The Hellfire Club

'You're going to drive?' Daisy had not undertaken to pilot a car as far as the end of the driveway in several decades.

Daisy laughed. 'Of course not. Jeffrey will drive me. Don't worry, Jeffrey is completely dependable. He's like the Kremlin.'

Nora gave up. 'You'd better do it fast. I don't know when Davey's coming home.'

'This is so exciting,' Daisy said. She hung up.

Nora released a moan and slumped against the wall. Davey could never know that she had seen his mother's book. The entire transaction would have to be conducted as if under a blanket in deepest night. Daisy would give her the manuscript, and after a few days, she would give it back. She did not have to read it. All she had to do was give Daisy the encouragement she needed.

Nora straightened up and went to the living room window, not at all comfortable with the idea of treating Daisy so shabbily.

When she thought that Daisy's car would soon be turning into Crooked Mile Road, she left the house and walked down to the end of the drive. A Mercedes came rolling toward her. Daisy began to open the door before the car came to a stop, and Nora stepped back. Daisy leaped out and embraced her. 'You darling genius! My salvation!'

Daisy leaned back to beam wildly at Nora. Her eyes were wet and glassy, and her hair stood out in white clumps. 'Isn't this wonderful, isn't this wicked?' She gave Nora another wild grin and then turned around to wrestle from before her seat a fat leather suitcase bound with straps. 'Here. I place it in your wonderful hands.'

She held it out like a trophy, and Nora gripped the handle When Daisy released her hands from the sides, the suitcase, which must have weighed twenty or thirty pounds, dropped several feet. 'Heavy, isn't it?' she said.

'Is it finished?'

'You tell me,' Daisy said. 'But it's close, it's close, it's close and that's why this is such a brilliant idea. I can't wait to hear what you have to say about it. My God!' Her eyes widened. 'Do you know what?'

Nora thought that Daisy had read about Dick Dart in the morning paper.

'They've gone and put up this hideous fortress on the Post Road, right where that lovely little clam house used to be!'

'Oh,' said Nora. Daisy was talking about a cement-slab discount department store which had occupied two blocks of the Post Road for about a decade.

'I think I should write a letter of complaint. In the mean time, Jeffrey is going to expand my horizons by driving me hither and yon, as you are going to do, also, my dear, by talking to me about my book. While I'm taking in the sights, you'll be peering into my cauldron.'

'Enjoy yourself, Daisy,' Nora said.

'You must enjoy yourself, too,' Daisy said. 'Now I think Jeffrey and I had better make our getaway. I will be calling you this evening for your first impressions. We need a code word, to announce that the coast is clear. She closed her eyes and then opened them and beamed. 'I know, we'll use what you said when I called you. If Davey's in the room, you say 'wrong number.' That's perfect, I think. I do have a gift for this sort of thing. Perhaps I should have been a spy.' She climbed back into the car and whispered through the open window, 'I can't wait.'

Nora bent down to see what Jeffrey made of all this. His face was rigidly immobile, and his eyes were dark, shining slits. He leaned forward and said slowly, 'Mrs Chancel, I don't mean to be presumptuous, but if I can ever do anything for you, call me. My last name is Deodato, and I have my own line.'

Nora stepped back, and the car moved forward. Daisy had turned around in her seat, and Nora tried to return her smile until Daisy's face was only a pale, exulting balloon floating away down the street.34

Nora hoisted the case onto the sofa and undid the straps. Scuffed and battered, variously darkened by stains, the suitcase appeared to be forty or fifty years old. When Nora finally yanked the zipper home, the top yawned upward several inches, the mass of pages beneath it expanding as if taking a deep breath.

Thousands of pages of different sizes, colors, and styles rose up. Most of these were standard sheets of white typing paper, some of them yellow with age; some of the remainder were standard pages shaded ivory, gray, ocher, baby blue, and pink. The rest, amounting to about a third, consisted of sheets torn from notebooks, hotel stationery, Chancel House invoice and order forms used on their blank sides, and the sort of notepaper that is decorated with drawings of dogs and horses.

Where could she hide this monstrosity? It would probably fit under the bed. She knelt to get her arms under the bottom of the case, lifted it off the sofa, and staggered backwards, barely able to see over the top. A faint odor of dust and mothballs hung about the weight of paper and leather in her arms.

The first sheet floated along in front of her and resolved itself into a title page which had never managed to make up its mind. Over the years Daisy had considered an evergrowing number of titles, adding new inspirations without rejecting the old ones.

In the bedroom Nora cautiously made her way toward the couch, then bent down to lower the case onto an out-flung leg of a pair of jeans and a blouse she had been intending to iron. Holding her breath, she put one hand on top of the suitcase while with the other she tugged the jeans to one side, the blouse to the other. Then she sat beside it. She looked at it for a moment, regretting that she had ever offered to read this unwieldy epic, then grasped it front and back and lowered it to the floor. Yes, it might just, it probably would, fit under the bed.

Nora regarded the bright double window in the wall to her left. She stood up to raise the bottom panes as far as they would go and returned to the couch. She looked down at the untidy stack of pages at her feet, sighed, picked up sixty or seventy pages, turned over the title, or nontitle, page, and read the dedication. Typed on a yellowing sheet with the letterhead of the Sahara Hotel, Las Vegas, complete with an idealized front elevation of the building, it read: For the only person who has ever given me the encouragement necessary to any writer, she who alone has been my companion and without whose support I would long ago have abandoned this endeavor, myself.

On the next page, also liberated from the Sahara Hotel, Las Vegas, was an epigraph attributed to Wolf J. Flywheel. The world is populated by ingrates, morons, assholes, and those beneath them.

Nora began to enjoy herself.

PART ONE: How the Bastards Took Over.

She began reading the first chapter. Through a maze of crossed-out lines, arrows to phrases in the margins, and word substitutions, she followed the murky actions of Clementine and Adelbert Poison, who lived in a decrepit gothic mansion called The Ivy in the town of Westfall. A painter whose former beauty still shone through the weight she had put on during the course of an unhappy marriage, Clementine drank a bit, wept a bit, pondered suicide, and had a peculiarly ironic, distant relationship with her son, Egbert. Adelbert made and lost millions playing with the greater millions left him by his tyrannical father, Archibald Poison, and seduced waitresses, secretaries, cleaning women, and the Avon Lady. When he was home, Adelbert liked to sit on his rotting terrace scanning Long Island Sound through a telescope for sinking sailboats and drowning swimmers. Egbert was a boneless noodle who spent most of his time in bed. Some vague but nasty secret, possibly several vague but nasty secrets, fouled the air.

When she reached the end of the first chapter, Nora looked up and realized that she had been reading for half an hour. Davey had still not returned. She looked back at the page, the last line of which was 'You know very well that I never wished to reclaim Egbert,' said Adelbert. Reclaim him? Egbert did resemble something reclaimed, like a lost dog.

The telephone rang. Hoping to hear her husband's voice, Nora picked it up and said, 'Hello?'

'Goody goody, you didn't say 'Wrong number,' so you can talk.' Daisy's voice, slightly slurred. 'What do you think?'

'I think it's interesting,' Nora said.

'Poop. You have to say more than that.'

'I'm enjoying it, really I am. I like Adelbert and his telescope.'

'Alden used to spend hours looking for topless girls on sailboats. How far are you?'

'The end of chapter one.'

'Umph.' Daisy sounded disappointed. 'What did you like best?'

'Well, the tone, I suppose. That sort of black humor. It's like Charles Addams, in words.'