by Sarah Smith
“It isn’t so,” Reisden said, trying not to overplay. “I remember you. You came to the house once or twice, didn’t you?”
“Among this Secret Service,” the Ferret continued inexorably, “people of no conscience said that one was worse than the others. He was very young and he was nobody, a boy that the late noble Count found abroad—who would tell these stories about such honorable people! This boy did—certain favors—for the late noble Count. For this he was given the name of honorable dead people,” the Ferret said. “At one time he tried to infiltrate the Russian underground by marrying a Russian lady; he distanced himself from the noble Count, but this was all a trick. Now he has moved to Paris to gather information among the French. He has married an American heiress for money, but he is a colonel in the Imperial and Royal Secret Service.—Such a dreadful story,” the Ferret said, crossing himself piously, “G-tt sei dank it’s not true.”
“All that is nonsense, and old nonsense.” His face felt numb. He risked a look at himself in the mirror above Dotty’s mantel. He looked all right, pale, but he was always pale. His voice sounded all right as far as he could tell. But his ears were ringing.
“It’s unfortunate,” the Ferret said, “in such political times, foolish people believe stories about spies.”
“When they’re spread by one of them?” Reisden said. “Who sent you?”
“Don’t, darling,” Dotty said.
“I will not be blackmailed.” Don’t sound like melodrama, he told himself.
“Darling—” Dotty took hold of his hand. “Talk privately with me for a moment. Herr Gehazy, you’ll excuse us.”
Dotty’s house had two salons, with a door between them. Dotty drew him into the other salon and closed the door. This salon, like the other, was strict eighteenth-century but for the piano, which was closed and covered with a Chinese shawl. The shutters were closed; dim gold spears of light fell onto the carpet, on a leg of the piano and the fringes of the shawl. The glass windows were open onto the Quai des Orfèvres, letting in the sounds of the twentieth century, a water-bus chugging down the Seine and a horse-drawn sprinkler hissing against the dusty hot pavement. He could smell heat, wet dirt. They stood by the window to mask their voices from Gehazy.
“Please, darling,” she said. Her thin cheekbones reddened.
“He’s threatened to spread rumors about you too?”
“About both of us, darling. That we’re—still doing it.” She looked up at him as if there were something he should say.
“You aren’t still doing it?” she said after a moment.
“No! After everything that happened? You?”
“No.”
They regarded each other as if they hoped to believe each other. Her face was reddened still; she looked down at her fan, opening and closing it. “No?” he said.
“No! No.” She looked up defensively. “I’m ashamed,” she said, “that’s all.”
“That settles one issue at least,” he said, “whether anyone else will believe the Ferret. We don’t believe each other. Does he want you to do anything?”
She shook her head, still looking at the floor. “Only you.”
“What does he want?”
“I told you,” Dotty said in a low voice, “you shouldn’t be involved in André’s film.—He wants the secret of Montfort.”
Of course he did. “Let’s go back.”
He opened the doors. Gehazy was looking at Dotty’s display case of eighteenth-century snuffboxes; he had the air of a man who has just tried the lock.
“There is a military secret at Montfort,” the Ferret said, straightening up. “I want you to tell me what it is.”
“No, there isn’t,” Reisden said. “I’ve been at Montfort; I don’t think there’s anything. You asked Jules Fauchard to find it before me. He didn’t find anything. I don’t think anything is there.”
“Find it for me,” the Ferret said. “You will know it when you find it,” he said, with the air of a penny oracle at a seaside arcade.
“Talk with the person who hired you,” Reisden said. “Tell him I need more information if he wants me to look at something specific.”
“You must find it from what you have.”
The Ferret left several minutes later. Dumézy showed him out; Dotty collapsed into a chair; Reisden went back into the second salon and folded back the right half of the shutters. He leaned out. Gehazy was visible through the trees, slinking away from the Pont-Neuf toward the Palais de Justice. Reisden had taken precautions; Roy Daugherty, his detective friend, was strolling after him, his hands in his pockets, discreetly shadowing him.
“Who is he working for? Sigi?” Reisden asked. His voice sounded tinny and distant, like a phonograph record.
“Sigi says no.”
“That means nothing.”
“What is going on?” Dotty breathed.
“I can handle it.”
“You should give up Jouvet,” Dotty said ferociously. “Darling, it’s not worth it.”
“Unfortunately, it is. I’ll find the secret of Montfort, whatever it is. Don’t worry.”
Dotty laughed a bit hysterically. “‘Don’t worry.’”
“Worry a bit.”
He went home and sent a telegram to Perdita at her New York hotel. Don’t come back to Paris yet, he wrote. Find an excuse, any excuse. Stay in New York.
Pawns
“DID YOU KNOW,” SIGI said, “I’m being also blackmailed?”
Sigi von Loewenstein was a big, blond, muscular man, strikingly like Leo, and from the moment he had come to Paris, three years ago, he had made a joke of who his father was. He would introduce him-self, “Hello, I am Count Sigi Loewenstein, son of the late chief spy of Austria-Hungary in Paris,” and then, with his broken French and his obvious questions, invited everyone to take it as a joke. “I’m just a military attaché, you know,” he would say solemnly. On Friday morning he called to demand that Reisden meet him at Ste.-Clotilde, a church so notorious that it had been nicknamed St.-Spy.
“The École de Médicine,” Reisden said, “upstairs, in the Chamber of Horrors,” where no one ever visits.
In the churchlike dim room, among the rows of monstrosities and wax statues, Sigi stood out indiscreetly in his white suit, with his soldier’s straight back and his decoration in his buttonhole, but no one was watching.
“This is funny,” said Sigi. “What is this Montfort? Do you think I would send someone like Gehazy on you? That’s Quatsch; I don’t use him. I come myself,” he said, spreading his hands. “And the secret of Montfort? I want Jouvet, Sacha. There you got secrets I want. You want money? I can give you money, everything what you need; I could give it even from French bankers or English. You give me nothing, you don’t help me with nothing, but you know it’s not me what’s trying to get you out from Jouvet, right? Do I get rid of my cousin to deal with a stranger?” Sigi thumped his chest with his flat hand. “What is it, I’m stupid?”
“What did he blackmail you with?”
Sigi shrugged. “Women.”
“Just women?”
“The wrong woman. Two wrong women.”
“What did Gehazy want from you?”
“The plans of d—n Montfort,” Sigi said.
“Who’s he working for?”
“The Germans maybe,” Sigi said. “Maybe the Russians. The Russians want to know if it delays the Germans. Maybe black men from the Fiji Islands want to know. He’s not working for me.”
Sigi was examining a row of pickled things in glass jars; he picked one up. Bleached morbidities swirled.
“Watch that,” Reisden said, “it’s probably interesting.”
“I don’t know who,” Sigi said, “but I know why.—Someday, someday pretty d—n soon, the Germans are invading.”
“Is that what they tell you?”
“It’s true what Dotty says, you are becoming a French citizen?” Reisden nodded. “It’s a picnic in front of the guns, Sacha. With your wife and your baby. It
’s not so smart.”
“I live here.”
“You should protect them. I can help.”
“Your story of being blackmailed is faked,” Reisden said, “isn’t it?”
“What did your man say, your detective who followed Gehazy? Did Gehazy meet someone?”
“How did you know I had someone follow him?”
“Because you’re smart, Sacha. But he didn’t find who it is Gehazy works for, no?”
Reisden shook his head, no. “Does that relieve you, Sigi?” Gehazy had spotted Daugherty—too easy in the crowds of short Frenchmen— and had lost him at the Gare St.-Lazare.
“You find out what is the Montfort secret,” Sigi said. “You can tell me. But what I want from you? It’s the archives at Jouvet. The Germans are coming; you need the money; you’ll give them to me.”
***
When Sigi had gone, Reisden put the specimens he’d disturbed carefully back and stood staring at them.
The Germans are coming, he thought. The Germans need to conquer France in six weeks, and to do it, they need to create confusion and scandal. A pawn here, a pawn there, that would do it.
Jules had been one of the chosen pawns.
Now he was.
Cyron and Reisden; the tragedy of fathers
MÉDUC HAS FOUR MAIN scenes. In the first, he sees the witches with Mabet and supports Mabet. In the second, he tells Mabet he’s gone too far, then flees. In the third, he hears that his wife and child have died and curses his father. He fights Mabet and captures him. Finally, just as Mabet is about to die, he forgives him.
“The third one is the one you have to carry,” Cyron said. “Your family is dead. So who do you curse? You curse me! ‘You have no children.’ Show me that.” Cyron stepped back. “Hate me. Hate me.”
Reisden gave it all the rage he had. Perdita and Toby were stuck in New York; he didn’t have a family; he was about to lose his company and his country. “That’s terrible,” Cyron said. “You have a son. What would you do if someone killed him?”
“Kill them.”
“Even if he’s your father.”
“Especially. Because it’s unforgivable.”
“Not Méduc. He’s a man of the law. He wants to defeat his father, shame him before he kills him. But then, he hears Mabet talk about loving France, and he understands his father at last. Look, here’s my speech.”
Cyron found the best light in the room and began the speech. To have Maurice Cyron speaking his best speech to you, you alone: any of his admirers would have melted with the sheer joy of the moment. Reisden tried to act like an admirer acting Méduc.
“I have loved France,” Cyron’s voice rose to a climax; “for France I have lost everything, my family, my son— Now you say, “No, no, Father, not your son.’ And you throw yourself at my feet.”
“Throw myself,” Reisden said.
“The way we do it in the play.”
This was not the time to have opinions about the play.
“You’re supposed to understand me,” Cyron said. “Look like you understand me.” Cyron stared at him while Reisden made faces. He sighed. “I’m defeated. You have no face. You can’t do He has no children, you look like a sick dog. Even that—that Fauchard would have been better.”
Reisden massaged his nonexistent face with the ends of his fingers. “I wouldn’t forgive you.”
“Méduc wills. He understands Mabet.”
“I don’t understand why you wrote the relationship that way. Why is Méduc Mabet’s son?” In Shakespeare’s original the character had been Macbeth’s friend.
“Ah, fathers and sons—” There was something in Cyron’s voice. “Did I ever tell you about my father?”
Reisden shook his head.
“My father.” The rough old rooster-face momentarily softened. “He was a woodcarver in Alsace, carved puppets, heads and hands; my mother sewed the costumes. He sold puppets and dolls and clocks and he had a puppet theatre. I was doing my time in the army. He was in what they call the Territorials now. He died defending Alsace. Still sometimes I think he’s in the audience at the theatre. I act for him.—So you see about Méduc?”
“No,” Reisden said.
“The thing Shakespeare did wrong—it’s not his best play, eh?—is that no one cares about Macbeth. He has no children. In my play, his son mourns for him. ‘What a terrible thing I did to you,’ the son says. ‘It’s our tragedy, I didn’t understand your greatness.’ You wouldn’t understand, you never had a father. A man’s not complete unless he has a father.”
“May I ask you a question?” Reisden said. “Your father was in the theatre. You’re in the theatre. You never wanted André in the theatre; why not?”
Cyron thrust his chin forward, insulted. “I’m not in the theatre; I’m in the army. I wanted to raise the Count of Montfort.”
Perdita returns
FOUR O’CLOCK IN THE morning, Saturday, just dawn. He would leave by the ten o’clock train for Arras. It had been too hot to sleep, and he too nerve-ridden. He had packed, unconsciously allowing the time required for one of their family expeditions. Without piles of diapers, toys, baby blankets and baby clothes and bottles and the baby-food grinder, his luggage seemed very small. The only equipment he had was the Braille typewriter on which he wrote letters to Perdita. He felt he was leaving vital things behind.
He haunted his office, pretending to do paperwork, pretending to study Méduc’s part, and staring instead at the pictures on the walls. Gilbert Knight, and, as visible through Gilbert as if he’d been trans-parent, nineteen-year-old Thomas Robert Knight.
There is a panic in going off to the country, where it’s hard to reach you; things will go wrong as soon as you leave. He had not heard from Perdita since he’d telegraphed her. He looked over everything he had left for Madame Herschner: the telephone number and telegraph address for the château, which she was to use in case any number of things happened. . . . Something would go wrong with Jouvet as soon as he left.
He picked up his boy’s picture and stared at it. Toby, laughing, utterly secure. But, my dear love, you aren’t secure at all.
The phone rang. “Darling, you spoke with Sigi?” Dotty, back from whatever party Society had most favored tonight.
“He says he isn’t behind it,” Reisden said.
They had both seen blackmailers pretending to be victims; it was one of the easiest ways to get information.
When she rang off, he sat in his office and thought of the conversation with Sigi. You know it’s not me trying to get you out of Jouvet. Sigi had been the one to mention that: Not bankrupting Jouvet, but getting him out of it. . . . In favor of whom? Someone more malleable, with more dependable ties to Austria-Hungary.
He looked around his office. The rows of gently outdated books, from the last Dr. Jouvet’s time. Descriptions of mental diseases, most of which he would never have the patience to read; some of which he shouldn’t read because they were out of date and wrong. Occasionally he didn’t know which were which. He was making Jouvet up as he went along, making up as much as he knew.
Jouvet would do better with a Frenchman, a doctor, a specialist in mental diseases.
So would André.
But he didn’t want to lose Jouvet. He was tired of always having to be careful that no one looked too closely into Alexander von Reisden’s background, tired of making himself up as he went along; he was tired of Alexander von Reisden never really existing in the inexorable way Richard Knight had existed, tired of being a thirtyish ex-lunatic with the wrong background; but he wasn’t tired of Jouvet.
He went down into the cool damp just before dawn, to turn on the lights and look at the lab. He went up to the third floor and unlocked the glass door to look at row after row of file cabinets. Five generations of mad patients; five generations of knowledge. He had reached that vicious stage of insomnia where one can’t think, only feel, and what he felt was how powerless he was for them: for André and Sabine; for everyone who worke
d for Jouvet and depended on him, for all of their patients; how powerless he was against whatever was brewing politically, against Gehazy. He looked at the waiting room, the testimonials on the walls; he went into an interview room and touched the desk, the chairs, the bars on the windows.
Someone was using the elevator. He went out into the hall; it was Roy Daugherty.
“What are you doing here?” he asked; four in the morning, after all.
“Goin’ home. Ain’t found your guy’s file yet.”
“You’ve been here all night?”
“I got a feelin’ it’s there.”
“Go home.” Roy Daugherty’s first marriage had broken up over his work. Now Roy was living with Suzanne Mallais—lodging with her, he put it; she was older, he wasn’t French, for the first time in twenty years Daugherty didn’t have an important and endless job. What do we do without our jobs.... Perdita and Reisden had ceded the Courbevoie house to them, with the right to come out on weekends, but when they did come to visit, they felt as though they were walking on souls.
“Get Suzanne to make you breakfast.”
Daugherty smiled: dawn breaking in winter. “I know it’s there, though,” he said, shaking his head.
“Then you’ll find it later; go home.” He went outside with Daugh-erty, locking the door. He stood in the courtyard a moment, looking back at the building. Barely visible repair-lines marked the frontage, making the building look, oddly, not damaged but cared for. One more bit of Jouvet’s history. It was a beautiful building, a beautiful company. Jouvet was his. Inadequate as he was to it, Jouvet was his own.
“Admirin’ it, are you?”
“This is what I want,” he said. “So. We keep looking. You do. And I go off and pretend to be someone’s son, again . . . and watch André.”