervened, after his brother’s funeral (which he did not attend) taking charge of his daughters and putting them under his own roof.

And what was the revenge Samax inflicted upon Vitale Cassiel and Nilus? With Nilus, it was simple: once he got wind of how Vitale
Cassiel was fleecing his brother, Samax simply sat back and watched it play out. Knowing Nilus the double-crosser was being double-crossed by his accomplice was far sweeter to Samax than anything else he could have concocted. Added to this was Samax’s knowledge of where Stella was and the fact that he was keeping it to himself. It was true Samax could have informed his brother of Stella’s whereabouts, thus poisoning the well between Nilus and Vitale Cassiel; but this might also have ended the possibility of a financial debacle for Nilus, which was what Samax most desired. Anyway, he wasn’t sure that his dissolute brother, involved with countless women after Stella left him, would have cared much at that point.

With Vitale Cassiel, revenge was more complicated—and more personal—because Samax knew that Vitale Cassiel, not his brother Nilus, was the brains behind the plot that had sent him to prison. To avenge himself on Vitale Cassiel, Samax bided his time, waiting for the opening that he hoped would allow for a blow akin to the one he had sustained: a year in prison and the loss of all his money. He knew Vitale Cassiel was too clever and vigilant to be set up for jail time, and bankrupting him would be nearly impossible with the tools at Samax’s disposal. So he got very personal.

This part of the story I heard in Samax’s own words one afternoon during his convalescence when I followed him on his rounds of the orchard, up and down the grassy corridors of the quincunx. He wore his red silk robe, rope sandals, and a big straw hat against the strong sunlight. He had to walk slowly, favoring his right leg and taking deep breaths at regular intervals, often as he poked his cane through a tree’s foliage to examine a cluster of fruit.

“You’re eighteen now,” he said, glancing at me sidelong. “You ought to hear the whole story.”

I understood from this that he was about to tell me something highly personal which did not cast him in the best light.

“You’ll meet women in your life like Stella,” he said ruefully, for he was well aware of my pursuit of girls at that time, “or maybe you already have.” Then he shook his head. “No, if you had met a girl like Stella, you wouldn’t be here now with me.” He shook his head. “How beautiful was she? An old man’s memory embellishes, it’s not to be trusted. But I’ll tell you what I remember. Blond hair that shined like gold. A sly turn to her lips when she smiled. Eyes blue as this sky that
stayed lit even at night. And a laugh you could hear, like a piece of a tune, long after she’d left you.” He folded his hands over the top of his cane. “She was something, Enzo.”

“When did you first meet her?”

“October, 1938. On Belmont Street in San Francisco. I can’t tell you the exact day,” he smiled, “but I remember it like it was yesterday. She was someone you never forgot. On my brother’s arm, crossing the street to enter a restaurant, she wore a midnight blue dress with a diamond choker. Every man they passed turned to look at her. I froze in my tracks. I was thirty-eight years old, and in the twelve years since my release from prison, this was one of only two occasions that I crossed paths with Nilus—the other was in a lawyer’s office. It caught him flat-footed as well. He never knew what to say to me anyway—what
do
you say when you’ve betrayed your own brother and seen him get locked up?—so kind of to deflect things, he mumbled an introduction between Stella and me. She was surprised—probably to find out that Nilus even had a brother—and looked me in the eye, and then he hustled her into the restaurant. I felt a shudder go through me, I wanted her so bad. I’d never felt that way with any woman right off the bat. But there wasn’t much I could do about it—not just then. When Vitale Cassiel encountered her for the first time a few months later, he had a similar reaction, but he came at it entirely differently. Whatever his lust for money and power, it was nothing like what he felt when he gazed upon Stella. She became the great and abiding passion of his life.

“And so Vitale Cassiel stole her away from my brother, and Nilus was left alone in a big house with two babies, Bel and Ivy. When Nilus died five years later, Stella was still living with Vitale Cassiel. In 1944, their son was six years old, but they had never married. Stella didn’t believe in marriage. She was the runaway daughter of a ship’s captain—at sixteen she ran away and never stopped running. Her six years with Vitale Cassiel in Reno had been her longest interlude with anyone, anywhere.
Wild
was the word that had attached itself to her, as if it was a part of her name. In 1944, she was still only twenty-six years old, twenty years younger than Vitale Cassiel, eighteen years younger than me. And she was restless. Chafing at the bit. Vitale Cassiel may have been one of the richest guys in Reno, but during the war, on the heels of the Depression, Reno was a dusty backwater—unbearable
for a girl who had grown used to the high life in San Francisco. He took her all around Europe, and there were Caribbean cruises, and he piled on the jewels and furs, but she took those things as her due. If anything, they made her even more restless. At the end of those six years, she was more than primed to jump ship: she was overdue. That’s where I come in. My revenge on Vitale Cassiel, I decided, would be to seduce Stella away from him myself.” He paused for a deep breath, and winked at me. “How unpleasant a task could that be? And how much faith I obviously had in my own powers of attraction,” he added drily.

Then he looked closely at me. “What, you can’t imagine me playing such a role?”

“I can imagine it.”

“It was messy. Like something out of an Italian comedy,” he muttered, “where you never get love served up without vengeance, and vice versa, and often it all comes out as tragedy in the end. One thing was for sure: Vitale Cassiel wasn’t laughing.”

We sat down on one of the wooden benches, in the shade of an apricot tree. A blackbird was singing in the higher branches. Samax fell silent, probing the tufts of onion grass at our feet with his cane.

“I can tell you,” he said suddenly, “that I did possess considerable charm with the ladies in those days. I had made some money. I dressed sharply. I knew how to have a good time. In the spring of 1944 the world was preoccupied with the war; Europe was in flames and all across the Pacific there were vicious battles over remote islands. But I was engaged in a different kind of warfare—obsessed with Stella and only Stella—utterly focused.”

“What did you do?”

He leaned back, his eyes faraway. “First I should tell you that I ran into her one more time after San Francisco. It was here in Vegas, at some charity function at the old Avior Hotel. Very stodgy. I doubt it was something Stella did very often. I was just leaving with a bunch of business guys I knew when I crossed paths with her. It was just for a few seconds on the front steps, but I know she recognized me from that time with Nilus six years before. She looked into my eyes, she smiled at me, I smiled back.” He paused for a long moment. “I felt like I was drinking her in. And then she was gone.” He chuckled softly. “That’s what gave me the idea that I could seduce her, and make her
mine. I told myself I was taking revenge on Vitale Cassiel, but really I was just hooked, like him and my brother before him. So the comedy began. A few weeks later, I moved into a fancy hotel suite in Reno and started pursuing her. I found where she spent her time, and that’s where I began spending my time. Finally, I was following her outright. Well, it didn’t take me long to accomplish my mission, and instead of making me wary, this merely reaffirmed to me that I was pretty hot stuff. Then I found out that for Stella I was no more than a means to an end: getting away from Vitale Cassiel. Stella used me even as I was using her—except she did it better. We ran off together just two weeks after I first approached her, outside the auditorium of the Fleischmann Planetarium one afternoon. She was there with her son, but that didn’t stop me.” He sighed. “Vitale Cassiel and her son never saw her again. I took her to Acapulco, where we lived together for two weeks in a rented villa. I couldn’t get enough of her. I gave her anything she asked for, including plenty of money. So it hit me like a ton of bricks when she ditched me. She boarded a Hong Kong-bound ocean liner late one night in July, 1944. In addition to the money I had given her, she had cleaned out two of her joint bank accounts with Vitale Cassiel and sold a bunch of the jewelry he had given her. Thus she could do whatever she liked, which evidently included sailing into a war zone at a time of fierce naval engagements from Midway to Guam, where the marines were landing even as her ship passed a hundred miles to the north.