The Hellfire Club

'I needed help and I called him.'

'You called Jeffrey? That's crazy.'

'I couldn't call you, could I? All the lines are tapped. And once Jeffrey realized that I'd been asking questions about Katherine Mannheim, he insisted on picking me up.'

'I'm lost. Jeffrey is a servant, he's Maria's goddamned nephew, what can he possibly have to do with Katherine Mannheim?' A slosh, a chinking of ice cubes. 'I'm beginning to hate the sound of that woman's name. I hope she died a horrible death. Why are you asking questions about her?'

'Dick Dart is doing more than buying new clothes.' For a little while she explained Dart's mission, and Davey responded with moans of disbelief. 'I don't care if you don't believe it, that's what's going on, Davey. As for Jeffrey, he's Katherine Mannheim's nephew because his mother, Helen Day, was her sister.'

'His mother? Helen Day?'

'She met your grandfather at Shorelands when she went there to see if she could find Katherine. Her husband had died, and she wasn't happy in her work, and he hired her.' She went on to explain the connections between Helen Day, Jeffrey, and Maria.

'Do these people think Katherine Mannheim wrote Night Journey? That could ruin us!'

'But Chancel House is in plenty of trouble even without a scandal about Hugo Driver. According to Dick Dart -'

'That expert on the publishing industry.'

'He knows a lot about Chancel House. Your father is running it into the ground, and he's been trying to sell it to a German firm. This Katherine Mannheim business is driving him crazy, because it could wreck the German deal.'

'There is no German deal. Dick Dart made it all up.'

'He passed along another interesting story, too. About the Hellfire Club.'

'Oh,' Davey said. 'Well, okay.'

' 'Well, okay'? What does that mean?'

'Okay, I didn't exactly tell you the truth.'

'You belonged to the Hellfire Club.'

'There was no Hellfire Club, not really. That was just what we called it.'

'But there's a branch in New York, isn't there? And you're a member.'

'It isn't like that. You keep making it sound like a real club, when it's just these guys who get together to mess around. They do hire a good chef now and then, or they used to, and they did have a concierge and a coat-check woman. There was a bar, and you could take girls to the rooms upstairs. I only went a couple of times after Amy and I broke up.'

'Who was the girl you took to the Hellfire Club in New Haven?'

'The same little menace who turned up in the art department. At Yale she called herself Lena Ware. Every time I saw her, she was reading Night Journey. I think she came to New Haven looking for me.'

'Why didn't you tell me you'd met her twice?'

'It would have sounded so strange. And I didn't want to tell you about… you know… about what Dart probably told you.'

'About hitting her with the car.'

'I didn't hit her. Well, I thought I did, but I didn't. When I met her at Chancel House a couple of years later, and she was calling herself Paddi Mann, she said she was so mad at me that she wanted to scare me. Nora, she was nuts. I love Hugo Driver, but she never thought about anything else. You should have seen her friends! There are Driver houses, did you know that? I went to one with her. It was in a tenement over a restaurant on Elizabeth Street. It was really bizarre. Everybody was high all the time, and they had cave rooms, and people who dressed up like wolves, and all this stuff.'

'That was what you described to me, wasn't it?'

'Uh huh. Anyhow, she kept trying to get me to go to Shorelands because she had this screwball theory that Shorelands was in Night Journey.'

'How?'

'She said she thought you couldn't understand the book unless you went to Shorelands, because Shorelands was in it. Something about the places, but that's all she said. The whole idea was goofy. I got a book about Shorelands by a guy with a funny name, and it didn't say anything new about Night Journey.'

'Just out of curiosity, what really happened the last time you went to her place?'

'I found the book under her bed, and I really did think that something bad had happened to her, because she just disappeared. Her room was completely empty. The other Driver people who lived there didn't know where she had gone, and they didn't care. She wasn't a girl to them, she was Paddi Mann, the real one, the one in the book. When I left, I felt so depressed that I couldn't stand the thought of going home, so I did check into a hotel for a couple of nights. When we moved into our house, the book turned up in a carton I took out of the Poplars.'

'It was in our house?'

'I remember opening it up and seeing her name. For a second, Nora, I almost fainted. Every time that girl turned up, my life went haywire. I put it in the Chancel House bookcase in the hallway. The day I met Natalie in the Main Street Delicatessen, she mentioned that she'd never read Night Journey. She liked horror novels, but Driver always seemed too much like fantasy to her, so she'd never tried him. The next day I pulled one of the Night Journeys out of the bookcase and gave it to her, and it turned out to be that one.'

'Oh, Davey,' she said. He took another swallow of his drink. 'So you wanted to get it before the cops saw it.'

'I told you that. It had my name in it, too.'

'So to cover up your affair, you told me this story instead of saying, 'Well, Nora, after we bought the house I gave this book to Natalie.''

'I know.' He groaned. 'I was afraid you'd figure out that I was seeing her. Anyhow, why are you asking me all this stuff? You don't care about Hugo Driver.'

'I bought all three of his books today.'

'No kidding. After you finish the first one, you have to read Twilight Journey. It's really great. God, it would be wonderful to talk to you about it. Want to know what it's about?'

'I have the feeling you want to tell me,' Nora said.

As ever, Davey instantly became more confident when given the opportunity to talk about Hugo Driver. 'Like in the first book, he has to go around talking to all these people and piece together what really happened out of their stories. He learns that his father killed a bunch of people, and almost killed him because he was afraid he'd find out. Anyhow, early in the book he hears that his parents aren't his real parents, they just found him in the forest one day, which in some ways is a tremendous relief, so off he goes in search of his real parents, and a Nellad, which is a monster that owns a gold mine and looks like a man but isn't, slices him with its claws, and the old woman who dresses his wounds tells him that his mother really is his mother. His parents left him in the forest when he was a baby, but she went out that same night and brought him back. He says, 'My mother is my mother.''79

For the second time that night, an enormous recognition seemed to gather in the air around Nora's body, cloudy, opaque, awaiting the moment to reveal itself. 'Incredible,' she said.

'It's a fantasy novel - what do you want, realism?' The ice cubes rang in the glass, and music rustled in the background. 'It's so strange. You've been through all this terrible shit, and we're talking about Hugo Driver. I'm pathetic. I'm a joke.'

'No, what you're saying is interesting. Tell me what happens in the third one.'

'Journey into Light! Pippin learns that the real reason they're living way out in the forest at the foot of the mountains is that his grandfather was even worse than his father. He tried to betray his country, but the plot failed, and they escaped into the woods before their part in it was discovered. The Nellads are some other descendants of his grandfather's, and they have all his evil traits. They're so bad they turned into