Spencer went in. Candy gave me a brief look and nearly shut the door in my face. I waited and nothing happened. I leaned on the bell and heard the chimes. The door swung wide and Candy came out snarling.
“Beat it! Turn blue. You want a knife in the belly?”
“I came to see Mrs. Wade.”
“She don’t want any part of you.”
“Out of my way, peasant. I got business here.”
“Candy!” It was her voice, and it was sharp.
He gave me a final scowl and backed into the house. I went in and shut the door. She was standing at the end of one of the facing davenports, and Spencer was standing beside her. She looked like a million. She had white slacks on, very high-waisted, and a white sport shirt with half sleeves, and a lilac-colored handkerchief budding from the pocket over her left breast.
“Candy is getting rather dictatorial lately,” she said to Spencer. “It’s so good to see you, Howard. And so nice of you to come all this way. I didn’t realize you were bringing someone with you.”
“Marlowe drove me out,” Spencer said. “Also he wanted to see you.”
“I can’t imagine why,” she said coolly. Finally she looked at me, but not as if not seeing me for a week had left an emptiness in her life. “Well?”
“It’s going to take a little time,” I said.
She sat down slowly. I sat down on the other davenport. Spencer was frowning. He took his glasses off and polished them. That gave him a chance to frown more naturally. Then he sat on the other end of the davenport from me.
“I was sure you would come in time for lunch,” she told him, smiling.
“Not today, thanks.”
“No? Well, of course if you are too busy. Then you just want to see that script.”
“If I may.”
“Of course. Candy! Oh, he’s gone. It’s on the desk in Roger’s study. I’ll get it.”
Spencer stood up. “May I get it?”
Without waiting for an answer he started across the room. Ten feet behind her he stopped and gave me a strained look. Then he went on. I just sat there and waited until her head came around and her eyes gave me a cool impersonal stare.
“What was it you wanted to see me about?” she asked curtly.
“This and that. I see you are wearing that pendant again.”
“I often wear it. It was given to me by a very dear friend a long time ago.”
“Yeah. You told me. It’s a British military badge of some sort, isn’t it?”
She held it out at the end of the thin chain. “It’s a jeweler’s reproduction of one. Smaller than the original and in gold and enamel.”
Spencer came back across the room and sat down again and put a thick pile of yellow paper on the corner of the cocktail table in front of him. He glanced at it idly, then his eyes were watching Eileen.
“Could I look at it a little closer?” I asked her.
She pulled the chain around until she could unfasten the clasp. She handed the pendant to me, or rather she dropped it in my hand. Then she folded her hands in her lap and just looked curious. “Why are you so interested? It’s the badge of a regiment called the Artists Rifles, a Territorial regiment. The man who gave it to me was lost soon afterwards. At Andalsnes in Norway, in the spring of that terrible year—1940.” She smiled and made a brief gesture with one hand. “He was in love with me.”
“Eileen was in London all through the Blitz,” Spencer said in an empty voice. “She couldn’t get away.”
We both ignored Spencer. “And you were in love with him,” I said.
She looked down and then raised her head and our glances locked. “It was a long time ago,” she said. “And there was a war. Strange things happen.”
“There was a little more to it than that, Mrs. Wade. I guess you forget how much you opened up about him. ‘The wild mysterious improbable kind of love that never comes but once.’ I’m quoting you. In a way you’re still in love with him. It’s darn nice of me to have the same initials. I suppose that had something to do with your picking me out.”
“His name was nothing like yours,” she said coldly. “And he is dead, dead, dead.”
I held the gold and enamel pendant out to Spencer. He took it reluctantly. “I’ve seen it before,” he muttered.
“Check me on the design,” I said. “It consists of a broad dagger in white enamel with a gold edge. The dagger points downwards and the flat of the blade crosses in front of a pair of upward-curling pale blue enamel wings. Then it crosses in back of a scroll. On the scroll are the words: WHO DARES WINS.”
“That seems to be correct,” he said. “What makes it important?”
“She says it’s a badge of the Artists Rifles, a Territorial outfit. She says it was given to her by a man who was in that outfit and was lost in the Norwegian campaign with the British Army in the spring of 1940 at Andalsnes.”
I had their attention. Spencer watched me steadily. I wasn’t talking to the birds and he knew it. Eileen knew it too. Her tawny eyebrows were crimped in a puzzled frown which could have been genuine. It was also unfriendly.
“This is a sleeve badge,” I said. “It came into existence because the Artists Rifles were made over or attached or seconded or whatever the correct term is into a Special Air Service Outfit. They had originally been a Territorial regiment of infantry. This badge didn’t even exist until 1947. Therefore nobody gave it to Mrs. Wade in 1940. Also, no Artists Rifles were landed at Andalsnes in Norway in 1940. Sherwood Foresters and Leicestershires, yes. Both Territorial. Artists Rifles, no. Am I being nasty?”
Spencer put the pendant down on the coffee table and pushed it slowly across until it was in front of Eileen. He said nothing.
“Do you think I wouldn’t know?” Eileen asked me contemptuously.
“Do you think the British War Office wouldn’t know?” I asked her right back.
“Obviously there must be some mistake,” Spencer said mildly.
I swung around and gave him a hard stare. “That’s one way of putting it.”
“Another way of putting it is that I am a liar,” Eileen said icily. “I never knew anyone named Paul Marston, never loved him or he me. He never gave me a reproduction of his regimental badge, he was never missing in action, he never existed. I bought this badge myself in a shop in New York where they specialize in imported British luxuries, things like leather goods, hand-made brogues, regimental and school ties and cricket blazers, knickknacks with coats of arms on them and so on. Would an explanation like that satisfy you, Mr. Marlowe?”
“The last part would. Not the first. No doubt somebody told you it was an Artists Rifles badge and forgot to mention what kind, or didn’t know. But you did know Paul Marston and he did serve in that outfit, and he was missing in action in Norway. But it didn’t happen in 1940, Mrs. Wade. It happened in 1942 and he was in the Commandos then, and it wasn’t at Andalsnes, but on a little island off the coast where the Commando boys pulled a fast raid.”
“I see no need to be so hostile about it,” Spencer said in an executive sort of voice. He was fooling with the yellow sheets in front of him now. I didn’t know whether he was trying to stooge for me or was just sore. He picked up a slab of yellow script and weighed it on his hand.
“You going to buy that stuff by the pound?” I asked him.
He looked startled, then he smiled a small difficult smile.
“Eileen had a pretty tough time in London,” he said. “Things get confused in ones memory.”
I took a folded paper out of my pocket. “Sure,” I said. “Like who you got married to. This is a certified copy of a marriage certificate. The original came from Caxton Hall Registry Office. The date of the marriage is August 1942. The parties named are Paul Edward Marston and Eileen Victoria Sampsell. In a sense Mrs. Wade is right. There was no such person as Paul Edward Marston. It was a fake name because in the army you have to get permission to get married. The man faked an identity. In the army he had another name. I have his
whole army history. It’s a wonder to me that people never seem to realize that all you have to do is ask.”
Spencer was very quiet now. He leaned back and stared. But not at me. He stared at Eileen. She looked back at him with one of those faint half deprecatory, half seductive smiles women are so good at.
“But he was dead, Howard. Long before I met Roger. What could it possibly matter? Roger knew all about it. I never stopped using my unmarried name. In the circumstances I had to. It was on my passport. Then after he was killed in action—” She stopped and drew a slow breath and let her hand fall slowly and softly to her knee. “All finished, all done for, all lost.”
“You’re sure Roger knew?” he asked her slowly.
“He knew something,” I said. “The name Paul Marston had a meaning for him. I asked him once and he got a funny look in his eyes. But he didn’t tell me why.”
She ignored that and spoke to Spencer.
“Why, of course Roger knew all about it.” Now she was smiling at Spencer patiently as if he was being a little slow on the take. The tricks they have.
“Then why lie about the dates?” Spencer asked dryly. “Why say the man was lost in 1940 when he was lost in 1942? Why wear a badge that he couldn’t have given you and make a point of saying that he did give it to you?”
“Perhaps I was lost in a dream,” she said softly. “Or a nightmare, more accurately. A lot of my friends were killed in the bombing. When you said goodnight in those days you tried not to make it sound like goodbye. But that’s what it often was. And when you said goodbye to a soldier—it was worse. It’s always the kind and gentle ones that get killed.”
He didn’t say anything. I didn’t say anything. She looked down at the pendant lying on the table in front of her. She picked it up and fitted it to the chain around her neck again and leaned back composedly.
“I know I haven’t any right to cross-examine you, Eileen,” Spencer said slowly. “Let’s forget it. Marlowe made a big thing out of the badge and the marriage certificate and so on. Just for a moment I guess he had me wondering.”
“Mr. Marlowe,” she told him quietly, “makes a big thing out of trifles. But when it comes to a really big thing—like saving a man’s life—he is out by the lake watching a silly speedboat.”
“And you never saw Paul Marston again,” I said.
“How could I when he was dead?”
“You didn’t know he was dead. There was no report of his death from the Red Cross. He might have been taken prisoner.”
She shuddered suddenly. “In October 1942,” she said slowly, “Hitler issued an order that all Commando prisoners were to be turned over to the Gestapo. I think we all know what that meant. Torture and a nameless death in some Gestapo dungeon.” She shuddered again. Then she blazed at me: “You’re a horrible man. You want me to live that over again, to punish me for a trivial lie. Suppose someone you loved had been caught by those people and you knew what had happened, what must have happened to him or her? Is it so strange that I tried to build another kind of memory—even a false one?”
“I need a drink,” Spencer said. “I need a drink badly. May I have one?”
She clapped her hands and Candy drifted up from nowhere as he always did. He bowed to Spencer.
“What you like to drink, Señor Spencer?”
“Straight Scotch, and plenty of it,” Spencer said.
Candy went over in the corner and pulled the bar out from the wall. He got a bottle up on it and poured a stiff jolt into a glass. He came back and set it down in front of Spencer. He started to leave again.
“Perhaps, Candy,” Eileen said quietly, “Mr. Marlowe would like a drink too.”
He stopped and looked at her, his face dark and stubborn.
“No, thanks,” I said. “No drink for me.”
Candy made a snorting sound and walked off. There was another silence. Spencer put down half of his drink. He lit a cigarette. He spoke to me without looking at me.
“I’m sure Mrs. Wade or Candy could drive me back to Beverly Hills. Or I can get a cab. I take it you’ve said your piece.”
I refolded the certified copy of the marriage license. I put it back in my pocket.
“Sure that’s the way you want it?” I asked him.
“That’s the way everybody wants it.”
“Good.” I stood up. “I guess I was a fool to try to play it this way. Being a big time publisher and having the brains to go with it—if it takes any—you might have assumed I didn’t come out here just to play the heavy. I didn’t revive ancient history or spend my own money to get the facts just to twist them around somebody’s neck. I didn’t investigate Paul Marston because the Gestapo murdered him, because Mrs. Wade was wearing the wrong badge, because she got mixed up on her dates, because she married him in one of those quickie wartime marriages. When I started investigating him I didn’t know any of those things. All I knew was his name. Now how do you suppose I knew that?”
“No doubt somebody told you,” Spencer said curtly.
“Correct, Mr. Spencer. Somebody who knew him in New York after the war and later on saw him out here in Chasen’s with his wife.”
“Marston is a pretty common name,” Spencer said, and sipped his whiskey. He turned his head sideways and his right eyelid drooped a fraction of an inch. So I sat down again. “Even Paul Marstons could hardly be unique. There are nineteen Howard Spencers in the Greater New York area telephone directories, for instance. And four of them are just plain Howard Spencer with no middle initial.”
“Yeah. How many Paul Marstons would you say had had one side of their faces smashed by a delayed-action mortar shell and showed the scars and marks of the plastic surgery that repaired the damage?”
Spencer’s mouth fell open. He made some kind of heavy breathing sound. He got out a handkerchief and tapped his temples with it.
“How many Paul Mars tons would you say had saved the lives of a couple of tough gamblers named Mendy Menendez and Randy Starr on that same occasion? They’re still around, they’ve got good memories. They can talk when it suits them. Why ham it up any more, Spencer? Paul Marston and Terry Lennox were the same man. It can be proved beyond any shadow of a doubt.”
I didn’t expect anyone to jump six feet into the air and scream and nobody did. But there is a kind of silence that is almost as loud as a shout. I had it. I had it all around me, thick and hard. In the kitchen I could hear water run. Outside on the road I could hear the dull thump of a folded newspaper hit the driveway, then the light inaccurate whistling of a boy wheeling away on his bicycle.
I felt a tiny sting on the back of my neck. I jerked away from it and swung around. Candy was standing there with his knife in his hand. His dark face was wooden but there was something in his eyes I hadn’t seen before.
“You are tired, amigo,” he said softly. “I fix you a drink, no?”
“Bourbon on the rocks, thanks,” I said.
“De pronto, señor.”
He snapped the knife shut, dropped it into the side pocket of his white jacket and went softly away.
Then at last I looked at Eileen. She sat leaning forward, her hands clasped tightly. The downward tilt of her face hid her expression if she had any. And when she spoke her voice had the lucid emptiness of that mechanical voice on the telephone that tells you the time and if you keep on listening, which people don’t because they have no reason to, it will keep on telling you the passing seconds forever, without the slightest change of inflection.
“I saw him once, Howard. Just once. I didn’t speak to him at all. Nor he to me. He was terribly changed. His hair was white and his face—it wasn’t quite the same face. But of course I knew him, and of course he knew me. We looked at each other. That was all. Then he was gone out of the room and the next day he was gone from her house. It was at the Lorings’ I saw him—and her. One afternoon late. You were there, Howard. And Roger was there. I suppose you saw him too.”
“We were introduced,” Spencer said. �
��I knew who he was married to.”
“Linda Loring told me he just disappeared. He gave no reason. There was no quarrel. Then after a while that woman divorced him. And still later I heard she found him again. He was down and out. And they were married again. Heaven knows why. I suppose he had no money and it didn’t matter to him any more. He knew that I was married to Roger. We were lost to each other.”
“Why?” Spencer asked.
Candy put my drink in front of me without a word. He looked at Spencer and Spencer shook his head. Candy drifted away. Nobody paid any attention to him. He was like the prop man in a Chinese play, the fellow that moves things around on the stage and the actors and audience alike behave as if he wasn’t there.
“Why?” she repeated. “Oh, you wouldn’t understand. What we had was lost. It could never be recovered. The Gestapo didn’t get him after all. There must have been some decent Nazis who didn’t obey Hitler’s order about the Commandos. So he survived, he came back. I used to pretend to myself that I would find him again, but as he had been, eager and young and unspoiled. But to find him married to that redheaded whore—that was disgusting. I already knew about her and Roger. I have no doubt Paul did too. So did Linda Loring, who is a bit of a tramp herself, but not completely so. They all are in that set. You ask me why I didn’t leave Roger and go back to Paul. After he had been in her arms and Roger had been in those same willing arms? No thank you. I need a little more inspiration than that. Roger I could forgive. He drank, he didn’t know what he was doing. He worried about his work and he hated himself because he was just a mercenary hack. He was a weak man, unreconciled, frustrated, but understandable. He was just a husband. Paul was either much more or he was nothing. In the end he was nothing.”
The Collected Raymond Chandler Page 140