The Hellfire Club (8 page)

19

“IT WAS ABOUT
a month after Amy left. You know, I think I was actually kind of happy for her. Some people acted like they thought I should be disturbed by what she did, but I didn’t know why. Amy never liked sex anyhow, so it was more like getting worked up about who she
wasn’t
doing it with than who she was, and that’s ridiculous. Anyhow, after about a month, I repainted my apartment and put new posters on the walls, and then I got a really good stereo system and a lot of new records. Whenever I found anything that reminded me of her, I threw it out. A couple of times when she called up, I hung up on her. Because it was all over, right?”

“You were pretty angry,” Nora said.

Davey shook his head. “I don’t remember being angry. I just didn’t see the point of talking to her.”

“Okay.” Nora reached over the side of the bed and picked her bra and blouse off the floor. She tossed the bra into the clothing bin and put on the blouse.

“I wasn’t angry with Amy,” he said. “Everybody kept telling me that I had to be, but I wasn’t. You can’t get angry at crazy people.”

Nora gave up and nodded.

“Anyhow, I was in a funny mood. After my apartment was all redone, I reread Hugo Driver—all three books—after I came home from work. Then I read
Night Journey
all over again. I felt like Pippin.”

In other words, Nora thought, he felt as though Amy had killed him.

“I couldn’t stand being in the apartment by myself, but I hardly had any friends because Amy, you know, made that difficult. I didn’t want to spend time with my parents because they hated Amy, and they
loved
telling me how lucky I was. I went through this weird period. Sometimes I’d spend the whole night staring at the tube. I’d listen to one piece of music over and over, all weekend.”

“I guess you got into drugs,” Nora said.

“Well, yeah. Amy always hated drugs, so now that I was free . . . you know? A guy in the mailroom named Bang Bang sold stuff, which Dad didn’t know about. So one day I saw this guy coming out of the mailroom on a break, and I looked at him, and he looked at me, and I followed him outside. I got some coke and some pot, and I pretty much did those for about a year. At work I stayed pretty straight, but when I got back to my apartment, boy, I poured myself a glass of Bombay gin on the rocks, did two big, fat lines, rolled a joint, and had a little party until I went to bed. Or didn’t. I was thirty, thirty-one. I didn’t need a lot of sleep. Just take a shower, shave, drop in some Murine, couple lines, fresh clothes, off to work.”

“And one day you met this Girl Scout,” Nora said.

“You sure you want to hear about this?”

“Why don’t you just say, ‘Nora, once when I was fooling around with drugs I had this messed-up girlfriend, and we got crazy together’?”

“Because it’s not that simple. You have to understand where I was mentally in order to understand what happened. Otherwise it won’t make any sense.”

It occurred to Nora that whatever he had to say, strictly factual or not, would be instructive. Maybe Davey had been a weekend punk!

“This isn’t just about a girl, is it?”

“Actually it’s about Natalie Weil.” He pushed himself upright and pulled the sheets above his navel. “Look, Nora, I didn’t tell you the truth the other day. This is the real reason I wanted to get into Natalie’s house.”

She tucked up her legs, leaned forward, and waited.

20

“I WAS IN
a stall in the men’s room one morning, feeling lousy because I’d stayed up all night. I snorted some coke, and my nose started to bleed. I had to sit on the toilet with my head back, holding toilet paper against my nose. Finally the bleeding stopped, and I decided to try to get through the day.

“I came out of the stall. Some little guy was going toward the sinks. I grabbed some towels and dried my hands, and this guy was messing with his hair, and I looked at his face in the mirror, and I almost had a heart attack.”

“The little guy was a girl.”

“How did you know that?”

“Because you almost had a heart attack.”

“She was in the art department. She had short hair and she wore men’s clothes. That’s all I knew. I didn’t even know her last name. Her first name was Paddi.” He looked at her as if this were of enormous significance.

“Patty?”

“Paddi. Two
d
’s and an
i.
Okay, my nose started bleeding again. I grabbed another towel and held it up against my nose. Paddi was dumping two piles of coke on the sink in front of her. ‘Try this,’ she said. We’re right in the middle of the men’s room! I leaned over and snorted the stuff right off the sink, and bingo! I felt a thousand percent better. ‘Get it?’ she said. ‘Always use good stuff.’

“ ‘What planet are you from?’ I asked her.

“She smiled at me and said,
’I was born in a village at the foot of a great mountain. My father is a blacksmith.’

“I almost passed out. She was quoting
Night Journey.
I said,
’I wander far and sometimes get lost. I own a purpose greater than myself, the saving of children from the darkness.’

“And she chimed in,
’I conquer my own fear.’

“We grinned at each other for a second, and I shooed her outside before someone came in. She was waiting for me across the hall. ‘I’m Paddi Mann,’ she said. ‘And you’re Davey Chancel, of the famous Chancel House Chancels. Want to buy me a drink tonight?’

“Normally, assertive women put me off, and we’re not supposed to go out with women from the office, but she could quote Hugo Driver! I told her to meet me at six-thirty at Hannigan’s, a bar a couple of blocks away, and she said no, we should go to the Hellfire Club down on Second Avenue, great place, and let’s meet at seven-thirty so she could take care of some things she had to do. Fine, I said, and she came right up in front of me and tilted up her head and whispered,
’His own salvation lay within himself.’ ”

Nora had heard these words before, but she could not remem-ber when.

“You know what? I thought I could learn things from her. It was like she had secrets, and they were the secrets I needed to know.”

“Sure,” Nora said. “You needed to know the secret of how to score coke better than Bang Bang’s.”

Davey had gone home and changed into jeans, a black sweater, and a black leather jacket before walking to Second Avenue. The Hellfire Club was between Eighth and Ninth, on the East Side. He reached the corner of Ninth and Second only a minute or two past seven-thirty and walked down the east side of the avenue, passing a fast-food restaurant, a Mexican restaurant, and saw a bar farther down the block. He picked up his pace and went past a window that showed a few men huddled over a long, dark bar, put his hand on the door, and just below his hand saw the name
MORLEY’S.

He had managed to miss the club. He went back up the east side of the avenue, checking the names on buildings, and missed it again.

A rank of three telephones stood only a few feet away. The first had a severed cord instead of a receiver, the second did not provide a dial tone, and the third permitted six-sevenths of Davey’s quarter into its slot and then froze.

Disgusted, Davey stepped away from the telephones and went to the
corner to wait for the light to change. He glanced down the block and this time
noticed a narrow stone staircase with wrought-iron handrails between Morley’s bar and a lighting-goods shop. The stairs led to a dark wooden door, which looked too elegant for its surroundings. Centered in the door’s top panel was a brass plate slightly larger than an index card.

The light changed, but instead of crossing the street, Davey walked to the foot of the stairs and looked up at a five-story brownstone wedged between two apartment buildings. On either side of the door were two curtained windows. The lettering on the plaque was not quite legible from the bottom of the stairs. He climbed two steps and saw that the plate read
HELLFIRE CLUB
and, beneath that,
MEMBERS ONLY.
He went up the stairs and opened the door. Across a tiny entry stood another door, glossy black. Three commands had been painted on a white wooden plaque fixed just beneath the level of his eyes:

DO NOT QUESTION.
DO NOT JUDGE.
DO NOT HESITATE.

Davey opened the black door. Before him was a hallway with a floral carpet which continued up a flight of stairs. To his left an elderly woman stood behind a checkroom counter beside the opening into a dim barroom. Past the bar, a wide leather armchair stood beside an ambitious potted fern. A white-haired concierge at a glossy black desk turned to him with a diplomatic half smile. To eliminate the preliminaries, Davey peered into the barroom and saw only prosperous-looking men in suits seated around tables or standing in clusters of three or four. He noticed a few women in the room, none of them Paddi. In the instant before the man at the desk spoke to him, he saw—thought he saw—a naked man covered to wrists and neck with elaborate tattoos beside a naked woman, her back to Davey, who had shaved her head and powdered or otherwise colored her body a flat, dead white.

“May I assist you, sir?”

Startled, Davey looked at the concierge. He cleared his throat. “Thank you. I’m here to meet a woman named Paddi Mann.” He glanced back into the bar and had the sense that the other people in the room had shifted their positions to conceal the surreal couple.

“Sir.”

Davey looked back at the concierge.

“That was Miss Mann?”

When Davey said yes, the concierge told him to be seated, please, and watched him proceed to the leather chair, which provided a view of nothing more provocative than the wide mahogany doors and a row of hunting prints on the opposite wall. The concierge opened a drawer and drew out a ribbon microphone at least fifty years old, positioned it squarely in front of him, and said, “Guest for Miss Mann.” The words reverberated from the barroom, from rooms upstairs, and from behind the mahogany doors.

One of the mahogany doors opened, and a Paddi Mann who looked less raffish and more sophisticated than her office persona stepped smiling into the hallway. The dark suit into which she had changed looked more expensive than most of Davey’s own suits. Her shining hair fell softly over her forehead and ears.

She asked why he was dressed that way.

He explained that he thought he was going to meet her at a bar.

Bars were disgusting. Why did he think she had invited him to her club?

He hadn’t understood, he said. If she liked, he could go home and put on a suit.

She told him not to bother and suggested they swap jackets.

He took off his leather jacket and held it out. Paddi slipped off her suit jacket and twirled herself into his jacket so smoothly that he barely had time to notice that she was wearing suspenders.

“Your turn,” she said.

He was afraid he’d rip the shoulder seams, but the jacket met his back and shoulders with only a suggestion of tightness.

“You’re lucky I like big jackets.”

Paddi opened the mahogany door to a lounge in which groups of chairs and couches were arranged before a window. He saw the backs of several male heads, a white gesticulating arm, newspapers and magazines on a long wooden rack. A waiter with a black bow tie, a black vest, and a shaven head held an empty tray and an order pad.

Paddi directed him to a pair of library chairs before a wall of books at the right of the room. Between the chairs stood a round table on top of which lay a portfolio-sized envelope with the Chancel House logo. The waiter materialized beside Paddi. She asked for the usual, and Davey ordered a double martini on the rocks.

He asked what the usual was, and she said, “A Top-and-Bottom: half port and half gin.” It was an outsider drink, she told him.

While he pondered this category, Davey took in that the owner of the naked arm he had glimpsed from the hallway was a middle-aged man seated in a leather chair near the center of the room. The arms of the chair cut his midsection from view, but there were no clothes on his flabby upper body, and none on the thick white legs crossed ankle to knee in front of the chair. A leather strap circled his neck. From the front of the strap, a chain, an actual chain, said Davey to Nora, like you’d use on a dog if the dog weighed two hundred pounds and liked to munch babies, hung between him and the bearded guy in a three-piece suit holding the other end. The man wearing the chain swiveled his head to give Davey a do-you-mind? glare. Davey looked away and saw that while most of the people in the room were dressed conventionally, one man reading a newspaper wore black leather trousers, motorcycle boots, and an open black leather vest that revealed an intricate pattern of scars on his chest.

He wondered how Paddi could have objected to his clothing when at least one person in the club wore no clothing at all.

“In here,” she said, “people wear whatever is right for them. What’s right for you is a suit.”

“Some of these people must have a lot of trouble when they leave the club,” he said.

“Some of these people never leave the club,” she said.

“Is this stuff real?” Nora asked. “Or are you making it all up?”

“As real as what happened to Natalie,” Davey said.

Paddi worked at Chancel House because it had published
Night Journey.
Her job gave her a unique connection to the book she loved above all others. And since she was on the subject, she drew out of the big Chancel House envelope a stiff, glossy sheet that Davey recognized as the reverse side of a jacket rendering.

“An idea of mine,” Paddi said, turning the sheet over to display a drawing it took Davey a moment to understand” when he did, he wondered why the idea had never occurred to him. Paddi had drawn the jacket for an annotated scholarly edition of
Night Journey.
(Her design was based on the famous “GI edition” of the novel.) Every one of the hundred thousand Driver fanatics in America would have to buy it. Scholars would be able to trace the growth of the book over successive variations and discuss the meanings of the changes in the text. It was a great idea.

“But there was one problem,” Davey told Nora. “In order to do it right, we needed the manuscript.”

“What’s the problem with that?” asked Nora.

The problem, Paddi said, was that the manuscript seemed to have disappeared. Hugo Driver had died in 1950, his wife in 1952, and their only child, a retired high school English teacher, had said in an interview on the twentieth anniversary of the book’s publication that he had never seen any manuscripts of his father’s books. As far as he knew, they had never come back from Chancel House.

Davey said he would try to find out what had happened to the manuscript. Lincoln Chancel had probably installed it in a bank vault somewhere. It certainly couldn’t be lost. Nothing so important could have slipped through the cracks—it was the manuscript of the first Chancel House book, for heaven’s sake!

“That would be unfortunate in light of the rumors,” Paddi said.

“What rumors?”

“That Hugo Driver didn’t really write the book,” Paddi said.

Where did this stuff come from? She knew what it was, didn’t she? It was what happened whenever somebody great appeared, a bunch of weasels started trying to shoot holes in him. Davey ranted on in this fashion until he ran out of breath, at which point he inhaled hugely and declared that after all it all made perfect sense”
Night Journey
was such a brilliant book that the weasels couldn’t cope with it. It happened all the time. Somewhere, someone was saying that Zelda Fitzgerald was the real author of
Tender Is the Night.

“Zelda
was
the real author of
Tender Is the Night
,” Paddi said. “Sorry. Just kidding.”

Davey asked her if she believed this crap.

“No, not at all,” she said. “I agree with you. Hugo Driver should be on stamps. I think his picture should be on
money.
One of the reasons I like this club is that it seems such a Hugo Driver–ish sort of place, doesn’t it?”

Davey guessed that it did.

Would he like to see more of it?

“I wondered when we were going to get to this part,” Nora said.