Pel And The Paris Mob

by Mark Hebden

  ‘I’ve seen her. He was back in drugs.’

  Ballentou’s eyebrows rose. ‘Already?’

  ‘I expect he got them through Pépé. He was in touch with some pusher in the American forces in Germany. Did you know?’

  Ballentou’s shrug came again. ‘You’ve come to the wrong man. I’m out of touch. I’ve been working steadily for nearly two years now. I’m in the clear. Imogen looks after me.’ He glanced at the girl who smiled. ‘There’s no reason for me to get mixed up in that sort of thing again.’

  Nosjean looked at Imogen Wathus. ‘I think he was hoping to make contact with students. His girl was to have been the contact.’

  Her face hardened angrily. ‘There are some bastards in this world, aren’t there?’ she said. ‘Had he started?’

  ‘I don’t think so. Not yet. He seems to have picked up a consignment recently but I don’t think he’d finished getting rid of it.’ Nosjean looked at Ballentou again. ‘Has nobody ever tried to recruit you? They don’t give up easily.’

  Ballentou gestured. ‘No. They’ve left me alone. I think it’s finally got around that I’m not interested. Besides, I’m too old these days.’ He leaned over to pour more wine into Nosjean’s glass. ‘Anyway,’ he ended, ‘why bother about Selva? He was a pusher. Somebody’s done a lot of kids a good turn.’

  Eighteen

  When Pel appeared at the Hôtel de Police the following day, Claudie Darel met him in the corridor.

  ‘Someone to see you, Patron,’ she announced.

  ‘God, perhaps?’ Pel chose to be heavily amusing. ‘The Pope? Or perhaps the President of France to confer on me the Legion of Honour?’

  Claudie didn’t turn a hair. ‘None of those, Patron,’ she said without a change of expression. ‘Inspector Duval, from the Sûreté.’

  Pel’s mild expression vanished at once. ‘What’s he want?’ he snapped.

  ‘He’s interested in the De Mougy business, Patron.’

  Inspector Duval was a tall handsome man – since Pel was small and anything but handsome, he disliked him at once – and he was waiting in Pel’s office, smoking a pipe that looked as big as a lavatory bowl. He didn’t bother to rise as Pel appeared, but he gestured with the pipe.

  ‘Mind?’ he asked.

  Pel always minded people who could smoke a pipe with the aplomb Inspector Duval showed. Pel would have loved to have smoked a pipe – if only to get out of the habit of smoking cigarettes – but pipe smoking left him with burn holes in his clothes and a mouth as foul as a puppy’s basket.

  ‘No,’ he lied through his teeth. ‘Not at all.’

  ‘You’ll know why I’m here, of course,’ Duval said. ‘The De Mougy business.’

  Pel was rapidly coming to the conclusion that there was not one Paris mob but two – one on each side of the law – and that at that moment he’d got them both on his neck.

  ‘Is it considered in Paris,’ he snapped, ‘that we’re incapable down here of handling it or something?’

  Duval waved the pipe, scattering sparks all over Pel’s carpet. Pel studied them sourly. He was proud of his carpet. It was a thick one – the sort only chief inspectors and above were allowed – and, having only recently been promoted, he’d barely grown used to it and didn’t want it spoiled.

  ‘Strings pulled,’ Duval said. ‘You know how it is.’

  ‘No, I don’t,’ Pel said. ‘We don’t go in for that much down here. Inform me.’

  Duval shrugged. ‘The Baron’s a pal of Carny de Vitage, the Minister. You’ll know that.’

  ‘I don’t tread the corridors of power,’ Pel said. ‘I didn’t know.’

  ‘Well, that’s the way it is.’ Duval was stupendously bland and confident. ‘He had a word with him. On the telephone. From Deauville. Didn’t think things were moving fast enough. Carny got in touch with the Commissioner who promised to have it looked into.’

  ‘It’s being looked into,’ Pel said. ‘By me.’

  ‘Yes, I know. But he wanted more than that.’

  Once more, Pel found it hard to understand how someone from Paris without local knowledge could possibly learn more than he and his team could. ‘And what do you intend to do?’ he asked.

  ‘Oh, I’m not going to get in your way,’ Duval said.

  ‘I’m glad to hear it.’

  ‘I won’t interfere.’

  You’d better not, Pel thought.

  ‘I’ll just probe a little higher, that’s all.’ Duval’s smile was condescending. ‘Higher echelon, so to speak.’ What, in God’s name, Pel wondered, did that mean? ‘Have a word among De Mougy’s friends.’

  Pel stared at Duval as if he were mad. ‘Why question De Mougy’s friends?’ he demanded. ‘They aren’t likely to have robbed him. They have plenty of their own.’

  Duval’s smile came again. ‘Of course,’ he agreed. ‘But I’ve got contacts with a few of them.’ Duval seemed to regard his work as an exercise in social behaviour. ‘Through friends, of course. People I was at university with.’

  Hah, Pel thought. Now we have it! Duval had arrived in the police force from university and considered himself an expert. In diplomacy, no doubt. He felt a plain honest-to-God robbery needed the sort of diplomacy the Foreign Office used when dealing with mad African dictators.

  Then, as he stared at Duval, the explanation leapt at him. Duval was the Sergeant Misset of the Sûreté. De Mougy had spoken to the Minister demanding action and the Minister had spoken to the Commissioner, and as usual the buck had been passed down the ladder to the man who mattered, and the man who mattered had immediately spotted an opportunity to get out of his hair the least valuable member of his team. It happened all the time. From his military service Pel remembered how, whenever his commanding officer had been asked for assistance in the form of extra men, he had always made a point of sending the most useless. That way, he was implicitly obeying orders while leaving his own unit’s efficiency unimpaired. Pel did it himself. Witness Misset.

  The grim expression on his face faded. He decided he could handle Duval.

  ‘You’re welcome to it,’ he said. ‘I have two murders on my hands which I consider marginally more important than robbery. Nevertheless, I shall not lose interest in it myself. Have you any information I haven’t?’

  Duval hadn’t.

  ‘See Claudie Darel next door,’ Pel advised. ‘She’ll give you a list of the Baron’s acquaintances. They’re well known. It’ll save you a lot of trouble.’

  Duval seemed happy enough and departed, waving his pipe and scattering sparks. As soon as the door had closed, Pel jumped round the room, spry as a spider, slamming his foot down on them before they set the place on fire.

  He was still considering the insult and the brilliant way he had handled it, when Darcy appeared. He was looking at his most elegant. He was dressed in a dark grey suit with a high white collar that seemed to saw at his ears. He was shaved to the bone and looked spotless enough to be on his way to an interview with Brigitte Bardot.

  ‘Morning, Patron,’ he said breezily. ‘It’s obvious you’re on top of the job.’

  Darcy grinned but Pel’s face remained expressionless. He didn’t find crime a joking matter and, in any case, he wasn’t given a lot to hilarity. His sense of humour started only after his first cigarette of the day. By the time he’d reached his second he’d used up his ration.

  ‘Who was it last night?’ he asked.

  ‘The one from the university,’ Darcy said. ‘She’s always around.’

  ‘One of these days one of them will catch you.’

  Darcy shrugged. ‘Any man with any gumption can make a mess of his love life,’ he agreed. ‘Romantic confession, once the privilege of the wealthy, is now within the reach of all of us. We went to my place for a spot of heavy breathing.’

  ‘Don’t you ever get bored with them?’

  Darcy’s grin came again, wide and full of large white teeth. ‘It’s my way of convincing myself I’m not in danger of becoming a homosexua
l,’ he said.

  ‘How is it you never look worn out in the morning?’

  Darcy smiled. ‘I keep fit. I play squash.’

  Pel knew about squash. An hour of frenzy then a coronary.

  Darcy offered him a cigarette. Pel stared at it worriedly for a moment, then he remembered reading somewhere that, out of every thousand smokers, only a few were killed by lung cancer while an equal number were probably killed on the roads. It was as good an excuse as any, he decided, reaching out.

  ‘Nick the Greek,’ Darcy said as he offered his lighter. ‘I think we ought to talk to that blonde he’s shacked up with.’

  ‘No.’ Pel shook his head. ‘Don’t go near her. He’ll bolt. Let him lie fallow for a while. He might bring in one or two others. Such as Pat the Bang. And if he bolts so will Lafarge. I want them all and I want the loot – to say nothing of the type who tipped them off to what the De Mougys were carrying. Because someone certainly did. Come to think of it–’ Pel glanced at the window ‘–it’s a nice day, Daniel. I think we ought to go and have another word with De Mougy’s staff.’

  The Château Mougy looked golden in the morning sunshine and Darcy’s car rolled up the crushed pebble of the wide drive with a satisfying crunch that made it sound expensive.

  ‘I wonder what it’s like to be so wealthy you don’t miss a few thousand,’ Darcy said.

  It had always been Pel’s ambition to be so wealthy his relations would go in fear and trembling of him in case he cut them out of his will. He’d often imagined himself when they were awkward, bringing them to heel with a shout of: What’s the matter? Don’t you want my money? ‘I think I could manage to live with it,’ he said.

  Algieri, the butler, met them at the door with the information that the Baron and his wife had not yet reappeared. He was wearing his coldest look. Pel returned it three-fold.

  ‘The Baron and his wife aren’t the ones I’m wanting to see,’ he said. ‘I’m interested in the staff.’

  Algieri gave him a look of loathing that somehow managed to be concealed behind a deferential manner. ‘Where do you wish to interview them, Monsieur?’

  ‘Same place as before would do.’

  ‘I’m afraid it’s being cleaned at the moment.’

  ‘Then take your pick. The Baronne’s bedroom. The Baron’s study. Your private bathroom.’

  The deferential hatred came again. ‘You’d better use the library.’

  When they were established, they invited Algieri to sit down.

  ‘Me, sir?’

  ‘You’re still staff, aren’t you?’

  ‘I’ve already been interviewed, Monsieur.’

  ‘And now we’re going to interview you again.’ Algieri’s eyebrows knitted together. Clearly he considered himself superior enough not to be lumped with the house-maids, footmen and gardeners. His world was ministered by the Baron, with himself somewhere just below and all the rest of the household – even including the Baronne and the Baronne’s son – suspended somewhere in the void beneath.

  Pel had taken a dislike to Algieri and he gave him a thorough grilling. ‘You came originally from Marseilles,’ he said.

  ‘That’s so, Monsieur.’

  ‘Go back often?’

  Algieri sniffed. ‘Occasionally, Monsieur.’

  ‘Family still live there?’

  ‘I have many relatives in Marseilles and Nice, Monsieur.’ Which was an interesting point. Was Tagliatti’s gang in touch with Algieri? Was it Tagliatti, after all, and not Pépé le Cornet? Or was it both? They had been known to co-operate in harness when it suited them – when the job being planned required more men than each could supply or more money to set it up and buy information than either was prepared to raise.

  Or if it wasn’t Algieri himself who was in touch, was it some member of his family? They might be worth investigating. Pel glanced at Darcy who made a note. Perhaps Algieri, in an attempt to show how important he was – and clearly he considered himself so – had dropped some hint which one of his numerous relatives had picked up.

  ‘When were you last in Marseilles?’ Pel asked.

  ‘A month ago, Monsieur. The Baron allows me plenty of leave and I return whenever I can. I like the heat.’

  Pel could well understand that. Much as he loved Burgundy – and Pel’s love of Burgundy was close to worship – he would have preferred it to be warmer in winter. ‘You have a family? Of your own? A wife? Children?’

  ‘I’ve never married, Monsieur.’ Algieri had the look of a priest at the altar. ‘I never seem to have had the time.’

  Homosexual? The thought crossed Pel’s mind. Was he being blackmailed into passing information? ‘I’ve come across butlers who’ve married members of the staff,’ he said shortly. ‘Maids. That sort of thing.’

  Algieri’s look seemed to suggest that marrying a maid would be not far short of sacrilege. It slid off Pel like water off a duck’s back and, when Algieri tried to suggest that once again he should look after the Baron’s interests by sitting in on the interviews with the rest of the staff, Pel put him firmly in his place at once.

  ‘The Baron’s interests won’t suffer,’ he snapped.

  ‘But I think–’

  Pel looked so angry he seemed in danger of a vertical takeoff. ‘What you think,’ he said, ‘is of no importance. You’re a suspect like everyone else and if you don’t disappear I’ll have you arrested under Section 63 of the Penal Code.’

  Algieri’s look contained daggers, bombs and guns. ‘The Baron would not approve of that,’ he said.

  Pel glared. ‘If the Baron objects,’ he snarled. ‘I’ll have him arrested too! If necessary, his wife also! And all his relations!’

  Pel was nothing if not thorough and Algieri disappeared, looking shattered.

  As he vanished Darcy grinned. ‘Patron,’ he said, ‘if you’d lived during the Revolution you’d have been at the guillotine every day watching the knife fall on the aristos.’

  ‘I might well,’ Pel said, ‘have been on the platform pulling the handle.’

  Without Algieri around, this time Josso, the chauffeur, was much more forthcoming. He was an ex-soldier who had been recommended to the Baron and he made no bones about the advantages of the job. ‘There are six girls employed in this place,’ he said cheerfully. ‘And the Baron likes them pretty. It saves me going out looking for them.’

  ‘Do you take them out?’

  ‘Yes. But you have to be careful. They get jealous.’

  ‘Do you do more than just take them out?’ Darcy asked with interest. ‘Visit them, perhaps, at night?’

  ‘No,’ Josso grinned. ‘They share rooms. I’d have the other one making the same demands. Of course–’ the sly grin returned ‘–some of us have our own rooms. Algieri, of course. The housekeeper. They have apartments. I’ve got a room over the garage. I get them in there sometimes. Suzy Vince, the Baronne’s maid, has a room of her own, too. Not an apartment like Algieri and the housekeeper, but a private room that she doesn’t have to share. It’s only the skivvies who share rooms. With them it’s more difficult.’

  ‘Does Vince ever visit you? Or you her?’

  Josso laughed. ‘Not likely. Too high and mighty for me.’

  Vince, it seemed, considered herself second cousin to the Baronne. She acted like her, behaved like her and dressed like her – sometimes even in the Baronne’s old clothes.

  ‘Well, not that old,’ Josso admitted. ‘The Baronne doesn’t have old clothes. And mostly she doesn’t let Vince have them either. She wouldn’t fancy one of the servants being seen wearing her cast-offs.’

  ‘And you’ve never chased her?’

  Josso grinned. ‘I tried. But I couldn’t get her into the car with me. Said she preferred that old bike of hers. She cycles all the time. Great little cycler, Vince. As a kid she wanted to enter the Tour de France but they wouldn’t let her because she had boobs and a bum and didn’t have legs with muscles like footballs. It would have put the other riders off. Besides,
she seemed to prefer the Baronne’s company.’

  ‘How do they get on?’

  ‘They fight a bit. They’re always fighting.’

  ‘What about?’

  ‘What dress to wear. Vince often thinks she knows better than the Baronne. I don’t think she does but she does have ideas.’ Josso smiled. ‘They always kiss and make up, of course, because the Baronne needs old Vince and old Vince needs the kudos that comes from working for the Baronne.’ Josso shrugged. ‘Not that it matters to me. There are plenty of others and the grounds here are extensive enough to get lost in. In addition, I have the use of the Baron’s cars. They’re all big with roomy back seats.’

  ‘Does the Baron know?’

  ‘No. And I hope you won’t tell him.’

  Josso seemed to be what was known as a card. With the Baron around, he played his rôle dead-pan with an expressionless face. But there was more than was obvious beneath the surface.

  ‘Think he had other bad habits, Patron?’ Darcy asked. ‘Such as being in touch with crooks? He could be. One bad habit begets another. For girls you need money and he won’t get all that much even as a baron’s chauffeur. Perhaps he has more girls than he can afford.’

  ‘It’s worth thinking about,’ Pel agreed.

  The housekeeper appeared to have no other interest apart from her job. She had a widowed mother in the village whom she visited whenever possible and spent all her time with her when off duty.

  ‘My father was an engineer,’ she said proudly. ‘My family weren’t poor. Unfortunately, my father made no provision for old age and I have to provide for my mother.’

  Suzy Vince, the Baronne’s maid, was a thin woman just past youth. She was still attractive but had an astringent manner. ‘I wouldn’t dream of passing on the Baronne’s business outside this house,’ she said sharply.

  ‘Could it be that you let something slip by accident? Something that could be overheard? In the village shop, for instance?’

  ‘I don’t use the village shop,’ she retorted coldly. ‘I make my purchases in Paris or Dijon or Lyons.’