by Matthew Head
“And you’ve invented one circumstance that explains all those things,” I said.
“Those and some others,” Miss Finney said. “There’s one circumstance I don’t have to invent, though. Surely you know Gaby’s in love with Henri? She wouldn’t talk to you about him; when she was a kid she loved Jeannette and Henri the way she never had a chance to love anybody else. When Jeannette died, Gaby transferred all the affection she had for her right on over and added it to what she already had for Henri. And she never got a chance to know another man who could hold a candle to Henri, anyway not until you came along with your own feeble little light. She’d have been abnormal if she hadn’t loved Henri. But the thing that needed explaining was why Henri never gave her a break. She was pretty and young and good, cut out to be the best kind of wife. There was the emotional tie-up with Jeannette, too, and that kind of thing happens over and over again—the widower marries his dead wife’s sister or best friend and so on. And Henri’s the kind of man who needs women the way he needs to breathe, and is attracted to them with as natural a reflex as his breathing action. Well, why not to Gaby? I’m sure he was fond of her but nothing ever happened, and she was the only woman around here after Jeannette died.”
“For a few months. Until Jacqueline came.”
“That’s hitting the nail on the head,” said Miss Finney. “Henri and Jacqueline are lovers. They’ve been lovers for a couple of years.”
“What?”
Miss Finney sighed. “Of course they are. Use your noggin, Hoop.” She took a long swallow of her drink and looked tired. “I wish this thing had some ice in it,” she said.
“But Jacqueline didn’t like Henri,” I babbled. “You just said so.”
“That’s one of the circumstances it explains,” said Miss Finney. “Jacqueline and Henri got along all right when she and Gérôme first came here. He hung around their house all the time—Henri told you so himself. I don’t know exactly when they became lovers, but it couldn’t have been too long after Jacqueline arrived, not with the kind of campaign she must have waged. Don’t argue with me that Henri would have stayed true to Jeannette’s memory. He really loved his wife, but the double standard was invented to take care of men like Henri. He’d had the habit of visceral relaxation probably ever since he sprouted his first whisker; he’d even have found it a release from his grief over Jeannette. The mere act of love doesn’t count as an infidelity with Henri’s kind, and I’m not sure that it should. I said I don’t know when this business with Jacqueline began, but if I had the date when she first complained to Gérôme that she didn’t like Henri Debuc and didn’t want to be around him any more than could be helped, I’d be willing to bet I could place the time of their first brangle within twenty-four hours. Didn’t like Henri my foot. Just a cover up.”
“It explains about Gabrielle,” I said.
“Sure,” said Miss Finney. “If Jacqueline hadn’t shown up I think the chances would have been a hundred to one that Henri would have worked around to marrying Gaby after a decent interval. It couldn’t happen as soon as a thing like this Jacqueline business did, because with Gabrielle it would have been something more than this sort of emptying process that went on with that hussy. All right, wince. I’m crude, but I know the psycho-biology of the Henris. He wouldn’t have pulled any funny stuff with a nice girl like Gabrielle; Henri’s too honest.”
I winced again.
“I didn’t mean it that way, Hoopie,” Miss Finney said quickly. “I understand how it happened between you two. Look, are you feeling any more sensible? About marrying Gaby, I mean?”
“That’s not what we’re talking about,” I said. “So you think Henri couldn’t fall in love with Gabrielle while Jacqueline had her hooks in him.”
“I didn’t mean that exactly,” she said. “Lots of men have fallen legitimately in love with a good woman while they had a bad one on the side. But I imagine Henri got in beyond his depth before long. With things as tight as they are on this station, you can imagine what a stink that nymphomaniac female ham would have raised if she had seen Henri look twice at Gabrielle. Even with all the experience Jacqueline has behind her, I doubt if she’s ever found anything so completely to her liking as Henri is, or anything she’s so determined to hang on to. She isn’t getting any younger, as the wise old saying goes. She’d have torn this station to pieces, even if she had to bring it down on her own head.”
“And it explains what else?” I asked, although I was beginning to see things fit into place.
“It explains why she did away with André,” Miss Finney said. “You know the degree of privacy there is around here. Even with the convention that nobody goes to anybody else’s house without being asked, it was difficult and dangerous for Henri and Jacqueline to meet. Gérôme was always going on those trips to the plantations, but even so, André still lived in the house. Sometimes they were both away at once and that must have been pretty nice, but you can imagine the dodging around and slipping in and out that must have gone on the rest of the time—Jacqueline down to Henri’s or both of them to the guest house, and so on. I’ll bet there wasn’t a native around the place that didn’t know what was going on, but they’d never tell. But you can’t get away with it forever, and my guess is that once when Gérôme was away they got careless or had bad luck, and André got the goods on his brother’s wife.”
“Blackmail,” I said.
“André wouldn’t be above it,” Miss Finney admitted, “and everybody knows that the mortality rate among blackmailers is awful high. I don’t know what he was asking. I doubt it was money.”
“Henri was dead broke,” I said.
“Maybe that was why,” she said. “But I’m thinking about how Jacqueline met André in Bafwali. You say he didn’t know she was in the house. On the other hand, maybe she was waiting for him there while he was waiting for her down there at the Airways house where you saw him—that’s where the plane passengers to Léopoldville spend the night. Maybe they got fouled up on making connections.” She spoke bitterly and said, “Knowing my one and only ex-lover as I did, I wouldn’t put it beyond him to have blackmailed Henri for money, and Jacqueline for another commodity she was in a position to supply.”
“You certainly think a lot of your fellow human beings,” I said.
“I’ve seen a lot of my fellow human beings, Emily dear,” Miss Finney said. That one shut me up.
“Not that I think Jacqueline ever meant to give in,” Miss Finney continued. “She agreed to the bargain with no intention of keeping it—not for moral reasons, that’s Jacqueline’s own particular little blind spot—but for reasons of distaste and security. She probably staved him off somehow in Bafwali and counted on the water carafe to settle things for her. Which it did.”
“And you think Henri gave her the culture.”
“I’ve tried to think not. I’ve tried to believe she stole it from the laboratory, but I can’t come around to it. I think that was when Henri burnt the books. I think that when the whole thing passed into such a desperate phase instead of the casual byplay he thought it was going to be, he wanted to break every connection between Jeannette and himself, as if he might be dirtying her. Henri’s a good man.”
“If he gave Jacqueline those bugs, he’s a murderer. You’re calling him a good man and a murderer in the same breath.”
“Yes.”
“That can’t be.”
“All right then,” said Miss Finney patiently, “he was a bad man. My God, Hoop, does everything have to be black or white to you? You can be good and bad at the same time; everybody is.”
“Not that bad.”
“Everybody doesn’t get so badly involved,” Miss Finney said. “Let’s not argue it. What have I explained? Why Jacqueline claimed to dislike Henri, why Henri didn’t pay any attention to Gaby, why he burnt Jeannette’s books, and why Jacqueline had a motive for killing André. Had I mentioned anything else?”
“Not yet,” I said.
“Fill my
glass,” Miss Finney told me, “and make it weak.” I poured the drinks and Miss Finney said “Thanks” and took a sip of hers. “I’m dog-tired, Hoopie,” she said. “I wish this were all over.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I’m going to tell Henri.”
My drink splashed over onto my hand. “So he can get away!” I said, and realized how much I wanted him to. Miss Finney moved her free hand in a gesture of half-amusement. “Can you imagine making a getaway from here?” she asked. “How would you go about it? Where could you go, except Costermansville? You go the other way and the road peters out in a few native trading villages. And you know what Costermansville is, just how much chance you’d have of getting in and out of there without being noticed.”
“But they could get there before the authorities knew about them.”
“No difference. Costermansville’s like any other Congo town. There’s one road into it and there’s one road out of it. There’s the lake steamer, but it’s even slower than the road and ends up at the same place, Kisenyi. Supposing they got to Kisenyi, or the other way, say to Usumbura? One road out and one road in, either place. Supposing they went to the next town after that? They could go all the way to Léopoldville for that matter. But the radio would catch up with them sooner or later. Hoopie, the Congo’s as big as the United States from the Mississippi to the Atlantic, but white men travel through it on little threads of road and little trickles of water that just don’t have any side-branches. If you were being hunted in the Congo you could no more get through it unobserved than you could cross Niagara Falls on a tight rope without people noticing. As for hiding out in the bush, that’s a form of death in itself, and even if it weren’t for us itinerant doctors and missionaries snooping around, any white man who tried to set himself up in a native village would be all over the Congo on the native grapevine so quick it would make your head swim. You can’t get out of the Congo if they don’t want you to, that’s all.”
“They could go by plane,” I said, groping. “They could get into South Africa—or Kenya or Egypt. Cairo’s big. They—”
“You know you’re being silly,” Miss Finney said. “Passports, for one thing. And with good luck you can get a plane reservation two weeks in advance without a priority, but it’s more likely to be a month. And they don’t give priorities on murder. They’re stuck.”
“Not if you don’t report them,” I said. “You only said you were going to tell Henri.”
“Don’t act so chickenhearted,” Miss Finney said. “Those two are murderers.”
“What makes you so sure about Henri?” I asked. “You’re just guessing all this stuff. If nobody says anything they’ll put it onto the natives.”
“And hang a few of them for it,” Miss Finney said. “However, I’m not going to report it. I’ll tell you later what I’m going to do. But you’re jumping the gun a little bit. I haven’t said anything about Gérôme and the natives, I’ve just talked about André.”
My eyes bugged out. “Do you mean you think maybe the natives did it after all?”
“Nothing of the kind,” Miss Finney said.
“Then tell me about it. The way you figured it out.”
Miss Finney looked uncertain and unhappy. “I can’t figure that one out so completely, Hoop,” she said. “I know some of it, but not all of it. I’m not sure we’ll ever know it all. Why would you say they killed Gérôme?”
“Henri and Jacqueline? I wouldn’t.”
“They did. What would you say?”
I said, thinking it out as I went, “You’re supposed to look for money in a civilized murder. Are there any more de l’Andréneau brothers or anybody?”
“No,” Miss Finney said, “whatever is left of the Congo-Ruzi belongs to Jacqueline now.”
“Then Henri and Jacqueline would have the money to get away. However bad off the Company is, if they sold everything they could get enough out of it to last them for a little while, to go somewhere, eventually to Belgium. It would last until they got started again.”
Miss Finney shook her head. “That might work for Jacqueline, but not for Henri. He’s not quite that cynical.”
“You thought he was cynical enough to let Jacqueline have that dysentery culture.”
Miss Finney waved away my interruption. “He wouldn’t kill for a few dollars. No matter how broke he is, he’s young and healthy and could always make a living. He certainly wouldn’t murder for the privilege of running off with Jacqueline. If you ask me, he’d like to shake her. No. No on the money proposition.”
“What makes you so sure he—they—killed Gérôme, then, if you haven’t found a motive?”
“They over-clued,” Miss Finney said. “It was silly to leave that knife there. Of course any native who had worked around Gérôme’s house or office would know the knife and could get it. But it wasn’t reasonable that any natives from our village would want to kill Gérôme, and even if they had, they wouldn’t have had the sense of melodrama to kill with that knife. It isn’t even a M’buku knife. Leaving that knife there was the silliest thing in the whole business. They must have been pretty well flustered by then. It makes you think maybe they didn’t plan it ahead of time. The business of imitating the murder of the M’buku administrator was a desperate expedient in any case, but this knife—no, that’s evidence against some white killer, not a black one.”
“But why does the white killer have to be Henri?” I begged. “What are you doing with Gabrielle’s story,” I said, even feeling angry with Miss Finney now, “chucking it out the window? Good Lord, she saw the native! She saw him doing things to Gérôme’s body, and she saw him leave on the path down to the village. Are you going to tell me Henri did this thing in blackface?”
“And,” said Miss Finney, “when she saw you coming down the path with that light she thought it was another native and she said Ne me touchez pas. Exact words, remember?”
“Get to the point.”
“My God, Hoop!” said Miss Finney. “She spoke in French. In French! Gabrielle never spoke to the natives in French. She was one of these Congo babies who have black boys for nursemaids and have to be spanked into speaking French. They always pick up Lingala first and they’d rather speak it; it’s easier. She could tell all these native folk stories in their own tongue; she translates back and forth, the way she used to do for Jeannette, like a breeze. It was second nature to her to speak their own tongue to natives. Most of them wouldn’t understand French anyhow. She didn’t think you were a native—she thought you were a white man, a French-speaking white man. She didn’t see a native out there with Gérôme—she saw a white man. She didn’t see him go down the path to the village, she saw him go back in the direction of the station, the way he had come. When she saw that light bobbing through the bush she thought he was coming back for something, taking the short cut. When the light flashed on her she thought there was a murderer behind it. A white man! She didn’t think it was a native. If she had, do you know what she’d have said? She’d have said Koba! Kobadu bai! Koba-du bai! My God, does that sound like Ne me touchez pas to you?”
“All right, all right,” I said, feeling sick at what was coming next, but Miss Finney didn’t hesitate.
“But then she pops up with this rigmarole about a native,” she went on, “because she saw that white man and what he was doing to that body and she knew why he was doing it, and why he was laying him out on the path to the village like that. But she loved Henri. She might not have wanted him to touch her, not there in the bush or ever again, but she couldn’t bring herself to give him away.”
“It didn’t have to be Henri!” I said. “It—there was someone else Gabrielle would have protected, another white man. Why couldn’t it have been Papa Boutegourde?”
Miss Finney slammed down her empty glass and raised her hands in despair.
“God Almighty, Hoop,” she said, “why couldn’t it have been Santa Claus? But if you want a specific reason, César would never ha
ve made that mistake about the knife. He knows native customs backwards and forwards. He’d have done it right. Henri killed Gérôme.”
I felt stunned and helpless. “There’s a lot you haven’t explained,” I said.
“There’s a lot I don’t know,” Miss Finney admitted. “I’m through talking for now, Hoop. I’ve got to rest. No—I can’t. Take me back to Gérôme’s, Hoop. I’ve got to write a letter.”
I looked at her.
“That’s right,” she said. “A letter to Henri.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
How We Ended
WHEN I WENT UP to the Boutegourdes’ later that night to get a sandwich, Miss Collins was waiting for me with a message from Miss Finney. She said acidly that Mary had told her to tell me that she, Mary, had finished “that little job of writing” but wouldn’t tell her, Emily, what it was. Maybe I knew; Mary seemed to tell me everything while certain other people weren’t let in on it. And Mary wanted everybody, in the high-handed way she had, to be all packed and ready to leave from the Boutegourdes’ for Costermansville in the morning. Mary said everybody must be there before seven, although we might have to wait until noon for her permission to leave. Nobody would be allowed to stay behind, but Mary had made no explanation as to why this was necessary. Miss Collins was breathless with resentment by the time she had delivered all this.