House of Cards

by Stanley Ellin

  “You deserve it,” I said. “That was a great performance, Sophia.”

  “Was it?” She was looking at me steadily, those sapphire eyes unbelievably lustrous.

  “Well, it was certainly convincing to the audience.”

  “And not you?”

  “No.”

  “I love you,” she said.

  “God damn it—!”

  “I love you.”

  “Amore, merda.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “You know what it means. It’s the same as in French, sweetheart. Merde. Crap.”

  “Be as hard-boiled as you like. You know how I feel about you. You must know.”

  “Oh, I do. Especially after you told me in plain language there could never be anything between us. Any honest-to-God amore.”

  “Can you blame me for that?” she asked. “What else could I tell you, when I had a husband and no way of changing that?”

  “You could have told me everything long ago. You’re supposed to trust the man you love.”

  “Don’t be angry. Please, don’t be angry.” Her arms went around my neck, her breath was warm on my cheek. “I love you,” she whispered. “It’s as simple as that. Everything else is horribly complicated and terrifying, but not this.”

  “Anne, be reasonable. Right now we’re like two people trying to walk a tightrope a hundred feet in the air and no net below. Even if we get across—”

  “I know. Matilde told me what you once said about the princess and the peasant. I was already in love with you then, and that hurt so much—”

  “Hurt or not, that’s the way things are between us. I have my pride, lady. It’s still got scars on it from the time I married money and was pointed out as a lousy fortune hunter.”

  “Pride, merda!”

  “No, because you have your own kind of pride. That’s why, as long as your husband was alive, you wouldn’t go to bed with me. That’s why, even at a time like this when we don’t even know if we’ll be alive tomorrow, you’re just crazy enough to be thinking in terms of marriage. Of Darby and Joan walking hand in hand into the pretty sunset.”

  “It seems to me you’re the one thinking in those terms,” Anne said serenely.

  “Not me. You’re the one. Despite everything you’ve been through, the life you’ve led, you’re still bourgeois to the backbone. You’re as cockeyed conventional—”

  “Crazy and conventional together?”

  “Why not? It’s a form of insanity to be conventional when the roof is coming down on your head.”

  “Yes, my darling.” Those arms clung even tighter; those warm lips moving lightly across my cheek sent shivers through me. “But don’t you see how simple it really is? You’re stuck with me, and there’s nothing you can do about it. I’m your woman. I need to be and I will be. It couldn’t be simpler than that, could it?”

  And as I crushingly bore her down, my hands grasping hungrily, our mouths glued together as if we were trying to devour each other, I knew that she was right. It was as simple as this.

  The sun was already clearing the treetops when, satiated, disheveled, exhausted, we finally got around to the job of counting what we had gleaned from the kindly, superstitious tourists who had contributed their mite to the Trevi fountain. It looked like a lot and turned out to be very little. After discarding American pennies, British pence, French centimes, and the rest of the useless foreign currency scattered among our cash, the balance added up to only about a thousand lire, not quite two dollars.

  But since the occasion certainly demanded it, I stopped on the way back to the Piazza della Pilotta and invested a hundred lire in a nosegay of violets for my woman.

  2

  The car was a black Cadillac limousine with the exaggerated tailfins of a few years ago. As it slid to a stop at the head of the alley leading to the butcher shop, Anne caught hold of my wrist.

  “That’s it!” she said.

  “All right. Keep down in the seat so that they can’t see you.”

  The woman who emerged from the Cadillac, however, in no way resembled my idea of the Montecastellanis’ cook. From the butcher’s scathing tone, I had somehow imagined her as a witchlike, malignant little crone. This woman, although white-haired and dressed in deep mourning, was tall, slender, and attractive. Her expression, when she slammed the car door behind her and leaned down to say something through the window to the chauffeur, was one of bright amusement.

  “Are you sure that’s Rosanna?” I said to Anne.

  “Yes, of course. I’d know her anywhere.”

  Rosanna departed down the alleyway. It was almost half an hour later by the dashboard clock before she returned, the butcher following her, staggering under a loaded basket which he stowed away in the Cadillac’s trunk under the chauffeur’s supervision. When the limousine pulled out into the traffic I had my motor idling and ready.

  The size of the Cadillac and the flamboyance of those tailfins made it easy to keep in sight as it crawled through the roaring, fender-to-fender jam of traffic in the center of the city and finally, with a triumphant burst of speed, entered the Via Ostiense, the broad highway running from the outskirts of town to Ostia. With the Château Laennac in mind, I had conjectured that the Villa Montecastellani would be one of those rundown, isolated properties on the way to Ostia, and now, as we raced southward past the sprawling wholesale-food market which was Rome’s Les Halles, past the clay-colored Gothic bulk of Saint Paul’s Basilica, it looked as if I had been right.

  But not for long. As we approached the E.U.R., the Universal Exhibition grounds, the Cadillac, to my surprise, swung off the highway into an exit leading to the E.U.R. itself. I was in the wrong lane to follow this abrupt move, but I had no choice. Violating every law in the book, I cut right across the oncoming traffic and sent the Fiat slewing into the exit in hot pursuit. Luckily, there was no other car ahead of me to slow me down, and a minute later I sighted the limousine again as it entered the avenue crossing the grounds. I closed the gap between us, but not too much, and then realized that Anne had swiveled around in her seat and was peering with concern through the rear window.

  “What’s wrong?” I said.

  “We’re being followed. Take a look.”

  I looked into the rear-view mirror. The only car reflected in it was a dusty, weatherbeaten blue Citroën which was maintaining the same distance behind me as I was maintaining behind the Cadillac. I slowed down a little, and although the Citroën had plenty of room now in which to move up and pass, it slowed too, not closing the gap at all. That was an unpleasant sight to see.

  “How long has he been with us?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. He stopped alongside at the red light on the Via Nazionale all the way back, and then when we pulled off at the exit here he was in the wrong lane, too, and almost had an accident when he followed us. Do you think it’s the police?”

  “Not in a French car.”

  “One of Leschenhaut’s men?” Anne said calmly.

  If I had ever loved her, I loved her now for the control she displayed.

  “Maybe,” I said. “The bad part is that if Leschenhaut knows you’re alive it ruins my chance of making a deal with him.”

  “Then we’ll try something else. If we can get hold of a gun—”

  “It wouldn’t help, and anyway we can’t. All we can do is pray the guy tailing us is interested only in me and doesn’t take you into account. Did you get a good look at him?”

  “Yes. He’s a sort of gray man.”

  “Gray man?”

  “That’s how it struck me when I saw him. He’s wearing a gray straw hat and a gray jacket, and his face is completely colorless and unhealthy-looking.”

  “Sounds like a jailbird fresh out of clink. Did he see you?”

  “I suppose so. He was right beside me at that traffic light.”

  “Hell. Up to now I thought we were holding the ace of trump or king of cups or whatever that de Laennac mummy calls it. Now—”
Suddenly, unreasoningly, a light burst on me. I saw a book with a garish jacket, the gaudy picture of a man beatifically dangling from a gibbet by one ankle. “Anne, listen! What was it Matilde said about that letter in code? Wasn’t it something about your not being able to read it because you weren’t a fortuneteller?”

  “Yes. But why—”

  “And at that dinner party when I met Leschenhaut, Sophie de Laennac said it was Madame Cesira who had proofread her Tarot book. And that was the book on Bernard’s desk, the code book!”

  “Darling, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “The book on Tarot! La Mystère du Tarot. Don’t you see? That’s what the code is based on. If we can only get hold of a copy—”

  “No.” Anne shook her head. “It still wouldn’t be any use unless Paul is here with us.”

  That brought me back to earth with a thud. She was right. The decoded membership list could blow the OEI apart, but as long as Paul might be a victim of the explosion, it couldn’t be triggered.

  The limousine ahead made a right turn into Via Laurentina, the perimeter of the E.U.R. and I followed, leaving the sports area behind. There was no sign of the dusty Citroën in the mirror, and I had a wild hope that its staying with us this far had only been a coincidence. Then it suddenly reappeared in the mirror, making the turn after us, weaving through a pack of youths on motor scooters to take up its position the same distance to the rear as before. That settled my plan to leave the Fiat when we reached the villa and explore the grounds on foot. As long as the Gray Man had us in his sights, the safest place to be was right inside the car, moving steadily along until we either shook him off or just ran out of gas.

  To my right, the Exhibition Grounds now became a series of landscaped terraces at the crown of which stood the familiar glass mushroom of the Sports Palace. To my left, however, I saw that something new had been added to the local scene since my last visit here for a bout a few years before. A scattering of villas, modernistic in architecture, rose here and there from the slopes. And one of them, I knew, was the present stronghold of the Montecastellanis, the de Villemonts, the OEI leadership, including Leschenhaut himself. This was where he had to be right now to take charge of his forces, hold council, make decisions that needed to be made very quickly.

  It was the last villa on the narrow, winding Via Altura which proved to be the Cadillac’s destination. I was at the head of the street as the big car entered the driveway of the building. I made a quick note of the name of the building on its gatepost—it was, unimaginatively, the Villa Altura—and then shot past at high speed, turning at the end of the road back toward the E.U.R.

  Anne was still keeping watch through the rear window.

  “He’s gone,” she said suddenly as we re-entered the Via Laurentina, and the mirror told me she was right. There were a few cars behind us on the avenue, but none of them was the blue Citroën. And there was no sign of it anywhere on the terraced slope we had just descended.

  It was hard to tell whether this was a good break for us or a bad one. On the one hand, it now left me free to make my phone call to the villa. On the other hand, it suggested that the Gray Man was an OEI scout and had pulled up at the villa to report on us. Yet why, I wondered, had he given up following us? Was he that sure he could pick up our trail any time he wanted to? If so, what made him so sure of it? More than ever, as I frantically searched for logical answers to these questions, I had the feeling of being surrounded by subtle, implacable enemies. Everyone seemed to be an enemy. Even the stout, gemütlich-looking couple overflowing the Volkswagen close behind me could be an OEI team assigned to keep us under surveillance.

  I had to fight a temptation to bear down on the gas, to cut free of the traffic, turn the car southward again and race for some desolate hiding place in the hills of Puglia or Calabria where for a little while I could be rid of this sense of being a fly struggling in a spiderweb. Could, for a few days, a few weeks, eat, sleep, make love to my woman without starting at every sound and seeing murder in every pair of eyes that looked my way. For all I knew, once I made the phone call, flight might be the only way out. If Anne and I had already been found out by the organization, what else was left to us?

  I made the call from a booth on the road opposite the Labor Building, that imposing series of arches rising six stories high in rows of nine, and had time to count all fifty-four arches facing me before the operator deigned to give me the number of the Villa Altura.

  My fingers, when I dialed the number, were as clumsy to manipulate as sticks of wood.

  “Pronto.” The man’s eager voice suggested he was expecting an important message.

  “I’d like to speak to Signora Cesira, please.”

  “Your name?”

  “The name doesn’t matter. Just tell her this call is urgent.”

  “Regrettable.” The voice was now ice-cold and forbidding. “The signora is indisposed. She cannot take any calls. If you wish to give your message to Signor Montecastellani—”

  “I don’t. It concerns information I have about the signora’s son.”

  “Ahh.” The sound floated over the wire like a sigh and could have meant anything. “Very well. Wait, please.”

  I waited. From the booth I could see Anne behind the wheel of the Fiat watching me intently. We had arranged that if there were the least reason to suspect during the call that the OEI was on to us, we would make a getaway at once, heading south as far as our depleted supply of gas would take us. Even Anne had to admit that our first job was to shake off pursuit. Otherwise, we were really done for.

  “Pronto.” Madame Cesira snapped out the word with venom. It must have been the cruelest possible blow when she was told of her only son’s violent end on Torcello, but none of the fire had gone out of her. “Who are you, signore? What is this about my son. I have no son. He died in Africa long ago.”

  “Please, signora, no games. Your son was Colonel Henri de Villemont who died only a few days ago. I know, because I was there to witness his murder.”

  “You? Who are you?”

  “Surely you recognize my voice,”

  “No, I do not. Wait!” Her voice became hoarse. “But it can’t be! It’s impossible!”

  “Not at all. Like Lazarus himself, signora, I am Reno Davis risen from the dead.”

  Her shriek at that, as if she had actually seen a corpse sit up in its coffin, told me the best news I could have heard.

  The Gray Man, whoever he was, had not reported on Anne and me to the OEI.

  The enemy did not know Anne was alive.

  3

  Signora?” It sounded as if she had let the phone fall. “Signora?”

  There was a faraway confusion of voices at the other end of the wire. Then one drowned out all others in a rumbling basso of bad Italian. I knew whose it was even before it addressed me over the phone in excellent French.

  “Monsieur Davis,” said Charles Leschenhaut, “where are you?”

  “Let’s not waste time, Leschenhaut. The question is not where I am, but what I want.”

  “I see. You feel you’re in a position to make demands on me.”

  “To make a deal with you. You get fifty million francs, and I get a half million of them and my passage out of the country. Does that sound reasonable?”

  He understood at once what I was getting at.

  “If you can produce the fifty million francs,” he said.

  “I can produce the remains of Madame de Villemont. That means I can point out exactly where you’ll find them in the marshes on Torcello. You know she was killed there, don’t you?”

  “I was told she died there,” Leschenhaut said smoothly. “But I was also told you shared her sad fate. If I was so grossly misinformed about you, how can I be sure that she—?”

  “Oh, she’s dead all right. You’ll see for yourself soon enough.”

  “Will I? It’s strange, Monsieur Davis. Everyone seemed to think you were passionately devoted to the lady. Yet you a
ppear remarkably unmoved by her death.”

  “Why the hell not when she was only playing me for a fool all along? As far as I’m concerned, Leschenhaut, the one thing that’ll make my troubles worthwhile is the cut I’ll get of her money. And don’t tell me half a million is too much for my end. Without my help it’ll take ten years for de Gonde or you or anyone else to get that estate settled.”

  He digested that in silence for a few seconds, then said, “What you propose does seem reasonable. However, there must be a discussion of it with the principals here. If you give me your phone number and allow me a few hours—”

  “Chansons que tout ça, copain! I’m wanted by the police, remember? And time is on their side. Whatever discussion is needed is taking place right now between the two of us. You know damn well nobody is going to veto any agreement you make with me.”

  “Agreement to what? I can hardly pull half a million francs out of my hat.”

  “I’ll settle for fifty thousand down. In lire.”

  “By when?”

  “Tonight after dark. I’ll meet you, and we can drive to Venice together. And just to prove I’m not pulling any swindle, you can bring along anyone else you want. Is that agreed?”

  “Agreed.”

  “I’ll also expect transportation to South America, meaning tickets and passport. And,” I added to make it sound all the more convincing, “I know forged passports come high. But whatever you have to pay for mine does not come out of my end.”

  “Agreed.”

  The phone booth was becoming stiflingly hot and airless, but with some sightseers close by I was afraid to open its door.

  “Finally,” I said, “I want evidence that the child is alive and unhurt.”

  “You have my word he is.”

  “That’s not enough. Let’s get it straight right now, Leschenhaut; if anything’s happened to him the deal is off. I’ll have to see him myself before we go ahead with it. Is he there with you?”

  “No, he’s living with Madame de Gonde not far from here. But,” said Leschenhaut, just as I hoped he would, “you will not pay him any visit”