“You have denied me nothing. You are my bounteous and most munificent lord and master.” Her eyes had fallen on the damning evidence which he had spread out on the tuffet. “And now, because of mistaken jealousy, I am about to die.”
“Mistaken!” It was a broken cry from a breaking heart. “Mistaken?”
She sat down beside him, tenderly fondled his toes. “Mistaken, my love. It all began so innocently, Etienne, almost in jest, this gentle nightmare.”
“Jest!”
She nodded. Her enormous eyes flooded with tears for a moment. She dried them with a tiny kerchief, snuffled delicately, went on:
“One day, less than a month agone, my kite, caught in a capricious downdraft, disappeared into an open window of the building there, and when I drew it down, someone had written upon it; these were the words: ‘Veiled enchantress of the roof, I am a poor inventor dry of inspiration and close to perishing. Let me look but once upon your face before I go. I ask no more!’
“What harm, thought I,” she continued, “what harm in granting this poor devil his dying wish, and so, only for an instant, mind you, I lowered my veil. That, I thought, was an end of it.”
“What harm,” Etienne echoed hollowly. “What harm!”
“But no!” Mercedes rose, paced to the door and back in obvious agitation. Dear Allah, thought Etienne, what loveliness. “No,” she said, sinking down beside him, “a few days later my kite once more – what Fates and Furies direct these things? – swooped to that window, and this time he wrote, ‘A plot’s afoot against your master, Etienne de Rocoque, and we must join in a counterplot to foil it!’ ”
“A plot!” Etienne half rose, sank back.
“Aye. And dangling from my kite were these.” She indicated the binoculars, manual, tracing paper. “Through infinite trial and error, I learned to communicate with him by semaphore from the window there. He swore that if I breathed a word to you about this dark conspiracy against you, all was lost. He told me his name, learned mine.”
“The plot then, what of that?” Etienne cried. “Who was involved?”
Mercedes shook her head. “I begin now to believe that it was only a figment, a tissue of lies,” she said. “Because,” she lowered her eyes, and her whole delightful body flushed a fragile pink, “a week ago he sent me a sonnet.”
“By wigwag?”
She nodded.
“The keys, then,” he demanded gently, “what of the keys?”
“That was before,” she murmured. “He said that he must have some means of gaining entrance to the house, to – these were his words – ‘Nip the fiendish designs upon de Rocoque in the bud, just as they are about to flower.’ ”
Etienne sighed. “My child, my sumptuous child,” he patted her hand, “you have been taken in.”
“I know it now!” She leaped to her feet and danced a little dance. “I know it now, my own true love, my king, my benefactor. But I did it all for you! Can you forgive?”
“The keys,” Etienne’s voice was barely audible, “he never used the keys?”
“Never.” Her innocence was a sword, a shield, a banner. “Never!”
Etienne was smiling, went on in a shaky whisper: “And the Tasting Machine. What of that?”
She stopped in mid-pirouette and gazed at him in puzzlement. “The what?”
“This varlet Vincent followed me home a little while ago. He had a machine that he said he had invented especially for me, and when I asked its price, he said – Etienne’s voice broke a touch – “its price was you.”
Her petaled face darkened; a half-hue with anger, curved to a kind of agony. She caught her breath. “The knave,” she muttered in a small spasm of loathing. “The unspeakable blackguard! What have you done with him?”
Etienne rose. “I have put him away,” he said, “in a place where he may dwell for a little while upon the bitter lees of vanity and youthful presumption. For only a little while, my sweet. Then I shall burden him with gold and jewels and send him on his way.”
“And the Machine?”
“It is an interesting novelty. At some time after nine I am expecting guests, the first in several months. It may amuse them.” He crossed to the door.
“I want to see it!” She ran to him, clapping her hands in childish joy. “I must see it!”
“Later,” he said, and he stooped to kiss her nose. “Later, my one . . .
Then he went out through the tiny foyer, closed and locked the door.
When Etienne came to the front room of his own apartment on the third floor, the day was duskening, there was the small drum of distant thunder. He turned on the lights, and saw, to his startled amazement, that Gertrude had fainted, was hanging upside down from a branch of the rubber plant. Swiftly and gently he disengaged her clenched talons and, hurrying into the bathroom, waved a phial of smelling salts beneath her beak. After a time she opened one eye.
“What is it, my saffron beauty?” he purred solicitously.
She opened her other eye and regarded him dully, expressionlessly. She said no word. He released her and she fluttered out, through the corridor and down the back stairs. Etienne frowned, shrugged, fell to dressing. As was his wont when expecting guests, he wore a belted smock, pantaloons of stiffly starched white duck, a tall and extravagantly flared chef’s cap. His chest glittered with jeweled medals – only a small part of his collection, but enough to cover an area of one square cubit.
After a last more or less resigned glance at his reflection in the mirror, he went back to the front room and, picking up the entirely quiescent Tasting Machine, carried it down to the Salle à Manger, placed it on one end of the table, and went on to the kitchen. Bubu was peeling a mangosteen; Gertrude was nowhere to be seen. Etienne peeked into an oven, uncovered a steaming pot and sniffed, gave its contents a reflective stir.
“Where is that absurd bird?” he finally demanded.
Bubu turned a fast back somersault, gestured towards the garden.
“She swooned,” Etienne continued, “swooned dead away. It’s probably the heat.”
He went then to the big slate upon which, only as a reminder, he sometimes chalked his menus, scrawled:
Anguilles au Gris, Vert, et Rouge
Anchois Robespierre
Oeufs de Rocs en Gelée
Veloute d’Eperlans Central Park
Agulhacreola au Sauce Nacre
Sylphides à la Crème de Lion Mann
Endive Belge au Goo
Grives, Becfigues, et Béguinettes
et Merles de Corse Bubu
Bubu, avidly watching, swelled with pride. Etienne must indeed be in a magnificent mood thus to honor him in naming a brand new dish. Etienne cocked his head and grinned at Bubu’s glee, scrawled on:
Hamburger 61st Street
Coots avec Leeks Navets Farcis Bleu
Ballotines de Oison Mercedes
He stopped and was thoughtful, went to an open window that gave upon the garden. The sky was writhing with thunder clouds and, by an abrupt flash of lightning, he saw Gertrude in the magnolia tree abstractedly tearing a large white blossom into bits. He whistled, but she only glanced fleetingly, fleetingly, in his direction, then lifted her head and bayed mournfully at the darkling, tumultuous sky. It was an eerie sound.
“Bright-feathered imbecile,” he muttered tenderly. “She’ll get soaking wet in another minute.”
A few drops of rain pattered on the sill. He whistled once more, crossed back to the slate, and added:
Salade de Concombres, Ambergris
et Choux Jaune
Jambon à la Prague
Sous la Cendre Teak
Fraises Réve de Bébé Blaque
Péche Attila
Bavaroise Gertrude
He was thoughtful again, crossed to the smallest of the refrigerators, and gently removed the eleven perfect daisies which would serve as an epergne. Opening the refrigerator, he thought of Vincent. It would not do to leave that brash youth too long in the Crucifreeze.
Perhaps another half-hour of chilled meditation upon his sins would suffice, then Etienne would free him, pay him handsomely for the Tasting Machine, and send him packing. It was well for Vincent – he smiled wryly – that he was not a vindictive man.
There was a bowl of caviar in the small refrigerator, the luminous, absinthe-greenish kind. It had been flown from Baku the previous day. It occurred to Etienne that it might be as well to test the Machine once more before his guests arrived. He took the bowl into the dining room and placed it on the table; almost immediately the Machine began to hum, whirr softly, ever so softly. The spoon arm slowly unfolded, reached out and – snup! – engulfed a great mouthful, snatched it to the aperture, popped it in. The filament began to glow, and then, sibilantly, sensually, unmistakably, the Machine chortled with pleasure.
Etienne heaved a great and beatific snortle. It worked, and perfectly. He carried the bowl back into the kitchen and put it in the small refrigerator. The Machine’s voice followed him for a moment with thin whines of anguish. That was as well, he decided. Let it be ravenous for the feast to come.
He listened then. He could hear Bubu in the cellar – clink and stumble, rumble, plink – as he chose wines to accompany dinner; he could hear the rain outside, a tenuous shuffle of thunder, Gertrude wetly baying at the sky; he could hear the distant surf of tires on Park Avenue.
And then he heard another sound – a slam, a click, a closed door. He wondered for a little while where it came from, then abruptly dropped his spoon and closed a pot, hurried to the Salle. The door was closed, locked.
He pounded on it lightly, then more heavily, then hard. A horrid sweat grew suddenly upon his flesh.
“Mercedes!” he shouted. “Are you there?”
There was no answer and no sound. He smiled a pea-green smile and tried to pull himself together. His nerves . . . Obviously an errant breeze had sprung. He need simply find the key . . . and . . .
The key, the only key, was inside, and this was a heavy, practically impregnable door. Ah, well, a locksmith . . .
“Bubu,” he called, but Bubu was in the cellar, and thunder quenched his voice. Thinking of keys, how could he have thought that Mercedes could be here? He himself had locked her door.
But wait! If she had traced the keys, and Vincent had made duplicates, then she, too, might . . .
From beyond the door there came – or did he only imagine it? – a faint, far hum, a tremulous, low-pitched moan of – what was it like, anticipation?
Etienne whirled, rushed up the stairs. Mercedes’ door was open. He shouted for her, shrieked her name. A crash of thunder worried away to silence. Dashing back down the stairs he fell, described a spinning parabola, and landed on his head. There was darkness . . .
He must have been unconscious for a full minute, perhaps more. When he sat up and ruefully rubbed his skull, it seemed that it was spring. Birds were singing, and a gentle fountain somewhere gently played. Then he knew it was the rain, a roaring cloudburst. And over it there was a great, expanding sigh of ecstasy that shook the house.
Etienne remembered then, and clawed his way along the corridor, weakly beat upon the door, and sobbed, “Mercedes!” And she answered him.
“Etienne!” she cried, and her sweet, tinkling voice was strained and harsh, like coarse silk tearing. “Etienne – I lied! I—”
And then her words were drowned in such a cataclysmic rhapsody of rapturous squeals and groans and slobbering slurrups of delight as to stun the ear and stop the heart. “Vincent!” she screamed at last, above this storm of gustatory joy, “Vincent, my love!”
And then her voice was stilled.
Bubu stood, his arms full of dusty bottles, staring down at his master in ajar-jawed astonishment. The rain had slacked, and in the garden Gertrude aped a nightingale, split the satin of her throat with melancholy song. And now the sounds beyond the door subsided slowly to a kind of satiated coda, a roundelay of little grunts and chucklings.
Etienne stumbled to his feet and stared unseeingly at Bubu. Then a little, very little life illumed his eyes.
“Fetch me the ax,” he said.
Mercedes’ robe was neatly folded on a chair, her spun-glass slippers glittered together on the floor. The Tasting Machine was silent, somnolent, its filament glowing with a blinding white-hot fever. Etienne took it gently into his arms and carried it to the cellar, held it poised for a moment above an open hundred-gallon cask of Thracian wine, then let it go. It came up thrice, and at the last time Etienne fancied – was it his overwrought imagination? – that it called out wispily for help, then choked and strangled, sank, and was entirely gone.
Back in the kitchen he opened an ironwood cabinet and removed a case of thin, brilliantly glistening knives, fell to sharpening them. Bubu was polishing glasses; Gertrude flew in through the open window, perched above the range, and preened her wet, bedraggled feathers.
“Pieces of eight,” she squawked. “Pieces of eight!”
The cuckoo clock on the floor above distantly caroled.
Etienne wondered, was it eight or nine? Or did it matter? He went to the slate, gazed at it reflectively for a little time, then slowly erased Hamburger 61st Street and scrawled in its place: Brochettes de Foie Vincent.
The front doorbell chimed.
“Please answer it,” he said to Bubu. “Sir Osbert Fawning and the Dowager Lady Swathe are often early.”
FINDERS KILLERS!
John D. MacDonald
1
We waited for him to run, because that was the final proof of guilt that we needed. We had him bottled up in a Chicago apartment. Our boys drove the cabs, delivered the milk, cleaned the street in front and in general covered him like a big tent. I don’t know exactly how we gave it away. But we did. We threw it to him.
You can say we were careless. That’s in the same league with Monday morning quarterbacking. Our excuse was that we didn’t know he was tipped. He walked into the apartment house and never came out again. Three hours later when we took the wire and tape off the fat woman across the hall from where he had lived, we learned how he’d used that cold, dark, drizzly evening to good advantage.
She was a tall woman, and fat. We knew he wore size 10B shoes. Hers were 9A. He tapped at her door. He hit her so hard that she still remembers hearing the tapping, but she can’t remember opening the door. Figuring the rest was easy. He merely undressed and wrapped his own clothes around his middle, tying them in place. Then he got into her clothes. He took her raincape and a big floppy hat. Maybe he’d taken the precaution of shaving himself closely. Maybe not. It was a dark night.
He walked out. Aragon, holding the night glasses on the apartment door, didn’t spot him. The boys in the cellar played back the recording of him going to bed. It was a sensitive pickup. I heard the shoes drop, the springs creak, the sleepy yawn.
And that was the way Torran walked out on us – walked out with two hundred and forty thousand dollars in brand new treasury notes in five-hundred dollar denominations – all in serial sequence, most of it still in the mint wrappers. In addition he had an estimated twenty-five thousand in smaller bills, all used stuff. He had a lot of the bonds, too. Negotiable stuff. Very hot. Even if they’d just dumped out the bank guards without the holes in the backs of their heads, the bonds would have been hot.
They had carried the guards across the Connecticut line before dumping them out. Torran and Holser. We knew that much. We didn’t have to worry about Holser. Some kids on a picnic found Holser a hundred feet from the highway. The thigh had gone bad under the dirty bandage. There was a hole in the back of his head. The slug matched the ones taken from the two guards.
There is not the slightest point in going over the history of how we located Torran. It was dull work. It took seven months. Then we had him bottled. We still couldn’t be certain that there wasn’t a third party involved. So we watched him. I was the one who advised against moving in and grabbing him. “Wait a little,” I said. “He’ll either run some more, or
he’ll have company.” Either way, I thought, we couldn’t lose.
I’d been with it for seven months. By painstaking spade work I’d uncovered the initial lead that eventually led to him. I was a hero. So Torran slipped away. So I was a bum.
It took three days to prove we hadn’t the faintest idea whether he’d left town, and if so, how, and in what direction.
Broughton called me in.
His eyebrows look like white caterpillars. He looks like a deacon in the neighborhood church. He’s the Broughton who went into that New Orleans hotel room in ’37. He expected one man to be in there. There was a slip. There were four of them. When it was over, Broughton was still standing up. The lead he was carrying didn’t pull him down until he got back out into the hall. That Broughton!
“Sit down, Gandy,” he said.
I sat. No excuses. They never go.
“Washington is disturbed, Gandy,” he said.
“As well they might be, Mr Broughton.”
“I’ve watched you carefully, Gandy. You’ve got a lot of presence. You speak well and you think clearly. But you’re too ambitious. You expect too much, too fast.”
“And?”
“And I could butter you up to keep you aboard. During your four years with us, you’ve done well. But now you’re marked. You saw what the papers did to us. That was unfortunate. Now you’re not Agent Gandy any more in Washington. You’re Russ Gandy, the one who lost Torran.”
“So I lost him. So I’ll find him again.”
“That’s what I’m trying to tell you. You’re being reassigned to duty with the School.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
He looked at me and the blue eyes went hard and then softened. “I was pretty ambitious for a while, Gandy. Until the afternoon I had Barrows trapped and he walked away from it.”
“I see,” I said. I stood up. I was too mad to stay sitting. “Suppose I go find him anyway?”
The New Mammoth Book of Pulp Fiction Page 13