Оливер Блик - The Highbinders

“Tom’s the chauffeur,” Apex said. “He was a wedding gift, too.”

“Of course, Tom’s younger than Jack,” Ceil Apex said. “At least ten years younger.”

“Tom’s only seventy,” Apex said.

“Jack’s not eighty.”

“How old was Jack when you first remember him?”

She thought about it as she arranged the teacups. “Well, he was getting on even then and that was twenty years ago — when I first remember him.”

More like twenty-five years ago, I thought, as I sat there watching her pour the tea. I guessed her age at being around thirty, a year either way. She had one of those faces in which the bones are just right and she would look the same at forty as she did now and not much older at fifty unless her neck and throat started to go. Her hair was that light ash blond color that she could start frosting at thirty-five or so and nobody would ever know whether it was really going gray or not. Although her cat eyes were her best feature, she had a nice nose and a firm chin, perhaps a little too firm, and one of those wide, happy-looking mouths that seldom seemed to be still, even if she weren’t talking. She wasn’t a beauty, at least not in the accepted meaning of the word, but she had a face that would stay with you for a long time.

“How do you like your tea, Mr. St. Ives?” she said.

“With a little sugar.”

Apex was still up so I sat there and let him hand me my cup and then we were all sitting there, sipping our tea and smiling at each other in the big house in Knights-bridge and except for our clothes, it might have been May of 1938.

“You mentioned a sword,” I said.

“Yes, I did, didn’t I?” she said.

“Do you know much about swords, Phil?” Apex said.

“Next to nothing. I know even less about any sword that’s worth one hundred thousand pounds. Unless it’s Excalibur.”

“Or Durandel,” Ceil said and smiled.

“Roland’s, right?”

“See,” she said to her husband. “He does know something about them.”

“Look at his face,” he said.

She studied it for a moment. “Apprehension mingled with skepticism, I’d say.”

Apex nodded. “He thinks I’ve come out of retirement.” He grinned at me. “Ceil knows all about what I once did to make ends meet.”

“He was very good at it, too, did you know that, Mr. St. Ives?”

“So I’ve heard,” I said. “But it doesn’t sound like him.”

“What?”

“King Arthur’s sword would be a little gamey even for you, wouldn’t it, Eddie?”

This time he laughed. “I might have worked it for five hundred quid now and again, but not for a hundred thousand.”

“But there is a sword?” I said.

Apex nodded.

“And it’s been stolen?”

“From my father,” Ceil Apex said. “And uncle.”

“And the thieves want a hundred thousand pounds to hand it back?”

“That’s right.”

“So it’s worth how much?”

Apex thought about it. “At a million pounds, it would be a steal; at two million pounds, an irresistible bargain.”

“It’s hot then, isn’t it?” I said. “I mean there wouldn’t be all this hush-hush about it, if it weren’t hot.”

Apex glanced at his wife. They smiled at each other. “Well, I suppose you could say it’s hot, but the rightful owners not going to do much complaining.”

“Why?”

“Because,” Apex said, “he’s been dead for about eight hundred years.”

Ceil Apex’s father and uncle lived in a mansion. Although not a term to be used indiscriminately, the four-story, dark stone building took up nearly a third of a block on Groom Place, virtually within hailing distance of Belgrave Square. Of course, Groom Place is a short street and from its name, I assumed that it may not have been too fashionable at one time, perhaps a few centuries back, but to me the big stone house was still a mansion and I suspected that it was to most people who are at all interested in the opulent.

Neither Eddie Apex nor his wife had been willing to tell me anything more about the sword that was supposed to be an irresistible bargain at two million pounds. They had insisted that I wait until lunch so that I could hear it from the two men it had been stolen from.

“This is what you call a flat?” I said to Ceil Apex as we got out of the Rolls with old Tom’s help and walked up a short flight of stone steps.

“Oh, they don’t have the entire place,” she said. “They have only the first two floors. Some big-rich Greek has the other two, but he’s seldom there. There’re separate entrances, of course.”

“I was worried about that.”

She laughed. “After Eddie and I were married it gave Father and Uncle Norbert an excuse to splurge a bit. I’m afraid they might have overdone it.”

From the outside the building was nothing spectacular, just a big, square, four-storied structure with a flat roof. It was built out of a dark red, almost purplish stone and architecturally I thought it was a bust. But someday, I kept telling myself, I was going to move out of my “deluxe” efficiency in the Adelphi and into some place decent and even perhaps a bit posh. So I kept up with real estate trends in some of the world’s high rent districts, places such as New York’s upper East Side, Paris, Rome, St. Thomas, and Aspen, Colorado. I also, more out of horrified curiosity than real interest, kept abreast of rents and land values in London’s West End, at least in its more fashionable sections such as Mayfair, Belgravia, Chelsea, Knightsbridge, and Kensington. In my high cost of shelter race, London won going away, with New York in place and Paris in show. Rome was a close fourth and St. Thomas and Aspen tied for fifth. And I kept on renewing my lease at the Adelphi.

So I didn’t even try to guess what it cost Ceil Apex’s father and uncle to live where they did. I assumed only that they were extremely wealthy, perhaps even rich. After all, the rich were the only ones who could afford English Eddie Apex as a son-in-law.

There was no superannuated butler to open the door for us at the house on Groom Place. Instead, there was something young and curvy, dressed in a black dress that may have been a uniform, but whether it was or not, was at least three sizes too small, and perhaps three or four inches too short. She had a round olive face and dark eyes and a very white smile which she turned on at the sight of Ceil Apex. She also bobbed up and down in something that resembled a curtsey.

“Hello, Luisa,” Ceil Apex said.

“Miss Ceil; welcome,” the girl said, or something that sounded very much like that.

Ceil Apex turned to her husband. “Ask her where Father and Uncle Norbert are.”

Apex started speaking to the girl in a language that I at first took to be Spanish, but which I finally decided was Portuguese. He would speak Portuguese, of course. At one time there had been some fat prospects in his line of work in Rio.

It was a brief, animated conversation with much giggling and eye-rolling on the part of Luisa and some expressive Latinate gestures from Apex who, I decided, plunged right into whatever role he played.

“What was that all about?” his wife said as we followed the maid down a long, wide hall.

“They’re in the red room,” Apex said.

“That wasn’t all she said.”

“I asked her if she were getting any.”

“And she said she was, I trust.”

“She said that life was very full.” Apex looked at me. “Maybe you understand now why we’re saddled with old Tom and Jack. Ceil’s dad and uncle are a couple of aging goats. When they moved here they hired four of these Portuguese bints to look after them. The old boys run a regular harem.”