Beggarman, Thief (2 page)

“Not to my knowledge,” the
chef
said. “I knew
Monsieur
Jordache. In fact, we occasionally had a glass together. It was with great sorrow that I learned of his death. I knew him as a peaceful man. He was very well liked. He had no known enemies. However—I cannot believe that he was a man of some importance in America, as you have said.”

“Nice-Matin
says he owned a yacht,” Hubbell said. He laughed lightly. “That’s pretty important.”

“He worked the yacht,” the
chef
said. “He was a charter captain. It was his means of livelihood.”

“I see,” Hubbell said. He couldn’t imagine one of the ten most promising young politicians in America making his living out of ferrying boating parties around the Mediterranean, no matter how many times his wife had displayed herself naked back home. The story was becoming less interesting. “Perhaps the murder was political?” he asked hopefully.

“I don’t believe so. He was not a political man at all. We tend to accumulate information on political people.”

“Smuggling?”

“I hardly think so. In that field, too, we have our information. Or at least suspicions.”

“How would you describe him, then?” Hubbell persisted, out of force of habit.

The
chef
shrugged. “A decent workingman. A good type.”
Brave type
in French. Measured praise, slightly patronizing from a French cop. “Honest, as far as anyone knew,” the
chef
went on. “We were not really intimate. He spoke very little French. Not like you,
monsieur.”
Hubbell nodded recognition of the compliment. “And my English, I regret to say, is most rudimentary.” The
chef
smiled at his disability. “We did not discuss our private philosophies.”

“What did he do before he came here? Do you know?”

“He was a merchant seaman.” The
chef
hesitated. Jordache had told him over a glass of wine, after the
chef
had commented on the broken nose, the scar tissue, that he had been a boxer. But he had asked the
chef
to keep quiet about it. In waterfront cafés boxers were likely targets for large men made belligerent by drink. “I didn’t come to France to fight,” Jordache had said. “It isn’t my lucky country for fighting. I had one bout in Paris and got my brains knocked out.” He’d laughed as he said it. From the look of the body the fight he’d been in before he died hadn’t been a lucky one, either.

Well, the
chef
thought, why not tell the newspaperman? It couldn’t do any harm anymore to Jordache, who wasn’t going to be doing much drinking in waterfront cafes from now on. “It appears,” said the
chef,
“that he was a professional pugilist. He even fought in Paris. Once. In the main event. He was knocked out.”

“A fighter?” Hubbell’s interest was aroused once more. The sports section might run a couple of hundred words. If the man had fought a main event in Paris he must have had some sort of reputation. People would be curious about an American fighter being killed in France. He would telex into the office as much of the story as he could dig up here and tell it to get the background dope out of the morgue. They rewrote all of his stories in New York anyway. “Jordache?” Hubbell said. “I don’t remember any fighter by that name.”

“He fought under an assumed name,” the
chef
said, making a mental note for himself to look into that part of Jordache’s history. Professional boxing was a business that gangsters were always mixed up in. There might be a lead there—a promise broken, a deal gone sour. He should have thought of it sooner. “He fought under the name of Tommy Jordan.”

“Ah,” the newspaperman said. “That helps. Certainly. I remember some stories in the papers about him. That he was promising.”

“I know nothing about that,” the
chef
said. “Just the fight in Paris. I looked it up in
I’Equipe.
He was a great disappointment,
l’Equipe
said.” Now he wanted to call a promoter in Marseilles who had connections with the
milieu.
He stood up. “I’m afraid I have to go back to work now,” he said. “If you want more information perhaps you could speak to the members of his family. His wife, his brother, his son.”

“His brother? He’s here?”

“The entire family,” the
chef
said. “They had been on a cruise together.”

“Would you happen to know the brother’s first name?”

“Rudolph. The family was originally German.”

Rudolph, Hubbell thought, remembering, Rudolph Jordache, that was the name in
Life.
“So,” he said, “he wasn’t the one who was married here?”

“No,” the
chef
said impatiently.

“And his wife is here, too?”

“Yes, and under the circumstances she, the sister-in-law, might be able to help you more than I can …”

“The sister-in-law?” Hubbell said, standing too. “The one in the bar?”

“Yes. I suggest you ask her,” the
chef
said. “If you find out anything that might assist me I would be grateful if you visited me again. Now, I’m afraid I …”

“Where can I find her?”

“She is at the Hôtel du Cap at present.” He had ordered Jean Jordache to remain in Antibes for the time being, and had taken her passport. He would need Jean Jordache for help in the case when he found Danovic.
If
he ever found him again. He had interviewed the woman, but she had been hysterical and drunk and he had gotten only a confused and disjointed story from her. And now the idiot of a doctor had put her under sedation. The doctor had said she was unstable, a confirmed alcoholic, and that he wouldn’t be responsible for her sanity if the
chef
kept after her with questions. “The others,” the
chef
said, “I believe can be found on the
Clothilde
in the harbor. Thank you for your interest,
monsieur.
I trust I haven’t wasted your time.” He put out his hand.

Hubbell said,
“Merci bien, monsieur.”
He had gotten all the information he was going to get, and left.

The
chef
sat down at his desk and picked up the phone to dial Marseilles.

The small white ship moved slowly in the afternoon sunlight across the Mediterranean swell. On the far-off coast, the buildings along the shore and back in the hills made a pink and white pattern against the green background of pine and olive and palm. Dwyer stood in the bow, the name of the ship,
Clothilde,
printed on his clean white jersey. He was a short, tight-muscled man and he had been crying. Because of his protruding long front teeth he had always been called Bunny, as far back as he could remember. Despite his muscles and his workingman’s clothes, there was something ineradicably girlish about him. “I’m not a fag,” he had said the first time he had had any kind of conversation with the dead man, whose ashes had just been strewn over the sea. He stared at the pretty coast through tear-blurred, soft black eyes.
Rich man’s weather,
the murdered man had said.

You could say that again
, Dwyer thought.
Not his weather, nor mine either. We fooled ourselves. We came to the wrong place.

Alone in the pilothouse, dressed like Dwyer in chinos and white jersey, his hand on a spoke of the polished oak and brass wheel, stood Wesley Jordache, his eyes fixed on the point of land on which stood the citadel of Antibes. He was tall for his age, a lanky, powerful, rawboned boy, tanned, his blond hair bleached in streaks by sun and salt. Like Dwyer, he was thinking of the man whose ashes he had consigned to the sea, the man who had been his father. “Poor, stupid, crazy son of a bitch,” the boy said aloud, bitterly. He remembered the day his father, whom he hadn’t seen for years, had come to take him out of the military school on the Hudson, where he had fought half the students, all ages, all classes, all sizes, in blind, incomprehensible, meaningless fury.

“You’ve had your last fight,” his father had said.

Then the silence. And the rough man saying, “Did you hear me?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Don’t call me sir,” the man had said. “I’m your father.”

His father had laid down the rules for the wrong member of the family,
the boy thought, his eyes on the citadel where, he had been told, Napoleon had been imprisoned one night on his return from Elba.

At the rail aft, dressed in incongruous black, stood the boy’s uncle, Rudolph Jordache, and his aunt, Gretchen Burke, brother and sister of the murdered man. City people, unaccustomed to the sea, accustomed to tragedy; stiff figures of death against the sunny horizon. They did not touch or speak or look at each other. What was left unsaid on this azure summer afternoon would not have to be explained or mourned or apologized for later.

The woman was in her early forties, tall, slender and straight, her black hair blowing a little in the offshore breeze, framing a luminously pale face, the signs of age just omens now, hints of things to come. She had been beautiful as a girl and was beautiful in a different way now, her face stern, marked by sorrow and a troubled sensuality that was not temporary or fleeting but a permanent habit. Her eyes, squinting against the glare, were a deep blue that in some lights shaded down to violet. There was no damage of tears.

It had to happen
, she thought.
Of course. We should have known
. He
probably knew. Maybe not consciously, but known just the same. All that violence could not have a nonviolent end. True son of his father, the blond stranger in the family, alien to the dark brother and the dark girl, although all from the same bed.

«  »

The man was slim, too, a well-cared-for, aristocratic Yankee slim-ness, inherited from no parent, acquired by an act of will, now accentuated by the neatly cut, almost ambassadorial dark American suit. He was younger by two years than his sister and looked younger than that, a false, gentle echo of youth in the face and bearing of a man whose speech and movements were always deliberate and considered, a man who had known great authority, had struggled all his life, had won and lost, had taken on responsibility in all situations, had come up from penury and want to amass a considerable fortune, who had been ruthless when necessary, cunning when it was useful to be cunning, harsh with himself and others, generous, by his lights, when it was possible to be generous. The resignation that had been forced upon him was there in the thin, controlled mouth, the watchful eyes, was there to be discovered or guessed at. It was a face that could have been that of a youthful air force general whose command had been taken away from him for a failure in the ranks below him that might or might not have been his fault.

He went alone,
Rudolph Jordache was thinking;
he came into the cabin where I was sleeping and closed the door softly and left alone. Left for what was to become his death, disdaining my help, disdaining me, disdaining my manhood or what he would think of, if he ever thought, as my lack of manhood, in a situation that required a man.

Down below, Kate Jordache was packing her bag. It didn’t take long. On top of her other things she first put the white jersey with the ship’s name on it that had made Thomas laugh when he saw what her full bosom had done to the lettering, then the bright dress he had bought her for their wedding just eight days ago.

She had nagged Thomas into marrying her. That was the word—nagged. They had been perfectly happy before, but then when she knew she was pregnant—Proper, bloody little well-brought-up, lower-class, obedient, English working girl … Here comes the bride. If there had been no wedding, that awful, twittery, smart-talking woman, that fancy wife of Rudolph’s, would never have had the excuse to get drunk, would not have gone off with a Yugoslav pimp, would have kept her expensive pink pants on her, would not have needed rescuing or a man fighting for her, and a man a lot better than her husband would be alive today.

Enough of that
, Kate thought.
Enough. Enough.

She closed the bag with a snap and sat down on the edge of the bunk, her solid brown body just beginning to show the swell of the child within her, her capable, quick hands folded quietly in her lap as she looked around her, for the last time, she had decided, at the cramped cabin with the familiar noise of the sea swishing past the open porthole.

Thomas
, she thought,
Thomas, Thomas.

“Who was Clothilde?” she had asked once.

“She was a queen of France. She was somebody I knew as a boy. She smelled like you.”

Absent from the small company of mourners on the vessel heading for the coast of France was Jean, Rudolph Jordache’s wife. She sat on a bench in the park of the hotel watching her daughter playing with the young girl Rudolph had hired to take care of the child until, as Rudolph had put it, she was in condition to handle Enid again herself. How long would that be? Jean had asked herself. Two days, ten years, never?

She was dressed in slacks and a sweater. She had not brought along clothes suitable for a funeral. Rudolph had been relieved when she said she wouldn’t go. She could not bear the thought of stepping aboard the
Clothilde
again, of facing the silent, accusing stares of the wife, the son, the beloved friend.

When she had looked at herself in the mirror in the morning she was shocked at what the last days had done to the small, pretty, girlish face.

The skin of her face, her entire body, seemed to be stretched unbearably on some invisible rack. She felt as though at any moment her body would explode and her nerves erupt through the skin, snapping and crackling like wild lines of wire, crackling under fatal electrical charges.

The doctor had given her some Valium, but she was past Valium. If it weren’t for the child, she thought, she would go down to the sea and throw herself off the rocks into it.

As she sat there in the shadow of a tree, in the spicy fragrance of pine and sun-warmed lavender, she said to herself,
Everything I touch I destroy.