Solo (Aka the Cretan Lover) (v5)

by Jack Higgins

  The Mercedes took the road across the Bois de Meudon, the park at that time in the evening quiet and deserted. It started to draw away. At that moment, a motorcyclist swept past them at speed, flashers going, a sinister figure in crash helmet and goggles and dark, caped coat, a submachine-carbine slung across his back.

  He disappeared down the road passing the Mercedes. 'Bastard,' Jarrot spat out of the window. 'There's been a lot of these CRS swine riding around on those flash motorbikes recently. I thought they were only supposed to be riot police.'

  Mikali smiled softly, lit another cigarette. 'You can slow down. I know how to do it now.'

  'Do what, for Christ's sake?'

  So Mikali told him. The Citroen swerved violently as Jarrot braked hard and pulled it in to the side of the road.

  'You're crazy. You must be. You'll never get away with it.'

  'Oh, yes, I will with your help. You can supply me with everything I need.'

  'Like hell I will. Listen, you madman, a voice on the phone is all the Surete would need.'

  'What a fat, stupid man you are,' Mikali said calmly. 'I'm John Mikali. I play in Rome, London, Paris, New York. Does it make any kind of sense that I could be contemplating such a crazy idea? Why would I do such a thing? My grandfather fell to his death from that balcony by accident. The court said so.'

  'No!' Jarrot said wildly.

  'Whereas you, old stick, are not only a cheap crook, as became painfully clear when you showed me all that loot at your garage that night. You were also heavily involved with the OAS.'

  'No one can prove that,' Jarrot said wildly.

  Oh, yes they can. Just your name and even a hint of an OAS connection and it's Service Five, isn't that what they call the strong-arm squad - the barbouzes? Half of them old mates of yours from Algiers, so you know what to expect. They'll spread you on the table, wire up your privates, then press the switch. You'll be telling them everything down to the finest detail within half an hour, only they won't believe you. They'll keep on, just to see if they've got it all. In the end you'll be dead or a drooling idiot.'

  'All right,' Jarrot groaned. 'Don't go on. I'll do it.'

  'But of course. You see, Claude, all you have to do is live right. Now let's get out of here.'

  He wound down the window and let the evening air cool his face. He hadn't felt so truly alive in years, every nerve in him strung to perfect tune. It was like that last final moment in the wings before walking out into the light towards the piano and then the applause rising, lifting in great waves...

  It was just after six o'clock on the following evening as Paros, the Embassy chauffeur at the wheel of the Mercedes, turned, Versailles on his left, and entered the Bois de Meudon. Sergeant Aleko sat beside him. Petrakis was in the back on the occasional seat, facing Colonel Vassilikos who was studying a file. The glass panel was closed.

  It had rained heavily all afternoon and the park was deserted. Paros was taking his time as usual and became aware, in the rapidly falling dusk, of lights close behind him. A CRS man in dark uniform raincoat and helmet pulled alongside and waved him down. With the collar turned up against the rain, the dark goggles, Paros could see nothing of his face at all.

  'CRS,' Aleko said.

  The glass panel opened. Colonel Vassilikos said, 'Find out what he wants.'

  As the Mercedes braked to a halt, the CRS man pulled in front, got off his heavy BMW machine and pushed it on its stand. He walked towards them. His raincoat was very wet and he carried a MAT 49 machine-carbine across his chest.

  Aleko opened the door and got out. 'What's the trouble?' he demanded in bad French.

  The CRS man's hand came out of his pocket holding a .45 Colt automatic of the type issued to the American Army during the Second World War.

  He shot Aleko in the heart, slamming the sergeant back against the Mercedes. He bounced off and fell into the gutter on his face.

  Petrakis, sitting in the occasional seat, his back to the glass panel, took the second bullet in the base of his skull. He fell forward, dead instantly, bowed as if in prayer on the seat beside the Colonel who cowered back, frozen in shock, his uniform spattered with blood.

  Paros gripped the wheel tightly, his entire body trembling as the barrel of the Colt swung towards him. 'No - please no!'

  Over the years Mikali had learned to speak Greek of a kind to meet even the most exacting demands of Athenian society, but now he reverted to the accent of the Cretan peasant as taught to him by Katina so many years ago.

  He pulled Paros from behind the wheel. 'Who are you?' he demanded, keeping his eyes on Vassilikos.

  'Paros - Dimitri Paros. I'm just an Embassy driver. A married man with children.'

  'You should choose a better class of employment instead of working for fascist bastards like these,' Mikali said. 'Now run like hell across the park.'

  Paros stumbled away and Vassilikos croaked, 'For God's sake.'

  'What's He got to do with it?' Mikali dropped the Cretan accent and pushed up his goggles. An expression of total astonishment appeared on the Colonel's face. 'You? But it isn't possible.'

  'For my grandfather,' Mikali said. 'I wish I could make it slower, but there isn't time. At least you'll go to hell knowing who it's from.'

  As Vassilikos opened his mouth to speak again, Mikali leaned in and shot him between the eyes, the heavy bullet killing him instantly.

  A second later he was pushing the BMW off its stand and riding away. A car passed him, going towards Versailles. In his mirror he saw it slow as it approached the Mercedes, then stop. Not that it mattered now. He turned off the road into one of the footpaths and vanished into the trees.

  In a secluded lay-by on the other side of the park, deserted at that time of the evening, Jarrot waited fearfully beside the old Citroen truck. The tailgate was down forming a ramp and he was pretending to tinker with one of the rear wheels.

  There was the sound of the BMW approaching through the trees. Mikali appeared and took the motorcycle straight up the ramp into the back of the truck. Jarrot quickly raised the tailgate, then rushed round to the cab, climbed behind the wheel. As he drove away, he could hear police klaxons over to his left in the far distance.

  Mikali stood at the open furnace door at the garage and fed the CRS uniform in, piece by piece, even the plastic helmet. The BMW stood in the corner beside the Citroen truck, stripped of the false police signs and number plates which, being mainly plastic, burned quite nicely too.

  When he went upstairs he found Jarrot sitting at the table, a bottle of the Napoleon in front of him and a glass.

  'All three,' he said. 'My God, what kind of man are you?'

  Mikali produced an envelope which he dropped on the table. 'Fifteen thousand francs as agreed.' He took the Colt from his pocket. 'I'll hang on to this. I prefer to get rid of it myself.'

  He turned to the door. Jarrot said, 'Where are you going?'

  'I have a concert,' Mikali told him. 'Or had you forgotten?' He glanced at his watch. 'In exactly thirty minutes, so I'll have to get moving.'

  'Jesus Christ,' Jarrot said and then added violently, 'What if something goes wrong? What if they trace you?'

  'You'd better hope they don't. For your own sake as much as mine. I'll come back after the concert. Say eleven o'clock. Okay?'

  'Sure,' Jarrot said wearily. 'I got no place to go.'

  Mikali got into his hire car and drove away. He felt calm and relaxed, no fear at all, but it seemed obvious that Claude Jarrot had very much outlived his usefulness. Plus the fact that his attitude left a great deal to be desired. He was certainly not the man he had been in the old days in Algeria. It was unfortunate, but it seemed painfully apparent that he was going to have to do something about Jarrot. But for the moment, there was the concert.

  He reached the opera house with only fifteen minutes in hand, had barely time to change. But he made it and stood watching in the wings, as the conductor went on stage.

  He followed him to a storm of applause. Ther
e was a full house and he noticed Melos and the Greek Ambassador and his wife in the third row, Melos sitting in the aisle seat.

  The Concerto in A Minor was written by Schumann originally as a one-movement fantaisie for piano and orchestra for his wife Clara, herself a concert pianist. Later, he expanded it into a three-movement concerto which the music critic of the London Times once described as a laboured and ambitious work and praised Madame Schumann's attempts to pass her husband's rhapsody off as music.

  In Mikali's hands that night it sparkled, came alive in a way that totally electrified the audience. Which was why there was considerable surprise, to say the least, when half-way through the intermezzo, in response to a message brought by a footman, the Greek Ambassador, his wife and the cultural attache got up and left.

  Jarrot watched the news on television. The killing was obviously political, according to the commentator, which was proved by the fact that the assassin had allowed the chauffeur to go free; had referred to the victims as fascists. Probably a member of one of the many disaffected political groups of Greeks living in exile in Paris. In this case, the police had an excellent lead. The man they were seeking was a Cretan - a Cretan peasant. The chauffeur was definite on that. He had recognized the accent.

  The pictures of the bodies, particularly in the rear of the Mercedes, were graphic to say the least and made Jarrot remember some of Mikali's exploits from the old days. And he had said he was coming back after the concert. Why? There could really only be one reason.

  He had to get out while there was still time, but to whom could he turn? Certainly not to the police and not to any of his criminal associates. Quite suddenly, in spite of his half-drunken state, he thought of the obvious answer. The one person. Maitre Deville, his lawyer. The best criminal lawyer in the business, everyone knew that. He'd saved him from prison twice now. Deville would know what to do.

  He wouldn't be at his office now, of course, but at the apartment where he lived alone since his wife had died of cancer three years previously. Rue de Nanterre, off the Avenue Victor Hugo. Jarrot found the number and dialled it quickly.

  There was a slight delay then a voice said, 'Deville here.'

  'Maitre? It's me, Jarrot. I must see you.'

  'In trouble again, eh, Claude?' Deville laughed good-humouredly. 'I'll see you at the office first thing. Let's say nine o'clock.'

  'It can't wait, Maitre.'

  'My dear chap, it will have to. I'm going out to dinner.'

  'Maitre, have you heard the news tonight? About what happened in the Bois de Meudon.'

  'The assassinations?' Deville's voice had changed. 'Yes.'

  'That's what I've got to see you about.'

  'Are you at the garage?'

  'Yes.'

  'Then I'll expect you here in fifteen minutes.'

  Jean Paul Deville was fifty-five years of age and one of the most successful lawyers practising at the criminal bar in Paris. In spite of this, his relations with the police were excellent. Although he used every trick in the book on behalf of his clients, he was fair and just and scrupulously correct in his dealings. A gentleman in the old-fashioned sense of the word, he had cooperated to the advantage of the Surete on more than one occasion which made him a popular figure in that quarter.

  His family had all been killed when Stuka dive-bombers had pounded Calais in 1940. Deville himself had not served in the army because of bad eyesight. A clerk in a lawyer's office, he had been shifted to Eastern Germany and Poland along with thousands of his fellow countrymen as a slave worker.

  Like many Frenchmen, caught behind the Iron Curtain at the end of the war, he had not reached France again until 1947. His family in Calais having all died, he had decided to make a new life for himself in Paris, going to the Sorbonne on a special government grant for people like him, and taking a law degree.

  Over the years, he had acquired a considerable reputation. He had married his secretary in 1955, but there had been no children. Her health had always been poor and with cancer of the stomach she had taken two painful years to die.

  All of which had occasioned nothing but sympathy for him, not only with the police and his own profession, but amongst the criminal fraternity as well.

  It was really rather ironic when one considered that this benign and handsome Frenchman was, in reality, Colonel Nikolay Ashimov, a Ukrainian who had not seen his homeland for something like twenty-five years. Probably the single most important Russian Intelligence agent in Western Europe. An agent, not of the KGB, but of its bitter rival, the Intelligence section of the Red Army known as the GRU.

  The Russians, even before the end of the war, had spy schools at various places in the Soviet Union, each one with a distinctive national flavour like Glacyna where agents were trained to work in English-speaking countries in a replica of an English town, living exactly as they would in the West.

  Ashimov spent two long years preparing in a similar way at Grosnia where the emphasis was on everything French, environment, culture, cooking, and dress being faithfully replicated.

  He had a distinct advantage over the others from the first as his mother was French. His progress was rapid and he was finally posted to join a group of French slave workers in Poland in 1946, enduring the hardships of their existence, assuming the role of the Jean Paul Deville who had died of pneumonia in a Siberian coalmine in 1945. And then, in 1947 he had been sent home - home to France.

  Deville poured Jarrot another brandy. 'Go on, drink up, I can see you need it. An amazing story.'

  'I can trust you, Maitre, can't I?' Jarrot demanded wildly. 'I mean, if the flics got even a hint of this...'

  'My dear fellow,' Deville said soothingly, 'haven't I told you before? The relationship between a lawyer and his client is like that between priest and penitent. After all, if I'd disclosed what I knew of your OAS connection to the SDECE...'

  'But what do I do?' Jarrot demanded. 'If you saw the news on television, you know what he's capable of.'

  'Fantastic,' Deville said. 'I've often heard him play, of course. He's quite brilliant. I remember vaguely reading in some magazine that he'd served in the Legion for a couple of years as a boy.'

  Jarrot said, 'He was never a boy, that one. If I told you some of the things he pulled off out there in Algiers in the old days. Why, at Kasfa, he took two bullets in the lung and still managed to kill four fellagha with a handgun. A handgun, for Christ's sake.'

  Deville poured him another brandy. 'Tell me more.'

  Which Jarrot did. By the time he was finished, he was thoroughly drunk. 'So what do I do?'

  'Eleven o'clock, I think he said he'd return.' Deville glanced at his watch. 'It's ten now. I'll get my coat and we'll go back to the garage. I'd better drive. You're in no fit state to cross the street on your own.'

  'The garage?' Jarrot's speech was slow and heavy. 'Why the garage?'

  'Because I want to meet him. Reason with him on your behalf.' He slapped Jarrot on the shoulder. 'Trust me, Claude, to help you. After all, that is the reason you came to see me, isn't it?'

  He went into his bedroom, pulled on a dark overcoat and took down the black Homburg hat he always wore. He opened the drawer in his bedside bureau and took out an automatic pistol. He was, after all, going to confront a man who, if everything he had heard tonight was true, was a psychopathic killer of the first order.

  He weighed the pistol in his hand, then taking, on hunch alone, the biggest chance of his life, he put it back in the drawer. He returned to the other room where he found Jarrot at the brandy again.

  'Right, Claude,' he said cheerfully. 'Let's go.'

  The concert was a total success. Mikali was called back again and again with many sections of the audience clamouring for an encore. Finally, he obliged. There was an excited murmur, then complete stillness as he seated himself at the piano. A pause and he started to play Le Pastour by Gabriel Grovlez.

  He parked the hire car some distance from the garage and walked the rest of the way on foot throu
gh the heavy rain, letting himself in quietly through the judas in the main gate. He still had the Colt in the right-hand pocket of his raincoat. He felt for the butt as he stood there in the darkness listening to music faintly playing in the apartment above.

  He went upstairs quietly and opened the door. The living-room was in half-darkness, the only light the lamp on the table at which Jarrot snored gently in a drunken sleep.

  One bottle of Napoleon beside him was empty, another already a quarter down. A portable radio played music softly and then the announcer's voice interrupted with more details on the massive police hunt for the assassin of Vassilikos and his men.

  He reached over and switched it off, then took the Colt from his pocket. A soft voice said in excellent English with a slight French accent, 'If that's the gun I think it is, it would be really an error of the first magnitude to kill him with it.'

  Deville stepped from the shadows at the back of the room. He still wore his dark overcoat and carried a walking stick in one hand, his Homburg in the other.

  'They would extract the bullet from his corpse, forensic tests would show it had come from the same gun which was used on Vassilikos and his men. I am right, am I not? It is the same gun?' He shrugged. 'Which still doesn't mean they would stand much chance of tracing you, but silly to spoil such a brilliant operation with even a single act of stupidity.'

  Mikali waited, the Colt against his thigh. 'Who are you?'

  'Jean Paul Deville. By profession, criminal lawyer. This creature here is a client of mine. He came to me earlier tonight in considerable agitation and told me everything. You see, we have a special relationship. I am, you might say, his father confessor. He'd been a naughty boy with the OAS a year or two back, I got him off the hook.'

  He reached inside his coat, the Colt swung up instantly. 'A cigarette only, I assure you.' Deville produced a silver case. 'I haven't fired a gun in years. No blunt instruments. Nothing up my sleeve at all. This whole affair is between you and me and this poor drunken swine here. He hasn't spoken to another living soul.'