The Highbinders

Chapter Six

The gray Rolls drew up in front of a four-story town-house which was painted that peculiar thick London cream that can mask a lot of age as well as a lot of decay. We were in Knightsbridge and the house faced one of those well-cared-for little green squares that have a fence around them with locked gates to keep out the riffraff.

It was an expensive neighborhood, not too far from Harrods and even closer to Beauchamp Place where all the trendy shops were, and the Rolls looked right at home and, for that matter, so did English Eddie Apex.

He had aged well during the ten or eleven years since I had last seen him. He was a bit thicker around the middle, but the genius who had tailored his suit out of tiny gray worsted herringbones made you forget about the waist and concentrate on the marvelous thing that had been done for the shoulders. Apex wore a blue striped shirt with a white collar and cuffs and what could only have been a club tie because it was such a tatty blue and black. I estimated that he was wearing close to £150 on his back and maybe another £40 on his feet in the form of a pair of black loafers that shone like waxed marble.

He wasn’t wearing a hat, and I could understand why. It might have mussed his hair which had been a deep, shining yellow when I had last seen him, the color of old gold — or perhaps new brass, since it belonged to Eddie Apex. Now it was a softly shining gray, the same shade as old, well-cared-for silver. Or new pewter.

Worn just long enough to be fashionable, his hair was almost the only thing about Apex that had changed. He was a little heavier, but not much, and there might have been a new line or two in his face, which was still as open as church and as honest as truth. Now in his early forties, Eddie Apex looked both distinguished and important enough to be a cabinet member, or a seasoned diplomat, or at least somebody who might be trusted to read the evening news over BBC. For some reason I found myself hoping very hard that Eddie Apex was still retired.

With the aid of the chauffeur, who looked almost old enough to be my grandfather, we got out of the Rolls, walked up a short curving flight of iron steps, through what may have been an Adams door, and into the center hall that was furnished with some stiff chairs and useless tables that looked uncomfortable and rickety enough to be antiques, although a lot of English furniture looks that way to me.

The elderly chauffeur had relinquished his care of us at the car and a stooped, thin man who might have been his uncle took over in the hall. He murmured, “Good morning, sir,” to Apex, and ran his filmy blue eyes over me with what seemed to be disapproval, or perhaps disappointment over my not having anything to hand him such as a hat and cane.

“Jack, would you tell my wife that we’ll be in the drawing room,” Apex said, just as if he had been saying it all his life.

“Yes, sir,” said Jack, the butler, and moved away with a surprisingly spry step for a man whose age I estimated to be around 102.

“You have any trouble with all this kid help of yours?” I said.

“They came with my wife,” Apex said, opening a door for me.

“When did you get married?”

“About six years ago.”

“That’s about the time I got divorced,” I said.

The drawing room was better than the center hall, in my opinion. It was modern, if you still happen to think that 1937 was modern. It was an oblong room, not quite narrow, and held an overabundance of chunky angular furniture heavily upholstered in some rather garish shades such as caution orange, schoolbus yellow, and roadmap green. There was a dark brown carpet on the floor and on the walls some flaming abstract paintings that I didn’t much like either. Tucked away in the fireplace was that peculiar British invention, an electric space heater, which on a cold day might bring the room up to a cozy forty-seven degrees.

“Would you like something?” Apex said.

“What, for instance?”

“Another drink?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“Tea?”

“Tea would be fine.”

Apex moved over to the fireplace and pushed a button in a wall speaker that looked as if it had been recently installed — around 1951. “We would like some tea, please, Jack.”

The box squawked something tinny that sounded very much like “Right away, sir.”

I sat down in an orange chair with wide arms and Apex chose a yellow one. “Well,” he said, “it’s been a long time.”

I looked around the room. “You’re a long way from Cadillac Square.”

“Yes, I am, aren’t I.”

“You like it here, I take it.”

Apex nodded. “It’s civilized.”

“That’s what they used to say about the Choctaws, until they got them riled or drunk or both.”

“You don’t find it so? Civilized, I mean?”

“I don’t think London is any more civilized than any other big city. In many ways London is just like New York. They’re both falling apart at the same places and if you’re poor, they’re both rotten places to live. If you’re rich — well, if you’re rich, almost anywhere is a good place to live.”

“Strange you should say that,” Apex said. “Most Americans like London.”

“That’s because a quaint brand of English is spoken here. If they spoke French here, you wouldn’t get five tourists a year.”

Eddie Apex smiled. “You exaggerate.”

“Not much,” I said. “Think it over while you’re deciding when you’re going to tell me why you got me over here.”

“We brought you over here, Mr. St. Ives, to get our sword back.” It was a drawling, husky voice and it came from behind me and it belonged to a woman. I rose and turned. She was standing in the doorway of the drawing room, smiling a little, and gazing at me with eyes that reminded me of a cat’s, the half-wild kind that hasn’t lived around the hearth too long. But it was her high cheekbones and her artful makeup that probably caused her eyes to look that way, that and the fact that, like a cat, she didn’t seem to blink very often.

Apex had risen and was smiling. “You haven’t met Ceil, have you?”

“No,” I said. “I haven’t. Hello, Mrs. Apex.”

She crossed the room and held out her hand, still smiling. “I hope, Mr. St. Ives, that you won’t be disappointed to learn that I adore listening at keyholes.”

“Nothing I like better myself,” I said, “unless it’s reading other people’s mail.”

“Oh, do you like to do that, too?”

“I also have a few other failings.”

She let go of my hand and cocked her head to one side, studying me with those eyes that I saw were somewhere between blue and green. “And you’re going to be our go-between. How nice.”

“I’m going to discuss it, at least.”

Before she could say anything else, Jack, the ancient butler, wheeled in the tea trolley.

“Oh, good, tea,” she said. “Over here, Jack, I think.” Over here was near a straight-backed chair that had been covered with a green material that I thought might have looked better on a snooker table. She lowered herself into the chair and then waited for the old man to roll the tea trolley over.

“Thank you, Jack,” she said.

“Will the gentleman be staying for luncheon, mum?”

“Didn’t I tell you? We’ll all be going to Father’s for lunch.”

“I’ll tell cook then, mum. She won’t like it, will she? But I’ll tell her.”

“And I’ll tell Father hello for you. And Uncle Norbert, too.”

“Yes, mum. You do that. Tell him I said hello. And your uncle, too. Him, too. And I’ll tell cook that there’ll be nobody for lunch. Nobody at all.” The old man stood there for a moment as if trying to think of somebody else he should tell, and when he couldn’t, he turned and moved briskly away with his spry step.

“Poor old Jack,” Ceil Apex said.

“How old is he?”

“Jack? I don’t really know.”

“He was a wedding gift,” Apex said.

“He wasn’t either,” she said. “It was just that when Dad and Uncle Norbert moved into their new flat, there wasn’t room for Jack. Or Tom either.”

“Tom’s the chauffeur,” Apex said. “He was a wedding gift, too.”

“Of course, Tom’s younger than Jack,” Ceil Apex said. “At least ten years younger.”

“Tom’s only seventy,” Apex said.

“Jack’s not eighty.”

“How old was Jack when you first remember him?”

She thought about it as she arranged the teacups. “Well, he was getting on even then and that was twenty years ago — when I first remember him.”

More like twenty-five years ago, I thought, as I sat there watching her pour the tea. I guessed her age at being around thirty, a year either way. She had one of those faces in which the bones are just right and she would look the same at forty as she did now and not much older at fifty unless her neck and throat started to go. Her hair was that light ash blond color that she could start frosting at thirty-five or so and nobody would ever know whether it was really going gray or not. Although her cat eyes were her best feature, she had a nice nose and a firm chin, perhaps a little too firm, and one of those wide, happy-looking mouths that seldom seemed to be still, even if she weren’t talking. She wasn’t a beauty, at least not in the accepted meaning of the word, but she had a face that would stay with you for a long time.

“How do you like your tea, Mr. St. Ives?” she said.

“With a little sugar.”

Apex was still up so I sat there and let him hand me my cup and then we were all sitting there, sipping our tea and smiling at each other in the big house in Knights-bridge and except for our clothes, it might have been May of 1938.

“You mentioned a sword,” I said.

“Yes, I did, didn’t I?” she said.

“Do you know much about swords, Phil?” Apex said.

“Next to nothing. I know even less about any sword that’s worth one hundred thousand pounds. Unless it’s Excalibur.”

“Or Durandel,” Ceil said and smiled.

“Roland’s, right?”

“See,” she said to her husband. “He does know something about them.”

“Look at his face,” he said.

She studied it for a moment. “Apprehension mingled with skepticism, I’d say.”

Apex nodded. “He thinks I’ve come out of retirement.” He grinned at me. “Ceil knows all about what I once did to make ends meet.”

“He was very good at it, too, did you know that, Mr. St. Ives?”

“So I’ve heard,” I said. “But it doesn’t sound like him.”

“What?”

“King Arthur’s sword would be a little gamey even for you, wouldn’t it, Eddie?”

This time he laughed. “I might have worked it for five hundred quid now and again, but not for a hundred thousand.”

“But there is a sword?” I said.

Apex nodded.

“And it’s been stolen?”

“From my father,” Ceil Apex said. “And uncle.”

“And the thieves want a hundred thousand pounds to hand it back?”

“That’s right.”

“So it’s worth how much?”

Apex thought about it. “At a million pounds, it would be a steal; at two million pounds, an irresistible bargain.”

“It’s hot then, isn’t it?” I said. “I mean there wouldn’t be all this hush-hush about it, if it weren’t hot.”

Apex glanced at his wife. They smiled at each other. “Well, I suppose you could say it’s hot, but the rightful owners not going to do much complaining.”

“Why?”

“Because,” Apex said, “he’s been dead for about eight hundred years.”