Yvonne Norval had chosen the oldest profession with no illusions, solely on her cold-blooded estimate that there was no other in which she was qualified to earn so much money so quickly. But unlike most of her sisters in it, she had hoarded every franc that she could. She spent nothing on personal luxuries, and no more than the essential minimum on such decorative vanities as were necessary to attract her clientele; her Spartan willpower and singleness of purpose substituted for the expensive stimulus of drink and drugs which many others depended on to numb their self-disgust, and with the cunning and ferocity of a tigress she evaded or fought off the approaches of the pimps who would have helped themselves to the largest share of her income. She did not say it all in those words, but the facts were implicit in her own austere way of telling it.
In seven years of this rigorous dedication, she had expended the last saleable vestige of her original stock-in-trade, but she had accumulated a fund that would guarantee her daughter’s care and education for the next ten, on a much higher level even than she could have hoped for if a fellagha sniper’s aim had been a little less deadly.
She placed the child in a convent school of excellent standing, representing herself as the widow of an Army officer whose snobbish family had sternly refused to recognize their marriage or its offspring. Too proud to plead for the charity of these intransigent in-laws, she was depositing everything he had left her to pre-pay the raising of their daughter in the style to which she should be entitled: the fact that she herself would thus be forced to take any menial job for her own subsistence was not to cloud the childhood of Denise. When the little girl became aware enough to ask why Yvonne visited her so seldom and never took her home, she would be told that her mother was married again, to a man who was so intensely jealous of the past that he refused ever to see the fruit of it; perhaps one day he would relent, her mother was working on him constantly, but the day had not dawned yet. The sympathetic nuns had agreed to lend their silence to the deception.
“They would have needed a very tolerant confessor themselves,” said the Saint, “if they had not been moved by such a sacrifice as yours. But after this, did you still have more trouble?”
“Like you, Monsieur, I thought it was ended. But if it had been, I should not be talking to you. Instead, it was only beginning. After all, there was a maquereau I did not escape.”
His given name was Pierre, and in the half-world where he belonged he was known as Pîerrot-le-Fût — a gross arrogant beast of the type that are loosely called Apaches, but not because there is anything noble in their savagery. Of surnames he had a variety, but once when he was picked up in a police dragnet it had amused him to call himself Pierre Norval — that same day, Yvonne had refused his “protection” for the nineteenth time, in particularly graphic phrases, and under the influence of a stolen bottle of Calvados it had struck him as a brilliantly subtle retaliation. Even afterwards, he was still entranced with his own malicious genius, and continued to use the name, grumbling obscure crudities about his unfaithful “wife.”
In a psychological reaction, that has afflicted many better men, rejection had not quenched his interest but had inflamed it. He did not think for an instant that she was irresistible or irreplaceable, he knew a dozen girls who were prettier or better built or more entertaining, but that abstract estimate made it an even more intolerable affront to his vanity that Yvonne should turn him down. It had become a point of honor that he must subjugate her, so that in his own time he could humiliate her as she had humiliated him. And to this objective he had devoted more tenacity and ingenuity than he would ever have squandered on any legitimate enterprise.
And when he finally found the key, it fitted more perfectly than he could have hoped for in his most vindictive imaginings.
“Somehow, he found out what I had done with Denise, and how I had paid the school so that she would be safe no matter what became of me. Naturally, I had let no one know about the money I was saving. And now there was no way for him to touch it. But he had armed himself with the one weapon that I could not fight. He told me that unless I became his slave, he would wait until Denise was old enough to be destroyed, and then tell her all the truth about herself and about me.”
For a few seconds the Saint was utterly at a loss for words, and in that silence he realized that no comment he could have made would have been adequate. In a lifetime that had been lived as close as possible to every form of evil, he had never heard a blackmail threat of such callous enormity.
Finally he said, “You should have killed him.”
“You are right. But that is easier for most people to say than to do, especially for a woman. And if I had done that, even the nuns might have turned against me. The whole scandal might have come out. And even if I escaped the guillotine, I could no longer have hoped to help Denise a little more, perhaps, after she left the school — to see her sometimes and perhaps not have her hate me altogether for giving her up to satisfy the new jealous husband I had invented.”
“So you had to accept Pierrot-le-Fût.”
“Yes. I accepted him. I had a little time left in which men of a lower class, or drunk enough, would still pay for me. And even after that, he would not let me go. He had not yet satisfied his hate. He kept me as his cook, his servant, to wait on his friends and their girls and to clean up after them. And to bring home enough money to pay for this privilege, I could go out and work as a scrub woman also, as you saw me tonight.”
Simon thought this must be the end of the story.
“You have my sympathy and my homage, Madame,” he said. “But that cannot be all you wanted of me. Tell me what you think I could do.”
“I would not have troubled you, Monsieur Templar, if only what I have been doing was enough. I am used to the work now, and to the beatings when he is drunk, and I am still able to hold back a little money which he does not know about, which I am saving for when Denise will need it. But now, Pierrot threatens something much worse than before.”
“Can there be such a thing?” asked the Saint incredulously.
“Yes. Now this filthiness says that what I do is no longer enough. He has been watching Denise. She is old enough and pretty enough, he says, to profit him much more than I can, in the one trade that he understands.”
Simon Templar would never again claim that he had heard everything.
“But what threat could he use to make that possible?”
“He may not need one. He can find some way to shame her at the school, by telling the truth about me to her, or to her friends, or to their parents. Then, when she is an outcast by them or by her own shame, he will take over, by force if necessary. He and his kind know only one art, but they know it well. And because I tried so hard to have her gently brought up, she will have none of the defenses that I had. Pierrot-le-Fût is not stupid, you must understand, but he is utterly ruthless, and he is obsessed with one idea which has become a mania. For him to reduce and ruin Denise would be his last and greatest triumph.”
“And, of course, there is no bribe left to offer him. He has had the satisfaction of making you suffer the last possible indignity. Now he can only look forward to the sadistic climax of proving that all your sacrifice was in vain.”
“C’est ça. One believes, now, that the Saint understands everything.”
“That’s one thing I’ll never do,” said the Saint. “But I’ll keep trying.”