by Sarah Smith
She wrote to Papa Cyron that she wanted to sleep with her husband. She didn’t say why. Papa Cyron got André drunk. It took two servants to carry him upstairs. She went in to him. Mademoiselle Françoise had prepared a salve; Sabine rubbed it onto his parts and said words over them until they unfolded and grew. It was fascinating, beautiful, like butterfly wings unfolding. It was nothing like with the incubus; it was something so tender. She felt so connected to him, so alive, it was almost as if he were going to die.
“There it is,” she whispered in her husband’s sleeping ear. “You have given me my son.”
Everything was perfect.
Except for one thing: the incubus wouldn’t go away.
Jules delivers the secret of Montfort
IT TAKES A GREAT deal of effort to make a false secret. Pétiot had provided Jules with an elaborate packet: photographs and specifications of wireless equipment, details of the Montfort electrical plant. The taller of the abbey towers had been given a “concealed” antenna, complete with rather conspicuous Marconi reflectors. Jules had spent two days at Montfort with a camera, supposedly spying, taking pictures that were not any better than Jules would take, and had written out in his own hand the secret of Montfort. There was a Marconi station and a new generator to power it.
Jules visited Reisden on Monday, jubilant because he was looking forward to a role he liked and because he was about to pass his false information to the Ferret.
“Look at that,” he said, spreading out the packet on Reisden’s desk. “It goes today to the Louvre post office. I think the police are watching to see him pick it up. It’s pretty exciting, isn’t it?”
“Just like a film,” Reisden agreed wryly.
Jules grinned. “Friday is the last day of the Necro season. Saturday morning we’re off! And on Monday morning Mabet and Méduc meet the witches and they tell both of us we’ll be important to history. And we will, this’ll be the film of the year. Reisden, you ought to come. Come for a couple of days and get in on it.”
“I may come down to watch you.”
“You’re too sober,” Jules said. He had brought the costume sketches for his role and had shaved his moustache for the part. He was an actor in love with his role.
“Jules,” Reisden said, “I want to talk with you about what’ll happen when you’re at Montfort. André will have at least one shock during the filming, and I don’t know how it’ll affect him. His wife thinks she’s having a child.”
It took Jules a moment to comprehend. Then the light went out of his olive face, leaving it muddy. “That’s wonderful,” he said, flushing.
“André doesn’t know. He’ll find out soon. He’ll be disturbed. When he’s disturbed, he turns to Necrosar or depends on you.”
“He can depend on me.”
“Will you call for help if he needs it? Cyron won’t.”
“Ruthie and I both will,” Jules said. “Count on us.”
And Jules went off to deliver his packet of lies to the post office, his face more somber, a little older; thinking of his expression later, Reisden would decide that Jules had looked as if he had been told he would be the father, not André; it had been that look of responsibility.
After he had gone, Reisden found the costume sketches; Jules had been shaken enough to forget them.
As far as the police could reconstruct Jules’ movements afterward, he went to the post office and then to the Necro, where André sent him off to do some errands. Jules did not seem unlike himself, André said; but André wouldn’t notice. Ruthie had expected Jules back at the apartment for early dinner. When Jules didn’t show up, she left a message at the Necro, presuming he was there. André had been meeting with the set dresser and barely got back in time to do the show. Jules wasn’t in the first half of the program, so it was well past midnight before anyone noticed he wasn’t there at all.
As the police told the story, Jules finished his errands, left off packages at the Necro, then walked to the Minaret, a neighborhood Turkish bath frequented by homosexuals. There, again according to the police, he requested the services of a Marcel D., twenty years old. Jules asked Marcel to buy them a bottle of wine. Marcel got the bottle, hoping to talk with his client about the acting business, but when he returned, Jules had left without paying.
And what did you do then? the police asked Marcel.
I gave Big Fiboul thirty francs and told him to beat the bastard up.
...with unfortunate results
JULES WAS RELEASED FROM hospital on Thursday, two days before he would have gone to Montfort to act Méduc. Reisden took him back to the apartment. Jules had to be helped to lie down on the chaise longue in the library. He gestured for the blinds to be drawn, for the papers that littered the library to be taken away. Jules could not speak; his broken jaw had been wired shut.
André awkwardly, carefully gathered up the papers that littered the floor. André, whom Jules usually waited on, was trying to reciprocate. Reisden, passing him papers, saw they were part of the script for the film.
Flung across the back of a chair was a wine-red coat in the eighteenth-century style. The sketch for it was still back in Reisden’s office. Reisden remembered Jules laughing, excited about playing Méduc.
Jules looked half medical machine, half vulnerable human. His neck brace immobilized his head so he could not look at any of them without turning his whole body; he could not look up or down, only stare straight ahead. The lower half of his face was in an iron-mesh protective mask attached to the brace; his mouth was swollen and wet; he couldn’t swallow easily because his attacker had hit him in the throat. Both eyes were blackened, yellow-purple. Between the swollen lids Jules’ eyes glared with an angry defensive pain. Go away, Jules gestured, not looking at André; go away.
The police had let Jules’ attacker go, because Jules had refused to testify against him. André had told him he should; Jules had scribbled NO, time after time. The story would have come out and André was part of the story. It was a declaration of loyalty; but loyalty that is a weight, a mistake.
Reisden took André into the dining room. “Leave him alone for a while.”
André sat down in one of the dining room chairs. He wrapped his arms around himself, as if needing to be enfolded by care. He was moving like an old man, as if the shock had brittled his bones. He hadn’t done Necrosar, onstage or off, since the first telephone call had reached him at the theatre. Necrosar would have said things André couldn’t bear hearing. Ruthie patted his shoulder awkwardly, tenderly, like a sister. “Would you like some mint tea?” she asked them. Reisden accepted, to give them all time to settle themselves. She made tea; she began to pour it into small cups painted with flowers. Suddenly, with his arms still around himself, André moaned and laid his head on the table. Ruthie stood rigid, like a pillar, a woman of wood, not moving anything but her arms, finishing pouring the tea, closing her eyes behind the glasses, and bowed her head and opened her mouth and made a sound, not loud, but as if someone had stabbed her, pain so unexpected it surprised her; she took off her glasses and jammed them into the pocket of her sensible skirt. She sat down at the table herself, one hand over her eyes, one hand outstretched, as if she were comforting André by touch, or asking for comfort. He put out his hand, close to hers. He touched the ends of his fingers to hers, patted her hand.
It was probably the first time in André’s life that anyone had asked for comfort from him. Reisden left them in the dining room with the roses and the singing birds; he closed the door gently behind him.
Squaring his shoulders, he went back into the library, where Jules was lying in the dimness, and closed that door, too.
“First,” Reisden said. “Whether the story’s true. Once I remember you’d raided the Necro’s petty cash to buy makeup for the company. You came back with a box of greasepaints and four francs seventeen centimes in change. I remember you counting the centimes out, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen. We all laughed at you. If you’d hired a Marcel, you’d have paid him. And drunk
with the d—n man and probably listened to him recite, bad as he was. You don’t cheat anyone. I know you.”
For a moment, in the dimness, Reisden thought Jules was choking— his breath rasped through his broken nose and bruised throat. But it was laughter, or something that might just as well be taken for laughter. Jules’ bruised hands counted out imaginary centimes in the air, explaining. He began to cough from his own spit; Reisden gave him a handkerchief, and Jules wiped his mouth and eyes. It left a bloody streak on the handkerchief; Jules looked at it apologetically. Only Jules, Reisden thought, would apologize for bleeding.
“Tell me what happened, if you can. Then I’ll tell you what I’ve found.”
Jules reached painfully, with bruised muscles, for paper and pencil. Don’t know, he scrawled, holding the paper against the wall so he could see to write.
He didn’t remember the attack. The last thing he remembered was the middle of rehearsal. He must have done the errands; he thought he had been walking back toward the apartment. He thought he remembered a van with two men, maybe three.
“You broke the biggest one’s nose,” Reisden said.
Jules turned his thumb up wryly.
“To a degree I misled you. I know the story’s wrong because I’ve talked with one of them. Gehazy hired them.”
Jules’s eyes widened.
Reisden had found Big Fiboul at the workmen’s club where he hung out. Fiboul was the size and shape of Wagny-les-Mines’ mine tailings, three hundred pounds. Moi, c’est mon métier dans le monde, he had explained in a gravelly voice. I beat guys up.
Marcel hadn’t hired Fiboul. “The guy who hires me, he’s wearing an overcoat, in this heat, and he has a little smile like this,” Fiboul had said, sliding his lips away from brown uneven teeth. “He said take some friends.” The only instruction was that the beating was to be severe, visible, and long-lasting.
“Gehazy knew you were lying,” Reisden said to Jules.
Jules looked up at him sharply from his blackened swollen eyes, as if hoping what Reisden said next could define his experience.
“You left the packet of information for Gehazy at about ten in the morning. Gehazy picked it up at the poste restante before noon. According to Fiboul, Gehazy hired him at around three in the afternoon. Gehazy had barely enough time to read your packet. He was looking for something specific, which he didn’t find.”
Jules thought and tried to nod with his immobile head. He picked up an orange and used it like a puppet, nodding its head.
“He was looking for something so blazingly obvious that he knew you were lying when you didn’t mention it—”
Jules moved the puppet-orange, shaking its head no.
“Or something he thinks you know and deliberately didn’t tell him. Did Fiboul and his friends ask you for information?”
Go after lost memory quickly and hard and sometimes you’ll get it back. Reisden asked the same questions repeatedly, with all the variations he could think of. Did they say any-thing to you? Did they ask you questions? Jules raised both hands helplessly. He didn’t know.
Reisden got up, paced the room, fiddled with the closed blinds. “Do you mind if I open these?” Light was not kind to Jules’ purple-and-yellow face. Reisden tilted the shutters and looked down into the street. No one was watching Jules’ building, though the police had promised protection.
“What would Gehazy presume you know? You’ve been to Montfort; you’ve known André for years. What’s the secret of Montfort?”
Jules raised both hands, shrugged, and winced in pain.
“Anything!” Reisden said. “The most obvious thing. It’s in plain sight. Anyone who knows the household knows it. What is it?”
Jules raised both hands, then pointed his finger at Reisden. He reached for the paper and scribbled.
You’ve been there. You’d know it too.
Cyron gives Reisden a role
“JULES IS OUT OF the film,” Cyron said. “Out of the Necro. Out of my son’s life. The whole world knows that my son’s business partner was caught in a male brothel.”
“That story is a lie,” Reisden said. “As you like to remind me, I was Leo’s ward. I knew Gehazy. He used real information if he had it. But henever cared whether the story was true; he simply made it scandalous. I saw the manager of this Minaret, which is a respectable place as those things go. No visit from Jules. He doesn’t go there. Fiboul was hired by the blackmailer. So was Marcel, who’s been fired.”
“The story’s true,” Cyron said.
“No. You don’t like the Necro, you don’t like Jules, but the story is not true and you cannot use it as an excuse.”
“It doesn’t matter if the story isn’t true, I won’t have it get round—”
“Cancel the film,” Reisden said.
“What?"
“André’s mental state was precarious before Jules was hurt. He depends on Jules, not only as his business partner but to run errands for him, cook for him, everything; what Jules didn’t do, his sister did. Jules and Ruthie were going to watch him. Now André doesn’t have any support.”
“If I’d say he has me,” Cyron said, “you’d say that wasn’t good enough, wouldn’t you, boy? According to you I don’t know him. Never have. Not the way you and his friends do.” He nodded his head bitterly. “So. All right. You watch him. Didn’t you say your friend Gehazy was looking for the secret of Montfort, which doesn’t exist? He didn’t get it from Jules, so he’ll try again, won’t he? There’ll be a lot of people at Montfort these next three weeks. I don’t want to watch all of them to look for German spies. The next man Gehazy wants to blackmail, I want it to be you.”
“What? No.”
“Here’s your chance to be loyal, eh? Prove yourself? Find out what this man wants, who he’s working for. Find out what he’s looking for, with this ‘secret of Montfort.’ You do that, I’ll talk to Pétiot, you’ll have your contract. Here’s your chance to get what you want.”
Cyron had him.
“You’ll need a role.” Cyron slid Jules’s copy of the scenario over the desk to Reisden. “Jules’s role. You’ll be Méduc.”
“You’re mad, Cyron. I’m an ex-amateur actor.” Not that that was the point, not at all.
“André’s worked with you before.”
“I can’t do it.”
“Nobody’s coming to see you, boy. Just stand still and let me act around you.”
“But—“
“You want to help André, or not? I want him helped. You say you can. Come rehearse with me tomorrow, ten-thirty. Know the scenario cold by then.”
Dotty is blackmailed
DOTTY TELEPHONED HIM. SHE was at an end-of-season party; in the faint background he could hear the sounds of an orchestra. He imagined Dotty in a Poiret lampshade ballgown crushed into a telephone cabinet.
“Darling, I’ve heard André du Monde is trying to get you into his film.”
Paris is a very small town. Gehazy would have heard too.
“Darling,” she said, “don’t.” Her voice was high and nervous. She had never liked him acting, but this was more than that. “Don’t,” Dotty repeated. “Say no to everything. Lose Jouvet if you have to, darling, but—”
“You know I won’t do that.”
“Darling,” Dotty said, at her most brittle, her most high-society, “I absolutely must have an escort to the Spanish Embassy party tomorrow night. There is someone who wants to meet you. Can you possibly, possibly do it? You simply can’t say no.”
France was continuing to quarrel with Spain over Morocco, which meant that there would be a large German and Austrian contingent at the Spanish Embassy, supporting their ally Spain, and a French demonstration outside condemning Spain as a bloody-handed imperialist invader. Not a party to go to if one were spending the next three weeks with Maurice Cyron. “Can’t, darling.”
“My house then. Seven, tomorrow.” Her voice took on an edge like crystal being rubbed.
Dotty lived on the
Île de la Cité, in an ancient house on the Place Dauphine. When the butler opened the door to the yellow salon, Reisden saw her first, dressed for the Spaniards in pastel silk and pearl ropes. She was not so much standing as backed up against the mantelpiece, with her painted ivory evening fan held in front of her like a broken sword. Makeup stood out on her face. A man was seated facing her; Reisden could see only the top of a grey head over the gilded back of the chair.
“Leave us, Dumézy,” Dotty said. The butler bowed, retreated, and closed the mirrored doors behind him.
“Good evening, Baron von Reisden,” Ferenc Gehazy said, standing and holding out his hand.
Reisden looked at it without comment, thinking of Jules. “Dotty, love, leave us.”
“I have to stay,” she said.
“You really don’t.”
“Do stay,” said the Ferret, “do stay.” Dotty flattened herself back against the mantel.
The Ferret sat down again in Dotty’s Louis XIV armchair, wriggling his bottom against the seat. Reisden stayed standing. The Ferret looked up at him, bowing in the chair and rubbing his hands. “Your beautiful cousin has been so kind to invite me to her lovely home, to introduce me to you. I was a great friend of your guardian, her noble uncle. With respect, kind honored sir, I have a little favor to ask of you, a little favor you can do, in the name of your esteemed uncle Count Leo von Loewenstein.”
The blackmailer was speaking to them in German, a language well-suited for groveling, but he smiled slyly and appraisingly up at them as if he were considering how they would taste.
“I’ve come to warn you, first of all, honorable Viscountess, honorable Baron, that I have heard a terrible story about you, terrible. I hear that—but no, it is too indecent to assault the ears of the well-born Viscountess.”
Dotty closed her eyes.
“This terrible story is about the family”—the Ferret bowed sympathetically toward Dotty—“and the ward”—with a nod toward Reisden—“of the late noble Count von Loewenstein. It is said by people of no conscience that in former days the late noble great Count was involved with the Secret Service of our Empire. His family and ward were trained as spies, to do favors for influential people and to gather information—”