House of Lords Read online

  Bolling himself remained the same crude but ingratiating man he had always been, boisterously friendly in a way that served double duty as both welcome and warning, Hi buddy, and Don’t fuck with me at the same time. Where the ladies were concerned, he was conscious of holding an immense advantage over these New York types. Just by not being one of them.

  He had come to New York because he was looking for things to do with his money and Blaine’s name kept coming up whenever he asked about investment bankers. Before getting on a plane, he had his research people do a bit of digging. They started with the Yale yearbook and followed it back as far as they conveniently could. They weren’t interested in what the banker had accomplished after he left Yale because it went without saying that he had accomplishments. Clint Bolling believed that you knew what a man was only when you knew where he came from. What they found was more or less what Bolling expected they would find. Jeffrey Blaine was a Bright Young Kid from a failing industrial town in central Massachusetts—which could just as easily have been New Hampshire or Mississippi, Georgia or Vermont. The story would be the same anywhere. Inevitably this Bright Young Kid would be the only son in a family that traced itself back through twelve generations, not one of which had ever amounted to anything. Families like that regarded their insignificance as a direct result of their virtue, and so their hearts were filled with a grubby pride that was in no way diminished by the fact that the world around them refused to validate it. On the contrary, these people looked at failure as a badge of distinction, leaning on their rectitude the way simpler folk leaned on religion. Sooner or later one of the males in the line would marry a woman who was fed up with inadequacy, who put no faith in rectitude, who possessed enough ambition to raise her only son to believe that he was entitled to more. Off he would go to Yale or Princeton, Harvard or Dartmouth, certain only of two things: that he would never come back, and that he would become in reality everything that his family had always imagined itself to be.

  The Jeffrey Blaines of the world, Bolling believed, were young men with missions, ambitious but grounded. What this meant, as far as Bolling was concerned, was that they were fighters but you could trust them. They had a duty to fulfill and a calling to answer, and so they programmed themselves to make vast multiples of the money their mothers thought their fathers should have made, but they had principles at the same time. He contrasted them in his mind with people like himself, people without either grounding or principles. He knew better than to trust people like himself. He had found, over the years, that there were men he liked and men he trusted, and they were hardly ever the same men. What his research told him about Blaine put the banker in the second category, which is why Clint Bolling was in New York. Ready now to take advantage of what the situation offered.

  He moved toward the girls clustered around the soccer player. One of them was certain to be Blaine’s daughter. The almost-blonde in the blue dress, he guessed as he headed toward them, taking stock, suddenly thankful for having no children, especially no daughters. Their bodies sheathed in golds and blues and blacks offered tantalizing views of young legs, young thighs, young breasts.

  “One of you must be Jessica,” he drawled.

  “I am,” Jessica said.

  Just as he thought. The prettiest one in the lot. Did each girl get a turn at being the prettiest at her own party? he wondered. It was a lovely world these children lived in.

  The Blaine girl’s restless eyes never met his as he offered and she took his hand. He told her his name and wished her a happy birthday. “There’s Daddy,” she said, pulling her hand from his. “Nice meeting you.”

  He watched her run across the restaurant, as though she were in sneakers and jeans. There was something magic about rich girls, he thought, and then he put her out of his mind.

  “You’re Mia Hamm, aren’t you?” he said, turning to the soccer player.

  She seemed pleased to be recognized.

  Considering the weather, it was probably a good thing Chet Fiore wasn’t going anywhere. It made tailing him that much easier. With the engine idling smoothly, the heater didn’t even have to be set very high to keep the two men comfortable in the car. Warm, in fact, warmer than they needed to be. Wally Schliester wouldn’t have minded opening a window, but that wasn’t an option because Gogarty was behind the wheel, and when Gogarty was behind the wheel Gogarty controlled what he liked to call the environmental variables.

  Gogarty was always behind the wheel. It was one of the perks that came with his seniority, and Schliester, who had no seniority at all, was in no position to question it.

  This was their third night of tailing Chet Fiore and so far they hadn’t seen anything worth staying awake for. Blind, random tailing of a subject is widely regarded as just about the worst way to conduct an investigation, and with good reason. For the most part it’s a waste of manpower. They had been investigating Chet Fiore for a little under two months and had absolutely nothing to show for it. They resorted to random tailing simply to have something to put in their reports.

  Schliester fought to keep his eyes open in the stupefying warmth of the car. They were parked just down the street from a restaurant called Seppi’s on Elizabeth Street in lower Manhattan. There was no Giuseppe. The place was run by a man named Artie, but Chet Fiore owned it, named it after his grandfather, and used it more or less as his office. He didn’t involve himself in the management of the establishment. He declared a small income from the restaurant on his income tax so that you couldn’t get him in trouble that way.

  The only difference between this night and the two before it was that tonight a blizzard was raging around them, which added an interesting wrinkle. If they cleared the windows, their presence in the car would be obvious from a block and a half away. If they let the snow accumulate, as it was accumulating on all the other cars parked on the street, they wouldn’t be able to see a fucking thing.

  Schliester raised this issue as a conversational gambit. Once in a while it helped to have something to talk about. Gogarty countered by suggesting they go with the flow. He claimed to be able to make out the front of the restaurant just fine through the snow.

  Schliester shrugged and gave up the struggle to keep his eyes open. They weren’t doing him any good anyway.

  Chloe Adams Todd hugged Phyllis Blaine as though they were sisters. She kissed her as though they hadn’t seen each other in years.

  “I was in a total panic,” Chloe whined in her high-pitched voice. She was thirty-eight years old and talked as though she were a teenager. “I mean, if he doesn’t take me, who exactly is going to do my hair? He’s the only man who has so much as touched my head since I was sixteen years old.”

  Phyllis managed a laugh. “Well, it worked out fine. You look stunning. Really,” she said, trying to make her getaway.

  There were people she had to talk to. And the waiters needed another reminder about the wine now that most of Jessica’s friends had arrived. As she walked across the dining room, her eyes swept over thousands upon thousands of flowers, a Rose Parade of blooming colors dominated by the stalky daffodils, yellow with orange centers, the rainbows of tulips, all of them deferring, as though on orders from Phyllis Blaine herself, to the discreetly muted tints of the clustered wildflower blossoms that surrounded the flowers and set the tone for the evening. What, Phyllis had wondered out loud when she first conceived the theme of the floral arrangements, would announce the birthday of a young woman with more perfect candor than the blossoms of wildflowers?

  But Chloe Todd wasn’t about to let her get away. She moved around so that she was in front of Phyllis. “I couldn’t believe it when I called,” she went on. “The girl said he didn’t have anything. I mean, didn’t have anything? Please. I said to myself, this can’t be Adrian, it’s got to be a new girl. She doesn’t know who I am. But it was Adrian. Can you believe that?”

  Phyllis was threading her way between the tables, Chloe keeping pace with her. Phyllis stopped to adjust a floral a
rrangement.

  “I said, ‘Let me talk to him,’ and she said, ‘Really, Mrs. Todd.’ As though I was the one being troublesome. So I said, ‘Yes. Really. And now, if you know what’s good for you.’ I actually heard her gasp. Well, not a gasp, but that sound people like that make. And then he comes on the line. ‘You know I love you, Chloe,’ he says, ‘you know I’d do anything I can,’ and I say, ‘I cannot go to the Blaines’ party with my hair like a rat’s nest,’ and he says, ‘Well, that’s the problem, because all the girls are being done, there isn’t—you know I wouldn’t lie to you—a minute, not a minute the whole day.’ You know how he talks.”

  Phyllis said to a waiter, “Eduardo, you promise me you’ll keep your eye on the wine bottles.”

  She absolutely was not going to let the children get their hands on the wine. At Jessica’s seventeenth a distressing number of the kids managed to get themselves drunk. It wasn’t going to happen again.

  “Yes, Mrs. Blaine,” Eduardo agreed enthusiastically. The entire staff had been given enough pep talks to last a football team a whole season.

  Phyllis moved on. She sampled one of the shrimp-and-avocado hors d’oeuvres and her eye caught Erill Stasny’s. She nodded her approval. He answered with a curt nod. His own approval was really all that mattered to him.

  All the while Chloe Adams Todd continued her eternal chatter. “He actually offered me an appointment on Thursday. Thursday. What good was Thursday going to do me? What was I supposed to do? Sit with my head in the refrigerator?”

  “Well, it worked out,” Phyllis said.

  It worked out because Phyllis called Kenneth herself. “Please do something for this woman,” she told him, “before she drives me out of my mind.”

  Phyllis stopped in front of Monsignor Fennessy, an insufferably pompous archbishop who was on the boards of some of the same charities as Phyllis. “Monsignor,” she said, “you know Chloe Todd, don’t you?”

  She slipped away while the monsignor pumped Chloe’s hand. Perhaps the saga of Chloe Todd’s hair would be of interest to a Prince of the Church.

  According to the official version of the story, Erill Stasny was a Czech from Paris, where he worked for five years as sous-chef at Archestrate under Alain Senderens. Stasny was certainly Czech, and he knew Paris intimately. But Archestrate? Senderens? Three prominent food critics came out and doubted it in print. None of the people who frequented the best of the Parisian restaurants could recall ever having seen him there. Or anywhere else, for that matter. He simply showed up in New York one day in 1994 and announced his presence.

  Six months after his arrival, Stasny’s was open for business on two floors of a brownstone in the East Forties between Third and Lexington, an auspicious location for a restaurant intended for instant primacy. It didn’t matter in the least that Erill Stasny probably wasn’t who he claimed to be. The upper end of the restaurant business has always operated with a higher quotient of lies per word spoken than any other industry in the world. Charm and genius are all that matter, and even charm doesn’t matter greatly. With enough talent, one is assumed to be charming. Stasny was rude to virtually everyone, without exception, but as word spread, even before the first glowing reviews came in, his surliness came to be seen as an important, even an essential, part of his appeal. So, too, did the air of mystery that surrounded everything about the man and his establishment.

  The biggest mystery was how to get a table. The secretaries of some of New York’s most influential people, including elected officials, commissioners, financiers, and the owners of major-league baseball, football, basketball, and hockey teams, called for reservations only to be told that no tables were available for six, seven, eight weeks. Others called Stasny’s in the afternoon and were dining there that night. No one ever managed to figure out if there was a list or how to get on it. The pecking order seemed whimsical, or at least it seemed whimsical to those to whom it didn’t seem outrageous.

  Jeffrey Blaine was the first person who ever approached Stasny about buying out the entire dining room for an evening. Le Cirque had been the scene of lavish parties, Lutèce even in the days of its greatest glory surrendered itself to private affairs. But Stasny’s? Never. Because it hadn’t been done, it was generally assumed that it couldn’t be done.

  The whole thing started out as Jessica’s idea. Her seventeenth birthday party had been held at the Yale Club, with sushi and roast beef, stuffed mushrooms and cotton candy, with carnival-style booths set up in the three downstairs reading rooms where the kids could pitch rings around little plastic frogs or throw softballs into milk jugs and darts at balloons. Smashing Pumpkins played in the large room upstairs, filling the building with sounds the Yale Club had never heard before. People devoted three pages of pictures to the party, which was also featured on Page Six of the Post, where photos of teenagers with champagne glasses in their hands were accompanied by a satirical text by Noel Garver proclaiming that the Eighties were alive and well on the East Side of Manhattan.

  The party was more than a success. It was a triumph. The kids loved it and talked about it for months. Parties of two and three years earlier, the sixteenth and seventeenth birthday parties of Jessica’s friends’ older brothers and sisters that had seemed so wonderful at the time, were suddenly second rate as Jessica Blaine’s party set a new standard. In the months that followed, no one managed to outdo Jessica’s party despite unimaginable expenditures. Money, after all, couldn’t buy originality. Copies were only copies.

  Nevertheless, Jeffrey could have done with less publicity. The Eighties were not alive and well, not in the least. Hedonism wasn’t part of his makeup and never had been. He prided himself on being a sensible and socially responsible man. Yes, he had money, and of course he was willing to spend some of it on his only child. What parent wouldn’t? But he wasn’t in any sense of the word an extravagant man. Although he never said anything to Phyllis or Jessica about the press comments on the party, they hurt him in a way he couldn’t fully explain. Besides, an elderly bartender who had been at the Club since the Korean War lost his job as a result of the scandal. And so, as one season rounded into the next and Jessica’s eighteenth birthday loomed on the distant horizon, Jeffrey worried about how they could celebrate it without either disappointing her or opening him up to more criticism.

  And then one night over dinner at Stasny’s, Jessica looked up from her dessert and said, “Why don’t we have my party here?”

  She was only joking, she said later, but Jeffrey glanced at Phyllis, whose eyes went to his at the same time, and the decision was made.

  For more reasons than Jessica could have possibly understood, it was a wonderful idea. Stasny’s reputation was based almost as much on his discretion as on his food. A senator, a tenor, or a police commissioner could take his mistress to Stasny’s without worrying that the paparazzi would be on the sidewalk when he came out.

  The very next morning, hours before the restaurant opened for business, Jeffrey Blaine was at the door. A waiter who pulled a suit coat over his T-shirt to answer the door seated him in the empty dining room. Coffee was brought. Erill Stasny himself followed a few minutes later, smiling and smelling of an herbal cologne. When Jeffrey told him what was on his mind, Stasny was cool to the idea. He wanted no part of carnivals or Smashing Pumpkins. There wasn’t, he said haughtily, enough money in the world to make him turn his restaurant into a circus.

  He left Jeffrey at the table and walked back to his kitchen.

  Jeffrey followed him there. “All right,” he said. “What do you suggest?”

  When Jeffrey Blaine wanted someone to do something, he always asked questions. He never gave orders. When the people answered his questions they were telling themselves what it was they were supposed to do. Stasny, though, didn’t take the bait. He looked at Jeffrey the way he might have looked at a roach in the risotto. Customers did not walk into Erill Stasny’s kitchen. Ever. Under any circumstances. Not when it was functioning in the evening, not when it lay in
morning torpor, manned only by two sullen young men uncrating vegetables.

  “I cannot permit this,” Stasny said.

  That seemed to be the end of the matter. On his way to the office, Jeffrey called Phyllis to tell her that Stasny’s was out.

  But it wasn’t out. Later that afternoon, Stasny himself telephoned Jeffrey at the office. He didn’t say what had changed his mind, but now he seemed willing to explore the idea. “I have question for you, Monsieur Blaine,” he said in his strange, unidentifiable accent. “This young woman”—he pronounced it ooman—“is to be eighteen years old. Why must she celebrate like a heathen child?”

  Negotiations began that afternoon and lasted through the fall and into winter. It took three months just to get Stasny to relent on the question of music, and then only on the condition that there be no amplifiers and no microphones. “Unplugged,” Jessica said, nodding her approval, surprising her father with her enthusiastic acceptance of the terms.

  “No, no,” Stasny said. “No plug, no noise, no machines.”

  “Yes, right, exactly,” Jessica said, enunciating clearly to boost her words over the language barrier. “Unplugged. No plugs. No machines.”

  With barely a month to go until the party, there remained only a few details of the menu to be worked out. The dinner wouldn’t be catered in the usual sense. Jessica’s guests would order from the menu. But, since the menu changed every day, depending on the whims of Stasny and the market, Jessica wanted to assure herself that at least a few of her favorite dishes would be available. The lobster crepes. The Morello mushrooms in a beef broth. The sautéed veal with dill and lemon. And above all, the poached cherries and raspberries in a mousse of white chocolate with a light orange glaze. Jeffrey and Phyllis insisted that Jessica be there for all these negotiations. She was, after all, going to be eighteen. It was time she learned to accept responsibility.