by Sarah Smith
“Hamlet. He’s dead.”
Puckett speculates about T.J.; André goes mad
GETTING UP THE STAIRS felt like climbing a mountain. The candle went out; Reisden would realize only later how bad the air had been. He half-dragged André out and caught up with Ruthie, who was supporting Jules. They staggered into the brilliant candles of the first cellar and found themselves in a circle of concerned faces. Reisden shook his head and pointed to Jules, who was flushed bright cherry red, dragging air in painfully through his nose and his wired jaw. Ruthie was crying. André tried to go back downstairs. A cook and under-cook manhandled Jules up the last flight, out through the back door and onto the paved terrace, under the stars. Reisden followed them. When the night wind hit his face, he sat down abruptly against the side of the kitchen wall, his chest heaving.
“Get the police,” he said as clearly as he could. “Dead man.”
Cyron was shouting at him. “What’s happened? What is wrong?”
Reisden lay down on the terrace flagstones, put his arm over his eyes, and gasped.
When he got back in focus again, finally, he was not looking at the clouds but at an electric light; it was almost morning, he was lying in one of the château bedrooms—not his and Perdita’s. The windows were wide open. An oxygen apparatus stood by the bed and he had a rubber taste in his throat and a headache so fierce that it hurt when he blinked. Perdita was sitting by the bed. “How is Jules?” he managed. “André?”
“Jules is all right,” Perdita said. She was holding his hand tightly; her voice was trembling, her face tear-streaked, and she was furious. “Alexander, what happened down there? What is going on?”
“Later.” Much later. “André?”
“The third cellar is full of carbon monoxide,” she said. “From the well pump. It isn’t vented right.”
“There’s a dead man.” He tried to remember the first horse-handler’s name. “Blantire.” T.J. Blantire.
He didn’t know if he remembered this, or dreamed it: André hadn’t wanted to leave. I have to stay, he had said, holding tight to the bars with both hands. Papa says I have to stay when they’re dying. The candle flame had been burning blue, a thin string, flickering, gulping for air. Papa said I’ll never be a man if I don’t stay, André said. He sounded like a child. “Turn this way, André,” Reisden had said, and André had turned, and Reisden had hit him hard enough to stun him and loosen his hold of the bars.
He woke up definitively in mid-afternoon, hoarse and headachy and bone-exhausted. Perdita was gone; a servant told him a detective wanted to see him in Cyron’s office downstairs.
Detective Baltazar, from the Sûreté, was a tall, thin, morose man with a pockmarked face. He wandered around Cyron’s office, looking at posters and props, answering no questions, taking Reisden methodically through the events of Wednesday evening.
“You reached the Holy Well.”
“Two of us, André and I. We saw the body. Was it Blantire?”
“Did the Count of Montfort say that it was?”
Reisden shook his head and regretted it. “How is André?”
“What did he say?”
“He wouldn’t leave.” Go on, Baltazar indicated. “I hit him,” Reisden said, “to get him moving.”
“That explains that,” Baltazar said, writing.
“How is he?”
“Just a little bruised.”
“How is he mentally?”
“There have been a number of—unfortunate incidents connected with this production.” Baltazar consulted his notebook. “The possible murder of the costumer, Mademoiselle Françoise. And of this Blantire—”
“She wasn’t murdered,” Reisden said. “Was she?”
“The costumer was poisoned by belladonna,” Baltazar said. “Belladonna that the rabbit had eaten. Rabbits eat belladonna. It doesn’t hurt them. But how did the rabbit get the belladonna, that’s the question! Was it an accident?”
Belladonna?
“You’ve been here before, yes? You’ve stayed here. You never went in the cellar before? Why not? A young man, almost a boy— Didn’t it interest you?”
“No. Is André all right?”
“He’s helping us in our inquiries.”
“He hasn’t done anything.”
When Baltazar let him go, Reisden went outside looking for information and his family, and found Zeno Puckett. The cowboy was sitting on the terrace, yellow under his tan, staring out over the view. Reisden sat down beside him. Down below, two policemen were discussing something, pointing at the vent set into the side of the hill.
“Danged thing to happen,” Puckett said, shaking his head. “T.J. breaks broncos and rides trail and dodges husbands for near fifteen year, then he just up and dies in a cellar.”
“He died of carbon monoxide?”
“Off the pump,” Puckett said. “They say.”
Not that one could tell, after this time and before an autopsy. Perhaps not even with an autopsy.
Puckett took off his hat, held it by the brim, and flicked dust off it with one finger, rotating the hat slowly. “That gal he was seeing. That Mamselle Françoise. She died too. Mighty peculiar, two accidents in a row.”
“So I’m told.”
“I’d guess he passed away about the time he disappeared. She died maybe two weeks later, huh?”
“The Saturday André and I were here.”
“T.J. liked his ladies and they liked him and all, but I don’t see any gal taking poison over him,” Puckett said, then cleared his throat as if he were changing the subject. “What kind of gal was she?”
“I met her only once.”
“Was she political?”
“Was Blantire?”
“He was Russian.”
“So,” Reisden said, surprised.
“Family come from Russia when he was a kid,” Puckett said. “Oo-cry-eeny, he said. Family was sodbusters, but not him. He was cowboy.” Puckett tried to explain. “They ain’t no cattle drives any more, noplace for boys like T.J. They ain’t nothing but Carver-Whitney’s Wild America and horse-wrangling for the movies. T.J. missed the high stakes. There was always someplace bigger’n where he was and he was lookin’ for it.”
“Russia?” Reisden said.
“He just sort of angled into Russia. A newspaper in Chicago, they started off to print things he’d wrut about the cattle drives. You know all them Schmidts and Hinkeydoofers round Chicago, they love them Wild West stories.”
“It was a German paper he wrote for? They sponsored him?”
“Yup.”
“Why did he come here after Russia?”
“Dunno.”
“Did the German paper send him?”
Horsemen’s hands were marked with a rein-line of callus under the thumb. Puckett rubbed at his uneasily. He had the thumbline, but also a callus on the first joint of the middle finger of his right hand.
“How did you get to Russia?” Reisden asked. “Were you writing too?”
“Me?” Puckett grinned. “I was making Westerns in New Jersey, drifted east from there. I mean to get to Africa someday.—Heard you was supposed to be working for the Germans.”
“No. My job is André.”
Puckett looked at him shrewdly, with slitted eyes.
“Why should you believe me, no one else does. But there is rumored to be a military secret here at Montfort, and the Germans are rumored to be interested. They might have sent Blantire. I wonder if Blantire found something,” Reisden said. “I wonder if he and Françoise Auclart found something. And now they are both dead.”
“I be danged,” said Puckett. “Well, that would be interesting. You mean ol’ T.J. was a spy?”
Perdita and Toby were coming round the corner of the terrace: Toby in a red jumper in Perdita’s arms, Perdita wearing her yellow-tinted glasses to make sure she could see him. Puckett stood up, unfolding himself in sections.
“Don’t you go away. Might be I could say something more about spying
and T.J.”
***
“You should be resting,” Perdita said.
“I’m fine.” He looked at his son’s bright red sweater. “I’ll watch him.” She put Toby on the ground; he crawled briskly away. She took off her glasses; she hated them, hated every inconvenience of being blind. He took them to clean them for her.
“Why did you go down there?” she asked, sitting by him.
For the secret of Montfort. Even Thomas Robert could not have been more stupid, he thought; the candle had been visibly going out.
Toby had discovered some potted plants on the terrace, had pulled himself up to investigate them, and was happily grabbing a handful of mulch to stuff into his mouth. “No, love,” he shouted, and ran to scoop him up, and panted, to his annoyance. Perdita, panicked, turned her head from side to side to understand what was going on.
“Just something he’d got that he shouldn’t,” he said, bringing Toby back and putting him down on the flagstones. Aline came round the side of the chateau. Toby was crawling off toward the plants again. “No, love; here.”
“Alexander, if someone has to chase him, give me my glasses back because I’m going to do it.”
“I’ll get him, monsieur, ’dame,” Aline said.
“Sit down, Alexander. You’re out of breath,” Perdita said accusingly, her voice trembling.
“I’m all right. Really.”
But he did sit down. She sat beside him and held his hand like someone at a sickbed. He caressed her hand with both his. If things had gone badly, he thought, today Perdita would be trying to deal with a funeral. And he wasn’t insured; no one sells insurance to a man with his history. There’d be no money.
“Don’t be kind to me, Alexander,” she said, unforgiving and at the edge of tears.
Aline had retrieved Toby, who was an unspeakable object, face covered with brown stuff, giggling happily. What would happen to you, Toby love, if I were dead? “Give him to me,” Reisden said. Toby chuckled and reached out a little goo-covered hand, smearing his father’s face and shirt with muck. “Vile child, such mischief. Here—” Reisden swabbed at his son’s hands with a handkerchief. “Papa will look after you.”
Papa hopes he will. Papa’s doing a G-dd—n bad job of it just now.
If he were to die, as things were now, the Jouvet situation would go bad instantly. The corporation he had set up owned both the business and the building. One mortgage covered everything. If he were dead, the whole mortgage would come due at once and there wouldn’t be money to pay it.
If he died, Gilbert would be her only resource.
So don’t die, he thought, holding his baby boy, who was already wriggling to get down. Don’t leave your baby to be fathered by a photograph.
And tell Perdita what’s wrong.
Tell her about Gehazy? And about Leo? In two days, if I don’t find the bloody non-existent secret of Montfort, Gehazy will tell the world I’m a spy. Meanwhile André doesn’t so much as look at his wife and there’s a body in the cellar.
He kissed his boy on the top of his head, pressed his cheek against Toby’s hair, and handed him back to Aline. “Look after him for a bit. Love,” he said to Perdita, “let’s just sit. I’m tired.”
They sat together, holding hands, looking out over the pasture and the beet fields, not facing the things neither of them wanted to talk about. He thought of what he should do for her, to guard against anything happening to him. He should write her a letter, detailing who could advise her financially, whom she should avoid. Tell her to take advice from Armand Inslay-Hochstein or Dotty but never take money from Sigi. Diversify to such-and-such stocks if there were money to do it. Sell Jouvet before it was sold from under her.
Who could she sell it to?
Cyron and Lucien Pétiot came out of the house, through the French doors from the dining room. “Reisden!” Pétiot called him. Cyron looked ill with fury.
“Excuse me a moment, love.—How is André?” Reisden asked, going to meet them.
“He’s gone mad!” Cyron said. “He doesn’t mean anything he says.—This is Jouvet’s fault, your fault—”
Pétiot laid a hand on Cyron’s arm, but Cyron shook it off.
“He says he killed them both,” Cyron said. “Blantire and the Auclart woman.”
Oh L—d. “Why?”
“Why? What do you mean, why? I’ll put him in a madhouse. I will.”
The Arras coach, Cyron’s coach, had been making its way up the hill, more quickly than usual and swaying emptily. Everyone had left for the Bastille Day weekend; no one should be arriving.
“Why,” Reisden repeated, “when he met Blantire only once, if that, and wasn’t here when Blantire died?”
“He says he poisoned them.”
“He’s not talking about Blantire.”
The coach stopped and let out Roy Daugherty.
He came round the side of the château toward the terrace. He was rumpled and disheveled, like a man who has been working all night and traveling all day, and he was holding a file, a thin brown Jouvet file tied with tape. He squinted, saw Reisden, and held it up, waving it. “Found it,” he shouted, and lumbered toward them.
“Where? Never mind.” Reisden took the file. The knots in the tape were stiff, thirty-five years old; he cut the tape with his pocketknife and opened the file.
The handwriting was the last Dr. Jouvet’s. Interview notes with the five-year-old Count André de Montfort; with Maurice Cyron, actor, not yet of the Theatre Maurice Cyron; with two detectives. A photograph fell out from between the pages: André’s parents, taken by Reutlinger, probably a wedding photograph. André’s father in his cavalryman’s uniform, too sloppy to be a desk soldier, too much smelling of the actual horse. André’s mother, very young—she might have been Sabine’s age—smiling tentatively into the camera.
Reisden turned the pages and read what André had to say about his parents. When he had finished, he closed the folder, leaned against the wall, and shut his eyes.
“Son?” Roy. “I got to get goin’ back to Paris. ’Zanne and I are goin’ dancin’ for Bastille Day. You all right?” Reisden nodded. “Bad stuff in there?”
“Very bad, and useful. Thanks.”
Daugherty nodded. “Well, I could have been fishin’ and paintin’; you owe me. You remember that.” He strode back over the terrace toward the courtyard and the Jerusalem Gate, grumpy and hurrying, a man who has been taken from his family.
Family, Reisden thought, and looked down at the lines of steady writing, the hopeless story of André’s family. Jouvet had written down everything; so here it all was, the first of the Necro stories, the one that had fathered all the rest.
“What does it say?” said Cyron.
“Sorry. I have to talk with him.”
Necrosar stages a film
THEY HAD TIED ANDRÉ up. He was in the bedroom with the angel bedstead, roped to one of the pillars, his wrists behind him. Above him the slant-eyed angels smiled enigmatically. It was as if he had been tied to a tomb. If he hadn’t been tied he would have been rocking back and forth, the short, choppy, mourning rocking of the desperate in spirit, and perhaps they had tied him to stop it, but his head could still move and he was banging it against the pillar as if he wanted to smash the thoughts out of his head. Someone had tied a pillow between his head and the pillar. His eyes were closed; his head thumped rhythmically against the bedpost.
Jules was watching him. Reisden caught his eye, nodded at the door: leave us alone. Free him? Not yet; if he were desperate enough to do something, Reisden wouldn’t be able to stop him. Reisden dropped into one of Sabine’s Olde Medieval chairs and opened the folder on his lap.
“You told Jouvet that you killed both your parents. True?”
The creaking stopped; André opened his eyes. Blue, wide, stunned.
“How did it happen?” said Reisden.
“I was supposed to stay,” André said, half stupidly, as though what-ever he was thinking got in the way of s
peech. “Reisden. You hit me.”
“I’m sorry. You wouldn’t let go of the bars.”
“I was supposed to stay,” André said with a childish insistence.
“I know. Your father took you to deathbeds.”
“I told you that,” André said.
He had. One doesn’t put it together; one doesn’t remember that André’s father had died when he was five. One doesn’t want to believe it. André’s father had started taking André to deathbeds when he was three or four years old.
“I told you. I’m never supposed to leave until he lets me. I have to stay.”
“Tell me what it was like. What you remember.”
“What it was like?” André said, and then in Necrosar’s voice: “It was like a play.”
“Not Necrosar, André.”
“No,” André said. “Necrosar.”
***
SCENE 1: THE GREAT HALL, MONTFORT.
André can’t tell Reisden what happened because he can’t tell anyone, he can’t even think of it himself, and Reisden won’t believe it. Reisden avoids the dark, he has a wife and child, he tries to believe the world is better than it is. There is no happiness, there is no security; André knows that and Reisden doesn’t. That is why André writes plays, why he makes films, lies that tell the truth. So he thinks now, out loud, not about what happened to him but a safe lie, shadows on a white sheet, a film, a play.
Working title: Never Leave a Deathbed.
THE GREAT HALL, MONTFORT. FULL SHOT. NOON. Poverty-stricken ruins of old gentility. Cupboard in background. At a table by the fireplace, the Count, his wife the Countess, and his son André are discovered eating vegetable soup. The Count, a big solid man, wears glasses on a strip of leather. He reads as he eats. It could be soup or hay he is spooning in, he doesn’t notice. The Countess eats with exaggerated Parisian manners. Little André imitates his father, spooning carelessly. His mother raps his fingers, and André looks dubiously from his father to his mother. Which of them should he be?