Angel's Ransom (35 page)

‘Liar,’ George said.

‘How did you meet Holtz?’ Neyrolle asked quietly.

‘I watched the yacht for several days, looking for my chance. He was watching it too, I suppose, and saw me. He
moved into my pension afterwards, to find out what I was up
to, and - and I told him I was trying to get up the nerve to
ask Freddy for a loan - because I hadn’t any money left, and
we were both Americans, and everyone knew how generous
he was to pretty girls.’ She finished in a low voice. ‘You
know the rest of it.’

‘They don’t know anything yet,’ George jeered. ‘Tell them about the chance you saw to double-cross Holtz and hold
Freddy up for a fat bribe to deny that the attachment
had ever been served, except that Holtz double-
crossed you
first! Tell them –’

‘It
’s
not true
!’
She whirled to face, him her eyes blazing. ‘I only wanted what he was going to pay me! I wanted to go
back to Paris! I had to go back to Paris, to be decent
again!’

‘Now hear
my story
,’ George said to Neyrolle.
‘s
he came to me in Paris
–’

‘You have told me several stories,’ Neyrolle said. ‘I am only now beginning to understand your anxiety to be the
first to speak with her when we boarded the
Angel
. Tell me,
mademoiselle. Was he afraid that you had joined forces with
Holtz?’

‘He accused me of it, when he let me out of the cabin.’

‘I see. And you still had the contract, the agreement he had drawn up for a division of M. Farr
’s
money, that would
have tied him to you if you had been tied to the kidnapping?’

‘I didn’t have it with me. It
’s
in Paris.’

‘You’re both distorting the truth!’ George said, raging. ‘It
’s
an ordinary employment contract! There
’s
nothing
criminal in introducing a girl to a millionaire, or buying her
an outfit of clothes!’

‘Then why were you so eager to ensure that she should not mention the contract, and why did you take such care to
prevent her from answering my questions which might have
led to a disclosure of its existence, and why have you shielded
her so carefully from contact with others to whom she might
talk about it? Why did you try to prevent her from coming
here tonight?’

‘Because I knew she’d distort the truth as you’re doing now! I haven’t done anything you could charge me with
even if the trick had come off! Freddy doesn’t have to give
his women yachts and diamond ear-rings! Nobody forces
him! If he wants to be a sucker, that
’s
up to him!’

‘My official biographer,’ Freddy said. ‘Thanks, pal.’

George made a spitting noise.

‘You’re a sucker,’ he said. ‘You’ve always been a sucker. You’ll always be a sucker. Women will rob you blind and
laugh at you for it as long as you live. What do you think
this tart
–’
he tossed a contemptuous shrug at Valentina
- ‘is hanging around you for? Your sex appeal?’

Freddy looked down at his splinted finger, then at Valentina. She shook her head, and smiled at him.

‘Not for me,’ she said. ‘I know you would do it if you could. That is enough.’

‘
S
am,’ Freddy said.

Blake was watching Marian. She had not once looked at him in all the time she spoke, but his certainty that he, not
Freddy or Neyrolle, had drawn her to the
Angel
to make her
shamed confession was as strong as his faith in himself. He
wished she would look at him. He needed no words to make
his declaration now.

She would not turn her head. He said, ‘What is it, Freddy?’

‘Are you still working for me?’

‘Yes.’

‘Put him off the yacht. Now.’

She looked at him then, and made her own declaration in her use of his name. It was the first time.

‘Not for me either, Sam,’ she said. ‘Don’t fight him. I don’t want it to be like that.’

George laughed.

‘
S
am, is it?’ he mocked.
‘
S
ucker number two. Don’t think you’re the first to get that smooth come-on, Captain. In Paris
I had to beat them off her with a stick. She
’s
–’

Blake hit him.

It was a clumsy blow, driven by his eager need to hurt. It knocked George off balance without knocking him down.
Blake followed it up with an attack that had no element of
self-defense
in it. He did not care that George, recovering,
was hitting back more often and more effectively than he
was being hit. Blake took a fierce pleasure in the interchange
of blows, even in George
’s
ability to stand up to him. Holtz
had been too small for him to fight, Jules too powerful, and
against neither man had he been able to feel the animal fury
that drove him against his physical match. He was
impervious
to pain, reckless of hurt. He shook off a punch that
brought the taste of blood into the back of his throat, and
triumphed in the blood on George
’s
face. He battered at the
face, and was battered, and knew the joy of combat with a
man he could hate.

He did not hear Marian say, pleadingly, ‘Not because of me! I don’t want it to be because of me!’ nor Valentina
’s
reply, ‘When a man fights for you, cheer him!’ He was aware
of nothing but the fight and the man he fought until George
went down, disappointingly and unexpectedly. Blake had
not yet expended his rage. George was limp, conscious but
barely so, and past the stage of resistance when Blake heaved
the loose body to his shoulder, by a great effort, and took it
aft, down the gangplank and stumblingly along the poor
footing of the jetty to where the taxi still waited. His knees
were buckling before he got there, but he managed to push
George into the car and close the door.

‘Take him
–’
he said to the taxi driver, and leaned against the car for support. ‘Take him
–
’
Stupidly, he did
not know how to finish.

Behind him, Neyrolle said, ‘I’ll take him, Captain. I have a
dossier
to close tonight. Go back now.’

When he did not immediately release his support, the
sous-chef
took him by the arm to turn him around. Marian
was coming towards him alone on the jetty. She moved
hesitantly at first, uncertain,
then less hesitantly as he went
towards her, more quickly when he spoke her name, running the last few steps when he reached out to take her, then
laughing in his arms, clinging and hysterical, when he said
in seriousness and concern because she was his to worry
about, ‘You’ve got to be more careful about running on
cobbles. You’ll really turn an ankle that way, some day.’

FIN

ABOUT DAVID DODGE

David Francis Dodge was born on August 18, 1910 in Berkeley, California. He was the youngest child of George Andrew Dodge, a San Francisco architect, and Maude
Ellingwood
Bennett Dodge. Following George’s death in an automobile accident, Maude “
Monnie
” Dodge moved the family (David and his three older sisters, Kathryn, Frances, and Marion) to Southern California, where David attended Lincoln High School in Los Angeles but did not graduate.

At the age of sixteen, he took a job as a messenger at Citizens National Trust & Savings Bank of Los Angeles and began night school classes at the American Institute of Banking. In 1931, after moving up to the position of supervising the bank’s commercial books, he quit the bank to become a marine fireman on a South American run for the Grace Steamship Company. In 1933, he came ashore to work as a stevedore and night watchman for Tubbs Cordage Company in San Francisco. In 1934, he went to work for the San Francisco accounting firm of McLaren, Goode & Co., becoming a Certified Public Accountant in 1937.

On July 17, 1936, he was married to Elva Keith, a former Macmillan Company editorial representative, and their only daughter, Kendal, was born in 1940. After the attack on Pearl Harbor he joined the U.S. Naval Reserve and earned his first commission in October 1942 in the Office of Supervisory Cost Inspector, 12th Naval District, San Francisco. He emerged three years later with the rank of Lieutenant Commander.

David Dodge’s first experience as a writer came through his involvement with the
Macondray
Lane Players, a group of amateur playwrights, producers, and actors whose goal was to create a theater purely for pleasure. The group was founded by George Henry Burkhardt (Dodge’s brother-in-law) and performed exclusively at
Macondria
, a little theater located in the basement of Burkhardt’s house at
56
Macondray
Lane on San Francisco’s Russian Hill. Other regular company members included Morris Shaw, Kathryn Dodge (Dodge’s sister and Burkhardt’s wife), Frances Montgomery, Steve
Broder
, Harvey and Edith Muldoon, Whitney Henry, Enola Barker, Lettie Connell (Kathryn Dodge Burkhardt’s daughter), and Elva Dodge. His publishing career began in 1936 when he won First Prize in the Northern California Drama Association’s Third Annual One Act Play Tournament. The prize-winning play, “A Certain Man Had Two Sons,” was subsequently published by the Banner Play Bureau, of San Francisco. Another Dodge play, “Christmas Eve at the Mermaid,” co-written by
Loyall
McLaren (his boss at McLaren, Goode & Co.), was performed as the Bohemian Club’s Christmas play of 1940, and again in 1959. In 1961 the
Grabhorn
Press published the play in a volume entitled Shakespeare in Bohemia.

His career as a writer really began, however, when he made a bet with his wife that he could write a better mystery novel than the ones they were reading during a rainy family vacation. He drew on his professional experience as a Certified Public Accountant and wrote his first novel,
Death and Taxes
, featuring San Francisco tax expert and reluctant detective James “Whit” Whitney. It was published by Macmillan in 1941 and he won five dollars from Elva. Three more Whitney novels soon followed:
Shear the Black Sheep
(Macmillan, 1942),
Bullets for the Bridegroom
(Macmillan, 1944) and
It
Ain’t
Hay
(Simon & Schuster, 1946), in which Whit tangles with marijuana smugglers. With its subject matter and extremely evocative cover art on both the first edition dust jacket and the paperback reprint, this book remains one of Dodge’s most collectible titles.

Upon his release from active duty by the Navy in 1945, Dodge left San Francisco and set out for Guatemala by car with his wife and daughter, beginning his second career as a travel writer. The Dodge family’s misadventures on the road through Mexico are hilariously documented in
How Green Was My Father
(Simon & Schuster, 1947). His Latin American experiences also produced a second series character, expatriate private investigator and tough-guy adventurer Al Colby, who first appears in
The Long Escape
(Random House, 1948).

Two more well-received Colby books appeared in 1949 and 1950. Dodge drew on his experiences living in Arequipa, Peru and his travels around South America to give these novels their locales. In 1950, the Dodge family relocated to the south of France, which, of course, provided the background for his most famous novel,
To Catch a Thief
(Random House, 1952). With this book, Dodge abandoned series characters and focused on stand-alone suspense adventures set in exotic locales around the world.
To Catch a Thief
was also Dodge’s greatest career success, primarily due to the fact the Alfred Hitchcock purchased the film rights before the novel was even published and turned it into the 1955 Paramount film starring Cary Grant and Grace Kelly.