The House That Jack Built (38 page)

    'Sure. He married a French movie actress, Jeannette Duclos. She was beautiful, I can tell you. There were no two ways about it.'

    'She died, didn't she?' asked Effie.

    Harry crushed out his cigarette into a crowded ashtray emblazoned Hotel Ritz, Paris. 'Yes, she died. In mysterious circumstances, that's what most of the books will tell you. But I went through the medical records and there was nothing mysterious about it, nothing at all. The only mystery was that Jack Belias paid a large sum of money to the coroner to testify that it was anything else but what it was.'

    'And what was it?' asked Pepper.

    'You really want to hear this?' asked Harry.

    'If we don't hear it, we'll never know what we're up against.'

    'Well, your funeral,' said Harry. 'She died by setting her head alight.'

    'She did what?' asked Pepper.

    'Belias wanted children. He wanted a son and heir, somebody to carry on his name. You've seen his coat of arms, and that motto of his,
Non omnis irwriar - "I shall never completely die"
. He couldn't accept the fact that he was mortal. He believed that he could live for ever, if he used all of the right rituals and prayed all the right prayers. But he still wanted a son and heir, in case the rituals and the prayers didn't work.

    'What he didn't know was that Jeannette Duclos had had an illegal abortion at the age of thirteen and had never been able to have children.

    'He was always ranting and raving at her. I have several eyewitness accounts of how he slapped her and screamed at her at the Golf Hotel at Le Touquet. He shouted at her again in the Palm Court of the Plaza, in New York, and called her a sterile, ugly bitch. I'll tell you who heard him say that: Harold Ross, the guy who founded The New Yorker. It's in one of his diaries.

    'Less than a month after that, Belias held a big gambling party up at Valhalla. Just about everybody was there. They had dancing, fireworks, a whole thirty-piece orchestra. Eyewitness reports say that Belias spent the whole evening with Gaby Deslys, the dancer. Then halfway through the evening, Jeannette walked into the ballroom and it looked like her hair was wet. Nobody realised it, but she had dipped her whole head into a pailful of gasoline. She walked across the ballroom, faced up to him, and then she struck a match.'

    Harry lit up another cigarette. 'The police came but everybody said they were out of the room when it happened. "I was having a smoke in the library". "I went to the powder room". "I was making a telephone call to my Great Aunt Matilda". But I talked to some of the people who were there. They don't all tell the same story, but some say she ran around the ballroom screaming, and others say she danced, she actually did a dance for him, with her head on fire.'

    Pepper said, 'What about Gaby Deslys? What happened to her?'

    'Oh, well, she was pretty fortunate. Belias went through a long run of bad luck on the tables, and spent so much time gambling that they kind of drifted apart. After that, he went through a whole string of mistresses. I've talked to some of them, even though they're pretty old now. They all said how cruel he was. He loved to hurt them; and of course some of them were young and stupid and drugged up, and they let him do whatever he wanted. He kept horses. Some of them even did it with horses, while Belias watched.'

    Effie pressed the back of her hand against her mouth. She hadn't eaten breakfast this morning, and she was almost choking on Harry's cigarette smoke.

    Harry said, 'I'm sorry. I don't mean to disturb you. But you wanted to know, and this is more or less what happened, so far as anybody can tell.'

    'How did it end?' Effie asked him. 'Why did Jack Belias have to disappear?'

    'There are rumours about this; and there are counterrumours; and it's very difficult to know what to believe. But one thing's certain. In the spring of 1937, Jack Belias invited eleven of his friends up to Valhalla for a non-stop weekend of baccarat. He had one every year, and it was quite an occasion, because he always held the bank and he always did what the Greek Syndicate used to do at Deauville, and allow tout va - that is, "anything goes", meaning there was no limit on what his guests could bet.'

    'I'm surprised he had any guests, from what you've been saying about him,' said Effie.

    'Don't you believe it. He had more gamblers wanting to play against him than Valhalla could accommodate. Almost every baccarat player on both sides of the Atlantic wanted the chance to break Jack Belias, and every year he gave them the opportunity, and he wined them and dined them, too, and every year he ended up richer. That man may have been Satan, but he could play baccarat like God.

    'Nobody knows who all of the eleven guests were that year, but Nico Zographos and Val Castlerosse certainly were, as well as Michael Arlen and Remy Morse and Karl Marjorian and Douglas Broughton. Most of them came because they wanted to settle old scores, win back some of the money that Belias had taken from them during the past year. But Broughton needed more than that. In the summer of 1936, Belias had taken him for over a million pounds sterling, which Broughton had been forced to borrow from his own company, Broughton Steelworks. He had been forced to sell his country house in England, his chateau in France, and his apartment on Fifth Avenue. He wasn't just looking for revenge. He badly needed to win his money back, or else he was facing bankruptcy.'

    Harry crossed the room and lifted a framed photograph off the wall, which he handed to Effie to look at. It showed a bluff, handsome man of about fifty-five sitting in a garden. He was wearing a wide-brimmed hat and an expensive three-piece suit, with spats. He had a white moustache and a white goatee beard; and rings on his fingers. He looked as if he had just said something which he considered to be terribly droll. Sitting on a low wall next to him, swinging her legs, was a very much younger woman, with dark hair perfectly cut in a long, shining bob, and wide dark eyes. She was nothing short of beautiful -and she had the extra allure of looking as' if she were unconscious of her beauty, a dreamy erotic innocence. She wore a short white low-waisted dress, with a large bow at the hip, and white stockings. She, too, was smiling, but for some reason she didn't look to Effie as if she were smiling at what the man had just said, but at some secret amusement of her own.

    'Is this Douglas Broughton?' asked Pepper.

    'That's right. And the woman sitting on the wall is his wife Gina. She was twenty-three years his junior when they married. Miss Pittsburgh, 1923. He saw her picture in the newspaper when he was visiting the US Steel Corporation in Pittsburgh, and he sent his chauffeur around to her home with two dozen roses and an invitation to dinner. Hard line to resist, wouldn't you say?'

    'She looks like a child, compared to him,' said Effie.

    'That's right. On first meeting, most people used to think that Gina was Douglas Broughton's daughter. But she was very much in love with him. She was absolutely devoted. Even when he lost his money and they had to sell all their houses and their cars, she still stood beside him, and did everything she could to cheer him up. For his part, Douglas Broughton believed that Gina always brought him luck, and that the only time he lost money at the tables was when she wasn't there. So that was why he took her to Valhalla that spring.'

    He squashed out his second cigarette. 'It was the worst thing he ever did in his life.'

    'What happened?' asked Effie.

    'They played baccarat, of course. Val Castlerosse won almost eight thousand dollars in the first few hours, and for a while it looked as if luck was running Douglas Broughton's way, too. By midnight on Friday he was up sixteen thousand dollars and according to Michael Arlen he was really hot. But he was playing by the Martingale system, which means that every time he lost a coup he doubled his stake in an attempt to get his money back. The Martingale's terrific if luck's running with you; but if it isn't, it's a very quick way to dig your own grave. It wasn't even two o'clock on Saturday morning before he was into a hole for eleven thousand, and most of the others were well down, too. It seemed like Jack Belias was unbeatable.' He reached for another cigarette, but as he did so he paused and listened, almost as if he were expecting to hear someone entering the front door.

    'Are you all right?' Pepper asked him.

    Just had one of those feelings.'

    'One of what feelings?'

    'It's always the same when I talk about Jack Belias. Maybe I'm just spooking myself. I always feel that he's right outside the door, listening to me.'

    Pepper said, 'I don't feel anything.'

    Harry listened a moment longer, and then shook his head at his own edginess. 'Stupid, I guess. But it's always the same. I started to write a magazine article about him once, and my typewriter keys kept jamming. I finished about half a page and then I gave it up as a bad job.'

    He lit his cigarette very carefully and then dragged at it with as much relish as a man who hasn't smoked in a week. 'I don't really know what I've got to be afraid of. But then I don't want to find out, either.'

    Effie said, 'The baccarat… did Jack Belias win all night?'

    'By dawn the others had lost so much money that they were threatening to quit the table and cut short the whole weekend. So Belias came up with a suggestion. If they were real gamblers, they should each of them bet the one thing in their lives that they prized the most… the one thing that they couldn't bear to lose.

    'None of them were interested at first, but then Belias himself said that he would stake Valhalla and everything in it, and that was more of a temptation than any of the others could resist. I don't know what Val Castlerosse staked, but Michael Arlen offered the copyright to The Green Hat, which was his bestselling novel, Remy Morse staked his yacht, and Karl Marjorian put up his favourite racehorse. Douglas Broughton had no yachts, no racehorses, no houses, nothing. All he had was his percentage share in the family steelworks, and his wife Gina. She wouldn't hear of him gambling away his livelihood, so she offered herself. Three nights and three days, for the winner to do with her whatever he wanted.'

    'I can't believe it,' said Effie.

    'I've seen gamblers stake more than their wives,' said Harry, waving smoke away with his hand. 'Maybe it seems unbelievable now, but you have to remember that Douglas Broughton was desperate, almost suicidal, and that Gina would have done anything for him. She was that kind of a woman.'

    He paused. 'I don't exactly know how they arranged the game. I guess they agreed that each player would be allowed to lose a certain number of coups before he had to surrender his prized possession. As it is, it took Jack Belias less than an hour to win everything, Gina Broughton included.'

    'And she really stayed with him, for three days and three nights?'

    Harry coughed, and shook his head. 'She stayed with him for eighteen months. Nobody knows why. She followed him everywhere he went, and yet he treated her worse than a dog. Whenever he held a party, he used to show her off; show how obedient she was. Whatever he asked her to do, she always did it. Once he dropped a spoonful of caviar on to the end of his shoe and made her kneel down in her evening gown, in front of all of his guests, and lick it off. And another time he made her do exactly what happened to you - he made her dance barefoot on broken champagne glasses. He probably did far worse things to her, but if so he did them in private.'

    Effie turned to Pepper, her eyes wide. 'Oh my God,' she whispered.

    'Didn't Douglas Broughton try to get her back?' asked Pepper.

    'Of course he did. He even called the cops and accused Belias of kidnap. But when the cops went to Valhalla and talked to Gina, she said that she was staying with Belias of her own free will. There was nothing they could do.'

    'So what happened to him?'

    'To Broughton? Nothing dramatic. He lost control of his steelworks. He went bankrupt. He contracted Parkinson's disease and he died in 1941 in a charity hospital in England. Three people went to his funeral. He was just like everybody else who tried to stand up to Jack Belias: ruined, cuckolded and humiliated.'

    'And what happened to Gina?' asked Effie.

    Harry went over to his desk, unlocked one of the side drawers, and took out a newspaper clipping, amber with age. He gave it to her as reverently as if it were a holy relic.

    The clipping was marked
Poughkeepsie Sentinel
, November 11, 1937, and headlined BLIND PREGNANT HEIRESS FALLS TO HER DEATH and subheaded
Impaled on Railings, But Baby Saved.

    The story read:
'Sheriff's deputies and firemen were called yesterday to Valhalla, palatial mansion home of textile tycoon Jack Belias, to discover that the recently-blinded wife of a close friend and business associate had apparently flung herself from an upper window to be impaled on iron railings 30ft below.

    
'Mrs. Gina May Broughton, 32, estranged wife of British steel millionaire Mr. Douglas Broughton, 55, was said last night to have died shortly after her arrival at Poughkeepsie Memorial Hospital. She had been blinded in an accident last August, and since then she was said to have suffered deep depression.

    
'Doctors disclosed last night that Mrs. Broughton was approximately seven months pregnant, and that the child had been removed on her death by Caesarean section and placed in an incubator. A boy, the child was apparently "poorly, but holding onto life".'

    
'Mr. Belias, 40, was in residence at Valhalla at the time of Mrs. Broughton's fatal fall, but declined to comment on the accident. He also declined to say how close his relationship with Mrs. Broughton had been, or to answer suggestions that the child that she was carrying was his.'