The Assassins Gallery - [Dr Mikhal Lammeck 01]

by David L. Robbins

  “Where my garlic?”

  Judith ignored her.

  “Girl? I asked you for somethin.’ “

  Judith stood, taking the knife with her, absentminded that it was in her hand.

  “Why are you so upset with me?” she asked the old woman.

  Mrs. P. kept her angry eyes on the bubbling pot.

  “I didn’t bring you into this house so’s you could keep gettin’ in trouble. No, ma’am, I did not.”

  Now Judith became aware of the knife in her grip.

  “What trouble am I in?” she replied evenly.

  The cook pulled the wooden spoon out of the soup. She tapped it on the rim, then shook it in Judith’s eyes.

  “Look at you. I know what you doin’. Got that top button on your blouse all undone. I know you done took a inch off the hem o’ that skirt. You walkin’ around this house like you got the hots for someone, Missy, and I know who it is.”

  Judith stayed still, the best way to draw the other out.

  “Don’t you gimme no sassy look neither. You ain’t no Miss Innocent, we know that. You stay away from the mister. This household got its share o’ trouble without you addin’ to it. An’ you know what I’m talkin’ about. I swear, girl, you got more nerve than a bad tooth. Now you abide me and shave me some garlic. And you button up that blouse.”

  The soup spoon stayed between them until Judith turned away.

  She walked back to the table to set down the knife. She did not want it in her hand.

  She pivoted to Mrs. P., who had her back turned and the spoon working the broth.

  I fucked him already, she almost said.

  Instead, she clamped her mouth and buttoned her blouse.

  An hour before the dinner party, the mister still had not come home. The house throbbed to ticking clocks; unlit candles on the table and the mantel, plus the smells from Mrs. P.’s cooking, lent the downstairs an air of anticipation. Judith had shined every silver service piece and set them now on the table according to Mrs. Tench’s diagram. She made amends with Mrs. P. by sampling her soup and breads, flattering them, asking to be taught their various secrets. Judith walked around the large dining room, straightening flatware and crystal, stopping when she heard a cry.

  She waited, to see if Mrs. P. might come out of the kitchen. The swinging door stayed closed. Again, a wail wafted from deep in the big house. Judith moved from the dining room into the den, padding quietly on the Oriental carpet. Something heavy thumped on the floor; Judith heard it and felt it in her soles. She moved along a hallway, lit by sconces, walls tiled by framed photos of the Tench couple in happy times.

  At the library door, she paused and listened to Mrs. Tench bawl again. Judith stood through a caterwaul of anguish behind the closed door, focusing not on the despondent woman but down the hallway, in case Mrs. P. should come and see Judith here, eavesdropping.

  After a minute, Mrs. Tench reduced herself to sniffling and a miserable mutter. Judith gave her another moment, then turned the doorknob and strode in. She made a point of not seeing the woman curled on the leather couch. From its perch on a short pillar, in an alcove between high, crowded bookshelves, a marble bust had fallen to the floor.

  “Mrs. Tench, are you in—? Oh, pardon me.” Judith paused, in a show of concern. “Ma’am, are you alright?”

  Hastily, the older woman sat up on the sofa, smearing a palm across both cheeks.

  “Yes. Please go back to your chores. I’ll be out shortly.”

  The woman sniffled again, making a poor attempt at composure. Judith did not leave the room. Instead, she walked to where the bust had tumbled from its column.

  “That’s heavy,” Mrs. Tench said. “I knocked it over by accident. I’ll have Mr. Tench put it back.”

  Judith returned the figure to its place. It was heavy, but she lifted it with ease. “No need for the mister to see this.”

  “Thank you, Desiree.”

  Judith turned the bust’s face carefully to the exact position it had been in. She smoothed her servant’s apron.

  “Your daddy was a handsome man.”

  A plaque on the stone identified the figure as Senator Rutherfurd B. Potts, Indiana. It also gave the dates of his tenure in government. Mrs. Tench shared her father’s jawline, and little else.

  The senator was marble and imperial; she was a red-faced wreck, pampered and delicate.

  “Yes. My papa was. He was quite a great man.”

  Judith stepped into the library’s bathroom and returned with a glass of water for Mrs. Tench. She closed the library door to keep Mrs. P. from stumbling on the two of them, then stood beside the sofa.

  “What’s wrong?”

  At her question, Mrs. Tench looked into space, perhaps seeing her troubles there. She must have counted them and found them few because she suddenly brightened. She finished the offered water in a few gulps as if it were an antidote, then she wiped her mouth with a lace-trimmed kerchief, and rose from the sofa. She drew a full breath and tugged down her skirt. Judith looked at the woman’s narrow hips and veined neck, whittled too thin.

  “Honestly,” she said, oddly refreshed, “I don’t know what comes over me sometimes. I’m fine.” The woman patted Judith’s arm. “Thank you, Desiree. You have a wonderful calming way about you. Your people back in New Orleans must be very kind.”

  Judith merely nodded, pretending some grief of her own to keep Mrs. Tench from asking further, requiring more lies. For a moment she reflected how much better the fictitious family in New Orleans was than her real one in Persia.

  “Well,” Mrs. Tench rubbed her palms, “that’s that. Needless to say, this little episode stays just between us girls. As you said, there’s no need for Mr. Tench or our Mrs. P. to hear of it. I just had myself a little cry, as we girls do once in a while. I’ll make sure there’s a little something extra in your pay envelope this week, alright?”

  Mrs. Tench extended her hand toward the door, inviting Judith to leave the library first. The thin woman followed and went upstairs, Judith back to the kitchen.

  Mrs. P. had the oven door down. She poked at twin roasting geese and spooned juices over them.

  “See what I mean? This house got trouble enough already. Now you know.”

  Judith breathed in the aromas and almost didn’t ask, the smells were so transporting. Nothing had just happened that did not play into her hands.

  “Know what, Mrs. P.?”

  “Why that woman can’t keep no he’p.”

  “Why is that?”

  The old cook closed the door on the browning fowl. She shook her head and wiped her hands on her apron.

  “Woman’s crazy, that’s why.”

  * * * *

  BY TEN O’CLOCK, MRS. P. had cleaned the last of the plates and pots. The dinner guests had retired to the sitting room for coffee and brandies. The men lit tobacco while the women set up a card table for a game of three-handed bridge. Judith stayed within earshot to mind their coffee cups and absorb gossip.

  Mrs. P. needed to leave, to catch the last bus across the Potomac. Mrs. Tench had asked Judith to stay behind. They would call her a taxi when the evening was done, she said. At the back door, Judith helped Mrs. P. into her winter coat. The old woman narrowed her eyes disapprovingly, then bussed Judith on the cheek.

  “Girl, we all got to do what we got to do. Jus’ be careful. That’s a snake pit in there. They ain’t yo’ people.” The old maid took firm hold of Judith’s shoulders and held her at arm’s length. “But I knows you up to somethin’.”

  Judith leaned close. She lowered her voice, conspiratorial. “You’re amazing, Mrs. P.”

  The old cook shrugged, pleased, and buttoned up her coat.

  “Laws, don’t you go and tell me neither. I don’ want to know nothin’.” Mrs. P. wrapped her red scarf around her neck, mumbling mournfully to herself, “I swear, I saved you from doin’s with drug dealers jus’ to get you all mixed up with white folk. Lawd have mercy. Your mama gon’ skin me she find ou
t.”

  Before opening the door, Mrs. P. touched Judith’s cheek.

  “You a good girl, Desiree. But you a sneak.”

  Judith smiled at the reproof. “And you’re a wonderful old woman. But you’re nosy.”

  The cook nodded, agreeing.

  Judith closed the door behind the old woman. The service bell rang. Arriving in the sitting room, Judith was informed that the general desired another slice of Mrs. P.’s rhubarb pie.

  For another two hours, Judith hovered in and out of the sitting room. The budget official proved himself the inebriate and boor Mrs. Tench had labeled him. The general was an up-and-comer, with little battle experience but a great administrative background. He expected to move up fast in the peacetime military. Naval secretary Forrestal spoke often and admiringly of Roosevelt, thinking him a great leader and gracious in person. Forrestal had witnessed the American landings in Normandy, had visited the Pacific theater twice. He was very suspicious of Stalin and communism. The Soviets would be the next great threat to world freedom, he declared to everyone’s agreement. Mr. Tench played host, pouring and cajoling, conscious of making himself popular. None of the women talked of anything beyond their homes, children, husbands, and clothing. Mrs. Tench’s voice was the giddiest of the ladies.

  At midnight, the guests left together. Judith wore white cotton gloves as she fetched the women’s coats and handed them to their husbands. Once the wives were cloaked, she helped each man into his overcoat. In the moments while she loaded Forrestal into his, Judith evaluated him, judging weight and height, the thickness of the skin on his wrists and on the back of his neck, where she touched him without his notice.

  Mr. and Mrs. Tench said their good-byes. Judith faded to the kitchen for her own coat. When she returned, Mrs. Tench had already gone upstairs to bed. Mr. Tench wore his winter jacket.

  “It’s late,” he told her. “I’ll drive you home.”

  * * * *

  Washington, D.C.

  JUDITH CLICKED ON A small electric light beside her bed. At her back, he said, “It’s very clean here.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Small, though. I can put you in a nicer place.”

  She held her hands out for his coat. He turned to let her slide it from his shoulders. “I don’t want a nicer place,” she said, standing behind him. “I don’t want any of your money that I don’t earn.”

  He turned with a smile at the statement, at the double meaning it took in his head.

  She frowned. “I don’t mean it like that.”

  The time was after midnight. Jacob Tench and Judith put on no pretense about why he was here in her room. She took him out of his clothes, arranging them neatly on a chair to show she shared in the subterfuge; he could not return home in wrinkled clothes. He succumbed to her hands but remained her master. She played the servant again, in a different fashion from her maid’s blue uniform and white apron, but another discipline she’d been taught long ago. Jacob Tench lay naked on his back across her narrow bed. Judith sealed his lips with a finger to save talk for afterward.

  She massaged him, kneading the folds of his privileged life. His torso was soft; in it she felt desks and automobiles, social dinners like tonight’s. His forearms and shoulders had for too many years labored only in politics. Judith did not undress to sit across his hips; she kicked off only her shoes. He reached up for her uniform a few times to tug it, but she stayed clothed awhile longer. She preferred to keep her power hidden until the time she chose, for her purposes.

  When she did undress, she stood beside the bed in the slim glow of the one lamp. At first she did not allow his touch, once more pretending shyness. Their first sex had been a rushed encounter four days ago in his Georgetown house, in his office there. She’d stood beside his desk, still in her uniform and apron, and he took her from behind while his wife napped upstairs. He’d dropped her underpants and rubbed the brown orbs of her bottom like great gems, that was all she’d allowed him to see of her. Now he lay in her room catching his breath at the stages of her nakedness.

  In the same way she’d treated his clothes, she folded hers in an attempt to appear self-conscious. She lapped one arm across her breasts and laid the other over her belly. She stepped to the side of the mattress where Tench rose to an elbow. She let his fingers play over her stomach. She dropped her arms and stood for his review.

  “My God,” he whispered.

  Judith did not lie on the bed, but spread her legs for him. Her own aroma reached her nostrils off his hand. She stared down and waited, letting him feel the promises of her.

  “I can’t stand this,” he moaned.

  “Good.”

  “What do you want, Desiree? Everybody wants something.”

  She left the question unanswered. Instead, she straddled him, matched him, and nestled down. She fixed his eyes and held them, keeping her heels on the floor, her breasts at his face as she rocked. His hands gripped her buttocks and thighs and shoved her to the rhythm he wanted. He did not last long. Judith muffled his mouth with her hand, not because she cared if a neighbor might hear but because she did not want to. Never once did she kiss him.

  She lay beside him while he stared at her ceiling and slowed his breathing. He uttered how incredible that had been and said nothing of affection. She didn’t expect him to. Her role as Desiree was to please him; his was to accept it and pay her in pittances.

  She rolled to lay her head on his chest. She listened to his heart, so close to the surface, easy to reach.

  “I think your wife might know about us.”

  Tench drew a sharp breath.

  “Why do you say that?”

  “She cried today in the library, something awful.”

  He snorted, joggling her head on his chest.

  “My wife is what they call a manic-depressive. She cries every afternoon. She’s like the rains in the fucking Amazon forest. You could grow ferns around my wife’s feet with how much she cries. Don’t worry. She doesn’t know about us. If she did, there’d be hell on earth, I guarantee you.”

  “Is she that unhappy?”

  “Unhappy’s got nothing to do with it. She just swings back and forth so far I can’t keep up half the time.”

  Judith endured his sigh, a man with a troubling wife, in the bed of his maid.

  “Let’s talk about something else,” he said.

  “Tell me about your boss. Mr. Forrestal.”

  “What’s to tell? Man works like a dog. Amazed I got him out for dinner tonight. He made a fortune on Wall Street in the twenties, managed to hang on to most of it during the crash. He had my job until Secretary Knox died and he got promoted, then I took his spot. All in all, I’d say he’s a cold fish, but he’s on the way up. He and I get along because we both have nutso wives. His was a Ziegfeld chorus girl.”

  Judith smoothed a palm across Tench’s abdomen. “So, if he died, you’d get his job?”

  Tench laughed. “Forrestal’s not dying anytime soon. He’s got too much work on his desk.”

  Judith sat up and crossed her legs.

  “But let’s play a game. If he died tomorrow, who would be the new Secretary of the Navy? You?”

  “We’re in the middle of a war. Who else would they get? Yeah, me, I guess.”

  “Then you’d meet with the President?”

  “I already do.”

  “But every day, you’d meet Roosevelt?”

  “Sure.”

  “Would the President come to Forrestal’s funeral?”

  Tench scooted back against the wall, fluffing a pillow for his back.

  “What an odd question. Is that some kind of New Orleans voodoo thing, who comes to whose funeral?”

  “It’s just a game, Jacob. I’m just imagining.”

  He stroked her thigh. “Alright, don’t get upset on me. Yes, if his health was good that day, Roosevelt would most likely go to Forrestal’s funeral.”

  Judith smiled at Tench. She could make him naval secretary, could hav
e done it tonight in his own home. Six drops of cyanide blended with dimethyl sulfoxide to open the skin pores, mixed with lanolin as an emulsifier. She would have worn condoms under the fingers of the cotton gloves. The lemon oil on them from her polishing and the lanolin would have hidden the poison’s telltale almond scent. She could have rubbed the cream on Forrestal’s neck while she pulled his coat up over his shoulders; she practiced tonight and he’d felt nothing. Ten minutes later, after he’d driven away, the secretary would have become short of breath, then dizzy and nauseated until he fainted. His thin body would convulse. He might have wrecked the car and killed himself that way, but that was wishful thinking. In any event, he’d be dead a half hour after leaving the Tench house. It would look like a heart attack. And if somehow the poison were discovered in an investigation, it would not be in his stomach. The source would be indeterminate, but the motive would lie with the ambitious assistant secretary, or his unstable social-climber wife, in whose house he’d spent the evening. By the time any eyes were turned on Judith, she would be long gone, hopefully with her task accomplished.