‘You ought to take lessons from Hans,’ she said bitterly. ‘You ask him, some time, how to deal with daughters. He knows it all.’
‘Now, Butch,’ said Johnny reproachfully, ‘do I deserve that tone? I can’t help being anxious, when I see you going overboard for a man I don’t like and don’t trust. You take my word for it, he isn’t worth any hard words between you and me—’
‘God!’ said Hero incredulously. ‘We sound like a cut-price soap opera.’
‘You’re only just nineteen,’ said Johnny doggedly, ‘and I’m responsible for you, and whether you find it corny or not, my girl, I’m going to be responsible for you. You think about it overnight, and don’t kid yourself I’m fooling. If you’re not to be trusted with a car, right, I’ll get rid of the Aston, and if you’re not to be trusted with money to spend I’ll tie up your allowance so you can’t get at it.’
That did it. Outraged, Hero marched across the hearth to stare him closely and fiercely in the eye. It wasn’t the threat that infuriated her, it was his sheer, monumental stupidity.
‘You can do all that,’ she said, ‘but still you won’t be able to dictate to me whom I shall love – or even like.’
‘Maybe not,’ said Johnny, equally grim, ‘but I can put a whole lot of obstacles in the way of your making ago of it.’
‘You might alter my ideas about some of the people I used to like though,’ said Hero as a vicious afterthought, and stalked out of the room shaken to the heart by the cruelty of the barb she hadn’t even suspected she was going to throw.
Franz Hassilt had called an extra rehearsal for the next morning, bent on worrying out a few rough edges he had detected in the immensely complex and delicate structure of the last act. It went well and ended early; and Marc Chatrier was just opening his late mail in his dressing-room when Johnny Truscott tapped at the door and walked in upon him.
‘Can you spare me five minutes? This won’t take longer.’
He had closed the door behind him with the finality of a man going into action, and his lively, inquisitive face had about it the settled look it must always have worn when he entered dangerous waters. Johnny was as capable of subtlety as anyone, but what he hated was inaction when action was ultimately inevitable. Moving in, he always looked the happier for it.
‘At the risk of appearing both obvious and crude,’ he said, declining the chair Chatrier swung round for him from the table, ‘I’ve got something to say to you. Keep away from my daughter.’
‘At the risk of appearing equally obvious,’ said Chatrier, suddenly erect and attentive, ‘I would point out that you seem to have committed your daughter to pretty close contact with me, since you allow her to sing major rôles in your theatre.’
‘Figaro,’ said Johnny crisply, ‘I don’t mind. Figaro I can stomach. Chatrier, to be blunt, I can’t. And I’m telling you again, leave my girl alone. I pay you what your agent asked, you give me, amply, what I’m paying for. Leave it at that, and we can respect each other and work together. But lay off Hero, or I pitch you out of here, and you can make it cost me what you like, it’ll still be very well worth it. And, if you’ll overlook a further crudity, the publicity will do you more harm than it will me – the stage you’ve reached.’
‘Ah!’ said Chatrier in a soft voice, and faintly smiling his ambiguous smile. ‘It’s like that, is it?’
He folded the letter he had been reading, and slipped it back into its envelope with deliberately graceful movements of long, elegantly-shaped fingers.
‘My dear Truscott, I am comfortable here, I have no intention of moving out, and none of suing. And I like your daughter.’
‘That I can believe. But it doesn’t alter the way I feel.’
‘Ah, but isn’t the way she feels of more importance?’
‘Not,’ said Johnny, ‘if you want the gold mind as well as the girl. And don’t pretend you’d be very interested without it, however much you might like her.’
‘Oh, come, how little faith you show in the charms of a very delightful young lady.’
‘I’ve warned you,’ said Johnny, unmoved. ‘I don’t say things twice.’
He turned and walked to the door, and his hand was already outstretched to open it when the soft voice behind him said conversationally: ‘How’s the export-import business doing, Truscott? How much per body these days, and in and out of where? Or have you become a hundred per cent legitimate? I dare say you’re rich enough to be able to afford to.’
The door remained closed. Johnny stood a moment with ears pricked, considering the implications, and they spread widening circles into recesses of his life of which he had not thought for a long time.
He turned slowly, and came back into the room, gazing down at Chatrier with a thoughtful face. The agreeable mask, turned up to him smiling, could have been covering a mind of knowledge or a monumental bluff.
‘Really well-informed bastards,’ said Johnny in a sweet, small voice, ‘talk less.’
‘They talk just enough to convey what they mean. I can be an interesting conversationalist when I lay myself out to please. Your authorities, for instance, would be interested in some of the stories I could tell about your old passenger lists. There would be names on them they never knew – wouldn’t there? Not all those pathetic refugees of yours came in like Gisela, all open and above-board-did they? There were others …’
Johnny relaxed his cramped fingers in his trouser-pockets, and wrote off the hope that this was simple bluff. The fellow knew about Gisela. She was all right, she had nothing to hide; nothing about her had ever been hidden, except the worst of her experiences, which she kept for ever to herself. But there had been others. There had indeed!
He remembered a Spaniard, tainted with a mild trade-union background, who had been just one jump ahead of a long prison term, without means, and without a hope of getting legal admittance to Britain. He’d be old now, but he could still be extradited if they caught up with him. And the Algerian girl who was still wanted by the French, if only they had known where to look for her.
Even some of the wartime waifs, whose political past, honest enough and innocent enough in Johnny’s eyes, had contained elements which made their admittance by ordinary channels dubious, at a period when there was no time to brief counsel and argue the matter out. And since then, certain scholars and artists of intractably independent mind who would not, simply would not, endorse theories and acts they held to be immoral. A long procession of his crimes passed before his eyes and warmed his heart.
Maybe there were one or two questionable cases among them, but on the whole he was proud of them. Those who could pay had paid, and those who couldn’t, hadn’t. The costs had been met, somehow. And then, the Palestine days. The active nights along that inhospitable coast, the crowded, passionate, desperate, resolute and tragic cargoes, shaken loose from their past, and bent with all the hoarded fire of their natures upon reaching their future. Of them, too, he thought with pleasure and warmth, and gratitude, too, because they at least were safe, nobody was going to extradite them any more. All they could do, if the record came to light, was sink him in the hottest water of his life. But the others could be hounded out of their new and fragile security back to countries that had ill-used them and codes that were waiting to kill them.
Not, thought Johnny behind his placid face, if I know it.
‘You tell me,’ he said. ‘It’s your story.’
Chatrier leaned back in his chair at ease, and lit a cigarette. He was smiling, and the sparkle in his black eyes looked entirely confident, but he was an actor off the stage as well as on, and who could be sure what sort of a hand he really held?
‘It would take too long,’ he said, ‘and you’d find it tedious. Perhaps just one little instance will settle your mind. You took off a certain party once from Italy, when Mussolini was cracking and the Germans were taking over. I could name the police official in Rome who was your contact and acted as go-between, but names are indiscreet. A fat fellow wi
th a short beard – you remember?’
Johnny continued to regard him with the bright, impartial interest of a helpful pupil taking pity on a dim teacher.
‘Yes, I think you remember. They shot him afterwards, did you know that? There were five people, all of them artists of one kind or another, all wanted by the Germans. But they weren’t official business, and they weren’t the kind that are easy to dispose of. A travelled lot, not wanted in several countries. Some of them got through eventually with legal papers, and some had to do without. But they all found asylum. Two of them in this country – and I could name both of them. I know what else you took aboard, too. Three very valuable canvases stolen from a German who had himself undoubtedly stolen them in the first place, and quite an assortment of smaller works of art – most of them in America now, I should imagine. They’d be very interested in that privateering sideline, too, but to do you justice I don’t suppose that worries you very much. But the people, Truscott, the people would worry you a great deal.’
He shouldn’t have lingered with such particular emphasis on his single instance; Johnny had him now. Eighteen years is a long time, and men change, but it was not for nothing Johnny had been scouring his remoter memories for that precise turn of the black head, and the rich music of the voice.
He hadn’t been known as Marc Chatrier then, and he hadn’t yet consolidated even the ground of his present reputation. Five people, all artists of one kind or another, and all in imminent danger of arrest; and one of them a young singer, born in Alsace, admittedly no hero, admittedly somewhat compromised in his complaisant dealings with Nazi authority, but due to be picked up within a day or two, and certain to be done to death rapidly or slowly thereafter. Johnny groped after the name, but it still eluded him. The face, hardened, polished and aged, smiled up at him through the smoke of Chatrier’s cigarette fom narrowed black eyes.
That made things clearer, if not easier. It meant that he really had knowledge he could use to harm at least two people besides Johnny. But in all probability it also meant that that was the sum of his knowledge.
Did that make him less dangerous? Hardly. What mattered was not what he himself could uncover, but what was there to be uncovered once he set the process in motion. If they followed up one case and found it proved, they would set about stripping all the rest. And even if they stopped at one or two, what use was that? They were none of them expendable.
Johnny relaxed; he knew now where he stood. No need to dispute what they both remembered very well; there were no witnesses.
‘Well, well!’ he said. ‘So that’s what became of the starved tomcat baritone from the Rome opera. You have got on in the world, haven’t you? No wonder I couldn’t quite place you. All this time I’ve been fretting over little things about you, trying to decide who it was you reminded me of. And I shouldn’t wonder if you weren’t on the run at all, if only I’d had time to go into it a bit more thoroughly.’
‘Oh, yes, I was on the run, and only just ahead of the axe, too. It was a little private matter that had made Rome too hot to hold me – a little affair of a woman who belonged to a German general.’
‘It would be!’ said Johnny, sighing. ‘Women are your line. If only I’d known you then as well as I’m getting to know you now, you needn’t have given any of them any more trouble.’
‘Ah, but this is different.’ The malicious smile caressed him shamelessly. ‘This is the love of a lifetime, my dear Truscott, and my intentions are honourable.’
‘Like all hell!’ said Johnny.
They studied each other long and steadily.
‘Think about it,’ said Chatrier, ‘think about it in the calm of solitude, my dear fellow, and I’m sure all your lame dogs can rely on you not to let them down by doing anything foolish.’
Johnny looked at him for a long moment in considering silence, with nothing in his face to indicate either anger or uneasiness, and then without haste turned and walked out of the room, closing the door quietly behind him. There was no point in wasting energy in words or gestures now; thought was indeed indicated, and pretty urgently, too.
Even if Hero made a healthy recovery from her infatuation, this man would continue a potential danger to all those helpless people he had threatened. As long as he lived there was always the possibility that he might some day find it to his advantage to set the hunt in motion, for gain or for spite, or simply for sport if the fit took him.
Johnny happened to be down in Sam’s box by the stage-door when Marc Chatrier came down from his dressing-room and strolled along the corridor to the door, where the car Johnny had put at his disposal was waiting for him. They watched him pass, hat at a debonair angle, whimsical mouth smiling faintly, eyes dreamily pleased with life and the sunlit noon. They did not take their eyes from him until the car slid forward from the kerb and vanished round the corner. In the corner by the window Codger knitted away with silent devotion, his steel needles clicking merrily, his large eyes fixed fondly on Johnny. In his presence they never strayed.
‘Marriage of Figaro!’ said Johnny bitterly, staring after the acquisition he had hailed with such innocent pride not so long ago. ‘That fellow’s ripe for a funeral, if everybody had what I wish him!’
Chapter Three
Johnny closed the door, and the faint, quivering, distant tremor of the strings leading into ‘Porgi amor,’ one of the most melting sounds in the world, was cut off sharply, as if by a blow. The second act beginning, the house full and responsive, and the mysterious fine thread of splendid tension already lifting players and audience out of their everyday selves, into a world of superhuman achievement and supernormal sensitivity of apprehension; the two halves of a magic, making between them one of those miracles of a night that send human beings out renewed, never to be quite the same again. And Johnny shut the door on it with a clouded face.
‘What’s the matter?’ said Gisela, turning from the glass. Marcellina’s mantilla lay discarded on the ottoman by the wall, but she still wore the black lace dress with its tight, boned bodice of stiff silk. She had not the operatic figure; he could almost have shut her waist in his two hands. He tried it, smiling faintly as he stretched his long fingers; and all with that shadow still heavy on his eyes.
‘Something’s happened,’ said Gisela with certainty. ‘What is it?’
‘Yes, something’s happened, all right. Yesterday, after the rehearsal. I tried to get you on the phone afterwards, but you were out. And I didn’t have time to speak to you alone before the curtain went up tonight.’
‘I knew there was something, or you’d have been in your box.’ Gisela swept Marcellina’s lace gloves from the long stool before her mirror, and drew him down there beside her. ‘Tell me.’
He told her, as simply and bluntly as if he had been confiding in a man. She listened in silence, her eyes intent upon his face. The shadow that lay upon him communicated itself to her. At the end she said, slowly feeling her way back through the years to a time she had often been adjured not to remember: ‘You say you took him aboard there in Italy? Are you sure of him?’
‘Yes, now I am. Ever since he came I’ve had an uneasy feeling at the back of my mind that I’d seen him somewhere before, that I ought to know him. But from photographs I did know him – who doesn’t? – and I put it down to that. But as soon as he mentioned that trip I had him. I’m quite sure.’
‘Then he really does know about two people, at least. Could he make trouble for them? After all this time, would anyone want to follow it up, even if they did get in with faked papers?’
‘I think they still might. I think so. She’d probably be all right, she’s getting old, and she lives in retirement, they’ve never had any trouble with her. But the professor has one of those consciences you can’t shut up. He’s up to the eyes in nuclear disarmament, and you know how popular that would make him. It’s taken his friends all their time as it is to keep him out of the active group and jail. And even if he was behaving like an orthodox lamb,’ s
aid Johnny, ploughing deep furrows through his thick brown hair, ‘government departments don’t like being by-passed. They’re only too well aware that three parts of ’em are useless as it is, it doesn’t pay to rub it in.’
‘So he must not set the machinery in motion,’ she said, ‘whatever happens.’
‘No, he mustn’t. I could put up a good running fight over my own record, if it came to it, but I couldn’t protect them. And now we know what cards he holds, it seems to me he’ll always be a danger. Even if I did stand out of his way and give him a free hand with Butch – and I’ll see him in hell first – I should never feel safe from him. The first time he chose to feel himself cramped, and start angling for some new concession, out would come the same threat. I could start an inquiry into his own record, and there might well be stuff there that would shut his mouth tight enough if we could get at it, but that’s going to take time. It isn’t even a question of Hero so much now,’ he said, scrubbing anxiously at his forehead. ‘I saw that as soon as the cards were down. He’s served me with notice that he reckons he can do as he likes round here, or else. And a set-up like we’ve got here is a powerful attraction to a man whose voice isn’t going to be getting any better from now on. I see a sort of dreamy look in his eye, as though he’s seeing himself as director of productions here in a year or two. Can you think of a better old age pension for a man like him?’
‘Open the door, Johnny,’ said Gisela. ‘You’ll miss “Voi che sapete”.’
He looked hastily at his watch and jumped to obey. To this room the sound from the stage came up faint but clear. Hero was already in full song; the notes soared light and true, pouring out all the agitation and ardour and haste of the boy in love with love.
Johnny stood with his head inclined, vulnerably fond and proud, smiling like an idiot, and Gisela, taking her eyes from him for a moment to stub out her cigarette, caught the same look on her own face, and smiled through her preoccupation.
‘She’s good, isn’t she?’ said Johnny, whispering, as shy as if he praised himself.
Funeral of Figaro Page 5