Elsinore Read Online Free Page A

the corporation.”
    â€œI’m speechless,” Holden said. “A vice president, and I’m shunted out the door, like a bag of garbage.”
    â€œHere,” Phipps said, and he handed Holden his check, signed by Howard Phipps, president of Aladdin Furs.
    â€œBut it’s a dying operation,” Holden said. “The Greeks own more than half the market. What would you want with a load of minks?”
    â€œI wanted you.”
    â€œI don’t understand,” Holden said. “I’m not so valuable that you had to buy a whole company out from under the Swiss. If you needed a favor, why didn’t you ask?”
    â€œI did. But you never showed up for breakfast.”
    â€œI was having problems with my fiancée,” Holden said.
    â€œCome, let’s eat.”
    The old man got up from behind his desk. He was taller than Holden, but his back was slightly bent. Phipps walked with a cane. His shoes looked like rubber boats. But even with the cane he was almost as quick as Holden.
    They rode upstairs in Phipps’ elevator car and stepped out into a restaurant that was three stories high and had the tapered walls of a cathedral with cut glass and metal bands that circled the ceiling in narrowing lines. Holden figured they were near the roof. There were murals on the walls of a New York that belonged to an age Holden had never heard about. It was a city of ramparts and flying boats, where the streetlife seemed to exist on laddered walkways and terraces that could float. One of the murals had words beaten into the corner with gold.
    MANHATTAN 1988
    And Holden realized what it was. An artist’s dream of Manhattan fifty years ago, a futurescape of glass tendrils and concrete vines. A city dweller’s idea of Jack and the Beanstalk. It was lucky that Holden had studied art and architecture with a graduate student from Yale. He’d been trying to keep up with Andrushka, a mannequin from the fur market who’d swallowed all of Cézanne after she’d married Sidney Holden. And now Holden wasn’t lost in this environment. He could interpret crazy murals on the wall.
    But he didn’t understand the restaurant. It covered an entire floor like some mock battlefield with soldiers that were held in place. Holden counted two dozen waiters. They couldn’t have come from Fine&Schapiro. They were tall and very blond and wore dinner jackets that Windsor himself wouldn’t have been ashamed of. But there was no turmoil attached to them. The waiters didn’t move. And it had nothing to do with any awkward hour between breakfast and lunch.
    No one eats here, except the old man .
    â€œYou look startled,” Phipps said.
    â€œWas this place ever opened to the public?”
    â€œHolden, it was the classiest spot in town. Took weeks to get a reservation. Even I had a hard time, and I owned it. That’s how independent my managers were. ‘Make him suffer,’ they said. Garbo had a corner table. She loved to watch people dance.”
    â€œWhat was it called?”
    â€œSomething simple. I didn’t care for those Parisian titles.”
    â€œSimple, but what?”
    â€œThe Supper Club,” Phipps said. “That’s all.”
    â€œAnd then …”
    â€œI closed it down.”
    â€œDid you start losing money?”
    â€œOf course not. And even if I did, I had a hundred offers to sell.”
    â€œWhat happened?”
    â€œLet’s eat,” Phipps said.
    â€œAny particular table?”
    Phipps smiled. “Holden, we can eat wherever you like.”
    And Holden tramped among the tables with Phipps and decided to sit under a mural. It was like wandering into an orderly forest, where the waiters themselves were the animals and Holden the hunter, but he still didn’t know why he’d come to hunt.
    â€œWhat happened?” he asked while the waiters arrived with silverware.
    â€œWhat always happens. I was in love. I