A Fine and Private Place Read online

  “Shorter than Import?… Imp? That’s about as appropriate for him as Cuddles would be.”

  “In between,” I said. You know. Sprightly. A little boy-girl game. How stupid can you get?

  “In between Import and Imp.” Peter’s blond-silk brows made like a frown. “You’re putting me on. There’s nothing between Import and Imp.”

  “Oh, no?” Big Mouth babbles. “How about Impo?”

  The moment I said it I’d have bitten my tongue off at the roots if my teeth could have reached that far. Because what it gave Peter was newborn hope. I saw the infant burst into life in his eyes, ready to yell.

  “Impo!” he said. “You can’t mean Nino-the great Nino-is incapable of…?”

  “It’s not worth discussing,” I said, fast. “I don’t know why I brought it up. Don’t you think we’d better order?”

  “Not worth discussing?”

  “Peter, keep your voice down. Please.”

  “My God, baby, don’t you know what this means? If your marriage has never been consummated, it’s not a real, marriage. That’s grounds for an annulment!”

  In his exuberance Peter didn’t think to pursue the subject of exactly what my marital life did consist of. Which was just as well. I don’t want to think of what might have happened. It turned out badly enough as it is.

  So I went through the whole dreary recitation of no-noes. How it didn’t matter what I could or couldn’t do to have the marriage dissolved, legally, religiously, or any other way if such existed-how because of daddy Nino had me by the short hairs, now more than ever, because the Gay Controller had not learned his lesson in 1962, the lesson I’ve already paid for with almost five years of my life. Although he hasn’t dipped into the till again and played more hanky-pank with the books-Nino’s made sure of that-he hasn’t stopped plunging on speculative stocks in the market or betting on long shots at the track, either. He keeps losing and going into debt to the loan sharks and Nino, kind, generous Nino, keeps bailing him out… his suocero, his father-in-law, his beloved’s papa. Never failing to give me an accounting to the penny, so that I’ll know the rising score of my obligation to him, and what he’s still holding over dad’s and my head: that fitting for a prison uniform.

  “How can I let that happen, Peter? He is my father, the only one I’ll ever have. In his own cockeyed way he loves me. Anyway, we couldn’t build a life on a foundation like that. I know I couldn’t, and I don’t believe you could, either.”

  “I’m not so sure about that,” Peter said crassly. “What’s the matter with that crazy old man of yours? Why the hell doesn’t he start seeing a psychiatrist? Doesn’t he realize he’s ruining your life?”

  “He’s a compulsive gambler, Peter.”

  “And womanizer-let’s not forget that. Virgin, your father is a compulsive everything.” Peter’s been calling me Virgin in private for some time now, how aptly he hasn’t known. It makes me writhe. “You say he loves you. It’s a hell of a love that makes a father sell his only daughter to a-a eunuch just to save his own miserable hide!”

  “Daddy’s weak, Peter, and self-indulgent, and all the rest of it, but he really doesn’t think marrying me off to one of the world’s richest men is such a horrible fate. Of course, he doesn’t know about Nino’s… condition.” The waiter was hanging about, and I said haughtily, “I’m hungry,” which I was not. “Are you trying to starve me?”

  We ordered something, I think mine was a veal cutlet that had been breaded in library paste-their marvelous chef must have been off today-and Peter kept asking me district attorney-type questions about the agreement I had been forced to sign before the wedding. I suppose he was desperate, poor darling, because we’d been over that Berlin wall a dozen times previously without finding a loophole or the sorriest chink. I had to point out to him again that for the five-year term of the agreement I have absolutely no financial claim on Nino or his estate, and if I left his bed (!) and board before the expiration date it would not only strand me without a Hungarian pengo but he could-and positively would-sic the gendarmes on daddy and have him packed off to jail on the old embezzlement charge.

  “Is his money so important to you?” How Peter’s lip curled.

  “I hate it. And him! For Pete’s sake, Peter, you can’t really think it’s the money. I told you. I’d gladly accept any kind of decent life, no matter how much of a struggle it would be, if not for-”

  “Right back to dear old dad again,” Peter said, grinding his teeth. “Oh, damn him! When’s the due date?”

  “Of what, Peter?”

  “The agreement. When the five years are up. That’s one of Nino’s private papers he’s never let me in on.”

  “What’s today? December 9. Well, it expires 9 months from today, on Nino’s 68th birthday, which is also our fifth anniversary. September 9 next year.”

  “Nine months,” Peter said in a very peculiar way.

  I hadn’t realized till Peter repeated it, and it struck me funny, so I laughed. Peter did not, and at the expression on his face I didn’t feel like laughing anymore. “What’s the matter now, Peter? What is it?”

  He said, “Nothing.”

  The way he said it…

  I know it was definitely not nothing. It was something. Something terrible. I mean what was going through that blond, frustrated, furious head. I didn’t even want to think about what it might be. I wanted to wipe it out of my head just as fast as I possibly could. I told myself my Peter couldn’t be thinking unthinkable thoughts like that. Even in fury. Or fantasy. Or anything.

  But I knew he could. And was.

  Does one ever really dig another human being? Not excluding the man one loves? And I mean dig? In every sense?

  At that moment I didn’t know Mr. P. Ennis, 30, Harvard ‘59, confidential secretary to Nino Importuna, Julio Im-portunato, and Marco Importunato, in charge of the three brothers’ personal affairs… I didn’t know him from any stranger brushed against in the street.

  It frightened me.

  It still does.

  And that wasn’t all that made today so bitchy. As I was staring across the table at Peter, biting on my napkin, I saw over his shoulder-just walking into the restaurant-my father. At the moment I spotted him I noticed a flashy chick near him, but whether she was with him or coming in alone I never did find out. The big thing that concerned me was that he mustn’t see me with Peter. Because not even daddy knows about Peter and me. He’d never consciously betray me to Nino, but he does take a few drinks too many sometimes, and Nino is a breathing radar-he plucks information out of empty air. I simply couldn’t risk it.

  I said under my breath to Peter, “Peter, there’s my father-no, don’t look-he mustn’t see us together…!”

  Bless Peter. He casually dropped a $20 bill on the table and strolled me toward the rear, so that our backs were to daddy all the way. We pretended to go to the rest rooms but instead we escaped through an utterly blase kitchen staff. There’s not much you can do to make New York service people look up from their appointed chores short of planting a bomb under them.

  It was a close call, too close, and I told Peter outside that we didn’t dare rendezvous in public again. He took one look at my stricken face, kissed me, and put me into a cab.

  But my love wasn’t through with me. Oh, no! Just before he slammed the cab door Peter said in a low, throbby sort of voice, “There’s only one thing for me to do and, by God, when the time is ripe I’m going to do it.”

  That was the last I’ve seen of him today.

  But that remark of Peter’s has been haunting me. That, and the look on his face a few moments before daddy walked into the restaurant.

  9 months…

  It’s as if something was conceived today in the womb of time. I hope and pray I’m wrong, because if I glimpsed in Peter’s eyes what I think I glimpsed, and if his parting shot to me meant what I think it meant, the embryo’s going to turn out to be a thalidomide baby, or worse.

  It’s a very morb
id thought, and I’m becoming incoherent besides. I see I’ve finished over half the fifth of zatsomac, and I’m good and smashed, which I almost never allow myself to get because I might grow to like it too much, and to hell with you and you and you too Mrs. Calabash. I’d better totter off and tuck my lil ole self into beddy-snooky-bye.

  First Month JANUARY, 1967

  Gestation, the carrying or hearing, has begun.

  The zygote has become a mul-ticelled embryo. It has grown to the size of a pea and its core to the size of a pinhead.

  The cells in this core now form a ridge, at one end of which an in finitesimal knob takes shape. It is the beginning of the head.

  Second Month FEBRUARY, 1967

  Before the latter part of the second month it is not possible, from ordinary observation, to determine whether the embryo is of a human being or a dog.

  But after the first eight weeks, it takes on the unmistakable semblance of humanity.

  By now it is no longer an embryo.

  It is a fetus.

  Third Month MARCH, 1967

  The eyes are no longer on the sides of the head but have approached each other. Tiny slits mark the ears and nostrils, a larger slit marks the mouth. The forehead has grotvn massive. The upper limbs show fingers, wrists, forearms. The internal reproductive organs can now be distinguished as to sex.

  Fourth Month APRIL, 1967

  During this period the abdomen develops with notable rapidity, reducing the disproportion between the head and the rest of the fetus.

  Hair emerges on the head.

  The mother begins to feel the stir of her little parasite.

  Fifth Month MAY, 1967

  The halfway stage of the pregnancy finds the lower portion of the fetus’s abdomen enlarging proportionately, and the legs beginning to catch up.

  The mother is note very much aware of what she is bearing. Its arms and legs are in frequent vigorous motion in her body.

  Ellery had had his study done over in driftwood paneling, a choice that had seemed inspired at the time. The pitted and irregularly furrowed surface looked as if it had been clawed by the tides of years, and it was artistically stained a salty sea-foam gray. Contemplating it, he could feel the rise and fall of his floor and little imaginary stings on his cheeks. With the air conditioner set to maximum, it was very hard to keep reminding himself that he was not on the deck of a pleasure craft plowing up the Sound.

  This proved a serious deterrent to the requirements of reality. The conversion of his workaday walls had altered his environment to the critical point, turning a functional study in an ordinary Manhattan apartment into a playful distraction. Ellery had always held that, for the most efficient use of time and the maintenance of a schedule, a writer required above all things a working atmosphere of familiar discomfort. One should never change so much as the Model T pencil sharpener on the windowsill. The very grime around the ratholes was an encouragement to labor. In the ancient metaphor, the creative flame burned brightest in dark and dusty garrets; and so forth.

  Why had he excommunicated the dear old dirty wallpaper that had seen him devotedly through so many completed manuscripts?

  He was glaring at the four and a half sentences in his typewriter and making beseeching motions with his hands when his father looked in, said, “Still working?” in a tired voice, and retreated from the sight of that anguished tableau.

  Five minutes later, somewhat refreshed and bearing a frosty, green-tinged cocktail, the old man reappeared. Ellery was now smiting himself softly on the temple.

  Inspector Queen sank onto Ellery’s sofa, taking a thirsty swallow on the way down. “Why keep beating your brains in?” he demanded. “Knock it off, son. You’ve got less on that page than when I left for downtown this morning.”

  “What?” Ellery said, not looking up.

  “Call it a day.”

  Ellery looked up. “Never. Can’t. Way behind.”

  “You’ll make it up.”

  He burped a hollow laugh. ‘Dad, I’m trying to work. Mind?”

  The Inspector settled himself and held up his cocktail. “How about I make you one of these?”

  “What?”

  “I said,” the Inspector said patiently, “would you like a Tipperary? It’s a Doc Prouty special.”

  “What’s in it?” Ellery asked, making a micrometric adjustment of the sheet in his machine, which was already adjusted to a hundredth of an inch. “I’ve sampled Doc Prouty specials before, and they all taste the way his lab smells. What’s the green stuff?”

  “Chartreuse. Mixed with Irish whiskey and sweet vermouth.”

  “No creme de menthe? God keep us all from professional Irishmen! If you’re bent on barkeeping, dad, make mine a Johnnie on the rocks.”

  His father fetched the Scotch. Ellery surrounded half of it with sedate gratitude, set the glass daintily down beside his typewriter, and flexed his fingers. The old man sat back on the sofa, knees touching like a vicar’s on duty call, sipping his Tipperary and watching. Just as the poised filial fingers were about to descend on the keys, the paterfamilias said, “Yes, sir. Hell of a day.”

  The son slowly lowered his hands. He sat back. He reached for his glass. “All right,” he said. “I’m listening.”

  “No, no, I just happened to think out loud, son. It’s not important. I mean, sorry I interrupted.”

  “So am I, but the fact, as de Gaulle would say in translation, is accomplished. I couldn’t compose a printable line now if I were on my deathbed.”

  “I said I was sorry,” the Inspector said in a huff. “I see I’d better get out of here.”

  “Oh, sit down. You obviously invaded my domain with malice aforeceps, as a show biz lady of my acquaintance liked to say, in contravention of my rights under the. Fourth Amendment.” The old man sat back, rather be-wilderedly mollified. “By the way, how about not talking on an empty stomach? Dinner simmers on the hod. Mrs. Fabrikant left us one of her famous, or to put it more accurately, notorious Irish stews. Fabby had to leave early today-”

  “I’m in no hurry to eat,” the Inspector said hurriedly.

  “Done! I’ll run down to Sammy’s later for some hot kosher pastrami and Jewish rye and lots of half-sour pickles and stuff, and we can feed Fabby’s stew to the Delehantys’ setter, he’s Irish-”

  “Fine, fine.”

  “Therefore how about another round?” Ellery struggled to the vertical, revived a few moribund muscles and tendons, shook himself, and then came round the desk with his glass. He took his father’s empty from the slack fingers. “You still traveling that long way?”

  “Long way?”

  “To Tipperary. Proportions?”

  “Three-quarters of an ounce each of Irish, sweet vermouth, and-”

  “I know, green chartreuse.” He shuddered (the Inspector snapped, “Very funny!”) and dodged into the living room. When he returned, instead of reoccupying his desk chair Ellery dropped into the overstuffed chair facing the sofa.

  “If it’s ambulatory help you need, dad, I can’t lift my duff. That damn deadline’s so close the back of my neck is recommending Listeriiie. But if you can use an armchair opinion… What’s this one about?”

  “About a third of a half billion dollars,” Inspector Queen grunted. “And you don’t have to be so darn merry about it.”

  “It’s frustrated-writer’s hysteria, dad. Did I hear you correctly? Billion?”

  “Right. With a huh.”

  “For pity land’s sake. Who’s involved?”

  “Importuna Industries. Know anything about the outfit?”

  “Only that it’s a conglomerate of a whole slew of industries and companies, great and small, foreign and domestic, the entire shtik owned by three brothers named Importuna.”

  “Wrong.”

  “Wrong?”

  “Owned by one brother named Importuna. The other two carry the handle Importunato.”

  “Full brothers? Or half, or step?”

  “Full, far as
I know.”

  “How come the difference in surnames?”

  “Nino, the oldest, is superstitious, has a thing about lucky numbers or something-I had more important things to break my head about. Anyway, he shortened the family name. His brothers didn’t.”

  “Noted. Well?”

  “Oh, hell,” his father said, and swigged like a desperate man. “Ellery, I warn you… this is wild. I don’t want to be responsible for dragging you into a complicated mess when you’ve your own work to do… “

  “You’re absolved, dad, shriven. I’ll put it in writing if you like. Satisfied? Go on!”

  “Well, all right,” the Inspector said, with an on-your-head-be-it sigh. “The three brothers live in an apartment house they own on the upper East Side, overlooking the river. It’s an old-timer, 9 stories and penthouse, designed by somebody important in the late ‘90s, and when Nino Importuna bought it, he had it restored to its original condition, modernized the plumbing and heating, installed the latest in air conditioning, and so on-turned it into one of the snootiest buildings in the neighborhood. I understand that prospective tenants have to go through a tougher check than the security men assigned to the President.”

  “I gather not quite,” Ellery suggested.

  “I’m coming to that. The place is one of I don’t know how many homes the brothers maintain around the world-especially Nino-but 99 East, as Importuna calls it, seems to be the one they run the conglomerate from, at least the American components.”

  “Don’t they have offices?”

  “Offices? Whole chains of office buildings! But the real dirty work, the high command decisions, that all originates at 99 East.-Okay, Ellery! But before I can get to the murder-”

  At the lethal word Ellery’s nose twitched like a Saint Bernard’s. “Can’t you at least tell me who was schlogged? How? Where?”

  “If you’ll wait just a minute, son! The setup’s as follows: Nino occupies the penthouse. His brothers Marco and Julio live in the apartments that make up the top floor of the building, the floor directly underneath the penthouse-there are two apartments to a floor except on the roof, and they’re enormous, I don’t know how many rooms to an apartment. You know those swanky old buildings.