Аврам Дэвидсон - Ellery Queen’s Double Dozen

Paul... well, I don’t remember his last name, probably because he was always called “the Baron.” One said, “Paul,” “the Baron,” or “the Baron Paul.” He was undeniably handsome — theatrically so, the sort who was too good-looking to be trusted, and the distrust was justified.

His mother was the queen of some little Balkan country — I’ve forgotten which. She was a very real queen, a very real Bourbon. His father was a gardener. Not — so the joke went — the head gardener. People made gags about Lady Chatterley’s lover. The little country went down into the dust, the lady his mother went into the dust, and Paul, like his father, never rose above dirt level. He supported himself, if one can put it that way, openly and explicitly, by paying suit to ladies.

Something about his openness was disarming. To my surprise and slight shame, and in defiance of my upbringing, I rather liked him.

“I’ve always wanted to say, ‘Not to put too fine a point on it,’ and you’ve finally given me the chance, Anne. Not to put too fine a point on it, he’s an outright gigolo. And you’ve surprised me once again. I don’t think you’ve ever paid much attention to another man. Good manners, you have.” I grinned. “Usually.”

She didn’t take her eyes off the Baron, and my grin faded. “Usually,” I said a little sharply. “But I’ll admit he is surprisingly good-looking.”

She gave a decisive little nod. “Yes, he is. But most of all he is astonishing because he looks exactly like what he is. Even his clothes. That’s what made me ask about him. I had never seen ‘an outright gigolo’ before. Do you know him?”

“The way one does. Around.”

“Introduce me, will you?”

She had explained her interest. It seemed harmless. I brought Paul over to the table and performed the introductions.

She married him two weeks later.

I didn’t see her during those two weeks, except at a distance. I kept saying to myself, “Dynasty.” That funny, unsuitable word she had used to explain her desire in life — I decided that was what she found fascinating in the man she herself had admitted was a blatant example of a low kind.

But she married him.

One week after the marriage they went out in a little boat, and he came back alone.

Two days later they arrested him. The medical students had set up a clamor, and the police — although very anxious not to get involved with Americans, which is all Anne spelled to them, very anxious to let Cannes reestablish itself as the playground of the world, very anxious to avoid any but the happiest of publicity, very anxious to deny that such types as Paul ever, ever put a foot in their paradise — the police gave in and arrested him.

Then, because he was so damned inept, they had no choice but to hold him for trial. To the question of where his wife had disappeared to, he said, “She got out and swam away.” And he stuck to that idiocy. It was his whole defense.

After talking to me the prosecution asked, not as a legal command but as a favor, if I would remain for the trial. They seemed to feel I would be helpful. I didn’t understand that until the trial. Then I could see how I was helpful, very helpful.

The cour d’assises would not sit for two months. Then they would hold court farther up the shore, in Nice, which is the prefecture of the canton of the Alpes-Maritimes.

So my three idyllic months on the fabulous Riviera stretched to five bitter ones...

A French courtroom is fancily confusing. I had to be guided to my place; I took a long time spotting the accused; I took a longer time accustoming myself to acceptance of the fact that he was considered guilty until he had proved otherwise.

Once I did get accustomed to it, I took a great pleasure in it.

The testimony was totally damning. All of it including the Baron’s. And he was left without a shred of dignity — not that he had much to start with, but he made a surprisingly good try for it at that trial. Still, out came the illegitimacy of his birth. Everybody knew it of course, but in a whispering sort of way, and he had a passport that clouded the facts.

And out came his age. When had this little Balkan country vanished? 1915. And how old was he at the time? Small bits of history piled up to push him to the truth: he was fifteen. So his passport had been falsified; the man who looked thirty-four and admitted to thirty-seven was forty-seven — and the admission meant more to him than to other men. Youthfulness was one of his stocks in trade.

And why did he marry this twenty-two-year-old? He flabbergasted everyone with the truth: he married her for her money. Ah, then he didn’t know that she would have no money for thirteen years? “Not,” said the prosecuting attorney nastily (he was given to nastiness), “until you reach the very edge of the age of sixty?”

“She didn’t tell me that.”

I remember that the defense attorney gasped helplessly.

“So you married her for her money, discovered you weren’t going to get it for thirteen years, and so decided you would collect it by inheritance?”

“I married her because she asked me to, because she was a nice person, and because she said she was rich. Until I entered this court I did not know anything about this ‘thirteen years.’ She said she had transferred money but that French banks are slow. Which they are. We had only a week of marriage.”

“A week. Only a week,” the prosecuting attorney said, slowly and bitterly, and sat down.

I was eventually guided to the stand, where I stood, hanging on, shaking with pain, loss, and rage. Did I want an interpreter? I was asked, and I said no, although my French wasn’t really sufficient. But I didn’t want anything clouding the air between me and vengeance.

My main value to the prosecution, I realized later, was my passion of love and regret. Through my eyes the judges saw how simple, how direct, how young, how eager for life she was. Through my loving eyes they saw how lovable she was.

They also got some facts.

“You went swimming with the Baroness?”

“Often.”

“She swam well?”

“Not at all well. Very badly.”

“You discussed money with the Baroness?”

“Yes.”

“She led you to believe she was in possession of her estate? Of the considerable assets — bank accounts, company stocks, bonds, et cetera — that were read out and entered as evidence?”

“She did not.”

“She told you the contrary?”

“She told me, explicitly and in detail, that she could not touch any of her money until she reached the age of thirty-five.”

“And yet you were in a similar relationship to her as the accused later was? That is, the question of marriage arose between you?”

“It arose between us. It was then that she explained she had very little; she lived ‘parsimoniously — that was the word she used.”

The defense tackled me briefly, and was sorry.

“You said you went swimming with the deceased?”

“Yes.”

“Well, then, she could swim, could she not?”

“Certainly. She swam like an infant poodle, half on her back, with one paw waving.”

“A little less rhetoric, Monsieur Dentelle, and a little more fact.”

“That was fact.”

“Another fact is that you discussed marriage with the lady?”

“We talked around it.”

“What does that mean?”

“What it says.”

“It does not say anything in French. I put it to you that you asked her to marry you, she refused, she then decided to marry another man, a far handsomer man. Perhaps she told you just that and you do not feel a kindness toward the accused as a result?”

“I did not actually ask her to marry me, and so she did not refuse. I think if I had asked her she might have accepted. And the only comment she ever made to me regarding the man she married was he looked exactly like a gigolo.”