I could trace the taste of bile in my mouth. It was harsh and bitter and yet it was welcome, a part of the relief that speaking my mind had brought. There was no sense of insincerity, hardly any realisation that part at least of what I had said had been a tremendous bluff. At last I had turned on an enemy and attacked.
Even then, of course, Lieutenant Trant, being Lieutenant Trant, gave me no chance to savour my victory. Meekly, with every symptom of being completely chastened, he sat there in the chair, his lips drooping in a rueful smile.
“Well, Mr. Denham, all I can say is that you have shaken me. Considerably shaken me, because you’ve hit on a very sensitive spot. You see, it is most important to me to feel that in my job I handle people—well, with grace. To think that I’ve given you the impression of—of deviousness, of playing what you call a game of cat and mouse! I can assure you that nothing was further from my intention. But … well, I’m sorry. All I can say is I am deeply sorry.”
Much as I would have relished accepting that grovel at its face value, he had made it perfectly obvious that every word had been spoken in mockery.
He got up from the chair then. He folded his coat over his arm and started for the door. Something in the carriage of his neck, as I saw it from the back, warned me that the victory I had thought I had won had been completely illusory.
I was right once more. He turned at the door.
“I’ll remember what you said about evidence, Mr. Denham. There is, as it happens, one little thing, one very little thing. You see, I went back to Esmeralda this morning and asked her to identify something from your apartment.”
With one hand still on the doorknob, he felt with the other in his pocket. He came out with a small circular object which he held up for me to inspect.
It was a black overcoat button.
“Esmeralda thought, Mr. Denham, that this might very well be a button from Mr. Olsen’s overcoat—the missing overcoat. Of course, it’s almost impossible for anyone to make positive identification of an ordinary metal black button. And yet, on the other hand, if it turns out to be a French button …”
He opened the door.
“Good-bye, Mr. Denham.”
The door closed behind him.
After he’d gone, I sat at the desk, thinking about him, remembering him, with hatred, in our living room, leaning forward, martini in hand, spilling the little pile of buttons with such an elaborately accidental clumsiness. “Ooops!” Should I call Virginia and warn her that the enemy had moved yet another step closer? No. What was the point of making it worse for her. Wait until I’d found out at least something to counterweigh Trant. The Lerchikovs.
I didn’t call the Pierre. My frustrated rage against Trant had transferred itself to the Prince and Princess. Why give them any warning of attack? This was no longer a contest in which the rules of sportsmanship applied. I picked up the box of flowers and, going into the outer office, told Mary to cancel my morning appointments.
I walked to the Pierre, which was only a few blocks away. I ignored the house phones. I went up in an elevator as padded and mahoganied as a Greek shipping magnate’s coffin. I waded through wall-to-wall carpeting to the door of the Lerchikovs’ suite. From inside I could hear the sound of rather faltering Chopin. I rang the buzzer. The music stopped. I rang again. Then Princess Natasha’s voice, high and imperious, clearly imagining a maid, called, “Entrez!”
I might at one time have found it charming that the Princess should feel it unnecessary to descend to English for a simple American serving wench. Now it seemed merely affected, and my anger found its focus. Who the hell did they think they were, these relics from a way of life which had been liquidated by the noose and the firing squad half a century ago? From where did they get the gall to be tossing Uncle Gene’s dollars around in a luxurious hotel suite, just because they had graciously consented to let their granddaughter marry into “une famille de l’Amérique du Nord, assez riche, vous savez, mais—zut, un tout petit peu bourgeoise quand même”?
I rang again, and Princess Natasha opened the door.
She was so pretty that her first impact as always jolted me. She must have been almost seventy but the structure was still intact—bones as delicate as dove’s bones, quick hands on tiny wrists, blonde hair still shiny as a girl’s, with a little girl’s bright blue eyes and a little girl’s tip-tilted nose. You could imagine her running, the hair streaming behind her, from room to room in some enormous Muscovite palace, hunting behind silk pillows and huge Winterhalter family portraits for the Fabergé Easter eggs hidden for her by her doting Papa. By contrast she made even Tanya seem lumpish and peasanty.
She was wearing a white wrapper with a swirl of maribou feathers at the neck (charged to Uncle Gene at Bonwit’s?). When she saw me, her hands fluttered affectionately to my arms, drawing me into the suite.
“Is Lewis, is our poor Lewis. No. Do not worry. I know. I hear. They tell me. You poor boy. You poor dear boy.” She was pulling me down the foyer towards the sitting room, calling, “Vladimir, Vladimir, guess who comes? Is Lewis. Our poor Lewis.” And the eyes, blue as the summer seas in the Crimea, quivered their lashes at me. “Do not worry. They tell me. They call. The Hugo. Oh, you poor dear boy. Your pretty new wife. Quel désastre.”
The Hugo! I might have known the Hugo would have been on the phone. It was uncanny how corporate they were. They weren’t individuals any of them. They had built themselves into a sort of multi-headed, multi-limbed monster—the Denhams.
What was that dragon in Greek mythology with the hundred heads? The Hydra. Well, it had been successfully slaughtered, hadn’t it?
The sitting-room was in full view now. I looked tautly for the strelitzias. There they still were, just as I had remembered them, orange and spiky on the piano behind the French Provincial couch. But there were masses of other flowers too, sent presumably by Tanya and Uncle Gene. Suddenly, what had seemed so positive to me in Constance Spry lost all its certainty. How could I have been so brash as to assume, with no evidence at all, that Esmeralda’s strelitzias were these strelitzias? And yet … They had been two dollars a stalk. If there were ten stalks …
I finished counting them just as we stepped across the threshold. There were ten.
Prince Vladimir was wearing a blue brocade robe, suggesting Metternich at some informal moment of backstairs wheelerdealing at the Congress of Vienna. He was seated by a breakfast table covered with silver dishes, plates and glasses, all of them, I noticed, empty, for the Prince and Princess were fond of their food. Thin to emaciation, with his Paderewski shock of white hair, Prince Vladimir was leaning forward, gazing with a child’s intensity at a colour television set on which for a moment a girl held up a box of detergent only to turn into a group of dancing cartoon gnomes as he pushed a button on the remote-control box in his hand.
“Vladimir, look!” said Princess Natasha, unnecessarily, it seemed to me, since I was standing directly in front of him. “Here is Lewis.”
Prince Vladimir pressed another button and got Roy Rogers or somebody galloping. Petulantly, like a baby with a disappointing rattle, he snapped down the OFF button and dropped the contraption on the floor.
“Gunmen!” he said. “Gunmen and prostitutes.” A reference, presumably, to the girl with the detergent. “The land of the free? The land of the gunmen and the prostitutes. And breakfast fit only for pigs.”
He was in one of his “Isn’t America lucky to have us?” moods. I thought of their cramped little apartment in Lausanne with its photographs of the Czar and various Queens of Spain and the smell of somebody else’s sauerkraut trailing up from the floor below, and it occurred to me how ideally suited the Lerchikovs were as victims for the Olsens of the world. Their whole economy was based on the exploitation of Uncle Gene and, snob though he was, Uncle Gene demanded from his tame titles behaviour as exemplary as he demanded from the Denhams themselves. If Olsen had caught them out in something, one word to Uncle Gene would have cut them off forever from their fav
ouritie pastime of condemning the American way of life in eighty-dollar-a-day American suites, on American yachts and American Caribbean villas.
Of course I was right about them. Then trust the hunch. And be tough. Don’t be distracted by the insidious enchantment of Princess Natasha.
She was hovering around the flowers now, letting her laugh tinkle.
“Oh, Vladimir, the dear boy. He brings a gift. Gifts! They make me again the little girl.”
She took the box and opened it. As she folded back the tissue paper inside, I said, “I brought strelitzias because I thought the ones Quentin Olsen brought you would be dead by now. But”—I pointed to the table—“I see they’re still as good as new.”
That remark had ruined whatever it was the Princess had been planning to say. Her face had started a smile but instantaneously it was changed into a pout of pretty bewilderment. It reminded me of Prince Vladimir pushing the television buttons.
“Olsen?” she echoed. “What is this Olsen? Ah yes, of course. The fleuriste fiom whom come the flowers.” The smile was back again as she scooped the strelitzias out of the box and cradled them decoratively against the silk wrapper. “How big are your American fleuristes! And how chic, mon Dieu! But alas, les violettes américaines—they have no scent.”
She was moving away from me. She reached the piano and started with little cries of pleasure to add my strelitzias to Olsen’s. Did she really believe that by pretending something hadn’t been said it would automatically be rendered unsaid? Probably. Probably that was what blue blood did to you. Probably the Czar even at Tsarskoe Selo had never got around to remembering Lenin’s name correctly.
I glanced at Prince Vladimir. He was merely looking noble and slightly plaintive. But that was typical too. If the name Olsen had registered, it wouldn’t have occurred to him that he should do anything about it. He was too used to letting the Princess cope with a world which had become so proletariat as to be far beneath his notice.
It was extraordinary how effective their attitude was. In spite of myself, they had made me feel crass and ham-handed, as if I were some shambling serf from the stables who had been graciously invited into one of the lesser reception rooms of the palace for a glass of tea on his Saint’s Day.
I said, “You know who Olsen is, Princess.”
“Olsen?” she twittered. “Olsen. Always you speak from this Olsen. What is then this Olsen? A chauffeur perhaps from your Uncle Gene who brings the flowers? Or perhaps from Tanya?” She stood back from her handiwork. “There. Look! How pretty!”
Luckily, that annoyed me enough so that all vestiges of “proper respect” were shorn away.
I said, “Quentin Olsen was a well-known blackmailer who was murdered two nights ago. The day before, around eleven-thirty, just a short while before I came here to lunch, in fact, Quentin Olsen came to see you with those flowers.” Just to make it stronger, because I put nothing past her, I embroidered. “There’s no doubt about it at all. The elevator man remembers him distinctly. He even waited at the elevator until Olsen had reached your door. So let’s get this over with once and for all. What was he blackmailing you about? You’d better tell me unless you’d prefer me to turn the whole matter over to the police.”
“Lewis!”
Princess Natasha had been preparing to add a few of the strelitzia sprays to a huge vase of blue and yellow iris. She dropped the sprays then and stood so still that she could almost have been turned to porcelain. I glanced at Prince Vladimir to see what damage had been done in that department. Confronted by a situation whose vulgarity was far too appalling for ears such as his, he had fled to the only available refuge. He had dropped back in his chair and was pressing one of the remote-control television buttons. The high piping voices of a group of little girls started singing the praises of somebody’s cake mix.
“Lewis!” said Princess Natasha again. She had made a remarkable recovery. Very calmly, she moved to her favourite couch and sat down, folding her hands in her lap, crossing her tiny feet in front of her—the darling child unjustly accused of pulling her sister’s hair in the nursery. “Lewis! What a thing do you say? Blackmail? What is this blackmail? C’est le chantage, n’est-ce pas?”
“Oui,” I said, “c’est le chantage.”
The pretty bewilderment was now grotesquely overdone. She craned her neck towards the Prince.
“Vladimir, you hear?” This seemed unlikely since the cake-mix tots were still piping their heads off. “Oh, Lewis, what a thought! What a thought! Le chantage! That man? That great man with the red hair and the big, big hands … so … so … degoûtant!”
I said, “You don’t have to identify him. We both know him.”
“But Olsen? Is his name? Olsen? You think we know the name of such a man? Such a person who pushes in. Who is it? How do we know? Who is this person, pushing in and saying : Look, I bring you flowers, please listen to me.”
“You mean,” I said, utterly unconvinced, “that you never saw him before he came here?”
“See him before? You think we know such people as that? Pouff. What companies you think we keep? He say … Oh yes … He say, Princess Lerchikov, you know from me. You remember from me. I am playing at the piano when you stay in Antigua. This you remember, Princess. Remember? He thinks we remember? Some man who sits playing at the piano? Who does he think we are? Teen-agers, bobby-soxers who sit and go whee-whee—with their jazzmen?”
Even the most stable-smelling serf could have seen through that. Of course she’d known perfectly well that Olsen had been the pianist from the Beach Club in St. John. Almost certainly she knew much, much more, but at least that was plain.
“I say to him …” she was talking with great emphasis now as if she were sure that firmness of tone guaranteed honesty—“I say to him, All right. You play at the piano in Antigua? All right. You say we know you? All right. I say that, did I not, Vladimir? So what, I say, is this coming with flowers? And he says to me—he was standing just where you are standing now—and he say, Please, is for money.”
She seemed completely to have forgotten that only a few moments before she had denied that he had been there at all. Probably that was the blue blood too. She had found the story she wanted me to believe, so it was up to me to ignore everything that had gone before.
“He asked you for money?” I said.
“For money. Oh, what a sad story. It is like the peasants in the old country—always the story is so sad. The poor old grandmother dies. The pretty young daughter is once more again ravished. Quelle tragédie. Always the same. And from him? Oh, he must leave the country quick, at once. Enemies have said bad things for him. He must go—quick, but how without the money? And we—because he sees us in Antigua, sees that we are so kind, so pleins de coeur, we must give the money. We must give please one thousand dollar.” She raised her voice to compete with the television. “Is that not so, Vladimir? You remember? The man who came—that brutish man with the flowers? The man who say to give one thousand dollar?”
Her story had become so ridiculous that it was hardly worth the time to refute it. And yet, through the patent falsehoods, I could glimpse little bits of reality. If Sheila had been telling the truth, Olsen’s predicament could well have been grave. Ray Callender had given him twenty-four hours to leave the country. He would have had to clear up any unfinished business in a hurry.
That was it, of course.
The Princess’s blue eyes were watching me with such simple trust in her own powers of deception that I almost hated disillusioning her.
I said, “What you mean is that Olsen had been blackmailing you ever since Antigua. He had to get out of the country on the run so he came to squeeze one last payment out of you.”
Her eyes were so wide-open now that I felt the actual eyeballs would drop out of their sockets to lie on the floor revealing what I had always suspected, that they were made out of exquisite white and lapis-lazuli china.
“Lewis, you do not believe me!”
“I’m sorry.”
“But, Lewis, my dear, what do you think from us? That we are bad people, bad wicked people who do things—oh, so wrong? Vladimir? Who is equerry to the Czar Nicolai Nicolaievitch? And me? Living so quiet, in my little maisonette in Lausanne, so quiet, so like a poor little bird? Us for the blackmail? Lewis dear, is your pretty wife, your poor wife with such troubles who makes yourself all poisoned in the mind.”
I wasn’t going to let her get off on that familiar Denham tack.
I said, “Why shouldn’t he be blackmailing you? He was blackmailing Sheila.”
Her reaction took me completely aback. She jumped up. The astonishment in her eyes seemed for the first time quite genuine. Astonishment—and shock.
“You know?” she said. “About Sheila?”
“Of course I know.”
“Mon Dieu!” She ran to the chair above whose top the white mane of Prince Vladimir’s hair was just visible. “Vladimir! You hear? He knows. Lewis knows from Sheila and Eugene. He knows that terrible man was making le chantage for Sheila and Eugene.”
For a second I was sure I’d been the victim of some auditory hallucination. Sheila and Eugene! She couldn’t have said that, could she? The Denham in me floundered in an attempt to accept the unthinkable. Then, gradually, I felt excitement welling up in me. She’d said it all right. She’d let it slip out because she’d made the mistake of assuming I already knew. Sheila—and Uncle Gene! So that had been the thing Olsen had had against Sheila, with the evidence which “included a photograph.” Not only Sheila but Uncle Gene who could have … No, watch out. Don’t let the amazement show. If you give yourself away, you’ll lose everything you’ve gained.
Family Skeletons Page 16
