by David Dodge
‘Liar,’ George said.
‘– to be the girl. The newspaper article he was writing was an excuse to learn all he could about you and then meet you, so he could introduce me to you. He drew up an agreement for me to sign, promising to divide anything I was able to get from you –’
‘Liar,’ George said. ‘It was an ordinary employment contract.’
‘– in return for a wardrobe he was going to buy me and the introduction.’ She was speaking sometimes to Freddy, sometimes to Neyrolle, always with the same breathless urgency to get it said, never once looking at Blake, yet the conviction that the explanation was for him grew in his mind. ‘I was sick of the cabaret. I hated exposing myself night after night to drunken tourists who followed me on the street afterwards and propositions in sign language – I’m not defending myself, only trying to explain why I did it –’
‘Get back to my villainy,’ George taunted. ‘Tell them how I led you astray.’
‘I never pretended that you led me astray. I wanted to do it. I wanted to have money, and nice clothes, and to be able to gamble at the casino, and see my picture in the papers as Freddy Farr’s guest aboard the Angel. When you came here and wired me that he was already interested in another girl, that we’d have to postpone our plan until he was tired of her, I thought you were trying to cheat me. I followed you to make sure that you didn’t. I thought I might be able to meet you by myself, Freddy - I couldn’t arrange it at the casino or any of the other places you went, because he was always with you - I thought I might be able to get aboard the yacht, somehow, before you sailed - I was certain I could make myself attractive to you, even if you did have another girl - and then all of a sudden it all seemed so shabby and mean and indecent - at least in Paris I wasn’t making the propositions, or trying to - that I just couldn’t go through with it.’
‘Liar,’ George said.
‘How did you meet Holtz?’ Neyrolle asked quietly.
‘I watched the yacht for several days, looking for my chance. He was watching it too, I suppose, and saw me. He moved into my pension afterwards, to find out what I was up to, and - and I told him I was trying to get up the nerve to ask Freddy for a loan - because I hadn’t any money left, and we were both Americans, and everyone knew how generous he was to pretty girls.’ She finished in a low voice. ‘You know the rest of it.’
‘They don’t know anything yet,’ George jeered. ‘Tell them about the chance you saw to double-cross Holtz and hold Freddy up for a fat bribe to deny that the attachment had ever been served, except that Holtz double-crossed you first! Tell them –’
‘It’s not true!’ She whirled to face, him her eyes blazing. ‘I only wanted what he was going to pay me! I wanted to go back to Paris! I had to go back to Paris, to be decent again!’
‘Now hear my story,’ George said to Neyrolle. ‘she came to me in Paris –’
‘You have told me several stories,’ Neyrolle said. ‘I am only now beginning to understand your anxiety to be the first to speak with her when we boarded the Angel. Tell me, mademoiselle. Was he afraid that you had joined forces with Holtz?’
‘He accused me of it, when he let me out of the cabin.’
‘I see. And you still had the contract, the agreement he had drawn up for a division of M. Farr’s money, that would have tied him to you if you had been tied to the kidnapping?’
‘I didn’t have it with me. It’s in Paris.’
‘You’re both distorting the truth!’ George said, raging. ‘It’s an ordinary employment contract! There’s nothing criminal in introducing a girl to a millionaire, or buying her an outfit of clothes!’
‘Then why were you so eager to ensure that she should not mention the contract, and why did you take such care to prevent her from answering my questions which might have led to a disclosure of its existence, and why have you shielded her so carefully from contact with others to whom she might talk about it? Why did you try to prevent her from coming here tonight?’
‘Because I knew she’d distort the truth as you’re doing now! I haven’t done anything you could charge me with even if the trick had come off! Freddy doesn’t have to give his women yachts and diamond ear-rings! Nobody forces him! If he wants to be a sucker, that’s up to him!’
‘My official biographer,’ Freddy said. ‘Thanks, pal.’
George made a spitting noise.
‘You’re a sucker,’ he said. ‘You’ve always been a sucker. You’ll always be a sucker. Women will rob you blind and laugh at you for it as long as you live. What do you think this tart –’ he tossed a contemptuous shrug at Valentina - ‘is hanging around you for? Your sex appeal?’
Freddy looked down at his splinted finger, then at Valentina. She shook her head, and smiled at him.
‘Not for me,’ she said. ‘I know you would do it if you could. That is enough.’
‘Sam,’ Freddy said.
Blake was watching Marian. She had not once looked at him in all the time she spoke, but his certainty that he, not Freddy or Neyrolle, had drawn her to the Angel to make her shamed confession was as strong as his faith in himself. He wished she would look at him. He needed no words to make his declaration now.
She would not turn her head. He said, ‘What is it, Freddy?’
‘Are you still working for me?’
‘Yes.’
‘Put him off the yacht. Now.’
She looked at him then, and made her own declaration in her use of his name. It was the first time.
‘Not for me either, Sam,’ she said. ‘Don’t fight him. I don’t want it to be like that.’
George laughed.
‘Sam, is it?’ he mocked. ‘Sucker number two. Don’t think you’re the first to get that smooth come-on, Captain. In Paris I had to beat them off her with a stick. She’s –’
Blake hit him.
It was a clumsy blow, driven by his eager need to hurt. It knocked George off balance without knocking him down. Blake followed it up with an attack that had no element of self-defense in it. He did not care that George, recovering, was hitting back more often and more effectively than he was being hit. Blake took a fierce pleasure in the interchange of blows, even in George’s ability to stand up to him. Holtz had been too small for him to fight, Jules too powerful, and against neither man had he been able to feel the animal fury that drove him against his physical match. He was impervious to pain, reckless of hurt. He shook off a punch that brought the taste of blood into the back of his throat, and triumphed in the blood on George’s face. He battered at the face, and was battered, and knew the joy of combat with a man he could hate.
He did not hear Marian say, pleadingly, ‘Not because of me! I don’t want it to be because of me!’ nor Valentina’s reply, ‘When a man fights for you, cheer him!’ He was aware of nothing but the fight and the man he fought until George went down, disappointingly and unexpectedly. Blake had not yet expended his rage. George was limp, conscious but barely so, and past the stage of resistance when Blake heaved the loose body to his shoulder, by a great effort, and took it aft, down the gangplank and stumblingly along the poor footing of the jetty to where the taxi still waited. His knees were buckling before he got there, but he managed to push George into the car and close the door.
‘Take him –’ he said to the taxi driver, and leaned against the car for support. ‘Take him – ’ Stupidly, he did not know how to finish.
Behind him, Neyrolle said, ‘I’ll take him, Captain. I have a dossier to close tonight. Go back now.’
When he did not immediately release his support, the sous-chef took him by the arm to turn him around. Marian was coming towards him alone on the jetty. She moved hesitantly at first, uncertain, then less hesitantly as he went towards her, more quickly when he spoke her name, running the last few steps when he reached out to take her, then laughing in his arms, clinging and hysterical, when he said in seriousness and concern because she was his to worry about, ‘You’ve got to be more careful about running on cobbles. Yo
u’ll really turn an ankle that way, some day.’
FIN
ABOUT DAVID DODGE
David Francis Dodge was born on August 18, 1910 in Berkeley, California. He was the youngest child of George Andrew Dodge, a San Francisco architect, and Maude Ellingwood Bennett Dodge. Following George’s death in an automobile accident, Maude “Monnie” Dodge moved the family (David and his three older sisters, Kathryn, Frances, and Marion) to Southern California, where David attended Lincoln High School in Los Angeles but did not graduate.
At the age of sixteen, he took a job as a messenger at Citizens National Trust & Savings Bank of Los Angeles and began night school classes at the American Institute of Banking. In 1931, after moving up to the position of supervising the bank’s commercial books, he quit the bank to become a marine fireman on a South American run for the Grace Steamship Company. In 1933, he came ashore to work as a stevedore and night watchman for Tubbs Cordage Company in San Francisco. In 1934, he went to work for the San Francisco accounting firm of McLaren, Goode & Co., becoming a Certified Public Accountant in 1937.
On July 17, 1936, he was married to Elva Keith, a former Macmillan Company editorial representative, and their only daughter, Kendal, was born in 1940. After the attack on Pearl Harbor he joined the U.S. Naval Reserve and earned his first commission in October 1942 in the Office of Supervisory Cost Inspector, 12th Naval District, San Francisco. He emerged three years later with the rank of Lieutenant Commander.
David Dodge’s first experience as a writer came through his involvement with the Macondray Lane Players, a group of amateur playwrights, producers, and actors whose goal was to create a theater purely for pleasure. The group was founded by George Henry Burkhardt (Dodge’s brother-in-law) and performed exclusively at Macondria, a little theater located in the basement of Burkhardt’s house at 56 Macondray Lane on San Francisco’s Russian Hill. Other regular company members included Morris Shaw, Kathryn Dodge (Dodge’s sister and Burkhardt’s wife), Frances Montgomery, Steve Broder, Harvey and Edith Muldoon, Whitney Henry, Enola Barker, Lettie Connell (Kathryn Dodge Burkhardt’s daughter), and Elva Dodge. His publishing career began in 1936 when he won First Prize in the Northern California Drama Association’s Third Annual One Act Play Tournament. The prize-winning play, “A Certain Man Had Two Sons,” was subsequently published by the Banner Play Bureau, of San Francisco. Another Dodge play, “Christmas Eve at the Mermaid,” co-written by Loyall McLaren (his boss at McLaren, Goode & Co.), was performed as the Bohemian Club’s Christmas play of 1940, and again in 1959. In 1961 the Grabhorn Press published the play in a volume entitled Shakespeare in Bohemia.
His career as a writer really began, however, when he made a bet with his wife that he could write a better mystery novel than the ones they were reading during a rainy family vacation. He drew on his professional experience as a Certified Public Accountant and wrote his first novel, Death and Taxes, featuring San Francisco tax expert and reluctant detective James “Whit” Whitney. It was published by Macmillan in 1941 and he won five dollars from Elva. Three more Whitney novels soon followed: Shear the Black Sheep (Macmillan, 1942), Bullets for the Bridegroom (Macmillan, 1944) and It Ain’t Hay (Simon & Schuster, 1946), in which Whit tangles with marijuana smugglers. With its subject matter and extremely evocative cover art on both the first edition dust jacket and the paperback reprint, this book remains one of Dodge’s most collectible titles.
Upon his release from active duty by the Navy in 1945, Dodge left San Francisco and set out for Guatemala by car with his wife and daughter, beginning his second career as a travel writer. The Dodge family’s misadventures on the road through Mexico are hilariously documented in How Green Was My Father (Simon & Schuster, 1947). His Latin American experiences also produced a second series character, expatriate private investigator and tough-guy adventurer Al Colby, who first appears in The Long Escape (Random House, 1948).
Two more well-received Colby books appeared in 1949 and 1950. Dodge drew on his experiences living in Arequipa, Peru and his travels around South America to give these novels their locales. In 1950, the Dodge family relocated to the south of France, which, of course, provided the background for his most famous novel, To Catch a Thief (Random House, 1952). With this book, Dodge abandoned series characters and focused on stand-alone suspense adventures set in exotic locales around the world. To Catch a Thief was also Dodge’s greatest career success, primarily due to the fact the Alfred Hitchcock purchased the film rights before the novel was even published and turned it into the 1955 Paramount film starring Cary Grant and Grace Kelly.
In 1952, the Dodges returned to the United States, staying for a time in Burlingame, California, before settling down semi-permanently in Princeton, New Jersey. Dodge picked Princeton because it was centrally located to both his New York and Philadelphia publishers. After Kendal graduated from high school in 1957 and went off to Wellesley, they sold their house and started traveling again.
For the remainder of his career, Dodge alternated between mystery and travel writing, continuing the saga of the Dodge family as they bumbled and bargained their way around the world. The Poor Man’s Guide to Europe, a “tipsheet for nickel-nursers and skinflints” appeared in 1953 and was so successful that Random House issued annual revised editions from 1954 to 1959. It was also a Book-of-the-Month Club selection. Although this book was a more traditional—and practical—travel book, it too was liberally sprinkled with anecdotes of the Dodge family’s personal experiences. He also wrote numerous travel articles for various magazines, appearing as a regular contributor to Holiday Magazine from 1948 to 1968.
In 1968, David and Elva settled in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. Elva died on October 17, 1973. David died less than a year later on August 8, 1974. They are both buried in San Miguel.
Although a writer by profession, Dodge’s true love was travel. He was fond of explaining that while many writers traveled in order to gather material to write about, his goal was to write in order to gather money to travel.
In 2005, Hard Case Crime reprinted Dodge’s second Al Colby novel, Plunder of the Sun, and in October 2006 published his last completed novel, The Last Match. The manuscript, which remained unsold at the time of his death, was discovered among his papers and is the first new Dodge material to be published in 35 years.
Randal Brandt, October 2006
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Novels
Death and Taxes (1941)
Shear the Black Sheep (1942)
Bullets for the Bridegroom (1944)
It Ain’t Hay (1946)
The Long Escape (1948)
Plunder of the Sun (1949)
The Red Tassel (1950)
To Catch a Thief (1952)
The Lights of Skaro (1954)
Angel’s Ransom (1956)
Loo Loo’s Legacy (1960)
Carambola (1961)
Hooligan (1969)
Troubleshooter (1971)
The Last Match (2006)
Travel Books
How Green Was My Father (1947)
How Lost Was My Weekend (1948)
The Crazy Glasspecker (1949)
20,000 Leagues Behind the 8-Ball (1951)
The Poor Man’s Guide to Europe (1953)
Time Out for Turkey (1955)
The Rich Man’s Guide to the Riviera (1962)
The Poor Man’s Guide to the Orient (1965)
Fly Down, Drive Mexico (1968)