City of Secrets (26 page)

It hadn’t taken him long to realize that she had no real idea of what her husband had been involved in. But she had no idea, either, of being in any danger herself simply through her association with him. Or perhaps she really was in no danger. If he told her that, he wouldn’t be able to keep her out of the way of accidents; but if he made her go home—and he could do that only by killing her happiness—he would lose her forever.

His imagination could not take in the idea of waking up without her somewhere nearby—in the same city, if not in the same bed. How had she come to occupy such a large space in his life so quickly, so easily?

The empty chair at Devin’s table scraped against the floor just then. He jumped, nearly knocking over the wine bottle. A hand reached out to catch it, and a voice whispered, “Take care, my friend. It is only I.”

“Claude! Good God, man, don’t sneak up on me like that.”

“Imbécile.
You could have seen me coming across half the club floor.”

“Well, I didn’t. What do you want, Claude?”

“I have information for you,” Claude hissed, “but if you don’t want it—”

“Of course I want it. But did you have to come here with it? I told you not to meet me in public.”

“You should be grateful I see you at all, never mind in a room full of
flics.
You lied to me, Devin.”

“What about?” Devin said, knowing the answer already.

“About this Malcolm,” Claude said, not yet angry enough to raise his voice above a whisper. “You know perfectly well he is dead.”

Grant took a deep breath. Claude had more right to be angry than he did, and it was unfair to take his edginess out on him. “That doesn’t mean his name might not still mean something to someone,” he said.

Claude sat back, making an effort to look as if he were just another patron of the club, enjoying a night out. “Well, you may be right. Here.”

He wrote a name on a napkin and passed it to Devin, who read “Frank Hartwell.” He looked up sharply.

“You know the name?” Claude said.

“If you know about Malcolm, you know I do. Do you also know where he is?”

“Unlike your Malcolm, he floated up again. Marius saw him last night in the rue Saint-Roch.”

Devin raised an eyebrow. He knew the street well, having used it as a back way into the Bristol when the prince used to stay there. “Hardly his usual neighborhood.”

“No. They say he is the leader of this new group, these Black Dogs. Others say he is only the real leader’s dog.”

“That seems more likely.”

Devin fell silent, considering all this for a few minutes. On the round platform that passed for a stage, a comedian was impersonating an elderly foreign visitor unexpectedly confronted with a nubile young can-can dancer in his hotel room. The sound of laughter came from the prince’s table, as if from a long distance away.

“Look at them,” Claude said with disgust, “stuffing themselves and swilling wine. How stupidly the upper classes behave themselves.”

“You’ve no respect for anything successful, have you, Claude?”

Fournier’s black eyes glittered in the dim light, but he did not pick up this unexpected gauntlet. Instead he asked in the voice he adopted with his journalist’s guise, “What do you see in him, anyway?”

“Unlike some,” Devin said, with no particular emphasis but a steeliness in his voice that he did not often feel called upon to use, especially with his friends, “he is not all talk. It is talk and the slogans so easily coined by idle talkers that cause trouble, not money or the spending of it. He may lack imagination, but there is nothing wrong with his mind, and he uses it. He has contacts that may seem stupid and useless to those who don’t have them and see only the trappings, but he makes use of them too, and of his predilection for amusing companions and his access to both heads of state and high-born women. He has used his whole life to gain the kind of knowledge of the world that he will need when he becomes king.”

There was a pause before Claude said, “If he ever becomes king.”

Devin looked into Fournier’s eyes. “When was the last time you were out of Paris, Claude?”

Fournier did not respond, conceding defeat. He picked up the napkin he had written on, concealing it in his pocket, then stood up to leave, but Devin reached up to grasp his arm.

“Merci, mon ami.”

Claude shrugged. “Oh, by the way...”

“Yes?”

“There is someone else asking questions. A Pinkerton.”

Devin stood up himself at that and kept his hold on Claude’s arm as he escorted him out the back door of the club. “Name of Drummond?” he asked, as he closed the door behind them.

“No, Bertaude. Paul Bertaude. You know him?”

Devin scowled. “No, but I’ll find him. Leave him alone, Claude. I don’t want him to know he’s being watched, and your friends are writers, not policemen. They wouldn’t know how to hide themselves.”

Claude smiled. “Do you think we haven’t been on intimate terms with the police and their methods?”

“Yes, but you’ve hardly been inconspicuous about it.”

Claude shrugged. “Whatever you say. Marius and Jean-Pierre, they have writing to do now, in any case.”

Devin took the hint; he also took his billfold out of his pocket, counting out a generous sum and handing it to Fournier.

“I’m sorry I was angry before, Claude. Thank you.”

“You do not have to pay for your anger, my friend. But I will take your money. I will also try to help you again. I think you are worried about more than your job now,
c’est vrai
?”

“Possibly.”

“Bah, you English!” Claude spat into the alley. “You apologize for your anger, and you do not even admit you have other emotions.”

“Possibly,” Devin said again, but smiled and embraced Claude, who shrugged it off and walked away down the alley.

Damn, Devin thought irrelevantly, as he peered into the black street after Claude. He’d have to buy a new pair of shoes. He’d wear these out before he left Paris if this kept up.

It was sweet—too sweet, too deliciously soothing—to simply lie back and remember how he had loved her. Maddie had never felt like that before; she had never been able to respond like that to Teddy, and she had loved Teddy, or believed she had.

“I love you, Teddy,” she had said, constantly it seemed, when they were first married. Perhaps she had only been trying to convince herself by saying the words over and over. She had never been able to connect them with the act of love, or the act with the emotion, which at least in the beginning Teddy really had stirred in her.

With Devin it all seemed to be the same thing. The feelings became the act, and the act was pure feeling.

Maddie got up and rummaged in her travel desk for the photograph of Teddy that Laurie had taken on the boat. She sat down with it for a moment and tried to make the image come alive, to remember that she had been happy with Teddy, too … at least in the beginning. But the image stayed fixed to the paper and did not move. She had looked at it so often now that it was as if the image were all, that there was no flesh-and-blood man behind it. And for the first time she really believed that Teddy was dead.

She stood up again and began pacing the carpet. Was she telling herself that now only to justify her feelings for Devin Grant? When had she stopped being so sure that she would find Teddy? Was it only after she fell in love with Devin? But when was that? She hadn’t seen it coming, but all at once it was there.

She hadn’t seen him since that day in the country, but he had sent several messages, and with the last one, one of those lovely little English enameled pillboxes. It had a poppy on the lid. She found it now on her bedside table and turned it over in her hand, smiling at the memories it conjured up.

All of his messages had been tinged with regret that he could not come to her now because of his duty to the prince. The short, hastily scrawled notes on backs of envelopes or whatever was at hand where he wrote them were very like him. She could see him writing them, so that when he begged her to be patient and never believe he was not thinking about her, she believed him.

Nevertheless, she had to do
something
to give her impatience an outlet. She went to her window to look down at the Place Vendôme. The view was not quite so good as the one she had given up to the prince’s entourage three days earlier, but she could see the base of the column, around which there seemed to be more traffic than usual this morning, as if something were going on in the square. Perhaps the prince was leaving the hotel for some reason, for even when traveling privately, he attracted a following wherever he went.

That gave Maddie an idea, and her growing restlessness made her snatch at it.
Anything Florence Wingate can do,
she told herself,
so can the American Beauty Rose.

“Louise!”

Her maid answered the summons almost instantly. “Oh, good, you’re here. Louise, be a dear and see if you can find out what the Prince of Wales will be doing today ... and where. Try the concierge’s desk first ... if Monsieur Pontcarre is there, he will tell you.”

Having long ago learned to gauge the determination behind Mrs. Malcolm’s impulses, Louise did not hesitate in
taking herself off on this errand with no delaying questions or arguments. Maddie, meanwhile, began shedding her morning dress and was standing before an open wardrobe in a loose wrapper, surveying her newest and most fashionable promenade gowns, when Louise returned to say the prince was about to leave for a drive in the Bois de Boulogne.

“Perfect. Here, help me with this dress, please, Louise.”

Half an hour later, Maddie was also on her way to the Bois. She secured Laurence Fox’s escort, if not Daisy Jervis’s company. Because Lady Jervis insisted she needed new clothes for their next stop, Baden-Baden, Daisy was dragged off by her mother to a dressmaking establishment, the unfashionable location of which, Laurie said, Daisy intended not to reveal to a living soul.

They were in luck. Laurie guessed that the prince would make for the Longchamp racecourse, where it would be more difficult to catch up with him. But on entering the Bois from l’Etoile they learned from the gatekeeper that although there was no race that afternoon, the prince’s party had just set off up the allée de Longchamp anyway.

They passed through the gate into Paris’s most popular park. Since the Second Empire, when Baron Haussmann had transformed this overgrown haunt of footpads into an open green paradise, it attracted on any sunny summer’s day a gleaming array of carriages full of fashionable Parisians and foreigners wanting to be Parisians. The broad, tree-lined avenues, immense sweeping lawns, lakes, and flower beds made lovely views—for those who might even prefer them to viewing one another.

The prince’s carriage was making leisurely progress, giving the royal tourist plenty of opportunity to ogle the ladies in other vehicles, and Laurence soon spotted it just ahead of them.

“What shall we do?” Maddie asked. “We can’t very well overtake him.”

“Look, he’s turning down the other avenue.”

Laurie tapped their driver on the back and held a whispered conference with him. Then they too made a turn, onto a narrower lane skirting the Pré Catalan, the open-air restaurant in the center of the park. Not ten minutes later, they were driving along the avenue de Saint-Cloud when they saw the royal party coming at them from the other direction.

“Oh, well done, Laurie!”

Mr. Fox grinned and wasted no time in unfolding his new pocket camera in anticipation of passing the prince at close range.

But Maddie had no intention of merely passing by, and when she spotted Devin Grant riding alongside the prince’s carriage, she hesitated only briefly to catch her breath at the handsome picture he made on horseback, then thrust to the back of her mind the other images the sight of him conjured up. She called out to him.

She thought he might be angry at her temerity, but instead he smiled, almost in admiration, and signaled the prince’s driver to stop.

“Good afternoon, Mrs. Malcolm,” he said, lifting his hat politely. “You are looking very well.”

His eyes left her in no doubt of precisely how well she looked, and she was able to suppress a blush only through sheer happiness at his reaction to her. She had hoped he would be glad that she had taken the initiative in seeking him out, but she had not expected that caress in his eyes. She felt it almost physically and was possessed with the idea of returning it—and not in kind.

But he was more in control of himself and said, “My lord duke, I should like to present Mrs. Edward Malcolm, an American lady who is an ardent admirer of yours.”

Maddie suspected that she was only one of at least a score of women who had been thus introduced to the “Duke of Lancaster,” but he was as delighted to acknowledge her as if she were the first. He tipped his hat; she bowed her head, thankful for Devin’s reminder that she was not to address him by his real title.

“Happy to meet you, Mrs. Malcolm!” he said. “I had no idea Grant kept such lovely company, but it seems I underestimated him. Is this your first visit to Paris, ma’am?”

“It is, sir, but not, I trust, the last.”

“No, indeed! One must always live with the expectation of seeing Paris again. It keeps one young—not that you need consider that, for you will be young for a very long time yet.”

He hesitated and leaned a little closer toward Maddie to study her out of his round blue eyes. “Do you know—forgive me, ma’am—but have we not met before?”

“You may have seen Mrs. Malcolm’s photograph in the
Illustrated London News,
sir,” Devin offered, with what Maddie was sure was some mischief-making motive. “Mr. Fox here is making quite a name for himself photographing beautiful ladies.”

“That’s it!” the prince exclaimed, slapping his knee in delight. “The American Beauty Rose! I am indeed honored to make your acquaintance, my dear, and to see that you are as much the beauty in person.”

Maddie did blush at that, but the prince transferred his attention to Laurie just then. “Is that a new Kodak you have there, my boy? My wife is quite the aficionada, you know. Would you like to take my picture, so that I may take a copy back to her?”