A few large stones had fallen into the trench with me. I chose the two roundest and sent them rolling down the trench. They raised as much dust as my crawling had. While Morel’s eyes would be following that down, I went up.
When I reached my screen of bushes I again slipped out of the trench under them. This time I didn’t pause there. I snaked away to the right, angling upward. On that part of the slope the maquis—the dense conglomeration of stumpy trees and high brush—spread for over forty yards. I kept to its cover until I reached a place where rocky spurs jutted out of the slope. Climbing around the nearest spur, I stopped to scrutinize the area where Morel had last been heard from.
There was no sign of him. I reined in my nerves and kept scanning that area, up and down. Finally I detected a stirring of some bushes there. No wind was blowing. The movement could only be Morel.
It was too far for precision shooting with a handgun. And I still had the same problem. I couldn’t chance killing him. Killing me was his objective. He had a rifle that outranged my weapon, and by then I knew he was too good for me to get close before he knew it. Another notion gone awry.
Another tangle of bushes stirred slightly. Morel was working his way back up toward the road. But I was closer to it than him now. I went the rest of the way swiftly, keeping the spurs of rock between me and Morel.
I pulled myself onto the road and stayed low until I reached my car. Crouching, I went around it to the driver’s side and slid in behind the wheel.
As I gunned away Morel fired again. The bullet pierced my rear window and went out the left side window behind me. The next second I was around another tight bend, out of his line of vision. Those who run away live to connive another day.
Morel’s Audi had little hope of catching my souped-up Peugeot on roads like this. I doubted he’d make the attempt. He’d missed his try here, and, like me, he’d be thinking out alternative methods.
My own drive up into these hills hadn’t been entirely fruitless. I had the Paris license number of that Citroën. And I knew the two men in it had thought they were coming to kill a French traitor. That made them something other than hired hoodlums, which had been a possibility until then.
Near the mountain summit, shortly before the place where the military road ended at the closed-down bunkers, a wide dirt-and-gravel path cut away from it. I drove onto the path, following its curling route over a hump and down another slope. That took me back to route D22, beyond the point where I’d left it, on the other side of the Col de la Madonna.
After that pass through the mountains the D22 begins to descend, via more gradual turns, in the direction of the sea. Seven miles of it brought me to the village of Sainte Agnes, perched on a hilltop at an altitude of two thousand feet and reputedly the highest town in Europe with a view of the sea. Cutting below the village, I drove down to Menton, the last French city before the Italian border. I used its main post office to phone Fritz Donhoff.
* * * *
“Is Reju there?” I asked him.
“Yes,” Fritz told me sourly. “If he is the one you wish to speak to…
“No, I just want to be sure he’s with you. The situation’s likely to get rougher now.”
“If it does,” Fritz said with a heavy sarcasm intended for his temporary bodyguard, “Reju need not fear. I will protect him.”
I gave him the license number of the Citroën from Paris. “Get me something on its owner as soon as you can. I’ll be up there to do the legwork.”
“When are you coming?”
“By this evening,” I told him.
“I’ll have it for you by then.”
I was sure he would. Fritz’s contact in the vehicle control branch of the Paris police enjoyed the magnums of champagne that came his way without fail every Christmas, Easter, and New Year.
Chapter 25
My plane landed at Orly ten minutes after seven that evening. It was still bright day—and hot. A thick heat that made my light chest bandage itch. Morel’s bullet had only grazed me, but risk of infection made it wisest to tolerate the bandage, and the ointment under it, for a couple of days.
I didn’t give my apartment address to the cabdriver. Instead I told him to take me to a parking garage a couple blocks from it.
When you travel by air the difficulty of getting a gun through boarding control can sometimes be a problem for someone in my business. I had left the P7 behind, tucked in its hidden compartment inside the rear seat of the Peugeot. More of Jacques Morel’s people could have the street outside my apartment staked out. I needed another weapon before approaching it.
The taxi carried me into a Paris full of foreigners and half-emptied of Parisians. Two thirds of the shops, restaurants, and cafes were closed for four to six weeks. Summer is when Paris gets the most visitors, so that’s when the city’s merchants could make the most money. That doesn’t matter to them; tradition dictates that they close up and go away. For Parisians, a long midsummer holiday, preferably down on the Riviera, is sacrosanct.
My apartment, and the garage where I kept my car, were near Place Contrescarpe. One of the oldest quarters of Paris, now popular again as a mixed-income family neighborhood. Workers, merchants, and members of the professions. Students from the nearby universities and kids going to local nursery and grade schools. Retired folks regarded as the elders of the community. And the clochards, a small group of Paris bums who still consider Place Contrescarpe home base and are tolerated as a vestige of old traditions.
The garage was on Rue de l’Estrapade, a block behind the Panthéon. My three-year-old Renault 5 was on the third level. I unlocked it but didn’t drive it out. Open-air parking is hard to find before midnight in the narrow streets of that quarter.
I climbed into the rear of the car and reached up under the back seat. As with the Peugeot in the south, I’d rigged a hidden compartment inside it.
This one held a stubby Mauser. A good tight-corner defense weapon. I holstered it under my jacket and slipped a spare ammo clip in my pocket. Then I relocked the Renault and walked the two blocks to Place Contrescarpe carrying my lightweight canvas suitcase.
The adjacent apartments Fritz and I had bought before neighborhood prices went up were in one of the solid restored houses inside a small courtyard half a block from the place, on Rue Lacépède. I checked out the street as I walked through it. Most of the people in sight I knew. None of those I didn’t recognize seemed to be paying undue attention to my address.
The courtyard was inside a tall wooden fence that concealed it from the street. I pressed the buzzer button beside its door. That clicked the lock open and simultaneously turned on two lamps in the courtyard. The lamps operated day and night. By day you didn’t notice their light, but at night it was useful. The courtyard cobbles were uneven—easy to trip on in the dark, especially for women and cowboys with high heels.
I went into the courtyard carrying the suitcase in my left hand, my right free for the Mauser if necessary. It wasn’t necessary. I circled the tall plane tree in the center of the court without incident, entered the house, and climbed the stairs. There was a short landing on the second floor. The door to my apartment was on one side, Fritz Donhoff s on the other. I rang his bell and announced who I was through the door.
Jean-Marie Reju let me in. He was holding a Colt .45 in his long, skinny hand. Not pointing it at me, just holding it. Reju was a rangy man of thirty, wide-shouldered but lean. He wore his sandy hair in a crew cut. Thick glasses made his watchful eyes look tiny. When he was sure that it was me and that nobody else was behind me Reju stood aside so I could enter. He didn’t smile at me, though we’d known each other for some years. I’d never seen him laugh. Life was a deadly serious business for Reju. His only relationships seemed to be with the people he protected. A lonely man, but good at his work. When I was inside he shut and relocked the door. Not until then did he stick the .45 back in his hip holster.
I put down my suitcase and looked at Fritz. He was a big, heavy, dign
ified man with baggy eyes and silvery hair. Seated behind the living room table in a wheeled, leather-padded swivel chair with his injured leg up on a footstool. He looked as neat as always. His trousers were recently pressed, his fresh shirt was buttoned, and his necktie was held just so with a pearl stickpin. He opened his arms with a warm smile of welcome. I went over and bent to hug him.
He thumped me on the back fondly. “Good to see you, my boy, good to see you. Especially after being shut up in here with this zombie.”
“Where are your local ladies?” I asked him.
“Oh, they drop by. But he chases them away.”
Reju frowned at him. “You want them around if somebody starts shooting? Or tosses a bomb?”
“You’re right,” Fritz admitted grudgingly. “If only you weren’t so damn boring.”
Reju was not offended. He acted like a veteran nurse dealing with a cranky patient.
I gestured at the chess game in progress on the table. “Who’s winning?” It was the middle game, and at that point Fritz had lost two pawns to take one of Reju’s knights.
“He’s a terrible player,” Fritz complained.
“So far,” Reju said in that humorless voice, “I’ve won three games to your one.”
“Because you take so long to make each move!” Fritz growled. “It makes me nervous.”
“And you move too quickly,” Reju told him. “Chess requires time to think.” He walked over to the living room window to scan the courtyard below.
I asked when he’d last checked out my apartment. “Fifteen minutes ago,” Reju said, and he walked off through Fritz’s apartment to have a look through the back windows.
Fritz picked his Beretta 92SB pistol off the seat beside him and placed it on the table near the chessboard. I had a gun just like it hidden in my own apartment. I sat down in the chair and asked, “What have you got for me?”
“A number of items. First of all, that Paris license number. The Citroën belongs to Paul Orain. Known in the milieu as the Butterfly, because he has a large tattoo of one on his chest. Known to the police as a professional thug. A contract leg-breaker. Possibly also a killer, though that has never been proved. Definitely a dealer in blanche as well. He’s done time for that.”
Blanche is police argot for heroin. “Did you get a description of him?” I asked Fritz.
“Naturally.” The man he described sounded like the ape who’d driven the Citroën and been killed by the bullet Morel had intended for me.
“This Paul Orain,” Fritz said, “lived in the quarter between the Gare du Nord and Gare de l’Est until a couple years ago. His driver’s license and other papers still have that address. So far I haven’t found anyone who knows where he lives now.”
“He doesn’t,” I told Fritz. “He’s dead.”
“Ah. In that case, people of the milieu will feel freer to discuss him. There is a bar in that quarter popular with the milieu. The couple who own it have been friends of mine a long time. Monique and Eric Barril.”
“I know them and their bar,” I said. “You introduced me to them there about four years ago.”
“So Monique reminded me. Orain used to frequent their place until he moved away, though she and Eric know him only as the Butterfly. She was reluctant to speak about him over the bar’s phone, since it is frequently tapped by the police. As you were due in Paris and they don’t close the bar until three in the morning, I didn’t ask them to come here for a talk. I told Monique to expect you.”
“I’ll drop in around nine-thirty,” I said. “The early evening crowd there has thinned out by then, and the milieu characters haven’t started settling in for the night.”
Jean-Marie Reju came back into the living room, putting on an oversized raincoat that concealed the big, long-barreled Colt on his hip. In his case it wasn’t the police he was hiding it from. Reju was one of the few who could get a carry permit whenever required—without time-wasting red tape—because of his special line of work and his impeccable record with the government’s V.O. department.
“I’m going to take a turn around the block.” He got out one of Fritz’s spare keys and used it, after he went out, to relock the door behind him.
Fritz gazed after him angrily. “Why don’t you send him to protect your mother? She could be in danger, too, if…
“Not necessary. She’s out of the country.” Her second husband was at a shipping conference in Japan, and Babette had gone with him to look at religious artworks in some of the Buddhist monasteries. I asked Fritz, “Nothing on Jacques Morel yet?”
“Very little. It’s puzzling. There is no record of his existence until a few months before he went to work at the Hotel Dhalsten. And nothing since that you don’t already know. He has deep cover from upper level, that is obvious.”
I nodded. “Otherwise there’d be something on him, even if he’s changed his name. Anything new on Serge Lotis?”
“Exactly what we were looking for,” Fritz said. “His secretary checked her office calendar and notebooks for me. A delightful woman. Lotis met with Anne-Marie three months before his couture show. Just three days before he changed all his designs for it. He worked everybody day and night after that to get the collection ready on time. And he had all the designs already prepared for it from the moment he began the changes.”
“Normally,” I said, “a designer comes up with a collection bit by bit, over a long period.”
“His staff thinks some unknown free-lance designer must have come in and sold the entire new line to Lotis.”
“Anne-Marie. Not much question of that anymore.”
“There’s more,” Fritz said. “Last Wednesday, after the meeting with Pilon that upset him so much, Lotis made that long-distance call to Nice.” He got a slip of paper from his pocket.
I looked at the phone number he’d jotted on it. “That’s Anne-Marie’s private line, in her apartment workroom.”
“Lotis called to warn her about Pilon. Legally, he didn’t have too much to worry about—as long as he could persuade her to deny any accusation and say nothing else. He was only in danger if she broke down and admitted selling him Mona Vaillant’s collection.”
Fritz and I never had difficulty communicating. We thought along the same lines. “But his call only frightened her more than she was probably already frightened,” I said. “It scared her into contacting Morel and—”
“How?” Fritz interrupted. “Blackmailers don’t give their addresses and phone numbers to their victims.”
“They do the contacting,” I conceded. “When they want more money. How she got in touch with Morel is one point I don’t have an answer to yet. But the rest fits: Anne-Marie told Morel that Pilon was getting too close to what she’d done. And Morel was forced to do something to blank out that line of inquiry.”
“It may,” Fritz put in, “have been the first Morel knew about her selling those designs to Lotis. A blackmailer doesn’t ask where a victim gets the money.”
“If he had known, he wouldn’t like it. Pirating that whole collection was bound to get her in trouble if Mona launched a professional investigation.”
“So when Morel did learn what she’d done, he got frightened.”
“August Pilon had a tough reputation in our area, Fritz. If he squeezed her, she’d have ended up telling him why she needed the money. And Morel would be in worse trouble than just being charged with blackmail.”
Fritz nodded thoughtfully. “He would be dead. His employers wouldn’t risk his being brought to trial and exposing their illegal operation at the Hotel Dhalsten. As well as exposing that they’d been stupid in their choice of employees.”
“No secret service likes that kind of scandal.”
“Indeed they do not. Cabinet ministers have fallen for less.”
Not only ministers. The SDECE—France’s main foreign intelligence service for thirty-five years—had ceased to exist a few years before because of similar embarrassments.
Fritz said, “That w
ould explain the extreme measures Jacques Morel has resorted to in order to clamp a lid on the situation.”
It did explain it. But it didn’t solve my problem: what to do about it. What Arlette had pointed out remained unchanged. I still didn’t have anything that would get Crow out of prison.
“Are you having dinner with us?” Fritz asked me. “One of the ladies prepared an immense amount of stew.”
“If you’re eating soon.”
“All I have to do is heat it.” Fritz lifted his swollen ankle off the stool and wheeled himself swiftly across the room, propelling the swivel chair with his good foot and keeping the other raised. I followed him to the kitchen. There was a large pot waiting on the stove. Fritz turned on the burner under it and set the flame on low. As he took off the lid and stirred inside with a soup spoon there was a tantalizing aroma of boeuf Bourguignon.
Reju returned from his prowl around the block. When he saw me still there he said, “I can check out your place again if…
“I’ll do it.” I went and picked up my suitcase. As I carried it toward the rear of Fritz’s apartment Reju sat down at the chessboard and told Fritz, “It’s still your move…
* * * *
The back of the clothes closet in Fritz’s bedroom had a secret door to my own bedroom closet. I used it and stood for a few seconds listening. My apartment seemed empty. I put the suitcase on the bed and went through the rest of the rooms with the Mauser ready. It wasn’t needed.
I tucked it back in its holster and put through a call to Gilles in Nice. “Got that stuff I asked for?”
“Photostats of Anne-Marie’s checks and her Visa statements,” he said. “But the rest of the credit firms will take much longer to send their copies. American Express, Diners…
“Send me what you have,” I told him. “I’m in Paris. Arrange for a courier service to bring it up on an early flight tomorrow morning. When you know which flight let me know, and I’ll be at the airport to pick it up.” He already had my apartment number. I told him to leave the message on my answering machine if I was out when he phoned.
Back in the Real World Page 15