Answered Prayers

Miss Bankhead said: "Damn it, Dottie. Who do you think you are? Helen Keller?"

"He's so beautiful," murmured Miss Parker. "Sensitive. So finely made. The most beautiful young man I've ever seen. What a pity he's a cocksucker." Then, sweetly, wide-eyed with little girl naiveté, she said: "Oh. Oh dear. Have I said something wrong? I mean, he is a cocksucker, isn't he, Tallulah?"

Miss Bankhead said: "Well, d-d-darling, I r-r-really wouldn't know. He's never sucked my cock."

I couldn't keep my eyes open; it was very boring, Red River, and the odor of latrine disinfectant was chloroforming me. I needed a drink, and I found one in an Irish bar at 38th Street and Eighth Avenue. It was almost closing time, but a jukebox was still going and a sailor was dancing to it all by himself. I ordered a triple gin. As I opened my wallet, a card fell out of it. A white business card containing a man's name, address, and telephone number: Roger W. Appleton Farms, Box 711, Lancaster, Pa. Tel: 905-537-1070.1 stared at the card, wondering how it had come into in my possession. Appleton? A long swallow of gin brightened my memory. Appleton. Of course. We had a Self Service client, one of the few I could recall pleasantly. We had spent an hour together in his room at the Yale Club; an older man, but weathered, strong, well-built, and with a handshake that was a real bone-cruncher. A nice guy, very open—he had told me a lot about himself: after his first wife died, he had married a much younger woman, and they lived on the lands of a rolling farm filled with fruit trees and roaming cows and narrow tumbling creeks. He had given me his card and told me to call him up and come for a visit any time. Embraced by self-pity, emboldened by alcohol, and totally forgetful of the fact that it must be three in the morning, I asked the bartender to give me five dollars' worth of quarters.

"Sorry, so

"Please. This is an emergency. I've got to make a long-distance call."

Counting out the money, he said: "Whoever she is, she ain't worth it."

After I had dialed the number, an operator requested an additional four dollars. The phone rang half a dozen times before a woman's voice, deep and slow with sleep, responded.

"Hello. Is Mr. Appleton there?"

She hesitated. "Yes. But he's asleep. But if it's something important…"

"No. It's nothing important."

"May I ask who's callin?"

"Just tell him… just say a friend called. His friend from across the River Styx."

But to return to that winter afternoon in Paris when I first met Kate McCloud. There we were, the three of us—myself, my young mongrel dog, Mutt, and Aces Nelson, all clumped together inside one of those little silk-lined Ritz elevators.

We rode to the top floor, disembarked there, and as we walked along the corridor lined with old-fashioned steamer trunks, Aces said: "Of course, she doesn't know the real reason why I'm bringing you here…"

"If it comes to that, neither do I!"

"All I said was that I'd found this wonderful masseur. You see, for the last year she's been suffering from a back ailment. She's gone from doctor to doctor, here and in America. Some say it's a slipped disc, or a spinal fusion, but most agree it's psychosomatic, a maladie imaginaire. But the problem is…" His voice hovered.

"Is?"

"But I told you. Just now. While we were having drinks in the bar."

Segments of our conversation replayed inside my head. At present, Kate McCloud was the estranged wife of Axel Jaeger, a German industrialist and allegedly one of the world's richest men. Earlier, when she was sixteen, she had been married to the son of a rich Virginia horse breeder for whom her Irish father had worked as a trainer. That marriage had ended on very well-founded grounds of mental cruelty. Subsequently she had moved to Paris, and over the years, became a goddess of the fashion press; Kate McCloud on a bearhunt in Alaska, on a safari in Africa, at a Rothschild ball, at the Grand Prix with Princess Grace, on a yacht with Stavros Niarchos.

"The problem is…" Aces fumbled. "It's as I told you, she is in danger. And she needs… well, someone to be with her. A bodyguard."

"Hell, why don't we just sell her Mutt?"

"Please," he said. "This isn't humorous."

Those were the truest words old Aces had ever spoken. If only I could have foreseen the labyrinth he was leading me into when a black woman opened the door. She wore a smart black pants suit with numerous gold chains twisted around her neck and wrists. Her mouth was loaded with gold, too; her denture looked less like teeth than an investment. She had curly white hair and a round, unlined face. Asked to guess her age, I would have said forty-five, forty-six; later, I learned she was a child-bride.

"Cori

"Never felt better, and never had less."

"P. B., this is Cori

Cori

"Pboebe?"

"Had to put her down. Same as they will me someday soon. But don't mention it to her. It'll just set her off again. Have mercy, I never saw a grown person cry that bad. Come along, she's waiting for you." Then, lowering her voice, she added: "That Mme. Apfeldorf is with her."

Aces grimaced; he looked at me as if about to speak, but there was no need; I'd leafed through enough Vogue's and ParisMatch's to know who Perla Apfeldorf was. The wife of a very racist South African platinum tycoon, she was as much a figure of the worldly milieu as Kate McCloud. She was Brazilian, and privately-though this was something I discovered later-her friends called her the Black Duchess, suggesting she was not of the pure Portuguese descent she claimed, but a child of Rio's favelos, born with quite a bit of the tarbrush which, if true, was rather a joke on the Hitlerian Herr Apfeldorf.

The apartment snuggled under the eaves of the hotel; the rooms, all dominated by large round dormer windows overlooking the Place Vendôme, were identical in size; originally they had been used as individual servant's rooms, but Kate McCloud had strung six of them together and decorated each for a particular purpose. The effect, overall, was like a railroad flat in a luxurious tenement.

"Miss Kate? The gentlemen are here."

And, magically, there we were inside Kate McCloud's bedroom. "Aces. Angel." She was perched on the side of a bed brushing her hair. "Will you have some tea? Perla's having some. Or a liqueur? No? Then I shall. Cori

"Well," said Mme. Apfeldorf, who had slicked-black hair shiny as a crow's and a voice with a crowlike croak, "I hope he's better than that sadistic little Japanese Mona sent my way. I'll never trust Mona again. Not that I ever did. You wouldn't believe what happened! He made me lie naked on the floor and then, in his bare feet, he stood on my neck, walked up and down my back, positively danced. The agony "

"Oh, Perla," said Kate McCloud pityingly. "What do you know about agony? I've just spent a week at St. Moritz and never saw a pair of skis. Never left my room except to visit Heinie. just lay there munching Doridens and praying. Aces," she said, handing him a silver frame that had been standing on a table near her bed, "here's a new picture of Heinie. Isn't he lovely?"