The Prisoner of the Riviera

by Janice Law

  I found that I could barely speak myself, and as soon as I moved, I discovered bruises unsuspected the night before. “We need water.”

  Pierre stood up and surveyed the rough countryside. “There will be paths, but I don’t know this area. I think we should go back,” he said.

  “And if Brun and Company are in residence?”

  “We make a swift retreat.”

  I couldn’t think of a better plan. We thrust our way through the scrub to the shelter of the stable and other outbuildings. Everything was quiet. The fish locker truck and Madame Lambert’s handsome Peugeot were nowhere in evidence, although the large sedan with the open doors was still parked in front of the building. There was a steady hum of flies in the morning air, and as we drew closer, a throat-catching stench, lightly tinctured with gunpowder. Two bodies were on the ground. The driver had a thin face with a low forehead punctured by a blackening wound. The other man was heavy with the brutal features I remembered from our conversation in the café and dark stains on his shirt and trousers.

  “Do you recognize them?”

  “The bigger man talked to me. He wanted Joubert’s notebook back. We had dinner on his tab.”

  “I recognize the Renault—it’s one of the new rear engine 4CVs. They tracked us to Madame Lambert’s, and they must have hung around the neighborhood and followed her car.”

  “Lucky for us.”

  We went to the farmhouse. The door was locked, but after a little searching we located a well with a pump and a bucket outside the stable. We drank as much as we could and washed the blood off our faces and hands. Pierre looked slightly less pale, but I noticed that he was walking with difficulty.

  “It’s miles to town, isn’t it?”

  “I’ve done harder in worse shape on the bike.”

  Right. Cyclists are deeply conversant with pain and endurance. I had hoped to be less knowledgeable. “What about their car?”

  “We’re already going to be suspicious.”

  “As Nan says, might as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb. Besides, they ruined your motorbike.”

  Pierre considered this for a moment. “What about them?”

  “We could bury them,” I said, though I dreaded the exertion.

  “You surprise me, Francis.”

  “Marcel, please.”

  “Very well.”

  He proved to be more of a country person than Cybèle. After a little reconnoitering, he located what had been an old manure pit. I found this a distasteful idea, but when I lifted the first shovelful of the soft compost, my reservations disappeared. Within an hour, we had removed all trace of our two pursuers. Pierre pumped another bucket of water and cleaned the side of the car. We could do nothing about the bullet holes at the moment.

  He got into the driver’s seat and tried the engine. A cough, a grunt, and then a very satisfactory low rumble. “Hop in,” said Pierre. “We’re getting out of here.”

  “Have we a destination?”

  “We’re going to see Hector. He knew Paul, Brun, and the Lamberts in the old days, the Chavanels, too.”

  “And what does he do?”

  “He was a commandant with the Sûreté Nationale.”

  “A policeman. Pierre, we’ve just finished not one but two illicit burials.”

  “He was a policeman. Based in Nice. When the Italians moved in, he went to the hills. He’s the man who can help us.”

  I wasn’t sure about that. My experience with London coppers has been almost uniformly negative, and Inspector Chardin had finished my enthusiasm for the French variety.

  “Have you got a better idea?” Pierre asked.

  Let’s see: We were banged up like third-rate boxers, we were flat broke, pursued by folk with a sideline in homicide, and driving a car belonging to two dead thugs. “Not at the moment,” I said.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Hector lived near Antibes, Picasso territory, the locale of bimorphs disporting on the beach, home of cubist gods and goddesses. The great man clearly had happier times on the Mediterranean than I’d had so far. But then joie de vivre isn’t exactly my subject, and I had to admit that there was plenty going on to feed my particular pictorial obsessions. Perhaps Hector would provide more of the same, for Pierre assured me that he had been formidable at laying explosives and planning ambushes. “He is a man to trust with your life,” Pierre said, which was more than I could say for most of my associates.

  This remarkable character lived in a small white stucco house next to a patisserie and a tabac; Pierre pulled smartly into the alley alongside. Hector’s place sported a pair of fancy urns holding a variety of bright flowers, and the low façade was ornamented with window boxes of geraniums. I wonder if retired coppers routinely turned to horticulture, if all that pruning, pinching, and deadheading console them after careers of nipping crime in the bud.

  Pierre knocked, and the door opened almost immediately—Hector was clearly an early riser who kept his perimeter under observation. Small but trim, he had a military bearing that reminded me unpleasantly of my father, fine features, still dark hair swept straight back, and deeply tanned skin over high cheekbones. Behind his horn-rimmed glasses, his eyes were black and faintly slanted, which combined with the neatness of his person to give him an almost Asiatic appearance. I found it hard to imagine him on the operating end of a machine gun, but I was soon to discover that he was a man who could turn his hand to whatever was required.

  “Pierre, Pierre! I hadn’t expected to see you until the next Criterion. You’ll be riding, I hope.” But even as he spoke, his voice took on a doubtful tone. He’d noticed the bruises on Pierre’s face, a certain stiffness in his stance, and our general dishevelment.

  “Nothing serious. Ribs,” he said.

  “Come in, and your friend, too.”

  “Marcel Lepage,” Pierre said.

  Something, perhaps Hector’s air of rectitude and competence, impelled me to add, “At the moment.”

  “Ah, a nom de guerre. Now that takes me back.”

  “Back is where we need to go, Hector,” Pierre said. The older man’s face assumed a curious new expression, at once still and watchful, and he led us into a small bright kitchen with modern appliances and a big square table. “Sit. We’ll have coffee. And maybe croissants? I find excursions into the past require sustenance.”

  We couldn’t conceal how hungry we were, and Hector followed up the croissants with a fine baguette and some cheese. “We didn’t get breakfast.”

  “Owing to a rapid departure,” Pierre added.

  “Under fire, perhaps?” Hector nodded back toward the window. “I noticed the Renault.”

  Pierre allowed that the Renault had taken a hit.

  “And its occupant?”

  Pierre and I exchanged glances.

  “Gone to ground,” I said. “Both of them.”

  Hector looked at us as if he could see all the way back to the old farm and our stint of dawn grave digging. “We need not worry about them?”

  “Definitely not,” said Pierre. “I think they will not be found for some time.”

  “But we’re still in a pickle.”

  “I can’t help if I don’t know,” Hector said.

  Pierre took a deep breath and gave a rapid account of the night’s events, beginning with the attack near the beach and continuing with our adventures accompanying Madame Lambert in the hinterland. I saw a new side of him as he spoke. The boyish and amusing cyclist disappeared and someone else, older, wearier, sharper appeared. He was cool and accurate and gave no more information than was required.

  “Well,” Hector said. “You do take me back: Serge Brun, Yvette Lambert, and possible associates of László Bencze. An eventful evening to be sure. But, Pierre, this cannot be connected with the war. You had nothing to do with Brun, and László had already fled for parts
unknown when you joined our group.” He turned to me and said, “Pierre was our youngest recruit. He was delivering messages for us while he was still in short pants.”

  Pierre smiled for the first time. “Race training was a good cover.”

  “Yes, and it made you a cyclist.” Hector gave him an affectionate glance. I could see that he was genuinely fond of my friend.

  “I’m afraid Pierre’s present trouble is all my fault. I saw a man named Victor Renard shot outside a London gambling club owned by Monsieur Joubert—whom you knew as László Bencze.” I described Renard’s injuries, my probably futile attempts to stop the bleeding, and my errand to deliver Renard’s “last words” to Madame Renard.

  “Poor Madame Renard,” he said. “You were perhaps the last to see her?”

  “I did not see her at all.” I recounted my visit to the villa and most of the subsequent events, omitting only my work for the Chavanels and my adventure with Cybèle.

  “A turbulent holiday,” he remarked when I’d finished. “And difficult to accomplish if the police have your passport.” He gave me a shrewd look.

  “I was able to acquire an identity card. Hence my new persona, Marcel Lepage.”

  “Might I see it?”

  I glanced at Pierre, who nodded.

  “Very nice,” Hector said after he had run a connoisseur’s eye over the card. “The workmanship is very fine—and familiar. Old friends of mine made this for you. Am I right?”

  “I don’t know who your old friends might be.”

  “Charming ladies.”

  “Then it would be ungallant to involve them.”

  He laughed at this. “They survived the war on skill, charm, and guile. They and the most attractive Cybèle.”

  “I’m afraid that she is in danger. The Chavanels know a good deal more than is healthy, and though the old ladies have supposedly gone on vacation, I believe that Cybèle is off to make her fortune.”

  “With Renard’s mysterious notebook?”

  “More or less. She said that she was taking a copy of the notebook to the authorities in Marseille.”

  Hector nodded at this. “She would do that. You can trust the ladies to put any evidence in the right hands.”

  “I am glad to hear that, but the Chavanels also seem to know a good deal about codes and ciphers.”

  “They do, indeed.” He smiled. “It would be poetic justice if they were able to access Paul’s fortune.”

  “Except we are not even sure Victor Renard is Paul Desmarais or that he is really dead.”

  “It would take a lot to kill Paul, but that he was calling himself Victor Renard is a sure thing.”

  “Why is that?”

  “The name, for one thing.”

  “The Chavanels thought it was a message from Cybèle.”

  Hector shook his head. “No, though it is connected with them, too.” He went into the front room and returned with a bulging folder of papers. “I retired during the war; unofficially, I keep an eye on cases involving old comrades and old enemies for the Sûreté. You can be sure that’s enough to keep me busy.”

  He opened the folder and studied a document for a moment before he spoke again in a reflective tone. “You realize that power was lying on the ground during the war, and types like Paul Desmarais stooped to pick it up. Afterward, some of them found it hard to return to the plow like Cincinnatus.”

  “Life is different now.”

  “Yes, and some, even some of the brave and good, have found peace difficult.”

  “Victor Renard developed a taste for gambling.”

  “Which he was probably funding by blackmail. We have heard rumors that he was putting pressure on his former associates, threatening to expose them as wartime profiteers. Your description of the notebook supports this theory.”

  “But wouldn’t he have been vulnerable to exposure as well?” Pierre asked.

  “Certainly. But he was without position and hence without shame. Plus the money he made could be put into a numbered Swiss account, beyond the reach of authorities here or in the United Kingdom.”

  “That doesn’t explain why you are so sure that he was living as Victor Renard,” I said.

  “But this does.” He ruffled through the folder and extracted a newspaper clipping with the very image of the late Madame Renard that had signaled the start of my troubles. Had she been the queen of spades she could not have been more ill-omened.

  “The police claim not to know her real identity.”

  “They may claim that. To some extent, they may even be telling the truth—but not entirely. I know better. You said that you did not see her?”

  “Just in the news photo.”

  “But I did,” said Pierre. “I train out that way and I admired her car one day.”

  “Describe her for me, carefully.”

  “She was tall, rather broad shouldered, but thin. As if she was not in the best of health. Very pleasant, maybe a little lonely.”

  “And her voice?”

  Pierre thought for a moment. “We exchanged only a few words, but low. She had a low, slightly hoarse voice. Too many cigarettes.”

  “I knew her,” Hector said, “when her name was Gustave Gravois. A very close friend of Paul’s. His little secret, one might say. Gravois was a fine amateur cyclist, who rode for your club, Pierre, long before your time. But his real love was the cabaret stage. He performed an amusing act in drag, and he had a genuinely beautiful singing voice. He made a small fortune during the war entertaining the Germans in both his male and female personas.”

  Pierre made a face. “Le cochon.”

  “Right, so after the war, when he was faced with difficulties, Gravois disappeared. He had a certain amount of money then, and if we are right about the blackmail scheme, he made more afterward as the contact person in France. He funneled Paul’s threats and collected the cash.”

  “And hid in plain sight as Madame Renard?”

  “That’s right. The name was a little in-joke that had the advantage of shifting suspicion to the Chavanel ladies, who’d used ‘Victor Renard’ as a code for their business.” He tapped the photo and took a long look at it. “As you see, the war aged him, and he was no longer welcome as a performer. Or perhaps he made himself up to look older. He was very skillful.”

  “Yet the police have given no hint of this!”

  “It is common to retain a key piece of information, and while the gendarmes can hardly have missed his gender, they may still not know his real identity.”

  “Paul trusted him?” Pierre sounded dubious. “We assumed that he would have sent anything of value to his sister. Particularly if he was dying.”

  “His dying, like his death, may have been announced prematurely. But as for his sister, that’s another story. We—and I mean both the Maquis and the Sûreté—were pretty sure that he had her husband murdered. She maybe didn’t love her husband, but she loved being Madame Lambert. The two fell out.”

  “Now she’s after his money in a serious way.”

  “Too serious. We will have to notify the authorities about the body in her villa. I can do that.”

  “Don’t involve Inspector Chardin,” I warned.

  “No, not him. There are questions about him as well.”

  “There certainly are. He’d like to pin Madame Renard’s killing on me, and he has retained my passport.”

  “Your passport will take some time to retrieve. In the meantime, it would be useful to learn more about why Madame Renard was murdered just at that time.”

  Oh-oh. I didn’t like the sound of that. Hector might be an old comrade on the side of the angels, but he was still a copper, and he seemed to share the fraternity’s desire to enlist my services. Well, if it would me keep out of his clutches, I could give him a theory gratis: “When Victor was shot, old pal László must
have seen a chance to take over the racket and secure whatever they had already made. But he didn’t know enough.”

  “László was never as smart as he thought,” Hector agreed.

  “Perhaps he figured that having me deliver the package would enable him to follow Madame Renard or to obtain the cipher key from her.”

  “He may not have known the name of the bank, either,” Hector suggested.

  “That is the last piece of the puzzle.”

  Hector smiled. “So the ladies were otherwise successful. That is very good. But our criminal case, as you can see, is all supposition. We have no proof of anything, and blackmail victims are unlikely to come forward once they are out of danger. We need to find where Madame Renard’s effects are, which probably means uncovering another identity, possibly male.”

  “Or female. Or younger. Or older.” A certain flexibility in such matters is ordinarily fine with me, but I could see complications multiplying exponentially and yours truly delayed ad infinitum. “If the police with their resources haven’t found anything—”

  “The police are not as interested as we are. They would have been happy to blame you for the killing. And would have, I’m sure, had you not delayed in delivering the package so long. It is one thing to retain information. It is quite another to fudge a time-of-death report by several days.”

  Procrastination equals salvation; I must remember that for the future. “Are we looking for the bank?” I asked.

  “We are looking for a murderer. Or more precisely to catch a murderer, as I think we all agree that Serge Brun is involved in some way.”

  Oh, yes, we agreed about that.

  “The bank is incidental to me,” Hector concluded.

  “But maybe not to the Chavanels.”

  “They would see the money went to good use,” he said.

  “And Cybèle?”

  “It is for her, of course,” Hector said quickly. “She sacrificed her youth to save our network. We are all in her debt.”

  I would like to have known how Romeo and Juliet saved Hector and the Chavanels, but he was disinclined to say anything more. Instead, he got down to our many practical problems, beginning with concealing the Renault, which was to be driven to a garage on the road back to town, where as Hector delicately put it, it would be “restored.”