by Philip Kerr
‘As if I care.’
‘I’m sorry you think that. Look, Phil you won’t – you won’t call the police, will you? At least give me a chance to prove myself innocent.’
‘That’s a good one. You, innocent. An oxymoron if ever I heard one. Sorry. That’s not a word we’re allowed to use in one of your books, is it? Because most of your readers wouldn’t understand it.’
‘Please, Phil. I’m begging you. Don’t give me away.’
‘Did I say I would give you away? Did I?’
‘No, you didn’t. Phil, you’ve got every right to be angry with me. And I apologize if you think I treated you badly. All I can say is that I was under a great deal of pressure at the time. But look here, Don has found it within himself to forgive me. Can’t you?’
French glanced at me and I shrugged back at him as if John was speaking something like the truth.
‘Don was always the best of us,’ said French. ‘I’m made of less noble stuff than he is, I’m afraid.’
That made me smile. It’s funny how people think they know you when in fact they don’t know you at all. There is certainly nothing noble about me; but I’m no psychopath, just someone preternaturally disposed to killing, A hundred years ago, in the trenches, I’d have been up to my neck in death and – I wouldn’t be surprised – quite comfortable with that.
‘If I can clear myself I shall try very hard to make it up to you,’ said John.
I almost laughed. John might have been trying his best to throw himself on Philip French’s mercy but instead he only managed to sound pompous.
French shook his head and then glanced over his shoulder at the maître d’. ‘Look, I can’t talk now, but I’m near the end of my shift. Meet me in the underground parking lot at three o’clock and we’ll talk then. All right?’
‘All right.’
French walked quickly away without a backward glance.
‘That’s all I fucking need,’ said John, and for a moment he buried his face in his hands. After a moment he looked up, tried to eat some lunch and then drained his glass empty. ‘He’s probably calling the police right now.’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘No? He hates my guts. Why wouldn’t he?’
I shrugged. ‘Because he said he wouldn’t. More or less. Philip generally means what he says. Besides, does he really want the trouble if he’s working here? The management, the other guests – they might not appreciate it if a hundred gendarmes descend on this place. That might reflect on him, and if he does need the money he also needs the job.’
‘Yes, good point.’
I ate my lunch, most of John’s, lit a cigarette, ordered some coffees and pushed my face outside the shade of our umbrella and into the sun. I realized I was enjoying myself and decided I’d been a little unjust to the Château Saint-Martin. The Coche-Dury and truffle-poached chicken salad had been excellent and the gardens were nice, too. As usual I had more of a taste for expensive places and hotels than I would ever have let on. I decided that when I was in possession of a fortune of my own – which, I hoped, would be quite soon – I would come back to the Château Saint-Martin, perhaps with Twentyman’s shapely young Russian friend Katya, and, in the hotel’s best suite, fuck the arse off her morning, noon and night.
Meanwhile John had gone off and cancelled his massage. There didn’t seem to be much point in having it now, since it seemed unlikely that he would ever relax again.
At three o’clock we both went to the hotel’s underground car park where we had left the Bentley and found Philip French already waiting for us in the cool gloom. He was no longer wearing his waiter’s uniform, but it wasn’t just his own clothes that made him seem different; he was altogether more businesslike, even intimidating. He lit a roll-up and for a moment he just faced us in silence.
‘So then,’ said John, ‘what did you want to talk about?’
French laughed. ‘What do you think?’
‘I really don’t know why you’re taking this tone with me, Phil,’ said John.
‘Don’t you?’
‘No, I don’t.’
‘Then I’ll come straight to the point. The price of my silence is 250,000 quid.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous.’
‘Fine. As soon as you’ve left here I’ll call the police. I don’t think they’ll have too much of a problem finding a nice Bentley like the one you arrived in.’ He walked over to the Bentley and sat on the blue bonnet. ‘You see, I already checked that with the concierge. The Swiss number-plate should make it easy to spot. By tonight you’ll be sharing a sweaty Monaco police cell with some Russian pimp and wishing you’d taken my offer.’
‘So that’s how it is,’ said John.
‘That’s how it has to be,’ said French. ‘I can’t afford it any other way. I’m skint, John. I owe money to all sorts of people down here. Which means I’m desperate. Maybe not quite as desperate as you are, perhaps, but that’s how it is, old sport.’
‘I don’t have that kind of money right now,’ said John.
French stroked the hood of Bentley and smiled. ‘Don’t give me that. This lovely car is worth at least a hundred K.’
‘It’s not mine. If I gave it to you the true owner would eventually report it stolen and then where would you be?’
‘No worse off than I am right now and that’s the truth. Caroline – my wife – she’s left me. Taken the kids and fucked off back to England. All I have down here are debts and dead mosquitoes. I can’t even afford to fill my swimming pool or switch on my air conditioning.’
‘When I closed the atelier I gave you a generous redundancy payment,’ said John. ‘Maybe you’ve forgotten that.’
‘That was taxable, since I am self-employed. Tax down here is something akin to demanding money with menaces. So the French government had more than half of it. But then you wouldn’t know anything about tax, would you? Famously, you don’t pay any tax at all. Besides, what you gave me, after writing all those bestsellers I wrote for you, it was fucking chickenfeed. You know it and I know it and Don knows it. I don’t know why he’s helping you after what you did to the four of us. Unless he has some other agenda. Your biography perhaps, when you’re banged up in a Monaco jail. Yes, that might be it. No one has known you for as long as he has, which would make him best placed to write a book like that.’
‘Please leave Don out of this,’ said John. ‘No one had a better friend than him.’
‘Have it your way, Houston. But my price stands. Two hundred and fifty grand or I telephone the cops. And don’t think I won’t do it. I’ve been on the go since seven o’clock this morning so, believe me, it’ll be the best job I’ve had all day.’
‘You weren’t listening. I simply don’t have that kind of money. Look, use your loaf, Phil, I’m on the run. I’ve got a few thousand and that’s it. The minute I use an ATM I’m toast.’
‘He’s right,’ I said.
‘Do you think I’m stupid? I looked at your fucking lunch bill. It was 650 euros. That’s a week’s wages for me. Including tips.’
‘That was my fault,’ I said. ‘I ordered a bottle of Coche-Dury. I don’t know what came over me. Touch of the sun I think.’
‘In all the years I’ve known you, Don, you never once ordered a really expensive bottle of wine. Not once. Your thrift always impressed me because that’s how I am myself. So if anyone ordered a 500-euro bottle of white Burgundy it wasn’t you.’
‘That doesn’t alter the fact that I don’t have two hundred and fifty grand,’ said John.
‘No?’ French smiled. ‘Then I tell you what, John. I’ll take that famous watch of yours, on account. The Hublot Black Caviar. According to the Daily Mail it’s worth a million dollars. So if I sell it I ought to get how much – maybe 150,000 euros? Who knows? These things are never worth as much second-hand as you think they are. Believe me I know. Lately I’ve had to sell a lot of my possessions on eBay: a nice guitar, a racing bicycle. I’ll take that watch and whatever cash yo
u can raise by nine o’clock tonight. But I’ll be disappointed if it’s not at least 20,000 euros.’
John said nothing.
‘That’s a good offer,’ said French. ‘Best deal you’re going to get from me, anyway. I’d advise you to take it, Houston. Besides, you’ve probably got a whole drawer full of expensive watches at home. Me, I’ve got this fucking ten-euro Casio.’ He held up his wrist to show us a strip of black plastic on his wrist. ‘Matter of fact, why don’t we swap?’
John took off his watch and handed it over to French, who put it on immediately. John looked at the Casio he’d received in return and then hurled it across the garage.
‘Now that’s just stupid,’ said French. ‘You know that watch probably keeps just as good time as your one. Which begs the question. Why spend a million bucks on a watch? It’s not like you get any more time for your money, is it? And you’ll forgive me for saying so, but it’s a million dollars you could have spent giving decent bonuses to the people who made you rich. Mike, Peter, Don and me.’
‘You bastard,’ muttered John.
‘On my new million-dollar watch I make it 3.15,’ said French. ‘I expect to see you both at my house tonight, with the cash. Shall we say nine o’clock?’ He handed me a card with an address and a postcode. ‘Here. Just in case you lose your way. The Villa Seurel. On the Route du Caire. A short way past the Hôtel Résidence des Chevaliers, and on your left. I’ll be expecting you. By the way, don’t count on me giving you any dinner. There’s nothing in the fridge except ice.’
CHAPTER 8
After John had left Colette’s apartment, I poured a glass of the Dom Pérignon he had left on ice in Colette’s champagne bucket and sat down in the sitting room. At more than a hundred pounds a bottle it seemed a shame to waste it. Meanwhile she took a long shower and then went into the kitchen to make us coffee; it was late and she must have thought we needed to stay awake for the drive to Nice airport. But I think she mostly went into the kitchen because she hardly dared to meet my eye for fear that I would tell her some unpleasant detail that she didn’t want to know about what had happened upstairs in the sky duplex. The sort of details you get in Macbeth about blood, and while the dogs didn’t exactly count as Duncan’s grooms I was sure she wouldn’t have appreciated my shooting them: Colette loved dogs. I could easily understand her reluctance to deal with Orla’s death, and so when she returned to the sitting room with a coffee pot and two cups I was happy to avoid the subject altogether. Indeed I was reading my Kindle when she came in and generally behaving as if the murder had never happened.
She was wearing a nice white blouse that was tight enough to show the swell of her breasts, a pair of neat black tailored pants, sensible ballet pumps, and a single gold bangle that resembled a snake. Her scent was Chanel 19 but I only knew that because there was a bottle of it on her dressing table and because it was exactly the same scent that Orla had worn; it would, I thought, have been typical of John to have given his mistress the same kind of perfume as his wife, just to avoid any cross-contamination. I admired him for that: John did adultery better than anyone I knew.
‘What are you reading?’ she asked.
‘The Information, by Martin Amis.’
‘What’s it about?’
I thought it best not to mention that it was about two authors who hate each other.
‘I think it’s a revenge tragedy,’ I said vaguely. ‘But to be honest I really haven’t figured what the fuck is going on.’
‘I don’t know how you can read at a time like this,’ she said.
‘I can read anywhere.’
I shrugged and watched her pour the coffee; and thinking it was now best to seem very ordinary indeed I told her something about my early life and my love of reading.
‘My mother taught me to read,’ I said. ‘I mean really taught me, so that I could read to her. Like that bloke in A Handful of Dust. Her eyesight wasn’t very good and there weren’t any talking books back then. You might say that I was her talking book. Consequently I read a lot of books that perhaps I shouldn’t have been reading at that sort of age. I mean I never read stuff like Winnie the Pooh or The Lord of the Rings. It was Edna O’Brien and Ian Fleming and Iris Murdoch right from the start. In spite of that I felt like a whole world had been opened to me. Not just a world of books but the world that those books described. As a child it was deeply liberating. As if someone had given me a ticket to a whole different universe. You might almost say I escaped having a childhood altogether. After that I found I could switch off and read at any time and in any place. I never had a problem about detaching myself from the reality of everyday life. It was usually people I had a problem with, not books, which is a common enough experience in Scotland. I was also drawing, playing the piano, or collecting things like stamps and shells and bottle-tops, and numbers of course – I was always collecting car numbers, which was a lot easier than collecting the numbers of trains, because the cars weren’t moving – but in the end it always came back to reading. I’m the kind of person who if ever I were asked on Desert Island Discs would much prefer to be cast away with eight books instead of with eight records. Music I can live without, but reading, no. This is good coffee, thank you.’
‘It’s Algerian coffee,’ she said. ‘I get my mother to send it from home. What sort of books did you read?’
‘I liked histories and biographies, or books about travel and nature. Still do. Oddly I was never much interested in fiction. The other boys were forever reading stories about the Second World War. Not me. I used to like books about wildlife.’
‘You don’t sound like someone who would have ended up in the army.’
‘After school I meant to become a lawyer. I did a law degree, at Cambridge. But my father died, leaving my mother with not very much money; debts, mostly; and luckily for me the army was there to cover the costs of finishing university in return for three years of service as a soldier. At the time it seemed like a fair exchange, although most of my contemporaries thought I was crazy. But I was a rather better soldier than anyone would have imagined. Although not so much a leader of men as an intrepid warrior, so to speak. More your lone wolf. No, I can’t say I was ever interested in leading a band of brothers.’
‘I was never much of a reader,’ she said. ‘My father read the Koran a lot and certainly never encouraged me to read anything. I couldn’t give a damn about the Koran now. It’s not a book for women. The first man who ever gave me a book to read was John. I still have that book. It’s The Great Gatsby.’
I nodded. I hardly liked to tell her that John gave a copy of The Great Gatsby to all of the women he had a thing with. I couldn’t ever love someone who didn’t like that book, he often said. He had a box full of the hardback Everyman edition in his study.
‘Did you read it?’
‘I tried,’ she said. ‘But I couldn’t see what all the fuss was about.’
I smiled and looked at my watch. It was now 3.30 a.m.
‘We’d best leave for the airport. Our cases are already in the car so there’s nothing left to do except lock up and leave.’
‘I can’t find one of my earrings,’ she said. ‘John bought them for me. At Pomellato. They were expensive.’
‘It’ll turn up.’
I stood up and glanced out of the window. Monaco was gilded with light, like the golden collar on the neck of some embalmed princess. I wondered if this was the reason I felt so comfortable in that little principality: I am quite comfortable with the dead. They don’t moan much about the cost of living.
I clapped my hands, businesslike, but rather too loudly for Colette’s nerves, as she gave a start as if something had exploded behind her head.
‘Now then. I’ve got you a ticket on Air France 6201 to Paris, which leaves Nice at 6.15 a.m. so we ought to get you there by 4.30 at the latest. That flight gets you into Orly at 7.40 a.m. I’ll give you the ticket and some money when we get to the airport and you can send John that text saying you’ve gone to vis
it your sister in Marseille when you’re sitting in the departure lounge. Yes, don’t forget that, will you? This is important, Colette.’
‘Why not now?’
‘Do you want to risk having him come down here again? With me sitting here?’
‘No, I suppose not.’
‘Do it in the departure lounge. When you arrive at Orly take the train into the city – it’s cheaper – and go to the Hôtel Georgette, where I’ve reserved a room for you. It’s a family-run hotel in the Marais – Rue Grenier-Saint-Lazare, number 36 – and while it’s not very expensive, it’s clean and it’s comfortable. I’ve stayed there several times myself and you’ll find that I’ve paid for two weeks in advance.’
‘Thank you, Don. That was very thoughtful of you.’
‘Don’t mention it. Then all you have to do is stick it out and wait for me to get in contact with further instructions. It might be a couple of weeks before I turn up in person. It could even be three. But we’ll speak on the phone long before that. Until then I suggest you go and see some exhibitions. I’m sure I don’t have to tell you about what there is to do in Paris. Only the dead have an excuse for finding nothing to do in Paris. A lot of tourists go to the cemetery of Père Lachaise, but as a writer I always find the one in Montparnasse rather more interesting and certainly less popular with the tourists. Samuel Beckett is buried there, as are Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, in the same plot, which is peculiar since they never actually shared a house when they were alive.’ I smiled. ‘Can you imagine?’
‘And you’re going to London?’
‘That’s right. My flight is a little later than yours. The BA 2621, which leaves Nice at 7.05 and gets into Gatwick at eight. I’ll go back to the flat in Putney and wait for the news to break and then the cops to show up. Which they will. I’m certain of it. There’s no point in us trying to see each other before that’s happened. All of the people who knew John and Orla will be under a certain amount of scrutiny from the police and the press until things die down a bit.’