“I know. I didn’t get anyone.”
Rosa’s frown of nonunderstanding turned into one of alarm. “You mean this is a kidnapping?” She shook her head violently, her thick hair flying. “No, sir! Count me out! They still have the guillotine in this country!” A further thought came to her under the sardonic eye of the man resting in the chair. “But then I don’t get it. Why all the photographic junk?”
“I didn’t say nobody was going to pose with her. I simply said that I was not.…”
“Then, who—?”
“You’re going to pose with her,” Sanchez said and instantly raised a bony hand, warding off possible argument. His eyes were cold. “It will be much more effective for our purpose, believe me. She might confess to a momentary lapse with a man and maybe even get away with it with this Huuygens. He looked like one of the new, modern breed, the so-called civilized—in quotes—type.” There was a sneer in his voice; he wiped it away. “But with a woman?” He shook his head decisively. “Never in a million years! Even Huuygens would draw the line at that. I know.” His tone indicated he was judging the other man by his own standards and was very sure of their validity. “You pose.”
Rosa took a deep breath. “You had me worried there for a minute!” She suddenly grinned. She kicked off her shoes, crushed out her cigarette, and started to unzip her dress, speaking over her shoulder. “It’s easy to see you never worked at Manuela’s. You should see what goes on upstairs after all you boys have had your kicks and gone home.…”
She slipped the dress down, stepping out of it, and started on her brassiere. She moved over in her stockinged feet to be before the mirror, watching herself undress. The brassiere slipped to the floor; she brushed her nipples lightly with her fingernail, watching Sanchez in the glass. Sanchez stared at her in minor shock. Rosa winked at him lewdly and turned from the mirror, continuing her strip, watching the unconscious girl on the bed as she did so.
“So I pose with her,” she said and smiled in a manner Sanchez found hard to interpret. “Who’s complaining?”
Sanchez, well aware that his labors had made him miss a meal, something his physique did not lend itself to, stepped from the elevator with Anita in his arms, her purse dangling helplessly. From her weight he was sure the girl he was carrying had never missed a meal in her life, although he had to admit it didn’t seem to cause her any unnecessary curves. Rosa followed along, a small package in her hand. The tripod and other equipment could wait for the time being; it was the film that was all-important. The concierge watched them owlishly, picking on a wart.
“My cousin—that is, my wife’s cousin,” Sanchez said to the old lady apologetically, worriedly, “she doesn’t seem to respond. We’ve tried everything we can. I’m afraid we’ll need to see a doctor after all, or take her to a hospital—”
Rosa stepped in front of him imperiously, interrupting.
“Taxi!” she commanded fiercely, and the old woman scurried out the door onto the sidewalk. She waved one down, looking like a scarecrow in a high wind as she did so. She even held the door as they entered, received a glare from Rosa, and hastily closed it after them. Sanchez looked at the made-up woman beside him with a faint frown. Between one thing and another—not to mention the passion of the scenes he had just finished photographing upstairs—he had come to a definite conclusion: In the future it would be another girl that received his custom at Manuela’s place.…
6
Anita was irritated. Someone was shaking her, and rather roughly at that, and she thought it a shabby thing to do, particularly considering that she was so very, very tired and didn’t like being shaken even when she was quite rested. It reminded her of when she was a child, and it also disturbed her hair. She intended to tell Kek about it at the very first opportunity. He’d make the mean person stop shaking her!
She tried to squirm away from the insistent hand, to turn on her side and pull the covers over her, up over her head, so she could go back to sleep in peace, away from all the interruptions and aggravations. But her hand, groping feebly for the blanket, encountered nothing. Someone, in addition to that miserable shaking, had also had the gall to steal the blankets, and when she finally woke up that someone was certainly going to hear about it!
The hand refused to obey her unspoken commands. It now seemed aided by a voice, a rasping, irritating voice. If this kept on, sleep was going to be impossible.
“Madame!”
She pushed feebly at the interfering hand, rolled slightly, and felt herself sliding. There was a faintly humorous aspect to it; she hadn’t fallen out of bed since she was a child. She started to smile at the memory and then winced sharply as her head suddenly began to throb with pain. She came to rest, leaned back, and was pleased to discover that while her legs seemed to be unduly cramped by some obstacle before them, at least there was support for her head.
“Madame!”
This was impossible! The shaking, which had stopped momentarily, was now being enforced again. Obviously this exasperating intruder would not be content until he had been told off, and Anita was just in the mood to do it. She opened one eye with an effort and stared blearily at the pockmarked, mustached, and unfamiliar face leaning over her. She thought she had never in her life seen anything as revolting.
“What do you want?”
The figure above her reared back in a neat combination of justified resentment and a sort of admiration for the nerve of the pretty girl wrinkling her nose at him.
“What do I want!” The eyes rolled upward and then came down to stare at Anita. Her hand unconsciously pulled down her skirt. The man raised his eyes again at this completely unwarranted gesture. “I’ll tell you what I want, if you can understand what I’m saying. I want you to go away. I come out from having my lunch and what do I find? You—sleeping it off in my taxi! Go somewhere else to sober up. I need my cab to go to work. I have a family to feed!”
“Taxi?” What was the man talking about? Anita forced herself up from the floor of the cab and slouched on the worn seat, leaning back. Her head was not only aching miserably, but it was also spinning dangerously and her stomach felt queasy. If this unspeakable animal didn’t stop both his incessant jabber and his breathing of sour wine fumes in her face, she would do more than merely occupy his taxi; she would undoubtedly throw up all over it.
“Yes, taxi.” The driver looked at her sardonically. “I’m sure you mistook it for a box at the opera.” At least six martinis, he judged. When would women learn to be content with plain wine?
Anita held her head and then glanced over the cabdriver’s head. The street was a small one, deserted, and at first glance appeared unfamiliar, but then she recognized a boutique she occasionally patronized on the far corner and noticed the stream of traffic pouring across the main artery just a few hundred yards along. Memory returned to a small extent—she had been shopping for groceries. She had gone to the Supermarket Gourmet in the Porte de Maillot. She looked at her watch and finally managed to focus on the tiny face—two o’clock. Two o’clock? Four hours since she left home, and here she was nowhere near the Porte de Maillot but over near the Louvre! Or maybe even longer than four hours—it didn’t even have to be the same day.…
“Madame!” Now that the woman was awake, communication was possible, though difficult. “Why don’t you—ah—recuperate somewhere else? The bistro over there, perhaps? The food is good, and you can probably use some. And I do need my cab. I have to make a living and I was not lying about the family.”
“What is today?”
“Christmas,” the driver said sarcastically.
It cost Anita a severe pang behind the eyes to bring her glare to bear on the wavering face before her, but she managed it.
“I asked you—”
“Tuesday,” the driver said hastily and honestly. The lady seemed to be sobering up faster than most, but still.… “Madame, seriously. Let me help you out—”
“Quiet.”
It had been unbearably ho
t in the supermarket, she remembered that. She had gone to the shrimp counter and the ice had been hot. She frowned. Hot ice? No puns, she instructed herself sternly; but it had been a fact. The ice had burned her. And after that? Four hours.… Where could she have been? Certainly not in this—or any other—taxi all that time. Then?
“Madame!” The driver decided that talking was useless; a policeman was the only solution. He hated to call on the law, his natural enemy, but could see nothing else for it. He looked about, well aware that a policeman was never around when you required one. He sighed and studied his unwelcome guest. Certainly the lady was beautiful and certainly well dressed, obviously not a fille de joie, but none of these facts helped get her out of his cab. The Magasin du Louvre was close by and at that hour taxis were in great demand. “Madame! Please!”
“Oh, be quiet!” Anita said crossly and pressed her hand to her head. She looked at the driver coldly, considering him for the first time as a person instead of merely a bothersome hand and an aggravating tongue. “If you want to earn money with your taxi, stop talking so much and start driving. The Avenue du Maréchal Favolle.…”
She gave the number and then had a frightening thought, one that had also occurred to the driver at the same time. She opened her purse and was relieved to see that her wallet was intact, bills poking out. The cabdriver also saw the money; he hopped into his seat and took off with a jerk before his odd passenger changed her mind and asked for a bar instead. In which case he’d probably not get paid. Anita looked around for her shopping bag, shrugged to find it missing, and leaned back in the jouncing vehicle, wishing she had chosen one with better springs in which to take her nap.
But where had she spent those four lost hours? Walking? But even overlooking the blackout, walking could not account for the difference in distance from the Porte de Maillot; she could walk that in twenty minutes to a half hour. Unless she was walking in circles.… In a cinema? Sitting on a park bench? Without knowing it? She closed her eyes, trying to put the problem out of her mind for a moment, trying to concentrate instead on willing her pounding headache to abate, but the icy fear of where she might have been or what she might have done continued to intrude.
The cabdriver, while possibly no master of the mot pour rire, was nevertheless excellent at his trade. He crossed the river on the Pont des Artes in favor of the lesser traffic on the Left Bank, eschewed the avenues and boulevards fronting the river in favor of a series of smaller but less crowded streets, quite accurately assuming his fare to be more interested in speed than architecture, traversed those streets with a better-than-average scattering of pedestrians, crossed back to the Right Bank on the Pont Bir-Hakeim to miss the Trocadéro and the crowds of tourists there, and shot down the Rue de la Tour as if trying to make up for the time lost in pointless discussion back at their starting point. He swung into the Avenue du Maréchal Favolle with gusto and pulled up to the curb before the apartment with a slight flourish. The cessation of motion brought Anita from her reverie; she climbed down and paid the driver. If he had any notion that fuzziness would make madame overtip, he was quickly disabused of the idea. With a grunt and a scowl he put the cab in gear and pulled away. Money for martinis they had in abundance, he thought bitterly, but a decent tip for a hard-working cabbie? Never. He should have put the meter on while trying to wake her!
Kek opened the apartment door at the sound of her key in the lock. He frowned at her, his gray eyes searching her face.
“Where on earth have you been?” He noted the missing shopping bag and returned to her face. “What’s the trouble?”
Anita smiled painfully. “Were you worried?”
“Of course I was worried.” He led the way into the living room and moved behind the bar, reaching for glasses. “You’ve been gone more than four hours. I asked André to go down to the market and look for you; I wanted to stay here in case you called. Where have you been, for heaven’s sake?”
“I’d love to know where I’ve been,” Anita said wearily. She sank into a chair, putting her hand to her pounding head. Kek paused in the act of taking down a bottle.
“What do you mean?”
“Just what I say, darling. And no drinks for me, thank you just the same. I feel as if I’d had about ten of them as it is. Without tasting them,” she added wryly. “Or enjoying them.”
Kek put the bottle aside and came from behind the bar. He walked over and looked down at her. His voice no longer exhibited irritation at her having given him a fright; nor did he sound curious when he spoke. Rather, his tone was emotionless, but his eyes were steady and alert. As always, Anita felt the wonderful sensation of being protected when she was with the man.
“All right,” Kek said evenly. “Tell me what happened. Everything. And exactly as it happened.”
Anita shrugged helplessly. She shook her head. “Nothing happened, darling. That’s what’s so strange. I remember thinking that the market was uncommonly hot and wondering why they didn’t turn on the air conditioning, and I remember walking over to the counter with shrimp, they were special this week, and I remember the ice burned me—I know it doesn’t make sense—and then the next thing I knew this cabdriver is shaking me and screaming at me and I was in a cab over on a side street near the Magasin du Louvre with nobody around and it was two o’clock.”
“That’s all?”
“All except I thought the top of my head was coming off. And it still feels that way.” Anita smiled at him; even forming the smile caused her head to ache. “Darling, could you get me some aspirin?”
“Of course.” Kek went to the bar and came back with two pills and a glass of water. He watched Anita swallow them and took back the glass, setting it on the bar. He drew up a footstool and pulled it close, looking at her steadily.
“All right. Where was the cabdriver when you got into the cab? What did he say?”
“He says he was in a small restaurant bar down the street having lunch.” She looked at Kek and suddenly felt a wave of protectiveness sweep over her. How odd, she thought; a moment ago I was the one who felt protected! “Don’t look so serious, darling. I have a headache, is all. I’ll be fine in a short while.”
“Was anything missing you were carrying? Money?”
“Nothing. Oh, my shopping bag. I probably dropped it when I fainted—” She nodded. “I remember that, too. I remember that I said to myself that I was going to faint and I never had before.”
“Anything else?”
“That’s strange.” Anita frowned. “Now you mention it, I seem to also remember being in bed. Twice—”
“Twice?”
“I think so. The last time, I recall, I tried to reach down for the covers. I wanted to pull them over my head to make the cabdriver go away. He was shaking me, like my mother used to do to make me get up in time for school.”
“Did you get his number?”
Anita shook her head. “Darling, he had nothing to do with it, I’m sure. He was just an innocent bystander.” She looked at Kek, a smile on her face, but it was a worried smile, unsure of itself. “You’re the one who’s been reading the encyclopedia—what does it say about amnesia? You had to go that far to get to ‘elephant’.…”
“As a matter of fact, I remember reading the section on amnesia,” Kek said quietly. It was obvious to Anita that Kek took the matter quite seriously; she knew he hated mysteries, or at least mysteries he did not concoct himself for some customs official or other. “It’s a form of hysteria and does have short forms, but you haven’t been suffering from amnesia.” He got to his feet, beginning to pace the room. “If you fainted, you certainly weren’t wandering around in a faint.… Someone must have picked you up, put you in that cab. Which means that cab must have been at the Porte de Maillot when you fainted.…”
“Darling,” Anita said firmly, “forget that cab! He couldn’t possibly have driven me around for four hours. Without being paid? It’s absurd.”
“Then another cab,” Kek said stubbornly. “If yo
u remember the bed and covers, you should remember someone putting you in the cab.”
“The cab was the bed, or at least the second bed,” Anita said and remembered something else. She giggled and then cut it short as her head protested. “I remember I thought I was falling out of bed, but I was just sliding down in front of the back seat.”
“If somebody didn’t bring you to this last place and put you in the cab and then pay the driver to take you someplace—”
“Nobody did,” Anita said. “The driver wanted me out, believe me. If somebody had paid him to deliver me someplace, he would have done it and left me on the curb. No, someone probably saw an empty cab and dumped me in.” She smiled. “I’ve often thought of using empty cabs to get rid of lots of trash when I’m on the street.”
“Which still explains nothing,” Kek said. “Especially why you should faint in the first place.” He sighed. “You don’t remember anything?”
“Darling, I’ve said—”
“All right,” Kek said and came to his feet. He smiled apologetically. “In any event I shouldn’t be interrogating you. You get to bed. I’ll call a doctor.”
“I don’t need a doctor,” Anita insisted. “I never fainted in my life! It was—” She hesitated helplessly. “Well, I guess it was just one of those things.”
Kek stared at her a moment and then suddenly grinned. “You might be right. There’s one possibility we’ve completely overlooked. It might, indeed, be just one of those things. I’ll tell the doctor to bring along a rabbit when he comes.…”
7
The smooth, deep, accented voice on the telephone was one Anita recognized, but it had somehow taken on an oddly sinister tone, as if the man at the other end of the line was trying to tell her something beyond the words he was employing. She glanced across the room. André, reading the morning newspaper, lowered it and looked at her inquisitively over the top. She raised her shoulders in a Gallic shrug of nonunderstanding, tapped ash from her cigarette into an ashtray, and returned her attention to the instrument.
The Tricks of the Trade Page 7