House of Cards

by Stanley Ellin

  “Ashamed of myself. Look at your face. That was my fault.”

  “Stop it. I’m here to give aid and comfort, but if you’re going to carry on like this—”

  “I won’t.” Anne shook her head weakly. “I promise I won’t. Now lock the door, then sit here beside me and hold my hand. That might help.”

  I followed instructions willingly, and when I took her hand I found it cold and clammy.

  “And all because of a few glasses of wine,” I said.

  “And a few glasses of cognac so I’d get up enough courage to join the festivities. Brandy courage. When that started to wear off I used the wine for a booster. Next thing, there I was on my high horse, galloping right off to disaster.”

  “I wouldn’t worry about it,” I said. “Your doctor wasn’t quite the disaster he thought he’d be.”

  Anne squeezed my hand hard.

  “That’s where you’re wrong. Hubert can be very dangerous. There are some people—friends of his who settled here from North Africa—who are fanatically devoted to him. They haven’t changed in their ways since that whole sickening business in Algeria. You know what that means, don’t you?”

  “I’m not sure. Are you trying to tell me that a respectable citizen like Morillon, a professional man at that, has a gang of cutthroats at his beck and call?”

  “Mon ange, I’m telling you to be careful of him. Of everyone else here, for that matter. When I made a fool of myself last night it put them all on guard against us. It’ll be harder than ever now to make a move they don’t know about.”

  “Then we’ll rise to the challenge,” I said, humoring her. “I’ll get the plane tickets through someone else so that I won’t have to go near a ticket office. And my ex-fight manager lives in New York. I’ll call him on an outside phone during the week and have him lease a house for us under the name of Dulac. Or an apartment if that’s quicker. I can cable him whatever money he needs for it.”

  “Yes, the money.” Anne had been listening to my plan of action as if it were a love lyric. Now she roused herself. “There’s a traveling case in that chifforobe,” she said, and fumbled through the purse on her bedside table until she found a small key which she handed to me. With it I opened the case and removed an envelope with a packet of banknotes in it. “It’s ten thousand francs,” Anne said. “Will that be enough?”

  “A lot more than enough.”

  “Keep it all anyway. You never know what extras might have to be paid for.”

  It was pleasurable to stuff that bulky walletful into my pocket. It made the still unreal promise of the future very real now. But there remained some dark clouds overhead that troubled me.

  “Anne,” I said, “about Dr. Morillon—”

  “Yes?”

  “Tell me the truth. Did he have anything to do with Sidney Scott’s death?”

  “Darling, I’ve told you the truth about Sidney’s death. Why can’t you believe that? Why do you refuse to believe it?”

  “Because from what I’ve put together about Scott and Morillon—”

  “No, you have to stop thinking about Sidney! You’re the one Hubert is jealous of; you’re the one he hates, not poor dead Sidney!” Anne drew me down beside her on the bed again. “That’s what frightens me. That something might happen to you because of me. I don’t want anything to happen to you.”

  Her arms went around my neck; her weight bore me down until our mouths met in a kiss that went on and on until I found myself blissfully drowning in warm, perfumed flesh, gladly suffering the sharpness of those small teeth cutting into my lips. There was something wonderfully ingenuous about this woman’s embrace. She was like a schoolgirl who, being kissed for the first time, joyously discovers how much she likes it and plunges with an awkward ferocity into the game.

  When she released me, I said, “If that was an invitation—”

  She smilingly shook her head.

  “In that case,” I said, “I’d better go while the going is good.”

  “I think you should. But whatever you do, mon ange, take care. I mean that with all my heart.”

  Back in my room I did some hard thinking about that warning. Added to de Gonde’s grim concern about the consequences of my manhandling Hubert Morillon, it hit home. I had seen Morillon in action the night before. The thought of how he would act if he ever learned I was going to take Anne out of the country made the sense of menace in the air real and palpable. It was like a cold current sluggishly stirring through the room and nuzzling me between the shoulder blades.

  It was hard to laugh off a premonition as strong as this. I went to the chest where I had stored Colonel Henri de Villemont’s Beretta. It didn’t matter that it was unloaded; in fact, I preferred it to be. I was sure that, aside from military action, I could never bring myself to aim a loaded gun at someone and actually pull the trigger. But letting it be known over the grapevine in the house that I was going around armed was a healthy ounce of prevention. Morillon’s devoted friends, whoever they were, would think twice about jumping me in some dark alley on the doctor’s behalf.

  I pulled out the drawer of the chest, set it on the floor, and lay on my belly to thrust a hand deep into the recess where I had hidden the gun. I inched forward on my belly, reached the hand out until my fingertips met the wood in back of the chest. I swept the hand back and forth, my nails scraping the wood.

  The gun was not there.

  My first angry thought was that someone who knew about the gun—Anne, Claude de Gonde, Madame Gabrielle—had surreptitiously removed it, but as the anger cooled I realized none of them would have had any reason to conceal this fact from me.

  What about Paul? He had been in the next room when I had hidden the gun away, he might have seen me do it, might have taken this shiny weapon as a delightful toy to play with in secret. The chest drawer was heavy, but if he had the patience to empty it he could have handled it easily enough.

  The idea disturbed me. The gun itself didn’t matter since it was unloaded, but until this moment I hadn’t imagined there were any secrets left between Paul and me. We had grown so close together that he now confided to me every opinion, every problem, every little sin he committed during the day. Whatever he had on his mind would be talked over gravely, man to man, and I came to see that he was constantly searching for precise definitions of right and wrong this way. Even more important, I found that no matter how he raged against some of my strict rules now and then, these rules were what he wanted. Without realizing it, he was happy they were there, marking the boundaries of what was permissible and what wasn’t.

  So I felt acutely guilty, searching his room for the gun. The room was as orderly on the surface as Djilana could make it, but the drawers of its dressers and cabinets when I pulled them out were magpie’s nests. I searched through every one, probed under the mattress of the bed, dug under the cushions of the chairs, emptied the huge toy chest and had to replace its contents like the pieces of a Chinese puzzle before I could fit them all back in. Nothing.

  My last hope was the bookshelves, but the only thing I found hidden behind a row of books was a cardboard folder. In it was a photograph, a family portrait. A smiling Anne stood against a dazzling whiteness of Moorish architecture, a scarf tied around her blowing hair, her eyes squinting into the glare of sunlight, and standing before her was Paul as a very small toddler. But what drew my close attention was the man beside Anne, an arm about her shoulders. He looked like an attractive boulevardier who had gone into military life. Tall and darkly handsome, his lip decorated with the boulevardier’s trim mustache, a paratrooper’s beret cocked jauntily on his sleek black hair, he was the schoolgirl’s dream, the hero of all the movies ever made about dashing Frenchmen in the Foreign Legion.

  When I returned the picture to its folder I noticed an inscription on the back of it. “To my dear mama from her worthless son, Henri,” it read in translation, which explained how Paul had come by it. I had surmised long before that Anne, like Madame Cesira, preferre
d not to have pictures of Henri de Villemont around to reopen fresh wounds, so Madame Cesira must have entrusted Paul with this photograph of his father to be kept in private. Thought of Madame Cesira also enlightened me as to why the man’s face in the picture should look so hauntingly familiar. It was, allowing for the difference in age, very much like the face of General Sebastien de Villemont in the picture on the mantelpiece of the old lady’s apartment overlooking the Quai d’Anjou.

  Still, it was Henri’s pistol, not his photograph, which was my real concern. An unpleasant possibility came to mind. When I had first brought the gun to the de Gondes they had said something about Dr. Morillon’s being told of it. At any time between then and now he might have decided to do something about it on his own. Servants were always in and out of the apartment. It would be a simple matter to bribe one to remove the pistol when I was away from my room.

  There was only one way to settle this. Claude de Gonde had insisted on returning the gun to me when I handed it to him. As far as I was concerned, that made him responsible for now finding out what had become of it.

  11

  It was Madame Gabrielle who opened the door of the de Gonde apartment to me. She was entertaining guests, the room was full of chic, middle-aged women chattering away at the tops of their voices, and whatever she read in my face led her to immediately step out into the hallway and close the door behind her.

  She peered at me anxiously through her glasses. “What is it? Is something wrong?”

  I saw no point in alarming her. “Nothing is wrong, madame. I only wished to speak to Monsieur de Gonde for a few minutes.”

  “Oh.” She pressed a hand to her bosom and sighed with relief. “After that dreadful affair last night I didn’t know what to expect.”

  “That affair was my fault, madame. I apologize for it.”

  “What nonsense. Is that what you want to talk to my husband about? Is it possible that because of last night you feel obliged to leave Madame de Villemont’s service?”

  “Do you think I should?”

  “My God, no,” Madame Gabrielle said. “I assure you that if you do leave, Paul would be the only one to really suffer. Before you came here he was such a sad little ghost of a child. Now—well, do I have to tell you how strong and alive he’s become? There have been too many upheavals in his life already. Your departure could be the most shattering of all because he’d feel that his friend and hero had deliberately deserted him. Although”—Madame Gabrielle could not help smiling a little at this—“he has confided to me that his hero can be a very cruel taskmaster when it comes to schoolwork.”

  “Only when the student is lazy,” I said. “But I have no intention of deserting Paul. What I wanted to talk about with Monsieur de Gonde concerns something else altogether. Do you know where I can find him?”

  “At present, he’s attending a business meeting in the conference room. But I suspect,” Madame Gabrielle said wryly, “that it may take hours for the meeting to decide the fate of the world”

  My feeling was that, business meeting or not, de Gonde would be glad to give me a few minutes on a matter which concerned him so vitally, but before I could make my departure, Madame Gabrielle insisted on leading me into her living room and introducing me to the guests there. At first, I imagined this to be merely a gracious gesture in my direction—after all, to these patrician ladies I was a servant in the house—but I quickly saw that the gesture had an ulterior motive. The pink-cheeked defiance with which Madame Gabrielle presented me to her friends, their startled expressions, raised eyebrows, and bright, false smiles, all made it plain that Anne de Villemont and I were objects of scandal to those present, and that Madame Gabrielle was publicly declaring her faith in us. If I had liked her before for her unfailing kindness, her obvious concern for Anne and affection for Paul, I had to wholeheartedly admire her now for her courage in facing down these glittering birds of ill-omen perched around the room.

  I took my leave as soon as I could and went directly to the conference room downstairs. It was the last room of the house’s west wing, the one immediately beyond the game room where the disastrous scene between Anne and Morillon had taken place the night before, and its massive doors were tightly closed. I heard the drone of a voice on the other side of the doors and hesitated there, straining my ears to make out what was being said. I didn’t want to break in on the meeting during an important speech and decided that if this sounded important I could wait it out.

  I wasn’t given a chance to wait very long. The next instant, I felt a pressure between the shoulder blades and a soft voice said, “Please do not move. This is a gun, and if you make one little move it will certainly go off.”

  I froze in my awkward listening position.

  “Very good, monsieur,” said the voice. “Now clasp your hands on your head and turn around to face me.”

  I did so, and found myself looking at a boy—he couldn’t have been more than twenty—who regarded me with an expression of sleepy indifference, although the gun he held aimed at my chest was certainly at the ready. It was a heavy, long-barreled revolver with a silencer attached to it.

  I tried to put on the same front of indifference as the boy. “What’s that all about?” I said, nodding at the gun.

  “It’s about my instructions, monsieur. There’s always a chance that someone may bruise an ear pressing it against that door. I’m here to see this doesn’t happen.”

  Too late I remembered Georges’ warning my first day in the house that the conference room was guarded against eavesdroppers during business meetings. While the boy kept the gun against my breastbone and frisked me with his free hand in a thoroughly professional manner, I said, “Look, I’m the tutor of Monsieur de Gonde’s nephew and only wished to speak to Monsieur for a minute. If you’d put that cannon away and call him out here—”

  “But of course. You always prepare to speak to someone by listening at his keyhole. Only it’s Monsieur de Gonde who does the calling here. Since he doesn’t want to be bothered now, you might explain yourself to his secretary instead. Do you know Monsieur Bourdon?”

  “Yes.”

  “We’ll soon find out,” said the boy.

  A side door in the game room opened onto a narrow staircase. Hands still clasped on my head, I was prodded up a flight of steps and along the second-floor corridor to the door of Bernard Bourdon’s apartment. When I was ushered through the door by a jab of the pistol, Bernard, seated at a desk, pen in hand, gaped at me, his mouth wide open with astonishment, and then burst into helpless laughter.

  “What a scene!” he managed to say. “I knew that sooner or later something like this had to happen.”

  “But this type—” the boy started to say angrily, and Bernard cut him short with a wave of the hand.

  “Yes, yes, idiot, this type is a dangerous spy sent by the oil companies of America to learn how many holes we intend to dig in the Sahara Desert next year. You’ve done a magnificent job in capturing him, and I’ll see you get a medal for it. Now put that disgusting piece of machinery back in your pocket or wherever you keep it and go downstairs.”

  White with rage, the boy thrust the gun into his belt and drew his jacket over it. As he started to open the door, Bernard cheerfully remarked, “And next time, hero, try a little more brain power and a little less fire power. Otherwise, you’ll be dragging Madame de Gonde herself up here one of these days, and how I’ll explain that to Monsieur de Gonde I don’t know.”

  When the boy was gone, savagely slamming the door after him, Bernard pityingly shook his head. “He takes his job seriously, that Albert.”

  “A funny sort of job,” I said.

  “Not at all. In case you don’t know it, Reno, industrial espionage is all the rage today. It can be worth a fortune to overhear a few secrets, get a look at some contracts, learn a formula for a new product. It should be. If the wrong people got an earful of that meeting downstairs, the Bourse could go crazy when it opens Monday. Anyhow, I’m sorry you w
ere bothered by that fool. What was it you were trying to do when he pulled his gun on you—see Monsieur Claude?”

  “Yes.”

  “He’ll be tied up in conference quite a while. Would you want me to deliver him a message?”

  “No.”

  Bernard regarded me quizzically. “You don’t like me very much, do you?”

  “I haven’t thought about it one way or the other.”

  “I suspect you have. The sad part, Reno, is that you and I should be good friends, considering our position here. Maybe we’re not members of the family, but we’re a long way from being chefs or chauffeurs. It’s possible that we even have an interest in the same literature, the same music, the same art. What could be a better foundation for friendship? It certainly offers more than a game of dominoes with those lumps in the kitchen.”

  What interested me in this appeal was not the meaning under it, the thinly veiled suggestion that I might fill Sidney Scott’s place in his life if I chose to, but the fact that Bernard did not share the attitude of the lumps downstairs to my manhandling of Dr. Morillon. Instead of responding to first impulse and walking out of the room, I remarked this to him, and he shrugged.

  “Monsieur Claude said you were forced to defend yourself and that’s all there was to it. For myself, I can tell you that the scene wasn’t unexpected. Anyone who becomes attached to your Madame de Villemont sooner or later finds himself involved in such ugly situations.”

  “Why?”

  “Why? Because this is a woman, Reno, who seems to have taken the great Shakespeare literally. ‘All the world’s a stage,’ he wrote, and so it is to Madame, who evidently regards herself as the heroine of a frantic melodrama playing off the people in her life against each other. Mad, quite mad, you see. The worst of it is that she happens to be extraordinarily attractive to men. At least enough to make even a man like Hubert Morillon behave like a fool.”

  “And me as well?”

  “For the sake of her child, I hope not.”