Shadow of a Tiger (10 page)

“Why, Li? Has he done that before?”

She didn't answer, but she turned, looked toward me. Her small, perfect face was paler than ever. She got up and went into the bathroom. I heard water running. The hotel room was hot and silent with the yellow afternoon sun through the windows. I lit a cigarette and waited. If Claude Marais was going to the river for a reason, I should be calling the police. Sure or not. I didn't call the police. I smoked and waited in the sunny room.

The water in the bathroom stopped. Li Marais came out. Her black hair was down all around her small face, her skin was no longer pale as if she had freshened in cold water. There was no other change in her. She stood just outside the bathroom door, wearing the long, slim dress.

“Li?” I said. “Is Claude involved in some deal? Something illegal, maybe? Big enough for murder?”

“No.”

“You're sure?”

“Yes. Dan? He walked away from me.”

I said, “Can you be really sure what he's doing, Li?”

“No, perhaps I can't. I don't know. Dan—”

“Did he give something to Eugene, Li? Something Eugene was to hold for him? Something valuable, even dangerous?”

“Perhaps he did. Dan, he said I should find a man.”

“What did he give Eugene, Li? What has he been doing?”

“There was a package. He sent it, I think. From the Congo,” she said. She took a step toward me, one step. “He is not a husband to me. He won't touch me. Will you, Dan?”

It was her hotel room—and Claude's. “Here? Li, I—”

“Now,” she said. “If you like me.”

“Claude lives here too, Li. Any time he could come back.”

She walked past me to the outer door, double-locked it, put on the chain. She stood with her back to the door.

“He would expect me to be here, he would not stop for a key at the desk. He would not knock. I might be asleep. He is a kind man. If he did guess, know, I think he wouldn't really care. Perhaps he would even approve.”

“Do you want to get at him through me, Li?”

“I don't know. I want to be loved.”

Claude Marais's wife and rooms. Wrong? No—not right and not wrong, only human. She had her need, so did I. Marty was gone. Some things just are, will be. Claude could walk in on us, but some risks must be, too. I kissed her at the door.

In her bedroom I found out what else she had done in the bathroom. When she took off the long dress, she had nothing on underneath.

Evening when I left, and she was asleep in the bed. She had cried the first time, and talked about all the places they had been, she and Claude, how good he had been then. The second time she cried and talked about herself and all she didn't understand that was pushing her into darkness. She talked about her childhood in Saigon when she had understood. After the second time, I was in love with her.

I didn't know if that was good or bad, and she fell asleep in the heat of the early evening, and I left. I knew that the bed had been good—for me and I hoped for her. I wasn't sure about the love or anything else, except that maybe the crying was good. Maybe she had needed the chance to cry and talk.

I knew I didn't really want to leave, but somewhere in my mind I was thinking of Claude Marais and the river. In the hotel room I had not thought about Claude or the river. Now I did, and I think I was going to walk to the river. Stupid. If he was in the river, I wouldn't find him. But he wasn't in the river.

As I went out into the heat of the street, I saw him coming toward the hotel at a distance. I stepped into a doorway until he had passed and turned into the hotel. He walked slowly, looked at no one. When I stepped out of that doorway I was still in love with Li Marais, but I did not feel good.

I had lost an afternoon of work. I had a murder to work on. Work is an answer.

14

Number 120 Fifth Avenue was a tall, older apartment house, its white stone facade gray with years of city grime. The apartment of Mr. Jules Rosenthal was on the tenth floor. The doorman told me that Mr. Rosenthal was away for the summer. I said I knew that, and took the elevator up. The doorman, after a good look at my clothes and missing arm, went to his house telephone.

The tall, military-looking man who had bumped me the night of Eugene Marais's murder was in the doorway of the apartment as I stepped off the elevator. He had that same haughty belligerence, and he recognized me. I saw that by a faint wavering in his stern eyes. He knew me, but I realized as I walked up to him that he wasn't quite sure where he knew me from.

“Hello,” he said. He smiled.

The “hello,” and the smile, told me a lot. He really couldn't place me, but he wasn't going to let me know that if he could help it. The style of a diplomat, or the trick of a salesman. The technique of a man who lived on contacts, sold his service not his skill, rose or fell not on what he knew, but on who he knew.

“Hello again, Mr. Manet,” I said, not helping him.

His imperious bearing stiffened. I knew
his
name, and that gave me a big edge. He wasn't sure how I knew his name. It made him uneasy in his tailored dark blue suit. Blue was his color, it seemed—the color of the French military. The suit had the same military impression, as if he didn't want people to forget his martial reputation. In his lapel he wore a ribbon that I didn't know, but I was certain it was something better than the Legion of Honor.

“Well,” he said, “come in, please.”

Still trying not to reveal that he hadn't placed me in his mind. We went into a sumptous sunken living room of deep yellow carpet and vast chairs, couches, tables and view of the city outside. I finally came to his rescue. After all, I wanted him to relax, to talk to me.

“My name's Dan Fortune, Mr. Manet. A private detective working on the Eugene Marais murder and robbery. The Balzac Union gave me your address. We bumped outside Marais's pawn shop a week or so ago, remember?”

His eyes remembered me now.

“Of course, I wasn't looking where I went,” he said, regally taking the blame again. He looked solemn. “A tragic affair, poor Eugene. A stupid way to die. A cheap robbery.”

“How do you know it was cheap?”

“The police have been to me, of course. Almost a week ago. I had not expected any further interrogation.”

The police had dug Manet out
after
Jimmy had been arrested then. Part of their doubts.

“Things have changed,” I said. “You knew Eugene Marais in Paris?”

“Our families were acquainted a long time ago. I, myself, did not know Eugene or Claude in those days.”

“The hero days?”

“One did one's best, Mr. Fortune.”

“Did Eugene Marais do his best then? In the Occupation?”

“In his way.” He sat down now in a mammoth red womb chair, crossed his legs like a general being interviewed, indicated a chair for me to sit in. “Eugene was a quiet man, a shopkeeper. He was not a man to do much in action. Most men are like that, eh? The vast bulk of the world, the citizens.”

“You met Eugene here through Claude Marais?”

“Yes.”

“How did you meet Claude?”

“On business in San Francisco, Mr. Fortune. I represent many French companies abroad, public relations I suppose you would say. Claude Marais is quite different from Eugene, is well known in French circles. I considered that we would have mutual business interests, could cooperate.”

“What business?”

“Wines, gourmet foods, perfumes, clothes.”

“Two heroes for France?”

“If you like. I thought Claude could be an asset to some companies I represent. Unfortunately, when we met again here in New York, Claude thought otherwise.”

“So you had a fight? At the Balzac Union?”

“He hit me, I do not brawl,” Paul Manet said coldly. “Claude is a sick man, bitter against his own country, denying its truth and glory. He is no true Frenchman now. A shame.”

“You're sure it wasn't a business fight? Some other business than wines or foods or perfumes?”

“I'm sure, Mr. Fortune.”

“What did you talk to Eugene Marais about?”

“Paris, the past, the old times. Nostalgia, I suppose.”

“Vel d'Hiv?”

“Perhaps it was mentioned.”

“But you didn't like to talk about it?”

He thought a moment or two. “Do you know about Vel d'Hiv?”

“Yes. July 16, 1942. The roundup of Jews.”

“Then you know why we don't like to talk about it. As a Frenchman, I am not proud of that night, or of what came after.”

“But you were a hero, a fighter.”

“I saved a few poor people, helped, resisted the Gestapo. To fight the Nazis then was not special heroism, a duty. No risk was too great, one did not have to decide much. All who could fought, helped. If I did more than many, I am happy, but it was long ago. Do you talk often of your past record, Mr. Fortune?”

“Not often,” I said, “but I don't trade on it, either. I don't live off my reputation from the past.”

I saw his anger again, quick and belligerent. Taller in the mammoth modern chair, menacing.

“Meaning that I do that?”

“You ‘represent' French companies—only French, right? And ‘represent' means you're a front man, a glad-hander, someone who gets respect for his employers not for how good their wares are, but for who and what he is. Did they hire you for your business knowledge, Manet, or for your heroic name? I'll bet you always live in apartments as plush as this one, and you never pay rent, right? A Jules Rosenthal everywhere to lend you his pad because you're a hero. A Balzac Union to roll out the red carpet for you. Not because you're really important, but because you were once a hero of France. A monument. A legend. I wonder what you'd be doing if you hadn't been a Resistance hero? Selling salami in some Paris shop? A factory hand?”

“You insult me, Mr. Fortune.”

“Your military honor, Manet? When were you ever a soldier? You were a Resistance hero, a Maquis. Why the soldier act?”

Manet said, “Leave, Mr. Fortune, please. You are a cripple, I do not want to hurt you.”

“Like you hurt Claude Marais? Maybe he didn't think you were a real soldier either.
He
was, right? Maybe that's what the fight was about. Or maybe he just didn't think much of a man still trading on his heroics of thirty years ago.” I lit a cigarette, blew smoke into the palatial room. “If there were any heroics thirty years ago.”

The silence that came down over the vast, expensive room was like the heavy, airless, yawning silence that comes in the hour before a hurricane explodes in all its fury.

“Did Eugene Marais know something about your past you never wanted anyone to know, Manet?” I said, smoked. “Facts about Paul Manet that would ruin his nice, soft existence?”

He took a deep breath, let it out. “You can check into the record of Paul Manet as far and as wide as you want, Fortune. You will find nothing hidden there.”

“Maybe I'll have to do just that,” I said. “Where were you the murder night, Manet? You left the pawn shop around five-fifteen in your car, where did you go the rest of the night?”

“For a drive, dinner at Le Cheval Blanc with businessmen, drinks with another businessman, and to bed here.”

“What time did you leave that last businessman?”

“About eleven, I believe. Despite your image of me as a kind of business gigolo, I work very hard. I need my sleep on most nights.”

“So you were alone after eleven
P.M.
? Or did you have an appointment with Eugene Marais at the pawn shop?”

“I was alone in my bed. Now you can—”

I heard a telephone receiver go down somewhere in the big apartment. Paul Manet wasn't alone. There were footsteps in the next room. Light steps, and the door opened. Naturally, I wasn't carrying my old gun. Luckily, I didn't need it. I saw a bedroom through the opened door, and Danielle Marais came out.

“Mr. Manet was my father's friend,” the heavy, petulant girl said. “You can't accuse him.”

“Was he a friend?” I said. “Or maybe only of Claude's, until they had a falling out?”

The long, dark hair of the dead Eugene's daughter was coiled up in a chignon, and she wore a new, green cocktail dress that had not come off some rack in Macy's. Her big, adolescent breasts stretched the sleek dress that was too old for her, too slim for her heavy body. But it did something for her, if you liked heavy, erotic nineteen-year-olds.

“You think Mr. Manet has to rob cheap pawn shops?” Danielle sneered. She wasn't a pleasant girl, but she was still young.

“There wasn't any robbery,” I said. “It was a cover for the murder. They let Jimmy Sung go. Now they're looking for another motive. I think your father knew something Manet there didn't want known. Or maybe it was something else. Where'd you get that dress, Danielle?”

“From Charlie Burgos, of course,” she snapped, and swung in a slow circle preening the new dress for me.

“Where did Charlie get that kind of money?”

“He works!”

“At his kind of pay that dress is a year's savings.”

“What do you know?” she sneered, but she stopped giving me the show of her dress.

She stood in the room as if uneasy, a girl trying to be a woman and not making it. She seemed almost confused.

“What money does Charlie have, Danielle?” I said.

She chewed at her full lips, a habit she had probably found right after she stopped sucking her thumb. It was Paul Manet who answered me:

“I gave her the dress. Eugene Marais was a friend of mine, no matter what you think. I wanted to cheer Danielle up.”

“A dress for a friend of the family?” I watched Danielle. She was grinning. “How long have you two known each other? Did Eugene and Viviane Marais know you knew each other? Maybe they didn't like it?”