The Hellfire Club

Nora closed her eyes. A demon flapped up and hissed, 'You're going to get hurt!'

She opened her eyes.

'Embarking on the great adventure of menopause, aren't we?'

'Yes,' she said, startled.

'Irregular periods, vaginal dryness?'

'Yes.'

'Irritability?'

'I suppose.'

'Hot flashes?'

'Just started.'

'Formication?'

'What's that?'

'Sensation of an insect crawling on your skin.'

She astounded herself by smiling.

'Doing any hormone replacement therapy? You should, but you have to experiment with the dosage levels before you get it right.'

She closed her eyes.

'I suggest a shower and a shampoo before we visit Home Cooking. Time for the next step in your education.'

He bestowed another hyena smile upon her and walked out. Moving as if in a trance, Nora dialed a disk at the end of the tub, and the bath-water gurgled into the drain. She pulled herself to her feet, waded through the froth, and twisted both dials at once. Water shot from the faucet. She flipped the lever directing the water to the showerhead, and freezing water shattered against her body.

BOOK VLORD NIGHT

The huge black animal might have been grinning at him.

'Why, now that you have learned about your fear, you must learn to trust it, of course.'48

'Of course it's about money.' Dart put down his fork and grinned. He had taken her to the hotel's gift shop, where he bought toothbrushes and toothpaste, a pack of disposable razors and shaving cream, two combs, mouthwash, a deodorant stick, a black polo shirt with MASSACHUSETTS stitched across the left breast in small red letters, and a copy of Vogue. His teeth were no longer so yellow, and without the stubble his cheeks were almost pink. Nora had heard only something like half of what Dart said, and half of that had disappeared into the demonic buzz filling her head. 'Hey, this is America! Bid'ness is bid'ness. When you see the other side is likely to rake in a hell of a lot more money than you are, what do you do? Switch sides. Here, what we have on the table adds up to four or five million smackers. Put that against a pissy billing of maybe ten thousand tops, you've got what the boys call a no-brainer.'

'From Night Journey.' This, along with the name of the young woman who had mysteriously disappeared from Shorelands, was most of what she had been able to retain from Dick Dart's explanation.

'Absolutely. You prove that Hugo Driver stole the manuscript, fifty-four years' worth of royalties, not to mention all future royalties, go to the real heirs. And if you can prove that the publishing house cooperated in this fraud, all of their profits from the book, plus a whopping payment in damages, go into the pot. On top of that, there's all the money from foreign editions.'

Nora's legs felt like rubber, and the center of her body sent out steady waves of pain. She looked at her plate. Beside a nest of french fries glistening with grease, a rectangle of processed cheese drooped over a mound of whitish paste on a slice of toast.

'So the old man cut a deal with this Fred Constantine, the old ladies' lawyer. Constantine knows he's in over his head, little practice in Plainfield, does a few penny-ante divorces and real estate closings, sixty- five years old, hasn't seen the inside of a courtroom since he got out of law school. Imagine his relief when after making him piss blood for a couple of weeks the great Leland Dart suggests - suggests, mind you - that an accommodation might be arranged. Whoopee! If Mr Constantine could settle for a payment of something on the order of a hundred thousand dollars. Dart, Morris might be willing to render some assistance to his poor defrauded clients, who would no doubt be delighted to receive fifty percent of the ultimate proceeds. Mr Constantine, who has no idea how much money is at stake, thinks he's getting a great deal!'

A bitten-off portion of a french fry lay on Nora's tongue like a mealworm. She spat it into her hand and dropped it on her plate. 'How can they do something like that?'

'Very carefully.' His eyes glowing, he pushed the remains of his first cheeseburger into his mouth and wiped his fingers with his napkin. 'Operative word? Buffers. By the time you're done, you're in a fortified castle a thousand miles away, and, baby, the drawbridge is up.'

'I mean, how can they do it?'

Holding his second cheeseburger a few inches from his mouth, Dart looked away and giggled 'Nora-pie, you're so touching. I mean that sincerely. Bid'ness is bid'ness, I told you. What's the name of our economic system? Isn't it still called capitalism?' He shook his head in mock incredulity and took an enormous bite out of the cheeseburger. Frilly lettuce bulged from the back of the bun, and pink juice drooled onto his plate.

Nora closed her eyes against a wave of nausea. Alden Chancel and Dick Dart thought alike. This discovery would be amusing, had she the capacity to be amused. Leland Dart, who shared Alden's moral philosophy, used it to justify betraying his own client. Presumably this moral philosophy reached its fulfillment in the lunatic cheerfully demolishing a cheeseburger across the table.

Nora remembered a detail from the Poplars terrace. 'I heard Alden tell Davey that your father might be playing both ends against the middle.'

Dart swallowed. 'Do the Chancel boys talk about this in front of you?'

'Davey was taking notes on the movie of Night Journey, and when I asked him why, he said there was some problem with the Driver estate.' The night in the family room seemed to have taken place on the other side of an enormous hole in time. 'A little while later, he told me something about two old ladies in Massachusetts who found some notes in their basement.'

She realized that she was having a civil conversation in a restaurant with Dick Dart as if such occasions were absolutely normal.

'Notes on the movie. What a schlump. Katherine Mannheim's sisters never read the book, of course, they remembered the movie when they found the notes, but I mean really.'

'I suppose you want to kill the sisters.' Nora poked her fork into the white paste and transported a portion the size of a pencil eraser to her mouth. It seemed that she had ordered a tuna melt.

'Absolutely not. The people I want to kill might help the case against Chancel House. We'll be protecting Hugo Driver's name, something I am pleased to do because I always liked Hugo Driver. Not the last two, you know, only the good one.'

'You like Night Journey?' That Dick Dart had enjoyed any book surprised her.

'Favorite book, bar none,' he said. 'Only novel I ever really liked. To keep up with some of my old ladies, I had to pretend to swoon over Danielle Steel, but that was just work. Agatha had a pash for Jane Austen, so I plowed through Pride and Prejudice. What a waste. Literally about nothing at all. But I reread Night Journey every couple of years.'

'Amazing.' Nora ate another forkful of her tuna. If you peeled off the plastic cheese and avoided the bread, it was edible after all.

'Amazing? Night Journey is one twisted motherfucker of a book. Whole thing takes place in darkness. Almost everything happens in caves, underground. All the vivid characters are monsters.'

It was like a warped echo of Davey; for the thousandth time she was listening to a man rave about the book. In asking him to research the case against Chancel House, Leland Dart had exploited his son's one conventional passion. The recognition that Alden Chancel had done the same thing with Davey brought with it an upwelling of