Bébises,
Geneviève
“What does she say?” Anna had not taken her eyes from his face.
“She wishes me well.”
“Ah, and what else?”
“It’s a very short note,” Rydal said evasively.
“But what else? Doesn’t she want to see you?”
“Now, Anna!—She says her father has offered to help me, if I need it.”
“Her father? The professor of archaeology?”
“Yes.”
“Well—let him help you. Can he help you?”
“No,” Rydal said.
“But you—you need somebody to speak for you. You can’t go on hiding all your life.”
“No, Anna. Just till tomorrow, I think. I’ll be off tomorrow.”
“Oh, not that you’re not welcome to stay here as long as you like, Rydal. You are our friend.”
The conversation irked him. He lit a cigarette, and stood looking at the dusty rectangular window. One could hardly see the red-brick wall three feet beyond it.
“Doesn’t she want you to answer her?” asked Anna.
“Yes.”
“Good, then, answer her! Do you want a pen and paper?”
“No, I have them, thanks.” Rydal looked at her. “Can you get someone to deliver it?”
“Certainly. I myself can—”
“Not you, Anna. Do you know a boy in the neighborhood you can ask? Tell him it’s about some laundry or something?” Rydal remembered that Anna sometimes took in laundry.
“Ah, trust me.”
Rydal wrote in French:
My dear Geneviève,
Your note received a moment ago. I wonder did you send one to Pan also? So you know where I am from that question. Please do not tell your father. I am grateful indeed for his offer of help, but I don’t need it, I should say better, I cannot use it just now. You are right I am not guilty of the mess on Crete. It is difficult if not impossible to explain why I am in the predicament I am in, but it is in the nature of an experiment, one which I must see through, one which isn’t finished yet. How I wish, a month from now, we could sit at a table at the Alexandre in Paris and have dinner and I should tell you all about it. Shall we make a date for February 18th, a month from today, at the Alexandre? At 7 p.m.?
I am grateful for your belief in me. You are in a distinct minority at the moment. But “public opinion does not concern me at all”, I say, remembering the words, more or less, of the trouserless man in the National Gardens in December! In answer to your question, I am not wounded. Not trouserless either.
My love to you and with a loud à bientôt!
He left it unsigned.
Anna went out to find a messenger for it, as soon as Niko came in. Niko had no news. No one, and no policeman, had asked him any questions. Frank was going to have Chester’s new passport ready for him by tomorrow, perhaps tomorrow morning.
“I want to know the name on it as soon as possible,” Rydal said.
“Oh, I told Frank that,” Niko said.
“Can’t you reach him now? I thought you would know it by now.” Rydal frowned, anxious.
Niko looked thoughtful for a moment. “Frank has no telephone where he is. But I have an idea. There is a taverna near Frank.”
When Anna came back, Niko went out to make a telephone call. Rydal had pressed a pencil and a piece of paper on him. He wanted the name down accurately.
Niko came back after thirty-five minutes. Chester’s new name was to be Philip Jeffries Wedekind. Frank was having the passport delivered in a shoe box to Chester’s hotel, the El Greco, tomorrow morning at 9:30. The messenger was going to ask a bellboy to put the shoe box in Mr. Chamberlain’s room, in case he wasn’t there, by Mr. Chamberlain’s request. Rydal’s Italian passport was to be ready at the same time tomorrow morning, and would be delivered to Niko on the street.
“Bring it home right away!” Rydal said, clapping his hands. “Before lunch.”
“Before lunch. Okay.” Niko rubbed his nose and looked at Rydal, smiling.
“Two thousand dollars. Very reasonable. You deserve some thanks also, Niko.”
Niko put up his broad, dirty palms. “Ah, no. We are friend, you and I. When I am in America . . .”
17
January 19, 19—
To the Attention of the Greek Police:
As you well know, Rydal Keener is still at large and his objective is nothing less than my death. Having murdered my wife, he now means to murder me. It is reasonable to think that he is in this city. I am grateful for the protection you have given me up to now, but I have premonitions that your efforts will not succeed forever, perhaps not even the few more days needed to track him down. I am still willing, as an honest man who prefers to cooperate with the law, to remain in the city, no doubt under the very eyes of Keener, in order to provoke another attack by him on my person. But he is a very clever young man, and he may defeat us both—that is, manage to kill me without being apprehended himself. These, I repeat, may be only the premonitions of an anxious and grief-stricken man. But I wished to state officially my fears, my dreads. If I should disappear, it will not be because of panic, cowardice or discouragement. It will be because Keener will have broken through your guard.
Wm J. Chamberlain
For this statement, Chester had borrowed a typewriter from the hotel. He signed it with the signature he was now rather good at, from his passport. It was a quarter to 9. Chester ordered breakfast, a substantial one of orange juice, two soft-boiled eggs, ham, toast and coffee. Then he took the remainder of his American cash from the lining of his tan suitcase, put as much as he could into his left hip-pocket, which buttoned, put some into his black morocco wallet, and the rest into his overcoat’s inside breast pocket, which had a flap with a button.
He had just finished his breakfast when there was a knock at the door. Chester glanced at his watch. Twenty to 10. “Yes?” he said to the closed door.
“Package for you, sir.”
Chester opened the door. “Oh, yes, my shoes. Thank you very much.”
The bellboy handed him a box wrapped in dark-grey paper, and Chester gave him a ten-drachma note.
The package was heavy, just about as heavy as a pair of shoes would make it. Chester opened the box, smiled at the authentic, rather worn, yellow-orange shoes it contained, looked under the tissue they lay in and found the passport. He opened it nervously. PHILIP JEFFRIES WEDEKIND. His own eyes stared blankly, innocently out at him from the photograph above the signature. Wedekind? What kind of name was that? German? Jewish? The handwriting was thin and tall and slanted strongly to the right. The W was a tall, leaning zigzag, without ornament. Chester took his pen and practiced it a few times on a scrap torn from the paper doily on his breakfast tray. He stopped at a knock on his door, put the passport into the drawer of the night table, and wadded the paper in his hand.
It was a waiter who had come to remove the tray.
When he had gone, Chester took the passport from the drawer and looked at it again. Occupation: salesman, and that was fine, as he could be a salesman of anything. Height: five feet ten. Age: forty-five, from the birth-date, not bad. Birthplace: Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The wife and minors boxes bore three Xs each. Fine, too. Home address 4556 Roosevelt Drive, Indianapolis, Indiana. Chester put the passport into the breast pocket of his suit jacket. Then he went into the bathroom and shaved his face clean. He was careful to wash all the whiskers down the drain, and he also cleaned his battery razor of whiskers. He started to burn the paper on which he had practiced the signature, then thought better of it. He’d take the paper away with him, wadded in his pocket. His statement to the police lay beside the typewriter on the writing-table, and Chester read it over. He hoped Rydal was dead, that he had been dead for twelve hours, but in cas
e he wasn’t—
Chester put on his jacket and overcoat and left the room. All he took with him was the pair of shoes wrapped up in yesterday’s Daily Post. He was on the fourth floor. He took the service stairs down, was glanced at by a cleaning man in a white jacket on the second floor, but the man did not speak to him, only went on with his sweeping. Chester emerged in an alley behind the hotel, and walked towards the street that he saw some twenty yards away. He turned down Stadiou Street in the direction of Constitution Square, and dropped the shoes into a metal rubbish bin at the next corner. Then he entered a café, and made a telephone call from the booth in the rear. There were two planes westbound that day, one at 11 a.m., one at 1:30. The man he was talking to spoke English, and Chester tried to make a reservation for Wedekind on the 11 a.m. plane, but he was told that no reservations were made over the telephone.
Chester took a taxi down to Constitution Square, got out at Stadiou and Voukourestiou, and found a luggage shop within half a block. He bought a sizeable black suitcase of rippled cowhide, and paid for it with his remaining drachmas. The next step was a bank. Chester changed three hundred dollars into drachmas. In the next twenty-five minutes, he managed to buy three shirts, a pair of slacks and a tweed jacket, pajamas and socks and underwear in two shops and without giving the appearance of being in a hurry. He removed the price tags from the items that had them. Then he bought a toothbrush—one made in America—and toothpaste at a chemist’s. At twenty to 11, he was rolling in a taxi towards the airport. He might not be missed by his police guard, he thought, until after noon, perhaps even after 2. He had not gone out yesterday until 11 o’clock. It was conceivable he would stay in all morning and have his lunch sent up by the hotel.
He made the plane nicely. It was only three-quarters full. The first stop was to be Corfu, then Brindisi, then Rome, where he would have to change for a plane to Paris. Chester’s companions on the plane were mostly Greek, he thought, and mostly men, a solemn, reserved lot who looked as if they were travelling on business. The passport examination had gone quickly and smoothly at the air terminal. Chester was not worried about false passports now. They were a kind of armour, he felt, an impenetrable disguise. He had signed his name hastily and casually at the bottom of his declaration.
Chester relaxed and even dozed as the plane hummed over the Ionian Sea. When lunchtime came, he ate well. At 10 p.m., he was in France, taxi-ing with his luggage from Orly towards Paris. He felt almost home again, comfortable, happy. In France, he could practically understand the language. From here he could send the telegrams, the simple, short but vital telegrams that had been going through his head during the flight from Athens. One to Jesse Doty. Hi, Jessebelle! Maybe not quite that. It was a silly name that he sometimes put on presents to Jesse, that the fellows sometimes called him when they were kidding him. But it would be one way of making sure Jesse knew the telegram from Wedekind was from him.
Chester had the driver stop at Les Invalides. It was the only place Chester was sure he could send a telegram from at this hour. He fired a message off to Jesse Doty:
ADDRESS FUTURE CORRESPONDENCE PHILIP WEDEKIND, AMERICAN EXPRESS, PARIS. ALSO REPEAT MESSAGES OF PAST TEN DAYS. CABLE IF NECESSARY. PHIL.
And at the bottom, PHILIP JEFFRIES WEDEKIND, as the name had to be there in full. Chester added a final sentence to his carefully printed message: INFORM VIC AND BOB.
Then he went out to his waiting taxi and told the driver to go to the Hotel Montalembert. Chester and Colette had had cocktails a couple of times at the Pont-Royal bar in the Hôtel Pont-Royal next door to the Montalembert, but he had never stayed at the Montalembert. He thought it looked like a substantial place that would have good heat and service. He would have preferred the Georges V, but alas, they knew him there. That was the penalty, he supposed, of feeling that Paris was home. He had just a twinge of fear as he walked through the doors of the Montalembert that the hotel might know Philip Wedekind personally, too. But all went quite well. He was given a room with bath on the fifth floor. Chester stayed in his room just long enough to hang his slacks and jacket from his suitcase and to lay out his pajamas on the bed. The French inspector at Orly had said:
“Not much in your suitcase, m’sieur.”
Chester had chuckled and said, “I was robbed a couple of days ago. Had to buy everything over again.”
The conversation had been in English. The customs inspector hadn’t asked him where he was robbed, just said, “Oh? Bad luck.”
The inspector hadn’t looked at him, Chester thought, not more than to give him a very brief glance. The man’s head had been bent over his suitcase the few seconds the inspection had taken.
Chester’s snack of superb beluns and a croque-monsieur at the corner of rue du Bac and Université made him see things more realistically, he felt. He had been over his potential dangers in Athens, but now they seemed imminent and new. The main thing was that, if Rydal Keener were still alive, he would know his new name. Chester had asked for Frank’s secrecy, had even bought it, because it was part of the deal, and Niko had said he would ask Frank not to tell Rydal—but how much could he count on that? Very little, Chester thought. About as much as he could count on Andreou performing the task for which he had been paid five thousand dollars. Chester felt he could only hope. And his only hope really was that Rydal would be afraid of bucking a charge of having killed Colette, should he try to get the police on his trail. Chester couldn’t imagine Rydal wanting that. Then Rydal, if he mentioned the Greek police agent, had also helped Chester hide the body. That wouldn’t look so good on Rydal’s record, either, as a character recommendation. So far, so good. But all Rydal had to do was pick up a telephone and tell the Greek police his new alias was Philip Wedekind. Rydal wouldn’t have to say who he was, where he was, or where he got the information. That was the real danger, the present danger. And what he was doing now was a gamble, a forced gamble, Chester thought. He had to try it, because there was no alternative. He had to get news from the States and had to get back to the States some day.
His confidence or his physical strength returned as he walked back the short distance to his hotel. If it came to a showdown, he’d give Rydal Keener a run for his money. He had plenty against Rydal Keener, plenty. Chester gave himself credit for having guts. Well, he would show them, if it came to that. He wasn’t going to be a pushover for Rydal Keener, that spineless vagabond, that half-assed soldier of fortune.
Chester thought of his cable reaching Jesse in the early morning, New York time. He slept quite well that night.
At 12 the next day, he called at the American Express to see if he had any mail. He knew it was impossible that Jesse could have replied so quickly, but still he had a compulsion to see. It was probably the worst possible time to come by for mail. The basement of the building was noisy and jammed with tourists and young Americans in sneakers and blue jeans, girls in tapered slacks and ballet slippers, waiting on the alphabetized lines. It was also a dreadful way to display oneself to fellow Americans, one of whom might know Howard Cheever.
“Wedekind,” said Chester, when he reached the busy girl behind the counter. He had his passport open.
She went to look, and came back shaking her head.
Chester thanked her, and made his way up the stairs and out of the building. He wanted very much to write to Bob Gambardella in Milwaukee. Good old Bob. A long, decent letter in longhand. Bob would understand. All Bob said when things went wrong was, “Oh, Jee-ee sus,” in a tired but resigned way, and then Bob would smile at fate and run his fingers through his hair. Bob never lost his head. Chester had known him now four years. Chester would tell Bob about Rydal Keener, make Keener out a blackmailer from the time he walked in on him when he was talking to the Greek agent. Chester’s latest arrangement of that story was that Rydal Keener had been tailing him for a couple of days—as he probably tailed any rich-looking American he might see—with an idea of tak
ing him for a little money. Rydal Keener had followed the Greek agent into the hotel, and after sizing up the situation had slugged the agent with a blackjack and killed him, then threatened to pin it on Chester, unless Chester paid him off. Somehow Chester felt that telling this story to an American friend would count for more in a law court than all the talking he had done to the Greek police in Athens. Chester would also tell Bob about the passes Keener had made at Colette, about Colette’s tragic death when Keener was trying to kill him, about the threats, the dangers that had followed, resulting in Chester’s having to assume another identity in order to escape from the vicious Keener who was still hiding out, free, in Athens. So, after a leisurely lunch on the Champs-Élysées, Chester tipped the waiter to get him some writing-paper, and sat on at his table over the remainder of a bottle of white wine, writing it. He sat on with a Scotch or two until nearly five, then went back to l’Opéra and the American Express.
Now there was a cable for him.
Chester carried it to a corner of the room and opened it eagerly.
NEWS NOT GOOD HERE. STAY THERE. INFORMING BOB NOT VIC. LETTER FOLLOWS. REGARDS COLETTE. JESSE.
The phrase stay there told Chester a great deal. It meant Howard Cheever was wiped out. not vic meant that Vic had run out, or talked to the police. It meant the Unimex Company was under investigation, or had been declared illegal, dishonest, or whatever they cared to call it. Chester’s jaw set. Not totally illegal. It was a sort of gambling company, more or less like everything else in stocks. If companies had the money to run themselves, would they sell stock in the first place? Howard Cheever and Jesse Doty were closely connected with the Canadian Star Company. Canadian Star had no other names to hide behind, not names attached to people, anyway. The news was bad.