Murder for the Bride (7 page)

“Then last year we get a rumor that Haussmann and the Renner woman have gone from Spain to South America. We do some more checking. Our people can’t locate the Renner woman or Glinka. Then Glinka turns up a suicide in Moscow, published in
Pravda
as heart failure.

“The file stays open, but no information. A month ago a middleman got in touch with the Department of Justice. All he knows is that the Renner woman is in the United States. She wants to make a deal. She wants amnesty for herself and for Haussmann. In return, she will turn over a document of ‘vital importance.’ The funny thing is, it could be of vital importance. Intelligence
files show that in the middle twenties one V. Glinka helped organize the Russki intelligence net all over the world. He was one of the few big Reds who didn’t get tangled with the purge trials of the thirties. But the Justice Department gives the middleman the standard answer. Turn over the document and we’ll talk about amnesty later. We were put on it immediately.”

“This is crazy talk,” I said. “Probably there is somebody named Tilda Renner, but that’s no reason to suppose that Laura Rentane was Tilda Renner.”

“Even when the description Captain Paris sent the State Department matches perfectly? Even when there’s no record of a passport issued to a Laura Rentane? Even when we know that she was knifed trying to get out of the Red zone, and we’ve seen the X-ray plate of the knife tip in her rib? Even when we know a guy answering Haussmann’s description put her on the ship in Buenos Aires and later visited her in Rampart Street?

“There are a lot of people working on this. We want Haussmann. We want that document. We want whoever is trying to get hold of the document. There are so many of us down here now we’re falling all over each other. We searched you good the other night. You slept like a baby. We know you haven’t any document. We’ve kept a close tail on you, every minute of the day and night. We knew that if somebody took a hack at you, it would show that they didn’t recover that document when they killed the Renner woman. That would leave two choices. You or Haussmann. If this document is as hot as we think it might be, then you can be certain that the people who forced Glinka’s suicide are hot after it.

“Tonight we bobbled the ball and got thrown for a loss. Andy, here, was the one who guessed that babe might be holding a knife on you while going through your pockets. We didn’t figure on her having a confederate who would smash the lights. It was stupid and we’ll probably never get another promotion, but it’s over now. Did she clean you?”

“No.”

“Good. Then you can still be our little stalking horse, Bryant. Unless they get to Haussmann first and get the
document off him, they’ll have to take another hack at you. If it’s as hot as we think it is, they’ll have to follow up every last possibility.”

I handed the cup back to be put on the tray hooked to the car door. My hand shook. “It’s all so—so unbelievable that I—”

His voice softened. “Sure. You were played for a sucker. But so was Colonel General Glinka, boy. Give us as good a description as you can of the girl.”

I did so.

Then he gave me my orders. “Don’t try to shake off any tail you happen to suspect. Just stay in circulation, and keep your mouth shut. If there’s trouble, just yell as loud as you can.”

“Why did Laura want to marry me?”

“She was a gal who never missed a chance, Bryant. She had you with the ring in your nose. If we’d grabbed her, we’d still have convicted her, but you would have raised hell with so many congressmen that you might have got her out sooner or later. Her big mistake was stealing information from the Russkis to use as trading material. They sent her along to join her pal Glinka.”

“Is Haussmann still in the area?” I asked.

“We think so. We hope so.”

“Why did they have to kill her? Why?”

“Because the entire document might have been in her mind. She might have memorized it. That’s the safest way to carry information.”

They left me back at the apartment. I locked the door behind me. I had to be alone to think about what they had told me. I told myself that it was a case of mistaken identity. A ridiculous mistake. I tried to laugh at the mistake they had made. The sound came out like a sob. There are some things you have to believe. And I found that I knew, deep inside me, that Laura Rentane was Tilda Renner, had been Tilda Renner.

The parts of the jigsaw puzzle that was Laura fitted together too readily. I hunted through my mind for a way to despise her. I wanted to hate her. It was a desire born of weakness. If I could hate her, I could cease mourning for her.

Instead, I found as I sat there alone in the darkness that I was making excuses for her. Probably Haussmann had taken her when she was too ignorant, too inexperienced, to know what he was. By the time she found out, maybe it was too late. She had then, like a frightened animal, done what she could to save her own life and her own freedom. It had taken a certain courage to do what she had done. Yes, it must have taken a great deal of courage.

And then, frightened and alone, she had come to this country to barter for her freedom. Probably Haussmann, through threatening to kill her, had acquired her cooperation in the barter.

I sat and tried to think of her as evil, and I could not. I thought, instead, of the way her sleeping face had looked on the pillow beside me. I thought of how I had awakened one sultry afternoon and seen her standing silhouetted against the lowering sun, her firm body the color of tea with cream except for the two startling white slashes where the sun suit had protected her body from the sun. I remembered how passion would blind her eyes, and she would speak small, limping, broken words of love.

I remembered the catlike way she cared for her body, how she would call to me and I would go into the thick steamy air of the bathroom and she would hold her silver-blonde hair out of the way with both hands while I scrubbed the long lovely column of her back.

I remembered the days of honeymoon, when night and day are curiously mingled, when there is food at crazy hours. It seemed a memory of perfection, and yet flawed in some obscure way. It took me a long time to isolate and examine the flaw. Even then I was not certain that it
was
a flaw. She had told me often that she loved me, but now I had a certain bitter speculation. Had it been love for me as a person, as a man and an individual, or had it been merely love for me as the faceless, nameless instrument of her gratification? In her, passion had run endlessly strong, endlessly demanding. Now, for the first time, I began to wonder if her strong desires had not been always turned inward to the point where, during
the instants of her completion, I was a nameless, voiceless, faceless entity that was good only because it was male.

I went to bed exhausted at three o’clock. It was purely emotional exhaustion. It hadn’t come from the girl who had held the knife. Nor had it come from the truths the men in the car had spoken. It came, instead, from some process of growth caused by trying to analyze what Laura and I had had for each other. During those dark hours of thought I became more of an adult. And yet my ultimate conclusion was so pitifully meager that it was like the mountain laboring to produce the mouse.

My conclusion was this: Laura and I had wanted each other, almost from the moment we met. We had been extraordinarily well mated physically. The endless wanting had resulted in something almost hypnotic. Yet the strength of it did not make it good, or even valid. It was far too much on the physical level. I could look back and see that though she was shrewd, clever, alert, she actually had little intellectual resource. She had read nothing. She could not talk abstractly. She ate and slept and cared for her body. Thus it could not be called love, in my understanding of the word, because love must also exist on an intellectual and a spiritual level, as well as emotional and physical.

It took me long hours to decide that perhaps I had not loved her after all. I could not as successfully dramatize my personal position with that new knowledge in mind, and that made the conclusion more difficult. It had been a desperately strong case of physical infatuation.

My conclusion did not in any way lessen my desire to get my hands on the person who had twisted the wire tightly around her throat. In fact, in a most odd way, it strengthened and reinforced my desire, because it made her more vulnerable.

I slid through a wet darkness into nightmare. I was on a boat. I had caught Laura on a cruelly barbed hook. She flopped about, nude, on the floor boards of the boat in her death agony while the guide kept saying it was a common type of fish, but inedible.

I
slept until noon and awakened in that drugged state where dreams seem to cling to the fringes of the mind and cannot be dislodged. The dreams give everything a look of unreality, and make all past experience implausible. In that state it seemed incredible to me that I had been married to anyone named Laura, and more incredible that Laura could have been a notorious person named Tilda Renner. It all seemed like something from a very poor movie, the sort of movie where the characters are yanked around on strings in order to heighten melodrama.

It is possible to understand, objectively, that there are Tilda Renners in this world, and Haussmanns and Glinkas. There is a sickness in the world, and such people are the symbols of the disease. Symptomatic. But it is far more difficult to understand such people in relation to your own life. Life is composed of small daily acts, small attitudes, small opinions. Insert the Renners and Haussmanns and Glinkas into your daily affairs, and the result is dangerously close to comedy. High, lusty comedy in the Shakespearean tradition. People who strut and bellow and wear false noses.

Once I saw a Burmese hillside that stank because tanks with bulldozer blades had covered the Jap-made caves from which they had fired on us, and then the rains had come and had washed away the dirt mounds. At first glance, at first full comprehension, it was a complete horror. Then the mind veered away from comprehension and all that was left was the stink, a troublesome nauseous stink about which everyone complained.

So it is with the Renners and the Haussmanns and the Glinkas. You comprehend them for a moment, and comprehension sickens you, and so you think of them
only on the basis of their ability to complicate your own life.

I sat on the bed and smoked the first cigarette of the day and tried to brush away the clinging bits of dreams, the same way you paw your face after walking through a narrow place strung with the webs of spiders.

This day was going to be worse than all the others, I knew. The humidity seemed to have gone up to an impossible high. Sweat ran from my throat and down my chest. The pillow and the sheets were sodden.

I went to the French doors and looked up at the sky. It was a pale brassy blue. I could feel the heat of the sun-drenched street against my face.

I showered and shaved and picked the coolest outfit I could find: white sleeveless shirt, rayon cord slacks, sandals. I looked at myself in the mirror and remembered hearing once upon a time that children do not increase their ability to learn in a regular upward curve. The chart resembles stairs. At intervals there will be a sudden upward jump in the ability to learn. And I wondered if maturity for an adult comes the same way. Possibly I imagined it. There seemed to be a new maturity in my face, a lessening of the look of recklessness. Already, the man who had struck Harrigan, who had come flying back to stare down at the face of his dead wife, seemed to be a stranger.

Plans for the day—none. I was a stalking horse. Make like a target and let the Jones boys stalk the stalkers.

I went to the bureau and distributed my belongings in my pockets. The cash situation was still healthy. I would have to get hold of a lawyer and make arrangements about Laura’s money. There was plenty of time for that. I picked up the key chain and looked at the small rabbit, remembering the way Laura had said, “You always give a husband a present.”

I had told her it was a pretty symbolic present for a bride to give, and we had laughed. A small golden rabbit about three quarters of an inch high, sitting on his haunches, with little red stones for eyes, one ear lopped over, the ring for the key chain fastened to the tip of the upright ear. It was a fatuous-looking little rabbit
—fatuous and at the same time debauched, hung over. It was the sagging ear that seemed to give that impression.

I was halfway down the stairs when I heard my phone ring. I went back up three stairs at a time, fumbled the key into the lock, and got to the phone before it stopped ringing.

“Hello, Dil? This is Betty.”

The voice was vaguely familiar. “Betty?” I said.

“Don’t be so
dull
, darling,” she said. There was annoyance in her voice and something else. Anxiety, maybe. The voice was oddly familiar.

“Oh, Betty! Sorry to have sounded stupid. How are you?”

There was relief in her tone. “I’m anxious to see you, Dil. It’s been so long, hasn’t it?”

“It certainly has,” I said with feeling. I knew the voice. It was the knife-wielding gal from the Rickrack. She must be afraid, I decided, of a tap on the line. “I’m anxious to see you, too,” I said, giving it a certain emphasis.

“Look, darling. I’m going to be terribly busy for a while. When do you think you can be free?” That was clear enough. Free meant without escort.

“That’s hard to say. The last time I saw you, I think we both decided, Betty, that I wasn’t good for you. How do you know that won’t be true again?”

“That’s something I’ll just have to risk, isn’t it?”

“Of course, there’s a certain amount of risk on my part too,” I said, and forced a laugh.

“Well, I guess you’re just too uncooperative, Dil. You seem to forget that a girl has some pride. I saw Monroe Wiedman at three o’clock yesterday afternoon and he told me you were in town. I’m sorry I listened.” There was a loud clack and the line was dead.

I hung up slowly. She had been trying to tell me something. I’d never heard of anyone named Monroe Wiedman. I looked up the name in the phone book. It wasn’t listed. Yet I knew that it was the clue as to where to meet her at three o’clock. I went down to the heated tunnel of the street and found a place to have brunch. Coffee made my mind work better. I bought a city map at a newsstand, slipping it inside a magazine, and went
back to the apartment. In Algiers, across the river, I found the intersection of Monroe Street and Wiedman Street. It was a quarter after one. That gave me an hour and forty-five minutes to shake off my friends and get over there. That is, if I wanted to shake off my friends. It made good sense to try to get in touch with them and tell them, or merely go on over and let them trail along.