• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 854 0

pieces of furniture, with a manicurist and a hairdresser who visit her every week. The apartment was huge, taking up a whole floor, so that the elevator let one out into a hallway with only one door. It had high ceilings and big windows overlooking Central Park, but despite that there was something dark and gloomy about it—maybe a result of its sheer size and formality, the carved wood paneling, the antique tapestries, the dark, unidentifiable Old Master–style paintings, the heavy drapes, or perhaps even the servants, who were silent, grave, and strangely glum. The dining room was enormous, but something about it suggested that it had been many years since it had been used, a feeling one had about most of the big rooms that we were led through.

Andrea greeted us in a small sitting room, slightly more cheerful than the rest of the apartment and crowded with antique furniture and expensive bric-a-brac and bibelots, like a Madison Avenue antique shop. There was a well-used backgammon board on the coffee table. Claus was a striking figure. Very tall, broad shouldered, once athletic, he was dressed casually in a sweater, tan trousers, and moccasins, and it was easy to see how he had charmed Sunny not so many years ago, when she had still been married to the dashing and notoriously unfaithful Prince Alfie von Auersperg.

Sunny had been something of a throwback (it was hard not to think about her as if she was dead), a tall, beautiful American heiress of enormous wealth, whose ambition, so far as one can tell, was to marry into the European nobility. A hundred years ago, this was common enough, when the daughters of the robber barons of New York and the meat packers of Chicago were shipped across the Atlantic with their mamas and trunks full of clothes to look for the right kind of husband: a duke, or a prince, with the right bloodlines, a castle, Schloss, chateau, or palace, and a need for ready cash. By the end of World War Two, however, this was already the stuff of musical comedies rather than real life. Sunny appeared, in this as in so many other ways, to be hopelessly out-of-date. Nevertheless, her ambition was to be part of the aristocratic European fast set and to marry into it, which she did twice, with all-but-fatal results.

Claus himself had belonged to this set only on sufferance. It was said that he had appropriated the von to his name, he wasn’t rich, and, having read law at Oxford, he eventually found himself a job working for the eccentric American oil billionaire John Paul Getty in England, where Getty lived in self-imposed and splendid exile. What Claus actually did for Getty is not altogether clear, but it gave him ample scope to play the man-about-town and to move easily in the circle of the international rich, where a good-looking, charming, and well-dressed single man with the right kind of manners was always welcome. In a way, Claus was as much of a throwback as Sunny, with his unapologetic snobbery, his life of ease as the husband of a rich woman, his fin-de-siècle elegance, and his weary sophistication. How many men these days had no profession, no job, and apparently no ambition?

Indeed, Claus did not seem to have accomplished much in his life (though many people no doubt regarded his marrying Sunny as the accomplishment of a lifetime, given her fortune). Even his notoriety was of recent date, acquired only when he was accused, tried, and convicted of trying to murder Sunny. Marriage had enabled him to live like a rich man, and the accusation of attempted murder had made him famous.

His expression was that of a man who was amused by both fame and fortune. He had a good face for a villain (if he was one): a supercilious, slightly lopsided smile, a long, slightly crooked nose, a raised eyebrow, sharp little eyes for such a big, strongly featured face. Absent the Prince Valiant hairdo and the funny hat, he reminded me of Olivier’s portrayal of Richard III, at once amused and gratified by the horror he inspires in other people. Claus, it was easy enough to see, hugely enjoyed his notoriety, which, like