Crowned Heads by Thomas Tryon Read Free Book Online

sinister, not at all.”
    Hardly more was known of Emmanuel Vando now than at the time, and few facts had come to light since his death. Fedora had always been inclined to surround herself with “types”—colorful, amusing, even bizarre (Derougemont easily fitted this category). But to outward appearances Vando seemed nothing more than what he claimed to be, a doctor of gerontology. He was a Portuguese, born in the Algarve, and claiming degrees at the University of Lisbon and the Neurasthenic College in São Paulo. He had a wife he had never divorced but didn’t live with, and children whose fates remained obscure. There was little doubt that he was to a large degree a charlatan, yet there was never any doubt in the public mind that it was he who was responsible for Fedora’s continuing youth.
    It was, if indirectly, Vando who had initiated the German mogul Improstein’s discovery of Maria Fedorowich at the Peterhof Company in St. Petersburg. She was already under consultation to the Portuguese, who was at Moscow’s Bagratian Clinic, and in order to catch himself this big rich fish, Improstein, he baited his hook with a prime example of his theories, an older actress in the company. Improstein was less impressed with her than he was with Maria, whom he subsequently brought to Berlin. As for Vando’s work at the clinic, it was not until the early thirties that he made anything known concerning his discoveries about the preservation of human tissue and the intricate processes he had devised for the retardation of age effects.
    “What were those stories about the Nazi business?” Marion asked.
    “That came out at the Nuremberg trials. Testimony given by one of the defendants, a man named Fritsche, tied Vando into having treated several high-ranking Nazis during the war. The Portuguese government evidently had already gotten wind of things, which is why they revoked Vando’s passport before the war. In any case, his reputation was destroyed, he had to close his clinic, and the only patient he continued seeing was Fedora. He died a ruined man.”
    “I remember reading an interview Rudi Kramm gave back in the sixties. He said he’d never photographed a face like that; he called Vando a genius.”
    “Do you think Kramm was as good a cameraman as King?”
    “I don’t know; I suppose so. Kramm was the first one to shoot her in color, wasn’t he? She’d never made a color picture before Santa Cristi. ”
    “That was her first.”
    “Which did she prefer?”
    “She never said. I don’t imagine Kramm ever topped ‘The Queen’s King,’ though.”
    Since Ophelie, Fedora had had only one cameraman, Walter King, hence the sobriquet “The Queen’s King.” People said he couldn’t have managed it without Vando, but Walter King was an artist, and he discovered new things in Fedora’s face that as she grew to increasing maturity only intrigued her viewers more.
    But what, Marion wanted to know, was his secret? How had he done it?
    “Ever see Corinne Griffith in Black Oxen ? No, too young, and they don’t show that on the Late Show. It’s from a Gertrude Atherton novel. Fedora’s story isn’t dissimilar—a woman’s physical youth is restored by gland treatments, and so on. But if Vando was a charlatan, as they say, would she have continued going to him for all those years?”
    “She was always sneaking in and out of his clinic, wasn’t she?”
    “She spent her life sneaking in and out,” Barry said, pouring more wine. It was true; Fedora’s had been the great disappearing act of the century. It seemed her natural habit, like the fox’s of going to earth, and while at first the newspapers and radio played it up importantly, the more often it happened, the less likely they were to make anything of it. There’d be a small paragraph buried among inconsequential items, mentioning that Fedora had not been seen since last May, the studio had no clue as to her whereabouts; then would come the follow-up item: