Brian Garfield (20 page)

Every time Pack saw the knife his awe was renewed.

To keep the establishment functioning there was a considerable population of servants. Pack had catalogued them for the newspaper's ardent readers: butler, French cook, wine steward, Madame's private maids, seamstress, six Italian chambermaids, dining room maids, laundress, scullery maids, maids for the children, stable boy, four German gardeners, a guide, four handlers to care for the horses and carriages and hunting dogs, a doctor for the Marquise and her two infant children. Pack had interviewed several of them to provide incidental stories here and there in the
Cow Boy.

He moved along the north side of the room, having his look out the windows. The lawn was wide; no cover within easy range of the house. Only a fool would try the half-blind luck of long-range shooting, whether by night or by daylight when he faced nothing but reflections off the surfaces of the windows.

No, it was nonsense. Huidekoper was getting exercised over nothing. Pack put it from his mind.

Lady Medora entered, skirts brushing the floor; behind her came a train of womanservants who took the two children into the kitchen. Madame la Marquise watched the little ones fondly through the open kitchen door as she pointed Pack toward a seat.

“Antoine apologizes for his rudeness. I hope you haven't been too bored.” She smelled delectably of washed linen and sachet. “You look very handsome, Arthur.”

Pack knew if he spoke he'd only stammer. He smiled, shook his head, kissed Medora's lovely hand.

She said, “Dakota is a better place to rear children than New York, don't you think?” In the kitchen he saw the high chair—Medora's own; her parents had saved it twenty years and given it to her for her firstborn. The children—daughter Athenais and son Louis—of course ate in the kitchen with the servants; they would not be allowed to eat in the dining room with their elders until they were judged fit to behave properly. That would be a while yet—they'd have to be somewhere between the ages of twelve and sixteen.

Madame's skirts rustled. “I'm pleased they're completing the church so quickly.”

“It seems to be going very nicely,” Pack agreed. That was the brick Roman Catholic chapel she was erecting in town as a thank-you offering after the births of her two children. It was to be the only church building of any denomination in Billings County.

She smiled with infinite sweetness and said, “The inhabitants of these Bad Lands do seem to feel less in need of theological instruction than of the spiritual consolation provided by Forty-Mile Red-Eye. But we mustn't let such things stand in the way of bringing the influence of civilization to the West. I'm employing a schoolteacher from the East, did we tell you?” She looked up past him and beamed. “Ah—Antoine.”

De Morès entered—tall, dashing, slender, erect, wafting cologne, wearing a blue shirt with yellow silk lacings. Pack stood and bowed. It was a practice De Morès preferred to the American habit of handshaking.

Pack said, “Your fine lady certainly adds more than a touch of charm to the Bad Lands.”

“She adds magic to whatever she touches,” De Morès said. He was watching the way Pack glanced at Madame; he seemed not resentful but, rather, pleased. His dark flashing eyes missed nothing.

When Madame excused herself from the room, Pack said to the Marquis, “Some of the ranchers seem to have misgivings about your personal safety. They feel you and your family may be in danger from the wilder crowd. I don't know how seriously you ought to take these vague threats but I feel obliged to pass them on to you.”

“I'll take them under advisement.” The Marquis smiled. “Thank you for not mentioning these trivialities in my wife's presence.”

“I shouldn't have mentioned them at all, save for concern toward Madame and the children.”

“We are grateful for your steadfast gallantry.”

Over sherry De Morès slouched on the davenport and spoke to Pack of his ambitions. He touched the barbed ends of his longhorn mustache, the points of which had been waxed and twisted to glorious perfection.

“We're chartered to do business in every state and Territory from the Atlantic to the Pacific. I shall keep building. Tanneries. Soap factories, glue factories, shoe factories. I shall expand the mining of lignite coal not only for use in the abattoir but also, I anticipate, for sale to the railroad and the inhabitants of the region. I'll raise cabbages—fertilize them with offal from the abattoir and deliver to the East in my refrigerator cars. The city of Medora will become the livestock center of North America. Ultimately it will be the capital of the state of Dakota.” He smiled for emphasis. “In the past half-century America's population has quadrupled to fifty million. Someone has to feed them—
I
shall feed them!”

“How many sheep did you bring in?”

“That was the first of some fifteen thousand Merinos this season. Ultimately I shall maintain a herd sufficient to allow the slaughter and shipment of ten thousand lambs and muttons each year.”

“There's been grumbling about the sheep. The Bad Landers don't like them.”

“The bumpkins don't like anything new till they've have time to grow accustomed to it. They'll learn to enjoy the taste of lamia—even if I have to force it down them.”

That was another mark of his strength: De Morès would rebuild the whole world, if need be, to fit his own visions.

Madame reappeared. “Shall we dine?”

De Morès graciously allowed his guest to take Madame's elbow. Pack's heart raced as he escorted Medora to the dining room.

Dinner was venison, flavored by the touch of the French chef and garnished with a vegetable variety from the cultivated half-acre along the river that was tended by the estate's four German gardeners.

“Our friend Roosevelt seems to have decided to raise cattle on a little ranch north of here,” De Morès said, as much to his wife as to the visitor. “I really don't understand it. He has money, hasn't he?”

“His family has,” she said. “He's not the eldest son.”

“Ah, but the older brother—what is his name?”

“Elliot.”

“A drunken wastrel, no? Off sailing the oceans or visiting maharajahs in India. I don't imagine the family should have entrusted the fortune on that one.”

“I don't know much about the family fortune,” she said. “Their father died several years ago.”

“I gather he was wealthy.”

“I think so.”

“Jewish?”

“No, Antoine, not Jewish.”

“I don't believe it.” De Morès's brilliant eyes wheeled and challenged Pack to deny him. “You only need to
look
at him,
n'est-ce pas?
The weak little boy, the eyes squinting with suspicion behind spectacles—and the sly deviousness. Does he come right out to challenge me in open competition? No. He slips a small herd of cattle in, very quietly, hoping I won't notice. He pretends he wants only a few acres of open range and a little log ranch house. Roosevelt—a nester? A small rancher? What do they call it, Arthur? A two-bit sodbuster. Ridiculous. He's at least as rich as I am. There is more than meets the eye. He's plotting. Something devilishly clever—I can feel it.”

Madame la Marquise said, “I don't think that's true, Antoine. He's not a sneak. Even his enemies in politics complain of his bluntness, his forthrightness—not his deviousness.”

“I don't know what he wants,” De Morès insisted, “and I don't trust him.” Then with the sort of bewildering change that was typical of him he turned to Pack. “Arthur, have you been to Deadwood?”

“No.”

“It's still quite a boom town.”

“That's what I hear.” There had been more gold discoveries in the Black Hills since the Custer days; Deadwood was more than merely the site of the murder of Wild Bill Hickok.

“If you examine the map,” De Morès said, “you will note that the closest point on the railroad to Deadwood is the point where you are now sitting.”

Pack was surprised. “What about the Central Pacific?”

“Twice as far. From here to Deadwood is only two hundred miles. There's a great deal of freight and passenger traffic in and out of the gold camps. It only needs a convenient connection with the railroad terminus here, and we'll become the gateway to those rich mines. Now I should like your advice, Arthur. I have an idea to start up a stagecoach line from here to Deadwood. What do you think?”

Pack, pleased to be made privy to such important confidential information, felt his cheeks redden with pride.

“Now, it's such an obvious idea,” Pack said. “I wonder no one thought of it before.”

“Every great idea is simple,” said De Morès, “and every great idea appears obvious after it has been discovered. I am a man who takes only an instant to comprehend things that other men may puzzle over for years. That's why I shall be more than merely another J.P. Morgan or Andrew Carnegie or John Jacob Astor. I shall be the richest financier in the world.” When he lifted his cup to drink he deftly pushed the points of his mustache out of the way with two fingers of his left hand.

Pack believed him. “Now, what will you do with all the millions you'll make here?”

“Do you know why I left the French army? I am, as you know, a graduate of St. Cyr and took my officer's training in the Saumur cavalry school. I was commissioned and I served. But I took leave of all that—because it is an army without the sense to feel shame. It is a disgrace. Its commanders have not sought revenge on Germany, they have not sought to restore the French throne—they are milksops.”

Unable to sit still, De Morès swiveled his chair and pulled open a drawer. Out of it, to Pack's surprise, came a gunbelt and a holstered revolver. The dining room sideboard seemed an odd choice for an armory; but then that was part of the Marquis's genius—always doing the unexpected.

De Morès lifted the blue steel weapon out of leather. In the way he regarded the revolver when he spoke, he reminded Pack of a man taking an oath. “Upon the death of my father I shall become Duc de Vallombrosa. I am an Orleans—a royalist with the God-given aspirations of my royal bloodlines.” His eyes lifted. They drilled into Pack's core. “With those millions I shall buy the French army. I'll gain control of the high command and recapture the throne of France.”

“Now, may I publish that?”

“By all means. I make no secret of it.” De Morès opened the revolver and looked at its loads like a soothsayer studying entrails.

Madame said gently, “Shall we serve cognac?”

De Morès snapped the thumb-gate shut. When he spun the cylinder it clicked like a rattlesnake. He enjoyed mechanisms and melodramatic gestures; it was part of his childlike charm. He said, “Cognac by all means. And one of your tunes on the pianoforte—to remind the press what an oasis we are in the wilderness.”

“The press needs no reminding,” Pack said; “but it is delighted by the prospect.” He took one side of Madame's chair; the Marquis took the other; together they pulled it back. Madame in bustle and floor-length gown rose to her feet like a flower gracefully rising to meet the sun. As she led them into the front room Pack had to quell the impulse to see if he could span her waist with his two hands. The willowy grace of her spine was enough to make him dizzy.

There was an abrupt confusion of shattering glass and violent movement. De Morès slammed into Pack and as he tumbled toward the floor Pack heard the slam of a gunshot. It took his mind a moment to catch up. De Morès flew past him, struck Madame and knocked her to the floor. There was the loud echo of another gunshot: a rifle, somewhere outdoors. Pack realized—as he broke the fall with the flat of his hand and rolled to one side—that the two bullets had smashed the window and struck something on the interior wall.

My God
.

All in the same fractured instant De Morès braced himself athwart Madame, shielding her with his body, and whipped up the revolver, which by odd Providence was still in his grasp. Pack saw him flick back the hammer and aim at the already broken window.

The angle of fire was upward; it would hit nothing but the night sky—Pack did not understand.

Another rifle bullet crashed through, breaking up more glass in the same pane, and De Morès fired swiftly—skyward, through the shattered window.

Immediately the room went pitch dark.

Then Pack understood. Concussion from the gunshot had knocked out all the lamps and candles in the room. Pack marveled: it had been very quick thinking.

He heard angry voices yelling in the night. They sounded drunk. There was a fusillade of rifle fire. Bullets whacked into the house; Pack heard them strike—
felt
their vibrations—and then at the window De Morès's revolver roared several times in the darkness: shooting, Pack supposed, at the telltale muzzle flames of those cowardly rifles in the darkness outside.

There was silence. Pack's heart raced. He heard soft voices:

De Morès: “Where are you going?”

Madame: “To get rifles.”

De Morès: “Stay down.”

Pack said, “I'll get them. On the porch?”

“Never mind. They've retreated.”

“How do you know?”

De Morès made no answer. Everything went still. Pack held his breath. Then he heard a sudden clatter of hoofbeats—several horses running away.

De Morès: “
Sauve qui peut! … Ma chérie—ça va?
”

“Nothing injured but my bustle. Antoine? Are you all right?”

“Of course.”

Suddenly the front door was open: a faint rectangle defined by starlight. De Morès stood outlined in it. He was making a target of himself, Pack thought—hoping to draw fire; but the cowards had fled. He saw De Morès stoop to pick up something. It rustled—a piece of paper, tied around a small rock on the porch. De Morès waited long enough for anyone to draw a bead on him, then came inside, shut the door and shoved the paper in a pocket. He fumbled about; after a moment he struck a match and held it to a lamp.