The House That Jack Built (16 page)

    'We could take an inflatable bed, and borrow a quilt.'

    'I don't want to take an inflatable bed and borrow a quilt. I want to stay here. I want a good bath and breakfast in bed.'

    Craig sat down on the end of the bed. He was dressed in nothing but his thick towelling bathrobe, loosely tied up. 'Come on, Effie, it'll be great. It's about time we had an adventure.'

    'I love adventures. But sleeping in some draughty, dilapidated old building is not my idea of an adventure. That's my idea of Purgatory.'

    He looked at her steadily for so long that she averted her eyes in sheer embarrassment. She didn't know what to make of him. She didn't know why he kept swearing at her when they were making love. She couldn't even begin to understand what it was about Valhalla that attracted him so strongly. But she was afraid of breaking the spell. She didn't know where their relationship was going. She had lost all sense of certainty. But she didn't want to go back to the miserable, argumentative days after Craig's 'accident', and she certainly didn't mind if she never had to say again,
'Ohaya gozaimas, ogenki des ka?'

    She would have preferred the droll young man who had once said to her, 'Oh, mirror! how many times, for hours on end, saddened by dreams and searching for my memories, have I seen myself in you as a distant ghost!'

    'No,' she said. Then, 'absolutely one grillion per cent no.'

    He turned away and lifted his hand as if he were fending off the evil eye. 'It's all right, don't worry about it. It was only a suggestion. I just thought that if we could spend the night there… well…' He poured himself a Scotch. She could see his face in the oval, gilt-framed mirror over the drinks table. His expression was unreadable. Usually she could tell what kind of a mood he was in, even when his back was turned, but even his back told her nothing.

    'If we could spend the night there what?' she asked him, after almost an entire minute had gone by.

    'It doesn't matter. Forget it.'

    'If we could spend the night there…' she demanded, even more stridently.

    'I said forget it, okay? You don't want to do it, we won't do it.'

    'Craig, I didn't say I didn't want to do it, I said it wasn't my idea of an adventure, that's all.'

    'What you said was, no. You said one grillion per cent no, that's what you said. So forget it.'

    'God, you're obstinate!'

    'And you never stop bitching.'

    'Is that the only word you know? Bitch? What happened to your vocabulary all of a sudden? Come to think of it, what happened to you? You're in love with some crummy old tumbledown house, you can't make love without calling me names. A man was killed and you showed about as much compassion as Adolf Hitler.'

    Craig slammed his glass on top of the drinks table and turned around and his eyes were wolf-like with anger. 'I could have been killed in that pharmacy! As it was, I was nearly turned into a eunuch! Now I've found Valhalla and Valhalla means something to me. Don't ask me why. It doesn't matter why. I don't even fucking know why. But it's everything. It's me. It's what I am.'

    'Oh, please. Spare me the consciousness-raising.'

    He approached the bed. He was dark and he was threatening and he was quaking with rage and she was genuinely frightened that he was going to hit her. 'You talk to me about consciousness-raising? You talk to me about consciousness-raising? You spend your life in some dumb art gallery filled with incomprehensible squat painted by a gang of overpaid pretentious jackasses who don't know one end of a paintbrush from another? Yes? And you talk to me...'

    Quite unexpectedly, she started to laugh. It was probably fear. But on the other hand, it could have been amusement, too, because he had articulated exactly what it was about Verulian galleries that she found so numbing. The art was all incomprehensible squat. Craig was absolutely right. Canvas after canvas of incomprehensible squat, painted by jackasses who couldn't paint for jackasses who couldn't see; and the more incomprehensible they were and the squatter they were, the more expensive they were. Their costiest artist, Paul Firman, was such a bad draughtsman that he couldn't have drawn breath.

    She laughed because she was upset, and because she was frightened. But she also laughed because he had said something completely true. After years of building up his law partnership, after years of pleading to erratic, egocentric judges and juries who couldn't tell the difference between a balance sheet and a grocery list, after years of bargaining and compromising, Craig was actually speaking the truth and saying what he wanted, what he really wanted, regardless of the risks.

    He said, 'What? What are you laughing at? What?' but all she could do was laugh even harder and shake her head.

    He started to laugh, too, and dropped onto the bed next to her, and took her in his arms.

    'Listen,' he said. 'I'm sorry. I shouldn't call you a bitch. I shouldn't ever call you a bitch.'

    She wiped her eyes with the pillow slip. 'Maybe I deserve it. Maybe I am a bitch. You seem to be finding yourself and all I can do is complain.'

    He kissed her. He kept his eyes open. He stared at her from very close up. 'I'm sorry. What I said earlier, about staying the night at Valhalla, just forget it.'

    She kissed him back, more greedily. 'Maybe I am a bitch. Maybe we should spend the night. Maybe we could spend the whole night making love. Think of it! In that draughty, mouldy, drippy old building!'

    He stared at her and his face was so near that she couldn't focus on it properly. 'You'd really do that?'

    'Sure… if that's what you want.'

    'No, you're just trying to humour me, aren't you?'

    'Did I ever humour you before, ever?'

    Craig sat up. 'I don't know. Sure you did. You and that Gaby.'

    Effie said, 'Gaby? Who's Gaby?'

    He pressed his forehead between fingers and thumb, as if he had a headache. 'I don't know why I said that. I don't know anybody called Gaby.'

    'You definitely said Gaby.'

    He climbed off the bed, went across to the drinks table, and picked up his drink. 'I don't know. I don't know why I said that. I don't know anybody called Gaby.'

    

    

    While Craig bathed, Effie finished her drink and read some more of her book. She had found it in the Cold Spring Library yesterday morning:
Only The Rich - Jack Belias and the Greek Syndicate.
It was the history of the greatest gamblers of the 1920's - Nico Zographos and Gordon Selfridge of Selfridge's department store and Andre Citroen the car manufacturer, among many others, men who won millions of francs in a single night, and lost them, too. But mostly it was the story of Jack Belias. While other heavy gamblers played because they were addicted to it - 'like morphine', said Zographos - Jack Belias played because he wanted to ruin and humiliate those he played with.

    He was phenomenally lucky at baccarat, and one afternoon at the Deauville casino he brought Zographos, who was one of the most skilful card players in Europe, right to the brink of bankruptcy. Only the turn of one card saved Zographos from ruin - the nine of diamonds. Afterwards, Jack Belias sent him a lapel pin with nine diamonds in it, a mocking souvenir to remind him how close he had been to poverty.

    But again and again, Jack Belias stripped his fellow players of their fortunes, and what they couldn't pay in money he took in kind. At one point, Gordon Selfridge had to borrow
f
155,000 from his own company to pay his gambling debts to Jack Belias; and a few days before Andre Citroen died, already impoverished by the failure of his latest automobile, Jack Belias stripped him of
f
64,000 in eight successive coups of
f
8,000 each, and took less than ten minutes to do it.

    There was a black-and-white photograph of Jack Belias in the centre of the book. It showed a tall, unsmiling man in a large black hat and a long black overcoat, standing alone on a sandswept boardwalk. He had a strong, squarish face and dark-circled eyes. He looked vaguely Turkish. He was leaning on a cane as if he were impatient to be off.

    The caption read: Jack Belias in Deauville in 1934. The only known photograph in existence.

    'What's that you're reading?' asked Craig, coming back into the bedroom, towelling himself.

    Effie showed him the jacket. 'It's all about Jack Belias. I found it in the library while you were down at Mr. Van Buren's office.'

    Craig sat on the bed beside her. 'Walter Van Buren told me he was quite a gambler.'

    'He was. He made his first million dollars out of textiles, but he just about trebled it by gambling. He used to bet on anything and everything, and he almost always won. That was how he made the money to build Valhalla. The only trouble was, nobody liked him very much.'

    Craig peered at the photograph. 'Hmm. He doesn't look very likeable, does he? It's strange, though. He seems familiar. I almost get the feeling that I've met him somewhere.'

    'I don't think you could have done. He died in 1937, and it says here that this is the only known photograph of him.'

    'That's pretty strange, don't you think?'

    'What's strange?'

    'You'd think that a man like Jack Belias would have had his photograph taken thousands of dmes. He ran one of the country's biggest texdle companies, after all. Don't tell me he was never interviewed by
Fortune
or
Business Week
, along with a picture. Don't tell me he never made presentations to staff, and had his photograph taken there.'

    'Maybe this caption is wrong. Maybe they haven't expressed it very well, and this is the only known photograph of him in Deauville.'

    Craig stood up, letting the towel fall from his waist. He walked over to the bureau and took out his underwear, and made a deliberate show of dressing himself in full view.

    'What else does it say?' he asked Effie. 'Does it mention Valhalla?'

    She licked her thumb and turned to the index. 'Yes… here we are. Page 209. "In 1929 blah-blah-blah Jack Belias had won over
f
300,000 at Deauville, Cannes, Monte Carlo and the Cercle Hausmann in Paris… he used all of this money to build a huge Gothic mansion overlooking the Hudson River Valley. He named it Valhalla after the hall of dead heroes in Norse legend, because he claimed that the money which had built it had cost the suicides of eleven bankrupted men." '

    Craig, tugging on his jeans, said, 'Not exactly Mr. Nice Guy, was he?'

    ' "In 1931 Jack Belias was briefly married to the French actress Jeannette Duclos, but after three months she died in mysterious circumstances." '

    'What mysterious circumstances?'

    'It doesn't say. It just goes on to mention that Jack Belias was involved in a scandal in 1937 involving the wife of the British financier Douglas Broughton, and that about a year later he disappeared. His car was found abandoned by Bear Mountain Bridge and it was presumed that he had taken his own life by drowning in the Hudson.'

    'That doesn't tell us very much, does it?'

    'This is mainly about his gambling career. But I guess there must be other books about him.'

    Craig buttoned up his blue check shirt and then pulled on a navy-blue sweater. His hair stuck up at the back like a little boy's.

    'I thought we were eating at Le Pavilion tonight,' said Effie. 'You're not going dressed like that, are you?'

    'I thought we'd agreed to stay the night at Valhalla. We can buy pizza on the way.'

    'You're really serious, aren't you?'

    'Of course I'm serious. We're going to live there. We're going to be spending most of our money on it. In fact we're probably going to be spending all of our money on it. I want to find out what it's like.'

    Effie closed the book and threw back the quilt. Craig took hold of her and held her close, and kissed her forehead and her hair. He tried to touch her breast but she covered herself with her hands. 'What, are you, shy?' he teased her.

    He sat in one of the velvet-upholstered chairs and watched her while she dressed. She didn't really like it, the way he looked at her while she stepped into her white lace panties and fastened up her bra, but she didn't say anything because she felt that she would annoy him if she did.
Besides, it was a compliment, wasn't it, if your husband still wanted to watch you after all this time together?
She buttoned up her Calvin Klein jeans and pulled on her cream Paul Levy skinny-rib poloneck. She brushed her hair, and static made it fly up fine and shining in the marmalade-coloured sunlight.

    She turned around and half-expected Craig to pay her a compliment, but he simply smiled and grunted as if he were thinking of a private joke. All the same, she went across the room and kissed him, and he kissed her back, very measured, very thoughtful, like a man tasting wine.

    'Where are we going to find an inflatable mattress?' she asked him.

    'I'll ask Norman. He looks like the kind of guy who'd know where to find an inflatable mattress. He looks like the kind of guy who'd know where to find an inflatable anything.'

    'Do you have his number?'

    'Of course. He lives with his mom, over the Hungry Moon.'

    He leafed through the local phone directory. 'Norman went back to Valhalla yesterday with a couple of friends from the building trade. He's going to give me a price on the roof. Once we fix the roof, the rest is going to be easy. Cutting out the dry rot, fixing the floors, plastering the ceilings. Easy. So long as we don't get impatient, so long as we're systematic.'

    'You're really going to sell out of Fisher & Bellman?'