“Yes, but there’s a fire here.”
“Have you among your guests a man calling himself Count Borowki?”
“Why, yes—”
“We’re bringing him there for identification. He was picked up on the road on some information we received.”
“But—”
“We picked up a girl with him. We’re bringing them both down there immediately.”
“I tell you—”
The receiver clicked briskly in his ear and Mr. Weicker hurried back to the lobby, where the smoke was diminishing. The reassuring pumps had been at work for five minutes and the bar was a wet charred ruin. Mr. Weicker began passing here and there among the guests, tranquilizing and persuading; the phone operators began calling the rooms again, advising such guests as had not appeared that it was safe to go back to bed; and then, at the continued demands for an explanation, he thought again of Fifi, and this time of his own accord he hurried to the phone.
Mrs. Schwartz’s anxious voice answered; Fifi wasn’t there. That was what he wanted to know. He rang off brusquely. There was the story, and he could not have wished for anything more sordidly complete—an incendiary blaze and an attempted elopement with a man wanted by the police. It was time for paying, and all the money of America couldn’t make any difference. If the season was ruined, at least Fifi would have no more seasons at all. She would go to a girls’ institution where the prescribed uniform was rather plainer than any clothing she had ever worn.
As the last of the guests departed into the elevators, leaving only a few curious rummagers among the soaked débris, another procession came in by the front door. There was a man in civilian clothes and a little wall of policemen with two people behind. The commissionaire spoke and the screen of policemen parted.
“I want you to identify these two people. Has this man been staying here under the name of Borowki?”
Mr. Weicker looked. “He has.”
“He’s been wanted for a year in Italy, France and Spain. And this girl?”
She was half hidden behind Borowki, her head hanging, her face in shadow. Mr. Weicker craned toward her eagerly. He was looking at Miss Howard.
A wave of horror swept over Mr. Weicker. Again he craned his head forward, as if by the intensity of his astonishment he could convert her into Fifi, or look through her and find Fifi. But this would have been difficult, for Fifi was far away. She was in front of the café, assisting the stumbling and reluctant John Schwartz into a taxi. “I should say you can’t go back. Mother says you should come right home.”
IV
Count Borowki took his incarceration with a certain grace, as though, having lived so long by his own wits, there was a certain relief in having his days planned by an external agency. But he resented the lack of intercourse with the outer world, and was overjoyed when, on the fourth day of his imprisonment, he was led forth to find Lady Capps-Karr.
“After all,” she said, “a chep’s a chep and a chum’s a chum, whatever happens. Luckily, our consul here is a friend of my father’s, or they wouldn’t have let me see you. I even tried to get you out on bail, because I told them you went to Oxford for a year and spoke English perfectly, but the brutes wouldn’t listen.”
“I’m afraid there’s no use,” said Count Borowki gloomily. “When they’ve finished trying me I’ll have had a free journey all over Europe.”
“But that’s not the only outrageous thing,” she continued. “Those idiots have thrown Bopes and me out of the Trois Mondes, and the authorities are trying to get us to leave the city.”
“What for?”
“They’re trying to put the full blame of that tiresome fire on us.”
“Did you start it?”
“We did set some brandy on fire because we wanted to cook some potato chips in alcohol, and the bartender had gone to bed and left us there. But you’d think, from the way the swine talk, that we’d come there with the sole idea of burning everyone in their beds. The whole thing’s an outrage and Bopes is furious. He says he’ll never come here again. I went to the consulate and they agreed that the whole affair was perfectly disgraceful, and they’ve wired the Foreign Office, and I’ve phoned Sir George Munready at Bearne, who happens to be a personal friend of mine.”
Borowki considered for a moment. “If I could be born over again,” he said slowly, “I think without any doubt I should choose to be born an Englishman.”
“I could choose to be anything but an American! By the way, the Taylors are not presenting Miss Howard at court because of the disgraceful way the newspapers played up the matter.”
“What puzzles me is what made Fifi suspicious,” said Borowki.
“Then it was Miss Schwartz who blabbed?”
“Yes. I thought I had convinced her to come with me, and I knew that if she didn’t, I had only to snap my fingers to the other girl… That very afternoon Fifi visited the jeweler’s and discovered I’d paid for the cigarette case with a hundred-dollar American note I’d lifted from her mother’s chiffonier. She went straight to the police.”
“Without coming to you first! After all, a chep’s a chep—”
“But what I want to know is what made her suspicious enough to investigate, what turned her against me.”
Fifi, at that moment sitting on a high stool in a hotel bar in Paris and sipping a lemonade, was answering that very question to an interested bartender.
“I was standing in the hall looking in the mirror,” she said, “and I heard him talking to the English lady—the one who set the hotel on fire. And I heard him say, ‘After all, my one nightmare is that she’ll turn out to look like her mother.’” Fifi’s voice blazed with indignation. “Well, you’ve seen my mother, haven’t you?”
“Yes, and a very fine woman she is.”
“After that I knew there was something the matter with him, and I wondered how much he’d paid for the cigarette case. So I went up to see. They showed me the bill he paid with.”
“And you will go to America now?” the barman asked.
Fifi finished her glass; the straw made a gurgling sound in the sugar at the bottom.
“We’ve got to go back and testify, and we’ll stay a few months anyhow.” She stood up. “Bye-bye; I’ve got a fitting.”
They had not got her—not yet. The Furies had withdrawn a little and stood in the background with a certain gnashing of teeth. But there was plenty of time.
Yet, as Fifi tottered out through the lobby, her face gentle with new hopes, her lovely body shining through he closes,—as she went out looking for completion under the impression that she was going to the couturier, there was a certain doubt among the eldest and most experienced of the Furies if they would get her, after all.
Published in The Saturday Evening Post magazine (31 January 1931).
