Shadow of a Tiger

by Michael Collins

  As I went out into the heat of the street, I saw him coming toward the hotel at a distance. I stepped into a doorway until he had passed and turned into the hotel. He walked slowly, looked at no one. When I stepped out of that doorway I was still in love with Li Marais, but I did not feel good.

  I had lost an afternoon of work. I had a murder to work on. Work is an answer.

  14

  Number 120 Fifth Avenue was a tall, older apartment house, its white stone facade gray with years of city grime. The apartment of Mr. Jules Rosenthal was on the tenth floor. The doorman told me that Mr. Rosenthal was away for the summer. I said I knew that, and took the elevator up. The doorman, after a good look at my clothes and missing arm, went to his house telephone.

  The tall, military-looking man who had bumped me the night of Eugene Marais’s murder was in the doorway of the apartment as I stepped off the elevator. He had that same haughty belligerence, and he recognized me. I saw that by a faint wavering in his stern eyes. He knew me, but I realized as I walked up to him that he wasn’t quite sure where he knew me from.

  “Hello,” he said. He smiled.

  The “hello,” and the smile, told me a lot. He really couldn’t place me, but he wasn’t going to let me know that if he could help it. The style of a diplomat, or the trick of a salesman. The technique of a man who lived on contacts, sold his service not his skill, rose or fell not on what he knew, but on who he knew.

  “Hello again, Mr. Manet,” I said, not helping him.

  His imperious bearing stiffened. I knew his name, and that gave me a big edge. He wasn’t sure how I knew his name. It made him uneasy in his tailored dark blue suit. Blue was his color, it seemed—the color of the French military. The suit had the same military impression, as if he didn’t want people to forget his martial reputation. In his lapel he wore a ribbon that I didn’t know, but I was certain it was something better than the Legion of Honor.

  “Well,” he said, “come in, please.”

  Still trying not to reveal that he hadn’t placed me in his mind. We went into a sumptous sunken living room of deep yellow carpet and vast chairs, couches, tables and view of the city outside. I finally came to his rescue. After all, I wanted him to relax, to talk to me.

  “My name’s Dan Fortune, Mr. Manet. A private detective working on the Eugene Marais murder and robbery. The Balzac Union gave me your address. We bumped outside Marais’s pawn shop a week or so ago, remember?”

  His eyes remembered me now.

  “Of course, I wasn’t looking where I went,” he said, regally taking the blame again. He looked solemn. “A tragic affair, poor Eugene. A stupid way to die. A cheap robbery.”

  “How do you know it was cheap?”

  “The police have been to me, of course. Almost a week ago. I had not expected any further interrogation.”

  The police had dug Manet out after Jimmy had been arrested then. Part of their doubts.

  “Things have changed,” I said. “You knew Eugene Marais in Paris?”

  “Our families were acquainted a long time ago. I, myself, did not know Eugene or Claude in those days.”

  “The hero days?”

  “One did one’s best, Mr. Fortune.”

  “Did Eugene Marais do his best then? In the Occupation?”

  “In his way.” He sat down now in a mammoth red womb chair, crossed his legs like a general being interviewed, indicated a chair for me to sit in. “Eugene was a quiet man, a shopkeeper. He was not a man to do much in action. Most men are like that, eh? The vast bulk of the world, the citizens.”

  “You met Eugene here through Claude Marais?”

  “Yes.”

  “How did you meet Claude?”

  “On business in San Francisco, Mr. Fortune. I represent many French companies abroad, public relations I suppose you would say. Claude Marais is quite different from Eugene, is well known in French circles. I considered that we would have mutual business interests, could cooperate.”

  “What business?”

  “Wines, gourmet foods, perfumes, clothes.”

  “Two heroes for France?”

  “If you like. I thought Claude could be an asset to some companies I represent. Unfortunately, when we met again here in New York, Claude thought otherwise.”

  “So you had a fight? At the Balzac Union?”

  “He hit me, I do not brawl,” Paul Manet said coldly. “Claude is a sick man, bitter against his own country, denying its truth and glory. He is no true Frenchman now. A shame.”

  “You’re sure it wasn’t a business fight? Some other business than wines or foods or perfumes?”

  “I’m sure, Mr. Fortune.”

  “What did you talk to Eugene Marais about?”

  “Paris, the past, the old times. Nostalgia, I suppose.”

  “Vel d’Hiv?”

  “Perhaps it was mentioned.”

  “But you didn’t like to talk about it?”

  He thought a moment or two. “Do you know about Vel d’Hiv?”

  “Yes. July 16, 1942. The roundup of Jews.”

  “Then you know why we don’t like to talk about it. As a Frenchman, I am not proud of that night, or of what came after.”

  “But you were a hero, a fighter.”

  “I saved a few poor people, helped, resisted the Gestapo. To fight the Nazis then was not special heroism, a duty. No risk was too great, one did not have to decide much. All who could fought, helped. If I did more than many, I am happy, but it was long ago. Do you talk often of your past record, Mr. Fortune?”

  “Not often,” I said, “but I don’t trade on it, either. I don’t live off my reputation from the past.”

  I saw his anger again, quick and belligerent. Taller in the mammoth modern chair, menacing.

  “Meaning that I do that?”

  “You ‘represent’ French companies—only French, right? And ‘represent’ means you’re a front man, a glad-hander, someone who gets respect for his employers not for how good their wares are, but for who and what he is. Did they hire you for your business knowledge, Manet, or for your heroic name? I’ll bet you always live in apartments as plush as this one, and you never pay rent, right? A Jules Rosenthal everywhere to lend you his pad because you’re a hero. A Balzac Union to roll out the red carpet for you. Not because you’re really important, but because you were once a hero of France. A monument. A legend. I wonder what you’d be doing if you hadn’t been a Resistance hero? Selling salami in some Paris shop? A factory hand?”

  “You insult me, Mr. Fortune.”

  “Your military honor, Manet? When were you ever a soldier? You were a Resistance hero, a Maquis. Why the soldier act?”

  Manet said, “Leave, Mr. Fortune, please. You are a cripple, I do not want to hurt you.”

  “Like you hurt Claude Marais? Maybe he didn’t think you were a real soldier either. He was, right? Maybe that’s what the fight was about. Or maybe he just didn’t think much of a man still trading on his heroics of thirty years ago.” I lit a cigarette, blew smoke into the palatial room. “If there were any heroics thirty years ago.”

  The silence that came down over the vast, expensive room was like the heavy, airless, yawning silence that comes in the hour before a hurricane explodes in all its fury.

  “Did Eugene Marais know something about your past you never wanted anyone to know, Manet?” I said, smoked. “Facts about Paul Manet that would ruin his nice, soft existence?”

  He took a deep breath, let it out. “You can check into the record of Paul Manet as far and as wide as you want, Fortune. You will find nothing hidden there.”

  “Maybe I’ll have to do just that,” I said. “Where were you the murder night, Manet? You left the pawn shop around five-fifteen in your car, where did you go the rest of the night?”

  “For a drive, dinner at Le Cheval Blanc with businessmen, drinks with another businessman, and to bed here.”

  “What time did you leave that last businessman?”

  “About eleven,
I believe. Despite your image of me as a kind of business gigolo, I work very hard. I need my sleep on most nights.”

  “So you were alone after eleven P.M.? Or did you have an appointment with Eugene Marais at the pawn shop?”

  “I was alone in my bed. Now you can—”

  I heard a telephone receiver go down somewhere in the big apartment. Paul Manet wasn’t alone. There were footsteps in the next room. Light steps, and the door opened. Naturally, I wasn’t carrying my old gun. Luckily, I didn’t need it. I saw a bedroom through the opened door, and Danielle Marais came out.

  “Mr. Manet was my father’s friend,” the heavy, petulant girl said. “You can’t accuse him.”

  “Was he a friend?” I said. “Or maybe only of Claude’s, until they had a falling out?”

  The long, dark hair of the dead Eugene’s daughter was coiled up in a chignon, and she wore a new, green cocktail dress that had not come off some rack in Macy’s. Her big, adolescent breasts stretched the sleek dress that was too old for her, too slim for her heavy body. But it did something for her, if you liked heavy, erotic nineteen-year-olds.

  “You think Mr. Manet has to rob cheap pawn shops?” Danielle sneered. She wasn’t a pleasant girl, but she was still young.

  “There wasn’t any robbery,” I said. “It was a cover for the murder. They let Jimmy Sung go. Now they’re looking for another motive. I think your father knew something Manet there didn’t want known. Or maybe it was something else. Where’d you get that dress, Danielle?”

  “From Charlie Burgos, of course,” she snapped, and swung in a slow circle preening the new dress for me.

  “Where did Charlie get that kind of money?”

  “He works!”

  “At his kind of pay that dress is a year’s savings.”

  “What do you know?” she sneered, but she stopped giving me the show of her dress.

  She stood in the room as if uneasy, a girl trying to be a woman and not making it. She seemed almost confused.

  “What money does Charlie have, Danielle?” I said.

  She chewed at her full lips, a habit she had probably found right after she stopped sucking her thumb. It was Paul Manet who answered me:

  “I gave her the dress. Eugene Marais was a friend of mine, no matter what you think. I wanted to cheer Danielle up.”

  “A dress for a friend of the family?” I watched Danielle. She was grinning. “How long have you two known each other? Did Eugene and Viviane Marais know you knew each other? Maybe they didn’t like it?”

  “We only met after Dad was dead!” Danielle said hotly. “Mother thinks I’m a child, but I’m not a child anymore. See?”

  She pulled her dress flat over her thighs and belly, outlined her body, and arched her back to show me her full breasts. It only showed what a child she was.

  15

  While I had the special veal cutlet at a diner on Sixteenth Street, I thought about the afternoon and Li Marais. I had tried not to think about her, or the afternoon, since I had left her asleep, and now I felt the hollow in the pit of my stomach. Was I in love with her? If I was, did it matter? Claude Marais had not gone into the river. He had probably done nothing, and she had been with him for eighteen hard years. I thought about something else. Not Marty.

  I thought about how you checked the details of a man’s actions thirty years ago in a foreign city under the rule of an invading army. Whatever had to be done, I couldn’t do it. It was a police job. For all I knew, they might have done it, or be doing it, already. To be sure, when I finished my coffee, I walked to the precinct station. The hot spell was breaking. Masses of high black clouds moved in the last light over the city from New Jersey. We would get rain, and then it would cool for a time.

  Lieutenant Marx was out of his office. Another detective said that Marx had contacted Paris about Paul Manet, but no word had come back yet. I left a message for Marx to call me—please.

  Wind whipped up stray dust and a hail of paper in the street as I walked toward my office. The storm was blowing up fast. Thunder was rumbling across the now night sky as I reached my building on Twenty-eight Street, and the first heavy drops came down. By the time I got to my office door, the sky opened, and the torrent poured down the airshaft outside my open window. I hurried in to close my window, and the hands grabbed me.

  At least four pairs of hands. A bag went over my head. I started to throw off the hands. Something poked into my back. A gun or a stick? I wasn’t about to find out the hard way. I stopped struggling. A voice whispered close:

  “Get him down, quick!”

  I was walked, hustled, out of my door and down the stairs toward the street and the torrent of rain. I heard a lot of feet, and a lot of low, hard whispering. There was something familiar about it all—the grim guerrilla band. Kidnapping the important official. The bag over my head, the urgings to speed, the pell-mell flight down the stairs into the rain—like an IRA unit in action, the Brazilian political rebels. Too many newspapers, too many old movies.

  I was soaked when they shoved me into a car. We drove off, drove for some time with the rain pounding on the roof of the car. An old car, the engine wheezing and the chassis creaking. A lot of turns around corners, right and left, and after a time I began to sense that we were driving around in circles, going a few blocks, then doubling back. Under the wet bag, I couldn’t know whether they were circling to evade a tail, or just to try to confuse me, but I had a sudden hunch that when we stopped we would not be too far from my office.

  We stopped. They pushed me out into the rain and an odd silence. All I could hear was the rain falling on something like thick grass or bushes, and cars hissing through the wet on some kind of highway. I was walked along some narrow path with an odor like hay, and down some narrow space between walls where the rain echoed in the night.

  Then we were inside, the sound of the rain shut out and yet reverberating in a kind of emptiness. Footsteps on bare wood. Up stairs that creaked loosely. Two flights, and into a room on the third floor that smelled of stale cooking, musty plaster, and something burning. I was pushed down into a chair. The bag came off my head.

  The first thing I saw were two candles burning in fruit-jar tops. They stood on orange crates, and were the only light in the long, dim-shadowed room. The windows of the room were covered by blankets, the heavy rain muffled outside in the night. I saw a long wooden table piled with empty cans, dirty dishes, and blackened Sterno cans. I saw mattresses on the bare floor, each mattress in a separated section with ragged clothes hanging on nails. The defined little areas like small rooms; one set of clean, sharp, gaudy dress clothes hanging in each section. I saw a television set all by itself along one bare wall like an idol on an altar. I saw four pale, unhealthy faces, and hungry, half-sane eyes, watching me from the candle-lit shadows. And I saw Charlie Burgos sitting on an orange crate in front of me.

  “Why’d they let the Chinaman go, Fortune?” Charlie said.

  “They found the stolen stuff, Jimmy Sung never had it. He’s clear. Why, Charlie? Where do you fit?”

  “I ask the questions, Fortune.”

  Too much TV, too many movies. The manner, the dialogue, of every tough guy who snarled his way through the cameras between commercials. With TV, anyone can know in an hour the way an FBI man, a Mafia soldier, or a Corsican bandit talks, looks, and acts. What no one can know from TV is why the Corsican acts as he does, how he got that way, what he feels inside. To know that is life, not television, and these kids did not know life beyond the slum streets and the hovels of their parents. An imitation, a surface ritual, that depended on the proper responses to maintain it. I wasn’t about to play.

  “Crap,” I said. “You didn’t rob the shop, Charlie. You wouldn’t have dumped the loot. But you were at the shop that night. Why? Money? Some scheme? Did you give Eugene Marais too much? He could have hurt you? So you killed him?”

  Charlie Burgos was up. “No way! I swear—!”

  Automatic. This was real, an accusation
. He had been accused all his life, and he reacted—protesting. Weak, a zero in the real world, and the weak can only protest, plead their innocence before power. Forgetting for the moment that in the dim room he was supposed to be the power, that he had me. The ritual lost for an instant. Then remembered, the script back.

  “Back off, Fortune. You got nothing. We got you.”

  What else did the street kids know? What did they have to do with their time? A dreary past, a hungry present, and no future at all. Today would always be the same, unless it got worse, until they died. For one reason or another, for each of them this room was home. Parents who could give them nothing. Afraid of organizations, because, for them, all organizations turned into a man with a whip. Their only view of the bigger world from their depths was, like Gorky’s bakers in their cellar, a single small window—the television set. They dealt with the bigger reality through the surface imitation of television, faced the tiger through its shadow.

  I said, “Where do you fit, Charlie?”

  “My business,” he said, sat down. “The cops got any leads?”

  “Ask them.”

  Another boy said, “We got you, we ask you, mister.”

  “Shut up,” Charlie Burgos said, the boss. “The cops’re nowhere. Maybe you got some ideas who killed the old man, Fortune?”

  “You’re worried, Charlie?”

  “I got no worries. No problems at all.”

  “Danielle?” I said. “Maybe you know something about her? Her own father, you know?”

  Charlie Burgos laughed. “Man, you’re sure crazy.”

  “He didn’t like you much, Charlie. Not for her.”

  “Hell, the old man was Jell-O, you know? No problem.”

  “How about Paul Manet?”

  Charlie Burgos’s face was bland. “What about him?”

  “Manet and Danielle, maybe? Eugene Marais didn’t like that? A fight, maybe? An accident? Maybe that’s your interest in the thing, Danielle was dumping you for Paul Manet? You—”

  “Danielle don’t dump me for anyone. You’re way off,” the youth said, leaned toward me in the dim room. “Look, the old man was knocked over in a two-bit grab-and-run. Happens all the time in hock shops, right? Danielle and me we got plans, okay? She got to get something now the old man’s dead. Only everyone’s nosing around, and Danielle don’t like that. You got her old lady paying you through the nose. That’s money out of our pockets. For nothing. Whyn’t you let the fuzz handle it, okay?”