Murder Is Served (5 page)

He walked lightly, slowly, his eyes everywhere. A busboy filling a saltcellar, his back to Maillaux, spilled a few grains on the tablecloth and brushed them away with his fingers. Maillaux spoke from half across the room. The busboy stiffened and shuddered, and dusted with a napkin where his naked fingers had profaned. Maillaux moved on.

The busboys wore dinner jackets, black ties. The jackets did not fit so well as to encourage confusion between busboy and patron. The waiters wore red coats with yellow piping and white ties and were a vastly superior breed. Since they could be confused only with one another, their coats fitted very well indeed and their stiff collars held their chins high. The captains, again, wore dinner jackets, and were to be distinguished from dinner and supper patrons only by a kind of enhanced elegance, a certain air of being in costume. There were gradations in captains, and the two who were superior to the others were, by the narrowest of margins, easier in their elegance, wearing it more casually. Now the captains watched the waiters, who laid silver, folded napkins and watched the busboys. André passed among them, watching everybody. The most superior of the captains stiffened under André's gaze, and watched the waiters with new, more worried, intensity. When André looked at a table, taking in its silver, its napkins, its place plates, the captain responsible looked at it with sudden, acute anxiety and, with a kind of desperation, counted the number of forks displayed, the alignment of the knives. The waiter who had placed the forks, aligned the knives, stiffened under the redoubled scrutiny and wished himself elsewhere, possibly in another trade.

The lesser captains bowed slightly to André Maillaux, and the greater captains bowed also but permitted themselves a gently breathed “M'sieu,” one to each. To these, André nodded; he said, “Good morning, Henri” to one and, “Good morning, Armand” to the other. He spoke without accent to his staff, and usually in English. To the patrons, who naturally expected it, he spoke the easier words in French and the others in accented English. André, who was a man of intelligence, precision of mind and well-established instincts, had no difficulty in remembering, and reproducing, the accent he had brought to the United States twenty years before, from Paris. He gave attention to such details, and to others.

William, who was greater than the greatest of the captains, who was only lesser than André could not have been distinguished from any other good-looking man in his early forties who happened to be wearing striped trousers in a deserted restaurant at eleven-thirty in the morning. He was sitting on a stool of the customers' bar, off the foyer, conversing with Hermann, the head bartender, their conversation being partly professional and partly social. Hermann drew himself up slightly when André, near the end of his progression through the dining room, approached the bar. He said, “Good morning, Mr. Maillaux.”

William slid from the bar stool, his striped trousers instantly assuming the drape of trousers perfectly disciplined by their occupant, and said, “Morning, André.”

“That Nick,” André said, without preliminary. “He continues to speak Italian to Fritzl. It is possible—it is even probable—that he does so within earshot of the patrons. I am distressed, William.”

A shadow of reciprocal distress crossed the face of the maître d'hôtel. William shook his head; he made soft clucking sounds.

“I know,” he said. “I have spoken to him. He promises. It appears that he forgets. It is, of course, true that he is Italian, and that Fritzl is Hungarian and—”

“At the Restaurant Maillaux there are no waiters who are Italian,” André said. “There are no waiters who are Hungarian. All are French. If they speak among themselves, they speak in French. Many of the patrons can tell when waiters are speaking in French and when in Italian. It is a flaw, William. A serious flaw. It is undermining.”

William, who had come from England two years after André had come from France and had an accent in English, French and, when he chose to speak it, German, which was completely unidentifiable, nodded agreement and permitted his face to show pain.

“I have explained,” he assured André. “I have said, ‘At André's we are all French.' I have said this in English, Italian, German, Polish and even, on occasion, in French. They all know. Even the busses.”

“A bus does not speak,” André said. “That is understood.”

The thought of busses appeared to cause him pain. “Not even to another bus,” he said. “That I
cannot
permit. You will arrange it, William.”

“O.K.,” William said. “You're the boss.”

“
Naturellement
,” André said. He looked at the slim white-gold watch on his wrist. He compared it with the discreet clock behind the bar. He motioned toward the coatroom.

“He has arrived?” André said.

“Early,” William told him. “You said early, Hermann?”

“At ten-thirty,” Herman said. “A few minutes after. I had just arrived.” He nodded. “It is my day to check the bar, you understand,” he said. “To prepare my—requisition.” He paused momentarily before the last word, and said it with a certain care.

“For lunch also, then,” André said. “It is—” Now he hesitated. William looked at him. “Admirable,” André finished. “An admirable example.”

André looked at his watch again, and noted it was nearing noon.

“Soon,” he said, “they will begin. The visitors. The little ones. You will see to them, William. I shall consult.”

William merely nodded, this time. Daily, at a few minutes before noon, André presented to William the task of taking care of the “little ones”—the odd people, the tourists, the hesitant explorers of the great world, the people who thought noon was a time for lunch at the Restaurant Maillaux in East Fiftieth. Among them there were none who could merit attention from André Maillaux himself, who could merit even a glimpse of André Maillaux himself. Even William was beyond their deserts. One of the greater captains would have done as well. Who were they to know the difference? There was, however, an issue of
noblesse oblige
.

William did not return to the bar stool. He walked to the head of the three wide steps which descended from the bar to the main dining-room and looked out over what was, for the time, his domain. The tables were set; the waiters were waiting, the bus boys were inconspicuous; the captains, minor, were circulating slowly; the captains, major were at their stations, Henri a little to the right, Armand a little to the left. All was in readiness. William returned to the foyer, realigned the bar stool which he had imperceptibly disturbed, and looked at the clock behind the bar. It was now five minutes past noon. The little ones were late; there had been a time, only three weeks ago, when two of them had appeared at eleven-thirty.
Noblesse oblige
had been under strain.

When he left William in command, André Maillaux crossed the foyer to the cloakroom and disappeared within it. Cecily Breakwell, the advance guard of the hat-check girls, was sitting down. She stood up and said, “Good morning, sir,” as she had at about this hour each day for the past two weeks. André looked at her and said, “Good morning, my dear,” as he had each day except the first, when he had said, “What is
your
name, my dear?” and had not, so far as she could tell, listened at all to her reply. He was, Cecily thought, a funny little man. He looked so foreign.

André Maillaux would not have been displeased by this, nor would he have been surprised. If he did not look foreign—distantly foreign, foreign at several removes—there would have been a failure in technic, and that was inconceivable. It took doing, after twenty years, particularly for a man not physically of a type. Not tall, to be sure, a little plump, but there it ended. There nature ended and art began, the delicacy of art. It had taken skill to find a tailor who could, without ever overdoing it, without any suggestion of burlesque, give to André's clothes the faintest suggestion of a Parisian cut—of, in effect, a reformed Parisian cut. It had taken considerable explanation, a good many years ago. One of André's minor worries was that this admirable tailor would not prove of long life, that the explanation would have some day to be repeated. “The effect,” André had said, those years ago, “the effect, you perceive, it should be that I make every attempt
not
to appear French, that I pattern myself—you perceive?—after the Americans. But that the clothes, these admirable American clothes, unavoidably—you perceive?—take on the appearance of the boulevards because it is I who wear them.” He had looked at the tailor, almost as if he were a busboy undergoing final examination before being graduated, and had been stern. “It is subtle, no?” André Maillaux, building toward success, had said. “You perceive, yes?”

The tailor had perceived; for fifteen years he had continued to perceive. “An artist,” André thought to himself each time he ordered new clothes, of that special dark gray so difficult to obtain, “a fellow artist.” It pleased André to see that others appreciated this; that his friend the tailor had also prospered. Perhaps, André had long thought, they might achieve world fame together—the most admirable tailor, the greatest restaurateur, of the habitable world. (The habitable world was not, to André, very large.)

It was no slight trick to remain permanently foreign in any part of this world, particularly for a man of no physical idiosyncrasy and with a marked aptitude for languages. The retained accent, the artfully tailored clothes, the barbering, these were essential, but these were only the costuming of the part. “He even walks like a foreigner,” Cecily Breakwell thought, watching him recede through the coatroom. “It's funny how you can tell.” André would have been pleased had he been able to overhear that thought; here, he would have realized, was a tribute to an art purely personal. The walk, the gestures, the use of the eyes, the inflection of the voice—these were of André, of André only. Even now, after many years, André Maillaux sometimes invented a new gesture, at once Parisian and personally idiosyncratic, to make himself more perfect, more perfect as the impeccable proprietor of the greatest restaurant in the world. There was little of planning, of diligence, of ingenuity, which André Maillaux was not ready, and for that matter able, to contribute to make that dream a reality.

Cecily Breakwell watched M. Maillaux walk, like a Frenchman, down the length of the cloakroom and leave it by a far door. Cecily sat down again, but almost at once got up. The first of the little ones appeared; she helped him off with his overcoat, took his hat, smiling welcome with all of her small, pert face. You could never tell who might come to the Restaurant Maillaux, or what might be the effect of her charm, her youth, her piquancy, on some guest who was looking for just that, who had almost, perhaps, decided not to produce that delightful little play because nowhere, in no casting office, had he found just the girl, with just the charm, the piquancy, for the leading part. And here, where he would least expect it, he would come upon the girl, drudging with hats and coats as Cinderella drudged at whatever menial tasks Cinderella drudged at. (Cecily was not very precise on this.) And then, Cecily thought (sitting down again, since this did not seem to be the man), he finds out I am really a college girl, just filling in here—between parts, really—and—

“Please, miss,” a new patron, who also did not look like a theatrical producer, “I'd like to leave my coat, huh?”

André Maillaux was in the office suite, by that time. The new suite, added to the restaurant during extensive alterations the summer before—the alterations which had expanded, and in so much changed, the Restaurant Maillaux.

Enlargement of the main dining-room, conversion of the second-floor dining-rooms, had left no place for the offices, just when the offices, also, needed enlargement. That had been solved by renting the premises next door, in which a dress shop had just failed. The show windows had been painted over and the forepart of the space was used now for storage. In the rear, the offices of André Maillaux, Inc., had been partitioned off. Various passages connected the offices with the restaurant itself, all of them inconspicuous. The one through the coat-room led into the receptionist's offices, which also could be reached from the street, through a passage beside the storeroom, without entering the restaurant itself. M. Maillaux emerged into the reception-room and said, “Good morning, my dear” to Gladdis Quinn, who said, “Good morning, mess-sere,” a form of address at which M. Maillaux no longer winced. Now he merely nodded toward one of the doors opening off the reception-room, and raised his eyebrows. Miss Gladdis Quinn nodded also, and smiled.

André went, with quick, light steps, to the door, opened it without knocking and, as he opened it, spoke cheerfully, “Mon cher Tony,” he said. “I come to—”

Then, abruptly, he broke off. Then, in a tone Gladdis Quinn had never heard him use, in a voice suddenly higher in pitch, strangely loud, M. Maillaux said, “My God!” Almost at once he said, in a voice nearer his own, “
Mon dieu!”
Then he went through the door he had opened and Gladdis Quinn, without thinking about it, got up from her desk by the switchboard and hurried, almost ran, behind him. When she got to the door and looked into the room M. Maillaux had entered, she screamed.

The man sitting at the desk was dead. He was very bloodily dead, collapsed forward on his desk. The top of the desk seemed to be almost covered with his blood. There was a knife sticking out of his neck on the left side, so that only the black wooden handle showed. She saw all this, looking past M. Maillaux, who was standing near the desk, a little to one side, and seemed to be swaying slowly. He looked around at her and his eyes were wide and seemed to be popping out.

“It is murder!” he said, and his voice was high and shrill. “Someone have killed my friend!”