Читать книгу Devil's Laughter: A Tale of Paris - John Hunter A.A. - Страница 11

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Malou’s flat, Gabrielle found, was situated three doors up in a four-storey building fronting on the Avenue Niel, and occupying an island site in that thoroughfare. There was a uniformed liftman in the marble panelled entrance-hall of the building, and he took Gabrielle aloft in the smoothly silent elevator, saying, as she stepped on to the luxurious carpet of the landing: “Madame’s door is right opposite, Ma’m’selle.”

The flat was tastefully furnished, and Malou, pouring tea, considered Gabrielle intently. Malou wore a gown whose expensive simplicity was the best evidence of her good taste; her talk contained unostentatious references to people she had met at Longchamps, Auteuil, Deauville and Nice. It seemed to Gabrielle, as Malou intended it should, that a little piece of her old life was being placed before her while she sat and drank tea with the woman she had befriended the previous night.

At last, having given Gabrielle a cigarette and lit one herself, Malou leaned back.

“I am going to talk business to you,” she said, “and be perfectly frank in doing so. You probably imagine I am a woman of leisure. I am not. The whole of these premises are mine, though”—with a little laugh and a shrug—“there’s a pretty heavy mortgage on them. By the way, I have not the pleasure of knowing your name.”

Her manner was brisk and businesslike, and Gabrielle tautened under its influence. She hesitated a moment at the implied question, and thought swiftly. Since that fateful interview with the man she had believed to be her father she had ceased to use the name of Gabrielle Laroche. It was a name to which she had no right.

“Lebrun,” she said. “Gabrielle Lebrun.” It was the name by which she was known at her lodgings.

Malou smile at her momentary hesitation. Of course, the girl was lying, but Malou did not mind that. She had been instructed in her part, had been given a description of the girl she was to trap, and her address. Her real name seemed of no importance to Malou at that moment. She accepted the lie.

“I shall call you Gabrielle,” she said. “Listen, Gabrielle, I had with me an English girl named Mabel Calthorpe. She was very useful to me, but she ran off and married an American and I wish to replace her. I propose offering you her position, if you will accept it, and before you say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ I want to explain.” She paused a moment. “I am going to trust you to treat all I say confidentially.”

“Of course,” said Gabrielle, quietly.

Malou appeared to measure her for a space; then continued: “I run the lower floors of this house as an exclusive night club, a cercle privée to which only a small clientele is admitted.” She tapped the ash from her cigarette. “It is my job. That is all. I have no personal or emotional interest in it. People come here to dance, to see the dainty cabaret shows I present to them. They spend money. I would emphasize—and use brutal language in doing so, perhaps—that this is not a house of ill-fame. For that sort of thing I have no use. No woman can come here unescorted.”

Gabrielle listened but said nothing. Malou went on:

“Mabel Calthorpe was useful to me; my friend, in fact. She kept my books. I don’t think she ever once visited the cabaret show or saw the inside of the club during what I might term business hours. Normally, I am a woman who likes the quiet things of life. Fate dictated that I should do what I am doing in order to live nicely, as I like to live. Miss Calthorpe was at once a confidential secretary and a friend. Would you care to take her place?”

Malou spoke crisply, with a hint of indifference in her tone, and Gabrielle, surveying her, found herself believing all that she said. Malou was, thought Gabrielle, the typically hard-headed Gallic woman who can “run” such places as she had described and keep her personality, her thoughts, her inward emotions, outside them.

Owning a night club was no offence against the law. Owning an extremely chic and exclusive night club was the métier of a woman of considerable ability. Malou impressed Gabrielle as possessing this.

Gabrielle hesitated a long time. On the one side was the temptation to live—as Malou put it—“nicely,” to have pretty clothes, some money to spend, a dainty flat for her sheltering, pleasant companionship. On the other side was the beady-eyed shopkeeper, the attic near the Bastille, the omnipresent terror of penury. She surrendered.

“It is very, very kind of you,” she said. “I can do nothing but accept.”

They talked terms, and the terms were generous. In twenty-four hours Gabrielle was installed in Malou’s flat, conning over the books of the night club, that club which, though she knew it not, was already known to the police as the swiftest gaming hell in all Paris.

For above the dance room, entered by doors, discreetly curtained, was a long room, in which was a table with a sunken wheel. There were other tables in the room, where baccarat was played, where much money was lost, and won—by the establishment.

Malou had various friends to whom she introduced Gabrielle, for her assertion that she treated her secretary as her friend was borne out by fact. There was a red-faced man called Gichot, who had been a colonel in the army, and a little lady who called herself his wife, and whose name was Annette. Both were the servants of Le Cagnard and actors in the drama staged for the trapping of Gabrielle. Then there was Monsieur Trevert, on whom the whole plot hinged.

Tall and dark, with long, thin white hands, and deep dark eyes, Trevert, one-time actor in provincial touring companies, now a confidence trickster whose nefarious trade was assisted by histrionic ability, took Gabrielle’s hand when first they met and pressed it to hot, full lips. She shuddered, and when he had gone she told Malou that she did not like him.

Malou shrugged her shoulders and laughed quietly. “Trevert! Oh, he’s all right in his way. A very clever man. One just has to be careful. That is all. He is very fond of women, you know, but easily kept at a distance. Of course, he would admire you, because you are beautiful and fair, and he is dark. I shouldn’t worry about him.”

“No,” agreed Gabrielle, and felt some doubt.

The days passed pleasantly enough for her. Her work was light and she was able to stroll in the Champs Élysées on sunny afternoons, and to drive round the Bois with Malou in the little car Le Gagnard had placed at Malou’s disposal.

Gradually Gabrielle settled down. She felt happier than at any time since Laroche made his disclosure to her, and would have been happier still but for Trevert, who was playing his part superbly and demonstrating that when the ineradicable kink in his nature made him a scoundrel France lost one who might have been a great actor.

He would sit near to Gabrielle in the drawing-room of the flat, and would find occasion to touch her hand, her arm, her frock. He would talk to her, with burning eyes fixed on hers. She would look up sometimes, when she thought she was alone, and find him standing just inside the doorway, watching her. It seemed that he was always near her, that his presence was always indefinably threatening her. So Trevert prepared cunningly for the great moment.

To Malou, Gabrielle made no further reference to the repugnance and fear that Trevert inspired in her, for Malou named Trevert among her friends. She tried to tell herself that she was being childishly foolish and magnifying an instantly conceived antipathy into something stronger, endowing a personality which jarred on hers with a sinister quality unjustified by any logic. But she failed to convince herself.

Trevert remained, omnipresent, threatening, admiring, seemingly desiring....