The Valentine Estate

by Stanley Ellin

  Chris wondered about commenting on this happy aspect of their misery to Beth, then decided against it. Better to stay off the whole subject right now unless she brought it up. She was suffering from a combination of exhaustion and strained nerves, desperately needing sleep, but just as desperately resisting it. After the main lights of the cabin were switched off, and the darkness was relieved only by the glow of the night lights, her head drooped to his shoulder again and again. Each time she violently jerked it upright.

  ‘Bad dreams,’ she wearily said at last. ‘Blood-curdlers. As soon as I conk out.’

  ‘I can see that. But there’s no use fighting them. Just try to think of something nice that happened to you long ago and then let yourself go.’

  ‘You sound like you had a lot of experience in this line.’

  ‘I did,’ he told her from the heart. ‘Every night on the circuit. And a lot of nights afterwards.’

  Finally, he led her back to one of the unoccupied trio of seats at the rear of the cabin, where he had a stewardess push up the armrests and supply a pillow and blanket. Then, despite Beth’s protests, he made her remove her boots and curl up on this improvised divan. As soon as he was sure she was asleep he padded in stockinged feet to the galley where a couple of the stewardesses were having coffee.

  ‘Want some?’ offered the one who had made up Beth’s sleeping quarters. She was small, bright-eyed, and pert as a sparrow. Her companion, a Junoesque blonde in her mid-twenties, looked almost matronly against her. ‘Or tea perhaps?’

  ‘No, coffee’ll do fine. Black.’

  She handed it to him. ‘I’m Miss Duncan. That’s Miss Green. She told me she knows you.’

  ‘Knows about you,’ corrected the Junoesque Miss Green. ‘You’re the tennis Chris Monte, aren’t you?’

  ‘That’s right. But I only bat the ball around now. It’s nice of you to remember.’

  ‘Well, my family have always been awfully keen on tennis, and they caught me young. I was along with Mum and Dad to see you in the West of England tourney once. You put on a marvellous show.’

  ‘She says she picked you to be our V.I.P. this flight,’ the perky Miss Duncan informed him. ‘That ought to show you. Wouldn’t you like a biscuit with your coffee?’

  ‘No, thanks.’ Chris waved aside the proffered tin. Just the sight of it made him feel queasy. ‘I only dropped in to ask a question about something that’s been bothering me.’

  ‘Question about what?’ said Miss Duncan warily.

  ‘Well, call it smuggling. This friend of mine flew to Boston from London last week, and after his bags were okayed by customs he was picked up by a team of inspectors and taken to a room to be searched. And it wasn’t one of those deals where they pick out somebody at random to show his credentials and what he’s got in his pockets. He’s been through that and knows all about it. This time there was something extra added. They also made him take off his shoes, so they could look inside them.’

  ‘Oh, that,’ said Miss Duncan with authority. ‘It must have been for jewels. Only last month we had this wormy little gent with us who, it turned out, had the heels of both shoes hollowed out and absolutely stuffed with industrial diamonds. A buttocks pincher, too. Wouldn’t you know?’

  ‘It wasn’t jewels,’ Chris said. ‘They didn’t take my friend’s shoes apart. They just looked into them as if they really expected to find something there.’

  The two girls regarded each other blankly.

  ‘Well,’ Miss Green said at last, ‘there’s a big trade going on right now in smuggled currency – we’ve been getting very stiff flight-bag inspections from your customs people and ours – but you can’t possibly carry enough currency in your shoes to make that game worthwhile.’

  ‘What about secret papers?’ volunteered Miss Duncan. Her eyes shone even brighter at the thought. ‘Top secret, fresh from Whitehall. After you read this message, butter it and eat it.’

  ‘Not a chance,’ Chris said. ‘My friend is a nice, simple-minded tennis instructor. All he knows about any spy stuff is what he sees in James Bond movies.’

  ‘Then it was a case of mistaken identity,’ said Miss Green firmly. ‘It’s the only possible explanation.’

  ‘Except that he swears those inspectors knew exactly who he was and what he was and so on. He’s still wondering what it was all about.’

  ‘So am I now,’ said Miss Duncan, and Miss Green shrugged hopeless agreement.

  He let it go at that with the feeling that if these experienced hands couldn’t offer the slightest clue as to why Big Brother was after him, no outsider could. And when it came out that Miss Green was itching to talk about tennis and his early retirement from it, he talked about them. Not with the old, ingrown bitterness and resentment either, he realized. Almost objectively.

  He left after a second cup of coffee and made his way back to where Beth was huddled under her blanket still sound asleep, her feet braced against the arm-rest of the aisle seat. He drew open the window curtain on the brilliantly starry night, and then, without waking her, managed to fit himself into the seat with her legs across his lap.

  He waited what seemed an endless time in that cramped position until he saw the first suggestion of a dim light on the far horizon. Not so much a light really, as an almost imperceptible diminishing of darkness. That was what he had been waiting for.

  With a fleeting, sympathetic thought of Miss Duncan’s lecherous jewel smuggler, he worked a hand under the blanket tucked around his wife and gently massaged one warm, rounded buttock until she stirred.

  ‘Nice,’ she said sleepily.

  ‘I know.’ He gave her a hard pat. ‘Get your legs down and sit up.’

  Yawning loudly, she obediently followed instructions. Then she parted the tangle of hair over her eyes and peered at her watch.

  ‘But it’s only one o’clock,’ she said mournfully. ‘We still have an hour to go, don’t we?’

  ‘Yes, but I want you to see something. Look through the window. Straight ahead, out beyond the wing.’

  He had timed it perfectly. The lessening of darkness on the horizon was already a faint grey light. The grey brightened, became a pearly white, arched upward and outward until it spanned the entire horizon, and suddenly glowed pink. The pink deepened to rose to scarlet to smouldering red. The whole sky was on fire with it now. Then out of the ocean on the rim of the horizon appeared the curve of the rising sun, small enough to be obscured by a coin held against the window-glass, but somehow overwhelming.

  ‘My God,’ Beth said in awe.

  Which, Chris thought, made this a big improvement over the last time he had awakened somebody to view a sunrise over the Atlantic from six miles up. That time it had been a snoring Frenchy Barbeau, and his protégé had promptly learned that you never wake a Frenchman – well, maybe a French painter, but never a sane, practical French tennis coach – to see a sunrise.

  So now, after all these years, he could say to this girl what Frenchy had not given him the chance to say that morning.

  ‘And it’s happening like this every split second,’ he said, marvelling at it himself. ‘Every split second of every day, the curtain is always going up.’

  Beth turned from the window and looked at him, smiling a little.

  ‘That makes it perfect,’ she said.

  ‘What does?’

  ‘Something I’ve been suspecting all along, but now I’m sure of. You may shudder at the thought, love, but you happen to be a bloody, blinkin’, bleedin’ poet at heart.’

  Part Four

  1

  Waiting in line for the customs inspection, he had the sweaty feeling that it would be Prendergast’s index cards in his pocket that would trip him up. Each step nearer the counter, he found his mind racing through the same scene. A bare little cubicle furnished only with a table and chair. A hard-faced official holding up those cards like a magician getting ready to do a trick and sceptically asking how he happened to be in possession of them. What then?
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br />   Nothing like that happened. What did happen was that he and his suitcase were given the most casual once-over and passed through the gate with a wave of the hand. But at the currency exchange counter, while he was pocketing the pounds, shillings, and pence his dollars had bought, he happened to glance over Beth’s shoulder and saw that he was being narrowly watched. And for the first time under such conditions, immediately recognized the watcher.

  As he had remarked to Augie Bloom over the phone, once you saw her you weren’t likely to forget her. Not even from thirty feet away. That flaming red hair, that strikingly beautiful, freckled face, that shape – they weren’t designed to be forgettable.

  He said to Beth, ‘Listen to me. Don’t act surprised, and don’t turn around. Just give me a big smile.’ She was a smart girl, he saw. Very smart. She caught on instantly. ‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘A big smile. Like mine.’

  She gave him a ghastly, death’s-head smile, her eyelids fluttering uncontrollably.

  ‘There’s somebody here, Chris? Big Brother?’

  ‘No. Mookerjee’s girl friend. So do exactly what I tell you to right now. And no questions.’

  ‘Chris, I don’t want you to be a hero.’

  ‘Just listen, damn it. Take your bag and get a cab to the Wilbraham Hotel on Park Lane. If you have any trouble getting a room there without a reservation, ask to talk to the manager. His name is Farrault, and he’s an old friend of Frenchy’s. Just tell him Mr Barbeau sent you to him, and he’ll fix you up. And don’t look like that. Keep the big smile working.’

  ‘But where will you be? What will you be doing?’

  ‘I told you no questions. We don’t have time for them. Just pick a name for yourself quick. Some kind of British-sounding name.’

  ‘For me to live under? Sanders?’

  ‘Good enough. And a first name.’

  She pressed her hand to her forehead. ‘Oh, God, now all I can think of is Winnie and Tigger. No, wait. Maud. Violet. Alice. How about Alice?’

  ‘Fine. You’ll be Alice Sanders to everybody except Warburton and me. Especially over the phone. If you pick up the phone and hear somebody ask for Miss Jones or Mrs Monte, what do you say?’

  ‘Wrong number. So sorry. But what –’

  ‘No questions. Register at the hotel as Alice Sanders. Go up to your room and call Warburton’s office every few minutes until you know somebody is there. Then, no matter who it is, go straight to the office. I’ll be there as soon as I can, but if I’m not there by, say, eleven, you tell Warburton everything there is to tell.’

  ‘But if you don’t show up I won’t know where you are, Chris. I won’t even know if something happened to you!’

  ‘Quit that! Now look in that pocketbook and get out a pen and something to write on. Make a big production of it.’

  She did, finally coming up with a pencil and memorandum pad.

  ‘Now write down Alice Sanders and the hotel name. The Wilbraham.’

  He took the slip of paper, glanced at it and thrust it into his pocket, palming some of the banknotes in the pocket.

  ‘Give me a handshake, British style,’ he said. ‘One good shake and that’s it. And don’t show any of the money I’ll pass you. Just slip it into your bag along with the pad and pencil.’

  He watched her pull the draw string on the tote bag, and from the corner of his eye saw Baby was drifting steadily closer. She was not alone. A step behind her drifted an unsavoury-looking young man, obviously in attendance. He fought down the qualm rising in him.

  ‘This is it, sweetheart,’ he said to Beth sotto voce, and then raising his voice, ‘So long, Alice. I’ll keep in touch.’

  He could have kissed her for the way she met the test.

  ‘Don’t keep me waiting too long, pet,’ she said throatily, her smile almost blinding, and then, suitcase in hand, was on her way out the door.

  He watched Baby and her escort move in on him. The last time he had seen her she was being hauled out of the Gulf Stream, spitting mad as a wet cat. She was sleeked down now, cool and deadly. Her escort, gorgeously attired in an orange velour shirt and a suit which was pure Carnaby Street, looked even more deadly. His hair fell to the collar of his jacket in a beautifully burnished pageboy cut and lay low across his forehead almost concealing his eyebrows. The eyes beneath them were a pale, watery blue with a sort of lunatic light of interest in them. The thin lips were twisted in what might have been sardonic amusement.

  A sweet pair, Chris thought with black foreboding. Dealing with them should be at least as much fun as trying to defuse a two-ton bomb.

  Baby looked him over, enjoying the moment.

  ‘Well, pet,’ she said nastily. It wasn’t a bad imitation of Beth’s throaty farewell. ‘Surprised?’

  ‘That you weren’t tossed to the sharks for helping me get away with the boat?’ He shrugged. ‘I kind of figured after I hung up on your Hindu friend that Prendergast might happen to get in touch with him and straighten him out. You know. Tell him who had really been talking to him over the phone and when I’d be landing here.’

  ‘You’re a liar. That’s what happened all right, but you never figured on it for a minute or you wouldn’t be standing here now with egg all over your chin.’ She gestured towards the street door. ‘Who was that? The little woman?’

  ‘Hell, no. A girl I picked up on the plane.’

  ‘You’re still a liar. What would you be doing with girls on planes when you’re supposed to have a wife along with you?’

  ‘Look, my private life –’

  ‘Crap on your private life.’ Baby dug a pack of Players from her handbag, then irritably shoved it back in. ‘Get me some cigarettes over there,’ she ordered her gaudy escort. ‘The American kind. I can’t take this kind any more.’

  ‘Filthy things’ll kill your health,’ he advised her sourly. ‘Either kind.’

  ‘Don’t worry about my health. Just get them.’

  She watched him drag himself off on the errand. As soon as he was out of earshot she turned back to Chris.

  ‘I have to lay it on the line for you quick, Monte, so fan those ears. And don’t start thinking of getting away from us now, because on that gimpy leg you can’t move fast enough to beat out my granny. Mookerjee sent me here to close that deal with you. You know the one. He gets you the Valentine dough, and you split with him fifty-fifty. And you sign up quick, or you’re as good as dead right now. Today is Wednesday. Stall on this deal, and, so help me God, you’ll never live to go to church Sunday. Believe that, Monte. Get it into your head good. It’s no bluff. We’re playing for all or nothing, so bluffing is out.’

  Her voice, although a whisper, hammered at him with its intensity. She meant every word of it, he knew. And it made brutal sense. If she and Mookerjee let him stall them along, their game was lost anyhow. In which case, they’d at least have the pleasure of paying him back for that.

  ‘Where’s Mookerjee?’ he said. ‘Why couldn’t he tell me this himself?’

  ‘Because you’re too hot, Jack. He’d just as soon not get near you right now.’

  The escort returned in slow motion, holding a cigarette pack between thumb and forefinger as if it were polluted.

  ‘Know what this kind costs?’ he asked.

  ‘What’s the difference? It’s not real money you use around here anyhow, is it?’ Baby said scathingly. She lit a cigarette and eyed Chris through its smoke. ‘That oversized teeny-bopper you were holding hands with. That’s your wife, isn’t it, Monte?’

  ‘I told you no. I don’t know where the hell my wife is. The last I heard, Prendergast let it slip she’d be checking in at the Hilton sooner or later. And how could you think that blonde was her? Didn’t Mookerjee ever tell you what my wife looked like?’

  ‘He told me.’ Baby was not quite so aggressively sure of herself now. ‘Let’s see that paper she gave you.’

  ‘Ah, come on,’ said Chris.

  ‘Don’t play dumb, Monte. I saw her give it to you.’
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br />   ‘You weren’t kidding about my private life, were you?’ He dug into his pocket and handed her the piece of notepaper.

  ‘I don’t kid about anything,’ she said. She glanced at the paper. ‘Alice Sanders, The Wilbraham. Does that sound kosher to you?’ she asked the escort. ‘Ever hear of the place?’

  ‘Argh. It’s in Mayfair.’

  ‘All right then.’ She thrust the paper back at Chris. ‘And you can take that chip off your shoulder, Monte. Maybe you noticed I don’t have any on mine, not even after you sent me for a ride in the middle of the ocean in a lousy row-boat. Now let’s get moving.’

  ‘Get moving where?’

  ‘To where I tell you, because this freak here has a gun on him and knows how to use it. We’re going to Teodorescu’s place. He’s out of town, but he’s putting me up there meanwhile. And you.’

  ‘Teodorescu?’ Chris said in total disbelief. That was all he had a chance to say before Baby gave him a warning look which ordered him louder than words to watch his big mouth in front of the escort.

  ‘Michael,’ she said to the escort, ‘pick up that bag and let’s move.’

  Michael looked at her. It was the kind of look, Chris thought, a cobra would give a mongoose that had stepped on its tail.

  ‘Me?’ he said. ‘Let him carry his own bloody bundle. He’s big enough.’

  Baby’s lovely blue eyes narrowed.

  ‘You Limey creep,’ she said softly, ‘you want me to turn you in to your boss? Now pick up that bag.’

  Michael did.

  2

  The house was one of a solid row of ancient, red-brick structures on Merivale Street in Chelsea, not far from the river, unprepossessing outside, handsomely furnished within. They travelled there in a small Humber with Michael at the wheel, and while he was parking the car Baby led Chris up two flights of stairs to his quarters, a spacious bedroom-dressing-room combination.