“Now you sound like Mussolini,” d’Inde said.
“I admire him,” Montaigne said blandly.
A murmur of surprise came from some at the table.
“More to the point of practicality,” the General interposed, “why not admire Hitler? Someday you may be able to bring him up alive.”
Young Montaigne glowered at him, his soft good looks shrouded in fury. “I deny that those two men are comparable—in any way whatever.”
The General shook his head, amused to have provoked such contention on an issue he considered not merely academic, but dead. He wondered if Montaigne were serious or simply without humour.
“Virginia,” he said, turning to her when a murmur of conversation resumed, “do you know that young man?”
“Leo?” she said. “Of course I do. He’s my boyfriend.”
It was remarkable, the General thought, sitting back and taking a long drink of his wine, how quickly a duck could turn out to be a drake.
“Only I’ll tell you the honest truth, Ransom, he’s a little young for me,” she added after a moment.
“He’s a little young for me, too,” the General said dryly. But he tightened the muscles in his arms and relaxed them just to be sure they were working. He could think of several blisters he would have liked to deliver at the moment to his host and hostess for such arrangements. If they had drawn their guests by lot they could not have been more ill assorted.
“Where were you thinking of us going, Ransom? I mean, instead of going to the ball?”
“I had no place special in mind,” he said, “and I suppose we should put in an appearance there.”
“Why?”
“Protocol, you might say.”
“Oh,” she said. “I thought maybe it was on account of Leo.”
“Certainly not.”
“’Cause he won’t be there.”
“Oh?”
“Don’t you know the Club Sentimentale?”
“No.”
“That’s Leo’s place. I sing for him sometimes.”
“I thought you told me you were a nurse these days,” the General said.
“Honey, I do that in my spare time.” She smiled at him dazzlingly. “Singing, I mean, naturally. I don’t have a very good voice really, but it’s full of nostalgia. You know what I mean?” Beneath the elegant damask tablecloth her dainty little hand found his and lingered but a persuasive second.
“Unequivocally,” he said.
“I’m my own mistress, Ransom,” she went on, “and I’ll tell you the honest truth: I’d love to spend an evening in the company of an older man.”
The “honest truth” again gave him pause. The truth was one thing, but to have to be honest about it—it was like a naked nude, just too much of a good thing.
“Do you have an automobile, Ransom?”
“I drive a Jaguar,” he said loftily.
“Oh, Ransom, do you? I think they’re absolutely sexy.”
7
JIMMIE AND HELENE ARRIVED at the ball early, hoping in that way to depart early, inconspicuously. It was the first Washington function at which he had not been among the available younger men, and he was very popular among the hostesses—his politics, his family, his fortune being irresistible recommendations. Consequently, his fashionable acquaintance gave Helene a severe scrutiny.
“I can take it,” she said. “After all, I started public life as a model.”
Jimmie frowned a little.
Helene laughed. “If I didn’t know the heart under that stuffed shirt, Jimmie, I’d be devastated.”
“It’s not stuffed. It’s stiff, that’s all. My stiff upper shirt.”
“Something every congressman must have, no doubt,” Helene said.
“Absolutely.”
“Would you like me to tell you why?”
“All right,” he said. “You tell me why.”
“It’s something you can’t wash in public.”
Jimmie looked at her in pained dismay. “Don’t you think we had better dance?”
It was a lovely, long, spiralling waltz into which he took her in full sail. The floor was all but given over to them for the stately command of their dancing. There was something about a waltz, Jimmie remarked at its end, that made chaperons expendable: if a couple danced it well, they need pass no other test of propriety. All the elegant old girls nodded approvingly upon the congressman and his friend; she was now quite acceptable.
“I wonder where Father is,” Jimmie said. The music had stopped as they neared the great doors, and Jimmie saw Secretary Chatterton and Mrs. Senator Grace Chisholm and Henri d’Inde. Jimmie would have liked to divert Helene from the Frenchman’s line of vision. Too late. He came with as much haste as he could, having to steer the senator with him.
D’Inde made all the introductions.
“You look like a midwesterner, girl,” the senator said.
Helene smiled. “My ancestors came from there.”
“Now isn’t that a switch?” Grace Chisholm said. “Mine came from New England. What about yours, Congressman?”
“New York State,” Jimmie said. D’Inde was asking Helene to dance, of course.
“Which side of the Hudson?”
“The American side,” Jimmie said, which was rather tart for him; more like his father. Unlike his father, he attempted to atone immediately. “May I have the next dance, Senator?” He had never heard anything that sounded more ridiculous, a man saying May I have the next dance, Senator? More to the point: choose your weapons, sir!
“Bless you, Jarvis, I haven’t danced since corn-shucking time of ’45. The Japanese had just surrendered and I knew my boys were coming home safe.” For an instant the eyes, normally clear and wide as a prairie sky, clouded. Then the senator frowned. She nodded toward the door and said, “And between you and me, sir, I think the next time I dance is going to be at the political demise of the junior senator from a neighbouring state of mine.”
Jimmie followed the direction of her gaze. Senator Fagan had just arrived. “I hope I’ll be here to dance with you, Senator,” he said, and walked her toward the palms. “You haven’t by any chance seen my father since dinner?”
“Your father?” The senator stopped and looked at him.
“General Ransom Jarvis,” Jimmie said, not without inner qualms at the look he was getting from her.
“No, sir, not since dinner,” she said curtly. “I can go on from here myself, Congressman. Thank you.”
Oh, Lord, Jimmie thought, what has he done now? He stood at the edge of the ballroom floor, his hands behind his back, and looked over the dancers. His father had always been a great one for dancing. Oh, damn his father! He was not his keeper. Still, he would like to know who else had attended the Chatterton dinner party. He gradually became aware that a few paces off, Senator Fagan was doing the same thing he was, standing, his hands in his pockets, surveying the dancers. Jimmie wondered if it was his imagination that suggested a tension in the room, an automatous quality coming over the dance. What was the power of this man? What lay behind the dark, sneering eyes, the contemptuous grin of one who seemed himself to enjoy trouble and therefore felt it his duty to create it for others? His following was considerable and, no less than most men’s following, with honest people among it: his man, Tom Hennessy, thought Fagan was great.
Of one thing Jimmie was sure: the spontaneity had gone out of the ball with Fagan’s arrival. And still he stood, rocking back and forth, as though waiting. Jimmie could feel his own nerves go taut. Why? Why could one man’s watching do this—and to honest men? Or were not perhaps the honest even more vulnerable? Were they not the innocent bystanders who lost their innocence standing by? Oh, damn Fagan, too! He wasn’t his keeper either!
But Fagan then did something that really set his nerves on edge: as Helene and d’Inde passed close to him, dancing toward Jimmie, the senator turned his head and watched them right to the point where they left the dance floor to join Jimmie. He contin
ued to stare while d’Inde took a handkerchief from his pocket, wiped his hands, his brow and his upper lip. Their dancing had not been that strenuous. Fagan grinned, shrugged, and turned elsewhere.
“What’s the matter with d’Inde?” Jimmie said when he and Helene were alone.
“I don’t know. Terribly tense, and he wasn’t this afternoon.”
“Why isn’t he home with his wife and seven children?”
Helene countered quite tellingly: “I understand your father was smitten tonight.”
“With what?” said Jimmie, as though he didn’t know.
“Something blonde and … oh, you know.”
If he didn’t know, he should have, Jimmie thought. “Do you know her name?”
“Virginia Allan.”
“Does she sing ballads?” he said hopefully.
“Blues,” Helene said throatily. “I understand she sings in a club.”
“What the devil is Chatterton doing, having someone like that to dinner?” Jimmie exploded. Helene shook her head. “I suppose I knew from the night he came to tell me they were retiring him,” Jimmie said. “I knew something like this would happen.”
“I think it’s charming,” Helene said. “I’ve never known a man to maintain so romantic a household as you do. Your secretary is quite handsome, by the way. I meant to tell you.”
“When did you meet her?”
“Him,” Helene corrected.
Jimmie thought for a moment. “Hennessy?”
“He brought me your flowers this afternoon, dear.”
“The Irish rogue! I told him to have them sent. And he’s not my secretary. I doubt if he can sign his own name.”
“I shouldn’t be surprised if he can sign yours though,” Helene said. “He has the same sort of devilry about him that your father has, and an eye for art—though perhaps not for its own sake. Henri spoke to him rather severely.”
“Henri was there for art’s sake, of course,” Jimmie said.
“Darling, is that Senator Fagan?”
“Yes.”
“He has fascinating eyes, hasn’t he?”
Jimmie came very close to saying something vulgar. Instead, he danced. Almost everyone did, at least one dance, in the course of the evening. But not Senator Fagan. He merely stood on the side and watched, a twitch of a grin now and then on his face. Senator Chisholm remarked he was like a carnival shill. Occasionally he would jerk his head in greeting to someone he recognized; but very few people felt more comfortable for the protective gaze he cast upon them.
It was almost midnight when the commotion started. Jimmie and Helene heard first that someone had fainted, then that it was Under Secretary of State Chatterton’s wife, then that it had happened when someone showed her a copy of a morning newspaper; the rumours flowed out from the vicinity of the unfortunate woman like circles in a pond from a flung stone.
Jimmie finally got hold of a copy of the newspaper. It was the early edition of the Washington Journal, and in it, headlined, was Senator Fagan’s latest exposé: at one of the gold-plate dinners preceding the Beaux Arts Ball, a dinner hosted by a prominent member of the State Department, at least four of the twelve people present were known security risks or subversives.
Jimmie sought out Senator Chisholm. “Who are the four? Do you know whom he means?”
“You’re looking at one right now,” the senator said, “for all I know. He’s the first farmer I ever knew didn’t look which way the wind was blowing before he pitched manure.”
The senator was kind enough then to recall for him the names of the Chatterton’s guests.
“Most of them aren’t even in government service,” Jimmie said. “By heavens, I’m going to confront him right now, and see what he has to say about Father.”
“You’d better hurry, Congressman, if you think you can catch up with his carrion.”
For just an instant, Jimmie was prompted by her bitterness to wonder how vulnerable Senator Chisholm really was. Then he cursed himself for having caught the infection. But that was what it was like throughout the great domed ballroom, throughout the capital city itself, old friends sudden unsuspecting suspects, each to the other, and no one so touched, however fleetingly, ever quite innocent again.
Jimmie looked everywhere for Senator Fagan, going finally to the men’s cloakroom. The senator had left the ball a few moments earlier.
8
NOT LONG AFTER LEAVING the Chatterton dinner the General and Miss Virginia Allan sped out of the city and into the Virginia hills. The air was clear and crisp, the moon full. Virginia was bundled in furs, not quite expensive, but not quite cheap either. The General, as was his custom driving, wore a great wool scarf around his neck. They were in the country, he mused, where the Civil War might have been earlier won with boldness, or early lost by rashness. Lincoln’s commander then was neither bold nor rash, merely ambitious. At times, General Jarvis realized, he was himself in danger of being rash, and he was now weighing certain intimations of possible disaster. Like any military man, he did not trust the promise of easy conquest.
“Ransom, you drive like a cavalier, I do declare.”
The farther south they got, the more southern did Miss Allan become, he noticed. But why not? After all, this was her country. It was her cabin in the hills toward which they were heading. Just how she happened to have a cabin in the hills, he did not care to contemplate. Maybe she had a pappy there with a shotgun. A fine scandal in the making there! But he thought not. Whoever, whatever she was, she was not the “pappy” type.
He laid his hand on hers where it snuggled in her lap. “Thank you, my dear, for the compliment.”
“What’s that little knob for, Ransom?” She disengaged her hand gently and pointed to the dashboard.
He explained. In fact, in twenty miles he had spent ten of them explaining the operational ways of the Jaguar. But some women were like that. It wasn’t that they wanted the information at all, but that they thought it flattered a man to ask it of him. Or else they wanted to keep him talking. He doubted that to be Virginia’s purpose.
“It’s the next right turn, Ransom.”
He slowed the Jaguar down to a growl, and turned onto a small wooden bridge.
“Oh, Ransom, I’m sorry, honey,” she cried. “This isn’t it. I make this mistake all the time. It’s a little way yonder, our turn.”
“Which way is yonder?” He threw the car into reverse.
“Like we were going. There, see that road?”
It occurred to the General that this might have been as good a way as any to signal ahead to someone looking out for their coming. His service revolver was under the driver’s seat, but where the devil was he to carry it on his person, wearing tails? It was one way for a man to shoot his brains out, presuming them to be where the General had begun to think his were this night.
“I got the most beautiful view, Ransom.”
He looked down at her, wondering if she was reading his mind at that instant.
“From my cabin. You’ll love it in the moonlight.”
“That’s what I’m looking forward to, Virginia, that beautiful view in the moonlight.”
“I want to hear just everything about your career, Ransom. We haven’t begun to discover one another, have we?”
“Certainly not.”
“You said you were in the war, didn’t you?”
“Mmmm.”
“Did you have some—experiences?”
“Mmmmm.”
“With—foreigners?”
The General spared her a quick glance. “About which war are you inquiring, my dear?”
The Jaguar seemed to be shinnying up a washboard. It banished conversation. Then they reached a plateau, the road levelling off and disappearing. Before them an unlit cabin huddled in the moonlight, seeming to start up like something alive when the car’s lights flashed onto the glass of the windows.
“There!” Virginia said. “This is my little house.”
It looked fol
ksy enough to have hovelled a president, the General thought.
The Jaguar nosed up to it like a hound dog. “Steady, boy,” the General murmured.
Virginia waited for him to get out and come around the car to open the door for her. The demand on his gallantry settled the matter of whether or not to take his service revolver with him. It was an altogether foolish notion anyway, he thought, once out in the still night beauty. The fresh green smell of spring was in the air, and then he caught a scent that took him quite a long way back in memory, to summers he had once spent on a farm: it was the acrid smell of silage—chopped, fermented corn. Unless, by God, “pappy” ran a still!
Virginia gave him the key to the cabin door. As soon as he opened it, a dark, smoky fireplace odour pervaded.
“I reckon I should have my chimney cleaned,” she said. “But every spring there’s a family of thrushes settle in there, and I can’t bear to trouble them.”
The electric lamps, as she went from one to another, illuminated a room which looked much cosier than it felt, and it had not been decorated with the airy flounces he expected of Virginia Allan. In fact, he would take his oath it had been done with the strong, square taste of a long-legged man. What the hell had he expected? Decidedly he was beginning to feel a little shoddy about the whole enterprise.
“Shall I make a fire?” the General suggested more cheerfully than his spirits warranted.
“Not in the fireplace!”
“Where, then, would you suggest, my dear?”
“It’s going to be comfy any minute now, Ransom, I just turned the heat on.”
You did that a couple of hours ago, he thought, but he said, “Electricity?”
Virginia nodded. “Terribly extravagant of me, isn’t it?”
“Depends,” the General said. “Depends entirely.” And there he let the matter stand.
“You just go in the kitchen, Ransom, and fix us a nice drink while I get into something comfy.”
He wished to God he could get into something comfy. It sure as hell wouldn’t be a log cabin. But he bumbled his way into the kitchen, and discovered a fine assortment of whiskies and brandies. He could feel the radiant heat edging out from the corners, and he began to get a better perspective on things. Considerably to his pleasure, when Virginia reappeared she was wearing—not the obvious, well, not the obvious obvious—but a skirt and cashmere sweater.
Old Sinners Never Die (The Mrs. Norris Mysteries Book 3) Page 4
