The Man Who Wasn't There
She was laughing so hard she had the hiccups, and when her companion asked to excuse himself she could only drunkenly tap the edge of her glass, hiccup, and giggle some more. But her meaning was transparent, and with a smile he poured her more champagne. She was so far gone, he reflected, that he could bring in Nikita Khrushchev as a substitute and she likely wouldn't notice.
He took her jacket as he slipped across the hall and knocked on the door opposite her suite. It was opened by a man who could have been his twin: tall and thin, with a pinched face, slightly concave on its left side, framing narrow eyes and topped with close-cropped hair. It could have been a cruel face, and in truth it had gazed over cruel things. Tonight though, that face—both his and that of the man who let him in—looked tired and a little apprehensive.
"Christ, Michel," he told his twin. "You could frighten Frankenstein with that puss." He dropped the woman's jacket onto the bed, then sat down and pulled off his own shoes.
Michel grimaced. "What's the topic of conversation in there?"
"It jumps about, so don't worry," came the reply. "Just keep pouring champagne into it." He pulled a bright medallion off his lapel and fiddled with it until a false front came away, revealing a gaudy little engraving of what looked like a cherub holding a wand. This he rubbed against the woman's jacket, wincing a little at the static discharge. "Okay," he sighed as he closed it up again and set his watch. "You've got her for twelve hours." He began to disrobe. "I should be back in three or four, but if I'm delayed just keep her entertained and out of sight."
"She's got a reputation," Michel said fearfully.
"Yeah, well so do you, for tonight at least," said his friend wanly. "Dirk Dirkson leaves no woman unsatisfied." His face was slowly softening—not emotionally, but physically, becoming more feminine. His voice began to alter, too. "After you've got her out of her dress, get it and her other things over to me. And hurry. It's a simple job, but I want to get it over with."
"You're the boss," Michel shrugged, and left.
Thirty minutes later he was back, knocking softly at the door; this time it was answered not by his twin, but by the twin of the woman he had just rolled into bed. He handed her a suitcase and a pile of clothes, gave her a playful peck on the lips, and left.
It was another hour before she was ready to go: she not only had to change into the woman's green silk dress and gloves, she had to carefully arrange her hair and makeup and nails. That done, she regarded herself in the mirror before setting everything askew with a good tousling and smudging. She was a professional in all things, and if, as the woman she was impersonating, she was to return home looking well-used, she was going to play the part completely by abusing a well-built foundation. Before leaving, she pinned the medallion onto her collar.
"Goodnight, Mme. St. James," the concierge said as she passed. She giggled and blew him a kiss and tripped over her high heels, falling into his arms. As he raised her to her feet she kissed him with champagne-flavored lips—tentatively at first, but then with greater force, until he gently pushed her away. She giggled again and tottered out as the attendant brought her Mercedes around. She was careful to weave drunkenly as she pulled away from the casino.
* * * * * *
Lucy St. James's chateau was forty kilometers outside Le Havre, and it was almost midnight before her substitute pulled up in front of it. A tall man, looking very sleepy, stumbled from around the corner of the darkened house and started to slip behind the wheel, but she waved him off. "I'm only back for a few minutes."
She found the study and the safe, all very quickly, and with some close listening at the combination lock soon had it open. It contained a lot of documents, but she was only interested in the velvet bag, which she shook open. Three ... six ... ten ... twelve ... all the rubies seemed accounted for. Then the sound of tires crunching over gravel took to the window, and through its lattice she saw a big limo pull up. Dupuy's men—a damnable coincidence, she cursed to herself, but one which explained why the real Lucy St. James had not been eager to return home.
She slipped the bag into her purse and thought briefly of making a break across the grounds, but she would need the car to get back to Le Havre, and two large men were now sitting on its trunk. The bell rang, and she decided there was nothing to do but play for time. "I'll let them in," she told a man struggling into his jacket as he headed for the door. Robert, she thought his name was, but didn't take a chance on using it.
Emile, Dupuy's top lieutenant, was on the doorstep, along with two other men. She knew Emile from another job—ironically, one in which, under a quite different identity, she'd been retained by Dupuy—and she knew him as a thoroughly bad sort. He was the kind of man who lost his squint (which he was wearing now) only when he replaced it with a leer. He didn't wait for her invitation, but brushed past before turning expectantly. "Do come in," she said with a tight smile. "The study is this way."
There, she shook the rubies onto the desk; Emile said a sharp word, and one of his companions began to examine them one at a time, closely. When he was satisfied, Emile put the rubies in his pocket and tossed her an envelope. She hardly felt more than cursory interest in its contents, but had to pretend great trepidation as she took the negatives and prints from it. Despite herself, she gave a low whistle: Yes, Lucy St. James would pay a great deal to keep this kind of photograph out of the public eye. "These are all the prints?" she asked.
"We'd be poor businessmen if we didn't keep our word," said Emile. It was true: Dupuy was a nasty sort, but he had a reputation for playing fair within the dirty rules of the game.
"You're not ... going right away ... are you?" she asked as Emile rose. He looked at her curiously, and she subtly swelled her breast so that he'd catch sight of their firm curves. He glanced down—and the leer came out.
* * * * * *
Robert—yes, his name was Robert—set a tall glass of tomato juice by her elbow. The morning sun cast a hard glint off the pool—a glint so hard that even her sunglasses could only mildly soften it. Emile had kept her awake most of the night, and in those brief intervals she could get away from the bed she saw that his other men were still keeping watch outside. And so she had a fierce headache as well as Emile's continued attentions to contend with. Right now he was in the pool—without any trunks, naturally—while she pretended to watch appreciatively.
"Can't you send them away and stay yourself?" she implored as noon crept closer. It was increasingly clear that the rubies, despite her best efforts, were going to end up with Dupuy, and she had to think ahead. And she thought she knew Emile well enough that she could pull off an imposture.
He grunted and slid back under water. But the thought had apparently dislodged something in him, because he clambered out. "No," was all he said, however, as he began vigorously toweling off.
She bit her lip. "What about leaving someone else, then?"
He looked at her with amusement. "I heard you were insatiable." He looked around, then grinned and jerked his head at one of his companions. "What about him?" The man was darkly handsome in a sad-eyed sort of way, but she didn't care so much about that; she just ran her tongue over her bottom lip.
"Marcel!" Emile called, and the man walked slowly over. "The lady is lonely. Keep her company till dinnertime." Marcel shrugged.
After Emile and the others were away she invited Marcel to use the pool, and with no great show of reluctance—but no great show of enthusiasm either—he stripped and dove into the water. As he made a few laps she went inside, ostensibly to bring him a beer, but in actuality to get the servants out of the house with an afternoon off. Once they were away she returned to the pool, where she called Marcel over.
"Why does Dupuy want my rubies?"
"Probably because they're worth a lot of money," he said.
"What's he going to do with them?"
"I don't ask questions like that."
"Would you give me a kiss?"
He grimaced and started to raise himself out of the pool; when he was halfway out she knocked his hands out from under him and slammed his head on the side of the pool. It wasn't enough to kill him outright, but it made it easier to hold his head underwater until he stopped struggling.
* * * * * *
"Marcel!"
He started guiltily and turned; a woman, her eyes blazing, ran up and gave him a hard slap across the cheek. Then she started yelling a lot of things, most of which were variations on the accusation that his parents had never been married. He didn't answer, even when she ran out of breath, and that caused her to burst into tears and run upstairs. He looked over at Paul—another man he'd met on the earlier job—and Paul made an irritable "go after her" motion. He grimaced and followed her up the grand staircase and down an immense hallway and into a bedroom, where he found her weeping on a bed. He looked around— it was a large and fairly well-appointed room, and he inferred from a few cheap-looking photographs that Marcel and this woman were married or, at least, sleeping together. It didn't surprise him: Dupuy ran his gang like an extended family. All were gathered in one spot and lived together, on the enormous grounds of the enormous beachside chateau that was paid for by Dupuy's various criminal activities: racketeering, gambling, gun-running, drug-smuggling ... extortion ...
He sat beside her and put his arm about her shoulder; she turned and wept into it. After a few minutes he raised her chin and they tried kissing, but something seemed to keep rising in her gorge and she kept choking. He was grateful when he heard Paul call his name and gesture that Emile wanted him. The woman tried to follow, but Paul stopped her.
He found Emile down in the billiards room, and the two of them—and various other members of the gang who drifted in and out—played until it was well after dark, taking a break only to eat some sandwiches and drink a few beers. Emile's conversation was light and meaningless, and he kept his own chitchat as neutral and nondescript as he could. By ten o'clock, though, he was exhausted and thoroughly distracted by the puzzle of how he was going to find the rubies in this immense house—even assuming Dupuy was keeping them there. Emile winked at him as he excused himself. "Marlene will be okay," he said. "The boys have been talking to her."
What "the boys" could have said mystified him, but he found her calm and pliant and even affectionate, and she seemed to expect that she could arouse him. He played along as she tugged off his shoes and trousers and shirt and pulled him under the sheets while he was still in his shorts and undershirt. They went at it for a little while and he did what was expected of him and then fell back and pretended to sleep. For an hour afterward, though, he could hear her weeping beside him.
* * * * * *
The next morning, the entire staff assembled for breakfast in the great dining room, where Emile gave a quick summary of the previous week's business. The matter of the rubies was only briefly noted—though it was a great score, it seemed not to have been an especially difficult one. One person listened with interest, though, and was intrigued by the implication that Dupuy would be keeping the rubies for himself out of sentiment: that particular acquisition, Emile had said, would not be subject to a distribution.
Dupuy didn't attend the breakfast himself, but he had left orders that he wanted to see various employees during the day. Marcel was summoned early in the afternoon.
He was ushered into a large study on the third floor: a sunny room, with fresh, sea-scented air drifting through the open windows. Dupuy sat behind an ornate desk that was clear of all but a few papers, and motioned broadly at him to come around and stand next to the desk rather than in front of it. It was the kind of friendly gesture that would have diminished the sense of a superior confronting an inferior if hadn't been made with such peremptory expectation that it would be fulfilled. Still, it gratified the visitor, because it let him see that the bottom left-hand drawer of the desk was actually a big, steel safe. He carefully ignored it, however.
Dupuy was not a big man, but he did tend to fill a space. Rarely would one ever find a man who looked more happy in his work: fat and round and pink, with elfin eyes and a wicked little mouth always pointed up at the corners. He still had a full head of hair though he was already in his late forties, but he kept it closely cut; probably he had it shaved back to stubble once a week. It was the kind of head, clean and vaguely Romanesque, one might see in a Revolutionary print—a Jacobin judge in dishabille, waiting in malicious, gleeful anticipation of prisoners who had been condemned before they'd even been arrested.
He wore tinted spectacles, even indoors, and grinned up at his visitor from behind them, but there was no real warmth in his smile. "Marcel, my lad," he said. "They tell me you stayed behind to entertain Mme. St. James." He didn't wait for an answer, but shook his finger. "That's bad business, you know. Mme. St. James is a bad influence, has done very bad things, and has paid a terrible price for them. You steer clear of such people." He didn't seem mind—or even notice—the sullen stare that his fatherly little lecture elicited.
"Marlene, now, there's a woman," he continued. "Smartest thing you ever did, marrying her. Luckiest stroke for you. Why don't you keep close to her? Eh?"
The door opened and a small boy, no more than six, ran into the room with a whoop. He was in a school uniform but had paint on his cheeks and feathers in his hair and danced around the room while Dupuy laughed. When he got too close, the latter scooped him up into his lap and began to tickle him. The boy squirmed and laughed and hugged Dupuy, who, from over the boy's thin, tanned arms, looked back up at his underling.
"You don't have children, Marcel. Why not?" He snorted at the shrug he received in reply. "A man should have children. No, a man isn't a man unless he has children. Not until you have a child do you ever really grow up." He fondly stroked the boy's blonde, almost white, hair. "You find yourself making sacrifices you never dreamed of. This one's mother, for instance, died giving him birth, you know. Eh, do you miss your mother, boy?" The boy gave an uncomprehending shrug. "Of course you do, though you never met her. Because she's still in here, isn't she?" He tickled at the boy's chest, then kissed his head and set him back on the floor; he ran out the room, laughing still.
"What will it be, Marcel?" Dupuy was suddenly very grave. "This isn't the first time, and it can't go on. Are you going to grow up? Or shall we, you know, arrange a separation?"
His visitor was struck less by indecision than by a sense of the futility of the question, so he just shrugged. Dupuy looked displeased, and sighed, but nodded his head. "I'll have Emile tell her tonight. Don't trouble yourself." With a wave of the hand he dismissed him.
Apparently there was no reason to return to Marlene, which was just as well, because the boy's antics in his father's study had been most suggestive. So he went looking for "little Henri," and when he found him told him about a wonderful, secret hiding place to be found down in the cellar.
* * * * * *
He'd forgotten how hot and scratchy wool pants were, and how big the world looked when you were scarcely over a meter tall, but he'd also forgotten the kind of energy a boy of six has, and was soon delighting in the way he could spring down the hall in a way that was neither walking nor running nor jumping. It would be foolish to return to Dupuy's study so quickly, so he didn't mind when a rather grim-looking woman suddenly appeared and took him by the hand and set him to work on basic arithmetic in a room done up like a miniature classroom. He took his time over the problems, and even doodled some pictures of pirates and cannons in the margins, until the woman returned and made exasperated noises. Then it was some bread and butter and a few slices of cheese and a big glass of milk for supper. As the sun set he was let loose in the garden to catch fireflies, and then put to bed. Dupuy came in and listened with a merry look on his face as the grim—and increasingly harried—woman tried to read a fairy tale, as the boy who wasn't a boy implored her to do it with different voices.
He slept long and was woken to a bath and a breakfast of porridge and sausages, and put in loose linen clothes for some horseback riding and very basic tennis lessons. Then he was put in his uniform and given lessons late in the morning and taken for a swim early in the afternoon. He pretended not to pay much attention to anything—unless it was the flies he tried catching and laughing at when he missed—but picked up news that Marcel wasn't to be found and that Marlene was being "sent away" later that afternoon. That pleased him immensely—it suggested an exit.
And so after his swim he affected a stomachache and was taken into a kind of infirmary where he was given a few pills of a very mild sort, and where he swiped a few of the more potent kind when the sour-faced orderly wasn't looking. He then begged and kicked until he was given a stethoscope. With it he skipped around the house listening to things until he found himself in Dupuy's study.
The boss was taking in a report on certain matters—matters, it quickly proved, which had nothing to do with anything important—and he smiled indulgently at his boy as he plopped down next to the safe and listened to it very carefully through the stethoscope while craftily turning the dial. In fact, the sight was so devastatingly cute that Dupuy gestured Emile and the others to creep up and watch. There were smiles all around—and then the boy noticed and blushed and ran out the room. Of course, he hadn't noticed until he had heard the last tumbler click into place.
So, an hour later, when he saw the study deserted, he slipped in, opened the now unlocked safe, and dropped the bag of rubies into his little school satchel. Then he skipped out into the garden, where he'd already made a show of digging holes, and covered the bag with a shallow layer of dirt. When Marlene was ready to go, she could retrieve them.
He found her in the bedroom, where she was sitting on the edge of the bed, a closed trunk by her feet, dressed very simply in black, gazing blankly into space. He looked at her for a moment; in Dupuy's study he had thought the choice he'd been presented futile, but afterward he hadn't been so sure. To lose a husband to death would leave the woman with emptiness; to lose him to his appetites and the wiles of other women would at least leave her with anger and contempt. He'd decided, in that absent-minded way he had of thinking through trivial things while otherwise preoccupied, that he'd actually done her a favor in so casually—accidentally even—asking Dupuy to effect a "separation" between her and Marcel.
Not that it mattered now. She started a little when she saw him, then smiled as he held out the glass of milk. But she took it gravely and sipped it slowly, seeming to savor each swallow while looking back at him with a gaze that was searching but otherwise impenetrable. He wondered if she had ever wanted children, if that had been one of the tensions she had with Marcel, and found himself, without quite knowing why, clambering up on the bed and putting his tiny arms around her neck. She closed her eyes and smiled and kissed his cheek.
And then she made a kind of choking noise and the glass slipped from her hand and she fell back onto the bed. Bubbles formed on her lips and her breathing became labored. But she had become still by the time he had the door closed and the scarf from around her throat.
* * * * * *
It would be tricky business until the transformation was complete, and maybe even tricky afterward. Little Henri certainly couldn't get her into the trunk, and he worried it might even be past Marlene. And in the meantime someone—anyone—might walk in. He kept the door locked and tried to be quiet, even as he unpacked her things and hid them under the bed.
Eventually the pulses in his limb stopped, and the new Marlene tried pushing the old one into the steamer. Fortunately, it turned out that Marlene had quite a bit of upper body strength, and after no little huffing and puffing, she got the corpse packed in and the lid shut. She was grateful that Marlene didn't trouble about makeup—not because she wouldn't have been able to handle it, but because it would have been one more thing to prepare. For clothing—as she had no time to pull off the former Marlene's outfit—she contented herself with a sun dress and simple sandals: it seemed like the kind of "fuck you" farewell Marlene would make.
No one had knocked in the meantime, so she hurried downstairs and outside to the garden, where she pretended to pick bluebells while surreptitiously digging the bag out of its shallow hole and dropping it into her purse. That done, she started to return to the house, but ran into Emile before she got to the door. "Dupuy is ready for you," he said.
He was sitting on the terrace, eating from a big bowl of sherbet. "They tell me you packed," he said, gazing out over the lake. She nodded. He looked up at her, and pulled his spectacles off; she was mildly surprised to see something like respect in his eyes. "We're going to miss you, Marlene. You were always thoughtful and professional that way." He returned to his sherbet, and Emile tugged at her elbow.
Something in Dupuy's words and Emile's manner set every warning bell ringing in her head, and when he led her not to the front gate but back into the garden, she tensed. And when he stopped and let her step in front of him, she was ready. Foolishly, he had drawn his pistol and let her see the open grave while she was still close, and with a quick strike she knocked the gun from his hand, kicked him in the groin, and punched him in the throat as he bent double. Then she had the gun and it was his brains all over the spadework.
She tried slinking around to the back wall, but soon saw there was no hope of successful escape except through the front gate with a vehicle. There was a gap between the hedges and the front drive, and she heard a shout as she dashed across, and then she was on the motorcycle—so conveniently abandoned by a man returning from an errand. She heard a few pistol cracks and a whistle by her ear as she roared out the front gate and down the highway.
She had nothing with her but the medallion—pinned to her dress in its fake case—and the jewels, and no hope of using the former for many more hours, so she had no real hope but to outrace them. It was an open stretch of coastal highway, with visibility for kilometers in front and behind. For the first twenty minutes or so she kept expecting to hear the roar of a powerful motor behind her, but resisted the urge to look back. Only when she had put almost fifteen kilometers behind her did she look, and see no sign of pursuit. Apparently Dupuy had decided she couldn't hide from him for very long—which would very likely have been true of Marlene. But then they would discover her body, and that, even in their perplexity, would set them scurrying again.
Ten kilometers farther on she came upon a small town—hardly more than a village with a few modern shops stuck around the edges—and stopped. She doubted she had enough gas to make it back to Le Havre, and the principle of hiding in a crowd until pursuit had passed recommended itself highly. She hid the motorcycle in an alley and wandered about until she saw a black shawl hanging from a clothesline; it quickly joined the jewels in her purse. But there was nothing to do then until well after midnight.
Shortly after ten o'clock, while sitting in the dark corner of an outside café, she heard the roar of motorcars, and watched as several powerful vehicles lunged into town; she recognized Dupuy's own limo as one of them. One vehicle kept going and was soon out of sight, but the rest pulled over, and a dozen members of the gang got out and started looking about. She discreetly stepped back into an alley between two houses and kept walking until she found a low wall, which she slipped over. Behind it was dark, damp earth and a lot of wire—a vegetable patch, seemingly—and she stumbled over into a corner and huddled close.
For the next two hours she sat there, hardly moving, and holding her breath when she heard voices. Once, a circle of light thrown by an electric lantern played over the house and the walls opposite her, but it missed her corner.
Then her watch told her it was time to make a change. Out came the shawl and the medallion.
And when the shift was done, she found she couldn't stand up. Her muscles were unresponsive and her very bones shook—and the fact that she felt no teeth in her mouth was enough to raise the most horrible suspicions in her mind. Still, she persevered, and eventually rolled over into a position where she could, with great difficulty, get her feet under her and use the wall to help raise herself up. She was bent almost double and couldn't straighten herself any further; and from her angle on the world, she guessed that in her bent shape she wasn't much taller than little Henri had been. Still, there was nothing to be done, so she slowly staggered her way along the wall until she came to a wooden gate, which refused to yield to her feeble pushes.
With a sigh, she kept moving about the wall until she came to the back of the house, where she found a patio chair and rested for a bit. Then she fumbled about until she found a door which—blessings be upon the countryside and its lack of crime! she thought—was unlocked. It was very dark in the house, and she was terrified of tripping and falling, and so felt carefully along the wall and furniture. At one point—and this was a stroke of unseemly luck—her hand fell into a bowl of coins, which she scooped up eagerly. She may have been carrying a fortune in rubies, but she would need simple copper to get back to Le Havre.
The front door was also unlocked, and with relief she stepped out onto a porch, where she again rested before tottering along to the front gate.
The streetlights were still on, and under their glare she could see Dupuy's men silhouetted. Of course they would have found the motorcycle and guessed that Marlene—or somebody who looked a lot like her—was still in town. She draped the shawl more loosely about her body and hoped it covered Marlene's dress enough to be unrecognizable.
She shuffled down toward the bus stop, where, she thought, one of the all-night buses that ran between Paris and Le Havre would be stopping soon. And when she reached it, she quailed: Dupuy himself was sitting on the bench by the stop.
She crept up and sat down on the bench's far edge; out of the corner of her eye she saw him shift a bit as he noticed her. Her mind raced: they were directly under a bright light, and the last thing she wanted was him paying close attention to her. That suggested keeping quiet, but an old lady on a bench in the middle of night is the kind of thing that generally attracts interest.
And so she started to cough raggedly and to make gummy, smacking noises with her mouth; she blew her nose wetly into her hand; she muttered. She had always hated old ladies, and now ran through a careful recital of everything that had ever irritated her about them—all the things that made her want to look away from them, to run away from them, even. And she was gratified to see Dupuy shift uncomfortably in his seat and begin to look everywhere but at her. At one point she gave a sharp gasp, and was amused to see him even jump a little.
This lasted for thirty minutes, and then a gassy and decrepit bus grumbled up. She made a snorting noise and shuffled toward it, reaching into her purse as she went. She was careless, though, now that she was so near escape, and fell backward as she lost her balance. It was Dupuy who caught her, and who, with a patently insincere murmur of concern, helped her up the steps. She smiled toothlessly back at him.
* * * * * *
In Le Havre she took a taxi to the casino and limped carefully to the garage, where she kept a spare suitcase in the boot of the car. A porter helped her to the front desk, where she registered as Mme. Chautemps and was taken to a well-appointed suite. There she rested until late in the afternoon, when she changed back into Dirkson and drove to a chateau on the outskirts of Paris.
* * * * * *
"I am most grateful to you," said the old man. "Pathetically grateful, even." There were tears in his eyes, but they couldn't quite obscure the greed as he picked through the rubies with a white, bony finger. The hand was almost skeletal; he really should be in the grave. Then he scooped the flashing gems into the bag and tottered over to the safe.
"Yes," he said as he put them away and took out a small leather case. "It is such a relief. She got them in the divorce settlement, you know—very bitter business that. I didn't begrudge her them, not much. But they were my mother's, and the thought of her pawning them away in order to bury the evidence of that ... that shameful affair." He shuddered. "Well, justice prevailed, didn't it? You saw to that."
His guest was suddenly and uncomfortably aware of the weight of the gun in his pocket. He thought of a man floating in a pool and of a woman stuffed inside her own trunk and of a small boy lying broken, like a doll, in the corner of a cellar, and wondered why this old fool shouldn't join them. But he would disgrace their company; and it wasn't as if he even knew the price others had paid so he could once again gloat sentimentally over his mother's things.
"Seventy-five thousand dollars, as agreed," the old man said, counting out the bundles carefully. He laid an extra one on top. "I am so grateful," he added.
His guest brushed the extra packet away as he pocketed the others. "The contract stipulated seventy-five," he said brusquely. "I'm sure there's a charity someplace whose gratitude can match your own in degree and kind."
* * * * * *
He had never seen Michel looking so worn—and the Dirkson body was one that could stand up to a lot of strain, he'd found. He made a great affected show of looking at his watch as Michel gazed haggardly back at him through the open door. "Ninety-eight hours," he murmured in astonishment. "Where does the time go? I trust you had fun?"
He slipped into the room in place of Michel and got the girl wrapped up and on her way home. She'd return to find the jewels gone, of course, and would think Dupuy had taken them—an especially justified conclusion, what with the way the servants would be in hysterics over Marcel. But whatever trouble of mind that caused her would be nothing once Dupuy paid her another visit. Her only consolation would be that the gangster no longer had the photographs—but she wouldn't even know that, since he had spitefully burned them before leaving the house as Marcel. No, things were going to be very unpleasant for the whole lot of them—the one thing that gave him a certain sour satisfaction.
After she was gone he went back up to his room and showered and put on a white jacket and tie. He needed a little recreation, and the game tables—even at this early-morning hour—would do nicely. He didn't want to wait to make another change, and, anyway, he liked to dress up as Dirkson when hitting the tables. The real Dirkson had been—and, so far as he knew, was still—a librarian in Wyoming: a gentle, helpful man who had seen nothing more exciting in his life than a baseball game. But his face looked good in a casino—knowing, confident, aware.
"Vodka," he told the bartender, and turned to look across the gaming floor as he waited, his antennae sweeping the room. He liked to pick up a souvenir from each job—a body he could add to his collection, for use in other jobs, the way he had so casually picked up Dirkson a few years back. He never went for anyone rich or prominent—it would be dangerous to go about under that kind of face—and his eye quickly lit on a cigarette girl. Later tonight, after some play, he'd get her back to the room, have some fun, then send her away, none the wiser, while quietly keeping one of her stockings.
He tossed back the shot and asked for another, and then his attention was caught by the couple next to him. She was a middle-aged woman, a little horsey in the face; the man had an unnaturally thick and black mop of curly hair set over a lined and drooping face; from their conversation it was apparent they were trying, clumsily, to pick each other up. He wondered, briefly, why he was paying attention to them, and then realized it was because the man had told her he did espionage work. "You don't look like a spy," she said in a low, thrilled voice.
"Real spies never look like spies," he found himself inserting into their conversation.
The man in the bad toupee glanced over at him. "True words!" he exclaimed.
"Real spies also don't go around telling perfect strangers that they are spies," he added irritably.
That earned him a narrow look. "And who are you, exactly?"
"Nobody," he shrugged, his eyes following the cigarette girl. "Nobody in particular."
The End