An Unexpected Ally
IT was Friday morning, and Napoleon Bonaparte strolled along the shady side of Swanston Street, pleased with the world in general and with the prospect of meeting Nancy Chesterfield in particular. He had dawdled over morning tea and the newspapers, and now intended interviewing the Australian publishers of the internationally known I. R. Watts.
Arrived at the offices of the Monarch Publishing Company, he asked to see someone in authority.
“My name is Napoleon Bonaparte,” he said bluntly to a large man behind a resplendent desk. “I am a visitor to this country from South Africa, where I am known as an author and journalist. I am a strong admirer of the works of I. R. Watts. You publish his books, and you would be bestowing a great favour on me if you gave me his address.”
“That, I regret, I cannot do, Mr-er-Bonaparte,” stated the large man. “It would be against the fixed policy of this firm to give to anyone the address of its authors. However, if you care to write to I. R. Watts, I’ll have the letter forwarded.”
“I thank you. Yes, perhaps that will be the best way,” Bony agreed. “Could you relent so far as to inform me if I. R. Watts is living in this State?”
“Oh yes, that is so.”
“Thank you. Forgive me for presuming once more. Can you tell me exactly whatis commercial fiction?”
The publisher smiled as he might at a harmless lunatic.
“Commercial fiction is any piece of fiction that will sell.”
“Oh! What, then, is literature?”
“Same thing, with the addition of non-fictional writings up to standard for offering for sale.”
“Ah! The same thing!” Bony murmured. “Thank you. I have been given to understand that in this country there is a distinct difference between literature and commercial fiction.”
The publisher smiled, saying, “The distinction doesn’t exist in any publishing house anywhere in the world.”
“Again I thank you, sir,” Bony said. “I haven’t read any Australian authors other than I. R. Watts. May I assume that there are other masters of Australian literature?”
“Thousands of ’em, Mr Bonaparte, tens of thousands of them. A master of literature is the man, or the woman, who enters a bookshop or a library with money to spend on books.”
“Just so! Very neat indeed,” Bony exclaimed. “I thank you. Good morning. I’ll write to I. R. through this address.”
Still pleased with the world, Bony walked down Swanston Street, strolled in and out of several book shops, filling in time until he came to stand outside the main entrance of the newspaper building where Nancy Chesterfield marketed vanity. He continued to stand there until three minutes past one o’clock, the time set for his luncheon appointment. When he went up in the lift it was four minutes past one, and when he entered Nancy Chesterfield’s office he was exactly five minutes late.
“Why, it’s Inspector Bonaparte!” she exclaimed.
“My apologies for being late, Miss Chesterfield. I was detained on a quest for information. There is no need to ask after your health.”
“Neither is there need to ask after your own,” she countered, her brows arched.
“My health concerns me less than my appetite. I could eat-anything.”
She was putting on her gloves, and she looked up from them to say, “You have no regrets for having deceived a poor female?”
“I am the gayest deceiver in the country.”
The blue eyes clouded. “What is it you want from me?” sheasked, her voice brittle.
“Table companionship, the envy of other men, and to be informed on the difference between literature and commercial fiction. In return, I am able to give-well, very little. You see, I am a person of no importance in the political, the social, or the literary world. How did you unmask me?”
The cloud vanished from her eyes, and her voice shed its brittleness.
“That was easy,” she said. “After you left the other day I rang through to the morgue-that’s our Records Room, you know. They found your name easily enough, your profession, all about you, even that you caught a swordfish weighing over four hundred pounds.”
Bony laughed without restraint, and she laughed with him.
“And I went to no end of trouble in having the editor of theJohannesburg Age prepared to receive an inquiry about me. Alas, I am becoming too famous. Well, do we go along?”
“Of course, Mr Bonaparte. I would have been disappointed had your courage failed you.”
He opened the door and she passed into the corridor. He said, before they reached the lift, “My courage often fails, Miss Chesterfield, but my will to succeed, never.”
“To succeed in what?”
“In what I set out to accomplish.”
They talked of nothing as they descended to the street level, and he accompanied her to her car parked outside the building. They continued to talk of nothing as they drove to a women’s club in Spencer Street.
“Being a foreigner in Victoria, Mr Bonaparte, you are lunching with me,” she explained. “You want to talk to me, don’t you? Cross-examine me, and the rest of it? As a matter of fact, I want to talk to you. Here we may talk.”
“You are being exceedingly generous,” he said, quietly.
She examined him with thoughtful appraisement, liking the cut of his light-grey suit, the expensive shirt, the tasteful tie. She liked his face and the shape of his head, and the way he did his hair. He was a new experience to her, and shewas liking that, too.
Herself smartly tailored in a blue-grey suit, with a suggestion of flame in the soft red of her blouse, and wearing a small black hat that threw into relief the tint of her perfectlycoiffured hair, Nancy Chesterfield was an experience quite new to Napoleon Bonaparte. As they faced each other across the white and silver table, the eyes of two fencing mastersclashed, held firmly. She was the first to speak, and she astonished him.
“If you want any assistance in this Mervyn Blake business, I’ll give you all I can.”
“Mervyn Blake business!” he echoed.
“It is why you are staying with Miss Pinkney. It is why-” and she smiled-“you are pursuing me.”
“It is admitted, Miss Chesterfield.”
“I have a friend in the C.I.B. who knows something of you,” she told him. “He said that in certain circles you are known as the man who never fails.”
“Partially true, only partially, Miss Chesterfield. I have failed to instil into my eldest son’s mind the necessity for conservative spending. I have failed my long-suffering wife. I have-”
“Never failed to-the word isfinalize, and I like it-never failed to finalize an investigation.”
“I have certainly been fortunate in my professional career,” he said, unsmilingly.
“To what do you owe your uninterrupted successes? It sounds as though I were interviewing you, doesn’t it?”
“I think I owe it to patience, to a disregard of inconvenient orders from superiors, and to a slight knowledge of human psychology.”
“And,” she took him up, “to an extraordinary mixture of pride and humility. You had a lot of hurdles to get over, didn’t you? Almost as many as confronted me. We have the same type of mind, Mr Bonaparte. We started, I imagine, from the same scratch line. Mervyn Blake was like us, but he failed. We have been successful because we love our work. He failed because he wanted the rewards with all his passionate heart, without having to work too hard for them. For him, writing was a means to an end, and the end was fame. With us, were we creative writers, the end would be the joy in creative writing and the fame to go to hell. I liked Mervyn Blake. He had many fine qualities. I want to help you unearth his murderer.” Her mouth tightened, and then she asked, “May I call you Nap?”
It brought the flashing smile.
“If it pleases you,” he told her. “If you want to please me, call me Bony.”
“Bony it shallbe, and you shall call me Nan. Don’t think me swift, because I’m not really. I want you to treat me as an ally, not a suspect, and I want you to accept the relationship without any waste of time. Don’t let us fence any longer. We both know that Mervyn Blake didn’t just die.”
His gaze dropped to his food. Of what he was thinking she could not guess, but she was sure he was not seeking an advantage. For a full minute neither spoke. Then he was looking at her as no man ever had regarded her. In another it would have been an insult. His bright blue eyes began with an examination of her clothes, and continued with an examination of feature by feature until finally they gazed with penetrating steadiness into her own eyes.
He said, “Are you prepared to give me your full confidence and be satisfied with only a portion of mine?”
She nodded, and he asked, “When shall we begin?”
“Now, if you like.”
“Very well. Why are you so sure that Mervyn Blake was murdered?”
“I don’t know why. I can’t tell you.”
“Do you know of a probable motive for killing him?”
She shook her head.
“You must not be offended if I throw your words back to you,” he warned. “You said just now that Blake wanted the rewards but did not like the work that earned them. Will you enlarge on that?”
“I didn’t say that he disliked the work of writing,” Nancy asserted. “He liked it well enough, but it took second place to the ambition to be famous. He wasn’t the great man a number of people thought he was, and he knew it. He had in high degree the gift of word painting, and in low degree the gift of telling a story. The division of those two gifts is even greater in Wilcannia-Smythe, but he is more accomplished in deluding himself.”
“I confess that I don’t see where this affair begins and where it ends,” Bony said. “I find myself unable to make a reasonably accurate assessment of the importance of these people. I am very feminine in my gift of intuition, and I have felt, and still do, that the motive for killing Blake, if he was murdered, lies somewhere in a distinction between what is termed literature and commercial fiction. Bagshott may have thrown me out of gear. On the other hand, he might very well have pointed out the track for me to follow. Am I right in assuming that a great novelist has in high degree the gift of story-telling added to the gift of word painting?”
“Yes-and the gift of taking pains.”
“Apply your measure to I. R. Watts.”
“He can paint word pictures and tell a story, but he lacks the gift of taking pains.”
“And Clarence B. Bagshott?”
“Bagshott is a born story-teller, but he lacks the gift of taking pains with his word painting. He is too slipshod ever to become a great novelist. But a story teller-he is certainly that.”
“Was Blake conscious ofhis own limitations?”
“I think he was. You see, he must have realized that when his books were refused publication in London and America they were not-well, good enough.”
“Go on, please.”
“I know this much about Mervyn Blake,” she said. “When he could not publish overseas, he strove to exert his influence on Australian literature so that he would secure an undying place in it. Long ago he and Wilcannia-Smythe planned it all. Fitted only to be flunkeys at the Court of World Literature, they decided it would be preferable to be joint dictators of the local Court of Literature.”
“What influence did they exert on Australian literature?”
“Actually very little. They tried to lead it. No one can do that. A nation’s literature goes on and up or on and down in accordance with the mental virility of its writers.”
“Was there, or rather, is there a great deal of what is termed back-slapping going on among author-critics?”
“Quite a lot, but, as Abe Lincoln said, you can’t fool all the people all the time, and in the long run it doesn’t do them any good. They have news value, not because they are authors but because they succeed in having themselves elected office bearers in literary societies. They don’t influence the unbiased critic.”
“Thank you, Nan. We are getting along very nicely.”
“I thought we could move once we got started, Bony.”
“Of course. Let’s attack the problem from a different angle. Was there any other woman in love with Mervyn Blake?”
“Ella Montrose was very fond of him. But-”
“Don’t think it. Was any other man in love with Mrs Blake?”
“Little Twyford Arundal worshipped her from a distance,” Nancy replied. “I think that Martin Lubers liked her.”
“Only liked her?”
“That is all, I think.”
“I have read the record of what occurred that last afternoon and evening of Blake’s life as set down by you. Did you forget anything when you made your statement?”
“No. InspectorSnooks saw to that.”
“Was Blake interested in women?”
“I don’t think so. He liked me. Liked me; no passion.”
“What about his private life? His relations with his wife?”
“Quite normal, I believe. She scolded him sometimes for drinking too much. I fancy they got along very well. They lived to a great extent independently, and they worked independently, though for the same end.”
“In their objective, therefore, they were united?”
“Yes, they were.”
“Tired of being questioned?”
“No, Bony, I’m not.”
“I would like to ask more personal questions.”
“Do so. Have you a cigarette?”
“Of course. Forgive me, please.” Having held a match to her cigarette, he said, “What was your interpretation of the meeting of Wilcannia-Smythe and Mrs Blake at the Rialto Hotel?”
“I don’t know what to think about that,” she confessed. “It seems that Mrs Blake found Wilcannia-Smythe’s handkerchief and accused him of leaving it somewhere or other. I don’t understand it at all.”
“Why did you leave without speaking to Mrs Blake?”
Nancy Chesterfield hesitated, and Bony was sure she was marshalling her facts.
“In the first place, I was furiously angry when Wilcannia-Smythe did not return to me, and in the second place, I felt that Mrs Blake was in such an emotional state that she would not appreciate it if I spoke to her.”
“She has a temper?”
“Yes. Also she has a forceful personality.”
“That night you spent with theBlakes, you slept in Mrs Blake’s room. Where did she sleep?”
“In the dressing-room, next to it.”
“And where did Mrs Montrose sleep?”
“In the room beyond the dressing-room. The dressing-room served both bedrooms.”
“You met otheroversea visitors at the Blake’s beside the man Marshall Ellis, did you not?”
“How did you know that? Yes, I did. Janet Blake has always been keen to entertain foreign literary people. Her correspondence with literary people in other countries is very large.”
“What was your impression of Dr Chaparral?”
“Good! I liked him. He could talk well and always interestingly.”
“He played ping-pong exceptionally well, I understand.”
“He held the South American Championship for three years running.”
“And he was almost an expert on the customs and superstitions of the backward peoples of his country, was he not?”
“Yes, he knew a great deal about them.”
“And as he told his stories, Ella Montrose jotted them down?”
Nancy Chesterfield frowned and regarded Bony with narrowed eyes. She nodded, and Bony pressed on, “What did she write on, do you remember?”
“Yes,” she said. “Ella started off by making memos of the doctor’s stories on pieces of paper and then either rewrote them in a note-book, or left it to Blake to do. Some of them were extraordinary stories, and terribly gruesome.”
“Did the note-book have a black cover?”
“It certainly did. How do you know all this?”
“Intuition.”
“Fibber.”
“You are correct. Thank you very much for taking me to lunch. It has been much better than if I had taken you. May I call on you at your office-when I want to?”
“Of course. And I hope you will want to soon and often.”