Fortune Is a Woman - Elizabeth Adler [144]
He called the waiter over and asked who she was. “That’s the Baroness Magda Muntzi,” he was told.
Harry sent her a note, watching eagerly as she read it. She smiled at him, a discreet smile so that her companion would not notice, but he thought it held promise. He found out where she lived and the next day sent her flowers and another note asking her to have dinner with him. She agreed, and when they finally met, he was instantly smitten.
Magda was Hungarian. She was flamboyant, with his favorite copper-red curls, flashing green eyes, and an uncertain temper. She was older than he was by several years, but she had the kind of body he liked, full of curves instead of the straight up-and-down nonsense that was so fashionable. She had breasts like alabaster, hips that swung when she walked, long tapering legs, and a healthy sexual appetite. She also had a smart apartment, bequeathed to her, or so she told him, by her late husband, and she bought expensive furs and trinkets the way other people bought groceries. Every day.
He forgot about Francie and Edward Stratton. Harry fell so hard for Magda that he paid the price she demanded without question, eagerly financing her forays to Lucille, Mainbocher, Cartier, and Tiffany. He bought a thirty-room house on Sutton Place and then he invited her to marry him and gave her free rein to decorate it. And when she accepted, he forgot about his newspaper and his businesses in San Francisco. He married Magda and for two years played attendant lover to her teasing “mistress” at social events and at nightclubs all over Manhattan.
Two years later, he woke early one morning, full of virile masculine pride, and made love to her. She lay like a stone beneath him until he was finished and then she said coldly, “I’m bored, Harry. I want a divorce.” He stared at her, seeing the indifference in her eyes, and then the enormity of what she had said dawned on him. He looked down at himself, still sweating with the glow of his triumphal climax, and at her lying like a marble effigy, her lip curling faintly in contempt. And then he struck her. Hard.
Magda did not cry. She put a hand to her bleeding mouth and bruised eye and said evenly, “That’s going to cost you, Harry.” And it did. It took another two years and almost half his fortune to buy her silence and save his reputation. She got her divorce, and after the war went to live in Monte Carlo on his money with some phony White Russian count, just one in a long line of lovers, while his fortunes dwindled.
His three years with Magda as mistress and wife had been expensive. The Sutton Place house alone had cost almost ten million by the time she had finished with fancy decorators and important French antiques and Old Master paintings. And even at that price, it had looked like the residence of an exclusive Hungarian whore. Which, he thought disgustedly, it almost was.
When he finally returned to San Francisco, looking a decade older than his twenty-eight years, with the puffy face of a heavy drinker and the world-weary expression of a man who had seen it all, there was a surprise awaiting him. As his chauffeur drove the burgundy de Courmont home along California Street, Harry turned to stare at the new house occupying the long-vacant lot a block down from his own place. “That’s gone up overnight,” he commented lazily. “Who owns it, do you know?”
The chauffeur refrained from reminding him that he had been away almost five years. Instead he shook his head and replied, “I haven’t heard whose house it is, sir.” He was lying—he just didn’t want to be the one who told Mr. Harrison that his notorious sister had built her house almost dead opposite him