Дональд Уэстлейк - Castle in the Air

At such an abandoned station, on an equally abandoned spur line, the two yellow boxcars from the freight yards stood behind the Gare de la Chappelle, along with the little switching locomotive which had removed them from the ken of the railroad. The boxcar doors were open, and Charles Moule and Jean LeFraque were carrying out an endless array of sofas, chairs, lamps, tables, beds and other furniture and furnishings. Renee Chateaupierre stood to one side, thoughtfully considering the platform, on which a room was gradually being assembled, under her instructions:

“Put that there. Yes, that’s right, put it right there. And that lamp over there. No, wait; I think it would be better over there, next to the love seat. No, don’t put that there, it clashes with the sofa. Let me see now, it should go, hmmm...”

“Decide, will you?” Charles asked, plaintively, the cigarette bobbing in the corner of his mouth. “This is heavy.”

“I’m doing my best,” Renee told him. “There, I think. Put it there. We can always move it later, if it offends.”

The atmosphere in the Robespierre Suite of the Hotel Vendôme was gloomy in the extreme, except for frequent lightning flashes. His Excellency Escobar Lynch, El Presidente of Yerbadoro, paced the Persian carpet with the purposeful tread of the Grim Reaper himself, while his wife Maria moved about in short violent bursts of unfocused energy, like a catamaran on a gusty sea. The police detective who had drawn the short straw back at Headquarters that chose him as the one to interview El Presidente Lynch and his First Lady on the subject of the theft, serially, of their castle from various points around Paris, had the pained expression of an agnostic in a lion’s den, and the two uniformed police officers who had come here with him remained firmly and silently in the background, pretending to be floor lamps.

The common language between the detective and the Lynches was neither French nor Spanish but English, in which El Presidente was fluent, Maria was voluble, and the detective was extremely Gallic. As when, in an accent as soft and twisty as a croissant, he said, “We are making progress, Mister President.”

“I had a castle,” Escobar Lynch pointed out, “and now I do not have a castle. I fail to see how that could be termed progress.”

“We have made several arrests,” the detective said. “Our police are scouring the slums.”

Dangerously quiet, like a distant thunderstorm, Escobar said, “You expect to find my castle in the slums?”

Maria paused in her spurting and tacking hither and yon to wave her arms over her head and cry, “Why doesn’t somebody do something?”

“We are making progress, Madam,” the detective promised her, with a tiny apologetic smile that begged for mercy.

Maria had no mercy: “You must be quick ,” she said, tacking toward the detective, pointing a long-nailed, sharp-nailed, ruby-nailed finger at his nose. “You’re much too slow .”

The detective blinked and swallowed. “We have already made several arrests,” he said.

“You said that before,” Escobar pointed out.

“It remains true,” the detective said. “A castle is not that easy to hide. Surely before long we—”

Escobar said, “Before long is not good enough. By then, they may have... stolen things from it. Valuable paintings, perhaps, uh, things of sentimental value.”

It was not the detective’s job to wonder what things of sentimental value the Lynches might possibly possess. It was his job to soothe them, to the degree that such soothing could be effected, and to hope that his compares in the field actually were making progress in the discovery and return of Escondido Castle. “We have the bills of lading,” he assured Escobar. “The castle and its content are fully itemized. When we find it—”

“Yes,” Marie said, swooping close. “When you find it. That’s the question, that’s it in a nutshell. When will you find it?”

“We are making progress,” the detective stammered, thoroughly rattled by Maria’s swooping manner. “We have already made several arrests.”

The dryness of his tone suggesting he might become murderous at any instant, Escobar said, “And you are scouring the slums.”

“Er, yes.”

Turning on Escobar, Maria said, “If this man remains in our room much longer, I believe I shall bite him on the neck. Very hard.”

The detective blanched, and raised a protective hand shakily to his neck.

His manner almost kindly, Escobar told the detective, “Perhaps you had best return to your duties.”

“We will report ail developments,” the detective promised.

“Grrr,” said Marie.

“By telephone,” the detective said, and fled.

Through the piles of fenders, heaps of bumpers, mounds of hubcaps, monkey bars of axles, doughnut trays of tires, through the whole rusting, glinting, metal crazy quilt of the abandoned junkyard, Eustace Dench, successful (yet again) master criminal, steered his poot-pooting motorcycle, with Lida Perez, the beautiful revolutionary, in the sidecar. Eustace steered the machine around a final fortress of hoods, and stopped in a small clearing where Bruddy and Andrew and Sir Mortimer labored away at the unpacking of many, many crates. All three looked up at the sound of the motorcycle’s roar, then went back to work again when they saw who it was.

Eustace switched off the motor and jumped off the cycle; Lida remained in the sidecar, looking valiant but short. Approaching his unpacking countrymen, Eustace said, “Well, well, well, and how’s it coming along?”

Removing from a crate a hideous red-and-gold table lamp with a fringed shade and a woodland scene on the base featuring nymphs and shepherds in fairly graphic contact, and holding this object aloft, Sir Mortimer said, “These people have execrable taste.”

“It isn’t their taste we care about,” Eustace pointed out. “It’s their income.”

“Well put,” Andrew said, carefully putting to one side a ceramic cigarette box whose handle was a pair of fornicating goats.

“None of this income come through here yet,” Bruddy said.

“Well, keep on with it,” Eustace said. “I have the walkie-talkies in the sidecar, give me a tinkle if you find anything.”

“I have the walkie-talkies in the sidecar,” echoed Sir Mortimer, his mouth curling like that of a rabid dog. “That such a sentence is even possible in English almost makes me lose hope.”

Andrew said, “Don’t forget the tinkle.”

“We’ll be off, then,” Eustace said, hopped on his motorcycle, gave them all a cheery wave, started the engine, and roared away.

When Eustace and Lida and the motorcycle and the sidecar arrived at the site of the incomplete apartment building, they found the Italian contingent completely surrounded by plumbing. Tubs, sinks, bidets, urinals, medicine cabinets, shower stalls, all were scattered here and there in the mud, sprinkled with excelsior and garnished with shredded wood. Ignoring the mutinous expressions on the faces of Rosa and Angelo and Vito, Eustace gaily hopped off his machine once more and strode through the mud, calling, “And how are we all doing, eh?”

“You see what we have here,” Vito said, in Italian, gesturing with his horny hand at all the porcelain in sight.

“Seven billion lire,” Angelo said, in tones of deepest sarcasm and disgust. “What we have is seven billion bathrooms.”

“Now, don’t you boys start talking Italian at me,” Eustace said, with a smile and a playful waggle of his finger; he was in too good a mood from the success of the operation to be seriously bothered by these continuing linguistic problems. Turning to Rosa, he said, “No success yet, eh?”