Tappinger said to his wife in a quieter tone: “It’s nothing that need concern you, Bess. I’m supposed to prepare some questions to test a certain man’s knowledge of French.”
“Is that all?”
“That’s all.”
She closed the kitchen door. Tappinger turned to us: “Forgive the elevation of the voice. I’ve got a headache.” He pressed his hand to his pale rounded forehead. “I suppose I can do this work for you now—I’ve expended twice the energy just talking about it—but I don’t understand the hurry.”
Peter said: “Martel is taking Ginny with him. We have to stop him.”
“Ginny?” Tappinger looked puzzled.
“I thought you told him about her,” I said to Peter.
“I tried to, on the phone, but he wouldn’t listen.” He turned back to Tappinger. “You remember Virginia Fablon, professor.”
“Naturally I do. Is she involved in this?”
“Very much so. She says she intends to marry Martel.”
“And you’re in love with her yourself, is that it?”
Peter blushed. “Yes, but I’m not doing this merely for selfish reasons. Ginny doesn’t realize the mess she’s getting into.”
“Have you talked to her about it?”
“I’ve tried to. But she’s infatuated with Martel. He was the reason she dropped out of school last month.”
“Really? I thought she was ill. That was the word that went around the college.”
“There’s nothing the matter with her,” Peter said. “Except him.”
“What’s her opinion of his Frenchness?”
“She’s completely taken in,” Peter said.
“Then he probably is French. Miss Fablon has a fair grasp of the language.”
“He could be both a Frenchman and a phony,” I said. “We’re really trying to find out if he’s the cultivated aristocrat he pretends to be.”
For the first time Tappinger really looked interested. “That should be possible. Let me try.” He sat down at his cluttered table and picked up his pen. “Just give me ten minutes, gentlemen.”
We retreated to the living room. Mrs. Tappinger followed us from the kitchen, trailed by the three-year-old.
“Is Daddy all right?” she asked me in a little-girl voice so thin and sweet it sounded like self-parody.
“I think so.”
“He hasn’t been well, ever since last year. They turned him down for his full professorship. It was a terrible disappointment to him. He tends to take it out on—well, anybody available. Especially me.” She made her shoulder gesture. This time her contempt seemed to be for herself.
“Please,” Peter said in embarrassment. “Professor Tappinger has already apologized.”
“That’s good. He usually doesn’t. Especially when his own family is involved.”
She meant herself. In fact it was herself she wanted to talk about, and it was me she wanted to talk about herself to. Her body leaning in the doorway, the blue side glances of her eyes, the drooping movements of her mouth more than the words it uttered, said that she was a sleeping beauty imprisoned in a tract house with a temperamental professor who had failed to be promoted.
The three-year-old butted at her, pressing her cotton dress tight between her round thighs.
“You’re a pretty girl,” I said, with Peter standing there as a chaperone.
“I used to be prettier—twelve years ago when I married him.” She gestured with her hip. Then she picked up the child and carried him into the kitchen like a penitential burden.
A married woman with young children wasn’t exactly my dish, but she interested me. I looked around her living room. It was shabby, with a worn rug and beat-up maple furniture. The walls were virtually papered with Post-Impressionist reproductions, visions of an ideally brilliant world.
The sunset at the window competed in brilliance with the Van Goghs and the Gauguins. The sun burned like a fire ship on the water, sinking slowly till only a red smoke was left trailing up the sky. A fishing boat was headed into the harbor, black and small against the enormous west. Above its glittering wake a few gulls whirled like sparks which had gone out.
“I’m worried about Ginny,” Peter said at my shoulder.
I was worried, too, though I didn’t say so. The sudden moment when Martel pulled a gun on Harry Hendricks, which hadn’t seemed quite real at the time, was real in my memory now. Beside it the idea of testing Martel in French seemed faintly preposterous.
A redheaded boy about eleven came in the front door. He tramped importantly into the kitchen and announced to his mother that he was going next door to watch some television.
“No you’re not.” Her sharp maternal tone was quite different from the one she had used on her husband and me. “You’re staying right here. It’s nearly dinnertime.”
“I’m starved,” Peter said to me.
The boy asked his mother why they didn’t have a television set.
“Two reasons. We’ve been into them before. One, your father doesn’t approve of television. Two, we can’t afford it.”
“You’re always buying books and records,” the boy said. “Television is better than books and records.”
“Is it?”
“Much better. When I have my own house I’m going to have color television in every room. And you can come and watch it,” he concluded grandly.
“Maybe I will at that.”
The door to the garage study opened, ending the interchange. Professor Tappinger came into the living room waving a sheet of paper in each hand.
“The questions and the answers,” he said. “I’ve devised five questions which a well-educated Frenchman should be able to answer. I don’t think anyone else could, except possibly a graduate student of French. The answers are simple enough so that you can check them without having to know too much French.”
“That’s good. Let’s hear them, Professor.”
He read aloud from his sheets: “One. Who wrote the original Les Liaisons dangereuses and who made the modernized film version? Choderlos de Laclos wrote the original, and Roger Vadim made the movie.
“Two. Complete the phrase: ‘Hypocrite lecteur …’ Answer: Hypocrite lecteur, mon semblable, mon frère—from the opening poem of Baudelaire’s Fleurs du mal.
“Three. Name a great French painter who believed Dreyfus was guilty. Answer: Degas.
“Four. What gland did Descartes designate as the residence of the human soul? Answer: the pineal gland.
“Five. Who was mainly responsible for getting Jean Genet released from prison? Answer: Jean-Paul Sartre. Is this the sort of thing you had in mind?”
“Yes, but the emphasis seems to be a little one-sided. Shouldn’t there be something about politics or history?”
“I disagree. If this man is an impostor passing himself off as a political refugee, the first thing he’d bone up on would be history and politics. My questions are subtler, and they cover a range that it would take years to bone up on.” His eye brightened. “I wish I could put them to him myself.”
“I wish you could, too. But it might be dangerous.”
“Really?”
“Martel pulled a gun on another man today. I think you’d better let me go up against him.”
“And me,” Peter said. “I insist on going along.”
Tappinger followed us out to our cars, as if to make up for his earlier impatience. I thought of offering him money for his work, five or ten dollars, but decided not to risk it. It might only remind him that he needed money and make him angry again.
chapter 8
I FOLLOWED PETER’S CORVETTE inland into the foothills. Their masses had been half-absorbed by the blue darkness of the mountains. A few lights, bright as evening stars, were scattered up their slopes. One of them shone from Martel’s house.
Peter stopped just short of the mailbox. The name stenciled on it stood out black in his headlights: Major General Hiram Bagshaw, U.S.A. (ret.). He cut the lights and start
ed to get out.
The quiet of the evening shivered like a crystal. A high thin quavering cry came down from the direction of the house. It might have been a peacock, or a girl screaming.
Peter ran toward me. “It’s Ginny! Did you hear her?”
“I heard something.”
I tried to persuade him to wait in his car. But he insisted on riding up to the house with me.
It was a massive stone-and-glass building set on a pad which had been excavated above the floor of the canyon. A floodlight above the door illuminated the flagstone courtyard where the Bentley was parked. The door itself was standing open.
Peter started in. I held him back. “Take it easy. You’ll get yourself shot.”
“She’s my girl,” he said, in the teeth of all the evidence so far.
The girl appeared in the doorway. She had on a gray suit, the kind women use for traveling. Her movements seemed shaky and her eyes a little dull, as if she had already traveled too far and too fast.
Perhaps it was the brilliant light shining down on her face, but its skin appeared grayish and grainy. She had the sort of beauty—shape of head, slant of cheekbone and chin, curve of mouth—that made these other things irrelevant.
She held herself on the concrete stoop with a kind of forlorn elegance. Peter went to her and tried to put his arm around her. She disengaged herself.
“I told you not to come here.”
“That was you screaming, wasn’t it? Did he hurt you?”
“Don’t be silly. I saw a rat.” She turned her lusterless eyes on me. “Who are you?”
“My name is Archer. Is Mr. Martel home?”
“Not to you, I’m afraid.”
“Tell him I’m here, anyway. All I want is a chance to talk to him.”
She said to Peter: “Please go. Take your friend with you. You have no right to interfere with us.” She managed to produce a little spurt of anger: “Go away now or I’ll never speak to you again.”
His large face contorted itself in the light, as if it could transform its homeliness by sheer expression. “I wouldn’t care, Ginny, as long as you were safe.”
“I’m perfectly safe with my husband,” she said, and waited demurely for his surprise.
“You married him?”
“We were married on Saturday and I’ve never been happier in my life,” she said without any visible sign of happiness.
“You can get it annulled.”
“You don’t seem to understand, I love my husband.” Her voice was soft but there was a sting in the words which made him wince. “Francis is everything I’ve ever dreamed of in a man. You can’t change that, and please stop trying.”
“Thank you, ma chérie.”
It was Martel, with his accent full on. No doubt he had been listening for an entrance cue. He appeared in the hallway behind Ginny and took hold of her upper arm. His hand against her light gray sleeve looked almost as dark as a mourning band.
Peter began to bite his mouth. I moved closer to him. Whether he was a French aristocrat or a cheap crook or a muddy mixture of the two, Ginny’s husband would be a dangerous man to hit.
“Congratulations on your marriage,” I said without much irony.
He bowed, touching his chest. “Merci beaucoup.”
“Where were you married?”
“In the chambers of a judge, by the judge himself. That makes it legal, I believe.”
“I meant what place.”
“The place doesn’t matter. Life has its private occasions, you know, and I confess to a passion for privacy. Which my dear wife shares.” He smiled down into her face. His smile had changed when he looked up at me. It was wide and mocking. “Didn’t we meet at the swimming pool today?”
“We did.”
“This man was here before,” Ginny said, “when the fellow tried to take your picture. I saw him in the fellow’s car.”
Martel stepped around his wife and came toward me. I wondered if his little gun was going to come into play. I also wondered what dark liquid had left a partial heelprint on the concrete stoop. More of it glistened on the heel of Martel’s right shoe.
“Just who are you, m’sieu? And what gives you the right to ask questions?”
I told him my name. “I’m a detective, and I’m hired to ask them.”
“Hired by this one here?” He gave Peter a black look of contempt.
“That’s right,” Peter said. “And we’re going to keep after you until we know what you want.”
“But I have what I want.” He turned to Ginny with his arm stretched out. It was just a little like a scene from opera, more light than grand. Next minute the merry villagers would troop in for the nuptial dance.
I said to fend them off: “One question that interests me at the moment—is that blood on your heel?”
He looked down at his feet, then quickly back to me. “I expect it is blood.”
Ginny’s curled fingers had gone to her mouth, both hands, as if another peacock cry was surging up in her throat. Martel said quietly and smoothly:
“My wife was alarmed by a rat, as she told you.” He had been listening. “I killed it.”
“With your heel?”
“Yes.” He stamped on the asphalt. “I am a fencer, very fast on my feet.”
“I bet you are. May I see the corpse?”
“It would be hard to find, perhaps impossible. I threw it into the undergrowth for the bobcats. We have wild animals up here in the hills, don’t we, ma chérie?”
Ginny dropped her hands and said yes. She was looking at Martel with a combination of respect and fear. Perhaps it was a form of love, I thought, but not one of the usual forms. His voice filled the vacuum again:
“My wife and I are very fond of the wild animals.”
“But not the rats.”
“No. Not the rats.” He offered me his wide cold grin. Above it his eyes and forceful nose seemed to be probing at me. “Can I persuade you to leave now, Mr. Archer? I’ve been quite patient with you and your questions. And please take this one with you.” He jerked his head toward Peter as if the fat young man didn’t quite belong to the human race.
Peter said: “Ask him the five questions, why don’t you?”
Martel raised his eyebrows. “Five questions? About myself?”
“Not directly.” Now that the time had come to ask the questions, they seemed childish, even ludicrous. The light-operatic note on which the scene had balanced was giving way to opéra bouffe. The courtyard under the light, surrounded by the amphitheater of the canyon, was like a stage where nothing real could happen.
I said reluctantly: “The questions are about French culture. I’ve been told that an educated Frenchman ought to be able to answer them.”
“And you doubt that I am an educated Frenchman?”
“You have a chance to prove it once and for all. Will you take a stab at the questions?”
He shrugged. “Pourquoi pas? Why not?”
I got out two sheets of paper. “One. Who wrote the original Les Liaisons dangereuses and who made the modernized film version?”
“Les Liaisons dangereuses,” he said slowly, correcting my pronunciation. “Choderlos de Laclos wrote the novel. Roger Vadim made the cinema version. I believe that Vadim collaborated with Roger Vailland on the screen play. Is that enough, or do you want me to outline the plot for you? It’s quite complex, having to do with a diabolical sexual intrigue and the corruption of innocence.” His voice was sardonic.
“We won’t bother with that just now. Question two. Complete the phrase: ‘Hypocrite lecteur—’ ”
“ ‘Hypocrite lecteur, mon semblable, mon frère.’ Hypocritical reader, my brother, my—comment-à-dire?—duplicate?” He appealed to Ginny.
“Mirror image,” she said with a small half-smile. “It’s from the front of Les Fleurs du mal.”
“I can recite many of those poems if you like,” Martel said.
“That won’t be necessary. Three. Name a great French pain
ter who believed Dreyfus was guilty.”
“Degas was the most prominent.”
“Four. What gland did Descartes designate as the residence of the human soul?”
“The pineal gland.” Martel smiled. “That’s a rather obscure point, but it happens I read Descartes nearly every day of my life.”
“Five. Who was mainly responsible for getting Jean Genet released from prison?”
“Jean-Paul Sartre, I suppose you mean. Cocteau and others also had a hand in the deliverance. Is that all?”
“That’s all. You scored a hundred.”
“Will you reward me now by disappearing?”
“Answer one more question, since you’re so good at answering them. Who are you and what are you doing here?”
He stiffened. “I’m under no obligation to tell you.”
“I thought you might want to lay the rumors to rest.”
“Rumors don’t bother me.”
“But you’re not the only person involved, now that you’ve married a local girl.”
He saw my point. “Very well. I will tell you why I am here, in return for a quid pro quo. Tell me who is the man who tried to take my picture.”
“His name is Harry Hendricks. He’s a used-car salesman from the San Fernando Valley.”
Martel’s eyes were puzzled. “I never heard of him. Why did he try to photograph me?”
“Apparently someone paid him. He didn’t say who.”
“I can guess,” Martel said darkly. “He was undoubtedly paid by the agents of le grand Charles.”
“Who?”
“President de Gaulle, my enemy. He drove me out of my patrie—my native land. But my exile is not enough to satisfy him. He wants my life.”
His voice was low and thrilling. Ginny shuddered. Even Peter looked impressed.
I said: “What has de Gaulle got against you?”
“I am a threat to his power.”
“Are you one of the Algérie-Française gang?”
“We are not a gang,” he retorted hotly. “We are a—how shall I say it?—a band of patriots. It is le grand Charles who is the enemy of his country. But I have said enough. Too much. If his agents have followed me here, as I believe, I must move on again.”
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