Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [83]
I was in an ambiguous position myself. On paper, I still worked for Henry; however, Bob was my friend, and I was also doing a lot of editing for Peter Schwed. Not for the first time in my career, I was obliged to steer a middle course between people whom I liked but who disliked each other. I consoled myself with the fact that I was welcome, for the moment, in every camp and that everybody—Schwed, Simon, Gottlieb, even Max—wanted me to work on their books. Perhaps because I had nothing at stake, I was the first to notice that the power structure had changed insensibly, as if an invisible hand were shaking it from below.
Which, in a way, was the truth.
• • •
IN THE meantime, however, everybody’s attention at S&S was diverted by an ice swan.
The ice swan is a relic of a past age of opulent display, when the great international hotels of the world had five-star restaurants, and the summit of luxury was still the transatlantic liner. In those days, any self-respecting hotel kitchen or ocean-liner galley had a sous-chef whose task it was to carve sculptures out of huge blocks of ice, often gleaming fantasies of vaguely nationalistic appeal. These sculptures, by definition ephemeral, usually four to five feet high, were carved in bulk and stored in the freezer, to be brought out to form the centerpiece in the first-class dining saloon at dinnertime. Caviar was usually presented in a life-size ice swan, its back hollowed out to hold about a kilo. On the big Cunard liners, smaller ice swans were also used for caviar at cocktail parties, either the purser’s, to which all the more important and distinguished first-class passengers were invited on the first night at sea, or at ones given by the more social passengers in their own staterooms during the voyage. On my mother’s side of the family, I actually had a distant relative who was chief purser of the Queen Mary, and I remember him taking me down to see a big, brightly lit freezer compartment stacked with ice sculptures, like an Aladdin’s cave of frozen treasures, in the center of which a heavily dressed and gloved member of the kitchen staff, his breath condensing in clouds of vapor as he chipped away with a mallet and chisel, was carving a swan out of a block of ice about five feet long and four feet across, to add to a whole row of swans, lined up neatly like a ballet chorus, on the floor.
It was therefore with some surprise that I found an ice swan in the shower stall of the men’s toilet at Simon and Schuster late one morning, its elegant, curved beak coldly mimicking that slightly supercilious smile that swans have as it dripped on the floor. The hole in its back was empty, so I surmised that the can of caviar it contained must have been removed before it was parked here to drip to death. It was a spectacle that produced a certain melancholy—so much effort, melting away so fast and unseen—as well as inevitable curiosity.
It soon transpired that I was, unfortunately, neither the first nor the only person to have seen the swan. It had been delivered on a trolley by two men earlier in the morning, and, as fate would have it, they had brought it up to the twenty-eighth floor in a passenger elevator with, of all people, Ray Schuster. At that time, the caviar was still in place, as was a card suspended from its beak.
There could have been no greater sign of the kind of hanky-panky that Ray most feared was taking place behind her back, so, to the great indignation of the two deliverymen, she ripped the envelope off the bird’s beak and, bursting into Max’s office, slapped it down on his desk. “Explain this!” she cried.
Poor Max bumbled and mumbled, his confusion no doubt passing for guilt in Ray’s eyes, but when he at last had worked out the whole story, he discovered that the swan was destined for Phyllis S. Levy, Bob Gottlieb’s assistant. Tall, thin,