CHAPTER 7

FROM BILLY ABBOTT’S NOTEBOOK—

HAPPENED TO PICK UP A COPY OF THE INTERNATIONAL ISSUE OF THE WEEK’S “TIME” MAGAZINE LO AND BEHOLD, UNDER CRIME THERE WAS THE SAGA OF THE JORDACHES, WITH NUDE PHOTOGRAPH AND WHOLE UNPLEASANT HISTORY OF THE FAMILY. FAILURE, MURDER AND DISGRACE IN SEVERAL HUNDRED WELL-CHOSEN WORDS.

I AM CLIPPING OUT THE STORY AND PUTTING IT WITH MY OTHER NOTES. IT WILL GIVE MY DESCENDANTS, IF THERE ARE ANY, A USEFUL RUNDOWN ON THEIR FAMILY TREE.

About the last place you’d expect to find the three children of a Hudson River town, German-immigrant suicide baker would be a yacht on the Riviera. But after the recent Antibes waterfront killing of Thomas Jordache, better known years ago as middleweight Tommy Jordan, a number of names from the past bubbled to the surface of a French police murder dossier. Among them: Rudolph Jordache, 40, Tom’s brother, millionaire, ex-mayor of Whitby, N.Y.; Jordan’s teenage son, Wesley; Jean Prescott Jordache, Rudolph’s wife and heiress to the Midwestern Prescott drug empire; and Gretchen Burke, sister to both Jordaches and widow of stage and screen director, Colin Burke.

Sources in Antibes say that Jordan was bludgeoned to death only days after his wedding and after he’d extricated his tipsy sister-in-law from the clutches of a harbor ruffian in a seedy Cannes nightspot.

Staying in the plush Hôtel du Cap while police continued their investigation, Jean Jordache says she was accosted while having a solitary, quayside nightcap. Jordan, appearing on the scene, savagely beat the man who had accosted her. Later, Jordan was found murdered on his yacht.

French police will only confirm that they have a list of suspects.

LUCKILY, IT DOESN’T MENTION ME. IT WOULD HAVE TO BE AN OUTSIDE CHANCE FOR ANYONE TO CONNECT ME WITH MRS. BURKE, ONCE MARRIED TO EMINENT DIRECTOR, NOW DEAD, EARLIER TO AN OBSCURE FLACK NAMED ABBOTT. MONIKA WOULD, OF COURSE, BECAUSE I’VE TALKED TO HER A LOT ABOUT MY MOTHER, BUT FORTUNATELY MONIKA DOESN’T READ “TIME.” INFORMATION FOR ENTERTAINMENT, SHE CALLS IT, NOT INFORMATION FOR THE SAKE OF TRUTH.

I SOMETIMES WONDER IF I SHOULDN’T TRY TO BE A NEWSPAPERMAN. I AM INQUISITIVE AND MISCHIEVOUS, TWO IMPORTANT QUALITIES IN THE TRADE.

MONIKA NOT HOME. NOTE ON TABLE. WILL BE GONE A FEW DAYS. SHE BELIEVES IN THE DOUBLE STANDARD ALL RIGHT—BUT IN REVERSE.

I MISS HER ALREADY.

«  »

The limousine that the concierge had ordered for them was packed. Gretchen, Jean and Enid were already on the back seat, Enid a little tearful because the French girl was being left behind. Rudolph had checked for the third time that he had all their plane tickets, and the chauffeur was holding the front door open for him to get in, when a car drove up to the courtyard in front of the hotel and stopped. A small, plump, plainly dressed woman with graying hair got out of the car and a small plump man in a business suit emerged from behind the wheel.

“Rudolph Jordache, if you please,” the woman called, coming toward him.

“Yes?” The woman looked vaguely familiar.

“I suppose you don’t remember me,” the woman said. She turned to the small plump man. “I told you he wouldn’t remember me.”

“Yes, you told me,” the man said.

“I remember you, though,” the woman said to Rudolph. “Very well. I’m Tom’s wife, Wesley’s mother. I came to get my son.” She dug into the big handbag she was carrying and pulled out a copy of Time Magazine and waved it at Rudolph.

“Oh, Lord,” Rudolph said. He had forgotten about the newspaperman and the telex. But the newspaperman obviously hadn’t forgotten about him. Poor Wesley, he thought, his name known for a week in millions of homes, the stares of the curious to be dealt with for years to come, the strangers approaching him wherever he went, saying, “Excuse me, aren’t you the one …?”

“May I see what the story’s like?” Rudolph reached out for the magazine. The journalist had been down to the boat before Wesley had been jailed, but he might have followed up on the story. He winced, thinking of what Time might have done with the account of Wesley’s fight in the nightclub and the Englishman in the hospital with a concussion.

Teresa drew back, put the magazine behind her. “You can go out and buy your own magazine,” she said. “According to what it says, you can damn well afford it. You and your fancy naked wife.”

Oh, God, Rudolph thought, they’ve dug up that old picture. What a blessing it would be for the entire world if the files in the office of every newspaper on the face of the globe suddenly went up in smoke in a single day.

“It’s all in the magazine,” Teresa said malevolently. “This time your money didn’t bail my great ex-husband out, did it? He finally got what he was looking for, didn’t he?”

“I’m sorry, Teresa,” Rudolph said. Tom must have been dead drunk or drugged when he married her. The last time Rudolph had seen her, three years ago in Heath’s office, when he had paid her off to go to Reno for a divorce, her hair had been dyed platinum blond and she must have been twenty pounds lighter. Looking no better and no worse than she looked now.

“Forgive me for not recognizing you. You’ve changed a bit.”

“I didn’t make much of an impression on you, did I?” Now the malevolence was more pronounced. “I’d like you to meet my husband, Mr. Kraler.”

“How do you do, Mr. Kraler?”

The man grunted.

“Where’s my son?” Teresa said harshly.

“Rudy,” Gretchen called from the car, “we don’t want to miss the plane.” She hadn’t heard any of the exchange.

Rudolph began to sweat, although it was a cool morning. “You’ll have to excuse me, Mrs. Kraler,” he said, “but we have to go to the airport …”

“You don’t get off that easy, Mr. Jordache,” Teresa said, waving the rolled-up magazine at him. “I didn’t come all the way here from America to let you fly off just like that.”

“I’m not flying off anywhere,” Rudolph said, his voice rising, to match the woman’s tone. “I have to put my family on the plane and I’m coming back here. I’ll see you in two hours.”

“I want to know where my son is,” Teresa said, grabbing his sleeve and holding on as he started to get into the car.

“He’s in jail, if you must know.”

“In jail!” Teresa shrieked. She put her hand to her throat in a tragic gesture. Her reaction reassured Rudolph. At least that part of the story hadn’t been in the magazine.

“Don’t carry on so,” Rudolph said sharply. Her shriek had been the loudest noise he had heard at the hotel since he had come there. “It’s not that serious.”

“Did you hear that, Eddie?” she screamed. “My son is behind bars and he says it’s not serious.”

“I heard him say it,” Mr. Kraler said.

“That’s the sort of family it is. Put a child in their hands,” as loudly as before, “and before you know it he has a police record. It’s a blessing his father got murdered or else I’d never have known where he was and God knows what these people would have made out of him. You know who belongs in jail—” She released Rudolph’s sleeve and stepped back a pace to point a shaking, accusatory finger at him, her arm outstretched operatically. “You! With your tricks and your bribes and your crooked money.”

“When you calm down,” Rudolph said, moving to get into the front seat of the limousine, “I’ll explain everything to you.” Then to the chauffeur, “Allons-y.”

She lunged at him and gripped his arm again. “No, you don’t,” she said. “You’re not getting off that easy, mister.”

“Let go of me, you silly woman,” Rudolph said. “I haven’t time to talk to you now. The plane won’t wait, no matter how loudly you scream.”

“Eddie,” Teresa shrieked at her husband, “are you going to let him get away with this?”

“See here, Mr. Jordache …” the man began.

“I don’t know you, sir,” Rudolph said. “Keep out of this. If you want to talk to me, be here when I get back.” Roughly, he shook the woman’s hand off his sleeve, and the concierge, who had come out to say goodbye, moved, quietly threatening, toward her.

Rudolph got into the car quickly and slammed and locked the door behind him. The chauffeur hurried around to the wheel and started the engine. Teresa was standing, waving the magazine angrily at the car, as they drove out of the gate.

“What was that all about?” Gretchen asked. “I couldn’t hear what she was saying.”

“It’s not important,” Rudolph said shortly. “She’s Wesley’s mother.”

“She certainly has changed,” Gretchen said. “Not for the better.”

“What does she want?”

“If she’s running true to form,” he said, “she wants money.” He would have to get Gretchen aside and tell her to make sure Jean didn’t get hold of a copy of Time Magazine.

From the terrace of the airport building Rudolph watched the plane take off. The good-byes had been quiet. He had promised to get back to New York as soon as possible. He had tried not to think of the comparison between today’s subdued farewell and the holiday gaiety with which they had arrived at this same airport, with Tom waiting for them with his bride-to-be and the Clothilde in port ready to take them all out to the channel between the islands off Cannes for a swim and a reunion lunch.

When the plane was out of sight, Rudolph sighed, went through the building, fighting down the temptation to buy a copy of Time Magazine at the newsstand. Whatever the story was like, it certainly could not bring him joy. He wondered how people who were constantly being written about, politicians, cabinet ministers, actors, people like that, could ever bring themselves to open a morning newspaper.

He thought of the plump, graying woman and her round little husband waiting for him back at the hotel, and sighed again. How had that dreadful woman ever managed to find a husband? And a second husband, at that. Perhaps, he thought, if the man from Time were still in Antibes, he should ask him to dig up the newspaper photograph of Teresa, with her old fake name, being taken away by the police after the raid on the brothel. One photograph deserved another. Poor Wesley.

Delaying, he asked the chauffeur to drive into Nice, directed him to the street on which Jeanne lived. He didn’t know what he would do if by chance he saw her coming out of the house with her children or her martial husband. Nothing, most likely. But she did not appear. The street was like any other street.

“Back to the hotel, please,” he said. “Go the long way, along the sea.”

When they got to Antibes, they skirted the port. He saw the Clothilde, in the distance, with Dwyer, a tiny figure, moving on the deck. He did not ask the chauffeur to stop.

“I know my rights,” Teresa was saying. The three of them were sitting on the chairs in a little glade in the park of the hotel, where there was no one to hear their conversation. The couple had been sitting stiffly in two chairs facing each other in the hotel lobby when Rudolph had come in. Their expressions were grim and disapproving, their presence a silent rebuke to the idle, pleasure-seeking guests, dressed for sport, who passed them on their way to tennis or to the swimming pool. They had listened sullenly as Rudolph led them into the park, explaining quickly, keeping his voice calm and neutral, how Wesley had fallen into the hands of the police and about his departure for America.

“We’ve been to a lawyer in Indianapolis, where we live, Mr. Kraler and myself, and I know my rights as a mother.” Teresa’s voice grated on his ears like chalk on a blackboard. “Wesley is a minor and with his father dead, the lawyer said I am his legal guardian. Isn’t that what the lawyer said, Eddie?”

“That’s what the lawyer said,” Mr. Kraler said. “Exactly.”

“When I get him out of jail,” Teresa went on, “I’m going to take him back to a proper home where he can get a decent Christian upbringing.”

“Don’t you think it would be wiser to leave religion out of this?” Rudolph said. “After all, the life you’ve led …”

“You don’t have to beat about the bush about the life I’ve led. Mr. Kraler knows all about it. Don’t you, Eddie?”

“All about it.” Eddie nodded, little pudgy sacks of flesh under his chin shaking rhythmically.

“I was a whore, and no bones about it,” Teresa said, almost with pride. “But I’ve seen the light. The strayed lamb is dearer in the eyes of the Lord …” She hesitated. “You know the rest, I’m sure, even if you and your whole family are lost heathens.”

“Actually,” Rudolph said, with false innocence, “I don’t know the rest.”

“It makes no difference,” she said quickly. “Mr. Kraler is a Mormon and by his efforts I have been converted and accepted into the fold. For your information, I don’t dye my hair any longer, as you may have noticed, if you ever stoop to notice anything about me, and I don’t drink alcohol or even coffee or tea.”

“That may be most admirable, Teresa,” Rudolph said. He had read somewhere that Mormonism was the fastest-growing Christian religion in the modern world, but with Teresa in the fold the believers must feel that they had cast their net too wide. He could imagine the shudder in the Tabernacle in Salt Lake City when the elders of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints had to accept Teresa Jordache into their blessed company. “But I don’t really see what that’s got to do with Wesley.”

“One thing that it’s got to do with him is that he’ll stop being a jailbird. I know your family, I know the Jordaches, don’t think I don’t. Fornicators and mockers, all of you.”

Teresa’s vocabulary, Rudolph noted, had expanded considerably with her conversion. He was not sure it was an improvement. “I don’t really think that Wesley’s being in jail for a few days because he had a fight in a bar is because I happen to be an atheist,” he said. “And for your information,” he couldn’t help adding, “fornication and mocking are not my principal occupations.”

“I’m not accusing anyone,” Teresa said, although there was accusation in every syllable she spoke and every gesture she made. “But it can’t be denied that he was in your charge, you being his uncle and head of the family when he nearly killed a man.…”

“All right, all right,” Rudolph said wearily. He wanted her to leave, disappear, with her pudgy, purse-lipped, righteous husband, but the thought of Wesley being at the mercy of the couple back in Indianapolis appalled him. He didn’t know what he could do to prevent it, but he had to try to do what he could. “What do you want?” He had explained that Wesley was to be put on a plane to America in six days, but he hadn’t told her of his own hardly formed notion of putting Wesley into a good boarding school in America for a year and then sending him back to France to continue his education there, or his own plan (selfish? generously avuncular?) to come back to France himself to keep an eye on the boy.

“What do I want?” Teresa repeated. “I want to make him a decent citizen, not a wild animal in the jungle, like his father.”

“You realize, of course,” Rudolph said, “that in a little more than two years, he’ll be eligible for the draft if he stays in the United States, and may be sent to get killed in Vietnam.”

“If that is God’s will, that is God’s will,” Teresa said. “Do you agree with me, Eddie?”

“God’s will,” Mr. Kraler said. “My son is in the Army and I’m proud of it. The boy has to take his chances, just like everybody else.”

“I don’t want any favors for any son of mine,” Teresa said.

“Don’t you think you ought to ask Wesley what he wants to do?”

“He’s my son,” Teresa said. “I don’t have to ask him anything. And I’m here to make sure he’s not going to get gypped of his just share in his father’s big fat estate.” Ah, Rudolph thought, now we come to the heart of the matter. “When that fancy yacht they wrote about in the magazine is sold,” Teresa said shrilly, “you can bet your boots that I’m going to be looking over everybody’s shoulder to make sure my son isn’t left out in the cold. And our lawyer is going to go over every slip of paper with a fine-tooth comb, don’t make any mistake about that either, Mr. Jordache.”

Rudolph stood up. “In that case,” he said, “I don’t think there’s any need to continue this conversation any longer. Wesley’s stepmother, who will probably be appointed as executrix for the estate, will hire a lawyer and the two lawyers can work everything out between them. I have other things to do. Good-bye.”

“Wait a minute,” Teresa said. “You can’t keep running off like that.”

“I have to take a nap,” Rudolph said. “I’ve been up since dawn.”

“Don’t you want to know where we’re staying here?” she cried, victory slipping from her grasp, the argument won so easily that she was sure that it was a ruse on her opponent’s part. “Our address in America? Mr. Kraler is a highly respected merchant in Indianapolis. He’s a bottler. He has three hundred people working for him. Soft drinks. Give him your card, Eddie.”

“Never mind, Mr. Kraler,” Rudolph said. “I don’t want to have your address here or in Indianapolis. Bottle away,” he added crazily.

“I want to see my boy in jail,” Teresa cried. “I want to see what they’ve done to my poor son.”

“Naturally,” Rudolph said. “By all means, do so.” Her maternal instincts had been less evident in Heath’s office when he had paid her off and she had signed away custody of her son at the sight of a check made out in her name.

“I intend to adopt him legally,” Mr. Kraler said. “Mrs. Kraler wants him to forget he was ever called Jordache.”

“That will have to be settled between him and his mother,” Rudolph said. “Although when I visit him in jail I’ll mention the idea to him.”

“When’re you going to the jail?” Teresa asked. “I don’t want you talking to him alone, filling his ear with poison.… I’m going with you.”

“No, you’re not going anyplace with me,” Rudolph said. “I always make a point of visiting jails unaccompanied.”

“But I don’t speak French,” she wailed. “I don’t even know where the jail is. How will I convince the cops I’m his mother?”

“I’m afraid you’ll have to figure all that out yourself, Mrs. Kraler,” Rudolph said. “Now I don’t want to see either of you two people ever again. Tell your lawyer that the law firm he will have to get into contact with is Heath, Burrows and Gordon. The address is in Wall Street. I believe you were there once before, Mrs. Kraler.”

“You bastard,” Teresa said, un-Mormon-like.

Rudolph smiled. “Have a pleasant afternoon,” he said. He nodded and left the two plump, little angry people sitting silently on the bench in the shade of the pine trees. He was trembling with rage and frustration and despair for the poor boy in the jail in Grasse, but for the moment there was nothing he could do about it. It would take a rescue mission of enormous proportions to tear Wesley out of the grasp of his mother, and today he was not up to thinking even about the first step to be taken. Christian or not, when there was the scent of money in the air, Mrs. Teresa Kraler remembered the habits of her ancient profession. He dreaded having to tell Kate what was in store for her.

He packed quickly. The concierge had gotten him a reservation at the Colombe d’Or in Saint-Paul-de-Vence. A hotel in Grasse would have been closer to the jail he visited almost daily. Saint-Paul-de-Vence was closer to Jeanne. He had chosen Saint-Paul-de-Vence. There was no reason for his remaining any longer at the Hôtel du Cap and many reasons for leaving it. He had told the concierge to forward his mail, but under no circumstances to tell anyone where he was staying. He wrote to Jeanne, telling her where he was going to be, and sealed the note in an envelope addressed to her, care of Poste Restante, Nice.

When he went down to the desk, to pay his bill while his bags were being put in his car, he was relieved to see that the Kralers had gone. He was shocked at the size of his bill. You pay a lot for agony, he thought, on the Côte d’Azur. It was one of the best hotels in the world, but he knew he would never come back to it again. And not because of the cost.

He drove first to the port. Dwyer and Kate had to know where to find him. Dwyer was polishing one of the small brass bitts up forward when he came aboard. He stood up when he saw Rudolph and they shook hands.

“How’re things?” Rudolph asked.

Dwyer shrugged. “It ain’t no holiday,” he said. “They ain’t delivered the shaft and the propeller yet. They have to come from Italy and the Italians ain’t going to send it across the border until they get paid. I been on the phone to the insurance every day, but they’re in no hurry. They never are. They keep sending me new forms to fill out,” he said aggrievedly. “And they keep asking for Tom’s signature. Maybe the Italians don’t think anybody dies in France. And I have to keep getting everything translated. There’s a waitress in town who’s a friend of mine, she got the language, only she don’t know fuck-all about boats and she had to keep asking for the names of things like equipment, running lights, fathoms, flotsam, things like that. It’s driving me up the wall.”

“All right, Bunny,” Rudolph said, suppressing a sigh. “Send all the papers to me. I’ll have them attended to.”

“That’ll be a relief,” Dwyer said. “Thanks.”

“I’m moving to the Colombe d’Or in Saint-Paul-de-Vence,” Rudolph said. “You can reach me there.”

“I don’t blame you, moving out of that hotel. It must have cost you a pile.”

“It wasn’t cheap.”

“You look around you,” Dwyer said, “all those big boats, all these expensive hotels, and you wonder where the money comes from. At least I do.”

“Bunny,” Rudolph said, absurdly feeling on the defensive, “when I was young I was poorer than practically anyone you ever knew.”

“Yeah. Tom told me. You worked like a dog. I got no beef against people who came up the way you did. I admire it. I would say you’re entitled to anything you can get.”

“There’re a lot of things I can get,” Rudolph said, “that I’d gladly give away.”

“I know what you mean,” Dwyer said.

There was a short, uncomfortable silence between them.

“I had hoped Kate would be here with you,” Rudolph said. “Something’s come up that she has to know about. How is she?”

Dwyer looked at him consideringly, as though trying to decide whether or not he should tell him anything about Kate. “She’s gone,” he said. “She left for England this morning.”

“You have her address?”

“I do. Yeah,” Dwyer said carefully.

“I need it,” Rudolph said. As quickly as possible, he told Dwyer about the Kralers’ visit, about the legal problems that Kate would have to deal with, or at least would have to be handled in Kate’s name.

Dwyer nodded slowly. “Tom told me about that wife of his. A real ball-breaker, isn’t she?”

“That’s the least of her virtues,” Rudolph said. He saw that Dwyer was hesitant about giving him Kate’s address. “Bunny,” he said, “I want to ask you something. Don’t you believe that I’m trying to do the best for Kate? And for Wesley? And for you, too, for that matter?”

“Nobody has to worry about me,” Dwyer said. “About Kate—” He made his curious, almost feminine gesture with his hands, as if explaining the situation in words was beyond him. “I know she sounded … well … snappish the other day. It’s not that she’s sore at you or anything like that. I’d say, what it is—” Again the little gesture. “It’s that she’s—” He searched for the word. “She’s bruised. She’s a sensible woman; she’ll get over it. Especially now that she’s back home in England. You got a pencil and a piece of paper?”

Rudolph took a notebook and pen out of his pocket. Bunny gave him the address and Rudolph wrote it down. “She doesn’t have a telephone,” Bunny said. “I gather her folks ain’t rolling in money.”

“I’ll write her,” Rudolph said, “when anything develops.” He looked around him at the scrubbed deck, the polished rails and brasswork. “The ship looks fine,” he said.

“There’s always something to be done,” Dwyer said. “I made a date to have it hauled up in the yard two weeks from today. The goddamn stuff ought to be here from Italy by then.”

“Bunny,” Rudolph asked, “how much do you think the Clothilde is worth? What it would sell for?”

“What it’s worth and what it would sell for are two different things,” Dwyer said. “If you figure what it cost originally and all the work and improvements Tom and me put into it and the new radar you gave him as a wedding present—that’ll have to be installed, too—I’d say it would come to almost a hundred thousand dollars. That’s what it’s worth. But if you have to sell it fast, like you said when you were telling us about settling the estate—and in this month, with the season more than half gone—nobody likes to pay for the upkeep of a boat for a whole winter—if people’re going to buy, they’re most likely to buy in the late spring—if you have to sell it fast in the off months and people know you have to sell, why then, naturally, they’ll try to cut your throat and maybe you’d be lucky if you got fifty thousand dollars for it. Anyway, I’m not the one to talk about this. You ought to go around, talk to some of the yacht brokers here and in Cannes, Saint-Tropez, you see what I mean, maybe they have somebody on their books’d be interested for a fair price.…”

“Has anybody approached you so far?” Rudolph asked.

Dwyer shook his head. “I really don’t think anybody who knows Antibes’d make a bid. After the murder and all. I think you’d do better to change the name and sail her to another harbor. Maybe another country. Italy, Spain, somewhere like that. Maybe even in Piraeus, that’s in Greece.… People’re superstitious about ships.”

“Bunny,” Rudolph said, “I don’t want you to get angry at what I’m going to say, but I have to talk to you about it. Somebody’s got to stay with the boat until it’s sold.…”

“I would think so.”

“And he’d have to be paid, wouldn’t he?”

“Yeah,” Dwyer said uncomfortably.

“What would the usual salary be?”

“That depends,” Dwyer said evasively, “how much work you expected him to do, if he was an engineer or not, things like that.”

“You, for example. If you were on another ship?”

“Well, if I’d been hired on earlier—I mean people’ve got their crews fixed by now—I guess about five hundred dollars a month.”

“Good,” Rudolph said. “You’re going to get five hundred dollars a month.”

“I didn’t ask for it,” Dwyer said harshly.

“I know you didn’t. But you’re going to get it.”

“Just remember I didn’t ask for it.” Dwyer put out his hand and Rudolph shook it. “I just wish,” Dwyer said, “there was some way of Tom knowing all you’re doing for me, for Kate and the kid, for the Clothilde.”

Rudolph smiled. “I didn’t ask for it,” he said, “but I got it.”

Dwyer chuckled. “I think there’s still some whiskey left on board,” he said.

“I wouldn’t mind a drink,” Rudolph said.

As they went aft, Dwyer said, “Your sister, Mrs. Burke—Gretchen—made me into a whiskey drinker. Did she tell you?”

“No. She kept your romance secret.”

He saw that Dwyer didn’t smile and said nothing more about Gretchen.

They had the whiskey in the wheelhouse, warm. Dwyer apologized for not having any ice. He didn’t want to have the generator that supplied the electricity running, wasting fuel.

“It’s a funny thing,” Dwyer said, relaxed now, with the glass in his hand. “You and Gretchen and Tom all in the same family.” He took a big gulp of his drink. “Fire and ice,” he said obscurely.

Rudolph didn’t ask him to explain what he meant by that.

As he left, Rudolph said, “If I don’t see you before then, I’ll see you at the airport when Wesley leaves. You remember the date?”

“I have it written down,” Dwyer said. “I’ll pack his things for him and bring them along with me.” He hesitated, coughed a little. “He’s got a whole folder full of photos up forward. You know—pictures of the ship, ports we put into, him and his father, me and Kate.… That sort of thing. Should I pack them in?” He lifted his glass and closed his eyes as he drank, as though the matter were of no great importance.

“Pack them in,” Rudolph said. Memory hurt, but it was necessary baggage.

“I got a whole bunch of pictures from the wedding. All of us … you know—drinking toasts, dancing, stuff like that, all of us.…”

“I think it would be a good idea to leave them out,” Rudolph said. Too much was too much.

Dwyer nodded. “Kate didn’t want them either. And I don’t think I have room to keep them. I’ll be traveling finally, you know.…”

“Send them to me,” Rudolph said. “I’ll keep them in a safe place. Maybe after a while Wesley would like to see them.” He remembered the pictures that Jean had taken that day. He would put the other ones with them.

Dwyer nodded again. “Another drink?”

“No, thanks,” Rudolph said. “I haven’t eaten lunch yet. Would you like to join me?”

Dwyer shook his head. “Kind of you, Rudy,” he said, “but I already ate.” Dwyer had a quota, Rudolph saw. One favor accepted a day. No more.

They put their glasses down, Dwyer carefully wiping away with a cloth the damp the glasses left.

He was going forward to finish polishing the bitts as Rudolph left the Clothilde.

After he had checked in at the new hotel Rudolph had lunch on the terrace overlooking the valley that looked as though it had been designed from a painting by Renoir. When he had finished lunch, he made a call to the old lawyer in Antibes. He explained that the Clothilde was for sale and that he would like the lawyer to act as agent for the estate in the transaction. “If the best offer you can get,” he said, “is not at least one hundred thousand dollars, let me know. I’ll buy it.”

“That’s most gentlemanly of you,” the lawyer said, his voice thin over the faulty telephone wires.

“It’s a simple business matter.”

“I see,” the lawyer said. They both knew he was lying. No matter.

After that Rudolph called Johnny Heath in New York and talked at length. “Oh, what a mess,” Heath said. “I’ll do my best. I await the letter from Mr. and Mrs. Kraler’s lawyer with impatience.”

Then Rudolph put on his swimming trunks and did forty laps in the pool, his mind empty in the swish of water, his body used and healthily tired by the time he had finished.

After the swim he sat drying off by the side of the pool, sipping at a cold beer.

He felt guilty for feeling so well. He wondered, displeased with himself for the thought, how he would act if the telephone rang and the call was for him and a voice announced that the plane with his family aboard had gone down into the sea.

Fire and ice, Dwyer had said.

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