Murder Is Served by Frances Lockridge Read Free Book Online

realigned the bar stool which he had imperceptibly disturbed, and looked at the clock behind the bar. It was now five minutes past noon. The little ones were late; there had been a time, only three weeks ago, when two of them had appeared at eleven-thirty. Noblesse oblige had been under strain.
    When he left William in command, André Maillaux crossed the foyer to the cloakroom and disappeared within it. Cecily Breakwell, the advance guard of the hat-check girls, was sitting down. She stood up and said, “Good morning, sir,” as she had at about this hour each day for the past two weeks. André looked at her and said, “Good morning, my dear,” as he had each day except the first, when he had said, “What is your name, my dear?” and had not, so far as she could tell, listened at all to her reply. He was, Cecily thought, a funny little man. He looked so foreign.
    André Maillaux would not have been displeased by this, nor would he have been surprised. If he did not look foreign—distantly foreign, foreign at several removes—there would have been a failure in technic, and that was inconceivable. It took doing, after twenty years, particularly for a man not physically of a type. Not tall, to be sure, a little plump, but there it ended. There nature ended and art began, the delicacy of art. It had taken skill to find a tailor who could, without ever overdoing it, without any suggestion of burlesque, give to André’s clothes the faintest suggestion of a Parisian cut—of, in effect, a reformed Parisian cut. It had taken considerable explanation, a good many years ago. One of André’s minor worries was that this admirable tailor would not prove of long life, that the explanation would have some day to be repeated. “The effect,” André had said, those years ago, “the effect, you perceive, it should be that I make every attempt not to appear French, that I pattern myself—you perceive?—after the Americans. But that the clothes, these admirable American clothes, unavoidably—you perceive?—take on the appearance of the boulevards because it is I who wear them.” He had looked at the tailor, almost as if he were a busboy undergoing final examination before being graduated, and had been stern. “It is subtle, no?” André Maillaux, building toward success, had said. “You perceive, yes?”
    The tailor had perceived; for fifteen years he had continued to perceive. “An artist,” André thought to himself each time he ordered new clothes, of that special dark gray so difficult to obtain, “a fellow artist.” It pleased André to see that others appreciated this; that his friend the tailor had also prospered. Perhaps, André had long thought, they might achieve world fame together—the most admirable tailor, the greatest restaurateur, of the habitable world. (The habitable world was not, to André, very large.)
    It was no slight trick to remain permanently foreign in any part of this world, particularly for a man of no physical idiosyncrasy and with a marked aptitude for languages. The retained accent, the artfully tailored clothes, the barbering, these were essential, but these were only the costuming of the part. “He even walks like a foreigner,” Cecily Breakwell thought, watching him recede through the coatroom. “It’s funny how you can tell.” André would have been pleased had he been able to overhear that thought; here, he would have realized, was a tribute to an art purely personal. The walk, the gestures, the use of the eyes, the inflection of the voice—these were of André, of André only. Even now, after many years, André Maillaux sometimes invented a new gesture, at once Parisian and personally idiosyncratic, to make himself more perfect, more perfect as the impeccable proprietor of the greatest restaurant in the world. There was little of planning, of