Once Mathis learned about this blind man, this “Pierre Rodiac,” he put the investigation of the CL-20 theft on the back burner and proceeded to unearth what he could about the stranger. His yacht, a superb Princess 20M, made the trip to Monaco every Thursday night, and back to Calvi, a port on Corsica’s northwest shore. A black Rolls-Royce would then take Rodiac south, into the mountains. Where he went from there was still a mystery.
But when he reported all of this to his superiors at the DGSE, they admonished him and warned him not to pursue it any further. After the tragedy in Nice, they wanted no part of any “speculations about Union schemes.” Mathis became angry and walked away, taking an indefinite leave of absence from his job. He decided to look into the matter on his own.
Mathis finished his drink and strolled back into the Salon Privé. Rodiac was still playing, and his pile of chips had tripled in size. Mathis shook his head, said goodbye to Dominic, then left the casino. He walked to the gardens behind the building and followed the path to the lift that would take him down to the harbor.
The smell of the sea was strong at this time of night. Seagulls were still out in force, crying loudly, looking for food in the water.
Rodiac’s Princess 20M, a sleek, white modern motor yacht built by a British company, Marine Projects, looked to be about 70 feet long and probably came with all the modern amenities.
“She’s a beauty, isn’t she?” came a voice behind Mathis. It was the harbor manager, a salty Monégasque in his fifties with sea-brine white hair.
“Oui,” Mathis replied. “Who owns her?”
“A blind man, he comes here every Thursday. He’s up at the casino now,” the man said. “He must be a wealthy bastard.”
“May I ask where the boat is registered?”
The man frowned. “I’m not allowed to give away that kind of information, you know.”
Mathis pulled out a 500-franc bill. “I’ll pay for it.”
The man scratched his chin. “Make it a thousand?”
Mathis slipped out another bill and handed it over. The man gestured for Mathis to follow him into the little office on the dock. He found and opened his notebook, then began to look through the pages.
“Here it is,” he said. “It’s registered in Calvi. Owned by a man named Cirendini.”
“May I see?” Mathis asked, feeling his heart skip a beat when he heard the name. The man turned the book toward him. Sure enough, there it was. The yacht was registered to Emile Cirendini.
“Merci,” Mathis said. He left the office and walked back across the dock to the steps leading back up to the lift.
Well, well! he thought. Emile Cirendini … one of the most senior members of the old Corsican mafia—the legendary Union Corse! While the name “Union Corse” was no longer fashionable, the Corsican mafia was still very much alive, operating mostly in France and the Mediterranean. In the old days of the Deuxième, the Union Corse was the equivalent of the Sicilian Mafia, specializing in drug smuggling, prostitution, racketeering, arms sales and gambling.
Cirendini had been in and out of prison on various racketeering charges but always managed to produce sharp lawyers and a lot of money. He never stayed in jail long. Now he ran a supposedly legitimate shipping business out of Corsica.
So … the blind man Pierre Rodiac was using a yacht owned by Emile Cirendini! This was very interesting indeed.
Mathis decided there and then that he would make arrangements to follow the Princess 20Mto Corsica—if not tonight, then next Thursday. From there, he would do his best to track Rodiac to his home and find out for certain if the man was whoMathis thought he was.
If it was true then Pierre Rodiac was in fact none other than Olivier Cesari, the man at the top of the Union, the man they called Le Gérant.
THREE
THE FILMMAKER
THE COCAINE BURNED THE INSIDE OF HIS NOSTRILS AS LÉON ESSINGER snorted and jerked his head back to savor the full effects of the drug.
He looked in the bathroom mirror at his shiny white teeth to make sure that none of his lunch was caught between them. As his heartbeat accelerated, he stared at his reflection. Not bad, he thought. His wavy brown hair, high forehead, dark eyes and full lips gave him a ruddy, Mediterranean look; he had been told that he resembled a famous rock star. At fifty-two, he was still considered good-looking. Women still came on to him, especially after his separation from Tylyn. He had everything going for him now.
Then why the hell was he so unhappy? Why did everything seem like a disaster waiting to happen?
Essingerwas sure thatWilcox waswonderingwhat could be keeping him. He said quietly, to himself, “You can wait, you American bastard.”
He straightened his tie, stepped out of the bathroom and walked back through the corridor and out onto the bright terrace of the sumptuous Palais Maeterlinck restaurant in Nice. Most of the lunch crowd was still there. Sure enough, Wilcox was impatiently looking at his watch.
Essinger sat at the table. The lunch plates had not yet been removed.
“The reason you don’t have any money is you spend it all on that crap,” Wilcox said pointing to his nose.
Essinger didn’t like Julius Wilcox. The man gave him the creeps. He was terribly ugly, what with that awful scar over the right eye, the hawk nose and greasy, slicked-back gray hair. He always appeared in a suit, but over that he wore a long duster, the kind of coat worn by outlaws in the American Wild West. It was an odd combination, thought Essinger, but it worked. The man oozed menace, and Essinger could tell that Wilcox had little regard for him. Wilcox was being cordial because he was following orders.
Essinger decided to ignore him and gaze at the Mediterranean. It was always a pleasure to come to the Maeterlinck when he was in Nice. It had a most interesting history. Originally conceived as a casino in the 1920s, the project was abandoned and later purchased by the author Maurice Maeterlinck. Recently restored and fashioned into a luxury hotel and restaurant, the Maeterlinck was the chic place to be in Nice, where Hollywood stars stayed when they were in town, where scenes from movies have been shot, and where they served the best truffles stuffed with lobster. Essinger felt important dining there. “We should be hearing from our man in LA any minute now,”Wilcox said.
Essinger nodded. They had been there for nearly two hours. He had met Wilcox for lunch and they had completed the meal half an hour ago. At any rate, if the call came through there would be some consolation, Essinger thought. Perrin and Weil were thorns in his side that had to be extracted as soon as possible. The two rival producers had slapped a multimillion-dollar lawsuit on him recently for breach of contract. The litigation was holding up funding from an American studio for Essinger’s latest picture. They had told him that the money would not be forthcoming until the suit was settled.
Sometimes Essinger wished that he were in another business. The motion picture industry had certainly made him what he was today but it had also corrupted him, turned him into a less-than-moral person. He admitted it, but he had few regrets. His successes were sweet enough to combat his failures. Unfortunately, lately he had experienced more failures and setbacks than successes.
As he took another sip of the vin de table, Essinger pondered the last ten years of his life. It had been a rapid rise to stardom. His early French films as a producer/director had established him as an auteur to be reckoned with, and he had spent nearly twenty years of his life making small films in Europe. Receiving the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival at the age of twenty-eight had boosted his career considerably. As an experiment, he tried doing an action film when he turned forty and it was a major international success—one of those small-budget, big-business anomalies that are legendary in the motion picture industry. It wasn’t long before Hollywood came calling, so Essinger packed his bags and left Europe. After moving to California and making two big-budget blockbusters for major studios there, Léon Essinger’s fortune was secured. The first film featured a popular American actor in an action role that the
public simply couldn’t get enough of. Essinger quickly found that more money was to be made with that kind of pulp fiction than with art films. Some of the critics said that he had “sold his soul to Hollywood,” but he didn’t care. He was laughing all the way to the bank.
The second film built upon the success of the first one, and it nearly doubled the former’s business worldwide. This film was even more significant in that it featured Essinger’s wife, model Tylyn Mignonne in her first starring role. She had caused a minor sensation and, in the process, created a new career for herself.
The credit “A Léon Essinger Film” above the title began to mean something. He formed his own production company and produced other pictures under his banner. Some were profitable, others were very profitable. For ten years he lived the life of a Hollywood mogul, but it had cost him.
For Léon Essinger had a dark side. There was the cocaine bust that didn’t help his standing in the Hollywood community. He also had a reputation for losing his temper in public, of throwing bottlebreaking fits in restaurants, exhibiting road rage, getting into scuffles, and beating his beautiful wife.
What nonsense, he thought. After Tylyn had left him, a ridiculous story came out that he had hit her!
But it was the special-effects accident that had really turned his life upside down.
He was in the middle of filming his third action picture in Hollywood and had decided to cut costs by using a less-than-adequate scenic material to absorb the heat of explosions on a set. The ensuing accident caused the death of a major Hollywood star and three young extras. The SFX man had been fired but that didn’t keep him from telling the press that he had warned Essinger about the poor protection. A month later, Essinger faced criminal prosecution. In response he did probably the worst thing possible—he fled the States and returned to France. As long as he remained in his native country and continued to work there, he would be fine. But he could never return to America, which was unfortunate.
However, it wasn’t long before he perceived that Hollywood had more or less turned its back on him. He found it more difficult to obtain studio funding. The calls stopped. He had been all but blacklisted by most of the major studios. Essinger had to rely on a small, independent art house, EuroClassics, to finance his last picture and the upcoming one. Unfortunately, he had made a mistake the night he had returned to Paris. Totally drunk and high on cocaine while dining at Maxim’s, he made a deal with Joe Perrin and Craig Weil, two Hollywood fast-talkers who owned a company that made Bmovies and teen horror and sexploitation comedies. They talked him into a contract that basically kept him prisoner to their company for life. He was forbidden to make any other deals.
When Essinger got funding for Tsunami Rising from EuroClassics, Perrin and Weil sued. EuroClassics withheld the money for his next proposed blockbuster, another action film starring international star Stuart Laurence. It was dead in the water until the lawsuit could be settled. Essinger had high hopes for the new picture, for Tsunami Rising, also starring Laurence, was scheduled to premiere at the Cannes Film Festival. Shooting on the new film, a sea epic called Pirate Island, was supposed to begin shortly in Corsica and on the Mediterranean. If production didn’t begin on time, he could stand to lose what little money he had left.
When his wife left him things really began to turn sour. And to think that he had already cast her in Pirate Island! he thought grimly. He wished that he could fire her, but he couldn’t. She was good for the box office.
The waiter asked if there might be anything else. Wilcox ordered a café au lait. Essinger waved the man away.
Essinger hated waiting.
Nine time zones to the west, the sun was not quite shining on Los Angeles. It was a kind of witching hour in the city—when it wasn’t quite dark and wasn’t quite light. It was the time of night when people are at their most vulnerable and unprepared.
The killer from the Bronx known only as Schenkman emerged from his discreet Volkswagen bug at the bottom of the hill where Maltman Street emptied into Sunset Boulevard. Traffic on the streets was light. Practically no one was about this early. Silverlake was unusually quiet.
He walked up the steep pavement, following the street as it curved up and around and met another hilly road called Larissa. Schenkman turned left and walked to the edge of a brown, stucco house that had been built in the thirties. He checked to make sure the two BMWs were parked in the drive, then paused to pull a 9mm Browning High Power from underneath his black leather jacket. Another hand brought out a suppresser seemingly from nowhere and attached it to the semi-automatic.
Light shone through two bedroom windows. Schenkman could hear music through the walls. The party was still going on.
Although they were based in New York, Joe Perrin and Craig Weil were native Hollywood players who kept a two-bedroom hideaway in Silverlake for business purposes. It was nothing fancy, but it was quiet and discreet. They also had flats in London and Paris. The apartments were the perfect havens for script meetings, deal making and orgies. They liked to travel often to get away from their wives.
They had arrived late the night before, immediately called their favorite escort agency, and proceeded to indulge in some serious partying. The festivities had begun around 1:00 in the morning and showed no signs of stopping.
When the buzzer rang, Joe Perrin had just turned over on his back so that the nineteen-year-old hooker could straddle his potbelly and get more leverage to move.
“Who the hell could that be?” he muttered. He called into the other room. “Craig? Are you expecting someone?”
Craig Weil was also in a compromising position. The girl with him was older, probably thirty, not as pretty, but she was definitely more experienced.
What the hell, this isn’t supposed to happen, Weil thought.
“I’m not expectin’ anyone,” Weil shouted back.
“I dunno,” Perrin said.
“Well, go answer it!” Weil shouted.
“You answer it!”
“Like hell I will!”
Perrin cursed and said to the girl, “Sorry, honey, you gotta get off,” and pushed her roughly over on the bed. She said, “Hey!” as he got up, naked, and staggered to the bedroom door. He was quite drunk.
The buzzer sounded again.
“All right, damn it,” Perrin called as he walked through the living room. “Who the hell is it?”
“Urgent legal papers from Europe, sir,” Schenkman called from outside.
“It’s kinda early, ain’t it?” Perrin asked.
“I must have your signature, sir.”
Perrin forgot that he was naked. He cursed again, unlocked the door and threw it open.
Phht!
The bullet caught Perrin in the head, throwing him back into the room.
Schenkman stepped inside.
“Joe?” called Weil from his bedroom. “Who is it?”
Schenkman began moving toward the sound when Perrin’s hooker made an appearance. She took one look at the body on the floor and one at the man with the gun, then began to scream.
Phht! The Browning jerked again and the girl crashed into a glass table covered with half-empty drinks.
Schenkman kept moving toward the other bedroom.
“Joe?”
Schenkman threw open the door in time to catch Craig Weil slipping on a robe. His girl was standing by the bed, lighting a cigarette. When they saw Schenkman, they both opened their mouths in surprise.
Phht! Phht!
The girl slammed against the wall and fell to the floor. Weil spun around and collapsed onto the bed.
The intruder stood there for a few moments as the rock ’n’ roll music coming from the stereo system filled the house. Blood began to seep onto the bed beneath Weil’s body.
Schenkman put away his gun. He then produced a large regulation size bowie knife from a sheath attached to his belt on the left side of his waist and coolly slit Weil’s throat, ear to ear.
Always let ’em know that thi
s was Union business.
Schenkman went back into the living room and did the same thing to Perrin. He then cleaned the knife on the white sofa and returned it to its sheath.
As Schenkman left the house he encountered no one on the street. He walked back to Maltman, down the hill and hopped into his car. The killer drove onto Sunset, headed west and disappeared.
Wilcox’s Ericsson rang. He removed it from his pocket and made a big show of flipping it open.
“Yeah?”
He listened for a few seconds.
“Right.” He snapped it shut and put it back into his pocket.
“You know that lawsuit?” Wilcox asked Essinger.
“Yes?”
“It’s been dropped,” Wilcox said.
Essinger paid the bill and the two men got into the black limousine for the short ride back to the studio. He felt better, but he couldn’t shake the feeling of impending doom.
The car went through the gates of Côte d’Azur Studios and passed the site of the tragic fire that had occurred four months ago. The place had been cleaned up, but the lot was practically deserted. Production had ceased after the disaster. Essinger hoped that it would begin again soon.
They got out of the limo in front of a stately villa that was used for administrative offices. Wilcox followed Essinger inside and into the producer’s office. Essinger went straight to the cabinet and poured himself a double bourbon. He sat at his large glass-top desk and fingered a press packet for Pirate Island while Wilcox helped himself to a glass of vodka. The press packet was full of publicity photos. A gorgeous black and white head shot of Tylyn caught his attention; unconsciously he held it in his hands as he spoke, running his fingers along the edges.
Never Dream Of Dying Page 3