The Prisoner of the Riviera

by Janice Law

  Though my chief affection for gardens lies in their shadowed allées and secluded groves, I indicated the bare earth and dried-up plants. “The yard needs something.”

  “A bagatelle, Monsieur, I assure you. Any good gardener can set it right.” He went on in this vein, and we were both laughing by the time he got the back door unlocked. Inside, levity stopped. We were in the stone-floored vestibule near where the late Madame Renard had come to rest after her residence in the fish locker.

  I wouldn’t go so far as to say that a bad spirit lingered. Without knowing the villa’s history, I would have found a certain spartan charm in the place. As it was, I felt the pictorial fascination of a shadowed body against subtly modulated stones—and the chill of depression. One door led to a dusty pantry; another to the large, dark kitchen. The pantry held a bag of coffee beans, a small grinder, and a coffeepot marooned amid dusty shelves. Cooking had clearly not been high on the agenda for the two Madame Renards and their associates.

  The kitchen was a similar story. A few cooking pans hung from pegs in the wall and a heavy omelet pan sat on the stove, which was old and blackened with long, but clearly not recent, use. I opened the cupboards and checked the drawers, even lifting the top of a heavy stoneware jug. Pierre waited by the sink. There was no sign of stain on the worn and uneven stones, or rather, the stains of the ages were everywhere, but both of us thought of the unfortunate “Madame Renard” and tread uneasily.

  The other rooms were similarly bare of hiding places, although there was a table in what might have been the dining room, and upstairs we found four beds stripped to their springs, an ancient armoire, a cheap chest of drawers, and beside one of the beds, a night table made of rattan and surmounted by a metal lamp.

  “As you see, Monsieur, all the comforts of home,” Pierre said, but the joke had worn thin, and the place was making us nervous. I sat down on the bed and bounced experimentally on the metal springs.

  “I’m guessing that she used this room.”

  He shrugged.

  “What could she have left here?”

  He opened the armoire, which proved empty, while I checked the drawer in the night table. Inside, I was disappointed to find only a Simenon mystery novel and a catalog of machine parts. “Eclectic reading.” I held them up.

  Pierre’s bright face turned pale.

  “What is it?”

  He shook his head. “Nothing.”

  “You don’t look like that over nothing.”

  He took the catalog out of my hand. It was last year’s offering of various carburetors, engines, clutches, brake pads, and pistons. “This is what she left,” he said.

  “Why that and not the Simenon?”

  “The Simenon was for fun. This was for business. Paul must have learned from Serge or maybe from one of the maquisards he interrogated.”

  “Enlighten me.”

  “It’s for a form of code. If I have it right, resistants used gridded pads with random letters in each square. The key would be a line from a book that both parties owned.”

  Possible, I thought. Anastasie Chavanel had said that the notebook and the letter might form two-thirds of a cipher. “But how do you know it would be this particular catalog?”

  “Paul never read anything but mechanical texts and parts catalogs.” He thought for a minute, then said, “That is why the original Madame Renard believed the material came from him. No one else would have chosen such a thing.”

  “Unless Paul had nothing to do with the package. Unless Monsieur Renard is someone else entirely. Unless the package came from Joubert. He’s an impresario and gambler. He’d have chosen the Simenon, whose books are easily available in both France and England.”

  “We take both,” Pierre said, “and let the Chavanels decide. Perhaps they’ll know.”

  “And Madame Renard. Do they know who she was? Do you?”

  Pierre shook his head. “I did not recognize the photo. Truly, I did not.”

  I didn’t necessarily believe him, but I got up from the bed and clapped him on the shoulder. “Let’s get out of here. I don’t think this property will suit me after all.”

  Pierre drove us farther up in the mountains to an abandoned farm where we took advantage of a shady half-open shed. All very exciting, though abandoned farms and stone-walled pens now come with thoughts of Richard Malet and his shallow grave, which I tried to replace with Pierre’s smiling face and fine legs. He dropped me off in time for dinner. I put both books on the kitchen table.

  “Well, Monsieur Francis,” said Agathe. “What have we here?”

  “The only personal effects left at the Villa Mimosa,” I said. “Pierre favors the catalog and guesses Paul Desmarais would have picked it; I lean to the Simenon and Joubert.”

  “Pierre has been explaining codes and ciphers to you.” She did not sound very pleased about that.

  “So far as I can understand it. But all I want is my passport—and that notebook to give to Joubert. I’m not interested in what you do afterward.”

  “I find your lack of curiosity unrealistic.”

  “Tell me who the dead Madame Renard is and I’ll be satisfied.”

  “If we knew that, we’d know exactly how to play this. But we will see what we can learn from these.” Agathe tucked the books into the big pocket of her apron and took them into the workroom for her sister.

  We started after dinner, or rather the aunts started. Cybèle and I were only enlisted when it became clear that there was too much material and too many possibilities. First we went line by line through the catalog and the adventures of Inspector Maigret, looking for a sentence that had been marked in some way. No luck.

  “She either had a super memory or she was killed before she got an indication of the key,” Anastasie concluded.

  “Perhaps the key came with the letter,” her sister said.

  Anastasie shrugged. If the key was in the letter, we had no hope until we secured that—if it still existed. Given what I’d been told about Serge Brun, he would not have been one to hold on to a sentimental farewell message.

  “What about the date?” I asked. I had been making my way through the tedious pages of the catalog, which, in addition to a dreary prose style, had its pages broken up into chapters, sections, and subsections.

  “We’ve never seen the letter. We don’t know the date,” Agathe said.

  “We can estimate,” her sister said quickly. “Monsieur Francis said that Renard was shot early on the morning of the fifth. He would have written the letter in the next day or so. Because Francis got the package on the seventh, the date must be between those three days.”

  “No, I don’t think that’s right. Wait a minute.” My visual memory is acute, and I focused on my studio, on Nan standing beside me, on the wrapper around the package, on the letter. The date was at the top. “7 March 1947,” I said.

  “But the date is wrong, isn’t it? It can’t be. Didn’t you say he was shot on the morning of the fifth?”

  “Right, but I can see the numbers. I remember them clearly.”

  “So his ‘dying letter’ was penned two days before he was shot.” Agathe was clearly skeptical.

  “Or he mistook the date, being under sedation or weak from loss of blood.”

  “Or else the date was deliberately chosen as a signal.”

  “Either is possible, but let’s try 3/7/47. Are there three chapters in the parts catalog?” Agathe asked.

  “There are eight chapters. And chapter three has”—I flipped through the pages— “ten sections.” I turned the catalog so that everyone could see the page.

  “Where is the ‘47’?” Agathe asked.

  “There is a ‘4’ and a ‘7,’ ” said Cybèle.

  “And each of them has a parts number.”

  “Together they are long enough, I think, for a bank account number.�
�� Agathe wrote them down.

  “Can we be sure of the order?” asked Cybèle. “I will not get more than one chance.”

  “We do not yet know the bank, either,” Anastasie pointed out. “Trial and error will be time consuming.”

  “If this is from Desmarais, I guess that she would already have known the bank.”

  “Would she? Would he have trusted anyone but his sister?” There was discussion about this. The difficulty in dealing with people who are sly, paranoid, and untrustworthy is that they are apt to do just about anything.

  “If this is from László, your Monsieur Joubert, he would know,” Anastasie suggested.

  “If he knew, and if Paul was dead, he would go to the bank and empty the account himself,” Agathe said, which I thought was about right.

  “Unless he did not understand the code. Unless he knew the bank but not how to acquire the number.” That was Cybèle’s contribution. “Hence his willingness to come here.”

  Another possibility. “So either he does not know everything or Paul isn’t dead or both.”

  “I think Paul wrote the letter,” Anastasie said. “I think he did. And Joubert either didn’t notice the mistake with the date or chalked it up to Paul’s state of mind.”

  “Right,” said Cybèle. “And this Joubert thought that he would send it by Francis so that it would be easy to follow the package to Madame Renard and find the key to the message. He didn’t know you were a procrastinator of the first water.”

  “There would be this bonus,” said Agathe. “Monsieur Francis was not given good directions. He would have to ask the way to the villa. If Madame Renard was not cooperative and was injured or killed, who would be more suspicious than the foreigner who had asked directions to her house?”

  “But neither one foresaw Serge,” I said. “How did he get involved? How did he know about ‘Madame Renard’ in the first place?”

  “Serge has excellent contacts in the clubs and theaters,” Cybèle said, “but I don’t think she was an actress or singer. I’ve never heard of her and at her age—”

  Anastasie had another thought. “She might have been one of his Resistance contacts. An old courier or wireless operator.”

  “Would he have murdered someone he’d worked with?” I asked.

  “He’d have murdered his mother,” said Agathe.

  “The woman’s never been identified. Could she have been foreign?”

  “Particularly if she worked the wireless,” said Agathe. “Yes, I think that is possible. He would have asked her as a favor to an old comrade.”

  “Perhaps mentioning the Milice,” her sister suggested. “Perhaps suggesting a way to settle up old scores and a way to uncover who had profited from the war.”

  “But we’re forgetting something,” Cybèle said. “Originally, Desmarais or Joubert must have had another contact in mind. There must have been a ‘Madame Renard’ that they had chosen.”

  “His sister, surely.”

  “Maybe. Or maybe he foresaw the danger. Maybe he had her hire someone else.”

  “If that’s the case, we still don’t know how Serge got involved.”

  “Right, and where is this original Madame Renard?” Cybèle asked. “One Madame Renard wound up in the fish locker, and I got away.”

  “Serge planned to make that escape temporary.”

  “Yes, he did. He wanted no witnesses.”

  “We need to visit Yvette Lambert,” I said. “We need to find out if she is still alive.”

  “I think,” said Agathe decisively, “that we do not know enough to act yet. You and Cybèle have been very helpful, but Anastasie and I need to concentrate now on certain details of the notebook.”

  So we were dismissed. I don’t know how long the aunts worked, perhaps all night, because when the dawn blackbirds woke me with their fluting notes, I heard voices in the kitchen, including Cybèle, who did not strike me as an early riser. I dressed and stationed myself by the window. When I saw her leaving with a small suitcase, I slipped downstairs as quietly as I could and followed her.

  I caught up with her at the first corner. “The aunts broke the rest of the cipher,” I guessed.

  “Not yet, but I have an engagement with a club back in Nice.”

  “Right, and I’m the Easter Bunny. Wherever you’re off to, it sure isn’t Nice. For one thing”—I nodded to the case—“you have a flat and, presumably, clothes in Nice. I’m guessing somewhere in Switzerland.”

  “You would be wrong. I am taking copies of the documents to Marseille for a trial.”

  “Marseille and then—Zurich, Geneva?”

  “Who knows,” she said. “But best we’re not seen together.”

  “I thought you were estranged from the aunts, yet you’re putting yourself into serious danger for them.”

  “Maybe I just like money,” she said and stepped off briskly toward the station, her heels tapping in the morning silence.

  Chapter Twelve

  Back to the gare. Fortunately, I like trains and I’m even rather fond of train stations, where once in a while fortune smiles and one meets an interesting stranger in the loo. But, today, yours truly was all business. My new passport was in my pocket, and as soon as I saw the back of Monsieur Joubert and collected the canceled gambling chits, my alter ego, Marcel Lepage, would be off for Paris and the boat train to London, where I’d be myself again and where the people who count, Nan and Arnold, would take me as I am—rowdy, promiscuous, and occasionally reckless.

  Marcel, who is none of those things, had been a strain, and I would have bought the ticket and wired Arnold but for the fear of jinxing my plans. Inconspicuous behind a pillar on the eastbound platform, I brushed up on my cycling vocabulary via Nice-Matin until the Marseille express was announced. A rumble and a clatter, a hiss of steam, a wheeze of brakes, a clatter of doors, and Joubert, who was probably a Hungarian named László Bencze, came prancing out of one of the first-class carriages.

  He was immaculately dressed in a dove gray suit, wearing a homburg and gloves, as if he were auditioning to play Hercule Poirot. “Ah, Francis,” he said. “Have we a car?”

  Have we wings and halos and a liveried chauffeur? “It’s not a long walk,” I said and led him out of the station and up the hill past the hôtel de ville. He complained the whole way, but though he was clearly used to being waited on, he would not let me help him with his attaché case. Interesting, that. I chose the street that fronted the house, rather than the garden entrance, which Anastasie said had been used by their wartime clients, and Joubert recognized nothing until we were at the front door and the bell was ringing deep inside.

  “The Chavanels,” he said, wiping his face on a silk handkerchief.

  “You know them?”

  “One met so many people during the war,” he said airily.

  Anastasie opened the door, took one look at him, and said, “László Bencze. Bonjour. It’s been a long time.”

  “It is all my pleasure, Madame.” He made a sweeping bow without looking particularly thrilled, and when we got in the hall, he gave me a sour look. “I might have known better than to rely on you, Francis.”

  “You are quite wrong, there,” Anastasie said. “Monsieur Francis recovered your notebook at considerable personal risk. We have merely provided a safe house for him.”

  Joubert bowed again without saying what he thought of this. Anastasie led him into the parlor and sent me to Agathe for some refreshments. In the kitchen, I whispered that she should beware of the attaché case. “He has something valuable or something dangerous.”

  “Bring that carafe of wine. We will be prepared.”

  I bet we would.

  Back in the parlor, Anastasie had produced the notebook and demanded, bless her, my gambling chits. Joubert resisted this; he wanted the letter as well.

  “You remembe
r Serge Brun, László?” Agathe asked.

  Joubert screwed up his face, miming thought.

  “He was an associate of Paul Desmarais,” Agathe continued. “Tall, light-brown hair, rather good-looking with a dangerous temper. Later, when Paul joined the Milice, Serge opted for the Resistance, with just about as much conviction.

  “I seem to remember someone of that ilk.”

  “We believe that he murdered ‘Madame Renard’ and took both the letter and the notebook. Francis was only able to secure the notebook.”

  Finally, Joubert agreed to the exchange. Still looking flushed with the heat and the unaccustomed exercise, he ruffled through the pages before placing the book in his case. When Agathe came in with a tray holding wine and water bottles and some of her delicious little cakes, Joubert made another big continental bow. “Such a pleasure,” he said, “to see two such charming ladies again. One had never hoped for a reunion.”

  “I imagine not,” Agathe said dryly and passed around glasses of Chablis. “To absent comrades.” Joubert raised his glass.

  Anastasie took a sip of hers before asking, “And your absent comrade, Paul Desmarais? We’ve heard rumors of his death.”

  He shook his head. “As I told Francis here, there was so little hope that one assumed the end must come.”

  “So he’s not dead,” Agathe said flatly.

  “He may be dead,” Joubert said. “He was dying, that was certain. When I gave the package to Francis, Paul was surely dying.”

  “But now he has recovered?”

  “Now he has disappeared.” Joubert spoke in a heavy and resentful tone that reflected the sudden change in atmosphere. Planning to loot the accounts of a dead thug was one thing; going after the resources of a live one who still scared half the Var was another. “He was placed, at my expense,” Joubert continued, “in a private nursing facility. He wrote the letter. Perhaps he wrote others I did not see, but he gave me the package and told me where to send it. I did not think that he would last the night, so I made the arrangements with Francis.”