An Infinity of Mirrors Read Online Free PDF Page B

car.
    â€œWe will change cars,” the crumbling beauty said in a heavy Hungarian accent. She bit the Negro’s earlobe, then got out of the car on the far side. As the women changed cars, Bernheim gave the address of the small house in the rue La Pérouse. When the women were seated, Bernheim hit the horn lightly again. The Hotchkiss took the lead, the Reina Stella was in second place, and Bernheim’s car completed the little unit. “I know you,” the Hungarian woman said to Paul. “More than six women have told me all about you.” She laughed in her throat with appreciative lust.
    The procession had doubled back through the Bois. Ahead of them the other two cars had just turned for the exit to the Avenue Foch when there was a loud sound and the Delage listed, then limped. “Merde!” Bernheim said softly. “A flat tire!”
    The Hungarian woman became indignant. “A flat tire? What are you going to do?”
    â€œI like you,” Bernheim said magnanimously. “My suggestion is that we get a taxi and go to my apartment on the Avenue Gabriel.”
    â€œNo. I could not. I like you too, but with me it must be group sex. It is the only way for me—I am a stone without it. Four years ago we were snowbound in a train in a pass in the Haute Savoie. Seventeen women, twenty-nine men. I was a different woman then. I was married to a Prince and—”
    â€œWhich Prince?” Bernheim was as conscious as anyone else of status symbols.
    â€œPasset-Grimetski.”
    â€œOh, yes. He paints on dinner plates?”
    â€œYes. You know him?”
    â€œI knew him in the war. That is, just after the war when I was waiting to get home. I had made it as far as Brindisi.”
    â€œ Plon-Plon was in Brindisi?”
    â€œOh, yes. And very active, too.”
    â€œHow strange that he never mentioned it. He knows that my great-aunt was from Brindisi.”
    Bernheim opened the car door slowly, saying, “Well, I’d better start to find us a cab and help you along with some of this group therapy.” He smiled at her warmly and, still thinking hard about his series of talks with Paule, he got out of the car in the darkness of the park and was hit by a large Citroën driven by James Cardinal Moran of Ludlow, England, and, according to the subsequent coroner’s report, was knocked forty-five feet.
    When the English Cardinal and the Hungarian Princess reached Bernheim, he was nearly gone. Cardinal Moran knelt beside him and began to murmur the last rites, knowing it could do the man no harm.
    â€œFranz! Set to!” Bernheim cried loudly and distinctly, and then he died. It was two minutes after twelve in the morning of June 14, 1932.

Four
    KILLED BY ENGLISH CARDINAL
    ACTOR DIES BLESSING FRANCE
    AS PRINCESS WEEPS
    IN BOIS DE BOULOGNE :
    GREAT ACTOR DIES
    IN ARMS OF
    PRIMATE & PRINCESS
    FINAL WORDS
    â€œFrance is Everything!”
    The understandable mistake of an English Cardinal and a Hungarian Princess of the words “Franz! Set to!” to mean “La France, c’est tout!” silenced all of Bernheim’s enemies at his death, for to minimize a man who had spoken such last words in the presence of two witnesses of such integrity would have provoked a lynching by an emotional populace. Though his lawyer was soon to hand over to his daughter bank cipher numbers and securities from funds and investments held entirely outside France, the national press, on the morning of the death of Paul-Alain Bernheim and for days thereafter, sternly proclaimed him to be “a true Frenchman” and “a great patriot who died as he lived.” The Chamber of Deputies grieved that the nation’s greatest artist had been struck down and urged all of France into mourning.
    The police reached Cours Albert I with the tragic news at seven-twenty the following morning; they had felt that the daughter might as well be allowed to sleep while she could. At