Madame Dufour both owned and personally operated the Chateau Plage, which remained one of the few finer old hotels left standing along that costly stretch of sand between Miami Beach and Fort Lauderdale.
Madame herself was a perfect specimen of what the French are accustomed to label la femme formidable. At the age of ten she had been struck totally bald as the result of typhoid fever, a tonsorial disaster that had naturally distorted the whole course of her childhood and adult life into odd channels. Even the foggiest psychiatrist would have attributed her absolute amorality to this catastrophe of hairlessness, and with no professional bother about stretching her out on a couch.
For years now a naturalized citizen of the United States, Madame had been born in Montreal during the closing period of Queen Victoria’s tightly bodiced reign. Her appearance (whenever she thought to wear one of her scarlet wigs) was superb for her years, while her bold features showed the bland arrogance common to ladies of the French noblesse who had managed to retain their heads upon their necks. Her intensely dark hypnotic eyes had the waiting quality of unfired bullets, and the Chateau’s selective clientele naturally — being fed up to their fleshpots and gilt-edged incomes with the commonplace — adored her.
While she crossed the lounge to the reception desk, several bets changed hands among small groups of guests who were marooned indoors by the weather. There was a running book on whether her public appearances would be scarlet-wigged or wigless — in the latter stage, of course, she rather resembled a caricature of Yul Brynner, the bizarre baldness not detracting an iota from her commanding presence and general aura of her reserved power.
She said to the desk clerk, “Let me have the reservations for this evening’s arrivals, Enrico.”
Enrico, a killingly good-looking type full of rich dark Italian blood, took six cards from the rack. Madame Dufour made a pretense of inspecting them. She was perfectly aware of their contents from her regular early-morning checkup, and she knew exactly the one she intended to put to her uses.
“This one, Enrico. Mr. J. Compton Bell. You will change the location of his room. I wish this number reserved for a Mr. Henri Pazz. It is understood that Mr. Pazz arrives on the evening flight from Montreal.”
Enrico shrugged with that Latin effect which translates each gesture into a delicately suggested seduction. He was indifferent to the bedded or unbedded future status of J. Compton Bell, whom he knew to be an inconsequential cousin to the soap dynasty outfit whose 30 room winter home lay a mile or so along the beach.
“But impossible, Madame. We are full up.”
Madame’s basilisk eyes pinned him coldly. “There is always 1207,” she said.
The shock of astonishment stamped itself on Enrico’s classic features. “You wish Mr. Bell transferred to 1207?”
“I wish.”
Enrico tore the Bell reservation in half. He took a fresh card and assigned the room number being held for J. Compton Bell to this out-of-the-blue Henri Pazz. “Credit rating, Madame?”
Madame Dufour’s brief smile reflected the glint of distant icebergs. “Unlimited.”
The situation made little sense to Enrico as he took a blank card and assigned the negligible cousin of the soap makers to 1207. It was a puzzle of magnitude. 1207, a handsome suite of plum velvets, ormolu and Louis Quinze, was a constant vacancy, one held strictly in reserve for the unheralded appearance of some personage of exceptional prominence. Not over four times during Enrico’s tenure had it been assigned — the last having been to an ousted South American dictator in passage, incognito, to a Caribbean hideout where reposed three of his eight mistresses and the main bulk of his loot.
That suite 1207 should now be placed at the disposal of this abysmally obscure, this very tiny cake of soap, was a grotesque. And how about this Montreal Henri Pazz with his for-the-good-Madonna’s-sake unlimited credit? Why had he not been awarded this unique distinction of the VIP suite, and the Bell nonentity permitted to retain his more modest and certainly more seemly room-and-bath?
Shortly after seven o’clock Madame Dufour, a monolith of patience in dark violet crêpe-de-Chine, acknowledged the nod of a page boy stationed at the lounge’s front entrance by rising from a citron damask love seat and moving toward the shallow staircase that descended to the lobby doors.
A young man entered, followed by a bellboy carrying a winter overcoat and a single suitcase, the latter inexpensively manufactured out of imitation leather in a bilious yellow. Madame stood immobile and regarded with intense if — passive concentration the advancing youth. He was a burly young brute, compact, with an acrobat’s physique and dressed with a flashy clutch toward elegance. His features stirred sharp and now dreaded memories of long ago.
“It is Henri?”
“Madame.”
She signaled to the bellboy. He departed desk ward with the overcoat and bag, being evidently under orders.
Madame continued her close study of Henri’s face. Yes, it was there, that reluctant cowardice of character no matter how protectively overlaid by a coating of strength.
“You have your grandfather’s look. The lashes of his eyes.”
“So it is said, Madame.”
“You left it cold in Montreal?"
“The winters remain frigid — as perhaps Madame remembers.”
She was shepherding him toward the mezzanine stairs, ignoring and bypassing the reception desk.
“I do not register?”
“It is arranged. The card for your signature awaits in my suite. Formalities do not exist between us, Henri. Your luggage is en route to your room.”
A smile that was something of an enigma brushed Henri’s full and remotely cruel-looking lips. Old fool, he thought. As if he would entrust what was to become a veritable Aladdin’s lamp to a flimsy suitcase! “An honor, Madame,” he murmured without obsequiousness.
In the living room of her suite, the windows of which opened directly above the storm-drenched terrace, Madame Dufour took Henri’s unbelievably blue felt fedora and deposited it on a console. She went to a cellarette.
“Cognac, cher enfant?”
“Please.”
She filled two glasses of a larger size than would be considered proper, indicated a comfortable armchair, and herself elected to sit with impressive formality on a side chair, the seat of which was covered in a gros-point bouquet of shallow roses. For a moment or two they regarded each other, the unfathomable old one and the athletic young one, and after a while Madame Dufour said with no inflection whatsoever, “You have come to blackmail me, of course. And how much do you expect, dear boy?”
Henri regarded her with unwilling admiration. A competent adversary, of a fact! His assurance, however, that inner power of sheer animal youth, remained unruffled. “Madame is direct.”
Madame accepted the obvious without comment.
“And,” Henri added, “clairvoyant.”
“A gift I must repudiate, Henri. Your telegram could be read between its lines by a veritable imbecile. Which,” Madame Dufour mentioned complacently, “I am not.”
“I had no sense of being set gauche. The wording was for your personal convenience, to prevent embarrassment should the wire intrigue the curious.” His piglike eyes glanced brightly at her from beneath the beautiful lashes. “Then all is clear?”
“Well, no, Henri. There are shadows.” Madame Dufour then asked, dreading the probable answer — and yet she must ask it in order to be sure — “Why is it you have waited until now?”