Lady of Fortune Read online

The sapphire-blue Hudson limousine arrived for him at six. He had a meeting downtown at eight-thirty. He had dressed by then, in a plain grey double-breasted suit, and while he was eating his breakfast he wore his small wire-rimmed spectacles, which made him look oddly vulnerable. Effie reached across the pale blue tablecloth and touched his hand. He put down his forkful of egg and maple syrup, unwound his eyeglasses, and smiled at her. She said, ‘You are somebody quite considerable, Mr Sabatini. I hope I’m not falling in love with you.’

  They kissed goodbye on the steps outside. George’s chauffeur was waiting beside the car, patient and smart. He could afford to be both, when you considered what he was being paid to betray him.

  George reached up and wound one ringlet of her fair hair around his finger. ‘I don’t want to say much,’ he told her. ‘It’s just that I don’t want to leave you without saying thank you. I’m not an easy guy to like, you know; and I guess that must make me even harder to love. But you’ve been willing to listen, ever since the beginning. You’re real special, Effie. One in a million.’

  The butler, Bolton, appeared from the hallway. ‘I’m sorry to interrupt, madam. But there’s a telephone call for you. Mr Walter Winchell, from the Evening Graphic.’

  Effie squeezed George’s hand. ‘There you are,’ she smiled, ‘We’re famous lovers already. First, Antony and Cleopatra. Then, Romeo and Juliet. Now, George Sabatini and Effie Watson.’

  She looked over her shoulder at Bolton and said, ‘Tell Mr Winchell that he can print whatever he cares to; provided that he lets me sue him for as much as I want to.’

  Effie watched George’s Hudson disappear around the curving driveway, her hands clasped in front of her; too happy and too content even to think of waving. He would soon be back, and waving had always seemed to her to be the saddest and most hopeless way of saying goodbye. She turned back into the house, still smiling and she smiled even more when she saw how rigidly Bolton was keeping in check any hint of disapproval.

  ‘It’s all right, Bolton,’ she said. ‘I don’t mind if you express your objections out loud. Everybody else has, including my attorney.’

  ‘I’m only thinking of your personal safety, madam,’ said Bolton. ‘Mr Sabatini is, after all, a hoodlum.’

  Effie nodded. ‘I know. He’s a very tough one, too. And that’s why I always feel safe when I’m with him.’

  ‘Yes, madam,’ said Bolton, with the kind of pursed-up face he always put on whenever one of their guests picked up the wrong fork, or sneezed into the caviare.

  Effie said, ‘You can make me another Silver Stallion, while I dress,’ and then she went upstairs, singing Night After Night

  ‘Night after night …

  You’re near me.

  Night after night

  You endear me …’

  CHAPTER TWO

  The news arrived with the late afternoon papers. A limousine had been found abandoned in Massapequa State Park, about a mile off the Merrick Road, containing the headless body of George Marcello ‘Spats’ Sabatini, the 41-year-old crime boss. It was understood that he had been returning to New York City after visiting Mrs Effie Watson, America’s only woman bank chairman, the ‘golden fist in the velvet glove.’ A friendship between the two of them had long been hinted at in the gossip columns, despite the fact that Sabatini was a known racketeer and extortionist. Dorothy Dey in the Morning Telegraph had called it, ‘the love that knows no law’.

  Sabatini, surmised the newspapers, had probably tried to push himself too far and too fast into the dockside territory of Giancarlo Eustachio, a scarred old walrus of a Sicilian who had once said that he had never murdered anybody, at least not during Lent. Sabatini had not, thankfully, been tortured. His murderers had simply taken his head off with a garrotte of very fine steel wire.

  Effie was unavailable for interviews. The Saturday after the killing, she was taken by seaplane from Long Island to Massachusetts, and from there to a secret retreat in New Hampshire. She did, however, send flowers to Sabatini’s funeral: a hundred white roses, with a handwritten card saying, ‘Only one tenth of what you did for me.’ Louis Sobol, the famous society columnist of the New York Journal somehow acquired the card and reproduced it next to his daily article. ‘If you’ve ever thought that bankers are the last people to conceal secret passions,’ he wrote, ‘just take a look at Effie Watson’s last sentimental goodbye to slain mobster George ‘Spats’ Sabatini. What Sabatini actually did for Miss Watson that was ten times greater than a hundred white flowers, we shall never know! But we may guess that there was an unholy bond between them which only death could break …’

  Effie, walking with her friend Margaret Shaw on the shores of Lake Winnipesaukee, on an afternoon that was already beginning to smell like early fall, spoke of business, and how she was going to redecorate her apartment in London, and whether she ought to sell her portfolio of Daumier etchings. But she never once spoke of George Sabatini, nor of the night that had been ‘Versailles’; and the only way that Margaret Shaw could tell how sad she felt was by the way she turned her head when she spoke of Long Island, and the tears that filled her eyes when she turned around again.

  CHAPTER THREE

  ‘But weren’t you frightened of him?’ the woman reporter asked her, on a blurred afternoon fifty-four years later, in Malibu, as they sat over China tea and tiny pâté sandwiches by the pool. ‘I mean, the consequences of loving a gangster could have been catastrophic, couldn’t they? Emotionally, and careerwise.’

  The old woman sitting opposite her on her basketwork chaise-longue, her face obscured by veils and by the violet shadow which was cast by the wide brim of her Italian straw hat, said drily, ‘Of course I was frightened. Love is always frightening.’

  ‘But didn’t you care what your friends thought? Or how the people at the bank might have reacted?’

  ‘I wasn’t in the habit of referring my lovers to my stock holders. I wouldn’t do it today, if I still had any lovers.’

  ‘Do you think you might have married him?’ asked the woman reporter. She had been shown by the butler to a seat in which the sun shone directly in her eyes, and in which, even in her red cotton sundress, she was uncomfortably hot. Every time the pool rippled, dazzling reflections of light crisscrossed her face. But she was determined to brave this interview to the end. She was the first journalist to have talked face-to-face with Effie Watson for twenty-two years.

  Beneath her veils, Effie whispered, ‘I can’t say. He asked me. He said, ‘I want you to be Mrs George Sabatini.’ But his days were numbered, from the very day of his birth. He led such a violent life that he couldn’t possibly have survived for long. Yet, if he hadn’t led such a violent life, he would never have become so rich, and I never would have met him. So he was always caught in the dangerous circle of his own life. Those could be very vicious days, in 1927. I knew several men who were killed by gangs, and not all of them nicely.’

  ‘Is there a nice way to die?’ asked the woman reporter.

  A clock chimed, somewhere behind the white lace drapes which rose and fell in the languid afternoon breeze.

  Effie said, ‘Time has tricked me, you know. I feel so young at heart, and yet I look at myself in the mirror and know that I am only three years away from being one hundred years old.’ She allowed herself a wry, almost invisible smile. ‘Perhaps I should stop taking ginseng. But I can’t tell you how terrible it is, to have a mind like mine, trapped inside such a futile body.’

  The woman reporter said, ‘Can I ask you about Merritt Watson?’

  ‘You may ask.’

  ‘Well, it’s difficult to put this question delicately. But the rumour is that there was some very unusual circumstances about his resignation. If you’ll forgive me, somebody mentioned incest.’

  ‘The rumours flatter me, my dear. Apart from the fact that I’m his grandmother, there are more than sixty-three years between us.’

  ‘But how did you really feel about him? Before he left you, I mean.’

&n
bsp; Effie took a deep, dry breath. ‘I loved him. Perhaps not in the way the rumours would have it. But I did love him. Love is not the exclusive territory of the young, you know.’

  ‘Do you think he loved you equally in return?’ asked the woman reporter.

  Effie hesitated. On the white-painted cast-iron table beside her was a photograph in a silver frame. The woman reporter had recognised it straight away as Merritt. Dark, swept-back hair, long and angular face, deep-set eyes. Very good-looking, if you weren’t afraid of men who seemed to harbour the secret desire to do very complicated and erotic things to you. The sort of man who might buy you a diamond choker, a bottle of Perrier-Jovët champagne, and a black lace basque, and then expect you to show him how much you appreciated all of his gifts, Not next week; not even tonight. But immediately, wherever you happened to be.

  Beneath her veils, Effie whispered, ‘Love appears to us in many different ways. Sometimes, it is immediate, like the love I felt for George Sabatini. At other times, it is not recognizable as love until it is too late. There have been several times in my life when I have let it pass me by, like a stranger in the street, and only afterwards, long afterwards, have I been able to recognise what it was that I allowed to slip by me.’

  She paused, and then she said softly, ‘Miss Munro, I asked you here because I wanted to talk about my life and what I have learned from it before I am too feeble to remember what happened and too senile to think what good it may possibly have done me. Perhaps it wasn’t such a good idea. Perhaps I expected too much of it. Perhaps, after all, it is better if men like George and Merritt are allowed to remain as they are. One dead, and the other lost. But, you know, life is all a question either of teaching or of being taught. George Sabatini taught me not just how to spend money but how to be extravagant. He taught me how to waste money, which in my family was always considered to be the gravest sin of all; even above adultery. To beat your neighbour over the head with a rock, that was one thing but to spend tuppence on a ribbon for your hair … well, the wrath of my almighty father would be upon you.

  ‘Merritt was my pupil. He was sophisticated, of course; and handsome; and outspoken. But I still had a great deal to teach him about business, and about power. When to strike and when to hold back. When to be charming and when to be angry. I told him everything about love that I knew, and everything about money. I gave him my knowledge, my memories, and my heart. I was far too old to give him my body, although I would have done, gladly, if only I had been forty years younger, and we had not been related.’

  Theresa Munro dotted her last shorthand outline, and then she said, ‘Will you ever try to get Merritt back?’

  Effie turned towards the pool, and for a very long time said nothing at all. Theresa Munro was beginning to wonder if the old lady had fallen asleep, or wandered off into a semi-coma. But then she raised one dry, liver-spotted hand, and said, ‘No, Miss Munro, I won’t.’

  ‘Can you tell me why?’

  ‘No.’

  CHAPTER FOUR

  George Sabatini had once told her, shortly after they first met, that she reminded him of a pearl. ‘You’ve got that shine to you, you know?’ he had said, looking up at her almost shyly as he peeled the gold band from his cigar. ‘It’s like milk and moonlight, all mixed up.’

  Even though eighty years had shrivelled her beauty away, Effie Watson still had the grace of a girl of 17; and when she was helped out across the pillared porch of her mansion two days later, she wore a cream summer dress with a cream straw hat and a billowing veil that, for a moment, disguised her age.

  This was the woman whom Fortune magazine had described only three weeks previously as ‘the dominatrix of Western banking’, and whose personal assets they had cautiously estimated at ‘well in excess of $620 millions’. Her dress had been specially designed for her by David Emanuel, who had made the wedding-dress for the Princess of Wales, and her veil was sewn with hundreds of tiny crystals and seed pearls.

  Her long-wheelbase Lincoln limousine waited for her in the California sunlight, parked beside the small shiny-leaved orange trees which lined the white Futura-stone driveway. A fat white dove had settled on the car’s V-shaped television antenna, and was warbling to itself contentedly. The chauffeur opened the car door, helped Effie to settle back in the pale blue velvet cushions in the back seat, and then neatly spread a cream tapestry rug over her knees.

  ‘Being a wayward girl again today, Miss Watson?’

  Effie smiled. She knew just as well as her chauffeur that the doctor had advised her against going out on her own. So had her insurance company. But her chauffeur always took extraordinary care of her – not as if she were some breakable and expensive vase, which most people did – but simply as if she were a woman of energy and brightness who, accidentally, had grown old. The chauffeur was young and broad-shouldered and tanned the colour of Ritz crackers. He had once been a walker for a fabulously cantankerous movie queen, but he much preferred Effie because she was indignant and amusing, and never patronised him, and because she allowed him whole free afternoons for windsurfing. She called him Carl, because she believed that all chauffeurs should be called Carl. His real name was Jerre.

  The Lincoln glided away from Malibu and joined the Ventura Freeway towards Forest Lawn. Effie watched a video-tape of a Bruckner concert for a while, but then switched the television off. She wasn’t in the mood for anything but her own deeply-concealed thoughts. She wanted no music but the quiet internal music of her own regret.

  It still hurt when she thought of what Merritt had said to the television interviewers when he resigned from Watson’s Interbank last month. ‘You think this place is a bank? This place is a jacuzzi. The management is all wet, and all that keeps them bubbling is Effie Watson’s hot air.’

  My God, she thought, how much Merritt misunderstood me. But how little I tried to make him understand. I just feel too weary to make people understand me any more. If they don’t know that everything I do is for the good of the bank, then I can’t help them.

  The only sad thing is, I have nobody now to whom I can pass on my fortune. I have millions of dollars in investments and trusts; I have a white-walled mission-style mansion with cloisters and courtyards and fountains; I have the finest collection of Gainsborough portraits outside Europe; I have Sèvres plates from which nobody now will ever eat.

  If only I were younger. I have so much love in me, so much strength in me. I have so much capability, and the fierce desire to apply it. I should be thirty-seven now, instead of ninety-seven. I should be twenty-seven. Or seventeen again.

  All those furious flickering decades of work and laughter and love and anguish, and what do I have to show for them? Dead lovers, and deserted friends. The experience of a whole life. A million meals eaten, a hundred thousand kisses shared. All gone. And no hope of handing any of it on to anybody.

  They arrived at the cemetery. Under an unfocused midday sun, Carl led Effie on his arm up to Alisdair’s grave, and she stood beside it for almost ten minutes, while Carl stood a little way off with his cap tucked under his arm, and winked at a young woman in a charcoal-grey suit and a flowered hat.

  Effie had erected for Alisdair a square plinth of white Italian marble, on which stood the nude statue of a muscular young man, in bronze, with a sword and helmet fallen at his feet, and his face raised sadly but defiantly to the sky. The statue had stylized curly hair, as curly as Alisdair’s and as Merritt’s. His chest was defined with well-exercised muscles, and his thighs were as convex as those of a Greek discus-thrower. His penis was half-swollen, as if his own defeat had stirred in him a perverse sensuality. That was Alisdair all over.

  Effie said, ‘Oh, Alisdair,’ out loud, and Carl glanced around at her for a moment because he thought, mistakenly, that she was calling for him. But when she said mournfully, ‘Oh, Merritt,’ he looked away.

  Effie closed her eyes, and she could picture Merritt as if he were standing next to her. The way he used to run his hand back across his h
air and then give a tiny, self-satisfied smile. That funny sideways look he had always given her when he was suspicious of some financial deal that she was proposing. She could hear his laugh, and feel the touch of his hand. She could see him now, sitting at a table on the verandah of the Silverado Country Club, with the golf course and the mountains behind him, and the summer flowers nodding beside his chair. She could see his white silk Italian shirt, very Rodeo Drive, with the cuff casually rolled back over his darkly-suntanned arm. His gleaming gold wristwatch by Patek Philipe, with a face of closely-set diamonds. And only two rings on his fingers. One, his fraternity ring from college. The other, a huge brown diamond set in gold claws, which Effie had given to him after their success in Saudi Arabia. Small brown diamonds are usually worth very little, but this one weighed 44.2 karats, and had been graded flawless. Besides, Effie had told him, it was the exact colour of his eyes. It had been worth paying $780,000 for a diamond which was the exact colour of his eyes.

  ‘Well, Alisdair,’ Effie said quietly, to the nude bronze man, ‘you still managed to disappoint me, didn’t you, even after everything you promised? After everything you said! My children will carry on your fortune, you said. My heirs will make sure you’re immortal. Well, I can’t bear you any grudges, my dear. I don’t suppose it was really your fault, and I was never a girl to bear a grudge. Herr Hitler called me frivolous. Can you imagine that? “Effie,” he used to say, “du bist so schõn, aber du bist so leichtfertig.” That’s what he used to say. But he wasn’t really right, was he? You were pretty, too – prettier than me, in your way; and you were frivolous. And look what it earned you. A tomb, my darling, at thirty-three. Can you imagine that? Merritt will be thirty-four this year. You are younger than your own grandson.’

  She found, strangely, that she was crying. She took a small lace handkerchief out of her pocketbook and dabbed at her eyes, beneath the secrecy of her veil.