Old Sinners Never Die (6 page)

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.

“Exquisite,” he murmured, and gently brushed up the nap with the back of his fingers.

“I just knew you were that kind of a man,” Virginia said purringly.

Most men were, the General supposed. It was characteristic of the species. He said, “Brandy or whisky?”

“A touch of Scotch, please.”

The General was reminded of Mrs. Norris. He frowned.

“There,” Virginia said, “you just thought of an old love, didn’t you?”

“Well, somebody’s old love. I was just thinking of … a housekeeper.” He hesitated, Mrs. Norris being Jimmie’s housekeeper, and his having no intention at that moment of dragging in the subject of a middle-aged son.

Virginia smiled at him brightly. “Would you like a housekeeper, Ransom?”

“Depends,” he said. “Depends entirely.”

Virginia laughed and clicked her glass to his. “I do believe you’re shy. I don’t want you to be, honey. I’ve been looking forward ever since dinnertime to a nice evening of conversation. I just love conversation. Especially with an intelligent man.”

The General took a long, deep draught of whisky and soda. “Don’t you think you’re going on an unwarranted assumption?”

“Beg pardon?”

“What makes you take for granted I’m intelligent?”

“Well, you’re rich, aren’t you?”

That, of course, was the most unwarranted assumption of all, but the General didn’t say so. He was oddly assured by the directness, the honesty of her answer. She was, after all, just a simple girl. He padded happily after her back into the living room.

“Ransom, I got a sloppy Joe sweater I swear would fit you. Wouldn’t you like to get out of that starched shirt for just a little while?” He allowed her to bring the sweater, a black and white striped affair, the stripes fortunately vertical. She opened it out. “I do believe there’s enough room for both of us in it.”

The General blinked his eyes mischievously. “Shall we try it on?”

Virginia put it in his hands and thrust him on his way with the same motion. “You go right back in the kitchen there and put it on you.”

The General did as he was bade. Having thrust his head through the turtle neck, he caught a glimpse of himself reflected in the kitchen window, his hair on end, his complexion ruddy, his chest capacious. “Coach,” he said at the image derisively. All he needed now was a pair of goddamned skis.

T
OM HENNESSY, AS WAS
his custom, had gone out for the paper just before bedtime. He pushed the cat off the chair and sat down at the kitchen table, where he read aloud to Mrs. Norris the story of Senator Fagan’s latest sensation. He was enjoying himself in a way she thought would have better become a football match than the investigations of the United States Senate.

“Does he give the names of the people?” she asked.

“There’ll be names in the later editions, never mind,” said Hennessy. “He has to clean out the stables before he can count the horses.”

Mrs. Norris sighed. “I don’t altogether approve him,” she felt compelled to say. “He makes some very wild allegations.”

“Of course he does! Would you expect tame ones with what’s going on in the country?”

Mrs. Norris tried to hold to her own line of reasoning. “And I don’t approve of people informing on one another. Let me finish, Tom Hennessy: it was one of the things I always admired in the Irish up till now, the way they had no use among one another for informers.”

“There’s informers and informers!” Hennessy cried, and whacked his fist on the table. “It all depends on who’s informing on who.”

Mrs. Norris opened her mouth and then closed it again without saying anything. The front doorbell was ringing, and the hour past midnight. Tom sat where he was, his fist doubled on the table.

“Can you not move, man?” Mrs. Norris cried.

“You want me to open it?”

“Aren’t you the butler?”

“Oh, aye,” Tom said. “I keep forgetting.” He put on the black silk coat Mrs. Norris was holding for him. It apparently had come with the house, but it took her to find a use for it.

“There. You look sartorial,” she said, which was not quite the right word, but close, and she wanted to flatter him into the role.

“Do I now?” he said cockily, and went through the house at a glide over the polished floors. He opened the door to an erect, elegant gentleman in full dress and sparkling sash. Tom thought he had never seen anything as startling as his stiff black mustachios with the matching eyebrows.

“Who are you?” said the stranger.

“Wasn’t it you rang the bell?” Tom said warily. He could see the chauffeured car in the moonlight, a bruiser of a fellow standing beside it.

The gentleman clicked his heels. “I am Ambassador Cru,” he said, and named the country he represented. “This is the Jarvis residence? Am I wrong?”

“You are right and I am the Jarvis …” Tom could not bring himself to say the word butler. Instead his tongue leaped to all the things he wanted and expected soon to be. “I am the boss’ secretary, his confidential man, his friend and his faithful servant.” After which recitation, he almost kicked one heel out from under himself with the other, and for good measure, saluted smartly.

“You are in position then to act as second for him, yes?”

It occurred to Tom that he was about to be asked to stand in for the boss at some diplomatic function he had no time for. And sure it was the boss’ place to tell him whether or not he could, not this fellow’s.

“Yes!” he said with less hesitation than so much thought would seem to require.

“Good!” The ambassador flashed a white card into Tom’s hand. “M. Montaigne’s card, sir. He calls your master out for having insulted him in the matter of the lady on whom he forced his attentions this evening. He is therefore challenged to duel to the death for honour’s sake at dawn. We shall expect you at the river’s edge on the Arlington side of the Key Bridge. Are you agreed?”

“With what?” Tom sputtered.

“Naturally you may choose the weapons. May I suggest pistols?”

“Pistols?” said Tom.

“Excellent. M. Montaigne will provide them.” The ambassador rubbed his hands in grim satisfaction. “At your service, sir. As a gentleman to a gentleman, I salute you.”

As a gentleman to a gentleman, Tom was not sure that he should not let him have a left to the jaw. But the dapper little diplomat clicked his heels, whirled and ran down the steps. The chauffeur flung open the door of the black limousine, folded his arms across his chest like the crossbones of a skeleton while the ambassador entered the car. He closed the door and leaped into the front seat. In seconds the limousine disappeared, slithering into the night like a well-groomed panther.

Tom banged the front door and all but skated back to the kitchen. “Lord, lord, wait till you hear this, Mrs. Norris! Will you get something and write this down before it goes out of my mind?”

Tom clapped his head as though to hold in the thought while Mrs. Norris got a pencil from beside the phone and brought it to the porcelain-topped table. “Let me hear it,” she said.

“The boss is to be under the Key Bridge …”

“What bridge?” she interrupted.

“Key—like in the Star Spangled Banner.”

Mrs. Norris wrote the words. “Go on.”

“On the Arlington side at dawn.” Tom drew a great breath and sighed with relief.

Mrs. Norris wrote “Arlington side” and then stopped. “Mr. James will not get up that early.”

“He’ll have to tomorrow. He’s challenged to a duel.”

“Nonsense. Someone played you a joke. The Irish are very gullible.”

“Gullible, is it? Then look at this.” He held the card in front of her nose. “This one’s to be there with pistols and the ambassador of some South American country, and I’m to be there and bring the boss.”

Mrs. Norris held the card to the light. “Leo Montaigne,” she read, pronouncing each syllable carefully.

Tom squinted at it over her shoulder. “Couldn’t that name be said ‘Mon-tan’?”

“I suppose it could. I’ve heard of ‘Mon-tan’.”

“Then I’ve got it all,” said Tom, “and I can tell you, it’s no joke. Remember me telling you this afternoon about the Frenchman I met at the boss’ girlfriend’s? Didn’t I say his name rhymed with ‘Dan’, well?”

“All right, you said it,” Mrs. Norris said.

“Now listen to what this fella said at the door: ‘monseur’—that fellow’s—card sir. He challenges your master to duel at dawn for having insulted him over the lady he forced his attentions on tonight.’ Or words to that effect. And he said we could have our choice of the pistols this fella would bring.”

Mrs. Norris folded the newspaper and fanned herself vigorously. “It sounds more like the General than Mr. James’ affairs,” she said.

“Will you stop confusing matters?” Tom roared. “You’re as contrary as a cow’s hind leg. You just arrived here today. You don’t understand what tempers are like in this town. And you should’ve heard the boss when he was getting dressed tonight, about the French artist fella meeting her at the airport this morning in striped trousers and frock coat …”

Mrs. Norris sat down and buried her chin in her fist. She was hearing now for the first time the reason Mr. James had not met her himself this morning: he had been at the airport meeting Mrs. Joyce. And she knew, as truth was truth, it must have been a hard choice for him to make, and perhaps after all, the Frenchman had something to do with it.

“The town’s full of foreigners,” Tom went on. “Didn’t you see in the paper tonight what I read you?”

“Well, Mr. James will certainly not fight a duel,” she said. “It’s against the law.”

“Do you think they’ll give him much choice, and them with the pistols?”

“We’re in America, boy. Not in the wilds of … (God help her, she had almost said Ireland) … Russia.”

“What do you propose to do then?” Tom cried. “Write him a message and go to bed?”

“I propose to wait up for him,” Mrs. Norris said, “as I have on more nights than you’ve seen daylight after.”

Tom straightened up and squared his shoulders to the utmost limits of the damned silk coat. He took it off then, and perhaps forever. “I propose to set him on guard—
en guarde!
I’m going out now and find him. You might say a prayer.”

“I’ll get my hat and meet you in the garage,” Mrs. Norris said.

“You’re a woman, not a detective,” the young Irishman said in his first and last attempt to put her in her place.

Mrs. Norris pulled a full measure of Victorian dignity out of her dumpy shape. “I’ve had sufficient experience in both categories to qualify,” she said. “I’m going with you.”

J
IMMIE RETURNED COMPLETELY FRUSTRATED
to the ballroom where Helene was waiting for him. D’Inde rubbed his hands together and made what Jimmie assumed were solicitous noises when he said that Senator Fagan had gone. Jimmie regretted it immediately, but he turned on the Frenchman: “Are you inoculated against this sort of thing?”

“I do not understand.”

“Weren’t you at the Chatterton dinner party?”

“Oh, yes. Ai! I suppose that’s the significance of Madame’s fainting, eh? What the senator said in the paper tonight?”

“It would seem like a fair deduction,” Jimmie said.

“Now I understand your question,” the Frenchman said. “And I am not immune. After all, I am an alien.”

“Sorry I said that,” Jimmie murmured. “I’m concerned about my father.”

The Frenchman shrugged. “All they can do to me, I think, if I am associating with bad company—they can deport me. But the General, they cannot very well deport him, can they?”

The apparent acquiescence to Fagan on all sides aggravated the very devil out of Jimmie. After all, everybody at the Chatterton dinner could not be vulnerable.

“Perhaps not,” Jimmie said, “but they can hold up his pension—and his good name to ridicule,” which he thought grimly, his father could do without Fagan’s assistance. Then he exploded, “What nonsense this is, talking this way!”

“I agree,” Helene said. “I’ve never seen you—hamstrung before.”

The Frenchman was looking at him speculatively, calculating his politics, his vulnerability. That was the deadly game Fagan set in motion: Russian roulette could scarcely be worse.

“The worst thing about it all,” Jimmie said, “so much is beyond the reach of law, and so much beneath the law …”

“And the senator, of course, above the law,” Helene said.

“Exactly,” said Jimmie and the Frenchman nodded. They seemed to have become a triangle. But Jimmie had begun to feel more composed. “Do you know Chatterton well, Dr. d’Inde?”