The Hellfire Club

'That's because you've only read the first chapter,' Daisy said. 'After that it goes through all kinds of changes. You'll see, you're in for a real treat. At least I hope you are. Go on, go back to reading, But you really like it so far?'

'A lot,' Nora said.

'Whoop-de-do!' Daisy said. 'Stop wasting time talking to me and surge ahead.' She hung up.

Nora went back to the couch and began the second chapter. Adelbert stood beside a tall, bony, blond woman and signed a hotel register under a false name. In their room Adelbert ordered the woman to undress. Honey, can't we have a drink first! He said, Do what I say. The woman undressed and embraced him. Adelbert pushed her away. The woman said she thought they were friends. Adelbert took a revolver from his jacket pocket and shot her in the forehead.

Nora read the line again. Adelbert raised the revolver, squeezed the trigger, and put a bullet through her stupid forehead. This was a new side of Adelbert. Nora smiled at the idea of Daisy's turning Alden into a murderer. She was killing off her husband's conquests.

The telephone rang again. Groaning, Nora got up and answered it by saying, 'Daisy, please, you have to give me more time.'

A male voice asked, 'Who's Daisy?'

'I'm sorry,' Nora said. 'I thought you were someone else.'

'Obviously. I hope she gives you all the time you need, whoever she is.'

'Holly,' Nora said. Chief Fenn, I mean. How embarrassing. I'm glad you called, actually. You must have some news.'

'It's Holly, and the reason I'm calling is that we don't have any news yet. We finally got Mrs Weil's doctor off the golf course, and he shot her full of sedatives and put her in Norwalk Hospital. According to him, the earliest we can get a straight story out of her is probably Monday morning. I thought I'd pass that along, so you can relax for one night, anyhow.'

She thanked him and said, 'I guess if I'm going to call you Holly, you ought to start calling me Nora.'

'I already do,' he said. 'I'll be in touch Monday morning around nine, ten at the latest.'

A wave of relief loosened the muscles in Nora's back. Holly Fenn assumed her innocent of whatever had happened to Natalie, that now. Holly Fenn wanted to clear things up.

She returned to Daisy's epic. Adelbert parked in front of his crumbling mansion and went inside to pull Egbert out of bed. Egbert got off the floor, crawled back into bed, and pulled the covers over his head. Adelbert went downstairs to order a cringing servant to bring a six-to-one martini to the library. By the time the servant appeared with his drink, Adelbert was deep into a volume called The History of the Poison Family in America.

A new chapter, apparently from a much older version of the novel, began. On yellowed pages, the letters rose above and sank beneath the level of the lines, every e tilting leftwards, every o a bullet hole. After a battle with the style, far more congested than that of the first two chapters, Nora saw that Adelbert was reading about the history of his father during the period immediately after the birth of Egbert. A secret Nazi sympathizer, Archibald had made millions by investing in German armament concerns and was presently diverted from his covert attempts to consolidate a group of right-wing millionaires into a Fascist movement by a maddening personal problem. After rereading several pages three times over, Nora gathered that Adelbert and Clementine had perhaps produced the grandson Archibald passionately desired. Either the child had died or they had put him up for adoption. Archibald's tirades, lengthily represented, had not convinced them to repair the loss. When his orders and ultimatums came to nothing, Archibald informed his son that he would be cut out of his will if he did not provide an heir.

All of this lay half hidden beneath a furious explosion of exclamation points, tangled grammar, and backwards sentences. Archibald's fantasies about American Fascism clouded whole pages with descriptions of Nazi uniforms and other regalia. Hitler appeared, confusingly. She could not be certain if the new child had been reclaimed, adopted, or even resurrected.

Nora turned to a page typed on a sheet of Ritz-Carlton stationery and skimmed through three paragraphs before the first two sentences chimed in her head. She went back and reread them and then reread the sentences again. Adelbert's shoes were crosshatched with scuff marks. Indeed, Adelbert's were not the shoes of a fastidious man, and such secret stains and stinks permeated his entire character.

'Oh, my God,' Nora said. 'It was Daisy.'35

She looked up in astonishment. Not only were Clyde Morning and Marietta Teatime the same person, but both were Daisy Chancel. After Blackbird's initial authors had deserted Chancel House, Alden had replaced them with his wife, who had churned out piecework horror novels while she labored on her grim monstrosity. Blackbird's two stalwarts had never been seen or heard from because they were phantoms. Spectre had been hidden on a conference room shelf because Daisy had lost interest and written it when tired, drunk, or both. Alden would never revive Blackbird. Davey had been right about that, though he did not know why.

She wondered how he would react if she presented him with her discovery, then realized that she could not. Nora knew exactly how Davey would respond, by frothing at the mouth for twenty minutes before disappearing downstairs to hide behind Puccini. A more urgent question was whether or not to tell Daisy what she had discovered. Once again, for a time two separate Noras inhabited a single body, which stood up to move into the kitchen and make a ham sandwich. Daisy's instability made it equally possible that she would be enraged or delighted to have her pseudonyms known. Nora carried the sandwich back into the bedroom and realized that Davey had been gone for hours. At least he was not in Norwalk Hospital cooing over Natalie Weil. She decided to do precisely what she had done on the parkway, postpone any decision until it made itself. Daisy's manner would dictate her choice.

Nora bit into her sandwich and began skipping through the pages, trying to learn where this story was going.

After another hour, she decided that if this story was going anywhere, it was in some Daisyish direction unknown to the normal world. Scenes concluded, and then, as if an earlier draft had not been removed, repeated themselves with slight variations. The tone swung from dry to hysterical and back. At times Daisy had broken up a straightforward scene to interpolate handwritten passages of disjointed words and phrases. Some scenes broke off unfinished in midsentence, as if Daisy had intended but forgotten to return to them later. There was nothing faintly like a conventional plot. One chapter read in its entirety: The author wants to have another drink and go to bed. You idiots should do the same.

After following these confusions through a maze of arrows and crossings-out, Nora began to feel sick to her stomach. She decided to see what happened at the end and dug the last thirty pages out of the pile. Cleanly typed on fresh white bond, they were free from alterations, insertions, or marks of any kind. Nora leaned back, resumed reading, and soon found herself once more entangled in barbed wire.

The ending of Daisy's book described an argument between Clementine and Adelbert ranging over the whole of their marriage. At various moments, they were in their twenties, their forties, fifties, and sixties. The site of the argument shifted from different rooms in their house to train compartments, hotel dining rooms, and terraces in European cities. They lounged on the grass in a London park and propped up the bar of a Third Avenue gin mill at two in the morning. The ending was a compilation of the occasions of their dispute. What Nora did not understand was the nature of the dispute itself.

Clementine spewed accusations, and Adelbert responded with irrelevancies, most of them about music. I have kept your business going, you bastard, but instead of thanking me you kicked me in the teeth. (Adelbert: I never liked Hank Williams all that much.) Your entire existence is based on a lie, and so is our son's. (Adelbert: Cheap music sounds good on car radios.) You're not merely a fraud, but a fraud soaked in blood. (Adelbert: Most people would rather go to a ball game than a symphony, and they're correct.) Bile soaked the paragraphs, a bitterness evoked by a subject as familiar to Clementine and Adelbert as it was opaque to Nora.

The last paragraph drew away from the protagonists to describe the terrace of a restaurant in the Italian Alps. Glasses sparkled beside white plates and shining silverware arrayed on pink tablecloths. Snow gleamed on the peaks beyond the terrace. A distant bird sang, and a diner answered with an imitation as exact as an echo. A white cloud of cigar smoke arose from a far table and dissolved into the air.