Beggarman, Thief (16 page)

“I don’t want any favors for any son of mine,” Teresa said.

“Don’t you think you ought to ask Wesley what he wants to do?”

“He’s my son,” Teresa said. “I don’t have to ask him anything. And I’m here to make sure he’s not going to get gypped of his just share in his father’s big fat estate.” Ah, Rudolph thought, now we come to the heart of the matter. “When that fancy yacht they wrote about in the magazine is sold,” Teresa said shrilly, “you can bet your boots that I’m going to be looking over everybody’s shoulder to make sure my son isn’t left out in the cold. And our lawyer is going to go over every slip of paper with a fine-tooth comb, don’t make any mistake about that either, Mr. Jordache.”

Rudolph stood up. “In that case,” he said, “I don’t think there’s any need to continue this conversation any longer. Wesley’s stepmother, who will probably be appointed as executrix for the estate, will hire a lawyer and the two lawyers can work everything out between them. I have other things to do. Good-bye.”

“Wait a minute,” Teresa said. “You can’t keep running off like that.”

“I have to take a nap,” Rudolph said. “I’ve been up since dawn.”

“Don’t you want to know where we’re staying here?” she cried, victory slipping from her grasp, the argument won so easily that she was sure that it was a ruse on her opponent’s part. “Our address in America? Mr. Kraler is a highly respected merchant in Indianapolis. He’s a bottler. He has three hundred people working for him. Soft drinks. Give him your card, Eddie.”

“Never mind, Mr. Kraler,” Rudolph said. “I don’t want to have your address here or in Indianapolis. Bottle away,” he added crazily.

“I want to see my boy in jail,” Teresa cried. “I want to see what they’ve done to my poor son.”

“Naturally,” Rudolph said. “By all means, do so.” Her maternal instincts had been less evident in Heath’s office when he had paid her off and she had signed away custody of her son at the sight of a check made out in her name.

“I intend to adopt him legally,” Mr. Kraler said. “Mrs. Kraler wants him to forget he was ever called Jordache.”

“That will have to be settled between him and his mother,” Rudolph said. “Although when I visit him in jail I’ll mention the idea to him.”

“When’re you going to the jail?” Teresa asked. “I don’t want you talking to him alone, filling his ear with poison.… I’m going with you.”

“No, you’re not going anyplace with me,” Rudolph said. “I always make a point of visiting jails unaccompanied.”

“But I don’t speak French,” she wailed. “I don’t even know where the jail is. How will I convince the cops I’m his mother?”

“I’m afraid you’ll have to figure all that out yourself, Mrs. Kraler,” Rudolph said. “Now I don’t want to see either of you two people ever again. Tell your lawyer that the law firm he will have to get into contact with is Heath, Burrows and Gordon. The address is in Wall Street. I believe you were there once before, Mrs. Kraler.”

“You bastard,” Teresa said, un-Mormon-like.

Rudolph smiled. “Have a pleasant afternoon,” he said. He nodded and left the two plump, little angry people sitting silently on the bench in the shade of the pine trees. He was trembling with rage and frustration and despair for the poor boy in the jail in Grasse, but for the moment there was nothing he could do about it. It would take a rescue mission of enormous proportions to tear Wesley out of the grasp of his mother, and today he was not up to thinking even about the first step to be taken. Christian or not, when there was the scent of money in the air, Mrs. Teresa Kraler remembered the habits of her ancient profession. He dreaded having to tell Kate what was in store for her.

He packed quickly. The concierge had gotten him a reservation at the Colombe d’Or in Saint-Paul-de-Vence. A hotel in Grasse would have been closer to the jail he visited almost daily. Saint-Paul-de-Vence was closer to Jeanne. He had chosen Saint-Paul-de-Vence. There was no reason for his remaining any longer at the Hôtel du Cap and many reasons for leaving it. He had told the concierge to forward his mail, but under no circumstances to tell anyone where he was staying. He wrote to Jeanne, telling her where he was going to be, and sealed the note in an envelope addressed to her, care of Poste Restante, Nice.

When he went down to the desk, to pay his bill while his bags were being put in his car, he was relieved to see that the Kralers had gone. He was shocked at the size of his bill. You pay a lot for agony, he thought, on the Côte d’Azur. It was one of the best hotels in the world, but he knew he would never come back to it again. And not because of the cost.

He drove first to the port. Dwyer and Kate had to know where to find him. Dwyer was polishing one of the small brass bitts up forward when he came aboard. He stood up when he saw Rudolph and they shook hands.

“How’re things?” Rudolph asked.

Dwyer shrugged. “It ain’t no holiday,” he said. “They ain’t delivered the shaft and the propeller yet. They have to come from Italy and the Italians ain’t going to send it across the border until they get paid. I been on the phone to the insurance every day, but they’re in no hurry. They never are. They keep sending me new forms to fill out,” he said aggrievedly. “And they keep asking for Tom’s signature. Maybe the Italians don’t think anybody dies in France. And I have to keep getting everything translated. There’s a waitress in town who’s a friend of mine, she got the language, only she don’t know fuck-all about boats and she had to keep asking for the names of things like equipment, running lights, fathoms, flotsam, things like that. It’s driving me up the wall.”

“All right, Bunny,” Rudolph said, suppressing a sigh. “Send all the papers to me. I’ll have them attended to.”

“That’ll be a relief,” Dwyer said. “Thanks.”

“I’m moving to the Colombe d’Or in Saint-Paul-de-Vence,” Rudolph said. “You can reach me there.”

“I don’t blame you, moving out of that hotel. It must have cost you a pile.”

“It wasn’t cheap.”

“You look around you,” Dwyer said, “all those big boats, all these expensive hotels, and you wonder where the money comes from. At least
I
do.”

“Bunny,” Rudolph said, absurdly feeling on the defensive, “when I was young I was poorer than practically anyone you ever knew.”

“Yeah. Tom told me. You worked like a dog. I got no beef against people who came up the way you did. I admire it. I would say you’re entitled to anything you can get.”

“There’re a lot of things I can get,” Rudolph said, “that I’d gladly give away.”

“I know what you mean,” Dwyer said.

There was a short, uncomfortable silence between them.

“I had hoped Kate would be here with you,” Rudolph said. “Something’s come up that she has to know about. How is she?”

Dwyer looked at him consideringly, as though trying to decide whether or not he should tell him anything about Kate. “She’s gone,” he said. “She left for England this morning.”

“You have her address?”

“I do. Yeah,” Dwyer said carefully.

“I need it,” Rudolph said. As quickly as possible, he told Dwyer about the Kralers’ visit, about the legal problems that Kate would have to deal with, or at least would have to be handled in Kate’s name.

Dwyer nodded slowly. “Tom told me about that wife of his. A real ball-breaker, isn’t she?”

“That’s the least of her virtues,” Rudolph said. He saw that Dwyer was hesitant about giving him Kate’s address. “Bunny,” he said, “I want to ask you something. Don’t you believe that I’m trying to do the best for Kate? And for Wesley? And for you, too, for that matter?”

“Nobody has to worry about me,” Dwyer said. “About Kate—” He made his curious, almost feminine gesture with his hands, as if explaining the situation in words was beyond him. “I know she sounded … well … snappish the other day. It’s not that she’s sore at you or anything like that. I’d say, what it is—” Again the little gesture. “It’s that she’s—” He searched for the word. “She’s
bruised.
She’s a sensible woman; she’ll get over it. Especially now that she’s back home in England. You got a pencil and a piece of paper?”

Rudolph took a notebook and pen out of his pocket. Bunny gave him the address and Rudolph wrote it down. “She doesn’t have a telephone,” Bunny said. “I gather her folks ain’t rolling in money.”

“I’ll write her,” Rudolph said, “when anything develops.” He looked around him at the scrubbed deck, the polished rails and brasswork. “The ship looks fine,” he said.

“There’s always something to be done,” Dwyer said. “I made a date to have it hauled up in the yard two weeks from today. The goddamn stuff ought to be here from Italy by then.”

“Bunny,” Rudolph asked, “how much do you think the
Clothilde
is worth? What it would sell for?”

“What it’s worth and what it would sell for are two different things,” Dwyer said. “If you figure what it cost originally and all the work and improvements Tom and me put into it and the new radar you gave him as a wedding present—that’ll have to be installed, too—I’d say it would come to almost a hundred thousand dollars. That’s what it’s
worth.
But if you have to sell it fast, like you said when you were telling us about settling the estate—and in this month, with the season more than half gone—nobody likes to pay for the upkeep of a boat for a whole winter—if people’re going to buy, they’re most likely to buy in the late spring—if you have to sell it fast in the off months and people know you
have
to sell, why then, naturally, they’ll try to cut your throat and maybe you’d be lucky if you got fifty thousand dollars for it. Anyway, I’m not the one to talk about this. You ought to go around, talk to some of the yacht brokers here and in Cannes, Saint-Tropez, you see what I mean, maybe they have somebody on their books’d be interested for a fair price.…”

“Has anybody approached you so far?” Rudolph asked.

Dwyer shook his head. “I really don’t think anybody who knows Antibes’d make a bid. After the murder and all. I think you’d do better to change the name and sail her to another harbor. Maybe another country. Italy, Spain, somewhere like that. Maybe even in Piraeus, that’s in Greece.… People’re superstitious about ships.”

“Bunny,” Rudolph said, “I don’t want you to get angry at what I’m going to say, but I have to talk to you about it. Somebody’s got to stay with the boat until it’s sold.…”

“I would think so.”

“And he’d have to be paid, wouldn’t he?”

“Yeah,” Dwyer said uncomfortably.

“What would the usual salary be?”

“That depends,” Dwyer said evasively, “how much work you expected him to do, if he was an engineer or not, things like that.”

“You, for example. If you were on another ship?”

“Well, if I’d been hired on earlier—I mean people’ve got their crews fixed by now—I guess about five hundred dollars a month.”

“Good,” Rudolph said. “You’re going to get five hundred dollars a month.”

“I didn’t ask for it,” Dwyer said harshly.

“I know you didn’t. But you’re going to get it.”

“Just remember I didn’t ask for it.” Dwyer put out his hand and Rudolph shook it. “I just wish,” Dwyer said, “there was some way of Tom knowing all you’re doing for me, for Kate and the kid, for the
Clothilde.”

Rudolph smiled. “I didn’t ask for it,” he said, “but I got it.”

Dwyer chuckled. “I think there’s still some whiskey left on board,” he said.

“I wouldn’t mind a drink,” Rudolph said.

As they went aft, Dwyer said, “Your sister, Mrs. Burke—Gretchen—made me into a whiskey drinker. Did she tell you?”

“No. She kept your romance secret.”

He saw that Dwyer didn’t smile and said nothing more about Gretchen.

They had the whiskey in the wheelhouse, warm. Dwyer apologized for not having any ice. He didn’t want to have the generator that supplied the electricity running, wasting fuel.

“It’s a funny thing,” Dwyer said, relaxed now, with the glass in his hand. “You and Gretchen and Tom all in the same family.” He took a big gulp of his drink. “Fire and ice,” he said obscurely.

Rudolph didn’t ask him to explain what he meant by that.

As he left, Rudolph said, “If I don’t see you before then, I’ll see you at the airport when Wesley leaves. You remember the date?”

“I have it written down,” Dwyer said. “I’ll pack his things for him and bring them along with me.” He hesitated, coughed a little. “He’s got a whole folder full of photos up forward. You know—pictures of the ship, ports we put into, him and his father, me and Kate.… That sort of thing. Should I pack them in?” He lifted his glass and closed his eyes as he drank, as though the matter were of no great importance.

“Pack them in,” Rudolph said. Memory hurt, but it was necessary baggage.

“I got a whole bunch of pictures from the wedding. All of us … you know—drinking toasts, dancing, stuff like that, all of us.…”

“I think it would be a good idea to leave them out,” Rudolph said. Too much was too much.

Dwyer nodded. “Kate didn’t want them either. And I don’t think I have room to keep them. I’ll be traveling finally, you know.…”

“Send them to me,” Rudolph said. “I’ll keep them in a safe place. Maybe after a while Wesley would like to see them.” He remembered the pictures that Jean had taken that day. He would put the other ones with them.

Dwyer nodded again. “Another drink?”

“No, thanks,” Rudolph said. “I haven’t eaten lunch yet. Would you like to join me?”

Dwyer shook his head. “Kind of you, Rudy,” he said, “but I already ate.” Dwyer had a quota, Rudolph saw. One favor accepted a day. No more.

They put their glasses down, Dwyer carefully wiping away with a cloth the damp the glasses left.

He was going forward to finish polishing the bitts as Rudolph left the
Clothilde.

After he had checked in at the new hotel Rudolph had lunch on the terrace overlooking the valley that looked as though it had been designed from a painting by Renoir. When he had finished lunch, he made a call to the old lawyer in Antibes. He explained that the
Clothilde
was for sale and that he would like the lawyer to act as agent for the estate in the transaction. “If the best offer you can get,” he said, “is not at least one hundred thousand dollars, let me know. I’ll buy it.”