Escapade

Chapter Five

I knocked.

“Who is it?” The Great Man’s voice, sounding flimsy through the thick oak door.

“Beaumont.”

“Come in.”

The Great Man was sprawled, face up, on the bedspread as though he had toppled there from the edge of a cliff. He was wearing all his clothes and his right arm was flung over his eyes.

“What’s up, Harry?” I asked him.

“Filth,” he said. Even though I was in the same room with him, his voice still sounded flimsy. “Filth. I have never in my life heard such filth.”

“Which filth is that, Harry?”

He swung his arm from his eyes. He sat up and swept his feet off the bed. “You heard him, Phil? That vile little German dwarf?”

“I thought he was Austrian.”

He shrugged. “Austrian, German, what difference? Did you hear him? The child craves sexual possession of his mother! His mother!” He closed his eyes for a moment, then opened them again. “Phil, if my own dear mother were alive to hear this, the shock of it would kill her in an instant. Did you ever hear such an obscenity? I was afraid I would vomit.”

“Well, Harry,” I said. “I’ve read about these psychoanalysts. I don’t think you have to take them all that seriously. They’ve got a lot of theories.”

He shook his head and looked off into the distance. “And this Sir David-how could he possibly talk like that?”

“Sir David likes to shake people up, I think.”

“But to say that about his mother.” He looked at me and said earnestly, “Phil, I truly believe that if ever an angel walked the earth, it was my mother.”

He had said that before, and often.

It was the death of his mother, I think, that had sent him chasing after mediums. Looking for one he could trust, but knowing too much to trust any of them.

I said, “Sounds like Sir David doesn’t feel the same way about his.”

Abruptly, he stood up. “We are leaving, Phil. I cannot remain here, among such people.”

I leaned back against the stone wall and put my hands in my pockets. “What about the seance?”

He waved a hand. “They can hold their ridiculous seance without Houdini.”

“Won’t look good,” I said.

He frowned. “What do you mean?”

“You leave now, you’re admitting defeat.”

He drew himself fully upright. “Houdini never admits defeat.”

“That psychic, Madame Sosostris, she’ll claim you lammed out because you couldn’t prove fraud.”

He snorted. “The famous Madame Sosostris. Where is she? She hasn’t arrived yet, even.”

“Looks worse, then. You wouldn’t even hang around till she showed up.”

He screwed up his face and chewed pensively at his lower lip. He turned and walked over to the window. He put his arms behind his back and grasped his left fist in his right hand and he stared out through the glass.

Maybe he wasn’t staring through it. All he could see through it was darkness. Maybe he was staring at his own reflection.

“Why not just ignore them?” I said. “You’ve got the rest of the world in your pocket, Harry. After this weekend, you’ll never see those two again.”

“Filthy vermin,” he said. He stared at the window.

“What about Conan Doyle?” I said. “Isn’t he a friend of yours? Won’t he be disappointed if you’re not here?”

What I wasn’t saying was that my job would be a lot easier out here in the country than it could ever be in London.

I also wasn’t saying that if we left now, the drive back to London would take us all night. I was too tired to do it myself and too fond of living to let him do it.

“And Lord Bob and Lady Alice,” I said. “You’ll hurt their feelings. That might get around. Maybe you wouldn’t get invited to any more of these soirees.”

He thought for another moment and then he turned from the window. “Yes. Yes, of course. You are entirely right, Phil. They are extremely fine people, Lord and Lady Purleigh, are they not? Extremely gracious. I cannot abuse their wonderful hospitality.”

“Right.”

He nodded. “Very well. We will stay. I can rise above this, above the other two. The vermin. I can ignore them, as you say. What are they to me? Nothing. Less than nothing.”

“Right.”

“Yes. Good.” Once more, he nodded. “But now I think I shall retire for the night. I find myself curiously fatigued.”

“I think I’ll pack it in myself. Mind if I use the bathroom?”

“No, no. Of course not.”

I left his room, walked past the bathroom into mine. I circled around the four-poster bed to the night table. I opened my bag. I hadn’t locked it. People don’t usually bother with an unlocked bag.

But when I dug around a bit, I realized that someone had bothered with this one. Someone had gone through it. Carefully, but not carefully enough.

I lifted out the clothes and set them on the bed. I took out the case that held my razor and my toothbrush and I put it beside the clothes. I lifted out the pint bottle of bourbon and put that beside the case.

“Phil?” The Great Man stood at the doorway between our two rooms.

I straightened up and looked at him across the satin bedspread. “Yeah?”

He was frowning, puzzled. “Someone has attempted to unlock my bag.”

I nodded. “Anything missing?”

He shook his head impatiently. “No, no. The locks are made to my own design and, naturally, they are impregnable. But someone has clearly tried to pick them. To an expert like myself, the signs are unmistakable.” He frowned again. “You seem very calm about this, Phil.”

“Someone got into mine. Didn’t take anything, looks like.” “But who would do such a thing?”

“Couldn’t be any of the others. They were all downstairs. One of the servants, maybe.”

He was standing fully upright. “Phil,” he said, “we must report this at once.”

“Let’s hold off on that for a while, Harry.”

Another frown. “But this is a personal violation. A defilement. And if one of his servants is a thief, Lord Purleigh must learn of it.”

“Whoever he was, he didn’t take anything. And if we tell the boss, all the servants will know we know. Including the one who did it. Maybe things will work out better if he doesn’t know.”

The Great Man considered this. Then he nodded. “We shall possess knowledge that he does not.”

“Like a magician and his audience.”

He nodded again. “It provides us an advantage. And possibly it will enable us to catch him in the act.”

“Right.”

He grinned. “Excellent. I approve. Mum is the word, eh?”

“Mum,” I said.

“Excellent.”

After the Great Man went back inside his room, I reached down into the empty bag and pressed the two concealed snaps with my thumbs. I raised the bag’s false bottom. The little Colt. 32 was still in there. So were the spare magazines.

I replaced the bottom. I hung some clothes in the wardrobe, took my watch from my pocket, placed it on the night table. I undressed, climbed into my pajamas and robe, grabbed the toilet case, went into the bathroom and washed up.

When I opened the bathroom door, the Great Man was standing outside it in his own pajamas. They were impressive. They were black silk and the lapels were piped with gold, and a large ornate golden H was stitched over the chest pocket. He was carrying his toothbrush in one hand and his tooth powder in the other and he was wearing his black silk blindfold across his forehead.

“Good night, Harry,” I said.

He stuck the toothbrush into his left hand, with the tooth powder, and then reached up to his ear and twisted out the lump of beeswax. “What was that?”

“Good night.”

He smiled and nodded. “Good night, Phil. Many pleasant dreams.” He corked up his ear again.

At night he put the blindfold across his eyes and the lumps of wax into his ears because he believed he was an insomniac. He wasn’t. All night long, maybe, he dreamed he was awake. But I had slept in the same compartment with him on the train from Paris to Amsterdam, and for hours I had listened to snores that sounded like coupling hogs. In the morning he told me he hadn’t slept a wink.

I returned to my room, shutting the dividing door behind me. I took off my robe and hung it on a hanger in the wardrobe, then slipped into bed and turned off the light.

I lay there for a while wondering who had broken into my bag. I decided there was nothing I could do about it now. A few minutes later I was asleep.

Something had awakened me.

The door to the suite opening? A footstep?

My eyes were wide open. I narrowed them slightly. I was lying flat on my back. My head was facing the door, my hands were outside the covers.

I kept my breathing slow and regular.

The clouds must have cleared away outside. A slab of moonlight slanted across the room and painted a rectangle of colorless design on the dark Oriental carpet.

I listened.

I heard the faint ticking of my watch on the night table. Nothing else.

With my eyes still narrowed, I peered through the gloom toward the door.

Was there something there, someone there, a lighter shade of gray lurking over there in the darkness?

There was. Something tall and thin. Something the color of ash. It had moved toward me.

It moved again. Very slowly. Silently.

I found myself wishing that I had taken the Colt from the suitcase and tucked it beneath my pillow. I hadn’t thought I would need it tonight.

The thing came closer. It was only a pale smudge against the sooty background and it made no sound at all. And then it floated into the spill of frosty moonlight and I saw that it was a figure shrouded from head to toe in white. It wore a hood that made an empty hole where the face should have been. It held something in its right hand, something that gleamed for an instant in the light of the moon.

It came still closer. It glided out of the moonlight and it became a silhouette, black against silver.

Four feet away.

Three feet.

Two feet from the bed.

It leaned toward me.

I whirled over, swinging my arm. Aiming my fist into the hood, at the spot where its chin should be.

My knuckles clipped the corner of something.

The figure toppled to the carpet, boneless and slack.

I sat up, turned on the light, jumped from the bed, bent down and turned the figure over. The hood fell away

Cecily Fitzwilliam lay there, out cold.

I said an impolite word.

Cecily's eyes opened. “What?” she said. She blinked.

I took the damp washcloth away from her face and dropped it into the ceramic basin I’d set on the floor. “Everything’s okay,” I said.

She blinked again. Her eyes were still unfocused.

I moved the lamp on the nightstand a bit farther away. “Everything’s okay,” I said.

She looked at me. “What happened?”

She was lying on my bed. It wasn’t a shroud she was wearing, it was a white silk robe with an attached hood. She was naked beneath it. I had learned this when I scooped her up and stretched her out along the bed.

“You tripped,” I said.

“I…” She winced. She reached up and put her fingers to her chin. “I hurt, ” she said. She looked vulnerable and lost and about twelve years old.

“Must’ve banged yourself when you fell. Probably what knocked you out.”

Suddenly her eyes opened wide. She looked quickly around the room, then back at me. I was sitting on the edge of the bed in my bathrobe. Her own robe was belted shut but she clutched at it with both hands and tried to draw the front of it closer together. She moved to sit up and then winced again and fell back to the pillow. “What are you doing here?” She was whispering now.

I smiled. “I was just going to ask you the same question.”

“But this is Mr. Houdini’s room!”

“We switched.”

She frowned. “Switched?”

“Exchanged rooms. What did you want with Mr. Houdini?” She lowered her eyebrows. Her hands still gripped the front of her robe. “I don’t see that it’s any of your business.”

Her flat, bored drawl was gone. Maybe it was something she hung up at the end of the day, with her clothes. Before she started wandering into other people’s rooms.

“I handle his appointments,” I said. “Usually he doesn’t have any at two o’clock in the morning.”

“I… If you really must know,” she said in a ferocious whisper, “I wanted to ask him something.” She winced again and she brought her left hand up to her jaw. “ Ow. ”

“Ask him about these?” I held up the object she had brought into the room. I had found it on the floor after I picked her up. A pair of handcuffs.

Her hand dropped to her chest and she blushed. It was a spectacular blush, a deep crimson that tinted her face from the hollow of her throat to the top of her forehead. It told me everything I wanted to know about her coming here, and then some.

I tossed the handcuffs onto the bed.

She looked down at them and then looked back at me. She raised her head. “They’re my grandfather’s,” she whispered defiantly. “Part of his collection. I thought it might be amusing if Mr. Houdini taught me how to unlock them.”

I nodded.

“It’s the truth,” she hissed.

“You don’t have to whisper,” I said. “No one can hear you.”

She glanced toward Houdini’s door. Looked back at me. Carefully, as if trying to decide whether I was telling the truth. She caught her lower lip between her teeth. She blushed again. Not as spectacularly, but still fairly well. She opened her eyes wide and she said, “Are you saying that, about no one being able to hear me, because you have designs on my virtue?”

“Your virtue is safe,” I said.

She looked down at her hands again, and when she looked up into my eyes she was smiling. She was trying for boldness and she got there. “Are you quite certain of that?” she said.

I smiled. I think it was a paternal smile, but I could be wrong. “Time for you to get back to your room,” I said.

She watched me. She lifted her left hand from her chest and ran her index finger down my own hand, from the back of my wrist to the first knuckle of my thumb. She canted her head slightly to the right. “Are all Americans so noble?”

I nodded. “We take an oath.”

Her fingertip was soft and warm. So was the second fingertip, when it joined the first. So was the third. She was still watching me, saying nothing.

I should have stood up. I should have moved away from her. I told myself I was only sitting there because I was curious. Someday I’ll sell myself the Brooklyn Bridge.

“Bedtime,” I said.

“You probably think,” she said, “that I’m a nymphomaniac.” “A nymphomaniac?”

“A woman who desperately-”

“I know what the word means.”

“I had a friend, Gwendolyn, who was declared a nymphomaniac. They put her into an lunatic asylum. She was smitten with one of the footmen at her father’s estate. I’ve always felt that one couldn’t blame her for it, really. Peters was absolutely dishy, and we all had a crush on him, all of us girls. But her parents took her to the family doctor and he signed some papers saying she was a nymphomaniac, and that was that. Now she’s locked away with all the lunatics.”

“Why didn’t her parents just dump the footman?”

“Dump? You mean dismiss him? Oh, they did that, first thing, of course. But Gwendolyn ran off, to be with him. She was totally smitten, you see. But they caught her. And then they had her put away with the lunatics.”

“I’m not sure that one footman makes a nymphomaniac.”

She nodded seriously. “I think that nymphomania, the idea of it, it’s something men invented, don’t you?”

“Probably,” I said. “Come on, Cecily. It’s time for bed.”

“I’m already in bed,” she said. She smiled, and then winced again. “Ow.” Her fingers squeezed lightly at my hand. “We have a rule. Here in England. If someone has a pain, a sore chin, let’s say, someone else has to kiss it. To make it better, you see.”

“We have a rule in America. We don’t fool around with the host’s daughter.”

She made a face. “Or his horse, or his automobile. I’m not just a daughter, you know. I’m not a piece of property. I’m a person in my own right. I’m a human being.”

“I can see that.”

“So. Do I get my kiss?”

She had gotten comfortable with the part she was playing. So had I. That was the problem.

“C’mon,” I said. “Let’s go.”

Her fingers left me. She plucked the handcuffs from the bed and held them out with both hands. She looked at me playfully over the connecting chain. “Who should wear them first, do you think? You? Or me?”

“Let’s go, Cecily.”

She moved pretty quickly for someone who had been unconscious just a few minutes ago. She swung a cuff at my arm and it clicked shut around my wrist. “You, I think.”

I stood up, away from the bed. The handcuffs dangled from my left wrist. “The key, Cecily.”

She laughed. A light musical laugh. She crossed her arms over her chest and she shook her head. She smiled, as smug as a burglar in a bank vault on a rainy Sunday afternoon.

I took a step toward her.

It was then that I heard the scream.

A woman’s scream.

Hard to tell where it came from. But the walls were stone. It had to be somewhere nearby.

Cecily had heard it too. Her head was cocked. The smug look was gone. She was listening, puzzled.

It came again, louder this time. A long frightened shriek. A wail.

I said, “Give me the key, Cecily.”

Cecily’s forehead was furrowed, her mouth was open. She closed her mouth and reached into the pocket of her robe. She frowned. She looked at me. “It’s gone.” She dug around in her pocket. “It’s gone!” Her voice had become shrill. “I had it, I know I had it, but it’s gone!” She looked quickly around the room, looked back at me, her face awry.

Fallen out of the robe when she hit the floor? I glanced around the carpet, didn’t see it.

There had been no more screams. I didn’t know if that was a good thing or a bad one.

I said the impolite word again.

I snatched the handcuffs up into my left hand and stuck both of them, hand and cuffs, into the pocket of my dressing gown. I took a last look at Cecily. She was on her hands and knees now atop the bed, slapping at the bedspread, her short hair flapping frantically as she looked back and forth. I ran to the door and yanked it open and I rushed out into the hall.