I paid my bar bill, feeling wildly excited. I glanced at my watch—9.45. The Hotel Crystal or the Club Marocain? The Club Marocain. Esmeralda would be there by now getting ready for her first show …
I took a taxi to the Club Marocain. It was open but only just, with an idle doorman chatting to a couple of girls on the side-walk and a straggle of men drinking at the front bar. I was so keyed up that I’d thought out no particular approach. I was also a little drunk. I’d been a reporter before. Then I’d be a reporter again? I went straight through into the main room where the floor shows took place. Two waiters were lounging around. A man came hurrying down a staircase in a business suit. The maître d’hôtel? Olsen’s co-owner? He came up to me with the wary look of someone accustomed to associating the unexpected with trouble.
“I’m sorry, sir, we don’t start serving in here until …”
“Esmeralda?” I said.
Unexpectedly the guarded look went. “Oh,” he said, “sure.” He pointed across the room. “The pass door by the stage.”
He lost interest in me then, moving away towards one of the waiters. Were visitors for Esmeralda common enough phenomena to be taken for granted? I hurried through the tables, pushed through the swing door and moved into a bleak no man’s land of narrow, grimy corridors and rusty overhead sprinkler pipes. A broom was propped against the wall. A door opened, revealing a toilet and a cracked washbasin as a man emerged carrying a saxophone.
“Esmeralda?” I asked.
He nodded with his head down the passage. I found a door and knocked. A girl’s voice, thickly accented, called, “What it is?”
I went in. Esmeralda was sitting on a wooden chair in front of a make-up mirror and a dressing table that was as messy and cluttered as the chest of drawers in the Hotel Crystal. Costumes—if her pseudo-Arabian bikini-type bits and pieces could be called costumes—were strewn haphazardly around. Until I’d shut the door behind me there was hardly any room for a second body.
I saw her face first reflected in the mirror. Grotesquely one eye was heavily made up, including a luxurious false eyelash, while the other, to which she hadn’t got around, in contrast seemed almost obscenely naked.
She twisted sideways on the chair, her full breasts in their black brassiere, brushing against me.
“Oh,” she said, “Mr. Denham.”
She knew my name. For a moment it threw me. How had the reporter of the Hotel Crystal become Mr. Denham? Didn’t that link with the owner’s casual acceptance of me? Hadn’t something happened? I struggled to make sense of it. Then all the frustrations of the day returned to goad me. What the hell did it matter what had happened? It was what I could make happen that was important. It was Esmeralda—or Virginia. No, even more than that, Esmeralda—or my own self-respect.
The anger seething in me, which had no other outlet, focused on her. I gripped her arms. My fingers sank into the soft flesh, which yielded as if there were no bone, no muscle.
I said, “You’re going to tell me the truth, the whole truth, if I have to beat it out of you.”
“The truth?” She made no attempt to release herself from my grip. She merely looked up at me, the luscious false eyelash drooping as if under the weight of extreme boredom. “What is this truth?”
“You were Olsen’s wife,” I said. “You’re Polish, you and your sister were with him when he murdered that woman in Grasse.”
For a long moment she remained silent, watching me. Gradually the familiar, narrowed glint of cupidity showed.
“Forty dollar.”
“For God’s sake …”
“Fifty dollar.”
From somewhere common sense checked the unreasoning rage. What sort of a position was I in to threaten her—or anyone? I dropped her arms. I took out my wallet. I left myself five dollars. I stuffed the rest of the bills into her hand. She counted them, the chipped scarlet nails flicking back the edge of each bill. I had no idea how much it was but it seemed to satisfy her.
This time the bills went into her brassiere.
“You ask questions. You want true answers, yes? Okay, Mr. Denham. I am from Poland, yes. I was with Ollie at the villa of the American woman, yes. But that Ollie killed her? All of them say Ollie killed her? How do they know? How do I know when it is night and I am all the time asleep? How does anyone know she did not just fall drunken into the pool and become dead? This I tell them already. All this I say to the police.”
“The police?” I exclaimed.
“The two policemen. Just these fifteen minutes away, they are gone. I tell them everything. They say, Please come to the police house to make the statement. But I say, When I must sing and dance? When they pay me here to sing and dance? When this is my bread? And they say, Okay, you make the statement here now to us—and then later, when the singing is finished, you come to the police house. They are good, the policemen of America, more good than the policemen of Europe.”
So that was why Esmeralda had known my name and why the owner had handled me so casually. He had supposed I was just another policeman. Once again I had underestimated Trant. The moment he had reached the precinct house he had sent two men. But why? Because he, too, had realised that Virginia could have been telling the truth? Had I maligned him as well as underestimated him? Hope stirred only to shrivel again when the flat, husky voice sounded again.
“Yes, they are good, the police. They think of the poor girl with no friends in a strange land. Do not worry, they say. You will be a witness, but do not worry. We know you do not kill Ollie, we know you do nothing bad in the South of France in this woman’s villa. It is just to be a witness even if it is hard for you to say bad things against—how is it put?—your own flesh and blood. You just speak the truth, they say, and all is all right.”
That moment might have been less terrible if there had been any traces of drunkenness left. But there weren’t. I was coldly, mercilessly sober now.
Somehow I made myself say it. “Your own flesh and blood?”
“What do you think? What does she say to you? That I was Ollie’s wife? Ollie’s wife? This is funny. Ollie knew what girls need to be married and what not. But she is different from me, oh yes. It must always be so fine, so grand, so married with her.”
She lifted up her head, miming the airs and graces of affected superiority.
“I am just nothing, the sister from Poland, the poor little nobody brought along to do all the dirty things. She is the grand one—my sister from England. This is Ollie’s wife—the fine Virginia Harwood.”
Hadn’t I once—days ago, years ago—thought: There’s no end? You press forward, you struggle towards some tiny flicker of light ahead only at the last minute to find total darkness again?
“It is perhaps bad for you, Mr. Denham. You let her say to you, Oh, I love you. You are the good man who will help me also to be good and to lead again the good life. Oh, trust me, for I love you so much. Oh, that Virginia! You poor man, I am sad for you. But men! One does not have to be sad for men.”
As the voice, brutal to me as a stabbing ice pick, murmured on, she had turned back to the mirror. Vaguely I watched her hand fumble around on the dressing table, pushing aside a pink G-string and reaching for a second false eyelash.
It was as she was raising the eyelash to her eye that my attention was caught by something glittering, revealed by the shifted G-string. A ring. Just one of her “er-diamond” rings. But … No … It wasn’t just any junky ring. Little rubies clustered around the diamond, prettily making the pattern of a heart. There was no mistaking it. It was Princess Natasha’s ring, the ring she claimed she had given to Olsen but hadn’t, the ring which, that very morning, I had seen in the suite at the Hotel Pierre lying by the keys of the grand piano.
It was as painful to hope again as it is painful for a starved man to eat. But it had happened. Once again, when failure had seemed irredeemable, Fate had come over to my side.
Esmeralda had been bribed by Princess Natasha to lie. To the police? To me
? It didn’t matter, nothing mattered except the fact that I didn’t have to believe a word she’d said. I didn’t have to believe she was Virginia’s sister, I didn’t have to believe Virginia had been Olsen’s “wife” in Grasse. Defeat had not been defeat after all.
She was easing the eyelash into place now, concentrating, the top of her tongue curling over her upper lip. As I opened the door, it jolted against her chair, but she didn’t seem to notice or to care that I was leaving.
As I squeezed out into the passage, I caught a last glimpse of Princess Natasha’s ring glowing in the light from the bare bulb above the dressing table, making life livable again.
I went down the corridor and out again through the swing door into the club room. Several of the tables were occupied now. Waiters were scurrying around. There was a pseudo-festive air of synthetic entertainment about to be dispensed. The owner was standing by the entrance. He smiled.
“You are letting her finish her act, aren’t you, Officer?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Thanks. We appreciate that. We appreciate it a lot.”
The wary look came again. Was I expecting appreciation in a more tangible form—like ten dollars, for example?
I hurried past him, thinking about Princess Natasha. The clue had been there since morning. If I had had my wits about me, I could have realised it then. She had pretended she’d given her ring to Olsen because she’d desperately wanted me to believe she was his victim. But she hadn’t given him the ring. She hadn’t given him anything, which meant that she’d never been his victim at all. And if she hadn’t been his victim, she could only have been his accomplice.
I was out on the street now. I started walking east, breathing whatever fresh air New York had to offer, getting the Club Marocain out of my lungs. A taxi was cruising by. I half raised my arm to flag it. Then I checked myself. Everything depended now on how I handled Princess Natasha. I could accuse her of giving Esmeralda the ring and she would have to admit it. But what was to stop her using the same story she had used for Olsen? Esmeralda had come to her as Olsen had come, threatening to expose Sheila and Uncle Gene. To prevent this, she had given Esmeralda the ring. It would be a lie, of course, but what could I do about it? No, before I went to the Princess, I needed more—much more. But what? The truth about the Lerchikovs, the reason why they had been working for Olsen, the thing—there must have been something—in their past that …
A sudden memory came, taking me back to those infinitely remote days when Olsen had been nothing to me but a pianist at the Club Marocain. I was sitting in the Lerchikovs’ suite at the Pierre waiting for lunch, trying to think of suitable small talk to compensate for my shortcomings as an expert on le chic Américain. The Baroness Kornikov! I had mentioned meeting her at a party and the Princess had blushed. Her whole pretty little face had turned pink as a boiled shrimp. “The Kornikov? That canaille? I do hope, Lewis dear, that you do not ever expose us to the embarrassment of having to bow to the Kornikov.”
At the time I had ascribed her discomposure merely to the archaic snobberies of the Old Regime. But now … of course … Princess Natasha had been terrified of meeting Baroness Kornikov because the Baroness had come from Russia in the old days and where but in the old days lay the key to what Olsen …?
There was a United Cigar Store on the corner. I hurried into it and found the telephone book. After the party I’d given the Baroness a lift home to—where had it been?—some apartment in the East Sixties. I found her name. Moura Kornikov. I dialled the number. When a voice answered I recognised its deep almost Chaliapin basso immediately.
I said, “Baroness, this is Lewis Denham. I don’t know if you remember me. We met at a party at the Maitlands’ about a year ago.”
“Who? Who it is? Who?”
“Lewis Denham.”
“Ah. The young architect. The young man who is a friend from Natasha Eleanovna.”
“That’s right,” I said. “And it’s extremely important. Otherwise, I wouldn’t …”
“Bother me?” There was a rumble of laughter. “You know many old ladies who do not like to be bothered by the young men? I—I have never heard of such. Come. I have tea and I have vodka. Vodka, I think, is better for the extremely important.”
I was there in ten minutes, knocking on a new door in a new fifth-floor corridor of a new building as impersonal and colourless as if it were its own floor plan. But the Baroness, opening the door, brought a burst of personality large enough to fill the entire corridor. She was as round and solid as Princess Natasha was tiny and fragile, with a bubbling joviality and a marked moustache on her upper lip which, oddly enough, like her booming voice, brought no suggestion of masculinity. She was the basic woman, the nurse, the benign Earth Mother.
A miniature cigar was dangling from her mouth. Its ash was spilled on the capacious bosom of her rusty black dress. She took my arm, drawing me into the foyer.
“Come, come. The young man with the extremely important!”
By some miracle the Baroness Kornikov had managed to make the brand-new little apartment look as if it had been the depository of an industrious pack rat for the past twenty years. Every object she had ever possessed, it seemed, still clung to her. There was a stuffed owl, a big case of butterflies, a balalaika, dozens of tasseled cushions and, strewn everywhere, metal trays of every size and shape and half-squeezed tubes of paint. I remembered then that she’d told me she earned her living by painting ornamental trays.
There was a huge samovar looming over the couch and in front of the couch on a coffee table a tray with red and blue liqueur glasses and a half-empty bottle of vodka. The Baroness swept me with her to the couch and, brushing aside cushions and trays to left and right, drew me down with her onto it.
“Now.”
She leaned across me, dropping cigar ash onto my wrist, filled two glasses with vodka, gave me one and drained her own.
“Now. You tell me. Something is bad and I will make it right? Is this?”
I thought I knew what Olsen had had on the Princess. It had come to me in the taxi. And if I were right …!
Conscious of how very much was at stake, I said, “The Lerchikovs are phonies, aren’t they? They’re no more a Prince and Princess than I’m an Albanian.”
“The Lerchikovs?” The Baroness’s black button eyes popped with astonishment. “Phonies? You mean—not real? Upstarts? The Lerchikovs? When Vladimir Gregorievitch is personal equerry to the Czar with estates once which took half the Ukraine? When Natasha Eleanovna is of the royal blood—with her grandmother a Romanov? My poor young man, you are bad in the head, I think. You have need of vodka, I think.” The heavy arm loomed past me, filling my glass again. “There. Drink up. What can you do with such a young man? Say, perhaps, that the Queen of England … she is a beggar maid in pretence? Oh yes, I think so.”
I was used by then to the fact that nothing came easily and knew that my worst enemy was discouragement.
I said, “But have you seen them in the States? Are you sure they are the same Lerchikovs that you knew in Russia?”
“Knew? Oh no. Never do I know the Lerchikovs. They are far too grand for me. Always so fine, so big, that for them the little Baroness from the oh-so-unchic Omsk, she is like a sparrow or perhaps a frog. But I see them. Oh yes. Last year at the White Russian Ball, there they are—Vladimir Gregorievitch, so thin, so straight, with his hair like the mane of the lion, white now but the same, and Natasha Eleanovna, still so pretty yet as a little doll. I saw them, oh yes, and almost I go to them and I say, I am Moura Kornikov. I am a good friend of your son and his wife in Budapesth. Then I think: Oh no, they are not like their children who learn to be the democrat. They are still all snob, all nose in the air. Oh no, I do not speak to Natasha Eleanovna and receive for my pains the snub in the face.”
The Baroness was sucking in her cheeks roguishly now, imitating the chagrin she would have experienced had she received the snub in the face. So much for that. It had gone for nothi
ng.
At random, clutching at any lead now, I said, “So it was their son and his wife who were your friends?”
“Ah, Prince Pavel and the good Olga and the little darling Tanya as pretty as a dream.” The Baroness’s face was aglow with reminiscence. “How charming they were, how free from the grand and the snob. Ah, we émigrés, we were poor, so poor, with nothing but our memories and each other. But there were happy times in Budapesth, many happy times.”
Enthusiastically she hoisted herself up from the couch and waddling to a table, brushing aside this and that, produced a large photograph album which she brought to me on the couch.
“Many, many happy times. Picnics by the Danube. With nothing perhaps but a single sausage or some fruits. But always a bonbon for little Tanya.”
She was leafing through the album. As the pages flicked over, there were yellowing glimpses of grand ladies in ball gowns and bearded gentlemen leaning on shooting sticks in front of huge, story-book mansions. Then she found what she wanted.
“Look!” she said. “Look. In the meadows of the spring. Ah, to think of those filthy Sovietski shooting them, putting them to the wall of the alley and shooting, leaving the poor Tanya with no mother, no father. Look, there am I sitting by the edge of the motorcar, there is Prince Pavel, so distingué, so handsome, with the Olga taking up the sausage, and the little Tanya. Always I have a name for her from Debussy. La fille aux cheveux de lin. Is it not so? So pretty from a ballet, no?”
I looked at the photograph. Baroness Kornikov, seated on the footplate of an old automobile, seemed even in those days to have been as solid and plump and nannylike as she was today. Prince Pavel, gazing romantically out beyond the camera towards some invisible landscape, was a young replica of Prince Vladimir. Tanya must have been about eleven or twelve, exquisite in a flounced white dress with her hair falling loose down her back. La fille aux cheveux de lin! A little behind her, less distinguishable in the shadow of the tree, Princess Olga was busying herself with something which might well have been a sausage.
Family Skeletons Page 21
