House of Cards

by Stanley Ellin

  “Yes, but it’s killing me, Larry,” the woman moaned. “Oh, God, it’s killing me. Do something. Please do something.”

  “For Chrissake, Alice, all I can do is get you to the hotel. They’ll have a doctor there, or they’ll know where to get one. You can hold out that long, can’t you?”

  We were a block from the rue de Courcelles now, and my foot started to bear down on the brake. This was the time and place to ditch the cab and make a run for the house. But I couldn’t pull my eyes away from that mirror. Beads of sweat the size of marbles showed on the woman’s forehead; her face was ghastly pale. Whatever Larry’s opinion, it looked to me as if the pain was really killing her.

  I took a deep breath, removed my foot from the brake, and bore down on the gas. We threaded the Place de Malesherbes and headed down the Avenue de Villers toward Neuilly, hemmed in by a maddening jam of traffic.

  Over my shoulder I said to the woman, “We can make it to the hospital pretty soon if you can stand some fast driving. Can you?”

  “I don’t know.” She was weakly crying now and rocking back and forth, the little girl watching her with wide, frightened eyes. “Yes, yes, I can, if you’ll only get me there right away.”

  “Hey, you do talk English,” Larry said to me in a voice of outrage. “You sound like an American.”

  “I learned how at the movies,” I said.

  Turning into the Boulevard Victor Hugo, I saw the two motorcycle cops cruising along the outskirts of the traffic. The first temptation was to steer past them; then I saw that here was the best possible answer to the immediate problem delivered right in my hands. For my own sake as well as the woman’s I had to make speed, and what cop would ever believe that an accused murderer would deliberately pick him up as an escort? I blasted away on the horn until I got the attention of the team, and the motorcycles wove through the traffic, closing in on me, one on each side of the cab, the drivers menacing figures in their crash helmets and goggles.

  I didn’t wait for the one on my side to say the first word. I jerked my thumb over my shoulder and said to him, “It’s an emergency, pal! Take a look.”

  One look at my passenger in her agony told him I wasn’t overstating the case. He gunned his motor, waved at me to follow, and so with both motorcycles clearing the way we raced through Neuilly at full blast. At the hospital entrance the cops slewed their cycles to a halt, and one ran inside to announce our arrival while the other flung open the cab door and carried the woman in his arms through the entrance.

  All I wanted now was to get away before the police reappeared, but it took Larry an endless time to maneuver his daughter and luggage out of the cab and climb out himself, the baby still sound asleep in his arms. Raging against this delay, I still pitied him as he tried to reach for the money in his pocket without losing his grip on the baby. The sight of his wife being carried into the hospital seemed to have washed all the bravado out of him. His face was as pallid as the woman’s now; his lips trembled as if he were ready to burst into tears.

  “How much?” he said, holding some folded banknotes through the window, and when I said, “Nothing. I just hope your wife makes out all right,” he stood there, gaping at me as if unable to comprehend this.

  “Look, it’s on the house; there’s no charge,” I said angrily, trying to push away his hand, but it was too late. The cops were with me again, and while one led Larry and his brood into the hospital, the other companionably leaned an elbow on the windowsill and thrust his head inside the car to give me the word.

  “She’s in bad shape,” he informed me, “but they think she’ll pull through.”

  “Fine,” I said, and raced the motor as a hint that I had important business elsewhere.

  The cop started to withdraw his head, then changed his mind. He sniffed the air with a frown.

  “You been taking your lunch out of a bottle?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “It sure smells like it”

  “No, that’s just from a glass of cognac that was spilled on me. One of the guys I was eating with is a real comedian.”

  The cop regarded me closely, suspicion showing in his eyes. “It looks like cognac wasn’t the only thing spilled on you. Those are bloodstains, pal. Don’t tell me they’re not.”

  “Sure they are. When I helped the lady into the cab she was bleeding from the mouth like a stuck pig. What the hell do you think made me head for the hospital so fast?”

  “Oh,” the cop said, evidently satisfied, and then knit his brow in deep thought. “Funny, I don’t remember seeing any blood on her.”

  “Very funny,” I said. Next thing, he would be asking for my identification. “Now I’d better get home and change these clothes before I take the hack out again. Thanks for the escort. I hope the tourists appreciated it.”

  I raced the motor again, and this time the cop took the hint. He withdrew his head, and I already had the cab rolling down the driveway when he called, “When do tourists appreciate anything? And this time, watch those red lights!”

  I took that advice to heart, drove back into the city as cautiously as if I were trying to win a safety award, and parked a block from the house at the tail end of the hack stand near the Russian Church. Jacket muffling me to the throat, hands in pockets, I strolled to the gate of the house and let myself into the courtyard.

  Standing there, I had the feeling that something was subtly wrong. Then 1 saw what it was. During the afternoon, the garage doors were always kept open and Pascal was usually servicing one or another of the cars, but now those doors were tightly shut. A few of the shutters at the house windows were always open in daytime, too, and now every one was closed. It was as if the house had been hermetically sealed against the world, and suddenly I remembered with misgiving that its phone service had been abruptly discontinued.

  I put my key into the lock of the big door, half expecting to find that the lock had been changed, but the door opened readily. I closed it behind me, crossed the rotunda, and made my way upstairs to Anne’s apartment. The door to it was wide open; the rooms were empty. Most bewildering was the sight of her dresser and dressing table cleared of all the personal belongings that ordinarily covered them.

  I went down the hushed corridor to the de Gonde apartment. There, too, the door was open, the rooms empty, the dressers and dressing table cleared of everything. I stood blinking at Madame Gabrielle’s dressing table as if this was all somehow a trick of my vision, as if by straining my eyes everything would come back to normal.

  It was the same in the Vosiers apartment and in the rooms occupied by Bernard—an open door, empty rooms. The electricity was on and that was something, but not very much.

  There was one hope left, the kitchen below, the ugly, reassuring face of Georges or, for that matter, the face of any one of the help. I ran downstairs full tilt, raced through the dank, narrow passageway behind the stairway of the rotunda and was brought up short by the door to the kitchen which, for the first time in my remembrance, was locked. I rattled the knob, threw my weight against the door in a fury of wrathful frustration, but there was no budging it.

  And then a voice behind me said cuttingly, “Enough of such exercise, you idiot. Even if you break down that door you’ll find no one behind it.”

  3

  It was Edmond Vosiers.

  Fat and sleepy-eyed, he stood in the passageway outside the door of the gun room. When I walked toward him he looked me up and down with open distaste.

  “What a spectacle,” he said. “What the devil have you been doing to yourself?”

  “Never mind that. Where is everyone?”

  “En route to the Château Laennac for a few days’ vacation. Madame de Villemont is with them, if that’s what you’re getting at.”

  “No,” I said, “what I’m getting at is that she didn’t go willingly.”

  Vosiers raised an eyebrow. “What are you suggesting? That the woman’s being carried off by force? Has she addled your wits so completely that
you believe such nonsense?”

  “Monsieur, is it also nonsense that Paul himself was taken from me by force a little while ago?”

  “Indeed?”

  “Do you think I’m joking?” I said angrily. “I tell you the boy is gone!”

  “Of course he is.” Vosiers glanced at his wristwatch. “Not fifteen minutes ago I had a phone call from his grandmother, who was with him at Le Bourget airport. At this very moment both of them are boarding the plane that will have them in Venice in time for their dinner.”

  It was stupefying news, but the man’s tone convinced me he was telling the truth. In that case, how had Paul been removed from the pension unseen? Then I understood how. In the hall closet on the top floor was the ladder to the roof. One could travel over a few rooftops and come down by way of a fire escape into the foul-smelling alley alongside Papa Tissou’s butcher shop. Eliane Tissou had made that trip with me several times after a night of love-making in my room. As Léon Becque’s fiancée she would surely have revealed the secret route to him. And whoever had been hidden behind Louis’ door and gunned him down must have used that way of carrying Paul off.

  “Monsieur Vosiers,” I said grimly, “I think the police are going to arrive here very soon. You and I have only a little time left in which to reach an understanding.”

  “I fail to comprehend.”

  “Then listen closely,” I said, and in very few words gave him a summary of the day’s bloody events.

  At the end of the account he looked at me skeptically. “And you mean our little Paul is the only one who can confirm this extraordinary alibi?”

  “There’s also Madame Cesira. The murderer was the man who delivered Paul to her. She could certainly testify to that.”

  “Could she?” Vosiers shook his head slowly. “And what if I tell you that the child was driven up to her door all alone in a cab, and in a state of hysteria, too. Believe me, she’d gladly see you guillotined for that.”

  Again someone was playing the game a move ahead of me. And what move was left to me now? To confess guilt by fleeing for my life, if I could even get out of Paris with the police barring all exits? To risk Paul’s life by going to the police with my story?

  No matter how I looked at it, I had been driven into a corner where there was only one way out. One desperate move to make that would either win or lose everything for me.

  “All right,” I said to Vosiers, “we still have to reach our understanding. I suppose you came here from your office to close the house and then join the family at the Château Laennac?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m going with you.”

  Vosiers stared at me in disbelief. “And make the chateau your refuge? But tomorrow the papers will be full of you!”

  “Let me worry about that. Where is the chateau?”

  “Near Dijon.”

  “Then I’ll be there in time to talk to Madame de Villemont tonight. I must see her. Once she gives instructions to have Paul brought back here to appear with me before the police—”

  “You take too much for granted,” Vosiers cut in nastily. “What if no one wants to become involved in your problems?”

  “Alors, monsieur,” I said between my teeth, “il y aura du sport,” which was my crude way of letting him know I was ready to kick over everyone’s applecart. “I’m not the only one the papers will be full of. Think how delighted they’ll be to discover that the daughter-in-law of the sainted General Sebastien de Villemont, no less, is up to her lovely neck in murder. You’re wrong about her, monsieur. She is Hubert Morillon’s mistress, not mine, and when I tell the police how she and Morillon arranged the murder of her husband in Algeria—”

  “You’re mad!” gasped Vosiers.

  “Then you’d be wise to humor me, monsieur.”

  “Look,” said Vosiers, “I’ll give you money and the run of the house. Then, when you think it’s safe to slip away—”

  “No, you’ll drive me to the Château Laennac and make sure the police don’t get their hands on me. If they do, I’ll have Morillon’s name and the name of everyone in the family in headlines the next day.”

  The way I said it must have convinced him that my patience was fast running out.

  “I suppose the sooner we leave, the better,” he said sourly.

  “It is. But I can’t travel looking like this. You can keep me company while I clean up.”

  I had been through Anne’s rooms on my first trip upstairs but not in my quarters. Now when I followed Vosiers into my bedroom, making sure he was always within arm’s reach, I couldn’t at first believe what I saw. Everything I owned had vanished. Books, typewriter, clothing, folders of manuscripts—everything. I pulled out drawers, peered into bathroom cabinets. Nothing was where it had been only a few hours before.

  “What the devil are you looking for?” demanded Vosiers.

  “All my things. Where are they?”

  He shrugged. “I have no idea. I thought you had them removed.”

  “I didn’t. But whoever did left me without a clean shirt and jacket. I’m afraid you’ll have to help out with your wardrobe.”

  Hand on his collar, I steered him to his apartment. There I stripped off my befouled clothing and scrubbed down in the bathroom. One of Vosiers’ shirts fitted me well enough, but I couldn’t get my shoulders into any of his jackets. I finally settled for a cashmere sweater which made me look, according to the pier glass, as if I were set for an afternoon of tennis.

  We went down the stairway of the rotunda, Vosiers leading the way, so it was by sheer good luck that he was the one who opened the huge front door to the courtyard.

  “The police!” he said with alarm, and the next instant I pulled the door wide open so that I was tightly sandwiched between it and the wall.

  “Leave it open,” I warned Vosiers. “They might have seen you. If you shut it now, they’ll know something is wrong.”

  Through the crack between the door hinges I had a chilling view of the three men in the courtyard. None were in uniform, but the pair walking toward the house moved with trained wariness, pistols in hand, while the third, standing on the alert inside the gateway, cradled a tommygun in his arms. The two men came to a halt not six inches from my hiding place behind the door. One was a grizzled, elderly man; the other was much younger and with a sharp, clever face.

  “Monsieur de Gonde?” said the younger man.

  “No, I am Edmond Vosiers, his brother-in-law. And who are you? What are those weapons for?”

  “We’re from the police, monsieur. I am Inspector Lenel and this is Detective Santange. We’re looking for a murderer we have reason to believe is in this vicinity. An American named Reno Davis. He’s in your employ, isn’t he?”

  “He was in the employ of my sister-in-law, but he was discharged this morning. And a murderer, you say?”

  “Yes?”

  “But he was here only ten minutes ago!” said Vosiers, and no one in the Comédie Française could have given those words a more bravura reading.

  “Only ten minutes ago?” said Inspector Lenel.

  “Right where you’re standing. I was bringing my luggage down to the car—I’m preparing to leave for a vacation in the south and everyone else has already gone—when there was this banging at the door and there he was. And what a sight, Inspector. Bloodstained, disheveled, drunk to the world. He wanted money, he said. He had been robbed of the money given him the day before in final payment for his services, and now he insisted I make up the loss.”

  “How much was it?” asked Inspector Lenel. “Do you know the exact amount?”

  “No, but it must have been a great deal. My sister-in-law agreed to give him a few months’ unearned pay just to get rid of him.”

  “Could it have been about ten thousand francs?” Lenel persisted, and when Vosiers answered, “Yes, I believe it could,” the Inspector turned to his colleague and said in a tone of triumph, “Ah, you see how it fits?”

  It did. It was only too ea
sy to see the prosecutor in court holding up that sheaf of banknotes spattered with Louis’ blood and pointing out to the jury that here was the motive for my crime.

  “But did you give him the money he asked for?” Santange, the elderly detective, said to Vosiers.

  “No, I gave him just a couple of francs and sent him off as I would any beggar. But if I had known he was a murderer—”

  “Ah,” said Santange, “then you might have tried some heroics, and that would have been a bad business. He’s a dangerous type, this American. He started the day by getting into a brawl at the Parc des Expositions and finished it off in style by shooting a man to death. Incredible you should ever have given employment to such a species of criminal in the first place.”

  “I told you that it was my sister-in-law who employed him. Madame Anne de Villemont. I’m afraid she’s not a very good judge of character.”

  “The widow of General de Villemont’s son, isn’t she?” asked Lenel in a tone of more than casual inquiry.

  “Yes.”

  “General de Villemont,” Santange remarked fondly. “The Old Man himself. I served under him in the Normandy landing.”

  “That’s to your credit, monsieur,” Vosiers said with ice in his voice, “but in this house we do not refer to the general in such familiar terms.”

  “Of course, of course,” Santange said hastily. “A thousand pardons. I didn’t realize—”

  By virtue of that one sharp rejoinder Vosiers was now in charge of the situation.

  “Gentlemen, I’m on my way to the country,” he said impatiently. “If there’s no further help I can give you—”

  The Inspector cleared his throat in apology. “We had hoped to make a search of the house.”

  “A search would be pointless. I told you I saw the man run out that gateway and disappear.”

  “But he occupied a room here?”

  “He did.”

  “Well, that much I’d like to look at.”