The Claimant Read online

  Claimant a serial killer?

  Anonymous sources say claimant may have murdered Vanderbilt heir.

  Claimant abandoned dying Vanderbilt heir in Da Nang, claims one family member. The relative declined to be quoted, citing sub judice rulings.

  Claimant stole dog tags and identity of the heir, another family member (anonymously) claimed.

  Claimant an Australian drifter coached by disaffected former servant of Vanderbilt family …

  Marriage of true minds, con man and con woman: Claimant revealed to be noted Australian con man coached by former maid of French countess …

  Former maid of French countess conned her way into NYU and Sotheby’s before conning her way into Australia …

  Tabloid Central was firing out rumours like rockets on the Fourth of July.

  What flared across every front page, every talkback show, every lead item on the evening news, every news anchor’s opening lines, was the trial that followed the trial and the avalanche of fresh evidence (much of it dubious, none of it well documented) that no lawyer had even tried to present in court. There was sudden intense media focus on what was now perceived to be a bizarre omission from coverage of the trial. Certainly it had been noted – and commented on as a curiosity – that the claimant had never actually appeared in court and had never made any claim on his own behalf. He had gone into hiding, perhaps on legal advice. Perhaps the lawyers for la comtesse, Lady Isabelle, considered his accent and body language detrimental to the case. It was assumed that the lawyers had advised him not only to stay in Australia but to stay out of sight and out of reach, and had ruled out any further contact with the press, the sole existing interview – the video which was by then available to all on TV and is now available via YouTube to anyone in the world – having caused such a storm.

  The press had constantly referred to ‘the claimant’s lawyers’ and the whole tuned-in world thought they knew who the claimant was. Post-trial, however, investigative journalists focused on the singular fact that, legally speaking, the Australian cattleman had never been the claimant at all.

  A rush of more scrupulous post-verdict reporting revealed that it was the lawyers of the Vanderbilt family who had first filed suit. Murkier and more titillating details followed. Documentation showed that at the time of the Vanderbilt/de la Vallière marriage – a matrimonial union that had never greatly warmed the hearts of the American side of the family – only modest affluence was involved as the inheritance of Lawrence Gwynne Vanderbilt who was still in uniform and still on duty with the Allied forces in Europe and who was, in any case, not the legitimate son of his father. Though they did of course insist on a pre-nuptial contract, family lawyers advised that it hardly seemed worth the trouble to object to the marriage. What changed matters was an odd set of circumstances and history, a series of Vanderbilts succumbing to untimely deaths like a row of dominoes falling. Lawrence Gwynne’s uncle, the heir at the time of Lawrence Gwynne’s French-village marriage, succumbed to cardiac arrest during a dalliance with a prostitute, a condition that seems to have been a genetically inherited flaw. Following that: a drowning of that uncle’s oldest son and, a few years later, a car crash in which the two younger sons of that uncle perished. At this point, Lawrence Gwynne’s older brother (the legitimate son) became the heir but was thrown from a horse in a steeplechase. He remained in a coma for months until a family conference agreed to pull the plug, but the melodrama had still not played itself out. If there is a moral to the Fall of the House of Vanderbilt it would seem to be: Beware adultery, ships and horses. Yet another equestrian death during a hunt, this time of Lawrence Gwynne’s nephew (cousin of the heir) meant that several parcels of inheritance had been bundled as it were and had devolved into an estate much larger than anticipated for Lawrence Gwynne, and hence for his son – long presumed dead – and hence for the next in line beyond that son.

  There were detailed and well-researched articles on the Comtesse Isabelle de la Vallière Vanderbilt. It was bruited far and wide – in the mainstream press, in the tabloids, in women’s magazines, fashion magazines, celebrity magazines – that the countess, grief-stricken by the absence of her son, and also because of mounting debts in connection with the maintenance of the chateau in St Gilles, had moved back to her husband’s penthouse in Manhattan in the summer of 1968, just in time for her son’s graduation from Harvard. For reasons that even the tabloid journalists had not fully determined (though speculation ran rampant) neither parent actually attended the graduation ceremony in Harvard Yard. Nevertheless, the countess remained in Manhattan and her husband promptly decamped for the Hamptons and spent most of his time thereafter either in Montauk or in Europe until his scandalous death in flagrante delicto and in coitus in Paris in 1994.

  Both parents apparently did exert considerable effort to make contact with their son when – to the bemused shock of his relatives and friends and against all possible prior political inclinations – he enlisted in the infantry in late ’68. He did not respond in any way to the overtures of either of his parents and declined to meet with either before being shipped to Vietnam in ’69.

  But back in early 1945 in France, in the pre-nuptial contract, the Vanderbilt family lawyers had specified the separation of assets. Should the Comtesse Isabelle be pre-deceased by her husband, the widow would keep her chateau and vineyard (from which, by French law and by seventeenth-century royal decree, neither she nor her heirs could be alienated) but Lawrence Gwynne’s legal descendants would be sole heirs of their father’s estate. Consequently, in the year following the death of her husband and twenty-six years after the official designation of her son as MIA, the lawyers for the Vanderbilt family notified la comtesse that they required her to declare her son dead and to vacate the Fifth Avenue penthouse.

  The countess responded, through her own lawyers, that she did not believe that her son was dead. She produced the letter from a Vietnam vet, a fellow platoon member, dated 1976. Dear Mrs. Vanderbilt … I was in the same platoon, the same squad, as your son …

  And so the public at last became privy not only to matters revealed in court but to so much more information than the jurors had ever heard.

  One week after the court finding of fraudulence, the frenzy of newly focused and redirected media attention revealed that members of the Vanderbilt family were themselves executors of the estate of the late comtesse. This seemingly flagrant conflict of interest had been made possible, following Lady Isabelle’s death, by opaque contracts dating back several generations. It was revealed that, sheltering under that legal umbrella, the family had dismissed the lawyers for the estate of the countess and had reappointed lawyers of their own choosing. In effect, the Vanderbilt family had become judge and jury. They owned both the lawyers for the prosecution and for the defence.

  Pandemonium ensued.

  There was a rush of interviews and comments on ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN and on the newly minted and salaciously inclined FOXNews, all channels hastily dispatching reporters and camera crews to the valleys of the Loire and the Vienne in France.

  There were villagers from a tiny hamlet south-west of Paris whose rural accents (as unintelligible to Parisians as to New Yorkers) instantly mutated into subtitles, English ones, not always white against a dark background, not always readable, a flaw which irritated many viewers. CNN was deluged with calls and promptly switched to dubbing.

  Petit Christophe, the gardener’s son, was murdered, the village school teacher said. That was many years ago, before I came here, but everyone knows that’s what happened.

  Actually, we don’t know for certain he was murdered, explained the priest in the incongruously large church in St Gilles. He just disappeared and people assumed …

  Yes, of course we remember him, the older villagers said. His father was the head gardener at the chateau and Petit Christophe was apprenticed to Monsieur Monsard, the village butcher.

  He was very well liked, very handsome, a ladies’ man who got himself into trouble with the
butcher’s daughter – (Here the dubbing faltered, the translator – in spite of long experience in simultaneous translation – bamboozled by the thick rural accent.)

  It was very mysterious, what happened. Petit Christophe, the gardener’s son –

  The butcher’s daughter –

  The gist of these fragmented reports was that the butcher’s daughter was unwed and pregnant when Petit Christophe disappeared. Shortly after he vanished, she killed herself. Some people believed that Petit Christophe had fled – fearful of the girl’s father – and was living in Paris or who knew where? Many in the village privately believed that her father had killed Petit Christophe, and, although that was a mortal sin, many privately thought it was the kind of sin God would forgive. She was, you understand, a certain kind of woman, his daughter … Others believed that the pregnant girl’s older brother was guilty of the killing since that older brother, son of the butcher, was notoriously prone to fights and violence and volcanic eruptions of temper, but since the body of Petit Christophe was never found, no charges were ever brought.

  Many said, under promise of anonymity, that it was widely believed in St Gilles that the butcher had been an informer during the war. He was a collaborator, people whispered. He gave up lives. He ratted on anyone who worked with the Resistance. He ratted on anyone he even suspected of being in sympathy with the Resistance. He let the Germans use his butcher shop for torture. That is why, some whispered, God punished him with a wayward daughter.

  After the war, Monsieur Monsard, the butcher, made a very large donation to the village church and dedicated a shrine to the Virgin.

  Petit Christophe, the gardener’s son –

  It was 1960 when he disappeared –

  The journalists asked if they might interview the gardener, the father of Petit Christophe. The villagers lowered their eyes. Christophe le père, they said sadly, Christophe le Jardinier, he is no longer alive. But even before he died, he was somewhere else in his head after the death – after the disappearance – of his son. He was never right again after that.

  For many years, other villagers whispered, there was speculation about the butcher …

  There was perhaps enmity between the butcher and the chateau gardener …

  The gardener’s son disappeared and one day later the butcher’s daughter killed herself and killed the gardener’s unborn grandchild … Well, the shock was too great for Christophe le Jardinier. He had a heart attack. He lived for another four years but he was never right again after that. He couldn’t manage the work …

  He died in 1964 but he was somewhere else in his head years before that … His daughter stayed with him until the end but then she went to New York …

  Some people believe that the gardener’s daughter and Petit Christophe, her brother, remained in touch …

  American journalists thrust photographs of the Vanderbilt claimant (stills from the video) in front of the people of the village of St Gilles. Old women with a baguette protruding from a string bag brushed the photograph and the microphone away, shook their heads, and declined to answer. Old men sipping pastis in sidewalk cafes were more garrulous. Roughly fifty percent of the villagers who were approached, speaking to global television, identified the Australian cattleman as Petit Christophe. As a butcher, he was an artist, they said. He was the Picasso of filet mignon. Approximately thirty percent of those willing to give an opinion rejected this theory with vehemence and recognised the Australian not as the son of the chateau gardener and not as the butcher’s apprentice, but as the son of the Comtesse Isabelle de la Vallière Vanderbilt, a woman un peu énervée and very devout, who had died of a broken heart because the courts had put a wall between her son and what was rightfully his and hers.

  ‘Elle se mettait dans tous ses états tout le temps,’ one old man said.

  ‘She wasn’t too stable,’ the dubber supplied, translating freely.

  ‘It was very sad,’ another old man said. He was fishing in the village pond. ‘She had that letter, you see, from someone in her son’s platoon, so she knew. A mother always knows her own son. Speaking for myself, I believe it was the lawyers killed la comtesse. They milked her, they squeezed out every last cent, and then she couldn’t afford the repairs to the chateau and couldn’t keep the vineyard producing. Me, I knew the heir when he was a child but I haven’t seen him since. I take the Comtesse Isabelle’s word. A mother knows her own son.’

  ‘And did you know the Comtesse Isabelle personally?’

  ‘I helped at harvest time, me. Christophe le Jardinier, he was her manager, for the harvest he always hired the whole village. He was a kind man, a generous man, a good man, Christophe le père.’

  ‘And what is your name, sir?’

  ‘My name is Jerome Benoît.’

  Beside Jerome Benoît sat another old man, also fishing. ‘And what do you think?’ the tele-journalist asked. The second old man said nothing. He gave no indication of having heard the question or even of being aware of the journalist’s presence, in spite of the hovering crew.

  ‘Is your friend deaf?’ the journalist asked Jerome.

  ‘No,’ Jerome said.

  ‘Then why doesn’t he answer me?’

  The journalist waited for his translator to convey the answer, which was: ‘He doesn’t like talking.’

  Here was a challenge that pricked the journalist in his most vulnerable and sensitive zones. In the best college French he could summon up from many years past, he told the second old man: ‘Me, I adore to fish. All the summers, I fish. What is it that it is that you catch?’

  ‘Fish,’ the old man said. ‘I catch fish.’

  ‘What kind?’

  ‘All kinds,’ the old man said.

  ‘Ah, I see. And … and this place where you fish, do you call it a little lake or a pond or a tarn?’

  ‘Je l’appelle un plan d’eau,’ the man said.

  ‘A stretch of water,’ the translator supplied.

  ‘Ah. They have about ten different words, don’t they, for pond? Can you ask him …?’

  The old man uttered something fast and vehement.

  ‘He says,’ the translator explained, ‘that the old lady was killed by her husband’s family. They would never let her son touch their money. Filthy English.’

  ‘Tell him the Vanderbilts are American, not English.’

  ‘La même chose,’ the old man spat. ‘Tout à fait, la même chose.’

  The translator summarised. ‘Same difference,’ he said.

  Jerome Benoît offered, via the translator, that it was his companion’s opinion that the Vanderbilts knew la comtesse needed the inheritance to repair the chateau, but those Vanderbilt fat cats, he said, those gros richards américains, they would never allow their money to move to France. Of course they knew the claimant was her son but they were never going to let a Frenchman keep his chateau. They hate the French, those Americans. A country of bigots. Let them eat eels and snails!

  The Comtesse Isabelle died in New York but was interred in the burial ground of the church in St Gilles. The whole village attended the funeral. The gardener’s daughter came back too, the villagers said. Some American journalists attended, though only a handful, as the trial had yet to attract the kind of international notoriety it was to gain within days of the jury’s verdict.

  CNN reported that twenty percent of the inhabitants of St Gilles, looking a little bemused as they faced the cameras, said they had not heard of the Vanderbilt claimant, did not recognise the man in the photograph, and said that no one – unless one counted goats and chickens – had lived in the chateau for many years. It was badly in need of major repairs, the villagers said. It was almost a ruin. Part of the roof had fallen in.

  As for Marlowe, watching and listening to all this, he went to the Oyster Bar every afternoon and waited for hours, drinking whiskey and checking for phone messages at the bar. He cursed himself for not having asked where Lilith was staying, which hotel. He kept one eye on the mirror and the bar b
ut she never appeared. He wanted to ask about Petit Christophe.

  Exactly how unreal was he? Was he her brother or not? Had McVie always been Petit Christophe? Had they swapped IDs?

  Lilith never showed up.

  What did show up was a messenger boy.

  ‘Sir? Are you Mr Lucifer?’

  Marlowe glared. ‘Why?’ He saw the envelope in the messenger’s hand: For Lucifer, Oyster Bar. ‘Yes, that’s for me,’ he said, reaching for a five-dollar tip. ‘Wait,’ he said. ‘Wait. Who gave this to you?’

  ‘The concierge at the Grand Hyatt, sir.’

  ‘Wait,’ Marlowe said. ‘Wait until I’ve read this. There might be a message in return and another tip.’

  Marlowe found a note, handwritten on Hyatt stationery.

  November 11, 1996

  Lucifer,

  The jury’s verdict twelve days ago should have made you very happy. Congratulations to you and Celise on getting the chateau and everything else. But be careful what you wish for.

  Sincerely,

  Lilith

  Marlowe instantly scribbled a reply on a paper Oyster Bar napkin.

  Dear Lilith,

  Can we meet? Fuck the chateau and my wife. I don’t give a damn about the Vanderbilts. It’s you I want. I’m in the Oyster Bar and I’ll stay here until you come. Tell me what you want. Anything, everything, I’ll arrange it. Call me at the Oyster Bar now.

  Marlowe.

  P.S. Please call. I’ll do anything you want.

  He folded the napkin into the Hyatt-embossed envelope, crossed out her hand-printed uppercase letters, and printed For Lilith Jardine, Grand Hyatt. He gave the messenger boy a ten-dollar tip with very specific directions: ‘Give this to the concierge himself. Immediately.’

  He waited. He kept watching the door. Drink after drink, he kept listening for the phone behind the bar. Although he never heard it ring – there was considerable ambient noise – a bartender approached with a note. ‘I think this is for you, sir. A woman just called and I wrote down what she said.’