Saratoga Trunk Read Free Page A

free of his wife’s restraining hand, his voice rang out with a resonance incredible in an organ that had known almost a century of use. “I tell you I’m giving you the real story if you’d have the sense to see it. I’m giving up my money now because I robbed widows and orphans to get it. That was considered smart in those days. But I’ll say this for myself—I didn’t want money or position or power for myself. I wanted Clio Dulaine and I had to have those to get her. So I outwitted them and I’ve outlived them, too, the whole sniveling lot of them—Gould and Vanderbilt and Rockefeller and Morgan and Fisk and Drew. We skimmed a whole nation—took the cream right off the top.”
    Tubby Krause spoke up soothingly, but even his unctuous voice had the gritty sound of patience nearing exhaustion. “Yep, that’s right, Mr. Maroon. You ought to write a book about it. I bet it’d make ‘em sit up. Ever read The Robber Barons? Great book. Yeh, those were the bad old boys all right. Now, Mr. Maroon, if you’ll just answer a couple of questions.”
    Mrs. Maroon took his great freckled hand in her own two delicate ones; she looked up into his face, earnestly. “You see, Clint, they don’t want to hear it. I told you they wouldn’t. They don’t believe it. Let it go. What does it matter now?”
    “Thanks, Mrs. Maroon.” It was Quinlan with an edge to his voice. “You understand how it is. We’re here to get our story. We’ve always been on the square with you and the Colonel. And you’ve been more than square with us. This is our job, see.”
    “Yah, your jobs!” snarled Maroon to their astonishment, for he had always been as charming as he was considerate. “You young fools! You deserve to lose ‘em. I suppose if I told you that Mrs. Maroon is the daughter of a Creole aristocrat and the most famous placée in New Orleans back in the ‘60s, you wouldn’t be interested!”
    “What’s a placée?”
    “I suppose you never heard of José Llulla, either? Pepe Llulla, they called him, isn’t that right, Clio? Long before your day. He fought and won so many duels that he had to start his own cemetery to take care of them. Cemetery of St. Vincent de Paul on Louisa Street. Anybody’ll show it to you. Well, now, Mrs. Maroon’s grandmother was killed by Pepe Llulla. Jealousy.”
    The newspaper people were smiling rather uncertainly now. After all, a joke’s a joke, they thought, but the old boy was going too far. Mrs. Maroon’s musical indolent laugh reassured them. Mischievously she shook her husband’s arm as one would remind a dear forgetful child.
    “Don’t leave out the important things, Clint, chéri.’’’’ She shut one handsome eye in an amazing and confidential wink. “Surely you won’t forget to tell them that Mama was accused of murder. And the scandal was hushed up,” Clio Maroon went on, equably. “They said he had died of a heart attack. So then Mama was smuggled out of New Orleans, they sent her to France, and of course that’s how I—”
    “—came to be educated in a convent,” chimed in two or three rather weary voices.
    Someone said, “Oh, listen, Mrs. Maroon! You going to start kidding us too? After we’ve given you the best years of our lives!”
    Clio Maroon smiled up at her husband. “You see, dear? Next time. Next time.”
    “That’s right,” Len Brisk assured her. “Next time we’ll run all that movie stuff, Mr. Maroon, just to show you our hearts are in the right place, even if our heads aren’t. Then what’ll you do to us?”
    “Sue you for a million dollars,” Mrs. Maroon put in, swiftly.
    “But it’s all true!” Clint Maroon shouted. “Damn it, it’s all true I tell you! I just want you boys and girls to write it—to write it so that Americans will know that this country today is finer and more honest and more free and democratic than it has been since way back in Revolutionary days. For a century we big fellows could grab and ran. They can’t