Midnight Plus One

by Gavin Lyall

I leaned over to Merlin and whispered: ‘Far better than anythingle Maîtrecould have done.’

  ‘La mode n’existe qu’à Paris,‘he said firmly. ‘If it is good – it is stolen.’ He had a photograph in his hand and was glancing from it to the model and back again.

  She knew what he was doing; she slowed up as she went past us, groping around her waist for a pocket or belt to hook her hands into. I don’t know why models do that; if a girl hooked her hands into her belt in real life you’d think she was a tart.

  Merlin exploded. ‘It is the dress ofle Maître! It is -c’est un vol! Votre Hopkins, il est un larron, un espion…’

  Istopped listening. I knew where we were, now.

  When he’d finished, I said mildly: ‘I agree there are similarities. But there are differences, too-‘ If that was true, I couldn’t spot them. But Merlin had.

  ‘They are very small. It is the dress ofle Maître. Many years your Hopkins has done this. Now Henri Merlin has caught him.’

  I said thoughtfully: ‘I doubt Hopkins will give in without a fight.’

  ‘Then we will fight.’ He stood up and shoved back along the front row. The model had turned and was floating along the catwalk, keeping level with us. I winked up at her and she winked down at me. She’d given up trying to find a belt or pockets and just had one hand on her hip. It didn’t make her look less like a tart. Only like a cheaper one.

  At the door, Hopkins and Merlin were standing pretending not to look at each other.

  I smiled at both and said to Merlin: ‘Excuse me – I have some advice to give to my client.’

  ‘Advise him to be rich tomorrow or cut his throat tonight.’ He gave me a fat grin. ‘I ring you.’ And he marched out.

  Hopkins said: ‘Well, boy – does he think he’s got a case?’

  ‘No. He started getting angry in French. If he’d had a case, he’d have explained it to me in English. But I acted worried enough so that he’ll push it a bit.’ I looked at my watch. ‘He’ll probably leak the story to the Press tonight. He’s got time.’

  ‘Marvellous.’ He thumped my shoulder, grinning hard.

  ‘You’ll go too far one of these days, Ron. They’ll nick you.’

  ‘I’ll ruddy wellhave to go too far. I can’t pull this stunt much longer: they’ll get fed up and stop making a fuss. And then what’ll happen?’

  ‘Nobody in Paris’ll buy your clothes.’

  ‘Dead right, boy. Unless they think I’m pinching the big Paris ideas, I’m finished.’

  ‘La mode n’existe qu’àParis’

  ‘Ay?’

  ‘Something Merlin said. Roughly translated, there’s no fashion but Paris fashion.’

  ‘Right again, boy.’ Then he turned mournful. ‘Put Paris on the label and you could sell ‘em a sack that still smelled of manure. Don’t get me wrong – I’m not knocking Paris. It’s a bleeding miracle how good most of their stuff is. But it don’t need to be. Most of the old cows haven’t got no more taste than a sixpenny hamburger. That’s why just being good ain’t enough.’ He waved a hand at the models titupping past us.

  I shrugged. ‘Why not change your name – call yourself Ron Paris? Then you could put Mode de Paris on the label.’

  He stared at me. Then he thumped my shoulder again.

  ‘You’re a marvel, boy. Knew I was on to a good thing when I got you instead of one of them lawyers. Too much bloody law with them.’

  I smiled weakly at him. ‘I’ll ring you in a few days, Ron.’

  He shook my hand, a cool firm grip that had nothing to do with his fancy dinner jacket. ‘What you doing now, boy?’

  ‘Spending a few days over here. Might be doing a little shooting.’

  ‘Shooting – in April? You can’t shoot anything now.’

  I shrugged again. ‘I’ve been told you can find something.’

  THREE

  I got off the train at Quimper at half past ten the next night. By then I was wearing a lightweight grey-blue raincoat over a new brown sports-coat with brass buttons, a blue shirt of that Swiss cotton that looks like silk, buttoned up to the neck without a tie, dark-grey trousers, and a short haircut.

  I wasn’t playing at being a fashion model. I just wanted to look French enough so that if the gendarmes got the word to look out for a tall, thin, forty-year-old Englishman, they might pass over me – but not so French that if theydid stop me, they’d get suspicious at a Frenchman carrying a British passport; there hadn’t been time to geta false identity card.

  It was a fairly subtle line I was trying to draw, and I could be wrong several ways. But I thought the brass buttons might just do it. They were the size and thickness of dog-biscuits and stamped with a heraldic crest that could only have belonged to a dog. I was very proud of them.

  They were just the sort of thing the French wear because they think it’s an English fashion.

  The night had a heavy ceiling of cloud, low enough to reflect the lights of the town, and the Place de la Gare was still wet from the last rain. Facing the station there were a row of restaurants. I picked the one I wanted and went in.

  Only five of the tables still had anybody at them, and all at the coffee and cognac stage. A waiter gave me a sour look and came forward to explain that they were closing.

  I picked a character sitting alone and asked him:’

  ‘Je m’excuse^ mais n avez-vous pas vu une jeune fille avec-‘

  He said: ‘Pass, friend, all’s well. Harvey Lovell.’

  ‘Lewis Cane.’ I sat down. The waiter hovered off my starboard bow.

  ‘Like a drink?’ Lovell asked.

  ‘Marc, if they’ve got one.’

  He snapped his fingers.‘Un marc.’

  ‘Aren’t you?’ I asked.

  He shook his head quickly. ‘Not tonight.’ We waited and looked each other over.

  He was solidly built, a few years younger and maybe a couple of inches shorter than me. He had wiry fair hair, cut rather short, and was wearing a grey sports-coat with a faint red check, dark trousers, a knitted black tie. None of this told you anything about him once you’d met his face.

  It might have been a haunted face, but if so, it was used to its ghosts by now. He had a wide mouth, held set, and light-blue eyes that moved quickly or stayed very still. The rest was lines: two sharp trenches carved from his nose down past his mouth, deep creases beside his eyes, permanent lines along his forehead. But they didn’t express anything; they were just there. Not tired or hungry or haggard. Not a face that had seen hell – but perhaps one that expected to.

  I grabbed for a cigarette. Maybe I was imagining things. I hoped so: I wanted a sensitive gunman as much as I wanted one with two tin hands.

  He shook his head at my cigarettes and lifted one out of a packet of Gitanes on the table, using his left hand.

  ‘So what’s the plan?’ he asked.

  ‘I’m collecting the car at midnight. Two o’clock we’re down at the Baie d’Audierne flashing a torch at the sea. They row Maganhard ashore – and we get rolling.’

  ‘What route are we going?’

  ‘We’ve pretty well got to go through Tours, anyway; after that, I’d pick the southern route: Bourges, Bourg, Geneva. I reckon we should be in Geneva by the middle of the afternoon. Then it’s only about six hours to Liechtenstein.’

  He nodded thoughtfully. ‘You know anything about the characters who are supposed to be trying to stop us?’

  ‘Merlin couldn’t say much. They’re something to do with Maganhard’s Liechtenstein business – it sounds as if they’re trying to take it over. He’s something to do with Caspar AG.’

  ‘AG?’

  ‘Aktiengesellschaft -means “corporation”, roughly. Caspar’s a big holding and marketing company: controls a lot of electronics firms in this end of Europe, France, Germany, Italy, so on. The firms make the stuff, then sell it at cost to Caspar. They don’t make any profit, so they don’t pay any tax. Caspar markets the stuff, takes all the profit -but there’s no real profit
s tax in Liechtenstein. So they don’t pay tax anywhere. It’s not a new idea.’

  The waiter came up with mymarc.

  When he’d gone, Harvey said, ‘I don’t see what Liechtenstein gets out of all this.’

  ‘Some stamp duty, a small capital tax, a lot of work for Liechtenstein lawyers.’ I sipped. ‘They get a small cut of businesses they wouldn’t even get a smell of otherwise. The last I heard, there were six thousand foreign firms registered in Liechtenstein.’

  He smiled. It was a slow, twisted movement that used up only one side of his face. ‘And I thought they lived by printing new mail stamps every year.’ He crushed his cigarette out. ‘I hear the cops are also after us.’

  ‘If they know Maganhard’s in the country. According to Merlin, they shouldn’t know. But if they do – let’s get one thing straight.’ I looked at him. There’s no shooting policemen.’

  He looked back at me, rubbing one finger slowly up and down the side of his bony nose. ‘Well, well, well,’ he said softly. ‘And I was just going to say the same thing. Okay.’

  His voice got brisker. ‘So we don’t kill cops. But we could have a problem – if Maganhard’s business pals remember they could fix him just by tipping off the cops that he’s around. No bother, no risk – to them.’

  I nodded. ‘I’d thought of that. Maybe they haven’t. Or maybe they want him dead.’

  He smiled his sideways smile again. ‘Or maybe there’s a lot we don’t know about this job yet?’

  It was about eleven o’clock when we left the restaurant and it had started raining again: a slow, steady drizzle that looked as if it could keep up for hours.

  ‘You book a room?’ Harvey asked.

  ‘No. I didn’t want to go filling out forms and leaving my name around here.’

  ‘Better come up to mine.’

  I looked at him sharply in the lamplight. He smiled lop-sidedly back. ‘I brought a different passport. This one doesn’t say Harvey Lovell.’

  We went to his hotel, just north of the river, and got up to his room without anybody seeing me. It was a small, clean, worn room with as much personality as a dead mouse. He sat on the bed, leaving me a choice of the bedside table or a chair, neither of which had been built for sitting on. While I was still making up my mind, he reached an old fabric Air France suitcase out from under the bed, and took out a rolled black wool shirt. He unwrapped it, and had a stubby revolver in a holster with some complicated-looking straps.

  ‘Sorry I don’t have a drink to offer,’ he said shortly. Then he pulled up his right trousers leg and started fitting the holster on to his calf and ankle. I walked across and picked the gun off the bed.

  It was a Smith and Wesson with a two-inch barrel, loaded with five.38 Specials. It was a perfectly ordinary-looking little gun except that he’d added a little more wood to the butt, to improve the grip. But even that wasn’t fancy: no careful carving so that every finger fitted exactly into the right place – and took five minutes to get fitted. Fully carved grips are strictly for the Saturday afternoon gunmen.

  I glanced quickly at him. He’d frozen with the holster still half strapped to his ankle, his eyes on my hand. He didn’t like somebody else holding a gun, and especially not his. Gunmen never do.

  I tossed it back on the bed and nodded at the holster. ‘Why’re you wearing it down there?’

  He relaxed and went back to strapping the holster on. ‘Easiest place to get it, in a car. Stick it in your belt, or under your arm and it’ll take you a week to pull it.’

  That made sense to me. ‘You planning to wear it there when you get out of the car?’ I asked.

  ‘Nope.’ He went on fixing the holster.

  I waited a moment, then said: ‘You’ve only got five rounds in that thing. Why not an automatic?’

  ‘You need a thirty-eight round to have any punch,’ he said, with careful calmness. ‘Thirty-eight automatic would be a sight heavier and a sight bigger. Automatics can jam, too.’ But by now I was hardly listening. I wasn’t really interested in his opinions on guns – only that he had some. To a man who bets his life on his choice of guns there’s only one True Belief about guns – his own – and the only True Prophet is himself. Every one has a different belief, of course, which is why there are still so many gunmakers in business.

  ‘Anyway – you think they’ll come at us more than five at a time?’ he ended up.

  I shook my head. He finished strapping on the holster and, still sitting on the edge of the bed, dropped the revolver in. Then snatched it out again. And again – and again. There was nothing smooth and graceful about it, the way it is in the cowboy books. It came out in a vicious grab. I liked that, too.

  Then he stood up and slid the gun into a small open-sided spring-clip holster on his belt just forward of his left hip.

  ‘You bringing a gun on this trip?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Merlin said you probably wouldn’t.’

  ‘He didn’t ask me. I borrowed one off some friends in Paris.’

  He was about to ask me what type. I said: ‘Mauser 1932.’

  For him, it was probably an expression of intense surprise: his face just went utterly still.

  The big job? The thing with a change lever that’ll fire full automatic?’

  ‘That’s the one.’

  He slanted his eyebrows slightly, one up, one down. He had me now: I’d betrayed a bit of my own True Belief -and what a belief.

  ‘You towing it behind us on a trailer?’ he asked. ‘Or sending it ahead by freight train?’

  I grinned There are a lot of snags to the old ‘broom-handle’ Mauser, particularly the 1932 model converted to real automatic fire. It weighs three pounds, is a foot long, has one of the worst grips going, and fired on full automatic it’s as easy to aim as an angry cat. But it has its advantages – and the hell with anybody who doesn’t agree.

  I said: ‘I’ve always thought the best place to wear a gun is in your hand. If you’re fast in your thinking you won’t have to be all that fast with a gun.’

  ‘Sounds reasonable,’ he said, in a voice with the reasonableness carefully sprinkled on top.

  ‘So you don’t like the Mauser ‘32?’ I asked.

  ‘You could say that. You might also say I don’t like you telling me about guns.’

  I grinned cheerfully. ‘All I wanted to know. I had to be sure I didn’t have to run you as well as everything else on this job.’

  He slanted his eyebrows again. ‘This was just to see if I could be pushed around?’

  ‘I didn’t know you. I’ve heard talk of you-‘ His face suddenly snapped shut, like a blind across a window. I went on: ‘But they could have been wrong.’

  He relaxed slowly and looked at the floor. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘they could have been wrong.’ He looked up. ‘I could like working with you. As long as you remember I won’t be making applications in triplicate to open fire. You’ll know I want to shoot when you hear me shooting.’

  ‘That’s another thing I wanted to be sure of.’

  He smiled. ‘I’ve worked with people who didn’t understand that – at first.’ Then his face got expressionless again, ‘Just one thing. We’re hired for different jobs: you get him to Liechtenstein – and I keep him alive. Most of the time it’ll be the same job. But maybe not always. You might remember that, too.’

  I nodded and buttoned up my raincoat. ‘I’m going to pick up the car. I’ll meet you down beside the river in twenty minutes.’

  He smiled again. ‘I still think you’re crazy, bringing that Mauser.’

  I shrugged. ‘Call it wartime experience. I started this work when it was mostly Sten-guns and plastic explosive. Doesn’t it make you feel better, being backed up by a machine-gun battalion?’

  He shook his head firmly. ‘Not backed up… If you ever get around to firing that thing, I want to bebehind you.’

  We grinned at each other. I thought of asking him why he’d gone stiff when I said I’d ‘heard talk
’ of him. But that isn’t the sort of question you ever ask a professional bodyguard-gunman.

  Later on, I sometimes wondered if I should have asked it anyway. But I always tell myself that he would never have answered it – and that already it was too late.

  FOUR

  The plan for the car was strictly from the old wartime rule book. Any sort of hand-over – of a car, arms, information – is the most dangerous time. It implicates two people, perhaps betrays two groups.

  I had the car number. It would be parked in the Cathedralplace, alongside the Cathedral itself. Locked. Keys just under the left front-wheel arch, held there by a piece of sticky tape. Simple It was still raining, which would cut down any spectators. Not that it would need much: after half past ten, the only things on the Quimper streets are the street lamps. Their light rippled across the wet cobbles in theplace as I strolled down the line of cars up against the Cathedral. There were plenty of them: Quimper is mostly narrow streets, so the cars pile up in theplaces.

  Ifound it: a black Citroen DS with the streamlined front end that always reminds me of a partly opened oyster. I slid along the left side and dropped a casual hand to grope under the wheel arch. No keys. I tried again, not so casually. Definitely none.

  I straightened up and looked carefully round theplace, making my head move slowly. I had that vague, creepy feeling that’s usually pure imagination – except that imagination is the only way to see round corners.

  It didn’t have to mean anything: people have forgotten their orders before, or misunderstood them. The keys could be on the other side, or he’d forgotten his sticky tape, or just decided to leave them in the dashboard. I reached for the door handle, just to try it. It eased open.

  Then I knew exactly why the driver had forgotten his orders.

  Fifteen minutes later I was cruising west on the Quai de FOdet. Harvey Lovell stepped out from under a caféawning. I pulled up, and he peered in to make sure it was me.

  The password is: Let Me Get The Hell In Out Of The Rain,’ he said. He slammed the door behind him, and slipped his Air France suitcase down on the floor by his feet. He made another quick movement that looked like shifting the gun from his waist to his ankle.