The Adventurers (43 page)

Silently the Armenian wrote the check and handed it to him. He closed the checkbook and looked up.

"Thank you," Marcel said humbly.

"Speculation is a dangerous business. I got very badly hurt during the last war."

Marcel looked at Amos in surprise. So he had known about the sugar. "It's still a good idea," he said defensively.

"Yes, if you get the sugar out before the government requisitions the warehouses."

"Do you think they'll do that?"

Abidijan nodded. "They'll have to. Roosevelt promised to supply the allies. Every warehouse along the waterfront will be requisitioned."

"Where will I ever find a place big enough for all that sugar?"

Amos laughed. "You're a bright young man. But you still have a lot to learn. You don't want it all in one place; that would make it too noticeable. What you must do is scatter it around. Hide it. In obscure places where they will never look. A little at a time like the bootleggers used to do with whiskey."

"I'll never find enough places in time."

"I know how you can," Amos said. "I have a friend. He used to be a bootlegger and he still has many of his old hiding places. I have already spoken to him. He'll take care of you."

Marcel stared at him. "You've saved my life."

Amos laughed. "I do no more than you did for me."

"Did for you?"

"I have had a letter almost two weeks. From Baron de Coyne. He told me you went there to see him about my proposition."

"Oh, that. It was nothing."

"Nothing?" Amos cried. "You fly to Europe in one of those crazy machines just because I ask you a favor and you say it is nothing? I wouldn't go up in one of them for my own father." He got to his feet and walked around the desk. "The baron and I just bought the Master Products Company for three million dollars less than my own offer."

Marcel stared at him. So the baron wasn't that proud after all. Money was the great equalizer.

Amos put his hand on Marcel's shoulder. "Now, that's enough talk about business. Let's talk about more important things. I think October is a very good month for a wedding, don't you?"

CHAPTER 13

Sue Ann put down the telephone. "Father wants us to come home."

Sergei raised his head from the newspaper. "You know the baby can't be moved from the clinique."

Sue Ann got to her feet angrily. When she moved quickly she appeared even heavier. After the baby she had made no attempt to get back her figure. Instead it seemed as if she had welcomed the excuse to stop caring about her appearance. Now she could eat all the cakes and chocolates she wanted, drink and stuff herself with all the delicacies she had formerly denied herself. The only thing that hadn't changed was her insatiable appetite for sex.

"I know that. But if we go home it won't matter to her. We're not doing anything for her by being here. The only people she really knows are the sisters at the clinique."

"She's still our baby. We can't just go off and leave her."

Sue Ann looked at him, her full face settling into grim lines. "You won't give up, will you? You won't admit she's beyond hope, that she'll always be like she is?"

"The doctors say there's a chance."

"The doctors?" She snorted contemptuously. "They'll say anything. They like the money they're getting."

Sergei didn't answer. Instead he got to his feet and started for the door.

"Where are you going?"

He looked back at her. "To the clinique. Want to come along?"

"What for? Just to stand there and look at her?"

He shrugged.

She crossed the room to the liquor cabinet and took out a bottle of Scotch. "I'm booking passage to the States for next week."

"If you do," he said quietly, "you'll go alone."

Sue Ann put some ice in her glass and poured whiskey over it. For a moment she sloshed it around in the tumbler, then turned to face him. "There's someone else. That nurse at the hospital. The English one."

"Don't be a fool."

"My friends saw her in your car."

"I was only dropping her off on my way home."

"Yeah?" Sue Ann said skeptically. "My friends say different."

"What do your friends say?"

"They saw you drive by from their balcony. They could look right down into your car. Your fly was open and she had your cock out."

"In broad daylight?" he asked derisively. "You believe that?"

"I know you," she said, finishing the whiskey in her glass and adding some more. "You can't drive a car without having someone to shift your gears. Someday you'll kill yourself doing that."

Sergei laughed harshly. "It's as good a way to die as any. At least I won't expire from stuffing myself like a pig."

Her face clouded. "Don't try to change the subject. I'm not the same girl I was when we got married. I'm wise to you."

"You're very wise," he replied sarcastically, "and do you want to know something? You were much more attractive when you were stupid!"

The door slammed behind him. For a moment Sue Ann stood there, then angrily flung the glass at the closed door. It shattered, the pieces scattered over the rug. "Screw you!"

Suddenly she ran to the window and flung it open. She looked down into the courtyard. He was just getting into the car. "Fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck you!" she screamed out the open window like a fishwife. She was still screaming as the car roared out of the courtyard into the street.

Sergei's hands gripped the wheel tensely. He could feel the throb of the big engine under the hood of the Mercedes responding. It had been a mistake, just as he had known it

would be. But that was no consolation to him now. Having been right didn't make him feel any better. Only worse.

It was just as he had said. They were too much alike. And much too different. Now it was over, only in one way it would never be over. Not for him. There was the baby. There would always be the baby. No matter how old she would become, Anastasia would always be a baby.

"Elle est retarde." He could still hear the voice of the specialist. Flat, trying to be unemotionally professional, but still filled with a world of sympathy for the pain of the parents.

He had looked across the room at Sue Ann. There was no expression on her face. At first he had thought she did not understand because the doctor had been speaking in French. "He says she is retarded."

Her eyes looked at him coldly. "I heard him," she answered in an emotionless voice. "I thought something was wrong when she was born. She never cried."

He had looked down into the crib. Anastasia was lying there quietly. Her dark eyes were open but there was no curiosity in them. She was three months old, long past the time for her to show signs of awareness. He felt a constriction in his chest, and fought back the tears. "Is there nothing that can be done? An operation?"

The doctor looked at him, then at the baby. "Not now, perhaps later when she is older. One never knows about such things. Sometimes it just clears up by itself."

"What can we do now?" he asked desperately. "She's such a tiny thing. So helpless."

Sue Ann had turned away from the crib and gone over to the window. It was as if she had divorced herself from whatever was going on in the room behind her.

"Keep her here," the doctor urged gently, "she needs special care. She's too delicate in many ways to be moved. That's all we can do for the present."

"Kill her!" Sue Ann's voice was suddenly savage as she turned from the window. "That's what you can do! Her blood is bad. Papa warned me about old European families. She'll never be any good. She'll be an idiot!"

The doctor couldn't hide his shock. "No, madame, she will never be an idiot. She is merely retarded. A little slow perhaps, but she will be a lovely child nonetheless."

Sue Ann stared at them both for a moment, then turned and walked out of the room, slamming the door behind her. After a moment the baby started to cry. The doctor bent over the crib. "See, she responds. A little slowly, as I said. But she responds. What she needs is care and love."

Sergei looked at him silently. The doctor knew what he was thinking with the intuitive knowledge of experience. He straightened up and came over to Sergei. "Your wife is upset. It is not your fault, these things sometimes happen in intrauterine pregnancies. The baby almost strangled in its umbilical cord. There was some damage to the brain before we could get oxygen into her. But it was very slight. Very often these things repair themselves with time."

Sergei still did not speak.

"You must not blame yourself, my friend," the doctor said gently.

But in a way, he did.

Sergei parked the car in the driveway of the clinique and went directly to the baby's room. The sister who was changing the bed linen smiled at him. "The baby's in the garden with the nurse."

Sergei walked through the tall French doors into the garden. He looked across the green lawn. The nurse was sitting on a small bench, the baby carriage in front of her. She looked up as she heard him approaching.

He walked around the carriage and looked into it. The baby was awake. She looked at him with lackadaisical eyes. "How is she this morning?"

"Fine. It was so lovely and warm I decided to give her a little air."

"Good." He took out a cigarette and lit it. His voice lowered. "Where were you last night? I waited at the inn until nine o'clock."

"I couldn't get off; the matron kept me in her office until late. By then I couldn't get a bus so I slept here."

He looked at her. There were tired lines in her face. "Is there anything wrong?"

"I didn't sleep very well, I guess. The matron gave me my notice."

"Your notice?" The surprise showed in his voice.

"Whatever for? There've been no complaints about your work."

She still didn't look at him, and a slight bitterness crept into her voice. "Oh, yes, there have. The matron told me."

Suddenly he was suspicious. "Did she say who?"

The nurse looked at him with her clear gray eyes. "Oh, no, the matron would never do that. But from the nature of the complaint I could guess."

He stared at her. "My wife?"

She nodded.

"She wouldn't! She knows how important you are to Anastasia."

"She did though," the nurse said. "She's the only one who could have. The complaint wasn't about my work, it was about my behavior."

Sergei got to his feet angrily. "I'll see the matron."

"No," she said firmly, "let it go. It would only make it worse."

"What are you going to do? Have you made any plans?"

She shook her head. "I'll have to find something here. There's no way of getting to England now that the Germans have occupied France." She squinted up at the sky. "It's getting a little cloudy."

Sergei followed her back into the room and stood there while she changed the baby and put her back into the crib. Anastasia lay there uncomplaining. He watched them silently. There was something profoundly touching about the gentle way the nurse handled the child. If only Sue Ann had taken the time to see how much the baby needed her perhaps things would have been different.

"She's really a very good baby," the nurse said.

Sergei walked over to the crib and bent over it. "Good morning, Anastasia."

The baby stared up at him for a moment, then her face lit up and her eyes and lips crinkled into a smile.

"She's smiling at me!" Sergei said, looking over at the nurse. "See, she's beginning to recognize me."

The nurse smiled back sympathetically. "I told you she was improving. In another few months you won't know her."

Sergei turned back to the crib. "It's your daddy, Anastasia," he said happily. "It's your daddy, who loves you."

But the smile was gone now and once more the baby looked up at him with lackadaisical eyes.

CHAPTER 14

Suddenly Sue Ann began to feel sorry, as sorry for Sergei as for herself. It was over between them. In a way it had been over a long time. If only she hadn't become pregnant. Or if she hadn't been afraid to have an abortion. Why hadn't she paid more attention to the calendar and not let it get so far. If—But there were so many ifs and none of them was of any help now.

But most of all she felt sorry for the baby.

She had wanted to love the baby. She had wanted to care for her and cuddle her and play with her but somehow once she saw her, her empty expression, she couldn't. She had tried at first. But when she had looked at her still discolored face, at the screwed-up, almost strangled expression, she had gone sick inside. Silently she had pushed the baby away, and the nurse had taken her back to the incubator.

Sue Ann leaned her head back against the couch and closed her eyes. It went a long way back. A long, long way to when she was a little girl.

Her father was never home. Perhaps at Christmas and on other holidays, but at other times he always seemed to be away on business. It was always the stores. She could see the yellow and blue signs against her closed eyelids, daley penny savers. The stores were Daddy's life, just as they had been his father's before him.

Her mother had been one of the beauties of Atlanta. Many times Sue Ann had heard her expressions of disappointment because her daughter took after her father, who was big and heavy, and had none of the beauty that all the girls in her mother's family had possessed.

By the time she was fourteen Sue Ann was taller than most of the boys in her class at high school. She was already fighting a weight problem unsuccessfully, because the more nervous she became about her weight the greater was her compulsion to eat. And with the onset of the menses she developed a chronic adolescent acne.

She remembered the tears of frustration she had shed in front of the mirror, and how she had not wanted to appear in public or go to school. But her mother had forced her and she remembered how most of the boys had laughed when they saw her pimpled face, usually covered with the remains of the latest healing ointment. After a while she began to hate boys because of this cruelty, yet in spite of this she always felt an inner excitement whenever they spoke to her or even noticed her. Her sexual responses even then were so great that no matter how hard she tried to control them she would soon be soaking wet. And she was always desperately afraid that they would notice.