Rich Man, Poor Man (99 page)

‘She told me, she told me,’ Rudolph said. This polite-looking well-spoken young man came up to her and said he had a car outside and he knew a very nice bar in Cannes that stayed open until dawn and would she like to come with him, he’d bring her back whenever she wanted.’

‘Polite-looking, well-spoken young man,’ Thomas said, thinking of Danovic lying on the floor of the cellar with the handle of the ball-peen hammer sticking up from his broken teeth. He chuckled. Tie’s not so polite looking or well spoken this morning, I can tell you that’

‘And then when they got to that bar, a strip-tease joint -God, I can’t even imagine Jean in a place like that - he said it was too noisy for him at the bar, there was a little cosy club downstairs.’ Rudolph shook his head despairingly. ‘Well, you know the rest.’ ‘Don’t think about it, Rudy, please,’ Thomas said. ‘Why didn’t you wake me up and take me along with you?’ Rudolph’s voice was harsh. ‘You’re not the sort of man for a trip like that, Rudy.’ ‘I’m her husband, for Christ’s sake.’

That was another reason for not waking you up,’ said Thomas.

‘He could have killed you.’

‘For a while there,’ Thomas admitted, ‘the chances looked pretty good.’

‘And you could have killed him.’

That’s the one good thing about the night,’ Thomas said. ‘I found out I couldn’t. Now, let’s go back and see what the divers’re up to.’ He hobbled down the deck from the bow, leaving his brother and his brother’s guilts and gratitudes behind him.

He was sitting alone on the deck, enjoying the calm late evening air. Kate was down below and the others had all gone on a two-day auotomobile trip to the hill towns and into Italy. It had been five days since the Clothilde had come back into the harbour and they were still waiting for the new propeller and shaft to be delivered from Holland. Rudolph had said that a little sightseeing was in order. Jean had been dangerously quiet since her night of drunkenness and Rudolph kept doing his best to distract her. He had asked Kate and Thomas to come along with them, but Thomas had said the newlyweds wanted to be alone. He had even privately told Rudolph to invite Dwyer along with the party. Dwyer had been pestering him to point out the drunk who had beaten him up outside Le Cameo and he was sure Dwyer was thinking of cooking up some crazy scheme of retaliation with Wesley. Also, Jean kept following him around Without saying anything, but with a peculiar haunted look in her eyes. Lying for five days had been something of a strain and it was a relief to have the ship to himself and Kate for a little while.

The harbour was silent, the lights out in most of the ships. He yawned, stretched, stood up. His body had gotten over felling bruised and while he still limped, his leg had stopped feeling as though it was broken in half somewhere along the middle when he walked. He hadn’t made love to his wife since the fight and he was thinking that this might be a good night to start in again, when he saw the car without lights driving swiftly along the quay. The car stopped. It was a black DS19. The two doors on his side opened and two men got out, then two more. The last man was Danovic, one arm in a sling.

If Kate hadn’t been aboard, he would have dived over the side and let them try to get him. But there was nothing for him to do but stand there. There was nobody on the boats on either side of him. Danovic remained on the quay, as the other three men came aboard.

‘Well, gentlemen,’ Thomas said, ‘what can I do for you?’

Then something hit him.

He came out of the coma only once. Wesley and Kate were in the hospital room with him. ‘No more . . , ‘ he said, and then slipped back into the coma again.

Rudolph had called a brain specialist in New York and the specialist was on his way to Nice when Thomas died. The skull had been fractured,, the surgeon had explained to Rudolph and there had been catastrophic bleeding.

Rudolph had moved Gretchen and Jean and Enid to a hotel. Gretchen had strict orders not to leave Jean alone for a minute.

Rudolph had told the police what he knew and they had talked to Jean, who had broken down hysterically after a half hour’s questioning. She had told them about La Porte Rose and they had picked up Danovic, but there had been no witnesses to the beating and Danovic had an alibi for the entire night that couldn’t be shaken.

The morning after the cremation Rudolph and Gretchen went by taxi to the place and got the metal box with their brother’s ashes. Then they drove towards Antibes harbour, where Kate and Wesley and Dwyer were expecting them. Jean was at the hotel with Enid. It would have been too much for Kate to bear, Rudolph thought, to have to stand by Jean’s side today. And if Jean got drunk, Rudolph thought, she would finally have good reason to do so.

Gretchen now knew the true story of the wedding night, as did the others.

Tom,’ Gretchen said in the taxi, as they drove through the bustle of holiday traffic, ‘the one of us who finally made a life.’

‘Dead for one of us who didn’t,’ Rudolph said.

‘The only thing you did wrong,’ Gretchen said, ‘was not waking up one night’

‘The only thing,’ Rudolph said.

After that they didn’t speak until they reached the Clothilde.

Kate and Wesley and Dwyer dressed in their working clothes were waiting for them on the deck. Dwyer and Wesley were red eyed from crying, but Kate, although grave faced, showed no signs of tears. Rudolph came on board carrying the box and Gretchen followed him. Rudolph put the box in the pilot house and Dwyer took the wheel and started the one engine. Wesley pulled up the gangplank and then jumped ashore to throw off the two stern lines, which Kate reeled in. Wesley leaped across open water, landed catlike on the stern, and swung himself aboard, then ran forward to help Kate with the anchor.

It was all so routine, so much like every other time they had set out from a port, that Rudolph, on the after deck, had the feeling that at any moment Tom would come rolling out of the shadow of the pilot house, smoking his pipe.

The immaculate white-and-blue little ship chugged past the harbour mouth in the morning sunlight, only the two figures standing in incongruous black on the open deck making it seem any different from any other pleasure craft sailing out for a day’s sport.

Nobody spoke. They had decided what they were to do the day before. They sailed for an hour, due south, away from the mainland. Because they were only on one engine they did not go far and the coast line was clear behind them.

After exactly one hour, Dwyer turned the boat around and cut the engine. There were no other craft within sight and the sea was calm, so there wasn’t even the small sound of waves. Rudolph went into the pilot house, took out the box and opened it. Kate came up from below with a large bunch of white and red gladioli. They all stood in a line on the stern, facing the open, empty sea. Wesley took the box from Rudolph’s hands and, after a moment’s hesitation, his eyes dry now, started to strew his father’s ashes into the sea. It only took a minute. The ashes floated away, a faint sprinkling of dust on the blue glint of the Mediterranean.

The body of their father, Rudolph thought, also rolled in deep waters.

Kate threw the flowers in with a slow, housewifely gesture of her round, tanned arms.

Wesley tossed the metal box and its cover over the side, both face down. They sank immediately. Then Wesley went to the pilot house and started the engine. They were pointed towards the coast now and he held a straight course for the mouth of the harbour.

Kate went below and Dwyer went forward to stand in the prow, leaving Gretchen and Rudolph, death coloured, together on the after deck.

Up in the bow, Dwyer stood in the little breeze of then-passage, watching the coast line, white mansions, old walls, green pines, grow nearer in the brilliant light of the morning sun.

Rich man’s weather, Dwyer remembered,