Росс Макдональд - Black Money

“I can’t tell you who he is,” she said after a while. “There could be very serious international repercussions if Francis were discovered here.”

Once again she seemed to be reciting. “I’m sure you mean well in what you’re doing – I’m not so sure about Peter – but I’m going to ask you to cease and desist, Mr. Archer.”

She wasn’t kidding me now. Her voice was grave.

“Are you trying to tell me Martel is a political figure?”

“He was. He will be again, when the conditions are ripe. Right now he’s an exile from his native country,” she said dramatically.

“France?”

“He’s a Frenchman, yes, he makes no secret of that.”

“But his name isn’t Francis Martel?”

“He has a right to use it, but it isn’t his actual name.”

“What is his name?”

“I don’t know. But it’s one of the great names of France.”

“Do you have evidence to support all this?”

“Evidence?” She smiled at me as if she had superior knowledge piped in directly from the infinite. “You don’t ask your friends for evidence.”

“I do.”

“Then you probably don’t have many friends. I can see you have a suspicious nature. You and Peter Jamieson make a good pair.”

“Have you known him long?”

I meant Martel, but she misunderstood my question, I think deliberately. “Peter has been underfoot in our house for twenty years.”

She gestured toward the rambling one-story house behind her. “I swear I’ve been wiping his nose for at least that long. When Peter’s mother died, I sort of took him over for a while. He was just a little boy. But little boys grow up, and when he did he fell in love with Ginny, which he had no right to do. She doesn’t care for Peter in that way, doesn’t and didn’t. He simply wore down her resistance because there was nobody else.”

She sounded fond of Peter in spite of herself. I said so.

“Of course, you get fond of anyone if you see him every day for twenty years. Also I detest him, especially at the moment. My daughter has a brilliant chance. She’s a beautiful girl”– she lifted her chin as if Ginny’s beauty belonged to both of them, like a family heirloom –“and she deserves her chance. I don’t want Peter, or you, fouling it up.”

“I don’t intend to foul anything up.”

She sighed. “Can’t I persuade you simply to drop it?”

“Not without some further checking.”

“Will you promise me one thing then? Will you try to handle yourself without spoiling matters for Ginny? The thing she has with Francis Martel is very bright and shining, and very new. Don’t tarnish it.”

“I won’t if it’s real.”

“It’s real, believe me. Francis Martel worships the ground she walks on. And Virginia’s quite mad about him.”

I thought I could hear a self-fulfilling wish in what she said, and I threw her a curve: “Is that why she went away for the weekend with him?”

Her blue eyes, impervious till now, winced away from mine. “You have no right to ask such questions. You’re not a gentleman, are you?”

“But Martel is?”

“I’ve had about enough of you and your innuendoes, Mr. Archer.”

She stood up. It was a dismissal.

I went next door to the Jamieson house. It was a great Spanish mansion, grimy white, which had the barren atmosphere of an institution.

The woman who answered the door, after repeated ringing, wore a striped gray dress which might have been a uniform but wasn’t quite. She was handsome and dark, with the slightly imperious look of the only woman in a big house.

“You didn’t have to keep ringing. I heard you the first time.”

“Why didn’t you answer the first time?”

“I’ve got better things to do than to answer the door,” she said tartly. “I was putting a goose in the oven.”

She looked down at her greasy hands, and wiped them on her apron.

“What did you want?”

“I’d like to see Peter Jamieson.”

“Junior or senior?”

“Junior.”

“He’s probably still down at the Tennis Club. I’ll ask his father.”

“Maybe I could talk to Mr. Jamieson. My name is Archer.”

“Maybe. I’ll see.”

I waited in the dim hallway on a high-backed Spanish chair, which Torquemada had made with his own hands. The housekeeper returned eventually, and said with some surprise that Mr. Jamieson would see me. She led me past closed oak doors to an oak-paneled library whose deeply embrasured windows looked out on the mountains.

A man was sunk in an armchair by the windows, reading a book. His hair was gray and his face was very nearly the same colorless color. When he took off his reading glasses and peered up at me, I could see that his look was faint and faraway.

Half of a highball stood on a low table beside him, and close at hand on a larger table were a bottle of bourbon and a pitcher of water. I caught the housekeeper glaring at the highball and the bottle as if they represented everything she hated. She had violent black eyes, and she looked like a good hater.

“Mr. Archer,” she said.

“Thank you, Vera. Hello, Mr. Archer. Sit down, here.”

He waved his hand at an armchair facing his. His hand was almost transparent against the light. “Would you like a drink before Vera goes?”

“Not so early in the day, thanks.”

“I don’t often drink so early myself.”

I noticed that the book in his hands was upside down. He hadn’t wanted to be found just drinking. He closed the book and laid it on the table. “ The Book of the Dead ,” he said. “Egyptian stuff: You may go, Vera. I’m perfectly competent to entertain Mr. Archer myself.”

“Yessir,” she said in a dubious voice, and went out closing the door sharply.

“Vera is a powerful woman,” Jamieson said. “She’s the bane of my existence, but also the blessing. I don’t know how this household would function without her. She’s been like a mother to my poor boy. My wife has been dead for many years, you know.”

The flesh around his eyes seemed to crumple, as if the blow of her death was about to fall again. He took a long sip of his highball to ward it off: “Sure you won’t have a drink?”

“Not while I’m working.”

“I understand you’re working for my son. He asked my advice about hiring you. I told him to go ahead.”

“I’m glad you know about it. I won’t have to beat around the bush. Do you think Francis Martel is an impostor?”

“We all are, to some extent, wouldn’t you say? Take me, for instance. I’m a solitary drinker, as you can see. The more I drink, the more sorely I am tempted to conceal it. The only way I can preserve any integrity at all is by drinking openly, and facing the music with Peter and of course with Vera.”

“You got that off your chest,” I said smiling, “but it doesn’t tell me much about Martel.”

“I don’t know. Anything I’ve learned about people I’ve had to learn by examining myself. It’s a slow painful process,” he said with an inward look. “If Martel is an impostor, he’s taking some big chances.”

“Have you met him?”

“No. But sequestered as my life is, I do get bulletins from the world of men. Martel has aroused a good deal of local interest.”

“What’s the consensus?”

“There are two camps. There always are. That’s the worst thing about democracy; there have to be two opinions about every issue.”

He talked like a man who needed a listener. “Those who know Martel and like him, mainly the women, accept him at his face value as a distinguished young Frenchman of independent means. Others think he’s more or less a fraud.”

“A con man?”