“It’s about Odile.”
He went still for a couple seconds. Then he said something quiet to Pasqua and came into the dining alcove, walking toward me slowly and warily.
When he reached my table I said softly, “It’s all right. I’m not from the police. And I’m not one of the other people she’s afraid of. Her father sent me to help her.”
He didn’t sit down, and he didn’t say anything. Just stood there considering what I’d said and studying my face. I studied his in turn. From the snapshots I’d thought of him as a boy. In person he looked older. Not in years, but in what he’d acquired from those years. He looked capable and self-contained, with resolute eyes and a firm, uncompromising mouth.
This was someone I would have to play carefully, or I wouldn’t get anything at all out of him.
I said, “You’re right not to trust me until I give you reason to.” I pushed back my chair and stood up. “The main post office is a five-minute walk. We can put through a long-distance call to her father, and you can talk to him. Then we’ll talk.”
I started toward the little lobby, but Gilbert Lucca stayed where he was, still eyeing me suspiciously. I turned to face him. “She phoned her father yesterday morning,” I said, “and left a message on his answering machine. She told him there are only two people in the world she can depend on, and he’s one of them. I guess you’re the other one she meant. But you don’t understand how much danger she’s in—or you wouldn’t have left her alone.”
That bothered him. I walked out through the lobby. This time he followed, pausing to ask Enio Pasqua to watch his bags. Outside he walked silently beside me. Not a word, all the way to the Piazza della Repubblica and into the post office. We went into the telephone section, and I let him have information check Egon Mulhausser’s two numbers in Eze, so he’d know I wasn’t tricking him. And I let him make the call.
He tried Mulhausser’s home number first and got him there. He told him he was a friend of Odile’s and wanted to be sure who I was. Then he handed me the phone.
“This is Sawyer,” I told Mulhausser. “The young man you just talked to is the one in the snapshot I showed you. The one your wife liked the look of. I do, too, but he’s suspicious, and that’s sensible of him. Just assure him that I’m working for you and that he can trust me.”
I gave Gilbert Lucca back the phone and walked to the cashier’s counter, waiting for him there. When he hung up I paid for the call, and we walked out together.
“I had to be sure of you,” he said.
“You did the right thing. And now you can relax. Where is she?”
“Where she’s safe,” he told me. “I’m not going to let you go there and walk in on her without me. Odile would think I betrayed her.”
I registered the stubbornness in his expression and put a clamp on my impatience. “Let’s go have an espresso.” We crossed to the nearest of the three big cafes on the piazza and took an inside table in the rear, where we could talk without being overheard. What I’d said to him back at the pensione still bothered him. When the waiter went to get our espressos Gilbert spoke.
“You have to understand—I didn’t want to leave Odile alone. But I had to come down here. I need to make some money, for both of us. Odile doesn’t have any left. And my business has gotten very tight lately. You know what the French economy has been like. Most of my French customers don’t want to buy any more until they sell off most of their present inventories. I barely managed to pay my rent last month.”
“Odile could get help from her father,” I said. “All she has to do is ask him.”
“I know that. And Odile knows it, too. But… Gilbert made a helpless gesture. “She’s too embarrassed to go to him. She says she acted too viciously toward her father—for too long.” He paused and then added, with an uneasy pride, “I’m the only one she’ll let help her now.” He paused again, trying to sort out his dilemma and explain it to me. “So I had to come down here. To get us at least a little income right now—and set up sources for more in the near future. I have some good customers in this part of Italy.” Gilbert shook his head, frowning. “But…Odile wouldn’t come with me. She’s afraid of moving around too much. Of having too many people see her.”
“She’s right.”
“Maybe. So I had to leave her—but in a place where she’s safe until I get back. If my van hadn’t broken down, I could have finished up here in Florence today and been back with her tonight. To make sure she’s all right, before coming down again.”
The waiter brought our cups and went away.
I said, “You’re not enough protection for her, Gilbert. You’re intelligent enough to know that. You don’t have any experience in dealing with the kind of trouble Odile is in. I do have that experience. There’s no way you can get her out of this mess. I can. That’s my business.”
He sat there for a long time, his face hard as conflicting needs and desires did battle inside him. I watched him. Neither of us touched our espressos.
Finally he said, “I can’t let you see Odile unless I’m there, too. I have to be there, so she feels safe. So she knows you can’t force her do anything she doesn’t want to. Look, my camionnette will be repaired by tomorrow afternoon. Then I’ll take you to Odile. All right?”
“No,” I told him flatly. “You want to take me to her, fine. But you have to do it now. Odile’s father will pay the repair costs on your van and your fare to come back and pick it up. All you’ll lose is a day. Odile could be dead by tomorrow. Get that through your head. Some very rough people are after her.”
“They won’t find her,” he said with absolute assurance.
“Don’t be a fool. Of course they’ll find her. It’s just a matter of time. Like I found you. And I don’t have as many people working on it as they do. If they were the ones who’d found you today, you wouldn’t be sitting here having a coffee with them. You’d be someplace where nobody could hear your screaming, so they could torture you until you gave them Odile. They’re that kind of people.”
I watched his assurance waver. “I know,” he said softly.
“Do you also know what she stole from them?”
“No.” But it was an uncertain negative. He had some idea. He asked me, “Do you?”
I told him. “Three million dollars’ worth of pure heroin.”
His eyes squeezed shut. When they snapped open they were as scared as I wanted them to be. “That crazy little idiot—”
“You must have known.”
“Not that much.”
“My car’s near the pensione,” I said. “Are we going?”
He nodded slowly. “But I won’t tell you where—until we get to Odile. I’m not giving you any chance to drop me along the way.”
“We’ll have a hard time getting close,” I pointed out dryly, “unless you at least give me a general direction. North, west, south, or—”
“I’ll drive,” Gilbert told me.
We looked each other in the eye. Neither of us blinked. I finally nodded.
We drank our espressos, got our things from the pensione, and put them in my Peugeot. He drove us out of Florence and turned northeast on route A-11.
We were on our way back to France.
Chapter 27
“The first time I saw her,” Gilbert told me, “was in Villefranche. One Sunday when I had a stand at the flea market there. That was when I was seventeen. The year before my mother died and I moved to Paris. Odile stopped at my stand and started asking how much I was charging for some of the pieces of jewelry. We ended up haggling over the price of a brooch I’d made. And flirting a little at the same time. Just kidding around, you understand. She was only fifteen. But there was something about her…
He smiled to himself. There was a very special tenderness in it.
“I finally sold her that brooch for less than it cost me to m
ake. And she still has it.”
He kept his eyes on the road while he spoke, driving fast and well. Not driving had its advantages: I was able to lean back and study him some more while I listened.
“Odile was staying in Villefranche with her aunt for a month that summer. The next three Sundays when I was there she came around to my stand, and we talked some more…flirted some more. Her aunt began sticking close, not saying anything, but you could see she was a little worried. Can’t blame her. Odile was just a kid. But…sweet and funny. And with something a little sad, too, sometimes. That thing she had about her mother and father—though I didn’t know about that until much later.
“Then her aunt took her back to Paris. And by the next summer I was up there, too. But I never tried to look her up. Tell the truth, I didn’t even think about Odile again. I was too involved with trying to get my business started. We didn’t run into each other again until just over a year ago.”
He had begun talking after we’d passed the ancient town of Lucca, half an hour out of Florence. Once he started it kept coming out of him, as though he couldn’t stop it. I got the feeling Gilbert had been needing to talk it out about Odile for some time—to someone with whom he didn’t have to conceal any part of it.
“We were both coming out of one of those little cinemas on the Rue Champollion when we saw each other again.”
I knew where he meant. A short, alley-like street near the Sorbonne and College de France, with six movie theaters in a row that showed very old films.
Gilbert said, “I like going there by myself now and then, for a couple hours of forgetting my own problems. Turned out Odile does, too. It was a Chaplin picture that night. Limelight. We came out at the same time. Odile recognized me first. Reminded me about Villefranche. And the brooch she’d bought from me…
“We ended up walking for miles that night. Up one side of the Seine, down the other. And I took her to another old film the next night. And after that—well, she wasn’t a kid anymore. We fell in love. I never met anybody who could make me feel so full of life”—Gilbert’s voice tightened a notch—“when she’s in the right sort of mood.”
“When did you realize she’s an addict?” I asked him.
“Oh, I knew pretty soon.” Gilbert’s voice was steady, flat. But the pain came through. “I didn’t want to believe it. But…I’ve got other friends who do hard drugs. I knew. The way Odile always wore long sleeves and would only make love in the dark. And those mood changes.
“Finally I told her I knew. That made us closer, in a way. Her not having to pretend any more and be afraid of how I was going to react whenever I did find out. It didn’t change how I felt about her, though. Except to make me determined to break her out of the habit somehow.”
Gilbert’s face got a haunted look you don’t see on many twenty-one-year-olds—except after a particularly bad stretch of combat duty. “Well, I tried. And she tried. She really tried to kick it. For my sake, mostly. It almost drove her crazy, though.”
“Does she shoot it in the vein, or just skin pops?”
Gilbert drew a shuddery breath. “She mainlines.”
I’d known that would have to be the answer. Odile wouldn’t have become desperate enough to snatch the shipment otherwise. “How long has she been hooked?”
“Since before we met again. Almost two years now.”
“How did she go about trying to kick it?”
“Just staying off it—with aspirins and some downers. And me holding her when she started shaking. But—she could never hold out long enough.”
“Nobody can,” I told him. “Not without medical help.”
“I thought,” Gilbert said, “that maybe if we got her away from Paris for awhile…to someplace calm. I was able to get the use of an isolated cabin, in the hills above Menton. In February. We moved in there for a week, hoping that might do it.”
I shook my head. “No way. I know too many addicts. And only one who ever made it cold turkey. A man who happens to have a kind of craziness that got him through it and out the other end. Nobody normal can handle that kind of agony. Except in a clinic where they pump enough substitute dope into you so you’re not quite there through most of it. Like going through a very long operation.”
“We tried that,” Gilbert told me darkly. “One of the free clinics that specialize in that sort of cure. But Odile wouldn’t stay there long enough. The substitutes they gave her did ease the pain. But she missed the high too much. Her nerves kept demanding that rush.”
There was only one way that would work for Mulhausser’s daughter, I knew. She’d have to be committed to a private sanitorium she couldn’t leave when she wanted to. And kept there until her ordeal was over. Whether she fell back into her addiction after the cure only Odile could control. Perhaps with Gilbert’s help.
But there was no point in discussing that with him now. The first order of business was her immediate survival. And one thing I needed for that was as much information about what had happened as Gilbert could give me. I continued to let him get to it in his own way.
“The last time we tried…that was back in early April. Neither of us had enough money left at that point to buy her the shit anyway. So—one last big try to kick it. The hard way. I stayed with her every minute.”
Gilbert’s face clouded as he remembered that time. I saw his hands tighten on the steering wheel. “But she couldn’t hold out. And finally she kissed me good-bye and cried…and went off to the South. To see if she could get more of the shit from the bastard who turned her on to it in the first place.”
“Who?” I asked him quietly.
“All I know is his name is Tony something. Odile would never talk about him much. But she did tell me he gave it to her free—at first.”
“That’s standard,” I told him. “Hook them young. Then you’ve got a lifetime customer.”
“Young… Gilbert repeated the word bitterly. “I’d kill this Tony if I ever met him. Odile was only seventeen when he gave her her first fix. And he kept giving them to her—until she couldn’t get by without it.”
His voice went harsh with anger. “And then—after she couldn’t do without the stuff—he began making her work like a call girl for him. Only not for money, like with a regular call girl. To amuse some of his friends. This Tony would make her go to them…and do whatever they wanted. And he’d pay her for it with a little heroin each time.”
“Was this around Cannes?” I asked him.
“There—and in Paris, too.” His voice was shaky. I let him take time to regain control of himself.
My Peugeot was running low on fuel by then. We pulled into the next gas station on the autostrada. After filling up we had some lunch in the fast food shack next to the station. Then we were speeding north again—and Gilbert told me the rest of it.
* * * *
“Odile stopped giving herself to Tony’s friends after she met me again in Paris.” Gilbert had himself and his voice back under tight control. “But it was hard. She needed her fix—and she had to pay for it. And before long we were both running out of money. Things got tight for me. And Odile—she sold some property she had in the country that she’d gotten from her aunt. And she drained her bank account dry—and all of that money went incredibly fast.”
“It’s expensive stuff. And you need more and more.”
“I know,” Gilbert growled. He repeated it more softly: “I know… He took several breaths before continuing. “So she went off to see this Tony character again. In the south. And she said good-bye to me. Because she knew…and I knew…there was only one way she could get him to supply her with what she needed.”
“But Tony fooled her,” I said. “He turned her over to somebody else instead. A thug named Bruno Ravic.”
Gilbert glanced at me, surprised. Then he looked back to the road ahead, his eyes narrowed. “Is that his name? Odile
didn’t tell me that.”
“What did she tell you?”
“This thug Tony gave Odile to…he’d give her a fix. But making her beg for it, or pay for it, any way he wanted.” Gilbert’s voice had gotten a sick sound. “He…he was turning her into an animal.”
His misery became too strong for him to continue for several moments. I said, “And one night Bruno had a lot of heroin in his place. Just turned over to him, for delivery to Paris. And Odile snatched it after he fell asleep.”
Gilbert nodded. “She told me that. She didn’t tell me how much she took. I thought maybe enough for a month or so…
“She took enough to last the rest of her life,” I told him. “So she’d never have to buy any more—or do anything else to get it.”
“She came back to Paris,” Gilbert went on after a moment. “Back to me—but only for one night. She told me she’d stolen some dope. From some rough people. And she didn’t want me involved. I wanted her to stay with me. So I could protect her. But she said her only chance was to disappear—alone. And I couldn’t force her to stay with me.”
“So she borrowed a friend’s apartment.”
Gilbert glanced at me again. “You know about that, too.” It worried him, but he tried to mask it.
“I was hired to find Odile,” I said. “The trail led there.”
“It belongs to a woman we both know. She was going to be away for a week. Enough time, Odile said, for her to think where to go next. She made me promise not to visit her there. To give her time to think. But I called her regularly, to make sure she was all right. And she promised to let me know before going anywhere else, whatever she decided.”
“And she finally decided to come south with you,” I said, keeping my tone casual.
“Yes… You see, the biggest Paris shop I sold to suddenly went out of business—owing me a lot of money I’d been depending on getting. So I decided I had to come south, try to stir up new business along the Cote d’Azur, and make some fast sales to my regulars in Italy. I called Odile and asked her to go with me. She finally agreed.”
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