Old Sinners Never Die (9 page)

And then he knew, of course, what there was about the entire place that made it dreamlike: it was a reconstructed speakeasy, a club of the ’twenties, which Jimmie could best identify from the midnight films on television. Sitting down at the red-checked cloth and looking round at the half-curtains hung on shuttered windows, he got the feeling of being on a movie set.

“I’ll tell Leo you want to see him,” the hostess said. “Do you want a little drink?”

“Could I have a Scotch and soda?” Jimmie asked, not sure that such a drink was in order here.

The blonde gave his shoulder a gentle “go-on-with-you” sort of push. “Sure. Leo’s got anything you want.”

Something ticklish ran down Jimmie’s spine. The orchestra was playing
It Happened in Monterey
…
a long time ago.
There was a patch of dance floor in the middle of the room, but no one danced. There were maybe twenty people present, all of them bent a little forward in their seats toward the orchestra, the only variation in their attitude, the hands under some chins. Jimmie began to feel himself misplaced, an anachronism.

Leo, Jimmie thought; it was not exactly a common name, except perhaps among popes.

The orchestra—three pieces, a shoofly drum, a saxophone and a piano—finished
Monterey
. While the musicians tuned up, a faint murmur of conversation ran among the guests—or members. The lights on all the tables were heavily shaded so that Jimmie saw most people in silhouette only; nonetheless, he sensed a familiarity about two or three of them. This too made him feel uneasy about time and place, for certainly no one of his acquaintance was likely to be here—except possibly his father and he had not spotted him yet. And in truth, this place was not at all likely to be to his father’s tastes. The old boy did not live in the past, alas.

The hostess brought his Scotch and soda—already mixed. There was not a great deal of drinking done here, Jimmie thought, if she could handle it. The customers came for some other sort of soporific.

The hostess waited until Jimmie had taken a sip. “Okay?”

“Thank you, it’s fine.” It was not exactly fine, but it wasn’t dreadful either.

“Leo’s busy till after the show,” she said. “What’s your name?”

“James,” Jimmie said, reluctant to disturb his incognito.

And that reminded him of Mrs. Norris. Where was she? Had she been here? After all, she had taken some sort of message about or by Montaigne. “Have you seen a woman here tonight, not a member—oh, getting on toward sixty, roundish, looks a bit like Queen Victoria?”

“Can’t you tell me her name? I wouldn’t want to commit myself on another woman’s looks.”

Jimmie saw no harm in giving it. “Mrs. Norris.”

The blonde shook her head.

“What about a strapping young Irishman, good looking, in his early twenties?”

The blonde gave a wiggle that ran from her head to her toes. “Uhn-unh, but you send him along any time. I’d love to entertain him.”

Jimmie pulled his neck a little higher out of his collar. Most of the table lamps went out then, a master switch apparently, and a spotlight flooded the dance floor. A young man came out from behind the orchestra and down through the watchers, getting a flourish of applause as a welcome. He wore a tophat and carried a cane, and when he took off the hat, his hair was brushed back, sandy and sleek.

“Welcome sinners …” The applause to this beginning was perfunctory. “Well, we can’t all, all the time, can we? … Just the same wasn’t it a busy day in Washington? I’m glad so many of us are gathered here together. Some, I hear, have fled to the woods. The redcoats again. I don’t think they’ve ever gone home, myself. I was just thinking about that a little while ago, and I said to myself, all right—let them stay. They can have Washington. I’ll take Paris. Anybody else want to go to Paris tonight?”

It was fascinating, Jimmie thought, the way all these faces had turned up as to the sun. A great chorus of yeas and hurrays rang out an answer to the question the M.C. had just asked. Everybody wanted to go to Paris. He began pouring on the nostalgia then. It was better than reading Elliot Paul. And in this Paris of his, there walked yet and much alive, the long dead, Joyce and Scott Fitzgerald, Grace Moore, George Gershwin, quite as gracefully as though their future had never passed.

He told his tale in the exhortation of an evangelist, and some people there found Paris. There were happy tears in their eyes. Jimmie began himself to dread the moment Montaigne would break the spell. The return to reality must be very harsh. It was then ten after one; at one-thirty Montaigne was telling anecdotes still, and much as though they flowed from recent memory, memory as detailed as the prose of Marcel Proust.

Jimmie remembered then d’Inde’s remark about Montaigne—very gay but reactionary, and there were words about Mussolini and Hitler between him and the General. Such names would spoil his séance, like a dead cat tossed into a banquet. And yet, not necessarily. The world he was recreating would acknowledge the dictators only in their early promise, not their grim fulfilment. Montaigne might even affect an admiration for Mussolini, as a number of young men did, sojourning in Italy in those days.

Jimmie was caught up in admiration despite his first and deep revulsion. Young Montaigne had the imagination of genius. He had actually brought to life a dead world and closed out the living present. He had, for as long as he regaled them, taken twenty-five years from the lives of each member of his cult. How often, Jimmie wondered, could he do this? Was tonight a very special occasion? Jimmie doubted that one of such imagination could stand self-repetition indefinitely. Then what? And how did he come by this depth of verisimilitude? Not merely out of books, off films. Jimmie would suspect there was a real live model—perhaps clinging to a lost youth of her own by making him her lover … Speculation, yes. Virginia Allan? Then what was she doing with Father?

Suddenly it was over. A stillness and a limpness pervaded the room, the people hangdog. No applause. Gloom. Montaigne himself stood, his head lolling forward, his long hair streaming over his face, his arms dangling. It might have been the awed moment after a magnificent orchestral performance, and he the conductor. And in a way it had been just that.

Someone at a table nearby sobbed. There had been an attempt to stifle it, but the sound of repressed emotion escaped.

Montaigne lifted his head and threw back the hair from his face. “No tears tonight!” he cried out. “I promise you the night has just begun. Stay with me, friends, and watch. Your vigil will have its own reward. Now!” He threw back his shoulders and rubbed his hands together.

“Now. In the absence tonight of our dear old Virginny …”

“No! No!”

“We want Virginia!”

“Virginia Allan!”

There was an increasingly vigorous protest from the audience. Montaigne seemed to lose his temper.

“I tell you she is not here! She ran off tonight with an Army man. …”

Someone tittered. Montaigne screamed, “It isn’t funny at all, you fools!”

Some woman in the audience made a soothing noise, as she would perhaps to a child. Jimmie could feel the sweat break out on his back.

Montaigne threw his head back and gave a violent direction of his arm, pointing to the orchestra. “Play, you clowns! Dolores, come out here and sing!”

He half-walked, half-glided then among the tables and off to the room behind the orchestra, never pausing an instant and rejecting all the hands of women flung out to him as he passed. Jimmie started to get up, intending to confront him at once.

The hostess, behind him, put her hand on his shoulder. “Not now.”

“When?”

“After Dolores gets off. Wouldn’t you like another of those?” She indicated his drink.

“All right,” Jimmie said, but resolved not to drink it. He waited until the woman was out of sight, intending then to make his own way to Montaigne. Dolores was singing, something inane and in a voice he could only think of as dollish. Even he could tell she was phony. No umph. Jimmie had passed but a few tables when he stopped and sat down at the next empty one. Montaigne was at the door, smoking, watching Dolores through the smoke with an intentness Jimmie had rarely known in anyone who wasn’t in love.

Although Montaigne himself led the applause the rest of it was only perfunctory. Jimmie took a good look at Dolores as she left the floor. She might not have nostalgia, he thought, nor “it”, nor “umph”, and she might not fit the ‘twenties’ makeup someone had plastered on her, but she had one thing in common with Leo Montaigne that so far as Jimmie had observed no one else in the house shared: she too was very young.

T
HE GENERAL STOOD, HIS
hands behind his back, before the fireplace in which there was no fire because Miss Virginia Allan was concerned about a bird’s nest in the chimney. The wall above the mantel was a virtual arsenal of weapons—shotguns, a rifle, a snub-nosed revolver, a set of pistols, really nasty looking.

“Those are my souvenirs, Ransom,” Virginia purred up at him from the sofa.

“Of what, my dear?” The General half-expected her to say of her late husbands.

“My hunts for antiques.”

“Not all of them are antique, you know.”

“I know. There’s one or two I keep workable in case I need ’em—you know, a woman all alone this way in the wilderness.”

The General would not like to have given odds on the times she had been alone in the wilderness.

“Are you a good shot, Ransom?”

“Passable.”

Virginia laughed, quite prettily. “I’m only passable myself. Come here, honey.”

The General skipped across the room.

“Sit down nice and comfy and I’ll fetch you another drink.” She was up before he was down so there was little point in protest. But he resolved he had taken his last gambol at her command. It was getting on toward two in the morning, and he had not yet discovered what she was up to. That in itself had become a challenge. He brushed his eyes with his hand. He had better go lightly on the whisky or that would be a challenge, too. He was a man who could drink a great deal—in the right company. But he needed good, solid talk, something to tear apart and shake up while he was drinking. And there was no use deluding himself, he had not come here for intellectual stimulation.

She returned and once more they touched their glasses. “I had to switch you to bourbon, Ransom. I hope you don’t mind.”

“Whisky,” he said profoundly, “is whisky.” He had just about had enough.

“Have you ever drunk vodka?”

“I don’t like the stuff. False friend.”

“Just like the Russians, I daresay.”

“Not at all, not at all,” the General said. “You make a friend of a Russian and you can’t get rid of him. He comes to you and sits with his soul. He brings it to you like—a pomegranate, breaks it open in front of you and expects you to sit and pick at it with him.”

“I’ve never had a pomegranate,” Virginia said.

The General took a great gulp of whisky to avoid saying what was on his tongue.

“Tell me some more about the Russians. Where did you get to know them, Ransom? You’ve been just everywhere.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t say that.” He lifted one eyebrow in self-mockery.

She wrinkled her nose at him and laid her hand in his. “Go on.”

“I never knew a Russian half as interesting as you, Virginia,” he lied out of an old gallantry. “What about this boyfriend of yours—what’s his name—Montaigne?”

Just a flicker of what might be malice seemed to have touched her eyes. “Are you interested in him or me, Ransom?”

The General feigned hurt. “Don’t you think I could better ask that question at the moment? Did you bring me here to make him jealous?”

She gave a little “ha!” that was quite bitter.

“Is he by any chance going to burst in here and snatch up one of those guns and run me down the hill with it?”

Virginia Allan looked deeply into her glass which he noticed she was holding very tightly. “No, he isn’t,” she said.

The General reached across and patted her knee. He was beginning to feel paternal. “That’s much too bad, isn’t it?”

“For somebody,” she said, and threw her head back. “I don’t want to talk about me, honey. Tell me some more about the Russians. Did you have to negotiate with them?”

“I was part of the American team,” he said.

“Can you speak Russian?”

“Nyet.”

“Oh, Ransom, you
can
!”

“No, my dear, I cannot.”

“What kind of work do you do, Ransom?”

“Ordnance. Supply.”

“I don’t suppose the Russians would be very interested in that, would they?”

“Not in peacetime, likely.”

She smiled at him, “I’m real glad, Ransom.”

He looked at her, puzzled.

“A man’s honour’s more important than his life. At least, that’s the southern code, and that’s what I live by, Ransom.” She seemed on the verge of tears.

“Are you drunk, Virginia?”

“A little, I suppose, honey. Aren’t you?”

“No, damn it. I seem to be getting more and more sober.”

“It’s such a cold world really. Finish your drink and put your arm around me for a minute.”

The General threw down the rest of the bourbon, and knew the moment he had done it that it was a mistake. There was just a little taste of bitterness which at the first mouthful he had attributed to the change of whiskies. But now he could see a powdery film on the bottom of the glass. He had been given a powder of some sort. No wonder she was tearful, the witch.

He put the glass down with slow determination. If it were only a sleeping powder, and he assumed that’s what it must be, he could, by enormous effort, fight off its taking effect. He had lived too well, too easily these recent years, he thought, and he had taken too much whisky through the evening. The overwhelming temptation was already creeping up on him to put his head on her treacherous little shoulder and let the rest of the world go by.

He sat a moment, his hands dangling between his knees, his head heavy.

“What are you thinking of, Ransom, honey?”

That, little girl, is a great mistake, he thought, to keep me talking. “Oh,” he said, fighting the thickness in his mouth, “I was thinking about the time the Soviet
charge d’affaires
offered me a thousand dollars.”