Old Sinners Never Die (12 page)

Jimmie nodded and sipped some very miserable whisky the blonde hostess just now brought him. It was a publicity gambit, of course, and probably rigged never to come off even if the General could be brought to arms.

The hostess said, “Leo, there’s a phone call for you. It’s important so you better hurry up.”

Montaigne excused himself. “Please don’t go, Jarvis. I trust you’re a gentleman in an affair like this.”

Jimmie did not know for the moment what he would do in either case, acting a gentleman or not acting one. The Key Bridge must be the rendezvous, of course; and whatever else Mrs. Norris heard, she and Tom had taken off with it.

“Your husband’s just come in, Madame Cru,” the blonde said. “He’s got half the newspapermen in Washington with him, it looks like. One of them’s even got striped pyjamas on under his suit.”

“Probably a zebra,” Jimmie said. And in truth, nothing that happened this night would surprise him now.

T
HE GENERAL SPLASHED COLD
water on his face and then rubbed his neck with his cold, wet hands. Finally he stuck his head under the kitchen tap. Groping for a towel, he knocked the telephone off its wall cradle.

Thus did it come to his attention. He replaced it and began to wonder if the monotone which he had thought in his stupor to be Virginia singing had not been Virginia on the telephone. The General looked at his watch. It was after two o’clock. Someone must think a very neat plan to be going according to schedule. And wasn’t it? The fact that he was conscious instead of unconscious at the moment was small impediment. He had been virtually kidnapped: he was not at all sure, however, that he would like to try to prove it, especially before the court of public opinion where everything seemed to be first tried these days.

But to what purpose was he brought here?

The General was not without resources of his own. He took the phone from the hook. “Let me have the supervisor please.”

A few seconds later he said, “I’ve been trying to put a call through to Washington. I expected the operator to call me back. I wonder if you would be so kind as to check.”

“One moment please.”

“Right.” The General was an old hand at putting just the right tenor in his voice to carry authority.

The operator came on again. “That call was completed, sir.”

“Oh?” The General was all apologies. “My wife must have put it through,” he improvised with magnificent aplomb. “Have you the number there?”

“Yes, sir,” she said, and repeated the number.

“Ah-ha. That’s it. I’m sorry to have bothered you.” He hung up and waited a long moment. He then called the Washington number.

The moment the receiver was lifted from the hook at the other end, the General knew somebody was having one hell of a party, he felt much relieved.

“Hello out there,” a man shouted into the phone at him.

“Who’s speaking?” the General demanded.

“Dempsey of the
Post-Citizen
. Who do you want?”

A newspaperman. The reassurance vanished. But the General hesitated only a second. “Listen, Dempsey, I’ve got a devil of a story for you … Where are you now?”

“The Sentimental Club … Club Sentimentale. Excuse me, honey child.”

“What’s going on there?” The General tried again.

“Who the hell are you?” the reporter came back at him.

Ever so gently, General Jarvis broke the connection.

So, he thought, whatever the game was, Virginia Allan was playing it with her boss, her boyfriend. What was it? Conspiracy? Blackmail? She did think he had money, foolish girl. But the truth was, he had not done anything so far that could not have stood photography. And to the best of his knowledge he had not even said anything that the Army Chief of Staff could not have tapped in on. It seemed like nothing more than a scheme to keep him out of circulation for a few hours. He was probably going to find out that somebody was doing it for his own good! Everybody was so damned solicitous of his good! The State Department once had airlifted him out of Berlin on the same pretext … Good God, not Chatterton’s doing, this, surely!

The General began to explore the house. A place as well equipped as this might very well have a jeep or some such conveyance for mountain travel. After all, he was presumed sleeping. He was not expected to do much exploring. He got his tails and dress shirt out of the closet—a woman’s closet. His things smelled delicious. Just let Mrs. Norris get a whiff of them. The dear woman, he would have been better off having spent the night in her company, and by this night’s end he might very well be content to retire into it.

A peculiar thing happened then: all the lights in the house—and a fair number of them had been left lighted—dimmed down to where the General thought they were going out. Then they came on again. Something around the place was demanding an extraordinary amount of electric power. But there was not the sound of any motor anywhere, furnace, heater, freezer.

The General decided to go down to the basement, and if he found nothing there, to go outdoors. It would take Virginia almost a half-hour to reach the city, if that’s where she was going. She had been gone ten minutes. He pulled on the striped sweater again for warmth over his coat, and catching a glimpse of himself in the closet mirror, his cropped hair bristling, the formal tails dangling behind him, he thought he looked like the King of the Cats.

The General found nothing electrical in the basement except a washing machine. But the curious thing about it all was, he did not even find a fuse box or a meter.

He was distracted, however, finding a filing cabinet, one drawer of which was padlocked. He had not the slightest qualm in opening the unlocked drawers. All accounts of Leo Montaigne’s travels, it seemed by cursory examination. He wished fervently that he had more time. The young man had been a great many places, and had met a great many people—every one of whom was referred to by initials. It would take remembering to put all those initials to people. The General guessed that in one notebook perhaps one hundred sets of initials appeared. Who could remember the names behind them? There was only one answer as he saw it: there must be a code for them. He was sure of it, noting that each page was hand-numbered. Why trouble numbering pages except for quick individual reference?

As for the contents, they read at first like women’s gossip at some God-forsaken military outpost: a place where the strain of isolation told on men’s nerves and women’s characters. After reading a few pages more, the General recognized the locale—the United States Embassy, and soon the country, the Netherlands.

Then the General read: “I have my bond! I negotiated it this morning, and the price I blush to say. Oh, what a rogue am I, sans peasant’s clothes. A. must wear me now like an albatross forever. Dear A. So brilliant a woman, and to have had but one indiscretion. But what responsibility now that I know. I must not sleep. I wonder if she is up to violence? Who is not, being desperate? It will be better that we go home soon, where it is more difficult to hire assassins.”

Very clearly, then, General Jarvis pieced together his recollection of Holland in the early years after the war. Madam Jennings had been the American ambassador, until for reasons of health she asked to be recalled. He had not seen her then, but he remembered it now. And he had remembered earlier this night how supple and feminine she was not long before then. And he also remembered that, having recently been invited to join the presidential cabinet, her work in hospital rehabilitation over the past five years had been cited, accounting presumably for her years out of public service. A sort of penitential withdrawal?

One more thing the General remembered while he searched the basement for a stout instrument: at the Chatterton dinner tonight Elizabeth Jennings’ defiant self-pride when he had surprised her gazing after young Montaigne. He cursed himself and his one-track mind: he had thought her enamoured of the young man herself. And yet, he suspected more people than himself might have that notion.

He found a small crowbar among the garden tools and without hesitance wrenched the padlock from the cabinet door. As he had anticipated, there was an entire notebook of initials and the names which matched them, only in his code. A. evidently was too familiar a person to need a code. He was reasonably certain A. was Elizabeth Jennings, but he would have liked to be dead certain. The drawer contained also notebooks of detail about what was going on in the world in the 1920’s. From Aimee to Vanzetti, the General thought, “Yes, we have no bananas,” but plenty of bathtub gin.

His mind quickened to that notion and to a couple of things of simultaneous association: the assault on electrical power, and the smell he had first apprehended, arriving outside the cabin with Virginia—fermented corn!

He hastily closed the cabinet door—or tried to. Some of the papers he had pulled out had not been properly put back. And trying to push the front folder down to the bottom of the drawer, he caught his thumbnails on an envelope fastened to the back of the drawer door. It was a neat, obscure hiding place really, which only his chance carelessness had discovered. The envelope was fastened in place by the screws that went through the metal to the drawer handle. The General tore the envelope free. Inside it were a half-dozen letters addressed to one of the most famous royal pretenders now living in modest exile with, the General was fairly sure, his wife and family. He opened one envelope and read only the salutation: “My dear,” and the signature, “Elizabeth.”

He cursed softly, having not even a pocket in which to put them except his trousers. Awkward. He decided to take them nonetheless. No one as honourable as himself might ever have the chance.

Friends in high places: that was what Chatterton had said of the scoundrel! And no doubt enemies in hell.

He turned off the light and, waiting a long moment to accustom his eyes to the darkness, he went out through the basement door. The cabin was on high ground, and there was no sign of a garage anywhere. He still had not found an electric meter, so he took that search as his line of departure. The moon was high still, and against the brightened sky he located the electric and the telephone wires. Curious, it was only the telephone service that came up the hill along the road. His own heartbeat accelerated as he started down the scrubby mountainside following the electric line. He was virtually certain there was an independent power plant. He paused now and then and held his breath to listen. An owl was all he heard at first, then the singing of a machine came to him, and finally, men’s voices.

He was some seconds listening, trying to locate their direction, when it suddenly broke through to him that he was sitting on the roof of a cave. He could feel the vibration in the earth beneath him.

He did not know much about making moonshine except that it required terrific heat, to say nothing of nerve. It would seem to him an occupation of last resort these days, and of small return. But what did he know? He had heard that the stuff was still bootlegged in the mountains, and he was sure as hell in the mountains. The question was, could he ever get out of the mountains?

One thing certain—an associate with private hootchmakers was right in character with Montaigne.

The General went down on his hands and knees and crept to the edge of the roof. A road twisted down from there like a dirty string in the moonlight. A truck—canvas-covered, perhaps a couple of tons’ capacity—was parked directly beneath him, its tail half into the garage, for light shone out around it. And that was where the men were also.

The General listened. Theirs was very nearly a foreign language, so strong was the hill country dialect—less than thirty miles from the capital of the U.S.A. Gradually he could make out words, none of which meant a damned thing to him. He began to calculate his chances of stealing the truck.

Then one of the men said, “How long now, Red?” The words were as “twangy” as a saw. But the General could understand them.

“Half-hour. I calculate we can turn her off and let her cool while we go down.”

“Think I ought to start loading?”

“Time enough. Deal another hand or two.”

“I can’t afford to lose no more.”

“Shucks, man, your credit’s good for a couple hours.”

“What if he ain’t there?”

“He better be there. Cash on Wednesday.”

“I don’t trust that boy much, Red. He’s too pretty.”

“Don’t have to trust him. It’s me what knows where the dynamite is—and you know something? I just don’t think he carries insurance on his little old cabin … I can’t open, can you?”

“Yeah, I’ll open since I’m playing with your money.”

The General resolved that even at the risk of his life, when that truck went down the mountain he was going with it.

M
RS. NORRIS, WAITING IN
the park, felt her bones to be as cold as a stone bench, and observing the benches, a line of them along the path in the moonlight, she was reminded of tombstones. It was a miserably lonely watch she kept; a clock somewhere off in the night struck two. Was there ever an Irishman born, she wondered, who had any notion of time? It was the greatest of follies to have left the house with him in the first place.

A very few minutes later she decided that she had had what long ago her mother called an elegant sufficiency. Still, there was a package put into the tree, and if the whole business weren’t nonsense, something had to be done about it. There was but one thing in her power, she decided, and immediately set about working her hand behind the stone plate into the hollow. She soon brought out into the moonlight a small neat package carefully tied with string.

It was her business only if she made it so. Not even a restless bird stirred to interrupt the silence. Mrs. Norris took the package beneath the nearest streetlamp, and painstakingly untied the string. She had in her hand, when the package was opened, several small, tight rolls of microfilm.

Mrs. Norris could scarcely breathe for the palpitations of her heart. She sucked in the night air for dear life. Finally her heartbeat slowed to more nearly normal and her hand grew steadier. If someone did come for the package, what could she do? It was not really a matter of bravery or cowardice, but rather of wisdom. Merely to watch and report was not going to prevent these things from passing into the hands of some culprit.