Lawless (15 page)

Matt halted in midstride. A jaw muscle writhed on the left side of his face. The gnome giggled again.

It felt as if a rope had been wound around his forehead and was being steadily tightened. The feeling of frustrated rage grew and grew. Lepp took a moment to draw out a silk kerchief and dab raindrops from his forehead. Doing that enabled him to get control of himself before he spoke again.

“An impasse has been reached, it seems. Perhaps we need to try a different tack with you, Madame Strelnik. Give you time to reconsider your rash and foolish answers to my questions.”

“I don’t need to reconsider anything. I’ve told you the tru—”

“Be silent and let me finish!
We shall permit you to ponder your ill-advised behavior for the next forty-eight hours. At the end of that time, another of my associates—someone you have never seen before—will call on you to receive the documents. If you fail to surrender them, your husband will be killed.”

“My God, why can’t you understand? I don’t have any documents to give you!”

Now Lepp hammered at her, quietly but without pity.

“Then get them. I know they’re somewhere in Paris despite your husband’s denials.”

“He’s telling the truth!
I’m telling the truth!”

“Nonsense,” Lepp whispered.

Leah closed her eyes. While Anton fretted and clutched at her neck, she sank to the ground at the base of the plane tree. She cried in silence.

Lepp retrieved the barrel of the cane from the spot where the layabout had dropped it. He rammed the sword back into the sheath and screwed down the hilt.

“Of one more thing I should particularly warn you, madame. Do not report this visit anytime during the next forty-eight hours.” He swished the cane at the plaster head of the. Madonna. “Do not report it to the police in this arrondissement. To the Sûreté detectives—to anyone in authority! We shall know if you do! And we shall take immediate, appropriate action.”

He extended the cane and used the ferrule to pluck the bloodied cap from the layabout’s back pocket. Deftly, he spun the cap through the air. It landed on the hem of Leah’s skirt.

Her eyes flew open. She stared at the cap as if it were contaminated. Wide-eyed, little Anton studied the cap too. A radiant smile spread over his face. “Papa’s. Papa’s!”

“Clever child.” Lepp tucked his cane under his arm. “Let us hope he’ll have more than a cap to remind him of his father as he grows up. It’s entirely up to you, madame.”

He barked something in his own language and marched toward the door in the wall. The layabout and the gnome fell in step behind him, almost like trained soldiers. Relief flooded over Matt then. Once the three left the house, he and Leah would have time to think. He kept his eyes on the men, relaxing just a little for the first time in twenty minutes. The men blocked his view of the latch as it moved.

Too late, he realized what had made the clicking sound. The gnome whipped the nickeled revolver toward the door opening inward.

She came into the garden in a rush, her arms laden with packages. Matt’s reactions were slow. Before he could make a sound, the gnome jumped sideways, out from behind Lepp. The maneuver gave the gnome a clear target. The revolver leveled, pointing to the center of Dolly’s forehead.

D
OLLY STARED AT
the gun in disbelief. One of the packages slipped from her hand. The string broke, the paper fell away, and two thick pink chops landed in the dirt of a flower bed.

Matt watched the gnome’s finger drain of color as the little man applied pressure on the trigger. He knew Dolly was going to be shot and killed, and the fear he felt was as consuming and profound as his fear had been when he’d thought the Gulf of Mexico was going to pull him to his death.

He started to hurl himself toward her, to get in front of her if he could. His body felt lethargic, his movements impossibly slow. It was as if time itself had been suspended in the garden, the natural laws of the world repealed. When the gnome’s mouth opened, a sadistic little grin revealing the gold crowns on his teeth, it seemed to take an hour for the smile to form.

The gnome’s finger whitened. One after another, the parcels kept spilling from Dolly’s arms.

And he couldn’t move fast enough!

But somehow Lepp did, jabbing his cane into the gnome’s shoulder. The revolver exploded. The illusion of suspended time shattered. Dolly fell sideways. Matt yelled her name and rushed to catch her.

He bumped Lepp, who shoved him away. Dolly crumpled to the ground. He was certain she was shot, and he knew what an incredible fool he’d been to try to deny how he felt about her.

Lepp seemed momentarily nonplussed by the sight of the fallen girl. Then rage wrenched his face. He shoved the gnome through the open doorway into the street, cursing him for shooting unnecessarily.

The layabout didn’t need to be ordered to leave. As the gnome scuttled away in the direction of the phaeton, the blue-chinned man shoved between two elderly women who appeared outside the door. They’d heard the shot. They weren’t the only ones. Across the way, shutters banged open. Voices cried questions. Lepp grasped the doorframe, spun and said, “Nothing is changed. Forty-eight hours. He’s dead if you say anything.”

Then he bolted, savagely kicking one of the women out of the way.

Matt dropped to his knees next to Dolly. She was breathing in a loud, uneven way. Directly above the door, a large pock in the wall showed where the deflected bullet had lodged.

He’d been wrong. She hadn’t been hit. But the emotion generated by those moments of utter terror wouldn’t leave him. Painters frequently symbolized death as a winged angel. The shadow of that wing had fallen over him for the second time in his life, and also for the second time, the effect was profound.

He slipped his hands under Dolly’s neck and shoulder. Her eyes were still half closed. She began to breathe noisily through her mouth. He barely heard the clatter of the escaping phaeton, or the cries of neighbors trying to stop it, or Leah Strelnik’s sudden renewed sobbing. As he knelt in the rainy garden, nothing mattered but Dolly. Not the Matamoras painting. Not even Strelnik himself.

“I love you, Dolly” was all he could say. “My God, I never knew how much.”

He lifted her head against his shoulder, bending his back as he did so, protecting her from the rain. “We’ll get married. We’ll give the child a name, I promise.”

Her eyes came fully open. For a moment she looked puzzled, as if her mind couldn’t hold all that had happened so quickly. Slowly, though, her expression changed, grew more alert. There was an almost ecstatic glow on her face when she reached up with her left hand. Her caress told him she understood what he was repeating with such fervency.

“I love you. I couldn’t bear to lose you. We’ll get married as soon as you want.”

He said it without the slightest reservation.

The next hour and a half were chaos.

More and more residents of the neighborhood arrived at the street door. At first they merely asked what had happened. Matt replied with polite evasions, which were unsatisfactory. The neighbors had heard a gun discharged! The questions grew angry. He heard a mention of gendarmes. Finally he slammed the door in the faces of the people shouting and shaking their fists at him.

During the next few minutes he told Dolly what Lepp had said before she arrived. He put Anton into her care and helped Leah to bed in her ransacked flat. He gave her several swallows of brandy to make her sleep. He also gave her a rash promise that he’d make sure Strelnik came back to her safe and whole.

By then someone else was knocking at the street door—someone with the authority to insist upon being admitted. A gendarme from the local precinct. Matt hustled Dolly out of sight and let him in.

Matt argued heatedly with the young policeman, who wanted to question all the residents of the household. That wasn’t necessary, Matt insisted. It was a trivial matter. Yes, there’d been some struggling, a lot of things thrown, even a gun discharged. Still, the cause was merely a quarrel with his girlfriend. Matt said he’d discovered she had a new lover. The gendarme could understand how that enraged a fellow, couldn’t he?

Being French, he could. He perched on a bench near the plane tree, prepared a little statement on several small sheets of paper, and Matt signed it. The statement contained the name and address of an entirely fictitious rival lover which Matt had thought up to add authenticity. To verify Matt’s story, the lover would be questioned, the policeman promised. Matt hoped the search for the fictitious lover would last at least forty-eight hours.

The policeman left. Ten minutes later Madame Rochambeau arrived, in an overwrought state. Several neighbors had seen her coming up the Rue Saint-Vincent and generously informed her that all sorts of disgraceful violence had taken place during her absence.

When the landlady saw the destruction, she went into a purple-cheeked screaming fit. Even her tiniest facial moles seemed to throb with fury. After she’d bellowed and stormed up and down for several minutes, Matt managed to make her listen to him, and she began to calm down a little.

The calm was temporary. The moment she heard him say the vandals had come in search of some papers they thought Strelnik possessed, she headed for the south side of the garden, bellowing that she didn’t care whether Satan himself had kidnapped her tenant, the family had to move out at once—
and
pay for all the damage!

Matt held Madame Rochambeau back physically until she no longer insisted on rushing in and waking Leah. He pleaded, wheedled and finally convinced her Strelnik’s wife was in no condition to go anywhere, and that to force her would be un-Christian.

The appeal to the landlady’s Catholicism worked. Without going into detail, Matt was then able to communicate a little of the urgency of the situation. He also promised to pay for every bit of damage out of the allowance he received from his father. Why, he’d even add twenty or thirty francs for emotional suffering on Madame Rochambeau’s part.

Mollified, she said Madame Strelnik would still have to leave—but not immediately. The landlady picked up the head of the Madonna and flounced into her quarters, where the sound of a broom and little exclamations of dismay were soon heard.

In the disorder of their sitting room, Matt finally managed to get a moment alone with Dolly. He didn’t care for the responsibility that was weighing on him.

“I guess I’m the one who must try to find Sime.”

Dolly’s momentary silence was agreement. Then she frowned.

“Suppose Lepp was bluffing, Matt. Suppose they don’t really have him.”

He thought about it. They might have gotten hold of Strelnik’s cap but not the man himself. In a fight, for example—a fight from which Strelnik had ultimately escaped. There was no guarantee the Prussian was holding anything except that cap, which could easily have been stained with animal blood.

“You could be right,” he said with a nod. “But can I take the chance and do nothing? I don’t think so. They
may
have him, and he may have only forty-eight hours to live.”

“What are you going to do, then? You can’t go to the police.”

He shook his head. “I wouldn’t want to take a chance. Lepp probably has informers inside.”

But that wasn’t the extent of his dilemma. He couldn’t call on any of Strelnik’s radical friends, either, for the simple reason that he didn’t know who they were or where to find them. Strelnik had never brought a one of them to the Rue Saint-Vincent. Had never even mentioned their names or revealed where he met them in Belleville. Because Strelnik’s politics were dangerous—and his associates were presumably scattered after the kidnapping—Matt was alone.

It made him angry. A bit of the anger was even directed at his friend who was in danger, until he realized how shameful that was.

He didn’t know where he’d begin his search. Dolly understood that problem as well. “They ¢ould have hidden him anywhere in Paris, couldn’t they?”

“Anywhere.” It had a gloomy sound. A moment later, he enunciated the one idea that had been flitting at the back of his mind. “There’s just an outside chance Herr Lepp used someplace which he already had available.”

“Is there such a place?”

“I’ve heard there may be.” He sounded distinctly reluctant as he added, “I’m going out for a while.”

“Where?”

“To see Lisa at the Guerbois.”

He kissed Dolly in front of the unfinished portrait. The gnome had ruined it. Slashed it to tatters.

“But don’t be jealous, Doll. It’s you I’m going to marry.”

For just a moment, while their lips touched, he had an uneasy feeling that by making his promise to her, he’d consigned himself to failure as an artist.

The unfounded pessimism quickly passed. He loved her, and he would marry her if he came out of his imbroglio alive. How Paul Cézanne would snort if he knew Matt had gotten mixed up in politics.

No, that’s not really it,
he thought as he patted Dolly’s arm, glanced at Anton, who’d fallen asleep in a chair, and left the flat.
It isn’t really politics I’m embroiled with
—
it’s people.
One of those could be ignored without the slightest twinge of conscience. One, but not the other.

He spoke with Lisa in the alley behind the café. “Do you want to settle with the Prussian?”

She replied with an obscene word. “Do you even need to ask?”

“All right. I need the help of every one of those friends of yours. The ones you call working girls.”

“Tomorrow?”

“Tonight.”

“Impossible, Matthew. They’ll lose business.”

“Are they friends or aren’t they? Do you want Lepp or don’t you?”

Heat lightning flickered in the sky in the direction of the Bois de Boulogne. A bad storm was on the way. Her voice grew harsh.

“All right, go on. What are the girls to do?”

“Help me find that private place you mentioned once—the place where Lepp sheds his public face and amuses himself.”

“My God, you’re asking to have the whole left bank searched. I don’t know that many whores!”