Cynthia Manson (ed) (17 page)

Three police cars
were promptly switched to that neighborhood, as well as every available
agent
cycliste
within reach. Even Janvier dashed off, taking the Inspector’s
little car, and it was all they could do to prevent Olivier from running after
him.

“I tell you, you’d
much better stay here. He may easily go off on a false trail, and then you
won’t know anything.”

Nobody had time for
making coffee. The men of the second day shift had not thoroughly warmed to the
case. Everyone was strung up.

“Hallo! Yes. Orient
Bar. What is it?”

It was Andre Lecœur
who took the call. With the receiver to his ear, he rose to his feet, making
queer signs that brought the whole room to a hush.

“What? Don’t speak
so close to the mouthpiece.”

In the silence, the
others could hear a high-pitched voice.

“It’s for the police!
Tell the police I’ve got him! The killer! Hallo? What? Is that Uncle Andre?”

The voice was
lowered a tone to say shakily: “I tell you, I’ll shoot, Uncle Andre.”

Lecœur hardly knew
to whom he handed the receiver. He dashed out of the room and up the stairs,
almost breaking down the door of the room.

“Quick, all cars to
the Orient Bar, Porte Clignancourt.”

And without waiting
to hear the message go out, he dashed back as fast as he’d come. At the door he
stopped dead, struck by the calm that had suddenly descended on the room.

It was Saillard who
held the receiver into which, in the thickest of Parisian dialects, a voice was
saying:

“It’s all right.
Don’t worry. I gave the chap a crack on the head with a bottle. Laid him out
properly. God knows what he wanted to do to the kid. What’s that? You want to
speak to him? Here, little one, come here. And give me your popgun. I don’t
like those toys. Why, it isn’t loaded.”

Another voice. “Is
that Uncle Andre?”

The Inspector
looked round, and it was not to Andre but to Olivier that he handed the
receiver.

“Uncle Andre. I got
him.”

“Bib! It’s me.”

“What are you doing
there, Dad?”

“Nothing. Waiting
to hear from you. It’s been—”

“You can’t think
how bucked I am. Wait a moment, here’s the police. They’re just arriving.”

Confused sounds.
Voices, the shuffling of feet, the clink of glasses. Olivier Lecœur listened,
standing there awkwardly, gazing at the wall-map which he did not see, his
thoughts far away at the northern extremity of Paris, in a windswept boulevard.

“They’re taking me
with them.”

Another voice. “Is
that you, Chief? Janvier here.”

One might have
thought it was Olivier Lecœur who had been knocked on the head with a bottle by
the way he held the receiver out, staring blankly in front of him.

“He’s out, right out,
Chief. They’re lugging him away now. When the boy heard the telephone ringing,
he decided it was his chance. He grabbed Loubet’s gun from his pocket and made
a dash for the phone. The proprietor here’s a pretty tough nut. If it hadn’t
been for—”

A little lamp lit
up in the plan of Paris.

“Hallo! Your car’s
gone out?”

“Someone’s smashed
the glass of the pillar telephone in the Place Clignancourt. Says there’s a row
going on in a bar. I’ll ring up again when we know what’s going on.”

It wouldn’t be
necessary.

Nor was it
necessary for Andre Lecœur to put a cross in his notebook under Miscellaneous.

—translated by
Geoffrey Sainsbury

We buried my mother yesterday, so I
feel free to tell the truth. She lived to be ninety-three because, like the
sainted, loyal son I chose to be, I didn’t blab to the cops. I’m Oscar Leigh
and my mother was Desiree Leigh. That’s right—Desiree Leigh, inventor of the
Desiree face cream that promised eternal youth to the young and rejuvenation to
the aged. It was one of the great con games in the cosmetics industry. I
suppose once this is published, it’ll be the end of the Desiree cosmetics
empire, but frankly, my dears, I don’t give a damn. Desiree Cosmetics was
bought by a Japanese combine four years ago, and my share (more than two
billion) is safely salted away. I suppose I inherit Mom’s billions, too. but
what in heaven’s name will I do with it all? Count it, I guess.

Desiree Leigh wasn’t her real name.
She was born Daisy Ray Letch, and who could go through life with a surname like
Letch? For the past fourteen years she’s been entertaining Alzheimer’s and that
was when I began to take an interest in her past. She was always very
mysterious about her origins and equally arcane about the identity of my
father. She said he was killed in North Africa back in 1943 and that his name
was Clarence Kolb. I spent a lot of money tracing Clarence, until one night, in
bed watching an old movie, the closing credits rolled and one of the character
actors was named Clarence Kolb. I mentioned this to Mother the next morning at
breakfast, but she said it was a coincidence and she and my father used to
laugh about it.

She had no photos of my father,
which I thought was strange. When they married a few months before the war,
they settled in Brooklyn, in Coney Island. Surely they must have had their
picture taken in one of the Coney Island fun galleries? But no, insisted
Mother, they avoided the boardwalk and the amusement parks—they were too poor
for such frivolities. How did Father make his living? He was a milkman, she
said—his route was in Sheepshead Bay. She said he worked for the Borden
Company. Well, let me tell you this: there is no record of a Clarence Kolb ever
having been employed by the Borden Milk Company. It cost an ugly penny tracking
that down.

Did Mom work, too, perhaps? “Oh,
yes,” she told me one night in Cannes where our yacht was berthed for a few
days, “I worked right up until the day before you were born.”

“What did you do?” We were on deck
playing honeymoon bridge in the blazing sunlight so Mom could keep an eye on
the first mate, with whom she was either having an affair or planning to have
one.

“I worked in a laboratory.” She said
it so matter of factly while collecting a trick she shouldn’t have collected
that I didn’t believe her. “You don’t believe me.” (She not only conned, stole,
and lied, she was a mind-reader.)

“Sure I believe you.” I sounded as
convincing as an East Berlin commissar assuring would-be emigrés they’d have
their visas to freedom before sundown.
^[i]

“It was a privately owned
laboratory,” she said, sneaking a look at the first mate, who was sneaking a
look at the second mate. “It was a couple of blocks from our apartment.”

“What kind of a laboratory was it?”
I asked, mindful that the second mate was sneaking a look at me.

“It was owned by a man named Desmond
Tester. He fooled around with all kinds of formulas.”

“Some sort of mad scientist?”

She chuckled as she cheated another
trick in her favor. “I guess he was kind of mad in a way. He had a very
brilliant mind. I learned a great deal from him.”

“Is that where you originated the
Desiree creams and lotions?”

“The seed was planted there.”

“How long were you with this—”

“Desmond Tester. Let me see now.
Your daddy went into the Army in February of ‘42. I didn’t know I was pregnant
then or he’d never have gone. On the other hand, I suppose if I
had
known, I would have kept it to myself so your dad could go and prove he was a
hero and not just a common everyday milkman.”

“I don’t see anything wrong in
delivering milk.”

“There’s nothing heroic about it,
either. Where was I?”

“Taking my king of hearts, which you
shouldn’t be.”

She ignored me and favored the first
mate with a seductive smile, and I blushed when the second mate winked at me.
“Anyway, I took time off to give birth to you and then I went right back to
work for Professor Tester. A nice lady in the neighborhood looked after you.
Let me think, what was her name? Oh, yes—Blanche Yurka.”

“Isn’t that the name of the actress
who played Ma Barker in a gangster movie we saw on the late show?”

“I don’t know, is it? That’s my ten
of clubs you’re taking,” she said sharply.

“I’ve captured it fair and square
with the queen of clubs,” I told her. “How come you never married again?”

“I guess I was too busy being a
career woman. I was assisting Professor Tester in marketing some of his creams
and lotions by then. I had such a hard time cracking the department stores.”

“When did you come up with your own
formulas?”

“That was after the professor met
with his unfortunate death.”

Unfortunate, indeed. I saw her kill
him.

It was Christmas of 1950—in fact, it
was Christmas Day. Mom was preparing to roast a turkey at the professor’s
house—our apartment was much too small for entertaining—and I remember almost
everyone who was there. It was mostly kids from the neighborhood, the
unfortunate ones whose families couldn’t afford a proper Christmas dinner.
There must have been about ten of them. Mother and the professor were the only
adults, although Mom still insists there was a woman there named Laurette with
whom the professor was having an affair. Mom says this woman was jealous of her
because she thought Mom and the professor were having a little ding-dong of
their own. (I’ve always suspected my mother of doing quite a bit of dinging and
donging in the neighborhood when she couldn’t meet a grocery bill or a butcher
bill or satisfy the landlord or Mr. Kumbog, who owned the liquor store. )

Mom says it was Laurette who shot
the professor in the heart and ran away (and was never heard of again, need I
tell you?) —but I’m getting ahead of myself. It happened like this: Mom was in
the kitchen stuffing the turkey when Professor Tester appeared in the doorway
dressed in the Santa Claus suit. He had stuffed his stomach but still looked no
more like Santa Claus than Monty Woolley did in
Life Begins at Eight-Thirty.

“Daisy Ray, I have to talk to you,”
he said.

“Just let me finish stuffing this
turkey and get it in the oven,” she told him. “I’d like to feed the kids by
around five o’clock when I’m sure they’ll be tired of playing Post Office and
Spin the Bottle and Doctor.” I remember her asking me, “Sonny, have you been
playing Doctor?”

“As often as I can,” I replied with
a smirk. And I still do. Now I’m a specialist.

“Daisy Ray, come with me to the
laboratory,” Tester insisted.

‘Oh, really, Desmond,” Mother said,
“I don’t understand your tone of voice.”

“There are a lot of things going on
around here that are hard to understand,” the professor said ominously. “Daisy
Ray!” He sounded uncannily like Captain Bligh summoning Mr. Christian.

I caught a very strange and very
scary look on my mother s face. And then she did something I now realize should
have made the professor realize that something unexpected and undesirable was
about to befall him. She picked up her handbag, which was hanging by its strap
on the back of a chair, and followed him out of the room. “Sonny, you stay
here.” Her voice sounded as though it was coming from that echo chamber I heard
on the spooky radio show,
The Witch s Tale.

“Yes, Mama.”

I watched her follow Professor
Tester out of the kitchen. I was frightened. I was terribly frightened. I had a
premonition that something awful was going to happen, so I disobeyed her orders
and tiptoed after them.

The laboratory was in the basement.
I waited in the hall until I heard them reach the bottom of the stairs and head
for the main testing room, then I tiptoed downstairs, praying the stairs
wouldn’t squeak and betray me. But I had nothing to worry about. They were
having a shouting match that would have drowned out the exploding of an atom
bomb.

The door to the testing room was
slightly ajar and I could hear everything.

“What have you done with the
formula?” he raged.

“I don’t know what you’re talking
about.” Mama was quite cool, subtly underplaying him. It was one of those rare
occasions when I almost admired her.

“You damn well know what I’m talking
about, you thief!”

“How dare you!” What a display of
indignation—had she heard it, Norma Shearer would have died of envy.

“You stole the formula for my
rejuvenating cream! You’ve formed a partnership with the Sibonay Group in
Mexico!”

“You’re hallucinating. You’ve been
taking too many of your own drugs.”

“I’ve got a friend at Sibonay—he’s
told me everything! I’m going to put you behind bars unless you give me back my
formula!”

Although I didn’t doubt for one
moment that my mother had betrayed him, I still had to put my hand over my
mouth to stifle a laugh. I mean, have you ever seen Santa Claus blowing his top?
It’s a scream in red and white.