Black Money

4

I went next door to the Jamieson house. It was a great Spanish mansion, grimy white, which had the barren atmosphere of an institution.

The woman who answered the door, after repeated ringing, wore a striped gray dress which might have been a uniform but wasn’t quite. She was handsome and dark, with the slightly imperious look of the only woman in a big house.

“You didn’t have to keep ringing. I heard you the first time.”

“Why didn’t you answer the first time?”

“I’ve got better things to do than to answer the door,” she said tartly. “I was putting a goose in the oven.”

She looked down at her greasy hands, and wiped them on her apron.

“What did you want?”

“I’d like to see Peter Jamieson.”

“Junior or senior?”

“Junior.”

“He’s probably still down at the Tennis Club. I’ll ask his father.”

“Maybe I could talk to Mr. Jamieson. My name is Archer.”

“Maybe. I’ll see.”

I waited in the dim hallway on a high-backed Spanish chair, which Torquemada had made with his own hands. The housekeeper returned eventually, and said with some surprise that Mr. Jamieson would see me. She led me past closed oak doors to an oak-paneled library whose deeply embrasured windows looked out on the mountains.

A man was sunk in an armchair by the windows, reading a book. His hair was gray and his face was very nearly the same colorless color. When he took off his reading glasses and peered up at me, I could see that his look was faint and faraway.

Half of a highball stood on a low table beside him, and close at hand on a larger table were a bottle of bourbon and a pitcher of water. I caught the housekeeper glaring at the highball and the bottle as if they represented everything she hated. She had violent black eyes, and she looked like a good hater.

“Mr. Archer,” she said.

“Thank you, Vera. Hello, Mr. Archer. Sit down, here.”

He waved his hand at an armchair facing his. His hand was almost transparent against the light. “Would you like a drink before Vera goes?”

“Not so early in the day, thanks.”

“I don’t often drink so early myself.”

I noticed that the book in his hands was upside down. He hadn’t wanted to be found just drinking. He closed the book and laid it on the table. “The Book of the Dead,” he said. “Egyptian stuff: You may go, Vera. I’m perfectly competent to entertain Mr. Archer myself.”

“Yessir,” she said in a dubious voice, and went out closing the door sharply.

“Vera is a powerful woman,” Jamieson said. “She’s the bane of my existence, but also the blessing. I don’t know how this household would function without her. She’s been like a mother to my poor boy. My wife has been dead for many years, you know.”

The flesh around his eyes seemed to crumple, as if the blow of her death was about to fall again. He took a long sip of his highball to ward it off: “Sure you won’t have a drink?”

“Not while I’m working.”

“I understand you’re working for my son. He asked my advice about hiring you. I told him to go ahead.”

“I’m glad you know about it. I won’t have to beat around the bush. Do you think Francis Martel is an impostor?”

“We all are, to some extent, wouldn’t you say? Take me, for instance. I’m a solitary drinker, as you can see. The more I drink, the more sorely I am tempted to conceal it. The only way I can preserve any integrity at all is by drinking openly, and facing the music with Peter and of course with Vera.”

“You got that off your chest,” I said smiling, “but it doesn’t tell me much about Martel.”

“I don’t know. Anything I’ve learned about people I’ve had to learn by examining myself. It’s a slow painful process,” he said with an inward look. “If Martel is an impostor, he’s taking some big chances.”

“Have you met him?”

“No. But sequestered as my life is, I do get bulletins from the world of men. Martel has aroused a good deal of local interest.”

“What’s the consensus?”

“There are two camps. There always are. That’s the worst thing about democracy; there have to be two opinions about every issue.”

He talked like a man who needed a listener. “Those who know Martel and like him, mainly the women, accept him at his face value as a distinguished young Frenchman of independent means. Others think he’s more or less a fraud.”

“A con man?”

He raised his transparent hand. “Hardly that. There’s not much question that he’s a cultivated European.”

“And no question that he has independent means?”

“I’m afraid not. I happen to know that his initial deposit at the local bank was in six figures.”

“I understand you’re on the board of the bank.”

“So you’ve investigated me,” he said with some resentment. “You do me too much honor.”

“I got it accidentally from Mr. McMinn, when I cashed a check. Can you find out where Martel’s money came from?”

“I suppose I can try.”

“It could be borrowed money,” I said. “I’ve known con men who used borrowed money, sometimes borrowed from gangsters, to get local status quickly.”

“For what possible purpose?”

“I know of one who bought a municipal bus system on terms, cannibalized it, then moved out and left it bankrupt. In the last few years they’ve even been buying banks.”

“Martel hasn’t been buying anything that I know of.”

“Except Virginia Fablon.”

Jamieson wrinkled his forehead. He picked up his highball, saw that it was nearly gone, and got up to make himself another. He was tall, but thin and frail. He moved like an old man, but I suspected he wasn’t much older than I was – fifty at most.

When he’d made his fresh drink and comforted himself with part of it and resettled himself in his leather armchair, I said: “Does Ginny have money?”

“Hardly enough to interest a confidence man. She isn’t a girl who needs money to interest any kind of a man – in fact she’s probably turned down more advances that most young women dream of. Frankly, I was surprised when she accepted Peter, and not so very surprised when she broke the engagement. I tried to tell him that last night. It was safe enough when they were high school kids. But a beautiful young wife can be a curse to an ordinary man, especially if he loses her.”

The flesh around his eyes was crumpling again. “It’s dangerous to get what you want, you know. It sets you up for tragedy. But my poor son can’t see that. Young people can’t learn from the misfortunes of their elders.”

He was becoming faintly garrulous. Looking past him at the mountains, I had a feeling of unreality, as if the sunlit world had moved back out of reach.

“We were talking about the Fablons and their money.”

Jamieson visibly pulled himself together. “Yes, of course. They can’t have a great deal. The Fablons did have money at one time, but Roy gambled a lot of it away. The rumor was that that was one reason he committed suicide. Fortunately Marietta has her own small private income. They have enough to live comfortably, but as I said, certainly not enough to tempt a fortune-hunter. Let alone a fortune-hunter with a hundred thousand dollars in cash of his own.”

“Is a hundred grand in the bank all that Martel would need to get into the club?”

“The Tennis Club? Certainly not. You have to be sponsored by at least one member and passed on by the membership committee.”

“Who sponsored him?”

“Mrs. Bagshaw, I believe. It’s a common enough practice, when members lease their houses in town here. It’s nothing against the tenant.”

“And nothing in his favor. Do you accept the idea that Martel is some kind of political refugee?”

“He may very well be. Frankly, I didn’t discourage Peter from hiring you because I’d like to satisfy my curiosity. And I’d also like him to get this business of Ginny out of his system. It’s hurting him more than you perhaps realize. I’m his father, and I can see it. I may not be much of a father to him, but I do know my son. And I know Ginny, too.”

“You don’t want Ginny as a daughter-in-law?”

“On the contrary. She’d brighten any house, even this one. But I’m very much afraid she doesn’t love my poor son. I’m afraid she agreed to marry him because she felt sorry for him.”

“Mrs. Fablon said very much the same thing.”

“So you’ve talked to Marietta?”

“A little.”

“She’s a much more serious woman than she pretends. So is Ginny. Ginny has always been a very serious young woman, even when she was a child. She used to sit in my study here whole weekends at a time, reading the books.”

“The Book of the Dead.”

“I wouldn’t be at all surprised.”

“You mentioned that her father committed suicide.”

“Yes.” Jamieson stirred uneasily, and reached for his highball, as if the little death it provided was homeopathic medicine against the big one waiting. “The decimation among my friends these last ten years has been horrendous. Not to mention my enemies.”

“Which was Roy Fablon, friend or enemy?”

“Roy was a friend, a very good friend at one time. Of course I disapproved of what he did to his wife and daughter. Ginny was only sixteen or seventeen at the time, and it hit her hard.”

“What did he do?”

“Walked into the ocean with his clothes on one night. They found his body about ten days later. The sharks had been at it, and he was scarcely identifiable.”

He passed his hand over his gray face, and took a long drink.

“Did you see the body?”

“Yes. They made me look at it. It was a very humiliating experience.”

“Humiliating?”

“It’s dreadful to realize how mortal we are, and what time and tide will do to us. I can remember Roy Fablon when he was one of the best-looking men at Princeton, and one of the finest athletes.”

“You knew him at Princeton?”

“Very well. He was my roommate. I was really the one who brought him out here to Montevista.”

I rose to leave, but he held me at the door. “There’s something I should ask you Mr. Archer. How well do you know Montevista? I don’t mean topographically. Socially.”

“Not well. It’s rich for my blood.”

“There’s something I should tell you, then, as an old Montevista hand. Almost anything can happen here. Almost everything has. It’s partly the champagne climate and partly, to be frank, the presence of inordinate amounts of money. Montevista’s been an international watering resort for nearly a century. Deposed maharajahs rub shoulders with Nobel prize-winners and Chicago meat packer’s daughters marry the sons of South American billionaires.

“In this context, Martel isn’t so extraordinary. In fact when you compare him with some of our Montevista denizens, he’s quite routine. You really should bear that in mind.”

“I’ll try to.”

I thanked him and left.