The Belting Inheritance (17 page)

The Magician

I opened my eyes and shut them again instantly. Outside there was a harsh intolerable light that screwed up the eyeballs. With the lids shut things were better. Or were they? My head felt as if it were being struck regular blows with a hammer and when I raised it a little, still with closed eyes, I felt an atrocious pain in the neck. Had I been involved in an accident, and landed in hospital? Cautiously I opened my eyes again, and with even greater caution lifted my head. I was in bed, in my room at the Hôtel Oeil d’Or, and I was wearing pyjamas. The discovery, although reassuring in a way, was too much for me. I sank back on to the pillows and groaned.

A couple of minutes later I made a daring move. I raised my whole body, swung my legs out of bed, and put my feet to the floor. The hammers pounded on my head, and my mouth felt as if a bonfire had been lighted in it and the remains were still smouldering. I stood up with the help of a bedpost, and measured the distance from bed to washbasin. Three strides. I felt the Ancient Mariner’s need for water. If water could be sprayed inside my mouth and splashed over my head I felt that I might live, but could I reach the washbasin without falling? Relinquishing the bedpost I flung myself forward. I did not fall, but caught my head a nasty crack against a glass shelf just above the basin. I was pouring water into and over myself when the door opened. Elaine stood there, in light blue blouse and dark blue skirt, looking extremely bright and fresh.

She was not sympathetic. “I thought you were dead, but I see you’ve woken. It’s ten o’clock.” I groaned, and stretched out a hand for help to return to bed. “What do you think you’re doing?”

“Back to bed.”

“Nonsense. We’ve got things to do.”

I said feebly, “What things?”

“Last night you kept saying we must go to some street or other – the rue Peter Paul. I don’t know why.”

I managed to reach the bedpost again, and sat down shakily. “What happened last night?”

“You passed out. Beaver and that poetess and I brought you back here. Beaver and Pasquin put you to bed.”

“Where was Uncle Miles?”

Her smile was grim. “He passed out too, five minutes after you. Betty Urquhart took him home. Do you think she’s attractive?”

The hammer thudded so loudly I hardly knew what I was saying. “Yes, I suppose so.”

“More than I am? Perhaps you don’t think I’m attractive at all.”

I felt unable to cope with this. “Don’t be silly.”

It was obvious that I had said the wrong thing. “You certainly made a pretty fair fool of yourself last night. Surely you realised that young man was queer.”

“Fallon, you mean.”

“Who else? Obviously he was a friend of Blakeney’s and then the magic man, whoever he is, replaced Fallon, and Fallon was jealous. He thought you were another rival. But I suppose you were too tight to grasp any of it. The Wainwrights certainly can’t carry their liquor.”

“I wasn’t tight. I remember everything perfectly.” And as I said it, I did remember everything, the play, the conversation with Fallon, and the conclusions I had drawn. But there was something else, something Elaine had said this morning. “What was it you said?”

“What are you talking about?”

“When you came in here you said something.”

She repeated it, as if she were speaking to a child. “I said that I thought you were dead, but I saw you’d woken up.”

“Of course,” I said. “Ulfheim.”

I sank back on the bed. Now I held all the threads in my hands. I knew why Blakeney had been sent over to England, why Arbuthnot had spoken as he had, who had killed Sullivan and Thorne.

“Come
on
,” Elaine said. “Get up.”

“Just a minute. The programme.”

“What programme?”

“The play.
Comédie d’Amour
. Have you got it?”

She looked at me as if she thought I were mad, then without a word went out of the room and came back with a copy of the programme, which she thrust at me. I pointed at the names of the characters with a shaky finger, and picked out two: “
Styver, a clerk
”
,
“
Straamand, a clergyman.
”

“Well?”

“I knew while I was watching the play that there was something I ought to understand about it. The man who called himself Wainwright took the name of Stiver in Paris, and do you know what an anglicisation of Straamand is? It’s Strawman. If you remember, Ulfheim said we could call him Strawman, a clergyman.”

She put on her spectacles as though they might enable her to sea through this fog. “What then?”

“The two names came from this play,
Comédie d’Amour.
”

“And how does that help?”

“Ulfheim, too. I remembered when you said you thought I was dead, but I’d woken up. Ulfheim is a character in Ibsen’s last play. Do you know what it’s called?
When We Dead Awaken.”

“I still don’t understand.”

“No, I suppose you need a special sense of humour to understand why that’s funny.” I sighed and gathered myself together. “Come on, then, there’s no time to lose.”

She began to laugh. “Speaking of sense of humour, you’ve no idea how funny you looked in that place, falling sideways like a statue.”

“I’m sure. If you’ll go out, I’ll get dressed.”

She walked over and stood at the window, with her back to me. “I don’t want you falling asleep again. I won’t look.”

“Thanks.”

“You do think I’m as attractive as that woman, don’t you?”

“Betty? I told you not to be silly. She’s old.”

As I was shakily putting on my trousers she said, still with her back to me, “I’ll tell you something else that happened last night. After you’d been put to bed you got up again and came into my room.”

“What happened?”

“Don’t you remember?”

“Well – ”

“Then you’ll never find out, will you?” And in fact I
never did.

Ten minutes later I was dressed and descending the stairs, feeling still distinctly shaky. As we passed Pasquin’s sitting-room the little man popped out, drew us aside, and patted me on the shoulder.

“How are you? Fairly rotten, I expect.”

“Yes.”

“But you had fun, you had a good time?”

“It was a good time while it lasted.”

Pasquin had unlocked the drink cupboard, and I was afraid that he was going to offer us Armagnac, which I should have had to refuse. But when he turned he was holding a glass containing a pinky-white liquid. “For you.” I looked at it doubtfully. “You know what Percy used to say, ‘This is the pick-me-up that never lets you down.’ That is a joke.”

“Yes.” I held the glass in my hand, then raised it to my lips and determinedly drained it. The result was touch and go. My stomach seemed to revolt against it, then revolt was succeeded by acceptance and a grateful warmth spread through me. Pasquin watched, then patted my shoulder again. “Now you are better.”

“Much better.”

“You go and find Percy now, and when you find him you bring him back here.”

I said we would. But we never brought Percy back to Pierre Pasquin.

The sunlight outside made me doubtful of my recovery, and my condition was not improved by the sight of Uncle Miles on the pavement. He looked distinctly greenish, but had the air of a man prepared to do his duty. He was accompanied by Betty, her hair brassy as ever. She was wearing what looked like the identical paint-stained trousers that she had on when I first saw her.

“I’ve come to take you back,” Uncle Miles said firmly, although with a restraint that suggested he might give way to sickness at any moment.

With equal firmness I said, “No.”

He put his hand to his head. “Christopher, please. I am really not up to argument this morning.”

“Then come on.” A taxi was passing. When we were all inside I said, “This won’t take long. At least, I hope not.”

“Where are we going?”

“To the rue Peter Paul.”

“I don’t think I can bear it.” Uncle Miles was referring to the motion of the taxi, which was erratic. He put a hand on his stomach.

Betty patted his knee. “You can’t believe what a relief it is not to be with a genius who’s got a stomach made of brass.”

“What I don’t see,” Elaine said, for her almost hesitantly, “is, do you know what Fallon meant when he talked about a magician?”

“Yes.”

“Was it some sort of code?”

“No. He was talking about a magician.”

“Please.” Uncle Miles was still holding his stomach. “I am not up to smart talk this morning, I am just not up to it. Please.”

“Do you expect to find him with Blakeney?” Elaine asked.

“I don’t know. But Blakeney will have gone to him, I know that.”

As soon as we stepped out of the taxi we saw the ambulance. It had stopped outside a house half-way down the street, and we joined the dozen people clustered around. I told Elaine to ask them why they were there, but this proved unnecessary. They were bringing the body out of one of the mean, picturesque houses as we came up to it. The blanket covering it slipped aside as they were lifting it into the ambulance, and I saw the face of the man who had called himself David Wainwright. Uncle Miles saw it too, gasped, and turned away. The dead man’s face was worn, but he looked more peaceful than I had seen him look in life. There was a neat hole almost in the middle of his forehead. Perhaps it is true that one becomes quickly habituated to death, for I felt none of the disgust and horror that had moved me when I saw Thorne’s body, nothing but a sense of pity. Policemen began to push back the onlookers. Elaine looked at me questioningly.

“Ask where the body was discovered. And try to find out where the magician is, Monsieur Magique. Tell them you’re a reporter. After all, it’s the truth.”

Betty looked at me with mock-admiration. “You are masterful.”

Elaine began talking to a slatternly woman standing in a doorway. Soon there was a group of half a dozen people, all talking at once. A few minutes later she came back.

“He was found this morning in the hall of that house, by the concierge. They seem to think he was killed last night.”

“And Monsieur Magique?”

“He lives in the house. He has a puppet show which he does twice a day. It’s somewhere in the Luxembourg Gardens.”

I ran to the end of the street, and we took another taxi. It put us down in the rue de Vaugirard, by the gate on the east side of the Palais du Luxembourg. As we entered the gardens I stood staring at the palace.

“You won’t find anybody giving puppet shows there,” Elaine said.

But I was checked, overwhelmed by the associations the palace must have for anybody with my kind of romantic feeling for French revolutionary history. In this mock palazzo Tom Paine had been imprisoned when he voted against the execution of the King, here Hebert, Danton and Camille Desmoulins had been kept before their trial, here David had drawn his first sketch for the painting of the Sabine women – I could go on, but at some cost to the pace of my narrative. Ahead of us stretched a terrace and a long avenue lined with statues, to our left was the traffic of the Boulevard St Michael, to our right were dusty lawns. Uncle Miles pointed with a shaking hand in this direction and said that he remembered a puppet theatre over there. We crossed these lawns on which children played, as they do in England, but with a polite, shy formality that you will not find here. We came to tennis courts where young men lazily knocked a ball over a net, a café, and the theatre of Uncle Miles’ recollection, but this was a long-established marionette theatre, and it made no mention of Monsieur Magique. We had crossed almost the whole gardens from east to west when we found it. In the part of the gardens opposite the rue Auguste Comte there stood a kind of marquee. A dusty signpost pointed to it: “Monsieur Magique.”

There was a small cubbyhole saying that the price of admission was Fr. 15, but nobody was there to take money. We pushed open a flap like the flap of a tent, and went inside. Monsieur Magique was on the stage.

In a sense the effect was one of anti-climax. The audience was composed of children and their parents, and the entertainment, or the last few minutes of it that we saw, was in the plane of that provided by a moderately talented conjurer. To be fair, I learned afterwards that the early part of the show was more original, containing puppet variants of fairy tales like The Sleeping Beauty and The Little Match Girl. But while we were there Monsieur Magique, dressed as a pierrot, called children up to him and drew eggs from their noses, discovered a moth-eaten rabbit beneath a boy’s pullover, changed water into fizzy lemonade.

“I don’t see why the hell you’ve brought us here,” Betty said in a loud voice. Then she stopped. Something, it must have been one of the conjurer’s movements or gestures, had caught her attention. She sat staring at the stage. I whispered, “Look at Miles,” to Elaine. He was sitting on the other side of Betty, with his mouth turned down, rubbing his eyes with his knuckles as though be were a small boy. He glanced once at me, shook his head unbelievingly, and went on staring at the figure on the stage.

That Monsieur Magique had heard Betty’s words was made evident only by the slight jerk of his head. Just for a moment he seemed to look over the heads of the children to us at the back of the tent. But he went on to perform what was evidently the main feature of the show, as he put a small boy into a cabinet, made him disappear, and brought him back again to the accompaniment of a magnesium flash. This act was obviously familiar to a considerable portion of the audience, and was a tremendous success. Monsieur Magique bowed and disappeared behind a curtain. The children filed out happily, asking their mothers how it had been done. Within a couple of minutes we were left alone under the canvas, dusty grass beneath our feet. Betty and Uncle Miles said nothing, but as though pulled by a magnet we walked slowly up towards the stage. The stillness was odd, after the clamour of children’s voices. Elaine put her hand on my arm and shivered.

“He’s gone.”

I shook my head. “He has nowhere left to go.”

As we neared the front of the stage the back curtain parted and Monsieur Magique appeared again. He had taken off his pierrot’s dress and bobbled hat and most of the greasepaint, and he was recognisable. Elaine cried out. “Ulfheim.” And then, with that instinct for self-justification I had come to recognise, she added: “I told you he came from France.”