A long breath seemed to go through the dark interrogation room. Jimmy had confessed, the denial didn’t count. Jimmy had been there, he had had a piece of the stolen property.
“Book him, Marx,” Captain Olsen said, and walked out to tend to more important business than Jimmy Sung.
After the two detectives took Jimmy Sung out, small and silent between them, Marx and I sat alone in the interrogation room. I lit a cigarette.
“The rest of the stuff?” I said.
“In the river. In some sewer. We’ll look, maybe Jimmy’ll tell us now, but it doesn’t matter. He’s a drunk, Dan, and maybe half crazy, too. When a drunk needs booze money he gets desperate and stupid. We found out that he was in a mental hospital out in California for six years about twenty years ago. It fits, Dan.”
It fitted. I went out to call Viviane Marais to tell her the reason her husband had died. She wouldn’t like it. Chance, a stupid act of a half-crazy alcoholic. Marty wouldn’t like it, either. It would depress her more. Damn!
7
Most men are guilty of the weak hope that if something isn’t talked about it will, somehow, go away. I’m no exception, so I didn’t tell Marty about Jimmy Sung and how Eugene Marais had died. She heard anyway.
Two days after Jimmy had been booked, the oven-night of the city outside, we were in my bed talking about our vacation plans. I was talking. Marty had been silent for some time. Then she sat up, leaned down over me, and kissed me. She held my shoulders hard—too hard, and a moment too long. It was a kiss that had a lot of years in it, and a decision.
She got out of bed, began to dress. It wasn’t quite midnight, not even time to sleep. I lit a cigarette.
“I have to go away, Dan, alone,” Marty said. “I have to.”
“I have the money, Marty,” I said.
“One job. No plan, no growth. You live in space, Dan, not in time. Now is always. Maybe you’re right, I don’t know.”
“When will you know?”
“Probably too late. I’ll call you when I get back.”
So she went. She would think, but in the end …? A woman doesn’t go off alone to think about her relationship to a man unless she has some alternative to think about too.
What Viviane Marais was thinking about I wasn’t sure, either. I called her on the phone to tell her about Jimmy Sung the afternoon he was booked. She was silent on the other end for a time.
“Then there is nothing for you to do,” she said at last. “Unless you have some doubt, Mr. Fortune?”
Did I have a doubt? Yes and no. Jimmy Sung fitted, and yet there was still the bulk of the stolen goods, Jimmy’s weak lying I couldn’t understand, and the clumsiness of it all. But all of that could be answered by the confused thinking of an unbalanced drunk, and the police would try to answer it all. They had no axe to grind over Jimmy Sung.
“I don’t think I can do much, Mrs. Marais,” I said. “So I worked one day. You want fifty dollars back?”
“No, I think not,” Viviane Marais said. “So, Jimmy it was? An accident after all? Chance? It would have pleased Eugene.”
“But not you?”
“No, but I cannot order the world.” She was silent again on the other end of the line. “Keep the money, Mr. Fortune, and if there is some news, call me again.”
Everyone was being generous with money. That makes me uneasy. After Marty had gone, I checked to see if Jimmy Sung needed a decent lawyer, or if anything new had happened. Nothing had, and Jimmy had a good lawyer—private, not court appointed. More money from somewhere.
The next few days I spent tracking down a skipped husband for a woman who owned four tenements. The husband had managed the properties, a paid hand. He had vanished without taking any of the cash. That puzzled the woman. The trail ended at Kennedy Airport—tickets for two to Montreal. The second ticket had been used by a dumpy brunette who had hung on the rabbit-husband’s arm. The woman-landlord called me off, and even paid me. That gave me over six hundred dollars, rich for me. The money didn’t seem very important, somehow.
I was sitting on a bench in Washington Square Park a week after Jimmy’s arrest, watching a gang of overage and hairy kids making music in the circle, when the man sat down beside me. Anyone can sit on a bench, for any reason, but this man I watched. Maybe because he was another Oriental. He watched the singers.
“You know Jimmy Sung didn’t rob that shop, or kill Mr. Marais,” he said.
He was small, slender, in a light brown tropical suit and a hat. Japanese, I decided, but American-Japanese. His English was pure, unaccented American; his voice quiet, even humble. A meditative manner, and no hair came from under his hat as if his head was shaved.
“Why do I know that?” I said.
“Because Jimmy Sung would not steal. Our people do not steal, and Jimmy had no need, anyway. He is hard-working, an industrious man, and has enough money for his needs—all needs.”
“Our people?” I said. “Just who are you, Mr.—?”
“Noyoda,” the small man said. “I am a Buddhist priest, Mr. Fortune. We have our temple in Chinatown. Jimmy is one of our members. Not very religious, but devoted. He comes to us often, is also paid a small wage as custodian. He would not steal, and if he did not steal, why then would he murder Mr. Marais?”
“Jimmy’s a Buddhist?”
“You are surprised?”
“I figured Jimmy as an all-American Chinese.”
“In most ways he is,” Noyoda said. “Perhaps he felt a certain isolation when he joined us five years ago, I can’t say for sure. His life has not been easy or even pleasant, which, I imagine, is why he drinks.”
Noyoda seemed to watch the hairy singers in the circle. His face showed no disapproval, nor any approval, only a kind of understanding, as if his meditations embraced all things alive.
“Jimmy was brought from China as a boy. He talks little, but from things he has said I think he was almost a slave of the man who brought him to America. It seems there was some trouble in his late teens with this employer’s daughter. Some drinking, a fight, and Jimmy was locked in a mental hospital for six years. He was alone, without friends or visitors, the entire six years because no one could communicate with him. Schizophrenic was the diagnosis because Jimmy was silent or seemed to babble in gibberish. You see, at that time, Jimmy spoke only a Manchurian dialect, and no one understood a word of it!
“He would probably still be there, as has happened to others, if a new doctor at the hospital hadn’t happened to have worked in North China and recognized a few words Jimmy mumbled at rare times. The doctor found a man who spoke Jimmy’s language, and at last Jimmy could tell his story. He recovered his speech rapidly then, and they released him—with a few dollars, one suit, no skills and no friends anywhere. That was when he began to be an alcoholic.”
I watched the singers and guitar players in the circle. Some of them were dancing now. Some were grabbing each other, getting together for the night to come, and maybe even longer.
“It’s enough to do it,” I said. “Alkie or worse.”
“Since then,” Noyoda said, “he supported himself, taught himself English, took nothing from anyone. A strict, austere, frugal life. Hard-working and never in trouble, not even drunk. Such a man does not steal, and certainly never for pennies. He is not stupid, Mr. Fortune. If he had robbed that shop he would have taken more and not been so clumsy.”
Two policemen had appeared under the arch of the square, and in the circle the ragged youth-sing was breaking up.
“Could he have faked a clumsy robbery to cover murder?”
“What possible reason could Jimmy have? Mr. Marais was his friend and employer. Jimmy liked the job at the shop.”
“What motives does anyone have?” I said morosely.
“I thought that perhaps you could find that out.”
Everyone wanted to hire me. Maybe I could make a career out of Eugene Marais’s death. One small pawn shop owner.
Noyoda said, “The members of
our temple have contributed what they can. We wish to help Jimmy. We planned to hire a lawyer for him, but he has one, and we thought that we could use the money to hire you to prove his innocence.”
“Jimmy paid for his own lawyer? How?”
“No, someone else hired the lawyer. I heard it was Claude Marais, the brother. Perhaps he thinks Jimmy innocent too.”
That made me sit up. “All right, but one thing still bothers me—the way Jimmy kept on lying even when Lieutenant Marx had him cold. The way he lied about being there at all that night.”
“Given his life, Mr. Fortune, it is understandable that he is somewhat paranoid, isn’t it? Wary and silent.”
“Maybe it is,” I said. “You can pay me fifty dollars now.”
Money is money, and, with Marty gone, what else did I have to do?
I rode the Hotel Stratford elevator straight up to the fourth floor and room 427. Li Marais opened the door.
“Mr. Fortune?”
She wore a western mini-skirt and blouse now, and I saw again how wrong I had been about her fragility. Her legs were far from fragile.
“Can I talk to your husband?”
“Come in, please.”
The room was a small living room with the usual anonymous furniture of a second-rank but respectable hotel. There was a bedroom and a tiny kitchenette. A suite for more permanent residence. A lot of people in New York lived in residential hotels like the Stratford.
“Claude is not here, but perhaps I can help,” she said.
She sat down, crossed her legs. Her thighs were smooth and full. I sat on a couch.
“Why did Claude hire a lawyer for Jimmy Sung? Doesn’t he think Jimmy killed Eugene after all?”
“Claude did not hire the lawyer, I did,” she said, her dark eyes bright and on my face. “I sold some jewels, Claude gave me some money. It was something I felt I must do.”
“Why?”
“Since Claude and I came to New York, Jimmy has been nice to me, always helping. Small things—favors, errands, services, company when I’ve been alone. Perhaps because I speak his old language, but the reason does not matter.”
“I thought you were Thai?”
“A Thai orphan adopted by a Chinese family in Vietnam. Life is a flux these last long years in Southeast Asia, death and change are what we know. The people who took me in were from North China. Saigon is a crossroad. I speak most Oriental languages now, as well as French and my little English.”
“You speak a lot of English.”
She smiled. It was her first smile, soft and warm. “Thank you, but I do not speak as well as even poor Jimmy. He helped my English, too. He seemed to like to talk to me, a memory of his forgotten past, perhaps.”
“Do you think he robbed the shop, killed Eugene?”
“My help does not depend on what he did or did not do. He helped me in a strange city. A lonely man who understands the loneliness in others.”
“Are you lonely, Mrs. Marais?”
Her expression didn’t change, she had no outward mannerisms, but I sensed a faint change in her whole body. Something in her bright eyes that considered me, probed behind my face. She smoothed her skirt—the universal gesture of a woman aware of herself, of her body. Touched herself.
“My husband was a soldier, a patriot, a man of loyalty and courage and devotion,” she said slowly. “All of this he put into the cause of France, and France lost. That hurt him, but it was not the worst. He came to believe that France had deserved to lose, that the world of France and honor was dead, and now he has no world he can understand. He cannot believe in France, or America, or China, or any country or cause. No pride, no destiny, no purpose.”
“Is he a man who needs a purpose?”
“Most men are. Even you, I think, if only to do your work well. Claude has no work to do well. He works to keep us alive, no more. Sometimes I am sure he does not even know where he is—here or Saigon; Paris or the jungle.” Her eyes seemed to look into me from a hollow inside herself. “He is alone, Dan, can feel nothing. Not war or peace, hate or love.”
Her face told me that she knew she had called me Dan. My mouth was dry. Maybe because of Marty, but I wanted this woman, and in her own way she was saying that her loneliness needed help. What kind of help maybe she wasn’t sure herself.
I said, “How long have you been married, Li?”
“Eighteen years.” She watched me. “I was twelve when I married Claude. A few months before Dienbien-phu. It is not uncommon in Vietnam, as your own soldiers have found. A child is a good wife for a soldier. Better than the brothels, or older women who want only his money and disappear when he goes to fight. A child will not leave him. Children die so easily in Asia, have no food, no medicine, no doctors, no homes. A child must work early, is easily lost in war. Vietnamese love children, and to be married is to be safe, fed, even happy. It is better for a child to be a wife than an ox.”
“Afterward? When you weren’t twelve anymore? Now?”
“I was Madame Marais, I was content. We lived many places, and Claude fought and worked for France. Now he is wasted as the land is wasted, burned out like the villages of Vietnam.”
Her small hands lay flat on her thighs, squeezed.
“Why did you hire me to stop Gerd Exner that night?”
“I hoped you would make him go away, leave the country. He hates to be noticed, watched. I hoped you would scare him.”
“I scared him, but he stayed around. Why? Who is Exner? Is there something he wants from Claude?”
“He is an ex-Legionnaire. Claude worked with him in Vietnam and Africa—trading, arms smuggling, black market. I do not know why he stays. I only wanted to help Claude. Eugene once said that Claude must wipe the past away, forget and start over. I had hoped to make Exner go away, make Claude forget.”
What she had hoped was to have her man back. If it wasn’t too late.
“Could Eugene have gotten in Exner’s way somehow? Maybe gotten in Claude’s way?”
I saw that the thought had occurred to her too. A shadow of possible motives she didn’t want to think about. I saw more on her face—an awareness of me. But she said nothing, only sat like some earth-mother who could only wait, had always waited, silent and still, for what would be done to her.
After a time I got up and left.
8
In her black dress, Viviane Marais stood at the door of the old frame house in Sheepshead Bay with a glass of wine in her hand.
“So?” the widow said. “Come in, Mr. Fortune.”
She took me into the spotless living room where everything shined as if she’d spent each day since Eugene Marais had died cleaning. She offered me a glass of the wine—La Tache, a fine, heavy Burgundy. I didn’t say no. I sat, sipped.
“You’re not surprised to see me?” I said.
“No.”
“You don’t believe Jimmy Sung killed Eugene?”
“One can tell a man who will steal. Jimmy Sung would not. Too much pride. If he did not steal, what reason is there?”
“Why didn’t you say that when I told you Jimmy was accused?”
She drank her glass empty, poured a fresh glass. “Eugene always said that only a man’s will counted—to do something for yourself, not for others or for gain. If I had told you to go on it would have been a job, for money. I wanted to see if you would come to me from your own doubts.”
“You know your sister-in-law hired a lawyer for Jimmy?”
“Li is a strong woman, she has her beliefs.”
“And her troubles?”
“Yes, and her troubles.”
“With Claude her main trouble?”
She tasted her wine as if it were thick enough to chew, savored it. “Eugene said once that Claude is like a man who has done some awful crime and now waits for his punishment—paralyzed. He treats Li like a sister, a daughter. What woman can live like that? Married eighteen years and not yet thirty-one?”
“She needs a husband again,” I said.
“So?” Viviane Marais said. “She has let you see that?”
“Doesn’t she usually let anyone see that?”
“No,” the widow said, watched me. “Treat her well, Mr. Fortune. She is a warm woman, loyal. A man who finds her with him will be lucky.”
I thought so too, and Marty was off somewhere making her decision, but I changed the subject for now.
“Some crime Claude had on his mind, Eugene said,” I said. “Could Eugene have meant some real crime? In Claude’s past?”
“I don’t know,” Viviane Marais said. “At the time I thought Eugene meant it only as a metaphor, but now—?”
“Could Claude be involved in something illegal? Some deal Eugene might have discovered, maybe tried to stop?”
“What Claude might be doing I can’t know,” the widow said. “But Eugene would not try to stop anything. He had seen too much of the horror caused by righteous men who think that they must stop other men for some abstract truth, for some principle.”
“What if he found that Claude was using him in some way?” I said. “Had involved him in some scheme?”
“Eugene would not have permitted that, but he would not have done anything against Claude, either.”
“Maybe Claude, or Gerd Exner, didn’t know that,” I said.
She thought, sipped her good wine, shrugged. There were too many “ifs,” but the possibility hung in the room.
“This Paul Manet,” I said. “You said Eugene had known him in the past in Paris?”
“Eugene knew the Manet family. I do not know if he knew Paul or not, or how well. Paul Manet was active in the Resistance, Eugene was not.”
“What is Vel d’Hiv?” I said. “Why would Paul Manet not want to talk about it? Why would it make him jumpy?”
“How do you know Paul Manet did not want to talk about it?”
“Claude said that to Eugene the day he was killed.”
She finished her wine again, did not refill her glass this time. She watched the far wall. “On the night of July 16, 1942, the Gestapo and the Paris police rounded up twelve thousand or so Jews, imprisoned them like sheep in the sports stadium—the Velodrome d’Hiver; to us: Vel d’Hiv. Non-French Jews, mostly German and Polish refugees. They were there a week, a hell, before they were sent to the worst hell of Auschwitz. It is not an episode most Frenchmen over forty-five want to talk about.” She reached for the wine bottle. “Four thousand of those Jews were children.”
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