House of Cards

by Stanley Ellin

  That was all very well, but it gave me a picture of meeting Leschenhaut under impossible conditions. As soon as the lesson period was over and Paul sent off to his lunch in the kitchen, I sought out Madame.

  I found her standing at the window of her living room, holding apart the heavy drapes and staring at the emptiness of the courtyard.

  “Madame?”

  When she released the drapes and turned toward me the room fell into semi-darkness, its only lighting from a table lamp. It gave me the feeling I often had at night in my own room—of eyes at keyholes, of ears at door panels, of a soft breathing over my shoulder, of a sly watchfulness surrounding me. There was something about the monstrous size and massiveness of everything in the house that seemed to breed that feeling, and the manners of its servants intensified it. Now, with the thickening mystery of Anne de Villemont filling my mind, it was so acute that I was almost tempted to look over my shoulder to see if someone was in the shadows behind me, watching me.

  “Yes, Reno?”

  I explained my concern about the meeting with Leschenhaut, and Madame shrugged.

  “You don’t have to be concerned,” she said. “No matter how Paul described it, it’s only going to be an informal dinner. I’m sure Leschenhaut will give you his undivided attention at it.”

  “What makes you so sure, madame?”

  “Woman’s intuition, Reno. There are times when I can be fantastically intuitive.”

  She said it with such an excess of bitter self-mockery that I was thrown off my guard. I had been resolved not to ask her anything about the riddle of Sidney Scott, much as I itched to. It was too dangerous a subject altogether; raising it might well cost me my job and the three thousand a month that went along with it. Beyond that, while I might lust after Madame now and then, I didn’t like her or trust her enough to want any more involvement in her curious affairs than I already had.

  But now, as a piece of jigsaw puzzle suddenly fell into place, it was out before I could stop it.

  “Leschenhaut was once invited here to meet Sidney Scott, wasn’t he?” I said.

  “How do you know that?” Madame de Villemont said sharply.

  “Through backstairs gossip, madame,” I lied. “Gossip is everyone’s favorite sport around here.”

  “Yours, as well?”

  “No, madame.”

  We stood facing each other in a long silence that was like a pressure in my ears.

  “Go on,” Madame de Villemont said abruptly. “What else were you told about Sidney Scott?”

  I had gone this far; I might as well go further.

  “That he committed suicide, madame, because a woman rejected him.”

  Madame’s fine nostrils flared. “You don’t have to play games with me. You know I was the woman.”

  “Yes, madame.”

  “Why that tone of voice? Am I to blame if Sidney Scott was a pitifully foolish and tragic young man?”

  “I was also told,” I said softly, “that he wasn’t a young man to kill himself for a woman. Any woman.”

  I have seen men in combat who did not go down under the bullet that struck them, but who remained motionless on their feet in a state of unbelieving shock. Madame de Villemont was struck that way now, turned into a staring statue of horror. Then life returned to her. She swayed and caught hold of the drapes with one hand to steady herself. When I quickly moved toward her, she shook her head.

  “A drink,” she whispered.

  A decanter and tray of glasses were on the sideboard. I poured her a stiff drink and watched her take it all down in one long gulp, reserving my pity for her until a final question had been answered, a question that had filled me with sick bewilderment every time it had risen to mind.

  I waited until, with her eyes screwed shut and her teeth clenched, she had shudderingly gotten the impact of the drink.

  “Sidney Scott was that kind of man,” I said relentlessly. “How could you have ever let him take charge of Paul?”

  “My God, do you think I knew what he was?” she said in anguish. “I didn’t. I never knew until that night.”

  “The night he died? When you were with him on the Quai d’Anjou?”

  “Yes. It was grotesque, incredible. He told me what he was, how wretched he was because of it. He told me I was the first woman he was ever attracted to, and that maybe I could save him. You see”—she gave a half-hysterical, sobbing laugh—”I was supposed to be therapy for him!”

  It was an explanation that made sense.

  “So that’s why you hired me to watch over Paul,” I said. “Because there’s someone who doesn’t believe Scott really killed himself, someone who’s threatening or blackmailing you because of it.”

  She shook her head violently. “No! Your being here has nothing to do with Sidney!”

  The explanation started to make much less sense.

  “You mean,” I persisted, “that the threat is from a different direction?”

  “I can’t talk about it. It’s better for all of us if I don’t.”

  This was too much like trying to catch hold of quicksilver. I wondered how a bluff would work.

  “Madame,” I said, “what if I told you that unless I know exactly what you’ve gotten me into here—and why—I’m leaving the house right now?”

  “You can’t!” She was completely her other self now, her imperiousness dissolved to quivering panic. She grasped my arm in supplication. “All you have to know is how much Paul needs you here,” she said breathlessly. “And he’s not the only one—”

  She hesitated, searching my face for my reaction to this.

  We were very close together. The eyes probing mine were so wide with panic that I had the sensation of swimming in sapphire-blue depths. The ripe lips were half-parted, the white, uneven edges of teeth glinting behind them. Then, to my astonishment, Madame de Villemont waited no longer. Her arms slid through mine, her hands clasping behind my back. Her head rested on my shoulder so that my nostrils were filled with the scent of her hair.

  “This is what I mean,” she said in a remote voice. “You’re like a rock. You have all the strength I don’t have.”

  My occasional dreams of finding myself in this position with her had been pleasant. The reality, I found, was even more so. But I trusted her as little as ever. I stood there, arms at my side, excited by the warm pressure of her body against mine, but refusing to fall victim to it.

  “Madame—”

  “Ah, mais non.” Her head turned on my shoulder so that her lips were almost touching mine. “Je m’appelle Anne.”

  After all, one didn’t have to trust a woman like this to take pleasure in her. I put my arms around her in a hard embrace and we kissed. Hotly. Lingeringly. But when my hands moved to explore that delectable body, the lady called quits. She yielded to the exploration for only a moment, then slowly drew away, breathing hard.

  “No,” she said. “Paul might walk in here any minute.”

  So he might. Or one of the servants for that matter. All of them in the house had the French habit of knocking once on the door and then walking in, whether invited to or not.

  “All right,” I said, “since you’ve produced such a convincing argument for my staying on here—”

  “Dear God.” She looked sick. Really sick. “Is that what you think it was?”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, and I meant it. She knew I did. The sickness faded from her face as I watched. But I didn’t intend to let it go at that. Like an echo of Claude de Gonde, who was once driven to use the same words about Anne de Villemont, I said, “The truth is I don’t know what to think any more. Can you blame me? All I know is that you’re desperately afraid of something. Anne—”

  “Anne?” Her lips curled in the palest shadow of a smile. “So you finally managed to say it.”

  “Because it’s hard to when you’re so damned evasive with me. Now let’s have it. Did anyone ever really threaten to kidnap Paul?”

  “No. But when you have money,
isn’t there always the danger—?”

  “Not in France, so that’s not the answer I’m waiting for. Let’s try again. What is it that keeps you in such a state of nerves?”

  “All right, I’ll tell you.” Her voice hardened. “It’s this house. And now it’s gotten to you the way it did to me. It doesn’t matter what it’s like outside; in here it’s always Elsinore Castle at midnight with the ghost of Hamlet’s father walking the parapet. Only here it’s Sidney Scott’s ghost that seems to do the walking.”

  “No,” I said, “it isn’t the house. You could always leave here.”

  “How? Do you have any idea what would happen if I tried to remove Paul from this museum?”

  “But since he’s your son—”

  “He also happens to be the sole grandson of Madame Cesira Montecastellani de Villemont. And the sole nephew of her daughters. Try to remove him a healthy distance from them and see what happens.”

  “Have you tried?”

  “Once. I made arrangements to travel to London with Paul, but it was no use. We got as far as Le Bourget, and there were Claude and Edmond waiting to bring us back.” She shrugged helplessly. “Claude has the right to do that. I had a breakdown after Sidney’s death and was tucked away in a sanitarium at Issy. The only way I could get out was to put myself in Claude’s charge. Even then, I might still be there if Paul hadn’t carried on so wildly when we were kept apart.”

  “So that’s how it is.”

  “That’s how it is.” She sounded as if just talking about it had exhausted her. “I might as well be in prison as in this place, except that I have Paul with me here. But if I could only get away—”

  “To where?”

  “Back to the States. God, how I dream of it. I’d be outside French jurisdiction; I could get doctors and lawyers to clear up my psychiatric record. And what it would mean to Paul to be far away from here!”

  She didn’t have to draw me a picture. I vividly saw what it could mean to both of them. As it was now, every one of her bad spells undid part of my week’s work with Paul, and every Sunday that he spent with the little martinet on Île Saint-Louis undid another part. But to be three thousand miles away from here—

  “Why not?” I said.

  Anne frowned at me. She pressed her hand to her forehead as if easing a sudden pressure there.

  “You mean, you’d help us get out of the country?”

  “I might.”

  “To New York? That’s how I’ve been imagining it. No luggage, just take a plane to New York before anyone can find out about it, and rent a house there under a different name. New York would be the best place, don’t you think? It should be easy to lose yourself there.”

  “I said I might be able to arrange it. First, I want to lay the ghost of Sidney Scott to rest.”

  “Not now,” Anne said pleadingly. “It’s best for you not to know any more about it than you do right now. When we’re in New York I’ll tell you all the rest.”

  “We?” I said. “Then you want me to come along with you?”

  There was more chance than ever now of Paul’s suddenly walking into the room, but we were again very close together, her hands resting on my shoulders, mine on the lovely swell of her hips.

  “Mon cher,” she said gravely, “I want very much for you to come along with us. Will you?”

  “I will.”

  “And it should be soon. As soon as possible. Can you make the reservations for two weeks from today—an afternoon flight, first class—and use the name Dulac? Monsieur-’dame Dulac and son. That sounds anonymous enough, doesn’t it?”

  “At least as much as Smith. Any special reason for the Dulac?”

  “No, it just sticks in my mind from a French lesson at school. Monsieur et Madame Dulac et leur petit fils, Robert. ‘Comment ça va, Robert?’ dit Monsieur Dulac—”

  “I can guess the answer. ‘Comme-ci, comme-ça, mon cher papa.’ ”

  Anne shook her head. “Things were never so-so for the Dulacs. They were always brimming over with optimism and energy. And you know—”

  “Yes?”

  “That can be a strange and wonderful feeling,” she said.

  9

  Charles Leschenhaut lived up to all expectations.

  His face had already been made familiar to me by photographs in the newspapers—it was the face of a lusty Friar Tuck without tonsure, a full-lipped, snub-nosed, sharp-eyed face under an unkempt tangle of dark hair—but no photograph had captured the dynamic force he was charged with, the electricity that emanated from him.

  “Your protégé?” he said to Claude de Gonde as we shook hands. “But what a brute this one is, what a giant! And talented too, you believe? I wouldn’t dare tell him otherwise. He might crack me apart like an eggshell if I did.” Which was hardly accurate, considering that Leschenhaut, although a head shorter than I, had the physique of a bull and an iron handclasp.

  “I once saw you fight in the Vel d’Hiv,” he remarked to me. “About five years ago, I think, when you knocked out that big Senegalese.”

  “I was lucky that night.”

  “You were,” said Leschenhaut wickedly. “If that black had sense enough to keep moving away from you the way he was doing, he could have chopped you apart piece by piece. And now you want to try your luck at writing. Your Hemingway was also a writer who was handy with his fists, wasn’t he? An amateur boxer of sorts. Was he really good at it?”

  “I’ve heard he was. But let’s keep him out of it. I have some stories to show you, and if you’re expecting another Hemingway—”

  “No, no, I’m not that much of a dreamer. All the same, I’m prejudiced in your favor from the start. You look healthy to me, and I’ve had a bellyful of decadent weaklings and whimperers. Would-be suicides without the guts to cut their own throats, that’s who manufactures our literature today. Now I say to hell with the mourners for our sick society. Let’s bury them with that society and create a new world worth living in!”

  It was refreshing to be caught up in this whirlwind, because until Leschenhaut made his appearance the evening had gone badly for me. When I had joined the company in the Grand Salon I was depressed by the baroque magnificence of the room and the tinkle of meaningless conversation in it. I was even more depressed when Dr. Hubert Morillon walked in and took immediate possession of Anne.

  From what I had been told about Morillon I had somehow come to visualize him as the caricature of the traditional psychologist—bearded, bespectacled, pompous as a walrus—and it was this which made it easy for me to reject Madame Matilde’s imputation that Anne was his mistress.

  Then I met him, and was jolted to find myself face to face with a tall, strikingly handsome man of about forty who looked, not like my idea of a scientist, but like a ski instructor at some place like Chamonix or Cortina. And this bronzed, blue-eyed, rugged Viking type with hair so pale that it looks as if all color had been bleached out of it has an uncanny appeal for women. Morillon had a diablerie about him too, a dash and glitter which I could only envy with all my heart. I might refuse to believe Madame Matilde’s gossip, but I couldn’t deny that this doctor looked like a fit man for Anne de Villemont; he was no one to laugh off lightly. I had a strong sense of proprietorship over Madame now, and the sight of her, head to head with Morillon in a corner of the Grand Salon, bothered me. The way they looked together gave a little too much credence to Madame Matilde’s words for my comfort.

  However, when we were at dinner I felt better, watching Anne’s manner toward Morillon, who was her table partner. As dinner progressed, she seemed to grow more and more indifferent to him, discarding him altogether after a while in favor of the wine bottle. This, I knew from experience, was her refuge whenever she was having a bad time of it, so it seemed evident that the doctor was not making the impression on her he was hoping to make. It was a relief getting that settled in my mind. I could concentrate on Leschenhaut and the rest of the company then, instead of always having half an eye on Morillon, me
asuring him as a rival.

  It was a curious gathering at that table. I knew the family, of course, including Madame Cesira, who was there in waspish good spirits, but the others were strangers to me, and a mixed lot they were. A foxy-looking little antique of a nobleman, le Comte de Laennac, and his apparently mummified wife; a hard-boiled retired colonel of the United States Army, Jesse Hardee, and his extremely youthful and pretty German bride Clara (“Colonel Bluebeard,” I heard Madame Matilde whisper to Madame Gabrielle. “She’s his fourth. When his wives reach their thirtieth birthday he trades them in for a new model.”); and, of course, Leschenhaut himself.

  I quickly learned that Anne had been right in her prediction that Leschenhaut would devote his attention to me at this gathering, an attention which largely consisted of barbed shafts aimed at the United States, the nation he held responsible for most of the troubles humanity found itself in today.

  When I challenged this, he took me up with ferocious delight. America, he made plain, was a land of nincompoops, of libertarians, of fake idealists who encouraged the barbarians outside its gates and the subversives within.

  Most painful, he declaimed, was that when on rare occasions, far too rare indeed, a nation like France awoke to the menace and tried to hurl it back, America served only to betray the effort. At Dienbienphu, in Algeria, in Egypt, America had betrayed the French to the enemy. In the Congo it had sold out all European civilization to the cannibals. What a bitter joke. Let the barbarians advance until their knives are at your throats, and then try to counter them by preaching peace and good will. Or by such half-hearted military excursions as our pitiful effort in Southeast Asia.