This time I let him set the pace, so that it took an endless time to cover
the remaining distance. But cover it we did, and then were on Chouchoute’s
roof where halfway up the slope was the skylight window of her bedroom.
Here, flat on my belly, I provided support for Costello’s soggy shoes, this way
shoving him up to where he could take a position directly under the window,
hanging on for dear life to its outside sill.
Somehow I managed to get enough handhold and foothold to work my
way up beside him. Peering through the skylight, I could dimly make out a form
on the bed and no one else in the room. I heaved up on the window frame, it
gave way and opened enough to let me crawl through. Inside, I hung
suspended, measuring the long drop below, felt my fingers slipping and willynilly
made the drop. Costello was already through the window and hanging
there. I reached up to break his fall, he came down in my arms and, a solid
weight, almost bore me to the floor with him. But we were in now, and, I
could only hope, had not roused those occupants capable of being roused.
Chouchoute was certainly not one of them. There was little left of her
but a pair of glittering eyes sightlessly fixed on the ceiling, and if it weren’t for
the slight rise and fall of the meager chest under the coverlet, it would be easy
to mistake her for dead. The room was stifling hot, the radiator hissing and
clattering away, which, from my experience, was an unnatural condition for
the house once winter had passed.
Costello had gun in hand when we opened the door to survey the
hallway, and when I motioned him to give it to me he surrendered it only
grudgingly. As it turned out, the hallway was empty, the rooms along it were
empty. The same for every room on the floors below, checked out one by one.
We moved down to the ground floor as silently as we could — not too silently
the way each step creaked in protest — and on the ground floor at the foot of
the stairway we waited for some sound to guide us in the right direction.
There was no sound.
I led the way to the kitchen, found the back door bolted from the inside,
and from there traced a route through the ground floor that took us back to the
staircase.
238
“Beautiful,” said Costello. “When we climbed in the top they walked out
the bottom.”
“We’re not at the bottom yet,” I told him.
The door to the cellar wasn’t locked. And the dim light over its stone
stairway was lit. From the head of the stairs I looked down at the familiar
collection of empty cartons, waste paper, and crates of discarded wine and
beer bottles that Madame, her packrat instinct always working overtime, could
never bring herself to throw away. I descended the stairs, gun at the ready,
Costello breathing down my neck. There had been a noise from some remote
part of the cellar, a bang and a clank, muffled but clearly audible.
The furnace and coal bin were at the far end of the cellar, and the door
in the partition that separated them from the storeroom was partly open and
showed a light behind it. I made my way toward it and stopped at the door to
look through at whatever was going on. Costello crowded me to get a look for
himself. “God damn,” he whispered in awe.
Marie-Paule, naked except for a pair of unlaced work shoes, was
furiously stoking the furnace fire which, from the glare of it, was already close
to white hot. Her hair was dank, her lean body poured sweat in rivulets that
shone under the drop-light, but there was good reason for the nakedness and
the labors.
A large plastic sheet had been stretched out on the stone floor. On the
sheet, also naked, bound hand and foot, lay the object she had been working
on. The skin was slate-gray, the lips blue, and the pattern of long, deep gashes
on chest and belly oozed trickles of blood to join the puddles of it on the
plastic sheet. There were all the signs here that this cadaver had been brought
to its end very slowly and painfully.
I took that one look and everything in me churned up into my throat,
choking me until I could force it down again. Then I managed to wrench my
eyes away from the sight.
“Frenchy,” whispered Costello.
Wrong.
The hair had been dyed black, the thin line of newly grown mustache had
been dyed black, but there all resemblance to Yves Rouart-Rochelle ended.
“Kees Baar,” I said.
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An exquisitely slow and painful end at the hands of a fanatically neat
workman. Paring knives, carving knives, and cleavers, those instruments for
torture and dissection, were all arranged in a neat row outside the plastic.
When the job of dismemberment was complete and the remains thoroughly
cremated there would be no misplaced blade left behind.
I walked into the room, Costello at my shoulder, as Marie-Paule
slammed the furnace door shut with the blade of the shovel. She turned and
saw us there, the pistol aimed at her. For a few ticks of the clock, she looked
like Lot’s wife halfway to becoming a pillar of salt. A few seconds, and then I
could actually feel her charge herself with the nerve and cunning to meet this
crisis.
“A gun,” she said contemptuously. “How brave.”
I motioned with it at the shovel. “Drop that thing.”
She glanced at the shovel in her hands as if unaware she was holding it,
and only after she had dropped it with a clatter did I thrust the gun inside my
belt.
“Now,” I said, keeping my eyes averted from her handiwork, “cover him
up. Find something to put over him. Quick.”
She found something in a stack near the coal bin, an old canvas drop
cloth, stiff with splashes of dried paint. She hauled it over the body and stood
back from it facing us. “There’s no use your killing me,” she said calmly.
“You’d gain nothing. You’d only lose everything.”
“Everything?” I said.
“Your agency’s share of the hijacked money. After all, it is the money
your CIA must be interested in, not the useless killing of people. And the
money will be returned to you. I swear to it.”
“Never mind that now. Where’s Yves?”
She pointed at the paint-encrusted cloth. “That —”
”No,” I said, “that is not Yves. That is what’s left of Kees Baar. Now
the truth. What happened to Yves?”
“Very well, the truth. He’s lying dead in his apartment in Marseille
where Kees settled with him. You know the rest. Kees took his car but
abandoned it at Dijon when your men came too close. He traveled the rest of
the way here by bus. I had told him to meet me here.”
“So that you could kill him?”
240
“Yes. He deserved killing. He deserved worse than killing. And that is
what he got.”
“Because of van Zee’s letter? The one telling of his feelings for you, and
the way Kees forced him to give you up?”
“Yes. And whether you intend to shoot me or not” — she motioned at
her nakedness — “do you mind if I put on some clothing? I find this very
embarrassing.”
This was embarrassing to her. The sliced-up body under that cloth
wasn’t.
The clothing was neatly folded on a box against the partition. She
dressed with deliberation, slipped on her shoes, shrugged her arms into a
jacket. She came back to the body and pointed a now handsomely shod toe at
it. “Consider, Mr. Shaw, I’ve only done to him what you would have been
forced to do in the end, because as long as he lived you would never have seen
one dollar of your money. This way it will all be returned to you, and the
whole thing can be forgotten. No one need ever know what has taken place
here.”
“Watch it!” shouted Costello.
I had been listening to her, not watching her, and that was my mistake. I
hadn’t even seen the motion of the hand that slipped the gun from her jacket.
All I knew was that I was suddenly looking right into it, and, though it
appeared to be a small-bore automatic, it was like looking into the mouth of a
tunnel.
“No!” Marie-Paule suddenly said, and Costello who had shifted his
position had sense enough to freeze where he was. She frowned at me. “I am
surprised, Mr. Shaw, that you did not take into account that I must have used
some device to persuade Kees to take the walk down here with me. You are
not really very good at your work, are you? Now it appears that all problems
will be resolved in my favor.”
I said, “Easily done, Miss Neyna. A matter of saying good-by to you and
forgetting all about this.”
“Too late, my friend. What both of you will do is place your hands on
your heads.”
We did. This was a killer who, from the look of it, enjoyed killing. And
there was the furnace ready, as capable of incinerating three as one. And here
241
she was, moving up close, the gun never wavering from its mark between my
eyes. “Now turn around, please,” she said.
So it was to be in the back of the head. Safer for her that way, because
the second bullet would explode in Costello’s skull before he could do
anything about it. Costello slowly turned aboutface. I didn’t.
“Marie-Paule,” I said, “look at me. Even with the surgery that was done
on my face, is it possible you still don’t know you’re looking at Jean
Lespere?”
Her lips quirked. “A curious gambit, Mr. Shaw. And a foolish one.”
I said, “I once saved your life. In Marseille, two thugs hired by a man
named Renaudat were ready to knife you until I came along. Would I know that
if I weren’t Jean Lespere?”
“Why not? You people must know every last detail of the company’s
business. But I knew Jean as none of you ever could.”
“You did, Marie-Paule.” I shifted to the hard-boiled Boulevard de
Clichy French of Jean Lespere. “You came to my room that night in a shabby
old robe. You opened the robe wide to show me there was nothing underneath
it. And you said to me, ‘Do you find this of interest to you?’ knowing how
desperately I did. C’est moi, ma chère! C’est votre Jean!”
“Ah, mon Dieu!” she gasped, her eyes searching my face, the gun
wavering. I lunged for it, by a miracle caught hold of her wrist and turned it
upward, and felt the shock of the explosion from wrist to elbow. Marie-Paule
stood there, that expression of incredulity still stamped on her face, then went
down full-length, the gun gripped in her hand even in that final convulsion.
Costello said weakly, “Jesus,” and kneeled down to look closely.
“Finished,” he said. “Under the chin and right through the top of her head.”
“Finished?” I said, trying to understand it.
“That’s right. She had us all wrapped up, and you told her you were the
old boy friend, and she blew the whole works.” He shook his head, marveling.
“She really had a big thing going for her Johnny, didn’t she? Never got over
it.”
No, she never did. A fatal condition, too.
242
We left by the kitchen door, which
opened on the congeries of unlighted alleys leading away from rue Houdon. On
Costello’s advice, we used the metro rather than a cab for the ride back to the
hotel.
When Harry opened the door of the sitting room to me I was once again
faced by the spectacle of a body bound, and, in this case, gagged, but unlike
the macabre object in that torture chamber on rue Houdon, this one was very
much alive. Bianca was planted in an armchair, her wrists fixed to its arms by
a couple of neckties, with a handkerchief and another tie sealing her mouth. On
the floor nearby stood her valise, evidently packed in such haste that the edge
of a feminine garment stuck out of it.
Harry seemed close to panic. “Mr. Costello told me not to let her go out,
sir, or get near a phone, and she tried both of them. This was the only thing I
could do about it.”
“A gag?” I said. “She didn’t really yell for help, did she?”
“I don’t know if it was for help, sir, because it was in Italian. But she
started yelling so loud anybody outside could hear it and that would have
meant bad trouble. I’m sorry sir, but —”
”No, it’s all right, Harry. You did fine.”
I nudged him through the door and locked it. Then I went over to
confront Bianca. “Allora, Signorina Prima Donna,” I said.
She glared at me and made a noise in her throat which, if not muffled,
might have been a roar.
“Not yet,” I said. “First, like it or not, you’re going to hear me out.”
She shook her head violently.
“Oh, yes, you will,” I said. “And what you’ll bear is the truth. I could
easily lie about what I’ve just been through, and Costello would back me up in
it, but I’d rather risk the truth.” I described the scene in that basement, not
sparing my captive audience any of the details. “So,” I concluded, “Marie-
Paule is now dead, along with all the others. For that matter, so are Jan van
Zee and Jean Lespere. All dead and gone forever. That leaves David Shaw
and Bianca Cavalcanti, and what becomes of them, I think, is very much up to
you.”
243
Again she shook her head violently.
“At least,” I said, “are you in a mood to behave reasonably if I reclaim
my neckties?”
She nodded, and when I undid her fastenings and the gag she sat there
stonily. Finally she said, “I warned you that if you went this far with your
madness, it was all over between us. I’m grateful you’re not dead. Deeply
grateful. But whatever the reason, you ended up killing that woman. That
makes you a killer, don’t you understand? I couldn’t live with you, knowing
that. I don’t see how you’ll be able to live with it.”
“I do understand. That’s why I just now used Signor Costello’s phone —
with his unhappy permission — to call the police and tell them about it.
They’ll be paying me a visit in a little while. I’ll fight the case as hard as I
can, cara mia, but of course when my past comes out it’ll mean at least a few
years in prison for me. If I know you’ll be waiting —”
&
nbsp; ”Prison?” she said with horror. “You’ll go to prison? Ah, no! Never! I’d
never live through it!”
I was still kneeling before her, the neckties in my hand, and she hurled
herself at me so unrestrainedly that she sent me flat on my back, and there she
was, sprawled over me, my face clutched between her hands while she rained
kisses on it, sobbing, “I’ll die, do you hear? Mio amore. What a fool to send
for the police! Caro mio. For you to be in prison even one day —!”
I managed to get my arms around her, and she yielded whimpering to the
embrace as I comforted her.
Ah yes, I was going to have a stormy time of it with her when she sooner
or later realized that I hadn’t called the police.
And after that, considering the temperament of my woman, I could
forecast other stormy times for God knows what other reasons.
But certainly never a dull moment, and certainly never an empty one.
About the Author
STANLEY ELLIN has been called “a master storyteller.” His novels have been
translated into twenty languages and have won him an international reputation.
He has been honored with seven Edgar Allan Poe awards; and his works have
been made into movies by such directors as Joseph Losey, Clive Donner and
Claude Chabrol, and into numerous television plays, most notably by Alfred
Hitchcock. Mr. Ellin is married, and his year is divided between his homes in
New York and Miami Beach.
Note to the electronic edition, 2002
Stanley Ellin was born in Brooklyn in 1916. He had a varied career, marrying
in 1936 (he and his wife Jeanne had one daughter) and serving in the U.S.
Army toward the end of WW2. He sold his first story in 1948, to Ellery
Queen’s Mystery Magazine, where most of his subsequent short fiction first
appeared. The 1979 omnibus volume The Specialty of the House and Other
Stories: The Compete Mystery Tales, 1948-1978 collected all his short
fiction up to that time; a couple more stories appeared in 1983.
Ellin’s first novel was Dreadful Summit (1948), for which he also wrote a
screenplay, the film appearing as The Big Night in 1951. His second novel,
The Key to Nicholas Street (1952), became the French film Leda (1961). A
movie of the novel House of Cards (1967) appeared in 1969 under that title,
featuring George Peppard, Inger Stevens, and Orson Welles.
Only one Ellin character appeared in more than one work, the private
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