Banquo's Ghosts Read Online Free PDF

Neville couldn’t see it. He and the columnist still locked eyes, anticipating something fun and the taste of that first drink. Jo’s parties always had that effect. As the elevator man opened the gated door, Johnson waved the exalted Nevillian out ahead of him, smiling, “It’s just a simple supper party, but let’s not keep the little woman waiting. She’s been slaving all day.”
    Poore laughed. “If I had your ex-wives, I wouldn’t have to work.”
    Johnson caught a glimpse of himself in the gilt-edged hallway mirror: the dapper drake with a receding hairline, in standard pinstripe blue and open collar, smiled gravely back. They heard the sounds of the party, the staccato clinking of glasses like a monstrous wind chime, then the sonorous murmuring of a gossipy theater crowd during an intermission at a Broadway opening. A long, tall, and narrow hall like the entranceway to a cathedral marched off ahead. The walls lined with paintings: a Caravaggio, a Dürer woodblock print—both darkly lush and worth more than $10 million; framed covers of Crusader issues; and black-and-white news file photos of Jo von H in various Edward R. Murrow poses. There’d been a lot of water under the bridge since those Oxford days, the briefest of marriages, a short detour on Josephine’s march to glory. Vanity, thy name is suffragette. And to make it all perfect, one portrait, an oil painting, lit from above: the late Mr. Josephine Parker von Hildebrand. Her second Ex.
    Also known on the oilfields of Texas as Big Joe Hill. No relation whatsoever to the Wobbly legend of Woody Guthrie fame. Josephine’s great conquest and now dead ex-husband. A trim black bit of crepe crossed the corner of the portrait. The likeness showed the hard, unrelenting face of an oilman, emphasis on the man, many years older than his pretty wife.
    Sure, she divorced him. Who wouldn’t? Sure, she took him for everything—what was wrong with that? But it was pure Josephine to honor the old wildcatter’s memory with a serious, sympathetic, and
heroic likeness. She took his money, despised his Texas ways, and fled to more sophisticated climes, but damned if she didn’t make him the poster boy of that long elegant hallway and every luxury that followed. After all, in every sense of the word, he was the founder of the feast.
    Still, you couldn’t feel too sorry for the old geezer. After Josephine put the touch on him, others lined up for the same treatment. She wasn’t beautiful, but people thought she was. Tall, in as good shape as a fifty-year-old could be, with platinum blonde-dyed hair and the best breasts money could buy; Johnson had nicknamed her lesser charms from those Oxford days “our little secrets.”
    Her wardrobe took up closets that four or five families from Queens would be happy to live in. No one noticed her plain features. The force of her personality overwhelmed all else. Witty, shrewd, magnetic, and kind when she wanted to be, Josephine had practically every desirable personal characteristic, except wisdom and mercy. She was always dating very wealthy men fifteen years younger than herself, who adored her and eagerly did her bidding. She called them her “Lancelots.”
    The von Hildebrand hallway opened up into a grand oval foyer with rooms radiating from its center and a staircase rising to fainting heights. Every catered affair had its tone, some informal, some black-tie, but Josephine preferred the starched white blouse and gray apron types, a uniform commonly seen in the 1950s on pale Irish maidservants and reserved Spanish butlers fresh from Cuba.
    Large silver platters of hors d’oeuvres circulated among the privileged, and Johnson never doubted his place among them: the hors d’oeuvres and the exalted both. In those days, he knew what he was supposed to think and duly thought it, although not without a dollop of ironic detachment. Whether he was chatting up the famous director of the Zyklon-B movie trilogy or whether he stopped