A Hamptons Christmas Page 10

  “Sorry,” he said mildly, “didn’t mean to shout.”

  “Quite all right, Admiral,” Alix said, her voice cool as cucumber sandwiches at tea. “Only a suggestion, y’know.”

  “I know, I know … it’s simply that I did play with her the other afternoon.”

  “And … ?”

  The Admiral set his jaw.

  “She cheats,” he said.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Lefty Odets “nearly” helped break “the Westies” and “almost” went on Letterman …

  So the kid was a card sharp. But where were her parents, whose chill indifference had sent a child careering halfway across the hemisphere in search of a spare room at Martha Stewart’s B & B, and just what mischief were they truly up to?

  Her father, it so happened, was easy to trace, having just (yet again) been profiled in People magazine, the news peg this time Dick Diver’s recent and astonishing disclosure of his plans for the afterlife.

  “When my latest building (the tower on Sutton Place) is up and running, surely one of the seven wonders of the modern world, I intend to designate it my final resting place.”

  The plan?

  “One of my few heroes is Jeremy Bentham, the legendary English don who founded and headed University College London. I expect to emulate Bentham.”

  The reporter shook his head. Just what was it that Bentham did, actually?

  “He had himself mummified and set up in an appropriate setting at University College and, to this day, functions as the institution’s totem and principal tourist attraction.”

  Being still alive, and not yet embalmed, Emma’s father was scarcely a hundred miles away in the penthouse suite of his Manhattan tower, fresh from a few days golfing with Prince Andrew at Lyford Cay, assiduously poring over architectural renderings of yet another future Manhattan tower intended to blot out what little remained of urban sunlight. As Dick Driver worked, a gorgeous young woman, his girlfriend du jour and the last Miss Lithuania but one, sauntered into the paneled study bearing a silver serving tray, the crystal goblets and ice bucket in Waterford, his Diet Dr. Pepper freshly uncapped, her split of Moet not yet uncorked, and Miss Lithuania high-cheeked and prettily barefoot in a vast terrycloth robe bearing the logo of the Paris Ritz.

  “A little bite of lime, darling?” she asked.

  “Without.”

  Dick Driver was fierce and disciplined about the small things. Diet, for one: a chunk of lime today, soufflés tomorrow. That’s how such things went. If you lacked discipline, life was a slippery incline indeed. For beautiful women, Driver cut a little slack.

  “How’s your kid?” the girlfriend inquired. “You gonna see her for Christmas?”

  “She’ll be with her mother.”

  “That’s good, Deek. Kids oughta be with their mothers. Specially for Christmas. In Lithuania we’re very strong on shit like that.”

  Driver pursed his lips in disapproval. He wished she wouldn’t curse. Even people who thought him a louse admitted Dick respected the old, established values. Consider that, out of deference to the prince and sensitive about possibly compromising royalty, he’d not taken his girlfriend to Lyford Cay for the golfing.

  But when he corrected the Lithuanian, she protested.

  “You like it when I talk dirty in bed, no?”

  She had a point there, he conceded. Yet it was nice to know she too respected the old, traditional, bourgeois family values. So many American cover girls, thinking only of themselves, their own pleasure. At one time he’d believed Nicole shared with him those same established values, but by the time he realized his mistake, well …

  “Let’s not argue,” he said, sipping at his Diet Dr. Pepper as she popped the champers, her lovely but scornful face half-smiling its superiority at a man who could buy, and sell, her. And had.

  It occurred to Driver that except for answering the Lithuanian’s question about Emma’s whereabouts, he hadn’t recently given his daughter much thought. Maybe he ought to look into it, see how Emma was making out, spending the holidays in Europe with her mother. “The bitch.”

  Who was skiing at St. Moritz, believing their daughter was in Manhattan dining at Le Cirque with her father. “The bastard.”

  But for all his espousal of traditional family values, it wasn’t Dick Driver but his wife, Nicole (“former wife?”), three thousand miles east of Further Lane, who first became uneasy about their child. Was that maternal instinct? Or simply the accustomed paranoia of the self-absorbed?

  To review the bidding, which had confused even my father, the master spy:

  In order to sneak off to East Hampton and hang her Christmas stocking from Martha Stewart’s mantelpiece, Emma Driver had concocted a scheme requiring her to lie shamelessly to everyone but Ken Starr, telling her mother she was spending the hols with daddy, telling her father, well, she was with mummy, and assuring the convent (and her merchant bankers) she was with … someone, the entire sham bolstered by a raft of phony E-mails dispatched into cyberspace. And abetted by the fact that neither parent really seemed to give a damn.

  As transparent as all this seemed in retrospect, it had been pretty effective for young Emma Driver. Who hadn’t yet been arrested, bumped off, accused of juvenile delinquency, kidnapped, or, worst of all, sent home. And who was in fact living off the fat of the land in out-of-season East Hampton.

  Except that now, the week before Christmas, questions began to be asked by a visiting nun, launching mysterious investigations from a suite in the American Hotel.

  It was Nicole who began to ask herself just where and with whom her daughter might really be spending the Christmas hols. Not that she even missed the child; simply that she feared that, in some devious way, her husband (ex-husband?) might possibly be gaining an edge. Her daughter’s dutiful E-mails about “fun with Daddy,” which had been arriving from the time Emma left the convent in mid-December, were reassuring, detailed, upbeat. But true? Nicole wouldn’t put anything past Dick, not even milking their mutual daughter for PR value as Christmas neared.

  On Further Lane, we knew nothing of all this, of course, nor would we for several days.

  In St. Moritz Nicole sprang vigorously into action. “Aux armes!” she cried aloud, rousing the Impaler from his midday torpor. (Count Vladimir wore ski clothes beautifully but didn’t actually ski. Never had. He spent his days tanning.) Within hours they were en route in a hired Mercedes to the airport at Zurich and a flight to Paris.

  But only following a brief tantrum from the count. “Why not flying from Milano?” he argued. “Same distance but Italian airport snack bars be more yummier, you know. The chocolates gooder! mein Gott.”

  She was astute; he was stupid, but Nicole was brutally aware that she was five years older than the Transylvanian and feared losing him when her looks went. Especially considering how the book royalties had gone dry and how Dick felt about sending support checks. So she allowed her lover to make minor decisions (airport snacks and the like) and retained the big ones for herself. “Yes, Count,” she said equably, “next time we’ll fly via Milano. You’re so clever.”

  He preened and wondered if he might travel to Paris in the flattering new ski clothes she’d bought for him. “I look so good, no?”

  “Of course, darling. Very chic, indeed.”

  Their Paris stopover was brief, efficient. Dancing at Castel’s, a night at the Crillon, a visit to an old flirt at the Sûreté, another to a man she knew at Interpol. And Nicole Driver was swiftly and authoritatively put in touch with the most reliable private detective agency on the Continent, whose Paris headquarters would, within the hour, assign their best, their highest-paid, their subtlest yet most ruthless operative, to what seemed on the face of it the simplest of assignments: To help a concerned mother involved in a bitter custody battle track down a small child who was supposed to be with her father in America for the holidays.

  When they found the child, Nicole Driver wanted instant notification. No instructions about r
etrieving the kid and getting her back to a loving mother. Just where she was and with whom.

  The operative assigned to the Driver case by Paris was named Mademoiselle Javert.

  And as part of her briefing, Nicole had provided Mademoiselle this crucial item of information: if Emma Driver was indeed spending Christmas with her father in Manhattan, dining at Le Cirque and the Four Seasons as her E-mails suggested, why was the kid charging on her platinum card ice creams from a place called the Candy Kitchen on Long Island?

  Dick Driver, goaded by Miss Lithuania, had also grown curious about his daughter’s whereabouts. Like Nicole, he had his sources (she bribed people at the credit-card companies; he paid off hackers who scoured the Internet for private E-mails). Since he employed security people on a more or less permanent payroll basis, he didn’t have to go through Interpol or the Sûreté. He retained as a private eye the celebrated Lefty Odets, who talked such a good game that even Driver occasionally was said to be “waiting for Lefty.”

  Lefty was a former cop who very nearly made the special squad (under legendary NYPD detective Joe Coffey) that broke the notorious West Side Irish gang called the Westies and put Mickey Featherstone behind bars. A man who “almost” broke the Westies was not to be trifled with. Trouble was, Lefty was “almost” a lot of things. He had Knicks tickets that were “almost” courtside. He palled around 21 and P. J. Clarke’s with a broadcast exec who “nearly” became head of ABC. Lefty was “almost” on Letterman the season Dave had the bypass. And he was “almost” a regular on the Imus in the Morning radio show. Except that Imus preferred another ex-cop, Bo Dietl. Now here was a chance for Odets to distinguish himself on a project of personal, rather than financial or commercial, importance to Dick Driver.

  His orders: Find the kid and determine whether Nicole was using their daughter to gain advantage in their never-ending legal scrum. Whether Nicole was or not, Dick might also “need” to have his daughter for PR reasons at some point over Christmas. The purloined E-mails, perused in Manhattan, pointed east. But oddly, not to Nicole and the Impaler in their European playpens, but to a closer and decidedly unseasonable East Hampton.

  Neither parent seemed worried about a young, helpless child’s well-being. Only that she not be used to profit the other. Talk about schaudenfreude!

  But then again, how helpless was young Emma Driver? Wasn’t there a naive, but in ways fiendishly clever, agenda at work here on the kid’s part? Reuniting her parents—at least for Christmas?

  So off she went, the trail of E-mails and credit-card receipts (her latter-day equivalent of Hansel’s bread crumbs and, all to the good, not eaten by birds!) could easily be picked up by even the clumsiest of private eyes. To Lefty Odets, and to a Frenchwoman named Mademoiselle Javert (now doing business as Sister Infanta de Castille), the task was laughably simple. Or so it seemed.

  Chapter Eighteen

  You fall in the Atlantic in winter. You’re dead within the hour …

  Even the ocean slows in winter here at the end of Long Island. The Atlantic is still all around us, embracing the land and its people, the green lawns and the gardens sloping down toward the beach, which is still golden if no longer warm. But in the cold, the surf slows. Not calms, I don’t mean that. There are still the great waves, heavy, powerful, booming. But the pause between breakers becomes appreciably longer. Not eight but twelve seconds or fifteen. Full minutes pass between the “sets” of greater, more powerful waves that come in multiples of five, or is it nine? The surfers can tell you all about them. People say it’s the molecules of sea water that slow in winter, jellied by the cold. And their sluggishness communicates itself to the actual waves as the ocean congeals, turns more ponderous, less skittish and playful. Not that it becomes less dangerous; the sea is always that. Only that its chill sluggishness may lull the unwary into complacency.

  Which is surely not to say that anyone out here in the Hamptons was either complacent or sluggish, not last Christmas.

  There remained gift shopping to be done, and the feast itself to be planned and laid out. The Admiral had Emma cheating him at cards, I had Alix in my bed, the Baymen were still sore about the Old Churchyard, the cemetery trustees had until December 31 to hand down a final, binding decision, and Reds Hucko’s corpse had not yet turned up. And if it did, the Baymen concluded glumly, he couldn’t be buried anyway. All because of that damned Marley and his sister!

  Nor had Sister Infanta de Castille gone sluggish or complacent.

  The assignment handed her in Paris a week ago by the great detective agency had been a simple one. Track down a missing child who had left her Swiss convent school, presumably to spend Christmas with either of two divorced parents, but suspected not to have gone to either. Find the child, report back, and await instructions. The subject was not to be “rescued” or even approached ; this was hardly one of those bizarre cult cases that called for deprogramming. Sister—or Mile—Javert, as she really was, was ordered to do nothing unless Mr. Driver appeared on the scene, when she would instantly contact Nicole for orders.

  Until then, do nothing. Just wait.

  The problem? Mademoiselle was bored. As a true Javert, direct descendant of the famous Javert, “an Inspector of the Police,” who stalked Jean Valjean in Les Misérables and who herself despite the five generations of Javerts that separated this particular Javert from her illustrious ancestor, shared his intensity and passion. You didn’t just take a Javert off a case and tell him to stand easy. When a Javert got the scent, the bloodhound in the genes came through, as he or she ran the prey to earth, much as the original Inspector Javert had tracked poor Valjean. So when she found Emma Driver so quickly (taken in by a local family called Stowe on Further Lane), and forced inactivity loomed, Mademoiselle kept herself occupied by picking at other loose threads in the puzzle:

  There’d been bad blood between Dick Driver and the late Jacob Marley? Good! The late Marley was the benefactor of young Emma? Even better! The surviving Sis Marley had stoked into flame the smouldering enmity of East Hampton’s celebrated Baymen? Excellent!

  Simplest thing in the world: get close to the Baymen and work her way back to the Marleys through their resentments. Being paid (and handsomely) by the day, Mademoiselle could easily have shrugged Gallic shoulders, enjoyed an American Christmas, and done nothing.

  Except that a Javert never rests! What made her the best in the business was a thorough professionalism, a passion for her craft. A sleuth ought to be sleuthing. It was at this point that Mademoiselle Javert dove below the surface of her undercover role and literally became a nun, a Madame of the Sacred Tower. Mademoiselle understood, as John LeCarré reminds us, that a good agent has entertainment value. And that a great agent not only assumes a role but lives it. And who were the very best nuns? The saints! Mademoiselle Javert would not only become a nun, but a … saint!

  Ministering to the hopeless and to those in despair. And who in East Hampton were the most hopeless, the most despairing people? Simple! The Bonac Boys in their grief over Reds Hucko and their anger at the Marleys for forbidding the dead their hallowed ground.

  Sister Infanta summoned the anointed chief, Peanuts Murphy, ordering him a cup of the American Hotel’s coffee and blessing herself.

  “You despair too quickly,” she informed Murphy, silently telling her beads, getting briskly to the point.

  “What’s that supposed to mean, Sister?” Peanuts asked, surly but wary at the same time. He didn’t yet understand this woman.

  “It means you give up your friend Hucko to the sea and lay plans for his burial, when the graveyard is forbidden to you, and as yet there’s no evidence he’s even dead.”

  “For God’s sake, begging your pardon, Sister, but Reds went into the North Atlantic a hundred miles out last month. You telling me he’s still treading water?”

  The rosary beads slipped smoothly through her fingers as she and Peanuts parried.

  “Have you prayed?”

  “Sure, lots of people pra
yed. We got serious Catholics out here. Irish, Polacks, Guineas. They all pray. They got novenas, retreats, rosaries. During Lent, they give out ashes, they give out palm. Lots of stuff.”

  “But have you specifically prayed for the unfortunate Hucko?”

  “Not me, but I ain’t much for it. Others, sure. They’re praying all the time for Reds’s soul. Night and frigging day.”

  “See, you of little faith, you capitulate too easily, send up the white flag. I tell you, Mr. Murphy, set your priorities. Pray for the man’s body first. That he survives. You have all eternity to pray for his soul. There’s no rush.”

  “Lady, Sister, he’s dead. You know religion, your rosary beads. I know the Atlantic. You fall in the ocean in winter, you die in an hour. A couple of hours. Reds fell off the Wendy E. three weeks ago.”

  Mademoiselle Javert wasn’t buying. Nor was Sister Infanta de Castille.

  “We shall pray together, Murphy! At the margin of the great ocean that took your friend. Each day until he returns, you and I will kneel by the water’s edge and attempt to bring him back.”

  “Yes, ma’am. Outstanding! Right you are,” Peanuts stammered, on his feet now and backing away. He would have agreed to anything, couldn’t wait to get out of there.

  That night over beer Peanuts briefed the Bonac Boys, six or eight of them gathered at Wolfies’s Tavern.

  “She’s a whackjob,” he said. “Wants us to kneel in the surf and say the rosary and stare at the horizon. Six Our Fathers, six Hail Marys. Hymns, as well. And watch for Reds to come wading up the goddamned beach, seaweed in his hair and returned from the deep.”

  “Let’s have another round,” someone said.

  But in the end, because it couldn’t hurt, and maybe might even help, a dozen or so Baymen, with a couple of girlfriends and wives and little ones along for moral support (plus three guys Reds owed money to), gathered the following morning at daybreak (just before eight A.M. at these latitudes and in this season) on the beach below the cliffs where teeters the ancient Montauk Lighthouse, to be addressed by Sister Infanta de Castille, now sporting a brand-new and roomy scarlet down parka, which kind of gave her the look of a cardinal of the church.