House of Cards

by Stanley Ellin

  With the dossier on Colonel de Villemont marked “case closed, subject deceased,” Dr. Hubert Morillon could freely move back and forth across frontiers knitting together the structure of the OEI and carrying out its assassinations (the attempt on de Gaulle in the summer of 1962 had been one of his few failures), but the price paid for this freedom was heavy. Aside from his political activities, the thing dearest to the man’s heart was his son, but as Leschenhaut pointed out, it was best not to have any contact with the child until he was grown old enough to share the father’s secret. A child’s eye might penetrate the disguise, a child’s tongue might wag carelessly—it was safer to stay at a distance than risk this. Safer, in fact, to stay away from the house on the rue de Courcelles altogether, because, while the servants knew the secret and could be trusted with it, there were old acquaintances one might run into who could not be trusted the same way. De Villemont’s attendance at the dinner party given for Leschenhaut had been in flagrant disregard of this injunction, but he could no longer contain his tormenting desire to meet his son’s tutor face to face. He had been hearing things about the young American who occupied his wife’s apartment, he would find some way at the meeting of detecting whether or not he was being cuckolded, and according to the evidence presented at that disastrous party, he was sure he was.

  Now, although the evidence had been misleading, here I was, lying in bed beside his wife while she told me all this, and doing what I could to remove his son from him. We had little to thank each other for, Colonel Henri de Villemont and I.

  “The man who threw the bomb into the staff car,” I said to Anne. “Was his name Léon Becque?”

  “Not Becque. Léon Schaefer. He was an Intelligence officer in the Legion in charge of interrogating prisoners. He had a horrible reputation for cruelty. Why? Do you know him?”

  “Under the name of Becque. He’s the witness you just read about in the news story of Louis’ murder. But if he got up to testify against me in court, and I could prove he was Schaefer—”

  “It’s no secret,” Anne said. “He was in prison already as an OAS leader. He was released under the general amnesty,” and the ray of hope I had seen before me went glimmering out. Algeria was ancient history, Léon Schaefer only a misguided revolutionary who had reformed and settled down to a peaceful civilian life as a rug salesman, and his story in court would remain as potent as ever. In the end, it came down to what I had known all along. The organization had to be completely destroyed at one blow.

  I had the power to do that.

  While Anne lay in silent reflection, I surreptitiously drew Colonel Hardee’s membership list from beneath my belt and looked through it. My heart sank. All I saw were numbers. Page after page of them.

  I slipped the papers back under my belt. No question about it, the list was in code. By the time it could be decoded, it would be too late to use it effectively against the OEI. I had plenty of time, however, to lie there and consider how I had risked my chance of escape from the Château Laennac for a handful of waste paper.

  The train slowed and stopped briefly at Domodossola and then sped southward again into a furious rainstorm which sent water sluicing against the window with an impact that sounded as if it were going to shatter the glass. But at least we were in Italy, and I celebrated this by inviting Anne to a breakfast of chocolate bars and then sharing my last cigarette with her.

  This time she didn’t waste a crumb of it.

  4

  We made the final leg of the run to Milan at breakneck speed through that steady downpour, and when the attendant tapped on the compartment door and announced we would be at Milan station in five minutes we had gained back enough of the time lost at the tunnel entrance to meet the four o’clock train to Venice. I desperately wanted to be on the train. Otherwise, the head start we had on our pursuers, the element of surprise I was counting on to snatch Paul away from under their noses, might all be dissipated.

  The last five minutes seemed interminable as we slowed to a crawl approaching the station, winding this way and that through a maze of rails like a bewildered caterpillar hunting a resting place. Then we glided alongside the platform and came to a halt with a jarring of couplers.

  The colonel’s lady, whose bed I had been sinlessly sharing, was already up and dressed. She stood before the mirror on the door trying to do something about her tousled hair, her thoughts evidently far away and depressing.

  “Never mind making yourself beautiful,” I said harshly, and saw this had the hoped-for effect of stiffening her spine. “Just switch off that light and take a look out of the window. See if there are any police down at the exit gate.”

  She did and drew back from the window to report to me.

  “It’s not easy to tell from here, but I think there are.”

  “In uniform?”

  “No, two men in raincoats, but they’re looking at everyone going through the gate. One of them keeps checking with a sheet of paper he’s holding. It could be that picture of you.”

  Could be? I knew damn well it was.

  I stood there groping for a solution to this problem while Anne obediently waited for instructions. I found myself enraged with her then for her faith in me, her unspoken confidence that I would now manage to pull a rabbit out of the hat on demand. After all, she wasn’t my woman, and whichever way it turned out—whether Henri de Villemont destroyed me or I destroyed him—she never would be. In one case I would be dead anyhow. In the other case I would have brought about her husband’s death, and no matter how she felt about him now, that would always lie like a shadow between us. Her upbringing had been too rigid and narrow to allow logic to prevail. To her the marital vows were not the amusing ritual they had been to my ex-wife, but something profound and meaningful. For that matter, I wasn’t sure she still didn’t find a powerful attraction in de Villemont’s fanatic courage and virility and magnetism—

  It was better not to dwell on it. The business at hand was to get us out of the trap we were in.

  Through the window I saw a couple of passengers walk by, followed by a porter carrying their bags, and then the dimly lit platform was empty. A baggage car, its doors gaping open, stood on the track the other side of the platform, and beside it were parked some handcarts of packages and crates waiting for the morning shift to come on duty.

  I took off my sweater and shirt and stuffed them into the valise along with the gun and Colonel Hardee’s papers, then knotted my handkerchief around my throat. Too bad I didn’t have Henri de Villemont’s resources for disguising myself, but under the right conditions a grimy undershirt and neckerchief and an unshaven jaw might serve as well as plastic surgery and contact lenses and hair dye.

  I said to Anne, “I can’t take a chance walking past the conductor. Is there anyone outside who might see me going through the window?”

  “Just those men at the gate. But there are some people coming toward them. They probably won’t be looking this way while they’re checking them out.”

  “Tell me when they do, and I’ll try to make it to that handcart across the way. When I start it moving, grab the valise and get out of here yourself. Use the door at the back end of the car. Then walk fast so that you can get ahead of me on the platform, but not too far ahead. At the gate ask those men a question—ask them where you get the train to Venice—anything, as long as you keep them busy until I get by. Can you do that?”

  “I hope so.”

  “Well, you’ve got what to do it with.” I reached out and pulled open the top two buttons of her blouse. “That’s the kind of distraction a pair of cops ought to go for. And get that scared look off your face. Be bright and smiling when you talk to them. Are those people at the gate yet?”

  “Yes. No one’s looking this way now.”

  I let myself out of the window, dropped to the platform, and crossed it at a casual pace so as not to draw eyes in my direction. The handcart I had picked for my purpose was piled high with crates; it was the only one in sight th
at offered me full concealment from anyone I was steering toward. The crates must have contained machine parts, judging from the weight of the load. It took a gigantic effort just to get the cart moving, but once on its way it was not too hard to keep rolling. I had made fair progress when Anne passed me by without a glance, walking briskly, the valise swinging from her hand.

  She reached the exit gate a car length ahead of me. Peering around my load of crates, I saw the two men in belted trench-coats eying her as she approached them at a deliberately provocative, hip-swinging gait. That, added to the tousled hair and the blouse open almost down to the brassiere, seemed to put them into a blissful trance. The only trouble was that they were having the trance squarely in my path, and there was no way around them through the gate.

  Both men came to quivering attention as Anne stopped before them.

  “Per favore, signores,” she said as carefully as if she were reading it by phonetics from a textbook, “dove il treno a Venezia?” and the two men glanced at each other with knowing smiles. This knockout came from France, and these French girls—

  I could see disaster ahead. They were totally oblivious of the cart which was almost on top of them now, and all I needed was an accident to have them give me their full attention.

  There was only one thing to do about it.

  “Ehi!” I shouted as I braced my heels, trying to drag the cart to a halt. “Attenti, attenti, idiotí! You want to lose a leg under these wheels? Make up to the girls some place else!”

  The men dodged aside just in time as the cart came to a standstill between them, and one of them, the one holding what I saw was indisputably my picture, snarled, “Watch out yourself, stupid. You know who you’re talking to?”

  “Never mind that,” the other told him sharply, and walked around to lend me a hand as I strained to get the cart back into motion. I kept my head averted from him as we heaved together, shoulder to shoulder, heaved again, and then I was through the gate and away, my whole body clammy with tension.

  I pushed along steadily, not daring to look around in case the police at the gate still had an eye on me. Ahead were only two trains showing signs of life. One was a sleek streamliner being loaded with ice and provisions, but that, I knew, must be a rapido being made ready for the morning run to Rome. The other, further down the shed, was undoubtedly the local to Venice, a couple of shabby, antiquated carriages hitched to a string of dilapidated freight cars. I steered the handcart toward it, and when I felt I was out of eyeshot of the plainclothesmen at the gate, I looked around expecting to see Anne not far behind me.

  She was nowhere in sight.

  I abandoned the cart where it was and moved to a position from where I could make out the figures of the two men at the gate. I could picture what had happened. Having cornered this luscious French doll with the big blue eyes, they weren’t going to let her get away that quickly. Not, at least, until Anne had showed them her wedding ring and a flash of temper. The one holding my picture would be especially hard to discourage. With his wolfish face and trim mustache he looked like a type who fancied himself a real Lothario.

  But, incredibly, only the two men were at the gate. No Anne.

  And wherever she was, there was the money for the fare to Venice and the clothes that would allow me to travel inconspicuously.

  In the few minutes since I had last seen her, I told myself, it was impossible she could have walked into the hands of the OEI. After all, I was its chief target, I was the one marked for its attentions. Yet, if this wasn’t an OEI job—

  Under any conditions, I couldn’t remain where I was, wondering with a sick apprehension what had gone wrong. There weren’t more than a dozen people to be seen in the whole vast cavern of the station, and in that emptiness I had the feeling of spotlights trained on me. I walked to the platform where the Venice train was standing and strolled past its two dismal-looking carriages, hoping against hope to see Anne in one of the compartments, trying to convince myself that she might have slipped by me while I was on my way here. Few of the compartments were occupied, none of them by Anne. They were the old-fashioned compartments, each with its own door and with wooden benches facing each other across a narrow aisle, anyone in them as visible as in a telephone booth, so there was no chance of missing her.

  Then, as I began to retrace my steps, I saw her coming toward me, running as well as she could with the valise burdening her, and the apprehension in me turned into savage temper at having been given such a scare. When she breathlessly started to say something I cut her short by snatching the valise from her hand and shoving her bodily into an empty compartment, slamming the door behind us for privacy. I opened the valise on a bench and rummaged through it until I came up with a fresh shirt and a sports jacket. Fully clothed once more, I tucked Colonel Hardee’s papers into my new jacket and thrust the gun into my hip pocket.

  I turned to Anne, who was sitting there watching me with an expression of mounting bewilderment. “The money,” I said. I didn’t intend to again find myself in the spot I had just been in.

  She wordlessly handed me the roll of banknotes, which seemed considerably depleted, and with it a pair of railroad tickets.

  “What’s this?” I said.

  “The tickets to Venice. They cost five thousand lire so we should have seven thousand left. I didn’t count it, but if you—”

  “Is that where you were? You didn’t have to buy these at the ticket window. We could have gotten them from the conductor. Of all the damn fool tricks—”

  “Now listen,” Anne cut in angrily. “When I asked that detective or whatever he is where I could get the train to Venice, he pointed to the ticket windows and said that was the place to ask. I couldn’t just walk after you then, could I, the way he was watching me? I had to go to the windows. And while I was there it seemed logical to buy the tickets. What did you think had happened to me?”

  “Plenty. And you can button up your dress now. The detective or whatever he is isn’t looking any more.”

  “That’s unfair!” She was so furious that she almost tore the buttons off, fumbling them into place. “I grant you’ve got reason to hate me, but not for this. Not for trying to help when I can.”

  “That’s because I don’t have your husband’s charming disposition. You know, it would be interesting to see which of us he’d kill first if he walked in here right now and—”

  As if timed with my words, the outside door to the compartment suddenly swung open. Anne gasped and cowered away as I whirled to confront the man looming in the doorway, my hand reaching for the gun in my pocket.

  Then I saw I didn’t need the gun. It was not Henri de Villemont who stood there, but a monk swathed in a robe which was the color and texture of an old khaki blanket and was belted with a piece of rope. He was carrying a worn carpetbag that looked a relic of a century ago. When he sat down and threw back his cowl, he revealed a freshly shaved tonsure and a bland, moonlike face with eyes that seemed distorted to twice normal size behind the powerful glasses he wore.

  A man may be willing to fight lions barehanded, but not have the nerve to remove himself from someone’s company, however unwanted it is. So I sat beside Anne while our traveling companion huddled in his seat facing us, hands clasped in his lap, distorted eyes fixed on us. It was hard to tell whether he saw me at all, or whether he was imprinting the image of my face, feature by feature, in his mind.

  Then we were on our slow, racketing way through the city and into open country, sealed in that stifling atmosphere by tightly closed windows. It was no use trying to leave them open. When I did, a spray of rain spattered across all of us. The conductor who entered the compartment to collect our tickets, a fierce-looking little old man with a magnificent white mustache, shrugged at the sight of the wet floor.

  “Let it rain in. Let it rain in,” he advised. “Drowning is better than frying to death any time.”

  The monk stirred from his reverie.

  “A fine choice,” he grumbled. “
But tell me, signor il capitreno, how long do we fry? When do we arrive at Venice?”

  “Who knows? We have to deliver a can of sardines to every lousy stop between Ventimiglio and Venice. It can take forever. Don’t worry about it. You’ll have time enough to say all your prayers twice over before you arrive.”

  “And what about starving to death?” I said. “Is there a stop along the way where we can get something to eat?”

  “At this time of morning?” The old man snorted. “Not a chance.”

  “A cigarette?” I hopefully produced the roll of money. “If you have some to spare—?”

  “I smoke a pipe. Cigarettes are an extravagance.”

  He went his way, leaving me to digest this information under the gaze of those distorted eyes across the aisle.

  Then Anne said abruptly, “Let’s go out in the corridor.”

  “What for? It won’t make the time pass any faster. You’d do better to try and get some sleep.”

  “Please.”

  There was a sharp urgency in her voice. Without further protest I followed her out to the corridor and to the end of the car. She turned to face me there.

  “That man isn’t a monk,” she said.

  “What makes you think so?”

  “Didn’t you see his hands? No monk would have his fingernails done like that. A manicure, nail polish—”

  “I’m not an expert on these things.”

  “You don’t have to be! Just use your common sense. It won’t be the first time one of Leschenhaut’s men has gone around like that and with false papers. And why do you think he got into our compartment when there are so many empties on the train? The best thing we can do is get off as soon as possible and not let him know we’re gone. We can leave the valise. That should do it.”

  “Not if he’s really OEI. It wouldn’t fool him for a second. Any time the train stops and we’re not in the compartment, he’ll be watching for us right outside on the platform.”

  “Then what can we do?”

  “I don’t know. Anyhow, I’d rather take a chance you’re wrong than get sidetracked at some godforsaken village this far from Venice.”