House of Cards

by Stanley Ellin

  “Oh la la” Véronique said merrily. “You’re just jealous.”

  “Jealous!” said Louis in an aggrieved voice. “If I had a jealous bone in my body, do you think I’d take you to see Cary Grant?”

  “Joking aside,” Eliane put in, “at least now we know who was pretending to be Max Marchat”

  “And who is he?” Louis demanded. He glowered at me. “Admit it. It’s just too much money for any such job. And look how the arrangements were made. Whoever heard of such intrigue when it comes to hiring a tutor for a kid?”

  He was right, of course. But if looking at it the way he did was going to cost me three thousand francs a month, I preferred to keep my eyes tight shut.

  4

  The car that pulled up before the pension at exactly nine in the morning was a magnificent gray Mercedes limousine. Its chauffeur, a hard-faced, leathery man of about fifty, wore a gray livery.

  “I’m Georges Devesoul,” he said curtly when I gave him my name. He jerked a thumb toward the seat beside him. “Let’s go. Company’s waiting.”

  When he swung the car around the corner past the weather-beaten arch of the Porte Saint-Denis—the poor man’s Arc de Triomphe, as Louis once described it—a thought struck me.

  “You’re Monsieur de Gonde’s chauffeur, aren’t you?” I said.

  “Yes.”

  “Is it his son I’m supposed to be tutoring?”

  “His nephew. Madame de Villemont’s son. Didn’t he tell you?”

  “No.”

  “That’s who it is. A real case, too. He’ll wind up as crazy as his mama, if she has her way about it,” he said bitterly.

  “Monsieur de Gonde mentioned something about her being a problem.”

  Georges made a grimace. “Problem? That’s a pretty fancy word for someone who’s had to put in time à Charenton!”

  That meant time in an insane asylum. Louis’ words of caution now sounded loud in my ears. For the first time since de Gonde’s phone call, I began to wonder if I shouldn’t have looked before I leaped.

  “That bad?” I said.

  “That bad. She had too many troubles and just cracked up under them. She’s soft. No backbone.”

  “What kind of troubles?”

  “I suppose the worst kind for a woman. Her husband was an officer in Algeria, a fine man, one of the best, and I know, because I was his orderly there. She and he were wild about each other, they were like a pair of honeymooners. Then those stinking Algerian mobsters caught up to him. One morning Madame kisses him good-bye when he leaves the house. Two minutes later, he’s spattered all over the street in front of her eyes by a bomb tossed into his car.”

  “My God!”

  “Then when we moved to Paris,” Georges said grimly, “she got into a mess with a young fellow who went for her big, a real wild-eyed type. When she put him in his place, he killed himself. Drowned himself in the Seine. That’s how it goes with her. She’s got fifty million francs in the bank, and all it seems to buy is bad luck. She knows it, too. That’s why she cracked up. If it wasn’t for the family, she’d probably have been put away for keeps by now.”

  What, I wondered, had made Claude de Gonde think I was qualified to deal with a psychotic?

  “Does Monsieur Claude live near Madame de Villemont?” I asked hopefully.

  “They all live together. The whole family. Except the grandma, that is. Madame Cesira. She says she can’t stand the mausoleum we’re stuck in, so she’s got herself this apartment on Île Saint-Louis.”

  “Mausoleum?”

  Georges grunted. “We pulled out of Algiers in a hurry when everything blew up there, and this was the only furnished place near the Parc Monceau big enough for our whole gang. Half the rich colons out of North Africa headed in the same direction, but we had to be the ones stuck with this miserable stone-pile.”

  Colons. The late Max Marchat had led an investigating commission in Algeria in 1960, so he must have known the leading colons there, the long-time French settlers who virtually owned the country. That would explain the connection between him and de Gonde, although not why de Gonde had posed as Marchat for my benefit.

  It gave me something to think about as we drove along, Georges now maintaining a tight-lipped silence as if sorry he had spoken so freely.

  For anyone who wants a quick trip up an ascending economic scale, there is nothing like the ride westward along the Grands Boulevards. The neighborhood around the Porte Saint-Martin and the Porte Saint-Denis is shabby lower class; then for a few blocks there is a jazzy, neon-lit stretch of movie theaters and showy cafés like the Bourneville; then past the Opéra there is the middle-class shopping district where the landmarks are those Macy’s and Gimbels of Paris, the Galeries Lafayette and Au Printemps; finally, as a climax, one enters the luxuriously upper- class world of the Plaine Monceau.

  At the rue de Courcelles, Georges turned off the boulevard and pulled the car to a halt before an enormous stone building in the middle of the block. A high wall surrounded it, and the huge arched doorway in the wall was barred by a wooden carriage gate solid enough to repel an invading army.

  Georges got out of the car—a chunky, barrel-chested, bandy-legged figure, he moved with the gracelessness of an ape—and unlocked the door set within the gate, stepped through it, and pulled open the gate from the inside. Then he re-entered the car and steered it into a courtyard.

  “Well,” he said, and gave me a sly, sidelong look, “what do you think of it?”

  He knew what I thought of it without my telling him. The building suggested a fortress hacked out of rock, it was that ponderous and barren of decoration. It surrounded the cobblestoned courtyard on three sides, and its rows of windows stared down at me like all-seeing, coldly hostile eyes. And the size of it, the expanse of its brooding façade, was overwhelming.

  “Why so big?” I asked. “How many are there in the family anyhow?”

  “Enough. Madame de Villemont and the kid have one apartment. Monsieur Claude and Madame Gabrielle—she’s Madame Cesira’s older daughter—have another. Monsieur Edmond and Madame Matilde—she’s Madame Cesira’s younger daughter—have still another. That’s three apartments big enough for a regiment apiece just to keep them all out of each other’s hair. Then there’s this Bernard Bourdon, Monsieur Claude’s private secretary and a real pain in the neck, who likes plenty of room for himself. And up there on the top floor under the eaves are the rooms for the permanent staff. Right now there are eight of us, so when you move in it’ll make nine.”

  That jolted me. “Move in? Do you mean I’m supposed to live here?”

  “Why the hell not? If you’re to take over the kid—”

  “As his tutor, not his nursemaid.”

  Georges spat hard on the ground. “Go on,” he said coldly, “don’t tell me you really figured to collect three thousand a month for sitting with the kid over his books a couple of hours a day. You couldn’t work that kind of swindle on anybody, even in America.”

  I looked up at the stony, silent walls around me, and suddenly the raucous, bustling, heart-warming Faubourg Saint-Denis seemed light-years away, the smoky little Café au Coin more desirable than Maxim’s, the shabby arch of the Porte Saint-Denis more beautiful than the Arc de Triomphe.

  But three thousand a month!

  When I entered the mansion I found myself in a vast rotunda, big enough for a circus, whose ceiling was the roof of the building itself, three stories above my head. On either side of me were open doors revealing a succession of spacious chambers, and before me was a broad marble staircase which ascended to the pillared entrance of the second-floor landing.

  “In that wing,” Georges said, pointing, “the Grand Salon, the ballroom, the conservatory. In the other wing, the dining room used for big shows, the Grand Gallery—pictures and stuff—then the library and card room. At the far end is the conference room used for business meetings. One thing to remember. Don’t hang around the doors there when a board meeting is going on.” />
  “No market tips,” I said.

  “No market tips. No snooping. Those corporation bigshots are dividing up the pie for themselves, not you and me. Now we go through this door behind the staircase and straight down the passageway to the kitchen.”

  The narrow, low-ceilinged passageway was marked at intervals by steel doors which looked as if they had been recently installed.

  “Storage rooms,” said Georges in answer to my query, “and this one is the gun room where all the hunting equipment is kept. It’s a repair shop, too, so if you hear someone banging away like a blacksmith you’ll know why. And right through there is the kitchen.”

  The kitchen looked capable of serving a battalion of gourmets at a sitting. Gathered there around a long table were some people leisurely comparing a collection of lottery tickets with the list of the week’s winning numbers in the morning paper. One of the hopefuls, a flinty-eyed matron, proved to be not only the housekeeper in charge, but also Georges’ wife, Madame Thérèse. After Georges introduced me to her, she, in turn, introduced me to the rest of the staff. One of them, a youthful domestic with a bouffant hairdo and ripe figure, ogled me with marked interest until Madame Thérèse rapped her knuckles on the girl’s forehead and acidly remarked, “Obviously, our Jeanne-Marie has never yet seen a man in her whole life, poor, deprived thing.”

  Still, it was Jeanne-Marie who was delegated to lead me to Monsieur Claude’s apartment where the family was waiting, and as I followed her through a door opposite the one by which I had entered the kitchen, I wondered how long it would take me just to learn my way around this labyrinth.

  Our destination turned out to be a wrought-iron cage containing the traditional French elevator, a car barely large enough for two passengers.

  “This way, handsome,” said Jeanne-Marie, waving me into it She joined me, making no effort to keep any distance between us. “So you’re coming to work in the mental ward,” she gibed as the elevator started a groaning, chain-rattling ascent.

  “Is it that bad?”

  “You’ll find out. When’s your day off from the job?”

  “They haven’t told me yet. What’s Madame de Villemont like, anyhow?”

  Jeanne-Marie gently rubbed her hip against mine. “She’s like somebody who gives ideas to men who ought to know better.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Nothing. Just don’t you get any ideas about her like that last character they had taking care of the kid. Then you won’t have to go drowning yourself in the dirty old river. That would be a terrible waste, big boy.”

  So it had been the child’s last tutor who had killed himself over Madame de Villemont. Hard to believe that in this practical day and age men were still capable of such idiocies, but if ever a place seemed capable of inspiring them, it was this gloomy castle on the rue de Courcelles.

  The elevator stopped, but Jeanne-Marie remained where she was, now leaning warmly against me, her face upturned expectantly. Instead of seizing the moment, I reached over her shoulder to push open the door. If I stayed on the job, there would be time later for such games.

  Jeanne-Marie drew away sharply and gave me a withering look. “Tiens,” she said, waggling a hand in a wonderfully expressive gesture, “un zozo des zozos!” which, words and gesture combined, stated that I was a supreme innocent of innocents, and God pity the girl who wasted her good intentions on me.

  The elevator opened on a corridor running the length of the building. It was impossible to tell what vista the windows ranging along one wall overlooked since they were completely shrouded by faded red velvet drapes. The walls, too, were covered with the same kind of material, the chairs and tabourets arrayed against them were dispiritingly ugly, and the lighting from tarnished gilt wall brackets was pallid and shadowy.

  The whole effect, in fact, was that of a corridor in a bad dream, just the place for a neurotic, tragedy-ridden woman to walk while nursing her bitter memories. Then it struck me that I didn’t really know whether Madame de Villemont walked this passageway or was a recluse in her apartment, or, for that matter, was altogether bedridden. I had to be prepared for anything when I met her.

  So I braced myself against surprise when Jeanne-Marie knocked on a door and announced us and was told to enter, but not against the one surprise that awaited me.

  There, of all the company gathered in the room, the first to catch my eye was the girl of the Club Barouf, the distracted American I had rescued from her tormentors the night I started work there, and in that instant of recognition I knew who Madame de Villemont was.

  5

  I knew she was Madame de Villemont because this made sense out of what had been happening to me since our first encounter. And because she sat rigidly upright in a straight-backed chair, distinctly apart from the others in the room, hands tightly clasped in her lap, face very pale, eyes shadowed with apprehension, the total effect somehow suggesting that she, the family problem, was on trial here.

  I also recognized as her companions at the club that night the pert little blonde and the bloated, sour-visaged man seated at opposite ends of a couch. Nearby, a pleasant-looking, matronly woman in eyeglasses, embroidery work in her hands, was sunk into the depths of an overstuffed armchair, and on its arm was perched a young man with a soft, pretty, girlish face so supercilious in expression that he seemed to be smelling something bad.

  If these seemed to be the jury at the trial, the man facing me from across the room, feet planted apart, arms folded on his chest, could be cast as the judge. As ascetically lean as the man on the couch was grossly fat, his thin, tightly compressed lips pale even against his sallow complexion, he had the strong features, the stubborn jaw and level eyes, the almost palpable air of authority of someone born to command. This, I was sure, had to be Claude de Gonde.

  After Jeanne-Marie departed, he was the one who brusquely introduced me to the gathering, and I found my surmise was right. He was Claude de Gonde and the woman with the eyeglasses and embroidery was Madame Gabrielle de Gonde. The couple on the couch were Edmond Vosiers and Madame Matilde Vosiers. The two women, I already knew from what Georges, the chauffeur, had told me, were the daughters of the doyenne of the family, Madame Cesira, who appeared to be the only member of it absent from the proceedings. And, finally, the supercilious young man was Bernard Bourdon, private secretary to Monsieur de Gonde. When, in response to my nod of greeting, Bernard murmured, “Enchanté”, and slowly looked me up and down with the eye of a connoisseur, I understood why Georges had commented unpleasantly on him.

  As for my new employer, Madame Anne de Villemont, she said nothing when I made an awkward little bow in her direction, but only gave me a regal lift of the chin like Nefertiti of Egypt acknowledging the obeisance of a peasant before the royal throne. It stung me, but, I warned myself, I was getting three thousand a month as balm for such stings. And there was something else that helped keep my temper down. The feeling that she was holding herself in tight restraint. That underneath her hauteur was an explosive tension barely under control. It made an electric aura around her as strong in its way as the sense of command emanating from de Gonde.

  In fact, the whole room was charged with this tension. De Gonde’s abrupt manner, the way Madame Gabrielle stared at me from her armchair, embroidery needle poised in the air, a sudden loud clearing of the throat by Vosiers, the angry glance his wife darted at him for it—they all seemed on edge.

  De Gonde was not in a mood to waste words on me. Madame de Villemont, he said, had been impressed by my tact and resolution in handling an ugly scene at the Club Barouf, had decided I might be the right person to take her fatherless son in charge. As it happened, the child was unusually intelligent, extremely sensitive, but in a very bad way emotionally. Charming, but unstable.

  “Hysterical,” snapped Vosiers. “Bound hand and foot to his mother’s apron strings. Can’t be away from her without coming apart at the seams.”

  “He’s only a child,” Madame Matilde sharply reminde
d him. “And he’s been through a great deal.”

  De Gonde cut all this short with a peremptory gesture.

  “The cure is our concern now, not the cause.” He addressed himself to me again. “And the cure may lie in his being supervised by a capable, athletic sort of a man with a reasonable amount of patience and understanding. Also, Madame de Villemont is an American like yourself. She feels that perhaps American methods—”

  “I don’t know anything about any methods,” I said bluntly. He struck me as someone you could be blunt with, and his response told me I had gauged him correctly.

  “Then you’ll have to improvise and use common sense,” he said. “Under any conditions, you’ll get a fair trial. Now, if you have any questions—”

  “I have. Why did you pose as Max Marchat when you were looking me up?”

  “Because,” de Gonde said calmly, “I didn’t want you on my neck if nothing came of this business. I presented myself to your Monsieur Castabert as Marchat to conceal my identity and avoid that.”

  “This Castabert,” the pert Madame Matilde remarked to me, wrinkling her nose in disgust. “Such an obscene little creature. How could you stand him?”

  “It was my job to, madame,” I said.

  What I didn’t say was that in applying for that job, I had been politely invited by Castabert to sit down, have a cup of coffee, light a cigarette. Not, as in the present case, kept standing before company, hat in hand. For the first time in my life I could really appreciate the feelings of the servant in the old-fashioned household where he was not supposed to have any feelings. Living here was going to be an enlightening experience.

  “One other question,” I said to de Gonde. “I’ve been told I’m supposed to live here in this house while I’m in charge of the child. But is that necessary?”

  At last Madame de Villemont herself had something to say.