House of Cards

by Stanley Ellin

  It must have been his hand suddenly outstretched to me that was the signal to Cimino. But it wasn’t that which triggered me into action, nor even the alarming realization that he had maneuvered us so he no longer stood as protective cover between his henchman and me. It was the unexpected dazzling glint of sunlight on Cimino’s gun as he drew it, and at that flicker of light I moved quicker than I had ever moved in my life. I caught de Villemont’s outstretched arm and almost yanked the man off his feet, getting him before me as a shield. In that instant, almost as if everything happened together, I heard the sound of Cimino’s gun, felt the impact of the bullet going home in the man I was grasping, was aware of Anne’s scream, and saw Cimino standing there, his face filled with horror, his gun still poised, but useless while de Villemont’s body shielded mine.

  Georges Devesoul had once mentioned to me the devotion Colonel Henri de Villemont inspired in his followers, and now I was given an awesome demonstration of it. Cimino stood there frozen for only a moment. Then, useless gun in hand, he charged at me, bellowing like a bull, blind to everything but the furious need to get at me. My first shot hardly staggered him. It took a second and a third to blast the life out of him and send him sprawling full length almost at my feet.

  Through all this, de Villemont never released his grip on my jacket, but the strength was fast flowing out of him. It was only my supporting arm that kept him upright.

  Anne ran to me. “Are you hurt?” she gasped. “Are you all right?”

  “I’m all right. Give me a hand with him. I think he’s had it.”

  She helped me lower de Villemont to the ground. The bullet hole in his side, on a level with his heart, was a testimonial to Cimino’s marksmanship. If the sunlight hadn’t flashed on his gun, that one bullet would have finished me off on the spot.

  Anne kneeled beside her husband and drew out his handkerchief to futilely dab at the thread of blood oozing from the corner of his mouth. His eyes were closed. Then the eyelids fluttered open, the eyes fixed on her.

  “Bitch,” whispered de Villemont, and that was all. The eyes remained open and glassily staring; the face became gray as I watched; the sound of labored breathing was stilled.

  Anne slowly stood up. She seemed helpless to remove her eyes from the sight on the ground.

  “It’s all right,” I said. “Just don’t look. Get to the house and wait for me there.”

  “What’s going to happen to Paul now?”

  “Nothing.”

  “But when Leschenhaut finds out—”

  “All hell find out is that your husband and one of his thugs settled with each other after getting rid of us. Anyhow, that’s what we’re leaving him to find out. Now get up to the house and don’t be worried if you hear a gun going off by the bridge. And whatever you do, don’t answer the phone if it happens to ring.”

  “I won’t. But I’d rather stay here and help you.”

  “I don’t need any help. Just that scarf.”

  After she had unknotted the gauzy piece of cloth from her head and handed it to me I pushed her in the direction of the path between the trees and she made her way toward it unsteadily. I waited until she was out of sight, then turned my attention to the stage-setting I had to prepare.

  The one thing I knew I had going for me was time. It was now noon; Braggi, the caretaker, would not be returning with the boat until after dark; there would be no excuse for my overlooking any detail of this operation. As I stood there considering each detail, it struck me that I was finally giving up the role of fool to which the OEI had long ago consigned me. I was going to do some manipulating of my own instead of always being manipulated.

  First I recovered my valise from among the trees where Cimino had stored it, and carried it to the footbridge that crossed the canal near the house. Then I stripped off all my clothing and, barefoot and naked, carted the two bodies to the bridge. It was hard work with Cimino; it took all my strength just to hoist that mass of blubber to my shoulder, and I had to make an additional trip to get his gun, eyeglasses, and beret and restore them to the body, which I laid out on the embankment across the bridge.

  Looking down from the embankment at the marsh below, I was sure that this was where I was to have been permanently disposed of. Not Anne. She was right when she said she would have to be identified as the victim of a fatal accident, if her estate and her son were to be turned over to her husband’s family as quickly as possible. But anything as flagrantly criminous as a bullet through her head could tie up the estate in court for years, and who knew that better than de Villemont?

  So what if Pietro Cimino had been too zealous in his duties? And what if the hot-tempered and murderous Henri de Villemont had seen his gunman blow apart all beautifully laid plans by carelessly sending a bullet through Anne’s head? And what if Cimino, instantly condemned to death for this costly mistake, paid his master back with a final, dying squeeze of the trigger finger?

  That was the deduction my stage-setting had to provide. Braggi would be the first to come on the scene, but even if he failed to grasp its meaning some superior of his would very soon afterward take charge and draw the conclusions I was foisting on him.

  So I arranged Cimino’s body on the embankment facing de Villemont’s on the bridge, placing the gunman’s pistol in one of his hairy fists and Anne’s kerchief in the other. When I turned my attention to de Villemont, I was gratified to find a small automatic strapped to his waist beneath his shirt. I fired three shots from it into the canal before laying it down close to his outstretched hand.

  I touched nothing else belonging to either man. To the enemy I must appear dead, buried along with Anne in the muck beneath that marsh grass, and the dead can’t pick pockets. There was hardly a chance in a million that someone knew the exact contents of de Villemont’s wallet, much less Cimino’s, but for all I desperately needed whatever money those wallets held, I refused to take even that chance. Never for me again the mistake of underestimating the enemy.

  So, regretfully, I set the valise on the bridge and, even more regretfully, fired off the remaining rounds in my gun and thrust the gun into de Villemont’s jacket pocket. There was no way around that. The whole Braggi family knew I had been armed and standing siege; the logical place for my empty weapon after I would have surrendered to de Villemont would be in his pocket.

  Transporting those bodies on my shoulder had been bloody work. Even more bloody than I anticipated, I saw, looking down at my naked chest and belly. Sick to the stomach, I hastily lowered myself into the canal from the bridge, and, chest deep in brackish, sour-smelling water, scrubbed myself down as well as I could. I dried myself with my undershirt, dressed, wadded the undershirt into a tight ball and stuffed it into my pocket.

  Only one thing remained to be done to complete the stage-setting. I quickly made my way to the house to attend to it.

  8

  Anne was waiting for me in the kitchen. From the way she was leaning back against the wall as if that were all that kept her from falling, and from her appearance—she still wore her sunglasses and her face was streaked with dirt and tears—I surmised she hadn’t moved from the spot once she had closed the door behind her.

  “What you need is a drink,” I said. “Where do they keep the stuff?”

  “In the pantry.” She barely managed to get the words out.

  There were provisions enough to feed a small army in the pantry—very possibly they were intended for just that purpose—and among the bottles there I found one of cognac from which I doled out a good-sized drink for each of us. Then like an automaton, Anne let me steer her to the kitchen sink where I removed her sunglasses, and supporting her around the waist with my arm, used a dish towel to give her a clumsy but thorough face wash. Finally, I swept aside the severed pieces of rope that had bound Signora Braggi to her chair and planted Anne firmly in the chair. Following my instructions at the Venice station, she had abandoned her ruined stockings in the gabinetto there. Now, when I removed her shoes and w
ashed the dirt from her bare legs, I saw the ugly scrapes and scratches the dirt had hidden, and, for want of a better antiseptic, I simply doused them with cognac. Using iodine, I had attended to her son this way more than once, and it had been a point of honor with him never to flinch or gasp at the sting. Anne, however, both flinched and gasped. I was glad of that. It seemed to bring her out of the spell she was in.

  “I’m sorry,” she said weakly. “Paul would have been braver, wouldn’t he?”

  “That’s why I’m not too much worried about him,” I lied. “Feeling better?”

  “Some. Anyhow, enough to get going.” She shook her head despairingly. “But where? They know we’ll be trying to get to Rome. All they’ll do is take Paul some place else.”

  “Not this time. This time we’ve gotten a move ahead of them,” I said, and when I explained how, Anne’s breath quickened with excitement.

  “If they think we’re dead, we can get to Rome without any trouble,” she said eagerly. “And when we’re in Rome—”

  “Yes, but it won’t be as easy as it sounds. For one thing, the police are after me. For another thing, we’ve got almost no money left, and it may take time before any showdown. At least a few days. Maybe more. Not that it means any change in plans. I just want you to be braced for a hard time ahead.”

  “I’m braced. Can’t we go now?”

  “Not yet.” I took out Colonel Hardee’s membership list, the pages of maddeningly cryptic numerals, and showed it to her. “Did you ever see anything like this before?”

  “What is it?”

  “An OEI membership list in code. The one your husband was so anxious to get his hands on. Would you recognize the code? Would you know how to read it?”

  Anne frowned. “No, but I did see something like it before. Paul once took a book from Bernard’s desk when he was snooping around, and there was a page like this folded in it—all numbers—and he suddenly showed it to me and asked what it was while we were at the dinner table with the family. From the arrangement of the lines, I think it was probably a letter to Bernard, or maybe one he was writing.”

  “What happened when the family saw you with it?”

  “There was quite a scene. Claude, especially, was in a rage, and I remember Matilde Vosiers made it all the worse by saying I’d have to be a fortuneteller to understand it anyhow, and since I didn’t believe in fortunetelling, what harm could I do? Claude was furious at her for making a joke of it.”

  “That’s all? They didn’t say anything about the code?”

  “No. Even so—if they want this list so much—”

  “I know what you’re thinking, but you’re wrong. Leschenhaut would never trade Paul for it, not when he finds out you and I are alive. He’d rather take his chances on the code’s being undecipherable to anyone who tries to break it.”

  “I thought all codes could be broken.”

  “Maybe they can, sooner or later. But the kind of private code a brilliant man like Leschenhaut would cook up would take a long time to solve—weeks or months, for all we know—and we don’t have that much time left to us. No, we must have Paul in our hands before anything is done about this list. Once he’s safe with us and clears me with the police, they might be able to break the code fast enough to move in on the OEI and nail the whole leadership before it gets clear away to the Andes Mountains. If not, we’re still in trouble.”

  “Then why can’t we start moving now? Why stand here and talk about it?”

  “Because we’re leaving this list here.”

  “Leaving it?” Anne said in bewilderment.

  “That’s right. It’s the finishing touch, the one thing that’ll really convince the organization we were killed here and dumped into that marsh. But we’re keeping a copy of the list. Now let’s scout around and dig up some pencils and paper.”

  There turned out to be a supply of pencils in the house, but no writing paper. In the end, we settled for some immense sheets of white wrapping paper which the thrifty Signora Braggi had stored away in a kitchen cabinet, and by using both sides of each sheet we made do. Even going as fast as we could without pause, each of us alternating in calling out the numbers while the other jotted them down, it took almost three hours to transcribe the entire contents of the colonel’s list. Each page was solid with digits, and there were anywhere from thirty to sixty digits a line, suggesting that each line probably contained a single name and address. I could only hope, as we wearily worked our way through page after page, that all this wasn’t wasted effort.

  When the job was finished I forced Anne against her will to join me in a lunch of bread, cheese, and wine, and then leaving her to clear up all traces of our presence in the kitchen, I went down to the bridge. I was sickened to find clouds of flies already swarming over the two bodies there, and I had all I could do to hold down my lunch when I brushed them away from de Villemont long enough to shove the original list into the breast pocket of his jacket. It took a final cognac back in the kitchen to wash the taste of that experience out of my mouth.

  Outside the house, Anne started toward the canal, and I caught hold of her arm.

  “We’re not going that way,” I said.

  “But that’s where the rowboat is.”

  “Use your head. If we took the boat, don’t you think they’d know we got away?”

  “But if we don’t use the boat—”

  “We’ll walk it, that’s all. We’ll keep heading south until we hit the shoreline, then find somebody with a boat to give us a lift there. The ferry makes a stop at Burano, doesn’t it?”

  “The vaporetto? Yes.”

  “And Burano’s near enough so that we ought to get a ride across to it from here pretty cheap. Then we take the vaporetto to the parking lot like nice tourists and pick up the car.”

  “But the barene. And all these canals.”

  “We’ll find our way around them. Leave it to me. I’m a country boy, remember?”

  As I soon learned, being a country boy from the banks of the Truckee River in Nevada didn’t mean much when it came to finding a way through the maze of canals winding in every direction across Torcello where bridges were few and far between. It was easy going where we could walk an embankment, but when the canal we were following swung away from the south we had to leave it and strike out through almost tropical undergrowth, across fields where we sank ankle-deep in the loamy soil, through thickets which treacherously hid quagmires of silt. At the worst spots we pulled off our shoes, and Anne held them clutched to her while I, trousers rolled up to the knee, carried her in my arms until we reached easier going.

  Throughout the journey I made sure to stay clear of any habitation that looked as if it might be occupied; and where we came on a vegetable patch or an orchard we took the long way around it. So it was almost dusk when we finally reached the shoreline and gratefully saw the water of the broad Laguna Veneta on fire with the setting sun, and the distant streetlights just going on across the chain of islands that led to the city itself.

  Not far from where we emerged on the lagoon was a stucco box of a house in ruinous condition, but smoke curling from its chimney and a small felucca beached before it led us to it.

  Its inhabitants turned out to be two Old Men of the Sea, incredibly wrinkled and ancient-looking, who were mending a net behind the house and who gaped at us in toothless, open-mouthed astonishment when we appeared before them. When I explained that the signora and I were tourists who had been separated from our party and would pay for a ride to the boat landing in Burano, I was prepared to meet exorbitant demands. Instead we were overwhelmed by hospitality. Yes, we would certainly be taken to Burano but first we must refresh ourselves with some food and wine. Indeed, if we wished to stay the night we could; the signora looked hardly able to stand on her feet.

  In the end, after I managed to convey to them that time was of the essence, that our friends, our relatives, our little children would be worried about us, they finally transported us in the felucca to
a jetty near the Burano vaporetto landing and would accept only the remainder of my pack of cigarettes as payment.

  “No, no,” said one of them in reply to my fervent thanks, “we know how to treat visitors on Torcello. We’re civilized people, not like that gang of lousy mercenaries around the Piazza San Marco. Tell them that for us, signore, when you get back there.”

  That, and the moonlight ride across the lagoon in the puffing little vaporetto, might have been idyllic under other conditions. As it was, I couldn’t shake the feeling that eyes were following me, that among the passengers on the boat—most of whom seemed to be footsore, bad-tempered tourists, done in by a hard day’s sightseeing—one, at least, was a hireling of the enemy, maneuvering to corner us as Pietro Cimino had so easily done.

  It wasn’t until the boat discharged us at the Autorimessa landing and I saw we were the only ones to step ashore there that I could shake the feeling. I waited behind the garage while Anne went to get the car. When she drove it around to pick me up, I was glad to see it was a neat black Fiat Millecento, the perfect car for inconspicuous travel.

  Anne moved aside to allow me to get behind the wheel, and I said, “No, you do as much of the driving as you can. At least you’ve got a passport. I don’t have any papers at all. That means that if the police stop us on the road for any reason, you might be able to talk your way out of it. If that happens, remember I’m just a hitchhiker you picked up. That’s all you tell them.”

  “Is it only the police we have to worry about? What if the organization finds out the car is gone?”

  “There’s no reason they should. We’re dead, aren’t we? So they won’t be worrying about the car while they’re wondering how to dredge up your remains. You never signed over power of attorney to them, did you? I mean to Claude or any of the family?”

  Anne shook her head. “They never asked me to.”

  “Because that would have made their plans a little too obvious. And you have been supporting the whole family, too, haven’t you? I mean, besides the money you were turning over to the OEI through that gambling joint. Signing all the checks for them?”