“Oui, madame. At vat hour do you vish me to be ’ere?”
“Not a minute before ten-thirty.” The maid might have to get used to some highly bohemian goings-on eventually, but there was no point in shocking her into a dither in the first few days. “I know I’ll be up very late tonight, and I won’t want to be disturbed.”
“I understand, madame.”
By the time she opened the door herself to the Saint’s ring, she had an excited feeling that the wheel of Fortune was spinning into a pattern loaded with her numbers — which only proves how misleading such hunches can be.
“Darling,” she said. “You’re terribly punctual.”
“Should I have pretended I did not care if I waited another hour to see you?” He kissed her hand with a flourish but went no farther except with eloquent eyes, and she thought that only a truly sophisticated gentleman would have had the gumption, in the circumstances, not to try to muss up a lady’s freshly perfected makeup at the very start of the evening. “I cannot play these games, especially after the games I have had to play since I was here.”
“You look very healthy for a man who’s spent a weekend in Chicago.”
“Only because on Saturday and Sunday I have to go out to the country clubs, or the yacht clubs,” he said quickly. “I have only one thing against America: when a business man wants to take you away for a change from the office atmosphere — be careful! When he gets you to take off your coat, he is planning to take your shirt.”
“Is that what those dreary pill makers did to you?”
“Yes. No. That is, they tried, but they didn’t. I think I made a good deal.”
“Darling. You’re at home here, remember? Make us a cocktail.” She settled into her corner of the oversize couch. “The very driest Martini, for me.”
He stirred up some Romanoff vodka with ice and allowed four drops of Cazalis & Prats to fall in the pitcher.
“You see? I am learning all the tricks of an American business man.”
“Why do you want to be an American business man?”
“Because, alas, I don’t have the temperament of a gigolo. When I compliment a beautiful woman, I want her to believe me and not think I am complimenting her bank account. Here’s an American compliment for you: you look good enough to eat. Is that why I would be called a wolf?”
She laughed.
“Well, you won’t have to prove it that way. I’ve made a reservation for us at Antoine’s.”
“No.”
Her head went back a fraction of an inch, as if jolted by a tiny invisible blow, and her eyebrows went up.
“Why not? It’s the most famous place in New Orleans.”
“That is the first reason. I have seen nothing but famous places for so many days now that I’m bored with them. Second” — he ticked the list off on his fingers, smiling disarmingly — “where I come from, it is the custom for a man who is taking a woman to dinner to choose the place. Unless she is paying, which I’ve told you does not agree with me. Third, I did not plan to go to any restaurant, which would be crowded and noisy and either too stuffy or too air-conditioned. For us, this time, I wanted something quite different.”
“Don’t tell me you want to cook something here!”
“Do I already look so domesticated?” he said reproachfully. “No, I am thinking much more romantically. It came to me while I was on the plane, thinking of you and of our first real date. What would be quite different, I thought, from the first date to which anyone else would invite her? So I had an idea. I remembered I noticed last night it was almost a full moon. I had time after I got here to hire a car, to make inquiries, to drive around. I found a place beside the lake, at the end of a road, fifteen or twenty miles out of town, away from all the traffic and the people, with the most beautiful big trees and nice ground to park, and there I decided we would have a picnic.”
She stared at him with mounting incredulity.
“A picnic? Are you kidding?”
“Ah, but you are thinking of the American or the English picnic. The blanket spread on the ground, the sand in the sandwiches, the ants in the warm beer. I shall show you how a civilized Frenchman picnics.”
“In these clothes? And after you told me to get all dressed up for you—”
“Certainly. In the car I have folding chairs, a folding table, even a tablecloth. I have knives and forks and plates and napkins. In a large box of ice I have caviar, vichyssoise, prawns in aspic, pheasant glazed with truffles — all from one of the best kitchens in town — a salad needing only to be mixed, and a magnum of Bollinger. For music, I provide some of the world’s greatest orchestras — on records. You will be served as well as you could be in the finest restaurant, if only I don’t spill anything. But all this, and the moon on the water, we shall have all to ourselves.”
“You and me and the mosquitoes,” she said, though his dramatic enthusiasm was so enchanting that her tone of voice was softened in spite of herself. “Darling. We’d be eaten alive!”
He shook his head.
“I have already thought of that too.”
He reached for her hand and held it open, and took a small gold box from his pocket and tipped out a pill into her upturned palm. The pill was a little larger than an aspirin tablet, pink and sugar-coated. Then he poured her a glass of water.
“Take it.”
“What’s the idea?” she demanded suspiciously. “Is this one of those happy-dope pills that you think’ll make me agree to anything, or just not care how much I get bitten?”
“No, it isn’t. I give you my word of honor that it cannot possibly harm you, or upset you, or affect your good judgment. It isn’t an aphrodisiac, or a drug that will place you at my mercy.”
“Well, these are two things I wasn’t worrying about.” She raised the pill to her lips and stopped again. “If I take it, will you promise to answer my next question?”
“I promise.”
She put the tablet in her mouth and washed it down.
“Now,” she said, “tell me what your business was with those pill makers in Chicago.”
“It was about this pill.”
“Don’t cheat. A full answer.”
He grinned ruefully.
“Now you have cheated me. I was looking forward so much to having you try to seduce the answer from me. Instead, I am trapped... Very well. They were bargaining for the formula of this pill, which will keep all mosquitoes and gnats and such nuisances away from you for the rest of the night. So do you have any more arguments against my picnic?”
“You’re crazy, but you did make it sound exciting and different,” she said slowly. “But this pill business — that’s the craziest of all.”
“You see how important it will be? No more people dabbing themselves with sticky, smelly things to chase the bugs, and never doing it quite enough. Just one little pill two or three times a day, and you can forget that they exist. A little aroma comes through all your pores, nothing that you or your best friends could detect, but to the nose of a bug — ppheuw!”
“I’d heard of them trying to find something like that, but I didn’t know they’d got it yet.”
He freshened the remains in the pitcher and refilled their glasses.
“I am lucky to have it first. Let me finish this full answer quickly, so that we can be gay again. My father’s hobby was exploring. He made many expeditions in South America, but because he was only a titled amateur, with no scientific qualifications, his discoveries were not taken seriously and often they were not even believed. Even the books he wrote he had to pay to have published — and of course they were not even translated in English. He was writing another when he died a few years ago. I read it, as a duty. He told how he had wondered how natives could live naked in a jungle with bugs that would drive an unprotected white man insane in a few hours, and how he could not believe the white men who thought it was only because the savages were used to it or didn’t feel it. He searched for another answer and found it in the nut of a certain tree that they eat.”