Читать книгу A Variety of Weapons - Rufus King - Страница 3

CHAPTER I

Sun sliced in with elegance through slatted blinds while New York sweltered far below, and Fanny Mistral, Inc., thought: Of all damn days for ocelots!

She was a tightened woman, like a very smart and newly reupholstered chair, unyielding, exact, and, as with most career women, electric with charm, with a swift awareness of the least happenings in her celebrated world, and frightened stiff of common human warmth.

Fanny lifted an office telephone and said: “Ask Miss Ledrick to come in, please.”

She thought, while waiting, of Ann Ledrick and on the general oddity of how chance could type you for life. Several months ago Fanny had sent for Ann simply because the girl had won an award in the Year Book of American Photography for a stunning shot of a Manx cat: fast pan, 1/100 sec., f:22. She had looked at Ann’s other stuff: more cats, many dogs, that handsome thing of a colt in sun-tipped wheat, then those frustrated eyes of a tiger in the Bronx Zoo. She had hired Ann on the spot.

The bulk of Fanny’s prominent clients owned pets, and there had been no one in the office who had ever touched Ann Ledrick’s work. Victor Lejeune was the nearest, but he remained far better with dowagers whose bosoms he could reduce through his artistry in lighting and with capitalistic giants whom he succeeded in keeping titanic while rendering them less harassed (he did something with a spot which neutralized the suicidal gleam), but with animals his portraits had always registered a reproachful reaction of outraged distaste.

Fanny looked up as Ann Ledrick came in, and for a moment the warmth of a human doubt made her wonder: Is it fair? I don’t quite like this. The ocelots won’t be bad, but there’s the whole unpleasant atmosphere of the job. When you thought what the place must be like even after twenty years. Its atmosphere would not have dissipated from the very fact that Marlow would have kept it alive: brooding in it, steeped in it as he was reputed to have been throughout those two decades. No matter with what luxury and truffled wealth.

Not that there could be any danger in a physical sense, unless you considered the imponderables of a mind so inbred with the companionship of tragedy and hate—hate? Yes, Fanny thought, that would be there too: a hatred against a social structure that for twenty years had turned a deaf ear to Marlow’s lone, pitiable cry and made it impotent. Absurd. Anecdotes concerning a place of that sort were always fantastic. It was the same way with that stupendous ranch in Texas where men were rumored to have entered and never to have been seen again. The tepid warmth cooled, and Fanny was efficiently electric again.

“Sit down, Miss Ledrick.”

“Thank you.”

“You are leaving for Black Tor at three this afternoon from the airport. A Marlow plane will take you. They have their own landing field on the grounds which are, incidentally, four thousand acres in the heart of the Adirondacks. There is a common rumor that entire safaris have perished from starvation while attempting to trek to the house itself. A rumor highly discouraging to uninvited guests, especially as there are no roads. People simply do not drop in.”

“It sounds like the lair of a cult.”

“It isn’t. I am afraid you will be bored stiff with normality. You will be plied with pressed duck and caviar and with trout so fresh that they still look dazed. Champagne will glitter through you, and you will take a lot of pretty pictures of Estelle Marlow’s beloved ocelots. There are three of the brutes, and she obviously adores them because she evacuated them with her from Paris around a year ago. You must tell me, when you get back, how.”

“I will. With details of their reception in Lisbon.”

“Good. Miss Marlow specified when she telephoned that you be sent. Her cousin remembered your shot of the Manx in the Year Book and is still impressed. You know, that’s odd—”

“What is?”

“How did Marlow know you were with us? Certainly not from the Year Book. But then it isn’t, really.”

“Why?”

“People of Marlow’s wealth, Miss Ledrick, just say to their secretary: ‘Get me that girl who did the Manx cat.’ And you’re got. You are expected to stay at Black Tor for a week and perhaps longer.”

For a moment Fanny studied Ann critically as a woman and not as a Graflex. It’s all right, Fanny thought. The girl is devilishly attractive-looking if you like the dark Irish type, and she has style. She’d never set loose any glares of anguish among the six best-dressed women, but that’s only because she hasn’t the money to buy the clothes that they can. Certainly she was manner enough, what with Spence and her training in hauling ropes of daisies over the grass at Vassar. Fanny was a little bitter about this. Her own daisy culture had taken place on Grandpa Eulis’ farm in Oshkoton, Iowa.

Fanny said, “How are you off for clothes?”

“Better put it down as adequate. Than which there is little grimmer.”

“All right. Estelle Marlow suggests something warm. She says it gets cold in the mountains. She must be something of a homebody in spite of her ocelots, although I can’t see how.” A touch of earthy humanity once more disturbed Fanny. “Do you know about the Marlows?”

“No. Should I?”

“Not necessarily. It was a long time ago.”

“What was?”

Fanny said sharply, “Nothing. Nothing that could possibly be of the slightest consequence to anyone today. Justin Marlow is a man in his late seventies. Estelle Marlow is his cousin. She must be in her forties and was one of the sights of Paris until the Germans chased her out. It was a common habit for sight-seeing buses to lump her in with the Arc de Triomphe and Gertrude Stein. Her salon was a feeding trough for battered tiaras and dented crowns. I want a blow-by-blow report on her too.”

“What will I need?”

“Your camera, film packs, and flash bulbs. They’ve everything else there, and she wants the works. Your job is to stay until she gets them. Good-by, Miss Ledrick.”

“Good-by.”

Fanny found herself watching the closing door. She also found herself shuddering as she muttered, “And good luck.”

The telephone was ringing when Ann reached her office. She lifted the receiver, and the pleasant voice of Miss Dingley on the switchboard said, “Mr. Forrest is calling from Washington. Just a minute, please, and I’ll put him through.”

For the past month, since he had quit his post as general manager in Fanny Mistral, Inc., and had taken over a government job in Washington, Bill Forrest had telephoned Ann at odd times. Some had been a bit too odd, specifically the four-o’clock-in-the-morning ones when Bill said he had been overcome with impulsive insomnia and that nothing but the sound of her voice could put him to sleep.

“Ann?” his voice said.

“Yes, Bill?”

“I’m in a hurry, so get this straight. I’ve a thousand things to do in nothing flat.”

“So have I. I have to leave in an hour and pose ocelots.”

“Now listen, Ann—Did you say ocelots?”

“Yes.”

“Well, don’t bother me with trifles. Just run up to the zoo and do it.”

“They’re in the Adirondacks.”

“Nonsense. I’m getting two weeks’ leave starting next Friday and will pick you up in that dear little two-by-four you call home at seven.”

“But I won’t be there, Bill. I’ll be in the heart of the Adirondacks, drinking champagne and posing ocelots.”

“Have you gone mad?”

“No, and I’m to be stuffed with pressed duck, caviar, and dazed trout.”

“You have gone mad. I can’t waste any more time because I’ve got to clear up my job here and become a marine. They told me this morning they’d let me play. I got sick of sitting on my rump in a chair that doesn’t even swivel and have decided to become a hero. So get sane by Friday and I’ll pick you up at seven and marry you. Good-by.”

The receiver at the Washington end of the conversation went bang.

An hour after Ann had left, Miss Dingley at the switchboard said: “Fanny Mistral, Incorporated. Good afternoon.”

“Bill again, Dingley. Put me through to Ann.”

“She left. She was due at the airport about ten minutes ago.”

“Give me Fanny.”

Fanny, who regarded Bill’s facade as something more than photogenic, cordially laced her voice with warmth when she answered.

“Bill darling, how are you?”

“I’m fine, but it’s not the point. Wasn’t it the Marlow woman, the dopey cousin in Paris, who landed here last fall and got the press about her ocelots?”

“Yes, dear. They had a suite on A Deck while the rest of the cabins were crushed with vertical diplomats.”

“I knew it. I realized it about two minutes ago. And you’ve sent Ann up to Black Tor in the Adirondacks?”

“Yes, darling.”

“Alone?”

“Yes, darling.”

“Well, I’ll be damned!”

Bang.