The Hellfire Club

'Some of these people never leave the club,' she said.

'Is this stuff real?' Nora asked. 'Or are you making it all up?'

'As real as what happened to Natalie,' Davey said.

Paddi worked at Chancel House because it had published Night Journey. Her job gave her a unique connection to the book she loved above all others. And since she was on the subject, she drew out of the big Chancel House envelope a stiff, glossy sheet that Davey recognized as the reverse side of a jacket rendering.

'An idea of mine,' Paddi said, turning the sheet over to display a drawing it took Davey a moment to understand; when he did, he wondered why the idea had never occurred to him. Paddi had drawn the jacket for an annotated scholarly edition of Night Journey. (Her design was based on the famous 'GI edition' of the novel.) Every one of the hundred thousand Driver fanatics in America would have to buy it. Scholars would be able to trace the growth of the book over successive variations and discuss the meanings of the changes in the text. It was a great idea.

'But there was one problem,' Davey told Nora. 'In order to do it right, we needed the manuscript.'

'What's the problem with that?' asked Nora.

The problem, Paddi said, was that the manuscript seemed to have disappeared. Hugo Driver had died in 1950, his wife in 1952, and their only child, a retired high school English teacher, had said in an interview on the twentieth anniversary of the book's publication that he had never seen any manuscripts of his father's books. As far as he knew, they had never come back from Chancel House.

Davey said he would try to find out what had happened to the manuscript. Lincoln Chancel had probably installed it in a bank vault somewhere. It certainly couldn't be lost. Nothing so important could have slipped through the cracks - it was the manuscript of the first Chancel House book, for heaven's sake!

'That would be unfortunate in light of the rumors,' Paddi said.

'What rumors?'

'That Hugo Driver didn't really write the book,' Paddi said.

Where did this stuff come from? She knew what it was, didn't she? It was what happened whenever somebody great appeared, a bunch of weasels started trying to shoot holes in him. Davey ranted on in this fashion until he ran out of breath, at which point he inhaled hugely and declared that after all it all made perfect sense; Night Journey was such a brilliant book that the weasels couldn't cope with it. It happened all the time. Somewhere, someone was saying that Zelda Fitzgerald was the real author of Tender Is the Night.

'Zelda was the real author of Tender Is the Night,' Paddi said. 'Sorry. Just kidding.'

Davey asked her if she believed this crap.

'No, not at all,' she said. 'I agree with you. Hugo Driver should be on stamps. I think his picture should be on money. One of the reasons I like this club is that it seems, such a Hugo Driver-ish sort of place, doesn't it?'

Davey guessed that it did.

Would he like to see more of it?

'I wondered when we were going to get to this part,' Nora said.21

At the landing above the curved staircase, Paddi did not take him down the dark corridor but led him up another flight of stairs. An even narrower version of the staircase continued upward, but Paddi took him into a corridor identical to the one below. Davey felt as if he were following Paddi through a forest at night.

Then she vanished, and he realized that she had slipped through an open door. The shade had been pulled down, and the room was darker than the corridor. After they undressed she led him to a futon. Davey stretched out against her, his body as hot as an oven-warmed brick, hers as cool as a stone drawn from a river. He hugged her close, and her cool hands ran up and down his back. When his orgasm came, he yelled with pleasure. They lay quiet for a time, then talked. And when they had established that neither of them was seeing anyone else, Davey fell asleep.

He woke up an hour later, hungry, light-headed, uncertain of his surroundings. He remembered that he was lying on a floor in the East Village. He was suddenly, shamefully certain that Paddi had stolen his money. He sat upright, and his hand touched a girlish shoulder. He looked down and made out the shape of her head on the pillow. Pillow? He did not remember a pillow. A sheet covered both of them.

'We should get something to eat,' he said.

'I'll take care of that, isn't there something else you'd like to do first?'

He stretched out beside her and once more felt that he was as hot as a potbellied stove and she as cool as a substance just extracted from a river. Davey surrendered to sensation.

Unimaginably later, they lay side by side, staring up. Davey had forgotten where he was. A slight, high- pitched buzzing sounded in his ears. The woman beside him seemed completely beautiful. Paddi rolled over, picked up an instrument like the mouthpiece of an old-fashioned telephone, and ordered oysters and caviar and other things he didn't quite catch and what sounded like a lot of wine.

Soon two young women entered the room carrying circular trays, from which they distributed around the futon a number of covered dishes. Two open bottles and four glasses appeared beside Davey's left shoulder. The women smiled at Paddi, who was sprawled on top of the sheet, but did not look at Davey. When they had put in place the last dish, they stood and turned to the door, where one of them said, 'Shall I?'

'Yes,' Paddi said. A low, rosy light spread through the room, and the women backed smiling through the door.

Plovers' eggs, dumplings, steaming sauteed mushrooms, eel, whitebait, rich finger-sized segments of duck, similar sections of roast pork, little steaming things like pizzas covered with fresh basil and glistening shreds of tomato, in a crisp transparent seal, round, pungent objects that must have been meatballs and tasted like single malt scotch, grapes, Clementines; an excellent white burgundy and a better red bordeaux. Taking almost nothing herself, Paddi brought plate after plate before him. Davey sampled everything, and together they emptied half of each bottle. Paddi kept him amused with tales of the art department and gossip about people who worked at Chancel House; she quoted Hugo Driver and wondered at the friendship between the author and Lincoln Chancel. Did Davey know where this unlikely pair had met?

'Sure, at Shorelands,' Davey said, 'this estate in Massachusetts. They were put up in the same cottage.' He thought that the owner of the place, Georgina Weatherall, who knew that Davey's grandfather was on the verge of starting a publishing company, had put them together in the hope that Lincoln Chancel would help Driver in some way. And exactly that had happened. Driver must have shown Chancel the manuscript of Night Journey, and Chancel had used it to make Driver's fortune and increase his own.

'Is that really how they met?' Nora asked Davey. 'In a sort of literary colony?'

'Shorelands was a private estate where the hostess liked to feel that she was encouraging works of genius, but yeah, that's more or less right. And whether Georgina Weatherall had anything in mind or not, she did put Driver together with my grandfather, and things fell into place. Neither one of them had been at Shorelands before, so they probably spent a lot of time together, like the new guys at school.'

A millionaire businessman and a penniless writer? Nora doubted that Lincoln Chancel, a ruthless acquirer of companies, had ever felt like a new boy in school. 'Who else was at Shorelands at the same time? I bet, afterward, they all wished that they'd been put together with your grandfather. Did he ever go back?'

'God, no,' Davey said. 'Haven't you ever seen that picture?'

Davey began to laugh.

'What's funny?'

'I just remembered something. There's a picture from when my grandfather was at Shorelands - a photograph of all these guys sitting on the lawn. Georgina Weatherall's in it, and Hugo Driver, and all the people who were there that summer. My grandfather's squeezed into this rickety lawn chair, and he looks like he's about to strangle someone.'

The rest of that night Davey lay with Paddi, sipping from a variety of drinks brought in by women he sometimes saw and sometimes did not, occasionally hearing music from the floors below, now and then catching a sob or a shout of laughter from rooms throughout the building.

And then, immediately it seemed, he was locking the door of his apartment, having showered, shaved, and