The taxi drew up at the Winter Gardens. Harriet felt a certain delicacy about paying the fare, ‘but soon realised that for Antoine the thing was a commonplace. She accompanied him to the orchestra entrance where, in a few minutes’ time, they were joined by Leila Garland and Luis da Soto — the perfect platinum blonde and the perfect lounge-lizard. Both were perfectly self-possessed and incredibly polite; the only difficulty — as Harriet found when they were seated together at a table — was to get any reliable information out of them. Leila had evidently taken up an attitude, and stuck to it. Paul Alexis was ‘a terribly nice boy’, but ‘too romantic altogether.’ Leila had been ‘terribly grieved’ to send him away, he ‘took it so terribly hard’ but, after all, her feeling for him had been no more than pity — he had been ‘so terribly timid and lonely’. When Luis came along, she realised at once where her affections really lay. She rolled her large periwinkle eyes at Mr da Soto, who responded by a languishing droop of his fringed lids.
‘I was all the more sorry about it,’ said Leila, ‘because poor darling Paul—’
‘Not darling, honey.’
‘Of course not, Luis — only, the poor thing’s dead. Anyway, I was sorry because poor Paul seemed to be so terribly worried about something. But he didn’t confide in me, and what is a girl to do when a man won’t confide in her? I sometimes used to wonder if he wasn’t, being blackmailed by somebody.’
‘Why? Did he seem to be short of money?’
‘Well, yes, he did. Of course, that wouldn’t make any difference to me; I’m not that sort of girl. Still, it’s not pleasant, you know, to think that one of your gentleman friends is being blackmailed. I mean, a girl never knows she may not get mixed up in something unpleasant. I mean, it isn’t quite nice, is it?’
‘Far from it. How long ago did he start being worried?’
‘Let me see. I think it was about five months ago. Yes, it was. I mean, that was when the letters started coming.’
‘Letters?’
‘Yes; long letters with foreign stamps on them. I think they came from Czechoslovakia or one: of those queer places. It wasn’t Russia, anyway, because I asked him and he said no. I thought it was very funny, because he said he’d never been in any foreign country except Russia when he was quite a little boy, and in America, of course.’
‘Have you told anybody else about these letters?’
‘No. You see, Paul always said, it would do him harm to have them mentioned. He said, the Bolsheviks would kill him if anything got put; I said to him, “I don’t know what you mean by that,” I said, “I’m not a Bolshie,” I said, “and I don’t know any people of that sort, so what harm would it do to tell me about it?” But now he’s dead it can’t do any harm, can it? Besides, if you ask me, I don’t believe it was Bolshies at all. I mean, it doesn’t seem likely, does it? I said to him, “If you expect me to swallow that story, you’re expecting a lot,” I said. But he wouldn’t tell me, and of course, that did make a little coolness between us. I mean’ to say, when a girl is friends with a man, like me and Paul, the does expect a little consideration.’
‘Of course she does,’ said Harriet, warmly. ‘It was very, wrong of him not to be perfectly frank with you. I really think, in your place, I’d have felt justified in trying to find out who the letters were from.’
Leila played delicately with a piece of bread.
‘As a matter of fact,’ she admitted, ‘I did take a tiny peep once. I thought I owed it to myself. But they were all nonsense. You couldn’t make a word of them.’
‘Were they in a foreign language?’’
‘Well, I don’t know. They were all in printing letters and some of the words hadn’t any vowels in them at all.
You couldn’t possibly pronounce them.’
‘It sounds like a cipher,’ suggested Antoine.
‘Yes, that’s: just what I thought. I did think it was terribly, funny.’
‘But surely,’ said Harriet, ‘an ordinary blackmailer wouldn’t write letters in cipher.’
‘Oh, but why shouldn’t they? I mean, they might have been a gang, you know, like in that story, The Trail of the Purple Python. Have you read it? The Purple Python was a Turkish millionaire, and he had a secret house full of steel-lined rooms and luxurious divans and obelisks-’
‘Obelisks?’
‘Well you know. Ladies who weren’t quite respectable.
And he had agents in every country in Europe, who bought up compromising letters and he wrote to his victims in cipher and signed his missives with a squiggle in purple ink. Only the English detective’s young lady found out his secret by disguising herself as an obelisk and the detective who was really Lord Humphrey Chillingfold arrived with the police just in time to rescue her from the loathsome
embrace of the Purple Python. It was a terribly exciting book. Paul read lots of books like that — I expect he was trying to pick up ideas for getting the better of the gang. He liked the talkies too. Of course, in those stories, the hero always comes out on top, only poor dear Paul wasn’t really a bit like a hero. I said to him: one day, “It’s all very well,’ I said, “but I can’t see you venturing into a Chinese opium den full of gangsters, with a pistol in your pocket, and being gassed and sandbagged and then throwing off your bonds and attacking the Underworld King with an electric lamp. You’d be afraid of getting hurt,” I said to him. And so he would.’
Mr da Soto snickered appreciatively.
‘You said a mouthful, honey. Poor Alexis was a friend of mine, but courage was just what he didn’t have. I told him, if he didn’t stand out of my way; and let little Leila pick her own sweetie, I would give him a sock on the jaw. I give you my word, he was scared stiff.’
‘So he was,’ said Leila. ‘Of course, a girl couldn’t feel any respect for a man that didn’t stand up for. himself.’
‘Remarkable!’ said Antoine. ‘And this young man, so timid, so complaisant, cuts his throat with a big, ugly gash because you turn him down. C’est inoui.’
‘I suppose you believe his Bolshie story,’ said Leila, offended.
‘I? I believe nothing. I am agnostic. But I say that your portrait of Alexis is not very logical.’
‘Antoine always talks about logic,’ said Leila, ‘but what I say is, people aren’t logical. Look at all the funny things they do. Especially men. I always think men are terribly inconsistent?
‘You bet they are,’ said Mr da Soto. ‘You’re just dead right, sweetest. They have to be, or they wouldn’t be bothered with naughty little girlies like you.’
‘Yes, but the letters,’ said Harriet, sticking desperately to her point. ‘How often did they come?’
‘About once a week, sometimes oftener. He kept them locked up in a little box. He used to answer them, too.
Sometimes, when I went round to see him, he’d have his door locked, and old Ma Lefranc said he was writing letters and wasn’t to be disturbed. Naturally, a girl doesn’t like her gentleman friend to behave like that. I mean, you do expect him to pay a little attention to you and not shut himself up writing letters when you come to see him. I mean, it wasn’t the sort of thing you could expect a girl to put up with.’