by Howard Engel
Wilson O’Donnell’s white face was moving over to the table near where we were standing.
“Hello, Mike! How are you? Crushing the grape, I see.”
“This vintage hasn’t been cooled a long age in the deep-delved earth, I fear, but it burns well enough, I think.”
“Don’t tell me! A damned scholar hiding behind a typewriter!”
“Just don’t tell anybody. Justine, I’d like to introduce my friend, Wilson. Wilson, this is my old friend Justine, who is a model by trade.” I immediately felt ashamed of the introduction. Maybe I had been crushing too many grapes. But I didn’t know Justine’s last name.
“You’re an American?” Justine asked, with a smile that could already taste the dollars. She poured a glass for Wilson, brightening, almost shimmering, as she handed the glass to the writer. Her eyes were now fully open.
“What’s going on here, youse guys?” It was Georgia O’Donnell, putting on a tough accent. She grabbed Wilson’s arm so that the wine spilled on the studio floor, where it would never be noticed.
For years I’d been reading about the great beauty of Georgia O’Donnell, the original flapper, the chain-smoking new woman of the Jazz Age. She didn’t in any way look like a drawing by John Held, Jr. She was rounder, for one thing, more traditionally feminine, more like the girl down the street than a movie queen. Her smile was certainly electric, but her eyes seemed to change from moment to moment: now smiling and joking, a second later, heavy, dark and troubled. Sometimes they were wide open and alive, the next, hooded and deep-set. Hers was by far the more interesting face of the couple. Wilson looked a little like Harry Langdon, a face waiting for its character to be stamped on. Georgia’s hair was not the spun-gold of legend but akin to her husband’s in colour. Wilson introduced us, giving last names with ease, except when he came to Justine.
“Vaux,” she said. “Justine Vaux.” She gave me a look as she did this, a small reproof for my earlier sloppy introduction to Wilson.
“Don’t tell me, I just know you are a genuine artist’s model!”
“All the world are artists’ models, Madame.” Her enthusiasm for Wilson began to chill when she saw Georgia’s proprietary hand on her husband’s arm. There was a flicker of a smile as yet another of her horses failed to finish.
I felt Georgia assessing me, measuring me against Wilson’s account of our recent lunch.
“And you’re the writer who was so understanding when Goofo was late for your luncheon.”
“Just a reporter, Mrs. O’Donnell. And he wasn’t very late.”
“Spoken like a sport!” chimed in Wilson. “Georgia, do you have some gin in that bag of yours or are you carrying it out of pure affectation?”
“There’s gin within,” she said, laughed, and repeated it in a louder voice. “Get some glasses. That wine looks positively revolting! I bet it would polish silver.” Georgia poured gin into the clutch of glasses Wilson brought over. “They say it almost amounts to a sin against the Holy Ghost to drink pure gin, but there’s not a thing on the table to mix with it. Not even varnish. You’d think they would keep varnish, wouldn’t you?” Georgia raised her glass high above her head and waved it as though it were a banner. “Well, here’s how!”
Both the O’Donnells drained their glasses swiftly. I looked at Justine over the brim of mine. It was plain that she thought that we were all quite mad. Her last words to me were abrupt and cruel, and a painful reminder of Laure:
“You want to find yourself some girl, you know, Michael.” It was the only time she used my first name. “There are lots of them, more sympathique than others, you know.”
Then she lost herself in the crowd of painters over in one corner. They were trying to take a photograph with a saucer full of magnesium. After several attempts they abandoned the project, leaving the room full of smoke. A painter who had been sitting inside a large gilt picture frame got up from his cramped position and executed a frog-walk across the floor, while those nearby laughed and shouted out unflattering remarks.
Meanwhile, the Waddingtons had been sitting near the large window with George Gordon, Biz, Dr. Anson Tyler and Tolstoi. Tolstoi was rather drunk.
“The simple fact is,” he was saying, “that actually I didn’t see Laure again after that night. Actually, I hadn’t seen much of her since the great parting of the ways. Actually —”
“Tell us, Anson, what sort of a man is it that kills helpless women that way? Is he human?” Lady Biz looked interested.
“The doctors in Vienna would have a name for him,” Hash said brightly, her round face glowing with the wine she’d been drinking and her red hair glinting under the fringed electric light above her head.
“‘Crazy’ is good enough for me,” George said.
“You should read Mrs. Lowndes’s novel, The Lodger,” the Doctor said. “She probes the mind of an insane criminal, not too different from the man the French police are looking for, with great skill.”
“Who gets time to read anything? Do you chaps read? I used to, didn’t I, George? I was a great reader. But things are too complicated nowadays. Perhaps it was the war.”
“You blame everything on the war, Biz. It’s become your whipping-boy.”
“Well, I say, George, can you think of a better one? The war is probably what twisted Jack’s mind. Although why he should take it out on defenceless women I can’t imagine.” Biz, who was not usually a great talker, was warming to her theme. “Wad, you’re a clever chap; why would anyone want to kill a chap like Laure? I mean, if he didn’t know her. We knew her all too well, but he didn’t have a reason for this.”
“He was probably trying to kill his mother,” Waddington said. “He’s killed her seven times now, maybe it will soon give him peace. Some mothers are hard to kill. Now my mother —”
“Wad! I won’t hear one word against mothers!” It was Georgia, who had been listening to this island of English in a sea of French. “You’ll support me in this, won’t you Cilla?” Hash smiled, but said nothing. I suppose she knew her mother-in-law, and Georgia O’Donnell did not.
“My mother is a collector of cojones,” Wad said. “She keeps my father’s in a yellow leather pouch in a drawer.” Those who knew Spanish laughed.
“I declare,” Georgia went on, “the police would have the head of the killer in a big brown bag already if it was a woman who went around killing men at random. Nobody cares about the deaths of seven women. Nobody will care when he’s killed a dozen. Because you men, filthy beasts that you are, all get a little jab of pleasure when a woman gets her throat cut. No! Don’t bother to deny it, because it’s true, it’s true. You know it’s true!” There was a storm of protest.
“That’s plain crazy!” said Wad.
“Every woman knows it,” Georgia insisted. “Speak up, Cilla. Tell them.”
Wad shrugged and looked at me.
“I have a hard enough time discovering what’s in one man’s head, Georgia,” Hash said. “I’d never presume to talk about all men. I don’t think I’d want to.”
“Damn it all, Georgia,” George Gordon said, “I haven’t cut a throat in weeks.”
“And I, only one or two,” said Anson with a smile. “But that was in the line of business.”
Arlette joined the group, her dark hair beautifully sculptured, carrying glasses of wine. She kissed all the men, including me. Biz quickly briefed her about the conversation.
“People do terrible things to one another. Doesn’t matter which sex,” she said, as though this were a self-evident fact.
“Cilla,” Georgia said, picking up her original thought, “are we going to sit here and listen to these evasions? I swear we should treat men the way the women do in that Greek play. What’s it’s name? Lysi-something. You know the one I mean, Goofo?”
“Lysistrata,” said O’Donnell.
“Here we go!” said Waddington, looking at Georgia, as though she was a bomb about to go off. Georgia ignored him, as she often did.
“Y
es,” she said, drawing out the word. “The women in the play deny their husbands all conjugal rights until … until… I forget what.”
“Well, I for one think it’s a jolly good idea,” said Biz, “on general principles. Men are beastly, the way they hang about, waiting for favours. I don’t mean you, George. You’re a prince among men.”
“Which isn’t saying much, according to you, old girl,” George said. “Being the best of a thoroughly bad lot is nothing to write home about. Be fair.”
“Don’t ‘old girl’ me, you degenerate beast,” Biz said, taking George’s big head in her arms, giving George a sheepdog look.
“I don’t know this Lysi — the play, you know — but you can’t take these Greeks seriously. They’re not like us. Don’t like cricket, for a start. And they’re too damned fond of their sheep.”
Hash, who was holding on to Wad’s arm, gave it a tug. They exchanged a grin.
“Oh, George!” Biz said. “I’ve never seen you at a cricket match! You always give away your Lord’s tickets to your tailor so he won’t dun you.”
“Hasn’t helped much. I suppose, on second thoughts, I could live quite reasonably in Greece. Wear one of those tutu things, live in a ruin, learn to take photographs of tourists, that sort of thing. I’d do that before going back into the army.”
“If they’d have you!”
“Yes, well, there’s that.”
“I think it would be a cute idea if all we girls got serious and started denying privileges to our boys. We could make out with appropriately shaped vegetables until this killer is brought to justice.”
“Really, Georgia, you go too far!”
“It’s all in the play! Goofo, don’t you think it’s a cute idea?”
“Now, darling, how could I approve of such a thing? I’d be a traitor to my sex.”
“It’s a very cute idea,” said Wad. “Like the Volstead Act.”
“Or the Repeal of the Corn Laws,” I suggested.
“Or banning Ulysses at home. All cute ideas,” Wad said. It had become a little too broad, and I was now sorry I’d made a contribution.
Georgia said, “When the game gets serious, the men get clannish.”
“Who began it, may I ask? Who began speaking of Lysistrata and vegetables?” Wad inquired.
“We were talking about poor Laure,” said Tolstoi, who had decided that he was inconsolable but was having a hard time holding on to centre stage. “I hadn’t seen her since that night in the Dingo.”
“You told me you lunched, chéri,” Arlette put in, then added, “Sorry.”
“No, not after that night at the Dingo.”
“Let’s all shut up about Laure, chaps. It’s too, too ironic that she should be dead and we should be sitting here around her coffin, as it were.”
“Where is the irony, Biz?” I asked. “You see, I didn’t really know her.” Like Tolstoi, I wasn’t admitting everything.
“Laure was —”
“De mortuis nil nisi bonum,” George quoted, with a look at Biz.
“I’ll say what I like. That’s what comes of not educating girls, George. We don’t know Greek.”
“Latin,” Tolstoi corrected from fifty fathoms down.
“The police still have no idea who has been doing these things. At least, they are keeping very quiet if they do know something.”
“Aw, come on, Michaeleen,” Wad said, “when they find him, they’ll announce to the world that a third-class bank clerk from Crédit Lyonnais or a sweeper of antiquities in the Louvre has turned himself in or done away with himself. It will be the first occasion his name will appear in print.”
“But, as a writer, don’t you find it interesting, old man?”
“No, George, it isn’t interesting. It would be cute if he wasn’t a madman. Then you’d have something.”
“What do you mean? I don’t quite follow you.” George tried to fix Wad with a look, but he couldn’t quite focus his eyes.
“If the killer is mad, then you have a very ordinary fellow who gives himself up to crazy impulses from time to time. Maybe when his mother tells him to clean up his room or to go out and get work, or maybe whenever he eats beetroot or sees the Eiffel Tower.”
“Pace, Alexandre Gustave, pace,” said Dr. Tyler. “Who wouldn’t feel inadequate?”
Wad continued after giving Anson a grin. “In order to make his bad feeling go away, he finds some innocent woman and kills her when nobody is looking. That will hold him until the bad feeling comes back.”
“What you’re saying, Wad, is perfectly sound from a medical point of view. But why do you say that it’s dull?”
“I didn’t say it was dull, I said it was uninteresting. From a writer’s angle.”
“I think I see. I’ve written enough to know that novelty counts a good deal,” said Anson, who now produced a small flask from an inside pocket and passed it to Wad, who took it and splashed an ounce or so into his glass.
“Novelty plays a part — don’t you agree, Wilson? — but it’s not the whole corrida. If the murderer were sane, it would be a more interesting mind for a writer to probe.”
“But Waddington,” Georgia asked, “how could he be sane?”
Wad made his forehead into a ploughed field. “I don’t know. But it wouldn’t be dull and it wouldn’t be cute.”
“What would it be like,” Georgia said, “to go out in the evening with the idea that you are going to kill someone?”
“Oh, Georgia, let’s turn the page! Honestly!” said her husband.
“You begin to sound like De Quincey: ‘Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts,’” I contributed.
“Some people argued that in the Landru case,” said Georgia, her eyes sparkling.
“Ah, Bluebeard! The chap who killed his wives. Our fellow is covering his trail better. He hasn’t been married to his victims,” George said.
“I don’t think I’d like to write about Jack, Wad. To me it doesn’t make much difference if he’s mad or not. What about you, Mike?”
I was flattered by having Wilson O’Donnell ask my opinion on a question of writing. I was beginning to feel like a fellow professional instead of a news service hack. It was a swell feeling.
“I’ve already filed a few sticks on Jack de Paris, based on police reports. I hadn’t thought of putting him into a story. Do you see me as a latter-day Edgar Allan Poe? I neither write nor drink in his league.” That came out more stuffily than I’d intended, more consciously literary. I bit my tongue. “Most of my writing is still in the box waiting to be unwrapped.” I hoped that that improved things, but nobody seemed to be listening.
“I say, Wad, you should slip our friend Jack into that book about this summer in Spain.”
“I don’t think Jack will travel, George. Besides, the book is finished.”
“But you only began it after the fiesta!” said Biz. “I say, you are a sly puss, Waddington. When you sit down to work, you’re a prodigious whirlwind, aren’t you? Who would have thought?”
“That’s right, everybody talks a good book in Paris, but didn’t they tell you, Wad, that nobody actually writes one?” Anson, like the others, was suddenly very interested in this news. “When did you finish it, old man?”
“Second last week of September, as close as I can recollect. I celebrated by taking a dip in the river. Tore a ligament, but the water was so cold I didn’t feel it until the next morning when my right foot wouldn’t support my weight.”
“That’s less than a month ago!”
“You put us all to shame, Waddington. I can stare all day at a jar full of dirty brushes,” said Biz.
“So, maybe next year you’ll be in the best-seller lists, Wad,” said Wilson, rather more expansively than he’d intended.
“Yes, it’s time somebody gave G.B. Stern and Janet Fairbank a run for their money. And what about Michael Arlen and Margaret Kennedy? Maybe it’s time to teach Somerset Maugham what Paris is really like.” Wad had added a snarl to his voice,
and that was a new side of him for me. I hadn’t actually imagined that he even looked at the best-seller lists. But I was forgetting his competitive side. And he was forgetting that Wilson’s novel was also holding its own in the best-seller lists.
“I say, Wad, is there a chance that we might have a look at your Pamplona opus? I hope you didn’t put me in it,” George said, taking a last sip from his glass. “I didn’t cover myself with roses down there. I don’t think I behaved quite well. Especially towards your friend Leopold.”
“That’s water over the falls, George,” said Wad.
“Still…”
“As a matter of record, George,” suggested Lady Biz, “you behaved abominably. But we all did. Everybody but Hash. Hash was the one and truly only lady of Spain.”
“I say, Wad, I think she’s just given you a title!” said George, missing the point.
“Yes, if I say it myself, I think I rather like that. Perhaps I should give up painting, which is so messy, and try fiction. I’ll have that title back for a start, Waddington. You can find your own title. Try the Bible. The Bible is full of titles.”
“Biz is good at finding titles,” Georgia said slyly. Nobody reacted, so she said it again: “Lady Biz is good at finding titles.”
Biz smiled this time and looked at her. “The title’s fine, Georgia. The problem is I haven’t a pocketbook or bankbook to put it on.”
Tolstoi put his arm around Biz’s shoulders. “I will be glad to share my millions with you, my dear.”
“Ah! At last! A true gentleman. I knew they couldn’t have perished to a man in the war.”
“I still say that Hash was the only one of us to come out of Spain with nothing to regret,” George added, trying to bring the conversation back to his own obvious interest.
“Let’s shut up about Spain, shall we?” Biz suggested.
“I’ll second that,” said Wad.
“Do you think I could become a writer, Waddington, or does it take years and years and years?” asked Biz, none too seriously.
“You just need one true sentence after the other,” he said. “That’s the trick of it.”
“I’ve got some wonderful stories from my time in the army,” said George. “Wonderful stories! I just haven’t had the time to write them down.”