French Exit: A Novel

by Patrick deWitt

“A good number.”

  “Have any been swallowed up by the Deep?”

  “I’m sorry to say it but yes.”

  “And do you ever awake in fright for fear of following after them?”

  “I have, Frances, and I have.” The captain’s underling came back and passed him a folded slip of paper before returning to his seat and staring dead ahead with a mysterious vigilance. The captain discreetly opened and read the note, nodded, and tucked it away in his coat pocket. The underling still was staring; Frances asked the captain, “Is this young man a relative of yours?”

  “No.”

  “He could be your son by the looks of him.”

  “Yes, that’s true, but no, he’s not.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “Douglas, but I like to call him Dugger.”

  “Isn’t that nice?” She leaned over. “May I call you Dugger also?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” answered Dugger. He blushed a flaming pink, and Frances was moved by the young man’s shyness and fine manners. “Out of the blue, and I feel so happy!” she said. The captain sensed his moment had arrived and laid a hand atop Frances’s. She looked at it, and he looked at her looking at it, then he himself looked at it. Malcolm also was looking at it; now he looked away, and at the older gentleman sitting on his left. The man wore a poorly fitted, well-worn white linen suit and he was sweating heavily, his breathing labored, his face the color of rare beef. He was staring at a glass of tequila fitted into his hand. Malcolm nudged him and the man flinched, inhaling sharply through his nostrils. “What?” he asked, not looking away from his drink.

  “I’m Malcolm Price.”

  “Good for you. I’m Boris Maurus.”

  “Your name is Boris Maurus?”

  “Yeah.”

  Malcolm considered this. He said, “We both have horror-movie names.”

  The man turned to face Malcolm. “May be,” he said. “But I wouldn’t know because I don’t watch horror movies, because my life is already a horror movie, so what’s the point?”

  “Okay,” said Malcolm.

  “I watch documentaries.”

  “All right.”

  This man was the ship’s doctor. When Malcolm inquired after his mood, the doctor acknowledged that the voyage had been a difficult one. “Some moron posing as a gypsy told one of the passengers she was dying, which is bad enough, but then the woman really did die.”

  “Do you mean Madeleine?”

  “The gypsy? I think that’s her name. You know her?”

  Malcolm said he did, and mentioned Madeleine’s disappearance. The doctor, nodding, said, “Oh, they threw her in the jug.”

  “The jug?”

  “The brig.”

  “Can they do that?”

  “You’re goddamned right they can.” The doctor drank half his tequila. “A middling lawyer could prove your buddy murdered that woman. Threat of violence leading to cardiac arrest.” He snapped his fingers. “These old birds spook if you say boo at them. Once Death’s on deck? In a contained environment? They freak fucking out. I’ve seen it. It’s grim.”

  “What are they going to do with her?”

  “Your buddy? Probably they’ll kick her off the ship at Calais. Or else they’ll keep her in the jug until the ship returns to the States. One way or the other, she’s out on her ass.” He finished his tequila, Malcolm his whiskey. A waiter stood nearby and they both waved and pointed at their empty glasses but the man walked away.

  “Do you have many emergencies at sea?” Malcolm asked.

  The doctor made a sour face. “You have no idea.” He leaned in, a bent light in his eye. “Insider secret,” he whispered. “A cruise ship is a death ship.”

  The waiter returned, and again Malcolm and the doctor waved to him, and again he didn’t see them or was pretending not to see them. Before he could get away, Boris Maurus lunged, grabbing the waiter by his sleeve.

  “Excuse me,” said the waiter.

  “I will not excuse you until you recognize our desire.”

  “Please let go, sir.”

  “Will you recognize it, yes or no?”

  The waiter soon brought them their drinks. The doctor took a long sip and gasped. “I could show you something very terrible, if you’d like,” he said.

  “Yes,” said Malcolm.

  They went away from the dining hall, descending a series of increasingly narrow stairwells, where the air grew stale. Together they entered a servants’ elevator, small enough that the men’s stomachs were touching. The ice in their drinks was chiming lightly as they arrived at the medical office. The doctor asked Malcolm to wait for him, then left by a metal door, on the face of which was a handmade sign that read: CHILL ZONE. The words were illustrated in such a way as to appear fabricated of solid ice. Malcolm lay his palm on the door and it was, indeed, quite cold.

  He sat at the doctor’s desk, flipping through the man’s workbook. At the start there were patient names, symptoms, medicines administered, etc.; then came a series of drawings: a clutch of pansies, an empty rowboat, a study of hands in various gripping and reaching positions. These renderings were neither good nor bad; they represented someone with a passing interest in figurative drawing and a degree of ability but no great verve or passion for it. There was one drawing that made an impression on Malcolm, however. It was of a most houselike house, with the requisite four-way windowpanes, picket fencing, tidy garden, shingled roof—all the familiar attributes of the idealized American home. Issuing from the brick chimney, sketched in a wispy font and bobbing along on the air, were the words: Death, a smoke—it enters the nostrils and exits the mouth!

  The words made Malcolm unaccountably uncomfortable. He closed the notebook and stood away from the table, unsure what to do next. He hadn’t precise control of his limbs and admitted to himself, “I’ve had too much to drink.” Now the doctor returned, smiling and holding a full shot glass in each hand. “Try this,” he said.

  “What is it?”

  The doctor passed one to Malcolm. “Palinka. Hungarian brandy.”

  Malcolm sniffed the liquid and recoiled. “I don’t want to drink this.”

  “You have to.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s fun. You and me. Drinking drinks.” He raised his glass to cheers Malcolm; Malcolm drank half the brandy in a bolt. The heat of it made him retch. “Strong,” he said wheezily, and shivered. “It’s quite strong.”

  “It’ll kill you,” said the doctor, and drank his palinka down. He beckoned for Malcolm to follow him into the CHILL ZONE; Malcolm was plunged into refrigerated cold as he entered the ship’s morgue. He found himself standing over the corpse of the old woman he’d seen dancing and tossing confetti. She lay on a slab the doctor had pulled from the wall. She was still in her pink gown, confetti in her hair, but her face was ghoulish and gray and all the life, the loveliness, had gone out of her.

  Malcolm was sometimes frustrated by his own inability to experience emotion, but in this moment it seemed he was feeling too much. It was not sadness or revulsion but something more like a too-loud noise in his ears. Behind him, the doctor was pulling out the other slabs, each of these holding a corpse, nine in total. Malcolm cast about in his mind for the meaning of this spectacle.

  The room had been empty, and now it was full.

  “What happened to them?” Malcolm asked.

  “Just that they died,” replied the doctor.

  “We haven’t been at sea a week.”

  “You get a body a day. That’s the industry standard for an Atlantic crossing. I’ve a theory that they come to sea because subconsciously they know they’re dying. Some ancient Nordic impulse, maybe.” Boris Maurus was smiling; Malcolm wanted to get away from him. He finished his palinka and set the glass on the slab before him. The doctor stared at it. “What’s the matter?” he asked.

  “I think what it is is that I’m feeling sleepy.”

  A heaviness came over the doctor. It seemed Malcolm had disapp
ointed him in some significant yet familiar way. “Thanks for showing me this,” Malcolm said, edging toward the exit. The doctor only shrugged. “I won’t tell anyone about it.”

  “Tell whoever you want.”

  Malcolm left the CHILL ZONE. He felt queasy, and craved fresh air, but when he went abovedecks the wind nearly bowled him over the railing. Returning to the ship’s interior, he wandered awhile. He realized he’d misplaced his key, and he couldn’t remember his or Frances’s room number, or even their floor—and he couldn’t think of what to do in answer to this. At last he became so tired he sought out a dark corner, sat down, and slept. Some hours later he awoke, startled by a pink light creeping over his legs: the dawn. He’d fallen asleep cross-legged and couldn’t move his legs for a time, but had to stretch out and wait for the circulating blood to rejuvenate them.

  12.

  After Malcolm and the doctor had gone off together, Frances and the captain also continued drinking; and when the captain asked Frances to visit his quarters she agreed, following him down long corridors. He had unhooked his clip-on tie; he held a bottle of champagne by its throat and was whistling “Hershey Bar.” His room was orderly, faceless. I’m going to fuck the captain, Frances thought. But he was a man past his prime, and very little was accomplished in his room that night. Frances was impressed by how unbothered he was by his impotency. “It’s very common,” he said.

  “I’ve never experienced it,” Frances admitted.

  “Very, very common.” Altogether it was as alarming to him as a Wet Paint sign on a park bench, it seemed. “Who’s got room for more?” he asked, popping the bottle and pouring out two glasses. It was low-quality champagne but the bubbles fizzed pleasantly against Frances’s lips and she was amused at her evening’s detour. It occurred to her that, so long as she maintained forward motion, her life could not not continue, a comforting equation that conjured in her a sense of empowerment and ease. She and the captain were lying together in naked embrace, the both of them staring down at the captain’s penis, a glum mushroom caving in on itself.

  “Tell me a bedtime story,” the captain said.

  “I don’t think I know any bedtime stories,” Frances answered. She thought awhile. “I could tell you about Olivia.”

  “Perfect,” said the captain, and he closed his eyes.

  “Olivia,” said Frances, “was my governess. She called me Miss Walnut, but I can’t remember why. She had a half-hidden limp, her homeliness summoned double takes, and her private life was, so far as I could tell, joyless. She’d been my governess since I could walk and was more a mother to me than my own ever was. I loved her very much, do you understand? And she loved me, also. We were close for many years, but as I grew older, then our relationship started to change.

  “By the age of eleven I was becoming beautiful, so that people began acting strangely because of it. Certain women were cruel to me, for example. They were unshy about this—they wanted me to appreciate their dislike of me. Men, of course, were deferential in a way I’d still call sexual. There weren’t any advances; I wasn’t molested. They were simply looking to the future, putting a pin in something that might be addressed later. Besides all this, I was discovering about money. What it meant to have as much as we had then, I mean, and how rare it was not to have to worry. In short, I was learning that my life was wide open. This went to my head, and I began to affect the airs of my elders: making cutting remarks about people after they’d left the room, sending back food in restaurants, things like that.”

  The captain’s eyes still were closed but he wasn’t yet sleeping.

  Frances said, “As the snobby phase took hold, Olivia pulled away from me. There was a period of gentle chastisement, I remember. This was followed by a peevishness. Then came a general avoidance. One night I was getting into a bath she’d prepared for me. The water was too hot, so that it burned my foot, and without thinking I spun around and snapped at her. What was she trying to do, cook me? She stared for a while, then began moving toward me. She had such an odd look in her eye; I think she was afraid of her own anger.” She poked the captain in the ribs. “Do you know what she did next? Do you want to guess?”

  The captain opened his eyes but said nothing.

  “She drew back her hand, and she slapped me so hard in the face that my head almost came off from my shoulders!”

  “Yes,” said the captain. He closed his eyes again. “Then what?”

  “She went away and I got into the bath and sat in the hot water. My cheek was tingling, and I couldn’t stop shaking. I put myself to bed that night and in the morning Olivia was friendly, as though we’d had some small disagreement. After a week, or a month, she said, ‘Miss Walnut, have you forgotten what happened in the bath?’

  “‘No,’ I said.

  “‘But why haven’t you told anyone about it?’

  “‘I don’t know. I just don’t want to.’” Frances sipped the champagne. The captain’s head was dipped; he was sleeping, now. Frances stared at him for a long while. She drew a lock of silver hair away from his simple face. “I never did tell on her,” she said. “It was something just for us to share. And I knew it was important, even then. Such complicated information, delivered with such concision.”

  Frances dressed. The doctor had hung his coat on the back of a chair and she noticed the slip of paper peeking from the breast pocket. It was a handwritten note: Coda: the concluding passage of a piece or movement, typically forming an addition to the basic structure. And after that: Hope this helps, Cap! Dugger.

  Frances, smiling, folded the note and returned it to the captain’s pocket. She had occasionally in her life found herself loving men not in spite of but for their stupidity. Suavity was never more than playacting, she knew this, and it endeared them to her that they themselves were unaware of their transparency. She hung her shoes from her hooked fingers, walking barefoot along the dim, carpeted halls to her suite. All were asleep and it was so quiet, and she felt very youthful and glad. Small Frank was up, waiting on the bed. His eyes narrowed as she entered. “Spare me,” she said. “You haven’t got a leg to stand on.” She moved to the bathroom to draw herself a bath. Now she was whistling “Hershey Bar.”

  13.

  Malcolm and Frances met in the morning and discussed their respective oceanic exploits. Regarding the doctor and his cadavers, Frances had little to say; she was more interested in Malcolm’s relationship with Madeleine the medium.

  “You made love to her?”

  “Well, yes.”

  “Did you do a good job?”

  “Not a very good one, no.”

  “Do you normally do a good job?”

  “Sometimes I do. I think the problem is that I don’t care enough.”

  Frances said, “If you do one thing well, it might as well be that.”

  Malcolm pondered this. He asked if the captain had done a good job and Frances said, “Don’t be tacky, pal.” Small Frank sulked in the background; Frances whispered to Malcolm, “How are we meant to get him into France?” Since their embarkation, she’d felt increasingly anxious that they were three together, not two, and that if Small Frank were left behind, then some piece of their luck would also fall away. She decided she would drug and smuggle him across the border in her purse, a seemingly simple scheme that in actuality posed disastrous potential. She had a bottleful of Valium, but how does one give Valium to a cat? And how much should be given that Small Frank would doze but not expire? After some consideration, and with the boat an hour from the port at Calais, she ground up five five-milligram pills into a portion of tuna salad and set this out for him before taking in the air abovedecks one final time. When she returned, she found him splayed on the bathroom floor and rolled him into her bag amid stacks of cash. She endeavored to think of the operation as chic in the cloak-and-dagger style, but Small Frank was snoring, the heft of the bag tantamount to manual labor, and she soon succumbed to self-pity. To combat this, and finding herself envious of the cat’s sta
te, she also took five Valium.

  It was a hazy day, and the rank air at Calais clung to the flesh. They entered the line for customs; ahead of them was Madeleine the medium. She was ducking down to avoid being seen by Malcolm, which he noticed but chose to ignore. He pushed ahead of the crowd, tapping her on the shoulder. She gave a half turn. “Hello,” she said.

  “Here’s our jailbird now.”

  “Here I am.”

  “And you’ve paid your debt to society?”

  “Yes, very funny.” She was wan and chalky and Malcolm asked if she was sick. “No, just mortified,” she said.

  Malcolm nodded. Looking around, he sniffed and said, “Smells different here.”

  Madeleine sniffed and shrugged.

  “It’s invigorating,” Malcolm added.

  Now Frances approached, on shaky legs, clutching at people as she passed them by. “Oh, your little witchy friend,” she said. “How do you do?”

  “Hello,” said Madeleine. “I hope you haven’t lost that cat?”

  Frances opened the purse and Madeleine peered in. “He’s having his siesta until we’re through customs.”

  Madeleine asked, “Is that real money?”

  “Of course. I don’t think that there’s anything so comforting as quite a lot of money, don’t you agree with me?”

  “I wouldn’t know.”

  “Try it sometime and tell me if it isn’t just the thing to chase your blues away.”

  It registered with Malcolm that something was amiss with Frances. She was mumbling to herself; she was repressing laughter; twice she stepped on his toes. “Are you drunk?” he whispered. “Noooooo,” she replied. Before he could uncover what was the matter with her, they had arrived at the front of the line. Madeleine went before them and passed through; the customs agent motioned for Malcolm and Frances to come forward. He asked what the purpose of their trip was and Frances, leaning an elbow on the countertop, said, “Chasing after youthful fantasies,” then winked.

  “Madame?”

  “We’re vacationists. I want to see the Eiffel Tower, then die.”