Elsinore (3 page)

3

He never showed at the Phipps Foundation.

He couldn't stop thinking of Fay.

The other bloodhounds he knew wouldn't return his calls. Paul was a very good teacher. No one wanted any sort of job from Sidney Holden.

“I'll find her myself,” he said. But he couldn't seem to get off his ass. He visited Strawberry Fields, saw the mosaic Yoko had put in the ground, with the word, “Imagine” in the middle. He'd come out of his own Liverpool, but he didn't have John's genius. He was almost thirty-nine, and he felt like a hundred and six.

A week passed and he went to Aladdin again. But there was no check in his mail slot. None of the nailers or cutters would have dared rip him off. They couldn't break a check into peanut brittle and have it disappear in their mouths. He walked into his office and dialed the Swisser, Bruno Schatz. He couldn't get through to Paris.

The phone rang, and Holden figured that the operator had found Schatz. But it was the lawyer lady. Gloria Vanderwelle.

“Are you always such a delinquent, Mr. Holden? We had a breakfast date.”

“I told you, Mrs. Vanderwelle. I'm retired.”

“Mr. Phipps still wants to meet you.”

“Look,” he said. “My fiancée was kidnapped. I can't sleep. And I couldn't concentrate on breakfast. I'll meet him next month, okay? I promise. I'll sit and eat croissants.”

“Will tomorrow at ten be satisfactory?”

“Don't you ever listen, Mrs. Vanderwelle?”

“Mr. Phipps is a compassionate man. And he has splendid resources. He doesn't like lovers to be apart. He'll get you to your fiancée.”

“Is this a gimmick, Mrs. Vanderwelle? Because if the old man is romancing me, I wouldn't—”

“He's not an old man. We'll expect you at ten. And please wear a tie, Mr. Holden. It is a foundation.”

He wore Windsor's tie, Windsor's shirt, and Windsor's jacket to the Phipps Foundation. Phipps had his own building on Park and Thirty-ninth. It had marble on the floors and metal beaten into the walls. The ceiling looked like some constellation of silver stars.

The foundation occupied a single floor, but the rest of the building was also devoted to Phipps. Phipps Bookbinding Corporation; Phipps Metalurgical; Phipps Tool and Die; Phipps Entertainment Industries. It was like a vertical country, where Phipps was landlord and king.

Holden went up to the foundation. A receptionist sat behind a glass cage, and Holden wondered if it was bulletproof. She stared at his Windsor Special. He could have waltzed out of another age, where men had all the elegance of a handsome, muted line.

“I'm Holden,” he said. “I have a breakfast appointment with Mr. Phipps.”

She pressed a button, whispered a few words, and said, “Have a seat.”

But Holden didn't like to sit in outer offices. He didn't like to sit at all when he was wearing his Windsor, because bending his knees ruined that flawless line.

He looked at the photographs on the wall, photographs of foundation projects. A room of battered wives; an ugly boy with a violin; a recreation hall of dying men. It seemed to Holden that the Phipps Foundation drew calamities to itself. But he was glad of it: there was nothing buttery on the wall, nothing meant to reward or inspire. It was like the spaces Holden had lived in, in spite of Windsor's suit.

A woman came out of an inner office with a bow in her hair. She looked twenty in her tinted eyeglasses. Holden figured she was some messenger girl, an intern from one of the Catholic colleges. Perhaps a student nurse. She was a bit shorter than Holden. She shook his hand. And when she smiled, he knew she wasn't a nurse.

“I'm Mrs. Vanderwelle.”

Holden looked again. “You can't be more than twenty-five.”

“I'm thirty,” she said.

“But you run this operation.”

“Yes, Mr. Holden. I've been around. I graduated from Harvard Law when I was nineteen.”

He couldn't decide if she was pretty or not. She didn't have Andrushka's long legs or Fay's curly hair. She wore a suit, like Holden, but without a tie. Her perfume dug into Holden a little. He expected to see her on the walls, with a violin in her lap. Foundation Graduate, Gloria Vanderwelle, All-American Girl. But then he remembered that Vanderwelle was her married name.

She led him into a corner office that was laden with glass. It had the perfect pinch of Manhattan. Holden could see both rivers from those glass walls.

The old man was behind his desk. Holden was disappointed, because Howard Phipps wasn't wearing a tie. He had a shirt open at the collar and a cardigan with patched sleeves. He didn't get up when Holden entered the room.

Holden looked for Gloria, But she'd slipped out with that bow of hers, and the bumper felt uncomfortable. He'd never talked to a philanthropist or a billionaire. But then Phipps turned to look at him. There was a hardness around the eyes, a strictness to the cheeks. And Holden understood. Howard Phipps was a bumper too. It didn't matter how many hospices he'd built, or virtuosos he'd thrust upon the planet. He'd had people killed. That's why he'd wanted Holden in the house. So he could talk bumper to bumper.

“Holden, would you care to sit?”

“Thank you, Mr. Phipps, but I prefer to stand. I like watching both rivers.”

“Should we have breakfast now?” Phipps said, like a kindly doll in his cardigan. If he was ninety, Holden couldn't tell. He had no liver spots or wattles under his neck. His hands didn't shake, and he didn't have Calendar's waxen look.

“Is this the breakfast room?” Holden asked.

“No. We'll run upstairs to the restaurant. But I'll be blunt. I purchased your contract six days ago.”

“I'm not sure what you mean.”

“I own Aladdin Furs.”

“You bought out Bruno Schatz?”

“Entirely.”

“And I was never notified? I'm vice president.”

“That was window dressing,” Phipps said. “You were never really an officer of the corporation.”

“I'm speechless,” Holden said. “A vice president, and I'm shunted out the door, like a bag of garbage.”

“Here,” Phipps said, and he handed Holden his check, signed by Howard Phipps, president of Aladdin Furs.

“But it's a dying operation,” Holden said. “The Greeks own more than half the market. What would you want with a load of minks?”

“I wanted you.”

“I don't understand,” Holden said. “I'm not so valuable that you had to buy a whole company out from under the Swiss. If you needed a favor, why didn't you ask?”

“I did. But you never showed up for breakfast.”

“I was having problems with my fiancée,” Holden said.

“Come, let's eat.”

The old man got up from behind his desk. He was taller than Holden, but his back was slightly bent. Phipps walked with a cane. His shoes looked like rubber boats. But even with the cane he was almost as quick as Holden.

They rode upstairs in Phipps' elevator car and stepped out into a restaurant that was three stories high and had the tapered walls of a cathedral with cut glass and metal bands that circled the ceiling in narrowing lines. Holden figured they were near the roof. There were murals on the walls of a New York that belonged to an age Holden had never heard about. It was a city of ramparts and flying boats, where the streetlife seemed to exist on laddered walkways and terraces that could float. One of the murals had words beaten into the corner with gold.

MANHATTAN 1988

And Holden realized what it was. An artist's dream of Manhattan fifty years ago, a futurescape of glass tendrils and concrete vines. A city dweller's idea of Jack and the Beanstalk. It was lucky that Holden had studied art and architecture with a graduate student from Yale. He'd been trying to keep up with Andrushka, a mannequin from the fur market who'd swallowed all of Cézanne after she'd married Sidney Holden. And now Holden wasn't lost in this environment. He could interpret crazy murals on the wall.

But he didn't understand the restaurant. It covered an entire floor like some mock battlefield with soldiers that were held in place. Holden counted two dozen waiters. They couldn't have come from Fine&Schapiro. They were tall and very blond and wore dinner jackets that Windsor himself wouldn't have been ashamed of. But there was no turmoil attached to them. The waiters didn't move. And it had nothing to do with any awkward hour between breakfast and lunch.

No one eats here, except the old man
.

“You look startled,” Phipps said.

“Was this place ever opened to the public?”

“Holden, it was the classiest spot in town. Took weeks to get a reservation. Even I had a hard time, and I owned it. That's how independent my managers were. ‘Make him suffer,' they said. Garbo had a corner table. She loved to watch people dance.”

“What was it called?”

“Something simple. I didn't care for those Parisian titles.”

“Simple, but what?”

“The Supper Club,” Phipps said. “That's all.”

“And then …”

“I closed it down.”

“Did you start losing money?”

“Of course not. And even if I did, I had a hundred offers to sell.”

“What happened?”

“Let's eat,” Phipps said.

“Any particular table?”

Phipps smiled. “Holden, we can eat wherever you like.”

And Holden tramped among the tables with Phipps and decided to sit under a mural. It was like wandering into an orderly forest, where the waiters themselves were the animals and Holden the hunter, but he still didn't know why he'd come to hunt.

“What happened?” he asked while the waiters arrived with silverware.

“What always happens. I was in love. I brought her here every night I could. She was twenty. I was forty-five. And she was more of a woman than the grandmas at the other tables. I was the boy, Holden. I was the boy. Jealous. Petty. Stupid. I had a private army watching. They sat with her at lunch counters. She begged me to stop. ‘Please,' she said. I read into that remark. I saw secret lovers. I doubled the detail of men and women who were following her. I collected all the notes, bound them into books. It was like a library of precise gibberish.”

“I know what you mean. I get crazy when I'm in love. But couldn't you have stopped yourself, Mr. Phipps? Did your army come up with anything that could incriminate your girl?”

“Not a word.”

“And that still wasn't enough?”

“No. I was the greedy sort.”

Food appeared at the table. Bread, cheese, omelettes, apples, and a soufflé. Demitasse that was almost as delicious as the coffee in Rome, where Holden had done some piecework for Schatz. He had an omelette with grapes in it. The bread crumbled in his fist like cake.

“Even as I started to lose her, Holden, I was happy. I had a picture of her life, from moment to moment.”

“But you're not happy now.”

The old man ate his coffee with a spoon.

“It was inevitable. She ran away, married an accountant in Rochester. I wrecked his firm. He had no idea what was happening. The poor man committed suicide.”

“And the girl?”

“Went out of her mind, Holden.”

“What was her name?”

“Judith Church.”

“She still alive?”

“Yes. She's a baby … sixty-seven.”

“And you want me to find her? Is that what this breakfast is about?”

“Find her, man? I know where she is. You think I'd ever lose sight of her?”

“Did she recover her senses?”

“Of course,” Phipps said. “The woman wasn't a lunatic. She was under distress.”

“Why didn't you court her again?”

“Bloody logical, aren't you, Holden? I did court her again. She wouldn't have me. Said I'd ruined her life. Hated my smell. Hated the look of my face. But that's how I am. I manipulate. Stocks. Bonds. People.”

“Where is she now?”

“Right in New York.”

“And you want her back?”

“No, no. That's not the point of the story. We were talking about my restaurant. I shut it down after Judith went to Rochester that first time. I couldn't bear to watch people eating under this roof while she was away. I wanted to murder them all, the bloody bastards, chewing their steaks.”

“That's a bit eccentric for a businessman. Why didn't you keep off the property?”

“I couldn't. I'd open my eyes and imagine her eating at a table with other men.”

“I studied accounting, Mr. Phipps.”

“I know. Three semesters at Bernard Baruch College. I had you investigated. I always do that when I consider hiring someone.”

“You didn't let me finish,” Holden said. “You were making a fortune from the place, right? You could have sold it, but you didn't want to. Then why didn't you come up to this joint wearing a blindfold, so you wouldn't have to imagine looking at your lady?”