“At the hotel in town.”
“How uncomfortable for you. The accommodations are deplorable, I understand, but of course there are very few guests in such a small place. You probably won’t want to stay long.”
“I hope to leave tomorrow afternoon. I’m expecting a small package before then.”
“I’m sure you won’t be disappointed.”
“You’re very kind and thank you again for seeing me.”
Cora left without looking back; but she did not go, as she had come, through the house. She walked around the outside along a walk bordering beds of bright flowers, and so past the fountain and around the concrete curve to the white birch and the little girl.
“Did you see Mother?”
“Yes. We had a nice talk.”
“Did she give you something for your charity?”
“She’s thinking about it. I’m sure she will.”
“I’m glad. Would you like to play another game of jacks?”
“No, thank you. I really must go.”
“All right. I guess I had better go back to the house now, anyway. Goodbye.”
Cora watched her go up the walk alone. For a few yards she walked sedately, and then she broke suddenly into the gait that seems peculiar to small girls — something between a trot and a skip, or perhaps a little of both by turns.
Standing under the white birch and staring after her, Cora had suddenly so intense and terrible a sense of loss and loneliness that she cried softly aloud, unaware, in anguish. In that instant the small villa in the south of France was a far and empty place of exile, and she envied the vulnerable woman she had just left on the terrace — the woman who had saved something, as Cora had not, from the sterile years.
The girl had gone away and left her jacks in a little pile on the grass beside the walk. Bending down, Cora picked up the small metal pieces and dropped them into a pocket of her linen jacket.
She would keep them, she thought, as a memento of this day — and all the spent days before.
Bonus Boy
Originally published in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, September 1963.
His name was Steve Miklos, although that wasn’t the name on the register downstairs. He had signed the register with the false name at three o’clock that morning, and now, after sleeping for ten hours, he was playing solitaire on a small table by a window of his room overlooking the street. Every once in a while, he would look away from the cards and down into the street, which was one side of a square in a small town. The street was white and burning hot with summer sunlight.
He had taken the deck of cards from one of the two bags he had carried upstairs at three o’clock. It was on a chair beside the bed now, spread open to make available the items in it, which were merely some clothing and some toilet articles. The other bag, much smaller, was on the floor beside the bed, closed and locked. Inside it was one hundred thousand dollars in bills.
He kept looking at intervals down into the street because he was waiting for someone. He had arranged to meet someone here today, a woman, but the time was indefinite, and there was no reason to expect that he would just happen to be looking into the street at the time when she appeared, if she appeared there at all.
His reasons for arriving at three o’clock in the morning in this small town and registering under a false name in this small hotel were related to the money in the small bag, and to the woman for whom he was waiting. Last night he had taken the money from another man’s safe, and the woman he was waiting for was another man’s wife. The money and the woman had belonged to the same man, and the man was powerful and dangerous.
Steve Miklos, playing solitaire and looking at intervals down into the street, was neither. He wasn’t even very intelligent, as intelligence is measured. He was, however, very handsome, and women usually liked him in excess of discretion. As if to reassure himself that this was true, that he was handsome and frequently desired by women, he got up suddenly from the table by the window and went into the bathroom. He snapped on the light above the lavatory and inspected himself in the mirror with what seemed narcissistic absorption, but as a matter of fact, he accepted his good looks with no more than lethargic satisfaction and a kind of undirected gratitude. He was not inordinately vain, and valued his appearance only for the advantages it gave him. Removing a comb from the hip pocket of his trousers, he began to draw it through his black hair, which was thick and lustrous and curly. The curls, released from the teeth of the comb, sprang crisply into soft coils. After a minute or two, he replaced the comb in the hip pocket and returned to the table beside the window. Gathering the cards, still lying in the precise arrangement of his last defeat, he began to shuffle them swiftly with a skill that suggested professional intimacy; and this was indeed the case, for he had worked, among other things, as a dealer of blackjack.
Holding the deck in his left hand, prepared to lay out another game, he paused to look down into the street, and he continued to sit very still in that position, suddenly fixed, the cards cupped neatly in his left hand and the right poised above them, for a bus had pulled up to the curb in front of the hotel, which also served as a depot, and a woman was descending from the bus. He could see, as she descended, a flash of nylon knees below a short skirt. She took a couple of steps along the side of the bus and stood waiting with a kind of arrogant grace that was apparent, even from the sharp angle of his vision from above, while the driver got her luggage from a compartment, matched cases, and put it out on the sidewalk. After he had closed the compartment, the driver picked up the bags and carried them into the hotel, the woman following two or three paces behind. She walked with the same grace with which she had stood waiting, breasts high and long legs scissoring, and she gave the effect of an expensive woman, which was what she was. She was an expensive and well-kept woman, the wife of a rich man, the woman Steve Miklos was waiting for.
He had risen and leaned toward the window as she walked behind the bus driver toward the hotel entrance, to sharpen his angle of vision and keep her in sight for seconds longer, and he was aware of a rising excitement within him. This was unusual and slightly disturbing, for he was usually rather brutally phlegmatic in his response to women, although he disguised it, and his intensity with this one, who was different from all the others who had been and would be, made him feel naked and vulnerable. He had a strong compulsion to go downstairs immediately to meet her, but this was contrary to their plans, which had been carefully made, and so he sank back onto the chair, acutely conscious of the hard beating of his heart.
She would take a room, paying for a day in advance, as he had paid for two. She would give as a reason, as he had, that she planned to leave very early in the morning of the next day and did not wish to be delayed by paying when she left. In her room, after an interval, she would call the desk and ask to be connected with the room of Stephen Miklos, using, of course, the name that Stephen Miklos had used. The disclosure of a room number, his or hers, would then bring them together, here or there.
In the meanwhile, there were the long, last minutes of waiting to be endured and survived. Getting up again from the chair, he lit a cigarette and went over and lay down across the bed on his back, drawling on the cigarette and blowing smoke upward in long plumes. The smoke rose and thinned and disintegrated against the faded ceiling. Waiting for her to call, in order to relieve the tedium of time, he began to review deliberately the way they had come from where they had been to where they now were.
Her name was Hannah Archer, and she was married to a man named Hugo Archer, who was a man with many interests in many places about which certain authorities had more curiosity than knowledge. One of his local places, a minor interest, was a combination restaurant and casino. You could eat fine food on the first floor to the muted sounds of a string ensemble that played routinely the music of such composers as Victor Herbert and Rudolph Friml and Jerome Kern, and was capable of playing something else upon request. On the second floor was the casino, and it was here that Steve Miklos worked. It was here, at least, that he was seen each night, although the character and purpose of his work were never clearly defined. He merely moved among the guests, being charming and decorative in a white tie, especially to the guests on the distaff side, and extra especially, among those, to Hannah Archer, who was entitled to preferred treatment by virtue of being, not a guest, but Mr. Big’s wife. Hannah had spent many nights in the casino, for she loved the quiet crowd, richly dressed, and the subtle suspense that was part of the quality of games of chance. If she began spending even more nights there after the sudden appearance of Steve, Hugo Archer seemed not to notice, or if he noticed, not to mind. This could have been a result of Hannah’s discretion, of course, for even after she began seeing Steve alone and away from the casino, she managed to sustain with him in company an overt attitude that was never more than the kind of sophisticated flirtation that she engaged in harmlessly with a dozen others.