The Claimant Read online

  Dedication

  For Cliff

  my first and best reader

  my toughest and most astute critic

  Epigraph

  You’re born, you know, the wrong names, wrong parents. I mean, that happens. You call yourself what you want to call yourself. This is the land of the free.

  Singer/songwriter Bob Dylan,

  born Shabtai ben Zisel Avraham Zimmerman

  Now, if a man’s subject is deception, you are deceived if you think you grasp his meaning …

  Hilary Mantel

  Prince Wen Hui’s cook was cutting up an ox.

  ‘Good work!’ the Prince exclaimed. ‘Your method is faultless.’

  ‘What I follow is Tao,’ the cook said.

  ‘My cleaver finds its own way.

  I cut through no joint, chop no bone.

  A good cook needs a new chopper once a year – he cuts.

  A poor cook needs a new one every month – he hacks!

  I have used this same cleaver nineteen years …’

  Prince Wen Hui said, ‘My cook has shown me

  How I ought to live my own life.’

  Chuang Tzu; trans. Thomas Merton

  CONTENTS

  COVER

  TITLE PAGE

  DEDICATION

  EPIGRAPH

  BOOK I: CALL ME MARLOWE

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  BOOK II: CAPUCINE

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  BOOK III: THE COLLECTED LIVES OF PETIT LOUP

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  BOOK IV: THE GOLDBERG VARIATIONS

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  BOOK V: DAYBORO

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  BOOK VI: IDENTITY: A MELODRAMA IN MULTIPLE ACTS

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  EPILOGUE: CHRISTOPHER FARM

  AUTHOR’S NOTE: THE CLAIMANT: BEHIND THE GATES

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  BY THE SAME AUTHOR

  COPYRIGHT

  BOOK I

  CALL ME MARLOWE

  1.

  In the week of the sequestering of the jury in the trial of the Vanderbilt claimant, you could not go into a bar anywhere on the Upper West Side of Manhattan or in Midtown or anywhere south of 34th Street without hearing heated opinions, pro and con. This happened, however, a long time ago in a time warp so far away that the trial and the tumult probably trigger nothing in public memory. The past is never dead, it’s not even past, Faulkner claimed, but the recent past is a different matter entirely. The recent past is beyond excavation and beyond archaeological interest until the far future arrives. Schoolchildren do not believe in the nineties, that quaint tail-end of the last century, the Twin Towers still standing, no Facebook, no YouTube, no Twitter. Their eyes glaze over.

  Cell phones did exist, as did email and the World Wide Web, but people actually kept their landlines and answering machines back then. They read newspapers and listened to radio and watched the evening news on TV. To hear music, they played CDs. Looking back across almost two decades, it is difficult even for me to reconstruct that era or to think of the brouhaha of the trial and its aftermath as anything other than a slightly absurd melodrama, though the consequences for me personally were far from benign.

  Nevertheless, in the third week of October 1996, the week of the sequestering of the jury, I had a very particular interest in the judicial proceedings and I read everything from the New York Times to the tabloids. I watched the gamut of televised coverage from intellectual PBS to the just-launched cable channel FOX with its tabloid sound bites, its twenty-four-hour ‘news’ coverage, and its fixation on the sordid. (Its owner understood one thing well: nothing spikes ratings faster than scandal and sleaze.) I was an equal-opportunity listener. I have a talent for picking up the significant tips of public conversation and tuning in, a skill that has been crucial to both my careers. Of course, I also had access to information not available to the general public, not available to journalists, not available to jury pools or judges.

  In the week of the sequestering of the jury in that sensational trial, I could not go anywhere in Manhattan without hearing burning opinions. North of 120th Street the topic was dangerous. On Amsterdam Avenue after dark, in watering holes crowded with hospital orderlies, bus drivers, janitors and short-order cooks, the mere utterance of the name Vanderbilt could trigger fistfights, smashed bottles, sometimes gunshots.

  Why?

  One faction, vehemently pro-claimant, loathed the Vanderbilts on principle for their arrogant refusal to believe that a man who actually worked for a living could be one of them: a man who worked as a butcher – a butcher! – a man not only engaged in physical labour but physical labour of the lowest and most degraded sort, the kind that splashed the worker with blood and guts.

  Another faction, more cynical, saw the whole affair as business as usual for the Vanderbilts and their kind. The trial, in their view, was just one more well-funded family whitewash of a history of rapacious greed and conspicuous consumption, one more way to drum up national attention and free tourist publicity for the Vanderbilt castle in North Carolina, one more opportunity to keep the maintenance workers and garden crews and household staff at the Biltmore chateau on minimum wage. Don’t play into their hands, this faction said. The trial is nothing but a publicity stunt and the claimant is their own straw man put together by the family lawyers. Ignore the whole circus.

  Sirens – police and ambulance – thickened the night (not, of course, that this was or is unusual for the neighbourhoods east of Amsterdam and north of Central Park).

  The trial was discussed with equal ardour in hotel lounges on Fifth Avenue and along Madison and Park, where partisan alignment was more predictable. In such immaculate spaces, needless to say, civility was never transgressed and disagreements were deferential in tone. Everyone concurred that the Vanderbilts had always been notorious for interfamilial litigation of the most astonishingly vicious sort – between parent and child, between spouse and ex, between siblings – and much anecdotal evidence and embroidered memories were wittily exchanged as proof.

  The trial had been in process for over a year without attracting any particular attention beyond gossip in the upper social circles of New York, but
the claimant’s testimony in court in March 1996 set off an explosion of public curiosity and investigative media zeal. When the countess died of a shock-induced stroke just weeks after the claimant made his spectacular appearance, the line-graph of public attention shot up like a fly ball and just hovered there, suspended high in the air for week after week as the legal arguments dragged on, until the next updraft (the closeting of the jury) blew it out of the stadium. Everyone’s eye was on that seductive and tantalising fly ball, which kept rising and rising until the verdict sucked it into the stratosphere.

  The countess (a Vanderbilt widow) had insisted that the heir was alive and that the claimant was her long-lost son; the rest of the extensive Vanderbilt family and its lawyers were equally insistent that he was not. The core questions, all over Manhattan, were the same.

  Was the claimant a fraud?

  Was he a hoax?

  Did he even exist apart from a single brief video-interview that had been shown in court and partially reproduced in stills in newspapers? (Now, of course, it is available on YouTube to anyone who types ‘Vanderbilt claimant’ into a search engine.)

  The relevant question at the time: Was there any kind of proof that the speaker in the video was actually the claimant, let alone any proof that the claimant was the actual heir?

  The man in the video was good-looking and muscular. He was wearing an Akubra hat (the Australian version, though rather more stylish, of the cowboy’s Stetson), a denim shirt and faded jeans. Behind him: green pasture and cattle, a loop of river. He wore riding boots and was leaning against his horse, the reins loose in his hands. Any actor could have been paid by the countess or by her lawyers to act the part. Whatever his origins, the lawyers for the Vanderbilt family argued that he could in no way be the refined and reserved intellectual son of the late Lawrence Gwynne Vanderbilt, whose only child (or rather, whose only acknowledged and legitimate child), a Harvard graduate summa cum laude, had been tragically lost in Vietnam.

  On the other hand, even the family lawyers were at a loss to explain why Gwynne Patrice Vanderbilt, that brilliant student, an activist anti-war protestor of the 1960s, had suddenly and inexplicably enlisted in the infantry and been shipped to Vietnam in ’69.

  Court testimony provided further confusion. There were witnesses for the defence who swore they had known the claimant at Harvard. ‘We were same year, class of ’68,’ one witness – now a celebrity TV journalist – declared. ‘We both took a class in American political history in senior year. What I mean is, Gwynne Vanderbilt, the real one, was in my year, and I recognise something about the claimant’s eyes that doesn’t completely rule out the possibility … Also, he was a wicked mimic – he could do professors, LBJ, Johnny Carson – so, you know, that Australian accent doesn’t throw me. It’s within his range.

  ‘He certainly didn’t come across as a wealthy man and I never even thought of him as one of those Vanderbilts, especially since no family showed up for his graduation. I remember that because I thought it was rather sad. Only his girlfriend came. He told me his father had no interest whatsoever in achievements unrelated to stock portfolios, horseracing or hunting, and that his mother had not come for fear that his father would be there. There was a history of family acrimony made all the worse by the total impossibility of divorce. His mother was Catholic, he said. Devout to the nth degree.

  ‘He always had this gaunt haunted look, so we figured he was one of us, back then. You know, keeping himself going on nothing except what he inhaled, worrying about the draft and about dying. Would we go or would we march? I know Vanderbilt went and never came back. Well, at least, we believed he never came back. He was officially declared Missing in Action but I do think it’s possible – or at least not impossible – that the claimant could be the heir.’

  ‘Physically, I wouldn’t have recognised him,’ another witness said, ‘but hey, you wouldn’t know me from my college yearbook photo either. I took a course he was teaching in fall ’68, when I was an undergrad at Boston College. We knew him as McVie but I remember hearing that he was really a Vanderbilt who’d legally changed his name as some sort of political penance. The rumour was that he was studying to become a priest.

  ‘Speaking for myself, I never believed the Vanderbilt rumour. It was certainly my opinion at the time that he was blue-collar Boston Irish, like me, like all of us at Boston College. We knew he had a Harvard degree, so I figured he must have been a scholarship kid, which is the sort of thing that marks you as an outsider at Harvard. I really have no significant evidence one way or the other as to whether or not McVie was a Vanderbilt, but I do think the claimant on the video is McVie. Or could be McVie.’

  Someone who had been at prep school and at Harvard with the young Gwynne Vanderbilt – and had known him as such – testified that his former fellow-student had gone off the rails in the late sixties, in his sophomore or junior year at Harvard, to be more precise. ‘There was a Vanderbilt and a McVie in my year at prep school, I can swear to that. McVie was a scholarship student from inner Boston, Irish-gangster turf. He was a complete outsider and he kept to himself. As you’d expect, none of us knew him and we didn’t associate with him. In fact, there isn’t even a photograph of McVie in our yearbook, just a silhouette outline. God only knows what that means. But he and Vanderbilt became friends, no one understood why. McVie was killed in Vietnam and the rumour was that Vanderbilt was unhinged by his death. At any rate, in retrospect, that’s what pulled the trigger, I think,’ this witness, now a hedge-fund manager, said. ‘We parted company in all senses because I never had any time for that anti-war flag-burning stuff, but Vanderbilt, he got high on the rabble. It was a phase, you know, with quite a few of my friends. Preppies slumming it, getting arrested, big thrill. It was the trendy thing to do back then.

  ‘Some of them fell by the wayside, fried their brains on dope and never climbed back out, but most of us had no intention of losing our student deferment. No way we were planning close encounters of the terminal kind with the Viet Cong. And we all sobered up as soon as we went on the market. We were just as patriotic as the guys drafted into Viet Cong fodder, but there are different ways of being patriotic, and keeping the economy firing on all cylinders is one of those.

  ‘To be honest, I have colleagues on Wall Street who keep posters of Che Guevara in their pool-table rooms. They joke about it, but they can still get maudlin after a few martinis.

  ‘At prep school, Vanderbilt was pretty much normal, a bit stand-offish, a bit of a loner, but most of the intellectual set were like that. A lot of the boys found him intimidating, because he had this obsession with moral philosophy and Augustine and the Just War theory and all that, which, you know, doesn’t go down so well in the locker room after a cross-country run.

  ‘One thing most of us found a bit off was the way he hung out with McVie and the full scholarship boys. Not that any of us had anything against the scholarship boys, don’t get me wrong, but socially, you know, they were just not our kind.

  ‘Come to think of it, Vanderbilt never seemed to be quite our kind either and maybe that explains things. Senior year at Harvard I heard he was trying to pass himself off as blue-collar instead of blue-blood. I suppose that’s why he enlisted, which dumbfounded us all. It was typical over-the-top sixties do-gooder posturing, pure gesture, bonding with boots on the ground, completely unnecessary and very stupid. Never understood it, but one thing I do understand and can state with absolute certainty: the claimant is not the student I knew at Dryden Academy and at Harvard. Doesn’t look remotely like him, doesn’t sound like him, and doesn’t act like him. There was always something solitary and nerdy about Vanderbilt. He was Catholic for one thing, and we never got too many of those at Dryden. And he liked playing chess and listening to Bach, for God’s sake.’

  The claimant was supposedly born in New York to one of the richest and most powerful Protestant families in America, but he was French and Catholic on his mother’s side and of aristocratic lineage, offsprin
g of a line of erotic and sumptuous extramarital beddings that stretched back to Louis XIV. He grew up in a village in France – in the chateau that dominated a cluster of vineyards – and was fluent in French.

  No. He was Australian and sounded Australian. When he opened his mouth, the muddy diphthongs of Crocodile Dundee oozed out, sluggish as the chocolate custard left behind by a river after floods.

  No. He was a blue-collar American who enlisted in December 1968, just before Christmas, was promptly shipped off to basic training at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, then to a short advanced training stint in California, and then to Vietnam, after which he was either killed, or was Missing in Action, or was protected by South Vietnamese villagers who became boat people and eventually made their way to Australia, or he was evacuated to the Philippines after the fall of Saigon in 1975, after which he made his way to Australia, perhaps with the dog tags and ID of a fallen Aussie soldier whom he may perhaps have tried to save or may have killed.

  Of the few things known for certain, one was that at the time of being purportedly located by the Vanderbilt lawyers, the claimant was a cattleman and a butcher in a small town in Queensland, Australia. He had been there since the mid-seventies and was going by the name of Christy McLew, accepted by locals as prototypical Irish-Australian.

  WOULD THE REAL CLAIMANT PLEASE STAND UP? ran the tabloid headlines. WHICH PERSONA IS THE ACTUAL FAKE?

  Was it just possible, some op-ed writers surmised, that he was the genuine article, an authentic offshoot of the vast and branchy Vanderbilt tree, so many of whose saplings sprouted from serial nuptials, rogue dalliances and dangerous forays into weed patches beyond the walls of family estates? When Vanderbilt sowers went forth to sow, they scattered their seed as lavishly as they scattered their fortunes. If even the family could not keep track, how could the lawyers?

  In short: Would the jury award the claimant a lavish penthouse on Fifth Avenue with a view of Central Park, a mansion on Long Island (a mansion in need of repairs and under a certain degree of duress from several banks and a mortgage company), a lifetime annuity, title to the Vanderbilt widow’s chateau in the Loire Valley and legal entitlement to the name?