‘Now, I’m finished,’ thought Aristide, ‘that damn Claude Brothers business. Haunted all my days by that bankruptcy! Now, I’ll have to go to Lallant. How can I escape? But wait! They saw me come in. Perhaps they don’t know me when they see me!’
He nerved himself and walked sullenly towards the stairs. He felt as if he were made of badly jointed planks. The detective saw him go past with a steely glance but made no move. Aristide went into the board room, through it, with lowered head, and up the private stairs which led to Jules Bertillon’s door. Behind Bertillon’s private room was a second door, concealed by a bookcase, where one could gain access to a passage leading to the general staircase in the next building. This arrangement arose naturally when two old buildings had been thrown together and reconstructed and Bertillon had seized upon it for its convenience.
‘Better,’ thought Raccamond, ‘throw myself on the mercy of Bertillon, a good sort, than fall into the arms of the dicks.’ He had to go through Bertillon’s room to get to the private passage. It took him a minute, though, to make up his mind to knock.
‘Who’s there?’
‘Raccamond!’
‘Oh, come in, Raccamond,’ said Jules Bertillon amiably.
Jules was sitting behind his great desk, pale, merry. His eldest brother, William, pale, plump, was grinning from ear to ear, his leg slung over an armchair. Hidden from view, except for one impeccable cuff, someone sat in one of the great chairs, his back to the door. Comte Jean de Guipatin, of bobsleigh build, tall, handsome, and softly nubby, like a puppy Great Dane, was smoking a cigarette and speaking Eton English to the person in the armchair. A beautiful white Dandie Dinmont bitch lay on the floor, its sweet eyes trained on the cuff in the armchair. Aristide, in his distress, realized that the cuff was also a good sort—Pedro (‘Pedrillo’) de Silva-Vizcaïno, dashing young Chilean, a madcap, baroque character, charming, very rich. Aristide’s heart which had been overworking now failed him.
‘Come in, Raccamond,’ said Jules, ‘come in: good news for you. Comtesse Rosy wants to see you about C.P.R. Hé, did you notice a couple of detectives hanging round downstairs? Is there one still sitting in the armchair?’
‘Yes.’
‘Cheer up,’ said Jules briefly, ‘they’re after Mr. Silva-Vizcaïno. Listen, Pedro, you’d better go. Raccamond, no one will suspect you. Go down and get a taxi to wait outside the scent shop on the corner. Tell him he’s to drive immediately to the Gare St. Lazare when the gentleman comes down. Mr. Silva-Vizcaïno will come out from next door, and get into the taxi with you. Drive him to the Gare St. Lazare, get out, go through the station, and get another taxi in the Rue d’Amsterdam and tell the chauffeur to drive to the Gare du Nord. Get Mr. Silva-Vizcaïno a ticket to Brussels, first class, put him on the train and wait till the train goes. I’ve just telephoned to Constant to bring me up some money.’
The teller came respectfully through the door and laid ten thousand francs on the table. Jules gave it to Pedro, who was sitting in a state of quaintly self-engrossed trepidation, seeming not to hear these remarks.
‘Now, Pedrillo,’ coaxed Jules, ‘leave Tiqui to me. We’ll let her parade up and down the balcony a bit after you’ve gone, for a decoy, until Raccamond telephones to us from the station that your train has left. Then I’ll send her home and Claire-Josèphe can take care of her.’
‘No, I want to take Tiqui,’ said Pedro, ‘I must take Tiqui: I’m very lonely at night otherwise.’
‘Go on, Pedro: you’re never lonely at night. Everyone in the world knows Tiqui: she’ll give you away in a second. Tiqui! Tiqui! You see, she knows me.’
‘She can only eat the sausages I grill her at night,’ complained Vizcaïno.
‘For God’s sake! I’ve got two butlers, I don’t know how many cooks and maids at home. They can grill sausages as well,’ said Jules. ‘Here, Raccamond: here’s the money for the ticket. Now go out and get a taxi in the Rue Lafayette, will you?’
Raccamond, mystified and a little grudging, turned to go.
‘Mr. Bertillon, my friend the grain merchant is coming in this morning.’
‘You mean Léon? Good, I’ll see him. Lively boy. Now go along and come back as soon as you can.’
Raccamond did not at all relish these messenger-boy trips: he believed one only got on by being a stickler for status. However, he went. Jules recalled him at the door.
‘Hey, Raccamond, don’t look so miserable. You see, if the Comte de Guipatin goes out, they’ll know he’s getting up some getaway for Mr. Vizcaïno. We’re all his friends and we would all, severally, be followed. But you’re not his friend and you’re safe. Don’t be afraid, Raccamond. Mr. Vizcaïno just tried to abduct a lady, that’s all. A little Latin fun.’
Raccamond was faintly relieved. Vizcaino laughed reminiscently.
‘A wonderful girl, marvelous black eyes! What a shame! She wanted to come!’ The others all shouted with laughter. Smiling softly to himself, the discreet shadow of a smile, Aristide went downstairs and into the street. The detective in the armchair, his eyes full of strictures, watched him go, but never suspected him.
In the taxi, Pedro said, ‘What’s all the fuss about? The Paris police don’t understand the Latin temperament at all. They’re cold northerners. I was walking in the Parc Monceau. I see a beautiful girl walking along the path and I suddenly put my arms round her so that she will not run away and kiss her. She does not cry out, so I think, “It is all right,” and I kiss her again. She looks at me with such soft eyes! Women are so beautiful. The air smells sweet, the evening is coming up, and I try to get her to lie down on the lawn. Just then the policeman comes up and tries to arrest me! “Don’t dare touch me,” I say, “it is an insult to this beautiful young girl. She does not object. Besides, I am the son of Don Alvarez-Garcia de Silva-Vizcaïno.” He said, “A lot I care.” So I run away. The beautiful young girl begins to cry. I begin to cry myself when I see her being taken home by the policeman. I run and hide in my flat. This morning I hear my concierge talking to someone. I look out and there is a policeman. So I go down and run out past them before they have time to look at me. I come to the bank: I say to Jules, “Jules, I am being persecuted.” The Paris police are absurd. They all are recruited at Dunkirk probably.’ He looked round anxiously. ‘Oh, they bundled me out without Tiqui. Didn’t you take Tiqui? What is your name, man?’
‘Raccamond,’ said Aristide somberly.
‘Raccamond, will you please look after Tiqui? Will you see they don’t neglect her? Will you see, personally? Tell Richard Plowman to take my guitar to London and get a new string put in it. He must take the guitar, pack it very carefully in tissue paper and corrugated cardboard and carry it himself and take it to them in Piccadilly, so that they can get the right string. It is the best guitar I ever had. Will you promise to do that for me, Raccamond? Oh, what will I do in Brussels? It’s cruel to send me there alone.’
Once he evinced a desire to get out of the taxicab and go back to Tiqui. Then he proposed that he should wait in a café while Raccamond went back and got Tiqui and the guitar. It did not worry him at all that he had no change of clothes, no hat, and no purse. He had plenty of friends in Brussels and they would all keep him, lend him money. He had wads of money in banks everywhere, but he never troubled to draw it out, unless one of his friends took him along. He was very miserable. However, when they got to the Brussels train he saw a dark young girl, with a swan’s droop of the neck and harem eyes, walking up and down between stern mother and fat father and he became very happy that he was going to Brussels and thanked Raccamond profusely for bringing him along. Aristide went and sat in the Pullman with him for a while listening to a complaint. Pedro had to walk three miles every day to a certain shop that alone in Paris kept the kind of sausages Pedro and Tiqui liked. He did all his own shopping and had never let a woman shop for him. ‘Women have no taste of any kind: God gives them divine beauty a
nd no human qualities. They don’t need anything else.’ He had to walk because it was uneconomical to take a taxi. He spent a few minutes explaining to Raccamond how much each sausage would cost him if, for example, he took a taxi to the shop and back again.
Pedro as he walked and talked had a flitting, sweet dark smile, the quick dusky gestures, the bright observant eyes, nods, and flirts of a tropical bird. No woman passed him without getting a quick, unconsciously affectionate glance from him. He was of medium size, very dark, slender, and delicately formed, looked about twenty-eight and was ten years older. His movements were unstudied, quick, grave and graceful as those of any animal which follows its own wild will all its life. He was full of airy wildness.
Raccamond thought him congenitally mad, but since he was an aristocrat, he treated him with great respect and even found his weaknesses something very proper in a gentleman. Besides, Raccamond had another reason for handling him with silk gloves. Pedro’s brother, Xesús, had killed a waiter in a café in Rio, for an accident which Xesús had taken as an insult (and the waiter’s family had killed Xesús). Manuel, another brother, had lost an ear, in an inopportune meeting with an outraged husband, in Madrid. Pedro told bloodcurdling tales of the cruelty of his eldest brother, Antonio, and of his father, Don Alvarez, on their estates in Chile. Their peons were no better than slaves and these savage dons burnt their lives up like straw. It was well known that Pedro carried a fine knife with a curved blade somewhere in his pale-blue monogrammed silk shirt.
Raccamond lifted his hat and wiped his hair, when the Brussels express pulled out. Pedro waved to him genially from the window.
* * *
Scene Eleven: Why Léon Is in Business
When Aristide telephoned to say that the train had steamed out with Pedro on it, Jules answered him, ‘Good work, Aristide, hurry back. Your friend’s here. Léon, Léon, of course.’
Aristide tumbled into a taxi and sat there in a heap of anxiety. If that elder brother, William, sulky and irresponsible, or the man of flash and intrigue, Alphendéry, got hold of him, Léon, who disliked intermediaries, might begin to think that Aristide was of no importance in the bank. And Léon only gave money to money. He didn’t waste anything on commissions and ‘manipulation taxes.’ When Aristide got upstairs the door stood wide open in Bertillon’s room and there was no one about. In the distance he heard Léon shouting. He strode round the corridors. Yes, in Alphendéry’s room Henri Léon’s voice was shouting, with a rising inflection, with frequent weightings, ‘You see, you see?’—his characteristic cascade of hesitations, gropings, then suddenly the clear apposite expression, sweet as a bell and the harmonious rush of words. The padded swing-door was locked on the inside.
Crestfallen, Aristide walked up and down the corridor trying to listen, but finding it impossible, as there were other persons in the room putting in their words and their words were inaudible. He presently went round to his own room, some five hundred yards away round two sides of a long U corridor. What a morning! And he had come in, feeling sure to pass in some good stock exchange orders, in the wake of the balanced French budget and its promised surplus.
In Claude and Company, at least, everything had been conducted in a respectable way: clerks in their places, the chiefs respected and staying in their offices, not scurrying round as if the bank were a maypole, not cracking jokes with everyone about the essence of banking, for example: there were no police des moeurs—well, the Parquet came at the end, but so it does always: no rushing crazy Chileans to the train. Aristide looked out the window into the Rue Pillet-Will and across into the corner of the Rothschild garden. It took some minutes for even this inspiring sight to cheer him up.
With Henri Léon, ten years ago, life had been a circus. Living with Léon was like living with a waterspout in a carafe; uncork it to get a drop of water and you were drowned in half the ocean. But Aristide was ten years younger then, just demobilized, sure of civilian success, a lieutenant with the military medal, full of bloom. Then he had married, not for love, but on a basis of mutual respect, Marianne Marcuzo, sister of Dr. Marcuzo of the Czorvocky Bank and through Paul Méline had got to know Henri Léon. He was thinner then, no press of blood. What a misery it was to make an honest crust! Léon let him down, of course. When the parent firm sent from Mannheim to examine the books, Aristide had no time to think. Léon was in Amsterdam. They came down on Aristide as office manager and company secretary. How to explain the state of affairs? Aristide Raccamond had seen at one shocking glance that Léon had removed whole sheets of the journal. Paul Méline’s operations and his own remained. Méline knew how to force Léon to take him into partnership in his own firm later on, but Aristide had believed that Léon was really bankrupt. On that occasion Marianne’s instincts had been right and his own wrong.
‘I swore I’d pick my men carefully after that,’ thought Raccamond. ‘With what result? Claude and Company? Still, bad as it was, that was a workout. This time, with that back of me, I can’t fail. This is my great chance to create something of my own … But I must keep Léon. He’s still my friend. He wouldn’t let me beg my bread. He has genius and he’s four times a millionaire in guilders.’
The street was very busy at this moment.
‘We Jews—’ continued Henri Léon, ‘I’m really in business now. This is not like when I was with Strindl’s and I was an iguana sucking out the eggs they laid, day and night. They kept me then. No! I’m working now. I’m not swindling.’
‘Go on,’ said Jules Bertillon, ‘you know damned well you made a couple of million dollars for them in New York and you built up the whole of their business in Mannheim.’
‘It’s this,’ cried Léon, disregarding this, with a jerk of the chin, ‘it’s a wonderful scheme for the wheat business. Alphendéry just said a good thing. Take over the food-buying for Britain! Yes. It’s this. The wheat-buying for Britain should be taken over, not nationalized, not a government department, the buying left free and over what periods the buyers like. You see, do you get it? A millers’ buying committee with government approval. It looks like muddling through: the English public will worship it. It looks like a lukewarm amateurish stab at nationalization: the Labour Party will think it’s enough of a compromise even for them.’
Alphendéry’s clear, schoolboy-debater voice was on the air. ‘I analyze it like this, Jules. A. The scheme is excellent because it takes the buying out of individual hands and exploitation; but, B., it is elastic, and C., it is under government control, but it is not uniform. It avoids the fault of uniformity which the English hate. It can be manipulated, it can conform to machinery that already exists. D. Its machinery is not stiff. E. It binds the individual talent and the taxpayer to the service of the government, in competition with the grain merchants who are now struggling against each other for everybody’s disadvantage. F. It is controlled by the taxpayer. G. It leaves the way open for nationalization (this is a sop for the Red element). H.—oh, you can think up a hundred and one reasons. Some form of public control of food-buying is so undeniably good that everything is in its favor. And then the Great War left the form in people’s minds. It is all nutty and unscientific, but it will appeal to the English, just for that reason. It’s cunning makes the English so indirect and so, indirectly, so stupid on plain matters. It’s their position in Europe. The Americans are Anglo-Saxons but they haven’t that.’
‘They’re cruder,’ said Jules.
‘No, no,’ said Léon. ‘Get on with the schematism, Alphéry—Alphendéry!’
‘Well, here’s Léon’s schematism, as he says, that I worked out for him.’ He was one wave of laughter. ‘I only met him two days ago, but we get on like a house on fire.’
‘Yes, yes,’ said Léon. ‘Now, for argument’s sake, for argument’s sake—a company, the manager owns fifty per cent—’
‘Well, here it is,’ broke in Alphendéry with sobriety. ‘Léon wants to quit business, but he’s af
raid to give it up altogether, he’d go to seed, or the girls. And he still wants to make money. Also, he’s having difficulty with the combines. He goes to the British government—the French government would do equally, but they’re smarter—and he says, Why should your all-essential flour be bought at the hazard of the markets? Let the millers be protected by a buying committee, a government affair, composed of government servants, which will buy from time to time according to the markets and hand out the stuff to the millers as they need it. There’s no question of storing it and of the expense of silos. There’s no fear of the government committee’s being held up by the combines or by foreign sellers. Because you have on the committee an experienced merchant who has his ear to the ground and immense foreign experience and who is above suspicion—a man who belongs neither to combine nor private business. Léon will only elaborate the plan, which has a strong socialist dressing, if they give him this position. Then, while they’re setting up the board, he liquidates his businesses abroad and he lives on his capital, which he has taken to England, and on the government salary. Léon, expert to the Government Buyers’ Council! Good. The millers know their requirements and the Council fixes a price at which they will buy. Léon buys for them. He alone knows the buying price.
‘What am I doing meanwhile? Meanwhile, you, say, Jules and Méline and I form a wheat company. I have an office in Paris, say in this bank and am the manager of the wheat company. I take over Léon’s buyer, who will be out of a job because Léon is going out of business. We’ll call it the Société Financière de l’Exploitation des Blés. I own fifty per cent of the shares; Léon owns the rest privately. Actually Léon, knowing the price the committee is prepared to pay, will buy the wheat cheaper in advance and will sell it to me. I sell it to the buying committee at one farthing less than the price they are seeking. “How do you get it so cheap in a high market?” they ask me. “I’m a good buyer,” I say. I only do this in ten per cent of the cases, though. So it looks good. Only ten per cent of the cases. They cannot suspect. Or how Léon made a business out of retirement. The beauty of it is that the English public benefits and the bread is cheaper—and, wow, are they going to need it! And we’re going good. A profit out of altruism!’
House of All Nations Page 12
