Answered Prayers

"Suddenly I said: 'Are you a good skier?' And she said: 'I might have been. But Harry was always dragging me to this horrible place in Canada. Gray Rocks. Thirty below zero. He loved it because everybody was so ugly. Aces, this drink is a marvelous discovery. I feel a decided thawing in my veins.'

"Then I said: 'How would you like to spend Christmas with me in St. Moritz?' And she wanted to know: 'Is that a platonic invitation?' I crossed my heart. 'We'll stay at the Palace. On floors as far apart as you like.' She laughed and said: 'The answer is yes. But only if you'll buy me another Verveine.'

"That was six years ago—Lord, all the blood that's flowed under the bridge since then. But that first Christmas in St. Moritz! Really, the young Mrs. McCloud from Middleburg, Virginia, was one of the most important things that had happened in Switzerland since Ha

"In any event, she was a fabulous skier—as good as Doris Bry

"And anyway, I didn't aspire to be her lover. But a friend; a brother, perhaps. We used to go for snowy walks in the white forests around St. Moritz. She often talked about the McClouds and how good they'd been to her and to her sisters, the homely Mooney girls. But she avoided Harry's name, and when she did speak of him the references were casual, though bitter-tinted—until one afternoon, as we were strolling around the frozen lake beneath the palace, a passing sled horse slipped on the ice and fell and broke its front legs.

"Kate screamed. A scream you could have heard the length of the valley. She started to run, and ran straight into another sled that was rounding the corner. She wasn't physically wounded, but she went into a hysterical coma-she was virtually unconscious until we got her to the hotel. Mr. Badrutt had a doctor waiting. The doctor gave her an injection that seemed to start her heart again, refocus her eyes. He wanted to order a nurse, but I said no, I would stay with her. So we put her to bed, and he gave her another piqûre, one that totally erased all trace of terror; and it was then I realized that swimming below the soigné surface, there had always been a fearful, drowning child.

"I lowered the lights, and she said please don't leave me, and I said I'm not leaving, I'm going to sit here, and she said no, I want you to lie down here beside me on the bed, so I did, and we held hands and she said: 'I'm sorry. It was because of the horse. The one that fell on the ice. I'd always wanted a palomino, and Mrs. McCloud gave me one on my birthday two years ago, a mare—such a great hunter, so brave-hearted; we had such fun together. Naturally, Harry hated her; it was all part of his crazy-man jealousy, the way he'd felt toward me since we were children. Once, the summer after we were married, he tore up a flower garden I'd planted; at first he said it was a fox, but then he admitted he had done it: he said the garden took up too much of my attention. And that was why he didn't want me to have a baby; his mother was always bringing up the subject, and one Sunday at di

A hundred nights he shook me and woke me up, holding a knife at my throat-and he'd say: "Don't lie to me, you slut, you whore, on nigger-fucker. Admit it, or I'll cut your throat from ear to ear. I'll slice your head off. Tell the truth. Wy

"But you know," said Aces, "she did marry. And less than a month later."

Yes: I was remembering a mass of magazine covers at Paris kiosks: Der Stern, Paris Match, Elle. "Of course. She married…?"

"Axel Jaeger. The richest man in Germany."

"And she has since divorced Herr Jaeger?"

"Not exactly. That's one of the reasons I wanted you to meet her. She's in considerable danger. She needs protection. She also needs a masseur who can travel with her permanently. Someone educated. Presentable."

"I'm not educated."

He shrugged and glanced at his watch. "May I ring her now and say we're on our way up?"

I should have listened to Mutt; she whined, as if warning me. Instead, I let myself be led off to meet Kate McCloud. Kate, for whom I would lie, steal, commit crimes that could have, and still could, put me in prison for life.

A weather change; showers—an enlivening spray dispelling Manhattan's heat-wave stench. Not that anything could ever get rid of the jockstrap and Lysol aromas here at my beloved Y. M. C. A. I slept till noon, then called The Self Service to cancel a six P. M. booking they had made for me with some john staying at the Yale Club. But the sun-kissed bitch, the golden Butch, said: "Are you gaga? This is a C-note gig. A Benjy Franklin with no problems." When I still demurred ("Honest, Butch, I've got a blue-balls headache"), he put Miss Self herself on the phone, and she gave me a real Buchenwald, Ilse Koch castigation ("Ali, so? You want to work? You don't want? Dilettantes we don't need!").

Okay, okay. I showered, shaved, and arrived at the Yale Club with a button-down collar, clipped hair, discreet, not fat, not femme, aged between thirty and forty, fairly well-hung and well-ma

He seemed pleased with me; and it was no hassle—a reclining labor, shuttered eyes, occasionally a spurious appreciative grunt as one fantasized toward the obligatory spasm ("Don't hold back. Let me have it").

The "patron," to use Miss Self's terminology, was hearty, balding, hard as a walnut, a man in his middle sixties, married, with five children and eighteen grandchildren. A widower, he had married his secretary, someone twenty years younger, perhaps a decade ago. He was a retired insurance executive who owned a farm near Lancaster, Pe