“It’ll be official in a couple of days,” Maxwell told me. “The old man has already okayed it You’re a lucky guy.”
I said I was.
“Will you mind leaving Rome?”
“I’ll get used to it,” I said and grinned. “A job like that is worth the move out of Rome.”
Maxwell shrugged.
“I don’t know. I wouldn’t want it myself. It’s too much like hard work and it would kill me to work so close to the old man.” He sank lower in his chair. “That pig wasn’t half bad. I think I’m going to take to Rome.”
“There’s no city in the world to touch it.”
He fed a cigarette into his mouth, scratched a match alight and puffed smoke into my face.
“By the way, how’s rampaging Helen getting along?”
The question startled me.
“Who?”
“Helen Chalmers. You’re her nurse-maid or something, aren’t you?”
The red light went up. Maxwell had a nose for scandal. If he got the faintest suspicion that there was something between Helen and me, he would work at it until he had found out just what it was.
“I was a nurse-maid to her for exactly one day,” I said casually. “Since then I’ve scarcely seen her. The old man asked me to meet her at the airport and take her to her hotel. She’s working at the university, I believe.”
His eyebrows jerked up.
“She’s-what?”
“Working at the university,” I repeated. “She’s on some architecture course here.”
“Helen?” He leaned forward, stared at me, then burst out laughing. “That’s the funniest thing I have ever heard. Helen on an architecture course!” He leaned back in his chair and roared. People turned around to stare at us. He certainly sounded as if he had heard the funniest joke of the century. I didn’t find it all that funny. It was as much as I could do not to kick my chair away and plant my fist in his handsome face.
When he got over laughing, he caught my eye. Maybe he saw I wasn’t all that amused because he made an effort to control himself and he waved an apologetic hand.
“Sorry, Ed.” He took out his handkerchief and mopped his eyes. “If you knew Helen like I know Helen…” He broke off to laugh again.
“Look, it can’t be all that funny,” I said, a rasp in my voice.
“What gives?”
“It is funny. Don’t tell me she has taken you in too? Up to now the only guy on the Telegram staff who isn’t on to her is her old man. Don’t tell me you haven’t got her taped yet?”
“I’m not fallowing this. What do you mean?”
“Well, you certainly can’t have seen much of her. I had an idea she might have gone for you: she seems to fall for big, husky he-men. Don’t tell me she showed up in Rome in her flat heels, specs and scraped-back hair-do?”
“I’m still not following you, Jack. What is all this?”
“All this?” He grinned. “It seems you’re luckier than I thought possible, or unlucky, depending how you look at it. All the boys back home know about her. She’s notorious. When we heard she was heading for Rome and the old man wanted you to keep an eye on her, we all thought, sooner or later, you’d be a dead duck. She’ll make a play at anything in trousers. You
mean to tell me she hasn’t tried to make a pass at you?”
I felt myself turn hot, then cold.
“This is something new to me,” I said, speaking casually.
“Well, well. She’s a menace to men. Okay, I admit she has everything. She has looks, comeon eyes and a shape that would bring a corpse alive, but the trouble she can get a guy into! If Chalmers wasn’t the biggest power in newspapers, every paper in New York would be carrying headlines about her at least once a week. She only escapes publicity because no newspaper wants to get on the wrong side of the old man. She gets into pretty near every damn mess there is. It was only because she was involved in the Menotti slaying that she cleared out of New York and came here.”
I sat very still, staring at him. Menotti had been a notorious New York gangster, enormously wealthy, powerful and a onetime killer. He had been hooked up with the Union and vice rackets and had been a bad man to know.
“What had she to do with Menotti ?” I asked.
“Rumour had it she was his piece,” Maxwell said. “She was always going around with him. A little bird told me it was in her apartment that be got knocked off.”
About two months ago Menotti had been brutally murdered in a three-room apartment which he had rented as a love nest. The woman he had been visiting had vanished, and the police hadn’t been able to trace her. The killer also had disappeared. It was generally thought that Menotti had been slain on the orders of Frank Setti, a rival gangster, who had been deported as a drug trafficker and was now supposed to be living somewhere in Italy.
“What little bird?” I asked.
“It was Andrews who, as you know, has his ear right to the ground. He usually knows what he is talking about. Maybe he was wrong this time. All I do know is that she used to go around with Menotti. She left for Rome soon after Menotti was killed. The janitor of the apartment block in which Menotti was strangled gave Andrews a pretty good description of the woman in the case: the description fitted Helen Chalmers like a glove. Our people closed the janitor’s mouth before the police got to him, so it never came out.”
“I see,” I said.
“Well, if you haven’t anything juicy to tell me about her while she’s in Rome, it looks as if
she has had a scare and is at last behaving herself.” He grinned. “Frankly, I’m disappointed. To tell the truth when I heard I was going to take your place, I thought I might have a try at her myself. She’s really something. As you were told to look after her, I was hoping to hear by now that you and she were more than old friends.”
“Do you imagine I’d be such a pea brain as to fool around with Chalmers’ daughter?” I asked heatedly.
“Why not? She’s worth fooling around with, and when she handles this kind of situation, she takes good care the old man will never find out. She’s been fooling around with men since she was sixteen, and Chalmers has never found out. If you haven’t seen her without her specs and that awful hair-do, you haven’t seen anything. She’s terrific, and, what’s more, I hear she is very, very keen. If she ever makes a play at me I’m not going to stop her.”
Somehow I got him off the subject of Helen and back on to business. After another hour of his company, I took him back to his hotel. He said he would be in the office the following morning to tie up the loose ends and thanked me for entertaining him.
“You really are a lucky guy, Ed,” he said as we were parting. “The foreign desk is about the best job in the business. There’re guys who would give their left arms to have it. Me — I wouldn’t want it. It’s too much like hard work, but for you…” He broke off and grinned. “A guy who can let a babe like Helen slip through his fingers — well, for heaven’s sake! What else could you do except hold down the foreign desk?”
He thought it was a good joke and, slapping me on the back, he went off laughing towards the elevators.
I didn’t think the joke was so good. I got into my car and drove through the congested traffic until I reached my apartment. During the drive I did some thinking. The information I had from Maxwell about Helen shocked me. I didn’t doubt that what he had told me was true. I knew Andrews was accurate in any story he had to tell. So she had been mixed up with Menotti. I suddenly began to wonder who she was mixed up with here. If she had acquired the taste for dangerous racketeers in New York, she might have continued to cultivate the taste here. Was that the explanation of her high style of living? Was some man financing her?