Old Sinners Never Die

by Dorothy Salisbury Davis

The General decided to go down to the basement, and if he found nothing there, to go outdoors. It would take Virginia almost a half-hour to reach the city, if that’s where she was going. She had been gone ten minutes. He pulled on the striped sweater again for warmth over his coat, and catching a glimpse of himself in the closet mirror, his cropped hair bristling, the formal tails dangling behind him, he thought he looked like the King of the Cats.

  The General found nothing electrical in the basement except a washing machine. But the curious thing about it all was, he did not even find a fuse box or a meter.

  He was distracted, however, finding a filing cabinet, one drawer of which was padlocked. He had not the slightest qualm in opening the unlocked drawers. All accounts of Leo Montaigne’s travels, it seemed by cursory examination. He wished fervently that he had more time. The young man had been a great many places, and had met a great many people—every one of whom was referred to by initials. It would take remembering to put all those initials to people. The General guessed that in one notebook perhaps one hundred sets of initials appeared. Who could remember the names behind them? There was only one answer as he saw it: there must be a code for them. He was sure of it, noting that each page was hand-numbered. Why trouble numbering pages except for quick individual reference?

  As for the contents, they read at first like women’s gossip at some God-forsaken military outpost: a place where the strain of isolation told on men’s nerves and women’s characters. After reading a few pages more, the General recognized the locale—the United States Embassy, and soon the country, the Netherlands.

  Then the General read: “I have my bond! I negotiated it this morning, and the price I blush to say. Oh, what a rogue am I, sans peasant’s clothes. A. must wear me now like an albatross forever. Dear A. So brilliant a woman, and to have had but one indiscretion. But what responsibility now that I know. I must not sleep. I wonder if she is up to violence? Who is not, being desperate? It will be better that we go home soon, where it is more difficult to hire assassins.”

  Very clearly, then, General Jarvis pieced together his recollection of Holland in the early years after the war. Madam Jennings had been the American ambassador, until for reasons of health she asked to be recalled. He had not seen her then, but he remembered it now. And he had remembered earlier this night how supple and feminine she was not long before then. And he also remembered that, having recently been invited to join the presidential cabinet, her work in hospital rehabilitation over the past five years had been cited, accounting presumably for her years out of public service. A sort of penitential withdrawal?

  One more thing the General remembered while he searched the basement for a stout instrument: at the Chatterton dinner tonight Elizabeth Jennings’ defiant self-pride when he had surprised her gazing after young Montaigne. He cursed himself and his one-track mind: he had thought her enamoured of the young man herself. And yet, he suspected more people than himself might have that notion.

  He found a small crowbar among the garden tools and without hesitance wrenched the padlock from the cabinet door. As he had anticipated, there was an entire notebook of initials and the names which matched them, only in his code. A. evidently was too familiar a person to need a code. He was reasonably certain A. was Elizabeth Jennings, but he would have liked to be dead certain. The drawer contained also notebooks of detail about what was going on in the world in the 1920’s. From Aimee to Vanzetti, the General thought, “Yes, we have no bananas,” but plenty of bathtub gin.

  His mind quickened to that notion and to a couple of things of simultaneous association: the assault on electrical power, and the smell he had first apprehended, arriving outside the cabin with Virginia—fermented corn!

  He hastily closed the cabinet door—or tried to. Some of the papers he had pulled out had not been properly put back. And trying to push the front folder down to the bottom of the drawer, he caught his thumbnails on an envelope fastened to the back of the drawer door. It was a neat, obscure hiding place really, which only his chance carelessness had discovered. The envelope was fastened in place by the screws that went through the metal to the drawer handle. The General tore the envelope free. Inside it were a half-dozen letters addressed to one of the most famous royal pretenders now living in modest exile with, the General was fairly sure, his wife and family. He opened one envelope and read only the salutation: “My dear,” and the signature, “Elizabeth.”

  He cursed softly, having not even a pocket in which to put them except his trousers. Awkward. He decided to take them nonetheless. No one as honourable as himself might ever have the chance.

  Friends in high places: that was what Chatterton had said of the scoundrel! And no doubt enemies in hell.

  He turned off the light and, waiting a long moment to accustom his eyes to the darkness, he went out through the basement door. The cabin was on high ground, and there was no sign of a garage anywhere. He still had not found an electric meter, so he took that search as his line of departure. The moon was high still, and against the brightened sky he located the electric and the telephone wires. Curious, it was only the telephone service that came up the hill along the road. His own heartbeat accelerated as he started down the scrubby mountainside following the electric line. He was virtually certain there was an independent power plant. He paused now and then and held his breath to listen. An owl was all he heard at first, then the singing of a machine came to him, and finally, men’s voices.

  He was some seconds listening, trying to locate their direction, when it suddenly broke through to him that he was sitting on the roof of a cave. He could feel the vibration in the earth beneath him.

  He did not know much about making moonshine except that it required terrific heat, to say nothing of nerve. It would seem to him an occupation of last resort these days, and of small return. But what did he know? He had heard that the stuff was still bootlegged in the mountains, and he was sure as hell in the mountains. The question was, could he ever get out of the mountains?

  One thing certain—an associate with private hootchmakers was right in character with Montaigne.

  The General went down on his hands and knees and crept to the edge of the roof. A road twisted down from there like a dirty string in the moonlight. A truck—canvas-covered, perhaps a couple of tons’ capacity—was parked directly beneath him, its tail half into the garage, for light shone out around it. And that was where the men were also.

  The General listened. Theirs was very nearly a foreign language, so strong was the hill country dialect—less than thirty miles from the capital of the U.S.A. Gradually he could make out words, none of which meant a damned thing to him. He began to calculate his chances of stealing the truck.

  Then one of the men said, “How long now, Red?” The words were as “twangy” as a saw. But the General could understand them.

  “Half-hour. I calculate we can turn her off and let her cool while we go down.”

  “Think I ought to start loading?”

  “Time enough. Deal another hand or two.”

  “I can’t afford to lose no more.”

  “Shucks, man, your credit’s good for a couple hours.”

  “What if he ain’t there?”

  “He better be there. Cash on Wednesday.”

  “I don’t trust that boy much, Red. He’s too pretty.”

  “Don’t have to trust him. It’s me what knows where the dynamite is—and you know something? I just don’t think he carries insurance on his little old cabin … I can’t open, can you?”

  “Yeah, I’ll open since I’m playing with your money.”

  The General resolved that even at the risk of his life, when that truck went down the mountain he was going with it.

  19

  MRS. NORRIS, WAITING IN the park, felt her bones to be as cold as a stone bench, and observing the benches, a line of them along the path in the moonlight, she was reminded of tombstones. It was a miserably lonely watch she kept; a clock somewhere off in the night struc
k two. Was there ever an Irishman born, she wondered, who had any notion of time? It was the greatest of follies to have left the house with him in the first place.

  A very few minutes later she decided that she had had what long ago her mother called an elegant sufficiency. Still, there was a package put into the tree, and if the whole business weren’t nonsense, something had to be done about it. There was but one thing in her power, she decided, and immediately set about working her hand behind the stone plate into the hollow. She soon brought out into the moonlight a small neat package carefully tied with string.

  It was her business only if she made it so. Not even a restless bird stirred to interrupt the silence. Mrs. Norris took the package beneath the nearest streetlamp, and painstakingly untied the string. She had in her hand, when the package was opened, several small, tight rolls of microfilm.

  Mrs. Norris could scarcely breathe for the palpitations of her heart. She sucked in the night air for dear life. Finally her heartbeat slowed to more nearly normal and her hand grew steadier. If someone did come for the package, what could she do? It was not really a matter of bravery or cowardice, but rather of wisdom. Merely to watch and report was not going to prevent these things from passing into the hands of some culprit.

  She opened her purse. She was in truth beginning to feel a bit uneasy on Tom’s behalf. He was very bold, and however serious he had pretended to be, he was taking this all too much as a lark. It was too bad a person could see best with hindsight. There was nothing in her purse except money and keys—and room.

  She dropped the package of microfilms into it, but—for Tom’s sake it might turn out—she wanted to leave a package in the tree that a messenger—a courier, did they call them?—could pick up and believe that he had the real thing. Alas, she had nothing to leave … except Tom’s own poems which she suddenly remembered to be in the pocket of her dress.

  Would he ever get them back, she wondered. Ah, but he knew them by heart surely, having offered to recite them to her. She would have to chance it.

  And perhaps this way, she thought, getting out the small bundle of them and putting them into the tree, they would win him a fame a poet could hallow only as a patriot. She pulled the stone plate forward, and standing back to survey it an instant, she thought it did resemble a mouthful of teeth surrounded by the swollen lips of the tree’s wound. Poor thing, to have its wound opened for such desecration. Looking back from a few feet away, Mrs. Norris could not tell the fatal tree from its neighbours.

  Mrs. Norris hastened out of the park. On a mission such as hers, the borrowing of a child’s bicycle was surely conscionable. She took careful notice that she would remember the house, since there was no one in the house likely to remember her. She also took care not to try to mount the vehicle until she was on an isolated part of the street, lest she collapse with a racket. She got her backside well situated, her purse on the handlebar, the front wheel heading down a slight hill, one foot on a pedal and, with the other, she pushed off from the curbstone with all her might. She might not be as agile herself as she was in her youth, but the bicycles they were making now were more so. She travelled with the wind. She was very shortly on and over the Key Bridge, having observed no life there at all. But having crossed the bridge, she discovered she must be in Georgetown by the architecture. In fact, she was on Thirty-fourth Street; she had but to go to Thirty-first, and follow it till she found herself home.

  Home. It was the only place for her surely, until she decided on what branch of police to contact. Besides, the General himself should be home now, and he was the man to advise her.

  Tom, the villain, had never murmured a word about how close they had come back to home. And yet it was not close enough. Her legs were beginning to ache. She pushed on. Two or three cars passed her: a queer sight she must be in her hat. What odds? Where were they accustomed to queerer sights than this meeting place of the world?

  She was almost there, glimpsing the numbers at every block, and God help her, it was past time. She was beginning to suspect the presence of ghosties in her wake: she dared not look back, chiefly lest she lose her balance, but out of a certain dread as well. Her imagination, surely. Look what had happened to Tam O’Shanter. But he had been in the bottle. Mrs. Norris wished fervently that she had been. Or better, asleep and all this a dream, a nightmare. It would be worth a tumble to try and wake up.

  But Mrs. Norris did not tumble. In fact, she scraped her leg on the bicycle chain, and did not wake up. Then at long last she came to the drive of her own house, and turning, threw herself off the bicycle. She saw then that she had indeed been followed. The black car which had pursued her from such a distance that she had not been certain it was there at all, quickly closed the gap. Mrs. Norris picked herself up, caught up her purse and ran for the steps. The car following her allowed a soft purr of its siren. Mrs. Norris gasped with relief. The police had followed her home! She turned with as much dignity as she could to welcome them.

  Two men in plain clothes stepped from the car before it was fully stopped and came up, holding open in their hands what she afterwards realized was identification. She did not have a chance to say a word.

  One of them gave his name and office, Federal Bureau of Investigation, and then said, “May I see your purse, madam?”

  Mrs. Norris gave it over bravely.

  He glimpsed its contents and said, “You are under arrest on suspicion of espionage.”

  20

  TOM WENT UP IN the hotel elevator to Mrs. Joyce’s suite with a very uneasy feeling in his stomach. The last thing he had expected was an invitation up—unless of course the boss was here. That would be something else again. But supposing the Frenchman had doubled back on him and was here himself now?

  “Much traffic tonight?” Tom tried amiably with the brass-buttoned operator of the lift.

  “Depends which way you’re going,” the elevator man said.

  Tom had reached his level anyway.

  Mrs. Joyce did have company. She opened the door to Tom and directly introduced him by his trade: “Tom works for Congressman Jarvis, Senator. Tom, this is Senator Chisholm.”

  Tom crumpled his hat in his hands. A woman senator was almost too fearsome. She was long-faced and homely, and probably as knowing as Abe Lincoln’s wife. There was a woman Tom would have been afraid of, to judge her by the picture given in a book he had read. But, sure, Lincoln himself was a little afraid of her.

  It was the Senator that put the bit in Tom’s mouth the moment he turned his head toward her. “Now, young man, what’s this you’ve discovered about Dr. d’Inde?”

  “Is that his name?” said Tom, “Dandy?”

  The senator looked at Mrs. Joyce.

  “I think we had better hear his whole story, Senator,” Mrs. Joyce said. “It may be clearer in the long run.”

  The senator nodded, leaned back in the armchair and closed her eyes. By God, Tom thought, if it gave her such a pain to look at him, what would a mirror do to her?

  “Sit down, Tom,” Mrs. Joyce said, “and tell it in your own way.”

  “Well, Mrs. Norris and I were sitting in the kitchen. It must’ve been going on midnight, for I was reading the late paper to her, you know, where Senator Fagan was sweeping out the State Department after the party tonight?” Mrs. Joyce nodded. “Well, the doorbell rang and I was the one answered it. There standing in all his ribbons and glory was a little man as though he had just popped out of a bandbox. He had a great sash across his breast with all the gems of the Andes shining in it …” That, Tom noticed, had pried open the eyes of the senator. “Well, he told me his name, and I’m ashamed to say I forgot it and the country that he’s ambassador from, but I know it’s South America.”

  “Ambassador Cru?” said the senator.

  “Aye, that’s the man,” Tom cried. “It’s a name I knew I’d remember if I didn’t forget.”

  The senator nodded ever so slightly at Mrs. Joyce.

  “Well, to make a long story short
, he asked me if I could stand second for the boss …”

  Helene said, “Please, Tom, don’t make a long story short. And don’t make it complicated. Tell us exactly what happened. The exact words if you can.”

  “Aw, I can’t do that,” Tom said. “I’m a simple man, and he was as elegant as a Greek bishop. The best I could make out of it was that the Frenchman challenged the boss to a duel at dawn with pistols, and I was to stand by him. Well, I couldn’t very well stand by him till I found him, could I? So Mrs. Norris and I went out to look …”

  “Hold on, Tom,” the senator said. “Where was the duel supposed to take place?”

  “Under the Key Bridge on the Arlington side. And he left the Frenchman’s card with his name sitting up on it.”

  “D’Inde?” said Helene.

  “How do you spell that?”

  Helene spelled it aloud.

  Tom shook his head. “Oh, now, it’s not a name like that. His first name—Leo, Leo the thirteenth.”

  The senator sat bolt upright. “Leo? Montaigne?”

  Tom beamed on her. “Now you’ve got it, ma’am.”

  “Then maybe I can give it back to you,” the senator said. “You’ve put one man’s name on another man.”

  “All right, we saw what we saw, didn’t we?” Tom blurted out.

  “There you’re dead right, son. Go on with your story.”

  “We just missed the boss, Mrs. Norris and me, when we got to the ballroom, but then we saw you coming out with the Frenchman, Mrs. Joyce, and we figured if we could keep him in sight, well, he wouldn’t be shooting up Congressman Jarvis.”

  Helene raised her hand to slow him down. “This is the important part, now, Tom. The challenge business I suspect is somebody’s play for publicity—and it was meant to involve General Jarvis, not Congressman Jarvis. Do you agree, Senator?”

  “I do,” she said.

  Tom scratched his head. “However in the world would I have got something as mixed up as that? I suppose it was him taking for granted I worked for General Jarvis.” Tom squared his shoulders. “I do look sort of military myself, don’t I?”