Forever and a Day
Page 5
The SDECE had sent back the personal belongings of the dead man but these had amounted to very little: his wallet, silver cufflinks, a Cartier cigarette lighter, a gold-plated Dennison-Omega watch. And yet he had been onto something. He had closed in on an international criminal, the woman who called herself Madame 16, and claimed he had evidence she was in bed with the local underworld. What sort of evidence? Photographs? Letters? And if the French police had already searched the flat and found nothing, why should it be any different for Bond? Never mind …
He started in the bedroom. A few clothes hung in the wardrobe: a single-breasted jacket, shirts from Hardy Amies, worsted trousers, three pairs of shoes. They all had a sense of desolation, the knowledge that they would never again be worn by their owner. Bond tapped the pockets, expecting to find them empty. They were. Then he examined the back of the wardrobe, but it was solid wood with no concealed panels. He went into the living room and searched the cupboards, feeling under the shelves. There was a grandfather clock in one corner of the room, a hideous thing. He opened it and rummaged through the workings. He studied every inch of the floor, searching for a board that might come loose. He removed the porcelain lid from the toilet and the panel from the side of the bath. Thirty minutes later, he was certain that apart from dust, damp and general decay, the rooms had nothing to hide.
What else then? A safety deposit box in a local bank? No. If he’d got something, he’d have wanted to keep it close.
Bond went back out into the corridor, looking for any fuse boxes, storage cupboards, even a loose strip of skirting board. He wondered about the old lady downstairs. Could she have been persuaded to look after a package for her nice English tenant? If all else failed, he would try her later.
He went back into the room and took out a cigarette, lit it, then walked over to a glass door that reached from floor to ceiling and opened onto a small terrace overlooking the street. A motorbike had just pulled in on the other side, an Airone Turismo made by the Italian firm, Moto Guzzi. It was painted a firebox red and Bond ran an approving eye over the gleaming aluminium and nineteen-inch wheels. He could imagine the four-stroke, air-cooled engine propelling the rider at 70 mph along the French coast. That was what he would rather be doing, not shuffling about in the shadows of this house of death.
He glanced down and noticed a dark footprint on the wooden floor in front of him. Someone had stepped into an area of black asphalt or tar and they had left a faint imprint of their shoe. But there was something wrong. It took Bond a moment to work out what it was. The footprint was facing into, not out of the room. If it had been the other way round, there would have been no mystery. You come in from the street. You go over to the window and open it. You leave a mark.
But that wasn’t what had happened.
Bond turned the handles, pulled open the glass door and stepped onto the terrace. There was a metal table and two chairs. The floor was covered with a latticed metalwork and there was nothing that could account for the footprint. He looked up at the ornamental balustrade that ran the full length of the building just above his head. He had an idea. There was nobody in the street now and, moving quickly, he climbed onto the table, then pulled himself over the balustrade and onto the roof.
All at once, Bond found himself in what might have been the heart of a maze. The blocks of flats in this part of Nice were divided into irregularly shaped quadrangles with inner courtyards, all of them with roofs made out of terracotta tiles. At the bottom of the street, he could see the two men with the jackhammer and beyond them, a park, the trees placed so regularly that they seemed artificial. In the distance was the sea, resolutely blue. The traffic was as solid as ever, cars, buses, bicycles and horse-drawn carriages tangled together in their slow procession along the coast. Next to the road, the restaurants were jammed, tables spilling out onto the pavements with waiters dancing round.
And what of his immediate surroundings? He was in a strange landscape of chimneys, skylights, washing lines and jutting dormer windows. In front of him, he noticed a whitewashed box-like building, about the size of a garden shed and built in the same, haphazard way. It was fastened with a padlock and Bond examined it with growing interest. Although the paintwork was old and flaking, the padlock was brand new. He turned it over in his hands. The lock was a Yale and too narrow for the curtain pick. What then? Bond took out his Beretta and waited for the jackhammer to start up again. As the noise echoed down the street, he fired once. The lock shattered. Bond opened the door.
The shed was floored with black asphalt. It housed some of the machinery that operated the lights and the lift inside the building. There were some old paint pots, tools left behind by workmen, a single bicycle wheel. Bond rummaged around in the shadows without finding anything, then noticed a shelf high above his head. Standing on tiptoe, he ran his hand along it, at first feeling only dust. But then his searching fingers touched something soft, made of paper. It had been placed well back where it couldn’t be seen. He took hold of it and dragged it down: a thick envelope, heavy, unsealed, clean. It hadn’t been there long.
Back in the daylight, he tipped out the contents and examined them on the ground in front of him: a gun, a wad of 10,000-franc notes (200,000 francs in total), two passports, one of them in the name of Richard Blakeney, an invoice of some sort, printed on a sheet of thin paper, a postcard with a view of the sea and several photographs. Bond glanced through them and knew at once that he had hit the jackpot. Pleased with himself, he slid them back into the envelope. The street was still empty, the bike parked opposite. He swung himself down and went back in through the open door.
He had taken two steps into the room when he felt something cold and unarguably lethal being pressed against his neck, and a voice said, ‘Hold it right there.’
Bond froze. Out of the corner of his eye he could see a man wearing a leather motorbike jacket, one arm outstretched, holding a gun, square and silver with a parkerised finish. Inwardly, he cursed himself. He had seen the bike draw up opposite the building but it had never occurred to him that the rider might actually be on his way here.
‘I’ll have that, if you don’t mind,’ the man said. He had a gravelly voice and an American drawl.
Bond was holding the envelope that he had found in his right hand. ‘And what if I do mind?’ he asked pleasantly.
‘Just hand it over.’
‘Sure.’ Bond turned quite naturally, as if passing the envelope across, but he continued the movement, suddenly accelerating, slamming the package into the man’s gun hand and at the same time ducking low. The gun blasted out its load but its aim had gone wild, the bullet veering across to the other side of the room, smashing into the face of the grandfather clock. He instantly followed through, slicing upwards, driving his knuckles into the man’s throat. It was a sledgehammer punch that almost lifted him off his feet, hurling him into the wall. For a moment he stood there, crowned by yellow roses. Then he slumped to the ground.
Bond stayed where he was, still holding the envelope. He heard the unmistakable sound of a death rattle – but it wasn’t the man who had attacked him. It was the internal workings of the grandfather clock. Well, that was one good thing to have come out of the encounter. Bond took the gun – an M1911 Colt Service Ace, much liked by the US government. He emptied it and laid it on a table, then quickly searched the unconscious man. He found coins, keys, a packet of wild cherry chewing gum and an ID card supplied by 2430 East Street in Washington that identified Reade Griffith as a member of the Central Intelligence Agency, helpfully adding that he was six feet tall, weighed 170 pounds, had blue eyes and brown hair. Bond would have added that he was clean-shaven, built like a quarterback and kept himself in shape.
The agent’s eyes flickered open. ‘That hurt!’ he said.
‘You shouldn’t have pulled a gun on me,’ Bond said mildly.
‘I’ll remember that next time. I don’t suppose you could get me a glass of water? My larynx seems to have been crushed.’
‘You’ve seen my ID.’ Bond had left it next to the gun. ‘Did you know it’s a felony to assault an agent of the CIA when he’s in pursuance of his duty?’
‘And it’s actually a capital offence to point a gun at a member of the British secret service when he’s in pursuance of his.’
‘The British secret service? I sort of guessed that when I heard the accent.’ Griffith had gulped down some of the water. He got unsteadily to his feet and held out a hand. ‘Reade Griffith,’ he said.
‘James Bond.’
‘Nice to meet you, James Bond. And I sincerely apologise for trying to railroad you just now. The trouble with this town is that you never know who you’re going to meet – and given what happened to the last occupant of this apartment, I figured it was best to play safe.’ Griffith rubbed his throat. The skin had turned a dark mauve. ‘When did you get into Nice?’
‘This morning.’
‘Well, you certainly don’t hang around.’ He glanced at the envelope. ‘Where did you find that?’
‘There’s a sort of service hut on the roof.’
‘That’s smart. Smart of him to hide it there, smart of you to find it. So have you finished here then?’
‘I would say so. Yes.’
‘Then what say the two of us head out of here and get ourselves a drink?’
Bond smiled and handed the CIA man back his gun.
Ten minutes later, they were outside a bar with parasols, wrought-iron tables and haughty-looking waiters in white aprons; the sort of place that could only exist in the south of France. Griffith had made a telephone call before he had sat down, running a background check on Bond while Bond ordered the drinks: a Campari for himself and, for Griffith, a cold beer.
‘OK. You and me may have got off on the wrong footing, but it looks as if we’re on the same side,’ Griffith said. ‘Welcome to the south of France. I guess they’ve sent you to find out what happened to your friend.’
‘Did you know him?’ Bond asked.
He took out his cigarettes and offered one to Griffith, who shook his head. ‘I met him a few times. He was pretending to be some sort of writer but I soon found out who he was and why he was out here … the same reason as me, as a matter of fact. It would have turned out better if the two of us had worked together but he preferred to play things solo. Worse luck for him.’
‘So what are you doing here?’
‘Broadly speaking, my job is to keep an eye on things. I’m sure I don’t need to tell you how important the French ports are to our interests – the Marshall Plan and all the rest of it. They’re our gateway to Europe and we need to make sure everything is running smoothly. Something bad happens here, it hurts us back home. You can think of me as an American outpost, James, fighting the good fight in my own little way.’
‘How long have you been here?’
‘About eighteen months. I joined the CIA after the war. Actually, I didn’t join them. They came for me. I was with the Marine Corps … Tarawa, Saipan, Iwo Jima, working in intelligence. I spoke Japanese and a bit of French. I seem to pick up languages from the girls I’ve dated. When the war finished, I went back to Harvard to study law but they had other ideas. There was a knock on the door and the next thing I knew, I found myself over here in the Côte d’Azur. Nice place, by the way, if you look out for yourself.’
Bond remembered the report he had read and particularly the comment (by ‘C.C.’) that the CIA had supported the crime syndicates. ‘Looking out for yourself. Does that involve cooperating with Corsican gangsters?’
Griffith laughed. ‘That was official policy two years ago but we soon realised it didn’t work. These people are animals. Monday they’re your best friend. Tuesday they don’t trust you. Wednesday, they shoot your head off and no regrets. That’s how it goes. In a way, I wish I could get closer to them because right now I’ve got no idea what they’re up to. What I do know is that the supply of heroin seems to have fizzled out and that doesn’t make any sense at all. I mean, for the last twenty years that’s been their number-one source of income. I’ve been trying to figure out what’s going on around here and when your guy turned up dead, I guessed he must have stumbled onto something. That’s why I went round to his place. I wasn’t expecting to find anyone there and when you turned up, I automatically assumed you must be up to no good.’
It was a pattern that Bond recognised and which he would have found amusing if it wasn’t so dangerous. Two intelligence agencies, operating from different sides of the world, had come to blows in a dingy Riviera flat. That was the trouble with the secret services. They didn’t even trust their own allies.
‘That was your bike?’ he asked. ‘The Turismo?’
‘Sure,’ Griffith said. ‘It wasn’t easy getting the office to agree to that one but I told them the traffic here stinks. Anyway, I love it. Back home, I drive a Pontiac.’ He sipped his beer then set the glass down. ‘So in the spirit of transatlantic cooperation, are you going to show me what’s in that package?’
The envelope was on the table between them. Bond had barely glanced at the contents and still wasn’t sure that he wanted to share them. At the same time, he had taken a liking to Reade Griffith. The CIA man had been outmanoeuvred and he had been badly hurt, but he had taken both with humour and good grace. It was an unusual start to a friendship but Bond felt he had discovered a kindred spirit. He took out the photographs first and laid them down flat.
They showed three people, a woman and two men, meeting over a bottle of wine. They were close together on the crowded terrace of a bar with the old port of Marseilles behind them and, in the distance, a church high up on a hill. Bond recognised the basilica of Notre-Dame de la Garde, which had come through the war unharmed. The name of the bar was printed on the canopy: LA CARAVELLE.
Griffith glanced at the photograph and whistled. ‘Well, you’re definitely onto something with this. That’s Jean-Paul Scipio. He’s not easy to miss. The man with him is his translator.’
The Corsican gangster was instantly recognisable. He was so fat that his shoulders and his head were actually some distance from the table and he would have to reach an almost impossible distance to pick up his glass. He was wearing a three-piece white linen suit, each piece the size of a small sail, and smoking a cigarette. His wig looked completely incongruous, only drawing attention to the fact that its wearer had no hair of his own. The translator, sitting next to him, had made no such effort. He was completely bald, his head a polished dome, and was dressed in a dark suit with round spectacles. The woman facing them was leaning back, a glass of wine in her hand.
Bond examined the long dark hair, the slim body, the folded legs. It was hard to match this photograph with the one he had seen in London, although he was almost certain they showed the same person. ‘Sixtine,’ he said.
‘That’s her all right.’
‘You’ve met her?’
‘No, I can’t say I’ve had the pleasure, but I’ve seen the files and I can tell you – she’s a piece of work! Last time I looked, she was number three on the CIA Most Wanted List, although we don’t arrest her because it’s almost impossible to pin anything on her personally. She’s too smart for that. She’s a go-between, a buyer and a seller, but she always manages to keep her hands clean. At the same time I could tell you a dozen people who’ve lost everything thanks to her.’
He paused for a moment, then went on.
‘You ever hear of Ralph Izzard? A Democratic member of the House of Representatives who was also a member of the Committee on Military Affairs? He resigned last year after he leaked information about our latest subs that somehow ended up with the Soviets. Or “Big” Bob Harling? He played basketball for the City College of New York until he got caught up in a point-shaving scandal to benefit gamblers in the Mafia. Now he’s in jail. Maybe he’ll share a cell with Conrad O’Brien, who walked out of his office at IBM one lunch
time, taking with him the top-secret designs for their latest vacuum tube technology. What did all of them have in common? They were clients of Madame 16 and thought maybe she fancied them when in fact she was sucking them dry! And let me tell you, James, that’s just the first three who come to mind. There are plenty of others.’
Griffith spun the photograph round. ‘So if this little tête-à-tête in a Marseilles café is anything to go by, it looks pretty certain that Madame 16 is in business with the drug syndicates. That’s interesting. I wouldn’t have said it was quite her style but she goes where the money goes and Scipio’s certainly got big pockets. Just look at the size of his suit! What else have you got?’
There were another half-dozen photographs taken at La Caravelle. This sequence showed Sixtine finishing her drink and leaving. Scipio and his translator had stayed behind, ordering a second bottle of wine and several plates of food. The translator didn’t eat.
Bond went back to the envelope and drew out the invoice he had noticed earlier. The top of the page was printed with the letterhead and the name of a company – FERRIX CHIMIQUES – with an address in Marseilles. In the right-hand corner, also printed, was the word ‘INVOICE’ and a number: 82032150. This was the third, or even the fourth carbon copy, stolen perhaps from the bottom of a pile. The typewriter keys had barely made it through and although Bond could make out a few letters, the rest of it was illegible.