He did not wait for Karla’s murmured, “I will be so happy to, darling,” but pushed his chair back and rose. Abel, Dr. Storm, Peabody, and Dr. Akst immediately rose, too. Abel followed his tall brother through one door, and the doctor, the lawyer, and the physicist trooped out through another. The Queens watched them leave, fascinated. It was exactly as if the long dinner had been a scene in a play, with everyone an actor and the curtain coming down to disperse them in their private identities, each registering relief in his own fashion.
As Ellery drew Karla Bendigo’s chair back, his eyes met his father’s over her satiny red hair.
In three hours, with all the principals present, not one word had been said about the reason for the Queens’ presence on Bendigo Island.
“Shall we go, gentlemen?”
King’s wife took their arms.
At the door, Ellery looked back.
Side by side at the littered table sat Max’l and Judah Bendigo. The ex-wrestler was still stuffing himself, and the silent Bendigo brother was pouring another glassful of cognac with an air of concentration and a hand that remained steady.
5
Karla’s apartment was on another planet, a gentle world of birds and flowers, with casements overlooking the gardens and a small fireplace burning aromatic logs. Water-colors splashed the walls, glass winked in the firelight, and everything was bright and warm and friendly.
A maid, not a flunky in livery, served coffee and brandy. Karla took neither; she sipped an iced liqueur.
“Coffee keeps me awake. Brandy—” she shrugged — “I find I have lost my taste for it.”
“Your brother-in-law’s influence?” suggested the Inspector delicately.
“We can do nothing with Judah.”
“Why,” asked Ellery, “does Judah drink?”
“Why does anyone drink?... Rest your feet on the footstool, Inspector Queen. Dinner was exhausting, I know. Immanuel Peabody is a fascinating raconteur, but he has never learned that the pinnacle of brilliance in story-telling is knowing when to stop. Dr. Storm is a pig. One of the world’s great internists, but a pig nevertheless. Am I being dreadful? It is such a relief to allow myself to be a woman on occasion, and gossip.”
The sadness in her eyes interested Ellery. He wondered how much Karla Bendigo knew of the threats against her husband’s life, if she knew anything at all.
The Inspector was apparently wondering, too, because he said, “Your husband bowled me over, Mrs. Bendigo. One of the most dynamic men I’ve ever met.”
“That is so characteristic, Inspector!” She was pleased. “I mean, your feeling that. It is the invariable reaction of everyone who meets Kane.”
“Who meets whom?” Ellery asked.
“Kane.”
“Kane?”
“Oh, I forgot,” she laughed. “Kane is my husband’s name. K-a-n-e.”
“Then the name King—”
“Is not properly his name at all. We are playthings of the press, n’est-ce pas? The newspapers referred to Kane so long and so often as ‘the Munitions King’ that he began to use the word ‘king’ as a name. In the beginning it was a family joke, but somehow it has hung on.”
“Does his brother Judah address him as King?” asked Ellery. “I don’t believe I heard Judah utter a word all evening.”
She shrugged. “Judah took it up with as much enthusiasm as he ever shows for anything. Judah’s affinity for cognac often leads him into childish irony. He uses ‘King’ as if it were a... a title. Even Abel has fallen into the habit. I am the only one who still addresses my husband by his given name.”
Ellery began to perceive a ground for the sadness in her eyes.
She told the story of how she and her husband had met.
It was in an ultra-fashionable restaurant in Paris under characteristic Bendigo circumstances. They were at adjacent tables, each in a large dinner party. She had noticed the big, dark, Byronic-locked man with the flashing black eyes when his party entered; it included two members of the French cabinet, a high British diplomat, a famous American general, and Abel Bendigo — there were no women — but it was on the Munitions King that all eyes fastened.
The buzz that filled the restaurant caused Karla to inquire who he was.
She had heard of him, of course, but she had always discounted the stories about him as the inflated gossip of the bankrupt society from which she came. Now, seeing him in the flesh, she was equally sure the stories must be true. In the world in which she lived, men were either cynical petrifactions in high places or useless, usually impecunious, exquisites. Among these people he stood out like a Roman candle. He was all radiant energy, heating and exciting the pale particles among which he moved.
Being a woman, Karla had immediately turned her glance elsewhere.
“I remember feeling thankful that my better profile happened to be turned toward his table,” Karla said, smiling. And wondering if it were possible to make a conquest of such a man. He was said to have very little to do with women. That, of course, is a challenge to any woman, and I was bored to death by my friends and my life.
“I suppose some of this showed in what was visible to him. Which was a great deal, I fear,” she added, “for this was immediately after the war and I was wearing a particularly shameless creation of Feike-Emma’s. Still, I was surprised when the Baroness Herblay, who was called behind her back ‘Madame Roentgen’ because nothing escaped her eye, whispered to me behind her lorgnette that Monsieur le Roi had been staring at me for some time with the most insulting intensity — ‘insulting’ was the word she used, hopefully.”
The Baroness explained at Karla’s raised brow that “Monsieur le Roi” was what the leftist French press had taken to calling Mr. King-of-the-Munitions Bendigo.
“I looked around,” Karla murmured, “and met Kane’s eye. Mine was very cold, intended to freeze him into an awareness that I was not some modiste’s mannequin to be looked over with insolence. Instead, I met such a heat in his...
“I looked away quickly, feeling myself blush. I was not a convent girl. The war had made us all a thousand years old. Still, at the moment, I was feeling exactly like one. He was so... uniquely attractive... And then I howled like a chambermaid, which was the effect Baroness Herblay sought, I am sure, for she was a wicked old woman and she had stabbed my ankle with the stiletto she wore in place of a heel. So I looked up through tears of pain to find him, very darkly imperious and amused, stooping over my chair.
“‘Pardon me, if I startled you,’ he said in schoolboy French. ‘But I had to tell you that you are the most beautiful woman I have ever seen.’
“Of course, in American English it sounds — how do you say? — corny,” continued Karla with a twinkle, “but there is something about the French language which gives this sort of sentiment a tone of ever-fresh glamor. And expressed — no matter how awkwardly — in Kane’s deep, rich American voice, it sounded as if it had never been said before.
“My cousin, Prince Claudel, was at the head of our table. Before I could find my tongue, Claudel rose and said frigidly, ‘And I must tell you, Monsieur, that you are a presuming boor. You will please retire immediately.’”
“There was a brawl,” chuckled Inspector Queen.
“A duel,” guessed Ellery.
“Nothing of the sort,” retorted Karla, resting her shining head on the back of her chair, “although either would have delighted the Baroness. Baron Herblay, who had grown old in the intrigues of Europe, whispered in Claudel’s ear, and I saw my cousin go amusingly pale. It was Bendigo money which had supported Claudel in exile while he plotted the destruction of the revolutionary régime in our country and his return there, which would mean eventually his elevation to the overturned throne. Claudel had never laid eyes on Kane Bendigo; it was a minor matter to the Bendigos, handled through agents and bankers in Paris.