Mignon (7 page)

“
Marie!
” I exclaimed.

“You did not know me,
petit?
”

“Well, you were wearing that veil, and——”

Actually, she seemed pleased at having fooled me, and pretty soon asked: “And our pigeon—he is in?”

“Yes. I just now checked.”

“He is alone?”

“He’s singing—must be to himself.”

“
Bon
. Now I prepare me.”

She ducked into the next room and was gone a couple of minutes. She came back looking half-boiled, her ringlets askew, her jacket off, her camisole mussed, so she looked terribly exciting. “One shall appear
séduisante
,” she whispered.

“There should be a law against it.”

She laughed and stretched out on the bed. “It is not yet time,” she said. “One must wait for the
gaz
in the hall, which the night maid shall light. One should not encounter her, when she comes.”

“My God, I should say not.”

“If we watch, the transom will tell.”

She beckoned and I sat beside her, but she moved over for me to lie, and I lay. She snuggled against me, then felt the gun. She took it out, set it on the night table. I said: “I’m sorry, but to be safe, I thought—”

“But
oui
. I too.”

She opened her pocketbook, and even in the murk I could see the brass sheen of a derringer. “One takes precautions,” she said, “but your
pistolet
hurts!”

With the gun out of the way, she practically wrapped herself around me, her skirt slipping up and most of her froufrou with it, so bare skin was touching me in all sorts of intimate places. She lined my lips with the tip of her tongue, then gave me a long, wet kiss. “One is not always
femme sérieuse
,” she whispered, “or
grande dame
. Sometimes I amuse me.”

“To say nothing of me,” I whispered.

“How long will you be? In that room?”

“Why—no more than five minutes, I’m sure.”

“
Alors?
Then we shall have the evening?”

“... Ah—yes. Of course.”

“We may dine? You like Antoine’s?”

“I’ve never been to Antoine’s. Sounds fine.”

“Then theater? At the Variétés are vaudevilles.”

“You can’t beat vaudevilles.”

“And then? We come here?”

“If you want to, Marie, that’s fine.”

“Or
chez vous
, perhaps? Where do you live, Guillaume?”

“... At the St. Charles, for the time being.”

“I think better
chez moi
.”

“You have a very beautiful place.”

She snuggled close, then rolled over on top of me and covered my face with little kisses. “It shall be
chez moi
,” she whispered.

Light showed through the transom and she got up, even more rumpled than before. She asked: “Have I the appearance of some poor helpless one, who has brandy, for example, a bottle in her room, and no way to extract the cork?”

“Have you the booze is the question?”

“Oh I brought. Fear not.”

“Then the appearance is overwhelming.”

She said: “When you return from the
recherche
, please drop your stick on the floor, to
claquer
, as signal to me. I shall send him for glasses, then come to you here
vite
, and together we disappear.” I said that would be perfect, and she put the gun back in my holster, helped me into my coat, and gave me my hat, saying: “You shall be ready to leave in one
coup
—I shall dress me as we go down.” She stood, soft, sloppy, and mussed, then kissed me quick and went. While I watched, holding the door on a crack, she drifted down the hall and flitted around the angle. I heard a knock, then voices—hers and a man’s, talking French. Then here she came back with Pierre, walking unsteadily, holding onto his arm. He was giggling, and carried a corkscrew in one hand. They went in 301, and when the door closed I tiptoed out.

I floated down the hall, turned the angle, stopped at 346, and got out my skeleton key. But when I put it in the hole and twisted, nothing happened. I twisted two or three times, and still the thing stuck. Then in kind of a panic, I twisted both ways, back and forth. On forth the thing turned. Then I realized the door was open—Pierre hadn’t locked it when he went down the hall with Marie. I went in, found everything as it had been, except that a gaslight was on over the desk. The basket, when I picked it up, had all kinds of stuff in it, a newspaper, a crumpled-up cardboard box, some string, maybe papers, I don’t recollect. But in the bottom were the same old scraps I’d come for. I took everything out and dumped them out on the rug. I sprinkled my own scraps in their place, put everything back as it had been, set the basket in its place. Then, on my knees, I gathered them up, two or three at a time, and dropped them into my envelope. How long it took I don’t know, but it seemed at least an hour. I pocketed the envelope, opened the desk drawer, made sure the tablet was there, as well as a package of envelopes of the kind the note had been mailed in. I stepped to the door, got out my skeleton key to lock it, then remembered not to. I tiptoed back to 303.

I listened, and laughing came through the partition—Marie’s laugh, and Pierre’s, everything quite gay. I poised my stick on the strip of bare boards between the rug and the wall. I was all set to let it drop, when I thought to myself:
Why?
You signal her, and you know what’s going to happen, as you like her, plenty. I thought: Are you, after doing all this for one woman, going to ruin it by hopping in bed with another? I thought: How can you be such a rat, after the help you’ve been given by this brave, saucy little thing, as to leave her now in the lurch, without even telling her thanks? I thought: Rat or not,
that
’
s what you have to do!
I shoved the stick under one arm, opened my wallet. I got out two twenties, dropped them on the bed. I put the wallet away, went to the bare boards, poised my stick again, and dropped it to make a clatter. Then I snatched it up, tiptoed quick to the hall, closed the door softly, and sneaked down the stairs, listening as I went.

On the second floor I sensed something.

I wheeled, and looking at me was another man with a stick, who had also apparently been listening. Suddenly I remembered him: Marie’s guard, the one I’d seen on the high stool in her gambling room. I saw he remembered me, and went plunging down to the lobby and on out to the street. I tried to tell myself I needn’t feel like a rat any more, that if this man had been brought to act as emergency guard that took all the danger out. I felt still more like a rat, a rat that had been caught.

T
HAT DIDN’T GET RID OF THE FACT
I had what I’d hoped to get, and as soon as I got back to my suite I worked like a wild man for the next couple of hours putting the scraps together. It wasn’t too hard a job, once I got system in it. My first gain came when I realized that pieces along the outside must have a straight edge. By studying the ones with lines and other ones without, I was able to figure out which scraps went at the top, which ones at the sides, and which ones at the bottom. When I laid them out on my escritoire blotter, I came up with kind of a frame around a blank space in the middle. Now finding edges that fitted edges was just a question of patience, and pretty soon I had all the pieces in place. Then I got out my gum arabic, the little bottle I had in my draftsman’s kit, and with that glued them in place, using hotel stationery as backing. At last I could read what they said, and it was damning so far as Burke was concerned. Because it was not only a trial draft, as I had hoped it might turn out to be. It was that, but it was also a translation from proper English, such as Burke always used, into dumb lingo, the kind an illiterate writes. In other words, on odd lines was a note, decently spelled and punctuated, giving details of the shoe shipment, while on even lines, under words to correspond, was the rough, misspelled printing of a pretended ignoramus, even to the signature
LORL PATROT
—everything in exactly the same style as the note I’d seen at headquarters.

I was plenty excited about it, but had to figure how to use it, and went down to the lobby to think. The point was that though I could name the informer, I couldn’t disprove his evidence if the Army insisted on believing it meant anything, and I kept telling myself Burke was incidental; the main thing was Mr. Landry and how to get him out. And then I suddenly saw that my tactic lay not in fine points of what proved what, but in taking the fun out of the Army’s self-righteous zeal for the sport of human sacrifice.

In a seat beside me watching the theater crowd enter was a newspaperman, John Russell Young, who wrote for a Philadelphia paper. After a moment or two he beckoned and another reporter, Olsen, who wrote for New England papers, came over. Young was just a boy, but Olsen was in his thirties, a bit seedy, with yellow paper stuffed in his pocket and a kind of hatchet face that squinted all the time. I halfway knew them both, and spoke; I couldn’t help hearing what they said. It seemed Young was taking a trip to field headquarters on the Teche and wanted Olsen to cover him here in return for copies of the Franklin dispatches. They fixed it up quick, then Young said: “Olsen, there’s one thing I’m having a look at, and that’s the camp followers they have out there—the bevy of colored girls who cook for the boys, as I hear, and press their pants, and do their laundry—and what else, would you say?”

“I couldn’t imagine,” said Olsen.

“I mean to find out,” said John Russell Young.

That’s when I remembered Dan’s panic at what the press might hear. I leaned over and interrupted: “Mr. Olsen, how’d you like it if I had a story for you?”

“I’d like it fine, Mr. Cresap. What story?”

“About a client of mine, falsely accused.”

“Not Adolphe Landry, by any chance?”

“I see you keep up with things.”

“Keeping up is my business. But how is he falsely accused? The way they tell it at headquarters, he’s practically a one-man Q.M. for Dick Taylor’s Army.”

“They tell it their own way,” I said, pretty grim, “but if you’d like to hear it my way, why don’t you have breakfast with me tomorrow, and I’ll have it all lined up.”

“Fine. Around eight-thirty, shall we say?”

“I’ll be expecting you then.”

I put in a call for 7:30, then went up and went back to work. I wrote a letter to the Commanding General, asking dismissal of the case on the ground of plain reason, but putting in other stuff too, like the motives the Army might have in being unduly severe, and other things the press could be interested in. I made two copies, and turned, in around 1:30. In the morning, shaved and brushed and slicked, I went down to find Olsen waiting, and took him to the main dining room, as the bar wasn’t open yet. When we’d ordered, I handed him one copy of the letter, telling him: “Keep it, I made it especially for you.”

He whistled as soon as he’d read it, and said: “Hey, hey, hey—I’ll say it’s a story, Cresap. You’ve practically accused this Army of inventing a false accusation in order to earn a bribe—something we’ve known goes on but haven’t been able to prove, as you say you’ll be able to do. You mind my asking how?”

“Well—I’ll reserve that for the confab.”

“What confab, Cresap?”

“At headquarters, today. That’s another thing I wanted to ask you about. How’d you like to attend?”

“Attend, Cresap? Hell, they wouldn’t let me.”

“Who is ‘they’? I’m this man’s counsel.”

“That’s right, so you are. So you are.”

He eyed me sharply then and read the letter again. Then he said: “But suppose you don’t have proof? This letter alone is a bombshell, enough to bring in the Gooch Committee. They’ll find the proof, if it’s there. And it has to be there, of course! This whole Army’s a mess of corruption, caused by cotton—graft, cumsha, and slipperoo, straight down the line and straight
up
the line, as this letter intimates. That’s what’ll interest Gooch.”

“Who’s Gooch, if I may ask?”

“Chairman of the committee in Congress that investigates this kind of stuff, the conduct of the war.”

“Oh yes, I’ve heard of him.”

“He can’t disregard
this
.”

I let him run on, through orange, eggs, and coffee, until he’d folded the letter up, tucked it in his pocket, and patted it. Then I said: “Of course, I haven’t submitted it yet.”

“What do you mean, you haven’t submitted it?”

“But that’s understood,” I said.

“Not by me,” he snapped, quite annoyed. “You hand me a letter, a copy you say you made for me, and I supposed it had been sent.”

“But I told you; I’m having a confab.”

“Listen, Cresap, you’re not in the newspaper business, so perhaps you don’t get the point. This letter is news, but I can’t touch it until it’s sent—that’s what makes it public, that’s what puts it on the record.”

“I do get the point. That’s the idea.”

“Well, thanks.
And
thanks.”

“Mr. Olsen,” I said very quietly, “I’m Mr. Landry’s counsel, and I don’t act for you, or the news, or the record. I act for him, and only him. If submitting the letter helps him, I submit. If not, if the confab says I shouldn’t, I don’t submit it. Now if you want to be present—”

“You know what this sounds like to me?”

“All right, Mr. Olsen, what?”

“Like you’re using me for a cat’s-paw.”

“Then call it that.”

“I call it what it is.”

“So I’m using you for a cat’s-paw, but if you don’t want to be one, just hand me the copy back, and I’ll find somebody else.”

“... What’s the rest of it?”

“You asking as a cat’s-paw?”

“As a cat’s-paw, yes. What next?”

“It’s very simple.”

I told him there was another person I had to invite to the confab, and that all he had to do was meet me at headquarters in an hour and let nature take its course. By the way he nodded, I knew he would be there.

I walked down to the City Hotel, turned in the key of 303, and when I got to the third floor, opened the room with my skeleton for a quick look. It was all just as I’d left it, even to the rumpled bed, except the two twenties were gone. I locked up and kept on to 346. Pierre opened as usual, giving no sign he connected me with the goings-on of last night—though of course, except for his brief interlude with a lady, he had no reason to know there’d been any goings-on. While he was calling Burke I had a flash at the basket: it was empty. So there weren’t any dangling ends, and Burke was surprised to see me. I told him: “I’ve been thinking things over since I saw you yesterday, and I’m making one last try on behalf of Mr. Landry, a direct appeal, man to man, to the Commanding General himself.”