The Claimant Read online

  The lawyers for the countess, therefore, considered it essential that her son return to claim his inheritance and to establish legal title, after which he would be free either to sell the properties or to gift them to his mother, but Christy McLew remained either unreachable or immune to persuasion.

  As for the countess, the medical verdict was stroke. This affected her ability to speak and paralysed one side of her body. She was discharged and provided with round-the-clock nursing care. A few weeks later, she died in her own four-poster bed.

  Legally speaking, after the death of la comtesse, the defendant was now her estate.

  In the Oyster Bar, Marlowe says, ‘You know the cattleman, don’t you? The two of you are in on this scam together.’

  ‘How is it a scam when he stated his absolute lack of interest in the Vanderbilt will?’

  ‘Cunning, that. A well-known ploy of Masters of the Game. So what’s your strategy?’

  Lilith stares at Marlowe until he drops his eyes and studies his glass of whiskey and his coaster. ‘I am asked this, quite seriously,’ she says, ‘by someone who pursued and married a Vanderbilt?’

  ‘I didn’t pursue her,’ Marlowe says. ‘Quite the contrary, as a matter of fact. But you obviously have an intense interest in the outcome of this trial, or you wouldn’t be here. If the claimant loses the case, as he will, there’ll be an appeal. When the legal surrogates find him and interrogate him in Australia, he’ll seem to know the sort of private detail that only a son (or the lover of someone intimate with the Vanderbilt family) could know. So then, if the appeal decides in his favour, you split the proceeds, right?’

  ‘Lucifer, talking to you is like talking to someone from outer space.’

  ‘You haven’t answered my question.’

  ‘There’s no point. We don’t speak the same language.’

  ‘I think I read you and the claimant rather well,’ Marlowe says.

  ‘You don’t, but I do read you. At least in your public life, Lucifer – the above-ground one, and the above-ground part of that one – you’re a wealthy man and a weirdly successful broker. Your returns are uncanny, which any sane person would consider a serious warning sign. The rich and famous flock to you; you make them feel richer and safer. So. You didn’t marry Celise Vanderbilt for her money because you don’t need it. Why did you marry her?’

  Marlowe closes his eyes and tries to recall why he married Celise.

  Lilith, however, carries on. ‘The answer’s obvious: you married her as a way to escape your Southern self which still embarrasses you. Celise was your portal to the Upper East Side, where you never felt you’d really arrived.’

  ‘Lilith.’ Elbows on bar, Marlowe rests his head on his hands. ‘I never needed to arrive because I was always here. Southerners have always known, deep in their bones, that they are superior to anyone north of the Mason–Dixon line. There is no such thing as not needing money or as having enough of it. It’s about being a Master of the Game. I compete only with myself and I never stop raising the bar. You entirely miss the point. What I’m trying to figure out is what is your point, and what was McVie’s?’

  For a full half-minute, Lilith studies Marlowe closely, seriously, an expression of bewilderment on her face. ‘It’s not translatable,’ she says at last.

  ‘Okay,’ Marlowe says, ‘let’s be blunt. No one changes their name and skips two countries for innocent reasons, so I know there’s something devious going on. I want to know what it is. I’m speaking as one master player to another.’

  ‘We’re not playing the same game, Lucifer. And do try to remember that the claimant, as you persist in calling him, is not the defendant and not on trial. Your wife’s next in line once the heir is declared officially dead or dismissed as a fraud, a calculation I’m sure you’ve both made. The probable verdict should make you deliriously happy.’

  ‘That is a slander.’

  ‘Intended.’

  Marlowe is so visibly agitated that the bartender appears, refill in hand. ‘You want another?’ he asks.

  ‘Yes,’ Marlowe says. ‘Jack Daniel’s.’ He pushes his empty glass away so violently that it falls to the floor and rises as a small cloud of glittering shards.

  ‘Jesus,’ the bartender says. ‘Not again. You don’t get another one.’

  ‘Give him one. He needs it. I’ll get him out of here safely,’ Lilith promises.

  ‘McVie was a Master of the Game,’ Marlowe says. ‘As McVie he was good, very good, fooled me for months. Never fooled me as Boston Irish, but it did take me a while to realise he was a Vanderbilt. One thing is crystal clear though: he certainly has nothing to do with this clown of a cow hand in Australia.’

  ‘Then it’s a win-win all round, isn’t it? The jury is bound to agree. So you’re happy, your wife is happy, I’m happy, the ghost of McVie would be happy.’ She reaches in front of him, picks up his glass, raises it in a toast, and drains his newly refilled whiskey. ‘To your winning,’ she says. ‘And to Celise. To what you have brought upon yourselves.’ She reaches for her own champagne glass and drains it. ‘I shouldn’t be drinking so much but it’s been a long wait. Nice seeing you again.’

  ‘Wait,’ he says. But by the time he reaches 42nd Street, she is inside a taxi.

  3.

  To go back to the beginning, Lilith’s version.

  This is actually, of course, my version – which is to say, Marlowe’s version – of Lilith’s version, and therefore suspect, but this is a variorum edition. I have tried to be scrupulous about integrating all her switchback redactions and flourishes, all of McVie’s annotations and interpolations and refutations, all those overheard snippets of their conversation that no doubt I imperfectly recall.

  I also have the advantage of hindsight and of truckloads of excavation by media grand inquisitors. In the wake of the trial, and especially in the wake of the death of the countess, investigative research spread like a windstorm of wildfires. Journalists had Pulitzers in their sights. I learned more about Lilith and McVie from the New Yorker and the New York Times and the less reputable papers than I knew when I used to see them every day. I clipped all those articles and kept them. I have them with me in here. Some of them, no doubt – especially the tabloid screeds – were fleshed out with conjectural detail. But I also have access to classified information that the press has never seen. Some of this came from files on sensitive geopolitical issues, but much more came from the exhaustive and meticulous research carried out by my wife, Celise, for her own personal and inscrutable reasons, and kept by her under encrypted lock and key in a secret computer file that I discovered purely by chance. At least, at the time I believed I had found it by chance. From this distance in years and location, I know better. Celise left nothing to chance. Looking back I can see I was meant to break the seal. Discovering that file was like stepping off a cliff into nothing. I stopped breathing, my hands shook, my vision blurred. Discovering that file saved my life – I mean that in the quite literal sense – even though the intention was otherwise, entirely otherwise. It was meant to unnerve me and it did. It was meant to make me afraid that Lilith was marked for erasure, and it did. It was meant to set in motion the unravelling of my investment career, which it did, but that was a downward spiral for which Celise can only tangentially be held accountable. Certainly her lavish and profligate spending did not help, but she was squandering a virtual fortune, not a real one, and though she instigated the whispers and the media innuendos and pulled the threads that began my unravelling, even I can’t accuse her of the demolition of the cloudy cumulus skyscraper of my stupendous imaginary wealth. That was inevitable, though I will admit I had actually come to believe I could keep walking on water forever.

  Nevertheless. My encryption contacts can also decrypt. They can hack into any computer and pull passwords out of the air. That is how I came to read the trove of exchanges between Celise and her own high-priced lawyers and to follow the trail of her informants from Australia to St Gilles. And what my wife
had learned and recorded about the lives of Lilith and McVie was astonishing.

  Perhaps in conflating these multiple sources of information I embellish from time to time. Some gaps in the narrative I fill in by intuition. Sometimes I have let contradictions stand. Other times, for valid aesthetic reasons, I have reshaped them into orderly narrative structure. Beauty is truth, truth beauty, we all know that, we were all force-fed Keats in prep school. As to the boundary lines between truth (i.e. received perceptions of reality) and beauty (i.e. subjective sensory ordering of the aesthetic), I leave that to the moral philosophers.

  There was a certain recurrent debate that Lilith and McVie engaged in from time to time, though only when they were so involved in their discussion that they were oblivious to nearby listeners, most of whom, in any case, were strangers in bars. (As for myself, I became addicted to the role of unnoticed eavesdropper.) Actually, debate is not quite the right word for what they engaged in; it was more like a weirdly competitive recounting of dreams or of vague memories of dreams or of invented dreams or perhaps merely of fantasies. Conflict was at the heart of these exchanges but I had the impression that each of them wanted to be proved definitively right or wrong.

  If I am to accept the splinters of evidence from these curious exchanges (and also the evidence filched from the investigative zeal of others: court briefs, journalists, my wife’s encrypted file), they were probably around five years old when they met for the first time (though Lilith was possibly a year older than whoever McVie was at that time) and he was the strangest boy-child she had ever seen. This happened in the village of St Gilles, about two hours south-west of Paris in the wine-growing district of the valley of the Vienne, a tributary of the Loire. The children met in the courtyard of the Château de Boissy, whose decaying stone wall was once part of the medieval keep that surrounded the entire village back in the thirteenth century, twelfth century, even earlier perhaps. Parts of the ancient rampart were still standing and where such fragments remained they were put to good use and recycled as the back walls of houses that might have been as adolescent as the sixteenth century.

  I sometimes believe that McVie and Lilith created an entire fictional childhood history for themselves, for what psychological reasons only their analysts (if they ever had any) would know. My own guess is that they needed to believe that their lives were mythically intertwined. McVie’s sick reasons would have died with him in a rice paddy in Vietnam, but long before that, in the courtyard of the Château de Boissy, the strange boy-child spoke imperiously. ‘You are not allowed in here.’ He spoke like someone with a plum in his mouth, or like a boy who was sucking on a lemon, not at all like a normal boy. His French was strange, foreign-sounding, very uppity, like the French of the doctor from Paris who spent weekends at his country house in St Gilles. There was a village joke about that doctor. He had complained to the neighbouring farm about their cock, which invariably crowed at dawn, well before the doctor wished to be awoken at his country retreat. The doctor had filed a lawsuit against his neighbour. The farmer in question had suggested, before the village magistrate, that the lawsuit should be filed against his rooster. The case had dragged on, unresolved, for several years. The boy sounded like the doctor, much mimicked in the local tavern by the farmers of St Gilles.

  The boy pointed to the arched gate in the high stone wall. ‘You have to stay outside the gate.’

  ‘Why are you wearing a dress?’ the girl asked.

  ‘Go,’ he said, pointing.

  ‘I won’t go.’

  ‘Maman says you are not allowed inside the gate. If you come inside, we’ll set the dogs onto you.’

  The girl laughed at him. ‘The dogs know me. Me and the dogs are friends.’

  ‘You are not allowed inside the wall.’

  ‘I live here. Where do you live?’

  ‘I live in the chateau,’ the boy said, gesturing back at the gabled and turreted facade.

  ‘Nobody lives in the chateau. Nobody’s lived there since the war except for the dogs, but my father has the key and he’s the gardener and the viticulteur and the caretaker and he feeds the dogs.’

  ‘My family has lived here for centuries, but we’ve been away and we’ve just come back.’

  ‘Come back from where?’

  ‘From New York.’

  ‘Where’s New York?’

  ‘You are very ignorant.’

  ‘You act like you own the place.’

  ‘I do own the place. Maman owns it. You’re the gardener’s daughter. You don’t bathe and you don’t wash your hair. You’re like a wild animal, Maman says, and I am not to talk to you.’

  ‘Your maman makes you wear dresses?’ The girl pointed to a tree, planted beyond the gate, that leaned across the stone wall. ‘I saw you last week from up there. I thought you were a girl. I told my father and my brother I saw a girl.’

  ‘You talk like a peasant,’ he said.

  ‘My brother says you are a boy, but you don’t look like one and you don’t sound like one.’

  ‘You sound like a barbarian. Maman says you are wild.’

  ‘Your mother doesn’t even know me.’

  ‘Maman knows everyone in the village. She grew up in the chateau. You haven’t even got a mother,’ the boy accused. ‘Maman says everyone in the village knows that.’

  ‘I do so have a mother.’

  ‘Where is she then?’

  ‘Somewhere else.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘We don’t know,’ the girl confessed. ‘How come I’ve never seen your mother?’

  ‘Because she doesn’t like to leave the chateau.’

  ‘Where’s your father?’

  ‘He’s in New York. He’s very rich and he lives in a penthouse. I was born there.’

  ‘What’s a penthouse?’

  ‘It’s a chateau in the sky.’

  ‘Why didn’t you stay there?’

  ‘Because Maman doesn’t like New York and she doesn’t like Americans. She likes this house better. This is her own chateau.’

  ‘This is our chateau. Papa has all the keys. Papa says if it were not for him, the vineyard and the potager would be dead and gone, and the chateau would have been bankrupt years ago.’

  ‘That is why Maman has kept your father on. You are one of our servants. You live in the gardener’s cottage for free because Maman is generous to her servants. The Château de Boissy belongs to Maman.’

  The girl was disdainful. ‘Everyone says it’s full of cobwebs and dust.’

  ‘Not anymore. We’ve come back to stay and the servants have fixed it all up.’

  ‘What servants?’

  ‘Ask your father. He’ll tell you. He’s one of them, but we have lots of new ones too. Maman has just hired them.’

  ‘My brother says your mother is very strange. She’s a loony. She acts like a nun.’

  ‘Maman prays a lot,’ the boy said with dignity. ‘I’m an answer to prayer. I’m a gift from the Virgin Mary. That’s why I wear blue.’

  ‘You going to wear blue dresses all your life?’

  The boy blushed and threw a stick at some birds in a tree. ‘Not when I’m grown,’ he said.

  ‘Is your Maman out-and-out crazy?’

  ‘My mother,’ he said stiffly, ‘and my father too, are both listed in the Dictionnaire de la Noblesse de France and in Burke’s Peerage.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘It means that we are aristocrats of the ancien régime on my mother’s side and on my father’s side we are married into dukedoms in England.’

  ‘Ooh la la. You want me to curtsey to you?’

  An impasse of several minutes ensued. The boy and the girl stared at each other. The boy found the unwavering intensity of the girl’s eyes unnerving. ‘You don’t understand,’ he said at last, studying his feet.

  ‘Yes I do,’ she said. ‘You are a fat cat, un gros richard. We don’t think much of fat cats in St Gilles.’

  The boy met her eyes again then. ‘My mot
her’s great-great-great-grandmother,’ he said, reciting family catechism, ‘was the daughter of a mistress of the king of France. This house was a gift from the king to his mistress and to her descendants forever and ever, and so it came on down to my mother, and one day it will be mine.’

  ‘No it won’t,’ the girl said. ‘It’s ours. We do all the work. We look after everything. Papa says even during the Occupation he never let the Germans in our cellars.’

  ‘Our cellars,’ the boy said. ‘During the Occupation, my mother was living here. The German officers treated her with great respect. We have photographs of my mother dancing with German officers in our ballroom. It was before you were born.’

  ‘Before you were born too. I would spit on anyone who danced with a German officer.’

  The boy pointed to the gate again. ‘Go,’ he said.

  ‘I won’t go. My papa is in charge of this property. Everyone in the département knows that. He was awarded the Croix de Guerre because he was part of the Resistance and because he stood up to the Germans. Besides that, he grows the best grapes and apples and vegetables and –’

  ‘That’s why Maman left him in charge while she was gone. We need peasants to look after these things. But you are our servants and Maman says I am not to talk to you because you are dirty and wild and you don’t speak proper French.’

  The girl clamped her hand over her mouth to hold back a scalding rush of rage. She pressed her lips hard together and heard her father’s voice inside her head. When fat cats, French or German, come from Paris, be polite and say little. Say as little as possible. Don’t ever show anger and don’t ever kowtow. Look them straight in the eye. They couldn’t survive without us, and they never know when they are being mocked.