Monsieur Monde Vanishes (12 page)

“Is the boss up there?”

“Why?”

“There's a dick coming up, a dick I don't know who wants to speak to him.”

Immediately, Monsieur René's thigh slid off the table, the sandwich vanished, he wiped his fingers, brushed his lapels, as swiftly as though with a single movement, and he sped across the dance floor, with enough self-control not to break into a run but to go on smiling at his guests.

Just as he reached the main door, which led onto the marble staircase, it opened to let in a man who had refused to leave his overcoat in the cloakroom, and whom Monsieur René greeted solicitously.

Désiré watched them through the little spy-hole. Julie and her friend, at their table, had grasped what was happening. Monsieur René could be seen inviting the detective to sit down at a table at some distance from the dance floor, but the policeman remained standing, shaking his head and speaking a few words; then Monsieur René disappeared through another door, the one that led to the gaming room. Other policemen, those who were on good terms with the establishment, had free access to this room, but it was wiser not to let a new man in.

He was a tall, strapping fellow of thirty-five. He waited, staring vaguely at the commonplace décor of the dance hall. Then Monsieur René reappeared, accompanied by the boss, Monsieur Dodevin, a former lawyer who had retained the outward dignity of his calling.

Once more the man was invited to sit down and have a bottle of champagne, but once more he refused. Then he was brought up to Désiré's den.

“Come in here,” Monsieur Dodevin said. “We can talk better here.… René!”

“Yes, monsieur …” And René, who had understood, picked out a good bottle of champagne among those that were left, and polished two glasses from the cupboard.

“As you see, we haven't much room here.…”

And Monsieur Dodevin, who was invariably of a fine marble pallor, stepped into the dance hall for a moment to get two chairs covered in red velvet.

“Do sit down.… Are you from the Nice squad? … No? … I thought I hadn't met you before.…”

Désiré was not watching them. He was keeping his professional watch on the dance hall, where everyone was impatiently waiting for the departure of the last guests, who lingered stubbornly, thus preventing twenty people from going off to bed.

Julie, who knew he was up there although she could not see his face, kept signaling to him from a distance: “What's up? Something serious?”

He could not reply. It didn't matter. Julie felt the occasional need to make contact with him in this way, pulling a face for instance, when she was afflicted with a bad dancing partner or a ludicrous companion.

He heard a whispered mention of the Empress, and he listened keenly.

“Really? Is she dead?” murmured the ex-lawyer in an appropriately solemn tone. “Such an amazing woman … And you say she died shortly after leaving here? Of course it's sad, a great misfortune, but I don't see how …”

Only the night before, the Empress had been there, barely five yards away from Désiré, who, though himself unseen, could examine her at leisure.

Who had first called her the Empress? It was hard to say. Probably she had borne that nickname for a long time on the Riviera. Some ten days earlier, Flip, the busboy, had rushed in, just as he had done when the policeman arrived, and had then announced to Monsieur René: “Good! Here comes the Empress!”

They had seen her come in, huge, obese, tallow-faced, a fur coat open on a bosom loaded with jewels. Under their puffy lids her eyes were so utterly lacking in expression that they seemed dead.

She was panting, from having climbed the stairs, for the Monico was on the first floor. She halted, like a queen waiting to be ceremoniously attended to. René hurried to welcome her, all smiles, bowing and scraping, pointing out one table and then another, finally leading her to a settee, while the Empress's companion, who carried a small Pekingese dog, followed with the modest bearing of a lady-in-waiting.

Désiré had not flinched that evening. Perhaps he had smiled a little more bitterly.

The Empress's companion was his first wife, Thérèse, whom he had not seen for eighteen years. Much as she had altered, he recognized her, and he felt no hatred, no resentment, only a sort of extra burden on his shoulders, added to the heavy weight they already bore, which he no longer even attempted to shake off.

Thérèse must be about forty now, scarcely more, for she had been eighteen when he married her. She looked older than her age. Her features had become set. She still looked rosy, but there must be a layer of cosmetics on her face to give it that disturbing, masklike immobility.

When she smiled, however, and she happened to smile several times, it was almost the same smile he remembered, a timid, ingenuous, delightfully childish smile, the smile that for years had misled Monsieur Monde about his wife's nature.

She had been modest, self-effacing, apt to incline her head a little and say, in the gentlest voice: “Just as you please …”

Or else: “You know I like whatever you do.…”

A sudden movement would have shattered her, and yet she was the woman who had collected, in her desk, those obscene photographs that men thrust into strangers' hands on the Grands Boulevards; who had annotated them, copying them carefully, exaggerating the size of the sexual organs: she, again—her husband had found out almost for certain, although he had not wished to pursue his inquiry any further—who had sought out their chauffeur in his attic bedroom and who, when he drove her into town, had him stop in front of dubious apartment houses.

Afterward she resumed her pure smile as she bent over her children's cots.

Her eyelids were wrinkled now, but they had retained a certain charm, reminding one of those flower petals which, as they shrivel, take on an ethereal transparency.

The detective now accepted the champagne he was being offered, the Havana cigar that Désiré hastily entered on the expense account, since this was his responsibility and eventually he would have to get the boss himself to sign a chit for it.

“They were both living in the Plaza,” the policeman explained. “A magnificent apartment overlooking the Promenade … You can't imagine in what chaos and filth they lived.… They wouldn't let the hotel staff clean up for them. They had a maid, a Czech or something of the sort, who brought up their meals on a tray and served them, usually in bed, for they often lay in bed for thirty hours at a stretch.… When I got there with my colleague there were torn stockings in every corner, dirty linen all mixed up with jewelry and furs, money lying about on the furniture.…”

“What did she die of?” inquired Monsieur Dodevin.

And as Monsieur René was standing behind them, he motioned him to leave the room. The detective drew from his pocket a metal box, from which he took out a hypodermic syringe, dismantled, and showed it to Monsieur Dodevin, looking him in the eyes.

The ex-lawyer did not turn a hair, but merely shook his head, saying: “No, never that …”

“Indeed!”

“I give you my sacred word of honor that no morphine has ever come into this place, nor gone out of it.… You know my business as well as I do.… I don't claim to keep always strictly within the law, for that's impossible. Your colleagues on the Gambling Squad, who often come to see me in quite a friendly way, will tell you I'm above-board. I keep as close a watch on my staff as possible. I've engaged a man specially …” (he indicated Désiré) “… specially to make sure that nothing illegal goes on in the hall.… Tell me, Monsieur Désiré, have you ever seen any morphine here?”

“No, monsieur.”

“Do you keep an eye on the waiters, the busboy, and the flower girls when they go up to the guests?”

“Yes, monsieur.”

“You see, Inspector, if you'd mentioned cocaine I might not have been so categorical. I play fair. I don't try to pretend what isn't true. With the sort of women we're obliged to accept here, it's inevitable that one day or another we get one who's hooked on snow. That soon becomes obvious. I nearly always notice it after a few days. It happened a couple of months ago, and I got rid of her immediately.…”

The detective may have believed him, or he may not. He was staring impassively at his surroundings, and cast an apparently casual eye over Désiré.

The latter was somewhat alarmed. Six days exactly after he left Paris, the day after his money had been stolen, his photograph had appeared in the newspapers, not on the front page, like those of wanted criminals, but on the third, sandwiched unobtrusively between two advertisements. It was a bad likeness.

“
Handsome reward offered for information as to the above person, who is probably suffering from loss of memory
.”

There followed the description of the clothes he had been wearing the day he disappeared and finally the address of a Paris lawyer, Madame Monde's own lawyer, who was looking after a lawsuit that she had been carrying on for ten years about property in which she was co-heir with some cousins.

Nobody had recognized him. He had not reflected for one moment that, if they were trying to find him, it was because the key of the safe was useless without his presence, or at any rate his signature.

“Was she wealthy?”

They were talking about the Empress.

“She had a fair amount left.… Only a few years ago she was worth tens of millions.… Actually she's an American, daughter of a garment manufacturer. She's been married four or five times. She's lived all over the place. She's been the wife of a Russian prince, among others, and that's why they call her the Empress.…”

“And the other woman?”

Désiré averted his eyes and looked into the dance hall, dreading the detective's watchful eye.

“A Frenchwoman, of a decent family. Divorced … She's done all sorts of things too.… When the Empress met her, she was a manicurist.…”

“Have you arrested her?”

“What's the use? … There were men involved too.… The hotel staff aren't communicative. They used to have people up to their bedrooms some evenings … nobody knows for sure, people they picked up goodness knows where, whom the staff were quite surprised to meet on the stairs of the hotel, and preferred not to see, you understand?”

The ex-lawyer understood perfectly.

“Yesterday morning, about ten o'clock, the Czech maid went down to ask for a doctor's phone number. When the doctor got there the Empress was dead already, and the other woman, still under the influence of the drug, seemed quite unaware of what had happened.… Your good health!”

“And yours!”

“I was obliged to come here. We're trying to find out where the morphine comes from.… This is the second case this winter.…”

“I told you …”

“Of course … of course …”

“Another cigar? Take a handful; they're not bad.…”

The detective did not demur; he slipped the cigars into the outside pocket of his jacket and picked up his hat.

“You can go out this way.…”

The door of the back staircase creaked. The boss switched on the light and waited to turn it off till the policeman had reached the bottom of the stairs. Then he retraced his steps and put away the cigars in the box.

“Five, Désiré …”

“I've entered them, monsieur.” And Désiré handed him a pencil with which to sign the form.

“That's how one gets involved in things!”

He went off to join Monsieur René in the dance hall. They stood near the door, arguing in low voices.

Julie was sitting with her legs crossed, swinging her left foot, to let Désiré know she was fed up. A waiter burst in and seized two empty champagne bottles from a basket under the table.

“I'm taking advantage of the least drunk of them having gone to the toilet!”

His customers were completely hoodwinked. Only the hostesses noticed the trick; the two bottles went to join those that the guests had drunk, and Désiré calmly put down two little crosses in his book.

He wondered what was going to become of his ex-wife. When she was a girl her parents had called her “Baby” because of her angelic look. The Empress was unlikely to have left her any money. Women of that sort never think of making a will.

He felt no resentment against her. Neither did he forgive her; it was unnecessary.

“Check for Number 9!” a headwaiter called out through the crack of the swinging door.

When the guests at Table 9 had gone it would be the end. They were paying. The cloakroom attendant was waiting behind them with their things. She was quite young and fresh-looking, dressed in shiny black, with a dark red ribbon in her hair. A doll. A plaything. She was engaged to a pork butcher's assistant, but Monsieur René made her sleep with him. Désiré suspected the boss of doing the same thing, but she was so secretive that one could never know the truth.

There was a scraping of chairs, noisy comings and goings, while the waiters, as they cleared the tables, drained the bottles and each ate something or other.

“A glass for me, Monsieur René!” Julie was thirsty, and he brought her one.

“It's been agony all evening! I was wearing my new shoes and I couldn't stand on my feet.…” She pulled off her little gold slippers and put on her street shoes, which were standing beside the gas stove.

Désiré was finishing his accounts, and the gamblers could now be heard crossing the dance hall on their way out. They were respectable citizens, all men, mostly tradespeople of Nice who, as such, were not allowed to visit the gambling rooms at the Casino. They shook hands as they parted, like fellow workers in an office.

“Are you coming, Désiré?”

Charlotte lived in the same hotel as they did. Day had dawned, and the town was deserted. Out at sea they could see white fishing boats with green-and-red-painted rims.