CHAPTER TWO
Emissary
GAMADGE SAID SMILING: “I don’t know what’s been bungled, I’m sure, Mrs. Bradlock, and I’m not conscious of needing an apology. Do sit down and tell me about it.”
He sat opposite her and took out his cigarette case. But she already had hers in her hand, a thin gold one. He lighted her cigarette. She looked about her—at the books and files, the moulded cornice, the dusky engraving over the mantel, the antique bronzes on the mantelshelf. Gamadge looked at her.
In her early forties, perhaps, perfectly dressed and groomed. Not an animated face, in fact a colourless one in every sense, but still beautiful, and Gamadge thought humourless. She had red-brown hair, darker eyes, a high, fastidious nose, a thin, exquisitely curved mouth. She wore make-up sparingly; the texture of her skin was so fine that it would have been a pity to hide it.
She said in her expressionless way: “What a charming room. What a sweet little house.”
The laboratory door opened and Clara put her head into the room. She had been developing snapshots, and held one by a corner; she was wearing a high-collared indigo-blue smock, and her hair was a brown cloud about the longish oval of her face.
Her grey eyes met Mrs. Bradlock’s, and she said: “I’m so sorry. I didn’t know there was a client.” She withdrew, closing the door.
Mrs. Bradlock remarked: “Cinquecento.”
“Well, not without the smock, I’m afraid,” said Gamadge. “But I must tell my wife that.”
“Oh, was it your wife?”
“She is a bit young for the job.”
“She looks just like one of those bystanders in the old masters—a saint or an angel.”
“She’ll be delighted.”
“I’m afraid you’ll think I’m as stupid as poor Avery was. He realized it as soon as he’d talked to you on the telephone for a minute, and he instantly made inquiries. The first thing he discovered,” said Mrs. Bradlock, smiling at Gamadge, “was that you belong to one of his best clubs.”
“I’m glad it was one of his best.”
“That little one behind this house that nobody can get into. And you went to his university. And you write. And he put his receptionist on you, and she put the secretary on you, and he ordered you down to his office.” She looked at Gamadge almost mournfully.
“But, Mrs. Bradlock”—Gamadge was laughing—“why not? I only wish I had legitimate business reasons for going down to Mr. Bradlock’s office. I wish somebody would supply me with them!”
“You mean money to invest? He thinks you don’t care about money.”
“He must think I’m a fool, then. But surely he can understand that even in my business people don’t want money on false pretences.”
“Well, he does understand, and that’s why he’s so anxious for you to be the one to look at those letters.” Her face, as she referred to the Paul Bradlock correspondence, expressed a slight distaste for the subject; she might be forgiven for feeling it at the very thought of her talented brother-in-law. “But those men down there,” she went on in her deliberate way, “they are so stupid.”
“Oh, don’t say that. No reason why they should ever have heard of me, you know.”
“I don’t mean that it was Avery’s fault; that Mr. Williamson—Avery thinks he knows everything because he’s made so much money. But he doesn’t know anything except that.”
“I think he must be wonderful, myself.” Gamadge was amused at Mrs. Bradlock. “He needn’t bother with the likes of me. He has other things on his mind.”
“Thinking you were a dealer!”
“I might well be. Perhaps my article in the University Review sounded as if I were.”
“Well, it was all stupid, and Avery wants you to come to dinner.”
“Oh, he doesn’t have to do that.” Gamadge was laughing again.
“And look at those letters,” said Mrs. Bradlock simply. “Nobody’s seen them except Vera, and she isn’t an expert—she can’t know their value. She’ll be cheated. Mr. Gamadge, could they really be sold to somebody for a thousand dollars?”
The Bradlocks seemed fascinated by this round sum. Gamadge said: “Not much chance that they’re worth a fraction of it, but collectors do love to pick a correspondence over, and if none of them has ever been published, that boosts the value. Your sister-in-law didn’t use many of them.”
“Oh, you’ve read her book? She said people were so scattered, the letters go back so far, and it would have been so hard to get the permissions. I thought it was a very dull book, didn’t you? Avery had to pay for it.”
“That’s quite a usual arrangement, if a family wants a book done in a certain way.”
“We had to get it done our way. Even Mr. Meriden—such a nice old gentleman—even he wanted a lot of personal stuff about Paul, and we couldn’t have allowed it. There was all that awful publicity when he died.”
“I was away.”
“It was awful. They lived in our studio, you know; Vera lives there still. We could get any amount of money for it now, if we rented it, but of course she had to stay on while she was working on the book, and Avery can’t turn her out until she wants to go—if she ever does. She took all the responsibility for Paul, over all those years. So frightful. And she has no money except what Avery can give her. It would be nice if she could make some out of the letters.”
“Why shouldn’t she send them to me?”
“Well, if she could meet you—it would make all the difference. She’s very jealous of Paul’s things. She always sees his dramatic agent herself, and she would hardly let Avery talk to Mr. Meriden, the publisher. But Avery did see the agent and Mr. Meriden, and there’s no money in any of Paul’s work now. His play was revived after he was killed—we were against that, but the agent thought it might make money, and Avery didn’t like to risk losing anything for her. Mr. Cookson—the agent—really, I don’t know what these people are made of. Just because Paul died like that—”
“Where have you been, all your life, Mrs. Bradlock?” Gamadge smiled at her.
“Not here.” She returned his look seriously. “I come from the South.”
“So I had guessed.”
“But I’ve lived here ever since I was married. I like it better here, Mr. Gamadge. Really I do.”
“I’m sure you do.”
“The revival wasn’t a success. I don’t know why it should be; I can’t imagine anybody liking that play, even if they could understand it. If you could run up tonight for dinner at half past eight, just a business conference, you know?”
“I could, of course.”
“Will you? We dine rather late, because Avery likes to get a little bridge at his club after hours. He never gets home till seven or later.” She rose. “You will come?”
“Thank you very much, Mrs. Bradlock, I’ll be there.” Facing her, he smiled. “It will be a scramble, you know, going through a correspondence in a couple of hours. I may find it impossible to get any idea of the value of it at all.”
“I’m sure Vera has it sorted. It’s so good of you. And we’ll feel so much better about it if you come to dinner.”
“We’ll be square.” Gamadge spoke solemnly.
She pulled on long white gloves. “I’ll tell Vera as soon as I get home. She’ll like you—she’s intellectual.”
“What a compliment.”
Gamadge helped her on with her fur jacket and went to the door with her. A small, handsome town car and a chauffeur waited for her at the kerb. He watched it roll away, then closed the door and went upstairs. Martin jumped off the desk and followed him—it was time for tea.
CHAPTER THREE
Background
DAVID MALCOLM HAD ARRIVED, and was having tea with Clara in front of the library fire; he was a dark young man of medium height, less disillusioned than he liked to appear. A big tawny chow lay beside Clara’s chair, and a yellow cat, younger and smaller than Martin, rushed up to greet that ancient and tried to wrestle with him. Marti
n stood with his eyes shut and his head up out of the way, not interested. The smaller cat fawned on Gamadge.
“Hello, Junior,” said Gamadge. “Hello, Dave. I’m asked out to dinner, Clara. You’re not. Mrs. Avery Bradlock thinks you’re cinquecento and an angelic bystander, but she didn’t invite you to dinner. No stray wives for the Bradlocks. It’s a business conference.”
He sat down and Clara passed him a cup. She said: “Then Mrs. Bradlock and I are even, because I wouldn’t ask her to dinner if I could get out of it, either.”
“Didn’t care for her?”
“She looks so half-alive.”
“Not at all, quite a conversationalist. Cultivated, too, if not too bright.”
“What’s it all about?” asked Malcolm.
Gamadge explained. “So I thought I’d like to know something about Paul Bradlock,” he ended. “His wife’s book isn’t informative. It has some of his poetry in it, though; the kind that has no syntax… Take it or leave it, and the reader be damned. Tell me about the play.”
“I saw it too,” said Clara.
“No, did you?”
“It was quite haunting, didn’t you think so, Dave? But I didn’t know what it meant.”
“What was it about?” asked Gamadge.
“Well, there were all these people in an empty room—”
“Empty house,” said Malcolm. “The whole house was empty, we were told so.”
“But we only saw one room. Really empty, you know,” explained Clara. “Perfectly bare.”
“And no complaints from the management,” suggested Gamadge.
“It was in blank verse,” said Malcolm. “Good, too. You learned that there’d been some sort of catastrophe in the neighbourhood—what was it, Clara? Flood? Landslide? Earthquake?”
“I don’t think that was explained. But these people couldn’t get out without being killed—drowned or buried or…”
“Or they’d fall off a cliff,” said Malcolm. “They all got out.”
“Did they?” Gamadge looked up from his preoccupation with buttered toast.
“One after another,” said Malcolm, “and in different ways. Through the door, through the windows, through the cellar, through a trap in the roof. They each had their own reasons for going, and like Clara I rather lost myself in the symbolism. But I suppose the room was reality.”
“America in the thirties,” said Gamadge, “after Paris in the Golden Age. Paul Bradlock got out all right.”
“Got out,” added Malcolm, “long before he was killed.”
“What do you mean, Dave?” asked Clara.
“He took to drink. Moral tale. Don’t care came to a bad end.”
“It isn’t a moral tale just because he was killed in the park,” said Clara. “Anybody can get killed in the park if they walk there in the middle of the night.”
“But perhaps if he’d been sober he would only have been knocked out,” answered Malcolm. “He probably put up a fight. He was a hopeless alcoholic by that time.”
“What made him one?”
“Now you’re asking.”
“But don’t they say there’s always some reason?”
“They say lots of things,” said Gamadge. “They don’t know what to say. Bradlock had talent, but he only published one book of poetry and one play, in all his forty-six years. That might be a reason. He had to leave Paris, where he wanted to be, and come back to America and live on his brother’s charity. That might be a reason. But people take to drink who have no such reasons, and sometimes there doesn’t seem to be any reason at all.”
“I think his fate is implicit in his work,” said Malcolm, “if you can judge by his play. He had a brutal point of view, quite sinister.”
“Perhaps his wife is right, then, after all,” said Gamadge, “and he didn’t belong in this world. But not because he was too good for it.”
“You still have these illusions about our globe?” asked Malcolm.
“I still have them.”
“Well, if you really want to know something about his life—”
“His life in Paris in the twenties,” amended Gamadge. “It ought to have been interesting. According to his wife it was pretty dull.”
“Dull? Dull?” Malcolm stared. “With all the excitement on the Left Bank, and all the gifted expatriates founding papers and writing manifestoes, and everybody in the cafés talking all night? And he was a young man then. It was all long before my day, the whole bunch of them had run out of supplies and died or gone home, but I kept hearing about it all, I can tell you! Ten years later!”
“Well, Bradlock’s wife gives you nothing of it, nothing you can’t get from better books. That’s one reason I’d like to see those letters, his wife may not have had the sense to know what people would like to read about.”
“There may be too much in the letters that people would like to read about,” said Malcolm. “If she’s protecting his memory she wouldn’t publish Paul’s high jinks in Paris. But if you’re interested I might get some information for you through Pierre Lazo. He’s here in New York, and he’s an older man—he must have known all about those goings on in the twenties over there. He was a newspaper man—he’s here in the International Book Service.”
“Do that, Dave, will you?”
“I’ll call him tonight. Clara can come up and have dinner with us, since the Bradlocks won’t have her, and you can pick her up on your way home. Better take your car, Gamadge; that card of Mrs. Bradlock’s says they live up in the Eighties, and if it rains—as I suppose it will—you’ll never get a cab up there.”
“I’ve been around,” replied Gamadge coldly.
Clara said: “It’s very nice of you to ask me, Dave. I’ve been thinking—what a frightful thing for these Avery Bradlocks; to have all that going on practically in their own house all those years, and then that thing in the park.”
“Not at all the kind of people to take it in their stride,” said Gamadge. “I feel rather sorry for them.”
At twenty-five minutes past eight he drove his car slowly into the Bradlocks’ street, on a quiet block of private houses between Madison Avenue and Fifth. The rain was holding off, the sky misty and tinted with rose. There was a fresh, leafy smell in the air—the smell of Spring.
A big modern apartment house on the Madison Avenue corner was cut off from the Bradlock premises by a deep service alley, and a high retaining wall topped by an iron fence. Beyond this was the Bradlock side yard, on street level; it was entered from the street through high iron gates. The yard was turfed and flagged, and set out with shrubs in huge Mexican pots. It led to a little plain square house, almost hidden by the Bradlocks’ big one, to which it was joined by a connecting way.
The Bradlock house was a double brown-stone, plain and handsome, with a bow window overlooking the side yard. Gamadge thought that the Bradlock property had probably at one time extended to the corner of the street, and that the little studio annex occupied what had once been the back garden.
He parked his car behind another smaller one, and walked back to the Bradlock front steps. They were low and broad, and the vestibule had a grille. He went in and rang; a parlourmaid admitted him to a well-proportioned hall, took his hat and coat, and ushered him into a large room on the right, which seemed to contain a good many people. But there were only five, and one of them—Mrs. Avery Bradlock, in severe black—left the group and came forward to greet him.
She looked younger in evening clothes and with her head bare, younger and quite beautiful. With her white skin, long slender hands, cold reticence, she might, so Gamadge thought, be the subject of an old song. The proud lady, with who knew what oceans of sentiment concealed under that cold look? Well concealed!
A tall, blonde, ruddy man came up behind her, and was shaking hands with Gamadge even before Mrs. Bradlock had introduced him as her husband.
“Mr. Gamadge, this is really very good of you.”
“Not at all,” said Gamadge, “I’m delighted.”
“I don’t know whether we dare”—he looked at his wife, and Gamadge was sure he never did look at her without that expression of pride and love—“do we dare tell him, Nannie?”
“We’ll have to.”
“Perhaps if we do, he’ll go. We can’t face that!”
Gamadge said that they couldn’t get rid of him now. “For one thing, I’m too hungry.”
“Then we’d better confess and get it over with.” Bradlock laughed. “You’re here on false pretences after all.”
“Really?”
“My sister-in-law has sold them. Sold the letters.”
“No!”
“As soon as my wife rang her about what Williamson had said—about selling a correspondence en masse, you know, sight unseen—Vera got hold of a friend of hers and Paul’s—Mr. Iverson, there he is—and he jumped at the chance. He didn’t know they were in the market; but of course they weren’t until now.”
“We all know him,” said Mrs. Bradlock. “And the best of it is, Vera got her price.”
“The thousand?”
“Yes. You must meet them. But first I want to introduce you to my mother.”
An elderly lady, smartly dressed in black lace, took a cocktail from a passing tray and then turned to acknowledge the introduction.
“My mother, Mrs. Longridge,” said Mrs. Bradlock. “Mr. Gamadge.”
Mrs. Longridge had preserved her figure, and she still showed that she had been a pretty woman in her youth. Her daughter seemed to have inherited nothing from her physically except that short, high, fastidious nose. She said: “They say you’re a writer, Mr. Gamadge, and all kinds of interestin’ things. I won’t be able to talk to you at all. You’ll be so bored.”
“You talk, Mrs. Longridge,” said Gamadge, “and I’ll promise to listen.”
Mrs. Longridge was delighted. “Makes me feel homesick,” she declared, “just to hear a man say a thing like that.”
The Book of the Lion Page 2
