House of Cards

by Stanley Ellin

  Vosiers was shrewd enough not to make an issue of this. He led the Inspector away while the elderly Santange remained in the doorway casually surveying the premises. It seemed impossible that he couldn’t hear the thudding of my heartbeat; we were that close to each other. The sweat poured from me. I began to ache with tension as the minutes of waiting ticked by.

  What, I wondered, was Vosiers telling the Inspector now that they were out of earshot. My mind raced. I had warned the man that if there was a double-cross I’d blow the lid off the family’s dirty affairs. But was that enough to seal his mouth now?

  Then I heard returning footsteps, heard the voices of Vosiers and the Inspector.

  “But you have no idea where he carted off his belongings?” the Inspector was saying, and when Vosiers answered, “None,” I went limp with relief.

  “Too bad,” said the Inspector. ‘It would have given us a lead. But never fear, we’ll catch up to him very soon. Since we have his passport, he won’t find it easy to get out of the country.”

  “I trust not,” said Vosiers. “And I’m free to leave now?”

  “You are. By the way, I’ll keep a man on duty at that gate twenty-four hours a day in case the creature decides to return here.”

  “On duty at the gate? Ah, but, Inspector—”

  “No, no, it’s not a personal favor. Just sound procedure.”

  Vosiers watched the team make their way out of the courtyard, then swung the door shut.

  “You heard him,” he said to me flatly. “That brute with the machine gun is remaining right there at the gate. So now you have no choice. You’ll have to remain here when I leave.”

  I said with slow, deadly emphasis, “I told you I was going to see Madame de Villemont and have Paul brought back here to Paris.”

  “And how do we get out of here with that man at the gate?”

  “I once saw Pascal carting scrap metal from the boiler through that small door in back of the garage, so there must be a passage between the cellar and the garage. We go through it, I hide in the car, and that’s all there is to it.”

  “I assure you there is no such passage!” Vosiers said vehemently. So vehemently I knew he was lying.

  “Then you’d better start digging one, monsieur,” I told him. “Otherwise, you and I are going to be stuck here for a long time. And I don’t think you’ll find it easy to sleep nights, tied down to your bed.”

  Vosiers’ eyes became pinpricks of hatred. “You oaf,” he said softly. “You buffoon.”

  “The passageway, monsieur.”

  He stood there in an agony of indecision, gnawing his lip. Plainly, the last thing in the world he wanted to do was lead me to that passageway, although it was impossible to see why. When I took a menacing step toward him, he looked around wildly as if trying to find some last-second means of escape from the inevitable.

  “I’ll give you the ten thousand francs,” he said hoarsely. “Remain here, and I’ll make it twenty thousand.”

  “The passageway. We don’t have all day.”

  It was not to the cellar he led me, but to the gun room. I had never been in it before. Now I saw that it was a small room handsomely paneled in oak, with a variety of rifles and shotguns mounted on the walls and with a glass case in one corner displaying a collection of antique pistols. In the middle of the room was a large workbench with rows of shallow drawers in it. It must have been in one of those drawers, I thought, that Anne had found the cartridges for Colonel de Villemont’s Beretta.

  But there was nothing out of the ordinary about the room, nothing to give one pause. Then Vosiers slowly and unwillingly rolled the glass case away from its corner, and I saw something very much out of the ordinary. He leaned his weight against the wall there, and a panel of it silently swung outward revealing pitch blackness beyond. I followed on his heels as he squeezed through the opening, my hand on his shoulder to guard against any tricks, and the panel closed behind me.

  “What about a light?” I said, as we were engulfed in darkness.

  “It’s not necessary. I know the way.”

  He didn’t know it as well as he thought. He took two steps forward, his foot kicked against something metallic, and I had to steady him by the shoulder to keep him from falling.

  “Now we’ll do it my way,” I said, and I swept a hand up and down the edge of the panel behind me until I found a light switch there. I pressed it, and then in the glare of almost blinding illumination I saw what Vosiers had been so desperately anxious for me not to see. Saw my incredible innocence in turning for help to Claude de Gonde, of all people.

  It was a low-ceilinged room but immense in size and as full of working equipment as a flourishing machine shop. I recognized the machinery. I had spent too much time in armorers’ wagons on the battlefront in Korea not to. This was the apparatus for the repair and maintenance of weapons, and while the size and shape of the metal packing cases on the floor might suggest they were meant to store gardening tools, I knew that they contained something far more deadly than rakes and hoes.

  I was indifferent to politics; my reading of the daily paper was perfunctory; I had always tried to steer clear of discussions about governments and the riots and rebellions endlessly stewing against them. But I had lived in Paris through the Algerian crisis, had seen with my own eyes the terroristic tactics of the outlawed OAS—l’Organisation de l’Armée Secrète—as it made its fanatic, bloody last-ditch stand against the official decision to give Algeria its independence. Now as I looked around this room which was so beautifully equipped to assemble plastiques and repair machine guns, I thought of the high-toned family of colons inhabiting the luxurious apartments above it and of their friend Morillon; and all the intrigue I had been blind to since the day I first came to the mansion was illuminated as brilliantly as this room itself.

  “Monsieur,” I said to Vosiers, “you were right. I have been a fool. But now that I’m so much wiser, what do you, as a member of the OAS, suggest we do about it?”

  4

  For a moment Vosiers looked tired and beaten, the stiffening gone from his spine. Then he recovered himself.

  “The OAS is dead,” he said in a flat voice. “It’s only a memory.”

  “Is it? The Sûreté may disagree after it gets a look at this layout.”

  Vosiers shook his head slowly. “But the Sûreté is not going to get a look at it.”

  “Because that would put my own neck on the block?” I said caustically. “No, monsieur, it isn’t really necessary for me to report in person that I have the goods on Hubert Morillon and his friends. An anonymous phone call will do quite as well.”

  “It will,” said Vosiers, “if you intend to destroy Paul.”

  “So you were lying when you said he was with his grandmother!”

  “He is with her, but that changes nothing! Not even Madame Cesira can save the boy if Hubert is betrayed to the police. You must understand that.” Vosiers’ voice broke. “If Hubert is betrayed, Paul pays the price for it.”

  “And the price?”

  “Death,” Vosiers whispered. “Certain death.”

  His hand suddenly went into his hip pocket, and I emerged from my stupor just in time to pinion it there, squeezing the wrist until he groaned softly. When I withdrew the unresisting hand it was clutching only a handkerchief.

  I released the hand, but then took the precaution of searching him for weapons. Vosiers bore this ordeal in silence, and when it was over he mopped his gleaming face with his handkerchief.

  “You’re strong,” he said. “Muscular as a bull. But trample carelessly in this china shop and you will certainly kill my nephew. Hubert Morillon’s safety comes before everything else. Believe me, this is a fact of life you must learn to live with.”

  “Believe you? Am I supposed to believe that you and your whole family are so completely in Morillon’s power—”

  “You make it sound as if the man is the devil himself!” Vosiers burst out. “Do you think he wants to see har
m come to the child? He’s the last one for that. But he has no choice in the matter. This arrangement was devised by his superior for Hubert’s own protection. Those closest to you are the ones most likely to betray you. This way, no one would want to risk the child’s life by such a betrayal.”

  I believed him then. It was impossible not to in the face of his sweaty anguish.

  I said, “And who is Morillon’s superior in this outfit? Who’s the one willing to murder a child? Is it a fake rug peddler named Léon Becque?”

  Vosiers shook his head. “I don’t know anyone by that name.”

  “A smooth customer with one eye missing and bad scars on his cheek.”

  “I don’t know him; I never heard of him. And there’s no use asking further questions about it. It’s not my affair to know the answers. Since the cause is just, I serve willingly in the ranks.”

  “As what? Butcher’s apprentice?”

  Vosiers emitted a hissing breath; his eyes glittered with rage.

  “What would you know about these matters?” he said. “What did you ever own in your life that couldn’t be tossed on a dump heap without regret? But my vineyards in North Africa brought me in a million a year until those Moslem savages destroyed them. So for the sake of my rotting vineyards and my ruined home where filthy sidis now squat on the floors to drop their dung, I serve as I’m told to without complaint. If I must be a butcher’s apprentice to make the world fit to live in again, then I will be. It’s as simple as that.”

  As simple as that. I thought of Louis’ sightless eyes staring at me, a bullet hole between them, but I took a tight grip on my temper. Vosiers had to get me away from this house and lead me to Anne de Villemont. He would be no use beaten to a pulp.

  “Let’s get going,” I told him. “We can cry over your sad story on the way to Dijon.”

  A door in back of the workshop opened on to the pasageway leading to the garage. Only one car remained in the garage, the white Ferrari, Matilde Vosiers’ favorite toy, and our footsteps echoed hollowly in the emptiness around us as we approached it.

  I opened the car’s trunk. In it were a couple of well-worn Vuitton suitcases and a spare tire, and when they were removed—the luggage placed inside the car, the tire laid on the floor of the garage—I saw that whoever had designed the Ferrari had certainly not allowed for the possibility of transporting a passenger in its trunk. It would have been a tight fit for a skinny, undersized specimen; for me it would be like doubling up inside half a coffin. But I was in no spot to be fussy about the accommodations. Not while that cop stood watchfully at the gate cradling the tommygun in his arms.

  At the same time, there was Vosiers to consider. I was sure he wasn’t the man to risk trying murder on his own account somewhere along the road—he was an underling in the organization and would want the go-ahead from his leaders before taking such drastic action—but still I couldn’t see myself letting him lock me in that trunk like a fowl placed in an oven for basting. So I searched around until I came up with a hammer and chisel, and while Vosiers watched with the anguish of a man who is having a chisel driven into his own heart, I knocked the catch off the inside of the trunk to keep it from being locked at all.

  “Was that necessary?” he asked.

  “I hope not. Do you know the woods the other side of Villeneuve?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. There’s a dirt road that crosses the highway about a kilometer past the town. Take that road and park in the woods. When the coast is clear, tap on the trunk so I’ll know it’s safe to come out. And no tricks.”

  “No tricks,” said Vosiers. He gave me a curious sidelong look, his lips twisting into an unpleasant smile. “As a matter of fact, I suspect my associates may find you much more valuable alive than dead.”

  “Keep that in mind,” I advised him, wondering what he meant.

  He waited while I fitted myself into the trunk, then lowered the lid on me. I heard the garage doors open, felt the car rock under his weight as he got behind the wheel, and we were on our way. There was a momentary delay at the gate, an exchange of words with the man on guard there, a heave and bounce of springs as we turned into the street, and then steady, surging motion.

  5

  So for the time being there was nothing left to do but lie there stifling, my knees under my chin, my arms clasped around them, and examine my situation. As far as I could see, it was bad but not fatal. For one thing, my recklessly walking into the lion’s den this way, the fact that I could argue I was Anne’s dupe and not her accomplice, should carry weight in the organization’s councils. And for Paul’s sake alone, de Gonde should be willing to meet my terms. Certainly they were easy terms. Let Paul clear me of murder without a word of the family’s secret affairs being mentioned, let me return to my job of substitute father to the child until he was able to stand on his own feet; that was all I wanted. If I got that much, I might some day be able to move against the organization itself.

  What about the organization?

  All the evidence so far suggested it was divided into cadres kept secret from each other. The members of the household on the rue de Courcelles must make up one such cadre, the toughs who had assaulted me in the Parc des Expositions another which might include Léon Becque. It was even possible that Charles Leschenhaut belonged to some cadre of intellectuals. When I thought of it now, I realized how much the viewpoint of his magazine, La Foudre, echoed the aims of the OAS. And there must be still others, ruthless and well disciplined to judge from the stock of arms behind that gun room in the mansion.

  OAS or not, this was a terrorist underground of the deadliest sort. Perhaps from the mansion itself had come the machine guns used by the squad of men who had nearly succeeded in assassinating de Gaulle that sweltering, emotional summer of 1962. And this underground army had to be flawlessly organized to have survived the retribution aimed at it by the government. A few of those involved in the assassination attempt had been tried and convicted but had never talked. The ringleaders had been tried and convicted in absentia, a farce if ever there was one. They had mysteriously vanished from the face of the earth, and not a trace of them could be found. Could it be that in the persons of Morillon and Becque they had reappeared?

  If that were the case, it was easy to see why extreme measures would be taken to protect Morillon, a man already condemned to execution. But why was little Paul de Villemont made the hostage for him? Exactly whom had Vosiers been referring to when he said that those nearest to you are the ones most likely to betray you? Surely not the prime conspirators, the family of colons on the rue de Courcelles, nor any of its servants, hand-picked, and, as I had cause to know, fiercely loyal to Morillon. What it came down to was that there was only one person in that household who was not trusted by it—Hubert Morillon’s mistress, Anne de Villemont.

  To give her all the best of it, it was possible that when they first became lovers she didn’t know of his activities. But sooner or later she learned about them and was thus made part of the conspiracy herself. Then at the first sign that she wanted to break with it, her child was made hostage for her good behavior.

  And this, to use Vosiers’ words, was the china shop I had gone blundering through like an enraged bull.

  No thanks to Anne that I was still alive to reflect on my stupidities. And, as Louis had pointed out, the greatest folly of all had been telling her of my suspicions, telling her I was going to let the cat out of the bag. She must have immediately fled in terror with this to de Gonde or Morillon—one would be as bad as the other as far as I was concerned—and after that it was only a miracle that saved my life twice in one day.

  I was the intended victim both at the Parc des Expositions and in poor Louis’ room. I was The Hanged Man who threatened to pull down that house of cards on the rue de Courcelles.

  Then miracle had canceled out miracle. I had managed to survive, but so had the house of cards.

  6

  In the woods beyond Villeneuve I crawled out of
the car trunk feeling as if I had just come off the rack. When I was settled in the seat beside Vosiers, he swung the car into the highway leading south to Dijon and drove at a steady, unobtrusive rate of speed, both of us maintaining a tight-lipped silence. Night fell as we approached Joigny; a track of moonlight across the Yonne River kept pace with us as we moved along. It was the last thing I remember seeing until I was started out of a deep sleep by a jab in the ribs.

  “If you’re going to sleep, at least do it on your own side of the car,” Vosiers said.

  I was stretched out, my head on his shoulder. I sat up and peered into the darkness. All I could make out was a line of trees along one side of the road, as evenly spaced as the pickets of a fence, and along the other side the glimmer of a narrow canal.

  “Where are we?” I asked.

  “Near Dijon, but we turn off here for the chateau. We’ll be there in ten minutes.”

  “What time is it?”

  “Nine o’clock. Just in time for dinner. If you have any appetite for dinner.”

  I realized that my previous aches and pains were gone, but had been replaced by a ravaging hunger. I remarked this to Vosiers, and he nodded admiringly.

  “You’ve got good nerves all right,” he said.

  We made a sharp turn into a lane between twin avenues of cypresses, the tires spraying up gravel as we jounced along. On a rise ahead I saw the chateau, silvery in the moonlight, an ancient building with a machicolated roofline bracketed between a pair of towers.

  “The vineyards are on the other side of the slope,” said Vosiers, then acidly commented, “De Laennac is a real genius in his way. It takes a genius to own land like this in the Côte d’Or and not be able to produce a decent bottle of wine.”

  There were several cars parked along the driveway, among them the familiar Mercedes limousine. As Vosiers pulled up behind it and cut the ignition, a couple of men emerged from the shadows of the building and walked up to us. One of them was my old admirer, Pascal the garage-hand. The other was a youth of the same vicious-looking cut as Albert and the knife-wielder at the fair. Both were armed with shotguns and neither blinked an eye when Vosiers got out of the car and said, pointing at me, “That one is to remain where he is until he’s called for, understand? If he makes a move, you’re at liberty to blow his head off.”