The Two Faces of January (25 page)

“Why don't you keep our streets clean of such trash!” shrieked a woman in a white nightgown. “A fine time to wake a person up!”

“Ah, you know, Marseille has many distinguished foreign visitors,” replied the young gendarme. “What would we do without tourists? This one has spent every sou here!”

Somehow the words were brilliantly clear to Chester, clear as the throat of the bird that was still singing in the treetop.
Why don't you look for the people who robbed me?
Chester had the sentence half formed in French, and then it dissolved in a wave of self-pity. He began to curse, good round curses in English. He cursed through his tears. He threw off the hands of the gendarmes. If they wanted him to walk, he could walk, and without their assistance.

The gendarmes toughened up in a flash, and the white baton crashed on Chester's head. His knees buckled. They caught him.

Then off they went, round a corner, Chester with his head lolling, catching dazed glimpses of his two white feet flapping like plucked birds below him, bruised and bleeding, he was sure, from the cruel, cold pavements beneath them.

“F'Christ's sake, haven't you got a taxi?” he roared.

“Dum-te-dum-te-dum,” sang the young gendarme, walking sprucely along on his left, and the one on Chester's right guffawed.

They flung him into a straight chair in a building that smelled of dead rats, sweaty wood, and stale tobacco.

“Votre nom—votre nom—votre
nom
!”
A hatless gendarme leaned towards him with pencil and paper.

Chester told him what to do with himself, but he seemed not to understand it.

“Your
—
name
!” he said.

“Oliver—Donaldson,” Chester said heavily. Let them chew on that for a while. Oliver Donaldson, Oliver Donaldson. He mustn't forget it. “A glass of water,” Chester said in French.

Somebody gripped his jaw and turned his face this way and that. There was much conversation among three of them, muttered, and Chester couldn't understand it. Chester glared back at all of them. Some were smirking at his attire.

“Philippe Wedduhkeen?” one of them said.

Chester sat stonily, bare feet planted as firmly on the floor as if he were fully clothed and wore jackboots.

Another, rushing so that he nearly tripped, shoved a small photograph in front of him. It was his passport photograph.

Cries of “Si!—Si!—Mais
oui
!”

“No,”
Chester said, and, as if this were a signal for a Bacchanal or a riot to begin, all the gendarmes seemed to leap in the air, to shout, to caper about, slap one another's backs, and dash in all directions. Chester had had quite enough, and he stood up to fight. He remembered catching two of them at once by the fronts of their tunics. He thought he succeeded in bashing their heads together. Then something hit him on the head.

When he lifted his face, some of the blanket lifted with it, stuck with blood. Chester touched his nose, and, frightened by what he felt, took his fingers away. He was lying on a cot in a cell. A bright beam of sunlight fell on his head, but he was not warm. His body shook with a chill. His teeth chattered, and he clenched his jaw to silence them. He frowned intensely at the grey stone wall before his eyes.

The realization of his position, his capture, his semi-nudity, his wretched physical state, was like dropping to the end of a rope with a terrible, almost neck-breaking jolt. It was something quite new to him. He had never sunk so low. It was like some awful pit he might never be able to climb out of. These thoughts, or sensations, were neither mental nor physical entirely, but a mixture of both. His brain seemed a tiny thing that was miles away from him. He remembered the photograph of himself. They had called it Philip Wedekind when they shoved it in front of his face. But it wasn't on record as Wedekind. Rydal would have had to tell them that. That photograph could have come only from the Department of State in America. It was not the photograph that the Greek agent had had in his notebook. It was the passport photograph of Chester MacFarland. He pushed himself up from the cot. Rydal Keener had done it all. Rydal Keener had caused him to kill Colette. Rydal Keener who was in Paris. Chester swore he would have his blood, if it cost him his own life.

Someone was coming into his cell. A gendarme with a tin bowl of something. A gendarme smiling slightly, and it was not a nasty smile.

Chester sat up and stood up, and so slowly the gendarme didn't know at first what he was doing, Chester flipped open the gendarme's holster and took out his gun.

The bowl of soup fell on the floor.

Chester gestured with the gun for the gendarme to stand against the back wall, and then there was a noise at the cell's door, and Chester fired at the gendarme who had brought the soup. He thought the gun did not go off. Chester was struggling with the safety catch, when a bullet hit him in his side. As he fell, another bullet struck him in the cheek.

21

It seemed that Chester had, or developed in his last moments, a wretched fear of death. He had talked, wept, and “confessed” with his last strength to a man of God who happened to be a Catholic, whom the police had rushed to his cell. Rydal heard the news at noon in Paris, in a police station in Cluny where he had been held since the police picked him up in the café in the boulevard Haussmann. Chester had not been in the Hôtel Élysée-Madison when the police went there to find him. He had escaped without taking any of his belongings with him, it appeared, and a check of Paris hotels, air fields, and railway stations had produced nothing. Then news had come from Marseille that Chester had been found in a gutter, stripped of money, papers and all his clothing except an overcoat. This Rydal had been informed of around 10 a.m., when he awakened in the cell where the police had put him. At about the time Rydal heard Chester had been found, Chester was dying, Rydal realized later. The news of his death came at noon.

Chester, with his last strength, had admitted to the priest and to the police clerks and officers who were standing by that he was William Chamberlain and also Chester MacFarland, which was his real name. He had told—and it must have been in gasped fragments, for Rydal heard about the blood coming from his mouth due to a wound in the lung—of the murder of the Greek agent in the Hotel King's Palace in Athens. The gendarme who spoke to Rydal had it down on paper, sent by wireless from the Marseille police. He read to Rydal:

“. . . ‘Rydal Keener was in the hotel corridor. He saw me with the body. I said to him, if you say anything about this, I will say you did it. I paid him to keep silent. I wanted him with me so I could watch him. Rydal Keener is not guilty of anything, but I made him help me hide the body in the service closet in the hotel corridor. It is not true that he blackmailed me. Not true.' That is correct?” asked the gendarme.

Two other police officers were watching and listening in Rydal's now open cell.

“Go on,” Rydal said.

“
‘I am guilty of swindling. I am guilty of fraud. I am guilty of the ruination of many men in the United States. I employed Rydal as my spy, my bodyguard, and then, when he made advances to my wife, I became angry. I tried to kill him at Knossos, because he knew too much. The vase fell on my wife instead. I then told Rydal that if he tried to accuse me, I would inform the police that he had killed her while trying to kill me. I don't want to die. I am afraid to die. I am only forty-two. Am I dying? Hold my hand, hold my hand . . .' The rest is . . . babbling,” the gendarme finished.

The reading shook Rydal profoundly and for a few seconds bewildered him—as if it might all be untrue. It was like hearing of his own father breaking down, hearing of something unbelievable. And yet he knew Chester had expressed those ideas, which the French had put into idiomatic French, and smoothed out into long sentences. And Chester had said all he could possibly say to clear him.
Rydal Keener is not guilty of anything.
Chester had actually been kind, more than kind. Rydal blinked. Tears had come in his eyes.

“Is what he says true?” the gendarme asked Rydal finally.

“That's . . . substantially true.” Rydal was trembling, and tears were ready to burst out again. He watched the gendarme, who was writing something at the bottom of the paper. In the early part of Chester's statement, he said that he knew Rydal Keener must have “told everything” in Paris, but that was not so. Rydal had not mentioned MacFarland. Rydal had not changed his story that he met the Chamberlains in Crete. The police had discovered MacFarland by seizing Philip Wedekind's mail at the American Express in Paris, they had told Rydal. They had cabled the New York police to find a man called Jesse Doty, and that was how the police had connected Wedekind with MacFarland.

The gendarme—not the one who had read the statement, but one who had questioned Rydal the night before, following the boulevard Haussmann rendezvous—asked Rydal, “Is it true that you saw MacFarland in the hotel corridor with the body of the Greek agent?”

“Yes.”

“You had known MacFarland before?”

“No,” Rydal said.

“You met him at that moment in the corridor? Quite by accident?”

“Yes.”

“And he threatened to accuse you if you should betray him?”

The question had a faintly skeptical note, as well it might. “He had also a gun in his pocket,” Rydal said. “The agent's gun. He wanted me to help him carry the body to the service closet. And then—after I had done this—I felt myself guilty of being an accessory after the fact.”

The gendarme nodded. “Ah, yes. This must be noted, however. Your attitude. Of course.” He studied the papers in his hands.

Rydal knew he had told a half lie. But Chester had told a whole one, one that fairly cleared him. Chester's lie would save him. It was a case of both of them lying, in a sense. Rydal had lied by omitting the murder story in Athens, saying he had met the Chamberlains only on Crete. To the police, that omission would appear as an effort to hide the fact he had been an accessory. Only he himself, Rydal thought, would ever know or believe that he had omitted that Hotel King's Palace incident as much to save Chester from a murder charge as to save himself from the charge of being an accessory. Rydal did not know as yet, couldn't know with the five gendarmes in the tiny cell with him, how his lie would sit on his conscience.

The gendarme looked at Rydal thoughtfully. “It is your attitude in Athens after the death of Mrs. MacFarland that is not clear. You were forty-eight hours in Athens. You have said that you obtained your false passport from the same source that MacFarland obtained his Wedekind passport, and you learned from this source that his new name was Wedekind. Yet you did nothing about it. He was stopping at the Hotel El Greco. If you had told the police his name—” The gendarme shrugged. “But on the contrary, you remained silent and obtained for yourself a false passport.”

“At that point,” Rydal said, “I was in a worse position than before. He had said he would accuse me of killing his wife, and he did accuse me to the police in Athens. The police were then looking for me. As I pointed out before, there were no witnesses to what happened. It would have been my word against his, and the Knossos ticket-seller had seen me running from the palace grounds.”

“Ah?” doubtfully. “But MacFarland was so afraid, as Chamberlain, that he changed his name to Wedekind. Wasn't he afraid of you?”

“Yes,” Rydal agreed firmly. “He knew I . . . I detested him because he had killed Colette. His wife. He knew I was upset. He was afraid I would go to the police in Athens and tell them what really happened. I could have gone farther back, you see, and told them about MacFarland, too. It was no wonder he wanted to disappear from me.”

“But you did not make a move.”

“Monsieur—I was in love, and she was dead.” Rydal said it with conviction. It was true. It was true enough. Impossible to explain, to the bureaucratic mind, the intricacies of his emotions in regard to Chester, in regard to Colette.

“You will have to be more formally interrogated than this,” said the gendarme. “I shall see if it can be arranged this afternoon—late. Meanwhile, I am afraid you must stay here.”

They all left his cell, and locked it again. Rydal sat down on his cot. He stared at his old brown suitcase that had been in the Hotel Montmorency. At least they had fetched that for him and given it to him, and his passport was in it still.

The interrogation that afternoon took place at dusk in a building several streets away. Some eight men were present, jurists, gendarmes, clerks. The facts were treated like hard stones, picked up and examined and tossed down. The result was a zigzagging and inaccurate pattern, it seemed to Rydal, and yet in every crucial area, he was cleared. He did not by any means emerge a hero, nor did his behavior appear very intelligent, but none of his actions was labeled criminal. None except the least of them, to Rydal, the obtaining of the false Italian passport, merited even a mild term of opprobrium in the view of the assembled officials. For this he was to pay a fine to the Italian government. He was released with a request to go to the French Consulate General to have his passport put in order; that was, a stamp saying he was legally in the country.

Rydal spoke to the gendarme who had questioned him in the cell. “I suppose MacFarland will be buried in Marseille? Or were there any arrangements made for his body to be taken to the United States?”

The gendarme gave a big shrug with arms outstretched.

“Would you find out for me, please? Could you call Marseille?”

Back at the station where Rydal had stayed overnight, the gendarme called Marseille. Chester's body was to be buried the following morning early in a potter's field outside Marseille. For an instant, Rydal saw it, a wooden box carelessly dropped into a pit, probably in a drizzling rain, probably under the bored eyes of an officer or two, the minimum of witnesses required by law, impatient to get away. No friends, no mourners, not a single chrysanthemum, the traditional flower at French burials. Chester deserved more than that.

“Why are you interested?” asked the gendarme.

“I thought I might go to the funeral—or whatever it is,” Rydal said. He had to go. No question. Rydal looked at the gendarme's puzzled face. “Yes. I'm going,” he said.