‘Fairy tales have nine lives. No. And I never was.’
‘I’m glad of that,’ said Rhys portentously. ‘I should have felt very differently about the whole thing. Yes, indeed …’
At the end of a year, the creditors’ case for the opening of the bank vaults, refused by the banks, was fought to the highest courts in Holland and, despite the assurances of Mme. Quiero, when they were opened, nothing was found there … Campoverde who to the very last had depended on his family’s money being there, and who had ridden the storm very well, was greatly dashed by this news and began to consider suits against everyone in general, including Jacques Manray, Richard Plowman, and Alphendéry. But Maître Lemaître, become his lawyer, drew a piece of paper to him and figured for a while on it, then pushed the paper to Campoverde. He read:
Banque Mercure S.A. Creditors are paying at this moment:
Eighty-five Belgian lawyers,
Sixty Dutch lawyers,
Ten English lawyers,
Thirty French lawyers,
Twelve North American lawyers,
One South American lawyer:
Grand total: two hundred and eight fat oxen on the Bertillon pastures.
‘How much of the totals aimed at (not of those accessible) will be paid over to the members of my profession, before one red living centime is returned to them?’ asked Lemaître. ‘Prince, I counsel you to take no counsel. Go into business yourself, and make money that way. Do not attempt to get it back. You will only lose your health, time, and money. Bertillon might go into business again, make another coup; then you would have a chance of getting your money back. Now it is pure fantasy. Drop it. It would be better, in fact, to go into business with Bertillon. That is a better play for you. You have the funds, you have the capacity, that is your ambition. Bertillon yielded up all his secrets to you. Go ahead, consider yourself paid, and try to get back your family’s money one of these days, as interest …’
And after some slow thoughts and sleepless hours, Campoverde decided to take this cheap advice.
When Campoverde opened his bank in Amsterdam in the very offices once occupied by Jules, with Jan Witkraan as his manager and Mouradzian as his Paris customers’ man, Henri Léon and Alphendéry went to wish him good luck and make the usual fuss. Alphendéry had a telegram which he smoothed out on Campoverde’s desk, when the visitors had left him for a moment:
ALPHENDÉRY, AMSTRAMGRAM, AMSTERDAM. JULES LEFT HERE WITHOUT WORD: HAVE YOU SEEN HIM? PLEASE TRY TO TRACE HIM.
WILLIAM
But Jules did not turn up and although everyone made extensive inquiries in every quarter of the financial universe, he was not seen. This was strange, contrary to Jules’s usual glorious, Hollywood way, and those who loved him began to hope that he had really been able to renew himself and start a new life elsewhere in a new name, without the shadow of the old. Who knows? Adventurers are flying every day and rising again under new governments and speaking new languages. His old friends, and even the most pertinacious of the creditors, hoped that he went and made immediately a shining new fortune with which he would come home presently to flash in their eyes. For he had by now benefited by the immorality as well as by the mythomania of the financial world and had begun to be relacquered in the minds of the rich. For others, though, it is true, he still remained a rankle and a hurt, the charmer who deceived.
Montpellier, France, 1937
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First published in 1938 by Simon & Schuster
Text © Christina Stead, 1938; estate of Christina Stead, 2013
Introduction © Alan Kohler 2013
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