Answered Prayers

Aces said: "And what are you going to name her?"

"Mutt."

"Oh? Since I brought you together, the least you might do is call her Aces."

"Mutt. Like her. Like you. Like me. Mutt."

He laughed. "Alors. But I promised you a party, Jones. Mrs. Cary Grant is minding the store tonight. It'll be a bore. But still."

Aces, at least behind her back, always referred to the Huttontot (a Winchell coinage) as Mrs. Cary Grant: "Out of respect, really. He was the only one of her husbands worthy of the name. He adored her; but she had to leave him: she can't trust or understand any geezer if he isn't after le loot."

A seven-foot Senegalese in a crimson turban and a white jellaba opened iron gates; one entered a garden where Judas trees blossomed in lantern light and the mesmeric scent of tuberoses embroidered the air. We passed into a room palely alive with light filtered through ivory filigree screens. Brocaded banquettes, piled with brocaded pillows of a silken lemon and silver and scarlet luxury, lined the walls. And there were beautiful brass tables shiny with candles and sweating champagne buckets; the floors, thick with overlapping layers of rugs from the weavers of Fez and Marrakech, were like strange lakes of ancient, intricate color.

The guests were few and all subdued, as though waiting for the hostess to retire before tossing themselves into an exuberant freedom-the repression attendant upon courtiers waiting for the royals to recede.

The hostess, wearing a green sari and a chain of dark emeralds, observed in persons long imprisoned and, like her emeralds, a mineralized remoteness. Her eyesight, what she chose to see, was eerily selective: she saw me, but she never noticed the dog I was carrying.

"Oh, Aces dear," she said in a wan small voice. "What have you found now?"

"This is Mr. Jones. P. B. Jones, I believe."

"And you are a poet, Mr. Jones. Because I am a poet. And I can always tell."

And yet, in a touching, shrunken way, she was rather pretty—a prettiness marred by her seeming to be precariously balanced on the edge of pain. I remembered reading in some Sunday supplement that as a young woman she had been plump, a wallflower butterball, and that, at the suggestion of a diet faddist, she had swallowed a tapeworm or two; and now one wondered, because of the starved starkness, her feathery flimsiness, if those worms were not still gross tenants who accounted for half her present weight. Obviously she had somewhat read my mind: "Isn't it silly. I'm so thin, I'm too weak to walk. I have to be carried everywhere. Truly, I'd like to read your poetry."

"I'm not a poet. I'm a masseur."

She winced. "Bruises. A leaf drops and I'm blue."

Aces said: "You told me you were a writer."

"Well, I am. Was. Sort of. But it seems I'm a better masseur than a writer."

Mrs. Hutton consulted Aces; it was as if they were whispering with their eyes.

She said: "Perhaps he could help Kate."

He said, addressing me: "Are you free to travel?"

"Possibly. I don't seem to do much else."

"When could you meet me in Paris?" he asked, brisk now, a businessman.

"Tomorrow."

"No. Next week. Thursday. Ritz bar. Rue Cambon side. One-fifteen."

The heiress sighed into the banquette's goose-stuffed brocades. "Poor boy," she said, and tapped curving, slavishly lacquered apricot nails against a champagne glass, a signal for the Senegalese servant to lift her, lift her away up blue-tiled stairs to firelit chambets where Morpheus, always a mischief-maker to the frantic, the insulted, but especially to the rich and powerful, joyfully awaited a game of hide-and-seek.

I sold a sapphire ring, also a gift from De

On Thursday, at one-fifteen precisely, I walked into the Ritz bar still toting Mutt in her canvas satchel, for she had refused to remain behind in the cheap hotel room we had moved into on the rue du Bac. Aces Nelson, slick-haired and gleamingly good-humored, was waiting for us at a corner table.

He patted the dog and said: "Well. I'm surprised. I didn't really think you'd show up."

All I said was: "This had better be good."

Georges, the head bartender at the Ritz, is a daiquiri specialist. I ordered a double daiquiri, so did Aces, and while they were being concocted, Aces asked: "What do you know about Kate McCloud?"

I shrugged. "Just what I read in the junk papers. Very handy with a rifle. Isn't she the one who shot a white leopard?"

"No," he said thoughtfully. "She was on safari in India, and she shot a man for killing a white leopard—not fatally, fortunately."

The drinks appeared, and we drank them without another word between us, except Mutt's intermittent yaps. A good daiquiri is smoothly tart and slightly sweet; a bad one is a vial of acid. Georges knew the difference. So we ordered another, and Aces said: "Kate has an apartment here in the hotel, and after we've talked I want you to meet her. She's expecting us. But first I want to tell you about her. Would you like a sandwich?"

We ordered plain chicken sandwiches, the only variety available in the Ritz bar, Cambon side. Aces said: "I had a roommate at Choate—Harry McCloud. His mother was an Otis from Baltimore, and his father owned a lot of Virginia—specifically, he owned a big spread in Middleburg, where he bred hunting horses.

Harry was very intense, a very competitive and jealous guy. But anybody as rich as he was, and as good-looking, athletic—you don't hear many complaints. Everybody took him for a regular guy, except for this one strange thing—whenever the guys started bullshitting about sex, girls they'd laid, wanted to lay, all that stuff, well, Harry kept his mouth shut. The whole two years we roomed together he never had a date, never mentioned a girl. Some of the guys said maybe Harry's queer. But I just knew that wasn't the case. It was a real mystery. Finally, the week before graduation, we got loaded on a bunch of beer—ah, sweet seventeen—and I asked if all his family were coming for the graduation, and he said: 'My brother is. And Mom and Dad.' Then I said: 'What about your girl friend? But I forgot. You don't have a girl friend.' He looked at me for the longest while, as if he were trying to decide whether to hit me or ignore me. At last he smiled; it was the fiercest smile I ever saw on a human face. I can't explain, but it stu

"Most secrets should never be told, but especially those that are more menacing to the listener than to the teller; I felt Harry would turn against me for having coaxed, or shall I say permitted, his confession. But once started, there was no surcease. He was incoherent, the incoherency of the obsessed: the girl's father, a Mr. Mooney, was an Irish immigrant, a real bog rat from County Kildare, the hand groom at the McClouds' Middleburg farm. The girl, that's Kate, was one of five children, all girls, and all eyesores. Except for the youngest, Kate. 'The first time I saw her—well, noticed her—she was six, seven. All the Mooney kids had red hair. But her hair. Even all scissored up. Like a tomboy. She was a great rider. She could urge a horse into jumps that made your heart thump. And she had green eyes. Not just green. I can't explain it.'

"The senior McClouds had two sons, Harry and a younger boy, Wy