by John Jakes
Chapter X
Shadow of Death
i
DOLLY STARED AT the gun in disbelief. One of the packages slipped from her hand. The string broke, the paper fell away, and two thick pink chops landed in the dirt of a flower bed.
Matt watched the gnome’s finger drain of color as the little man applied pressure on the trigger. He knew Dolly was going to be shot and killed, and the fear he felt was as consuming and profound as his fear had been when he’d thought the Gulf of Mexico was going to pull him to his death.
He started to hurl himself toward her, to get in front of her if he could. His body felt lethargic, his movements impossibly slow. It was as if time itself had been suspended in the garden, the natural laws of the world repealed. When the gnome’s mouth opened, a sadistic little grin revealing the gold crowns on his teeth, it seemed to take an hour for the smile to form.
The gnome’s finger whitened. One after another, the parcels kept spilling from Dolly’s arms.
And he couldn’t move fast enough!
But somehow Lepp did, jabbing his cane into the gnome’s shoulder. The revolver exploded. The illusion of suspended time shattered. Dolly fell sideways. Matt yelled her name and rushed to catch her.
He bumped Lepp, who shoved him away. Dolly crumpled to the ground. He was certain she was shot, and he knew what an incredible fool he’d been to try to deny how he felt about her.
Lepp seemed momentarily nonplussed by the sight of the fallen girl. Then rage wrenched his face. He shoved the gnome through the open doorway into the street, cursing him for shooting unnecessarily.
The layabout didn’t need to be ordered to leave. As the gnome scuttled away in the direction of the phaeton, the blue-chinned man shoved between two elderly women who appeared outside the door. They’d heard the shot. They weren’t the only ones. Across the way, shutters banged open. Voices cried questions. Lepp grasped the doorframe, spun and said, “Nothing is changed. Forty-eight hours. He’s dead if you say anything.”
Then he bolted, savagely kicking one of the women out of the way.
Matt dropped to his knees next to Dolly. She was breathing in a loud, uneven way. Directly above the door, a large pock in the wall showed where the deflected bullet had lodged.
He’d been wrong. She hadn’t been hit. But the emotion generated by those moments of utter terror wouldn’t leave him. Painters frequently symbolized death as a winged angel. The shadow of that wing had fallen over him for the second time in his life, and also for the second time, the effect was profound.
He slipped his hands under Dolly’s neck and shoulder. Her eyes were still half closed. She began to breathe noisily through her mouth. He barely heard the clatter of the escaping phaeton, or the cries of neighbors trying to stop it, or Leah Strelnik’s sudden renewed sobbing. As he knelt in the rainy garden, nothing mattered but Dolly. Not the Matamoras painting. Not even Strelnik himself.
“I love you, Dolly” was all he could say. “My God, I never knew how much.”
He lifted her head against his shoulder, bending his back as he did so, protecting her from the rain. “We’ll get married. We’ll give the child a name, I promise.”
Her eyes came fully open. For a moment she looked puzzled, as if her mind couldn’t hold all that had happened so quickly. Slowly, though, her expression changed, grew more alert. There was an almost ecstatic glow on her face when she reached up with her left hand. Her caress told him she understood what he was repeating with such fervency.
“I love you. I couldn’t bear to lose you. We’ll get married as soon as you want.”
He said it without the slightest reservation.
ii
The next hour and a half were chaos.
More and more residents of the neighborhood arrived at the street door. At first they merely asked what had happened. Matt replied with polite evasions, which were unsatisfactory. The neighbors had heard a gun discharged! The questions grew angry. He heard a mention of gendarmes. Finally he slammed the door in the faces of the people shouting and shaking their fists at him.
During the next few minutes he told Dolly what Lepp had said before she arrived. He put Anton into her care and helped Leah to bed in her ransacked flat. He gave her several swallows of brandy to make her sleep. He also gave her a rash promise that he’d make sure Strelnik came back to her safe and whole.
By then someone else was knocking at the street door—someone with the authority to insist upon being admitted. A gendarme from the local precinct. Matt hustled Dolly out of sight and let him in.
Matt argued heatedly with the young policeman, who wanted to question all the residents of the household. That wasn’t necessary, Matt insisted. It was a trivial matter. Yes, there’d been some struggling, a lot of things thrown, even a gun discharged. Still, the cause was merely a quarrel with his girlfriend. Matt said he’d discovered she had a new lover. The gendarme could understand how that enraged a fellow, couldn’t he?
Being French, he could. He perched on a bench near the plane tree, prepared a little statement on several small sheets of paper, and Matt signed it. The statement contained the name and address of an entirely fictitious rival lover which Matt had thought up to add authenticity. To verify Matt’s story, the lover would be questioned, the policeman promised. Matt hoped the search for the fictitious lover would last at least forty-eight hours.
The policeman left. Ten minutes later Madame Rochambeau arrived, in an overwrought state. Several neighbors had seen her coming up the Rue Saint-Vincent and generously informed her that all sorts of disgraceful violence had taken place during her absence.
When the landlady saw the destruction, she went into a purple-cheeked screaming fit. Even her tiniest facial moles seemed to throb with fury. After she’d bellowed and stormed up and down for several minutes, Matt managed to make her listen to him, and she began to calm down a little.
The calm was temporary. The moment she heard him say the vandals had come in search of some papers they thought Strelnik possessed, she headed for the south side of the garden, bellowing that she didn’t care whether Satan himself had kidnapped her tenant, the family had to move out at once—and pay for all the damage!
Matt held Madame Rochambeau back physically until she no longer insisted on rushing in and waking Leah. He pleaded, wheedled and finally convinced her Strelnik’s wife was in no condition to go anywhere, and that to force her would be un-Christian.
The appeal to the landlady’s Catholicism worked. Without going into detail, Matt was then able to communicate a little of the urgency of the situation. He also promised to pay for every bit of damage out of the allowance he received from his father. Why, he’d even add twenty or thirty francs for emotional suffering on Madame Rochambeau’s part.
Mollified, she said Madame Strelnik would still have to leave—but not immediately. The landlady picked up the head of the Madonna and flounced into her quarters, where the sound of a broom and little exclamations of dismay were soon heard.
In the disorder of their sitting room, Matt finally managed to get a moment alone with Dolly. He didn’t care for the responsibility that was weighing on him.
“I guess I’m the one who must try to find Sime.”
Dolly’s momentary silence was agreement. Then she frowned.
“Suppose Lepp was bluffing, Matt. Suppose they don’t really have him.”
He thought about it. They might have gotten hold of Strelnik’s cap but not the man himself. In a fight, for example—a fight from which Strelnik had ultimately escaped. There was no guarantee the Prussian was holding anything except that cap, which could easily have been stained with animal blood.
“You could be right,” he said with a nod. “But can I take the chance and do nothing? I don’t think so. They may have him, and he may have only forty-eight hours to live.”
“What are you going to do, then? You can’t go to the police.”
He shook his head. “I wouldn’t want to take a chance. Lepp probably h
as informers inside.”
But that wasn’t the extent of his dilemma. He couldn’t call on any of Strelnik’s radical friends, either, for the simple reason that he didn’t know who they were or where to find them. Strelnik had never brought a one of them to the Rue Saint-Vincent. Had never even mentioned their names or revealed where he met them in Belleville. Because Strelnik’s politics were dangerous—and his associates were presumably scattered after the kidnapping—Matt was alone.
It made him angry. A bit of the anger was even directed at his friend who was in danger, until he realized how shameful that was.
He didn’t know where he’d begin his search. Dolly understood that problem as well. “They ¢ould have hidden him anywhere in Paris, couldn’t they?”
“Anywhere.” It had a gloomy sound. A moment later, he enunciated the one idea that had been flitting at the back of his mind. “There’s just an outside chance Herr Lepp used someplace which he already had available.”
“Is there such a place?”
“I’ve heard there may be.” He sounded distinctly reluctant as he added, “I’m going out for a while.”
“Where?”
“To see Lisa at the Guerbois.”
He kissed Dolly in front of the unfinished portrait. The gnome had ruined it. Slashed it to tatters.
“But don’t be jealous, Doll. It’s you I’m going to marry.”
For just a moment, while their lips touched, he had an uneasy feeling that by making his promise to her, he’d consigned himself to failure as an artist.
The unfounded pessimism quickly passed. He loved her, and he would marry her if he came out of his imbroglio alive. How Paul Cézanne would snort if he knew Matt had gotten mixed up in politics.
No, that’s not really it, he thought as he patted Dolly’s arm, glanced at Anton, who’d fallen asleep in a chair, and left the flat. It isn’t really politics I’m embroiled with—it’s people. One of those could be ignored without the slightest twinge of conscience. One, but not the other.
iii
He spoke with Lisa in the alley behind the café. “Do you want to settle with the Prussian?”
She replied with an obscene word. “Do you even need to ask?”
“All right. I need the help of every one of those friends of yours. The ones you call working girls.”
“Tomorrow?”
“Tonight.”
“Impossible, Matthew. They’ll lose business.”
“Are they friends or aren’t they? Do you want Lepp or don’t you?”
Heat lightning flickered in the sky in the direction of the Bois de Boulogne. A bad storm was on the way. Her voice grew harsh.
“All right, go on. What are the girls to do?”
“Help me find that private place you mentioned once—the place where Lepp sheds his public face and amuses himself.”
“My God, you’re asking to have the whole left bank searched. I don’t know that many whores!”
“Ask the ones you know to recruit as many others as they can. The whole left bank needn’t be scoured. You said you’d heard that Lepp buys the favors of students.”
“That’s true. What of it?”
“Have the girls work the Latin Quarter first. The places near the Sorbonne where idlers congregate—the Maube, the Boul’ Mich. I know it’s a slim chance. But there’s no other starting point. If anyone finds Lepp’s hideaway by this time tomorrow—this time but no later—I’ll pay a hundred francs to the girl and another hundred francs to any informant she uses.”
Lisa whistled. “Why didn’t you mention those prices before? They’re better than what the most popular girl gets for a whole night with some rich man at the Hotel Meurice! We won’t have any trouble putting platoons of young ladies on the street. Indeed, I venture to say every slut from here to Marseilles will want to join the search.” Her cynical jocularity disappeared all at once. “I shouldn’t be laughing. This is urgent business, isn’t it?”
“Urgent.” He nodded.
“Bad, too, uh?”
“Yes, ugly.”
“I thought so. I’ve never seen you so wrought up—except when you’re discussing artistic theories with your colleagues, of course.”
“The life of my friend Strelnik may depend on what your girls learn, Lisa.” And if Yuri Strelnik’s claim that Bismarck was maneuvering to put a Hohenzollern on the Spanish throne ever reached Louis-Napoléon’s hands in documented form, the lives of hundreds of thousands of others might be affected by the diplomatic repercussions. The whole basis for Strelnik’s abduction still seemed absurd to Matt. Though he found it idiotic and almost inconceivable that some men actually cared about such things as kingships and spheres of influence, his friend’s danger was horrible proof that they did.
“One more thing, Lisa. Do you know a shop that sells good secondhand revolvers?”
Gravely, she nodded. “Yes, my Virginia dove. I do.”
iv
Lisa’s girlfriends spread out through the student section of the left bank before the night ended. By eight o’clock the following evening, one returned with what she said was a reliable address. A tenement in the Rue Cujas just a block from the Boulevard Saint-Michel and the Sorbonne.
The girl had obtained the address from a young Alsatian boy she met in a café. The boy, a philosophy student, had hired himself out to a German. The boy remembered the German well, and bitterly regretted ever agreeing to spend a night in his rooms. He was ashamed of the incident, he said, but he didn’t keep quiet about it because he wanted to warn others to stay away from the man, whose name was Gruen. Even by the liberal standards of the Latin Quarter, Gruen had depraved tastes.
Matt paid the young prostitute and gave her the agreed-upon price for the informer as well. Then he set out for the left bank in a heavy rain that had started shortly after his talk with Lisa the preceding evening. The air had turned sharply colder during the day, and still the rain came down. His teeth chattered as he crossed the Seine by the Pont Neuf.
God, how he wished he weren’t out on such a miserable night. And on such a dangerous errand. He remembered a letter his father had sent him shortly after he’d arrived in Paris. Jephtha had spoken of the Kents as people of conscience. Cursed if he wasn’t right.
Bent against the wind, he hurried on. In one pocket of his shabby overcoat he had a scrap of paper with the tenement address jotted on it. In the other he had a .41 caliber LeFauchaux revolver, model 1861, bearing the mark and identification of the arms company’s Belgian works. The revolver was fully loaded.
Chapter XI
The Hidden Room
i
“NO, I HAVEN’T any tenant named Gruen. Now go away!”
Hard rain pelted the small window in the front wall of the ground-floor foyer. A calèche with its top raised against the storm and its running lamps alight went clattering down the incline of the Rue Cujas toward the Boul’ Mich. The concierge, a sour little woman with a flickering candle in her hand, had obviously given Matt the answer she was paid to give.
He decided to try a bluff. He hoped his smile was suitably sleazy. “But he’s expecting me. He paid me to come here.”
The concierge’s old eyes gleamed with rheum. She squinted at him, searching for truth or falsehood in what he’d said. Her candle provided the only illumination in the foyer. Up the stairs lay a darkness full of rustling sounds, creakings, faint cries of passion or pain. The whole four-story tenement seemed astir with unseen life.
Suddenly the concierge said, “He told me it was a young lady—and that she wouldn’t arrive till midnight.”
Matt kept the lewd smile in place. “Oh, he changed his mind, you see.” He winked. “On both counts.” With a faintly shaking hand, he slipped a few sous into hers.
“Well—all right. But if there’s any difficulty, I’ll say you slipped past my door without my seeing you. Do you know where it is?”
“No.”
“Top floor. All the way back.”
She scrat
ched herself in a vulgar way, turned and began counting the sous as she returned to her foul-smelling room. Lightning whitened the street outside. Thunder rocked the building, loud as huge howitzers firing close by. The concierge’s door slammed, blotting out the candlelight. Matt shivered; his overcoat was soaked. He reached into his pocket to grasp the revolver.
During the war he’d carried a pistol for protection in certain ports. On calm days at sea he’d practiced marksmanship off the stern and found he had a fair eye. But shooting at a bobbing barrel for sport was one thing, defending yourself quite another. Never in his life had he fired a shot in anger. He didn’t know whether he could.
Reluctantly he started up the stairs in total darkness relieved intermittently by a glow of lightning through the foyer window. By the time he reached the first-floor landing, even a brilliant burst down below provided very little light.
He felt his way around the walls of the landing. He gasped when his right foot struck something soft. A pale flicker from below showed him a ghost’s face, a gaping mouth wet with saliva.
His heart pounded. He stepped over the outstretched leg he’d bumped. The derelict didn’t stir.
Matt could smell wine in the darkness. But he could hear no breathing. His scalp crawled. Was the man dead? He didn’t linger to investigate.
On the next landing he heard a faint squeal and a ticking of claws behind one wall. He touched the walls, damp, springy with rot. The ticking continued. Rats running?
He kept climbing, sickened by the stenches of the place. Rotted meat. Slops. God knew what else. If Strelnik was being kept in another location, could he force the Prussian to tell him where? Was anyone with Lepp this moment? The questions seemed to turn his mind to soup. Sweat broke out on his forehead although the rest of his body still felt cold.
On the top floor, he crept down the hall until he’d gone as far as he could. He found Lepp’s door with an outstretched hand, sidled closer, listened.
He thought he heard the Prussian laughing against a curious background noise—heavy rhythmic grunting.
