Old Sinners Never Die (13 page)

She opened her purse. She was in truth beginning to feel a bit uneasy on Tom’s behalf. He was very bold, and however serious he had pretended to be, he was taking this all too much as a lark. It was too bad a person could see best with hindsight. There was nothing in her purse except money and keys—and room.

She dropped the package of microfilms into it, but—for Tom’s sake it might turn out—she wanted to leave a package in the tree that a messenger—a courier, did they call them?—could pick up and believe that he had the real thing. Alas, she had nothing to leave … except Tom’s own poems which she suddenly remembered to be in the pocket of her dress.

Would he ever get them back, she wondered. Ah, but he knew them by heart surely, having offered to recite them to her. She would have to chance it.

And perhaps this way, she thought, getting out the small bundle of them and putting them into the tree, they would win him a fame a poet could hallow only as a patriot. She pulled the stone plate forward, and standing back to survey it an instant, she thought it did resemble a mouthful of teeth surrounded by the swollen lips of the tree’s wound. Poor thing, to have its wound opened for such desecration. Looking back from a few feet away, Mrs. Norris could not tell the fatal tree from its neighbours.

Mrs. Norris hastened out of the park. On a mission such as hers, the borrowing of a child’s bicycle was surely conscionable. She took careful notice that she would remember the house, since there was no one in the house likely to remember her. She also took care not to try to mount the vehicle until she was on an isolated part of the street, lest she collapse with a racket. She got her backside well situated, her purse on the handlebar, the front wheel heading down a slight hill, one foot on a pedal and, with the other, she pushed off from the curbstone with all her might. She might not be as agile herself as she was in her youth, but the bicycles they were making now were more so. She travelled with the wind. She was very shortly on and over the Key Bridge, having observed no life there at all. But having crossed the bridge, she discovered she must be in Georgetown by the architecture. In fact, she was on Thirty-fourth Street; she had but to go to Thirty-first, and follow it till she found herself home.

Home. It was the only place for her surely, until she decided on what branch of police to contact. Besides, the General himself should be home now, and he was the man to advise her.

Tom, the villain, had never murmured a word about how close they had come back to home. And yet it was not close enough. Her legs were beginning to ache. She pushed on. Two or three cars passed her: a queer sight she must be in her hat. What odds? Where were they accustomed to queerer sights than this meeting place of the world?

She was almost there, glimpsing the numbers at every block, and God help her, it was past time. She was beginning to suspect the presence of ghosties in her wake: she dared not look back, chiefly lest she lose her balance, but out of a certain dread as well. Her imagination, surely. Look what had happened to Tam O’Shanter. But he had been in the bottle. Mrs. Norris wished fervently that she had been. Or better, asleep and all this a dream, a nightmare. It would be worth a tumble to try and wake up.

But Mrs. Norris did not tumble. In fact, she scraped her leg on the bicycle chain, and did not wake up. Then at long last she came to the drive of her own house, and turning, threw herself off the bicycle. She saw then that she had indeed been followed. The black car which had pursued her from such a distance that she had not been certain it was there at all, quickly closed the gap. Mrs. Norris picked herself up, caught up her purse and ran for the steps. The car following her allowed a soft purr of its siren. Mrs. Norris gasped with relief. The police had followed her home! She turned with as much dignity as she could to welcome them.

Two men in plain clothes stepped from the car before it was fully stopped and came up, holding open in their hands what she afterwards realized was identification. She did not have a chance to say a word.

One of them gave his name and office, Federal Bureau of Investigation, and then said, “May I see your purse, madam?”

Mrs. Norris gave it over bravely.

He glimpsed its contents and said, “You are under arrest on suspicion of espionage.”

T
OM WENT UP IN
the hotel elevator to Mrs. Joyce’s suite with a very uneasy feeling in his stomach. The last thing he had expected was an invitation up—unless of course the boss was here. That would be something else again. But supposing the Frenchman had doubled back on him and was here himself now?

“Much traffic tonight?” Tom tried amiably with the brass-buttoned operator of the lift.

“Depends which way you’re going,” the elevator man said.

Tom had reached his level anyway.

Mrs. Joyce did have company. She opened the door to Tom and directly introduced him by his trade: “Tom works for Congressman Jarvis, Senator. Tom, this is Senator Chisholm.”

Tom crumpled his hat in his hands. A woman senator was almost too fearsome. She was long-faced and homely, and probably as knowing as Abe Lincoln’s wife. There was a woman Tom would have been afraid of, to judge her by the picture given in a book he had read. But, sure, Lincoln himself was a little afraid of her.

It was the Senator that put the bit in Tom’s mouth the moment he turned his head toward her. “Now, young man, what’s this you’ve discovered about Dr. d’Inde?”

“Is that his name?” said Tom, “Dandy?”

The senator looked at Mrs. Joyce.

“I think we had better hear his whole story, Senator,” Mrs. Joyce said. “It may be clearer in the long run.”

The senator nodded, leaned back in the armchair and closed her eyes. By God, Tom thought, if it gave her such a pain to look at him, what would a mirror do to her?

“Sit down, Tom,” Mrs. Joyce said, “and tell it in your own way.”

“Well, Mrs. Norris and I were sitting in the kitchen. It must’ve been going on midnight, for I was reading the late paper to her, you know, where Senator Fagan was sweeping out the State Department after the party tonight?” Mrs. Joyce nodded. “Well, the doorbell rang and I was the one answered it. There standing in all his ribbons and glory was a little man as though he had just popped out of a bandbox. He had a great sash across his breast with all the gems of the Andes shining in it …” That, Tom noticed, had pried open the eyes of the senator. “Well, he told me his name, and I’m ashamed to say I forgot it and the country that he’s ambassador from, but I know it’s South America.”

“Ambassador Cru?” said the senator.

“Aye, that’s the man,” Tom cried. “It’s a name I knew I’d remember if I didn’t forget.”

The senator nodded ever so slightly at Mrs. Joyce.

“Well, to make a long story short, he asked me if I could stand second for the boss …”

Helene said, “Please, Tom, don’t make a long story short. And don’t make it complicated. Tell us exactly what happened. The exact words if you can.”

“Aw, I can’t do that,” Tom said. “I’m a simple man, and he was as elegant as a Greek bishop. The best I could make out of it was that the Frenchman challenged the boss to a duel at dawn with pistols, and I was to stand by him. Well, I couldn’t very well stand by him till I found him, could I? So Mrs. Norris and I went out to look …”

“Hold on, Tom,” the senator said. “Where was the duel supposed to take place?”

“Under the Key Bridge on the Arlington side. And he left the Frenchman’s card with his name sitting up on it.”

“D’Inde?” said Helene.

“How do you spell that?”

Helene spelled it aloud.

Tom shook his head. “Oh, now, it’s not a name like that. His first name—Leo, Leo the thirteenth.”

The senator sat bolt upright. “Leo? Montaigne?”

Tom beamed on her. “Now you’ve got it, ma’am.”

“Then maybe I can give it back to you,” the senator said. “You’ve put one man’s name on another man.”

“All right, we saw what we saw, didn’t we?” Tom blurted out.

“There you’re dead right, son. Go on with your story.”

“We just missed the boss, Mrs. Norris and me, when we got to the ballroom, but then we saw you coming out with the Frenchman, Mrs. Joyce, and we figured if we could keep him in sight, well, he wouldn’t be shooting up Congressman Jarvis.”

Helene raised her hand to slow him down. “This is the important part, now, Tom. The challenge business I suspect is somebody’s play for publicity—and it was meant to involve General Jarvis, not Congressman Jarvis. Do you agree, Senator?”

“I do,” she said.

Tom scratched his head. “However in the world would I have got something as mixed up as that? I suppose it was him taking for granted I worked for General Jarvis.” Tom squared his shoulders. “I do look sort of military myself, don’t I?”

“Very soldierly,” Helene said.

“And of course it was seeing the Frenchman here in the afternoon that was preying on my mind.”

“Young man,” Senator Chisholm said sternly, “there are some pretty important matters preying on my mind right now. Will you get on with what happened?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Tom said, and accounted then with as few diversions as possible for him, Mrs. Norris’ and his pursuit of d’Inde.

“You’re sure of the address?” the senator said.

“Well, I’m sure of the house,” Tom said, “and Mrs. Norris’ll be sure of the number. She’s a very exacting woman.”

“Where is she now, did you say?”

“Where I left her, I hope to God, in that little park in Arlington watching the tree he hid the package in. I promised to go back for her soon.” Tom sighed deeply. “Ah, but sure, I made the same promise to my mother in Ireland five years ago.”

“Well, Mrs. Joyce,” Senator Chisholm said, “now what do you think? You know the man. Is he really an art curator?”

“Oh, I should think so,” Helene said, “but that would not obviate his being something else also, would it?”

“A foreign agent?” said Tom.

“Something like that,” Helene murmured.

“It would not. In fact it would better his entrée, as they say in polite circles,” the senator said. “I wish to glory I could reach decisions in a hurry like this young man does, even if they were wrong ones. And I wish I had taken a look at the diagrams he was trying to get an opinion on. But as I said, I make it a practice to talk about those things with nobody on the outside. And I mean nobody. If certain other members of the Armed Services Committee would follow the same practice … ah, well. But never tell me that women talk more than men.” She got up wearily and went to the window where she looked down on the street. “What time is it?”

“Ten minutes after two,” Helene said.

“Oh, Lord,” said Tom. “Mrs. Norris’ll be stiff as a weathervane.”

“If it wasn’t so near morning,” the senator said, “I’d call the FBI. I know one of the boys up there, but I don’t know where his home is. I don’t like to kick this affair out in the open till we know whether it’s sense or nonsense.”

“How would it be,” Tom ventured, and his heartbeat quickened at his own boldness, “to call Senator Fagan?”

Senator Chisholm twisted her head around to look at him without moving the rest of her body. “That would be just fine, son,” she said some thirty seconds later, while she looked back to the street.

Tom looked at Mrs. Joyce, who shook her head slightly, suggesting that they were not partial to his idea.

“Do you have a car, Tom?” the senator asked.

“I do, your honour, and at your service.”

The senator turned back into the room and picked up her coat. “Let’s all go and pick up your Mrs. Norris, shall we?”

A
S SOON AS WORD
came to her that her husband had arrived, Madame Cru hastened back to her table. She did pause long enough to invite Jimmie to join them. Jimmie wanted very much to see Cru. However, he had observed Dolores, looking out most dolorously on the scene and he might never again have a chance like this. When he caught her eye, he lifted his glass and indicated that he would be pleased to have her join him. With all his consultations he was beginning to feel like Bernard Baruch.

She came at a leisurely pace—to pick up the compliments which, alas, were as hard to get out as bloom among thistles.

Jimmie stood up. “May I buy you a drink? I shall have to fetch it myself, I’m afraid, with the gentlemen of the press taking over the bar.”

“Thanks,” she said in a voice she must have worked to flatten. “But Leo won’t let me.” Curiously, she seemed to have worked at flattening more than her voice: the ’twenties again, when women seemed to have tried for silhouettes like baseball bats.

“You’re a minor, then?”

“Sort of.”

Jimmie smiled. “You’re sort of lots of things, aren’t you?”

“Jack-of-all-trades, that’s me,” she said. “What do you do?”

“I work for the government,” Jimmie said.

“You aren’t a member, are you?”

“Of what?”

“The Club Sentimentale.”

“No. Just a visitor.”

“That’s what I thought.” She sat back and appraised him frankly. “You just don’t look like the type.”

“Is that a compliment?”

She shrugged. “I think so.”

Jimmie leaned forward and said with gentle inquisitiveness: “If I were to tell you that I don’t think you look like the type either, would you be complimented?”

Obviously, she was not. She became quite peevish about it. “What d’you expect? I can’t learn everything in a day, can I? I’m trying.”

Jimmie seemed to have touched something very tender. “I didn’t say you weren’t the type,” he tried to amend. “I merely suggested that you didn’t look it.”

“You’re too deep for me,” she said. “Got a cigarette?”

While Jimmie shook one out of his package, she took a cigarette holder as long as a piccolo from her purse. He smiled watching her try to work the filter tip into the holder, biting her tongue in concentration. She was very young and very pretty, and he decided to risk one more impertinence: “Whose daughter are you, Dolores?”

“My mother’s and father’s,” she said without hesitation.

“Touché,” Jimmie said. “I thought I might know them.”