Vengeance q-5

by Benjamin Black

  But no, she told herself, no-she had known, of course she had. She had known and had chosen not to know. It was exactly what she had always secretly despised in the Irish, that capacity for self-delusion, that two-faced way of dealing with the world. She was just as dishonest, as hypocritical, as anyone else, and might as well admit it.

  She stood up suddenly, clutching her handbag and looking about herself wildly. Her lower lip was trembling. She needed the lavatory urgently. Quirke, too, rose to his feet, and she reared back almost in fright-she had almost forgotten that he was there. He was saying something, but she was not listening. She shook her head and stepped back. “I must go,” she said, in a choked voice. “I’m sorry, I have to-” And she turned and fled.

  12

  The first thing that struck Phoebe was the fact that they had known where to find her. But how had they known? She had been in the habit of stopping at the coffee shop two or three evenings a week on her way home from work. It was a place where she could be on her own-she had not even told David Sinclair about it. The owner of the shop, Mr. Baldini, an Italian man of middle age with wonderfully soft eyes and a melancholy smile, knew her well by now, and would greet her when she came in, and would show her to her favorite table by the window, as if she were a regular at some grand restaurant and he the maitre d’. She would sit at the plastic-topped table in a wedge of evening sunlight and read the paper, and drink a cup of milky coffee and eat one of the dismayingly sweet little cakes that the owner’s wife baked in the kitchen at the back, from where there wafted warm smells of vanilla and chocolate and roasted coffee beans. She prized these intervals of solitude, and was shocked this evening when the Delahaye twins came in and without being invited sat down at her table.

  She could not get used to the uncanny likeness between them. Looking at them sitting there smilingly side by side, she had the unnerving sensation, as she always had in their presence, that a fiendish and immensely complicated trick was being played on her, by means of mirrors and revolving chairs and walls that only looked like walls. They were dressed alike, in brown corduroy slacks and short-sleeved gray woolen shirts, and each had a cricket sweater slung over his back with the sleeves loosely knotted in front. She would not have been surprised if they had begun to speak to her in unison, like a pair of characters out of the Alice books.

  “Hello,” she said, keeping her voice steady and her tone light. “I thought I was the only one who knew about this place.”

  “Ah,” the one on the left said, “but you see, we’re good at nosing out secrets.” He pressed his smiling face forward across the table, making snuffling noises, like a pig after a truffle. Then he lifted a hand and showed her the signet ring on his little finger. “I’m Jonas, by the way, to save you having to ask.”

  The other one, James, laughed. She looked at him. She had noted before how strange his eyes were, hazed over somehow and yet alight with eagerness, as if he lived in constant expectation of some grand and hilariously violent event that he was convinced would begin to unfold at any moment. She wondered uneasily if his mind was quite right. “Where’s your boyfriend this evening?” he asked, with a sort of playful truculence.

  “Yes, where is he?” Jonas said. “We thought one of you was never seen without the other, like James and me.”

  James at this gave a snort of laughter, as if it were richly funny.

  “He’s at work, I think,” Phoebe said. These days he always seemed to be at work, whatever the time of day. That was why she was here now, trying to fill in some of the long night that was ahead of her.

  “Mit ze cadavers, ja?” Jonas said, putting on a comic accent and making a broad slicing gesture, as with a scalpel. “Professor Frankenstein in his laboratory.”

  She did not know what to reply. She pushed her coffee cup aside and gathered up her purse and her Irish Times and made to rise, but Jonas reached across and pressed an index finger to the back of her hand, quite hard, and she sat down again, slowly. “Don’t go,” he said pleasantly. “We’ve only just arrived.”

  Mr. Baldini came to take the twins’ order. He was from a hill town in Tuscany, he had told her. She often wondered how he had ended up here, but did not like to ask. The twins said they would have coffee and a cake, like her. Mr. Baldini nodded, unsmiling. His soft brown eyes slid sideways and met hers, as if to send a warning signal. Had the twins been here before? Did he know something about them that she did not? “For you, signorina?” he said. “Something else, perhaps?” She shook her head and he turned to go, as if reluctantly, and gave her again that odd, cautioning look.

  “Enjoy the party?” Jonas said.

  “The one at Breen’s house?”

  “Where we saw you, yes.”

  “It was all right. A bit too noisy for me.”

  Jonas played a brief tattoo on the edge of the table with his fingers. “Good old Breen, eh?” he said. “Good old Breen.” He was looking at her with what seemed a dreamily calculating air. She wondered what he was thinking, but decided it was probably better not to know.

  “Breen is a brick,” James said, more loudly than was necessary. “A real brick.”

  “James is fond of rhyming slang,” Jonas said, and grinned, and winked.

  Mr. Baldini brought the coffee and the cakes. “Two and eightpence,” he said.

  Jonas glanced up at him, and the Italian stared back stonily. For a moment there was the sense of something teetering in the air, dipping first this way and then that. Then Jonas shrugged. “Pay the man, Jamesy,” he said quietly, smiling at Phoebe, and began to hum under his breath the tune of “O Sole Mio.” James handed over a ten-shilling note, and Mr. Baldini went off again.

  Jonas, pushing aside the coffee and the plate with the cake on it, extended his arms straight out in front of him across the table, almost touching Phoebe’s face, and turned his hands backwards and linked his fingers and pressed them against each other, making his knuckles crack. Then he gave himself a shivery shake and blew loudly through slack lips like a horse. “Seeing your chap later, are you?” he asked. Phoebe nodded. “Jolly good,” Jonas said, giving her again that narrow speculative stare. “In the meantime,” he said, “why not come along with us?”

  She stared back. “Come along where?”

  “We’re off to the ancestral pile. Have a glass of something, bite to eat, listen to the wind-up gramophone. Typical relaxed evening chez Delahaye. What do you say? The stepmater is home, I’m sure she’d love to meet you. She’s a bit of a party girl herself, though you mightn’t think it to see her in her widow’s weeds.”

  She looked at the two of them, Jonas lazily smiling and James with that avid light in his eye. It would be foolish to go with them, she knew, and yet, to her surprise, a small sharp voice in her head immediately spoke up, urging her to accept.

  “All right,” she heard herself say, with an insouciance she did not really feel, “but just for an hour.”

  “That’s settled, then!” Jonas exclaimed, and smacked both his palms flat on the table and stood up. He was wearing a Trinity tie for a belt. “Avanti!”

  He went first, with Phoebe after him and James following. Phoebe could feel the twin’s eye on her, and a tiny tremor made her shoulder blades twitch. At the door she glanced back and saw Mr. Baldini standing by the big silver espresso machine, looking after her with a grave and melancholy gaze.

  The evening was smoky and hot. They walked along by the railings of St. Stephen’s Green, the two young men sauntering with their hands in their pockets and Phoebe in the middle, to where Jonas’s car, a low-slung, two-door red Jaguar, was parked under the trees. “See that shop?” Jonas said, pointing across the road to Smyth’s. “I once bought a jar of honey there with bumblebees drowned in it. And a box of chocolate-covered ants.”

  “Why did you do that?” Phoebe asked.

  Jonas was unlocking the door on the driver’s side. “Wedding presents,” he said, “for our new mummy, when Daddy bethought himself to marry again.”

/>   Phoebe was not sure if she was meant to laugh. “And did she like them, your stepmother?”

  “Scoffed the lot. You should have heard her crack those ants between her little pearly teeth.”

  James climbed into the narrow back seat while Jonas took the wheel, with Phoebe beside him. They roared off in a cloud of tire smoke. Phoebe was aware of her heart madly beating. What was she thinking of, how had she dared?

  In Northumberland Road the tree-lined pavements were dappled with late gold, and midges in clouds bobbed and rose like bubbles in a champagne glass. Jonas slewed the car in at the gate almost without slowing, making the gravel fly, and drew to a bucking stop beside the front steps.

  As they walked up to the door, James lagged behind again, to have another look at her, Phoebe felt sure. A phrase came to her, drawing up the rear, and she smiled somewhat bleakly to herself. Would she tell David about this exploit she had allowed herself to be taken on? She thought not. She could imagine the look he would give her, out of those liquid brown eyes of his, with his head skeptically tilted and his chin tucked in.

  The hall was cool. A seething patch of sunlight from the open doorway settled briefly on the parquet. “Welcome to the House of Usher,” Jonas said gaily, and James did another of his snorting laughs. Phoebe, despite herself, rather liked the idea of being the menaced innocent in a gothic tale. A red-haired maid, young, with thick ankles, appeared at the other end of the hall and, seeing Phoebe with the twins, gave a sardonic half grin and withdrew to wherever she had come from. “The staff, as you see,” Jonas said, “lack a certain polish.” He made a deep bow, with an arm extended. “This way to the funhouse, ladies and gents!”

  The drawing room glowed with greenish light from the garden. Phoebe noted the vast white sofa, the Mainie Jellett on the wall behind it, the sideboard with bottles, cut-glass decanters, a soda siphon. There was a big bunch of red and yellow roses in a china bowl on the table.

  “A drink,” Jonas said, making for the sideboard. “My dear, what will you take?”

  Phoebe hesitated. Should she drink? Probably not. “Gin,” she said firmly. “I’d like a gin and tonic.”

  “That’s my girl! James, be a dear and fetch some ice from the kitchen. And see if there’s a lime, will you?” He grinned at Phoebe. “Lemons are so common, don’t you think?”

  Phoebe walked to the window and stood looking into the garden. She was conscious of herself as a figure there, as if she were posing for her portrait. Young Woman by a Window. She had grown up in a house like this, not so large or luxuriously appointed, but with the same hushed air, the same high ceilings, the same fragrance of roses and floor polish. Here, though, there was something else. What was it? The faintest hint of something sickly, as in a room where lately an invalid had lived, that even the musky scent of the roses could not mask.

  James came back with the ice, lobbing a lime high into the air and catching it expertly in his palm with a small sharp smack.

  “By the way,” Jonas said, plopping ice cubes into Phoebe’s glass and handing it to her, “we were questioned by the rozzers-did you know?”

  She thought at first he was making a joke, but decided he was not. “No,” she said carefully. “What did they want to ask you about?”

  “Yes,” he said, ignoring her question, “the good old third degree. Shall we sit?”

  They took to the sofa, with Phoebe perched in the middle, Jonas lounging to her right, and James sitting a little too close to her on the left. Now that she was seeing them properly and had a chance to study them, she realized that far from being identical they were in fact entirely distinct. The circumstance of looking so alike might be no more than an ingenious piece of mimicry, the putting on of a kind of camouflage behind which they could hide in order to spy on the world. Jonas was the brighter of the two. He was clever and quick, and funny in a brittle sort of way, while James, with that laugh and that air of avid anticipation, was distinctly alarming. Yet if she were to be afraid of them, she knew, it was Jonas who would frighten her the most.

  “It was just like in the movies,” Jonas was saying now. “They took us downstairs, to the basement, and put us in separate cells, so we wouldn’t be able to coordinate our stories, and asked us all kinds of things.” He nodded at her glass. “Need some more ice?”

  She shook her head. “What kinds of things did they ask?”

  “Oh, silly stuff. It was that pal of your dad’s, Inspector-what’s it?”

  “Hackett?” she said, surprised.

  At the name, for some reason James, on her other side, laughed. She thought of the monkey house at the zoo.

  “Yes, that’s it,” Jonas said. “Hackett. Good name for a detective. Bit of a rough diamond. Country cute, I’ll grant you, but not what you’d call bright. Can you tell me now, young lad, ” he said, doing an uncannily close imitation of Hackett’s tone and accent, “ where you were on the night of the full moon, and can you produce a witness to prove it? ” He smiled at her, and his voice sank to a purr. “That would be you, my dear. Our witness.”

  “Me?”

  “Yes. At Breen’s place, the night of the party. I told you already.”

  “Why did he want to know where you were? Why that night?”

  The brothers glanced at each other. Jonas laughed. “Because, my dear, that was the night Jack Clancy fell out of his boat and drowned.”

  She looked away. Yes; yes, of course.

  Abruptly Jonas sprang up from the sofa. “Music,” he said. “Let’s have some music.”

  At the other end of the room there was a radiogram, a great mahogany brute standing on four little braced peglike legs. Jonas opened wide the cabinet doors and leaned down to read the spines of the record sleeves. “Eeny meeny miney mo,” he murmured, and extracted an album, “catch old Frankie by the toe!” He turned, showing the record cover with its stylized portrait of the singer-the hat, the cigarette-standing in a melancholy mood on a street corner at night. “Frankie-boy,” he said, “every bobby-soxer’s damp dream. Here we go.” He took out the disc and put it on the turntable. There was a faint hiss and then came the first plinking notes of the tune picked out against a soupy orchestral background. Jonas struck a pose, head back, nostrils flared, his arms encircling an invisible partner, then danced a sweeping step or two, singing along with the record. Phoebe could feel James beside her laughing without sound. Still singing, Jonas now supplied his own lyrics.

  “Where were you, lad, on that fatal evening?

  Can you prooooove your whe-ere-abouts?

  If I ask Miss Griffin if she saw you

  Will she back up your cast-iron al-i-biiieee?”

  He danced now in the direction of the sofa, and as he swept past he grabbed Phoebe’s wrist and drew her stumbling to her feet and took her in his arms and waltzed her off around the room at such a pace she felt her feet were hardly touching the floor. His brother, meanwhile, threw himself back on the sofa, clapping his hands and raucously whinnying.

  Phoebe, her heart hammering in its cage, saw the room spinning around her. She was dizzy already. She could smell the man who was holding her, his odor a mingling of sweat, cologne, and something else, sharp and sour, a faint acid reek. On the second turn around the room she glimpsed over Jonas’s shoulder the door opening, and someone, a woman, coming in. For a second the woman’s face, slender and pale, was a point of stillness in the general whirl; then Jonas swept on, whirling Phoebe with him. They passed by James, asprawl with his arms stretched out at either side along the back of the sofa, watching her with huge enjoyment. Then in rapid succession came the window, the sideboard, the sofa and James seated, the Jellett abstract, and then the woman again, in the doorway.

  Jonas too had seen her, and veered towards her now, and letting go of Phoebe’s left hand he caught the woman by the wrist and pulled her into the dance with them. On they dashed, three of them now, whirling and whirling. The woman seemed quite calm, and merely amused, as if she were used to this kind of thing. Smi
ling, she kept her eye fixed on Phoebe. Abruptly Jonas let go of both of them and flung himself down with a great laughing gasp to sprawl beside his brother. Phoebe stumbled, and would have fallen if the woman had not put an arm round her waist and held her firmly. They waltzed on together, the woman keeping no better time to the music than Jonas had. She was wearing a green silk blouse and a black skirt with petticoats underneath it.

  “I’m Mona,” she said. “Mona Delahaye. And you’re Phoebe, yes? I know your father, a little.”

  The song ended and they stopped, and Phoebe stood panting, and smiled back at the smiling woman, and thought how little like a widow she seemed. Both twins now regarded them with keen interest. Mona ignored them, and walked to the rosewood sideboard and poured herself a gin, and added a splash of tonic. “You two,” she said accusingly, addressing the twins over her shoulder, “you’ve used all the ice again!”

  Jonas looked sideways at his brother, and James put his hands on his knees and heaved himself to his feet with a histrionic sigh. “Oh, all right,” he said, “I’ll go.”

  When he had left Mona went and sat where he had been sitting, pressing down her skirt and ballooning petticoats with a careless gesture, and smiled at Phoebe again and patted the place beside her. “Come,” she said, “come and sit.” She turned her head and spoke to Jonas. “Move over, you.”

  Phoebe did as she was invited and came and sat down beside Mona. She felt exhilarated, but dizzy, too, more than dizzy-how much gin had she drunk? — and her tongue felt thick and she had difficulty focusing her eyes. Mona had grabbed Jonas’s glass and with her fingers fished out what remained of the ice cubes in it and dropped them into her own drink.

  “Hey!” Jonas said, laughing as he attempted to take back his glass. “You are a cow.”

  “And you’re a pig,” Mona answered complacently.

  They were like a pair of spoiled siblings fighting over a toy, Phoebe thought. This observation seemed to her at once profound and funny. She blinked-could she be tipsy already?