House of Cards Read online

  House of Cards

  Stanley Ellin

  MYSTERIOUSPRESS.COM

  For my daughter, SUE,

  with love and admiration

  PART ONE

  The Fool

  1

  This discothèque, the Club Barouf, was different.

  All the other discothèques I had ever been in were on the Left Bank and were small, candlelit holes. This one was on the Right Bank, on the Boulevard Montmartre, and it was a huge, garishly lit place, as big as a barn but furnished with only the bare essentials, a banquette along the walls, an assortment of cheap, unmatched café tables and chairs, and a dozen amplifiers mounted overhead around the room.

  My friend Louis le Buc, who had sent me out into the rainy evening for an interview with the owner, had told me that the Club Barouf was a converted roller-skating rink. It looked like it.

  The owner’s name was Jacques Castabert. He was a sleek, sad-eyed little man who seemed to have the cares of the world piled on his narrow shoulders. His office was a cubicle with plywood walls in a corner of the dance hall, and there was just enough room in it for his desk and chair and a rickety bar stool.

  “Monsieur Reno Davis?” he said to me as I stood in his doorway, dripping with the icy February rain; and when I nodded he waved me to a seat on the bar stool. “Coffee? A cigarette?”

  “Thanks. I could use them.”

  We talked about the weather while I was having my coffee and cigarette, and I saw he was sizing me up narrowly.

  “How long have you lived in Paris?” he suddenly said.

  “Six years. Two years in Italy before that.”

  “Then that explains it. The six years, I mean. Your French is excellent. Maybe a little too common, a little too much Boulevard Magenta, but excellent. And you’re a pugilist?”

  “Was. I gave it up a couple of years ago.”

  “And since then?”

  “I’ve been trying to become a writer.”

  “Ah, another of those.” He made a face. “But obviously you haven’t become one yet.”

  “Obviously.”

  “Then what have you been living on?”

  “Odd jobs now and then. Tourist guide. Translator for a magazine publisher. I was bouncer at Le Hollywood Strip on the Boulevard de Clichy for a while. That’s why Louis le Buc thinks you might be able to use me here.”

  Castabert sternly shook his head. “I don’t need a bouncer. I need a diplomat. Are you a diplomat?”

  “When I have to be.”

  “I hope so. Let me explain. The kids open the place here in the evening, and you won’t have trouble with them. But later on, the snobs will show up, the chichi crowd from the Faubourg Saint-Honoré, and when they and the kids rub up against each other there can be complications. That’s what you’re to stop before it starts. But no rough stuff, you understand. No muscle. The Grands Boulevards haven’t been fashionable since grandpa cut his milk teeth, so it’s a miracle we’re getting any upper-crust trade at all, and I don’t want it scared away. Is that clear?”

  “Yes. Then I’ve got the job?”

  “If you want it for a hundred francs a week. The whole thing’s an experiment anyhow. Maybe later on—”

  “All right. But I’ll need two weeks’ pay in advance. My good suit is in the pawnshop and I’m a little behind in my room rent. Two hundred francs right now would square everything.”

  Castabert’s eyes closed tight. He put a hand to his round little belly as if seized by a pain there.

  “That’s how it goes,” he muttered. “I’m the money tree. Come and pluck me.” His eyes opened. “You’ll get your two weeks’ pay in advance. I don’t know why, but there’s something about you that inspires confidence. I know I’m being weak-minded; you’ll wind up cutting my throat and robbing the till, but I’ll take my chances on it.”

  “Thanks. When do I start?”

  “Tonight. But one final word—”

  “Yes?”

  “Keep away from any of those teen-age chicks around here, because if you get one of them pregnant, I’m ruined. Just remember that no matter how skinny a kid looks, how stringy she is, she can be as fertile as a rabbit.”

  “I’ll remember that,” I said.

  I learned that first night on the job what Castabert meant about complications. Until almost eleven the customers were mostly kids, and I had an easy enough time with them. But after eleven a new element entered the scene, a new odor pervaded the outside foyer of the club. Now, instead of smelling from youthful sweat and cheap pomade, it was filled with the scent of damp mink and sable and of very expensive perfume. The Faubourg Saint-Honoré customers had arrived, and I led party after party of them through a gauntlet of hostility to the choice banquettes. En route, the newcomers must have caught some of the remarks about them, but either blank-faced or openly amused, they appeared not to mind.

  Only once was there a break in this pattern. When some pimpled and pomaded youth grandly announced, “Ah, the Jet Set. Crapule and company,” a fat, putty-complexioned man in dinner jacket hesitated menacingly until the pert little blonde he was escorting jogged his elbow and shoved him on his way.

  Watching this gathering of expensive people, it struck me that in them I had material for the sort of play Madame Olympe, my landlady and an avid reader of the scandal sheets, was always advising me to write, and that the Club Barouf might well supply me with grist for the creative mill just as all my previous employments had.

  I even picked out the heroine of the play at a glance, a tall, slender, full-breasted girl with splendidly regal carriage who, in the middle of that mob, managed to seem isolated and apart from it. Dark-haired, with unbelievably large, sapphire-blue eyes and a warm, full-lipped mouth, she sat in brooding silence among her companions, neither speaking nor being spoken to. Later, when I glimpsed the wedding ring on her finger, I added a second character to my play, a husband who was an unappreciative clod.

  As luck would have it, I met her before the night was over. There was a signal for help from a waiter near the door of the foyer, and when I went out there I found the girl, and the pert little blonde who had jogged the fat man on his way, and a crowd of youths, all in hot dispute over the use of the one telephone on the wall.

  It was a dispute with elements of nastiness in it. The boy at the phone was a big, hard-looking case, a motorcycle crash helmet slung over his shoulder, who leaned against the wall, receiver to ear as if he were just settling down to a few hours’ chat. His copains, with eyes narrowed and tight little smiles on their lips, were teasing their girl friends by loudly remarking on the attractions of the dark-haired beauty; and the girls, the most dangerous of all, I suspected, had been roused to venom by this and looked ready for some serious hair-pulling.

  “Thank God,” their intended victim said when I presented myself to her. She pointed a finger at the boy with the phone, who leered at her in response. “He’s only pretending to make a call, do you understand? And I must use the phone immediately!”

  “Oh, do try to restrain yourself, Anne,” said the little blonde in an undertone. “It’s not really that important. I assure you Paul is perfectly safe.”

  “Maybe it is that important,” jeered a girl behind her who had caught this, a chunky Cleopatra. “Maybe she wants to make sure her fancy man is ready for her when she ducks away from her husband later on.” And another girl remarked to me with curled lip, “She tried to pay André to give her the phone. She’s the kind that thinks she can buy whatever she looks at.”

  Beauty seemed deaf to these provocations. “Isn’t there anywhere else to call from in this wretched place?” she asked me tensely, and I realized from her accent that she wasn’t French at all, but British or American. So the hostile crowd around
her had a double score to settle.

  “You can call from the owner’s office,” I said.

  The cloakroom woman, placidly watching from her counter, shook her head. “Not a chance. Castabert went out for a bite to eat, and the office stays locked until he gets back.”

  “Then get this phone away from that overgrown bully,” the girl commanded. “This is incredible. I tell you he’s only pretending to use it!”

  Her face was chalk-white now. She looked as if she might fly apart in another moment.

  I turned to the boy holding the phone. “Let’s have it, son.”

  “Allez-vous coucher” he said coldly. “Beat it. I can’t hear a thing with you and that dame yapping away. Why don’t both of you get lost?”

  Around me I heard a menacing grumble. I held out my hand to the boy, half expecting a blow in back of the head from one of his tight-lipped copains. “The phone,” I said.

  “All right, if you want it, come and get it.”

  He was a hefty specimen but he was only a kid, after all. When I meaningfully raised my fist he paled and swallowed hard.

  “You want to get yourself killed, André?” someone finally said out of the hard-breathing silence around us. “He used to be a heavyweight fighter, that one. Go on, let him have the lousy phone.”

  “Go on, you might as well,” said someone else, and André, making it plain he was surrendering only to humor them, contemptuously tossed me the phone.

  I put it to my ear, heard the shrill yammer of a female voice at the other end, and to André’s open-mouthed astonishment, tossed the phone back to him.

  “I’m sorry,” I told the dark-haired girl, “but it really is in use. So if you don’t mind—”

  “Oh, this is too much!” cried the little blonde, and there was no question about her being a born and bred Parisienne. “Well go back to the table, Anne, and see if we can’t get them to leave.” Then in excellent English she said scathingly, “You’re certainly not going to get any help from that big oaf, I can tell you. He’s no better than the rest of this scum.”

  I couldn’t resist paying her back.

  “If you’ll let me finish what I was saying,” I told her, also in English, “there’s a phone down the block at the tobacconist’s. I’ll escort the lady there if she wishes.”

  The blonde looked momentarily startled, then angrier than ever. “Ah, an American, is it? But if you think I’ll withdraw my comment because you understood it—”

  “Dear God, never mind that,” said the dark-haired girl. “Just let me make my call.”

  I watched her from the tobacconist’s counter while she was in the phone booth, envying the man who owned her. Then the shop door was suddenly flung open with a force that almost shattered its glass; the fat, putty-complexioned man, his face wrathful, stalked in and went directly to the phone booth. When he rapped his knuckles on its glass, the girl turned to stare at him with open hatred.

  I left them there like that. It was my policy never to mix in anyone’s family affairs.

  2

  Before my first week at the Club Barouf was up, Castabert was pleased to take me aside and confide that he was much impressed by my capabilities on the job, and that if I continued to impress in this fashion, my future in his employ was bright indeed.

  “You’ve got style enough to get along with the swanky crowd,” he said, “but even more important, you understand, is that the kids seem to have made you some kind of hero and they’re behaving themselves when the snobs are around. Of course, this can be dangerous, too. All you have to do is get careless with one of those imbecilic schoolgirls who stand around adoring you, and presto! we’ve got a fat lawsuit on our hands. You want to remember that.”

  I assured him I would.

  “I hope so for my sake as much as yours,” he said.

  His admiration lasted exactly one day. The next evening when I came to work, the cloakroom attendant told me that the big cheese wanted to see me in his office as soon as I arrived, and, in saying this, she drew her forefinger slowly across her throat.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  She shrugged. “I don’t know, but he’s in a real sweat. I wouldn’t keep him frying in the pan too long, if I were you.”

  Still, it was with a clear conscience that I went into the office. There I found Castabert seated behind his desk looking like a thundercloud.

  “Well,” he said without preliminary, “what kind of trouble are you in?”

  “Trouble?”

  “Yes, trouble! With the law? With a woman, maybe? Do you know what a scandal could do to me? Don’t I have the right to be told what disaster is coming to strike me down before it arrives?”

  “Sure, but what’s that got to do with me? I’m not in trouble with anyone.”

  “Aha!” Castabert said triumphantly. “Then will you kindly tell me why you are under investigation?”

  “Under investigation?”

  “And will you stop repeating my words like a parrot? Yes, under investigation. This afternoon, someone was in my apartment—right there in my apartment, you understand—questioning me about you.”

  “Who was he?”

  Castabert flung up his arms in a tragic appeal to heaven. “Who was he, this creature asks, when that is exactly what I’m asking him!”

  “And I have no idea. Did you get his name?”

  “Yes, Marchat. Max Marchat. It’s right here on his card.”

  I read the card and shook my head.

  “A lawyer,” said Castabert, eying me narrowly. “Distinguished, good-looking, obviously very wealthy. Excellent manners, but underneath them a very tough cookie.”

  I shook my head even more emphatically. “I don’t know him,” I said, “but I’d certainly like to. Mind if I use the phone?”

  The phone number was on the card. I dialed it and was startled to hear a metallic voice respond: “This is a recording. The number you have called is not in service. This is a recording. The number—”

  “Well,” said Castabert, “what is it?” and I handed him the phone so that he could hear this monotonous message. He listened, then gently put down the phone.

  “Very curious,” he said. “A joke? No, this type Marchat is not a man for jokes. A tough cookie. A very tough cookie, believe me.”

  I lay sleepless in bed a long time that night, pondering my history, wondering what there was about it that would lead any lawyer to purposefully investigate it. At sixteen, I had fled from home in Nevada, leaving my parents to their unending war with each other, and had lied my way into the Marines just in time to see service in the even noisier war then being waged in Korea. But both my parents were now dead and my service discharge was honorable, so that offered no clue to the mystery. And although at the unripe age of twenty-one I had undergone six dismal months of marriage in New York, my ex-wife, from last report, was now on her fourth husband and had no claims on me.

  My passport? My identification papers? My work permit?

  All in order as far as I knew, but was it possible that somewhere along the way I had taken oath to a false statement and made myself liable to a jail sentence? That was a really idiotic thought, I realized just before I finally fell asleep, but being under investigation seemed to raise such speculations naturally.

  When I woke in the early afternoon and threw open my shutters on the bustling Faubourg Saint-Denis I found myself shaking my head at my nighttime idiocy. I was still anxious to meet lawyer Marchat and find out what he was up to, but not so desperately anxious now that I would skip breakfast and a cigarette at the Café au Coin down the block. Louis le Buc and some other regulars would be there for an apéritif at this hour, and I relished the thought of tossing my mystery to them as a conversation piece before I went to Marchat’s office and had it explained to me. Café conversation about literature or politics in places like the Dôme or Deux Magots was tame stuff compared to what it could be in the Café au Coin when there was someone’s personal affairs to thrash out.


  The café had another asset besides its conversationalists. The Faubourg Saint-Denis was lined with food stalls of every description offering high quality for low prices, and if, on your way down the block, you selected a couple of oranges and a sausage for breakfast á l’américain, Jeanloup, the boss of the cafe, would squeeze the oranges and grill the sausage for you free of charge, provided you ordered a bottle of wine with them.

  So it was to the Café au Coin, oranges and sausage in hand, that I hied myself with my riddle of lawyer Marchat. There I found Louis at a table in a far corner looking pinch-faced and mournful. When I asked how he felt, he said gloomily, “Like something the cat dragged in. I gave up smoking again yesterday, and I’m having a terrible time of it.”

  I was about to light a cigarette for myself while waiting for Jeanloup to prepare my edibles, but at this I shook out the match.

  “No, no,” Louis protested. “Light it up, pal. Enjoy it. That’s the real test for me—holding off while I watch someone else enjoy it.”

  So I lit my cigarette, and after watching me exhale the first lungful of smoke Louis helped himself to my pack and lit one for himself.

  “Did you see Olympe on your way out?” he said. Madame Olympe was our landlady and concierge, a virago in the grand tradition.

  “No.”

  “Well, she had a visitor inquiring about you last night.”

  “What visitor?” I asked, with the unpleasant feeling that I already knew the answer.

  “A lawyer named Marchat. When I was going down for dinner I saw your door open, so I looked in and there he was, inspecting the room like a sergeant in the barracks and pumping Olympe about you.”

  “And you let him?”

  “I more than let him. I got him around to pumping me, too, so I could give him an earful about your noble character. What’s it all about, anyhow?”

  “I wish I knew. Last night, Castabert told me this same man had been at his apartment asking questions about me.”

  “Could it have something to do with that collection of books you’ve piled up? Are you trying to sell them?”