The House That Jack Built (37 page)

    Inside the store, a light was switched on. Then Pepper appeared, tousle-haired, wearing nothing but a man's striped shirt. She peered through the window at Effie and mouthed the words, 'What is it?'

    'Let me in,' Effie mouthed back. 'Something's happened.'

    Pepper unlocked the door. Effie stepped in and smelled all the dry herbal smells of the magical concoctions and potpourris.

    'I was sleeping,' said Pepper. 'What the hell's happened to you? Your face is all scratched up. I thought you were having dinner at the Hudson Inn.'

    Effie told her everything that had happened, trying not to cry. But she couldn't help herself. She clung to Pepper and her sobs were so deep and so agonised that they hardly sounded human.

    'He tore... he tore off my clothes. Everything. There was nothing I could do. He didn't talk like Craig or behave like Craig…'

    'It's getting worse,' said Pepper. 'There's no question about it, it's getting worse.'

    Effie wiped her eyes with her fingers. 'I told him I was going to divorce him, but I don't want to divorce him. Not him, not Craig. It's that person who's taken control of him. He talks to me like he doesn't even know who I am, and when I said I was going to divorce him, he said that I couldn't divorce somebody I wasn't even married to.'

    'God Almighty,' said Pepper. 'This is much more serious than I thought it was going to be. Jack Belias has almost completely pulled him in. He's beginning to look like Jack Belias; and to talk like Jack Belias, and behave like Jack Belias. Before you know it, he'll be Jack Belias, and you'll have lost your Craig forever.'

    'I don't understand this at all. How can this be, Pepper? How can this be?'

    'I don't know. All I know is that sometimes we can see and talk to people from other times. But it looks to me as if nobody can stay permanently in any other time unless they make an exchange. Trade bodies, if you like.'

    Effie watched silently as Pepper paced around the shop. 'I think Jack Belias wants to live in the present, but to do that, he has to send Craig back to the past. I've read about it, but I never thought it was possible, to tell you the truth. I have a terrible feeling that this is what Belias is trying to do… using Craig as a surrogate to send back to 1937.'

    'I can't believe it. I just can't believe it.'

    'Effie, you've seen it for yourself. Jack Belias disappeared in 1937, but he's trying to make a comeback and he's been using Craig to do it. Craig's body, Craig's intellect - everything.'

    'What's going to happen?' Effie pleaded. 'If Jack Belias takes him over completely, where will he be?'

    'I don't know the answer to that. I simply don't.'

    'But if I lose Craig-'

    'Effie, I simply don't know. I wish I did. Half of this is only guesswork. I could be completely wrong. I always believed that the days of your life never disappeared - that they were always there, if only you could get back to them. But I never knew that a dead person from a long time ago could take over the mind and body of somebody from here and now.'

    'It's impossible,' said Effie. 'I know it's impossible. It must be impossible.'

    'But don't you see… it is possible. This is the first rational explanation of ghosts that anybody has ever come up with. And this is the first rational explanation of people who mysteriously disappear. The truth is that they don't disappear - they simply walk to another room. You saw what happened to the cat, too.'

    Effie sat down on a small wheelback chair beside the counter. 'Oh God, Pepper. I'm so damn tired and I'm so damn confused.'

    Pepper hunkered down in front of her and rested her arms on Effie's knees. 'Come on, honey. Don't give up. We're going to do something about it. We're seeing Harry Rondo tomorrow and we're going to find out all we can about Jack Belias. We need to know why he's doing this, and how. I mean, is he consciously doing it, or is it just happening?'

    Pepper squeezed her hand. She was trying to be reassuring, but she couldn't hide the troubled look on her face - the look of a woman who dreads the past as much as the future.

    

    

    Harry Rondo turned out to look just as close to death's door as he had in his book jacket photograph. He lived in a shabby green-painted house that was nearer to Route 117 than it was to the picturesque village of Pocantico Hills. The driveway was barred by a dilapidated iron gate, wound around with rusty chains, and guarded by a fierce brindled mutt with a neck that was wider than its hips.

    Pepper tooted the horn of her pick-up and eventually Harry appeared. He walked around a sagging Lincoln Continental Mk IV that was parked right outside the front door, whistled sharply to the dog, and then proceeded to unravel the Gordian knot which held the gate in place.

    'Had a couple of break-ins,' he explained. 'Don't know why they bothered. I never keep more than a hundred dollars in the house and my microwave's busted.'

    He was lean and stooped, with a skeletal head and thinning, brushed-back hair that he had dyed to a strong shade of orange. He wore a soft charcoal grey shirt that was dusted in cigarette ash, and baggy black pants that would have looked the business in a Havana casino circa 1955. He had one of those odd, angular faces that nearly reminds you of somebody you know, but his washed-out eyes kept reminding you differently.

    'I'm still not sure whether I want to talk about this,' he remarked, over his shoulder, as he led them to the house. 'Dangerous does as dangerous is. Jack Belias was dangerous; and for my money, he still could be.'

    'Do you have any evidence of that?' asked Pepper.

    'Depends what you mean by evidence. If a feeling in your guts is evidence, then yes.'

    The house was cramped and stuffy and there were books and papers stacked everywhere. The walls were papered with a pattern of faded yellow flowers, and an odd assortment of prints and photographs were hung all over them, apparently at random. Effie saw a sepia photograph of ex-King Manuel of Portugal and his Hohenzollern wife walking on the promenade at Cannes - he very dapper with a wide-brimmed hat and walking-cane, she wearing a white cloche hat and a long blazer and looking bored. There were cartoons of famous 1920's gamblers like Berry Wall and Solly Joel; and framed menus from The Sporting Club, Rue Francois Premier in Paris, and the 43 Club in London. There was still a brown stain on the Sporting Club menu, a permanent souvenir of a sauce prepared and eaten one evening more than sixty years ago.

    Harry went across to a cluttered rolltop desk, picked a cigarette out of a pack of Camels, and lit it with a book match. 'So many people suffered at the hands of Jack Belias - so many people were ruined or humiliated - that it was considered bad luck even to mention his name. And you know how superstitious gamblers are.

    'When I came out of the service in 1946 I started writing articles and books about gambling and gamblers, and one name kept on cropping up: Jack Belias. I tried to talk to my father about him but he didn't want to know. I tried talking to some of the big names of gambling - men who used to play baccarat with Belias in the twenties and the thirties. What did I get? The complete loss of memory, that's what I got. All I had to say was, "Tell me about Jack Belias", and instant amnesia set in.'

    He blew smoke, coughed, and looked around him. 'You want to sit down?' he suggested. 'How about some coffee. You may not believe it, but I make excellent coffee. With chocolate flakes.'

    Effie cleared a sheaf of papers from a green upholstered armchair, and awkwardly sat down. Pepper managed to find a dining-chair with no back to it.

    'Are you the lady who's bought Valhalla?' Harry asked Effie.

    'It was my husband's idea, more than mine. I don't really like the place at all.'

    'If I tell you what happened there, do you think you're going to be upset? I mean, I don't want to put you off living there.'

    Pepper said, 'She needs to know, and I do, too. Listen, you don't know what's been happening in that house. Eflie here had a kind of waking daydream that she was dancing on broken glass, and when she came out of it her feet were all cut up. Another time she heard a woman crying in one of the upstairs bedrooms, and she's seen a strange man going downstairs. I went there myself, and I saw the whole place like it used to be, with furniture and mirrors and everything.'

    She paused, and then she said, 'While I was there, I truly believed that I was Gaby Deslys, the dancer; and that Jack Belias and me were lovers. But I wasn't Gaby Deslys and Jack Belias wasn't Jack Belias. He was Effie's husband Craig.'

    Harry smoked and nodded, and then he found himself a wheelback chair and dragged it up close. 'It's just like I always said. Jack Belias never died. Not in the way that ordinary people die. Jack Belias left his automobile next to Bear Mountain Bridge because he wanted people to think that he had done away with himself. But did he shit. All he did was leave one time and step into another; and the only reason he left that automobile next to Bear Mountain Bridge was because he couldn't take it with him, not where he was going. He was trying to get into the future… be immortal. And he was looking for somebody who was weaker than him, somebody who needed what he had to offer, which was strength, you understand me? Strength, and a total lack of scruples, didn't care who he hurt, or how badly, or whether it was justified or not. Not only that, virility. Jack Belias was a very virile man, he needed sex like most people need to breathe, and he used his virility to dominate people, too.'

    'So what did happen at Valhalla?' asked Effie. She couldn't help thinking of Craig, in the days after his 'accident'. What had he needed more desperately than strength and virility? If Harry Rondo could be believed, the influence of Jack Belias had caught him at his lowest ebb.

    Harry said, 'If you want to understand what happened at Valhalla you have to understand who Jack Belias was. What shaped him, what motivated him. I spent years traipsing from one side of the Atlantic to the other, trying to find out everything I could about him. In the end, it didn't amount to very much more than a few proven facts, a hundred guesses, and a thousand assorted riddles. Like I told you, the only real evidence lies here in my gut.

    'You want the proven facts? He was born John Henry Belias in the winter of 1897, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. His father was Walter John Belias, also known as Jack, who worked for the First National Bank of Pittsburgh, as chief teller. His mother Annette Belias doted on him, and spoiled him so much that his father threatened to send him off to boarding school. But Annette Belias died in 1906, when Jack was nine, from complications following the birth of a daughter, Lily. From what I gather, Jack never forgave his sister for killing his mother; and hr never forgave his mother for betraying him by having another child. From that time on, it seems that his opinion of women in general was very low.'

    'Do we have any evidence of that?' asked Pepper.

    'Oh, sure we do. Reports from the Pittsburgh newspapers of 1919 and 1922, when one Jack Belias was accused of kidnapping and torturing prostitutes. In the first case he was alleged to have abducted a prostitute called Mary O'Hagan for seven days, and nailed her nipples to a kitchen table. In the second case he forced an empty gin bottle into a prostitute called Georgina French, and filled up the bottle with boiling water.

    'Oh, my God,' said Pepper. 'Oh, my God it doesn't bear thinking about.'

    'He did worse than that to other women, so they say; but these are the only cases that are backed by evidence. As it turned out, he was found innocent on both charges; although there were several accusations of jury-rigging, especially from the state's attorney Nathan Tidyman. Tidyman was found dead four weeks after Jack Belias' last acquittal, in his overturned automobile, with his neck broken.

    'Jack Belias' father had never liked him - and after the court cases he cut him off completely. When he died he gave over $3 million to charity, and Jack Belias got nothing. I believe that's what gave him his special taste for bringing rich men low.

    'In 1923 he was appointed a junior accountant at Penn Textiles. He wasn't liked, but he was such a whiz with figures that he saved the company hundreds of thousands of dollars in his first six months; and at the end of his first year he was appointed chief accountant. He took over the running of everything, right down to buying the raw cotton on the Memphis cotton market. By the spring of 1925 he was appointed to the board, and by the winter of 1925 he virtually controlled the whole corporation. He pressed ahead with all kinds of experiments with synthetic fibres, and in 1926 he produced Fresh-Press, which wasn't a trufe synthetic fabric, not like nylon, but it was a chemical-treated cotton that didn't crease anything like as badly as natural cotton.

    'He made a fortune out of Fresh-Press. That particular textile dominated the world market until 1938, when W. H. Carothers discovered nylon. Penn Textiles went out of business in three years; but by then, of course, Jack Belias was what you might call dead. Or moved on. Depends which definition you prefer.

    'By 1927 Jack Belias was worth more than 11 million dollars. He started to travel, and to gamble; and he became a regular visitor to Deauville and Monte Carlo and Biarritz. He didn't set out to win money. He set out to ruin people. That was what turned him on. He treated women like dirt and men like potential victims. I never talked to a single person who knew Jack Belias and wasn't afraid of him. He nearly bankrupted Nick Zographos, of the Greek Syndicate; and there were dozens more gamblers who weren't so skilful and weren't so lucky. He desecrated their wives and he took their money.'

    'He married, though, didn't he?' asked Effie.