House of All Nations (80 page)

‘You are right to organize the routine, Aristide. Mr. Jules Bertillon belongs to the species of which Buffon remarked that “servile imitation costs more than a new design.”'

Did Buffon say it? Alphendéry was such a mountebank that a man had to doubt the authenticity of his authors and citations. He disliked this intense mental life of Alphendéry apropos of anything, nothing; he found it impractical and repeated the well-worn saw of striving dullards, ‘A brilliant man cannot be sound.'

* * *

Scene Sixty-seven: The Cholera

S
plendid Zucchero Zurbaran, with dark skin, bulbous forehead, and deep-set eyes was the very pinnacle of South American society. He entertained the Prince of Wales, married the most beautiful young European actress in Hollywood. When in Paris he negligently deposited his check with, and drew on Jules, along with the other extrarich gallants of his race and type. He never asked for an account and Jules never gave one. In this, Zucchero and Pedrillo were alike. The other South Americans were more businesslike and some of them, though rich, played Jules for a goldfish: but there is give and take in banking as elsewhere. All these dashing young fellows moved in a restricted international, which takes its orders from Paris and New York. They spent money like water and tried to keep down their mortality, manslaughter, and murder account, in order to stay in Paris. These young men are the
ne plus ultra
of today, handsome, rich, lawless, powerful. They are aviators, sports champions, riders. When they die young, at bobsleigh, hunting, or flying, one cannot regret it; they have flown over the Andes, thrown away gold on the roof gardens of New York, been feted at fashionable crushes with sixteenth-century music in London, talked with Hitler, flown with Mussolini's son-in-law, for a prank run out to some new ruins dug up by archeologists in the Sahara, outyachted, outflown, outridden each other; they have had all the toys in creation, from superspeedboats to new drugs; they are the wonderful race, the supermen of a weary, middle-aged European society, these young broncobusters, the carnivorous orchids of South America.

When Zucchero went home to Brazil, so that his two young sons, aged two and four, could be brought up on the paternal acres, Jules was sorry, Mayfair remembered, Paris forgot him; there were others.

William strolling in one morning, pointed out to Jules that the time had come to send Zucchero a letter (‘if he could read,' he nastily added). Zucchero's account was overdrawn some twenty-five thousand American dollars. Jules replied, ‘Oh, leave it; he's good for the money. Zucchero can't stay away from Paris. He'll be back in the spring.'

But Zurbaran went up into the sky one blue morning, zoomed over the flashing walls and avenues of Rio de Janeiro, and suddenly came down into the bay. Small Rodolfo Zurbaran became the owner of the several million acres; and William gnashed his teeth.

‘Don't worry,' said Alphendéry: ‘Pedro will go home leaving us—what? Eighty-nine hundred dollars. The Zurbaran estate owes us twenty-five thousand dollars. They'll pay. We're in nearly thirty-five thousand dollars. Not much but a mouthful. As long as Jules doesn't conceive the idea of letting it run on till Rodolfo grows up.'

‘We won't be here then,' said William, with more than customary spleen.

Arturito MacMahon, son of richissimes of the Argentine, originally of Scottish stock and devilishly proud of his name, was twenty-eight, blue, handsome, long, cold, and amiable as an English hunting rifle. Even in the bank and among the forgiving and understanding South American society, gloomy tales were told of him. Arturito spoke Jockey-Club French and Eton English, with a cutting snobbery, but if he carried on any conversation any length of time he produced a strange imbroglio of accents of all classes, for in London he ranged from Mayfair to the East India Docks in the raging pursuit of fashion and vice, and in France from the apartments of the Avenue Foch to the bars of the ‘milieu' behind the Boulevard Barbès and the Mayas of Marseille.

Arturito MacMahon was therefore to an Englishman or a Frenchman an anatomical section of his national dialects. Elegant, smooth, and cold, avid and detached as a black leopard, Arturito in the bank relished its green corridors and shady corridors, spoke to no one except Jules and the richest members of the South American colony. With his somber eyes, he seemed to see visions of hate and ferocity and to ignore all that passed in front of him. As instinctively as they loved Pedrillo, the women hated Arturito, who was nevertheless, possibly the most handsome of them all. Nevertheless, on account of his immense wealth, his unlimited vice, his beauty and elegance, and his savage temper, MacMahon was courted in South American society and it was for this reason that Jules paid him the ‘small' salary of about twenty thousand dollars yearly. Arturito for this only had to say that he had his bank account with Jules Bertillon and that Jules was a good fellow. This was practically the only work that Arturito had done in his life. His family had made a great fortune out of lumber in the Argentine, and Arturito was the sole heir. He had a superlative head for business and even at his age, was grasping. He turned in accounts to Jules, who rode, flew, raced, gambled, and dined with him, but so far the profit on those accounts had only equaled about $15,000 yearly. William chafed and Jules laughed elfishly.

No one knew exactly how sophisticated Jules was. Nightly to Claire-Josèphe, rarely to William and Alphendéry, Jules went over his game, spoke of them all as his pawns, gave his reasons, hung up the cloak of irresponsibility and intuition which was one of his great masquerades and charms.

The South American colony was Jules's stay. They liked him, were not penurious or querulous, gambled and spent with a large gesture, paid whenever they were asked: they did not care whether their accounts were right to the centime; they preferred to live as magnificoes and have no questions asked.

But when they were out of pocket they expected Jules to help them out, and he gave them overdrafts for large sums, out of his own pocket and the bank. Every two or three years a fresh river of South American money would flow into Paris, with a new boom, in coffee, lumber, tea, or phosphates, and when a depression came and some Arturito or some Pedrillo had to go home, they sent young men of their caste and more fortunate in some new boom to take their place. Like all children of booms they spent freely and to the last penny, they spent with hope, and returned home broke with hope and often returned again to Paris in a space of time between three and twenty years.

Jules, a Walloon by origin, during the war, founded a friendship with a young French liaison officer, Edmond, who had a beautiful young French southerner for mistress. After the war, when Jules married Claire, Claire and Simone, Edmond's mistress, were great friends and bought their clothes and were seen having tea together. José MacMahon came to Paris, exiled for the assassination of a man of his own class, met Simone and married her. Edmond's second mistress, Aza, married another Argentine living in Paris. Paris belonged to the South Americans during the war, and Jules had known them in their glorious time: they clung to him. He was also both generous, immoral, and fantastic, much in their own line, although quieter. ‘Soft,' Pedro told him he was. ‘We'd send you to a convent in the Argentine: you can't ride a morning in the Bois but you complain of a raw seat: I've spent three weeks in the saddle, sleeping, eating, drinking, raping, and never grown a corn.'

‘What were you doing three weeks in the saddle?'

‘Whipping the peons when they were troublesome.'

The colony Jules called ‘the silvertails,' his English clients and brokers ‘the umbrellabirds.' Arturito had been gone nine months and was receiving regularly a check from the bank for ‘invisible returns.' William was smoldering into revolt, when José MacMahon penetrated the shades of the bank one morning to give an item of news: Arturito was dead, assassinated one afternoon in a street in Buenos Aires. Accident, thief, hired assassin, plundered peon, mistress, feud? No one knew. ‘And who cares?' asked William coarsely. ‘Tigers are hard to catch: thank God the world has one less!'

Aristide Raccamond hove busily in sight at this moment, elephantine in a new suit draped rather than cut, to hide his fatness. William called, ‘Aristide, you'll need an armband to that suit: one of your friends was taken for a ride in Buenos Aires.'

Raccamond paled excessively, looked at José MacMahon; William pointed to José, ‘Arturito MacMahon.'

‘Do you believe it?' asked Raccamond of José.

‘Why not?' José looked at him with dislike.

‘You have three brothers.'

William handed him a newspaper clipping, ‘I don't often get pleasure out of reading the paper—excuse me, José; but you know your brother.'

José gave his flashing smile. ‘Unflinching and ferocious—he was rare, even with us: he was the flower of our family, a true chief. The cowards see to it that such men die quickly and by stealth, of course.'

William observed that Aristide was ill at ease, even trembling; he turned his back and was walking towards Alphendéry's door, humped, in his usual curious style of distress, wandering a little from the straight line. William nodded to José, did not smile, said softly, ‘
He
had so much experience in the Eastern Mediterranean after the war—Constantinople, Smyrna, Aleppo, Port Saïd, Morocco—Marseille! How do such types escape assassination: his back is broader than Arturito's.'

William smiled creamily at José. It gave him a real pleasure to gloat over Arturito's death and the other's discomfiture in the presence of Arturito's brother. He detested all the silvertails, except Pedrillo; he detested Raccamond, their customers' man, a curious jack-of-all-trades of rascality.

José took his leave and William went straight to Alphendéry's room.

‘I regretted Zucchero,' said Alphendéry. ‘He was a good scout, a lovely boy; but I can't regret Arturito. I felt a tooth in my spine every time that adder glided in.' William slumped into a chair opposite Alphendéry and contented himself for a minute with chuckling and flushing; then, ‘A coincidence! I was out playing tennis with young Mouradzian last night. He told me Arturito was a white slaver in the grand style and Raccamond did jobs for him as well as others. That's the reason he spends so much time down South—it isn't funk at all. As soon as the market collapses and his clients won't put money in the market, he takes time off to look after the white-slaving and drug end. Easy. Madame, that moral dame, covers his tracks and receives his mail at their villa.'

‘Aristide seemed down in the mouth; he didn't say it was Arturito.'

‘I never believe in psychology,' jeered William. ‘When a fellow like Aristide walks round with an old man of the sea on his back, it's real trouble, not melancholy. He isn't a poet and he's got enough bread: a man doesn't worry like that over a son forging checks—that's all washed out, anyhow—'

‘Why not?' asked Alphendéry, who would have liked to have had a son.

William flapped away the idea, the eternal blond spring of his round face looking forward to no son.

‘Hippo Raccamond is in a mess. He's got a bunch of girls going out, and Arturito's not there to carry out his end: that's about it.'

‘I wish,' said Alphendéry philanthropically, bitterly, ‘that the people of all the Americas would rise and just wipe our precious clients clean off the slate. I could stand the loss financially. It would be a pleasure to see the MacMahons and their breed stood up against a wall. But Aristide couldn't be such a fool as to be white-slaving. He's terrified of the police as it is, since his two
faux pas
in banking. He's not too bad a fellow.'

William bit his lip, smirked. ‘Forget it!' He flapped his hand downwards. ‘Forget it, will you? The police! He tricks his income tax, doesn't he? What about his company formed in England, to pay him half his salary, so that only half is paid in France? What about his goings and comings with Carrière? A southerner who behaves like an archdeacon is someone to watch. Young Mouradzian knows an earful and he hasn't got his knife into Raccamond—quite the contrary: he says he's a fool, who doesn't know how to keep his shoes clean. He says everyone in the white-slaving cafés knows Raccamond. And Raccamond meets Parouart in his famous alley. What for? For canoodling, for friendship? Vultures would turn pale at the sight of either. I've only got one principle in business, Michel, and that is—when a fellow is high in the collar and down in the nose, he's worse than the rest, he's not only crooked, but a lardy fool. Listen, we're all crooks, aren't we? What's the use of putting on the face of a gravedigger? It can only be that he has something in his record which stinks even to crooks.' William shifted and went to look in the card index. ‘I'm going to send in a claim to the MacMahons straight away. We don't have to get rid of Aristide, it's true: the police will be round with a butterfly net, one of these days. Carrière's his friend, but who's Carrière? A thirty-million-franc cheese.'

‘Jean told me that Laval called him in and said, “If you want to stand for Parliament in January, you've got to call off the Bertillon affair: it's too unpopular.” At the same time, we've got chiefly foreign clients, we've got the largest slice of the South Americans, Belgians, and Dutch, the floating population, that is: the other banks would like to see us close our doors. We don't want it given out that our bank is a rendezvous of white slavers.'

William did not answer for a time, busy over Arturito's card, then, ‘Oh, don't worry: you worry too much, Michel. Every bank has its pigsty customers' man, someone who procures, runs drugs, knows the addresses of whores, is a herring catcher for usurers, has an abortionist, a photographer, and a clap doctor on a string—and he can't be a little blenny like Parouart, he's got to look honorable so that the best people can be seen round with him and if the wife drops in, ‘This is Monsieur Wetfoot': his presence explains itself, is in fact, honorific. That's why Parouart goes round in tatters. He has not fat on his bones: ergo, he isn't respectable. Respectability is a matter of fat. Raccamond's moral look and his moral feelings are an asset in his business.'