Black Money

7

Peter met me at the gate in the picket fence. Professor Tappinger was home now, and would see us.

He lived in the adjoining harbor city, in a rather rundown tract whose one obvious advantage was a view of the ocean. The sun, heavy and red, was almost down on the horizon now. Its image floated like spilled fire on the water.

The Tappinger house was a green stucco cottage, which except for its color duplicated every third house in the block. The cement walk which led up to the front door was an obstacle course of roller skates, a bicycle, a tricycle. A girl of six or seven answered the door. She had a Dutch bob and enormous watching eyes.

“Daddy says that you can join him in the study.”

She led us through the trampled-looking living room into the kitchen. A woman was bowed over the sink in a passive-aggressive attitude, peeling potatoes. A boy of about three was butting her in the legs and chortling. She paid no attention to him and very little to us. She was a good-looking woman no more than thirty, with a youthful ponytail, and blue eyes, which passed over me coolly.

“He’s in the study,” she said, and gestured with one elbow toward a door.

It let us into a converted garage lined with bookshelves. A fluorescent fixture hung on a chain over a work table cluttered with open books and papers. The professor was seated there with his back to us. He didn’t turn around when Peter spoke to him. The implication seemed to be that we were interrupting important brainwork.

“Professor Tappinger?” Peter said again.

“I hear you.”

His voice was impatient. “Excuse me for another minute, please. I’m trying to finish a sentence.”

He scratched at his head with the blunt end of his pen, and jotted something down. His coppery brown hair had a frost of gray at the edges. I saw what he eventually got up that he was a short man, and at least ten years older than his handsome wife. He had probably been handsome, too, with his sensitive mouth and clean features. But he looked as if he had had a recent illness, and the eyes behind his reading glasses were haunted by the memory of it. His handshake was cold.

“How are you, Mr. Archer? How are you, Peter? Forgive me for keeping you waiting. I snatch these precious moments of concentration from the Bergsonian flux. With a twelve-hour teaching load and all the preparation it entails, it isn’t easy to get anything written. I envy Flaubert the luxury he had of spending whole days in search of the right world, le mot juste–”

Tappinger seemed to have the professional habit of non-stop talking. I interrupted him: “What are you working on?”

“A book, if I can ever get the time to do it. My subject is the French influence on modern American literature – at the moment I’m studying the vexed question of Stephen Crane. But that wouldn’t interest you. Peter tells me you’re a detective.”

“Yes. I’m trying to get some information about a man named Francis Martel. Have you run into him?”

“I doubt it, but his name is certainly interesting. It’s one of the ancient names of France.”

“Martel is supposed to be a Frenchman. His story is that he’s a political refugee.”

“How old is he?”

“About thirty.”

I described him: “He’s a man of medium height, trim and fast on his feet. Black hair, black eyes, dark complexion. He has a French accent which varies from strong to weak.”

“And you think he’s putting it on?”

“I don’t know. If he’s a phony, he’s fooled quite a few people. I’m trying to find out who and what he really is.”

“Reality is an illusive thing,” Tappinger said sententiously. “What do you want me to do – listen to his French and pronounce on its authenticity?”

He was only half serious, but I answered him seriously: “That might be a good idea, if we could work it out. But Martel is on the point of leaving town. I thought if you could provide me with a few questions that only an educated Frenchman could answer–”

“You wish me to prepare a test, is that it?”

“With the answers.”

“I suppose I can do that. When do you need it? Tomorrow?”

“Right now.”

“That’s simply impossible.”

“But he may be leaving any minute.”

“I can’t help that!”

Tappinger’s voice had risen womanishly. “I have forty papers to read tonight – those bureaucrats at the college don’t even provide me with a student reader. I have no time for my own children–”

I said: “Okay, we’ll skip it. It wasn’t a very good idea in the first place.”

“But we have to do something,” Peter said. “I’ll be glad to pay you for your time, professor.”

“I don’t want your money. All I want is the free use of my own days.”

Tappinger was practically wailing.

His wife opened the kitchen door and looked out. Her face was set in a look of concern, which somehow gave the impression that it had been blunted by use.

“What’s the trouble, Daddy?”

“Nothing, and don’t call me Daddy. I’m not that much older than you are.”

She lifted and dropped one shoulder in a gesture of physical contempt and looked at me. “Is something the matter out here?”

“We seem to be getting on your husband’s nerves. This wasn’t a good time to come.”

Tappinger said to his wife in a quieter tone: “It’s nothing that need concern you, Bess. I’m supposed to prepare some questions to test a certain man’s knowledge of French.”

“Is that all?”

“That’s all.”

She closed the kitchen door. Tappinger turned to us: “Forgive the elevation of the voice. I’ve got a headache.”

He pressed his hand to his pale rounded forehead. “I suppose I can do this work for you now – I’ve expended twice the energy just talking about it – but I don’t understand the hurry.”

Peter said: “Martel is taking Ginny with him. We have to stop him.”

“Ginny?” Tappinger looked puzzled.

“I thought you told him about her,” I said to Peter.

“I tried to, on the phone, but he wouldn’t listen.”

He turned back to Tappinger. “You remember Virginia Fablon, professor?”

“Naturally I do. Is she involved in this?”

“Very much so. She says she intends to marry Martel.”

“And you’re in love with her yourself, is that it?”

Peter blushed. “Yes, but I’m not doing this merely for selfish reasons. Ginny doesn’t realize the mess she’s getting into.”

“Have you talked to her about it?”

“I’ve tried to. But she’s infatuated with Martel. He was the reason she dropped out of school last month.”

“Really? I thought she was ill. That was the word that went around the college.”

“There’s nothing the matter with her,” Peter said. “Except him.”

“What is her opinion of his Frenchness?”

“She’s completely taken in,” Peter said.

“Then he probably is French. Miss Fablon has a fair grasp of the language.”

“He could be both a Frenchman and a phony,” I said. “We’re really trying to find out if he’s the cultivated aristocrat he pretends to be.”

For the first time Tappinger really looked interested. “That should be possible. Let me try.”

He sat down at his cluttered table and picked up his pen. “Just give me ten minutes, gentlemen.”

We retreated to the living room. Mrs. Tappinger followed us from the kitchen, trailed by the three-year-old.

“Is Daddy all right?” she asked me in a little-girl voice so thin and sweet it sounded like self-parody.

“I think so.”

“He hasn’t been well, ever since last year. They turned him down for his full professorship. It was a terrible disappointment to him. He tends to take it out on – well, anybody available. Especially me.”

She made her shoulder gesture. This time her contempt seemed to be for herself.

“Please,” Peter said in embarrassment. “Professor Tappinger has already apologized.”

“That’s good. He usually doesn’t. Especially when his own family is involved.”

She meant herself. In fact it was herself she wanted to talk about, and it was me she wanted to talk about herself to. Her body leaning in the doorway, the blue side glances of her eyes. The drooping movements of her mouth more than the words it uttered, said that she was a sleeping beauty imprisoned in a tract house with a temperamental professor who had failed to be promoted.

The three-year-old butted at her, pressing her cotton dress tight between her round thighs.

“You’re a pretty girl,” I said, with Peter standing there as a chaperone.

“I used to be prettier – twelve years ago when I married him.”

She gestured with her hip. Then she picked up the child and carried him into the kitchen like a penitential burden.

A married woman with young children wasn’t exactly my dish, but she interested me. I looked around her living room. It was shabby, with a worn rug and beat-up maple furniture. The walls were virtually papered with Post-Impressionist reproductions, visions of an ideally brilliant world.

The sunset at the window competed in brilliance with the Van Goghs and the Gauguins. The sun burned like a fire ship on the water, sinking slowly till only a red smoke was left trailing up the sky. A fishing boat was headed into the harbor, black and small against the enormous west. Above its glittering wake a few gulls whirled like sparks which had gone out.

“I’m worried about Ginny,” Peter said at my shoulder.

I was worried, too, though I didn’t say so. The sudden moment when Martel pulled a gun on Harry Hendricks, which hadn’t seemed quite real at the time, was real in my memory now. Beside it the idea of testing Martel in French seemed faintly preposterous.

A redheaded boy about eleven came in the front door. He tramped importantly into the kitchen and announced to his mother that he was going next door to watch some television.

“No you’re not.”

Her sharp maternal tone was quite different from the one she had used on her husband and me. “You’re staying right here. It’s nearly dinnertime.”

“I’m starved,” Peter said to me.

The boy asked his mother why they didn’t have a television set.

“Two reasons. We’ve been into them before. One, your father doesn’t approve of television. Two, we can’t afford it.”

“You’re always buying books and records,” the boy said. “Television is better than books and records.”

“Is it?”

“Much better. When I have my own house I’m going to have color television in every room. And you can come and watch it,” he concluded grandly.

“Maybe I will at that.”

The door to the garage study opened, ending the interchange. Professor Tappinger came into the living room waving a sheet of paper in each hand.

“The questions and the answers,” he said. “I’ve devised five questions which a well-educated Frenchman should be able to answer. I don’t think anyone else could, except possibly a graduate student of French. The answers are simple enough so that you can check them without having to know too much French.”

“That’s good. Let’s hear them, Professor.”

He read aloud from his sheets: “One. Who wrote the original Les Liaisons dangereuses and who made the modernized film version? Choderlos de Laclos wrote the original, and Roger Vadim made the movie.

“Two. Complete the phrase: ‘Hypocrite lecteur...’

Answer: Hypocrite lecteur, mon semblable, mon frère – from the opening poem of Baudelaire’s Fleurs du mal.

“Three. Name a great French painter who believed Dreyfus was guilty. Answer: Degas.

“Four. What gland did Descartes designate as the residence of the human soul? Answer: the pineal gland.

“Five. Who was mainly responsible for getting Jean Genet released from prison? Answer: Jean-Paul Sartre. Is this the sort of thing you had in mind?”

“Yes, but the emphasis seems to be a little one-sided. Shouldn’t there be something about politics or history?”

“I disagree. If this man is an impostor passing himself off as a political refugee, the first thing he’d bone up on would be history and politics. My questions are subtler; and they cover a range that it would take years to bone up on.”

His eye brightened. “I wish I could put them to him myself.”

“I wish you could, too. But it might be dangerous.”

“Really?”

“Martel pulled a gun on another man today. I think you’d better let me go up against him.”

“And me,” Peter said. “I insist on going along.”

Tappinger followed us out to our cars, as if to make up for his earlier impatience. I thought of offering him money for his work, five or ten dollars, but decided not to risk it. It might only remind him that he needed money and make him angry again.