“It was because I couldn’t tell you then. And I can’t tell you now!”
“Why not?”
“This is a delicate business, Jim; it’s a damn delicate business.”
“We’re all aware of that. At the same time…”
“Clay’s a great friend of mine, too, you know. Before I’ve made the most discreet and cautious inquiries at home, I mustn’t open my big mouth at all. I can’t even tell an old friend like you, or a model of discretion like Jill. I may have said too much already.
“Let’s suppose I am right. And Clay’s entirely innocent, as I’m sure he is. If I go talking or hinting too much to anybody, anybody at all, I myself may start the very accusation Clay’s enemies want to start. It wouldn’t get into the papers, of course. But just the rumor or report, more and more magnified as it spread, could play merry hell with any man. If you two knew, and either of you dropped an indiscreet word without meaning to…”
“May I ask a question?” interposed Jill.
“That depends on the question, little one. Let’s hear it.”
Jill’s color had come up. Distressed, uncertain, she glanced sideways at Leo before lowering her eyes.
“I was just thinking,” she said. “This accusation, whatever it is, must be an accusation of something perfectly dreadful!”
“A line of inquiry,” Jim pointed out, “which can be carried still further. It’s something abnormal or unnatural, is it? The slightest suggestion of homosexuality, for instance…”
Leo smote his fist on the table, so that glasses and china rang.
“What kind of friends do you think I have, for God’s sake? No, Jim, I won’t hear that for a minute! It’s nothing at all abnormal or unnatural, at least in the way you mean.”
“Then there’s nothing left, surely, they can charge my namesake with. When he’s safe in the arms of his high-priced siren, the guidfolk of your city seem to regard it with indulgence if not actual approval. Barring the abnormal or the unnatural, what could a man possibly do that would blow his career sky-high?”
“May I ask my question now?” murmured Jill.
“Look, little one, you’ve already…”
“Pardon me, Leo, but I haven’t! I remarked that it must be an accusation of something dreadful, and Jim suggested what he did suggest. Since we seem to have decided on plain speaking, a rare thing nowadays except in theatrical circles or perhaps newspaper offices, I must confess something of that sort occurred to me, too. And plain speaking may be best after all. But I didn’t ask my question, so I’ll ask it now. Who’s Flossie Yates? Is she what she sounds like?”
Leo leaned back and hooked his thumbs in the armholes of his vest.
“Well, now, me dear, that’s part of the secret. You’ve discovered for yourself, I think, that old Uncle Leo can keep a secret when he promises he will. Who’s Flossie Yates, the lady asks, and is she what she sounds like? Be more explicit, little one: what does she sound like?”
“Not like a prostitute, really, or at least not like one who’s practicing now. More like what they’d call in England an old…an old…!”
“I would spare your delicate ears, Jill. But you’re the advocate of plain speaking. Are you by any chance trying to ask me whether Flossie’s the madam of a brothel?”
“Yes!”
“In one sense the answer’s yes; in another sense the answer’s no. Flossie doesn’t advertise in the Blue Book, a guide to Storyville you may buy at any barber-shop for twenty-five cents a week. And if my friend Clay should hear that secret, wicked voice threatening him on the telephone, it won’t be Flossie’s voice he hears; it won’t be a woman’s voice at all.”
Then Leo exploded again.
“I just wish the secret voice would try its games on me! I’d soon wring the voice’s damn neck, if I may so express myself.
“For I have one small talent, Jim, which even you may not have noticed in the old days. If I’ve talked to any given person more than once or twice, I can always identify that person’s voice afterwards, no matter how much he or she may try to disguise it. I can do it blindfolded; I can even do it on the telephone. But, since there’s no reason to think I’ve ever met the owner of the secret voice, that leaves us just where we were before, doesn’t it?”
Jim snorted at him.
“If you mean it still leaves us completely in the dark, yes! What’s all this about a secret voice? And you might tell me…”
“No, Jim.”
Leo hoisted himself up, demanded the breakfast bills, and insisted on paying for everybody.
“No, Jim,” he repeated, when the waiter had gone. “For the moment, at least, that’s all I’m going to tell you: about Flossie Yates, about the secret voice, or about anything else. In the meantime, mind, not a word of it to anybody until I give permission! I know it seems hard lines when you’re after a news story. But it’s only temporary; unless I’m much mistaken, you’ll have a corker of a story (full permission granted) within a very short time.
“Heigh-ho, ladies and gentlemen! It’s just on ten o’clock and we’re coming into Charlotte, Norm Carolina. Your Uncle Leo must now sit down for some very hard thinking: this whole accursed situation and how to handle it. Excuse me, will you?”
And there, for the moment, he left them in the air.
Jim’s further efforts to question him had no effect. Leo locked himself in his drawing-room, breathing maledictions behind the door. He wouldn’t even come out for lunch, which he had sent to him on a tray.
“I’ve just thought of something else,” he said. “Now shut up and go away!”
They had soon crossed the South Carolina border. Jim devoted himself to Jill, whom he found still more fascinating if no less perplexing. For all her good nature, almost her naïveté, there remained that quality of elusiveness which would not allow her to approach the personal, or let him approach it either.
Towards five in the afternoon (the next stop would be Atlanta), they sat together in open air on the platform of the observation car, the last car of the train, watching the tracks unreel and shine by dwindling sunlight. A damp breeze whipped the ends of the scarf Jill had bound over her head; her right arm touched his left.
“Jim, what is the matter with Leo?”
“He’s worried. He’s badly worried. So he’s being deliberately mysterious.”
“Well, so are you.”
“I am being mysterious?”
“I asked you about the real people in The Count of Monte Carlo. But you wouldn’t tell me.”
“We were interrupted, that’s all. Try again.”
“Count Dimitri, the Russian nobleman with the villa, is a real person?”
“He is (or was) very much a real person. Under his own name he was a minor nobleman. But he wasn’t Russian; he was Austrian. And he wouldn’t have had a villa anywhere; he moved about too much. I had to disguise him so completely that nobody could possibly have guessed his identity.”
“Why did you have to do that?”
“Because espionage, which seems such a joke to Colonel Harvey and Leo, isn’t a joke at all. It’s dirty, dangerous work, with long imprisonment or a firing squad if they catch you off base.
“Franz was chronically short of cash, though he had an income from his own estate and got good pay from the Wilhelmstrasse. I met him one night at a hotel in Trouville, when he was half drunk and so fed up with life that he might have put a bullet through his head. Well, I did him a favor. Pledging me to strict secrecy, a pledge I’ve kept, he told me first a little and then a lot. Afterwards, when I kept running into him all over the continent of Europe…”
“That’s when started you on the book?”
“Yes. I couldn’t use his adventures for the New York Banner. I couldn’t use ’em in any form if it meant risk to Franz. But with every character and event twisted out of shape or upside down, with suitable additions of glamour and bloodshed, I could get away with it as fiction.”
“Oh, you succeeded! Those vi
vid personal details…”
“I made the count young and dashing; in fact he was stout, fiftyish, and bald. The fictitious Russian had an English mother, to prepare the ground for revealing him as a British agent. The real Austrian, who hated England, spoke fluent English because he learned it at school; he hadn’t even had an English nurse. Count Dimitri never flinched before the most menacing revolver; Franz was one mass of exposed nerves. Having covered my tracks like that…”
“And the heroine, Marcia Allison!” Jill said with radiant innocence. “Was she one of your women?”
“What do you mean, one of my women?”
“I think you know what I mean.”
“And I also know you’re dead wrong. Marcia Allison, Jill, was suggested by a girl I once saw for perhaps five minutes in the casino at Monte Carlo. I never learned her name or even her nationality. She was at one of the roulette tables; her elbow knocked some counters off the edge, I picked ’em up and she thanked me. That’s all. The next moment her escort, an elderly man who might have been father or uncle or even husband of sixty-odd, drifted up and took her away. She had to be imagined from scraps and patches of other people. When I made Franz fall in love with her…”
“Franz. Yes, Franz! What was his full name?”
“I don’t think I’d better tell you that, Jill. It’s only protecting my source of information, as any reporter should.”
“Protecting your source of—!”
Jill’s laughter, somewhat overstrained and not altogether convincing, rang out on that platform amid the Georgia hill-country. She whooped and chortled: her head thrown back, her shoulder against his arm.
“Protecting your source of information! Really, it’s too funny for words! You think I’m hiding some grisly secret…”
“Have I said I think you’re hiding anything?”
“Not in so many words, maybe. But your looks have said it a hundred times since last night. What did I tell you, Jim? You’re making a mystery where there oughtn’t to be any mystery. Leo won’t answer questions, and neither will you!”
“Who says Leo won’t answer questions,” struck in a familiar voice, “if he thinks they’re fit and proper questions to answer?”
And he towered up in dignity, holding open the glass-paneled door. Leo, his tweed cap contrasting with a lightweight suit, swept them a ceremonious bow before he went to lean against the railing of the platform.
“All right, Jim! You’re waving your hand like a schoolboy who wants to leave the room. We’re open to questions now, I say, always provided they’re relevant to the issue.”
“I’ll give you a very relevant one, which I tried to ask this morning. You’ve referred more than once to what Clay Blake’s enemies might do. Just who are these enemies?”
“Offhand, and before this came up, I’d have said Clay had no enemies. Still, who among us is without ’em?”
“That’s no answer, Leo. What about young Peter Laird? Didn’t they have a row in some bar or other?”
“Yes, but that’s all blown over and forgotten. Besides, Pete’s not the type. Since you’re investigating, though, I’ll give you a little tip. Keep your eye on Pete’s mother, Mrs. Mathilde de Jarnac Laird.”
“The one they call Madam Ironface? Has she got it in for my namesake?”
“Judas Priest, no! I say keep your eye on her because I love the old girl, whom I call Aunt Mathilde! Cherish Aunt Mathilde. If you’ve got a problem, take it to Aunt Mathilde. She’s the most sensible and reliable of all the Lairds.”
“Although her son isn’t allowed to drive his own car?”
“She won’t let such a damn bad driver kill himself, if that’s what you mean! Pete Laird oughtn’t to be trusted with a wheelbarrow, let alone a new Cadillac. Do you drive, Jim? Yes, I see you do. Traffic conditions are easier in New Orleans than in New York. Why not try driving on your errands while you’re with us?”
“Where would I get a car?”
“Rent one.”
“Is it possible to rent a car?”
“It is if you see my friend Stu Guilfoyle—Guilfoyle’s Garage, Chartres Street—and tell him I sent you. Stu may not come up with a Mercer Raceabout like mine, but he’ll find you something serviceable. Better buy goggles and a dust-coat, even for a car with a windshield; I always wear ’em. If any errand takes you out to the suburbs, the roads are shocking and you can hardly breathe for dust. Good idea, Jim?”
“Renting a car may be a very good idea, agreed. But I was asking you…!”
“Yes, of course!” The other blinked and snapped his fingers. “Mustn’t let a hobby run away with me, as I so often do. You were asking about Clay’s enemies, weren’t you? Well, now, as regards potential enemies…”
And yet, despite Leo’s professed willingness to help, Jim got little further.
Raymond P. Chadwick, Leo conceded, just might cut the throat of the man who had defeated him for nomination to Congress. Leo thought this unlikely, Mr. Chadwick being one with notoriously little fondness for risk. But it remained a possibility. Leo said he could think of nobody else.
Afternoon became evening; evening deepened into night. The three of them dined together on fried chicken and sweet potatoes, a substantial meal if no gourmet’s delight. Leo talked freely about motoring; he would talk freely about anything, in fact, except the riddles centering around James Claiborne Blake. Since clearly it was some aspect of this which so haunted or bedeviled him, Jim forbore to hammer at it too long.
Leo’s apprehension took no definite shape until the following morning, at which time it struck them like a blow in the face.
Jim himself spent the wakeful night he had feared twenty-four hours earlier, a vision of Jill forever in his mind and forever eluding him. Though he fell into a troubled doze as the train left Mobile, Alabama, at well past three in the morning, he woke again before seven. He was shaved, dressed, and at least outwardly presentable when they rolled into Terminal Station, New Orleans.
The porter had removed his suitcase several minutes before. Jim emerged into the car, a cavern of disarranged green curtains with berth-lights still burning, and descended to the platform outside.
Bedraggled, half-awake passengers were hurrying through the station towards Canal Street. Various articles of luggage from car sixteen had been set in a row on the platform near the foot of the vestibule steps, where the porter bowed above them. Jim found Jill standing beside her own luggage, a valise and a hat-box. Leo, at first seeming unworried, joined them there a moment later.
“Now listen!” he began. “One cab will do for us all. I think you said, Jim, you were going to the St. Charles?”
“First to the St. Charles Hotel, to get a room and have breakfast, and then to the Sentinel office to see Mr. Alec Laird. It’s an evening paper; he ought to be there by nine-thirty or ten. As for Mr. Clay Blake…”
“I live out Jackson Avenue way, as you may or may not remember.” Leo waved a hand to indicate. “I’ll drop you at the St. Charles, which isn’t far from here, and then take Jill wherever she wants to go. Don’t worry about finding Clay; don’t even bother to telephone; I’ll introduce you to him myself. We’ll just get a redcap to take our bags, and—” He broke off. “Oh, dear God!”
“What’s the matter?”
“In my drawing-room; something I forgot. Now don’t move, either of you; stay right where you are. I’ll be back in thirty seconds!”
And he sprang up the steps.
It was much more than thirty seconds. Some five or six minutes had passed, and Jim several times waved back hovering redcaps, before Leo descended again. He moved slowly and heavily, turning on them a face of something like collapse.
“Did you find what you wanted, Leo?”
“I found something I didn’t want, Jim. Now hearken, brothers and sisters; prepare yourselves for a shock. Though I didn’t know it until a few minutes ago, Clay Blake’s on that train. He’s been on the train since New York, shut up in a drawing-room of car seventeen b
ehind us, having his meals sent in as I did once yesterday. Jesus H. God! I thought this business might be bad, but it’s a damn sight worse than anything I ever expected!
“And it necessitates a slight change of plan. I’d better stay here for a little, I think. You get the cab, Jim. I’ll phone you later, either at the hotel or at Alec’s office. Get the cab, take Jill, and—” Again he broke off. “Just what the hell is going on in this place, anyway?”
Jill and her luggage had disappeared.
PART TWO:
QUEST OF PHANTOMS
6
JIM LEFT THE HOTEL at a quarter past ten.
When he had registered there on arrival just over two hours before, he wondered whether anybody would say, “Well, Mr. Blake, and how’s the campaign for Congress?” Nobody said it. Colonel Harvey, it appeared, had telegraphed ahead to reserve room and bath, carefully designating him as “my distinguished author, James Buchanan Blake.”
They received him with a cordiality near courtliness. He was whisked aloft to comfortable, even sybaritic quarters on the third floor overlooking St. Charles Avenue. Vividly in his mind remained that parting scene at Terminal Station, when Leo hustled him into a cab.
“Where does she live?” Leo had fumed. “How should I know where she lives? She’s not in the telephone directory, I can tell you. There’s more than one Matthews, but no Gillian or Jill, not even a G. or J. You certainly won’t find her boss there either.”
“What’s the boss’s name again, Leo?”
“Hollister. Old Ed Hollister, the mystery man of finance. Never mind, Jim; we’ll find her somehow, since you’re so determined. Now beat it; I must get back to Clay. But I’ll be in touch before long.”
Once installed at the hotel, despite Leo’s warning Jim had leafed through the telephone book in vain. Then he ordered wheat cakes and sausages, to be served in his room. A morning newspaper, its first page devoted almost exclusively to Teddy Roosevelt, arrived with the food. He sat long at breakfast, lingering over coffee and cigarettes. He drew a hot bath and lingered in that, thinking long thoughts.
The Ghosts' High Noon Page 7
