“But is it authenticated?” She said it much as she would once have thought but not said, Fie on you!
“Sufficient to my company’s requirements,” he said. “But don’t misunderstand — we are not proposing to make any inquiries. We are always satisfied in such delicate negotiations just to have the painting back.”
Mary did not misunderstand, but she certainly did not understand either.
He took from his inside pocket a piece of paper which he placed on the coffee table and with the tapering fingers of an artist — or a banker — or a pickpocket — he gently maneuvered it to where Mary could see that he was proffering a certified check.
He did not look at her and therefore missed the spasm she felt contorting her mouth. “The day of the fire,” she thought, but the words never passed her lips.
She took up the check in her hand: $20,000.
“May I use your phone, Miss Gardner?”
Mary nodded and went into the kitchen where she again looked at the check. It was a great deal of money, she thought wryly, to be offered in compensation for a few months’ care of a friend.
She heard her visitor’s voice as he spoke into the telephone — an expert now, to judge by his tone. A few minutes later she heard the front door close. When she went back into the living room both her visitor and the Monet were gone…
Some time later Mary attended the opening of the new wing of the Institute. She recognized a number of people she had not known before and whom, she supposed, she was not likely to know much longer.
They had hung the Monet upside down again.
Mary thought of it after she got home, and as though two rights must surely right a possible wrong, she turned the check upside down while she burned it over the kitchen sink.
Money to Burn
MARGERY ALLINGHAM
Margery Allingham (1904-66) was a writing prodigy whose first novel, the swashbuckler Blackkerchief Dick (1923), was published by major American and British firms when she was still a teenager. The London-born author, who came from a literary family, served an apprenticeship as a prolific writer of formula magazine fiction before becoming one of the key figures of the Golden Age of Detection between the two World Wars. Her first mystery novel, The White Cottage Mystery (1928), anticipated a least-suspected-person device later used by Ellery Queen and Agatha Christie, and her second, The Crime at Black Dudley (1929), introduced the inconspicuous and self-effacing Albert Campion, one of the most celebrated gentleman detectives of his time and, with a hint of royal blood in his veins, probably the highest born. Like that other aristocratic sleuth, Dorothy L. Sayers’s Lord Peter Wimsey, Campion gradually developed from a semi-comic “silly ass” caricature to a fully realized character.
Of the celebrated Golden Age detective-story writers, some (like Agatha Christie and Ngaio Marsh) stuck to the pure who-dunnit formula for decades thereafter; others (like Sayers and Anthony Berkeley) left the field for other sorts of writing or retired altogether; and a few (like the Ellery Queen team) stayed with the basic format but deepened their exploration of character and theme. Allingham, whose understanding of human foibles and keen social observations were always manifest, belongs to that third group. While Mr. Campion continued to appear through most of her writing career, her post-war novels laid less stress on the formal puzzle, and in some of them Campion was relegated to a secondary role. (Campion received name-in-the-title billing only after his creator’s death in two novels written by her husband and sometime collaborator, Philip Youngman Carter.) Of Allingham’s early novels, Death of a Ghost (1934) and The Fashion in Shrouds (1938) are often cited as highlights; of the post-war group, The Tiger in the Smoke (1952), with its unflinching examination of pure evil, is considered a crime classic.
It is appropriate that Allingham, with her insights into the puzzles of human character, should be represented by “Money to Burn,” a 1957 non-Campion tale which represents that rarest of detective story subtypes: the pure whydunnit.
Did you ever see a man set light to money? Real money: using it as a spill to light a cigarette, just to show off? I have. And that’s why, when you used the word “psychologist” just now, a little fish leaped in my stomach and my throat felt suddenly tight. Perhaps you think I’m too squeamish. I wonder.
I was born in this street. When I was a girl I went to school just round the corner and later on, after I’d served my apprenticeship in the big dress houses here and in France, I took over the lease of this old house and turned it into the smart little gown shop you see now. It was when I came back to go into business for myself that I saw the change in Louise.
When we went to school together she was something of a beauty, with streaming yellow hair and the cockney child’s ferocious, knowing grin. All the kids used to tease her because she was better-looking than we were. The street was just the same then as it is now.
Adelaide Street, Soho: shabby and untidy, and yet romantic, with every other doorway in its straggling length leading to a restaurant of some sort. You can eat in every language of the world here. Some places are as expensive as the Ritz and others are as cheap as Louise’s papa’s Le Coq au Vin, with its one dining room and its single palm in the whitewashed tub outside.
Louise had an infant sister and a father who could hardly speak English but who looked at one with proud foreign eyes from under arched brows. I was hardly aware that she had a mother until a day when that gray woman emerged from the cellar under the restaurant to put her foot down and Louise, instead of coming with me into the enchantment of the workshops, had to go down into the kitchens of Le Coq au Vin.
For a long time we used to exchange birthday cards, and then even that contact dropped; but somehow I never forgot Louise and when I came back to the street I was glad to see the name Frosné still under the sign of Le Coq au Vin. The place looked much brighter than I remembered it and appeared to be doing fair business.
Certainly it no longer suffered so much by comparison with the expensive Glass Mountain which Adelbert kept opposite. There is no restaurant bearing that name in this street now, nor is there a restaur-ateur called Adelbert, but diners-out of a few years ago may remember him — if not for his food, at least for his conceit and the two rolls of white fat which were his eyelids.
I went in to see Louise as soon as I had a moment to spare. It was a shock, for I hardly recognized her; but she knew me at once and came out from behind the cashier’s desk to give me a welcome which was pathetic. It was like seeing thin ice cracking all over her face — as if by taking her unawares I’d torn aside a barrier.
I heard all the news in the first ten minutes. Both the old people were dead. The mother had gone first but the old man had not followed her for some years after, and in the meantime Louise had carried everything including his vagaries on her shoulders. But she did not complain. Things were a bit easier now. Violetta, the little sister, had a young man who was proving his worth by working there for a pittance, learning the business.
It was a success story of a sort, but I thought Louise had paid pretty dearly for it. She was a year younger than I was, yet she looked as if life had already burned out over her, leaving her hard and polished like a bone in the sun. The gold had gone out of her hair and even her thick lashes looked bleached and tow-colored. There was something else there, too: something hunted which I did not understand at all.