The Hellfire Club (10 page)

25

AT EIGHT O’CLOCK
on the previous Thursday night, a flat package clamped under his left arm, Davey had stood uncertainly in front of a restaurant called Dragon Seed on Elizabeth Street, looking back and forth from the restaurant’s front door to a slip of paper in his hand. A row of leathery ducks the color of molasses hung across the restaurant window. The black numerals beside the menu taped to the door matched the number, 67, Paddi had written on the piece of paper.

A delicious odor of roast duck and frying noodles met him when he opened the door. Davey stepped inside, stood at the end of the counter for a moment to look over the room, then went to the only empty table and sat down.

All the men in the room ignored him. Davey looked around for the door that would lead to a staircase and saw two set into opposite ends of the rear wall, one of them marked restrooms, the other private. Then he was on his feet.

Two waiters in black vests and white shirts watched him from across the room, and a third set a platter of noodles before four stolid men in suits and began cutting toward him through the tables.

Davey tried to wave him off, and said, “I know it says Private, but it’s all right.”

“Not all right.”

Davey put his hand on the knob, and the waiter’s hand came down on his before he could open the door. “You sit.”

The waiter pulled him away to his table and pushed him down. Davey placed his package on his lap and considered making a break for the door. He looked around and found that everybody in the restaurant was eyeing him.

The waiter came back through the tables carrying a tray with a teapot and a cup the size of a thimble. He set these before Davey and spun away, revealing a small man in a zippered jacket behind him who rotated a chair and straddled it, and gave Davey a horrible smile. “You funny,” the man said.

“I was invited.” Davey withdrew from his pocket the paper on which Paddi had written her address and showed it to the man.

The man squinted at the paper. He looked straight into Davey’s eyes, then back at the paper. Without any transition, he started laughing. “Come,” the man said, and got on his feet. He led Davey to the front door, stepped outside, and motioned Davey to follow him. Davey came out. The man moved one step to his left and pointed at Dragon Seed’s door. He pointed again, and this time Davey saw it.

Set back into the building between the entrance to Dragon Seed and a shop filled with souvenirs of Chinatown, at an angle that concealed it if you did not know it was there, was a plywood door with the number 67 spray-painted on it in black.

Grinning, the man prodded Davey’s chest with his forefinger. “Dey go in, but dey don’t come out.” Davey settled the package under his elbow and knocked on the spray-painted door, and a faint voice told him to come in.

He found himself at the foot of a tenement staircase. “Lock the door behind you,” the voice called down.

He came upstairs and passed through another door into a vast, darkened loft created by the removal of most of the tenement’s walls. A few dim lights illuminated crude murals it took him a moment to see were illustrations of passages in
Night Journey.
Thick, dark curtains covered the windows. In the distance a high-backed sofa and two chairs stood in front of an ornate wooden fireplace frame and mantel affixed to a wall without a fireplace. Long bookshelves took up the wall at the front of the building. Rough partitions marked off two rooms, and one of these opened as Davey came deeper into the murk. Completely at ease, Paddi Mann emerged naked through the door.

“What is this place?”

“Where I live,” Paddi said, not naked after all, but wearing a flesh-colored leotard. She gave him a smile and moved toward the sofa, swept up from a cushion a man’s wing-collar formal shirt, slipped it on, and buttoned the last few buttons so that it covered her like a short white frock.

“What’s that under your arm?”

“I had some trouble finding you.” Davey’s legs finally unlocked and permitted him to move toward her through the darkness.

“Looks like you had trouble finding the manuscript, too. Unless
that’s
it.”

“No.”

Paddi shifted her position, drawing her legs up beside her and tucking them in. She gave three smart pats to the seat of the sofa.

He found that he was standing directly in front of her and sat down as ordered. Her feet insinuated themselves against his thigh as if for warmth. “Here,” she said, and turned sideways to take from a tray and press into his hand a glass filled with ice cubes and a cloudy red liquid.

He drank, then jerked back his head at the pungent, unpleasantly sweet shock of the taste. “What’s this?”

“A Top-and-Bottom. Good for you.”

Davey let his eyes wander around the dark, jumbled spaces of Paddi’s loft. Arches and openings led into invisible chambers from which came inaudible voices. “Are you going to show me what’s in that package?”

Davey said, “Oh,” because he had forgotten the package, and handed it to her. In seconds her fingers had undone the knots. In another second the wrapping lay in her lap like a frame around the frame and Paddi was gazing down at the long photograph with her mouth softly opened.

“Shorelands, July 1938.”

“And here is your grandfather.”

Warts and carbuncles jutting from nose and cheek, jowls bulging over his collar, eyebrows nearly meeting in a ferocious scowl above blazing eyes, hands locked on the arms of his chair, rage straining at the buttons, seams, and eyelets of his handmade suit, Lincoln Chancel appeared to have breakfasted on railroads and coal mines.

Davey regarded the phenomenon with the mixture of wonder, respect, and terror his grandsire invariably aroused in him. For the fifty years of his adult life, he had bullied his way south from Bridgeport, Connecticut, to New York and Washington, D.C., north to Boston and Providence, swallowing human lives. Before a massive stroke had felled him in a private dining room in the Ritz-Carlton Hotel, indictments and lawsuits had buzzed around the great man’s head. After his death nearly all of the intricately pyramidal structure Lincoln had constructed had tumbled. What remained was a transient hotel in Rhode Island, a struggling woolen mill in Lowell, Massachusetts, both of which had soon folded into bankruptcy, and his last bauble, Chancel House.

“He looks so unhappy.”

“He’s the only one looking at the camera,” Davey said, having noticed this for the first time. “See? Everybody else is looking at another person in the group.”

“Except for her.” Paddi delicately tapped the glass over the face of a small, strikingly pretty young woman in a loose white shirt, a half-mast necktie, and trousers. Seated on the ground beside Lincoln Chancel, she was gazing down at the grass, lost in thought.

“Yes,” Davey said. “I wish I knew her name.”

“Whose names
do
you know?”

“Apart from Driver and my grandfather, only her.” He indicated a tall woman with a bulldog chin and a fleshy nose who sat upright staring at Lincoln Chancel from a wicker chair. “Georgina Weatherall. She and Hugo Driver are both staring at my grandfather.”

“Probably wondering what they can get out of him,” Paddi said.

“Oh?”

“There have been a couple of books about Shorelands,” Paddi said. “Georgina wanted to be the center of attention. Everybody made fun of her behind her back.”

“Georgina couldn’t have been too pleased about that girl.”

Now Davey indicated an elongated, bearded gentleman in sagging tweeds gazing down at the young woman, his lips stretched so tightly that they looked like wires. “That’s not a very friendly smile,” Davey said. “I wonder who this guy was?”

“Austryn Fain,” said Paddi. “In 1938 he had just published a novel called
The Twisted Hedge.
It was supposed to be wonderful and all that, but from what I gather people forgot about it in a hurry. He killed himself in 1939. January. Cut his wrists in a bathtub.”

“Georgina wouldn’t help him?”

“Georgina dropped him flat. But, Davey, look at this man. Mer-rick Favor was his name. He was murdered about six months after this photo was taken.”

Paddi was pointing at the broad, handsome face of a man in an unbuttoned double-breasted blue blazer and white trousers who stood immediately behind Georgina. Like Austryn Fain, he was smiling at the girl seated on the grass.

“Murdered?”

“Merrick Favor was supposed to be a rising star. His first novel,
Burning Bushes
, got great reviews when Scribner’s published it in 1937, and he was supposed to be working on something even better. One day his girlfriend showed up after trying to call him for a couple of days, and when she couldn’t get him to come to the door, she climbed in a window, took a look around, and almost passed out.”

“She found his body?”

“His house was torn up, and there were bloodstains everywhere. Favor had been stabbed to death, and his body was in his bathtub. They never found who killed him. The book he was working on was torn to scraps.”

“Shorelands didn’t bring much luck to these people,” Davey said. “What happened to this guy?”

He was pointing at a long-haired young man with horn-rim glasses, a floppy bow tie, velvet jacket, soft eyes, short nose, and a witty mouth. This person seemed to be concentrating all of his thoughts on handsome Merrick Favor.

“Oh, Creeley
Monk.
Another sad story. A poet. His second book was called
The Field Unknown
, and the only reason anybody remembers it is that a lot of third-graders used to have to memorize the title poem.”

“Oh,” said Davey, “we had to recite that at the Academy.
The field unknown, the unknown field I thought I knew / In childhood days, my ways return me now to you.
”

“Creeley Monk killed himself, too. Shotgunned himself in the head. Right around the time Merrick Favor was killed.”

Davey stared at her. “This guy blew off his head a few months after he left Shorelands?”

Paddi nodded.

Davey was staring at her. “Two of the guests at Shorelands that summer killed themselves?”

“It’s even better than that. Three of them killed themselves. This man here, the one who looks like a bricklayer, he did, too.” Paddi’s finger was tapping the chest of a wide, sturdy man in a lumpy blue turtleneck sweater who was trying to smile at the camera and Lincoln Chancel at the same time.

“His name was Bill Tidy, and he’d published one book, called
Our Skillets.
It was a memoir of his childhood in the South End of Boston. Must have been the only really working-class guest Georgina ever had at Shorelands.
Our Skillets
is a beautiful book, but it went out of print right away and only came back into print in the late sixties. I don’t know about this for sure, but I think Tidy had a lot of trouble getting to work on a new book after he got back to Boston. Anyhow, he jumped out of his fifth-floor window. In January 1939.”

“When...”

“Right between Merrick Favor’s murder and Monk’s suicide, which happened a few days apart, and two days before Fain killed himself. It’s like a curse or something, isn’t it?”

“God, it’s like they paid for Hugo Driver’s success.”

“You should write a book about all this,” Paddi said.

“I thought you already read a book about all this.”

“I read a lot of books about Shorelands because I’m interested in Hugo Driver, but this information is scattered all over the place. Actually, hardly anybody cares about what was going on at Shorelands after the early thirties. By the start of the war, it was all over. Georgina was drinking a lot and taking laudanum and her stories began smelling like fish. She told people that Marcel Proust used to stink up Honey House with his asthma powders, which is a nice story, but Proust never left France. Georgina finally retreated into her bedroom, and she died around 1950. The house rotted away until a preservation group bought it.”

“What happened to the girl sitting on the ground next to my grandfather?”

“She was supposed to have disappeared during her stay, but even that isn’t really clear.”

The characters in the photograph on his lap, his grandfather and the great author, Austryn Fain and Merrick Favor and Creeley Monk, Georgina Weatherall and Bill Tidy and the abstracted young woman, seemed as familiar, as
known
, as his old schoolmates at the Academy. He saw into them so clearly that he could not understand why until now he had not seen the clearest thing in the picture. All he had really seen before was his grandfather’s comic fury. What was clearest in the photograph was the reason for the universal discomfort.

As if the picture came equipped with a soundtrack and a flashback, it all but shouted that Lincoln Chancel had uttered a crude flirtatiousness to the attractive young woman at his feet, and that the young woman had swiftly, woundingly rebuffed him. While she looked inward and Chancel erupted, everyone else in the photograph took sides.

Davey said, “You know what? I don’t know anything about you. I don’t know where you were born, or who your parents are, or what college you went to, if you have brothers and sisters, anything like that. It’s like you stepped out of a cloud. Where did you live before you walked into our offices?”

“Lots of places.”

“Where were you born?”

“You really want to do this, don’t you? Okay. I was born in Amherst, Massachusetts. My parents’ names are Charles
Roland and Sabina. Sabina teaches German in a high school in Amherst, and Charles Roland was an English professor at Amherst College. I went to the Rhode Island School of Design. After I got out of RISD, I went to Europe and traveled here and there, but mainly lived in London, painting and taking art courses, and after a couple of years I came back and lived in L.A. and did some design work for a couple of small pressesand read everything I could about Hugo Driver, which is when I learned about Shorelands, and after a while I came to New York so I could get a job at Chancel. I just walked in, showed my work to Rod Clampett, and he hired me.”

“I should have guessed the RISD part,” Davey said. Rod Clampett, Chancel’s art director, had gone to RISD and liked hiring its graduates.