He had thought by simply going down to the water, he might find an outward-bound ship, a passenger ship or a freighter. All he saw at first was an open rectangle of a harbour full of small fishing boats tied up at the wharf with furled sails, and a few more coming in. A placard advertised an afternoon excursion to the Château d’If.
“Where are the big boats?” he asked a fisherman.
“Oh, out there,” the man said, waving an arm to the right. He had metal-framed front teeth, like Niko in Athens. “This is the old port.”
“Thanks.” The vieux port. Chester had heard of it.
He walked down the right side of the old port. Fishermen were mending nets, coiling rope. He narrowly missed being hit by a basketful of crayfish shells which a woman flung from the door of a small restaurant. She was yelling something that Chester couldn’t understand. His walk netted him nothing but a pretty view. He saw a grey battleship, which might have been British or American, but nothing that looked like a passenger liner. He walked back to the Cannebière. He had noticed some travel agencies on the Cannebière on his walk down.
No boat was leaving that day. A Swedish freighter was leaving tomorrow for Philadelphia, but the man in the travel agency was not able, when he telephoned the ship, to speak to the person who would know if there were cabins for passengers on the freighter. The only passenger liner the man mentioned was an Italian boat Chester had never heard of, not one of the big ones, coming in tomorrow and sailing the day after tomorrow. Chester did not want to wait that long.
He thought he had best try flying. He telephoned the Marignane airport and learned that there was no room on any flight today.
“And tomorrow?” Chester asked.
“A flight at two in the afternoon, sir. Do you wish to make a reservation?”
“Yes. For the two o’clock, please. Wedekind. Double vé . . .”
He could pay for his ticket at a certain agency on the Cannebière, he was told. Chester said he would buy it at once. He did, with francs he obtained from a bank which was also on the Cannebière. After that, he strolled up one of the streets to the east. He assumed it was to the east, since the Cannebière seemed to run from north to south to the water. Marseille seemed rather like a dirtier Paris, and the town looked even older. He dropped into a café for a Scotch, had two, then drifted on, upward. He came to an outdoor market, all empty of produce and shoppers now, where women and men were sweeping up cabbage leaves, scraps of paper, and damaged oranges and potatoes. The town was shutting up. That meant the bars and restaurants would soon be in full swing.
At 6:30, Chester was in the men’s room of the Hôtel de Noailles, changing into a new white shirt he had bought, doing the best he could to clean his nails and to smooth his hair without a comb. He was well on the way to being drunk, he realized, but he felt absolutely in command of himself, even confident, with his airplane ticket in his pocket, and with plenty of money on him. He intended to telephone Jesse Doty tomorrow just before he went to the airport. Jesse’s letter had sounded quite shaken and worried, even defeated. “Am destroying subscriber lists. . . .” A word from him would give Jesse courage. Just a confident tone, saying, “We’ve weathered some bad times before, old chap, and . . .”
Chester made his way back to the bar of the hotel, where a Scotch he had sipped only once awaited him on the counter. In the paper bag that had held his new shirt he had his soiled shirt, a good heavy silk one that Colette had bought for him in New York at Knize’s. In a few minutes, he thought, he would go and see about a room for the night here. He liked the looks of the Hôtel de Noailles. He wondered what Rydal was doing at this moment? Were they looking all over Paris for him? Chester chuckled to himself, saw the barman looking at him, and stopped. He stared into his drink. He had been imagining the French police, numerous and lively, rushing into his hotel room last night and finding it empty. Looking the Paris streets for him all last night in the rain—lots of luck!—when he had been riding down to Lyon in a taxi. Maybe they’d think he had jumped into the Seine. Chester hoped so. Yes, he must have presented a pretty dismal picture to Rydal last night, the picture of a man not far from suicide. Well, people had another think coming in regard to Chester MacFarland. Philip Wedekind. Well, Mr. Keener, the French police would say, where is this Wedekind you’re talking about? You say he’s the same as Chamberlain? Prove it. Where is he?
Chester changed his mind about staying at the Noailles. Maybe best not register at a hotel tonight, not if Rydal had spread the name Wedekind around. A whorehouse, that was the place to hide in. No trouble to find in this town, either, as he had already been accosted three times before 6 p.m. Whorehouses had hidden many a man in trouble. Yes, indeed.
“Un autre, s’il vous plaît,” said Chester, sliding his glass forward.
“Oui, m’sieur.”
During the second drink, Chester consulted with the barman about a good restaurant for dinner. The barman recommended the Noailles. But in the course of the conversation, he suggested a few others, and Chester chose the Caribou out of the lot, mainly because he could remember its name best. The Caribou was—Chester couldn’t retain the street name—down a bit towards the vieux port and to the left.
It was close to nine before he got there. He had stepped into a restaurant at the upper corner of the vieux port, because a woman hawker out in front had fairly pulled him in, and, once in, he had decided to sample Marseille bouillabaisse, touted as the very best in the city by the woman. Chester thought his appetite equal to the task of two dinners that evening. At this little restaurant, he somehow acquired two children, who tagged after him despite his giving them five francs apiece to disappear. The children went with him to the Caribou. The children had directed him there. The maître d’hôtel or a waiter at the restaurant made the children go back out of the door, and showed signs of refusing Chester service, but Chester said as solemnly as he could:
“I am awaiting someone. A table for two, if you please.”
And he was shown to a table.
From here on, Chester was aware of very little. Warm candlelight. A sort of balcony in the place from which mounted heads of caribou or moose or elks looked down on him. A plate of food consisting of two round slabs of dark meat—what was it? he had forgotten what he ordered—a bottle of wine that was white when it should have been red. Chester was sure he had ordered red. A very cold and unsympathetic brunette woman, quite pretty, at the table next to him, who refused to answer him when he spoke to her. There was string music, from somewhere.
And from somewhere, deep within him, hope, confidence, even laughter struggled up to the surface. He was quite drunk, that was certain, but he wasn’t going to pass out, and he felt he could walk. He deserved to be drunk, after what he had been through. He took out his ball-point fountain pen and started to compose a telegram, or his message on the telephone tomorrow, to Jesse, and discovered he couldn’t write well enough to read, or at least read tomorrow. No matter.
The next thing Chester was aware of were wet cobblestones in his face and pains in his feet. His feet were being struck, three times, four. A man’s voice shouted to him in French. Chester looked up the red stripe of a trousers leg into a gendarme’s smiling face. Chester’s hair, wet and matted with mud, hung over his eyes. He struggled to get up aching from head to foot. He fell again. The gendarmes laughed. There were two of them. Chester realized that he was barefoot, trouserless, also. He was naked under his overcoat! He looked around for his clothes, as he might in a room he had undressed in, but he saw only a gutter down which clear water ran, cobblestones, a few trees with peeling bark along the pavement, the gendarmes.
“Your name, m’sieur?” one asked in French. “Card of identity?” His voice shook with laughter.
A bird twittered, pure and clear, from the sunlit top of a leafless tree.
Chester felt for his passport. It was gone. His pockets were empty.
There were not many in the overcoat to look in. He had not a thing, not even a cigarette.
“Look here, I don’t know how I got here,” he began in English. He swayed on his bare feet, as if the pain in his head were pulling him this way and that with its weight.
The young moustached gendarme who had spoken to him stepped off the curb, tucked his baton under his arm, and searched Chester’s overcoat pockets. He was still smiling uncontrollably, and the other gendarme, an older man, was rocking back on his heels with laughter. A window went up above them.
“Why don’t you keep our streets clean of such trash!” shrieked a woman in a white nightgown. “A fine time to wake a person up!”
“Ah, you know, Marseille has many distinguished foreign visitors,” replied the young gendarme. “What would we do without tourists? This one has spent every sou here!”
Somehow the words were brilliantly clear to Chester, clear as the throat of the bird that was still singing in the treetop. Why don’t you look for the people who robbed me? Chester had the sentence half formed in French, and then it dissolved in a wave of self-pity. He began to curse, good round curses in English. He cursed through his tears. He threw off the hands of the gendarmes. If they wanted him to walk, he could walk, and without their assistance.
The gendarmes toughened up in a flash, and the white baton crashed on Chester’s head. His knees buckled. They caught him.
Then off they went, round a corner, Chester with his head lolling, catching dazed glimpses of his two white feet flapping like plucked birds below him, bruised and bleeding, he was sure, from the cruel, cold pavements beneath them.
“F’Christ’s sake, haven’t you got a taxi?” he roared.
“Dum-te-dum-te-dum,” sang the young gendarme, walking sprucely along on his left, and the one on Chester’s right guffawed.
They flung him into a straight chair in a building that smelled of dead rats, sweaty wood, and stale tobacco.
“Votre nom—votre nom—votre nom!” A hatless gendarme leaned towards him with pencil and paper.
Chester told him what to do with himself, but he seemed not to understand it.
“Your—name!” he said.
“Oliver—Donaldson,” Chester said heavily. Let them chew on that for a while. Oliver Donaldson, Oliver Donaldson. He mustn’t forget it. “A glass of water,” Chester said in French.
Somebody gripped his jaw and turned his face this way and that. There was much conversation among three of them, muttered, and Chester couldn’t understand it. Chester glared back at all of them. Some were smirking at his attire.
“Philippe Wedduhkeen?” one of them said.
Chester sat stonily, bare feet planted as firmly on the floor as if he were fully clothed and wore jackboots.
Another, rushing so that he nearly tripped, shoved a small photograph in front of him. It was his passport photograph.
Cries of “Si!—Si!—Mais oui!”
“No,” Chester said, and, as if this were a signal for a Bacchanal or a riot to begin, all the gendarmes seemed to leap in the air, to shout, to caper about, slap one another’s backs, and dash in all directions. Chester had had quite enough, and he stood up to fight. He remembered catching two of them at once by the fronts of their tunics. He thought he succeeded in bashing their heads together. Then something hit him on the head.
When he lifted his face, some of the blanket lifted with it, stuck with blood. Chester touched his nose, and, frightened by what he felt, took his fingers away. He was lying on a cot in a cell. A bright beam of sunlight fell on his head, but he was not warm. His body shook with a chill. His teeth chattered, and he clenched his jaw to silence them. He frowned intensely at the grey stone wall before his eyes.
The realization of his position, his capture, his semi-nudity, his wretched physical state, was like dropping to the end of a rope with a terrible, almost neck-breaking jolt. It was something quite new to him. He had never sunk so low. It was like some awful pit he might never be able to climb out of. These thoughts, or sensations, were neither mental nor physical entirely, but a mixture of both. His brain seemed a tiny thing that was miles away from him. He remembered the photograph of himself. They had called it Philip Wedekind when they shoved it in front of his face. But it wasn’t on record as Wedekind. Rydal would have had to tell them that. That photograph could have come only from the Department of State in America. It was not the photograph that the Greek agent had had in his notebook. It was the passport photograph of Chester MacFarland. He pushed himself up from the cot. Rydal Keener had done it all. Rydal Keener had caused him to kill Colette. Rydal Keener who was in Paris. Chester swore he would have his blood, if it cost him his own life.
Someone was coming into his cell. A gendarme with a tin bowl of something. A gendarme smiling slightly, and it was not a nasty smile.
Chester sat up and stood up, and so slowly the gendarme didn’t know at first what he was doing, Chester flipped open the gendarme’s holster and took out his gun.
The bowl of soup fell on the floor.
Chester gestured with the gun for the gendarme to stand against the back wall, and then there was a noise at the cell’s door, and Chester fired at the gendarme who had brought the soup. He thought the gun did not go off. Chester was struggling with the safety catch, when a bullet hit him in his side. As he fell, another bullet struck him in the cheek.
21
It seemed that Chester had, or developed in his last moments, a wretched fear of death. He had talked, wept, and “confessed” with his last strength to a man of God who happened to be a Catholic, whom the police had rushed to his cell. Rydal heard the news at noon in Paris, in a police station in Cluny where he had been held since the police picked him up in the café in the boulevard Haussmann. Chester had not been in the Hôtel Élysée-Madison when the police went there to find him. He had escaped without taking any of his belongings with him, it appeared, and a check of Paris hotels, air fields, and railway stations had produced nothing. Then news had come from Marseille that Chester had been found in a gutter, stripped of money, papers and all his clothing except an overcoat. This Rydal had been informed of around 10 a.m., when he awakened in the cell where the police had put him. At about the time Rydal heard Chester had been found, Chester was dying, Rydal realized later. The news of his death came at noon.
Chester, with his last strength, had admitted to the priest and to the police clerks and officers who were standing by that he was William Chamberlain and also Chester MacFarland, which was his real name. He had told—and it must have been in gasped fragments, for Rydal heard about the blood coming from his mouth due to a wound in the lung—of the murder of the Greek agent in the Hotel King’s Palace in Athens. The gendarme who spoke to Rydal had it down on paper, sent by wireless from the Marseille police. He read to Rydal:
“. . . ‘Rydal Keener was in the hotel corridor. He saw me with the body. I said to him, if you say anything about this, I will say you did it. I paid him to keep silent. I wanted him with me so I could watch him. Rydal Keener is not guilty of anything, but I made him help me hide the body in the service closet in the hotel corridor. It is not true that he blackmailed me. Not true.’ That is correct?” asked the gendarme.
Two other police officers were watching and listening in Rydal’s now open cell.
“Go on,” Rydal said.
“‘I am guilty of swindling. I am guilty of fraud. I am guilty of the ruination of many men in the United States. I employed Rydal as my spy, my bodyguard, and then, when he made advances to my wife, I became angry. I tried to kill him at Knossos, because he knew too much. The vase fell on my wife instead. I then told Rydal that if he tried to accuse me, I would inform the police that he had killed her while trying to kill me. I don’t want to die. I am afraid to die. I am only forty-two. Am I dying? Hold my hand, hold my hand . . .’ The rest is . . . babbling,” the gend
arme finished.
The reading shook Rydal profoundly and for a few seconds bewildered him—as if it might all be untrue. It was like hearing of his own father breaking down, hearing of something unbelievable. And yet he knew Chester had expressed those ideas, which the French had put into idiomatic French, and smoothed out into long sentences. And Chester had said all he could possibly say to clear him. Rydal Keener is not guilty of anything. Chester had actually been kind, more than kind. Rydal blinked. Tears had come in his eyes.
“Is what he says true?” the gendarme asked Rydal finally.
“That’s . . . substantially true.” Rydal was trembling, and tears were ready to burst out again. He watched the gendarme, who was writing something at the bottom of the paper. In the early part of Chester’s statement, he said that he knew Rydal Keener must have “told everything” in Paris, but that was not so. Rydal had not mentioned MacFarland. Rydal had not changed his story that he met the Chamberlains in Crete. The police had discovered MacFarland by seizing Philip Wedekind’s mail at the American Express in Paris, they had told Rydal. They had cabled the New York police to find a man called Jesse Doty, and that was how the police had connected Wedekind with MacFarland.
The Two Faces of January Page 27