The Luxembourg Run Read online

  THE

  LUXEMBOURG

  RUN

  Stanley Ellin

  1977

  For Jeannie, with love

  CONTENTS

  The Invisible Prince/1

  The King of Vondel Park/35

  The Emperor of Square Nine/112

  THE

  INVISIBLE

  PRINCE

  Part I

  2

  Once upon a time, I was ten years old.

  In a photograph taken of me on my tenth birthday — that, by simple

  calculation, had to be in the year 1955, in the time of Eisenhower — I, David

  Hanna Shaw, am standing alone on the summit of the Acropolis against the

  whiteness of the ruined Parthenon and the dazzling blue of Grecian sky, garbed

  in a flawless replica of the evzone military regalia. A small musical-comedy

  hero with those pompons on my slippers, short pleated skirt, ornamental jacket

  draped with cartridge belt, tasseled cap and all.

  When you know that it was my mother who was inspired to thus

  fantastically garb me, putting me through endless fittings in order that I might

  be presented to a select gathering of Foreign Service families and their Greek

  opposite numbers at a birthday party for me that afternoon, and that she then

  forgot to send out invitations to the party, you know pretty much what there is

  to know about my mother. Divinely featherheaded. And, before she started to

  put on her middle-aged weight, divinely beautiful.

  My expression in the photograph is interesting. All done up in costume

  for a party that wasn’t being held, I am facing the camera with a smile. Not

  forced either. Evidence that after only one decade of existence I had attained a

  marvelous emotional balance. For eight years of that time I had been hauled

  around European capitals by a scatterbrained mother, a pompous father, and a

  succession of governesses, and what with that and the peculiar boarding

  schools I was occasionally dropped into, I had absorbed the lesson that

  yielding to the current is the way to go.

  Of course, I had luck on my side. Where other Foreign Service kids from

  the States were usually planted in one specific alien place and raised there in

  an Americanized hothouse, I had a father whose office was always on the

  move. His title was Commissioner of the United States Economic Agency in

  Europe, a title much more formidable than any powers of the agency, but

  which provided deluxe living quarters, staff, limousine, chauffeur, and a

  popgun salute on arrival. It cost my father somewhat more to maintain his

  position than it cost the government, but it was the position he wanted, the title

  and perquisites of which made up his idea of glory.

  3

  At ten years old I already had a vast amount of such information tucked

  away in my brain because I had the gift of tongues. I was fluent in French and

  Dutch, competent in Spanish, Italian, and German, and had a fair smattering of

  what might be called kitchen Greek. Also, I had pretty much a free run of any

  quarters we occupied, and it was the domestics, taking small notice of this

  silent, apparently uncomprehending little American boy, who not only filled in

  my command of their native tongues, but supplied fascinating opinions of those

  they served.

  It stung sometimes to overhear the backstairs analysis of my mother’s

  idiocies and my father’s overbearing stupidity and endless cheapness with

  money, but I was wise enough to understand that if I raised a voice in protest I

  would be cut off from the backstairs gossip. Only once I came near blowing

  the whole thing. That was in our Brussels apartment where I found that to his

  servitors my father was known as Monsieur le Bécoteur. Title of honor,

  perhaps? But no, there was something about the way it was said that suggested

  otherwise. At last, itching with curiosity, I approached my then Ma’mzelle, a

  middle-aged Walloon lady, and faced her with the question. Her immediate

  reaction was an involuntary hoot of laughter. Then she put on the familiar

  frowning dignity. “C’est dégoûtant. Disgusting. Where did you hear it?”

  “I don’t remember. But what does it mean?”

  “Ah, you really are something, you know that? Well, I will tell you, so

  that you do not say it in front of decent people. It means a man who touches

  women where he should not. Now you see how disgusting it is? So you will

  kindly put it out of your mind.”

  Far from putting it out of my mind I seized on it as the clue to those latenight

  conversations between my mother and my father when, in my bedroom

  that adjoined theirs, I could catch heated words and phrases. “Incorrigible

  womanizer,” went the treble, and “Oh, yes, I saw you with her! I saw what

  was going on!” while the bass rumbled and grumbled angry denials.

  Womanizer. Un bécoteur, hein? So now I knew.

  By all the statistics ever extracted from case histories I should have been

  as neurotic a kid as was ever destined to wind up on the couch, but somehow I

  wasn’t. True, now and then I did suffer fits of melancholy. I would sit alone, a

  lump rising in my throat, tears welling in my eyes, savoring a delicious selfpity.

  But it never lasted long. Even through the woeful moment I was fortified

  4

  by the awareness that I knew things no one else around me knew; I was the

  Invisible Prince.

  I was, in fact, mostly content with myself and my lot. I suppose it never

  struck me in my childhood that I wasn’t supposed to be.

  5

  The man who took that photograph of me

  as midget Greek warrior was named Ray Costello, and he was a sort of gift

  from my grandmother and grandfather Hanna in Florida, shipped across the

  Atlantic to serve as my bodyguard in Athens. Whatever news of Greece during

  that period reached the Miami Herald, it must have portended for those folks

  on South Bay Shore Drive at least the kidnapping of their grandson. The one

  and only grandchild. The J.G. Hanna son, who would have been my uncle had

  he lived, was killed in World War II at Anzio. The Hanna daughter, my

  beautiful, scatterbrained, egomaniac mother, had produced me, then gone out

  of production, and, I suppose, had made it clear to her family that she had no

  intention of ever returning to it.

  So one day Costello showed up at the mansion in Athens, a chunky,

  hard-faced man who wore a gun in the shoulder holster under his jacket and

  who never spoke unless directly addressed. And, even then, with the absolute

  minimum of words. Altogether a heroic image, but not really much of a

  companion.

  Of course I was not completely marooned in Europe. Once or twice a

  year I would spend time basking in the adoration of grandma and grandpa

  Hanna in South Florida, and if there was any outside agency which could be

  credited with the perhaps unnatural equilibrium that sustained me through most

  of my very young life, it had to be those folks in that house on South Bay Shore

&
nbsp; Drive who obviously thought I was the greatest thing to ever come down the

  pike. My grandmother was the more demonstrative addict. Everything I said

  dazzled her.

  “Tell me what you and grandpa did today, darling.”

  I would tell her.

  “Now tell it to me in French.”

  I would tell it to her in French.

  “Perfectly beautiful,” my grandmother would say. Then motioning over

  Mrs. Galvan, the Cuban housekeeper, and aiming me at her: “Now tell it to

  Emiliana in Spanish, darling.”

  My grandfather, not quite so overt in his enthusiasms, was, however, the

  more potent influence on me. A slight little man, always cool and neat, he was

  6

  the one for the boat outdoors and the checkers and chess indoors. The boat,

  moored at Dinner Key, was named the Carrie H. in honor of my grandmother,

  and it was an imposing forty-footer, rigged for deep-sea fishing, and capable,

  as my grandfather solemnly assured me, of going right across to Europe if one

  chose to take her there. There was also a captain and a one-man crew, the

  captain generally looking very uncaptainlike to my critical eye, the crew

  always in patchwork clothes and smelling strongly of fish and beer. Each

  morning at dawn we would set out with full bait buckets for the trolling lines,

  and return at noon in time for lunch, sometimes with a catch on display

  considerably larger than I was.

  For a while I had the impression that my grandfather made his living as a

  fisherman, and it came as something of a disillusionment to be informed by my

  grandmother that no, he was a lawyer, and a very good one. There was never

  any question in my mind that whatever he was he would be good at it. Always

  soft of voice, he never had to raise that voice to command attention. At most,

  there was a small, unfunny smile he took on that was like a danger sign. Once

  there was a scene behind the closed doors of the living room where he and

  some men were closeted on business, the men's voices alarmingly angry, his

  voice hardly to be heard, and when they all emerged at the end, the men

  slamming out of the house red-faced with bad temper, my grandfather wearing

  that little smile, my grandmother said complacently to me, “Grandpa can drive

  a hard bargain, dear, and some folks just seem to resent it.”

  Whatever that meant, I could see he was more than a match for three

  very angry men, all of them much larger than he was.

  Sometimes I practised that little smile in the mirror, but I could never

  make it very impressive.

  7

  The evening of my partyless tenth

  birthday in Athens, the simmering relationship between my father and mother

  finally came to full boil.

  That midnight I was wakened by my mother, and drugged with sleep was

  helped to dress and led downstairs to the car, where Costello was waiting for

  us. Then we were driven to a hotel off Syntagma Square where we spent the

  rest of the night. Next afternoon we were on our way to Paris by train, and the

  following day set up in the Hôtel Meurice on the rue de Rivoli.

  It was not until then that my mother took me into her confidence. She was

  in no mood to mince words. Father had made Mother very, very unhappy, so

  they were separating now and would divorce later. Mother had done her best

  to make a loving home for all of us, but it was simply no use.

  She squeezed my hand. “You do understand, darling, don’t you?”

  “Yes,” I said. Then I said hopefully, “Will we live here in the hotel?”

  “I will, darling, but you’ll be living at school. A delightful school. Le

  Lycée Anglais d’Auteuil, not a half-hour from here. You start next week.”

  C’est la vie.

  Well, it was a lycée, a “middle school,” and it was certainly planted

  right there in Auteuil on the outskirts of town, but how that Anglais came to be

  part of its title is something else again, because of its several dozen youthful

  boarders — we ranged in age from the innocent eights to the sophisticated

  sixteens — I was the only one to whom English was the native tongue.

  In his brochure describing his institution, Monsieur Stampfli, founder

  and headmaster, summed it up neatly. Here is a school which allows the

  growing child himself to determine his course of study so that in the end he

  emerges as a gloriously creative force in society. In practice, this meant that

  one attended classes which entertained one and disregarded those which

  didn’t, a process that made for a sketchy education at best. But the atmosphere

  was amiable, the cuisine sufficient, and the library well stocked, so I had no

  complaints in that direction.

  The one item in the curriculum that required at least a show of

  attendance was outdoor athletics, and a large, unevenly marked-off football

  field with wobbly goal posts and torn net was provided to that end. Here it

  8

  was that I discovered I had an undreamed-of talent. I was agile and tough, I

  was brainlessly unafraid of getting a boot in the shins or an elbow in the eye,

  and with very little effort I could make that battered old soccer ball do tricks.

  This became one of my distinctions among my peers. The other was

  awarded me much against my will when the news of my parents’ divorce hit

  the press. Stuck away here, a few thousand miles from America where the

  divorce proceedings were being held, I could not, of course, get a first-hand

  view of the mess, but I didn’t have to. My schoolmates — especially the

  seniors, avid scandalmongers — were right on the ball.

  For a couple of weeks they had all the grist they needed for their mill. It

  was a mess all right, considering my father’s hitherto secret career as elderly

  Don Juan; it was featured in the Paris papers, earned a gaudy half-page in the

  London News of the World illustrated with photographs not only of my father

  and mother, but also of a lissome British beauty in a barely discernible swim

  suit. And finally, courtesy of Jean-Pierre de Liasse, our senior of seniors, I

  was shown the two-page spread in the magazine Paris-Match where my

  parents now appeared in the pictorial company of several Continental beauties

  out of my father’s past. Paris-Match also played up the aged husband-youthful

  wife theme, thus making me aware for the first time that my father was almost

  the age of my grandfather Hanna, and somehow this seemed the most shocking

  revelation of all.

  A mess all right. “Un vrai micmac,” as Jean-Pierre de Liasse cheerfully

  put it in kitchen French.

  He and a handful of the other seniors, smokers and winebibbers all, took

  to using my study as a sort of clubhouse during this bad time. I lived with that,

  not only because I lacked the nerve to order them out, but because I sensed that

  they were, under the hard-boiled talk, trying to be kind to me. Trying, in their

  way, to fortify me against the wallops the older generation keeps landing on

  the younger in their wild swinging at each other.

  Jean-Pierre, at least as hard-boiled as a twenty-minute egg and the

  school’s reigning nobleman — he was, in fact, Monsieur le Comte de Liasse

  ever since his father had hit a
n oil slick at Le Mans while under full

  acceleration — Jean-Pierre it was who put it in a nutshell. “Il jete sa gourme,

  votre père. Your old man’s getting off his rocks while he can, that’s all. No

  harm done. That’s how it is with all us men.”

  9

  “It doesn’t hurt to be a little discreet about it though,” remarked another

  senior, and Jean-Pierre shrugged. “One gets careless at times. Then you get a

  stink in the papers, especially if they can call papa a distinguished diplomat

  and mama an international beauty. But our David is a tough one, right? He

  looks the situation over, he says that’s life, that’s how it is with the old folks,

  no sweat for me. J’m’en-fichisme. It’s the only way.”

  Right. J’m’en-fichisme, that was the name of the game. Total

  indifference. No sweat for me, baby, whatever goes on out there. It’s the cool

  one who’s the real hero.

  Not bad at all, having those seniors mark me as a cool one.

  10

  Now and then, mail arrived.

  Affectionate little notes in violet ink from my mother on the Hôtel Meurice

  stationery, each violet i capped not by a dot, but by a perfect tiny circle. Stern

  messages from my father on State Department stationery in which I was

  admonished to practise thrift — hard to do otherwise, considering my meager

  allowance — and to heed my instructors. Long, chatty letters from my

  grandmother, with a few teasing words appended by my grandfather.

  Finally one day there arrived, not one of those notes from the Meurice,

  but my mother herself, driving up in her own shining new little car and with a

  stranger in tow. A smallish, gray-haired man, deeply tanned, and speaking in

  an almost too precise Berlitz English. This, my mother said so brightly that it

  raised my hackles with premonition, was a very dear friend, Mr. Periniades.

  Milos Periniades. A Greek gentleman who lived in Rome and had business

  here in Paris. And when in departing my mother said to me sotto voce, “You

  do like him, don’t you, darling? I can see you do,” the sense of premonition

  was overwhelming.

  I didn’t like him. I didn’t like him any better on their next visit either. So

  when the marriage took place in Rome, although I was invited to attend, I

  made a point of reporting to the infirmary with an imaginary disease a day

  before the event and spent the occasion malingering.