In the grooms’ changing quarters near the horse barn, Eric had found Hank Dunker’s footlocker and wedged the Ming burner into a pair of sweat socks, stuffing these back under an assortment of trousers and knit underwear. (A friendly but anonymous telephone call to Mrs. Cadwalader in the morning would close the trap with finality. “A word from a friend who must be nameless... A pity. Your groom Hank, after all, probably has imprecise notions of right and wrong. But I did happen to see him reach through that open window in your library and snatch that little treasure...”)
Eric stood and toasted himself once again in the mirror.
The television announcer said, “...drew Dalworth, one of the world’s wealthiest and most famous industrialists, injured earlier today, remains in a coma, his condition listed as grave at his country estate, Easter Hill in Ireland.”
Eric Griffith smiled at the imaginary phone he was pretending to speak into. “Please, Mrs. Cadwalader, you mustn’t thank me. If our sort didn’t stick together, I can’t imagine what the world would come to.”
He went into the bathroom and splashed cold water on his face. Reaching for a towel, he frowned suddenly, trying to grasp and remember what the announcer had just said. His thoughts swirled with whiskey, and he couldn’t pin it down. Somebody hurt, injured. An accident?
Turning on the water tap, he splashed more cold water on his face, feeling the coldness pierce his eyes and bring reality once again into focus. Dalworth, that was it, and Easter Hill, he knew those names. At the TV set, he knelt, drops of water streaming down his face, and listened with frustration to a beaming sportscaster talk about basketball and somebody setting picks.
Eric flipped from station to station, but there was nothing on but local news and police shows, cars racing into alleys, machine guns flashing like fireflies in the darkness. Gripped by a sense of excitement, Eric dressed hurriedly and left the room.
At the first intersection, he bought a newspaper from a battered vending machine. The story was on page one, below the fold, an old picture of Andrew Dalworth descending from an aircraft in Athens. The headline read: “Industrialist in Coma After Accident.” A subhead read: “Thrown from horse on Irish estate.” The dateline was UPI Dublin.
Standing there on the sidewalk, a wind stirring refuse in the gutters and the flashing lights of the “Jesus Saves” sign falling across the paper, Eric Griffith read the story twice, experiencing a thrill of personal involvement at the sight of familiar names and places. Easter Hill and Jessica Mallory and Andrew Dalworth, the Honeybelle stock farms in Kentucky, the Dalworth Holding Company... He knew them all, he realized with sustaining excitement, a sense of growing power.
Since the time he’d come across Jessica’s picture in Town and Country in the doctor’s office, Eric and Maud Griffith had kept a file on his niece, newspaper clippings and articles, items from the sports and financial pages relating to the Dalworth Stables and business enterprises, a piece in Vogue on the jade animal collection, a lay-out on Easter Hill in Architectural Digest, and other articles.
His thoughts were polarized, tightly circling two facts: in a coma... condition grave...
In his motel room again, he read the story a third time, aware of the sound of his heart thudding against his ribs. He felt wrapped up in this business, in some way an essential, vital part of it. He almost felt sorry for Dalworth, leaving so much...
And what of Jessica?
Eric Griffith sat sipping whiskey judiciously now, just a touch to keep his thoughts spinning smoothly, while a gray light of dawn mingled with the flash of the neon sign on his hard, thoughtful features.
Jessica... She would need help now, counsel, advice. Not the nudgings and maneuverings of managers and lawyers and accountants — cold, impersonal bastards out to fleece the child and feather their own nests. Now she needed, desperately needed, the warm and loving strength of her own family.
He stood and began pacing, twisting his big hands together and casting sidelong, almost furtive glances at the mirror, analyzing his appearance as he might a horse in an exercise ring, giving himself points for a high forehead, a straight nose, and eyes that appreared, when he smiled, to suggest an amiable honesty.
There were, on the other hand, the thinning blond hair, the fine network of cracked veins across his cheeks and, deep inside him — fortunately where it didn’t show — the self-pity and angers that could only be dissolved in whiskey or by Maudie’s annealing administrations.
He stared at himself in the mirror, knowing that he was close to something very important, quite literally the chance of a lifetime. Yet, in his envious observations of privilege, Eric had learned a great deal about the very rich. And he knew from bitter experience that they despised, above all, not the nouveau, because all money had become nouveau today. Oil money bred indiscriminately, after all, with sterling and Marks and Eurodollars and produced bastard offspring that deposited Iranian sheikhs in the delis of Beverly Hills and Greek shipping merchants on Park Avenue so scared of kidnapping that they instructed the doormen to address them by assumed names. No, nouveau was acceptable, Eric thought, with a flash of anger. Nobody gave a damn where you came from once you had it, but what the rich really hated were the pretenders, because they could truly and finally screw up the game for everybody.
And so, from the outset, he must establish credibility, deal from a secure financial base. Not join the whining beggars with cups who would be drawn toward Easter Hill like bees toward honey. He wouldn’t go through that groveling performance because the essential thing about Eric Griffith was not what the mirror reflected of him, and not even what the world might think of him, but the very genes and cells that linked him to Jessica, the blood from the same family that flowed through their veins.
He scooped up the phone and dialed the house on Black Velvet Lane. When Maud answered, saying, “Hello? Hello?” in a sleepy, irritable voice, Eric said quietly and insistently, “Maud, I want you to listen carefully to what I’m going to tell you. Don’t ask questions. Just listen to what—”
“Is that you, Eric?”
“Of course, it is. Did you think it was Sinatra with a singing telegram?”
“You said you’d be home tonight. Where are you, Eric? I’ve had this funny ache in—”
He sighed and said, “I’m sorry, Maud. Now forget that and listen to me. I want you to call Tony Saxe first thing in the morning. Set up an appointment for both of us tomorrow at his club, anytime that’s convenient for him.”
“Eric, what have you been up to?” Her voice was sharper.
“I’ll explain when I see you at Tony’s.”
“Well, okay. I guess I wouldn’t mind seeing the old place again.”
Maud had sung at Tony Saxe’s club in Camden, New Jersey when she was married to Tony, crooning of lost loves and smokey afternoons in a pleasant but reedy little voice, whose vibrations went largely unnoticed by the patrons — hostile people with a look of challenge about them, talking usually of sex and fixed fights and ward politics.
“You’ve got just one other thing to do, luv,” Eric said into the phone. “Bring along that file, the manila folder in my desk. It’s in the top drawer, the one with all that stuff on Jessica Mallory...”
Stretching out on the unmade bed, Eric laced his hands behind his head and smiled thoughtfully at the ceiling. He felt charged with confidence now, unintimidated by the thought of mingling his interests with the world of Tony Saxe, an arena of cunning tricks and deceits, a world of street-smart hustlers.