OBLIVIA BROWN ONLY LIVED THREE BLOCKS FROM CINDY, so we walked to the party, holding hands. It was a sharp, clear night. Clouds of frozen breath streamed behind us as we walked, like vapor trails.
Oblivia’s house was only slightly smaller than the Executive Office Building, and hailed from about the same period. The butler who let us in was a dour little shrimp, the antithesis of Benson. He was so fish-eyed and uninterested in life that he didn’t even change expression when I handed him the Stetson with the diamondback hatband. He reminded me of the croupiers in minor casinos in places like Elko, Nevada.
As we started to go down a hallway hung with not very good mirrors in not very interesting frames I saw a dog standing in our path. It was black and extremely shaggy and seemed to have a hump of some sort. It looked like a miniature buffalo.
“That’s Felix,” Cindy said. “Hi, Felix.”
Felix retreated in a hurry. He went bounding up some stairs. As we passed he was standing on a landing, looking very much like a small buffalo.
A large number of people were assembled in a long living room. Our hostess immediately spotted us and swam through a sea of pinstripes to our side. I had expected her to be beautiful, or at least stylish, but she was neither. She had a thin face, her hair was limp, her complexion blurred, and her look vague. She wore a dowdy-looking gray dress and a string of imitation pearls that looked like they’d been bought at Woolworth’s.
“So tall,” she said, looking at me. “Adore those yellow boots. I just hope they’re not made from the skin of some pathetic endangered creature. My charity, you know. Very partial to creatures here. So yellow. I’ve never seen such a yellow creature.”
Oblivia stood at a kind of angle to us, so that she could speak to us and yet keep an eye on the crowd, which I noticed included both old Cotswinkle and John C. V. Ponsonby.
“The boots are just armadillo,” I said. “They’re not endangered.”
“Oh,” Oblivia said. “Armadillo. I thought that was where Prub lived.”
Cindy smiled. “That’s Amarillo,” she said.
Oblivia smiled. “So far,” she said. “Can’t keep places straight unless I’ve been to them.”
Prub I knew. He was a crazed liberal trial lawyer who lived in Amarillo. His real passion in life was collecting minor league baseball teams. At the time he owned eight, scattered from Puerto Rico to Vancouver. I had once sold him a baseball autographed by Heimie Menusch, one of his true heroes.
“Is Prub here?” I asked hopefully.
“Well, I hope not,” Oblivia said. “Of course, the man’s brilliant, but so difficult. Won’t eat asparagus. Insulted my chef so badly he almost quit. Told him the sauce had curdled. Of course it had—even Jean-Luc has an off night once in a while. Nobody but Prub would have dared mention it. Jean-Luc had one of his rages—so fierce. Didn’t bother Prub.”
“Why won’t he eat asparagus?” Cindy asked.
“Claims he ate it on his wedding night and a bad thing happened,” Oblivia said.
Actually Prub had been married six times. Every time he won a big case his wife of the moment divorced him and took half of his fee. One of them had been a friend of Coffee’s, so I was no stranger to stories about Prub Bosque.
Cindy had had enough of such chitchat. She started into the crowd, only to be immediately embraced by a short man in a tweed suit. The short man stood on tiptoes and kissed whatever she would allow him, which was just a cheek.
“So lecherous,” Oblivia said. Something like a spark of hatred appeared in her otherwise unfocused eyes.
“Who’s that?” I asked.
“George,” she said. “Can you imagine those tweeds?”
I remembered that someone named George Psalmanazar was the boyfriend of Khaki Descartes, but that didn’t explain the spark of hatred. George also had snow-white hair. His teeth were clenched as if he had a pipe in them, but he didn’t.
“Such a crowd,” Oblivia said, taking my hand in order to lead me into it. Her hand was damp, as if it had been left in a dim room in a tropical clime too long. I was puzzled as to why old Cotswinkle might be fucking her, when he had a wife who was fifty times more beautiful. His wife was standing nearby, in fact, looking even better than she had at the Penroses’.
The clammy hand of my hostess pulled me deeper into the pinstripes. The crowd sucked at us like an undertow and before I knew it we were over in a corner, far from safety, where Khaki Descartes was in earnest conversation with John C. V. Ponsonby.
“Knew I’d find you together,” Oblivia said. “George is drunk.”
“Don’t be silly,” Khaki said.
John C. V. Ponsonby said nothing. He appeared to be in a hypnotic trance. Perhaps over the years he had learned to sleep on his feet, like a horse. His silence had an equine quality.
“George is drunk,” Oblivia repeated. The flash of hate came in her eyes again.
“Moreover,” she said, “he is talking about Iran. I consider that ominous.”
“Well, go tell him to shut up about it,” Khaki said. “You know him as well as I do.
“Not the case,” Oblivia said. “That was long ago.
“I put him at my table only because he gave his word not to talk about Iran,” Oblivia continued. “He gets so pettish if he’s not at my table.”
George seemed to be clinging to Cindy like a small tweedy burr.
Meanwhile Andy Landry and Eviste Labouchere had just stepped into the room. Eviste was wearing a white suit. From a distance it made him look a little like Claude Rains.
“My god,” Khaki said. “Where’d he get that suit? Look at that suit.”
“More to the point,” Oblivia said, “where did he get Andy? I thought Lilah was the one who liked him.”
“You’re slipping a little, Via,” Khaki said. “Lilah just took him home by mistake. She thought he was Jean-Luc.”
“My chef?” Oblivia said. “Why that’s an outrage. Much as I like the woman I won’t have her sleeping with my help.”
Khaki allowed herself a trace of a smile. “Not your chef,” she said. “Jean-Luc Godard.”
Since neither of them were paying any attention to me I edged away. I wanted to try and have a word with John C. V. Ponsonby, who was still holding his position in the corner, staring hypnotically at an ugly green drape.
However, I was a little slow: a tall, aquiline young man in impeccable pinstripes reached Ponsonby just before I did.
“Hello, Jake,” he said. “I’ve been in Riyadh. That place is really shaping up.”
This piece of information made absolutely no impression on Ponsonby. Thinking, perhaps, that he was hard of hearing, the young man repeated it. Ponsonby continued to stare at the drape. Having taken two called strikes, the young man gave up and edged off into the crowd.
The reason I wanted to speak to Ponsonby was because I happened to know that he was the world’s foremost collector of truncheons and it so happened that I had an excessively rare truncheon, one of the very few Ponsonby did not possess.
“Mr. Ponsonby,” I said, “are you still buying truncheons?”
The word “truncheon” penetrated his hypnosis more effectively than the word “Riyadh.” The film over his eyes quickly burned away. He turned his head and looked at me with marked distaste.
“Why are you here?” he asked. “This is an eminently civilized occasion.”
“I just came here to sell you a truncheon,” I said. It was more or less true.
“That in itself is reprehensible,” he said. “This is a social occasion. If you are a tradesman you should apply to me at my home.”
“I like to deal catch as catch can,” I said.
“Then deal with someone else,” he said.
“Well,” I said, “I have one of the Luddite truncheons.”
That gave him pause. In fact, he seemed to find it a real pisser. If he had had my Luddite truncheon in his hand at the time I think he would have bashed me with it.
In fact, Luddite truncheons were originally used to bash the Luddite rioters—their rarity is a result of the fact that many of them were used for firewood, in the grim aftermath of the Luddite riots.
I had not really taken the time to delve deeply into the matter, but I did know that Luddite truncheons belonged to that small class of objects, the true rara avis, for which all scouts continually search: cire-perdue Lalique, rosethrow whimsies, Sung vases, and great historical artifacts such as the boots of Billy the Kid.
“I believe you are lying,” John Ponsonby said. “No Luddite truncheon has changed hands in this country since 1946. There are, in fact, only two in this country, one in the Metropolitan Museum, where it doesn’t belong, and the other in Boston, in a private collection.”
“You’re well informed up to a point,” I said. “The one in Boston changed hands last year. I bought it. It’s in my car.”
Ponsonby, who looked somewhat like a frog, also looked like he’d just swallowed one. A person he didn’t like had just informed him that he had missed out on one of the rarest truncheons in the world—a truncheon he had probably been plotting to get since 1946.
“Am I to understand that you have bought the Eberstadt truncheon?” he said. “That in itself is an outrage. Who are you?”
“Just a scout,” I said.
The fact that, in defiance of all appropriateness, the Eberstadt truncheon had come to me rather than him, had left him too dazed for speech.
“But I knew Woodrow Eberstadt,” he said, almost plaintively. “We went to the same school. I knew his wife, Lou Lou. I sent Lou Lou flowers once. I think it was when Woodrow died. They knew of my interest in the truncheon. Lou Lou knew, I’m sure. It is very distressing. She might have given it to me. I’m sure I sent her flowers once.”
In fact, Mrs. Eberstadt had told the antique dealer she sold the truncheon to that she would have it carved into toothpicks rather than sell it to Ponsonby, since he had pestered her and her husband about it for thirty years.
“Regrettably, Lou Lou had a will of her own,” Ponsonby said, with a sigh. “There was talk when she married Woodrow. No one was in favor of the match, as I recall. I always felt Woodrow lacked judgment, an opinion that has now been borne out.”
Before my eyes, Ponsonby’s spirits began to droop. The thought of his old schoolmate’s lack of judgment weighed on him visibly.
“I’m afraid this means the end of Western civilization as we know it,” he said, turning away.
For no good reason, unexpectedly, I began to get my Harbor City feeling. What was I doing in a room full of blue suits and Empire furniture with Harbor City slightly less than a continent away?
While I was mentally calculating the most satisfying route across America, Felix, the buffalo dog, reappeared. He stood about ten feet away, looking at me through his hair.
At that point the little butler who should have been a blackjack dealer in Elko came and called us in to dinner.