House of Cards Read online

  If there was anything that could put the inquisitive minds in the kitchen at rest, that was it.

  5

  The Ile de la cité lies like a ship in the middle of the Seine, its sharp prow pointing westward, and behind it, like a barge under tow, lies Île Saint-Louis. The distance between the two islands is only the length of the little footbridge which connects them—a few steps altogether—but crossing that bridge means moving from one world to another. The Île de la Cité is alive with activity around the Palais de Justice, the Hotel-Dieu, and Notre Dame. Île Saint-Louis, except for a stray party of tourists now and then, seems lost in a centuries-old slumber.

  Late Sunday morning, Paul and I were driven there by Georges, Paul tense and unhappy as he was every Sunday when faced with the imminent prospect of meeting his grandmother. When the car pulled up to the door of Madame Cesira’s home I saw we were on the Quai d’Anjou where Sidney Scott had come to his end, and looking around at the sedate graystone and brownstone buildings along one side of the street, the embankment wall along the other, the trees freshly green, their leaves shimmering in a warm breeze, the river flowing beneath the lovely arches of the Pont-Marie, I had the feeling that this simply wasn’t the right setting for death by violence. But of course, Scott had died in February. It would have been different then, especially at the midnight hours. And again the thought rose in my mind as it had so many times during the past two days—what was Madame de Villemont doing with the man on the Quai d’Anjou at midnight?

  I thrust the thought aside as a maid led us up a flight of stairs to Madame Cesira’s living room, a room filled with an indescribable clutter of bric-a-brac which must have taken a lifetime to gather. Madame was waiting there for us, a tiny little, white-haired woman with fierce eyes and a face almost monkey-like in its ugliness.

  “Well,” she said tartly to Paul after he had given her a gingerly kiss on the cheek, “haven’t you been taught how to make introductions, you ninny?”

  “Yes, Grandmama. This is Monsieur Reno. And this,” he said to me, sullenly rattling it off as if he had learned it by rote, “is my grandmother, Madame Cesira Maria Montecastellani de Villemont.”

  “And what about your grandfather?” demanded Madame, which gave me quite a start until I saw Paul point to a framed photograph on the mantelpiece of a handsome, gray-mustached man in ornate military uniform.

  “Yes, and that was my grandfather, General Sebastien de Villemont,” he said to me. “A great general of the Army of the Republic of France.”

  “A very great general,” said Madame. Her French, I observed, was flavored with a strong Italian accent. She gave Paul an ungentle nudge. “Now leave us. You’ll find the albums on the little table next to my bed. But if you’re going to be all over the bed with them, you’ll have to take off your shoes. I’ll send you off without lunch if you dirty my clean coverlet again.”

  Paul, plainly relieved to be dismissed even this unkindly, was already tugging at his shoelaces as he disappeared into the next room. “Those albums,” Madame Cesira said to me, “contain all the photographs, the documents, the newspaper accounts of the General’s career. Not a bad form of entertainment for the child if it teaches him pride in his grandfather?’

  “I understand his father was also a fine soldier, madame,” I said, looking around. In Anne de Villemont’s apartment there was no photograph of her dead husband, and I had been wondering what he looked like. It was frustrating to find there was no picture of him in his mother’s apartment either.

  Madame Cesira caught my meaning at once. “No, I prefer not to have reminders of my son about me. That wound is still a little too fresh.” She seated herself majestically on a small gilt chair, and small as the chair was, her toes barely touched the floor. “You may sit also, so that we can talk. But take one of those chairs that won’t come apart under you.”

  “Thank you, madame.” By now, she had me as much on edge as Paul. “May I smoke?”

  “You may not! I don’t permit smoking here. If anything happened to the General’s collection, it would be disastrous. Use your thumb if you must keep something in your mouth like an infant.”

  “That won’t be necessary, madame.” I actually found myself sitting at attention with shoulders squared as those fierce eyes drilled into mine.

  “Do you know why you’re here, Reno?”

  “No, madame.”

  “It’s because I want you to explain a mystery to me. My daughters and Monsieur de Gonde himself—ordinarily, a man of sound judgment—all seem to agree that you’re a veritable paragon. Now tell me how such a paragon came to be a penniless gladiator inhabiting the Faubourg Saint-Denis instead of making something of himself in his homeland.”

  “Perhaps because I wasn’t really ambitious to make something of myself the way you mean it, madame.”

  “Did you ever try to?”

  “Yes, madame. For a little while during the time I was married.”

  “When was that?”

  “About ten years ago. The marriage lasted only a few months.”

  “Of course,” Madame Cesira said coldly. “You had an eye for women, and women, I am sure, had an eye for you.”

  “No, madame. My wife married me because, as she once informed me, she thought it would be amusing to have a prizefighter for a husband. When she learned otherwise, she insisted I go to work in one of her father’s companies, and after a couple of months I was as disillusioned with her and business as she was about me and prizefighting. We were divorced by mutual consent.”

  Madame Cesira made a contemptuous gesture. “You American men don’t know how to handle your women, that’s what it comes to. But what happened then? You fled the scene?”

  “You might call it that. I had an offer to fight in Italy and went there. Then I came to Paris six years ago, and somehow never got home again. As for living on the Faubourg Saint-Denis, madame, it wasn’t a hardship. I got along very well there.”

  “To me it has the same stink as Trastevere in Rome,” said Madame Cesira. “Sickening, how that stench of the canaille is spreading everywhere today. Even the ancestral home of the Montecastellanis on the Via della Pilotta in Rome is now surrounded by the reek. Still,” she nodded thoughtfully, “it can be an asset, knowing how to tolerate it. And while you were in Italy did you learn the language?” she asked, slipping into Italian. “Can you speak it as fluently as you speak French?”

  “Not quite, but well enough to get by,” I answered, also in Italian.

  Madame Cesira leaned forward. “And do you know the meaning of loyalty and discretion?” she asked sternly. “Do you believe in them? Be honest with me.”

  “I find them comfortable virtues, madame.”

  “All to the good. Well, I have decided to do you a favor, young man. Monsieur de Gonde’s commercial interests extend from here to Italy and beyond. I am going to recommend you to him for some worthwhile position in his employment.”

  “Thank you, madame, but I’d rather you didn’t.”

  “Why not? Believe me, you’ll do well for yourself in my son-in-law’s service.”

  “Not if I were tempted to sit at my desk writing stories instead of attending to his business, madame.”

  “Ah, so that’s it.” Madame Cesira’s lips puckered sourly. “Yes, I’ve heard of your ambition to win a place in the Academy, but I hardly thought you’d choose to sacrifice a profitable career to such nonsense. Stories, is it? Stories about what?”

  “People I’ve met. Prizefighters and their women, petty criminals, clerks, café habitués—”

  “You approve of such people?” demanded Madame Cesira coldly.

  “I don’t approve or disapprove, madame. I just write about them.”

  “A waste of time.”

  “That I must leave to the judgment of an editor Monsieur de Gonde has kindly arranged for me to meet.”

  “Charles Leschenhaut. I know about it. Well, young man, I trust you’re braced for the truth about your talents because
that’s what you’ll get from him. A brilliant man, passionately truthful. God knows how many enemies he’s made because of that, but he has the courage to face them down. A great man. France hasn’t seen his like in a long time. Another Louis IX in spirit.”

  I tactfully nodded acceptance of this, although it was not how I would have described Leschenhaut. From what I knew about him, he had been a priest, had entered the worker-priest movement to help battle Communism, had been converted to Communism and unfrocked for it, and had eventually departed from the Communist Party in a storm of invective to found La Foudre, a magazine which attacked the Church, Communism, and any other institution which had won his enmity. And of course, in so doing, he had made La Foudre a French institution itself.

  But mere iconoclasm could never have made Leschenhaut the power he was. It was his invention of a formidable new social theory which did that, and it was his enemies who jeeringly named it la méthode Leschenhaut, a name he promptly seized on and raised as a banner which drew a host of followers. Charles Leschenhaut had changed sides too often to be another Saint Louis, but he undeniably had charisma.

  Certainly, I now had occasion to learn, he had had a potent effect on Madame Cesira. Once on this subject she remained there, growing more and more vitriolic about my indifference to Leschenhaut’s political philosophy, or, as I incautiously let slip, all political philosophies. How, she demanded, could one remain neutral in the battle of ideas? If I were typical of the American people, no wonder my wretched country was such a weak-kneed colossus, unable to move this way or that.

  I had a bad time of it until lunch, when Paul joined us at the table. I was grateful he remained at the table after lunch instead of leaving me alone to his grandmother again.

  “Will you tell Reno’s fortune with the cards, Grandmama?” he asked hopefully.

  “There are some people who don’t believe in fortunes,” Madame Cesira said with malice. “There are some people who don’t believe in anything. What good is it to tell their fortunes?”

  “But Reno would believe in it, Grandmama. He believes in magic.”

  “White magic,” I said. “Sympathetic magic.”

  Madame Cesira’s lip curled. “How fortunate my magic is only that kind.”

  “The cards never lie,” Paul said with a shrug of resignation. “My card is the nine of cups, and it means I’m going to Saint-Cyr and learn to be a soldier no matter what Mama thinks.”

  I cocked an inquiring eye at Madame Cesira. “Persuasive magic, madame?”

  “Don’t be too clever, young man,” she said coldly.

  Still, she rose and went to her escritoire and from it drew a beautifully done marquetry box. When she removed the worn deck of cards from the box and spread them face up on the table I guessed what they were although I had never seen anything like them before.

  “Tarot?” I asked.

  “Yes. Are you familiar with them?”

  “I’ve heard of them. Especially this one.” I picked up a card which depicted a young man trussed upside down by one ankle to a gibbet. “The Hanged Man, isn’t he?” When I turned the card upside down I saw that the expression on the young man’s face was that of beatific acceptance of his uncomfortable lot. “Not that hanging seems to bother him very much, does it?”

  “You see,” Paul said excitedly to his grandmother, “he turned it around just the way I did! That’s very good,” he told me. “If you don’t turn around The Hanged Man to see if it really hurts him, it means you have a donkey head.”

  “One also shows he has a donkey head by giving away such secrets,” sniffed Madame Cesira. “In all his Me, your grandfather never let his tongue wag carelessly.”

  She deftly shuffled the deck, had me cut it, then dealt out part of it before her, face up. The remainder of the deck was placed aside. Now Madame studied the cards spread out before her and removed one.

  “This is The Magus and will tell us nothing. But the card that fills its place—”

  Madame Cesira turned up the top card from the remainder of the deck and placed it in the space left vacant by The Magus. She stared at it.

  “My God,” she whispered. “The Tower.”

  If she was putting on an act, it was a good one. She seemed really shocked by the sight of that pasteboard with its vividly colored picture of a stone tower, tongues of flame belching from its windows, bodies hurtling from it.

  Her tone and manner were infectious. Paul’s face went white, his eyes became enormous.

  “That’s very bad, isn’t it?” he said tensely, and I quickly said, “No, it isn’t. This is only a game, Paul. It doesn’t mean anything.”

  “It does! And what do the cards around The Tower say, Grandmama? Are they bad, too?”

  Madame Cesira took irascible notice of her grandson’s state.

  “Stop behaving like that,” she ordered in a hard voice. “What a weakling, to faint away at the sight of a card. A fine soldier you’ll make.”

  Paul squared himself on his chair and took a deep breath. “I’m not fainting away, Grandmama. But The Tower is a bad card, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” said Madame Cesira, “it warns of disaster and ruin. But that’s the advantage of the Tarot. It warns what may be coming so one can take measures in time. Now let’s see what surrounds The Tower so that we know what measures must be taken. Above it is the two of pentacles.” She raised her eyes to mine. “This tells us that matters which trouble the inquirer are only in his mind. They do not exist at all, but by letting himself think they do, he is being drawn into danger.”

  I was jolted by that myself. It sounded as if she knew I was at work digging up her family skeletons.

  Madame Cesira pointed a wrinkled finger. “And here below The Tower,” she said to me, “is the king of cups. There is a powerful man who may become either your good friend or your deadly enemy. This is now being weighed in the balance, so take care not to weight the balance against yourself.”

  And who, I wondered, was the king of cups? Bernard Bourdon? But what could this woman know about my suspicions of him? Had Pascal the garage-hand told anyone about the questions I had asked? Not likely, when he seemed so terrified of Bourdon himself.

  Suddenly it struck me that I was playing right into Madame Cesira’s hands by thinking these thoughts. Simply watching my expression as I reacted to her nonsense, she knew she was hitting some target. There was every chance that my indifference to la méthode when we discussed Charles Leschenhaut had determined her to win me over as his follower with the help of the Tarot. Leschenhaut, in fact, made a far more logical candidate for king of cups than Bourdon.

  I smiled at Madame. “The cards don’t give names, I suppose,” I said lightly.

  “No, young man. Nor addresses and telephone numbers.”

  She swept the cards together with an impatient gesture and replaced them in their box.

  “But there was more to tell, wasn’t there, Grandma?” Paul protested.

  “No more,” Madame Cesira said shortly. “Besides, the cards change each time they’re dealt. The next time they’re dealt for Reno, everything may be changed for the better.”

  I sincerely hoped so, no matter what she was trying to tell me with her mumbo-jumbo.

  Or was I only imagining there was a message in it?

  I might be.

  She had seemed really stricken when she had turned over The Tower, that gaudy card promising disaster to come.

  6

  One strange aspect of Anne de Villemont’s relationship with the family was that while she had little to do with any member of it in the house, she only left the house on her evenings out in the company of Edmond and Matilde Vosiers. No other escort ever showed himself on the premises.

  I ascertained this by spying on her several times after she had left the apartment and was safely on the elevator. I would take my position at the balustrade overlooking the rotunda and watch as she came into sight below, arm in arm with Madame Matilde and with Vosiers glumly trailing beh
ind. It was always the same, the three of them and no one else.

  Then, just as I had once caught Madame Matilde watching her husband from this vantage point, I was fairly caught in my turn by Bernard Bourdon. I started when I realized he was standing beside me, and he said apologetically, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to take you unawares.”

  Perhaps because I disliked and distrusted him, I read meanings into his voice and manner that weren’t really there. But it seemed to me that the voice was too sweetly apologetic, the manner too ripely ingratiating. As I had told Louis, it was impossible to know what went on behind those pale eyes shadowed by their long, dark, girlish lashes. The only thing one could be sure of was that they were coldly observant eyes, strangely at variance with that soft-lipped, pretty face. When I looked into them now, it was like looking into opaque gray glass where the only thing to be seen was your own tiny double image.

  “Were you looking for me?” I asked.

  “Yes.” He watched a maid pull open the door downstairs and the trio depart through it. “Monsieur Edmond is getting fat as a pig,” he remarked. “Paris must agree with him. Back in North Africa he was bad enough, now he’s getting to look like a Strasbourg goose, the lazy bastard. It takes a man like Monsieur Claude to know how to keep in shape. Or you, for that matter. You always look in the pink.”

  The way he smilingly surveyed me from head to foot made my flesh crawl.

  “What’s on your mind?” I said, anxious to get clear of him as quickly as possible.

  “Two messages. First, someone called while you were out this afternoon and said the filly you bet on had won and you could collect your bet any time.” Bernard nodded at the downstairs door through which Anne de Villemont and the Vosiers had just departed. “Too bad you couldn’t be there to hand out some advice on how to win bets. Tonight would be the night for it.”

  “Why?”

  “Because tonight’s another night at Spinosi’s,” said Bernard as if this were self-explanatory. Then seeing from my puzzled expression that it wasn’t, he said, “Madame de Villemont doesn’t keep you in touch, does she? Spinosi’s is that classy gambling joint out at Saint-Cloud. She drops a load of money there once or twice a month.”