The Two Faces of January (22 page)

So, Monday morning, he went at 9 o'clock to the American Express office near the Opéra. If Chester did not show up today, he thought, he wasn't in Paris. Rydal spent a tedious morning. He had left his post at 9:30 for about fifteen minutes, in order to buy a hat at a shop nearby. Then he returned to his bench in the basement where the mail was given out, and hid himself beneath the hat and behind a newspaper.

Chester came down the steps just before noon. Rydal stood up, and immediately Chester saw him and turned. Unfortunately, there were three or four matronly women creeping down in a body just then, and a lot of jostling, impatient young people behind them, also on their way down, and when Rydal reached the top of the stairs, he had lost Chester. He looked quickly around the busy floor, at the lines for traveler's checks, at the information desk, then he went out on the street. He turned in a circle, looking.

No. He was gone.

Rydal cursed. Then he re-entered the building slowly. Chester hadn't been able to pick up his mail, and Rydal knew he would be anxious. He went down to the mail department again. There were telephone booths against one wall. He went into one of them, and closed the door and sat. From here, he had a view of all the mail lines. No one was waiting for a telephone booth. After a few minutes, when someone approached his booth, he took the receiver off the hook and pretended to be talking. He sat there for so long, he felt sure that Chester had decided to have lunch before he came back.

Chester came in at a little after 2. Rydal watched him closely, waiting his turn, glancing around him now and then in a way that Rydal now saw was quite expert: a casual enough glance not to attract attention, yet his slow sweep took in the whole room. It hadn't taken in Rydal's glass-windowed telephone booth, however.

Chester was given a letter. He looked at the envelope on both sides, pushed it into his overcoat pocket, and walked towards the stairs. Rydal was a few feet behind him. Now there was going to be a little game of shadowing, something Rydal had never done. Shadowing must be so much easier, he thought, if the shadowee doesn't know the shadower. Rydal had to keep himself out of sight and Chester in sight. He was sorry Chester had seen the hat this morning.

Chester walked down the avenue de l'Opéra and went into a corner café, where he stood at the counter with a beer and read his letter. Rydal watched him through the café window from across the narrow side street. It was too far away for him to see the expression on Chester's face, but Rydal doubted if the news from home was pleasant. Rydal turned the corner and walked a few yards down Opéra before he turned again. He could still see both doors of the café where Chester was. After a few minutes, Chester came out and turned left, walking up the avenue again, his back to Rydal. Rydal followed him, keeping about a third of a block between them. There was quite a sprinkling of pedestrians on the pavement, so that if Chester looked behind him, his eye wouldn't necessarily fall on Rydal. Chester walked on around the Opéra to the right, then turned into a smaller street, and Rydal had hope: he might be going to his hotel. Rydal crossed the street and dropped farther behind. This street had less people in it. Chester vanished into a doorway on the left side of the street.

Rydal stopped, hesitated, thinking suddenly that Chester might know he was following him, that he might have ducked into the first hotel he came to, to throw him off. Rydal could see the name plaques on either side of the doorway, but he could not read them from here. He waited five minutes, then made himself wait another five, by his watch. Then he crossed the street, and went closer to the hotel, walking near the curb.

The hotel was the Élysée-Madison.

Rydal turned around, and the first thing he saw was a gendarme walking slowly towards him, his cape askew as if he had his hands on his hips underneath it. Rydal did not look at him after the first glance. He hated the new hat, which he felt was conspicuous, though it was a dull-brown felt.

The gendarme strolled on by him, but Rydal had the dis­tinct feeling that the gendarme had stopped and turned to look after him. Rydal had ducked his face as much as he dared to into his upturned coat collar. And now he made himself go straight ahead, not look back. Yet an absolute panic had seized him to get to a telephone. He saw a bar-tabac half a block away and wanted to run to it. He managed to walk.

In the bar-tabac, he asked for a jeton. Then he looked up the hotel's number in the directory. His hands were perspiring. He realized he was scared, and the fact scared him more. He dialed the hotel's number.

“I would like to speak to M. Wedekind, if you please,” he said in French, with the Italian accent that after three days had become habitual.

“Oui, monsieur, un moment,” said a pleasant, female voice.

Rydal looked through the window of the booth and saw the gendarme standing on the pavement in front of the door. Rydal shuddered, and wet his lips. “Hello, Phil,” Rydal said, interrupting Chester's “Hello” in his haste. “Don't hang up. I have something very important to tell you.”

Chester made a growling sound, then said, “What?”

“I want you to meet me tonight. Les Halles. Got it? In the flower section. It's a long pavement, you know, full of flowers and flower trucks. Plants. Got it? At nine o'clock.”

“Why?”

“I'm going back to America.” Rydal's throat was so dry, he sounded hoarse. He couldn't swallow. “Going back to America, Chester, and I want one last little payment. Ten thousand. All right? Last time around.”

“Ugh!” with elaborate disgust. “When are you leaving?”

“Tomorrow morning early. By plane. So it's good-bye, Mr.
Wedekind, and, for ten thousand more, I'll keep your little secret.
Secrets.
Is it a date tonight?—Hurry up. You know the alternative, don't you? I'm in a telephone booth—” His voice cracked. “—and if you don't want to make it, I'll just tell you know who that you're at the Élysée-Madison. I'm just around the corner, matter of fact. You couldn't possibly walk out without my seeing you.”
Rydal waited.

“I'll meet you,” Chester said, and hung up.

Rydal hung up, and opened the booth's door. He bought a package of Gauloises. The gendarme was still there. Rydal could see him without looking at him. He opened the pack by pinching a little hole at a bottom corner. For Christ's sake, he thought, what's done it, the hat? The crazy hat? He lit his cigarette, and walked to the door. He did not look at the gendarme.

“Excusez, m'sieur. May I see your carte d'identité, if you please?”

“Ma quoi?”

“Carte d'identité, s'il vous plait.”

“Ah, carta d'identità,” said Rydal. “Si.” He pulled the dark-green Italian passport from his inside jacket pocket. “Mi passaporto,” he said, smiling.

The gendarme looked at it, and his eyebrows went up when he saw the passport photograph. The eyebrows came down again. Frank's retouching was at least
some
good, Rydal told himself hopefully. Frank had thickened his eyebrows, and had given the corners of his mouth an upward turn with a little shading. The gendarme was hesitating. He was a slender man of middle height with graying temples, a black moustache.

“Enrico Perassi. You come from Italy?”

“Si. Roma,” said Rydal, though he knew the officer meant was that the country he had been in before coming to France.

“Greece,” said the gendarme heavily, looking at the last page in which there were entries. “You have come from Greece just three days ago?”

“Si. I make a trip to Greece.”

“For how much time?”

“Three weeks,” Rydal replied promptly, remembering the dates in the passport.

“If you please, remove your hat, sir?”

“Hat?” Rydal repeated in Italian, smiling. He took his hat off.

The gendarme stared at him, frowning. Then he glanced at his clothes, at his new shoes, back at his face.

In that instant, Rydal felt his guard collapse. His left eye twitched. His mouth had become hard, unsmiling, defiant. Shame, guilt had annihilated him. For one flashing second, Rydal thought of the moment in his father's study, when his father had accused him of violence against Agnes. Then an instant later, it had passed, Rydal could smile slightly again, though his forehead was cool with sweat.

“Where are you staying in the city?”

“At—Hotel Montmorency. Rue Labat,” Rydal said, pronouncing every letter in each name.

“You speak a good Italian? Speak some.”

Rydal looked puzzled, as if he hadn't quite understood, and then, smiling, he rattled off, with an open-handed gesture that Italian evoked by itself for him: “Certainly, sir. Why not? It's the tongue of my birth. Very easy. Not like French. Ah, once I start, I probably won't be able to stop. Do you like Italian? You understand what I'm saying, signor?” He laughed and slapped the gendarme on the arm.

It was good, but it didn't do any good, essentially. The gendarme shook his head, handed Rydal back the passport, and said:

“If you please, I would like you to come to the préfecture for a few more questions. For just a few minutes.” He already had Rydal by the arm, and was raising his other hand, with his white baton in it, for a taxi.

They arrived at a préfecture with little blue lamps beside the door. Here there was much talk between Rydal's gendarme and another officer about “Reedal Kayner” of Greece. Rydal's clothing was examined. His suit was Italian, but his shirt, well worn, was French. His tie was English (that was a bit odd, but possible, even though Enrico Perassi had never been to England according to his passport). His underwear was—of all things—Swiss. Rydal had bought it over a year ago in Zürich. They were going to go to his hotel, no doubt about that. His suitcase was American. His American passport was in the lining, out of the view of customs inspectors, but not out of the view of the French police. It was hopeless.

“All right,” Rydal said in French. He was in a back room, stripped to his underwear.

The officers looked up from his great-grandfather's pocketwatch, which they were examining appreciatively.

“All right, it's true, I am Rydal Keener.”

“Ah! You are—American!” said the second officer, as if this were more interesting than that he was Rydal Keener.

“And William Chamberlain is alive,” Rydal said. “And I did not kill his wife.”

“Ah, just a minute. Wait,” said the portly second officer. He was going to get paper and sit down at the typewriter and take it all down properly.

The other gendarme, the one who had spotted Rydal, was almost strutting, walking up and down the room with a tight smile of satisfaction on his face.

Rydal recovered his trousers and his shirt. He first answered a lot of questions “Yes” and “No”, and then he was asked to tell them what happened on Crete. Rydal said he had met the Chamberlains there. He admitted that there had been an attraction between Chamberlain's wife and himself. Chamberlain had been jealous, because his wife had told him she was in love with him, and wanted a divorce from Chamberlain. This seemed to go down well with the French police. Rydal said he had wanted to leave the Chamberlains, go back to Athens and wait for Mrs. Chamberlain to get her divorce, but Chamberlain had insisted that he stay with them. Then Chamberlain had attempted to kill him in the Palace of Knossos. Here Rydal could describe it exactly as it happened, and he thought his account sounded very convincing.

“Chamberlain was grief-stricken, I'm sure, when he found he had killed his wife. He ran away. I stayed for a few seconds by her body. I was stunned. Then I ran after Chamberlain. I found him again in Iraklion. That's only thirty kilometers or so away. I wanted to turn him in to the police, but he said if I did he'd say that I killed his wife because she wouldn't have me. Something like that. Do you see?”

“Um-m,” grunted the first gendarme, who was now listening with intense interest. It was no doubt a story he would tell for a long time to come.

“Continue,” said the man who was typing.

“We went to Athens together and there—”

“Together!”

“Tais-toi,” absently from the typing officer.

“Yes. Mrs. Chamberlain wasn't identified at once, so it wasn't hard for Chamberlain to move about. He got himself a new passport in Athens, I'm sure of that.”

“How so?” asked the typer.

“Because . . . he is here in Paris, and he is supposed to be dead or kidnapped in Athens. He couldn't possibly have entered France or even left Greece as Chamberlain.”

“Um-m,” said the listening gendarme.

“And where is he? Do you know?” asked the typer.

Rydal wet his lips. “I'd like very much a glass of water.”

It was brought for him.

He still stood, talking. “I don't know where he is staying, but I have seen him here in Paris. He must have been here since Friday. I thought he would come to Paris, which is why I came here.”

“Speaking of false passports, where did you get yours and why?” asked the listening gendarme.

“In Athens,” Rydal said. “Rydal Keener was being sought . . . for murder. I had to get a passport. Don't you see? I am also trying to find Chamberlain.” He said the last sentence with vehemence.

“In Athens, were you also constantly with Chamberlain?”

“On the contrary! He disappeared at Piraeus. From me, I mean. For a few days—Well, I was in love with his wife. I admit it. I was crushed by grief. I felt more grief than I felt hatred for Chamberlain. Do you understand? I might have told the Athens police immediately the story and said, ‘Look for Chamberlain.' But don't forget he had threatened to accuse me if I accused him. It would have been my word against his, because we had no witnesses.” Rydal finished his water.