Young Petrella

by Michael Gilbert

  No. 97 turned out to be a leather-worker’s shop. The sign above the shop said:

  ANGRIFFE FRÈRES

  It was bolted and barred, like all the rest.

  Petrella rang the bell. Then he knocked a couple of times on the door. He wondered where Mlle Arture would fit into the house of a Monsieur Angriffe and his brothers. He wondered if any of the Angriffe family were at home. He wondered if anyone lived in the street at all.

  Suddenly, quietly, and without any sound of bolts or locks, the door opened, and a man looked out. He was middle-aged, his skin was the colour of milky coffee, and he had black hair and a pair of brownish eyes, rimmed in yellow. He looked at Petrella, and said nothing at all.

  Petrella said, “Mademoiselle Natalie—”

  The man opened the door six inches. “You are a day late,” he said, “but come in.”

  Petrella stepped over the threshold, and followed the man down the empty hall and into a kitchen at the end. He got the impression, as he went past, that the front rooms were all empty, but the kitchen was crowded. There were two women working at the stove, and another in front of the sink. A child was asleep in a cot in the corner, being rocked by an older girl. A boy of perhaps twelve, with bright mischievous eyes in a monkey face, squatted under the table. None of them seemed, at first sight, to be a very probable correspondent of Detective Constable Wilmot, of Y Division, Highside.

  “Mademoiselle Natalie—” said Petrella again.

  “Business,” said the man. “Let us stick to business. Business before pleasure. If you will wait a moment.”

  He opened what looked like the door of a cupboard, and disappeared up a flight of steps. The occupants of the room stared at him in undisguised astonishment. There was nothing hostile about their interest. Indeed, he fancied he read, in the bright eyes of the boy, a sort of admiration.

  The man of the house reappeared. He was holding a thick canvas envelope, a little larger than an ordinary registered envelope. Its shape indicated that it contained something more solid than paper.

  He handed it to Petrella and said, “Will you tell your principal that this must terminate the matter. I think he will understand.”

  “I fear—” began Petrella. Then changed his mind abruptly. If something had gone wrong, if the whole of his errand was a mistake, the important thing was to get out of the house. The long, blind street was a trap. Apologies and excuses would come better from outside it.

  Something more seemed to be expected of him. He put his hand into his pocket and pulled out Wilmot’s letter. It was a long and conscientious piece of night-school French, and it contained, as Petrella knew, two photographs of Wilmot, one in plainclothes, and one in uniform. He wondered just what the Angriffe family would make of them.

  “For Mademoiselle Natalie,” he said, and handed the thick envelope to the man, who held out his hand and took it. The tips of his fingers paused on the envelope, and Petrella knew that he was trying to detect whether there was money in it, and if so, how much.

  “Remember,” he said, putting as much authority into his voice as he could muster, “that is for Mademoiselle. In person. You understand? In person.”

  “Yes, yes,” said the man hastily.

  “Now I must go,” said Petrella. For a moment the man looked as if he would have liked to say something more. Then he changed his mind, moved to the door, and opened it.

  As soon as the house door had shut behind him, Petrella started to walk very quickly. He wanted to run, and go on running until he was in front of the Gare du Nord, in sight of a gendarme. He had gone fifty yards when he heard the pattering of steps.

  Looking over his shoulder he saw that it was the boy. On the slippery pavé his bare feet were making twice the speed of Petrella’s iron-tipped shoes. There was no question – he would be caught before he reached the end of the street.

  He thought it better to stop, and face about.

  “Monsieur,” said the boy, in nervous, sibilant French. “There has been a great mistake. Will you please hand back the envelope?”

  “Not to you,” said Petrella, “and not here. When I have seen what is in it, then perhaps.”

  “It would be better,” said the boy.

  “That is not for you to say.”

  Petrella half turned to go. He saw the knife out of the corner of his eye. It came up, in a silver stream, from the ground, clenched in the boy’s small tight fist. Petrella jumped back, slipped, heard the edge of the blade make a noise like “shurr” as it went through the thick tweed of his jacket, and then was running for his life.

  When he reached the Place de la Goutte d’Or, he realised that the boy had not followed him. Just the one, quick, upward knife-swing of the professional killer, the swing that puts the knife in under the ribs and into the heart; and then no more. He looked down at his coat and saw that it was cut cleanly, from below the side pocket to the second button. Six roads led from the Place. He guessed that any of the three southern ones would serve him. He plunged into the nearest and started down it.

  At first he thought that the sound was a ringing in the ears. Then, when he stopped, he could hear it quite clearly. It was a fluting whistle. It came from the street ahead, or from the rooftop above him. From anywhere and from everywhere. Then, breaking the silence, the sound of a lorry coughing into life.

  He had delayed too long. The sound came from in front. The pursuit was ahead of him.

  To his left, a gap showed in the houses, fronted by a high, boarded fence. He could reach the top. It seemed clear of nails, barbed wire, and other sharp obstacles, so he pulled himself up and dropped into the open space behind. It was some sort of builder’s yard.

  He picked his way between the stacks of tiles, bricks, and pipes to the wall at the far end. The coping was out of his reach, but there was a ladder lying under one of the sheds. He stood this up against the wall, saw that there was an asphalted courtyard within dropping distance below him, straddled the wall long enough to kick down the ladder behind him and dropped.

  He guessed from the white lines on the asphalt that he was in a school playground, surrounded on three sides by buildings. As he stood, uncertain, one of the doors ahead of him opened and thirty or forty children ran out. They were boys, some white, some coffee-coloured. When they caught sight of him, they stopped and stared.

  Petrella walked up to the largest boy, and said, “I wish to see your master.”

  The boy gaped at him. Petrella realised that, apart from his sudden appearance in the playground, his torn coat and his black hands must call for some explanation.

  “I have had an accident,” he said shortly.

  “Perhaps I can help?” A stout man, with gold-rimmed glasses and a thick beard, was standing in the doorway.

  “Might I have a word with you?” said Petrella.

  “It would seem called for,” agreed the man.

  “In private.”

  “Very well. If you will follow.”

  They went into a small classroom.

  “I observed your entrance,” said the man. “My name, by the way, is Cleroux. If you do not wish to mention yours, I will not insist. I imagine that you are in some sort of trouble.”

  “I’m glad,” said Petrella, “that you do not ask for explanations, for there is practically nothing I could explain.”

  “You speak French well,” said Monsieur Cleroux. “But I think you are a foreigner. English, perhaps. It is the clothes more than the accent.”

  “Yes, English.”

  “I shall ask nothing. I have my school. We have all sorts of boys, as you see. I take no part in politics.”

  “If I could have a quick wash,” said Petrella, “and get back to the more public part of the city, I should be forever in your debt.”

  “Wash, certainly,” said Monsieur Cleroux. “As for the rest, you could not leave now by the front gate. It would not even be advisable for you to come to the window. From what I observe in the road, I assure you that it is so.” />
  “I’ll take your word for it,” said Petrella. “Which way can I go?”

  “We have an arrangement. In case of fire. You go through a window on the first floor, across the roof, and into the factory next door. We should only use it, you understand, in an emergency. Once you are in the factory, it should be possible for you to walk out without question – if you looked a little more presentable. There is a wash-basin next door.”

  While Petrella was cleaning his face and hands and combing his hair, Monsieur Cleroux stood behind him. He seemed suddenly nervous. “I wonder,” he said, “it seems impertinent. But I wonder if you could help me.”

  “Of course.”

  “It is just that we have had arguments in the school – as to the proper word. Is it right, in England, to call the man who collects the tickets on a bus an inspector or a collector?”

  Petrella explained, as best he could, the respective functions of a ticket inspector, a ticket collector, and a conductor. Monsieur Cleroux thanked him profusely.

  Five minutes later, one hand in his side pocket to hold together the slit in the jacket, he was walking out of the Works Entrance of the Frambouillet Motor Accessories Factory. So far as he knew, his departure aroused no interest.

  He strolled through three or four streets, going south, towards the centre of the town. At the first opportunity he went into a shop and bought himself a light, pastel linen sun jacket of a type much worn by young men about Paris that summer. The shopkeeper obligingly parcelled up his tweed jacket for him into a neat brown paper package. Petrella bought himself some sunglasses as well, and then, his mind more easy, strolled down the Rue d’Hauteville and into the Boulevard Poissonière where he picked himself a crowded café.

  Most of the patrons were sitting out on the pavement under the striped awning. He went into the interior, which was nearly empty, and pleasantly cool. He settled at a table in the corner, where he could not be overlooked, took the bulky envelope from his inner pocket, and slipped the point of a table knife under the flap. For a moment, the stout manilla resisted. Then it gave with a rasping jerk, and a fold of tissue paper shot out and hit the table; and out from the folds of the tissue paper slid a little snake.

  It was made of gold, and had tiny, crimson eyes. Petrella had seen snakes of a similar type before, but they had been made of larger links and were comparatively crude. This was a piece of magic, made of two or three hundred tiny interleaved plates, none of them loose, yet all of them moving freely, fitted into each other with miraculous perfection, so that the whole thin body rippled with venomous life. What it must be worth, he could not begin to imagine.

  “Pretty thing,” said a voice. “Buy it for your girl?” A waiter had come up. He was a big blond boy with the look of a German.

  “That’s right,” said Petrella. He picked up the snake by its tail and slid it back into the envelope.

  “I bought mine a hairclip last week,” said the waiter. “It cost me three weeks’ pay. The proprietor here is a pig. He pays nothing.”

  Petrella ordered a fine, drank it down quickly, and left a tip almost large enough to buy the waiter’s young lady a second hairclip.

  Then he went out into the street. At the door of the café, he paused for a quick look. All seemed in order. Twenty yards away, on the other side of the road, was parked an old, ivy-green Renault saloon, which had not been there when he went in. Nothing suspicious about that. Plenty of Renaults in Paris.

  He crossed the road, and made for the gardens of the Palais Royal. He wanted time to think.

  He was fairly clear now what had happened. He had gone to the wrong address. What he had said had been construed as a password, and he had been entrusted, by some part of the Algerian terrorist organisation, with a very valuable piece of property, probably stolen, and designed to be sold for their funds.

  So much was clear.

  What was far less clear was what he was going to do next. He could go to the police. And tell them what? At best, be held for endless questioning. If the snake had been less valuable or less attractive, he might have pushed it down behind a seat in the Métro and left it.

  In the end, he went out, bought a stamped envelope, addressed it to his great-aunt, and slipped the snake into it. He added a note, asking her to place the snake in her own bank for safekeeping, and added that he had changed his plans, and was leaving for Spain that night by the ten o’clock train.

  When he had posted the envelope he felt better. A good lunch at the Ruban Bleu completed the cure. In the afternoon he walked out to the Bois de Boulogne, went off the path into a clearing in the bushes, lay on his back, and went to sleep.

  He was woken by a soft thud in his stomach. He came straight out of sleep and up on his feet, ready for anything.

  Standing a few paces away, staring at him, was a small girl. It was her ball which had hit him. His sudden movement had frightened the child, and she started to cry.

  “There, there,” said Petrella. “Do not be alarmed.”

  A stout lady, dressed, despite the heat of the afternoon, in a sealskin coat, arrived upon the scene, panting. She swept up the girl, like a baby seal, into her flippers and glowered at Petrella.

  “I alarmed her, I am afraid,” he said. “I woke up.”

  “Chérie does not cry because a man wakes up,” said the lady. “What did you do to her?”

  For the second time that day Petrella’s discretion got the better of his valour. He walked rapidly off into the bushes, but not so rapidly that he did not hear the lady say, “There are men of a certain type who should not be allowed to enjoy their liberty.”

  He got back to the Place de la Concorde by early dusk, and chose himself a restaurant for his evening meal. His train went at ten. The change of plan would mean abandoning his reserved sleeper, but a night in a first-class railway carriage was not a great ordeal.

  He had his baggage to collect from the Gare du Nord. If he allowed an hour, that should be ample. He ordered his meal with care and ate it with deep satisfaction.

  It was while he was drinking his coffee and turning the pages of his Paris Soir that his eye was caught by the announcement in the Stop Press. The print was smudgy, but the meaning was clear enough.

  “Just after midday today, a party of Algerian terrorists forced a letterbox in the Boulevard Poissonière. The affair was elaborately organised. A heavy lorry was backed up to the box, a grapnel inserted, and the front of the box ripped out. The contents were collected and removed. An armed party kept watch to prevent interference. By the time the police arrived, those guilty of this outrage had taken themselves off. The precise object of this latest manoeuvre of the terrorists is not known.”

  Petrella felt suddenly cold.

  It was not the fact that the snake was now back with its original owners. This was rough justice. It was the thought that, since they had known precisely which box to open, they could never have lost sight of him for a moment.

  He got up and walked to the window.

  Twenty yards up the street, on the other side of the road, was parked an ivy-green Renault saloon.

  Now that danger was at his elbow, Petrella’s mind worked with clarity. Get hold of the police? Impossible, now, to explain why he had not handed the snake over to them at once. Get out of the restaurant and keep moving until his train left? Their organisation was clearly better, far better, than he had imagined. But once he was in the street, surely he could use the cover of darkness to slip them for the few vital hours.

  He took out enough money to cover his meal, with a generous tip, and pushed it under the plate. Then he got up, purposely leaving his hat and paper in full view on the chair beside him, and strolled towards the vestibule.

  “Have you a telephone?” he said to the girl behind the desk. She pointed to the far end of the hall. He walked towards it. To the left was a side door, bolted. To the right, a flight of stairs. At the end, a telephone booth.

  At the last moment, he darted to his right, up the stairs.
The girl in the desk, who had evidently been watching, called out after him, but he took no notice.

  At the top of the stairs a corridor presented itself, closed doors on both sides. Footsteps were coming up the stairs behind him. He picked a door on the right-hand side, and went in. It was a bedroom, unoccupied, and almost unfurnished. There was a bolt on the inside of the door, and this he shot.

  The only window in the room opened on to a very narrow, flat open space, ahead of which was darkness of perhaps six feet in width, and uncertain depth. Not knowing what lay below made it curiously difficult to jump.

  It was a rattling on the handle of the door which launched him. He shot upwards and outwards and landed, on hands and knees, on the roof opposite. Here the going was fairly easy. He walked cautiously to the far end, lowered himself on to a sort of penthouse which stuck out into the back alley behind the restaurant, and dropped from that to the pavement.

  As he picked himself up he realised the futility of his manoeuvre. His opponents were all round the building. Ten yards up the alleyway a cigarette glowed; and he heard, once again, the twittering whistle.

  He turned and ran. The alley forked, and he went left at random. It was damnably dark, and in ten paces he realised that he was in a cul-de-sac. Next moment something hit him in the back, and three figures jumped at him, and he went down. He hit out blindly and went on hitting, long after he knew that it was useless.

  A cloth was round his mouth, his left arm was already pinned. Strong, cruel hands were feeling for his other hand, for his nostrils, for his eyes.

  Then a very bright light came on and, with explosive suddenness, a machine pistol opened fire, the bullets thudding into the wall behind them.

  Like bees unclustering from a swarm at the first whiff of smoke, his assailants left him. The last to go slid his hand down, but Petrella saw the knife and had enough strength left to wrench his head back out of reach. He felt the point, like the touch of a white-hot wire, slide down the back of his head, and lodge against the collarbone with an agonising jolt.