The Sphinx (5 page)

Gene had fallen
in love with a wealthy married woman almost twice his age and had been
emotionally turned inside-out, while Maggie fell for a super-jock from Yale and
had been through all the traumas of unwanted pregnancy and abortion.

They were back
together again now because they were friends, and because the whole Democratic
theme for the new administration had been Southern together^ ness,

Gene tore
bread, and chewed it in large pieces.

“Did you manage
to get it?” he asked her.

She grinned.
“You’ll get fat, you know, eating as much bread as that!”

“Nobody could
get fat on what I eat. Do you know what I had last night? One crab pastry and
two Jack Daniels. I was so hungry in Walter’s meeting this morning that my guts
were rumbling.”

Maggie picked
her tapestry bag off the floor and probed inside it. She brought out her
shorthand notebook, and opened it up.

“I got most of
it,” she said, “with the single exception of Lorie Semple’s telephone number.
For that, we have to wait until the phone company reference office opens on
Monday morning.”

Gene coughed.
“I’m an important politician, and I have to wait till Monday morning? Did Jack
Kennedy ever have to wait till Monday morning? Did LBJ?”

“Oh, I expect
so,” said Maggie. “The point was, I to do this quietly and not cause a ruckus.
I’ve already had a call from Senator Hasbaum’s secretary this morning, asking
how you made out with the gorgeous Ms. Semple, and if I were you I’d keep this
particular romance out of the papers.”

“Romance? Who
said anything about romance? If you call a sprained ankle and a bitten tongue
romance...”

Maggie blinked
at him. “I thought you said it was an ulcer.”

Gene shrugged,
embarrassed. “Well, it’s a similar kind of feeling. Ulcer, bite. Hard to tell
the difference.”

Maggie flipped
over a few pages in her book. “The Semple house is quite interesting. It stands
in forty acres of its own ground in Merriam. Most of the grounds are scrub and
woods and I’ve been promised an aerial photograph. The house is a
fifteen-bedroom ante-bellum mansion originally built by a Virginia tobacco
grower. It was owned by various planters and politicians until it fell into
disuse in 1911. It was empty until the Semples bought it in 1973, when Jean
Semple was appointed to the staff of the French diplomatic staff in Washington,
and they’ve lived there ever since.”

Their steak and
eggs arrived, and Gene lavished black pepper onto his plate while Maggie
continued to read from her book.

“Jean Semple is
–or was, rather– a very educated and wealthy man. He was born in 1919, in
Sassenage, in Isere, of rich parents, and it looks like his family always
expected him to make it in the diplomatic service. He went to Egypt in 1951 as
a junior diplomat, and that’s where he met his wife, Leila. There is hardly any
information on her, except that her maiden name was Misab, and she spent most
of her early life in the Soudan. Their only child, Lorie, was born eighteen
years ago in Paris.

“Jean was
always keen on wildlife. He gave quite a lot of money to various wildlife
charities, particularly the national parks in Africa. But he was also a hunter,
and it was while he was hunting that he was mauled by bears and killed. I have
a Canadian coroner’s report on its way.”

Gene forked a
piece of steak into his mouth, and then frowned.

“Is that all?”
he asked her. “What about valuables? Did he collect anything? I mean–why is the
house so fiercely guarded?”

“Nothing at
all,” said Maggie. “I talked to a couple of French diplomats who knew him, and
they both said that he never collected anything much, and that all they knew
about him was that he liked his privacy. Oh, and they also said that his wife
was very beautiful, with, what one of them called
une grande poitrine.
”

“What’s
une grande poitrine.’

“Big knockers.
I would have thought that even your French could have stretched to that.”

“Stop being
sarcastic and eat your steak.”

They finished
their meal, and afterward they walked together past the White House to Gene’s
office. It was a gray, humid day, hi that indecisive period between September
and October, when the Washington weather can never make up its mind. Up above
them, unseen, a jet roared down toward Dulles Airport, throttling its way along
the difficult flight path over the Potomac.

When they
reached the silent, pillared portico of Gene’s office, they held hands briefly.
“Thanks for the lunch.” Maggie said. “That’s the best steak I’ve had in weeks.”

“It’s a
pleasure. Maybe we should do it more often.”

“Do what?” she
asked, feigning innocence.

He looked at
her for a moment, and then he leaned forward and kissed her forehead. “Whatever
it is that good friends do.”

“You will be
careful, won’t you?”

“Careful?”

She pulled her
knitted jacket tighter around her. “It’s what one of those French diplomats
said. I didn’t tell you before because I thought it sounded ridiculous. But
it’s been nagging me.”

“What was it?
‘Beware of the dogs?’ “

“No, it was
stranger than that. After he told me all about Mrs. Semple and Lorie, he asked
if anyone was interested in them as far as marriage was concerned. I said no, I
didn’t think so. But he said if anyone is, warn them about the dance.”

“The dance”?
What the hell does that mean?”

“I don’t know.
I told you it sounded ridiculous.

But I just
thought you ought to know. Just in case.”

Gene took her
arm, and laughed. His laugh echoed in the portico, and sounded strangled and
peculiar.

“My beautiful
Maggie,” he said, “the last thing I am about to do is marry Lorie Semple, let
alone her mother. The way she treated me last night, I don’t suppose I’ll even
see her again, let alone get the opportunity to pop the question.”

“I don’t know,”
said Maggie. “I’ve always pictured you with hordes of kids and a station-wagon,
and a suburban house in Grand Rapids.”

“With Lorie
Semple? You’ve got to be joking.” Maggie shrugged. “It’s going to hit you one
day.

There was one
time when I thought it would have to be me.”

Gene stood
there with his dark curly hair blown into tangles by the afternoon breeze. He
had a square, Democratic-candidate kind of face, but like all Democrats it was
capable of looking sensitive and sad as well as confident and vigorous.

“Maggie...” he
said. But she shook her head and turned away from him.

“It doesn’t
matter,” she told him gently. “Whatever you do, provided it’s the best for you,
it doesn’t matter.”

Then she walked
off down the street and left him standing under the tall and dignified porch,
of his chosen profession.

About an hour
later, he switched off his desk lamp and took off his heavy-rimmed spectacles.

The report was
almost finished, and he reckoned he could tidy it up without too much work in
the morning. Although it was gloomy in the office, the sky was still pale and
luminous outside, and he guessed there were three or four hours of good
daylight left. He shuffled the papers on his desk and then stood up.

Maybe he should
take a drive out to the Semple place and look again for himself.

An erotic
vision of Lorie Semple had been floating around in the back of his mind all
day, even during the West Indian meeting. He only had to close his eyes for a
fraction of a second, and he could see that silky, sensuous body, and that
beautiful feline face. He said to himself, out loud, “That woman has gotten
under my skin,” and he tapped a True out of a crumpled pack and lit it.

Why not do what
he’d suggested, and .call on her? There had to be a visitor’s bell somewhere at
the main gate, and maybe if he rang it and announced himself, instead of trying
to sneak over the wall like a second-class yegg, he might get himself admitted
to the house the respectable way. He just hoped that Lorie hadn’t found his
shoe.

He locked up
his filing-cabinet, switched off all the office lights, and went out to get his
car. It was nearly five by the time he drove out of the city center, and the
clouds were growing heavier and darker. On the car radio, a preacher was calling
for “an end to iniquity, O Lord, and an end to all human suffering.” He added
his own prayer for an end to losing expensive footwear in gates.

It took him
half an hour to find the narrow uphill road that led up to the Semple place,
and he drove past it twice before he recognized it. In the daylight, it somehow
looked different, although he knew he had taken the right turn-off when he
drove through the overhanging tunnel of trees, and emerged at the crest of the
hill by the high spiked wall. He turned the sharp corner, and there was the
wrought-iron gate. The shoe, as he had feared, was gone.

He climbed out
of the car and walked up to the bars. Even during the day, the Semple grounds
looked gloomy and overcast, and the leaves of the oaks rustled sadly in the
wind. The drive stretched ahead of him, and disappeared around the corner, and
he knew that he was going to have to discover what lay beyond it. He stepped
back a few paces, looking right and left, and eventually saw it. A small brass
bell, with the name Semple engraved around it in Gothic lettering.

He pushed it,
twice. Then he paced up and down, his ankles teased by tumbling leaves, waiting
for someone to answer.

It was almost
ten minutes before he saw any sign of life. Then he heard the whine of an
electric motor, and around the corner in the drive appeared a bright red golf
cart with a red-and-white striped awning, driven, by the stoney-faced Mathieu.

The golf cart
took almost five minutes to arrive at the gates. Mathieu halted it a few yards
away, and dismounted. Then he walked up to Gene, and examined him through the
bars.

“I’ve come to
call on Lorie,” said Gene, in a louder and more uncertain voice than he’d
hoped.

“If she’s in,
I’d like to say hello.”

Mathieu
appeared to give this some thought. Then he began to wave his hands backward
and forward as if to say “no.”

Gene stood
there stubbornly. “Will you please just tell her I’m here?”

Again, Mathieu
waved his hands. No, monsieur, I won’t.

“Well, how
about Mrs. Semple. Can I see her?”

No–and a
flapping gesture that obviously meant go way.

“Mathieu,” said
Gene insistently, “will you try to understand? I don’t mean Lorie any harm. I’m
not a Casanova. I just want to say hello and ask her out for dinner.”

No. Go away.

“Look,” said
Gene. “Let’s be sensible about this, huh?” He took out his wallet, and produced
a ten-dollar bill, which he folded between his fingers and poked through the
gates. “Will you just let me in?”

Mathieu stared
at the bill with icy, relentless eyes. Then he looked back at Gene, and there
was such intense contempt on his face that Gene withdrew the bill and tucked it
hastily and untidily back in his wallet. At that particular moment, he was
extremely glad that there was half a ton of iron gate in between him and this
mute kravmaga freak.

“All right,”
Gene said. “If I can’t persuade you, I can’t persuade you. But will you just
take a message? Will you tell Lorie to call me? Please?”

Mathieu looked
at him coldly for a few more moments and then turned around and walked back to
his golf cart. With a high-pitched whine, he trundled off again down the drive
and disappeared from sight behind the trees. Gene leaned against the gates and
sighed.

He was about to
return to his car when he thought he saw something in the distance, almost
hidden by the long grass. He screwed up his eyes, and for one fleeting second
he saw Lorie, walking slowly among the trees with a big dog on a leash. She was
wearing blue slacks and a billowing white blouse, her tawny hair brushed, back
and floating in the wind.

Gene yelled,
“Lorie! Lorie!” But she was too far away and before he could shout again she
was gone.

He went back
and sat in his New Yorker, drumming his fingers on the steering wheel and
wondering what to do next. He didn’t fancy trying to break into the Semple
estate in broad daylight. Nor did it help ringing the visitor’s bell. All he
could do now was to wait for the morning, when Maggie would hopefully have the
telephone number. Then perhaps he could get past the impassive Mathieu and talk
to Lorie herself, or at least her mother.

He drove back
to the city, feeling disappointed, but increasingly determined. If ever he’d
faced an up-and-up challenge, this was it, and no matter what it took, he was
damned if he wasn’t going to lick it.

Monday morning
was bright, with a slight snap of winter in the air, and Gene wore his overcoat
to work. He reached his office early, just before eight, but Maggie was even
earlier. She was sitting at her desk with a plastic cup of coffee, smoking a
cigarette and hanging on the phone.

Gene hung up
his coat. “Who is it?” he mouthed. “Anyone I shouldn’t talk to?,’“

Maggie put her
hand over the receiver. “It’s my secret Monday-morning lover. Keep your mouth
shut, or he’ll hear you.”

Gene went to
his desk and flipped quickly through the stack of mail. There was a whole pile
of letters from the West Indies, and some irritating enquiries about subsidy
policy in parts of Central America. Even if he got down to it straight away,
this particular bundle was going to take him most of the morning to answer, and
he still had to finish a report on .West Indian internal affairs. He tapped a
True out its pack and lit up.

Maggie was
saying: “Uh-huh. Okay, I gotcha. Thanks, Marvin. I owe you one.” Then she put
the phone down and came across to Gene with a self-satisfied smile. She was
wearing a neat rust-colored suit today, and not for the first time he realized
just how pretty she really was.