“Exquisite,” he murmured, and gently brushed up the nap with the back of his fingers.
“I just knew you were that kind of a man,” Virginia said purringly.
Most men were, the General supposed. It was characteristic of the species. He said, “Brandy or whisky?”
“A touch of Scotch, please.”
The General was reminded of Mrs. Norris. He frowned.
“There,” Virginia said, “you just thought of an old love, didn’t you?”
“Well, somebody’s old love. I was just thinking of … a housekeeper.” He hesitated, Mrs. Norris being Jimmie’s housekeeper, and his having no intention at that moment of dragging in the subject of a middle-aged son.
Virginia smiled at him brightly. “Would you like a housekeeper, Ransom?”
“Depends,” he said. “Depends entirely.”
Virginia laughed and clicked her glass to his. “I do believe you’re shy. I don’t want you to be, honey. I’ve been looking forward ever since dinnertime to a nice evening of conversation. I just love conversation. Especially with an intelligent man.”
The General took a long, deep draught of whisky and soda. “Don’t you think you’re going on an unwarranted assumption?”
“Beg pardon?”
“What makes you take for granted I’m intelligent?”
“Well, you’re rich, aren’t you?”
That, of course, was the most unwarranted assumption of all, but the General didn’t say so. He was oddly assured by the directness, the honesty of her answer. She was, after all, just a simple girl. He padded happily after her back into the living room.
“Ransom, I got a sloppy Joe sweater I swear would fit you. Wouldn’t you like to get out of that starched shirt for just a little while?” He allowed her to bring the sweater, a black and white striped affair, the stripes fortunately vertical. She opened it out. “I do believe there’s enough room for both of us in it.”
The General blinked his eyes mischievously. “Shall we try it on?”
Virginia put it in his hands and thrust him on his way with the same motion. “You go right back in the kitchen there and put it on you.”
The General did as he was bade. Having thrust his head through the turtle neck, he caught a glimpse of himself reflected in the kitchen window, his hair on end, his complexion ruddy, his chest capacious. “Coach,” he said at the image derisively. All he needed now was a pair of goddamned skis.
9
TOM HENNESSY, AS WAS his custom, had gone out for the paper just before bedtime. He pushed the cat off the chair and sat down at the kitchen table, where he read aloud to Mrs. Norris the story of Senator Fagan’s latest sensation. He was enjoying himself in a way she thought would have better become a football match than the investigations of the United States Senate.
“Does he give the names of the people?” she asked.
“There’ll be names in the later editions, never mind,” said Hennessy. “He has to clean out the stables before he can count the horses.”
Mrs. Norris sighed. “I don’t altogether approve him,” she felt compelled to say. “He makes some very wild allegations.”
“Of course he does! Would you expect tame ones with what’s going on in the country?”
Mrs. Norris tried to hold to her own line of reasoning. “And I don’t approve of people informing on one another. Let me finish, Tom Hennessy: it was one of the things I always admired in the Irish up till now, the way they had no use among one another for informers.”
“There’s informers and informers!” Hennessy cried, and whacked his fist on the table. “It all depends on who’s informing on who.”
Mrs. Norris opened her mouth and then closed it again without saying anything. The front doorbell was ringing, and the hour past midnight. Tom sat where he was, his fist doubled on the table.
“Can you not move, man?” Mrs. Norris cried.
“You want me to open it?”
“Aren’t you the butler?”
“Oh, aye,” Tom said. “I keep forgetting.” He put on the black silk coat Mrs. Norris was holding for him. It apparently had come with the house, but it took her to find a use for it.
“There. You look sartorial,” she said, which was not quite the right word, but close, and she wanted to flatter him into the role.
“Do I now?” he said cockily, and went through the house at a glide over the polished floors. He opened the door to an erect, elegant gentleman in full dress and sparkling sash. Tom thought he had never seen anything as startling as his stiff black mustachios with the matching eyebrows.
“Who are you?” said the stranger.
“Wasn’t it you rang the bell?” Tom said warily. He could see the chauffeured car in the moonlight, a bruiser of a fellow standing beside it.
The gentleman clicked his heels. “I am Ambassador Cru,” he said, and named the country he represented. “This is the Jarvis residence? Am I wrong?”
“You are right and I am the Jarvis …” Tom could not bring himself to say the word butler. Instead his tongue leaped to all the things he wanted and expected soon to be. “I am the boss’ secretary, his confidential man, his friend and his faithful servant.” After which recitation, he almost kicked one heel out from under himself with the other, and for good measure, saluted smartly.
“You are in position then to act as second for him, yes?”
It occurred to Tom that he was about to be asked to stand in for the boss at some diplomatic function he had no time for. And sure it was the boss’ place to tell him whether or not he could, not this fellow’s.
“Yes!” he said with less hesitation than so much thought would seem to require.
“Good!” The ambassador flashed a white card into Tom’s hand. “M. Montaigne’s card, sir. He calls your master out for having insulted him in the matter of the lady on whom he forced his attentions this evening. He is therefore challenged to duel to the death for honour’s sake at dawn. We shall expect you at the river’s edge on the Arlington side of the Key Bridge. Are you agreed?”
“With what?” Tom sputtered.
“Naturally you may choose the weapons. May I suggest pistols?”
“Pistols?” said Tom.
“Excellent. M. Montaigne will provide them.” The ambassador rubbed his hands in grim satisfaction. “At your service, sir. As a gentleman to a gentleman, I salute you.”
As a gentleman to a gentleman, Tom was not sure that he should not let him have a left to the jaw. But the dapper little diplomat clicked his heels, whirled and ran down the steps. The chauffeur flung open the door of the black limousine, folded his arms across his chest like the crossbones of a skeleton while the ambassador entered the car. He closed the door and leaped into the front seat. In seconds the limousine disappeared, slithering into the night like a well-groomed panther.
Tom banged the front door and all but skated back to the kitchen. “Lord, lord, wait till you hear this, Mrs. Norris! Will you get something and write this down before it goes out of my mind?”
Tom clapped his head as though to hold in the thought while Mrs. Norris got a pencil from beside the phone and brought it to the porcelain-topped table. “Let me hear it,” she said.
“The boss is to be under the Key Bridge …”
“What bridge?” she interrupted.
“Key—like in the Star Spangled Banner.”
Mrs. Norris wrote the words. “Go on.”
“On the Arlington side at dawn.” Tom drew a great breath and sighed with relief.
Mrs. Norris wrote “Arlington side” and then stopped. “Mr. James will not get up that early.”
“He’ll have to tomorrow. He’s challenged to a duel.”
“Nonsense. Someone played you a joke. The Irish are very gullible.”
“Gullible, is it? Then look at this.” He held the card in front of her nose. “This one’s to be there with pistols and the ambassador of some South American country, and I’m to be there and bring the boss.”
/> Mrs. Norris held the card to the light. “Leo Montaigne,” she read, pronouncing each syllable carefully.
Tom squinted at it over her shoulder. “Couldn’t that name be said ‘Mon-tan’?”
“I suppose it could. I’ve heard of ‘Mon-tan’.”
“Then I’ve got it all,” said Tom, “and I can tell you, it’s no joke. Remember me telling you this afternoon about the Frenchman I met at the boss’ girlfriend’s? Didn’t I say his name rhymed with ‘Dan’, well?”
“All right, you said it,” Mrs. Norris said.
“Now listen to what this fella said at the door: ‘monseur’—that fellow’s—card sir. He challenges your master to duel at dawn for having insulted him over the lady he forced his attentions on tonight.’ Or words to that effect. And he said we could have our choice of the pistols this fella would bring.”
Mrs. Norris folded the newspaper and fanned herself vigorously. “It sounds more like the General than Mr. James’ affairs,” she said.
“Will you stop confusing matters?” Tom roared. “You’re as contrary as a cow’s hind leg. You just arrived here today. You don’t understand what tempers are like in this town. And you should’ve heard the boss when he was getting dressed tonight, about the French artist fella meeting her at the airport this morning in striped trousers and frock coat …”
Mrs. Norris sat down and buried her chin in her fist. She was hearing now for the first time the reason Mr. James had not met her himself this morning: he had been at the airport meeting Mrs. Joyce. And she knew, as truth was truth, it must have been a hard choice for him to make, and perhaps after all, the Frenchman had something to do with it.
“The town’s full of foreigners,” Tom went on. “Didn’t you see in the paper tonight what I read you?”
“Well, Mr. James will certainly not fight a duel,” she said. “It’s against the law.”
“Do you think they’ll give him much choice, and them with the pistols?”
“We’re in America, boy. Not in the wilds of … (God help her, she had almost said Ireland) … Russia.”
“What do you propose to do then?” Tom cried. “Write him a message and go to bed?”
“I propose to wait up for him,” Mrs. Norris said, “as I have on more nights than you’ve seen daylight after.”
Tom straightened up and squared his shoulders to the utmost limits of the damned silk coat. He took it off then, and perhaps forever. “I propose to set him on guard—en guarde! I’m going out now and find him. You might say a prayer.”
“I’ll get my hat and meet you in the garage,” Mrs. Norris said.
“You’re a woman, not a detective,” the young Irishman said in his first and last attempt to put her in her place.
Mrs. Norris pulled a full measure of Victorian dignity out of her dumpy shape. “I’ve had sufficient experience in both categories to qualify,” she said. “I’m going with you.”
10
JIMMIE RETURNED COMPLETELY FRUSTRATED to the ballroom where Helene was waiting for him. D’Inde rubbed his hands together and made what Jimmie assumed were solicitous noises when he said that Senator Fagan had gone. Jimmie regretted it immediately, but he turned on the Frenchman: “Are you inoculated against this sort of thing?”
“I do not understand.”
“Weren’t you at the Chatterton dinner party?”
“Oh, yes. Ai! I suppose that’s the significance of Madame’s fainting, eh? What the senator said in the paper tonight?”
“It would seem like a fair deduction,” Jimmie said.
“Now I understand your question,” the Frenchman said. “And I am not immune. After all, I am an alien.”
“Sorry I said that,” Jimmie murmured. “I’m concerned about my father.”
The Frenchman shrugged. “All they can do to me, I think, if I am associating with bad company—they can deport me. But the General, they cannot very well deport him, can they?”
The apparent acquiescence to Fagan on all sides aggravated the very devil out of Jimmie. After all, everybody at the Chatterton dinner could not be vulnerable.
“Perhaps not,” Jimmie said, “but they can hold up his pension—and his good name to ridicule,” which he thought grimly, his father could do without Fagan’s assistance. Then he exploded, “What nonsense this is, talking this way!”
“I agree,” Helene said. “I’ve never seen you—hamstrung before.”
The Frenchman was looking at him speculatively, calculating his politics, his vulnerability. That was the deadly game Fagan set in motion: Russian roulette could scarcely be worse.
“The worst thing about it all,” Jimmie said, “so much is beyond the reach of law, and so much beneath the law …”
“And the senator, of course, above the law,” Helene said.
“Exactly,” said Jimmie and the Frenchman nodded. They seemed to have become a triangle. But Jimmie had begun to feel more composed. “Do you know Chatterton well, Dr. d’Inde?”
“I know Mrs. Chatterton. She is an art patron. Very generous woman.”
Jimmie then asked a direct question, something Mrs. Norris had trained him from childhood to avoid as bad manners. “Do you know the woman with whom my father left the dinner?”
D’Inde cocked his head wistfully. “I cannot know every woman, much as I should like to be able to.” No one had trained him in direct answers at any rate.
Helene smiled apparently charmed. Jimmie thought him as charming as a jackdaw.
“If you will excuse me a moment,” he said, “I am going to call home. It’s just possible they will have heard from Father.”
Jimmie phoned from the lounge. It was a long chance indeed, he mused, listening to the telephone signal. He wondered if his father, wherever he was, had heard the news of Fagan’s charge. Chatterton was a friend of his … A strange assortment of people for him to have gathered regardless of Fagan’s charges: d’Inde made sense, but was there no Madame d’Inde? Or was she home with the brood, obliging some ancient Gallic tradition? The violinist, Katz: he was an ageing prodigy, not first rate by any means although his concert was sold out. Jimmie happened to know that the concert had been lately arranged, to coincide with the Beaux Arts Ball Week, and Katz was the best available performer. Maria Candido: he seemed to recall that her reputation as a singer of bawdy songs far outdistanced her operatic fame. The whole party was damned indiscreet of Chatterton, bad taste, and quite out of character. If Cabinet Secretary Jennings was involved in anything scandalous—that was unthinkable, really; one of the daughters of the country—but if she were involved, the administration was involved. Probably what Fagan wanted. The man couldn’t stand to be tolerated: he wanted either to be kicked out like a bum or proposed as a presidential candidate.
Jimmie realized then that the phone had been ringing for a long time. He broke the connection and then called again, to be sure it had not been a wrong number ringing. There was no answer. This, on top of everything else, was very distressing. Mrs. Norris was most unlikely to go out her first night in Washington. Of one thing, he was sure: she would have left a message for him at home. When he could no longer rely on Mrs. Norris, Jimmie thought, he would consider it folly for the human race to continue propagating itself.
When he returned to the ballroom, d’Inde volunteered gallantly to see Helene home if M. Jarvis felt it imperative to leave.
The lesser of two imperatives, Jimmie thought, choosing to go home now. He gave the Frenchman dry thanks and then asked, “If you don’t mind, Dr. d’Inde, can you tell me again who the other men at the dinner were?”
“I did not pay very much attention, but I will try—ah, Ambassador Cru. Do you know him? No matter, he and Madame Cru. And somebody I think called Montaigne—a young man. He was very gay, and most reactionary. The violinist, M. Katz, who was very melancholy. And that is all, except the host—and your father, who was, if you don’t mind me saying it, also very gay.”
He didn’t mind d’Inde’s saying it half so much as
he minded the old man’s being it. “Forgive me for not seeing you home, Helene?” He was more than a little hurt that she did not insist on accompanying him.
She put her hand in his and clung to it for a second. “Call me … or come,” she said in a voice not quite a whisper but intended for him only to hear. There was, he became aware, some purpose to her easy consent to d’Inde’s escort. “I do understand, of course,” she said more loudly.
“By the way, Jarvis,” the Frenchman said, “your father had words with that Montaigne boy—as I did myself.”
“On politics?”
“On Hitler and Mussolini. Of course, I suppose you could call it politics.”
“Oh,” Jimmie said, relieved. His father was rather fond of talking about the Russians. He liked to say that some of his best friends were Russians. Whereupon he often recited their names, making up some of them, Jimmie was sure, for rhyme and metre. What it did for the Russians at home, friendship with an American army officer, Jimmie used sometimes to ponder, little realizing until the last few months how little it might prosper the American at home.
Montaigne, Jimmie thought, awaiting the delivery of his car: he did not suppose he had ever heard the name except for the sixteenth century French essayist.
In the car Jimmie turned on the radio as he headed along the Potomac. It was time for the 12.30 news. He did not know whether or not he really wanted to hear it. Surely there were other important things going on in the world. There were, but Jimmie soon discovered he was not listening to them: he was waiting for the name, Senator Fagan, convinced he would hear it before the broadcast was over. How many throughout the city were waiting for the same thing, albeit less intimately concerned: there were some people to whom Fagan’s revelations had more suspense than a lottery. And the senator never failed his public. The newscaster said:
Old Sinners Never Die (The Mrs. Norris Mysteries Book 3) Page 5