He told her he would escort her back to her hotel. She replied that he must be crazy even to consider any such thing. Under no circumstances must Paul Hébert or anybody he knows see them together, not after her treachery. Because now he knew the true narrative of the night before. And, most important, knew where he could find Paul Hébert. Once again, they kissed good night, and goodbye.
The stoplights, though they were few, seemed interminable. The highway was under construction but most of it was still as it had been before the war and during it. The beaches were full but not crowded, as tout Paris edged back toward the capital after a pastoral August, relinquishing the Riviera to its inhabitants and to the tourists—always, the tourists. It was still warm and the salt air came in, tangy and palpable whenever they were stopped at a traffic light; faintly, nicely discernible when under way at 100 kph.
“What does Pauline expect you to do with Mr. Paul Hébert?”
“Oh, that was pretty obvious. She just figures I’ll buy him off. Pay more for the fucking pictures”—Danny paused. “Mot juste, Henry?—than the tabs would.”
“But she knew you were broke the other night?”
“Yeah, but schoolboy-broke. She obviously figures that for this operation there wouldn’t be any shortage of cash.… I’d call home—
“ ‘Mom? Hi, Mom. Fine, how are you, Mom? Ah ha. Well you know, Mom, there is this slight problem. There is a dirty old man—A dirty … old … man. You know, French type? And you know, Mom, when I called the other day, said I needed some cash? Well, the dirty old man saw that I was having trouble so he came and said to me that there was a very beautiful woman around who was so nice and generous he was absolutely sure she’d give me some money, or anyway, lend it to me.
“ ‘Well’ ”—Danny’s amusement won out for the moment over his anger—“ ‘well, I went to the lady, Mom, told her about my problem, and she gave me the four hundred bucks. And I just didn’t know how to thank her, so I dropped my pants and fucked her.’ ”
He roared with laughter, and decided to go on. “ ‘No, Mom. I didn’t pick up any disease, not that I know of. The problem was the dirty old man. You see, he had a camera there and took a bunch of pictures of me saying thanks to the lady.
“ ‘Yes, Mom, I quite agree. He had absolutely no business doing that. Absolutely correct, total invasion of privacy. I must remember to tell him that.
“ ‘What is he going to do with the pictures? Sell them on the street? Well, uh, no, Mom, he has other ideas. He sells to the tabs. The t-a-b-s. Tabloids. They’re pretty raunchy over here, and the idea is, Hey, you want to peek at the way the grandson of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt says thanks to nice French ladies who do him favors?’ ”
Danny’s laugh was truncated.
And Henry’s voice was earnest. “Listen, buddy. I think we probably should make an effort to buy him off. Did Pauline give you any idea what kind of price the pictures would fetch?”
“No. But if they would fetch more than one hundred bucks, that’s more than I’ve got.”
“I’ve got some.”
“I knew you’d say that. But we’re probably talking maybe a couple of thousand bucks. After all, they paid me four hundred and twenty-five dollars. So? There’s just one alternative: grab them. They’re probably still wet, hanging in some improvised darkroom.”
The Citroën bounced confidently over all the potholes. Now there was a stretch of beach—“That belongs to Farouk,” Danny said. “Where we’re headed is the development, over there,” he pointed, “at the end of his property.”
It was a brand-new high-rise, not yet complete; there were men at work on the top story. The entrance hall was light and large, the salt air providing fine ventilation through the lobby floor. They walked confidently past the desk into one of the automatic elevators. The target was 18B.
Henry was more than willing to act as the man up front, as had been agreed. He would knock on the door, with Danny out of sight. He would tell M. Hébert that he was there to buy some pictures for a British newspaper. If Hébert refused to let him in, Danny would materialize and together they would force their way in and overpower Hébert. If Henry was admitted, he would there and then deliver a knockout blow—in the elevator they had put on gloves to cover their tracks—then open the door for Danny. Together they would tie up Hébert and search for the pictures.
“If we don’t find them, we’ll need to get serious with him,” Danny had said. Henry never remembered seeing Danny more resolute, more vindictive, actually.
M. Paul Hébert, dressed in a sports shirt and slacks, seemed not in the least surprised by Henry’s explanation for calling on him, an explanation begun in halting French, but completed, at M. Hébert’s invitation, in English. Evidently he was accustomed to doing business thus extemporaneously.
Hébert opened the door. Henry stepped in and instantly delivered an uppercut that crumpled his host, who fell to the floor on his back, his arms outstretched, his mouth open, eyes entirely blank.
The door had not even shut, so that Danny came in by himself. Wordlessly they brought Hébert’s wrists together behind him and put on the handcuffs. Then Danny began with the tape. He did not need to pry open Hébert’s mouth—it was wide open. He bound him tight.
“Pull up on the desk, Henry.” Henry did so while Danny dragged the manacled hands and let the desk leg come down between Hébert’s arms.
Danny stood up, breathing deeply. “Not bad. He can’t move his arms, can’t talk, can’t move any farther than the desk can move. Yes, not bad, not bad. Say, Henry, that’s a hell of a swing they taught you. I hope you don’t ever get angry with me.”
Henry smiled. Mad at Danny? Not easy. Not impossible—but very nearly that, when Danny was in a jam, as he now was. Henry had once been in a jam.
Their search was instantly successful. The negatives were there, dangling on clothespins.
“If you don’t mind, Henry, I’ll do the identifying on those pictures.” Danny examined them. He was visibly inflamed by what he saw. He looked down to adjust the lamplight and spotted a small glass tray. On it were a pair of glasses and a key ring. “Looks like he hadn’t gotten around to making prints yet. But for the hell of it let’s look in the drawers.” While looking at a negative he reached for the key ring, slipping it into his pocket.
They did so, and Danny took pleasure in leaving the drawers overturned. “May as well make it look like a robbery. Actually,” he smiled, “in away, it is. I mean, the pictures are his, technically speaking, aren’t they?” Henry said he thought that rather a fine point, but obviously Danny enjoyed making it.
They found nothing, and now Danny turned to the figure on the floor.
“Well, M. Paul. Having fun?”
Muffled groans.
Danny launched now into his deception, an attempt to shield Pauline as his informant. “There is a nice woman in Nice—I know you look after her comfort because you enlisted me in that effort a couple of nights ago. Well, I went to say goodbye to her last night and found she had left town. To Algeria, the concierge told me. Why that upsets me, Paul, is this: I thought if I could find her, I’d tell her you were uncomfortable and for a change she could look after you—see what I mean?”
“Danny, let’s get out of here.”
“Yeah.”
Henry lowered his voice. “We can call the police after we’re away and give them the room number, tell ’em we think there’s a problem there—”
“Yeah, yeah.” Danny’s voice was hoarse. He shook his head, as though attempting to wake up.
They went down the elevator together, removing their gloves.
Danny stepped into the car and closed the door. But suddenly he opened it again. “Damn! I got to go back up. I left my dark glasses.”
“Well, make it fast—”
Danny was out of the car.
As he rode up in the elevator he studied the key ring and isolated the key likeliest to open the apartment door.
Now
he was staring down at Paul Hébert, the dandy manqué with the hint of a decoration on his tuxedo coat, lying now on his side, his goatee protruding under the gag that kept him silent, or rather, just capable of grunting. Danny trained his thought on the Germans he had fired on, thrown hand grenades at. It wasn’t at all clear why such as they should die and leave alive such as Paul Hébert. He gave himself a full minute to recapture, step by step, exactly what the vile Hébert had done to him. Tried to do to him. And he imagined what now, if free, and if he settled his suspicion on her, he might try to do to Pauline.
He brought his revolver out of his pocket, approached Hébert slowly, stepping around his thrashing legs, brought the barrel to an inch from the top of Paul Hébert’s nose and pulled the trigger.
He tossed the key ring back on the tray, walked back through the room and, in the elevator, tried to concentrate on the question, Was his heart beating faster right now than on that night at the Arno, in the last seconds of the countdown?
Probably less. One gets used to things.
“All set,” he told Henry, getting into the driver’s seat and adjusting his sunglasses.
Nine
IT WAS ELSIE who had first suggested that Caroline go with her to West Point on the double date, but after Caroline said thanks a lot, no, it was Harriet who more or less put herself in charge of the social agenda.
Harriet Carberry, who roomed with Elsie, was the daughter of a colonel in the army. Her father, notwithstanding his exalted rank, was always something of a drill sergeant. He dealt with Harriet and her two younger brothers as he might have done with recruits. He told them what to do, explained how things worked, supervised their activity, and disappeared from their lives only during their schedule breaks, ten minutes every hour, and the hours after school and other duties. As a boy, Philip Carberry had been sent to Culver Academy, a proud military secondary school whose teachers exercised a comprehensive concern for every detail of the young cadets’ lives. Punctuality was central to the working of Colonel Carberry’s universe. “If you are not prompt,” Colonel—then Captain—Carberry lectured his ten-year-old daughter when she arrived not at twelve o’clock at the corner outside the schoolhouse, as instructed to do, but five minutes later, “you may be the instrumental factor in a breakdown in arrangements whose consequences you cannot estimate.” Mrs. Carberry whispered to her husband that he was not addressing a seminar of officer candidates but a ten-year-old girl, but the colonel paid her no heed and persisted in a scolding that lasted so long they missed the train. Mrs. Carberry was amused that the colonel had been the victim of the vice he was so eloquently adjuring his daughter to abstain from, but in fact did not laugh; laughter in the house of Carberry was always suspect, contumacious as often as not, the colonel thought, and also rather effete, like so many of those male leads in Hollywood.
Harriet was a total success, faithful to her father’s preachments. And having been born with so exuberant a good nature, she had a difficult time expending it all. She worried about herself hardly at all (what was there, after all, to worry about?), but worried most persistently about Caroline, and about Elsie; and, as a matter of fact, about many of her teachers. Oh yes, and she worried also about the president of Smith. He was overworked, she informed her friends, his office understaffed.
But the object of her concerns at the moment was Caroline Chafee. “Why?—Caroline, don’t just say you don’t want to go to West Point with Lucy, tell her why you don’t want to go to West Point with Lucy.”
Caroline smiled. Caroline smiled a great deal. It was sometimes the sign of understanding, sometimes of gratitude and deference, sometimes a way of closing off a subject she thought it appropriate to close or, in any case, a subject she wanted to close.
She liked Harriet, really did. It had taken her almost the whole of the first two years to get used to Harriet’s hectoring. But somewhere along the line it became evident that Harriet simply cared—cared very much, the way some people care if other people remembered to brush their teeth that morning. Cared, in this case, very much (Caroline knew this) about her restricted social life. Caroline sighed, seeing no way out of it.
“Darling Harriet, I don’t like to repeat myself, but I have told you that I am very attracted to someone, and I don’t terribly enjoy myself when I am out with somebody else. Now, is that so unusual?”
Harriet took a deep puff from her cigarette, and then set it down as if to prepare to begin a lecture.
“It is very unusual, very mistaken, and utterly wrong, Caroline. We know of course that you are talking about Danny O’Hara. I have nothing against Danny, nothing at all. He is polite, he is handsome, his family is rich and distinguished, he graduated from Yale last spring and has gone to work in New York. Fine. When he was a senior at New Haven he came here what, once a month? And you went to New Haven on odd months. That means that even then, three quarters of the time you spent the weekend—well, alone. But now that he’s working in New York he comes only every five or six weeks.…”
Caroline had told Danny, at one of her last visits to Yale in the spring, just before his graduation, about Harriet’s preoccupation with her lonely weekends.
“What does Miss Harriet do on weekends?”
They were together that evening at the lounge of the Taft Hotel, had walked the short distance from Zeta Psi, Danny’s fraternity. It had been a crowded day. That morning, Caroline had taken the train to Springfield from Northampton and there caught the express, Hartford-New Haven. There was a milk punch party at the Yale Daily News, then lunch at Silliman, then in Danny’s car to the sybaritic crew race with Harvard on the Thames River. Caroline found herself quite carried away—more, actually, than Danny, whose cheers for the home crew she thought perfunctory. Then the cocktail party at Zeta Psi, followed by dinner and two rounds of bridge with Fred Zahn and Charlie Melhado who, some survivors of their game were convinced, were majoring in bridge. Their game was speedy, quiet and ruthless. Danny was accustomed to losing to them but he enjoyed the sport, and the proximity to Caroline.
It did not matter that they were not engaged in conversation during the two hours. His closeness to her was what mattered; and then, during the bidding, he would look at her, the oval face framed by the light yellow hair, her hazy brown eyes looking down at her hand, then up—sometimes, even though she was looking directly across the table, she gave no sense of seeing him. She never lost the train of the conversation, never delayed needlessly in putting down a card or making her bid, but Danny felt that her quiet self-containment was a means of telling those about her that she was quite happy in the private garden in which she strolled, without any need of accompaniment. Danny found this enchanting, but never spoke of the phenomenon, not even to Henry. Surely, he thought, this fascinating faculty of Caroline’s must be obvious to everyone around her?
It was after eleven when they sat down at the lounge of the Taft. She ordered Coca-Cola, he a beer. She was at the end of one large leather couch, Danny sat in the armchair perpendicular, his right hand outstretched, his elbow resting on the arm of the couch. She stroked the palm of his hand.
“What does Harriet do on weekends? You know, Danny, I simply don’t know. I am sure she has every minute planned of every weekend from now until we graduate … she is that way. And I suppose one day she will say to herself, ‘Harriet, it is time you got married.’ She will then survey the field and notify the lucky winner. And believe me, Danny, he will be lucky to have Harriet.”
Danny’s shudder was intentionally exaggerated. Caroline noticed it and simply changed the subject. Danny acknowledged the maneuver and commented on it: “You are the least contentious person I have ever known.”
Caroline smiled, and replied, “You are not the least contentious person I have ever known.”
He gripped her hand.
And now his voice was slightly hoarse. She sensed what was coming and she was right. “Caroline, I can’t stand it any longer. I have to have you. To love you, in my arms. You go up
and let me follow in a few minutes, will you, darling?”
“No, Danny dear, I will not. You are my beautiful Danny boy and I do love you, I have told you that, but I am not—”
“—not going to spoil your beautiful Danny boy?” He sighed. The spell was quickly broken, his desire sublimated. He removed his hand. The ache of longing was still there, but instantly he recaptured control. He grinned broadly. “Oh dear, I guess I will have to go sleep with somebody else tonight, what a pity.”
She didn’t say anything, but put down her glass and got up. She looked about the large old-fashioned lobby with its two-dozen leather armchairs, the coffee tables with the day’s newspapers here and there, the unused, sleepy, slightly untidy old Negro porter sitting within conversational reach of the night clerk. “It’s time, Danny. Time to go to bed.”
“That exactly has been my point.”
Another of her smiles, but no comment. He walked with her to the elevator. They kissed and he said, “The usual?”
“The usual. I’ll walk over to Silliman after the eight o’clock mass.”
Danny waved his hand as the elevator doors closed. She blew him a chaste kiss.
Walking back to his college he realized suddenly that if there had been a cat house between the Taft Hotel and Silliman College, with hot and cold running raunchy girls, he would not now—not this very minute—stop to patronize it. After being with Caroline, there was no substitute for Caroline. But, lying in bed a half hour later, he reflected that his self-denial was not, really, all that natural. He was bewitched—that was the best he could make of it. It was a very nice feeling, but the odds were against its lasting forever. He called Sally Smithers in New York and made a date for Sunday night.
Ten
THEY WERE TAKING final exams and there was only one left to go—as it happened, the single course both Danny and Henry were enrolled in, third-year French. They were bone-weary from the studying done to prepare for the exams taken during the preceding ten days, and now Danny was especially, exuberantly restless. He would rather complain about tomorrow’s exam than prepare for it, he’d have conceded if asked. So he cranked up:
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