The Luxembourg Run

by Ellin, Stanley

  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.

  239

  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