Текст книги "Rich Man, Poor Man"

Автор книги: Irwin Shaw

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“I don’t go for talk like that, you French cunt,” Jordache said. “I didn’t come all the way here from Europe to listen to talk like that. And if I was French these days, what with running like rabbits the first shot the dirty Boche fired at them, I’d think twice about insulting anybody. If it’ll make you feel any better, I’ll tell you I killed a Frenchman in 1916 with a bare bayonet and it won’t surprise you that I stuck it in his back while he was trying to run home to his Mama.”

As his father talked, calmly, as though he were discussing the weather or an order for flour, Rudolph began to shiver. The malice in the words was made intolerable by the conversational, almost friendly, tone in which they were delivered.

Jordache was going on, inexorably. “And if you think you’re going to take it out on my boy here, you better think twice about that, too, because I don’t live far from here and I don’t mind walking. He’s been an A student in French for two years and I’ll be here to ask some questions if he comes back at the end of the term with anything less. Come on, Rudy.”

They went out of the room, leaving Miss Lenaut sobbing at her desk.

They walked away from the school without speaking. When they came to a trash basket on a corner, Jordache stopped. He tore the drawing into small pieces, almost absently, and let the pieces float down into the basket. He looked over at Rudolph. “You are a silly bastard, aren’t you?” he said.

Rudolph nodded.

They resumed walking in the direction of home.

“You ever been laid?” Jordache said.

“No.”

“That the truth?”

“I’d tell you.”

“I suppose you would,” Jordache said. He walked silently for awhile, with his rolling limp. “What’re you waiting for?”

“I’m in no hurry,” Rudolph said defensively. Neither his father nor his mother had ever mentioned anything about sex to him and this afternoon was certainly the wrong day to start. He was haunted by the sight of Miss Lenaut, dissolved and ugly, weeping on her desk, and he was ashamed that he had ever thought a silly, shrill woman like that worthy of his passion.

“When you start,” Jordache said, “don’t get hung up on one. Take ’em by the dozen. Don’t ever get to feel that there’s only one woman for you and that you got to have her. You can ruin your life.”

“Okay,” Rudolph said, knowing that his father was wrong, dead wrong.

Another silence as they turned a corner.

“You sorry I hit her?” Jordache said.

“Yes.”

“You’ve lived all your life in this country,” Jordache said. “You don’t know what real hating is.”

“Did you really kill a Frenchman with a bayonet?” He had to know.

“Yeah,” Jordache said. “One of ten million. What difference does it make?”

They were nearly home. Rudolph felt depressed and miserable. He should have thanked his father for sticking up for him that way, it was something that very few parents would have done, and he realized that, but he couldn’t get the words out.

“It wasn’t the only man I killed,” Jordache said, as they stopped in front of the bakery. “I killed a man when there was no war on. In Hamburg, Germany, with a knife. In 1921. I just thought you ought to know. It’s about time you learned something about your father. See you at supper. I got to go put the shell under cover.” He limped off, down the shabby street, his cloth cap squarely on top of his head.

When the final marks were posted for the term, Rudolph had an A in French.

Chapter 4

I

The gymnasium of the elementary school near the Jordache house was kept open until ten o’clock five nights a week. Tom Jordache went there two or three times a week, sometimes to play basketball, sometimes merely to shoot the breeze with the boys and young men who gathered there or to play in the mild game of craps that occasionally was held in the boys’ toilet, out of sight of the gym teacher refereeing the permanent game on the basketball court.

Tom was the only boy his age allowed in the crap game. He had gained entrance with his fists. He had found a place between two of the players in the ring and had kneeled on the floor one night and thrown a dollar into the pot and said, “You’re faded,” to Sonny Jackson, a boy of nineteen waiting to be drafted, and the guiding spirit of the group that congregated around the school. Sonny was a strong, stocky boy, pugnacious and quick to take offense. Tom had chosen Sonny purposely for his debut. Sonny had looked at Tom, annoyed, and pushed Tom’s dollar bill back along the floor toward him. “Go way, punk,” he said. “This game is for men.”

Without hesitation, Tom had leaned across the open space and backhanded Sonny, without moving from his knees. In the fight that followed, Tom made his reputation. He had cut Sonny’s eyes and lips and had finished by dragging Sonny into the showers and turning the cold water on him and keeping him there for five minutes before he turned the water off. Since then, whenever Tom joined the group in the gymnasium, they made room for him.

Tonight, there was no game in progress. A gangling twenty-year-old by the name of Pyle, who had enlisted early in the war, was displaying a samurai sword he said he had captured himself at Guadalcanal. He had been discharged from the Army after having malaria three times and nearly died. He was still alarmingly yellow.

Tom listened skeptically as Pyle described how he had thrown a hand grenade into-a cave just for luck. Pyle said he heard a yell inside and had crawled in with his lieutenant’s pistol in his hand to find a dead Jap captain, with the sword at his side. It sounded to Tom more like Errol Flynn in Hollywood than anybody from Port Philip in the South Pacific. But he didn’t say anything, because he was in a peaceful mood and you couldn’t beat up on a guy who looked that sick and yellow, anyway.

“Two weeks later,” Pyle said, “I cut off a Jap’s head with this sword.”

Tom felt a tug at his sleeve. It was Claude, dressed in a suit and tie, as usual, and bubbling a little at the lips. “Listen,” Claude whispered, “I got something to tell you. Let’s get out of here.”

“Wait a minute,” Tom said. “I want to hear this.”

“The island was secured,” Pyle was saying, “but there were still Japs hiding out, coming out at night, and shooting up the area and knocking off guys. The C.O. got pissed off and he sent out patrols three times a day. He told us to clean every last one of the bastards out of the area.

“Well, I’m on one of those patrols and we see one of ’em trying to wade across a creek so we let him have it. He was hit but not bad and he’s sitting up, holding his hands over his head, saying something in Jap. There wasn’t no officers on the patrol, just a corporal and six other guys, and I says, ‘Hey, listen, you guys, just hold him here and I’ll go back to get my samurai sword and we’ll have a regular execution.’ The corporal was a little chicken about it, the orders were to bring in prisoners, but like I said, there were no officers present and after all, that’s what the bastards did all the time to our guys, cut off their heads, and we took a vote and they tied the fucker up and I went back and got my samurai sword. We made him kneel down in the regular way and he did it just like he was used to it. It was my sword so I got to do the job. I picked it up way over my head and clunk! there was his head rolling on the ground like a coconut, with his eyes wide open. The blood spurted out, it must have been close to ten feet. I tell you,” Pyle said, touching the edge of the weapon lovingly, “these swords are something.”

“Horseshit,” Claude said loudly.

“What’s that?” Pyle asked, blinking. “What’d you say?”

“I said horseshit,” Claude repeated. “You never cut off no Jap’s head. I bet you bought that sword in a souvenir shop in Honolulu. My brother Al knows you and he told me you haven’t got the guts to kill a rabbit.”

“Listen, kid,” Pyle said, “sick as I am, I’ll give you the beating of your life, if you don’t shut up and get out of here. Nobody says horseshit to me.”

“I’m waiting,” Claude said. He took off his glasses and put them in the breast pocket of his suit. He looked pathetically defenseless.

Tom sighed. He stepped in front of Claude. “Anybody wants to pick on my friend,” he said, “he has to go through me first.”

“I don’t mind,” Pyle began, handing the sword to one of the other boys. “You’re young, but you’re fresh.”

“Knock it off, Pyle,” said the boy who now was holding the sword. “He’ll murder you.”

Pyle looked uncertainly at the circling faces. There was something sobering that he saw there. “I didn’t come back from fighting in the Pacific,” he said loudly, “to get into arguments with little kids in my home town. Give me my sword, I’m due back at the house.”

He beat a retreat. The others drifted off without a word, leaving Tom and Claude in possession of the boys’ toilet.

“What’d you want to do that for?” Tom asked, irritated. “He didn’t mean no harm. And you know they wouldn’t let him take me on.”

“I just wanted to see the expression on their faces,” Claude said, sweating and grinning. “That’s all. Power. Raw power.”

“You’re going to get me killed one day with your raw power,” Tom said. “Now what the hell did you have to tell me?”

“I saw your sister,” Claude said.

“Hooray for you, you saw my sister. I see her every day. Sometimes twice a day.”

“I saw her in front of Bernstein’s Department Store. I was riding around on the bike and I went around the block again to make sure and she was getting into a big convertible Buick and a guy was holding the door open for her. She was waiting for him in front of Bernstein’s, that’s for sure.”

“So, big deal,” Tom said. “She got a ride in a Buick.”

“You want to know who was driving the Buick?” Behind his glasses, Claude’s eyes were joyous with information. “You’ll drop dead.”

“I won’t drop dead. Who?”

“Mr. Theodore Boylan, Esquire,” Claude said. “That’s who. How do you like that for moving up in class?”

“What time you see them?”

“An hour ago. I’ve been looking for you all over.”

“He probably drove her to the hospital. She works in the hospital on week nights.”

“She isn’t in any hospital tonight, Buddy,” Claude said. “I followed them part of the way on the bike. They took the road up the hill. Toward his place. You want to find your sister tonight, I advise you to look in on the Boylan estate.”

Tom hesitated. It would have been different if Gretchen was with one of the fellows around her own age, off in a car to the lover’s lane down near the river for a little simple necking. Tease her a little later on. Hideous boy. Get a little of his own back. But with an old man like Boylan, a big shot in the town … He would rather not have to get mixed up in it. You never knew where something like that could lead you.

“I’ll tell you something,” Claude said, “if it was my sister, I’d look into it. That Boylan has quite a reputation around town. You don’t know some of the things I hear around the house when my father and uncle are talking and they don’t know I’m listening. Your sister may be asking for a big load of trouble …”

“You got the bike outside?”

“Yeah. But we need some gas.” The motorcycle belonged to Claude’s brother Al, who had just been drafted two weeks before. Al had promised to break every bone in Claude’s body if he came back and found that Claude had used the machine, but whenever his parents went out at night, Claude pushed it out of the garage, after siphoning off a little gas from the family’s second car, and raced around town for an hour or so, avoiding the police, because he was too young to have a license.

“Okay,” Tom said. “Let’s see what’s happening up the hill.”

Claude had a length of rubber tubing slung on the motorcycle and they went behind the school, where it was dark, and opened the gas tank of a Chevy that was parked there and Claude put the tube in and sucked hard, then, as the gasoline came up, filled the tank of the motorcycle.

Tom got on behind and with Claude driving they spurted through back streets toward the outskirts of town and began to climb the long winding road that went up the hill to the Boylan estate.

When they got to the main gate, made of huge wrought-iron wings standing open and set into a stone wall that seemed to run for miles on each side, they parked the motorcycle behind some bushes. The rest of the way they’d have to go on foot, so as not to be heard. There was a gatekeeper’s cottage, but since the war nobody had lived in it. The boys knew the estate well. For years, they had been jumping over the wall and hunting for birds and rabbits with BB guns. The estate had been neglected for years and it was more like a jungle than the meadowed park it had been originally.

They walked through the woods toward the main house. When they got near it, they saw the Buick parked in front. There were no lights on outside, but there was a gleam from a big French window downstairs.

They moved cautiously toward the flower bed in front of the window. The window came down almost to the ground. One side of it was ajar. The curtains had been drawn carelessly and with Claude kneeling in the loam and Tom standing astride him, they both could look inside at the same time.

As far as they could see, the room was empty. It was big and square, with a grand piano; a long couch, and big easy chairs and tables with magazines on them. A fire was going in the fireplace. There were a lot of books on the shelves along the walls. A few lamps did for the lighting. The double doors facing the window were open and Tom could see a hallway and the lower steps of a staircase.

“That’s the way to live,” Claude whispered. “If I had a joint like this, I’d have every broad in town.”

“Shut up,” Tom said. “Well, there’s nothing doing here. Let’s move.”

“Come on, Tom,” Claude protested. “Take it easy. We just got here.”

“This isn’t my idea of a big night,” Tom said. “Just standing out in the cold looking at a room with nobody in it.”

“Give it a chance to develop, for Christ’s sake,” Claude said. “They’re probably upstairs. They can’t stay there all night.”

Tom knew that he didn’t want to see anybody come into that room. Anybody. He wanted to get away from that house. And stay away. But he didn’t want to look as though he was chickening out. “All right,” he said, “I’ll give it a couple of minutes.” He turned away from the window, leaving Claude on his knees peering in. “Call me if anything happens,” he said.

The night was very still. The mist rising from the wet ground was getting heavier and there were no stars. In the distance, below them, there was the faint glow of the lights of Port Philip. The Boylan grounds swept away from the house in all directions, a myriad of great old trees, the outline of the fence of a tennis court, some low buildings about fifty yards away that had once been used as stables. One man living in all that. Tom thought of the bed he shared with his brother. Well, Boylan was sharing a bed tonight, too. Tom spat.

“Hey!” Claude beckoned to him excitedly. “Come here, come here.”

Slowly, Tom went back to the window.

“He just come in, down the stairs,” Claude whispered. “Look at that. Just look at that, will you.”

Tom looked in. Boylan had his back to the window, on the far side of the room. He was at a table with bottles, glasses and a silver ice container on it. He was pouring whiskey into two glasses. He was naked.

“What a way to walk around a house,” Claude said.

“Shut up,” Tom said. He watched as Boylan carelessly dropped some ice into the glasses and splashed soda from a siphon into the glasses. Boylan didn’t pick up the glasses right away. He went over to the fireplace and threw another log on the fire, then went to a table near the window and opened a lacquered box and took out a cigarette. He lit it with a foot-long silver cigarette lighter. He was smiling a little.

Standing there, so close to the window, he was clearly outlined in the light of a lamp. Mussed, bright blond hair, skinny neck, pigeony chest, flabby arms, knobby knees, and slightly bowed legs. His dick hung down from the bush of hair, long, thick, reddened. A dumb rage, a sense of being violated, of being a witness to an unspeakable obscenity, seized Tom. If he had had a gun he would have killed the man. That puny stick, that strutting, smiling, satisfied weakling, that feeble, pale, hairy slug of a body so confidently displayed, that long, fat, rosy instrument. It was worse, infinitely worse, than if he and Claude had seen his sister come in naked.

Boylan walked across the thick carpet, the smoke from his cigarette trailing over his shoulder, out into the hall. He called up the stairs. “Gretchen, do you want your drink up there or do you want to come down for it?” He listened. Tom couldn’t hear the answer. Boylan nodded and came back into the room and picked up the two glasses. Then, carrying the whiskey, he went out of the room and up the stairs.

“Jesus, what a sight,” Claude said. “He’s built like a chicken. I guess if you’re rich you can be built like the Hunchback of Notre Dame and the broads still come running.”

“Let’s get out of here,” Tom said thickly.

“What the hell for?” Claude looked up at him in surprise, the light that came through the parted curtains reflecting damply on his eyeglasses. “The action is just beginning.”

Tom reached down and grabbed Claude by the hair and jerked him savagely to his feet.

“Hey, for Christ’s sake, watch what you’re doing,” Claude said.

“I said let’s get out of here.” Tom held Claude roughly by his necktie. “And you keep quiet about what you saw tonight.”

“I didn’t see anything,” Claude whined. “What the hell did I see! A skinny crock with a dick on him like an old rubber hose. What’s there to keep quiet about?”

“Just keep quiet, that’s all,” Tom said, his face close to Claude’s. “If I ever hear a word from anyone, you’ll get a beating you’ll never forget. Got it?”

“Jesus, Tom,” Claude said reproachfully, rubbing his sore scalp, “I’m your friend.”

“Got it?” Tom said fiercely.

“Sure, sure. Anything you say. I don’t know what there’s to get so excited about.”

Tom let him go and wheeled and strode across the lawn away from the house. Claude followed him, grumbling. “Guys tell me you’re crazy,” he said, as he caught up to Tom, “and I always tell them they’re nuts, but now I’m beginning to see what they mean, I swear to God I do. Boy, are you temperamental.”

Tom didn’t answer. He was almost running as they neared the gate house. Claude wheeled out the bike and Tom swung on behind him. They drove into town without talking to each other.

II

Replete and drowsy, Gretchen lay in the wide soft bed, her hands behind her head, staring up at the ceiling. The ceiling reflected the fire that Boylan had lit before he had undressed her. The arrangements for seduction were planned meticulously and smoothly practiced up here on the hill. The house was hushed and luxurious, the servants were never in evidence, the telephone never rang, there was never any fumbling or hurrying. Nothing clumsy or unforeseen was allowed to intrude on their evening ritual.

Downstairs, a clock chimed softly. Ten o’clock. It was the hour the common room in the hospital emptied and the wounded men made their way, on crutches and in wheelchairs, back to the wards. These days Gretchen only went to the hospital two or three times a week. Her life was centered, with a single urgency, on the bed in which she lay. The days were passed in expectation of it, the nights away from it in its memory. She would make restitution to the wounded some other time.

Even when she had opened the envelope and seen the eight one-hundred-dollar bills, she had known she would return to this bed. If it was one of Boylan’s peculiarities that he had to humiliate her, she accepted it. She would make the man pay for it later.

Neither Boylan nor she had ever spoken of the envelope on her desk. On Tuesday, as she was coming out of the office after work, the Buick was there, with Boylan at the wheel. He had opened the car door without a word and she had gotten in and he had driven to his house. They had made love and after that gone to The Farmer’s Inn for dinner and after that had driven home and made love again. When he took her into town, toward midnight, he had dropped her off two blocks from her home and she had walked the rest of the way.

Teddy did everything perfectly. He was discreet—secrecy was to his taste; it was a necessity for her. Nobody knew anything about them. Knowledgeable, he had taken her to a doctor in New York to be fitted for a diaphragm, so that she didn’t have to worry about that. He had bought her the red dress, as promised, on the same trip to New York. The red dress hung in Teddy’s wardrobe. There would come a time when she would wear it.

Teddy did everything perfectly, but she had little affection for him and certainly didn’t love him. His body was flimsy and unprepossessing; only when he was dressed in his elegant clothes could he be considered in any way attractive. He was a man without enthusiasms, self-indulgent and cynical, a confessed failure, friendless and shunted off by a mighty family to a crumbling shipwreck of a Victorian castle in which most of the rooms were permanently closed off. An empty man in a half-empty house. It was easy to understand why the beautiful woman whose photograph still stood on the piano downstairs had divorced him and run away with another man.

He was not a lovable or admirable man, but he had other uses. Having renounced the ordinary activities of the men of his class, work, war, games, friendship, he dedicated himself to one thing: he copulated with all his hoarded force and cunning. He demanded nothing of her except to be there, the material of his craft. His triumph was in his own performance. The battles he had declined elsewhere, he won in the face below his on the pillow. The fanfares of victory were her sighs of pleasure. For her part, Gretchen was not concerned with Boylan’s profits and losses. She lay passively under him, not even putting her arms around the unimportant body, accepting, accepting. He was anonymous, nobody, the male principle, an abstract, unconnected priapus, for which she had been waiting, unknowing, all her life. He was a servant to her pleasures, holding a door open to a palace of marvels.

She was not even grateful.

The eight hundred dollars lay folded into the leaves of her copy of the works of Shakespeare, between Acts II and III of As You Like It.

A clock chimed somewhere and his voice floated into the room from downstairs. “Gretchen, do you want your drink up there or do you want to come down for it?”

“Up here,” she called. Her voice was lower, huskier. She was conscious of new, subtler tonalities in it; if her mother’s ear for such things had not been deafened by her own disaster, she would have known with one sentence that her daughter was sunnily sailing that dangerous sea in which she herself had foundered and drowned.

Boylan came into the room, naked in the firelight, bearing the two glasses. Gretchen propped herself up and took the glass from his hand. He sat on the edge of the bed, flicking ashes from his cigarette into the ash tray on the bed table.

They drank. She was developing a liking for Scotch. He leaned over and kissed her breast. “I want to see how it tastes with whiskey on it,” he said. He kissed the other breast. She took another sip from her glass.

“I don’t have you,” he said. “I don’t have you. There’s only one time when I can make myself believe I have you—when I’m in you and you’re coming. All the rest of the time, even when you’re lying right beside me naked and I have my hand on you, you’ve escaped. Do I have you?”

“No,” she said.

“Christ,” he said. “Nineteen years old. What are you going to be like at thirty?”

She smiled. He would be forgotten by that year. Perhaps before. Much before.

“What were you thinking about up here while I was down getting the drinks?” he asked.

“Fornication,” she-said.

“Do you have to talk like that?” His own language was strangely prissy, some hangover fear of a domineering nanny quick with the kitchen soap to wash out the mouths of little boys who used naughty words.

“I never talked like that until I met you.” She took a satisfying gulp of whiskey.

“I don’t talk like that,” he said.

“You’re a hypocrite,” she said. “What I can do, I can name.”

“You don’t do so damn much,” he said, stung.

“I’m a poor little, inexperienced, small-town girl,” she said. “If the nice man in the Buick hadn’t come along that day and got me drunk and taken advantage, I probably would have lived and died a withered, dried-up old maid.”

“I bet,” he said. “You’d have been down there with those two niggers.”

She smiled ambiguously. “We’ll never know, now, will we?”

He looked at her thoughtfully. “You could stand some education,” he said. Then he stubbed out his cigarette, as though he had come to a decision. “Excuse me.” He stood up. “I have to make a telephone call.” He put on a robe this time and went downstairs.

Gretchen sat, propped against the pillows, slowly finishing her drink. She had paid him off. For the moment earlier in the evening when she had delivered herself so absolutely to him. She would pay him off every time.

He came back into the room. “Get dressed,” he said. She was surprised. Usually they stayed until midnight. But she said nothing. She got out of bed and put on her clothes. “Are we going somewhere?” she asked. “How should I look?”

“Look anyway you want,” he said. Dressed, he was important and privileged again, a man to whom other men deferred. She felt diminished in her clothes. He criticized the things she wore, not harshly, but knowingly, sure of himself. If she weren’t afraid of her mother’s questions, she would have taken the eight hundred dollars out from between Acts II and III of As You Like It and bought herself a new wardrobe.

They went through the silent house and into the car and drove off. She asked no more questions. They drove through Port Philip and sped on down south. They didn’t speak. She wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of asking where they were going. There was a scorecard in her head in which she kept track of the points they gained against each other.

They went all the way to New York. Even if they turned back promptly, she wouldn’t get home much before dawn. There probably would be hysterics from her mother. But she didn’t remonstrate. She refused to show him that she allowed herself to be worried by things like that.

They stopped in front of a darkened four-story house on a street lined with similar houses on both sides of it. Gretchen had only come down to New York a few times in her life, twice with Boylan in the last three weeks, and she had no idea of what neighborhood they were in. Boylan came over to her side of the car, as usual, and opened the door for her. They went down three steps into a little cement courtyard behind an iron fence and Boylan rang a doorbell. There was a long wait. She had the feeling that they were being inspected. The door opened. A big woman in a white evening gown stood there, her dyed red hair piled heavily on her head. “Good evening, honey,” she said. Her voice was hoarse. She closed the door behind them. The lights in the entrance hall were low and the house was hushed, as thought it was heavily carpeted throughout and its walls hung with muffling cloth. There was a sense of people moving about it softly and carefully.

“Good evening, Nellie,” Boylan said.

“I haven’t seen you in a dog’s age,” the woman said, as she led them up a flight of steps and into a small pinkly lit living room on the first floor.

“I’ve been busy,” Boylan said.

“So I see,” the woman said, looking at Gretchen, appraising, then admiring. “How old are you, darling?”

“A hundred and eight,” Boylan said.

He and the woman laughed. Gretchen stood soberly in the small, draped room hung with oil paintings of nudes. She was determined to show nothing, respond to nothing. She was frightened, but tried not to feel it or show it. In numbness there was safety. She noticed that all the lamps in the room were tasseled. The woman’s white dress had fringes at the bosom and at the hem of the skirt. Was there a connection there? Gretchen made herself speculate on these matters to keep from turning and fleeing from the hushed house with its malevolent sense of a hidden population moving stealthily between rooms on the floors above her head. She had no notion of what would be expected of her, what she might see, what would be done with her. Boylan looked debonair, at ease.

“Everything is just about ready, I think, honey,” the woman said. “Just a few more minutes. Would you like something to drink, while waiting?”

“Pet?” Boylan turned toward Gretchen.

“Whatever you say.” She spoke with difficulty.

“I think a glass of champagne might be in order,” Boylan said.

“I’ll send a bottle up to you,” the woman said. “It’s cold. I have it on ice. Just follow me.” She led the way out into the hall and Gretchen and Boylan climbed the carpeted stairs behind her up to a dim hallway on the second floor. The stiff rustling of the woman’s dress sounded alarmingly loud as she walked. Boylan was carrying his coat. Gretchen hadn’t taken off her coat.

The woman opened a door off the hallway and switched on a small lamp. They went into the room. There was a large bed with a silk canopy over it, an oversized maroon velvet easy chair, and three small gilt chairs. A large bouquet of tulips made a brilliant splash of yellow on a table in the center of the room. The curtains were drawn and the sound of a car passing on the street below was muffled. A wide mirror covered one wall. It was like a room in a slightly old-fashioned, once-luxurious hotel, now just a little bit déclassé.

“The maid will bring you your wine in a minute,” the woman said. She rustled out, closing the door softly but firmly behind her.

“Good old Nellie,” Boylan said, throwing his coat down on an upholstered bench near the door. “Always dependable. She’s famous.” He didn’t say what she was famous for. “Don’t you want to take your coat off, pet?”