The gendarme—not the one who had read the statement, but one who had questioned Rydal the night before, following the boulevard Haussmann rendezvous—asked Rydal, “Is it true that you saw MacFarland in the hotel corridor with the body of the Greek agent?”
“Yes.”
“You had known MacFarland before?”
“No,” Rydal said.
“You met him at that moment in the corridor? Quite by accident?”
“Yes.”
“And he threatened to accuse you if you should betray him?”
The question had a faintly skeptical note, as well it might. “He had also a gun in his pocket,” Rydal said. “The agent’s gun. He wanted me to help him carry the body to the service closet. And then—after I had done this—I felt myself guilty of being an accessory after the fact.”
The gendarme nodded. “Ah, yes. This must be noted, however. Your attitude. Of course.” He studied the papers in his hands.
Rydal knew he had told a half lie. But Chester had told a whole one, one that fairly cleared him. Chester’s lie would save him. It was a case of both of them lying, in a sense. Rydal had lied by omitting the murder story in Athens, saying he had met the Chamberlains only on Crete. To the police, that omission would appear as an effort to hide the fact he had been an accessory. Only he himself, Rydal thought, would ever know or believe that he had omitted that Hotel King’s Palace incident as much to save Chester from a murder charge as to save himself from the charge of being an accessory. Rydal did not know as yet, couldn’t know with the five gendarmes in the tiny cell with him, how his lie would sit on his conscience.
The gendarme looked at Rydal thoughtfully. “It is your attitude in Athens after the death of Mrs. MacFarland that is not clear. You were forty-eight hours in Athens. You have said that you obtained your false passport from the same source that MacFarland obtained his Wedekind passport, and you learned from this source that his new name was Wedekind. Yet you did nothing about it. He was stopping at the Hotel El Greco. If you had told the police his name—” The gendarme shrugged. “But on the contrary, you remained silent and obtained for yourself a false passport.”
“At that point,” Rydal said, “I was in a worse position than before. He had said he would accuse me of killing his wife, and he did accuse me to the police in Athens. The police were then looking for me. As I pointed out before, there were no witnesses to what happened. It would have been my word against his, and the Knossos ticket-seller had seen me running from the palace grounds.”
“Ah?” doubtfully. “But MacFarland was so afraid, as Chamberlain, that he changed his name to Wedekind. Wasn’t he afraid of you?”
“Yes,” Rydal agreed firmly. “He knew I . . . I detested him because he had killed Colette. His wife. He knew I was upset. He was afraid I would go to the police in Athens and tell them what really happened. I could have gone farther back, you see, and told them about MacFarland, too. It was no wonder he wanted to disappear from me.”
“But you did not make a move.”
“Monsieur—I was in love, and she was dead.” Rydal said it with conviction. It was true. It was true enough. Impossible to explain, to the bureaucratic mind, the intricacies of his emotions in regard to Chester, in regard to Colette.
“You will have to be more formally interrogated than this,” said the gendarme. “I shall see if it can be arranged this afternoon—late. Meanwhile, I am afraid you must stay here.”
They all left his cell, and locked it again. Rydal sat down on his cot. He stared at his old brown suitcase that had been in the Hotel Montmorency. At least they had fetched that for him and given it to him, and his passport was in it still.
The interrogation that afternoon took place at dusk in a building several streets away. Some eight men were present, jurists, gendarmes, clerks. The facts were treated like hard stones, picked up and examined and tossed down. The result was a zigzagging and inaccurate pattern, it seemed to Rydal, and yet in every crucial area, he was cleared. He did not by any means emerge a hero, nor did his behavior appear very intelligent, but none of his actions was labeled criminal. None except the least of them, to Rydal, the obtaining of the false Italian passport, merited even a mild term of opprobrium in the view of the assembled officials. For this he was to pay a fine to the Italian government. He was released with a request to go to the French Consulate General to have his passport put in order; that was, a stamp saying he was legally in the country.
Rydal spoke to the gendarme who had questioned him in the cell. “I suppose MacFarland will be buried in Marseille? Or were there any arrangements made for his body to be taken to the United States?”
The gendarme gave a big shrug with arms outstretched.
“Would you find out for me, please? Could you call Marseille?”
Back at the station where Rydal had stayed overnight, the gendarme called Marseille. Chester’s body was to be buried the following morning early in a potter’s field outside Marseille. For an instant, Rydal saw it, a wooden box carelessly dropped into a pit, probably in a drizzling rain, probably under the bored eyes of an officer or two, the minimum of witnesses required by law, impatient to get away. No friends, no mourners, not a single chrysanthemum, the traditional flower at French burials. Chester deserved more than that.
“Why are you interested?” asked the gendarme.
“I thought I might go to the funeral—or whatever it is,” Rydal said. He had to go. No question. Rydal looked at the gendarme’s puzzled face. “Yes. I’m going,” he said.
The Two Faces of January Page 28
