by Mike Ripley
Rupert gave her a gentle squeeze. ‘Then I’ll be the rich playboy who is actually the Riviera’s most notorious jewel thief and I have seduced you, the humble peasant girl who does the village laundry, and you’re out taking the evening air with me while I case the local houses for rich old widows who wouldn’t miss the odd diamond necklace. How’s that?’
‘I think I’ll stick with surprised but extremely polite English girl saddled with an idiot husband who has got them both lost.’
‘If you’re comfortable with that …’
With the idiot husband’s arm around the polite English girl’s waist, they sauntered down the street having eyes only for each other in case they were being observed, until they reached the rear door of the Bedford and the garden gates kept open with thick wooden wedges at the bottom corners, at which point they both did an eyes-left as they slowly passed by. All that could be seen was a rectangular garden and patio with shrubs and small trees planted in earthenware pots the size of beer barrels, and a set of open French windows which gave access into the house. Despite the open gates and windows, the place seemed deserted and because the gates and windows were open, it also seemed suspicious.
And then there came a thump from the interior of Rue Garibaldi 9, as if someone had missed a step on the stairs or dropped a log on an uncarpeted floor and a muffled curse which could have been in one of several languages, but was undoubtedly masculine in timbre.
The courting couple froze in their tracks, clutching each other tightly. There was no pretence now of casually passing by and they leaned in to the gateway, straining their necks and eyes towards the open French windows.
When they heard a second thud and a second and then third curse, they involuntarily found themselves stepping into the garden.
‘What was that?’ Perdita breathed into Rupert’s ear.
‘I don’t know but I think it’s coming from upstairs.’
‘Is the old girl being burgled, or worse?’
‘It would take a brave burglar,’ whispered Rupert. ‘You keep back, while I take a look.’
‘For goodness sake, be careful,’ said Perdita releasing her grip on her husband and taking a step backwards into the potted shrubbery.
‘I will,’ he promised.
Rupert took a tentative step across the threshold of the open French windows and into the empty room, which with the approaching dusk and no other source of natural light was cool and already gloomy. Rupert detected the scent of stale ‘black’ French tobacco in the room’s still air, mixed with a woman’s perfume which he made no pretence of recognising. It was clearly a living or sitting room, with armchairs positioned under standard lamps with fringed shades, a sideboard on which perched an ancient Bakelite radio and a low coffee table on which sat a silver tray with a decanter half-full of brown liquid, a soda syphon and a single empty glass. Across the room was an open door through which he could see the foot of a staircase and it became instantly apparent that the staircase was the source of the bumps and grunts.
Rupert distinctly heard the heavy – very heavy – tread of feet clumping down the creaking stairs and then a jarring scraping sound followed by an angry exchange in ripe but clear English.
‘Bleedin’ ’ell watch it, you dozy ape, you’ll damage the damn’ thing.’
‘I thought it be supposed to be damaged – an’ don’t going calling me names or Oi’ll rip your bloody ears off.’
‘I’ll call you what I like, you lumbering ox, if you wake the old coot up with your row.’
‘Stop arguing!’ commanded a third voice. ‘And don’t worry the old lady; she will sleep until morning after one of my special nightcaps.’
The third voice was female and easily identifiable as belonging to Frau Berger.
Rupert’s eyes shot towards the empty glass on the tray on the coffee table and then urgently back towards the staircase in response to the sound of descending footsteps. He stepped back out into the courtyard garden pulling the French windows closed as he went and he half-turned his head and hissed loudly: ‘Hide! Quick!’
But the French windows did not want to close, at least not without a struggle and then a very loud snap.
Through the thick glass panes, Rupert saw a large figure enter the living room, a very large figure, entering slowly and laboriously – and backwards. He heard a voice raised in surprise, which could only have been in response to the noise he had made closing the windows, but he did not wait for clarification.
Rupert turned on his heels and ran for the gate. He had completed two long strides when his foot connected with the thick wooden wedge keeping the nearest gate open and he tumbled, base-over-apex as his old rugby master would have said, landing painfully on his back and rolling out into the cobbled street. His one thought as he performed his inelegant and involuntary somersault was Where the hell is Perdita?
Perdita was later to say (often and to anyone who would listen) that if her husband had any future at all in the theatre it would not be as a director or a playwright for his stage directions were worse than useless.
For as long as they remained married, which would be a long time, Perdita always maintained that Rupert’s hissed warning to ‘Hide! Quick!’ on being almost discovered trespassing at Rue Garibaldi 9 was nowhere near as helpful as the instruction ‘Run for it!’ would have been. In fact, standing as he had been in the French windows, what he ought to have done was brazen it out by striding into the room swishing an imaginary racquet and intoning ‘Anyone for tennis?’ as he had done many times in preparation for a career in regional rep.
Perdita, sensing but not seeing the source of tension which had affected Rupert, did what all young wives do – or pretend to do – and instantly obeyed her husband, by hiding quickly. As she was in a garden of sorts, albeit a garden of potted plants, tomboy instinct from a childhood spent with three older brothers told her to climb a tree. Unfortunately, in small walled patio gardens in hillside villages in the south of France, trees were in short supply and so Perdita improvised. In the corner of the garden were two substantial bay plants which had been confined to large earthenware pots for many years and had grown as luxuriant bushes, as thick as a good privet hedge and over five feet tall. The possibility of climbing up either of them would have daunted an agile cat, but their thick green foliage provided the perfect hiding place, at least for someone willing to dive behind them and then clamber on to rims of their pots so that their feet did not show.
It was positioned thus, her arms outstretched around the two neighbouring bushes as if hugging a portly uncle, and her yellow high-heeled shoes each balanced on the edge of a pot rim, that Perdita saw, through the tiny gap in in the bay leaves she had made with her nose, her husband make his spectacular exit from the courtyard, pursued a few seconds later not by the Winter’s Tale bear (a creature known to all in the acting profession) but by two men she had never seen before in her life, and then one woman she had met only that morning.
But that morning, the woman had not been carrying a small automatic pistol.
‘There’s nobody here,’ said Frau Berger, ‘you must be imagining things.’
‘Oi’m sure I pulled them windows open wide.’
‘You couldn’t be sure you’d tied your bootlaces unless somebody double-checked for you.’
‘An’ you could find one of my bootlaces tight round your scrawny neck if you ain’t careful, boy.’
‘Be quiet, both of you!’ snapped Frau Berger. ‘Check the street.’
The two men, dressed in blue overalls, were a Laurel and Hardy pair but what they lacked in charm and humour they more than made up for in swaggering menace. The smaller of the two was all quick rat-like movements, whilst his much larger colleague walked with a lumbering gait that probably required a brick wall to bring it to a halt.
It was the larger, hulking, one who had – to Perdita in her fragrant evergreen hiding place – a definite East Anglian accent. She was sure of that as it was an accent she had mastered for the
paltry three lines she had once been allowed as a parlour maid in a forgettable country house murder mystery which ran for a week at the Theatre Royal, Norwich. (Her character, the maid, was not specifically identified in the script as a Norfolk lass but the producers had insisted as their local audience would feel more at home.)
The two overall-ed thugs – Perdita was sure they were thugs as neither had shown any surprise that Frau Berger was waving a pistol about – did as they were ordered and marched out of the gate to check the street for their suspected intruder and where they would almost certainly find Rupert lying in the gutter having knocked himself unconscious.
Incredibly, the two thugs reappeared in the garden shrugging their shoulders.
‘Nothing out there – the street’s empty. Nothing moving, not even a mouse,’ the smaller one reported.
‘Then lock the gates and fetch the box and try not to break anything else on the way,’ instructed Frau Berger, slipping the pistol into the pocket of her cardigan. ‘As soon as it’s dark, I will transfer the goods.’
‘Why do you have to do it out here in the dark?’ whined the small thin man, his companion behind him looming over him like a cliff.
‘Because, dummkopfen, in the dark we cannot be observed from the houses further up the hillside which look down on us.’ Frau Berger’s tone made it clear that not only houses could look down on people. ‘And we do it out here in the garden because I cannot risk spillages inside the house. The police have dogs with clever noses and they could become suspicious if they ever came to call.’
‘You reckon they’d notice that gun you’ve been flaunting then?’ growled the second, big-as-an-ogre, man.
Frau Berger was not in the least intimidated and shrugged off the question.
‘Pah! In Switzerland, every house with a man has to have a rifle by law, as all men are in the militia. Here in France, handguns are permitted in houses to protect against burglaries. Here in this garden I could shoot you dead as an intruder and the police would thank me for saving their time.’
In the bay trees, clinging to the shrubbery and convinced that spiders were nesting in her hair, Perdita’s mouth went very dry very quickly.
Where the hell was Rupert?
Perdita had read, in one of the lowbrow Sunday newspapers, stories of Japanese soldiers marooned on Pacific atolls who were unaware that their war had ended more than twenty years before. The stories, she knew, were almost certainly invented on slow news days, but as she shivered in the dark and the foliage, she could empathise with the terror felt by those abandoned soldiers who peered out from their jungle hideaways and watched a strange world pass before their eyes.
Dusk had rapidly turned into night and this reassured her, for even though a bright, almost full moon was rising, the walled garden with its potted bushes offered another layer of darkness to mask outlines and aid her concealment. She felt confident that if she could resist moving suddenly to uncramp her tortured leg muscles and if the bay leaves stopped tickling her nose and she fought back the urge to sneeze, she could remain undetected. Why did she have to think about sneezing? She should concentrate on what was happening in front of her, less than thirty feet away through the bay leaves. Thirty feet! Good Lord, how could they not have seen her or sensed her presence? Although the night was cooling fast, she knew she was sweating profusely and for a moment was convinced that the liberal application of her roll-on underarm deodorant (she hated the new-fangled aerosols) that morning would not be enough to protect her. Even the fattest, laziest, over-fed French restaurant dog would surely have sniffed her out by now. Oh God, what if they had a dog?
This way lies madness, thought Perdita, steadying herself. She would simply pretend she was not there in that garden at all, but her uncomfortable perch on the rims of adjacent plant pots would be her seat in the stalls and the sharp, brittle leaves of the bays trees would be the curtain through which she could peep at the dramatic action on the moonlit stage thirty feet in front of her.
After securing the gate, the assembled dramatis personae had retreated into the house and for a split second Perdita thought she had a chance of escape, but she knew the garden walls were too high to scale and before she could register crushing disappointing, the players re-emerged for the next act, entering from stage slightly right as she viewed it.
The two henchmen – should that be spear carriers? – appeared first, though they were not carrying spears. Between them they were manhandling what looked at first, in the dark with the only backlighting a single lamp in the house, like a trunk or a small coffin. But as Perdita concentrated, she discerned that the object had a leg at each corner and as the henchmen set down their load in the garden and stepped back, the outline of the thing reminded her of the small electronic organs she had encountered in run-down provincial theatres and church halls used as rehearsal rooms.
Was she about to be serenaded or treated to a recital? Were the henchmen in reality frustrated musicians who had to resort to performing in secluded French gardens after dark? Clearly, Perdita’s imagination was wandering and needed to be calmed by a stiff drink or the arrival of her husband riding to the rescue; and neither seemed probable.
For a moment she was convinced her hallucination was solidifying when the smaller of the henchmen lifted a lid on the organ/trunk/coffin and propped it open. If the giant one had produced a stool for him to sit on and held sheet music for him to follow, she would not have been surprised, but the two men – she had now labelled them in her racing brain as Giant Thug and Scrawny Thug – were merely part of the chorus there to support the diva.
Frau Berger made her entrance on the al fresco stage through the French windows with a small torch in one hand and a dark Gladstone or doctor’s bag in the other. She set the bag down next to the whatever-it-was-on-legs and shone the torch, which had a thin pencil-like beam, on it. Then she gave orders to Scrawny Thug to which he responded, then sank to his knees and opened the bag in the torchlight.
They had not, Perdita realised (more slowly than she would later admit), been speaking English or French or, as far as she knew, any of the four languages in official use in Switzerland. And though she would never admit it, her vague suspicions were only confirmed by Giant Thug, who complained loudly: ‘Oi’ve told you before Oi don’t loike you speaking foreign.’
Frau Berger and Scrawny Thug had a further exchange in ‘foreign’ and both found whatever was said highly amusing as they laughed, much to the annoyance of Giant Thug.
‘Don’t you mock me. Oi don’t loike it when Oi’m mocked.’
‘Nobody’s mocking you, you big goon,’ said Scrawny Thug, though his voice betrayed a stifled laugh. ‘We’re just talking business.’
‘And I suggest we get on with it,’ said Frau Berger with authority.
Perdita was unable to see clearly what that ‘business’ involved, but she heard it and it involved much clinking of glass and things being removed from the coffin/organ and replaced by other things from Frau Berger’s Gladstone bag. When it was finished, the lid on the whatever-it-was was closed and Frau Berger shone her torch into Scrawny Thug’s face.
‘Now get that into the van and make sure it’s secure.’
‘We always take care of the merchandise,’ Scrawny Thug answered her. ‘We’ve got blankets and rope in the van.’
‘When you’ve done that, bring me my money and you can have a drink while I count it.’
‘Now you’re talking,’ enthused Giant Thug. ‘A bit of hospitality wouldn’t go amiss.’
‘Just one drink,’ said Frau Berger sternly. ‘You’ve got a long drive ahead of you and if you’re going to have an accident, I would be happier if it was in England.’
She unlocked the wall gate and the two henchmen picked up the thing-on-legs and carried it out into the street.
Perdita calculated her chances on making a freedom dash for the street. Her legs were cramped, she would have to force her way through, or knock over, two substantial potted bay trees, and t
hen sprint past Frau Berger who, as far as she knew, still had an automatic pistol in her pocket. It did not sound like much of a plan and the opportunity to put it into action quickly passed.
She heard her two Thugs open the door of the van over the wall on the street and a succession of bumps and thumps, some muffled swearing and finally the slamming of a metal door and the rattle of a handle checking to make absolutely sure it was locked, an action which only the male of the species seems compelled to perform.
Then Scrawny and Giant came back into view, Scrawny holding a large thick envelope or parcel which he handed to Frau Berger, who again spoke to him in a language Perdita did not recognise, but conscious that Giant Thug, right behind him, had started growling, he answered her in English.
‘No, no problems. British Customs are only really interested in what we bring back in. They asked at Dover if we knew about the currency regulations and we said we just had the regulation £25. They didn’t bother to search us. I mean, we don’t look the sort to be carrying that much cash, do we? And the French only glanced at our passports. I doubt they’ll even do that on the return journey.’
‘Good. Shall we now count it just to make sure none has … evaporated?’
She led them into the house, closed the French windows, turned on the main lights and drew the curtains, ending the second act of the private performance they had given to an audience of one.
Perdita was sure there would be a Third Act but had no intention of staying to watch. She raised herself up to stretch her aching legs but even standing on the rims of the bay tree pots, the garden wall seemed impossibly high and unconquerable. Perhaps Frau Berger’s Swiss efficiency had momentarily lapsed and she had left the key in the lock of the garden gate. Failing that, the gate might offer a foothold or two which the wall did not. Gingerly she dismounted from her perch and quietly eased her way through the underbrush, conscious of the fact that she was walking bandy-legged as if she had just completed a long, cold journey on the pillion of a motorbike.