Miami who, as my agent in the matter, had lately been receiving urgent
messages from various airline executives. All the messages struck the same
note. My concern as shareholder about certain illegal practices engaged in by
the company was now being investigated. Immediate correction of the problem
was assured.
“So the squeeze is on,” Costello said. “No more kickbacks. For all we
know, Frenchy and the rest of them are feeling it in the pocket right now.”
“Probably.”
“So,” said Costello, “considering that you’re holding a quarter of a
million dollar’s worth of Frenchy’s notes, how about asking for full payment
of them right now?”
“I have to get to Vahna first, Ray. She makes up the payment that
matters.”
“It’s too complicated that way, Davey. You’re trying to fit a lot of odd
pieces together all at the same time.”
135
“They’ll fit,” I said.
And, as I saw, going through those index cards again and again like a
riverboat gambler trying to foretell the deal coming, there was material here
which provided neither frustration nor encouragement but only a large blank.
There was the original report on Chouchoute noting that she was very ill and
generally out of sight, and nothing more.
I pointed this out to Costello. “Doesn’t Detec still have a man on her,
Ray?”
“No need. They’ve got one of her girls on our payroll. The head girl.
She’ll report quick if anybody like the Dutchman shows up there.”
“What’s her name?”
“Avril. No second name. Just Avril. Our contact man with her is a guy
name of Schefflin. Why? You figure on meeting with her?”
“Her boss,” I said.
136
Itimed my arrival at Chouchoute’s for
precisely noon. Much might have changed over the past ten years; perhaps
Madame’s waking time had not.
A grimy young man answered the door, all hair, mustache, and dark
glasses, the latest model Jean Lespere. “Que voulez-vous?”
It was shrewd of him to suspect that I was too well turned-out to be a
customer for this level of entertainment. I smiled engagingly. “I’m sorry. I
don’t speak French.”
“No? I say what do you want.”
“Avril. A friend sent me.”
Chacun à son goût. He opened the door wide and motioned me in, not
briskly and cheerfully as Jean Lespere had once done it, giving the client full
value for his money, but indifferently. Viewing my surroundings with a
professional eye while he trudged upstairs to rouse Avril, I had the feeling that
no one since my time had properly scrubbed and polished these premises. And
what about that early springtime chill in the air? Undoubtedly, the furnace had
gone out again, the ever-cranky grates collapsed into the ash pit. The one small
improvement I could mark was that the pair of girls sprawled at ease in the
waiting room seemed to be younger than the girls I remembered here. Or, on
second thought, was I that much older?
This year’s Jean Lespere hailed me from the head of the stairway, and I
made my way up to the door he indicated. Avril’s room was already prepared
for business, the traditional bowl and stack of towels in evidence, and Avril, a
buxom redhead, was ready for action in men’s pajama tops. “’Allo, bébé,” she
said cheerfully, advancing on me.
I waved her off. “Do you speak English?”
“A little. If you speak slow.”
I said it very slowly. “A man named Schefflin works for me. Do you
understand?”
She nodded with instant comprehension. “I watch, I tell the others to
watch, but no van Zee. No Hollandais.”
“Then just keep watching. But right now I want to talk to Chouchoute.”
“Impossible. She is sick, you know? Ver’ sick.”
137
I had the bribe ready. I handed it to her, and with deliberation she
examined the thousand-franc note front and back. “A gentleman,” she said.
“Vraiment.”
Decent in robe and slippers she led me up to the top floor. For a moment
as we left her room I found I was doing the leading but caught myself in time.
A knock on the door, and there was Madame’s voice, shrill with the familiar
bad temper. “Entrez! Entrez!”
Chouchoute was propped up in bed, a breakfast tray before her,
newspapers scattered all over the coverlet. In whatever sunshine could filter
through the dirty skylight she looked like a yellowed, mummified image of her
old self, but the eyes were very bright as they fixed inquiringly on me and then
angrily on Avril. “Et qui est-ce qui ce type-là?”
“Un Anglais, Madame. Un brasseur d’affaires. Il ne parle pas
Français.”
A Britisher. A wheeler-dealer on a large scale. Non-French speaking. I
listened poker faced to this description of myself, but could see no reason for
playing the bilingual game. Madame, as I well knew, had an excellent
command of basic English.
I said to her, “I’ve heard that you speak English.”
“I speak what I wish to speak.”
“Right now,” I said, taking out my money clip, “English would be most
profitable to you.”
This time it was two one-thousand-franc notes. Madame seized them
with a bejeweled claw. “And so?” she said.
“Ten years ago,” I said, “a young man named Jean Lespere worked here
for you. He was also called Janot. Do you remember him?”
“Yes. An ugly brute. And starving out there in the streets until I gave him
honest work. Then what does he do? One day he steals the money I keep here
and runs away.”
“No, he did not steal your money and run away. What happened was that
you sold his services to a certain man. The man who supplied you with drugs.”
Madame strained to sit upright, then fell back against her pillow. “Va-t’en!”
she snarled at Avril who was taking all this in, mouth agape. “Va-t’en,
salope!”
138
It was the old snarl again, one not to be denied. Avril departed with a
slam of the door. Madame narrowed her eyes at me. “Who are you?”
I pointed at the newspapers around her. “Somewhere there you may have
read about me. The name is David Shaw. I’m American, a maker of motion
pictures. I had an arrangement with a man to write a story for a motion picture,
but now he’s disappeared. He was your Janot, Madam.”
“My Janot?” She scrabbled among the newspapers. “It’s here. You are
the one with la belle négresse, true?”
“True.”
Her face clouded. “But wait. You say Janot. But in the paper it was not
somebody French.”
“That’s right. The man you sent Janot to gave him a Dutch passport, so
Janot became Jan van Zee.”
“Yes, yes, that is the name. But I did not sell his services. It was a
kindness to him.”
“That’s not important,” I said. “All I want is the address of the man you
sent him to. Kees Baar. Any address where I can meet him and ask him how to
find Janot. Have you seen Baar lately?”
“Heard from him?”
She took too much time deciding on the answer. “No.”
“Madame —”
”No.” She weakly shook her head from side on side on the pillow. “I
have no strength left. Go now. Tell Avril to come to me.”
No use pushing this further. She had weighed her answer and would stay
with it. And from the waxy look of her, the hard breathing, she really had used
up what little strength remained in her. But she had, no matter her intentions,
fortified my conviction that Kees Baar was not far away from here.
When I pushed open the door to depart I almost banged it against Avril’s
head. “She wants you,” I said.
Avril swung the door shut. “She will wait, hein?” Then very sourly,
“Why did you give her so much money? She will never live to spend it, you
know?”
“Never mind that. Did Schefflin tell you to look through her mail?”
“No.”
139
“Well, do it with any letter coming to her from another country.
Then tell Schefflin what they’re about. I’ll arrange extra payment for that,
understand?”
“Yes. But do you know she sold this place? When the new one
comes —”
”The new owner?”
“Yes. She was already here to see what it was like. She will soon be
here again, even before Madame is dead. When she is I do not think I can help
you any more.”
“Do you know her?”
“A stranger. I think there will be trouble when she comes. Ver’ thin, you
know?” Avril pursed her lips and drew her face down. “And with a face like
this. It looks to me a type worse than Madame. Not one to play tricks on.”
“Too bad,” I said. “Then let’s just hope that Kees Baar shows up here
before she does.”
140
Sold the place?” Costello said. “Well,
she sure as hell got a pile for it, because I never yet knew a whorehouse that
wasn’t a gold mine.”
It gave me a picture of Madame’s almost lifeless yellow claw grasping
my bank notes. And flung over the chair beside the bed, a corset that would
now go twice around what was left of her. I said, “What concerns us is that
she knows more about Baar’s whereabouts than she’s telling, and there’s not
much time left for her to tell it. A lot depends on Avril. Make sure Schefflin
understands he’s not to bargain with her. Whatever she wants for worthwhile
information, she gets.”
“The whole agency knows that’s our policy.”
“All right then. Did they have anything to report since this morning?”
“One item,” said Costello. “They checked out that woman who goes
along with Frenchy’s wife on those London trips. It’s a Mrs. Max Denoyer.
Seems she’s Frenchy’s sister.”
“And watchdog.”
“That’s the size of it. When the women go shopping in London the sisterin-
law doesn’t buy, and when they’re in the casino she doesn’t bet. But she’s
always right there. If you want to get to the wife in London, you’ll have to
figure out some way of getting around the watchdog.”
“When the time comes,” I said.
“I’ll leave it to you. But talking about watchdogs, when you went to look
up old lady Choochoo you didn’t take Harry along, did you?”
“No.”
“That’s a fact. Because right after you left he was in here picking over
my clothes for the valet service. Which was not very bright of you, Davey.
Nobody is so big and tough that a thirty-eight slug can’t cut him right down to
size.”
“Not in this case, Ray. There’s one thing all of them must have on the
mind. If anything happens to Mister Shaw from America, his collection of van
Zee letters is likely to wind up with the police.”
141
The salon of Jean-Pierre’s mama, the
dowager countess, was held in her town house on the Île Saint-Louis, that
picturesque bit of real estate in the middle of the Seine. Grete and I made a
strategically late entrance among the company, and Grete, playing the chaste
damsel on my orders, was enough to set the already overheated Jean-Pierre
back on his heels. “Incroyable,” he murmured at the sight of this vision.
Upstairs in the grand reception room, however, we were received with
considerably less warmth. No great surprise. This was not merely High
Society, as Vahna Rouart-Rochelle must have resentfully put it to her
nonpedigreed husband, it was the Highest, hence the only one for a daughter of
Siamese nobility to attain to, never mind her plebian marriage.
By the time we came to the dowager countess, I knew I had my work cut
out for me. Jean-Pierre’s mama was tall, handsome, snowy haired, and with
the hard eyes and tight lips of one always in command. There was no rise in
the temperature as Jean-Pierre imaginatively set forth my credentials — my
family among the foremost in America, my father once an honored envoy to
France — and, in fact, there was even a further drop in it when, in answer to
the direct question from my hostess, I explained that at present I was engaged
in the making of a motion picture.
“Indeed?” the lady said with distaste.
“Yes. It will portray what’s happened to a world which once existed —
that happy world our ancestors bequeathed us and which modern generations
have shattered into fragments. Have you ever felt, Madame, that today we’re
living in a second Rome, the barbarians already inside the gates?”
The hardness of Madame’s eyes was softening. “Who of any breeding
would not feel this, young man?”
Peripherally, I saw Jean-Pierre and Grete receding from us hand in
hand. It was an encouraging sight. “Madame,” I said, “one may expect an
American to approve this new barbarism, but — forgive me — so many of
your own countrymen seem to share this approval. Or is that too harsh a
judgment?”
“No, no.” Madame now had my wrist in a tight grip. She drew me down
beside her on a settee. Someone imposingly white-bearded approached us and
142
addressed her, and she irritably waved him away. “Young man,” she said to
me, then shook her head in self-deprecation. “But my son informed me of your
name. David, is it not?”
“It is.”
“Then let me tell you, David, I know that contemptible breed you must
have encountered in France. All descended from those pawnbrokers who
bought their titles from the scandalous third Napoleon. What is more —”
After that, all I had to do was listen.
When Madame and I made our farewells she suggested that if, despite
the press of my work, I could manage a visit to the château at Chaumont, I
might find her ancestral home worth the viewing.
“I’m sure I would, Madame. But do I have your word that you’ll accept
my hospitality in return?”
“I am not often in Paris, David — an unbearable place really — but yes,
I feel we have much to discuss with each other. I trust he’ll forgive me for
saying it, but I wish my son were more like you.”
&nb
sp; Downstairs, Jean-Pierre, a proprietary arm around Grete, said to me,
“You know, my mother seems quite infatuated with you. How the devil did you
manage that?”
“By letting her know the truth,” I said. “That I’m quite infatuated with
her.”
The Rolls was parked on the embankment side of the street, Harry, in
decorous gray livery, already holding its door open when Grete and I crossed
over to it. He saw us seated, then got behind the wheel.
“Hold it,” said Grete. She pointed down the block and said to me,
“That’s Jean-Pierre’s car. The little red one.”
“Very nice.”
“Yes. Well, there’s something I want to get straight with you, only I
don’t know how you’ll take it.”
I said, “Jean-Pierre invited you to dinner this evening. So far you
haven’t said yes or no. If it’s yes, he’ll find you waiting in that little red car.”
“Close,” said Grete. “But it’s more than dinner. His mother has this big
place in the country. He thinks that while she’s in town here he and I could
drive out and have a weekend there. But I don’t know how you feel about it.”
“How do you feel about him?”
143
“I like him. But not as much as getting into the movies. So if you say no,
that’s all there is to it.”
“Then all I have to say is that from now on you’d better have your own
room at the hotel. When do you expect to be back in town?”
“Monday morning, Jean-Pierre said.”
“Make it Sunday night. Because early Monday, Oscar and I are going to
Brussels on business, and I want you along.”
I watched as she went down the street switching those hips in the glare
of the Rolls’s headlights and saw Jean-Pierre leaving the house to join her
even before she reached his car.
Pawn had taken knight, no trouble at all.
144
Early Monday morning Costello joined
me for coffee and a final briefing. He handed me a slip of paper. “On top is a
café address in Brussels. You pick up our agency man there, and he’ll take you
to the school and point out the kid. How old would she be anyhow?”
“Sarah? About sixteen.”
“Old enough to have her own opinions about this, but that’s your
problem.” He pointed at the paper. “Her mama’s down there too. Emmaline
Bell. Macclesfield Street, London. A couple of cheap rooms over a Chink
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