“She claims the whole operation is highly top-secret. Mr. Arbalest never lets anybody come to the atelier, he goes out to visit the clients. In a Rolls-Royce with Goudge as a uniformed chauffeur, we later found out. Lydia wouldn’t even tell Max where the house was. Naturally he got to wondering what she might have let herself in for, so after she’d gone along on her errand, he called me and we put a tail on her.”
“That’s when you found out about the house on Marlborough Street?”
“Yes,” said Sarah. “That same evening, Mr. Goudge showed up at our house on Tulip Street. He’d been bodyguarding Lydia, it transpired, at Arbalest’s orders. He thought he’d better let us know the setup so that we wouldn’t be making extra work for ourselves, which of course was his polite way of warning us off. But we couldn’t let go because right after that a cousin of mine called us about a painting of his wife’s that had been stolen. Arbalest had just returned it to them, after doing a very nice job of cleaning and reframing. Furthermore, it was right after Arbalest had brought back the Protheroes’ candlesticks that George was murdered.”
“That doesn’t exactly prove the crimes were related.”
“We are not amateurs, Lieutenant,” Sarah reminded him in her best Aunt Emma tone. “We did have a little more to go on than coincidence. After he’d tracked Lydia to Arbalest’s atelier, our man went around through the alley to find out whether the back is as well-protected as the front, which it is. He came upon a small Asian-looking man in a heavy red sweat suit doing exercises in the alley, directly behind Arbalest’s house. When Max and Brooks visited Arbalest the following day, the maid told them that Mr. Arbalest got upset whenever he saw the man.”
“Did she say why?”
“No, evidently she’s not very bright. But anyway, we ourselves saw the fellow in the red suit, or someone like him, yesterday when we were going to get our car from the Common Garage. He ran right in front of us quite deliberately, we thought. And when I went out to see my cousin’s wife, Anne, that afternoon about the painting that had been stolen, Anne told me an odd little story of having come upon a small, thin, Asian-looking man behind a bush in her garden on the morning after the robbery.”
“Wearing a red sweat suit, was he?”
“No, he was wearing a rhubarb leaf.”
That got a smile out of Levitan. “For God’s sake! Did he explain why?”
“He didn’t explain anything, he was trying to hide from her. This was very early, before she’d discovered that the painting was missing. Anne knew that her husband, my Cousin Percy Kelling, would hit the ceiling if she told him there was a naked man in the garden, so she took out an old pair of dungarees and a T-shirt, dropped them casually on the ground near the bush, and went in to get breakfast. When she looked out the window, the clothes were gone and so was the man.”
“And the painting?”
“Oh yes, but they didn’t know until Percy discovered it missing a little while later. He called the police and then rang us up, wanting our help in getting it back. That’s what we do, you know. So I went to check things out and found that a vent duct in the greenhouse had been unscrewed. The house had been locked up and protected by an alarm system, this seemed to be the only way a burglar could have got in. The hole wasn’t very big; he’d have had to be somebody small and thin, so we assumed it must have been the man with the rhubarb leaf. We surmised that either he’d torn his clothes to ribbons trying to squirm through or else he’d taken them off first and left them outside, and that either a person or an animal had gone off with them.”
“But you don’t have any concrete evidence,” Levitan insisted.
“No, we don’t. However, you may be interested to hear a little story Anora told me that same afternoon. She said that the day before George was killed, he and she had been sitting out on the veranda. She’d gone into the house for a few minutes and when she came back, George was standing up looking out over the railing. He told her he’d got up to watch a little brown man in a red jogging suit run across the lawn and into the backyard. George thought the man looked like a Tamil.”
“Why Tamil?”
“George was familiar with Asian physical characteristics, he’d traveled in the Orient a great deal when he was an importer. He could even speak a little Tamil, Anora told me. I might add that it would have taken something pretty special to haul George out of his rocking chair, considering his age and weight and general inertness. I know this doesn’t count as solid evidence either, but you must admit it’s somewhat thought-provoking.”
Sarah opened another door and closed it again. “Anora must have put Mr. Dubrec in George’s room, the one he used when he could still climb stairs. Ah, here we are.”
“Well,” said Levitan, “what do you know? This is where we found Arbalest.”
“Really? What was he doing?”
“He was down on his knees looking under the bed. He claimed he’d dropped his fountain pen.”
“And had he?”
“Who knows? He had one in his hand when he got up. I asked what he’d been writing and he said he was taking notes. I asked to see them and he said he hadn’t actually written any yet, he’d been just about to when he’d dropped his pen.”
Sarah shrugged. “Well, as you said yourself, Lieutenant, you can’t blame a person for trying. If he was looking for the envelope, he apparently hadn’t found it. Or else he had, and didn’t want to be caught with it. Did you look up under the mattress? I expect the old-fashioned bedsprings are still there, Anora never gets anything new unless she absolutely has to. They’re easier than a box spring for hiding things in, you don’t risk messing up the bed. I used to hide my coloring books that way when I stayed here, I don’t know why. Shall I peek?”
Levitan grinned. “Allow me.”
It wasn’t quite that easy. They poked around a bit, then Sarah remembered that sturdy old dressers tend to have extra space under their bottom drawers.
“This must be it.” The file-size envelope was exactly as she’d pictured it: yellowish brown with age, the little red cardboard discs and the string twisted around them faded to a melancholy russet. Sarah felt a surge of something like panic.
“We’ll have to wait till Anora wakes up. It’s her letter.”
Levitan wasn’t buying that. “Mrs. Bittersohn, we’ve just had a second murder here in four days. Mrs. Protheroe’s under sedation, we don’t know how long she’ll sleep. By the time she wakes up we could have another corpse on our hands, for God’s sake. I’m not going to stand on formality when I may be holding the solution right here. Now do you want to open this envelope or would you rather I did it myself?”
Much as she hated to, Sarah yielded. “All right, Lieutenant. If it has to be done, I expect Anora would rather have me than a stranger, but I’d feel less awful if my husband were with us. Could we go back to the den?”
“Sure, why not? Want me to call in one of my men as an additional witness?”
“I’d rather you didn’t. I can trust myself and Max not to repeat whatever may be in that letter, and I sincerely hope we can also trust you, but I do think we should keep it among ourselves till Anora’s had her chance.”
“Fair enough.” Levitan tucked the envelope under his arm and followed her downstairs, the front staircase this time.
Max was prowling back and forth between the open drawing-room doors, he stopped pacing when he caught sight of Sarah. “What took you so long? Where the hell have you been?”
“You’ll find out. Come on, darling, we need you. At least I do,” Sarah amended. She had a feeling that Levitan would as soon have left Max to prowl.
That was his problem, not hers. She was not at all happy to see Levitan sitting at George’s desk, unwinding that faded old string, reaching into the bulky envelope, drawing out what was there. The bulk was a padded folder covered in fine green leather, with a photograph inside. The letter was many sheets torn from a lined writing tablet.
Sarah recognized the clerkly script
, she and George had played word games sometimes. He’d always kept score, writing their two names neatly at the top of the score pad, jotting down the rows of figures in absolute symmetry. George could add in his head quick as lightning, Sarah had always marveled at that because he’d done everything else so slowly. Oh, God! She hoped he hadn’t had time to see that spear coming at him!
“Go ahead,” she snapped, “read the letter.”
Levitan didn’t want to. “Maybe you’d better, Mrs. Bittersohn. You’re her friend.”
“I’m sorry, I just can’t. Max, please, you read it.”
“Okay, Kätzele.”
Max had succumbed to reading glasses. He pulled out a pair of tortoise-rimmed half eyes and stuck them partway down his nose, adjusted the pages to reading distance, and began.
My dearest Anora,
I don’t know how much longer the doctors are going to keep me around before the undertaker gets me, so I thought I had better tell you something that has been on my mind since I left India. Amadée knows but he won’t tell anybody, I am going to give this to him to keep until after I die. If I get better I can always tear it up but if I don’t you may have to do something for me. It is an odd thing to ask a wife but I know I can trust you to do what is right. As you know, I am not much good at voicing my feelings, but I want you to know I count every day blessed that I am with you, even though I know I don’t deserve you. I only hope I can be spared long enough to pay you back for a little of the joy you have given me.
I hope you can read this. I can write just so long, then I get too weak to hold the pen and have to stop for a while. So I will cut it short though not sweet. As you know, I started going on shopping trips with Amadée right after college. I was green about the Orient and everything else then and I got into the usual kind of trouble.
Her name was Medea. That should have tipped me off but it didn’t. She was very beautiful, with black hair and green eyes. She said she was the daughter of a Russian prince and an opera star but I suspect she was lying. Amadée said she was something I won’t quote and was probably right but I wouldn’t listen. So one thing led to another until she told me she was in a certain condition.
I was all for marrying her at once but Amadée said I had better not be precipitate because father would be very upset, to say the least. Medea herself was not eager, she said there was something that had to be done first. She told me that her own father’s family had once owned a fabulous jewel, a diamond as big as an egg. She didn’t say what kind of egg, but it was as big as a hen’s, roughly speaking. Some Indian monks or lamas or something had stolen the jewel from her father’s great-great-grandfather and put it in the forehead of an idol they had in their temple, which was not far from where Medea and I had both been staying; that was how we’d happened to meet.
Medea told me that since then all the male heads of the family had tried one after another to get the diamond back and had all met terrible deaths. She said she could not marry me and give our child a legitimate father until the stone was restored to its rightful owner, which would be the son she was carrying as she was the only one left and had gone to India for that very purpose but been distracted from her mission by falling madly in love with me. So it now became my duty to help her get the jewel back.
As you can understand, this put me in an awkward position. Not being head of the Russian family, I had no personal inclination to court a terrible death but as the father of the child (I had of course no idea whether the child would turn out to be a boy or a girl but did not deem that to be an honorable reason for ducking my responsibility) I thought it my duty to see Medea through what she considered to be her family obligation. I never did find out what the family’s name was as she didn’t use any name but Medea all through our alliance, though I suppose you would think misalliance the more appropriate term.
Anyway, I went along with the adventure, as it seemed at the time. I will not bore you with the details, you would think me a fool for taking the risks I did, with Medea egging me on. (That was not meant as a pun, dear, forgive me.) Those monks or lamas or whatever (you must remember I was new to the Orient at that time) had been, as seemed to be the local custom, pledged to kill anybody who desecrated their sacred idol and were quite serious about honoring their vows. I had a couple of near misses, then one night Medea somehow managed to slip powdered opium into their begging bowls and they all fell asleep sitting in a semicircle around the idol.
This made it fairly simple for me to swarm up. The idol was set on a high pedestal and was itself about ten feet tall so the climb was not a short one but the pedestal was carved with elephants and other beasts in high relief and the idol had a good many arms and legs sticking out in all directions so between the trunks and tusks and assorted limbs plus my experience in rock-climbing as an undergraduate I did not have much trouble. Prizing the gem out of the idol’s forehead without dropping it on a sleeping lama was the hard part. It was quite dark up there and I couldn’t see very well, but I managed and got down with the diamond weighing down my shirt pocket. It was surprisingly heavy.
I never did get a really good look at the jewel. Medea immediately demanded that I hand it over to her, which I did very gladly as I was anxious to leave before the lamas or monks (or priests, whichever they were) woke up. Instead of making a quick getaway as I had anticipated, however, Medea started around the circle with a cutthroat razor in her hand, calmly slitting each throat. My remonstrances were in vain. She wouldn’t quit until she’d slaughtered every one of those poor fellows who had been, after all, only doing their duty. From that moment, the veil of infatuation (if that isn’t too high-flown a phrase) fell from my eyes. I saw Medea as she really was and I can honestly say I did not like what I saw.
As it turned out, Medea was pretty sick of me, too. After we’d finally got away from the temple (or shrine) she told me that all was over between us, that I was a dull stick and a fool to boot and that she didn’t need me any more because while I was climbing the idol she had busied herself prying rubies out of the elephants’ eyes and would be able to take care of herself quite nicely from then on, which I didn’t doubt for a minute.
I told Amadée the whole story because I had to give him some explanation as to why I thought we’d better get away from where we were (even now I don’t want to say where it was as I believe those Asiatic men of the cloth can be very persistent over that desecration business) and he said the best thing for me to do was go home and marry some nice girl of my own class. As you know, I took his excellent advice and only wish I’d had sense enough to do it sooner.
So now you know my sordid secret, dear, and I hope you will not judge too harshly of a dull stick who loves you as he never loved before, and I am not just quoting the song. I will only add that on this last trip I ran into Medea in Bangalore, of all places. She was dressed to the teeth and had an ayah walking behind her with a little boy by the hand. I have to admit the boy was the spitting image of myself. Even Amadée, who was with me, noticed it at once.
I wanted to speak with the boy but Medea sent him off with the ayah and suggested that I get rid of Amadée and that she and I have a drink somewhere and discuss our son’s future. I felt it only decent to comply although I insisted that Amadée accompany us and that she bring the boy so that I could get to know him. She acquiesced to Amadée’s presence but said she did not want me to meet the child because he now had a stepfather and it would only upset them both. She was eager for me to start a fund for the boy’s education and wanted a down payment of a thousand dollars American. I said I would get it to her but she must first give me a photograph of the boy and send another photograph each time she asked for further funds, which I would pay through our Bangalore agent directly into a trust fund in the boy’s name because I did not trust her an inch.
The next morning the ayah came around to my hotel with a very nicely hand-colored photograph in a leather folder and I gave her the money to take back to Medea. That’s the last I�
��ve heard so far. I am putting the photograph in the envelope so that you will at least know what the boy looks like if you are approached to accept any responsibility for him. If so, you had better investigate carefully to make sure Medea isn’t up to one of her games, but if you find that there is a real need, I beg you to care for the boy. Not as your own, I can’t ask that of you, but as the son whom your husband might have loved if he’d ever got the chance to know him.
Yours always, no matter what happens,
George
Max laid down the letter. “Well, that’s it. Poor bastard. I wonder what happened to the kid?”
23
“LET’S HAVE A LOOK at the photograph.” Levitan opened the elegant leather folder. “Huh, pretty fancy. Hand colored, I suppose. Nice job. How about it, Mrs. Bittersohn, does this kid look like George Protheroe?”
“Oh yes, no question, the likeness couldn’t be missed. Oddly enough, though, he also reminds me of somebody else. I can’t think who.”
“The great-nephew, maybe?”
“No, George’s sister’s children took after the other side of the family. Furthermore, none of the Protheroes ever had green eyes, definitely not George. His were pale blue.”
“He says in his letter that the girl friend’s eyes were green,” Levitan reminded Sarah.
“Oh yes, so he does, the boy must have got them from the mother. But this other person whose name I can’t think of has green eyes too, and that same little bump at the tip of the nose. Max, you’re better than I at faces, can you help us out?”
“Hell, yes,” Max replied after a moment’s study, “It’s Bartolo Arbalest. You can’t mistake the nose, or the shape of the eye sockets. So that’s why he was crying at the funeral, poor bastard. What have you done with him, Levitan?”
“He’s in the dining room with one of my men. I haven’t charged Arbalest with anything yet, but on the strength of this evidence, I think I’m about to.”
The Resurrection Man Page 21
