Chapter Twenty-Four
Elizabeth stepped down onto the Place de la Bourse shortly after two, counting the fare into the driver’s palm as a messenger boy shot past the taxi’s bonnet, pigeons scattering from under his wheels.
“Le Figaro! édition spéciale! Le prétendu scandale du prêt – un faux grossier!”
The so-called loan scandal. A crude forgery.
The crier had stationed himself at the top of the Métro steps, folding the papers as fast as the coins came at him. Two men broke off their conversation to buy, and a third read over the shoulder of the first without troubling to hide it.
It seems Le Figaro had spent the morning pouring cold water over L’Humanité’s scoop. And forgery sat a good deal closer to the truth than any newspaper in Paris could know.
Which rather raised the question of who had put the word into Gaston Vidal’s ear before the ink was dry on L’Humanité’s story.
“Elizabeth!”
She turned as Cybil broke from the crowd at the Métro steps and crossed the pavement towards her.
“Well, you’ve picked a fine day for it.” Cybil ushered her away from the crier and towards the narrow streets behind the Bourse. “Half of Paris is applauding Lenoir’s front page, while the other half is calling him a liar, and he’ll consider both a triumph.”
“Do you think he’ll see us?”
“One look at you and he won’t be able to stop himself.” A woman with a basket came between them, and Cybil waited until Elizabeth drew level again. “Though it’s probably best if we don’t mention your title.”
“And how do you come to know a man like Monsieur Lenoir? Through the paper?”
“No, we were lovers.” Cybil steered them off the square, and within a street the grand facades had given way to soot-darkened stone.
Lovers. Delivered as plainly as if she’d ordered a café serré.
“What happened?”
“He wanted his girlfriend to move in with us.”
“And what did you say?”
“Not a lot. I packed my bags and moved in with Maggie.”
They turned at the corner, and Elizabeth stepped around a crate of empties left out on the pavement, the smell of stale wine rising from it as she passed.
The Faubourg felt a long way behind them now.
No dress shops here, no milliners, just a cobbler’s, a tabac, a wine shop with its zinc counter crowded even at this hour, and men on the pavement who paused in their conversations to watch the two of them pass.
“That’s it ahead.” Cybil tipped her chin towards a café two doors along, its terrace deserted, every window full of men. She stopped short of the glass, out of the sightline of those inside, and squared her hat with the flat of her hand.
“Shall we?”
The noise reached them before the door was fully open, a dozen conversations running together, and somewhere at the back a voice carrying over the rest.
Elizabeth followed Cybil inside, into a fug of black tobacco and coffee that caught at the back of her throat. Sawdust shifted under her shoes, and there were no marble tabletops or gilded mirrors here.
Men in their shirtsleeves stood drinking at the zinc counter, and papers lay everywhere she looked, folded, spread, rolled into batons, while at one table, long galley sheets sat weighted down with a coffee cup at each corner.
At the back of the room, the carrying voice stopped mid-sentence.
“Mais ce n’est pas possible!” A bear of a man in his shirtsleeves rose up out of his chair at the centre table, both hands lifting as he started towards them. “Cybil, ma chérie. If I had known you were coming, I would have made them sweep the floor.”
“Hello, Raoul. Still promising more than you deliver, I see.” Cybil offered her cheek. He pressed a kiss to one side and then the other, lingering a moment before drawing back, and turned his attention to Elizabeth.
“And who is your friend?”
“Elizabeth Hawthorne.” Cybil’s hand rested briefly on Elizabeth’s back. “Raoul Lenoir.”
“Enchanté, madame.” He took Elizabeth’s hand and inclined his head over it, but his eyes had already returned to Cybil.
“All these years, not so much as a word. Then this morning Vidal brands me a liar. This, from the man who sold his pen to London and wears England’s livery as though it were the Légion d’honneur.
And by the afternoon, The Times walks into my café.
“ He looked from one to the other. “You will forgive me, chérie, if I wonder who sent you.”
“No one sends me anywhere, Raoul. You know that better than most.”
“Ah, still the same spirit that broke my heart.”
“That would require you to have one.”
The laugh rolled up through him, his belly straining against his waistcoat. “Oh, Cybil, how I have missed you.” He swept an arm towards the back of the room. “Come. Sit. If I am to be worked on by the English press, I would rather it were done properly, at my table. Marius, trois cafés.”
Lenoir drew out a chair for Cybil, and Elizabeth took the seat beside her. He dropped into the one opposite, its frame creaking under his weight.
An old man with a cloth over one shoulder set three cups down from a tin tray and left without a word.
“Now.” Lenoir spooned sugar into his cup and stirred. “I know you didn’t cross Paris for le père Marius’s coffee. But first, tell me.” He turned to Elizabeth. “How does Paris strike the English aristocracy this season?”
So much for not mentioning her title. It seemed a man who could read a room full of comrades could read a string of pearls just as easily.
“We didn’t cross Paris to discuss the decline of the British aristocracy.”
“Indulge me, ma chérie.”
Cybil thumbed open her cigarette case. Lenoir’s hand went to the matches beside his packet, but she had already struck her own, shaking it out and exhaling towards the ceiling.
“Paris is as expensive as ever, monsieur, and entirely unrepentant about it,” Elizabeth replied.
The laugh burst out of him, loud enough to turn heads at the zinc counter, and his palm came down on the table until the cups rattled in their saucers.
He pointed at Elizabeth, his eyes still on Cybil.
“You hear her? The estates are mortgaged, the titles are up for sale, but the tongue, that is the last thing an aristocrat surrenders.”
Cybil tapped her ash into the tray, and when the last of the laughter had died away, she looked at him through the smoke.
“You’ve had your indulgence. Now, about that front page of yours. Where did the loan terms come from?”
“You, of all people, ask me for my sources?”
“Then Vidal’s version stands.” Cybil rolled the tip of her cigarette against the edge of the ashtray. “The great Raoul Lenoir, fooled by a forgery. Now that’s a story all of London will read.”
“We do not know it was a forgery.” Lenoir muttered something under his breath that Elizabeth suspected was better left untranslated. “Why do you do this to me? No one brings secrets to a man who cannot keep them. You would make me that man?”
“Your choice, Raoul. Either you give me something, or that’s the story I’m filing.”
Elizabeth raised her coffee to her lips, watching her friend over the rim.
She’d seen Cybil conjure a devoted sister out of thin air for a Paris landlady, but she’d never seen her call in a debt.
No raised voice, no threats, no theatrics.
She’d simply read him tomorrow’s headline and left him to decide whether it ran.
Cybil settled back in her chair and let the silence do her asking for her.
Lenoir’s gaze went from her to Elizabeth and back again, searching for an ally and finding none.
“D’accord, d’accord.” He reached for the cigarette packet beside the matches, struck a light, and drew deeply until the tobacco caught.
“I cannot give you a name. But what I will say, and only because it is you.” He leaned in, his voice dropping.
“The person who brought me those papers was no comrade. No idealist. They bring us pamphlets and bad poetry, not government secrets.” His mouth turned down at the corners.
“And rarely do they ask for payment. For them, the cause is enough.”
“But this one wanted paying?”
“Motus et bouche cousue, Cybil. You know I cannot say more.”
“I’m going to need more than that, Raoul.” Cybil ground the Gitane into the side of the ashtray. “There’s talk the British have found their man. Someone’s to be recalled to London over it, quietly.”
“And you expect me to give you his name?” Lenoir spread his hands and shrugged. “Just like that?”
“I could always just get it from Maggie this evening. The only question is which story I turn in: a certain editor being taken in by a forgery, or the American ambassador and Madame de Massenet.”
“You drive a hard bargain, Cybil, but you know I can’t just give you a name.”
“Very well, what if I mention who I think it could be and you stop me when I get there? Havers … Redfern … Arbuthnot …”
“Arbuthnot?” Lenoir looked at her for a long moment, and then the laugh rolled up out of him. “Oh, Cybil…” He wiped at one eye with the heel of his hand. “You don’t seriously think it’s him, do you?”
“Arbuthnot has access to everything that crosses the ambassador’s desk and more–”
“Non, I know all that.” He waved the objection away. “Why do you think I have been trying to recruit him for years?”
“Then it isn’t him?” Elizabeth asked.
Lenoir turned to her. “No amount of money could buy that man, madame. There is nothing in him for money to speak to. Offer him a fortune and he would correct your arithmetic.”
So that was the reason for it. The catch in the polishing when Oliver had asked how well he knew Raoul Lenoir, and the answer that told them who the man was instead. Not guilt. A man who had spent years refusing that particular knock, and had no wish to explain why it kept coming to his door.
There is nothing in him for money to speak to.
Was Arbuthnot not for sale, or had the currency not been to his liking?
But if not money, then what? Possessions, perhaps?
Her pulse quickened. Of course, it was never about the money.