Cat nodded in reply. Bibi held out her compact, a weighty gold disk lined with mother-of-pearl, and snapped it open loudly.
Cat gasped. Bibi had managed to elongate her lashes, brows, and eyes without any makeup lines appearing at all, and her lips had been stained a brownish mauve, but the color almost looked natural—there was no trace of product. Her skin was whiter and smoother than ever, as though they’d been able to sandblast and bleach it into perfection.
“Bibi, it’s so French!” she exclaimed.
“No-makeup makeup,” Bibi replied proudly. “But with a little bit of this monarchy shit”—she gestured toward the suite’s Charles X decor—“thrown on top. White face, dark lips, like Marie Antoinette.”
Bibi looked at her watch. “Time to get dressed,” she said forcefully, clearly accustomed to corraling temperamental clotheshorses. She stubbed out the cigarette and dragged Cat back inside the suite.
“You better go to the toilet,” Edith commanded them both. “It might be your last chance.”
While Cat sat in the bathroom, she idly coated her fingers in the beautiful, thick eucalyptus-scented hand cream that had been placed on the back of the toilet. I’m getting old, Cat thought. I need to start taking better care of myself when I travel. She rifled through her cosmetics bag and chewed half an Adderall, hoping the amphetamines would jump-start her lethargic body. As if by magic or psychosomatic expectation, she felt an immediate boost.
When she returned from the bathroom, Cat was unceremoniously squeezed into a hateful rubber bodice, to lift what was left of her breasts and smooth over the rocky vertebrae of her back, the sharp angles of her hipbones. After that she was stitched into an astonishingly tight dove-gray suede dress that ended mid-calf, the neckline laser-cut in triangle shapes, as though it had been hemmed with the world’s biggest pinking shears. Bibi fitted Cat’s feet into bleach-white patent leather stilettos, while Edith pinched Bess into an ecru minidress—made of the same fine suede as Cat’s dress—that barely covered her buttcheeks. Bess’s long legs ended in a pair of sculpted greige suede open-toe heels, held fast to her ankles with nearly invisible PVC straps.
As Cat stared into the gilded mirror they’d dragged into the living room, she wanted to laugh at the irony of it all: I’m completely fucking immobilized, a dictator’s mistress, tits pouring out of my dress, everything I always hated.
But after a moment passed, Cat didn’t laugh after all. The look was part Antwerp avant-garde and part real-life princess. If only twelve-year-old Cat could see me now, she thought, remembering the stings of adolescence, she’d be so excited to grow up.
Bibi drew a seam on the backs of Bess’s legs, as though it were the 1940s and stockings were scarce, while Edith picked out their jewelry: piles of gold and diamond necklaces made by Cy Bianco, the designer being honored at tonight’s dinner. She piled them first onto Bess, and then Cat. The necklaces felt like a pair of reins looped around her neck. As they walked to the door, the bell rang: their steaks had finally arrived. “Right away” in France meant at least an hour.
“Shit,” Bess exclaimed. “I don’t know if there will actually be food at this dinner. Do you want to eat before we go?”
“I’ll eat when I’m dead,” Cat said dismissively. “Let’s just get this over with.”
Chapter Eighteen
Still at the precinct, Hutton was just finishing a late lunch of cold takeout from a Styrofoam package, blindly shoveling forkfuls into his mouth between opening file folders. His hard work was paying off: there was only one more box to go through. He cut it open with a penknife and tossed out the folders to the four junior FBI agents who had spent their entire morning in his office.
“Read carefully,” he said before picking up the pile of possibles. “I’m going to get started.”
He read through the deliberately vaguely named corporations, one by one.
CostCompany Limited. Version Holdings Inc. Spatula Fork Productions. Triangle Limited. Brown Jones Inc. Lilac Futures Limited. Creative Solution Company. IdeaPark. Twentieth Street Limited.
It went on and on; they all seemed the same. He pulled up the spreadsheet that cross-referenced the companies in his pile with those they’d already examined, a document he’d spent the last ten weeks compiling. It had been aggressively tedious, but gut instinct told him it would eventually pay off.
Sorting by column gave him three companies that owned the most shares in what would eventually be Bedford Organics, LLC. Suddenly, a name caught his eye.
Donal Windsor, Esquire, a partner at Cavendish Crane and Vittoria Cardoso’s attorney, had been the registered agent for the original formation of Lilac Futures: a New York State Limited Liability Company located at 1131 Broadway, apartment 2250. He punched the address into his computer and found the website for a large rental complex.
He picked up his cellphone and dialed.
“Detective Hutton,” Betty Cormorant yelled into the phone. “Whatcha got?”
“Fifth Avenue, two-bedroom. But I need another favor first,” he told her.
“You’re a real pain in the ass, you know that?”
He laughed. “I know.”
Hutton fell asleep on the precinct’s plastic sofa waiting for the records to appear, but he woke up in the middle of the night to find them in his in-box. When he finally found the name of the applicant, he almost threw the computer across the room: James Burton, Esquire. Employer: Cavendish Crane.
Hutton typed the man’s name into his computer and found, as expected, that he worked as a senior associate and had litigated alongside Donal Windsor. It was an ouroboros, an endless loop of scales and vertebrae made from corporations and lawyers and lawyers and corporations, processing their secrets into dust, until there was nothing left to find. Still: there was one legal route left in his playbook. He picked up the phone, dialed the IRS, and started the process of recalling every single form that had ever been filed in relation to the profits of Lilac Futures.
Two hours into the sit-down dinner, Cat was finally starting to feel good. The Adderall had kicked in, you could smoke cigarettes inside the tent, and there was a seemingly inexhaustible supply of Louis Roederer Brut in generous, bell-bottomed flutes. There still, however, wasn’t any food—not that she cared. Food was for the birds. She downed glass number four in a swallow, grabbed glass number five from a tray, and teetered mincingly toward the dance floor where a live band had started playing Louis Armstrong covers with lots of verve—then stopped, aghast. The band was in blackface, something she hadn’t realized from across the room. The whites of their crooked smiles gleamed unnaturally behind the heavy black paint coating their faces. She backed away quickly and prayed that they could get out of here before this got online.