House of Cards

by Stanley Ellin

  I laid out my strategy as I ran into the house and up the stairs. I would remain here with Paul while Louis would take the cab to the rue de Courcelles and explain matters to Claude de Gonde. To de Gonde or Madame Gabrielle and no one else. Anne was Morillon’s puppet, Edmond Vosiers was his admirer, and I didn’t trust Madame Matilde or Bernard Bourdon on general principles. No, the de Gondes were the only ones capable of relieving me of my duties as Paul’s protector.

  My footsteps thundered through the house as I raced upstairs. As I reached the head of the stairway, Léon Becque opened the door of his room and peered inquiringly at me through his dark glasses.

  “My God!” he said. “What’s happened to you? Are you hurt?”

  “No. Is Louis here? Did you see him come in with the kid?”

  Becque shook his head. I was aware he had crossed the hall and was close behind me when I flung open Louis’ door and saw Louis and Paul standing there side by side facing me.

  Then Louis leaped toward me, arms outthrust, I heard the roar of an explosion in my ear, and that was all.

  PART THREE

  The World

  1

  I came to hazily.

  I was lying on the floor, my nose buried in a rug which filled my nostrils with the smell of dust. Then I felt something warm and wet trickling down my face and knew from the pain in my skull that this must be blood. I was wrong. The wetness touched my lips, burned them like an astringent. Cognac.

  I braced my hands against the floor to push myself to a sitting position, and one hand brushed against something cold and metallic. A neatly polished, solid-looking black shoe pushed whatever it was out of my reach, and a familiar voice said, “No more guns for you, chum. Try that again and I’ll mash your fingers into mincemeat.”

  “At least he’s not dead,” said another familiar voice. “I thought I might have killed him.”

  “Saved him a lot of trouble if you did,” said the first. “Anyhow, it takes more than a whack on the head with a bottle to kill a type like this. Look at him, the sleeping beauty. If you hadn’t cooled him off, he’d be a mile away by now and with all the money, too.”

  There were other voices clamoring in the background.

  “What a monster!”

  “Who would have believed it!”

  “Yes, but when it comes to money—”

  The shoe nudged me sharply in the ribs.

  “All right, champ, the fight’s over, so let’s not play dead any more. Up, assassin. It’s time for a nice little ride in the wagon.”

  I managed to get to my feet and stand there swaying as if I were on the deck of a small boat in a high sea. Then the deck steadied, my vision cleared, and I could try to make sense out of what was being said to me and why.

  It was my old acquaintance, Maguy, the cop on the beat, who confronted me, his eyes cold, his jaw set; and it was Léon Becque beside him, his dark glasses concealing whatever emotion he might show through his one good eye. Behind them were the cabby I had told to wait downstairs, and Madame Olympe almost filling the doorway with her bulk and barring the way to some tenants of the house and vendors from the stalls downstairs who craned their heads to witness this scene.

  But there was something missing from the scene.

  “Where’s Louis?” I said to Maguy. “Where’s the kid?”

  He was standing between me and the bed. He moved aside and jerked his thumb at the bed.

  “You want to make sure you did the job right?” he said. “Take a look, butcher.”

  I looked, and sickness rose in me, sticking in my throat so that I wanted to vomit but couldn’t. Louis lay sprawled on the bed, his head hanging over its side, his eyes blindly staring at me upside down. His beret had fallen off exposing the waxen forehead and gleaming skull, and centered in the forehead was a small, dark, round hole from which oozed threads of blood.

  For the past six years he had been my friend and family, a sort of hard-boiled, worrisome, affectionate older brother who was always there to lend a helping hand or to share my good times or bad times, and when the realization penetrated that he was really dead I was stricken by a sense of utter loneliness, a feeling of standing alone in a desolate world where everyone, no matter how familiar, was a stranger.

  “Do you have to let him lie there like that?” I managed to say. “Can’t you at least cover him?” and Madame Olympe remarked acidly, “Ah, but what tender sentiments now that it’s over and done with.”

  “A little late for tears,” someone else agreed.

  I looked at the hate-filled faces pronouncing these strange words, looked at the scene around me, and now desolation was replaced by a wild rage at what had been done to Louis, by fear at what might have happened to Paul, by bewilderment at the sight of the money scattered over the bed and on the floor at its foot. Thousands and thousands in banknotes lay there as if a tree bearing them had been roughly shaken over the bed. On the floor were also the shattered remnants of a cognac bottle—the quart bottle of Courvoisier Louis always kept on his dresser—its contents soaked up wetly by the carpet, and near the stain lay a gun.

  The sight of that gun transfixed me. It was a Beretta, beautifully and efficiently designed, and it was either the gun which I had flung down on Anne’s bed the night before, or its perfect facsimile. I reached down toward it, and Maguy shoved me back.

  “Is that yours?” he demanded.

  “I don’t know. I was given one like it, but I never carried it with me. Who did this, Maguy? Who killed him? And where’s the kid, for God’s sake? What happened to him?”

  “What kid?”

  “The one I’m supposed to be taking care of, damn it! Madame de Villemont’s son. He was right here when I came into this room! Where is he now?”

  Maguy turned to Becque, who slowly shook his head.

  “He was here!” I said. “He was standing next to Louis when I opened the door.”

  “There was nobody here but Louis,” Becque said to Maguy as if the words were being wrung out of him. “I was right at the door and saw everything. Reno came running up the stairs like a madman with the gun in his hand. He threw open the door, and there was Louis counting the money on the bed. “You thief!’ he yelled at Louis. ‘You swindler! So you’d rob me, would you?’ and before I could do anything he fired that bullet into Louis’ head. Then he started toward the bed—I suppose he was going to gather up the money—and I seized the bottle and hit him with it. I don’t know where I got the strength. Both of them were my friends, and to have this happen before my eyes—!”

  I looked at Léon Becque and knew that at last I was looking into the face of the enemy. Whether he was head conspirator or only an accomplice, here in the open was one of those fanatic friends of Hubert Morillon who evidently lived only to serve him.

  And how beautifully I had been duped into renting him my room, telling him my secrets, handing over to him Eliane Tissou who could explain my character to him, and Louis who could keep him informed of my every move.

  From the day Léon Becque had entered my life, wherever I was—on the rue de Courcelles or the Faubourg Saint-Denis or any place in between—I had been under surveillance.

  I lunged for Becque, and Maguy was instantly between us, his hand on the butt of his holstered pistol.

  “Make one more move like that,” he warned me, “and I’ll blow a hole in you just the way you did to that poor slob laying there.”

  “Listen to me, Maguy. You know me. You can’t believe I killed Louis. I tell you Becque is the one who did it!”

  “With your gun? The gun I had to pull out of your fist while you were stretched out here dead to the world?”

  “That’s his gun, all right,” the cabby put in loudly. “That’s the one he aimed at me when he jumped into my car.”

  I wheeled on him, and he shrank back, fearful but defiant.

  “What the hell are you talking about?” I demanded. “You know I never aimed any gun at you!”

  “No?” The cabby h
eld his arms wide in a gesture of outraged virtue. “You think I would have driven off with you otherwise, once I saw the cops chasing after you? You think I’m a type to help criminals make a getaway?”

  I could see myself standing before a judge and jury while he testified to that, while Maguy testified to the way he had found me gun in hand, while Léon Becque testified to the murder he had seen me commit before his eyes. One by one, witnesses would swear to my guilt until the prison doors were locked behind me for good.

  In all the world there was only one witness to Louis’ murder who would tell the truth about it.

  “Maguy,” I said, “when I opened that door the boy was standing here with Louis. I swear to you he was here, and he’s been kidnaped and is in danger. You must get in touch with his family at once. You’ll have to tell them—”

  “There was no one here but Louis,” Becque said patiently, as if he were humoring someone with a hallucination.

  “I know the child,” declared Madame Olympe. “I opened my door as soon as I heard the gun. I would have seen the boy taken from the house. I saw nothing.”

  “Then he’s still here in the house,” I told Maguy, who slowly shook his head at me. “The kidnaper might be holding him in Becque’s room for all we know. Why don’t you search and find out?”

  “There’s nobody in Becque’s room,” an onlooker said from the hallway. “The door is open. It’s easy to see the room is empty.”

  “You hear that, assassin?” Maguy said to me. “Empty. And what kind of kidnapers are you concocting who would take a child and leave a fortune in money lying around like this?”

  In the distance I heard the demented, warbling note of the siren on a police wagon. It was an alarm that set my mind to racing frantically. I would be hauled to Santé Prison, and no matter what I tried to do in my defense—expose Morillon, involve Anne and the family in a gigantic scandal—it wouldn’t clear me of Louis’ murder. Worse, if I were locked up I would be unable to find Paul, and for his sake and mine I had to be free to find him.

  The window was open, its curtain fluttering in the breeze. It was a long drop to the ground, I knew, but beneath the window was a canvas canopy over the fruit stalls against the building, and I could only pray the canopy would save me from a broken leg.

  “Maguy,” I said, bracing myself, “that’s the bastard you want!” and shoved him with all my strength into Léon Becque. I saw them both stagger and fall, almost bearing Madame Olympe and the cabby down with them, and the next instant I was through the window and clinging to the sill by my fingertips. I looked down, saw the striped canvas of the canopy below, saw the crowd gathered in the street before the house staring up at me. I hadn’t allowed for this audience, but there was nothing to be done about it anyhow. I heard Maguy bellowing at me as he charged toward the window, heard the crowd shouting, and released my grip.

  The canopy collapsed when I landed on it, and canvas and I came crashing down on a table piled high with oranges. I tried to scramble to my feet, oranges rolling every which way under me and spilling out into the gutter, and when I did get to my feet a couple of daring spirits grabbed at me and I had to throw a few punches to clear a way to the cab. If the ignition key wasn’t in place I intended to get out through the other door and make a run for it, but the key was there, and the cab, a shining new Citroën, roared into life immediately. The next instant, with a dozen pursuers futilely trying to keep pace on foot, I was down the block and away at full throttle. I reached the corner just as the police van, its siren deafening, swung into the Faubourg Saint-Denis, and we almost crashed head-on. I swung the wheel hard, careened up across the sidewalk and down into the boulevard, horns honking furiously and drivers raging at me as I threaded my way through them, and then I got control of my nerves and let the cab be engulfed by the traffic moving west toward the rue de Courcelles.

  2

  My thoughts moved in two directions at once.

  The immediate problem of escape I dealt with mechanically. The traffic on the boulevard made a good camouflage, but pursuit, I knew, would be coming this way so I swung the cab into the Faubourg Montmartre, cruised along a few blocks, and then turned west again on rue Saint-Lazare.

  Slouched low in the seat to conceal the bloodstained jacket, the typical Parisian cabby’s expression of boredom on my face, I drove with just enough abandon to pass, I hoped, for the real thing. About the reek of cognac which had soaked my hair and jacket, there was nothing I could do. There had been a time when the sharp fragrance of good brandy was pleasant to my nostrils. Now that it brought me only the picture of Louis sprawled out in death, his eyes staring at me upside down with glassy accusation, the smell was sickening.

  What had happened after I flung open the door to that room and seen Louis and Paul standing there? All I knew for a fact was that Léon Becque had been close behind me, and Louis had suddenly leaped toward me, hands outthrust, as if to shove me out of danger. Then there had been the explosion of a gunshot, a blow on the head, and oblivion. When I had come to, Louis was dead and Paul was gone.

  But no matter how murderously efficient Becque was, he could not have manipulated all this by himself. There must have been an accomplice behind the door with his gun ready. That was what Louis had been trying to save me from by flinging himself at me. That was why, probably in panic, the gunman had shot him down. The next instant, Becque had snatched up the bottle of cognac and smashed it over my head, and no better sacrificial goat could have been stretched out on the floor for his purpose. The accomplice had stilled any outcry from Paul and carried him away to some hiding place in the house. Becque had planted the gun in my inert hand, thrown open the window and shouted for the police, and the trap was sprung.

  But those banknotes scattered over the bed and floor?

  I clapped a hand to my pocket and knew, with a sinking heart, where that money had come from. It was the ten thousand francs getaway money Anne had given me; my wallet itself, with all my papers in it, would certainly be found in Louis’ pocket. It was all the evidence needed to substantiate Becque’s story that Louis had robbed me and I had killed him for it. No question about the murder weapon remained in my mind now. It was the late Colonel Henri de Villemont’s pistol, and it rounded out an airtight case against me.

  At least it was airtight if Paul couldn’t testify for me. It was useless to count on Anne as a witness, with her child in enemy hands.

  So now at all costs I had to get to Claude de Gonde before the police did. I wasn’t sure how much of my story he might believe—the dimensions of Hubert Morillon’s conspiracy were so staggering that I found it hard to believe in it myself—but de Gonde would do anything for Paul’s safety. With his help I might elude arrest until I cornered Morillon or Becque and got the truth about Paul’s whereabouts. Ten minutes alone in a locked room with either of them was all I wanted.

  Yet, if the police got to de Gonde before I did, I was now walking right into their hands.

  Tormented by this thought, twitching with the desire to step on the gas and cut through the jam-up of trams and buses heading in and out of their terminus in front of the Gare Saint-Lazare, I didn’t see the traffic cop at the crossing until I was almost on top of him, and then at the sound of his whistle and furious motion of his hand I pulled up so short that there was a clash of bumpers in the rear. I cowered still lower in the seat and sweated it out while the cop venomously started toward me. The next moment, to my relief and mystification, he changed his mind and, while still glaring at me, returned to his post. Then I realized why. The rear door of the cab swung open and a passenger pushed her way in, a young woman carrying a very small child in her arms. Close behind followed a little girl of about six or seven and a plump young man with crew-cut hair and a prissy mouth. He was burdened with a large canvas valise in one hand and a couple of airline carry-alls in the other and looked hot and irritable.

  “Ah, non, madame!” I said in despair, putting an arm behind me to bar the woman from entering a
ny further. “Mais non! Le taxi est dérangé!”

  “Crap,” said the young man in plain American. He shoved his family into the cab and clambered in after them, slamming the door behind him. “Comprenez English, Jack?”

  “Un peu, monsieur.”

  “Beaucoup more than un peu, I’ll bet. So get this straight, Jack. I know the law just as well as you, and that means you take us wherever we want to go or I get that gendarme to come over here and find out what the hell is going on. Vous allez where je demand, or else. Comprenez?”

  “Oui, monsieur.”

  “Good. Make it the Hotel Lutetia, Boulevard Raspail. And by the short way, too. Le vite route.”

  The cop was now furiously gesturing at me to get moving, so I did. The rue de Courcelles was a ten-minute drive along the avenue, and my idea was to pull up to the curb a block or two from the house on some pretext and leave my passengers to work out their own destiny while I risked making my way to the house on foot. I could only hope, as we swung into the rue de Rocher, that the peevish customer with the crew cut didn’t know we were heading in the opposite direction from the Left Bank and Boulevard Raspail. If he did, it meant nasty complications.

  But it wasn’t crew-cut who made the complications, it was his wife.

  “Larry,” she said, “please take Bubba.”

  Larry snorted. “How the hell can I take him when I’m loaded down with these bags as it is? Anyhow, he’s sound asleep. He’s not bothering you, is he?”

  “Please, Larry. It’s getting worse. I feel awful.”

  “What is it? That lousy appendix acting up again?”

  “It must be,” the woman said with a gasp. “Oh, Larry, it’s awful. It’s killing me.”

  “All right, give me Bubba.” In the mirror I saw Larry impatiently thrust the carry-alls on the little girl’s lap and take the baby from his wife. Relieved of the burden, the woman doubled over, her face twisted with agony, her teeth biting into her lower lip. “Jesus, what perfect timing,” Larry said, thus expressing my own anguished thought. “What a great vacation this turned out to be. The kids in our hair all the time, and now this. I told you to have that operation a year ago, didn’t I?”