The Prisoner of the Riviera

by Janice Law

  True, French currency was down, but there was enough to make someone a rich man. Well, well. The Chavanels had exercised their agile minds searching for a Swiss account and all the time Paul—or his Madame Renard—had kept the cash on hand. I closed the case and heaved it back up onto the seat. I decided against wasting a bullet on the second case, closed the door, and climbed behind the wheel. I touched the gas pedal, as the motor was beginning to sputter, and the engine returned to a soothing purr.

  Behind me, Paul was becoming much more vocal. He’d guessed what the shot was for and wanted to negotiate. He’d belatedly realized that the rear of the van was hot, and he was not in the best of health. He had threats, he had inducements, he had proposals, some of which, sitting as I was in the white heat, began to make sense. This would never do. I closed my eyes for a minute and recalled my night drive with Cybelle. I focused on her struggles with the gears, on the way her left foot had depressed what she consistently referred to as the “goddamn clutch.” Could I do worse? I took a breath, released the brake, and began the search for first gear.

  Travel is adventure—and so it should be. I got the van rolling, steered us from the wide place where Paul had parked without entering the dreaded reverse, and headed back along the narrow road. I managed second. Beyond that, we could not seem to go any faster, which was fine, considering that we were scraping the bushes and grasses on either side and wallowing from one rut and pothole to the next. Behind me, Paul kept up a steady stream of threats and proposals—no more imperious gestures from him. I would have appreciated a few hints on the higher gears once we reached the road, as well as a little advice on the steep descents and hairpin curves.

  But once Paul realized that we were descending toward the sea and town, he shut up. Instead, I began to hear a disagreeable thumping whack against the barrier between us. He’d carried a knife somewhere on his person, and he was using it to make a gap in the plywood directly behind me. Go faster, Francis, straight to the first little town, the first little tabac, there to pull over and call Hector. First little town. First shop. The tires squealed around a curve, as I oversteered right into the oncoming lane. Back again, wrestling with the wheel, but not so far, not so far! The van got a rear tire on the soft shoulder, and it took all my strength to haul us away from what looked like a bottomless abyss.

  We’d begun to accelerate remorselessly, and even the low gear and all my weight on the brake could not slow our descent. The van careened from one side of the road to the other, and to add to the joy, nasty splinters sprayed from a widening hole just to the right of my head. I shrank away from the point of the knife. First little town, I told myself. Paul could stir up a row and alert the citizenry. So be it. First town, first phone, I stopped.

  Thwack! A bit lower this time, right at the base of my neck if I was calculating correctly. I was driving a crazy person. A glance in the mirror showed that he’d made a second hole, and from the sound of splintering wood, he was now trying to split the layers of plywood so that he could stab my neck while I was distracted by hairpin bends and the van’s tendency to waggle its back end like a rent boy.

  No doubt in my place, Paul would have picked up the revolver and fired a warning shot through the barrier, but I didn’t dare take a hand off the wheel. No, indeed, so there we were, careening around the bends, slithering between rock and chasm. The slit behind my head widened relentlessly until I felt a sharp prick to the right of my neck, smack in the big trapezius muscle. By sheer reflex, I grabbed at the injury with my left hand, which overbalanced the steering wheel to my right and sent the van roaring toward the edge of a steep drop into rocks and scrub.

  A pain in my fingers; hacking away through the gap, Paul had caught my thumb. I jerked my bleeding hand away and grabbed the wheel, but it was too late. This time two tires plowed into the soft shoulder; the van listed crazily and lost the curve. I stood on the brake, but, overbalanced, the van bounced down the slope, scrub clawing at the undercarriage, my stomach clawing at my palate. We’d have dropped right to the bottom, if we hadn’t fetched up against a rock outcropping as big as a bus.

  I slammed into the steering wheel and my knees cracked the dashboard. It was a moment or two before I realized that we had stopped, perhaps thirty feet below the road, balanced on two wheels at a forty-five-degree angle, with a straight shot down to the next hairpin turn. Get out of the van, Francis!

  Paul was quiet in the back, but I thought that I could leave a man of his ingenuity to his own devices. I unlatched the driver’s-side door and after a struggle against weight and gravity, got it open. I was set to climb out when I remembered the suitcases. Two were more than I could manage, but one seemed a good idea. I stuck Paul’s revolver in my waistband, threw the unlocked case from the van, and followed it out. Though the vehicle shivered and dipped, the rock held it fast. I started to clamber back up to the road, but the grade was steeper than I’d realized. Down, then. I let the case go and followed, sliding and stumbling, grasping at branches and roots and rocks all the way to the tarmac below.

  Far in the distance, I could see the blue of the sea with a pale ribbon of road snaking down toward it. I hefted the case and set off. I’d maybe walked a mile when the usual insect drone was increased by a metallic whir. I looked back to see a young cyclist descending at reckless speed, crouched over his machine with his dark head down and his rump in the air. The boy leaned into the curves, right, left, then dropped out of sight. He was followed by two, three, a dozen more, all dressed in the same striped shirts Pierre sported. Junior cyclists on a training run.

  As the buzz and whir of their derailleurs faded, I heard the sound of a motor. I stepped into the road and waved at a truck loaded with spare bikes. A squeal of brakes and then Pierre’s curly head leaned out. “Francis!”

  I threw the case in the back, opened the passenger door, and climbed in.

  “What are you doing out here?”

  “I was chauffeur to a crazy man, but I crashed the van. Long story.”

  “What’s the short version?”

  “Serge Brun is dead; we’ve come into money, and I need to see Hector.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  I wanted nothing more to do with Paul Desmarais, flics, or heavy suitcases. I was getting sick of adventures without pleasure, and my small quotient of public-spiritedness was so depleted it was going to take years of self-indulgence to replenish the store. But though I explained this at length to Hector, he still insisted that I come along to help find the van. That my own memory of the journey was spotty to say the least meant little. According to him, everything had shifted into high gear thanks to my adventures in café society, and I was the authorities’ fair-haired boy. Did that mean my passport would be returned?

  “We’re working on that,” said Hector.

  We went—Hector, Pierre, and me—with two plainclothes detectives in a big sedan, accompanied by a flic on a motorcycle to lend us importance. I had remembered the name of the street where Paul had taken the van, and some functionary was already tracking who owned the building and how it was that my lame abductor had gone there with such confidence. I could not help them on the route into the hills, except to assure them that most of the time I thought we had traveled northwest.

  “Why did he stop?” One of the detectives wanted to know. He was very tall and thin with ginger hair and a face raw from the sun, as if his northern pelt had never adapted to the latitude. He sat uncomfortably in back with Pierre and me, on a little jump seat that had his knees keeping company with his chin.

  “I believe he intended to kill me.”

  “Suggesting he no longer needed you to carry the case?” The detective sniffed at this and pursed his lips doubtfully. “Why not at the garage?”

  How I love having my demise discussed so casually. “There were other garages and small works around. In the hills, there was nothing but scrub. Who goes up there?”

 
“You said there was a road.”

  “A poor excuse for one.”

  “Yet you were able to drive back without a license.” He spoke as if he would like to write me up for that.

  “I’d never driven before, but I’d seen people drive. Anyway, I had no choice, as he was trying to smash through the barrier and stab me. Once on the road, it was downhill; all I had to do was steer.”

  “Not very well,” the detective observed. What an ungrateful bunch. They had a witness to Serge Brun’s killing, they had evidence of the killer’s whereabouts, and they had the murder weapon. They had, in fact, everything but the leather case stuffed with francs currently residing in Hector’s closet. I wasn’t sure how that was going to come out, though I agreed with Hector and Pierre that those francs would do no good languishing in some evidence room. “Besides,” said Hector, “there are still officers on the force nostalgic for the old days.”

  Right, and Inspector Chardin was one of them. The question was, could I trust these new coppers? Even with Hector’s imprimatur, I was apparently unsatisfactory, because I hadn’t steered the van direct to their HQ and delivered Paul cleaned of paint and smelling like a rose.

  I was preparing to sulk when Pierre interrupted to say that he thought he could estimate where I’d gone off the road. But though the Sud-Est team regularly used that stretch for training, even he did not spot the accident site until we had turned around far up in the hills and started back down again.

  I thought I recognized a particularly formidable curve. “We came onto the road near here,” I said. I could feel my hands getting sweaty with the memory.

  “You came down a fair way,” said Pierre.

  “It seemed like forever.”

  Another curve, another hairpin bend. There were no guardrails, and in some places the scrub was so thick it was impossible to see if there had been damage.

  “Wait, stop,” said Pierre. “Back up.”

  I got out of the car and went to the edge of the road where the tire marks Pierre had spotted sketched a loose curve in the white dust. “We almost went off here, but not yet. Farther on.”

  With one of the detectives driving slowly alongside, the rest of us walked down the road, through another turn, then into the sharp drop that I remembered all too well. “Somewhere in here,” I said, and Pierre’s sharp eyes picked out the tracks, a deeper gouge this time, then a tangle of broken branches. Even so, had we not been looking specifically, we’d almost certainly have missed the van. It was just as I had left it, leaning on two wheels against the big rock, but when we scrambled down the slope, over loose stones and thorny branches, we found the rear doors open.

  They were splashed with white paint to confirm my story, and there were white, sticky handprints on the side of the van and on the driver’s-side door, as well as two jagged holes hacked out of the plywood divider. But Paul had gotten himself out of the van. He was gone and the second case was, too.

  “You said you locked the van doors.”

  “I secured the latch.”

  “The doors must have popped open on impact,” suggested Pierre.

  All these details—and the suspect’s absence—were relayed up to the motorcyclist, who roared away down the road.

  “We will need a very good description of him,” the thin detective said. “As you are the only one to have seen him.”

  I could see myself once again as a prisoner of the Riviera, mired in doubtful identifications and bound to assist the police. “The cabdriver saw him, too,” I said quickly. “I can’t remember the name of the company, but there was a palm tree painted on the side of the cab.”

  The detective made a note of this without ceasing to regard me with deep suspicion. The two coppers examined the van from every angle and traced my path down to the hairpin bend below, but the track plowed by the van and our descent en masse effectively concealed which way Paul had gone.

  Hector, Pierre, and I returned to the roadway and waited while the guardians of the law made yet another inspection of the van interior. “I don’t think they believe me,” I remarked to Hector. “Paul was clearly able to muscle one case to the roadway. And that’s after an accident. What did he need me for?” Though it was nice that some ill-gotten gains would go to the deserving, concealing that second case wasn’t helping me at all.

  “It is a risk,” Hector admitted.

  “That’s not all. If he makes any connection to you or the Chavanels, if he thinks you might have his money, look out.”

  Hector did not get to answer that, because the detectives were lumbering back up the slope. We drove back into town, where Pierre was excused, and Hector accompanied me to the station to give yet another statement and to look at some old photos of Paul Desmarais.

  I turned them over one by one. Same black hair, same black eyes, though the camera had not caught the malevolent expression that had so struck me. His face was a little fuller, remarkable in wartime and indicative of his work in the black market; I couldn’t decide about the mouth or nose. “He looks very like that.” I said finally. “But did he have a limp? A noticeable awkwardness?”

  The detectives shook their heads.

  “The man I know as Victor Renard limps.”

  “You said that he was shot in London.”

  “In the chest. He was shot in the chest and supposedly died.”

  “He might have been hit in the leg as well,” Hector suggested.

  That was possible. In the darkness, I could have missed a leg wound in my concern for the massive bleeding from his chest.

  “Yet with all that, he seems to be out and about and killing old associates,” said the thin detective.

  I found his skepticism worrisome, since I kept winding up compromised by corpses of one sort or another. “Who are killing one another,” I added before I caught myself. “I’m thinking, of course, of Madame Renard.” Say no more about that, Francis!

  We went over my visit to the Villa Mimosa again. The detectives weren’t getting anywhere. They didn’t know about my activities as amateur undertaker, and I hadn’t a clue as to what they thought. At last, I was released into Hector’s custody with vague promises of progress on my passport, which still resided with Inspector Chardin.

  “If he has it, I’ll be here forever,” I complained to Hector.

  “He’s one of the people we’re looking at. He was an associate of Paul’s and a big supporter of the Milice. If he gets his hands on that case, you can be sure it will disappear.”

  “Everyone wants Paul’s money.”

  “Yes,” said Hector. “Even Madame Renard. I wonder where Gustave kept the cash hidden.”

  “The apartment looked to have been gone through pretty thoroughly. I thought maybe that was Cybèle’s work.”

  “I don’t know where Cybèle is,” Hector said. “Maybe Paul ripped up the apartment himself, searching.”

  “Suggesting that ‘Madame Renard’ had hidden money from him?” That was a possibility and an explanation for entrusting the “last letter” to a jackal like Joubert, but I wasn’t convinced. “I don’t think so. I heard him moving around upstairs in the night, but not making the sort of clatter the search must have caused. I had the sense that he had tidied the place, swept up the glass and so on, as if the damage offended him.”

  “Then he must have known where to look.”

  “I think so, and I’m guessing that he brought the cases with him. And he must have had a key. I climbed in a window, but he is not in such good shape.”

  “Good enough to kill Serge Brun.”

  “Yes, and if I were you, I’d get that case out of your house as fast as possible and get me on the boat train tonight before Paul makes the connection.”

  Hector looked surprised. “Thank you for your concern,” he said with the formal politeness the French favor, “but that is impossible. We have waited ye
ars to settle with Paul Desmarais. My hope is that he will come after his money, and I intend to do everything possible to let him know where it is.”

  I didn’t like that at all; I’d really had enough of being the goat that lures the tiger.

  “Of course, of course,” he said. “It is very bad of us to impose on you again, given that you’ve taken risks for us already. But,” he continued, “it is not totally one sided. Your position is delicate and some of your activities would not withstand closer examination.”

  I hoped he wasn’t threatening me, but I suspected that he was. “My activities involved both Cybèle and Pierre,” I said. “Do not expect me to protect them.”

  Hector looked sad at this, as if disillusioned by the weaknesses in human nature, specifically mine. “I meant only that you still need my help and that my contacts in the Sûreté can protect you somewhat from people like Chardin, who would sacrifice you in a minute to protect old comrades and new rackets.”

  I apologized for any mistaken insinuation and the two of us exchanged formal expressions of esteem. French is very good for that. It allows one to lay cards on the table without open hostilities.

  “My thought,” said Hector, “was that we treat Pierre to a fine dinner, perhaps with some of his cycling colleagues. And let it be known.”

  “Perhaps the restaurant at the Negresco,” I said sarcastically.

  “The very thing,” exclaimed Hector. “That will certainly secure attention. Monsieur, you are a species of genius.”

  That is how I went from dishwasher to guest at the most expensive hotel in Nice and added entertaining to my previous skills as gravedigger, beachfront artiste, and van driver. Our plans hit a little snag in that the Sud-Est team was pedaling away in the foothills of the Alps and could hardly be released for a slap-up feast with wine at every course. Hector surmounted this problem by inviting the junior team and some of the support personnel, and he saw that the event would be noticed in the local papers.