by Gavin Lyall
Harvey said: ‘Must be some car.’ He was looking suspicious. So was Maganhard, but with him it was congenital.
The General said calmly: ‘It is “some car”, as you put it.’
I was ready to believe him. And even if I wasn’t, we still stood a better chance in his car than in any one we hired. Switzerland’s a small country, and the area you can drive across before the southern passes melt is even smaller. Whatever we did, we were going to have to drive down the central valley which includes almost all the big cities -Fribourg, Bern, Luzern, Zürich – and that gave us a choice of only about three main roads.
Harvey said slowly: ‘Look, I’m not sure I like the idea-‘
‘I’m running the ideas department,’ I snapped. ‘Shut up and look at the pretty pistols! ‘
He stopped as if I’d slapped him in the face. Then he turned slowly away, and went back to staring at the guns over the mantelpiece.
Miss Jarman glared at me.
Maganhard said: ‘Shouldn’t we be starting?’
I looked at my watch: nearly noon. Three hundred kilometres to go. Say five hours’ driving.
‘We’re not in too much of a hurry,’ I said. ‘We can’t cross the frontier until it’s dark, after half past eight. And we don’t want to spin out the road journey – we’re safer sitting here.’
‘Then you’ll join me for lunch?’ the General asked.
Maganhard said: ‘We will not be in Liechtenstein until nine o’clock, then? We are cutting it very fine. What if the car breaks down?’
‘Sergeant!’ the General called. ‘When did the car last break down?’
Morgan stiffened and started considering. ‘We had the silencer trouble in 1956, sir. But that wasn’t a real break-down. I think the last time was the electrical problem in – that would be in ‘48.’
I grinned. ‘All right. Lunch up here?’
‘Of course,’ the General said.
The lunch arrived on the table at the other end of the room. Morgan took the trays at the door and handed round the food – presumably so that the waiters wouldn’t set eyes on Maganhard. My first idea was that this would make them doubly suspicious, but then I remembered the General had been in this hotel over forty years. Forty years isn’t enough to stop waiters being suspicious, of course, but it’s time enough for them to learn to be forgetful when the police come asking questions.
We had troutau bleuand a straightforward veal escalope that was as soft as butter: the General obviously didn’t belong to the overdone-roast-beef movement that most of Montreux’s English guests insisted on. He went on with his glass of swizzled champagne, but the rest of us got a crisp cold Ayler Herrenberg.
It was a quiet meal, except for the General’s eating. Maganhard was worried about the time factor, and annoyed that the right thing to do was just wait. Harvey was quiet and morose. He drank a glass of wine – no more – but he took it in three big gulps, and fiddled with his glass a lot, counting the seconds until he could take the next gulp.
Just before half past one, Morgan was pouring coffee. The General asked if we’d like a liqueur and I said No, fast, to pass the hint to Harvey. He gave me a twisted little smile and said No in his own time. No customers for liqueurs.
I tried to think of something to say to spin things out a bit – and to stop Maganhard and the General insulting each other and cocking up the whole deal.
Before I could think of anything, the General looked at Harvey and said: ‘Understand you’re a bodyguard. What d’you think of me collection?’
Harvey glanced back at the guns over the mantelpiece. ‘Pretty expensive, I’d guess.’
‘One of the best collections in the world. For its period. But’ – and the old face dragged itself into the ghost of a smile – ‘I thought perhaps you see another value in ‘em.’
Harvey shrugged. ‘As pistols, you’d be better off throwing rocks. As art, the trouble is they’re pistols. Junk like that stopped gun development dead for two hundred years. And I don’t suppose it helped art much, either.’
I said: ‘Hold on. You could never get handcrafting like that on a gun these days.’
‘Thank Christ for that. Or somebody, anyhow.’ He jerked his head at the display. ‘Take a real look at them: with all that carving the butts are lousy grips, and I’ll bet most of them are muzzle-heavy. Sure, some of the cheaper stuff was better – duelling pistols had real grips and a good balance. But when the top men were doing this sort of stuff, the rest were trying to follow. So they spent two hundred years putting more engraving and gold wire on pistols. If they’d known their jobs they’d have learnt a bit of chemistry and invented percussion caps and cartridge loading two hundred years earlier.
‘But they weren’t interested: that was too damn practical. They wanted to be artists. Wanted to forget they were making pistols.’ He stared across at the General. ‘So they ended up making your stuff. It’s an expensive sort of wallpaper – but the wall’s where they belong.’
I’d been half expecting the General to burst into flames the moment Harvey gave him the chance. But all he did was nod very slowly and rasp: ‘A refreshingly new point of view, young man. Why d’you hold it so strongly?’
Harvey shrugged and frowned and said slowly: ‘Pistols are for killing people. Nothing else – there’s no other point to them. Maybe I just don’t like to see that wrapped up in ‘ fancy dress.’
The General chuckled softly and the damp eyes fixed on Harvey. ‘If you get to my age – which I doubt, in your job -you’ll know that everybody has to wrap it up somehow. You must have your own way, already.’
Harvey went very still.
I shunted myself to my feet. ‘If we rehearse much longer, we’ll start overplaying our parts. Let’s get started.’
Morgan began helping people into their coats. The General sat where he was, and I stood where I was. The eyes swivelled to me. ‘Well, Mr Cane,’ he said quietly, ‘was I right about Mr Lovell – the way he wraps it up? I saw him with his glass…’
‘You were right.’
‘Difficult, Mr Cane. Difficult.’ The old head trembled on its stalk. ‘And how do you do it?’
‘Me? I go around believing I’m in the right.’
‘Ah. You know – I’d say that was even more difficult. One so easily comes unwrapped.’
I nodded. ‘And how do you do it, General?’
He sank carefully back in his seat and his eyes closed slowly. ‘As Mr Lovell said: with gold wire and fancy engraving. I find it lasts.’
‘I hope so, Brigadier.’
The hoods slid open. ‘You noticed my little conceit, did you?’
‘One rank up from Colonel is Brigadier-General – in your day. They dropped the “General” from it in the ‘twenties some time.’
‘True. But the “General” was still there when I got it, so…’ the eyes closed again. ‘It helps the wrapping.’
‘Goodbye, General.’
‘He didn’t say anything. I nodded and picked up my jacket and raincoat and followed the rest out. Morgan led the way to the back lift. We went straight down to the basement garage.
TWENTY-SIX
The moment! saw the car I knew we were safe as far as the frontier. To forget a car like that, the cops would have to be a lot more stupid than even I was ready to believe. Apart from anything else, they must have had over thirty years to get to know this car.
It was a 1930 Rolls-Royce Phantom II 40-50 with a seven-seat limousine-de-ville body! I didn’t know all those names and numbers right then: Morgan told me. All I could see then was something like the Simplon-Orient Express mated with a battleship and on four wheels. It was sharing the garage with a couple of modern Rolls, a new Mercedes 600, a Jaguar Mark 10, and a Cadillac. It made the whole bunch look like mere transportation.
It had one other little distinction: the damn thing looked as if it was made of engraved silver. In the dull basement light it glowed like next Christmas.
At second glance, I saw it w
as just aluminium: un-painted aluminium, milled in small circles so that it caught the light from every angle, and studded with lines of ground-down rivet heads. Five minutes before, I’d have said aluminium hadn’t got quite that Rolls touch. I’d have been completely wrong. It had exactly the Rolls touch: it looked expensive, simple, and tough, the way the best fighter planes look, the way a good rifle looks, the way the first real space ship will look.
Beside me, Harvey said softly: ‘Jesus.’ Then he nodded at the rear door. ‘I guess he was worried it didn’t look individual enough.’
I hadn’t noticed it before: a painted crest, about the size of a spread hand, on the door. At first I couldn’t work it out, then it clicked. The green-and-white shield of Vaud canton, with the rose and laurel wreath of the Intelligence Corps painted on top – the ‘rampant pansy resting on its laurels’ as the rougher Departments of the Army used to call it. I grinned. It was the only fancy thing about the whole car; the General hadn’t been able to resist wrapping it up a little.
Morgan stepped forward and swung open the door. By now he had a black, peaked cap on his head instead of the orange tweed accident. He looked the perfect chauffeur.
Maganhard and Miss Jarman climbed in – and I mean climbed. The bottom was high off the ground, and the top was high off the bottom: you couldn’t see over it without standing on the running board.
Harvey walked past and up to the long square-cut bonnet, rapped on it, and called: ‘You down there in the engine-room – this is the Captain speaking. I want flank speed on both engines.’ He walked back and got a look from Morgan that you normally only see at bayonet practice.
Harvey nodded to him, said: ‘And damn the torpedoes, too,’ and climbed in.
I asked: ‘Will we have to stop for petrol? ‘
Morgan did a little mental arithmetic, then said: ‘I don’t think so, sir. We have twenty gallons – and another two in a tin in the boot, if we need it.’
That reassured me. I didn’t much want to start showing our faces at petrol stations. I climbed in after Harvey and the door closed behind me with a small solid click.
We rolled up into the daylight with all the stately dignity of the Queen Mary going down the Solent. On a hearse heading for an expensive funeral.
The time was half past two.
We turned north, back through most of Montreux, then right into a zigzag up the hillside to Blonay and over to meet the main road for Fribourg, across the corner of the mountains.
Harvey sat beside me on my right, sharing a jump seat that folded down from the partition between us and Morgan. We faced forwards and the back of our seat almost restricted Maganhard’s leg-room. But not quite – not in that car.
As soon as we were rolling, Harvey started a careful check-up on the inside of the car: the plate-glass partition between him and the back of Morgan’s neck, the roof, the door beside him.
I wasn’t worried about the local citizens seeing it wasn’t the General in the back seat: where Maganhard and Miss Jarman were sitting, it was too dark to recognise your own wife, even if you’d wanted to. There were no side windows behind the rear doors, and the car went back nearly four feet from there. The small back window was heavily smoked glass, and even the rear door windows were tinted. The car had the atmosphere of the smoking-room from one of the richer London clufa, and it was furnished to match.
The seats were of thick brown leather, the woodwork was dark mahogany, the handles and knobs of scratched, worn brass that looked much more solid than brand-new brass ever did. The carpet and the silk panelling on the roof had the same tone: a dull gold. None of it looked smart and new, but it had never been intended to. It was supposed to look worn – and as if it would never wear out.
After a while, Maganhard said: ‘This seems a very distinctive car for a man like the General. He must be a man who makes enemies; I would have expected something less obvious.’ He was obviously feeling smug about his own idea in choosing a Citroën.
I’d been trying to work that out for myself, and reckoned I had. ‘It’s protection – of a sort,’ I said. ‘Once somebody’s really trying to kill you, you can change your car every month and it won’t fool them. This way he attracts as much attention as he can – and a pro killer won’t shoot at a man in a spotlight. I suppose it’s the same thing as living in one part of one hotel for forty years: anybody knows where to find him but theydon’t know how to get through five floors of a big hotel once they’ve blown his head off. In a private house up in the hills, he’d be a pushover.’
Maganhard said: ‘I seem to remember some famous political assassinations that worked in public places.’
‘Political killings are by cranks – and they get caught. The point of a pro killer is that he can count the odds; he won’t shoot unless they’re on his side.’
‘Amateurs are hell,’ Harvey said absently, still looking carefully round the inside of the car. ‘You can set up something that’s watertight for the professional – you’re playing the same rules. Then some amateur walks in and blows the whole thing. The trouble in our business is, we only fire the second shot. You get a guy who doesn’t care if the second shot knocks his head off – what can you do?’
I turned and smiled reassuringly at the dark shape that was Maganhard. ‘You see? Just be glad people like you and the General don’t attract cranks – only real killers.’
Maganhard said: ‘I’ll try and remember to be thankful.’
Harvey just grunted and went on exploring the door at his side, and the partition in front.
I noticed we were going up a steep hill, but the car didn’t. It would have taken a hopped-up Mercedes a lot of work with the gearbox just to keep us in sight. Morgan only changed down from top a couple of times. But you hardly need gears with a seven-litre engine that turns slowly enough to have started the old crack about ‘it fires once at every mile-post’. That period of Rolls doesn’t have much top speed – and never did have – but it’ll go up a vertical slope like fire along a fuse.
We didn’t even slow down for the corners. I got a hasty flashback of my past life the first time Morgan slammed that great chariot into a hairpin bend, but it just sailed round. The springing was as stiff as a five-day corpse. We got to know that springing better once we were over the crest and opened up down the straight on the other side. It felt very solid and stable, but when you hit a hole in the road your backside knew about it by special delivery.
Harvey finished his tour of inspection, swung round on me, and said abruptly: ‘Okay – the car’s secure. There’s no microphones and that partition’s soundproof. He can’t hear a word.’ He nodded at the back of Morgan’s neck, a few inches away through the thick glass. ‘So now tell me, Cane: why the hell are we riding in this heap?’
I smiled in a friendly way and said: ‘It’s a nice car. And as far as you’re concerned, it’s a free ride. Enjoy it.’
His eyes were cold and steady. ‘A piece of cheese,’ he said softly, ‘just a big piece of Gruyère – and four blind mice sitting around in the holes thinking how nice somebody’s left it lying around just when they felt hungry. Why are we riding in this car, Cane?’
‘It’s still a free ride.’
Miss Jarman said: ‘Do you think the General-‘
‘Yes-I-do-think-the-General,’ Harvey said, still watching me. ‘Okay, Cane -1 know you’ve been right before. But just think of this: for the first time on this trip, somebody knows where we’ll be -exactly where we’ll be, within a few inches – when we’re crossing that frontier. If that’s a trap, it’s a very damn good one.’
‘I know,’ I said. ‘But look at it this way: we know exactly wherethey’ll be waiting. And that hasn’t happened before, either.’
‘You mean itis a trap?’ His eyebrows had that half-degree slant on them.
‘Hell, of course it’s a trap. What else d’you expect for three thousand francs in this business?’
Maganhard came awake at full volume: ‘General Fay is working for
– for this Calieron?’
I smiled over my shoulder at him. I liked the way he said ‘this’ Calieron, as if the world was full of Gallerons, all trying to lift his ten millions’ worth of Caspar AC, but only this one likely to do it.
‘Well,’ I said, ‘if the General wasn’t working for him twenty minutes ago, I’ll bet he is now. But I think he always was. It was always likely, wasn’t it? There’s damn few big deals in this part of the world where the General isn’t working for one side or the other. And you and Fiez hadn’t hired him.’
‘You guessed this?’ he shouted. ‘And you let me pay him three thousand francs?’ He was glaring at me as if I’d grown two heads, and neither of them friendly.
‘Well, Idid suggest you paid a third of seven and a half,’ I said soothingly. That’d have saved you five hundred. He knew he’d never collect the rest, but he wouldn’t have dared refuse it.’
He wasn’t soothed, of course. ‘Why should I pay anything to be betrayed?’
‘He did help get you out of jug – and you’re still getting What he sold you: a cop-free ride to the frontier. He wasn’t fooling about that. If he wanted us caught by the cops, he could have left you in the pen in Montreux. Anyway, we know they don’t want us caught: they want us dead. You must have noticedthat.’
‘And we’re driving into a trap,’ he said harshly.
‘Let’s just say we’ve conned them into giving us a free ride past the cops. And telling us where the trouble’s coming.’
Harvey slanted his eyebrows again. ‘You were planning this?’
I shrugged. ‘I was spinning a coin. Either he wasn’t working for Calieron, so he could have sold us some genuine help, or he was, and he’d try to steer us into a trap. When he came down, I just had to know if he was heads or tails.’
Miss Jarman said curiously: ‘Howdid you know?’
‘He didn’t make enough money out of us. Three thousand is nothing in this game; he didn’t even charge for getting Maganhard out of jail. Then he tried to fool us over the fortifications.’