Chapter 11
The next day in a taxi on the way to Bemrose’s office, Larry warned Janice not to provoke any arguments.
She withdrew to her corner of the cab and tossed a burned-out match on the rubber mat, taking jerky puffs at her cigarette. The wide rouged mouth made a nice contrast with the gray Persian of her coat and with her Cossack-style fur turban. Janice’s long, straight hair, brushed close to her cheek, looked darker next to the gray fur.
“What’s worrying him?” she asked. “If he’s going to upset easy, maybe we’d better not——”
“Supposing Shore is mixed up in this. That would be something for him to worry about.”
“I don’t see why. What if he is?” she asked perversely, twisting the end of her cigarette on the metal snuffer of an ash tray.
“Anything about Shore is Arthur’s business. I thought you agreed last night——”
“You didn’t say he was going to be difficult,” she objected. “What’s the matter with him?”
Larry began to regret that he had suggested the meeting. Aside from Shore’s possible involvement in a suspicious deal that Janice had turned up during her trip—he really did think Bemrose should know that Janice planned to incriminate Shore—Larry had figured it might do him good to see her once and get it out of his system.
“The same old thing is eating him. The War,” Larry said.
“I thought surely he’d be in uniform by now.” Janice fumbled in her pouch-shaped handbag through a snarl of cigarettes, compact, lipstick, gloves, notebooks, memos, letters and handkerchiefs, and brought out a white card with scribbling on it. “Here, you better hang on to my notes. I went back to the stateroom and jotted down what Richter said. This is the dope.”
Larry slipped the card into his wallet. “He’s been breaking his neck to get a commission, but no luck so far. He’s going to enlist soon if they won’t take him. He says that he’s fed up hanging around.”
“It’s ridiculous for him to think of enlisting. Anyone with his connections in Washington.”
“I don’t think he has any connections in the Army, but you’d imagine if Tom Newton spoke to someone in the War Department— Hell, I thought this was what he was saving up for. All the favors he’s done Newton for years——”
“I know a few spots where the State Department could use him if the Army won’t take him,” Janice said. “They’re screaming for trained people at the Embassy in London.” She turned her foot and studied the platform sole of her shoe which made her taller by an inch or so.
“You probably could fix it for him,” Larry said.
“Maybe I could, but it’s like calling the boy scouts when the Empire State building’s on fire. He knows more people who can help him than I do. He ought to be able to produce action faster than I could.”
Larry kicked the small seat in front of him and it fell forward with a thump. “I don’t think he likes to ask. I’m willing to bet he hasn’t said a word to Newton.”
“He’d better stop fooling around. If he doesn’t watch out, they’ll take him as a private.”
“Sure they’ll take him.”
“Maybe he’ll feel more patriotic, being a private.”
“You don’t know many fellows his age who are willing to give up what he’d be giving up,” Larry asked.
She looked at him incredulously, and he knew what she meant. The millions of poor devils over there. Not only willing but already sacrificing more than a job.
“All right, who?” Larry asked. “I mean here. Not in England, and not the Poles or the Czechs. I said someone who wasn’t forced to go but who wanted to——”
“Don’t make him sound so damned noble.”
“All right, but you’re lucky just the same that he’s willing to see you.”
“Why?”
“You walked out. After you promised me to hang around,” Larry reminded her. “I wouldn’t have blamed him if he refused to see you.”
“I went away because he seemed to need time to think it over. I was only giving him a chance to find out what was in his own heart, what he really felt like doing about us,” Janice argued.
“What were you supposed to be doing while he was thinking it over?” Larry asked.
“Finding out whether I was in love with him.”
“Are you?”
“There was a man in Sweden. He thought so,” Janice said. “After a few weeks he decided I wasn’t even a prospect for love. He seemed quite disturbed by it.” Her profile was quiet, and the smoothly arched nose remained rigid.
“That fellow in Sweden ought to get together with Arthur’s wife someday.”
After a minute Larry asked, “Why don’t you talk to him about taking a job in London? He needs to get away.”
“What about his wife? What would she do if he walked out? He can’t just walk out because the going is tough.”
“Jan, let me go to see him and tell him what’s on your mind about Shore,” Larry offered. “He’s been through hell. If you turn up and make cracks about his marriage——”
“What’s the matter with his marriage? Can’t his wife keep him from being upset?”
“He won’t let anyone help him,” Larry reminded her. “He hasn’t changed.”
“He lets you.”
“He talks himself out at me because I don’t see his friends, and I don’t run into his clients,” Larry said. “I’m outside of his life, and when he talks to me, it’s like telling it to this.” He thumped the leather seat between them.
The taxi pulled up a few feet west of Forty Wall Street. Larry shoved even change and a quarter tip into the driver’s hand. “I’m not asking for miracles,” he told her. “Only go easy on him. Remember, he’s not in good shape.”
“I don’t believe it.” Her grin had the glitter of winter sunshine. “He’ll never be in bad shape while he has you for a friend.”
It took Janice only a few minutes to tell Bemrose about Richter. She hurried her story as if she were anxious to have it over and get away. Larry could see that the meeting had turned out to be an ordeal for Janice, too. He could tell by the vertical blue vein which stood out on her forehead, emphatically dividing it.
Outwardly Bemrose was controlled, a little quiet and reserved toward her, but calm. Buttressed by his massive desk, he listened impersonally.
Janice described her meeting with Gerhardt Richter on the ship coming over. Richter was a Fifty-seventh Street art dealer with Berlin connections. Anyone with a name like that might have been suspect in wartime, and when Janice heard him brag to another passenger about the time he had dined with Goering, she drew the obvious conclusion. One afternoon when she was alone at the bar, Richter turned up. He was going to stop for a drink but saw her and changed his mind. Another time he rather pointedly left the sun deck when she sat down two steamer chairs away. The purser tried to introduce them the first day at sea when they were both in line waiting to change some bills, but Richter fumbled in his pocket, muttered something about forgetting his stateroom key, and hastily left the line. Her own stateroom was in the corridor that ran directly past the purser’s desk, and on the third day out, she emerged from the passageway just as Richter was handing the officer a wrapped cylinder about six inches in diameter and two feet long. Richter cautioned him that the bulky package must be locked up. The purser said it was too long to fit in the safe, but he might find room in a storage closet that had a safety catch. Richter explained that the package contained valuable art which had been entrusted to him by an important client. Then he saw Janice, who had been standing quietly at the corridor exit, and without leaving the package or finishing his conversation, he hurried back to his stateroom. The purser shrugged, and swung closed the door of the safe.
That same night after a movie in the recreation hall on B deck, Janice stopped to chat with Richter’s confidant, a sun-dried Italian business man of about fifty. He told her that on previous business trips to New York he had visited Richter’s Fifty-seventh Street gallery which specialized in old masters. The Italian himself didn’t care for old French or Dutch, but Richter had told him on this trip that he was bringing back some Brueghels. Now there was a painter. The Italian rubbed the fake buttonhole of his lapel. No one had ever handled crowds like Brueghel. Especially Brueghel the Elder. Crowds, comedy, and color. Brueghel was one old master the Italian wouldn’t mind collecting himself. He sighed. It was his misfortune not to have the price for art. If this filthy war ever ended— But by that time the Germans or the rich Americans, like Richter’s client, would own everything.
Then Richter had a client for whom he was buying the Brueghels? While Janice questioned the Italian, another screen of her brain showed the Brueghel painting of a Flemish feast day which she had seen and loved in Vienna. The Italian mentioned the name of Richter’s New York client, Signor Way. Way, Way. Janice tried to pin him down, but he admitted that his memory for foreign names was terrible. The name was something that meant a path or a way, he feebly recalled. Richter told him the client had made his money in Wall Street.
Could it be anyone named Signor Shore, Janice had asked.
It was not impossible, the Italian admitted, rubbing the false buttonhole.
Goering. Brueghel. Janice wondered what the Nazis would want of a humorous painter. Rubens and his undulating nudes perhaps, but not a satirist. She made the jumps quickly. Brueghel. Vienna. New York. Wall Street. Davis Shore. The Nazis selling art for cash, Richter the intermediary for an American collector who put up the money. It was a little raw to lift a Brueghel from the wall of a Vienna museum, but Goering or even Hitler himself might have confiscated the painting from a private collection, arranged with Richter to sell it and have the proceeds deposited in Mexico or the Argentine. It sounded fantastic. Self-consciously Janice looked at Bemrose. However, it was no more incredible than some other well-known Nazi deals, she said defensively. The name of Shore was the wildest kind of guess, of course, except that she had remembered Arthur telling her about a collection of Flemish paintings at Shore’s Long Island place. She might be dead wrong about Shore, Janice told him, but she didn’t think she was mistaken about Richter. He had bragged about visiting Goering, and— Well, one look at him with his bull neck and fishbowl glasses. Besides he had definitely tried to avoid her, and that in itself was suspicious.
She had thought of going straight to the F.B.I. and putting the whole thing in their laps—Janice reached for the card of notes she had given Larry in the taxi, and he handed them to her. Here was the evidence, she explained. She had jotted down exactly what was said by Richter, the purser, and the Italian whose name was Terelli. Naturally she had no idea how Richter had made out with the paintings at customs. He couldn’t possibly have smuggled in a cylinder two feet long. Maybe the F.B.I. picked him up at the pier. But if by any chance he got the pictures past customs unopened— That’s why she had called Larry for advice. She wasn’t sure whether to go to the F.B.I. directly, although her instinct told her to go——
Larry kept an eye on Bemrose. “When she told me Shore might be mixed up in it, I thought she better see you first. I knew you wouldn’t want Shore’s name to come into it unless we were absolutely sure——”
Bemrose had been taking notes while Janice talked. He reread them and excused himself from the room. Janice, trying to decipher her pencil scrawls, put on green harlequin frame glasses to make out the writing on the dogeared card.
When Arthur returned about five minutes later, he looked relieved. “Nothing to it,” he reported. “Shore never heard of Richter. He buys through the Valentine Galleries.”
Janice’s lips divided her jaw like a track of red metal. “You didn’t phone him,” she objected. “You didn’t go and phone Shore without telling us.”
“Why not? That was a serious charge, and I felt I had to ask him. Maybe you don’t remember the Lusk committee after the last war, but I do,” he reminded her. “Did you ever hear of the wholesale witchhunts under our Attorney-General at that time, Mr. A. Mitchell Palmer?” He frowned. “They blackjacked three hundred men whose only crime was being foreigners. They broke in and searched homes without a warrant. They made false arrests.” Bemrose slammed his hand against the corner of his desk. “They did away with trials by imposing sentences before trial. They took prisoners, and when they had them locked up, they denied them counsel and bail. They kept out reporters and wrote canned press releases. There was a nasty non-liberal stink to the whole business, and if we don’t watch out, we’ll have the same thing over again in this War. That’s what happens in wartime. Everyone becomes suspect. The thing rolls up like a snowball. If people start running to the F.B.I. about everyone who talks with a foreign accent— Or even every German for that matter——”
“Richter isn’t every German,” Janice protested. She stuffed the notes into the fur pocket of her coat and got up. “Forget it. Forget the whole thing. I’ll handle it.”
Larry motioned her to wait. “Tell Arthur something about your trip,” he said. “Tell him what you think about the way the War is going.”
Janice sat down again and described conditions in England when she had left three weeks ago. “Larry says you might want to hook up with Lend-Lease. There are plenty of openings in London. If you want to know whom to see——”
“I have some Army feelers out. Thanks just the same.”
Larry felt a thickening of the tension. “Arthur would rather get a commission,” he explained to her.
“I suppose you’re down in Washington most of the time.”
“Not all the time. Once in a while.”
“I wondered.”
“Why?”
“No one in New York seems to see much of you.”
“He’s been busy fixing over his house,” Larry said.
“What have you done to it?” Janice asked. “I saw the Storeys, and they didn’t mention it being done over.”
“They haven’t been up. I haven’t gotten around to asking them.”
She must have noticed that Bemrose said I, not we. She must have realized that he hadn’t as yet accepted fully the idea of his marriage.
“They were wondering why you didn’t invite them to that reception you had last summer. They heard about it and naturally they wanted to meet your wife.”
“I arranged it at the last minute,” Bemrose apologized. “Larry can tell you——”
“It wasn’t a real party, just a few people,” Larry said.
“I bumped into Judd Harrison at the airline office the other day when I went to pick up my tickets,” Janice said.
“I haven’t seen him for months.”
“I know. He wondered if you were hibernating.”
Bemrose’s lip jerked sharply, and the old distracting tic started.
“Judd thought maybe you were afraid to let your wife be seen by eligible wolves. I told him you’d never have to worry about amateur competition.” Janice thrust her open cigarette case toward him, laughing with her eyes. “On me.”
She settled back, and for the first time since Larry walked in with her this morning, things seemed easy between them.
“When is your friend Churchill going to kick out Franco?” Bemrose taunted her.
“When he gets through using him.”
“Using him for what? To keep the German Army supplied?”
She slipped out of her coat and threw it over the rounded back of the armchair. Her upper topography showed to advantage in a plain black dress cut to a low V at the throat. “How do you know what Franco’s going to do for him? Maybe England plans to base troops in Spain and use them to clean up Italy.”
“You mean he’s going to take on another war? He hasn’t his hands full enough with Hitler?” Bemrose asked.
“Maybe that’s his plan for defeating Hitler,” Janice said.
“Where did you pick up that idea? In London?” Bemrose sounded skeptical, his training in suspicion coming out.
“Why couldn’t I figure it out for myself? It makes good sense. I don’t have to get all my ideas from other people. Once in a while I figure things out for myself.”
“That’s what I thought when you went to Sweden without calling me,” Bemrose said. “I thought you had things figured out.”
“I did call you. You were out of town.” She swallowed hard.
“You have just an hour to make the airport, Jan,” Larry reminded her. “That isn’t long. We may get caught in traffic.”
“You know as well as I do that the British can’t afford to lose the Mediterranean,” Janice addressed Bemrose. “How are they going to get supplies through the Suez Canal if they lose their southern ports? Have you ever stopped to think that with Greece gone——”
“But it’s playing off one dictator against another, and they’re nasty boys to play with,” Bemrose protested.
“Why is he running down the British?” Janice appealed to Larry. “I thought he was pushing for us to get in and fight with them.”
“We can be allies and not swallow all their policies. I don’t care much for the way they’re handling the situation in India, do you?” Bemrose slammed shut the drawer of his desk, although it was only open a few inches.
“India is quite a subject. Let’s talk about it when I get back from Hollywood,” Janice offered. “I’d like to come up anyway and spend an evening with you. You can show me how you’ve done over your place, and you can introduce me to Mrs. Bemrose.”
She was buttoned into her coat before Larry could reach her. As she extended her hand to Bemrose, Larry remembered what a firm, compact implement it could be.
“I’ll see you dressed in eagles on the next trip,” she predicted.
Bemrose followed them through the reception room to the corridor, but Janice didn’t turn back. She grabbed Larry’s sleeve and raced him along the slippery stone floor to the elevator.
The first cab, a Yellow, turned them down, but a Checker offered to drive them to the airport if they would skip the Queensborough traffic and use the twenty-five-cent Triboro bridge instead. Larry steadied a cigarette between his lips, trying to keep the end dry before offering it to Janice. She refused, flipping open the lid of her compact and looking uncertainly into the mirror.
“First you bring up Shore. Then all that about no one seeing him. I told you it doesn’t take much for him to go off—” Larry said.
“Phoning behind our backs, walking in two minutes later with the answer. That may be the way he wins cases, but thank God I don’t have to sit on the jury and listen to him.” She vengefully stroked the straight, long mouth with purple lipstick.
“He’ll feel better the minute the Army takes him,” Larry said. “Everything’s unsettled with him. He doesn’t know what to do about his practice, whether to close the house, or where to put Lucy. He has no idea where he’ll be sent if they give him a commission——”
“I can’t see him again. It takes too much out of me. For all he cares, I could have stayed in Stockholm. It’s hard on me, Larry, very hard——”
Larry reached for her hand, and the small joints went limp in his fist. “He was covering up, too. It was just as hard for him to see you.”
“I suppose he was right about Shore,” she said contritely.
“Probably.”
“I didn’t expect him to apologize for getting married, but I thought he’d, well, I thought he’d be glad to see me. And he didn’t have to blame me for walking out. I hung around for weeks waiting——”
“That stuff about Shore threw him.” Larry stroked the knuckles of her hand.
“But before I even told him about Shore, when we first walked in—‘Good to see you, my good girl,’ she mimicked. You’d think I was there begging him to keep me out of jail.”
“I bet he didn’t close his eyes last night. Not after he heard you were in town. When he saw you, he was thrown. He forgot to ask you about the tax matter that came up when you were away,” Larry reminded her. “That’s how much you could have stayed in Stockholm.”
“That’s right. You said last night he had trouble with my taxes.” The black eyes widened. “He didn’t write me, did he?”
“I don’t know. Anyway his mind didn’t seem to be on taxes this morning.” Larry grinned, and he squeezed her narrow shoulders.
“He remembered to cover up for Shore, his mind was clicking where Shore was concerned,” she said bitterly. “I’m not going to drop it. I’m going to turn Richter in.”
“Think it over, Jan,” Larry cautioned. “You’ll have enough on your mind out in Hollywood without turning up spies.”
“And let Richter go on working for the Nazis?”
“I’ll see an F.B.I. man I know here in town. I’ll ask him if they have a record on Richter,” Larry promised.
They swept across the bridge, and traveling high above the East River, looked down at the stadium on Randall’s Island, ahead to Welfare with its city of public hospitals set solidly in the moving water life of tugboats, lighters, and barges. Larry always felt as though he owned it from up here—the River and the streams of cars and drivers. Everything except the bridge. The bridge, for all the delicacy of its steelwork, had its own indestructible character. It owned him. He imagined that even if he were Commissioner Robert Moses and had helped to build the span, its flawless functioning would awe him. Larry wasn’t an atheist, but he hadn’t been inside a house of worship in years. This perfect steel image aroused whatever religious sparks lay dormant. He felt more reverent about it than about an old church like St. Mark’s of the Bouwerie around the corner from where he lived, the place where Peter Stuyvesant was buried.
When he remembered about Janice, she was crying. The tears calmly washed her unrouged cheeks.
“For a smart girl, you’re not being specially smart,” he said, offering her his handkerchief.
The tears stopped, and she looked at him.
“Do you remember what I told you? You don’t run away,” Larry said. “You ran away once, and you’re miserable because you did, but now you’re doing it again, acting as if you’ve signed up for the track team the rest of your life.”
A sob broke loose, and Larry figured from its unwilling harshness that it was a symbol of weakness which had not been shaken from her in years.
“Maybe he’s happy,” she said humbly. “If he is, I haven’t any right——”
“For someone who’s happy, he is easily thrown. I wouldn’t say that he acted happy when you walked in this morning.”
“It’s too late,” Janice said. “He’s all set. He has a wife, a home. What would he want of me now?”
Larry shrugged. “It’s late for us to get into the War, too, but we’re going to get into it just the same.”
“I know one of my troubles,” Janice admitted. “I keep doing second what I really want to do first.”
“Which do you do first, the job?” Larry asked.
Her hair moved solemnly across her cheek. “When I’m like this, it isn’t worth doing. When I’ve just seen him, even the War doesn’t matter. All I want to do is stick around. That’s how I feel. The trouble is I’m trained to work, not to feel.”
“Just once, why don’t you turn things around and let your feelings tell you what to do?” Larry suggested. “It makes more sense than running off carbon copies of a mistake. That man in Sweden knew you weren’t feeling. There will be other men, and they’ll know it when they’re with you. You can’t go on living logically, figuring everything out with your bean, even if it’s a good bean.”
“I’ll get hurt. If I let myself go. I can’t risk it, Larry. I’d go to pieces.” The tears started again.
Larry picked up his handkerchief from where she had left it on the seat and blotted her eyes.
“Why not look at it this way, and then maybe you’ll stop resenting him,” Larry advised. “With Bemrose the War really is the thing. That doesn’t mean that he didn’t miss you while you were gone, or that he wasn’t tied in a knot when he heard last night that you were back in this country. I was with him and saw his reaction. He damned near went to pieces. Once Arthur is set in a job, maybe he’ll be able to handle himself better. He’ll know more what to do about you, about his marriage, and whatever else is bothering him. The thing that is knocking him off base is not having it settled and not being in the War.”
“The War comes first, and I’m second, or third, or tenth,” Janice said.
“Right now the War comes first,” Larry agreed. He saw that they were curving off the parkway into a drive that circled the entrance to the airport. “I’d let him know how it is with you. He’s going to settle this Army thing any day, and while he’s changing his life around, you ought to let him know. He’d want to know. He was probably looking for some signs from you this morning, but you had all the flags down,” Larry reminded her.
She reached into her pocket for three baggage checks.
Larry took them. “Now’s the time to talk to him, Jan. Don’t put it off too long. Things move fast during a war.”
“As soon as I get back from the Coast,” she promised. “Before some editor decides to send me to China.”
Larry helped her gently through the low door of the taxi. “I think he always figured the job came ahead of him. With you, too. He’ll be relieved to find out that some of you wants to hang around.”
Later when Larry saw her thin, small frame disappear up the ramp into the monstrous silver hulk, he felt better than he had in months about Janice. She might turn out to be more than an affair for Bemrose, if his marriage continued to go sour and he needed an affair. The Janice he had seen this morning had a little the look and sound of the real thing.