Act of Darkness(21)

Finished with the inquisition, their driver came back to the car and got in. A moment later, the gate popped open, as jerky as an automatic door in a thirties insane asylum. Gregor looked through his window at the asphalt of the drive as they passed on to it and saw that he’d been right. It was studded with polished metal hearts.

“Victoria Harte,” Bennis told him, “is the woman who told the entire Hollywood press corps that her second husband was going to be a kept man and proud of it.”

“What?” Gregor said.

“Victoria Harte,” Bennis repeated. “What I’m trying to tell you is, she’s famous for being—I don’t know what you’d call it. For making sure everybody knows what’s hers is hers.”

“She’s certainly making sure everybody knows this house is hers,” Gregor said.

“You’d think she’d get tired of hearts,” Bennis said. “I mean—never mind. Anyway, according to my mother—”

“Your mother knows Victoria Harte?”

“They’ve met. They were on an American Heart Association thing together in 1972 or something.”

“I didn’t think the Main Line mixed with—actresses.”

“My mother would have mixed with anybody to get money for the Heart Association. At least, she would have back in 1972. Afterward—”

“I know about afterward, Bennis.”

“Yes. Well. Anyway, what Mother said was that Victoria Harte had a little notebook she carried with her everywhere, and every time she did anything she wrote it down. Most people don’t do that, you know, when they’re working for charities. They get a big kick out of toiling in the vineyards, or they say they do. But she wrote it all down, and if there was a press story she got to the reporters and made sure they put in exactly what she had done. You see what I mean?”

“She wanted to get credit for her work,” Gregor said.

“She wanted to own her work,” Bennis said. “That’s something different. Mother said she had her initials on everything, on her clothes, on her compacts. She left her comb at home one day and she went to a drugstore and bought a little plastic one to use instead, and before she used it she took one of those indelible ink laundry pens and put her initials in the corner.”

“Obsessive,” Gregor agreed.

“I’ll tell you something else my mother told me,” Bennis said. This time she looked worse than smug. “She hates her son-in-law. And I mean positively hates him.”

“What?” Gregor said again.

But there was no time for an answer. The drive was a straight shot from the road to the house, and it was not pocked. The Rolls had traveled it at a speed Gregor would have thought impossible when they were back in traffic. They had passed a seven-bay garage with a line of red cars parked just outside its doors. The cars had license plates that started at “VH-101” and ended at “VH-107.” They had passed a cast iron, white-painted, modernistic gazebo with filigree hearts hanging from its eaves. They had passed a heart-shaped fountain made of poured concrete and a heart-shaped reflecting pool filled with tropical fish. Gregor thought it was no wonder the neighbors were supposed to hate this place.

Now they were pulling into the roundabout in front of the main doors—not heart-shaped, Gregor saw with relief—and as they did he saw that she was waiting for them, Victoria Harte herself, standing under the portico in a bright red raw silk caftan that fell to the ground. The shoulder of the caftan was held up by a heart-shaped ruby the size of a Kennedy half dollar. Her hair was piled on top of her head and stuck through with ornamental pins. Gregor couldn’t tell if they had hearts on them or not. Her feet, whisked into view every once in a while by a breeze, were stuffed into what he thought of as flip-flops, but not the kind made of rubber. In the few glimpses he got of them, they seemed to be made of the same silk as the caftan, stretched over something hard and unyielding, like wood. They had hearts on them, too.

Gregor looked across the seat to see if Bennis had noticed any of this, and found her strangely absorbed in herself, closed off and shut down, as if she had retreated into a cave or a trance.





[2]


Victoria Harte was a woman who believed in the redemptive power of publicity, as if it were the report, and not the fact, that determined the reality. That was how Father Tibor Kasparian had described her, putting her personality together from the bits and pieces he’d read about her in the thousands of magazines he seemed to devour every month, and that was how Gregor had thought of her ever since, when he’d bothered to think about her at all. Now, as the Rolls made the last curve in the roundabout and pulled up in front of the main doors, he turned his attention to her completely, blotting out Stephen Whistler Fox and Dan Chester and Carl Bettinger and all their works. He even managed to blot out the mental echo of Father Tibor’s calm, accented, analytical voice—a necessity, because he trusted Tibor more than he trusted himself. Right now, he wanted his own impressions, unmediated.