Marisha Pessl - Night Film

“What was the substance?”

“Marijuana and MDMA. He served two months, did a hundred hours community service.”

I told Blumenstein I’d cover the bail, then, hanging up, quickly relayed the conversation to Nora as we prepared to leave for the meeting with Olivia Endicott. I’d made Nora an omelet this morning, but as soon as she saw it, she announced she wasn’t hungry, her face red. I chalked this up to that bizarre black box of feminine behavior that defied explanation, until I realized — cursing my stupidity —it was because of what she’d told me last night. She didn’t want me to treat her with kid gloves, didn’t want to be handled like some fragile thing with a crack through it. So I brutally chucked out the omelet and announced that Moe Gulazar’s black sequin leggings and Captain Sparrow blouse didn’t suit a meeting with one of New York’s most elegant swans. I ordered her to change her clothes, which made her smile with relief as she raced upstairs to do so. Within minutes, we were out the door, hurrying down Perry Street.

It was a gray day, the sky threatening rain. We headed for the subway because we were already late. And if there was one thing I knew about New York’s wealthiest, they loved to keep you waiting, not the other way around.

“Mr. McGrath. Welcome.”

The woman who greeted us at the door of apartment 17D was in her fifties, dressed in a dust-gray suit. She had the dimmed-bulb face of someone who’d lived a life in servitude. Her eyes moved inquiringly to Nora.

“This is my assistant. I hope it’s all right if she joins us.”

“Certainly.”

Smiling, the woman ushered us into the foyer, where an old codger wearing a rumpled burgundy jacket appeared — seemingly from the walls — to take our coats. Wordlessly he drifted with them back down another dim hall.

“Right this way.”

She led us in the other direction down a dark gallery. The wine-colored walls were plastered with paintings, the way scaffolding downtown was covered with ads for concerts: only these happened to be Matisses and Schieles, Clementes, the odd Magritte, each painting sporting its own bronze lamp like a miner’s helmet. Between these masterpieces were dark open doorways, and I slowed to glance inside. Every room looked like a grotto, dank and stalactited with brocade curtains and Louis XIV chairs, vases and Tiffany lamps, busts in marble, ebony sculpture, books. We passed a formal dining room, the walls celery green, a crystal chandelier like a frozen jellyfish floating midair.

The woman led us briskly into a large sitting room. The windows framed a northwestern view, turning the city into a serene concrete still life with gray sky. A helicopter hovered over the Hudson like an errant fly.

The woman gestured for us to sit on the yellow chintz couch in front of a coffee table covered in miniatures: porcelain schnauzers, sheepherders, finger bowls. Fresh yellow and red tulips exploded out of a Chinese vase. They matched the yellow walls and the red jackets of the riders in the giant foxhunt oil painting looming behind us.

Nora sat down stiffly beside me, folding her hands in her lap. She looked nervous.

“May I offer you some tea while you wait? Mrs. du Pont is finishing up a telephone call.”

“Tea would be nice,” I said. “Thank you.”

The woman slipped out of the room.

“This is what you call jumbo rich, ” I whispered to Nora. “These people are their own strange breed. Don’t try to understand them.”

“Did you see the shining armor on the way in? Real shining armor just standing there, waiting for a knight.”

“The two percent of the world’s richest people have over half of the world’s wealth. I think it’s all in this apartment.”

Nora, biting her lip, pointed at the small end table on my right, where there was a black-and-white photograph in an antique silver frame. It was Olivia standing with her husband, Knightly, probably some twenty years ago. They had their arms around each other, posing beside an antique Bentley in front of a colossal country manor. They looked happy, but, of course, that didn’t say much. Everyone smiles for a photograph.

Abruptly, Nora sat up.

A woman was entering the room. I stood up immediately, Nora following my lead, fidgeting to straighten her skirt.

It was Olivia.

She didn’t walk so much as float, three Pekingese dogs shuffling alongside her feet. The room had obviously been designed with her in mind, or vice versa. Her chin-length brown hair, streaked with silver — worn in a rich candy swirl around her face — matched the Persian rug, the carved lion-paw legs of the table, even the silver cigarette case with the elegant initials engraved on the lid — OPE — the fine lettering like tangled strands of hair clogging a shower drain.

I wasn’t sure what I’d expected — some grande dame blistering with jewelry — but she was surprisingly light and airy, devoid of ornamentation. She wore a simple gray-and-black dress, plump pearls roped twice around her neck. Her oval face was attractive and soft, neatly made up, long splinters of eyebrows framing her bright brown eyes, an elegant neck like a stalk on a flower just starting to wilt. How many times had Marlowe Hughes dreamed of wringing that thing ?

As Olivia moved toward us, smiling, I realized her right arm hung limply in a sling fashioned out of a black-and-red floral scarf. The hand hung there like a broken wing, but she seemed resolved to pull off this handicap gamely. The fingernails on that withered hand were perfectly painted tomato red.

On the ring finger of her functioning hand, which she now extended to us, was a pale blue diamond, at least twelve karats. It stared out, unblinking, like a mesmerized eye.

“Olivia du Pont. I’m so pleased you could come, Mr. McGrath.”

“My pleasure.”

After shaking her hand, we all sat down, including her three Pekingese, which resembled fat girls stuffed into fur suits. Olivia settled into the white couch opposite, extending an arm over the white throw draped across the back, and the dogs piled around her as if to form some sort of fluffy stronghold, then stared at us expectantly as if we were meant to entertain.

“I’m sorry to have kept you waiting. It’s quite mad around here with the move.”

“You’re leaving the city?” I asked.

“Just for the season. We spend the winter in Switzerland. The whole family comes out. My grandchildren love to ski and hike, though Mike and I tend to just laze around. We really sit down in front of the fire and don’t budge for four months.”

She laughed, a crisp, elegant sound, bringing to mind a spoon tapping a crystal glass before some dignitary made a toast.

Boy, had the apple fallen far from the tree. It was astounding how a woman, when she struck marital gold, procured not just a new wardrobe and new friends but a new voice straight out of a 1930s gramophone (brittle, mono-stereo) and a vocabulary that reliably included laze, season, and terribly sorry. I had to actively remind myself Olivia was an army brat who’d grown up so impoverished, her mother had a third job cleaning the bathrooms of the very public high school she attended. Now Olivia probably had six estates and a yacht as big as a city block.

“My grandson, Charlie, is a huge fan of yours, Mr. McGrath.”

“Scott. Please.”

“Charlie’s in eighth grade at Trinity. He read your first book, MasterCard Nation, over the summer. He was quite impressed. Now, he’s reading Cocaine Carnivals and wants to be an investigative reporter.”