The Adventures of Hiram Holliday (8 page)

Thus they met, after the performance was concluded. She came dressed in a skirt and sweater and a camel's-hair polo coat and no hat, but a dark red ribbon in her hair. And arm-in-arm they walked away from the bright, garish lights and blatant, tinny noises of the Boulevard Rochechouart, up the hill of the Mount of Martyrs through crooked streets, past crooked houses, and the
dark pile of the Eglise du Sacre
Coeur to a tiny restaurant in the rue Nicolet where the tablecloths of red and white checkered stuff were clean and fresh. The chef came forth from the kitchen to be introduced, and because he too seemed to have been caught by something in the eyes of the plain man with the little circus queen, he announced that he, Manuel, would with his own hands prepare them an onion soup to be followed by an omelette
aux fines herbe
,
after which they should have
les rognons,
kidneys with the sauce of his own soul and being.

While they waited they went to the door and looked at the wonderful, crouching shape of Paris that lay at their feet, the fantastic, shadowy roof-lines and the jewelled blanket of lights that lay over the city like a downy covering that followed every contour.

It was Hiram who talked mostly during the wonderful supper. He spoke of the beauty and the tradition of the circus, and particularly of clowning. He said: 'Do you know, Lisette, I would rather be a clown than priest or president. Strange that only the brutal men of the world are remembered and not those who make us laugh, the Marcelines and the Grocs. Groc was a great clown. I saw him once. He never spoke a word, but the audience would laugh so hard that it cried. Can there be anything more beautiful in this grim, troubled world than to make people laugh, or as you do, to delight the eye and the senses and the feeling of rhythm? Never mind the mechanics of it. But certainly, when an arena is rocking with the laughter of human beings, God is more surely there than in the gloomy caverns where we choose to visit Him.... Oh, dear,' finished Hiram Holliday, 'now whatever made me talk like that
...
?'

The circus girl watched him with her dark, shining eyes and suddenly reached across the table and patted his hand. She said: 'You are a strange American. The outside
...
yes, it is American. But inside
...'

Later they walked on to the rue des Portes Blanches where she lived, and he thanked her gravely for her kindness. The girl looked up at this man who was not handsome or the figure of a hero, but who seemed to have such strange fire inside him, and said: 'Please do you kiss me good night, Hiram.'

He bent down and kissed her and said: 'Thank you, Lisette, for your great kindness. May we be together again ?' and turned and went away. He wanted very desperately to stay, and she might have let him, but then he was more a romanticist than an opportunist. The curious, searching tenderness of the girl's kiss had set a period to the evening. And besides he had no illusions about himself. He felt that he was hardly the figure for conquest. He was never able to know how much that which was within him blazed through his plainness, how much he was a man.

How Hiram Holliday Killed a Man and Created Laughter in Paris

The next afternoon occurred the absurd episode of the exchanged umbrellas. It had drizzled in the morning and there were low-hanging coppery rainclouds over Paris. Hiram went forth in his mackintosh with his umbrella hung over his arm by the crook of the handle, the handle that in England had been kissed by a princess named Heidi. In the late afternoon he stepped into the Dunhill shop at the top of the rue de la Paix to leave a pipe to be repaired. He left the bowl with his name and the address of his hotel, and selected a new briar, paid for it, turned to go and ran plump
into the rear extension of the
well-dressed, fatherly-looking gentleman who had been bent over a showcase and was peering into it through gold-rimmed eye-glasses fastened to a black ribbon. There was a thump and a clatter as two umbrellas fell to the marble floor.

'Oh, my dear sir!' said Hiram. 'I beg your pardon.'

'But no! A thousand pardons. It was my fault. How stupid of me to stand so.'

'Permit me
...'
said Hiram, and prepared to reach for the floored umbrellas. But the affable gentleman with the spade beard, striped trousers, morning coat, and pleasant, fatherly demeanour, was before him. 'No,
no....
Permit
me.
It is all my fault.'

He bent down quickly, pounced upon the umbrellas and handed Hiram his. The two men lifted their hats to one another and Hiram went out of the store and stepped into a taxi, and said: 'Notre Dame!' to the driver. He wanted to see it in the gloom of the cloudy twilight and in possible rain. He fancied as he drove off that he heard a shout:
'Hola! Hola!
M'sieu!
¹
but then, Paris is full of shouts and cries and squawking and braying of auto horns, so he paid no attention and was driven off. It was not until they were crossing the Pont Neuf that he noticed that he did not have his own umbrella, though the one he had was so similar, in fact, almost identical, that it was not surprising a mistake should have been made. But it felt different, and looked different. And when he suddenly opened it and examined the steel ferrule he was certain. Because it was clean and shining and there had been a stain on his, a stain that he cherished greatly, since it had been acquired when he had driven it through the mouth of the unpleasant Nazi with a scar on his face, in London.

Hiram thought first of returning to the shop, because his umbrella had become very dear to him, but, of course, the gentleman with the spade beard would long since have gone. He was irritated at his loss, and gave the handle of the umbrella an exasperated twist so that something clicked and came loose, and he held in his hand the wooden crook and eighteen inches of sword steel, razor sharp, needle-pointed and channelled down the centre. It was discoloured slightly, and Hiram noted with a sudden catch of his breath that it was the same kind of stain that was on the ferrule of his lost umbrella.

'Now what the devil,' he said to himself, 'would a nice, polite old gentleman like that be doing with a pretty thing like this?'

He examined it with more interest. He had heard of French sword canes, so why not, indeed, sword umbrellas, too ? It was a terrible weapon. He tried the temper of the blade and fingered it carefully. He was unaware that the driver had drawn up in front of Notre Dame and had stopped and was waiting stolidly, because he was interested in the way the blade was set into the handle, and holding it carefully he twisted and pulled gently near the top. It gave a little, so he pressed and twisted and it came away smoothly and showed the haft ingeniously embedded in a ring and socket. He thrust his finger up into the hollow wooden handle and found it entering what seemed to be a small cardboard cylinder that was loose and came out when he pulled. The cylinder had a double wall with the inside one loose, and it came away when he tugged at it gently. Inside there was a roll of a half-dozen sheets of delicate onion-skin paper covered with fine writing, but he was unable to read it, as it was in a language that was quite foreign to him. He judged it to be Russian, though part of it seemed to be in German. There was also a long list of names, and at the end a signature that struck him as vaguely familar, not in writing, but in the name.

'Oh, no. No,' said Hiram Holliday to himself. 'It is not possible. It doesn't happen. The papers
...
the secret compartment
...
the deadly weapon....'

'C'est Notre Dame, m’sieu’
said the taxi-driver.

'Yes, yes,' said Hiram, but sat with the sheets between his fingers. The signature,' Vinovarieff.' Where had he heard
...
?
The light broke. It was the Russian general who had disappeared. And Mikoff, a name that appeared in one of the lists.... The Soviet under-secretary who had been stabbed to death in his home by an unknown assassin. Vorolich - the Soviet Ambassador upon whose life an attempt had been made. The stain on the blade ? Was that all that remained today of the murdered Mikoff? What was in those papers ? At which point Hiram Holliday folded them and put them into his pocket. He returned the empty cardboard cylinder into the hollow of the handle and snapped the blade back into place, and then returned it to its sheath in the shaft of the umbrella. The obvious thing to do was to find out.

Now there is one thing that working on a newspaper for many years, no matter in what department, does for a man. It makes him intensely direct and practical when it comes to finding things out. From another pocket Hiram pulled a small guide-book and directory of Paris and consulted it and gave an address to the taxi-driver in the rue des Jeuneurs. When he arrived there he told the man to wait.

There was a large sign painted across the upper windows of the building: 'Demoisson School of Languages.' Hiram went upstairs and inquired for Professor Demoisson.

When the professor, a portly gentleman with a bald skull, appeared, Holliday wasted no time. He said: 'Perhaps you will be able to help me. I came upon some curious papers by accident. They seem to be mostly in Russian. Is there anyone here who could translate them for me ?'

Professor Demoisson adjusted a pair of spectacles. 'It will be a pleasure to assist monsieur. I myself am quite fluent in Russian.'

Hiram handed him one of the sheets and watched him as he read; watched him turn first pale, and then crimson, and saw the globules of perspiration rise at the top of his bald skull, and his hand begin to shake, and hear him murmur:
^e
Mon Dieu ! Mais non ! C'est pas possible.
...
Bon Dieu !'

When he turned to Hiram again he was completely shaken and unstrung. 'M'sieu!' he said, hardly able to speak. 'Is it possible that you do not know what you have here ? I
...
but
we must inform the police at once. At once.
'H
e
hardly
noticed that Hiram had gently removed the sheet from his

trembling fingers 'It is i
ncredible. I will telephone the
prefecture at once. But at once. They must have this immediately. I go to telephone.'

He rushed from the front office. When he was gone, Hiram sighed, refolded the sheets, put them into his pocket and quietly went out, down the stairs, got into his taxi and drove off. If the stuff was that good, he wanted to be in on it before the police. Nor was he sure how the French authorities would accept his explanation of how they had come into his possession.

And then he did a rash thing, a thing he later very much regretted. It was an intensely simple and practical thing and the idea seemed a good one to him at the time. He dismissed the taxi and walked until he came to a post office where he secured a stamped envelope. At the desk he wrote a short note on a telegraph blank, and placed it in the envelope along with all of the thin sheets of paper removed from the umbrella. Then he sealed it, and wrote the address: 'J. R. Beauheld, Esq., Managing Editor the
New York Sentinel,
New York City, N.Y., U.S.A.
Personal’
He consulted a sailing list on the wall, marked the envelope 'Via s.s.
Normandie,’
purchased the requisite number of stamps, added them to the envelope and dropped it through the posting chute. He was no more than a block from the post office when he found himself wishing he hadn't done it.

It was nearly seven o'clo
ck when he returned to his room
on the fourth floor of the modest little Hotel Vol
taire in the
rue Jean Goujon. His he
art was banging, somehow, as he
turned the key in the lock. The place had been hit by a cyclone.
It had been ransacked, and
by an expert. Nothing had been
overlooked, furni
ture, bedding, bureaux, luggage.

The telephone bell tinkled and the porter said:
'A
gentleman is on his way up to see you. He has been here several times already.'

The knock on the door coincided with the click of the replaced receiver. Hiram opened it. It was the pleasant, fatherly gentleman of the Dunhill shop, with his umbrella.

'Ah, m'sieu!'

'Come
in, come in,' said Hiram. 'Excuse the mess. Somebody evidently thought I was rich enough to rob. How did you know where I
...
But, of course, I left my name and address at the shop. I'm sorry you've been put to all this trouble, but I'm damn glad you found me, because I value that old umbrella of mine a hell of a lot.'

He was watching the pleasant gentleman as he babbled on, and it struck him that he was pale and his eyes kept staring behind Hiram.

'So stupid,' said the gentleman. 'And all my fault. It was I who made the exchange. Well, now here is yours. There is mine, and the little comedy is happily ended, eh ?'

Hiram said to himself: 'But is
it?
What a damned fool I was.' And then aloud: 'Sure, and much obliged. Wouldn't like to have a drink on it, would you ?'