The Other Side of Silence

“It was in his hand. The scarf. Chances are she was wearing it when she shot him, at pretty close range, too. There was a powder burn on his shirt. So it must have been someone he trusted. That’s what my friend says, anyway.”

“Hmm.”

“What does ‘hmm’ mean?”

“I’m not a detective. So it means I really don’t know what to think about it, Henri.”

Of course this was hardly a surprise, given everything else that was now crowding in upon my mind; my head must have looked like a stowaway’s cabin on the ship in that Marx Brothers film. But most of the floor space was taken up with the realization that the whole thing involving Maugham hadn’t been much to do with blackmailing him, at all. Not really. That had just been the hors d’oeuvre. Hebel had something else for sale. Something much more important than a photograph of some naked men cavorting around a swimming pool in 1937. That had been nothing more than a lure, designed to secure everyone’s attention. To establish some credentials. Well, now he had them established, as if he had just presented them at the court of St. James while wearing white gloves and carrying a cocked hat with ostrich feathers.

“I did what you asked,” he said resentfully. “He was a good man, Spinola.”

“Sure, sure. I’ll look into it, okay, Henri? Maybe I’ll find something relevant. Maybe.”

But somehow the name of the woman who’d shot and killed our friend Spinola seemed of lesser importance besides an elaborate plot to blackmail the British Secret Intelligence Service.

FOURTEEN

Up at the Villa Mauresque they were finishing dinner; at least they were until I showed up with the money and the photograph. For a while I let them all think I’d done a great job of getting back the prints and the neg and somehow the fifty thousand dollars as well. I couldn’t have felt more popular there if I’d been Noel Coward wearing just a pair of sandals. I hadn’t the heart to tell any of them that the whole thing had been merely the first act in an opera that threatened to be longer than Tristan und Isolde. So we sat on the terrace under the starry sky, watched by a Pekingese dog and a couple of blackamoor wooden bishops, and I ate some corned-beef hash and drank amarone and even permitted Somerset Maugham to put my hand to his pink, rictus mouth and say that whatever they were paying me at the Grand Hotel, he would double it if I came to work for him at the Villa Mauresque.

“Doing what, exactly?” I asked.

The alligator eyes narrowed in their folds of brown skin as he considered the proposition. “I’m a r-rich man,” he said, “and it strikes me that I need protection of some kind. Especially at my time of life. I might be kidnapped. Or blackmailed again. And there are always unwanted visitors at the front gates wanting a book signed. You have no idea. But if you became my security adviser, Herr Wolf, then I’d feel a lot safer. And not just me. My guests, too. Some very famous people come and stay here from time to time. Very famous and just as often even richer than I am. Charlie Chaplin, Jerry Zipkin, the Queen of Spain. And then there’s my art collection. As you will doubtless have observed, I have paintings by Gauguin, Matisse, Renoir, Pissarro, Picasso, Toulouse-Lautrec, Bonnard, Monet, Utrillo. A man with a gun is just what the place needs most, I think.”

“Who painted that one?” I said.

But Robin Maugham agreed enthusiastically. “This is a brilliant idea, Uncle,” he said. “Your very own Simon Templar.”

“You don’t know the first thing about me,” I said, with no idea of who Simon Templar was. “I am not a good man.”

“Look around,” said Searle. “There are no honors and decorations coming the way of anyone in this house.”

“No, indeed,” said Robin.

“I know that you returned with fifty thousand dollars I thought I’d never see again,” said Maugham. “I think that b-bespeaks a certain devotion to principle.”

“Then try this, sir. I’m not sure I could handle the predominantly male atmosphere up here at the villa. Pool parties and rent boys.”

“We’re much too old for all those shenanigans now,” said Maugham. “Aren’t we, Alan?”

“Speak for yourself,” said Searle.

“What about you, Mr. Wolf? Is there anyone in your life? A woman, perhaps.”

“You managed to make that sound queer,” I said.

“It is,” he said. “To us.”

“I’m not interested in anything like that anymore.”

“You sound exactly like a man with a broken heart,” he said. “You fascinate me, Mr. Wolf. Who was the woman who made you so bitter?”

I laughed. “It took more than just one.”

“Love is just a dirty trick that’s played on us to achieve a continuation of the species,” said Maugham. “That’s what I think.”