The False Faces (Vance)/Chapter 16
XVI
AU PRINTEMPS
IN THOSE days New York nights were long; this was still young when Lanyard sauntered sedately from a side street and stopped on a corner of Broadway in the Nineties; he had not long to wait ere a southbound taxicab hove in sight and sheered over to the curb in answer to his signal.
It was still something short of one o'clock when he was set down at his door.
Wearily he let himself in by the private entrance, made a light, and without troubling even to discard his overcoat threw himself into a chair. Leaden depression weighed down his heart, and the flavour of failure was as aloes in his mouth. Thrice within an hour he had fallen short of his promises, to Cecelia Brooke, to himself, to his idée fixe. His three chances, to redeem his word to the girl, to measure up to his queer criterion of honour, to rid his world of Ekstrom, all had slipped through fingers seemingly too infirm to profit by them.
He felt of a sudden old; old, and tired, and lonely.
The uses of his world, how weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable! What was his life? An emptiness. Himself? A shuttlecock, the helpless sport of his own failings, a vain thing alternately strutting and stumbling, now swaggering in the guise of an avenger self-appointed, now sneaking in the shameful habiliments of a felon self-condemned.
What had prevented his dealing out to Ekstrom the punishment he had so well earned? That insatiable lust for loot of his. But for that damning evidence against him of the stolen necklace in his pocket he might have had his will of Ekstrom, and justified himself when discovered by proving that he had merely done justice to a thief who sold what he had stolen and stole back to steal again what he had sold.
Self-contempt attacked self-conceit like an acid. He saw Michael Lanyard a sorry figure, sitting stultified with self-pity … crying over spilt milk. …
Impatiently he shook himself. What though he had to-night forfeited his chances? He could, nay, would, make others. He must. …
To what end? Would life be sweeter if one found a way to restore to Cecelia Brooke her precious document and to smuggle back to Mrs. Arden her pilfered diamonds? Would this deadly ache of loneliness be less poignant with Ekstrom dead?
With lack-lustre eyes he looked round that cheerless room, reckoning its perfunctory pretense of comfort the forlornest mockery. To lodgings such as this he was condemned for life, to an interminable sequence of transient quarters, sordid or splendid, rich or mean, alike in this common quality of hollow loneliness. …
His aimless gaze wandered toward the door opening on the public hallway, and became fixed upon a triangular shape of white paper, the half of an envelope tucked between door and sill.
Presently he rose and got the thing, not until he touched it quite persuaded he was not the victim of an optical hallucination.
A square envelope of creamy paper, it was superscribed simply in a hand strange to him, Anthony Ember, Esq., with the address of his apartment house.
Tearing the envelope he found within a double sheet of plain notepaper bearing a message of five words penned hastily:
"Au Printemps—
"one o'clock—
"Please!"
Nothing else, not another word or pen-scratch. …
Opening the door Lanyard hailed the hall-attendant, a sleepy and not over-intelligent negro.
"When did this come for me?"
"’Bout anour ago, Mistuh Embuh."
"Who brought it?"
"A messenger boy done fotch it, suh—look lak th' same boy."
"What same boy?"
"Same as come in when you do, 'bout 'leven o'clock—remembuh?"
Lanyard nodded, recalling that on his way up the street from Sixth Avenue he had been subconsciously irritated by the shrill, untuneful whistling of a loutish youth in Western Union uniform, who had followed him into the house and become engaged in some minor altercation with the attendants while Lanyard was unlocking the door to his apartment.
"What of him?"
"Why, he bulge in heah an' say we done send a call, an' we tell him we don' know nuffin' 'bout no call, an' he sweah an' carry on, an' aftuh you done gone in he ast whut is yo' name, an' somebody tell him an' he go away. An' then 'bout haffanour aftuhwuds he come back with that theah lettuh—say to stick it undeh yo' do, ef yo' ain't home. Leastways he look to me lak th' same boy. Ah dunno fo' suah."
Repeated efforts failing to extract more enlightenment from this source, Lanyard again shut himself in with the puzzle.
Somebody had set a messenger boy to dog him and find out his name and address. Not Crane: Lanyard had seen that one disappear in the elevator of the Knickerbocker and had thereafter moved too quickly to permit of Crane's returning to the lobby, calling a messenger boy, and pointing out Lanyard.
For that matter, Lanyard was prepared to swear nobody had followed him from the Knickerbocker to the Biltmore.
Vaguely he seemed to recall a first impression of the boy at the time when he emerged from the drug store after his unprofitable effort to telephone Cecelia Brooke, an indefinite memory of a shambling figure with nose flattened against the druggist's window, apparently fascinated by the display of a catch-penny corn cure.
Was there a link between that circumstance and the long delay which Lanyard had suffered in the telephone booth? Had the Knickerbocker operator been less stupid and negligent than she seemed? Was the truth of the matter that Crane had surmised Lanyard would attempt communication with the Brooke girl and had set a watch on the switchboard for the call?
Assuming that the Secret Service man had been clever enough for that, it was not difficult to understand that Lanyard had purposely been kept dangling at the other end of the wire till the call could be traced back to its source and a messenger despatched from the nearest Western Union office with instructions to follow the man who left the booth, and report his name and local habitation.
Sharp work, if these inferences were reasonable. And, satisfied that they were, Lanyard inclined to accord increased respect to the detective abilities of the American.
But this note, this hurried, unsigned scrawl of five unintelligible words: what the deuce did it mean?
On the evidence of the handwriting a woman had penned it. Cecelia Brooke? Who else? Crane might well have been taken into her confidence, subsequent to the sinking of the Assyrian, and on discovering that Lanyard had survived have used this means of relieving the girl's distress of mind.
But its significance? … "Au Printemps" translated literally meant "in the springtime," and "in the springtime at one o'clock" was mere gibberish, incomprehensible. There is in Paris a department store calling itself "Au Printemps"; but surely no one was suggesting to Lanyard in New York a rendezvous in Paris!
Nevertheless that "Please!" intrigued with a note at once pleading and imperative which decided Lanyard to answer it without delay, in person.
"Au Printemps—one o'clock—please!"
Upon the screen of memory there flashed a blurred vision of an electric sign emblazoning the phrase, "Au Printemps," against the façade of a building with windows all blind and dark save those of the street level, which glowed pink with light filtered through silken hangings; a building which Lanyard had already passed thrice that night without, in the preoccupation of his purpose, paying it any heed; a building on Broadway somewhere above Columbus Circle, if he were not mistaken.
Already it was one o'clock. Fortunately he was still in evening dress, and needed only to change collar and tie to repair the disarray caused by his encounter with Ekstrom.
In two minutes he was once more in the street.
Within five a cab deposited him in front of the Restaurant Au Printemps, an institution of midnight New York whose title for distinction resided mainly in the fact that it opened its upper floors for the diversion of "members" about the time when others put up their shutters.
Lanyard's advent occurred at the height of its traffic. The dining rooms on the street level were closed and unlighted: but men and women in pairs and parties were streaming across the sidewalk from an endless chain of motor-cars and being ground through the revolving doors like grist in the hopper of an unhallowed mill, the men all in evening dress, the women in garments whose insolence outrivalled the most Byzantine nights of L'Abbaye Thêlème.
Drawn in with the current through the turnstile door, Lanyard found himself in an absurdly little lobby thronged to suffocation, largely with people of the half-world—here and there a few celebrities, here and there small tight clusters of respectabilities making a brave show of feeling at ease—all waiting their turn to be lifted to delectable regions aloft in an elevator barely big enough to serve in a private residence.
For a moment Lanyard lingered unnoticed on the outskirts of this assemblage, searching its pretty faces for the prettier face he had come to find and wondering that she should have chosen for her purpose with him a resort of this character. His memory of her was sweet with the clean smell of the sea; there was incongruity to spare in this atmosphere heady with the odours of wine, flesh, scent, and tobacco. Perplexing. …
A harpy with a painted leer and predacious eyes pounced upon him, tore away his hat and coat, gave him a numbered slip of pasteboard by presenting which he would be permitted to ransom his property on extortionate terms.
And still he saw no Cecelia Brooke, though his aloof attitude coupled with an intent but impersonal inspection of every feminine face within his radius of vision earned him more than one smile at once furtively provocative and unwelcome.
By degrees the crowd emptied itself into the toy elevator—such of it, that is, as was passed by a committee on membership consisting of one chubby, bearded gentleman with the look of a French diplomatist, the empressement of a head waiter and the authority of the Angel with the Flaming Sword. Personae non gratæ to the management—inexplicably so in most instances—were civilly requested to produce membership cards and, upon failure to comply, were inexorably rejected, and departed strangely shamefaced. Others of acceptable aspect were permitted to mingle with the upper circles of the elect without being required to prove their "membership."
In the person of this suave but inflexible arbiter Lanyard identified a former maître d'hôtel of the Carlton who had abruptly and discreetly fled London soon after the outbreak of war.
He fancied that this one knew him and was sedulous both to keep him in the corner of his eye and never to meet his regard directly.
And once he saw the man speak covertly with the elevator attendant, guarding his lips with a hand, and suspected that he was the subject of their communication.
The lobby was still comfortably filled, a constant trickle of arrivals replacing in measure the losses by election and rejection, when Lanyard, watching the revolving doors, saw Cecelia Brooke coming in.
She was alone, at least momentarily; and in his sight very creditably turned out, remembering that all her luggage must have been lost with the Assyrian. But what Englishwoman of her caste ever permitted herself to be visible after nightfall except in an evening gown of some sort, even though a shabby sort? Not that Miss Brooke to-night was shabbily attired: she was much otherwise; from some mysterious source of wardrobe she had conjured wraps, furs, and a dancing frock as fresh and becoming as it was, oddly enough, not immodest. And with whatever cares preying upon her secret mind, she entered with the light step and bright countenance of any girl of her age embarked upon a lark.
All that was changed at sight of Lanyard.
He bowed formally at a moment when her glance, resting on him, seemed about to wander on; instead it became fixed in recognition. Instantly her smile was erased, her features stiffened, her eyes widened, her lips parted, the colour ebbed from her cheeks. And she stopped quite still in front of the door till lightly jostled by other arrivals.
Then moving uncertainly toward him, she said, "Monsieur Duchemin!" not loudly, for she was not a woman to give excuse for a scene under any circumstances, but in a tone of complete dumbfounderment.
Covering his own dashed contenance with a semblance of unruffled amiability, he bowed again, now over the hand which the girl tentatively offered, letting it rest lightly on his fingers, touching it as lightly with his lips.
"It is such a pleasant surprise," he said at a venture, then added guardedly: "But my name—I thought you knew it was now Anthony Ember."
Her eyes were blank. "I don't understand," she faltered. "I thought you … I never dreamed. … Is it really you?"
"Truly," he averred, lips smiling but mind rife with suspicion and distrust.
This was not acting; he was convinced that her surprise was absolutely unfeigned.
So she had not expected to find him "Au Printemps" at one o'clock in the morning, till that very moment had believed him as dead as any of those poor souls who had perished with the Assyrian!
Therefore that note had not come from her, therefore Lanyard had complimented Crane without warrant, crediting him with another's cleverness. Then whose …?
And while Lanyard's head buzzed with these thoughts, an independent chamber of his mind was engaged in admiring the address with which the girl was recovering from what must have been, what plainly had been, a staggering shock. Already she had begun to grapple with the situation, to take herself in hand and dissemble; already her face was regaining its accustomed cast of self-confidence, composure, and intelligent animation. Throughout she pursued without a break the thread of conventional small talk.
"It is a surprise," she said calmly. "Really, you are a most astonishing person, Mr. Ember. One never knows where to look for you."
"That is my good fortune, since it provides me with unexpected pleasures such as this. You are with friends?"
"With a friend," she corrected quietly—"with Mr. Crane. He stopped outside to pay our taxi-driver. How odd it seems to find any place in the world as much alive as this New York!"
"It seems almost impossible," Lanyard averred—"indeed, somehow wrong. I've a feeling one has no right to encourage so much frivolity. And yet. …"
"Yes," she responded quickly. "It is good to hear people laugh once more. That is why Mr. Crane suggested coming here to-night, to cheer me up. He said Au Printemps was unique, promised I'd find it most amusing."
"I'm sure. …" Lanyard began as Crane entered, breezing through the turnstile and comprehending the situation in a glance.
"Hello!" he cried. "Didn't I tell you everybody alive would be here?"
Nor was Cecelia Brooke less ready. "But fancy meeting Mr. Ember here! I had no idea he was in New York—had you?"
"Perhaps a dim suspicion," Crane admitted with a twinkle, taking Lanyard's hand. "Howdy, Ember? Glad to see you, gladder'n you'd think."
"How is that?" Lanyard asked, returning the cordiality of his grasp.
Crane's penetrating accents must have been audible in the remotest corner of the ground-floor rooms: he made no effort to modulate them to a quieter pitch.
"You can help me out of a fix if you feel like it. You see, I promised Miss Brooke if she'd take me for her guide, she'd see life to-night; and now, just when we're going good, I've got to renig. Man I know held me up outside, says I'm wanted down town on special business and must go. I might be able to toddle back later, but can't bank on it. Do you mind taking over my job?"
"Chaperoning Miss Brooke's investigations into the seamy side of current social history? That will be delightful."
"Attaboy! If I'm not back in half an hour you'll see her safely home, of course?"
"Trust me."
"And you'll excuse me, Miss Brooke? I hope you don't think"
"What I do think, Mr. Crane, is that you have been most kind to a lonely stranger. Of course I'll excuse you, not willingly, but understanding you must go."
"That makes me a heap easier in my mind. But I' got to run. So it's good-night, unless maybe I see you later. So long, Ember!"
With a flirt of a raw-boned hand, Crane swung about, threw himself spiritedly into the revolving door, was gone.
"Amazing creature," Lanyard commented, laughing.
"I think him delightful," the girl replied, surrendering her wraps to a maid. "If all Americans are like that"
"Shall we go up?"
She nodded—"Please!"—and turned with him.
The committee on membership himself bowed them into the elevator. Several others crowded in after them. For thirty seconds, while the car moved slowly upward, Lanyard was free to think without interruption.
But what to think now? That Crane, actuated by some motive occult to Lanyard, had engineered this apparently adventitious rencontre for the purpose of throwing him and the Brooke girl together? Or, again, that Crane was innocent of guile in this matter—that other persons unknown, causing Lanyard to be traced to his lodgings, had framed that note to entice him to this place to-night? In the latter event, who was conceivably responsible but Velasco, Dressier, O'Reilly—any one of these, or all three working in concert? The last-named had looked Lanyard squarely in the face without sign of recognition, back there in the lobby of the Knickerbocker, precisely as he should, if implicated in the conspiracies of the Boche; though it might easily have been Velasco or Dressier who had recognized the adventurer without his knowledge. …
The car stopped, a narrow-chested door slid open, a gush of hectic light coloured morbidly the faces of alighting passengers, a blare of syncopated noise singularly unmusical saluted the astonished ears of Lanyard and Cecelia Brooke. She met his gaze with a smiling moue and slightly lifted eyebrows.
"More than we bargained for?" he laughed. "But there is always something new in this America, I promise you. Au Printemps itself is new, at all events did not exist when I was last in New York."
Following her out, he paused beside the girl in a constricted space hedged about with tables, waiting for the maître d'hôtel to seat those who had been first to leave the elevator.
The room, of irregular conformation, held upward of two hundred guests and habitués seated at tables large and small and so closely set together that waiters with difficulty navigated narrow and tortuous channels of communication. In the middle, upon a small dancing floor, rudely octagonal in shape, made smaller by tables crowded round its edge to accommodate the crush, a mob of couples danced arduously, close-locked in one another's arms, swaying in rhythm with the over-emphasized time beaten out by a perspiring little band of musicians on a dais in a far corner, their activities directed by an antic conductor whose lantern-jawed, sallow face peered grotesquely out through a mop of hair as black and coarse and lush as a horse's mane.
Execrable ventilation or absence thereof manufactured an atmosphere that reeked with heat animal and artificial and with ill-blended effluvia from a hundred sources. Perhaps the odour of alcohol predominated; Lanyard thought of a steam-heated wine-cellar. He observed nothing but champagne in any glass, and if food were being served it was done surreptitiously. Sweat dripped from the faces of the dancers, deep flushes discoloured all not so heavily enamelled as to preserve an inalterable complexion, the eyes of many stared with the fixity of hypnosis. Yet when the music ended with an unexpected crash of discord these dancers applauded insatiably till the jaded orchestra struck up once more, when they renewed their curious gyrations with quenchless abandon.
The Brooke girl caught Lanyard's eye, her lips moved. Thanks to the din, he had to bend his head near to hear.
She murmured with infinite expression: "Au Printemps!"
The maître d'hôtel was plucking at his sleeve.
"Monsieur had made reservations, no?" Startled recognition washed the man's tired and pasty countenance. "Pardon, monsieur: this way!" He turned and began to thread deviously between the jostling tables.
Dubiously Lanyard followed. He likewise had known the maître d'hôtel at sight: a beastly little decadent whose cabaret on the rue d'Antin, just off the avenue de l'Opéra, had been a famous rendezvous of international spies till war had rendered it advisable for him to efface himself from the ken of Paris with the same expedition and discretion which had marked the departure from London of his confrère who now guarded the lower gateway to these ethereal regions of Au Printemps.
The coincidence of finding those two so closely associated worked with the riddle of that note further to trouble Lanyard's mind.
Was he to believe Au Printemps the legitimate successor in America of that less pretentious establishment on the rue d'Antin, an overseas headquarters for Secret Service agents of the Central Powers?
He began to regret heartily, not so much that he had presented himself in answer to that note, but the responsibility which now devolved upon him of caring for Miss Brooke. Much as he had wished to see her an hour ago, now he would willingly be rid of her company.
Why had he been lured to this place, if its character were truly what he feared? Conceivably because he was believed—since it now appeared he had cheated death—still to possess either that desired document or knowledge of its whereabouts.
Naturally the enemy would not think otherwise. He must not forget that Ekstrom was playing double; as yet none but Lanyard knew he had stolen the document and done a murder to cover the theft from his associates and leave him free to sell to England without exciting their suspicion.
Consequently, Lanyard believed, he had been invited to this place to be sounded, to be tempted, bribed, intimidated—if need be, and possible—somehow to be won over to the uses of the Prussian spy system.
Leading them to the farther side of the room, the maître d'hôtel paused bowing and mowing beside a large table already in the possession of a party of three.
Lanyard's eyes narrowed. One of the three was Velasco, another a young man unknown to him, a mannerly little creature who might have been written by the author of "What the Man Will Wear" in the theatre programmes. The third was Sophie Weringrode, the Wilhelmstrasse agent whom he had only that afternoon observed entering the house in Seventy-ninth Street.
He stopped short, in a cold rage. Till that moment a mirror-sheathed pillar had hidden from him Velasco and the Weringrode; else Lanyard had refused to come so far; for obviously there were no unreserved tables, indeed few vacant chairs, in that part of the room.
Not that he minded the cynical barefacedness of the dodge; that was indeed amusing; he was sanguine as to his ability to dominate any situation that might arise, and to a degree indifferent if the upshot should prove his confidence misplaced; and he did not in the least object to letting the enemy show his cards. But he did enormously resent what was, after all, something quite outside the calculations of these giddy conspirators, the fact that he must either beat incontinent retreat or introduce Cecelia Brooke to the company of Sophie Weringrode.
His face darkened, a stinging reproof for the maître d'hôtel trembled on his tongue's tip; but that one was busily avoiding his eye on the far side of the table, drawing out a chair for "mademoiselle," while Velasco and the Weringrode were alert to read Lanyard's countenance and forestall any steps he might contemplate in defiance of their designs.
At first glimpse of the Brooke girl Velasco jumped up and hastened to her, with eager Latin courtesy expressing his unanticipated delight in the prospect of her consenting to join their party. And she was suffering with quiet graciousness his florid compliments.
At the same time the Weringrode was greeting Lanyard in the most intimate fashion—and damning him in the understanding of Cecelia Brooke with every word.
"My dear friend!" she cried gayly, extending a bedizened hand. "I had begun to despair of you. Is it part of your system with women always to be a little late, always to keep us wondering?"
Schooling his features to a civil smile, Lanyard bowed over the hand.
"In warfare such as ours, my dear Sophie," he said with meaning, "one uses all weapons, even the most primitive, in sheer self-defense."
The woman laughed delightedly. "I think," she said, "if you rose from the dead at the bottom of the sea, Tony, it would be with wit upon your lips. … And you have brought a friend with you? How charming!" She shifted in her chair to face Cecelia Brooke. "I wish to know her instantly!"
Velasco was waiting only for that opening. "Dear princess," he said, instantly, "permit me to present Miss Cecelia Brooke … Princess de Alavia. …"
Completely at ease and by every indication enjoying herself hugely, the girl bowed and took the hand the Weringrode thrust upon her. Her eyes, a-brim with excitement and mischief, veered to Lanyard's, ignored their warning, glanced away.
"How do you do?" she said simply. "I didn't understand Mr. Ember expected to meet friends here, but that only makes it the more agreeable. May we sit down?"