Murder At the Flea Club

by Matthew Head

  “People are pretty much the same everywhere,” I suggested, not knowing whether I believe it or not.

  “Nonsense,” she said. “No, I take that back. They are. But they look so different against different backgrounds. Also, I’m starving.”

  I found a few crackers and some dried-up cheese and brought them out. I offered her wine to go with them, but she said no, more coffee. We settled down with this repast between us, and I kept talking.

  CHAPTER SIX

  WHEN TONY AND Nicole came out that night for their number, it was obvious that Freddy was right. Nicole was away off form. Tony sometimes accompanied her on the piano, sometimes on the accordion. Tonight it was the accordion, and the number, which I’d heard again and again, was virtually a duet between voice and instrument. It was a fine number, but Nicole wasn’t doing much more than the most routine job. Even admitting that her routine job was a lot better than most people’s good jobs, still there were a couple of tempo changes where she left Tony in the lurch, and he had to cover up for her. It wasn’t obvious to everybody, but it was obvious to Freddy Fayerweather, and he punched me in the ribs with his elbow and said, “See? See what I mean? Really!”

  They got a good hand, as usual, even so. Nicole took a couple of bows, made Tony take an extra bow himself, and they did two more numbers. Then the lights went up and Nicole came down from the small stage and began to walk around the place greeting people from table to table, as usual. What was less usual, Tony came along.

  After a couple of preliminary pauses, they headed for the table where René sat with his Mrs. Jones.

  From where Freddy and I stood, Mrs. Jones was nothing but a silhouette—narrow squared-off shoulders, a neck and a hat with a couple of faintly sinister feathers curling up from it into the smoky air. But I could imagine her poor raddled face that didn’t look half bad if you caught her early enough in the evening, but began falling to pieces after the first couple of drinks. For Mrs. Jones and her ilk I am a chump. She was worthless, a parasite given to conspicuous waste, spoiled, even vicious, but I felt sorry for her. Poor Mrs. Jones with all those husbands and all that dough. I felt like going over and telling her not to worry—that if René was quitting her she was lucky, although of course it didn’t make any real difference, since she had that infallible eye and unquenchable thirst for the real indisputable thoroughgoing dyed-in-the-wool good-looking son-of-a-bitch. She could pick them every time, and René might even be better than whatever was to follow.

  Nicole and Tony paused and spoke to Mrs. Jones and then to René. After a minute or two Tony pulled up two chairs and they sat at the table. I noticed that René hadn’t even stood up.

  I turned to Freddy to say something or other which never got said, because he was looking as if he had been slapped across the face. He was pale and his lips were fluttering, and he was staring across at the group with an expression I’d have hated to have directed at me. “That prostitute!” he managed to whisper in a pathetic voice. “That absolute abandoned prostitute! He’s sitting down with that absolute prostitute!”

  “Oh, come now, Freddy. Poor Mrs. Jones.”

  “Mrs. Jones! Who’s talking about Mrs. Jones? I mean him! René!” His voice had risen to a thin piercing treble.

  “Freddy, for God’s sake!”

  “Well I don’t care,” he said, not much more quietly, and giving the impression of howling and wringing his hands. “I said it and I’ll say it again for anybody to hear. I think René’s an absolute prostitute! I think he’s the most utterly despicable—”

  “Despicable.”

  “What?” He floundered for a minute. “Despicable, despicable, what do I care? I despise him and I say he’s a prostitute!”

  He looked ready to dissolve into tears, and when Freddy gets into a state like that you have to handle him carefully or there will be a real scene, so I began talking to him as calmly as I knew how. I told him that I agreed with him, that René was certainly a prostitute if the term included male courtesans near the top of their profession. “But look, Freddy,” I said, “first of all, be generous. In lots of ways, René’s exactly your opposite. It takes an effort of will to be fair.”

  “Well honestly, Hoop, if you’re asking me to be fair to René—” and then, with sudden suspicion, “What do you mean, my opposite? Is that a crack?”

  “Not at all. Look, Freddy, one thing you do share with René is an appetite for elegant living. But look at the difference. You came from nowhere, but you have an inexhaustible supply of money for clothes and automobiles and collecting paintings and so on. Isn’t that true? You don’t mind my saying it?”

  “Of course not. I don’t pretend to be anybody. I never said I was anybody, did I? I’m always saying I’m nobody, aren’t I?”

  “Good. That’s a very sensible attitude, Freddy. But look at René. Gosh, Freddy, you ought to be sorry for him. He came from a really important somewhere. Family clear back to the Crusades. But your family from nowhere made a few million dollars out of the war, and René’s lost the last penny they had. You say you haven’t got a thing but money. René hasn’t got a thing but six-feet-odd of beautiful body and the problem of feeding it.”

  “He’s got something else, he’s got entreé,” Freddy said, and this was true. René had entreé to places Freddy and I couldn’t have bought our way into with money or a body like René’s and I suppose that except for a real talent of his own, the thing Freddy would have most liked to have was René’s chichi connections.

  “And anyway,” Freddy objected further, “other people have to find a way to feed themselves, too, and they—”

  “You don’t.”

  “All right, I don’t, but plenty of other people do, and they don’t go and prosti—”

  “Listen, Freddy, it’s a matter of using to best advantage whatever nature gave you. René’s obvious answer is rich women until he finds that one rich wife, and René, being a Frenchman and practical, has adapted his life to his talents. That’s all. He simply does what he does best, don’t you see? It’s logical.”

  I said it would be a crime to let exceptional equipment and training like René’s go to waste. I said it was René’s duty to use them. What a loss to the world, I suggested to Freddy, if Gieseking at René’s age had decided to earn an honest living instead of playing the piano. How ridiculous, I pointed out, if Freddy’s tailor should stop making suits for Freddy and take up the harp. So how absurd for René to get a job as a clerk instead of going to parties in Venetian palaces and getting bronzed on private beaches and skiing at Zermatt and other places too fancy for Freddy and me even to know about, and living on the Avenue George V instead of the Rue Bonaparte, pleasant as the Rue Bonaparte may be—not to mention the light and warmth he brought into the lives of one poor god-forsaken raddled weather-beaten broken-down money-ridden old she-dragon after another. It was not only René’s privilege, I insisted to Freddy. It was his downright obligation.

  Freddy looked at me, trying to decide whether I was meaning all this or not, and decided that there was a possibility that I did, and finally he said, “Really, Hoop, sometimes I think you’re almost too broadminded.” But I could see him accepting the proposition that if he expected people to tolerate his own conspicuous vagaries, he had to let them accept René’s too, although it did seem to take some of the icing off the cake.

  “Really, Hoop,” he said again, “you quite depress me. Nothing is quite so depressing as logic when it works against you, is it? But of course I don’t give a damn, I really don’t, what René does, but I do hate to have Tony exposed to—”

  “Tony’s a child of the Paris streets. What he hasn’t been exposed to, nobody has.”

  We were quiet for a minute. Freddy gazed into his highball glass and swirled the remains of his drink around in it absently, and then said to me, without looking up, “Hoop, once more. If you’d just say something to Tony for me, just suggest that if he devoted his talents entirely to serious work, you know, quit this place and
let me set him up in a really good studio—”

  “Absolutely not, once and for all. For one thing, Nicole would never forgive me.”

  “You’re just crazy about that old Nicole,” he said. “Everybody is, and nobody really appreciates Tony. I don’t want to talk to you any more tonight, you’re too depressing. Not going to Capri, and all this rot about René’s duty to prostitute himself. You don’t fool me one bit.”

  He set his glass down and turned as if to leave without looking at me, but then he turned back, looked at me directly and smiled, and said, “No hard feelings.”

  “Of course not, Freddy.” Impossible to hold any hard feelings against Freddy.

  “And if Tony comes over here, at least suggest that I want to see him at my table, will you?”

  “O.K., Freddy, I’ll do that.”

  “Really, Hoop,” Freddy said, “you’re very nice. Sometimes I think you’re the only one around here who understands me.”

  By the time I had told all this to Mary Finney, it was getting well along into the early morning, two or three o’clock. I croaked, “I’m tired! I’ve got to have a breather.”

  “How about a brief refreshing walk through beautiful Paris? A few lungfuls of nice cold Luxembourg air?”

  “Closed at night.”

  “Tuileries, then. Relax you. Walk and talk.”

  “But I can’t talk! My throat—”

  “You talk to me the rest of tonight, see, then maybe we can catch a couple of hours sleep, then I want to talk to some of these people, first thing tomorrow. Think I could?”

  “Some of them would see us if I asked them. Your little French friends could manage the others by less friendly persuasion, if you’re serious. Haven’t you got the keys to the city or something?”

  “Just so I get to see them. Come on,” she said, “pull yourself together. We’ll walk a little. Freshen us up. What else happened that night?”

  “I had a brush with Nicole. I learned something about Audrey that shocked me, and I met the Italian boy.”

  As for the brush with Nicole…

  She and Tony came over to the bar to say hello, and I gave Tony Freddy’s message. He went to Freddy’s table. Freddy leaned across the table and talked earnestly, as if there had been no interruption in their conversation, and Tony sat there as usual, looking enigmatic and gentle.

  Nicole and I said a few odds and ends about Siena and so forth. Then I said, “What’s happened around here? Anything new?”

  “No, nothing. How did I sing tonight?”

  “You’re always good.”

  “But not as good tonight as some times?”

  “Maybe not inspired.”

  “I’m tired,” she admitted. “I haven’t been sleeping.”

  “Troubles?”

  She hesitated long enough for it to be a confession, then said, “No, not really.”

  I took a shot in the dark, for no reason that I can remember except that Freddy had been talking about him: “How’s my friend René?”

  “I didn’t know you called René your friend.”

  “‘Friend’ is just a manner of speaking. I hear he has a new woman.”

  Nicole said with great control, “Freddy talks too much.”

  “Poor guy, he’s jealous. Freddy suffers, you know.”

  “Any person with money who suffers is a fool.”

  “Gosh, Nicole, that’s a broad statement.”

  She shrugged. I went on, “Freddy seems to think René shouldn’t bring his women around here,” which was ridiculous, of course. “Seems to think he ought to ply his trade elsewhere.”

  Nicole never drank. She had just then, as usual, a glass of rather awful lemon soda. She set it down so suddenly that some of it slopped over on to her hand. I pulled out a handkerchief, but she rejected it. She was silent, cold and removed from me, while the bartender brought a towel. She wiped her hand carefully, pushed away the towel, looked at me and said very deliberately, “Freddy talks too much. So, for the first time, do you,” and she left, walking away, through the room, and past the stage to the door which led back of it.

  Over at his table, René rose. He walked round the table and pulled Mrs. Jones’s chair out for her as she rose also. She was hidden by René’s back; then, as they started moving away from the table, I saw her face.

  It wasn’t Mrs. Jones at all. It was Audrey.

  René had a new one, and it was Audrey.

  On the other hand, Audrey had a new one, and it was René.

  Suddenly I felt better. It was like the opening of a fight before the gong has rung, where you have no favourite but are sure either fighter deserves the worst that can happen to him, and that whatever happens is going to be brutal and bloody. Not that I’ve ever seen such a fight, but I had that kind of feeling.

  I turned round quickly and hunched myself over the bar. If they were leaving, they would have to pass right by me. I didn’t ask myself why I didn’t want Audrey to see me, but I didn’t. I didn’t want to have to talk to her. Then I realised that maybe I did have a favourite in this fight after all. I was sorry for anybody that got mixed up with René, even sorrier than I was for anybody who got mixed up with Audrey.

  Audrey and René didn’t leave the Club, though. Instead, they went over to the door that led into the members’ cellar and I saw René get out his key, unlock it, and stand aside for Audrey, who went on through the door and started down the stairs. René looked up and caught my eye and nodded. That was all right, Audrey hadn’t seen me.

  I suppose it was fifteen or twenty minutes later that Tony got up and left Freddy’s table, just a minute or two before Mrs. Jones appeared.

  I am not sure that anybody would ever have called Mrs. Jones a real beauty, and I never saw her except in newspapers and magazines until she was already pushing into middle age, but I have seen her when she was still a good-looking woman, from a slight distance. I have also seen her when she looked like a beat old hag even from a long way off. She was a beat old hag when she came into The Flea Club that night looking for René. Her clothes and hair gave a general effect of disarray, and her face had had a serious quarrel with her make-up.

  She came in alone by the boulevard entrance, ducking in quickly as if escaping from somebody, glanced quickly around the room, and finally fixed me with a gaze at once intense and vague. Mrs. Jones had met me half a dozen times around The Flea Club, and a couple of times I had been at the same table with her, but she never remembered my name and she never more than half remembered my face. I am rather a plain honest type, not at all the type she responded to. But this time she established some kind of association between me and René. After the fifth or sixth drink, Mrs. Jones’s mental switchboard tended to break down. It was never possible to tell just what final connection would result from an original impulse.

  She came up to me exuding a typical aroma of gin and cosmetics and said, “All right, where is he?”

  “Who?”

  “You know who,” she said, and it was the truth. “René.”

  “Mrs. Jones, I’ve no idea.”

  “Why don’t you call me Hattie? You always have,” she said. I had never used her first name in my life. “Where’s René?”

  “I said I didn’t know.”

  “I know you did. But I know you do.”

  “Well, I don’t. Will you have a drink with me instead—Hattie?”

  “I’m on the wagon,” she said so firmly that I think she believed it. “Anyway I’ve asked you time and time again not to call me Hattie and I wish you wouldn’t.”

  “Just as you say. What do you want René for?”

  “I want to tear him to pieces. I’ve got a piece of news for that son-of-a-bitch.”

  “You have really?”

  “Oh, nothing he doesn’t already know. But something he doesn’t know I know.”

  “I don’t suppose you’d tell me? I’d be happy to deliver the message.”

  “Certainly not. I have few enough pleasures in li
fe as it is. Did he have that woman with him?”

  “Concerning René that’s a vague question. Which woman?”

  “Audrey, her name is. She’s nobody, of course—nobody at all. Trying to crash, of all the nerve. I know what people are saying, of course. They’re saying René jilted me for her. Isn’t that true? I mean what they’re saying. Because it isn’t true.” She looked at me huffily as if I had argued with her and said, “It may interest you to know I jilted René.”

  “Oh, it does. It fascinates me. I never doubted it.”

  “You’re sweet, sometimes. Now where are they?”

  “I really don’t—”

  “You’re horrible,” she said, and there was nothing casual left in her voice when she added, “You can go straight to hell,” and she started for the cellar entrance.

  Freddy came tootling up to me from across the room, piping “Oh, my dear! Witches’ Sabbath, no less! Just what I’ve always wanted to happen. Been waiting for! Hoopy, come on, let’s not miss it!” He grabbed my arm and we crossed the room. By the time we got to the cellar door Mrs. Jones had her purse open and was fumbling around in it for her keys, but before she could find them, Freddy produced his own and opened up for her.

  “You’re so right, Hattie,” he said. “You’re so absolutely right. What I mean is, why let René play fast and loose with you? It’s your dignity, is what I mean, don’t you think? Because after all, think who you are—but who is he? And as for this Audrey thing, I think you’re so right, so right, and I’d tear her to pieces if I were you, I’d have no compunction in your position, none at all…” and as they went down the stairs his voice trailed away. Fragments of sentences floated behind him like so many chiffon veils: “…ordinary climber, that’s…be so bitchy about it…absolutely justified, no compunction, and no mercy, my dear…”