House of All Nations (102 page)

‘Yeh, we'll do that, too,' said Jules negligently. ‘That guy doesn't frighten me; he's pitiable. He makes me laugh. Wait till I get those books. I'll show him what sort of an agreement he'll get. Just itching to get at my cashbox, like the rest of them. I won't finish with him till I see him sold-up and begging for a five-franc bit outside my door. Imagine it, the cheap Shakespeare! “I'll ruin you; I'll drag you in the gutter!” I say, how do fellows get that way? Come and eat with me, Jean. Do you want to come, William?'

‘Gladly,' said Jean; and ‘No, thanks, I've had enough,' scolded William. Michel, hovering round, rather sadly, said, ‘Well, I suppose I'd better jump if I have to catch that damn Zurich train.'

‘Yeh,' said Jules. ‘Have you got any cash? Here take some!' He opened his billfold and handed Michel nine or ten one-thousand-franc notes. ‘Do you want more, Michel! Fifteen, twenty thousand? I don't care. Put it down on the account.'

Michel smiled palely and took five thousand, ‘Thanks: I've got to pay for it, after all.'

‘Why? This is my picnic, I pay for it,' Jules said with amiable insolence. ‘Now, get home, get your valise and scram to the station. That's your role.' His laughter rang out, ‘Well we're getting some fun out of it, after all.'

At dinner that night Jules declaimed, ‘I went into banking because I had a streak of luck. I wanted some fun, people were always wanting to stake me, and I thought folks were more or less happy-go—they'd give me a break if the wheel went round too far, one time. Luck's with me: but they won't wait! I'm tired: I'm lazy: I don't want to work any more and I've got a hunch that now is the time to stop. There's something
fatal
about Raccamond. I've seen him making a whirlpool round my ship and I want to fly. I don't make agreements with bogeys.'

He lay back in his chair languidly, looked cross and tired. ‘It's—Carrière! Parouart! Raccamond! And Alphendéry wants to leave me. He's my luck. He's afraid of me. He wants to go and work in London with Stewart.' He pouted, hung his lower lip, ‘It's not kind,' he cried. ‘I treated him well. They think I'm speculating, they think I'll blow up one of these days, and not one of them will stay! It's ridiculous. I don't want to stay in business. I'm tired of it. You see.'

Claire-Josèphe murmured, ‘I hear Michel gave you money back.'

William laughed affectionately, ‘Oh, Jules pulled out a handful, some fell on the floor, and Michel didn't see it, or wouldn't. Michel took five thousand francs and refused the rest.'

All went well. The man in Biarritz telegraphed that Mr. Raccamond had arrived. Those left behind went to sleep, after their few harassing days. Rumors, of course, flew round Amsterdam and Antwerp. Numerous curious persons telephoned Jules, Alphendéry, and William, and Carrière even sent a message to Jules Bertillon by Jean de Guipatin to assure him that although he wanted to do him in, he hadn't told Raccamond to get the books, as they seemed to think. Raccamond was his man for some business, but not for this. He assured Jules that he was very anxious to keep the bank open.

Henri Léon, Méline, and Stewart all came to Paris to see what they could see. They saw the bank functioning as before; they called in amiably on Jules, and were told by him various fairy stories, all glib, all satisfying, and all making fine table talk. Each one had his own method for getting rid of Raccamond, and almost everyone thought that the easiest way would be—first, to murder him; second, to send in a burglar to steal the books; third, to denounce him to the police for something or other—blackmail, say, or income-tax fraud.

‘Fire him,' said Stewart. ‘Let him run with his books. You get up new books and say he bought your clerk to get up a blackmail case.'

Léon had the best scheme. Jean de Guipatin was to let the police know that an ex-agent of the bank was about to come and put in a complaint, with books. The police were to demand the books. Friends of Brouwer would then set the Belgian police in action. The Belgian police would notify the French embassy that a Frenchman had stolen books from a Belgian banking concern and would say that they had private information that these books had been turned in at the Criminal Division in Paris. Friends of Léon, Brouwer, and Bertillon in the Belgian Ministry to France would ask for the return of the books, ‘for verification,' to their own offices. The books would be seized at the frontier as stolen property, by the Belgian police who would ‘mislay' them with Brouwer, and so complete the return. When Raccamond tried to push his plaint the police would then reply, in Paris, that the books had been returned to Belgium ‘for verification.' And Raccamond would be out of a job and would ‘come crying for mercy.'

Méline's idea was to ‘go over Aristide's head and apply to the woman': he charged himself with that.

‘You couldn't dally with that battle-ax,' said Jules. Méline was sure he would succeed.

‘What's your method, Paul?' asked Jules.

‘I flatter them,' said Méline. ‘I flatter their beauty, their brains, and their temperament; I lay it on, I do it delicately, I do it grossly—oh, why go into it? I'll do it for you.'

Léon looked nervous. ‘Won't do, my boy: not Mme. Raccamond,' he said with distaste.

‘Send Marianne poisoned chocolates anonymously,' Claire-Josèphe suggested helpfully. ‘He would be simply a dishrag without her. Or a basket of
glacé
fruits, say.'

Méline suggested, ‘Send José MacMahon to him with a revolver and tell him he'll denounce him as a white slaver and the accomplice in the murder of Arturito, if he doesn't give up the books …'

‘Not José,' Jules objected dubiously.

‘Aristide has a gun himself,' said William. ‘I've seen it. His service revolver, I think. I guess he's expecting burglars.'

They had an amusing time and began to let the urgency of the case slip; only Henri Léon and Brouwer were really anxious. Henri Léon said to Jules privately, ‘My Dutch merchants will still buy, as you stand, if you'll give a private statement. They won't care how your accounts are, my boy. Your reputation is all right since the Kreuger money; lots of people think you're a hell of a smart fellow. If you let me bring in my friends and give them serious consideration, we can fix it up so that I'm their agent, and we can tell Aristide that he's breaking up a business deal. Leave me to deal with him. He's ambitious and he shilly-shallies. I can get on the right side of Marianne, I
think
: she's more ambitious than he is. I'll pretend to go into this Hollywood magazine she's got on the brain. I'll tell my girl Margaret Weyman to go into it with her: that'll keep them off until the deal is done, or until we see where we stand. See! You don't have to complete the deal, although, frankly, Jules, between one luck-child and another, I think you ought to get out of here. Your name, your bank—listen, Jules, if it's only a shell—if you
have
stowed away the cash—you can still sell it. What do you say, eh? Will you consider it, Jules?'

‘Thanks, Henri,' Jules said, very offhand. ‘Thanks, I'll think it over. Yes, that's right: you tell Mrs. Weyman you'll go in with her and Marianne on the paper and tell Marianne to come right up to Brussels. You can give her a talking-to, and I can send someone down to hold up Aristide in a dark street, while they go through the apartment …'

Jules became more and more fantastic in his replies, until he had confused them all and driven them away, to leave him to his own musings.

* * *

Scene Ninety: Aristide's Friends

A
lphendéry, in London, found that Newchurch had received no instructions from the Bertillons and would not give up the books, secreted in his home, no doubt. Alphendéry wrote to Bertillon: ‘Tell Newchurch you want me to have the books.' But Jules, still irritated, veered round and telegraphed, ‘Don't want you to have books. Don't do any business. Amuse yourself. Keep in touch.'

Alphendéry was humiliated. He visited the branch every day, to show that he was not lazy, he looked through the London orders, interviewed Stewart, sent to the Paris branch his day's gleanings. This irritated Jules, too, who telegraphed him, ‘Keep away from London branch. Do nothing. Amuse yourself.' Alphendéry presently discovered that Theodor Bomba, who had secretly been on Jules's charity list for months, was now re-employed by Jules and was in a big chair at the London office. Theodor Bomba greeted Alphendéry the next time the latter went in, therefore, with a regal smirk, ‘What are you doing these days?'

‘What is happening?' wrote Michel to Jules. ‘I find Bomba in London. Are you actually sending Aristide there?'

‘It's my bank,' Jules wrote back.

Alphendéry had no more but a note from William, asking him to come back soon. But Alphendéry, dismayed by these contrary orders, stayed in London and moped. The bank, the last few weeks, had been swarming with new individuals he had never met, with all sorts of queer businesses he had never been told of—the oil business, the negotiations for which were carried out without him; an ‘aviation' business. He had to leave.

Jules and William were now closeted together daily. Even Richard Plowman rarely saw them and complained of it good-humoredly. ‘I told you I'd stick by you till the finish but let me know when the finish is.' He whiled away the time by visiting Claire-Josèphe and the four sons of Jules Bertillon; convinced, no doubt, that he was so far in the family affections that they would do nothing serious without consulting him. He hated to appear importunate to ‘the boys.'

Two days after he arrived at Biarritz, Aristide telephoned Jacques Manray at his home at night. ‘Jacques, I saw the Bertillons and asked them to reinstate the clients' accounts. They agreed to do so but would put nothing in writing. I am afraid of double-crossing. Keep your eyes open. Let me know if there is difficulty in paying out any account. Let me know if the clients make any complaint. Tell Mouradzian to write to me. Mouradzian is with us, Jacques.'

This put Jacques in a panic. He and his wife sat up till two in the morning wondering what this could mean! Bertillon had
refused
to buy back shares for clients that had been sold out. If, for example, there was a big rise in the market and suddenly Bertillon was forced to deliver out eight thousand or ten thousand shares, what sort of a loss would he have? Suppose there was a panic, war, markets, rebellion—and the clients began to ask to transfer their accounts out, to other countries? Suppose Raccamond got hysterical and started a run? Could Bertillon meet it? These were bad moments for Jacques.

‘Raccamond himself is our worst danger,' said Jacques to his wife.

‘So you must humor him, keep him in a good temper, work in with him,' said the small dark-eyed woman that shared his troubles. ‘Always say, ‘Yes.' That way, too, you will see what his scheme is and whether he really has a scheme. What are you going to do about Mouradzian?'

‘I'll sound him.'

Jacques went out to lunch with Mouradzian in an Armenian restaurant near the Rue Chauchat.

‘Mr. Raccamond has gone away to the Côte d'Argent for his health.'

‘It's a good thing,' said Mouradzian. ‘There are some men who can't stand our business. They should be in—selling pictures or rugs. Raccamond and his wife have a certain understanding of—esthetics, perhaps—they should be in that business. They only make trouble for themselves and others here.'

‘You know he made some trouble just now for Mr. Bertillon?'

‘I know.'

‘He told me you were working in with him.'

‘On what business?' asked Mouradzian hotly.

‘On this business; getting the positions of the clients reinstated.'

‘Certainly not, most certainly not. He is ridiculous,' Mouradzian said angrily. ‘He wants that? Where will we be? Bertillon would lose money hand over fist. Now he makes money. Listen to me, Mr. Manray: I have been in business forty years and my family five hundred years. Do schoolteachers, do young girls, go into business? No, only men, and only cunning men. The laws are made by men to trap some: others are more cunning. The point is: don't give your adversary a chance to catch you. The law is your adversary. Not because law is wrong, but because law is only made by your adversaries to catch you. Law is not for the people; law is not for right, or purity or charity: law is made by cunning fellows to trap cunning fellows, and it's a game, therefore, to know and to get the better of. The law is made by Mr. de Wendel and Mr. Rothschild so that they won't have any competition and we've got to get the better of them.

‘He howls about law! What a hyena; what a dingo! Your Frenchmen of that breed are such hypocrites! He is a radical, too. Of course, they talk liberty, equality, and they tread on as many as they can, oust as many as they can, sell, kill, outsell, betray, rob, and cheat. And what is the result? When they have an
adversary
, Mr. Manray, instead of fighting back like a cat or a snake, they are caught in their own ritual. They don't say, “I'm beaten because I'm a fool,” but, “I'm beaten because the other side is ungodly.” That's cowardly, Mr. Manray. In the East, we don't think like that. We think straight. We are honorable men. I would not even eat with this Raccamond again. Do you know what he would do? He would take the bread and butter out of everyone's mouth, Mr. Bertillon's and Mr. Manray's and everyone's and put it all in his own. That is what he is. No, I am not with him. I will never make a scandal or such an outcry. He should be ashamed. Everyone ought to laugh at him. He tried to rob a client from me. I have no illusions about Mr. Raccamond. Ah! Ah!'

The next night it was Marianne that telephoned Jacques Manray. ‘Try them out, see how they feel: get my husband's team together, Campoverde, even Voulou, although he's soft. Find out if they'd move with my husband, but say nothing definite, you know.'