I went into the living-room. Lieutenant Trant and Virginia were sitting together on the couch. For the first fraction of a second they looked quite ordinary—like friends chatting about somebody’s party. Then I saw their faces. Virginia’s was gaunt with apprehension. Trant, getting up to greet me, was completely different from the man in my office that morning. There was none of that phony blandness. His mouth was a thin, ominous line, the blue of his eyes had the texture of metal.
“I’m glad you’ve come, Mr. Denham. I’ve only just arrived. I won’t have to repeat myself.”
I went to Virginia. I longed to say or do something to let her know that it was all right, that, however narrowly, I had survived the worst test yet and that nothing could come between us now. But Trant made that impossible. All I could do was sit down beside her and put my hand on hers, hoping that some of the love and newly reforged trust would somehow convey itself to her.
Lieutenant Trant was moving about the room now. At one moment he was standing on the exact spot where we had washed the blood from the carpet. It was strange how well I seemed to know him. It was as if we had been intimate from childhood, as if I could say to myself from years of experience, Yes, that’s exactly the way he always holds his head when he knows he has all the cards.
He stopped his pacing. He was in front of us, only a few feet away. I thought of his conspiratorial session with Uncle Gene, and a sudden murderous vision came of myself jumping at him, pounding him to the floor, rolling around, my hands reaching for his throat.
He said, “I’ve come, Mr. Denham, about two things which have been brought to my attention. Since you now have your wife’s full confidence, I’m sure you’ll be familiar with them both.”
The mock-courtesy was still there, but it was only the thinnest of veneers now. I wasn’t meant to believe that he was being polite any more.
“In the first place, Mr. Denham, you know, don’t you, that exactly a year ago this month your wife was arrested on the Island of Elba.”
Virginia’s fingers dug into my palm. Trant paused, watching me, challenging me to be what I had claimed to be, the husband whose love for his wife was “civilised” enough to resist all shocks.
“She was convicted of stealing a bracelet valued at three thousand dollars from a certain South American—a Senor Ricardo de los Fuentes.”
A South American! Uncle Gene’s South American with the Mediterranean yacht?
“The trial took place in Livorno, Mr. Denham. In spite of the efforts of the British Consulate, she served a six-month sentence there.” Trant’s eyes lingered on me just long enough, I was sure, to register that this was something entirely new to me. Then he turned to Virginia. “That is correct, isn’t it, Mrs. Denham?”
As so many times before, it was anger that kept me steady. He had found his most effective technique and of course he was staying with it. Work on the husband, show him over and over again how little he knew about his wife, press—until he finally got wise to himself and to the woman he was protecting.
This was going to be easy. There was nothing to worry about now. My hand on Virginia’s strengthened its pressure. I said, “And just what difference does that make? Who cares if she held up a yak caravan in Katmandu? You’re meant to be investigating a murder in New York City and …”
“No,” said Virginia. “No, Lew. He has every right. Of course he does.”
Her hand slipped out of mine. She took a cigarette from a box on the coffee table and lit it. She seemed quite serene. I had forgotten how resilent she could be under stress. She was looking straight at Trant now.
“If I told you the true story, Lieutenant, you wouldn’t believe me. I know the police mentality. At least I know the Italian police mentality because I told them the truth often enough and they didn’t believe me. But then, of course, since they’d all been bribed by Ricardo de los Fuentes, that might have made a slight difference.”
She half turned then, not looking at me, merely addressing me.
“I told you what happened after—after Quentin. This was one of the less attractive episodes. Ricardo de los Fuentes was a very rich gentleman with a yacht. He was very charming and very attentive too. And I remember there was quite a lot of talk about divorces for both of us. I was even introduced as his fiancée to his sainted mother. I was delighted to accept his invitation for a Mediterranean cruise. I was also delighted to find in my cabin three little Cartier boxes—a diamond bracelet, an emerald pin, a pair of ruby earrings. I was less delighted when I discovered that I had been laid on not only as his fiancée but also as the fiancée of any of the other guests who happened to feel in the mood. I managed to get away in Elba. Rashly, as it turned out, I decided to keep, as part payment for the insult, one of the three little Cartier boxes. Ricardo de los Fuentes was a very vindictive man. I was arrested at the ferry, trying to get back to the mainland, by his buddy, the chief of police. Later, in Livorno, all his other buddies, driving back and forth from the courthouse in their brand-new Fiats, finished the job for him—just to prove once and for all that Ricardo de los Fuentes was not a man to have his whims tampered with.”
She crushed out the cigarette in a tray and once again looked up at Trant.
“I honestly don’t care whether you believe me or not, but that—for the record—is what happened on and around the Island of Elba. It had one good effect. It made me realise that something was a little unsatisfactory about my choice of friends. When I came out of jail, as soon as I could get the money together, I went to Mexico, I got my divorce and I started to lead a life a little more in keeping with reality.”
She did look at me then. It was a quick, almost defiant glance, the opposite of any bid for my sympathy. Trant, on the other hand, was gazing directly at me, the faint trace of a smirk on his face. He was saying as plainly as if he’d put it into words: You see? Now you’re beginning to find out what she really is.
Even if the demons of doubt had stirred again, that smirk would have defeated them and Trant. To hell with him, to hell with Uncle Gene, to hell with all decriers. Hadn’t Virginia told me of those squalid years? What difference could the pinpointing of one sordid episode make? I put my hand back on hers. At the touch of my fingers, she turned to me. Slowly her face lit up with a smile of warm, scarcely credulous gratitude. I smiled back.
I said, “Okay, Lieutenant. That’s the first thing. What about the second?”
Trant was looking down at the backs of his hands. He was studying them as if something of great moment could be deduced from the lines on his knuckles. When he looked up, it was at Virginia.
“I’m sorry to hear you were the victim of such a very vindictive and such a very influential man, Mrs. Denham. I’m glad, though, that the unfortunate incident taught you to steer clear of the wealthy yacht-owning set.” Just to make sure that the sarcasm went home, he added, “I should have said, the wealthy yacht-owning, non-North American set. By the way, do you have a sister?”
There was something wrong with the casualness of that question.
“A sister?” Virginia looked bewildered. “Why, no. I don’t have any sister.”
“You don’t?” said Trant. “That’s rather odd. I know we’re all always forgetting things, but it isn’t often we forget we have a sister.” He took a sheet of paper out of his pocket. He looked at it. “Your mother, I believe, was a certain Wanda Kolinski, a Polish actress who got out of Warsaw and came to London, where she married your father, just before the Nazi invasion. The record states that she left behind her in Poland a divorced husband, Stepan Gregorieff—and a daughter, Maria.” He dropped the paper on his knee. “A half sister is still a sister, isn’t she, Mrs. Denham?”
I hadn’t the slightest idea what Trant was leading up to now, but with a skittering of dismay I saw that Virginia was blushing.
“But … but,” she stammered. “But … of course … but I never thought about Maria. Why should I? I never even met her. And she’s dead anyway. She died as a child in a prison camp.”
“The Polish authorities have no record of any death, Mrs. Denham. In fact, there was a rumour that at one time quite recently she was living in Paris. The rumour cannot be substantiated, but that’s beside the point at the moment. The only reason I draw your sister to your attention is …”
He let the sentence drop and turned to me. “I think I told you on the phone, Mr. Denham, that Quentin Olsen, under his alias of Oliver Michaels, was wanted for questioning in a death in the South of France. It happened two years ago. An American woman was found drowned in her swimming pool. All the evidence points to the fact that Olsen-Michaels killed her. But the woman led a very secluded life. She had no friends in the neighbourhood and there was no one who could throw much light. However, there was an old servant who confirmed that Oliver Michaels had stayed at the villa for several days before the death—accompanied by two girls. The servant testified that the girls were sisters and that one of them had told him they were Polish although her sister was English-speaking. He also testified that the English sister was Olsen’s wife. Now, for all I know, Mr. Denham, your wife may have told you that she’d separated from Olsen before that time. However, there is nothing to substantiate such a claim, nothing at all.”
It was the speed with which it happened to me that was so humiliating. I had been utterly convinced that at least I had insulated myself from any kind of shock to which Trant or anyone else could subject me. And for one fleeting moment I did manage to tell myself: This is a trick. With despicable cunning, Trant has thought out the most effective lie to suborn me. But it was only for a moment. Then it was worse, far worse than it had been with Uncle Gene. I struggled to keep intact what, only a few seconds ago, had seemed my impregnable faith, but I was like a man with a handful of feathers in a windstorm. Gradually the realisation came that there was, after all, a point beyond which the most burning desire to deny reality no longer operated. With it came despair.
I knew Trant was looking at me, but I couldn’t look back. I knew if I did, he would see how completely he had defeated me. Instead, with an effort, I made myself turn to Virginia in the hope that some miracle would happen, that there would be something in the way she looked, something she might say, which could save me from seeing myself as Trant had seen me all along—the booby, the pathetic sucker who had let himself be taken for the longest ride in history.
But the moment I looked at her, I knew it was no good. She was sitting completely still on the couch. She seemed to have no awareness of either of us. She was just sitting, cold and dazed, her shoulders sagging. And as my eyes, against my will, remained as if hypnotized on her, I saw the slow disintegration of her face.
Suddenly she became conscious of me. She spun around to me, her eyes quite wild.
“No,” she said. “No, Lew, no. Please, please believe me.”
If there had been anything I could offer her, I would have offered it. But there was nothing now except the despair. Her hand came up to her mouth. She was biting her knuckles. She knew I was abandoning her. I could tell that in the second before she turned away from me and threw up her hands to cover her face.
Trant had risen. He was standing directly in front of me, ignoring Virginia, concentrating all his steeliness on me.
“Well, Mr. Denham, don’t you think we’ve had enough? You can’t believe I’ve enjoyed this so-called cat-and-mouse game any more than you, but I’ve let it go on because I believe that a policeman must be patient. So I’ve given you every chance in the world to come clean with me—every chance to get yourself off the hook. But enough’s enough. Your wife killed Quentin Olsen because he knew what she was and what she was up to. You came back and found the body here. God knows what lies she fed you, but you were infatuated enough to swallow them.”
He grabbed my arm. The physical contact was shocking.
“That alibi of yours! Did you really expect it to fool anyone? Olsen was killed at five-thirty. What do you claim to have been doing at five-thirty? Shopping with your wife? Where were you shopping? Nobody saw you. And what about the car you took out of the garage to go to a movie and then not go to a movie? By eight o’clock you’d got the body into the car. And then—a slight mishap! Your uncle borrowed the car. Never mind. Go to your cousins’ and pick up the car again. Drive it to Wall Street, dump the body. And the gun? That gun you threw away because you have a thing about guns? Probably you tossed it into the river. And all this time you pretend you were sitting together in some crowded nightclub where no one could possibly prove when you came in or how late you stayed.”
His face, so close to mine, seemed to blur as if it were some phantom face I had conjured up in my misery.
“This morning, Mr. Denham, you defied me not to come back until I had evidence. Well, I haven’t done so badly. That button was a French button. What happened? Did you forget to take Olsen’s overcoat to the car and then, just before you disposed of it down the incinerator, did one of you remember that metal doesn’t burn? And by the way, did Olsen bleed a lot? Was that why you threw out the rubber floor matting from the luggage compartment of the car? Needless to say, I’ve inspected the car. Another case of the flagrant abuse of personal privacy for which the New York police are world-famous. And, oh yes, if Olsen did a lot of bleeding, I wonder how much of it spilled on the floor or the carpet. Well, it won’t be long before we find out. The boys from the police lab will. be here any minute.”
He stopped then. He sat down on the arm of his chair.
“Well, Mr. Denham, let’s get organised. There are two alternatives. The official procedure would be to wait until bloodstains have been found in this apartment. Once that’s done, I can get two warrants—one charging your wife with the murder of Quentin Olsen, the other charging you as an accessory after the fact. I don’t have to tell you your rights as citizens. If you want me to wait, I’ll wait. But if you’re willing to skip the technicalities, we can all go to Headquarters right away and you can both make your statements.”
I had always known, I suppose, that this moment would come. Even in my most optimistic periods, I’d never really believed that our gimcrack alibi could stand up for long or that the inevitable killing pounce from Trant could be put off indefinitely. And yet, when I had anticipated it, when I had lain in bed goaded by visions of the day on which the corpse would become a real corpse again and our nightmare ordeal of getting rid of it would be exposed for the real and flagrantly antisocial act it had been, I had never dreamed it would be like this.
Because of Virginia. The one thing I had been certain of was that my love would remain intact. Even if the evidence against her mounted until it was irrefutable, even if it was proved over and over again that to save herself she had been forced to lie to me, surely my love …
Trant was speaking again.
“Of course, Mr. Denham, there’s a third possibility. Perhaps you’d prefer to get it over with right now. Admit that you helped to remove the body, admit that your wife’s guilty, and you have my word that, under the circumstances, there’s a very good chance no charge will be made against you at all.”
There was, of course, no magnanimity in that offer. He needed a certain conviction. What did or didn’t happen to me was utterly unimportant to him. As he watched me almost derisively—knowing so well that it was the role of gulled husband that humiliated me the most—I knew this was the test of tests. The rest of my life would depend on what I said. I could become a Denham again, indulgently admitted back into the Fold, forgiven for my pathetic attempts at self-assertion, even pampered—with Virginia, like all the other Denham unpleasantnesses, obliterated by a conspiracy of silence. Or …
I turned to look at Virginia. Her hands had dropped to her sides. She was looking directly in front of her. If she knew what was going on inside me or if indeed she cared at all, there was no sign of it on the cold set face.
“Well, Mr. Denham?” Trant’s voice was very quiet. “I don’t want to press you, but the men from the police lab will be here any minute, and once we have the evidence of the bloodstains, an admission from you won’t be quite as valuable, will it?”
There now was the threat. I was still looking at Virginia in a last hope that somehow I could believe again that I had been loved by the woman I loved, not exploited by a cynical murderess. But all that happened was—the Byword of Rome! For the first time Uncle Gene’s ridiculous phrase meant exactly what it said to me. Visions came crowding in—Virginia and Olsen lying in each other’s arms in the Parisian hotel bed, Virginia in a prison cell in Livorno, Virginia in a bikini lounging on the deck of the Fuentes yacht, “laid on for the other guests.” It was all excruciatingly vivid now, as erotic, obscene as the fantasies of some desert anchorite. And I could feel the temptation stirring. Give up. Why not? Who but an infatuated fool would reject an opportunity to escape the rewards of his folly?
“Just admit she killed him, Mr. Denham. That’s all I ask. Just admit it.”
I turned back to Trant then. That’s why I didn’t see Virginia get up. I wasn’t even aware she had moved until I heard her voice.
“Why bother to ask him, Lieutenant? I’m sure he’s ready to tell you, but after all it’ll be a little more official coming from me. All right, Lieutenant. You win. Do you want me to come to Headquarters and sign a statement?”
Suddenly, perched on his chair arm, Lieutenant Trant smiled. It was a bright, blinding smile of victory. I saw it before I turned back to my wife.
The word came from me with no particular meaning. It was merely a reflex—like the quivering of a muscle in a dead frog.
She seemed perfectly calm again. She even turned back to the couch and picked up her bag, sliding it down over her wrist.
“Do you have a car, Lieutenant?”
“Yes. I have a car.”
“Then,” said Virginia, “we might as well leave, don’t you think?”
“Yes,” said Trant, “I think we might as well.”
He half turned towards the door. She had to pass in front of me to join him but she never even cast me a glance.
They started for the door, the two of them—ignoring me. It was preposterous. It couldn’t end like this.
I said, “Wait. I’m coming.”
Virginia did turn then. She stood looking at me, her eyes hard as bronze.
“Why you?” she said. “Didn’t you hear the lieutenant? They don’t want you. They’re not pressing charges against you.”
Trant said, “She’s right, Mr. Denham. There’s no need for you at the moment. In fact, you’d be much more helpful waiting here to let in the men from the lab. And, incidentally, you might pack a few things, toilet articles, etcetera, for your wife. She’ll be needing them, and the boys can bring them over.”
He turned to Virginia, putting his hand on her elbow. For a second she still stood there, looking at me. There was no plea in her eyes, no sign of regret, nothing but that hard, bright gaze.
“I’m afraid there’s nothing in the house for dinner,” she said. “But that shouldn’t matter too much. If you call Sheila or Hugo or your Uncle Gene, I’m sure they’ll be delighted to have you take potluck.”
She started for the door. Trant went after her.
As the door closed behind them, I felt, with no justification at all, as if I were the criminal.
I was far too dazed to have any coherent thoughts. I went into the kitchen and poured myself a drink. Then, automatically, I went into the bedroom and, moving back and forth from the bathroom, put things in a suitcase for Virginia. Dimly, through the partial anaesthesia of shock, I knew what was going to happen to me later on. But now the suitcase was just a suitcase, lying brown and impersonal on the white spread of Beth’s bed, and I was just a man with a drink in his hand walking from a bedroom to a living-room.
It was the sound of Virginia’s voice that stayed with me. “If you call Sheila or Hugo or your Uncle Gene …” What right had she to stand in judgment of me? Because that’s what she’d been doing. I knew it. She had despised me for abandoning her. It was that moment when she’d turned to me on the couch and I … But for God’s sake, what did she expect? I hadn’t betrayed her. Was it betrayal to have been forced to believe evidence which only a moron could have ignored, evidence which exposed her as the Byword of Rome, the convict of Livorno, the accomplice of a squalid murderer—and, of course, the most heartless of liars?
Oh, Lew, believe me. Sheila Potter did call me to go to the Waldorf … Oh, Lew, I swear it, I never spoke to Quentin at the club. I haven’t the slightest idea how he got into the apartment … Oh no, she didn’t have a sister. Oh no, that wasn’t it, that wasn’t true, nothing was true. Believe me. Please, Lew, believe me …
I had started to feel again and what I felt was rage, rage at her for playing on my emotions, on my vulnerability, on my openly offered love. How dared she imply that I had betrayed her, when ever since that disastrous meeting in Puerta Vallarta she had been consistently manipulating and humiliating me?
I thought of the men from the police lab then. The prospect of them streaming into the apartment, glancing sidelong at me as “that sucker whose wife conned him into removing the body” was unendurable. I finished my drink. I pulled a topcoat out of the hall closet. Leaving the door open … Let them come. Let them all come … I ran out of the apartment to the elevator.
I was in the street, with no plan. I wandered aimlessly down the block, headed east. It was cold even for April. The normal evening activities were beginning. A couple were getting into a taxi. A woman was walking a basset hound. A boy and girl passed me, arm in arm. Nothing had happened for them, had it? Perhaps the man in the taxi had bawled his wife out for making them late for a party. Perhaps the basset hound was off its feed. Perhaps the girl on the arm of the boy was worried whether her deodorant was giving her “full protection”. But that was all. There was nothing for them to separate this day from any other.
The anger was still there. I needed it too much to let it dissipate, but the other thing was coming—the thing I had been dreading—the terrible, deadening sense of loss. But how could you lose something you’d never had? What was this insanity that made me long for a wife who had never existed and to feel bitter hatred against Lieutenant Trant as the enemy who had destroyed the only genuine happiness I had known? The guilt had come back, too, the corroding illogical conviction that there had been a final crucial test which I had disastrously failed.
I was passing a phone booth. An almost overwhelming impulse came to call Mary Lindsay. Of all the people who were supposed to be my friends, she was the only one who seemed to have any reality to me. She would understand, she would sympathise, she … would let me weep on her shoulder? To hell with it. I hadn’t sunk so low as to exploit her friendship to that extent.
I had reached Third Avenue now. There was a bar. A bar was the obvious, the only place in which to nurse my despair and ignoble self-pity. I have no idea what the name of the bar was; it was a neutral, featureless establishment with a normal quota of anonymous, solitary people standing at the bar. There were booths, too, I think, and a television with the sound cut off, enigmatically conveying some indecipherable message.
I stood at the bar and drank. The liquor didn’t help. It only obsessively heightened the images of Virginia that haunted me: Virginia on the couch turning to me, the knuckles of her hand at her mouth. “No, no. It isn’t true. Believe me, please, please believe me.”
Somebody started the juke box. A woman, brushing past me, joggled my glass. Oh, pardon me! Believe her? I thought, deliberately fanning my indignation. Believe in the innocent little provincial girl tricked into marriage for her inheritance by a crook? Believe in the unfortunate victim of a degenerate South American’s spite? Believe in the girl who denied that her Polish half sister was alive, who therefore could not have been the wife brought by Olsen to the villa in Grasse?
Anyone who could believe all that could believe that the world was rectangular.
I was on my third drink when suddenly it happened. It came without warning, blowing everything else to hell and gone like a gale—a memory of Virginia the night before in the living-room, just as I’d left to go to Sheila. I could see her far more clearly than the barflies around me as she’d turned her face up to mine, her eyes so close to my cheek that I could feel the flutter of her lashes.
“It’s you that makes it possible. If I ever thought you’d stop believing in me, I’d die.”
My sense of guilt was overwhelming then because I saw or seemed to see everything. That was why she had given in to Trant. That was the reason for her bitter last words to me. I had stopped believing in her. Because of Trant, because of Uncle Gene, because of all of them, I had failed her, and because I had failed her, there was no point for her to go on, for if even I could no longer trust her, what was the value of fighting? For what? What worth could she have found in life after what it had done to her in the past, once I had turned out to be just another disenchantment?
“If I ever thought you’d stopped believing in me, I’d die.”
Wasn’t that it? Wasn’t I, indeed, the guilty one? Weren’t there times in life when the only test of love and trust was to believe what was seemingly unbelievable?
There was still a part of me which could derisively dismiss this as the most maudlin and drunken of sentimentality. But the hope welling up in me was powerful enough to ignore it. Why couldn’t the improbable be true? Why couldn’t Virginia’s Polish half sister have died? Why couldn’t she have been telling the truth when she’d said Olsen had left her eight months before the murder in Grasse? What did Trant have against her but the vague testimony of an old servant, relayed at second-hand through the French police? For … yes … Why couldn’t Olsen have acquired another “wife” by that time? A man with two aliases was not above acquiring two wives. Mrs. Oliver Michaels. Why couldn’t one coincidence just for once have actually happened? Mrs. Oliver Michaels, a Polish Mrs. Oliver Michaels—who had had a sister?
Once again at the extermity of need, an answer came. Mrs. Oliver Michaels? A Polish Mrs. Oliver Michaels? What about the “genuine stomach dancer direct from the Soukhs of Meknes”? Hadn’t I placed her, the moment I saw her, as an Eastern European? What could make a more logical fit? A moment of doubt came. Could Trant have been so idiotic? … Why not? Hadn’t I summed up Lieutenant Trant’s weakness? For all his cleverness, he was a man who could be defeated by the very brilliance of his ability to detect a lie, pursue it and expose it. Virginia and I had presented him with more than enough lies to distract him from somebody who to anyone less complex could have presented all along an obvious target. Esmeralda.
I paid my bar bill, feeling wildly excited. I glanced at my watch—9.45. The Hotel Crystal or the Club Marocain? The Club Marocain. Esmeralda would be there by now getting ready for her first show …
I took a taxi to the Club Marocain. It was open but only just, with an idle doorman chatting to a couple of girls on the side-walk and a straggle of men drinking at the front bar. I was so keyed up that I’d thought out no particular approach. I was also a little drunk. I’d been a reporter before. Then I’d be a reporter again? I went straight through into the main room where the floor shows took place. Two waiters were lounging around. A man came hurrying down a staircase in a business suit. The maître d’hôtel? Olsen’s co-owner? He came up to me with the wary look of someone accustomed to associating the unexpected with trouble.
“I’m sorry, sir, we don’t start serving in here until …”
“Esmeralda?” I said.
Unexpectedly the guarded look went. “Oh,” he said, “sure.” He pointed across the room. “The pass door by the stage.”
He lost interest in me then, moving away towards one of the waiters. Were visitors for Esmeralda common enough phenomena to be taken for granted? I hurried through the tables, pushed through the swing door and moved into a bleak no man’s land of narrow, grimy corridors and rusty overhead sprinkler pipes. A broom was propped against the wall. A door opened, revealing a toilet and a cracked washbasin as a man emerged carrying a saxophone.
“Esmeralda?” I asked.
He nodded with his head down the passage. I found a door and knocked. A girl’s voice, thickly accented, called, “What it is?”
I went in. Esmeralda was sitting on a wooden chair in front of a make-up mirror and a dressing table that was as messy and cluttered as the chest of drawers in the Hotel Crystal. Costumes—if her pseudo-Arabian bikini-type bits and pieces could be called costumes—were strewn haphazardly around. Until I’d shut the door behind me there was hardly any room for a second body.
I saw her face first reflected in the mirror. Grotesquely one eye was heavily made up, including a luxurious false eyelash, while the other, to which she hadn’t got around, in contrast seemed almost obscenely naked.
She twisted sideways on the chair, her full breasts in their black brassiere, brushing against me.
“Oh,” she said, “Mr. Denham.”
She knew my name. For a moment it threw me. How had the reporter of the Hotel Crystal become Mr. Denham? Didn’t that link with the owner’s casual acceptance of me? Hadn’t something happened? I struggled to make sense of it. Then all the frustrations of the day returned to goad me. What the hell did it matter what had happened? It was what I could make happen that was important. It was Esmeralda—or Virginia. No, even more than that, Esmeralda—or my own self-respect.
The anger seething in me, which had no other outlet, focused on her. I gripped her arms. My fingers sank into the soft flesh, which yielded as if there were no bone, no muscle.
I said, “You’re going to tell me the truth, the whole truth, if I have to beat it out of you.”
“The truth?” She made no attempt to release herself from my grip. She merely looked up at me, the luscious false eyelash drooping as if under the weight of extreme boredom. “What is this truth?”
“You were Olsen’s wife,” I said. “You’re Polish, you and your sister were with him when he murdered that woman in Grasse.”
For a long moment she remained silent, watching me. Gradually the familiar, narrowed glint of cupidity showed.
“Forty dollar.”
“For God’s sake …”
“Fifty dollar.”
From somewhere common sense checked the unreasoning rage. What sort of a position was I in to threaten her—or anyone? I dropped her arms. I took out my wallet. I left myself five dollars. I stuffed the rest of the bills into her hand. She counted them, the chipped scarlet nails flicking back the edge of each bill. I had no idea how much it was but it seemed to satisfy her.
This time the bills went into her brassiere.
“You ask questions. You want true answers, yes? Okay, Mr. Denham. I am from Poland, yes. I was with Ollie at the villa of the American woman, yes. But that Ollie killed her? All of them say Ollie killed her? How do they know? How do I know when it is night and I am all the time asleep? How does anyone know she did not just fall drunken into the pool and become dead? This I tell them already. All this I say to the police.”
“The police?” I exclaimed.
“The two policemen. Just these fifteen minutes away, they are gone. I tell them everything. They say, Please come to the police house to make the statement. But I say, When I must sing and dance? When they pay me here to sing and dance? When this is my bread? And they say, Okay, you make the statement here now to us—and then later, when the singing is finished, you come to the police house. They are good, the policemen of America, more good than the policemen of Europe.”
So that was why Esmeralda had known my name and why the owner had handled me so casually. He had supposed I was just another policeman. Once again I had underestimated Trant. The moment he had reached the precinct house he had sent two men. But why? Because he, too, had realised that Virginia could have been telling the truth? Had I maligned him as well as underestimated him? Hope stirred only to shrivel again when the flat, husky voice sounded again.
“Yes, they are good, the police. They think of the poor girl with no friends in a strange land. Do not worry, they say. You will be a witness, but do not worry. We know you do not kill Ollie, we know you do nothing bad in the South of France in this woman’s villa. It is just to be a witness even if it is hard for you to say bad things against—how is it put?—your own flesh and blood. You just speak the truth, they say, and all is all right.”
That moment might have been less terrible if there had been any traces of drunkenness left. But there weren’t. I was coldly, mercilessly sober now.
Somehow I made myself say it. “Your own flesh and blood?”
“What do you think? What does she say to you? That I was Ollie’s wife? Ollie’s wife? This is funny. Ollie knew what girls need to be married and what not. But she is different from me, oh yes. It must always be so fine, so grand, so married with her.”
She lifted up her head, miming the airs and graces of affected superiority.
“I am just nothing, the sister from Poland, the poor little nobody brought along to do all the dirty things. She is the grand one—my sister from England. This is Ollie’s wife—the fine Virginia Harwood.”
Hadn’t I once—days ago, years ago—thought: There’s no end? You press forward, you struggle towards some tiny flicker of light ahead only at the last minute to find total darkness again?
“It is perhaps bad for you, Mr. Denham. You let her say to you, Oh, I love you. You are the good man who will help me also to be good and to lead again the good life. Oh, trust me, for I love you so much. Oh, that Virginia! You poor man, I am sad for you. But men! One does not have to be sad for men.”
As the voice, brutal to me as a stabbing ice pick, murmured on, she had turned back to the mirror. Vaguely I watched her hand fumble around on the dressing table, pushing aside a pink G-string and reaching for a second false eyelash.
It was as she was raising the eyelash to her eye that my attention was caught by something glittering, revealed by the shifted G-string. A ring. Just one of her “er-diamond” rings. But … No … It wasn’t just any junky ring. Little rubies clustered around the diamond, prettily making the pattern of a heart. There was no mistaking it. It was Princess Natasha’s ring, the ring she claimed she had given to Olsen but hadn’t, the ring which, that very morning, I had seen in the suite at the Hotel Pierre lying by the keys of the grand piano.
It was as painful to hope again as it is painful for a starved man to eat. But it had happened. Once again, when failure had seemed irredeemable, Fate had come over to my side.
Esmeralda had been bribed by Princess Natasha to lie. To the police? To me? It didn’t matter, nothing mattered except the fact that I didn’t have to believe a word she’d said. I didn’t have to believe she was Virginia’s sister, I didn’t have to believe Virginia had been Olsen’s “wife” in Grasse. Defeat had not been defeat after all.
She was easing the eyelash into place now, concentrating, the top of her tongue curling over her upper lip. As I opened the door, it jolted against her chair, but she didn’t seem to notice or to care that I was leaving.
As I squeezed out into the passage, I caught a last glimpse of Princess Natasha’s ring glowing in the light from the bare bulb above the dressing table, making life livable again.
I went down the corridor and out again through the swing door into the club room. Several of the tables were occupied now. Waiters were scurrying around. There was a pseudo-festive air of synthetic entertainment about to be dispensed. The owner was standing by the entrance. He smiled.
“You are letting her finish her act, aren’t you, Officer?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Thanks. We appreciate that. We appreciate it a lot.”
The wary look came again. Was I expecting appreciation in a more tangible form—like ten dollars, for example?
I hurried past him, thinking about Princess Natasha. The clue had been there since morning. If I had had my wits about me, I could have realised it then. She had pretended she’d given her ring to Olsen because she’d desperately wanted me to believe she was his victim. But she hadn’t given him the ring. She hadn’t given him anything, which meant that she’d never been his victim at all. And if she hadn’t been his victim, she could only have been his accomplice.
I was out on the street now. I started walking east, breathing whatever fresh air New York had to offer, getting the Club Marocain out of my lungs. A taxi was cruising by. I half raised my arm to flag it. Then I checked myself. Everything depended now on how I handled Princess Natasha. I could accuse her of giving Esmeralda the ring and she would have to admit it. But what was to stop her using the same story she had used for Olsen? Esmeralda had come to her as Olsen had come, threatening to expose Sheila and Uncle Gene. To prevent this, she had given Esmeralda the ring. It would be a lie, of course, but what could I do about it? No, before I went to the Princess, I needed more—much more. But what? The truth about the Lerchikovs, the reason why they had been working for Olsen, the thing—there must have been something—in their past that …
A sudden memory came, taking me back to those infinitely remote days when Olsen had been nothing to me but a pianist at the Club Marocain. I was sitting in the Lerchikovs’ suite at the Pierre waiting for lunch, trying to think of suitable small talk to compensate for my shortcomings as an expert on le chic Américain. The Baroness Kornikov! I had mentioned meeting her at a party and the Princess had blushed. Her whole pretty little face had turned pink as a boiled shrimp. “The Kornikov? That canaille? I do hope, Lewis dear, that you do not ever expose us to the embarrassment of having to bow to the Kornikov.”
At the time I had ascribed her discomposure merely to the archaic snobberies of the Old Regime. But now … of course … Princess Natasha had been terrified of meeting Baroness Kornikov because the Baroness had come from Russia in the old days and where but in the old days lay the key to what Olsen …?
There was a United Cigar Store on the corner. I hurried into it and found the telephone book. After the party I’d given the Baroness a lift home to—where had it been?—some apartment in the East Sixties. I found her name. Moura Kornikov. I dialled the number. When a voice answered I recognised its deep almost Chaliapin basso immediately.
I said, “Baroness, this is Lewis Denham. I don’t know if you remember me. We met at a party at the Maitlands’ about a year ago.”
“Who? Who it is? Who?”
“Lewis Denham.”
“Ah. The young architect. The young man who is a friend from Natasha Eleanovna.”
“That’s right,” I said. “And it’s extremely important. Otherwise, I wouldn’t …”
“Bother me?” There was a rumble of laughter. “You know many old ladies who do not like to be bothered by the young men? I—I have never heard of such. Come. I have tea and I have vodka. Vodka, I think, is better for the extremely important.”
I was there in ten minutes, knocking on a new door in a new fifth-floor corridor of a new building as impersonal and colourless as if it were its own floor plan. But the Baroness, opening the door, brought a burst of personality large enough to fill the entire corridor. She was as round and solid as Princess Natasha was tiny and fragile, with a bubbling joviality and a marked moustache on her upper lip which, oddly enough, like her booming voice, brought no suggestion of masculinity. She was the basic woman, the nurse, the benign Earth Mother.
A miniature cigar was dangling from her mouth. Its ash was spilled on the capacious bosom of her rusty black dress. She took my arm, drawing me into the foyer.
“Come, come. The young man with the extremely important!”
By some miracle the Baroness Kornikov had managed to make the brand-new little apartment look as if it had been the depository of an industrious pack rat for the past twenty years. Every object she had ever possessed, it seemed, still clung to her. There was a stuffed owl, a big case of butterflies, a balalaika, dozens of tasseled cushions and, strewn everywhere, metal trays of every size and shape and half-squeezed tubes of paint. I remembered then that she’d told me she earned her living by painting ornamental trays.
There was a huge samovar looming over the couch and in front of the couch on a coffee table a tray with red and blue liqueur glasses and a half-empty bottle of vodka. The Baroness swept me with her to the couch and, brushing aside cushions and trays to left and right, drew me down with her onto it.
“Now.”
She leaned across me, dropping cigar ash onto my wrist, filled two glasses with vodka, gave me one and drained her own.
“Now. You tell me. Something is bad and I will make it right? Is this?”
I thought I knew what Olsen had had on the Princess. It had come to me in the taxi. And if I were right …!
Conscious of how very much was at stake, I said, “The Lerchikovs are phonies, aren’t they? They’re no more a Prince and Princess than I’m an Albanian.”
“The Lerchikovs?” The Baroness’s black button eyes popped with astonishment. “Phonies? You mean—not real? Upstarts? The Lerchikovs? When Vladimir Gregorievitch is personal equerry to the Czar with estates once which took half the Ukraine? When Natasha Eleanovna is of the royal blood—with her grandmother a Romanov? My poor young man, you are bad in the head, I think. You have need of vodka, I think.” The heavy arm loomed past me, filling my glass again. “There. Drink up. What can you do with such a young man? Say, perhaps, that the Queen of England … she is a beggar maid in pretence? Oh yes, I think so.”
I was used by then to the fact that nothing came easily and knew that my worst enemy was discouragement.
I said, “But have you seen them in the States? Are you sure they are the same Lerchikovs that you knew in Russia?”
“Knew? Oh no. Never do I know the Lerchikovs. They are far too grand for me. Always so fine, so big, that for them the little Baroness from the oh-so-unchic Omsk, she is like a sparrow or perhaps a frog. But I see them. Oh yes. Last year at the White Russian Ball, there they are—Vladimir Gregorievitch, so thin, so straight, with his hair like the mane of the lion, white now but the same, and Natasha Eleanovna, still so pretty yet as a little doll. I saw them, oh yes, and almost I go to them and I say, I am Moura Kornikov. I am a good friend of your son and his wife in Budapesth. Then I think: Oh no, they are not like their children who learn to be the democrat. They are still all snob, all nose in the air. Oh no, I do not speak to Natasha Eleanovna and receive for my pains the snub in the face.”
The Baroness was sucking in her cheeks roguishly now, imitating the chagrin she would have experienced had she received the snub in the face. So much for that. It had gone for nothing.
At random, clutching at any lead now, I said, “So it was their son and his wife who were your friends?”
“Ah, Prince Pavel and the good Olga and the little darling Tanya as pretty as a dream.” The Baroness’s face was aglow with reminiscence. “How charming they were, how free from the grand and the snob. Ah, we émigrés, we were poor, so poor, with nothing but our memories and each other. But there were happy times in Budapesth, many happy times.”
Enthusiastically she hoisted herself up from the couch and waddling to a table, brushing aside this and that, produced a large photograph album which she brought to me on the couch.
“Many, many happy times. Picnics by the Danube. With nothing perhaps but a single sausage or some fruits. But always a bonbon for little Tanya.”
She was leafing through the album. As the pages flicked over, there were yellowing glimpses of grand ladies in ball gowns and bearded gentlemen leaning on shooting sticks in front of huge, story-book mansions. Then she found what she wanted.
“Look!” she said. “Look. In the meadows of the spring. Ah, to think of those filthy Sovietski shooting them, putting them to the wall of the alley and shooting, leaving the poor Tanya with no mother, no father. Look, there am I sitting by the edge of the motorcar, there is Prince Pavel, so distingué, so handsome, with the Olga taking up the sausage, and the little Tanya. Always I have a name for her from Debussy. La fille aux cheveux de lin. Is it not so? So pretty from a ballet, no?”
I looked at the photograph. Baroness Kornikov, seated on the footplate of an old automobile, seemed even in those days to have been as solid and plump and nannylike as she was today. Prince Pavel, gazing romantically out beyond the camera towards some invisible landscape, was a young replica of Prince Vladimir. Tanya must have been about eleven or twelve, exquisite in a flounced white dress with her hair falling loose down her back. La fille aux cheveux de lin! A little behind her, less distinguishable in the shadow of the tree, Princess Olga was busying herself with something which might well have been a sausage.
Suddenly, as I studied the faded record of that remote Danubian picnic, everything became clear. The whole intricate and sordid plot was as plain as if it were printed in block letters across the album page. My heart was pounding. I could hardly trust my voice as I looked up to the Baroness and said, “Could I borrow this photograph?”
“You want?” The Baroness was smiling indulgently. “You like? You wish to bring it to your oh-so-grand friends—to remember?”
“Can I have it?”
“Of course,” she said. “Always we share when it is memories. If Natasha Eleanovna …”
I wasn’t listening any longer. With a hand clumsy in its unsteadiness, I fumbled the photograph out of its slots. I got up and started for the door.
The Baroness’s voice came back into my consciousness.
“Young man … But, young man … the tea! The samovar is there. The tea—and the little sugared violets …”
Princess Natasha opened the door of the Lerchikovs’ suite. She was wearing an evening dress of delicate robin’s-egg blue. On her feet were a pair of little white rabbit-fur slippers, the first step, presumably, to bed.
“Ah, Lewis. Dear, dear Lewis.” All the pretty smiles, all the little clutches. “You come. How late but how charming!” She started to draw me into the foyer. “Poor Vladimir. He sleeps already. Always in New York so fatigué. Is the American dinners. Such heaps on the plate. What do they think one is, for so much eating? Perhaps a cow?”
We were in the sitting room now. There was a game of solitaire spread out on a table by the window. Princess Natasha was addicted to solitaire. In the taxi my anger and disgust at what had been done to Virginia had grown to a point where it was almost out of control. I grabbed her arm. She gave a little startled whimper. The cry merely heightened in me the impulse to violence.
“You’ll be glad to know your diamond ring paid off,” I said. “Esmeralda told the police what you wanted her to tell them. It couldn’t have been better timed either—just when they were ready for it.”
All she could think of was to slip into her little-girl bewilderment. “Esmeralda? The police?”
“That was the deal, wasn’t it? Pretend Virginia was her sister, pretend Virginia was in on the murder in Grasse?”
“But, Lewis.” I could feel her arm quivering in my grip like the wing of a trapped bird. “What is this? What has come to you?”
“The truth,” I said.
“But—but the truth about what?”
“About you and Olsen. He came to you in Lausanne, didn’t he? Olsen, Michaels, whatever he was calling himself—he came to you with a proposition. How much did he pay you? Or maybe he didn’t give you a cent. Maybe he just talked you into it for the loot that would be there for you.”
“Lewis.” The voice was a bird’s voice too, a thin piping “Lewis.”
I let go of her arm then, partly because I was afraid of the murderous pleasure the contact gave me. I brought the photograph out of my pocket.
“Remember the Baroness Kornikov? That canaille you were too high and mighty to meet? As you probably know, she was a great friend of your son and his wife. She had a special name for your granddaughter too. La fille aux cheveux de lin. The girl with the flaxen hair. Suitable, isn’t it? Look.” I held the photograph up in front of the blue, darting, terrified eyes. “That’s the prettiest golden hair anyone could want to see. Where is this golden-haired granddaughter of yours? Was she shot with her parents? Or is she maybe tucked away in some convent?”
It was rather frightening to find that I could look at a totally destroyed woman without so much as a flicker of sympathy. Princess Natasha had dropped down on the chair behind her solitaire game. Tiny as she always was, she seemed to have shrivelled into a little child’s mummy. She lowered her face until it rested on the table, scattering the cards. For a long moment she was silent. Then, not even raising her head, she whispered, “Tanya died in Davos. She came to us from Hungary, but oh so frail, so sick from the journey, the horrors. She fought for her life in the sanitarium, fought so hard, but … It was the will of God.”
There it was at last—the one clue that had been missing the clue which accident had unearthed in an old album, in the faded photograph of a plump little golden-haired girl who could never, by any stretch of imagination, have turned into the dark, high-cheekboned Tanya who had married Hugo.
It was all so easy to reconstruct now. Olsen and his “wife” fleeing from the villa in Grasse, jettisoning Esmeralda, the “poor little nothing of a Polish sister” who was picked up or abandoned as necessity demanded. Olsen and his “wife” seeking sanctuary in nearby Switzerland, on the lookout—always on the lookout—for a fast buck. I thought of Hugo’s familiar anecdote of his first encounter with love—that tale which had always been so boring but which now was merely pathetic. The gallant Hugo raising his hat on the pleasure steamer to the girl in white—the beautiful girl in white who happened to be Olsen’s “wife”. “There’s no need to ask who you are. You’re a princess.” The pompous rich young American—the perfect fall guy.
But how do you hook a snobbish millionaire who wants a princess for a bride when you happen to be a whore and the “wife” of a crook? Why, what could be easier? Turn yourself into a princess. Switzerland is crawling with blue-blooded, penniless émigrés. Find a suitable one—one who happened, in this case, to have a conveniently dead granddaughter.
Slowly the Princess was raising her head. She was gazing at me with the ghost of that pretty earnestness which had never fooled me in the past but which now that it had grown so threadbare, oddly enough, seemed real.
“To be so poor!” she said. “If you knew! The little rat-hole apartment, the tiny supper from perhaps a bowl of soup, the fat, sweaty landlord all the time shouting: Where is my rent? To us! Us who in the good days have fifty servants, servants for the servants. Olsen does not seem bad. Help this poor girl, he says, and you will help yourselves. Oh, but we do not know how it was a trap, how he would follow us here, to Antigua, everywhere, always pressing: You think I give you the rich life for free? Find out le scandale. There must be scandale.Find it out for me and my chantage. You think I wish to tell him of Sheila and Eugene? You think, when they are so kind, it is pleasure to tell to this man? Oh, Lewis, if you knew—the shame.”
Perhaps if it hadn’t been for the rage, I might have felt some pity for the Lerchikovs whose easy-won American paradise had turned out to be so serpent-ridden, but my heart was utterly unaffected because Princess Natasha had now become as unsubstantial to me as the faded photographs in the Baroness Kornikov’s album. She hadn’t killed Olsen. She might have wanted him dead, just as she had wanted, by bribing Esmeralda, to steer the police to Virginia and thus save her own skin. But Princess Natasha luring Olsen to my apartment? Princess Natasha letting him in with a key she could not possibly have obtained? Princess Natasha shooting him with a gun from the bedside drawer of whose existence she couldn’t possibly have been aware? In this sordid intrigue which had ended in murder, just as in life itself the Lerchikovs had been extras—charming, corruptible, ineffectual small-part players. Before I’d even reached the Pierre, I had known who the real enemy was. How wide of the mark I had been with my fantasies of Sheila, Uncle Gene—Beth. Beth, who had died a natural death but who, because I had wanted to clear myself of the guilt and neglect, I had tried to turn into the victim of someone—anyone else. Yes, even in the taxi, the enemy had been as obvious as the motive was simple. All I had needed was confirmation.
Well, it had come. “Tanya Denham,” whose first name wasn’t Tanya and whose second name probably wasn’t Denham, since the chances were she had always been Olsen’s wife and that the marriage to Virginia for her pathetic little inheritance had been as phony as everything else about him. “Tanya Denham,” the whore who had struck it rich through a man who had helped her to wealth but who later had become a constant threat, for one word to Hugo or Uncle Gene and the whole Denham coterie would have recoiled from her as from a leper. “Tanya Denham,” longing to get rid of him, biding her time, laying her plans until the ideal opportunity presented itself in Virginia Harwood, Olsen’s other “wife,” the perfect scapegoat waiting to be exploited in an apartment to which Tanya had a key and which, as she well knew, provided its own gun.
At last, by accident, by persistence—mostly by accident—it had come. The struggle which had endured so long and in which I had so frequently blundered and stumbled was over. I had, if such things were redeemable, redeemed my betrayal of Virginia. All that was left to be done was to call Trant and, yes, to go to Hugo.
I was ashamed of the faintly malicious satisfaction which the prospect brought me. After his persistent effort to save me from an “unfortunate” wife, this turning of the tables seemed almost too pat a revenge.
I started for the door. I had almost forgotten Princess Natasha until I heard the little shuffling footsteps behind me.
“Lewis, Lewis, where do you go?”
She came running around me and stopped in front of me between me and the door—a blue, fluttering, faded butterfly.
“You do not go to the police? You do not say we kill Olsen! Kill him, Me? Vladimir? The girl Tanya? Lewis, you do not think bad things of the girl Tanya? Please, please, you must believe me. She is a good girl. Always she hates this Olsen, who has taken her so young, who has made her do his evil things. She is sweet, she is kind, she is to us like a daughter and she loves the Hugo. Always she loves the Hugo. I swear to you, Lewis. She is a good girl.”
Her hand was clutching my arm. Incredibly, this impassioned championship of Tanya seemed quite sincere. Is that what happened, I thought, to grandmothers who lose their only granddaughter? Do they blindly embrace any substitute?
“Listen, please, please, you must listen. You do not think Tanya kill him? You do not think he say: All right, now I tell Hugo—and she kill him? Lewis, this is not so. I know. She was here with us when Olsen comes with the flowers. Yes, she is here. And he says: Okay, now I go but you give me all you have. And she did—money, jewels, everything. Only I—I hide my pretty diamond ring. And Olsen says: Okay. I go now. Good-bye. This is true, I swear it.”
The other hand had perched now on my arm. “Lewis listen, I say. What is this you speak of sisters? You say I give my ring to that woman to speak of sisters—of murders in Grasse? What is this? It is not so. She come this afternoon, yes. She come and she say: I am friend of Olsen, I know of you. And I give my ring to stop her from telling of us. That is all. I know nothing of sisters, of murders. Does this Esmeralda then say that Virginia is her sister? Does she say that Virginia was of this murder in Grasse? If she does, it is not from me. Maybe then it is true. Oh, Lewis, you will hate me, I know. But think … before you do this to Tanya. Are the police idiots? Do they go after the innocent? Does even this Esmeralda speak of sisters if it is not so? Cannot love of a man for a woman so blind him, so confuse him, so deceive him? Think, Lewis. Be true. What do you know of Virginia?”
It was only in dreams, surely, that a snake, slashed to death with a thousand blows, suddenly stirs and is alive again. And yet here it was once more—the Denham snake, the Sheila snake, the Uncle Gene snake, the Hugo snake, hissing its poisonous message of temptation: Not us, not us, not one of us. Virginia.
The poison no longer had any power over me. Of course it didn’t. Tanya hadn’t killed him? Tanya had given him everything she owned and he’d consented to leave them alone? Tanya a “good girl”? Tanya not Esmeralda’s sister? It was so preposterous, that Princess Natasha with her ridiculous child’s lies was less bothersome to me than a midge. And yet, as if the venom were indeed still potent, fury came rushing in as an antidote.
It was this fury that made me turn back from the door and hurry to the phone. I had been planning to call Trant from the lobby. But why? Let the Princess know exactly what I thought of her and her contemptible insinuations. I had Trant’s card in my pocket. I dialled the number.
“Lieutenant Trant, please.”
“Lewis!” cried the Princess.
A man’s voice on the phone said, “Trant’s not here.”
“Where can I reach him? This is terribly important.”
“Sorry. He’s not available right now.”
“But I’ve got to talk to him.”
“Lewis!” said the Princess. “Oh, Lewis, please.”
The man said again, “Sorry. Trant’s unavailable. Can I take a message?”
“Yes,” I said, fighting frustration. “Tell him it’s Lewis Denham. Tell him I know who killed Olsen. Tell him to meet me at my cousin Hugo Denham’s just as soon as possible.”
I slammed down the phone. The Princess was gazing at me with that expression which had so often undermined me in the past, that maddening Denham look of exasperation mingled with affectionate pity.
“Poor Lewis,” she said. “Poor, poor Lewis.”
I made a decision then. After Tanya was arrested and Virginia was restored to me, I would never see a Denham again. The exhilaration which came with the decision was extraordinary. It had taken me thirty-two years but at last it had happened. I had grown up.
In the taxi on my way to Turtle Bay, I felt as calm as if the whole thing were over. There was nothing to worry me except the awkwardness of breaking it to Hugo. Every move both Tanya and Olsen had made was clear. Tanya hadn’t been with the Lerchikovs when Olsen went there. That was just the Princess’s pathetic, pseudo-grandmotherly improvisation. Olsen had gone to her. He had made a final, impossible demand, and Tanya, who had Virginia on ice as the ideal scapegoat, had everything ready. What could have been simpler than to promise payment and arrange a meeting at my apartment? A call from “Sheila” to get Virginia out of the way—and it was done.
The taxi stopped outside Hugo’s house. As I got out, I saw the lights in the upstairs sitting room were on. Would Trant be there already?
I rang the doorbell. Until then I hadn’t really thought of Tanya as the Tanya I knew. In my mind she had merely been Olsen’s “wife,” Esmeralda’s sister, the girl in Grasse, the murderess. Suddenly, as I waited for the door to open, she became once more the poised fashionable hostess, the Denhams’ crowning glory. What would I say when Tanya opened the door?
She didn’t. It was Hugo. He had his pipe in his mouth. He looked more than ever like the advertising agencies’ ideal of Young Executive America. At least he did until he saw that his caller was me. Then, instantly, the worried, governessy frown came.
“Lew, what is it? Not Virginia? They haven’t …”
I knew then that Lieutenant Trant hadn’t arrived. Hugo was shepherding me into the hall.
“Here … here … let me take your coat.”
Somehow I couldn’t bear to have him go through his compulsively courteous little hat-check-girl routine—not under the circumstances.
I said, “No, it’s okay. I’ll only be staying a minute. Is Tanya here?”
“No,” he said, “no. As a matter of fact, she’s not. She’s gone to the opera with the Gardiners. Thank God I got out of it. Traviata or some such braying. But she should be back any minute. Come up, come on up. I hope it’s nothing bad. I mean, for your sake, I hope …”
He had his hand on my elbow leading me towards the stairs. Tanya was out. Did that make it better or worse?
“I’ve been worried, Lew. So worried. So has Tanya. We almost called a dozen times, but since you didn’t call
We were going up the stairs past the Dufy water colours (bought by Tanya), across the upstairs hallway with its Venetian mirrors (bought by Tanya) into the living room which was totally her creation. It occurred to me that until he had married Tanya, Hugo had been hardly a personality at all. He had only come into his own as Tanya’s husband. That thought didn’t help.
He was hovering around the bar. “What’s it to be? Scotch, as usual? Scotch on the rocks?”
I’d refused to take off my coat. Surely I couldn’t refuse a drink too. It would be too much.
“All right,” I said.
“Twenty-five years old. Direct from Scotland. It always pays off. Never trust the importers over here.”
Importers, I thought, who imported twenty-five-year-old bonded wives from Switzerland?
He brought me the drink. “Now. What is it? I can tell it’s bad from your face.”
“They’ve arrested Virginia,” I said.
“Oh no! Why, Lew …”
“She’s innocent,” I said.
“Why sure. I mean, of course, if you say so.”
“She’s been framed.”
“Framed?” he echoed.
In spite of the furrow of anxiety on his forehead, there was a faintly quizzical look. Poor old Lew. There he goes again. It irritated me just enough to get me over the hump.
“I know who killed Olsen,” I said. “It was someone he’d been blackmailing, someone who knew Virginia used to be his wife—and framed her.”
Hugo blinked. “Then—then where’s your trouble? If you know—go to the police.”
“I’m going to, I said. “In fact, I’ve asked the lieutenant to meet me here. I just thought I ought to tell you first.”
“Me?” Hitching up his trousers—the old crease-preserving gimmick—he perched himself on the arm of a chair. “Why me? I don’t know this—this mysterious blackmailer, do I? My God, you’re not back on Sheila again?”
“No,” I said. “Not Sheila. It’s a woman who married Olsen, or, if she didn’t actually marry him, lived with him. It’s a woman who was involved with him in a murder in the South of France.” Say it!“A woman who wanted a rich husband and who, with Olsen’s assistance, bribed the Lerchikovs into letting her pose as their granddaughter. The real granddaughter died after escaping from Hungary.”
“Lew!” Hugo’s voice had soared into his choirboy alto. “Lew—now listen to me. Let’s get this straight. Are you saying that Tanya is—is an imposter? That she and this Olsen …?”
“That’s right,” I said.
I’d expected almost any reaction except what came. Amazement was showing on his face, but it was purely Denham amazement that I, poor infatuated Lewis, could have got things so preposterously muddled.
“But, Lewis.” I always became “Lewis” when the unfortunate non-Denham side of me had gone too far. “Fair’s fair. I mean … Of course, if they’ve arrested Virginia, you’ve got to try to stand up for her. I mean, any red-blooded man would have to do that. But to turn on your own family. Sheila yesterday and today—Tanya!”
I said, “If you don’t believe me, call Princess Natasha. She’s already admitted it.”
“Admitted it!” Hugo got up. He was gazing at me, still a little peeved but not really mad. Of course not. One didn’t get mad with lunatics. “Now, Lewis, you’re standing there trying to tell me Princess Natasha admitted that Tanya killed …?”
He broke off. Tautly I turned to the door because voices and laughter were sounding from the stairs. For a moment the two of us froze into quite arbitrary positions. Then the door opened and Tanya, turning back to call over her shoulder to someone behind her, swept into the room in a long white dress with a sable cape.
She saw me and smiled her bright, friendly, immaculately tooled social smile.
“Lew darling, how lovely! Hugo, you idiot, you missed a marvellous Violetta, didn’t he, Sue?”
The Gardiners had come in behind her, the young Gardiners, the glossiest, most well-connected and wealthiest of the Denhams’ coterie. Suddenly the room was shimmering with social animation. Tanya, passing me, kissed me on the ear, leaving a subtle whiff of carnation. Sue Gardiner was saying, “Lew, why on earth do we never see you?” Hugo, a flawlessly unruffled host, was at the bar with Harry Gardiner. “What’s Sue’s poison these days? I hope you’ve got her off that Fernet-Branca kick.”
Tanya was coming back to me. “Darling, what are you doing with your coat on? You can’t be leaving. I won’t have it. Sue … Sue come and seduce Lew.”
But it was Hugo who came up to me. He threw his arm over my shoulder.
“Hey, folks, listen. Lewis and I have been playing a game. It’s Lew’s idea. His theory is that half the time we don’t know what we’re doing. If someone asked us where we were at any given time, even a couple of days ago, most of us, he says, wouldn’t have the slightest idea.” He turned to Sue Gardiner. “Okay, Sue. Where were you—let’s say—three days ago between four P.M. and seven P.M.?”
That, of course, was the time when Olsen had been killed. Dimly anxiety stirred but only very dimly, because it was inconceivable that now when everything …
“Three days ago between four P.M. and seven P.M.” Sue Gardiner grimaced over her drink. “Oh, darling, make it a little harder than that. Three days ago between four P.M. and practically eight P.M., Tanya and I were at the Plaza at that goddam committee tea for the Black and White Ball. You should see my photograph in yesterday’s Tribune. I looked like a camel on the verge of a nervous breakdown, while Tanya, of course, as always, looks divine.”
Hugo, passing Harry a drink, shot me a quick sidelong glance. There was no malice in it. It was merely amiable, a little sadly corrective.
“You see, Lew, you’ll have to revise that theory. Most people do know where they were and when and they can testify to it in a court of law. I think you’d better do a little facing up to reality, don’t you?”
Sue Gardiner and Tanya were mocking the dress of some woman they had run into at the opera. Harry Gardiner had got on to golf. Their voices came in and out of focus as if I were going to faint. It couldn’t be true. Somehow they were all conspiring. Conspiring? Wasn’t that what I’d tried to make myself believe about Uncle Gene’s alibi? That the entire Board of Directors at the bank had been conspiring? Sue Gardiner conspiring—when there was a picture in yesterday’s Herald Tribune? Of all my defeats, this was by far the most disastrous because I was left with—nothing. Nothing but Princess Natasha’s insidious voice: What is this about sisters? I do not give Esmeralda my ring to speak of sisters. If she says Virginia is her sister … Think, Lewis. Be true …
Don’t give in to it. Fight. Princess Natasha hadn’t told Esmeralda to invent that lie, then somebody else told her. Somebody else? Who? The chattering was echoing around me. Sue Gardiner laughed. As if this room were the nightmare rather than what was inside me. I had to get away.
I said, “Sorry, Tanya. I’ve got to go. Good night all.”
I started for the door.
Hugo’s voice called, “Hey, wait a minute. I’ll see you out.”
He was with me on the stairs. His hand on my elbow, squeezing it slightly, offering clumsy comfort.
“Now, Lew, don’t get me wrong. I’m not mad. Of course I’m not. I understand how you feel. God knows what you did to old Princess Natasha, God knows what you rattled her into admitting. But that’s okay, too. When a guy’s in as tough a spot as you …”
We were halfway down the stairs now. The hand on my elbow manoeuvred me around so that we were facing each other.
“Listen, Lew, I wasn’t going to tell you this. After all, one doesn’t go around just wantonly hurting people. But now, under the circumstances, I think you’d better know. That day at the Club, I only told you part of what Father found out about Virginia. There was more, much more. Why, last year it seems, she was jailed in Italy. Remember that yacht? She swiped all the women’s jewels and tried to make a getaway on Elba. Why, Lewis, if you’d just shape up to this …”
That wasn’t true. Virginia was not what they said she was. To concede that now was to die. I wanted to yell at him. I wanted to destroy through him all the filthy gossip-mongering of Uncle Gene’s cronies, all the sarcastic insinuations of Lieutenant Trant, all the pitying, condescending sympathies of the Sheilas, the Uncle Genes, the Princess Natashas. But all that was left was exhaustion. Here it was—the end of my tether.
The doorbell rang. Vaguely I heard Hugo.
“Now, what …?” He ran down the rest of the stairs to the door and I heard the voice saying what I knew it would say, “Why, Lieutenant. Come in, come in. It’s Lew you want, isn’t it? He told me. He—well, I guess he isn’t bearing up too well.”
There were two of them now—both of them standing below me, looking up at me. But Hugo had faded out. It was Lieutenant Trant, spruce in his neat coat and discreetly jaunty young-minister hat, who was the real enemy.
“I got your message, Mr. Denham. They tell me you know who killed Quentin Olsen.”
The bright, merciless eyes seemed to be boring into me.
“Perhaps you’d like me to catch you up on your wife first. Although she has admitted in detail your disposal of the body, she still denies she killed him. She claims she was called away by a phone call purporting to come from Sheila Potter. There is nothing to prove this. There are no witnesses. It is merely her word. But if she is telling the truth, the only possible alternative murderer is someone who had a key to your apartment, someone who knew you kept a gun in the drawer, someone, presumably, to whom Olsen was a threat, and someone who knew of your wife’s former connection with him and had decided to frame her for the killing. All I can hope, Mr. Denham, for your wife’s sake and your own, is that the person whom you are about to accuse to me fulfills all these specifications. And, needless to say, that you have enough evidence to back your accusation up.”
I was longing for a cigarette. I had been reduced so low that I had no feeling, no thought beyond the craving for a smoke. Did I have any cigarettes with me? I felt in the right-hand pocket of my Burberry. Nothing. I tried the other pocket. My hand touched somethmg quite unfamiliar. It was smallish and yielding and yet oddly bristly like … like …
With my hand still in my pocket, I looked down at my coat. I was terrified of the excitement that was stirring in me. Be careful. Go slow. Think. The day of my lunch with the Denhams had been unseasonably warm. Until tonight, when I had grabbed any coat from the hall closet at random, I hadn’t worn my topcoat since … Yes, of course …
Should I take the thing out of my pocket? Should I brandish it at them? No, no. Hold it.
Meeting the challenge in Trant’s eyes, struggling with the excitement, I said, “Lieutenant, would you go to that coat closet and take out a Burberry like the one I’m wearing?”
With no change of expression at all, Trant moved to the closet. Little bits and pieces of memory were clicking together in my mind, making the pattern, at last making the pattern. The hat-check girl in the restaurant helping Hugo into his Burberry, which was identical with mine except a couple of shades darker. Hugo, at his deadly social party, praising the woman’s green dress for being as blue as her eyes—revealing his colour-blindness. Hugo with Beth’s key letting himself into my apartment, putting his coat away in the closet, Hugo getting the gun from the drawer, waiting for Olsen, and when he came, ushering him in, compulsively going through his little ritual of putting the “guest’s’’ coat away in the closet too, Hugo killing Olsen, Hugo making his getaway, snatching his coat out of the closet. His coat? Colour blindness … My coat.
Hugo was standing quite still. Lieutenant Trant was back at the bottom of the stairs, holding up a topcoat to me.
“This, Mr. Denham?”
“Yes,” I said. “Look at the label. You’ll see my name. The coat I’m wearing I took out of my own closet when I left the apartment and I haven’t taken it off since I got here. In case you want any more evidence, I have never in my life smoked a pipe.”
I took the thing out of my pocket then and held it up—a package of badger-bristle pipe cleaners, especially imported from England.
Was there anything else? The call from “Sheila,” of course. Hugo’s choirboy alto had easily taken care of that. But there was one thing more—one thing so improbably Denham that until that moment it would never have occurred even to me.
That Olsen should have gone to Hugo after the Lerchikovs was reasonable enough from Olsen’s point of view. He had been forced to leave the country, his days for exploiting the Lerchikovs and Tanya were over. But why not try for one last windfall? Wouldn’t that “civilised” arbiter of the young married set, Hugo Denham, pay quite a lot for information which could once and for all enable him to dispose of the whore who had tricked him into marriage under false pretences?
But Olsen hadn’t known his Denhams. He hadn’t known their magnificent ability to ignore the realities which did not suit their purposes. He hadn’t known that Hugo was going to continue to have a princess for a wife whether she was a real princess or not. He hadn’t known that to preserve that illusion, Uncle Gene’s son was more than ready to kill the person who dared to threaten it.
I looked down at my cousin. He was gazing up at me with owlish bewilderment. I thought of all his little comforting squeezes, all his clucking “Now, Lewises.” Had they all been a complete sham or had he—the arch Denham—already forgotten that he killed Olsen and framed Virginia, with Esmeralda’s help, just because they were things which, of course, had had to be done but were much better put out of the mind?
“Lewis!” he said. “Now, Lewis.”
“Just a moment, please.” Trant was looking with professional briskness from me to the coat in his hand. “Mr. Denham, are you ready to swear you found the coat you’re wearing in your own closet this evening?”
“Yes,” I said. “And Hugo hasn’t been to my apartment since the murder. There’s only one way it could have got there. After he’d met Olsen there and killed him, he grabbed my coat by mistake.”
Trant would see that. He couldn’t fail to, once I’d told him the rest. I let the excitement take over then. Virginia would be back with me tonight. Surely in time she could forget my moment of betrayal. Perhaps in time I could forget it too.
Perhaps I was still Denham enough for that.