House of Cards

by Stanley Ellin

  “C’est un cautere sur un jambe de bois,” he snorted at the conclusion of this indictment, meaning that my country was like a doctor who applied medicine to a wooden leg; and I observed with irritation that when Mrs. Hardee, the Teutonic child bride, had translated the gist of this in richly accented English to her husband, the colonel joined the rest of the company in applauding it. So with the colonel on Leschenhaut’s team and with Anne now morosely devoting herself to the wine bottle, I found myself all alone in defending the American way, like a Yankee Horatius at the bridge.

  The trouble was that Leschenhaut apparently knew much more about the American way than I did. To make it worse, while he was loudly demonstrating this, Madame Cesira turned the Comtesse de Laennac loose on me. Madame la Comtesse, it seemed, was a great authority on the Tarot cards and had written a splendid book about them. Up to here, Madame la Comtesse had been sunk in a deep reverie. Now she suddenly came to life, seized my wrist with an avid claw, and paying no heed to the booming Leschenhaut, addressed me at length on the mysteries of the Tarot.

  Under fire from both sides, distracted by the way the colonel required his wife to serve as translator during the proceedings, I found it hard to understand what any of them were saying.

  “And what is the first step to be taken by the state, monsieur?” This from Leschenhaut, aiming a stubby forefinger at me. “To instruct its people in the nature of the enemy. Yellow hordes, black hordes, mongrel hordes. And the second step—”

  The colonel’s sharp voice. “What’s he saying, Clara? Damn it, don’t sit there like a dummy.”

  “Somesink about hordes, nicht wahr? Suh yellows, suh blacks—”

  “—so you see, monsieur,” this from Madame la Comtesse, plucking at my sleeve, “—when you examine the card known as The Priestess you will observe she is holding the scroll of the Law. From this we know that the key lies in the Cabala. Therefore, we—”

  “—and why this second step?” Leschenhaut, sweetly reasonable. “Because unless the state is splendidly monolithic—”

  “—decided to call my little book La Mystère du Tarot.” Madame la Comtesse mercifully releasing me and turning to Madame Cesira. “Do you remember, Cesira, while you were reading the proofs you asked—”

  Leschenhaut now triumphant. “—so even your own Thomas Jefferson believed in rule by an elite! And la méthode—”

  “Damn it, Clara!” The colonel’s voice briefly drowning out all others. “What’s that he’s saying about Thomas Jefferson?”

  Afterward we all adjourned to the library, where card tables had been set up, but conversation still took precedence over cards. Here Colonel Hardee drew me aside and looked me over with concern on his craggy face.

  “What do you think of him?” he asked, jerking a thumb in the direction of Leschenhaut.

  “He’s a clever man.”

  “He’s a lot more than that, Davis. He’s an inspired man. He sees the big picture like no one else around. He sees the termites gnawing away at the foundations of the house and he damn well intends to do something about it before the walls cave in.” The colonel frowned. “You got every word he said, didn’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “I wish to hell I did, but I’m tone deaf or something when it comes to foreign languages. Great thing, languages. A man can make himself useful anywhere if he’s got an ear for them. You ever been in the army?”

  “Marines.”

  “When was that?”

  “Around the end of the Korean business. I was sixteen then, so I had to lie my way in, and when they got wise overseas they tossed me out.”

  “Honorable discharge?”

  He was so much the commanding officer addressing the enlisted man, what with his sharp voice and closely cropped gray hair and military stiffness of spine, that I was hard put not to address him as “sir.”

  “Yes,” I said, “it was an honorable discharge. I saw action a few times and was almost divisional middleweight champ and always kept my nose clean like a good boy.”

  The colonel nodded vigorously. “I thought so. I could tell right off you’re my kind of man. Too bad you didn’t think of making a career of the service once you came of age. Still, there’s a lot of ways to fight the good fight even if you’re not in uniform.”

  I never had a chance to ask him what good fight he was referring to. In the middle of the room a scene was building up between Anne and Dr. Morillon. Other voices fell as theirs rose. All faces turned toward them with surprise.

  “I will leave,” Anne said loudly. “I told you I want to see how Paul is.”

  Her arm was in Morillon’s grasp. When she swung away from him, he didn’t release the grasp but effortlessly drew her back to face him again.

  “Djilana is watching Paul,” he said angrily. “What could possibly happen to him?”

  “Oh, all right! Will you believe I’m too exhausted to keep my eyes open any longer?”

  “No, I will not,” the doctor said scathingly. “You are not exhausted, madame, you’re drunk. Very drunk. And you know how I warned you against that. You know how dangerous it can be.”

  “Hubert!” de Gonde said sharply. “What the devil kind of performance is this? What are my guests supposed to think of it?”

  “Whatever they please,” retorted the doctor. “As for what I think, it’s that I’d better escort Madame to her room before she collapses on her face in front of your guests.”

  Suddenly the positions were reversed. Morillon started toward the door, but now Anne hung back. From the glassiness of her eyes, the slightly disheveled look of her, I saw she really was quite drunk.

  It was Madame Cesira who stepped forward to break up this ugly tableau. She faced Anne wrathfully.

  “Do you remember promising to do whatever the doctor advised?”

  “I don’t remember,” Anne said thickly. “I don’t want to remember. I’ll do whatever I like.”

  “Even to having another breakdown?” demanded Madame Cesira in a voice that cracked like a whip.

  That struck home.

  Anne jerked free of the doctor’s grasp. “All right, I’ll go!” she said, but made no move to. Instead, she vaguely looked around the room until her eyes fell on me. She raised her arm and pointed at me. “I’ll go,” she said, “if you take me.”

  All at once, I was the focus of everyone’s shocked attention. The only thing to do was try and brazen it out.

  “I must go upstairs to get some manuscripts for Monsieur Leschenhaut anyhow,” I said to the assemblage at large. “It won’t be any trouble for me to escort Madame to her apartment.”

  Most of the faces around me registered pained resignation. Dr. Morillon’s registered naked murder.

  “You seem to forget your place,” he said to me. “I’ve been told that you’re paid to be Madame’s servant, not her escort.”

  I may have flinched at that, but I took it in silence. At all costs, I warned myself, do not rock the boat.

  My refusal to shove his words down his throat only added to Morillon’s fury. A strange doctor, I thought. A man dedicated to the study of emotions who couldn’t control his own.

  “Are you deaf?” he demanded. “Must I repeat my words?”

  Even Madame Cesira, his ally, recoiled at the violence boiling in him. “Enough, Hubert!”

  He wheeled on her. “No, madame! If they leave this room together—”

  We left together, Anne and I. But I had Morillon’s expression vividly in my mind’s eye as I took Anne up in the elevator, my arm around her waist, her body almost limp against me. There could be more trouble with the man about this, but my concern was leavened with a hot sense of triumph. There had been a showdown between this dashing doctor and me, and Anne had publicly rejected him in my favor. True, as a cynic like Louis might argue, she was too drunk at the moment to know what she was doing, but I was willing to believe in vino veritas. Anyhow, in a short time I would be escorting her and Paul out of the country, thus neatly settling
any problem of a clash with Morillon.

  As if reading my thoughts, Anne suddenly stirred and said in a blurred voice, “I’ve done something. What was it? Tell me what it was.”

  “Nothing at all.”

  “It was,” she said fearfully. “I want to see Paul now. I must see him right now.”

  I comforted her as well as I could and delivered her to Djilana, who appeared to recognize the symptoms at a glance and who reacted to them with tight-lipped disapproval. I left the two of them standing together over the bedside of the sleeping Paul. There had been a time when Paul tossed restlessly all night, always on the edge of sleep but never quite entering it, when he would come violently awake two or three times a night with shouting nightmares; but all that seemed a thing of the past now, and he regularly slept as if he had flung himself into happy unconsciousness.

  It didn’t take me long to make sure the manuscripts I had ready for Leschenhaut were in order and to thrust them into my pocket and leave the apartment. The quicker the better, I knew. This was no time to linger and rouse obscene speculation in the company waiting below.

  It was when I reached the landing overlooking the rotunda that I saw I had been too sanguine about the chances of avoiding a real clash with Morillon. It takes two to avoid a clash, and the doctor was standing at the foot of the marble staircase looking up at me with grim anticipation on his face. And, I saw with disbelief, he held in his hand a riding crop—undoubtedly supplied by the helpful Edmond Vosiers—which he slapped with a steady rhythm against the palm of his other hand.

  It was an incredible scene, yet somehow in keeping with the baroque, tragic-opera setting provided for it here. It gave me the eerie feeling that Anne might be right after all, that maybe this monstrous house on the rue de Courcelles did have a baleful effect on everyone who entered it. It seemed to be like a looking-glass world where rationality and the ordinary emotions were discarded as soon as you stepped, through the glass.

  The doctor was not alone. With him were Claude de Gonde and Edmond Vosiers, de Gonde plainly angry about this turn events were taking and Vosiers just as plainly gloating over it. And leaning against the closed door to the dining room stood Charles Leschenhaut, hands in pockets. That meant a real complication if a brawl started. Leschenhaut knew I had been a professional fighter, had seen me in the ring. I could imagine his contempt if he saw me willing to practice my old trade against the doctor, big and fit as Morillon looked to be.

  So, as I walked down the marble steps, I set my teeth against any possibility of a brawl. I would be the soul of forbearance. I would keep myself in control at all costs and hope that de Gonde could manage to exercise some restraint over Morillon. But when I reached the foot of the staircase where Morillon stood barring my way, the riding crop tap-tapping against his hand, I saw it would be hard for anyone to exercise restraint over him. He was the image of malevolence. He reminded me of an aroused cobra, cold-eyed and deadly, spreading its hood before striking.

  “Ah, Monsieur Larbin,” he said, laying heavy emphasis on this gutter word for a hired lickspittle, “have you finished attending to Madame for the present? Have you put her to bed and assured her you’ll be back very soon to properly comfort her? How sad that you’re now going to have to disappoint her.”

  “If you don’t mind, Doctor,” I said, “you’re in my way. I’d like to speak to Monsieur Leschenhaut.”

  “You will not speak to Monsieur Leschenhaut. You will listen to me while I give you some vital instruction in psychopathology. In a nutshell, Monsieur Larbin, delusions can be dangerous. Especially delusions about your position in life. Wouldn’t you agree that the time has now come for you to face reality?”

  “I would, Doctor, because I find it highly unreal to get a lecture in psychology from someone holding a whip in his hand. I’d say you need some vital instruction in your own profession.”

  “For God’s sake,” said de Gonde, “that’s enough of this.”

  “Not quite.” The doctor shook his head. “Not until this scum has gone through that door back to the garbage heap he crawled from.” He bared his teeth at me, and the riding crop slapped down hard in his hand. “That means now, do you understand?”

  “I’m not sure I do, Doctor. If you’re ordering this as Madame’s medical advisor—”

  “No, Monsieur Larbin, I am ordering it because Madame de Villemont will never again have a call for your services, gratifying as they may be to her.”

  “In that case, Doctor, when Madame de Villemont tells me to leave, I’ll leave. Meanwhile—”

  He struck then, quick as a cobra. Before I could get an arm up, the riding crop slashed across my face with a searing impact. And, half-stunned by that impact, blindly following instinct, all good resolutions washed out of my mind in that instant, I swung my fist square into Morillon’s jaw, knowing as the blow landed that I had never hit anyone harder in my life.

  He never knew what hit him. His head went sideways as if it were being wrenched from his shoulders, he sagged at the knees, and then went down flat on his face, arms outflung, one leg twitching a little.

  Looking down at him, feeling the burning pain of the welt across my cheek, I suddenly saw the bloated corpse of Sidney Scott before me. Was it possible that Hubert Morillon, with his frantic jealousy, his seething temper, his willingness to use violence, was the one behind Scott’s death? True, the police report had stated there were no marks of violence on the body, but wasn’t there a chance that certain marks of violence wouldn’t show on those blackened and swollen remains? That story of suicide in the report had sounded thin from the time I first read it, and Anne’s confirmation of it almost as thin. But Morillon—?

  Leschenhaut came walking up as de Gonde kneeled worriedly over my inert foe.

  “He’ll be all right,” Leschenhaut said placidly, and I was glad to see him take it this way. “He’s a tough one, our doctor friend. He’ll live to make a few more mistakes like this before he’s done for.” He put a friendly hand on my shoulder. “Just like that careless black at the Vel d’Hiv, wasn’t it?” he said. “One little mistake, and down he went. Now if you can only handle words as well as you handle your fists—”

  But de Gonde, observing that Morillon was struggling back to consciousness, looked up at us and shook his head grimly.

  “Do you really believe this has settled the matter?” he said, and I knew what he meant.

  He was telling me that no one could deal with Dr. Hubert Morillon the way I had and expect to get away with it.

  10

  Next day, when I went down to the kitchen for the usual late-morning coffee break, I learned that I had desecrated an idol. I was sure when I walked into the kitchen that news of my fracas with Morillon had already circulated through the gathering there, and I expected the swollen, purpling welt on my cheek to draw sympathy. Instead, I found everyone there banded against me in cold hostility. It seemed that I had been given the unusual honor of dining with the family and had then proceeded to disgrace myself and the entire staff. I had gotten drunk. I had made eyes at Madame de Villemont. I had assaulted a guest who had resented this, and what a guest! What a man Dr. Morillon was. What a privilege to have him in the house. And what a horror to have him depart from it, bruised and battered by my drunken assault

  When I tried to defend myself, Jeanne-Marie promptly put me in my place.

  “No, big boy, we’re not buying that bill of goods,” she sniffed. “Not with the kind of man Dr. Morillon is, and not when Monsieur Edmond said right out it was plain unprovoked assault. Take my word for it, if you weren’t the only one around here who could manage the kid, you’d have been out on the street for good last night.”

  It left me wondering just how Dr. Hubert Morillon, who certainly wasn’t part of their world, had come to earn such popularity with the help.

  I was still wondering about it when I went upstairs. Each room of Anne’s apartment—as with all the upstairs apartments—had a door opening on the gloomy, red-v
elveted main corridor, and as I walked down the corridor I saw Madame Matilde emerge from Anne’s bedroom where, I was sure, she had been vividly describing the scene in the rotunda last night. Judging from what I had just encountered in the kitchen, the fact that Madame hadn’t witnessed the scene would only add to the bias and color of the description, so when we met face to face I was braced for more hostility. But Madame only flicked her eyes over my damaged cheek with detached interest.

  “A lovely day, isn’t it, Reno?” she said.

  “Yes, madame.”

  “You won’t mind then, if I take your pupil for a little drive in the Bois? At least, I hope you won’t mind. He’s waiting in the car now, and I’d hate to disappoint him.”

  She was being too solemn about it.

  “It’s up to Madame de Villemont,” I said warily. “If you have her permission—”

  “Oh, I have,” Madame Matilde said sweetly. “But we know whose decision really matters around here, don’t we?”

  With that, she went off down the corridor, leaving me feeling like a large, slow-witted mastiff that has just had a losing encounter with a nastily clever little poodle. Yet I found myself pitying her rather than disliking her. Marriage to a brutal, sour-tempered lump like Edmond Vosiers entitled her to all the pity she could get.

  I knocked on Anne’s door, and when she called for me to come in I found her in bed looking wretchedly at the tray of food Djilana was offering her.

  “I’ve come to report on Paul’s progress, madame,” I said, “but if you’re not well—”

  “No, I’m well enough for that.” She waved Djilana out and waited until the door had closed behind her. Then she said bitterly, “Yes, I know. I made a fine mess of things last night, didn’t I?”

  “Forget last night. How do you feel now?”