by Gavin Lyall
Midnight Plus One
Gavin Lyall
Lewis Cane is an ex-SOE operative who worked with the French Resistance against Nazi Germany. He stayed in Paris after the end of World War II, making a somewhat precarious living as a business expediter. One day he is approached by a lawyer, Henri Merlin, a former resistance comrade, with a job: a wealthy international financier, Maganhard, needs to be driven from Brittany to Liechtenstein in secrecy and within three days. The fact that the French Sûreté have an open arrest warrant out on Maganhard seemed like a simple problem. However, when half the hit-men in Europe start gunning for them, things get complicated quickly. As Cane races the clock, the police, and the assassins across France and Switzerland, whom can he trust? His alcoholic and trigger-happy bodyguard? Maganhard’s mysterious private secretary who seemingly goes out of her way to create problems? Or his former Resistance contacts, who might or might not sell him out for the highest price?
Gavin Lyall
Midnight Plus One
ONE
It was April in Paris, so the rain wasn’t as cold as it had been a month before. But still too cold for me to walk through it just to see a fashion show. I wouldn’t find a taxi until it had stopped raining, and when it stopped I wouldn’t need one: I only had a few hundred yards to go. Impasse.
That left me sitting in the Deux Magotsgetting wet only on the inside and listening to the evening traffic making angry Grand Prix starts from the lights on the Boulevard St Germain outside.
The caféclaimed it was the Rendez-vous de l’élite intellectuelle, but it was the quiet time when most of theélitehad gone off to wave their arms and egos over dinner. The only other customer I could see without turning my head was a young gent in a green corduroy suit and mauve denim shirt, but he obviously wasn’t reallyintellectuellebecause he was reading the continental edition of the Daily Mail. The front page was getting excited about the setting up of another enquiry into British security leaks. I stayed calm; all it meant was that another half-dozen retired civil servants and judges were going to be told secrets they wouldn’t have known otherwise.
The loudspeaker on the wall said:‘Monsieur Caneton, Monsieur Caneton. Téléphone, s’il vous plait.’
Ask me what my wartime codename was and I’d need a moment to remember. Broadcast it over a caféloudspeaker in Paris and I know immediately who you mean. The back of my neck felt cold, as if somebody had touched it with a gun muzzle.
I finished taking a sip of Pastis, which I found I’d been in the middle of, and started thinking what to do. In the end, I did the only thing possible: went to answer it. Whoever-it-was must already know I was there. He couldn’t have been ringing the Deux Magots twice a day since 1944 on an off-chance The telephones are downstairs, near thetoilettes’, two wooden booths with small porthole windows. I could see somebody’s back view in one; I picked up the other phone and said:‘Allo?’
‘C’est Monsieur Caneton?’ said whoever-it-was.
‘Non,’ I said. ‘Je ne connais pas Monsieur Caneton. Qui est là?’ If he wanted to play by the old rules, he’d get ‘em. You never admitted to knowing anybody, let alone being them.
All he did was chuckle. Then he said, in English: ‘I am an old friend. If you meet Monsieur Caneton, please you tell him that Henril’avocatwishes to talk with him.’
‘And where would he find Henri the lawyer?’
‘In the next telephone box.’
I dumped the phone, stepped out, and yanked open the next door. And there he was, wearing a malicious grin that stretched from side to side of the booth.
‘You bastard,’ I said. ‘You sadistic bastard.’ I wiped the back of my neck.
The grin flowed out of the booth towards me. Behind it was a shortish tubby man in a crisp white raincoat, curly grey hair, a deep fat face with bright grey eyes behind rimless glasses, and the sort of moustache that could have been just a moment’s forgetfulness in shaving.
Henri Merlin, Paris lawyer. And one-time Resistance paymaster.
We shook hands, using all four of them. It was ten years since we’d met and I hadn’t seen much of him since the end of the war. He’d aged – he was well into his fifties – but elegantly and, it seemed, prosperously.
‘You have not forgotten everything, then,’ he beamed. ‘Even the accent is not too horrible.’
‘The accent’s bloody good.’ Good enough to keep me alive in France for three years in the war – and a sight better than his English. But on a second thought, I wondered if his English might not be deliberately stagey. American and British businessmen or lawyers might ease up a little once they had him spotted as that familiar type, the gay, flippant musical-comedy boulevardier. Top Paris lawyers are as gay and flippant at work as the men who cut diamonds for a living.
Then I remembered I had a living to make, too. ‘Can’t stop now, Henri. Can I see you later?’
He stretched a fat hand towards the stairs. ‘We go together. We are enemies.’ He grinned again.
‘You’rein on this case?’
‘Naturellement. You see how determinedle Maîtreis this time? – he now has the best of all Paris lawyers. This time weprove your Mercedes Melloney is stealing the – themodèles’ -he held out his raincoat like a skirt while he searched for the word – ‘the dress designs (you see? in England you do not even have a word for it) – the designs ofle Maître. We prove it. You pay us one million francs. Then we have dinner – and we talk about a job I have for you.’
‘We’ll take it to court,’ I said. But he was already bouncing up the stairs.
He stopped halfway and looked down at me. ‘You are not perhaps Caneton any more? Not withl’Intelligencenow?’
‘Not Caneton. Just Lewis Cane.’
‘Louis.’ He gave it the French pronunciation. ‘With all these years, I did not know your real name. We go to see the horrible fashions of Mercedes Melloney.’ He accelerated upstairs.
TWO
As far as I know there had never been anyone called Mercedes Melloney, which doesn’t surprise or sadden me. It was just Ron Hopkins’ idea of the sort of name he needed to sell the sort of dresses he made. He had another, and better, idea of how to sell them, of course; that was why he needed the sort of advice I specialised in.
It sounds crazy, an English mass-production dress manufacturer giving fashion shows in Paris, but Ron didn’t haul a plane-load of clothes and models across the Channel for anything but the health of his bank balance. According to him, the French had stuck to thehaute couture from the big fashion houses, or the tailor-made stuff from the little-woman-round-the-corner. Which left themselves wide open for somebody doing cheap up-to-date mass-production clothes. And since he’d been doing this for three years now, I suppose he was right. Always taking into account his little gimmick, of course.
The show was in the dining-room of a big hotel in Montparnasse, probably because Ron thought Paris was more Parisian on the left bank. It was a long, narrow room done up in white and gold and long scarlet drapes that did a fine job of recalling a pre-1914 era that it had never known. It also gave a good excuse for the hard little gilt chairs you had to sit on.
As Merlin and I came in Ron zoomed down at us, under the impression that we were French cabinet ministers or some such leaders of fashion, saw who I was, and said sharply: ‘You’re late, boy.’
‘So’s the opposition. ‘ I did the introductions. ‘Henri Merlin, Monsieur Ron Hopkins. A vrai dire, c’est Mercedes Melloney.’
Merlin smiled politely.‘Enchanté.‘Ron was wearing a dark-green dinner jacket with light-green silk lapels and a pink orchid which was his idea of how to look as pansy as he thought the Paris dress trade was. Behind it, he looked as English as roast beef and as homosexual as a tomcat.
He gave Merlin a fast up-and-down, then nodded at the catwalk down the middle of the room. ‘There’s a front seat for you over there, boy, and your pal next to you. Don’t go selling me out, now.’
I leered at him, and we kicked our way past a row of legs to our places; the audience seemed to be mostly women, and mostly either those who had got old without getting fat or got fat without getting old. A couple of trumpeters in plumed brass helmets let out a toot to announce a new range of dresses and half a dozen models floated out from an arch of roses. Somewhere along the way Merlin had picked up a programme.‘Numéro37,’ he read. ‘It is called Printemps de la Vie. Springtime of life – a most enchanting title. When he first designed it,le Maîtrenamed it onlyau Printemps.Your Hopkins shows a most accurate understanding of that somewhat decayed age of woman to which it is supposed to sell. When I decide that it is also exactly the same dress, it will cost him one million francs.’
‘It won’t be exactly the same,’ I said.
He was looking at his programme again. ‘And these frightfulnesses are supposed to be forle cocktail.’
A model in a black sheath dress twittered her feet up the catwalk and paused to despise the air over our heads.
Merlin looked up and said firmly: ‘Of what sex is that creature?’
The girl’s negligent smile froze on her face.
I winced. She was thin all right, but not that thin. ‘Very sexy,’ I said loud and clear. ‘I could rape her myself, here and now.’ She didn’t seem encouraged.
Merlin shrugged his fat shoulders. ‘For Englishmen, always sex. Sex and fashion are not even connected. In England, you think if a woman gets raped her dress must be fashionable. You have forgotten all you knew about France, Caneton.’ He slid me a sideways look.
I knew about the look without meeting it. ‘Wait until after this case. What’s this job you want me to do?’
Merlin said quickly and quietly: ‘A client wishes to go from Brittany to Liechtenstein. Others wish him not to go. Shooting is possible. You wish to help him get there?’
I pulled out a cigarette and lit it and blew smoke at a model’s ankles. ‘How was he planning to get there? Plane? Train? And what are you paying for this?’
‘I would say twelve thousand francs – nearly one thousand pounds. I would suggest by car; it is more simple, more – more flexible. And there are frontiers to cross – or you have forgotten where Liechtenstein is?’
The far side of Switzerland, between it and Austria. And what’s this lad doing in Brittany if he should be in Liechtenstein?’
The trumpets tooted again and the models drifted away Next scene: dresssportif.
Henri said: ‘He is not in Brittany now. He is on a yacht in the Atlantic. He cannot reach Europe before tomorrow night, and the nearest point he can reach is Brittany. C’est très simple. You take him from there to Liechtenstein. The problem is the others who know also where he is and that he must be in Liechtenstein very soon.’
It didn’t sound like just the only problem to me – not like twelve thousand francs-worth of problem, anyway.
‘I’ve only heard of two good reasons for going to Liechtenstein,’ I said. ‘One is to collect the new postage stamps they do every year. The other is to set up a tax-dodging company. Your man doesn’t sound like a stamp collector.’
He chuckled gently. ‘His name is Maganhard.’
‘I recognise the fortune. Not the face.’
‘Nobody knows the face. There is one passport photograph only – just one – taken eight years ago. And not in France.’
‘I’d heard he was something to do with Caspar AG.’
He spread his hands. ‘One hears anything about such men. I cannot tell you much, you understand – perhaps he himself will tell you more – but he will lose much if he does not reach Liechtenstein quickly.’
‘Lawyer’s confidences, eh? Now let’s get this straight: I pick up Maganhard in Brittany, in a car, and drive him to Liechtenstein, fighting off gunmen all the way. Very simple. Only why doesn’t he go by plane or trainand ask for French police protection?’
‘Ah, yes.’ He nodded and looked atme witha sad smile. There is of course the other problem. Heis wanted by the police of France.’
‘Oh yes?’ I said casually. ‘And what would thatbe for?’
‘Anaffaire of rape. Last summer – on the Côted’Azur.’
‘They notice such things down there?’
He smiled again. ‘Fortunately the womandid not complain until after Maganhard had left France. I had to advisehim not to return.’
‘It didn’t get much space in the papers; I never saw it.’
‘As you say’ – he shrugged – ‘in summer on the Côte d’Azur rape is merely a variation on a theme. But still illegal.’
‘I might not be too keen on helping a rapist escape justice.’
‘C’est possible. But the police would be no problem – they will not know he is in France. Only his rivals know he must get to Liechtenstein.’
‘On the other hand, rape is about the best frame-up charge I know.’
‘Ah.’ He gazed sunnily up at the models and said quietly: ‘I had hoped the great Monsieur Caneton had not forgotten everything he once knew.’
A model stalked past, hips and head shoved well forward as if she was auditioning for the Hunchback of Notre Dame, and wearing a tartan cloak where the Campbell Macdonald war was still going on.
‘All right. Why don’t you fix a private plane for him? – then he wouldn’t have to show his face at the frontiers.’
He sighed. ‘Airfields are carefully watched these days, mon Caneton. And it could not be a small aeroplane to fly all the way from Brittany to Liechtenstein, not one that can land just in a field anywhere. And all the good pilots are honest – and the bad pilots’ – he shrugged again – ‘a man like Maganhard does not fly with bad pilots.’; That all added up. I nodded. ‘So where can I get a car? -not hired or stolen.’
‘The police have not confiscated the Paris cars of Maganhard – and I do not think they know I have the keys. Would you wish the Fiat President or the Citroën DS?’
‘If it’s not a fancy colour, the Citroën.’
‘Black. Nobody will notice it.’
I nodded. ‘Are you coming with us?’
‘No. But I meet you in Liechtenstein.’ He smiled up at the girl in the Glencoe Massacre cloak and asked out of the side of his face: ‘Do you want also a gunman? ‘
‘If there’s likely to be shooting, yes: I’m not a professional. I hear that Alain and Bernard are still the best men. And the American, Lovell, is the next best. Can I have any of them?’
He glanced at me. ‘You know such people?’ He hadn’t expected me to be able to name the top three bodyguard-gunmen in Europe.
‘I also have clients, Henri – and some ofthem are worried about getting shot in the back, too.’ Perhaps I was exaggerating. I certainly had clients who were liable to get shot, but most of them – rightly – didn’t value their own lives at as much as a good bodyguard costs. Still, one tries to keep in touch.
He nodded. ‘I forgot – you knew Alain and Bernard in the war, I think.’
I had. They’d been a couple of good Resistance men, farther south, who hadn’t wanted to lay down their guns when the war ended. So they hadn’t. I’d heard that they always worked together – and also that not all of their work was bodyguarding. But if I could get them on my side, I was ready to skip moral questions.
Merlin said: ‘I am afraid I cannot contact them. But I can get Lovell. You know him?’
‘Never met him. He was in the American Secret Service, wasn’t he?’
Over there, ‘Secret Service’ doesn’t mean what it does in Europe. In America, the Secret Service specialises in providing bodyguards for presidents and their families. That all meant that Lovell was a well-trained man – but what did his leaving the service mean? Well, maybe some people just don’t like being organisation gunmen.
Merlin said:
‘I will fix for Lovell to meet you at Quimper.’
‘If that’s where we’re starting. Can you get the car to meet me there, too? I can drive to Liechtenstein inside twenty-four hours, but I don’t want to do any driving the day before.’
‘I fix it.’
The trumpets called the models home across the sands of Dee.
Merlin gave me a satisfied but slightly curious look. ‘It seems, Caneton, that you are doing this job. Do you know why?’
‘Twelve thousand francs is why.’ Perhaps I’d said that a little too quickly. I said more slowly: ‘Provided I get eight thousand in advance – and double if I land in jail.’
Merlin nodded.
‘And one more thing,’ I said. ‘You’re Maganhard’s lawyer: I want your promise that he didn’t do this rape -and that he’s going to Liechtenstein to save his own investment, not pinch somebody else’s.’
He smiled a sleepy, cat-like smile. ‘So Caneton is a moralist – you wish to be on the side of truth and justice now, hein?’
‘I have the impression,’ I said sharply, ‘that I was on the right side when you first knew me – in the war.’
‘Wars are so simple, morally.’ He sighed. ‘But I promise: Maganhard is no rapist – and he is not trying to steal another’s money. You will believe that when you meet him.’
The trumpets blew a complicated fanfare: Big Scene -evening dresses, including number 37. The models flooded out through the arch of roses.
Merlin waggled his backside to get more comfortable on the stiff little chair, and said: ‘I ring you at your hotel, later. Now – we become the enemies. Voici.’
He had spotted number 37.
To me, number 37 -Printemps de la Vie – was just a bolt of bottle-green silk wrapped around the girl to give a lot of horizontal creases up top and vertical creases below, and dragging a short train behind. But I got Henri’s point about the age of the women who’d wear it: under those thick creases you could be any shape at all. The only idea the dress put across was that you were rich enough to afford a lot of bottle-green silk.