Act of Darkness (2 page)

There was silence on the other end of the line that wasn’t really silence. Harvey was swearing under his breath, using the full range of obscenities he had learned on the barricades of Berkeley in 1968. Clare was always surprised at how crude Harvey’s language was, and how unimaginative. Her steel-worker father had been a foulmouthed man, but at least he’d shown some originality.

Harvey Gort coughed in a strangled way and said, “We can’t ace Debrett out anyway. He’s known Fox since God knows when.”

“We can’t ace him out, but he can ace us out,” Clare said. “Let’s face it, Harvey. That bill can be written any one of three ways. It can cut us in and cut Debrett out—which it won’t, because you’re right, Debrett and Fox have known each other forever. Debrett was Janet Fox’s obstetrician when they had that child that died—”

“Stephanie Fox who had Down syndrome,” Harvey said cynically. “Stephen Fox’s great personal tragedy.”

“Never mind Stephen Fox’s tragedy, Harvey. Fox owes Debrett. That’s all that counts. Fox does not owe us. He has no reason not to cut us out completely.”

“We’d make a public stink,” Harvey said.

“So what? Dan Chester would make the whole Empowerment Project look like a bad cover for a worse grab at legal graft. And no matter what kind of stink you made, you couldn’t oppose the competency exam thing without looking like—”

“Competency exams,” Harvey Gort exploded. “Of all the white supremacist, racist, bigoted—”

“Spare me the rhetoric, Harvey. Spare everybody. The general public doesn’t see a single thing wrong with competency exams. After all, they’ve got to get licenses just to drive their cars. If Chester puts a competency exam clause into that bill and you try to do anything public to get rid of it, you’ll be crucified. What we need is a bill that spreads the money around without calling for competency exams. Right?”

“Absolutely.”

“Fine.” Clare rubbed the palm of her free hand against her forehead. She was sweating. “If we’re going to get what we want, we’re going to have to contribute to the war chest. You know that and I know that. Campaign contributions buy access. That’s the way this town runs. So I’ve bought us into the cocktail party, and as soon as I get off the phone with you I’m going to buy us into one of those ‘seminars.’ If I’m lucky, there’ll still be a place open on the Fourth of July.”

“Why the Fourth of July? Because Debrett will be there?”

“No. Because it’s a long weekend, three and a half days with Fox instead of two and a half.”

“Oh.”

“I’m very good at what I do, Harvey, I know how these things run. We’ll get up there on Friday, listen to a two-hour speech on Saturday, and spend the rest of the time drinking mineral water and pretending to be impressed by Fox’s Hollywood relatives. Then they’ll send up a bunch of Fireworks and everybody will pretend to be having a good time. Not a single solitary thing will get done except this: we’ll be on board.”

“And we have to be on board,” Harvey said.

“You bet we do.”

Harvey Gort sighed. “Do you think the rumors are true? That Chester is setting Fox up to run for president?”

“I don’t think it makes much difference if he is or he isn’t. If he is, we’re contributing to a presidential campaign. If he isn’t, we’re contributing to his next run for the Senate. Who cares?”

“Not me,” Harvey said.

“I’m glad you feel that way. Now get off the phone and let me get back to work.”

There was a slight hesitation on the other end of the line and a cough, as if Harvey were considering getting back into the fray. Then there was a click and then a void and then a dial tone, and Clare found herself holding a telephone receiver that connected her to nothing.

Damned idiot, she thought. Damned slimy little bastard.

She replaced the receiver in the cradle and walked over to her wall of smoky gray windows, to look out on the cars and the people and the mossed-over brown granite buildings. It was one o’clock on the afternoon of a hot June day and everything she could see looked wilted. Funny, she thought. I’m only twenty-nine years old, I won’t have my thirtieth birthday for another six months, and I feel tired enough to die.

Being tired didn’t really worry her, though. She was tired all the time. It was part of the job. What made her uneasy was that she had actually found a point of agreement with Harvey Gort.

Dan Chester was a slimy little blob of corruption who ought to be squashed into the pavement somewhere and left to rot.

W
HEN VICTORIA HARTE HAD
first found herself transformed into a movie star, her politics had consisted of a manic ambition to get into the bed of one Kennedy or another. It was one of the few ambitions she had never been able to realize. Now, more than thirty years from the day she had first heard Senator Jack Kennedy speak at a Hollywood Democratic Club luncheon, she thought that was probably a good thing. Jack would have been a coup, Bobby would have been a pleasure, but that other one—bleh. There was something about that other one that made Victoria think of her childhood in Los Angeles and all those men who used to spend every nonworking waking minute at the Knights of Columbus” Hall. Actually, as far as Victoria was concerned, most of the things that had happened to her, and most of the things that had not, had been for the best. There had been a time in the late sixties when she had felt cheated because she had not been ten years younger than she was. The world had seemed to belong to the very young, and she had wanted desperately to be one of them. Now she realized that being part of that generation, or the one that followed, would have been a bore. These new “movie stars” were not allowed to behave like movie stars at all. When they tried, they got beat up by the gutter press. She, on the other hand, was expected to travel with an entourage of twelve and enough clothes to outfit a small Caribbean island. It was part of the Old Hollywood mystique she was supposed to represent. That mystique gave her a lot of latitude, for which she was grateful. The presently fashionable cause back in Beverly Hills was Fake Fur and Kindness to Animals. All the young women out there were throwing their minks on the bonfires of the animal rights movement. Nobody expected her to do the same, which was a very good thing. At the moment, she had six minks, four chinchillas, three sables, and a moth-eaten Persian lamb. She also had a leopard, but she’d put it into storage. In the present political climate, mucking around with endangered species would probably be pushing things just a little too far.

It was two o’clock on the afternoon of June first, and she was sitting in the living room of her suite on the top floor of the Old Washington Hotel, the biggest, flashiest, most ostentatious, and most expensive accommodation in the District of Columbia. It was the kind of place that suited Victoria, and she knew it. It was also the kind of place she liked. She had started her life as a child actress, and an unsuccessful one. What she remembered of the world before her eighteenth birthday consisted of a series of two-room apartments with peeling paint and leaking pipes, inadequate heat and nonexistent air-conditioning, disintegrating stucco and the brown pinpoint tracks of rampaging bugs, presided over by a mother with only two emotional modes: euphoria and condemnation. The euphoria surfaced every time Victoria got an audition. The condemnation was more of a constant, Mother’s preferred response to auditions failed, weight gained, weight lost, potato chips eaten, and pimples and blackheads of any kind. During the acne years, Victoria had wanted to take a razor blade to her face and settle the issue once and for all. Nobody with a face full of scars would ever be a movie star, and nobody with a face full of scars would ever have pimples again either. In the dark quiet hours after one of her mother’s real fits of craziness—Mother pulling her own hair out in clumps, tearing at her face with her nails, keening in the high whistling screech that sounded like a cross between a banshee and a witch being burned at the stake—permanent disfigurement had seemed like the least of all possible evils.

Now, of course, she was the universally acknowledged Most Beautiful Woman in the World, even at sixty considered to be more attractive than most of the children who had risen to success in the Industry behind her. Her mother was long dead, buried out in Forest Lawn next to Victoria’s first pet Pekingese dog. Some of the two-room apartments were part of Victoria’s portfolio, spruced up (barely) and reclassified as condominiums. It would have been a success story for the ages, if it hadn’t been for one thing: the pain of Victoria’s childhood had been real, and she still felt it. When nobody was looking, she spent endless hours in front of the mirror, trying to see what everybody else saw and failing. Looking at her face was like looking at one of those pictures that changed from a tree to a duck depending on how you tilted it. She could never get the tilt just right or make the picture change.

Fortunately, she was not so blind when it came to her daughter, the grandchild Victoria’s mother had once called “that damned little cancer of defeat.” Victoria’s mother had wanted her to abort, but Victoria had been smarter than that. In the first place, she hadn’t believed in it. In the second, she hadn’t wanted to. In the third, it was 1948 and the procedure was illegal as hell, carried out in back rooms and likely to lead to sterility or death. It made more sense to disappear for a year, to pretend to have been married and divorced. Women in Hollywood did that all the time and nobody ever asked any questions. They knew better.

So Victoria had Janet, and Janet was beautiful, as beautiful as her father had been. If it hadn’t been for that odd streak of repressive conventionality, Janet would have been the unalloyed joy of Victoria’s life. Even with it, she was the one thing Victoria took really seriously, the one cause for which she would let herself be ruined rather than betray, the cornerstone and single element in what she couldn’t help thinking of as her honor. It surprised her, sometimes, that emotion: not love so much as a commitment so total and so passionate as to leave no room in her for anything else. Like a butcher with his thumb on the scale, Victoria weighed everything with Janet already part of the equation. Stuck in the hospital with gallbladder surgery less than six months ago, she had worried about how Janet was taking it. Even her choice of clothes was dictated by what she thought Janet would feel if she saw her mother photographed in them and on the cover of the
National Enquirer.
It was a piece of good luck that Janet was more amused than annoyed by Victoria’s flamboyance. It was not a piece of good luck that Janet had married Stephen Whistler Fox, and it was aggressively bad luck that Stephen never went anywhere without that first-class thug, Dan Chester. Victoria leaned forward on the couch and picked up Janet’s wedding picture, secure behind glass in its sterling silver Tiffany frame. It was her fault Janet had met Stephen—that had happened at a Democratic party fund-raiser Victoria had organized herself—but it certainly wasn’t her fault that the two of them had married. Victoria had done everything short of having Janet drugged and kidnapped to put a stop to that. And she had been right. Considering everything that had happened since, she had been more than right.

She put the photograph back, down among the complimentary hors d’oeuvres the management had sent up when she arrived, the caviar in the tiny ice sculpture swan, the tea in the Wedgwood teapot, the. cold shrimp in the silver bowl. There were two Limoges vases filled with a dozen red roses each on the coffee table, too, and her own sterling-silver brush and comb and mirror set. She smoothed her famous pile of honey blond hair and pushed the buzzer for Melissa. Then she sat back and waited for Melissa to arrive.

Victoria Harte traveled with a personal masseuse, a personal trainer, a personal nutritionist, a personal shopper, a wardrobe woman, a hairdresser, a makeup woman, a secretary, a bodyguard, a chauffeur, and a maid. She also traveled with Melissa, who had no title and was young. When pressed, Victoria sometimes called Melissa her “companion,” but that was not quite right. What Melissa actually was, was one of the world’s most talented gossips, and Victoria’s personal spy.

She was also the kind of woman who seems destined to spend her life in flat-heeled shoes. She arrived at the door of the living room in brown oxfords, four plastic fake tortoiseshell haircombs, and the twin set she’d bought in Harrod’s in 1982. It was the only time Victoria had ever known Melissa to buy clothes.

“Yes?” she said. And that was it. The reason Melissa was one of the world’s most talented gossips was that she rarely said anything. She listened.

Victoria fussed at her hair again—Melissa always made her nervous—and then said, “Did you get hold of Janet yet? Is she coming over?”

“I haven’t been able to find her, Ms. Harte. I think she’s working at the school today.”

“Working at the school.” Victoria bit her lip. “I wish I could talk her out of working at that school.”

“I think she likes it, Miss Harte.”

“I don’t. I think she—never mind. Do you know if she’s seen the papers this morning?”

“No, Ms. Harte. I know she knows all about the Act in Aid of Exceptional Children. Is that what you were worried about?”

“Yes,” Victoria said.

“She was interviewed on the radio this morning,” Melissa said, diffident, as if she didn’t want to take credit for something anyone could have done. “I made a tape for you, if you’d like to hear it.”

“Of course I want to hear it.”

“I took a call from Mr. Chester, too, Ms. Harte. Making sure we’d be at the cocktail party tonight.”

“Is Janet going to be at the cocktail party?”

“Yes.”

“Then we’ll be there. Sometimes I wish we’d spend more time in Washington. I’d like to know more than I do about Mr. Daniel Chester.”

“Miss Rawls called, Ms. Harte. She said it was extremely important you get in touch with her.”

Miss Rawls. Victoria made one of the faces that had been her trademark in the series of screwball comedies that had first made her famous and began to root around in her pocketbook for the cigarettes she almost never allowed herself to smoke. In a way, Miss Rawls was her fault too, because she had introduced the little slut to Stephen. Miss Rawls had introduced herself to Dan Chester, however, and it was Dan Chester who did Stephen’s pimping.