by Leslie Ford
I must say I should never have recognized her as the same woman who was demanding her gin and tonic the night before and holding up dinner till she got it. Her long face was haggard and actually the color of mustard thinned with milk, her eyes were hollow and desperately unhappy, and the smoke from the candle had made their rims red and moist. She had on a long robe made out of a black-bordered Paisley shawl tied around the waist with a gold-tasseled cord. It was as extraordinary as she was.
She got up. “You may go, Mary. Close the door, please.”
She turned to Sylvia without the least preliminary.
“I wanted to see you,” she said painfully. “I want to know how you knew.”
She put her hand sort of wildly to her head and pushed back her hair.
“Knew what, Lady Alicia?” Sylvia asked. She was genuinely bewildered.
“What you said last night. That I… am a coward. That I ran away. Because it’s true. I am a coward, and I did run away—but not from what you think. Not from the bombs. I’m not afraid of the bombs. It’s something else. Something that follows me wherever I go. That’s what I was running away from. And you know, don’t you? That’s what I have to know. How you know!”
Sylvia moved a step closer to me.
“I—don’t know, Lady Alicia,” she said unsteadily. “I didn’t mean to say it. I really didn’t. I just get annoyed at people coming over here and telling us what we should do. I was just being very rude. I hope you’ll forgive me.”
Lady Alicia shook her head.
“No, no. It’s not that—you don’t have to say that,” she said quickly. “It’s that you do know it. You could see it. That’s what I want to know. How you could see it. Was it me, myself, or somebody else?”
“But I’ve told you. Really—”
The woman’s hands dropped to her side.
“Don’t go on,” she said helplessly. “You knew, but it’s very likely you don’t know how you knew. It’s there, you see. It’s everywhere I go. I’ve tried to run away from it, but it’s here now, waiting for me.”
She turned to the table and picked up a card lying on the center pile of the game she’d laid out. It was the six of clubs.
“It’s always there. It always comes up. The knave of hearts is there too, but this is always in between us.”
It wasn’t a game she was playing at all—I realized tardily. She was telling her fortune. I glanced nervously at Sylvia.
“Oh, I’m not demented, if that’s what you think,” Lady Alicia said sharply. “That’s what my husband thought. It’s not true. It’s here, here in the cards. It’s getting closer—every day it’s closer. I thought if I came to America… but here it is. Don’t you see? Even Mary knows it’s coming closer.”
She looked at us with such helpless appeal in her eyes that my blood chilled.
“Maybe… the cards are wrong, Lady Alicia,” Sylvia said. “Maybe they might come out differently if you tried them again.”
She glanced at me, helpless herself. And there was obviously no use telling the woman to throw the pack in the fire and get out in the sunlight. She was in no state to tolerate common sense.
“It’s no use,” she whispered. “Nobody will ever believe me.”
“I believe you,” Sylvia said. “But what can I do?”
“I don’t know. If I only did!”
She gathered the cards up in her hand, bent over the table, closed her eyes and shuffled them three times. Then she cut them, twice, and turned the center pile over. Her hand was trembling and so was her body pressed against the table. Still she didn’t open her eyes.
“What is it?” she whispered.
Sylvia looked quickly at me. If she could have changed the card I know she would have.
“You don’t have to tell me,” Lady Alicia said softly. “It’s the club six.” Her voice sank to a whisper again. “It’s death. It’s always death.”
She opened her eyes slowly, nodding her head. “It’s death,” she repeated quietly.
She picked the cards up and dealt them out in an intricate order into three rows of five cards each, her eyes closed again and her hand faltering before she laid the last card down. I stared at her, fascinated, believing for an instant in spite of the fact that I knew it wasn’t true. She opened her eyes.
“You see,” she said. “It’s always the same. Even when I change my queen it’s still the same. He always comes between us.”
“Who?” Sylvia asked.
Lady Alicia put her forefinger on the knave of diamonds. It lay above the death card, and next to the queen of clubs.
“That’s my queen.” She pointed to the jack of hearts. “That is my heart’s desire. And this knave”—she returned to the jack of diamonds—“always comes between us. He brings death.”
She put her finger on the six of clubs again. “It’s never been so close before.”
She was silent for a moment. Then she picked up the red jacks.
“I don’t understand. Mary doesn’t understand either. They’re not the same. They’re not aspects of each other, as I thought once. Because the ocean still divides us.”
She pointed to the nine of spades. I didn’t ask her how she knew it was the ocean, because I believed implicitly, at that moment, that that’s what it was. And it did lie between the queen of clubs—her queen—and the heart jack.
Lady Alicia looked at us earnestly. “But it’s not true. He’s here, you see; he’s not on the other side.”
She pointed to the eight of spades. “And this is his letter. The letter I understand.”
She went over to the secretary and pulled out what some people still call a secret drawer because it looked as if it’s part of the frame. She took three letters out and held them in her hand.
“These are letters he wrote me a long time ago. This is the one from France written before he got away.”
Sylvia looked quickly at me. The idea of Kurt Hofmann as the jack of hearts was a little bewildering to me, but then I’d never been in love with him, and Lady Alicia had, and still was, apparently, extraordinary as it might seem.
She put the letters back in the drawer, pushed it shut and came slowly back to the table.
“If you could only tell me who this is,” she said, picking up the jack of diamonds and holding it out. “He’s the same color, but he represents evil. He brings my queen the death card. They always come together. That’s what you sensed. Or perhaps it was just my own fear, like a living thing, a dark flower I wear in my hair. But if you can tell me… or afterwards if you will make them understand.”
Her voice had sunk to a whisper again, but the appeal in her eyes had changed to tragic certainty, a kind of stoical fatalism that made it useless to try to say anything.
“Oh, I’m so desperately sorry,” Sylvia said, holding out her hands. “I wish there was something—”
Lady Alicia shook her head. She stood looking down at the cards for a long time. Then she said slowly,
“When they came last night and said that man had been killed, I was almost mad with relief. I thought I’d read the cards wrong. I thought perhaps they could have meant that. That this was for him.”
She touched the six of clubs.
“I called Mary. We ran up here and laid them out, and read them together.”
Her body went limp and helpless again.
“It turned up immediately—the first card I uncovered.— And I don’t know why it terrifies me so. I’m really not afraid to die—not really afraid.”
15
I’m still not quite sure how we got out of that room and down the stairs. I know I’ll always remember the maid looking at us as she closed the door, and my almost sickening sense of relief seeing Sergeant Buck’s square granite figure standing there looking up at the house. He executed a sharp about-face and got into his car. Sylvia and I got into mine.
“It’s terrible!” Sylvia whispered. She was as shaken as I was. “Just think, the two of them living there with that ghastly f
ear always around them. She’s so terribly sure of it, isn’t she?”
The pale wintry sunlight and a modem motor gathering power under the pressure of my foot, together with Sergeant Buck’s realistic presence, began to have its effect on me. “It’s crazy,” I said. “It’s just plain medieval witchcraft.”
“I know, but if you think things hard enough, you can make them happen,” Sylvia said. “You really can. That’s what she’s doing.”
Then her own voice cleared. “And who do you suppose that jack of diamonds is? He’s not her Kurt Hofmann anyway—and isn’t that something! Who were the other blond gentlemen there last night?”
“Well, there’s Larry,” I said. “And Sam Wharton. He must have been blond before he was white. His eyes are blue. And—”
“I know,” she said quietly when I hesitated. “Pete. But that means we believe in witchcraft too, doesn’t it?”
I didn’t answer, and we didn’t say anything else until we came out of the Park on the P Street Bridge and turned back toward Massachusetts Avenue. Then I said, “Sylvia, what is this book Pete’s writing?”
She turned her head quickly.
“What book are you talking about?” she demanded sharply. “Who told you about it?”
I was so surprised I didn’t stop for the red light on 21st Street. Fortunately the car on my left had good brakes.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t realize it was a secret weapon. Colonel Primrose told me about it. Last night.”
“I’m sorry too,” Sylvia said. “I didn’t mean to snap at you. It’s just—well, the less said about it the better. Let’s skip it, shall we?”
I nodded and drove along. Pete Hamilton lived on 16th Street not far from the White House in a brownstone mansion that had been converted into bachelor apartments. The switchboard operator eyed us a little suspiciously as we went in.
“Mr. Hamilton hasn’t gone out yet, so I suppose he’s up there,” she said. “The back apartment, third floor. His mail’s just come—would you mind taking it up?”
She handed Sylvia a pile of letters and newspapers.
We went up the staircase that had seen Washington in perhaps not more opulent but certainly more formal days. The janitor was emptying the trash on the third floor. Sylvia glanced at me. One wastebasket was definitely set aside, the others being dumped into a big brown paper carton.
She knocked at Pete’s door, the janitor watching us out of the corner of his eye. I could hear Sergeant Buck’s iron tramp on the stairs. From inside came a shout: “Come in!” and Sylvia opened the door.
“Who is it?” Pete shouted.
“It’s me,” she called. “And Grace. Can we come in?”
“Sure, come ahead. Eyes front—the maid hasn’t come yet today.”
We went along a narrow hall with a bedroom on one side and a tiny kitchenette and bathroom on the other to a big room at the end, across the back of the house, overlooking the garden.
“What do you mean, today?” Sylvia said. “It looks more like a week.”
Pete grinned. He was working at his desk in the middle of the room behind the sofa littered with papers and his dinner coat and shirt from the night before. He had on an old gray sweater and he hadn’t shaved. On the gateleg table behind him was a coffee percolator and the remains of a self-made breakfast. The drawers were hanging out of his fifing case, and papers were piled on top of it.
“It’s a mess, all right,” he said. “If I was a beachcomber I’d have a native girl to look after me. That’s the trouble with civilization.”
He turned to me.
“You know, one of the things I like about Sylvia is she doesn’t come in and first crack out of the box start picking up and washing the dishes.”
He looked at her critically.
“Only I can’t figure out whether it’s self-control or she just doesn’t give a damn.”
“I thought this was the way you liked it, dear,” she retorted serenely. “After all, you can get a native girl for three dollars a week.—One that’ll come in, I mean.—What’s the matter? Why didn’t you let her stay? Aren’t you going to the Commissioners’ press conference this morning?”
Pete shook his head. “I’ve been asked to stay away,” he said quietly.
She stared at him. “Oh, Pete!” she cried. “When?”
“This morning.—I guess the Colonel was right.”
“And what are you going to do? You aren’t just going to sit here and take it, are you?”
“I haven’t decided yet.”
There was a long silence. He sat there stuffing his tobacco into his pipe, looking down at his typewriter.
“Pete,” Sylvia said after a moment. “Have you seen Larry’s column this morning?”
“Me? Lord, no. I get my social items out of the Police Gazette.”
“Well, you’d better read it.”
She picked The Chronicle up off the sofa, opened it to the society page and handed it to him. He shifted his pipe to the other side of his mouth and tilted his chair back, the paper propped up in front of him against his typewriter. His chair came slowly down to the floor again. He took his pipe out of his mouth and looked blankly up at Sylvia.
“This—is news to me,” he said. He looked down at the paper again. “Nice crack at the Whartons too. Ought to cheer Captain Lamb up.”
Sylvia was watching him with a kind of tense anxiety. She looked back now at the table by the door where she’d put his mail, went quickly over, picked it up and brought it to him. He looked through the pile and straightened up abruptly as he came to the last letter. He ripped it open and read it, his face going as tight as a steel trap, a slow hard flush darkening his cheeks. He looked at it a long time and handed it to her. Her hands were trembling as she read it.
I saw that the letterhead was that of the news syndicate that handled Pete’s stuff.
“Then—he’s right,” Sylvia whispered.
“Straight from the horse’s mouth. Larry sure gets the dope.”
She put the letter down on the desk. “Pete,” she said unsteadily. “You don’t seem to think what all this means!”
“Oh, yes,” he said. “It means I’m a dirty rotten traitor. It also means I’m out on the sidewalk on the seat of my pants. That’s what it means.”
“You can do something, can’t you?”
“Sure. I can get a job digging ditches, if they aren’t all dug.”
“I don’t mean that, and you know it. I mean, can’t you stop all this? Can’t you deny it? Can’t you—”
He got up, came around the table to her and put his hands on her shoulders, gripping them tightly, looking down into her face. Any idea I might have had that he was taking what had happened lightly, or that he didn’t know clearly what it meant and what it involved, was gone from that moment.
He looked at her with an expression that I’d never seen on his face before.
“Look, Sylvia,” he said, his voice hard and his eyes steady. “You don’t think I write that stuff?” And that’s not the word he used. “Do you?”
Her eyes searched his just as steadily for a long moment.
“No!” she said, with a sudden almost passionate triumph. “No, Pete—never! Oh, Pete!”
Suddenly his arms were around her, crushing her to him, his mouth pressed against hers. He raised his head then, pushed her hat off with one hand, still holding her, pushed her hair back from her forehead, still looking steadily down into her eyes. “Sylvia,” he said. “I didn’t know—I’ve never known—how much I love you.”
It was obviously no place for me, and I got out as quickly as I could, interrupting Sergeant Buck’s quiet heart-to-heart with the janitor over the garbage. I felt a lot better. I didn’t know who wrote “Truth Not Fiction,” but I did know now that it wasn’t Pete Hamilton. And I didn’t seem to care much, at the moment, who’d killed Corliss Marshall. I say that because otherwise there’s no possible excuse for the chase I led poor Sergeant Buck that afternoon. The haird
resser was first, then the lingerie department of a woman’s specialty shop, and then—I suppose I ought to be ashamed to admit it—I left him for at least half an hour outside a Ladies’ Room while I wrote a couple of letters admonishing my sons about their grades and did the day’s telephoning. And not least, as I was going back into the Randolph-Lee I met Senor Delvalle. Sergeant Buck, by this time permanently dyed the color of glacial brick-dust, was the usual ten paces behind me.
“How charming, madame,” Senor Delvalle said. He bent over my hand and kissed it.
Sergeant Buck cleared his throat—and if the Randolph-Lee had had walls like Jericho, they’d have gone down with a crash. As it was, his square-toed size twelve boot was in dangerously near proximity to Senor Delvalle as he was bending over my hand. I was a little alarmed, frankly. I pulled my hand away quickly, probably, because Delvalle straightened up and looked around, and back at me with a questioning lift of his eyebrows.
“It’s just a member of the Elite Guard, Senor,” I said. “He goes wherever I go.”
“Does he have to have tea with us?” Senor Delvalle inquired.
“He’d love it,” I said.
When we were settled in the cocktail lounge, with the Sergeant practically at the table with us, I said, “I suppose you saw your name in the paper, this morning.”
“Yes, I did,” he answered. “It’s very interesting. I understand Mr. Wharton would like to go to my country. Mrs. Wharton, I mean. Perhaps you can tell me, Mrs. Latham, why women are so much more determined not to return to private life than men.”
“I guess it’s deadly dull back home after Washington,” I said. “You don’t find Washington very glamorous?”
“Not until I met you, madame.”
Sergeant Buck cleared his throat again. The waiter came out so fast from behind the bar that you’d have thought an evzone had appeared there. I’m sure I don’t know how long this would have gone on, or whether Senor Delvalle, who was enjoying it quite as much as I was, would have got out alive, if Colonel Primrose hadn’t come in.
Sergeant Buck saw him first, stood at attention, did a veritable squads right to the door, reported and left—very fast. I can’t think he was ever relieved from any duty with greater satisfaction.