Back in the Real World

by Marvin Albert

The farmer told him, “Jacques wouldn’t introduce his friends to you. Anyway, he never brings them up here, and you never go anywhere else. Too lazy to.”

  Antoine looked away from us and sipped his drink, pointedly ignoring our presence again.

  The farmer couldn’t resist needling him further: “Like we were saying, Jacques could’ve built himself a nice new modern house for less than half what he’s spent so far on that chateau of his. And it’s still mostly a ruin.” Not a lover of antiquity, apparently. He went on with it: “Of course, all the people around here doing that restoration work for Jacques are glad to have him back. Glad to see his money.”

  Antoine gulped down the rest of his drink, tossed money on the bar, and stalked out, his face ruddy with suppressed anger. Outside, he turned to the left and vanished from sight, leaving his pickup truck parked out front.

  The farmer laughed softly. “Jacques’s kid cousin. Only relative he’s got left alive, far as I know. Lazy bum. No good for anything except hunting. Used to work sometimes down in Moustiers, when he had to. Now he doesn’t have to. Jacques takes care of him. Pays for his food, clothes, his place here in town. And fixed him up a room in the ruins near the chateau so he can stay up there nights.”

  “Antoine doesn’t get all that for doing nothing,” the barmaid reminded him. “He works for Jacques as his caretaker.”

  The farmer shrugged. “Not much work in a job like that.”

  I looked at my watch, taking note of the exact time.

  The farmer finished his second glass of red. I bought him another, paid for our drinks, and strolled out.

  Chapter 32

  Morel’s cousin Antoine was not in sight. I went to my car and got a few items out of the back, putting them where they’d be handy.

  I was sitting on the front steps of the hotel when Antoine emerged from a narrow passage between two dark stone houses. He saw me but made a show of having no interest in me as he walked quickly back to his pickup truck. He climbed into the cab and drove off, going toward the waterfall at the end of the road.

  I let the truck get farther away before getting into the Peugeot and starting it. When Antoine turned up onto the dirt road I went after him.

  He was halfway up the dirt road when I came onto it. I gunned after him and caught up as he neared the ruins of the original village. Churning clouds of dust, I passed him and then cut over in front of the truck, blocking it. Antoine jammed on the brakes so hard the truck stalled.

  I jumped out of the Peugeot and sprinted back as Antoine twisted around in the seat of the cab, reaching down for something behind it. He was picking up a hunting rifle when I poked the P7 through his open window and stuck it in his ear.

  I said, “Let it go.”

  He let it go.

  I opened his door and stepped back. “Get out.”

  He climbed out, his surly face scared. “What do you want? There’s no money or—”

  “Turn around and put your hands behind your back. Don’t make me wait. If you make me nervous, I’ll shoot you.”

  Antoine turned quickly, hands behind him. From my pocket I took one of the items I’d gotten out of the back of the car. A pair of handcuffs. I locked them on his wrists. Then I said, “Now let’s go up to the chateau.”

  He led the way, climbing awkwardly with his arms pulled behind him. The rockslide had plowed straight through the middle of the original village, flattening most of its houses. Some giant boulders still rested there, rising higher than the ruins. Several houses on either side had escaped the main force of the slide. But neglect and looting over the century since had turned them into wrecks, too.

  One of the smallest houses had a door and windows, as well as a roof. It was the only one that did. That would be for Antoine when he stayed there on guard duty. We went through a space between it and a boulder up to the chateau.

  It had once been a long, majestic structure. The slide had wiped out all of the left wing. But part of the right wing, with its square tower, remained. Restoration work on this section was extensive. New blocks of stone raised the big tower to its original height. It had been roofed with gray slate, and all of its windows were new. The rest of the right wing connecting to the tower was in various stages of repair.

  A gravel driveway led to the last part of this wing, where a wide opening had been cut through a wall. Whatever the function of that part of the chateau had been, it was now being converted into a garage. Antoine led me into it. There was a floor of poured concrete and new rafters, but no roof as yet. It was big enough to take three cars.

  We went through the back of the garage onto a patio of crushed stone and crossed to a house attached to the tower. It was roofed, with shuttered windows and recent masonry work around a stout oak door with two locks.

  “Where are the keys?” I asked Antoine.

  He hesitated, struggling between fear and duty.

  One of the items I’d gotten from the back of the car was a crowbar I’d stuck down through my belt. I tugged it out and said, “I can break in. But if you’re going to make me work like that, I’ll use this on you first.”

  “In my left pants pocket,” Antoine told me.

  I dug a ring of keys from his pocket and found the two that worked the locks. We entered a wide hallway. Its cement floor had been laid in but not covered, the walls plastered but not painted. An interior archway led between a totally modern kitchen and bathroom and then into a vast living room and dining area that took up much of the ground floor of the tower.

  It had been entirely restored and renovated and comfortably furnished. Oriental carpets on the parquet floors, paneled walls, a rebuilt curve of stairway leading to the floor above. I opened the shutters of a wide set of windows on one side to let in the daylight. The windows framed a beautiful view of the waterfall.

  I turned around and looked at the piece of furniture that interested me most: a television set.

  It had a top-brand videocassette player connected to it. But there were no videocassettes in evidence anywhere in the room.

  Until that moment I couldn’t be sure I’d come to the right place. All I’d known was that Jacques Morel had to keep his blackmail ammunition hidden somewhere. Preferably far removed from the Hotel Dhalsten.

  “Your cousin Jacques has a stock of videocassettes here,” I said to Antoine. “Where does he keep them?”

  He said, “I don’t know.”

  I brandished the crowbar, and he squealed, “I don’t know! I swear it! I never saw anything like that!”

  I believed him. Morel wouldn’t trust Antoine with the secret of his prosperity. “He has to have a private storage place,” I said. “Where he keeps things he doesn’t want you or anybody else to touch.”

  Antoine drew a ragged breath, fighting it out in his guts. It was a short fight. He told me, “There’s a cellar room under this one. I’ve never been down there. He keeps it locked all the time. I don’t have a key to that—I swear I don’t.”

  I looked around the living room. “Where’s the door to it?”

  He nodded his head toward the stairway. “Under there. The floor.”

  I lowered the crowbar and went under the stairway. A rug covered the floor there. I flipped it up with my foot. There was a trapdoor with a solid lock.

  I told Antoine to sit on the floor in a corner of the living room, facing the walls. He had trouble lowering himself all the way with his wrists fastened behind him. But finally he settled into place.

  I used the crowbar to break open the locked trapdoor. Getting a flat flashlight from my jacket, I shone it down through the opening. There was a flight of wooden steps, recently installed and unpainted, leading down to what had probably once been part of a small underground crypt. Two steel filing cabinets stood against a wall down there.

  I looked at my watch.

  Then I told Antoine, “I’m going to have a look. If I come up and see you’ve moved, I’ll kill you.”

  He made a sound like a repressed groan. He didn’t
turn his head to look in my direction.

  I went down the steps. The drawers of the cabinets were locked. I broke one open. It was filled with videocassettes.

  Each cassette was neatly labeled, but in a code I couldn’t interpret. I broke open the rest of the drawers. One had more cassettes. The rest were empty—ready to receive future cassettes.

  I carried five cassettes up to the living room. Antoine hadn’t budged from his corner. I turned on the TV and its videocassette player and inserted one of the cassettes.

  I played a short part of it, and then a little of each of the other four. All of the recorded scenes had taken place in what looked like rooms in the Hotel Dhalsten. In some sequences the hotel’s distinctive monogram showed up on bathroom towels or bed covers.

  One involved an often-photographed German industrialist and two striking-looking young hookers, one male, the other female. I didn’t recognize the people in the other scenes I played, but in some one could infer what the participants were from what was said. Like the one in which two officials of an African government discussed how to assassinate their country’s present dictator. But most of the scenes involved misconduct of either a sexual or business nature.

  I had what I’d come for.

  Going into the kitchen, I rummaged through drawers and found a roll of large plastic garbage bags. I took one and went back to the living room, dumped in the five cassettes, climbed down through the trapdoor, and filled the bag with the rest of the cassettes. Carrying it up into the living room, I set it on the floor and looked at my watch again.

  Just over an hour had passed since Antoine had stalked out of the hotel’s bar.

  I took out my gun, walked over to Antoine, and told him to turn around. When he did, I aimed the P7 at his face.

  “What did your cousin Jacques tell you when you called him after you left the bar?”

  He looked up into the dark mouth of the gun, his eyes almost crossing. Weakly, he whispered, “He said for me to get up here with my rifle and keep you away from the house.”

  “Until he got here,” I added.

  Antoine nodded unhappily.

  I helped him to his feet, holding the gun on him while I used my free hand to unlock the cuffs and slip them back in my pocket. Then I took him over to the trapdoor and sent him down the steps into the room under it.

  “Stay quiet down there until I let you out,” I warned him. I closed the trapdoor, dragged over a heavy chest of drawers, and dumped it on top. Antoine wasn’t going anywhere until I came back.

  I picked up the bag of videocassettes and carried it down to my car. Then I drove back to Moustiers.

  * * * *

  In addition to being a center for visitors to the Grand Canyon du Verdon, Moustiers is renowned for its glazed pottery. I bought a cardboard packing carton from one of the pottery houses and stuffed the bag of cassettes in it. Tearing a page from my notebook, I wrote instructions on it, put them inside with the cassettes, and sealed the carton with tape. I wrote the name and address of Denise Berri on the outside of the carton and carried it to the bus park on the edge of the town.

  Denise Berri was an Air-Inter hostess who lived in Nice and flew the airbus shuttle between there and Paris. We’d gotten friendly over the past four years, and we’d lunched together with Fritz Donhoff in Paris when we’d been there at the same time.

  The note inside told her that if I didn’t pick up the carton from her before her next morning’s flight, I wanted her to deliver it to Fritz. He would know how to make use of the cassettes, if I wasn’t around to do it. The note also asked Denise to give the bearer of the carton two hundred francs, which either I or Fritz would repay.

  My timing was good. The tour buses that bring sightseers up from the Riviera to the Grand Canyon of Verdon always stop at Moustiers to give their passengers time to eat and shop. Two of the buses at the park were scheduled to begin their return trip to Nice in half an hour.

  I gave one of the drivers two hundred francs and told him about the other two hundred he’d get when he delivered the carton to Denise Berri. He took the carton from me with a pleased smile. I’d made his day.

  I drove back to the village of Châteauneuf but stopped before reaching the little hotel and turned off the road into a grove of trees. When the car was in far enough so it couldn’t be seen from the road I got out. I walked the rest of the way to the waterfall and up the dirt road, moving fast. The timing was getting close.

  When I reached Antoine’s pickup truck I took out his hunting rifle and checked to make sure it was fully loaded. I carried it with me up to the chateau and inside the tower living room.

  Dragging the chest away, I opened the trapdoor and let Antoine climb out. Then I used the handcuffs again, this time to shackle his wrists to one of the stairway’s balusters.

  “You should be able to break that in an hour or so,” I told him, “if you put all your weight to work on it. However,” I added, “there’s likely to be some shooting around here before long. I wouldn’t advise you to get loose before that’s over.”

  I walked outside and surveyed the terrain around the chateau. Then I looked at my watch.

  Jacques Morel would be showing up soon. Probably with whatever honorable correspondents he had left.

  Chapter 33

  He came shortly after eight that evening. At that time of year it was still full daylight.

  Two other men arrived first. Only two. The attrition rate among Morel’s troops had become fierce lately.

  The two left their car beside the pickup truck and began their climb up the rest of the slope on foot, spreading apart and crouching as they neared the original village, using its ruins and the rockslide to cover their approach. One had a rifle, the other a repeating shotgun.

  They disappeared inside the village ruins, one swinging to his right around the rockslide, the other to the left between the roofless, broken-walled houses.

  Then Jacques Morel appeared, climbing a heavily wooded slope behind the ridge above the chateau. He was carrying his rifle, which had a telescopic sight. When he reached the ridge Morel eased into position between a rock spur and a boulder and stayed there. From there he had a vantage point overlooking all of the slope that held the chateau and the broken village.

  It had been predictable. That was his mode of operation. Send his troops in first to pin down the enemy. Then come in over the high ground, from which he could make sure the job got finished properly.

  His two-man team emerged from the broken village. They advanced slowly up the slope toward the chateau. Keeping well apart, using bushes, rocks, and trees for cover.

  Morel stayed where he was, observing, waiting for his helpers to flush me out or make me reveal my position down there by firing at them.

  I stepped out from behind a jut of rock with Antoine’s rifle, twenty yards to his left, and said, “Morel…

  He could have done the sensible thing: frozen in position and dropped his weapon. But he didn’t. What he did was hurl himself to one side, dropping toward the ground as he twisted to fire at me with his own rifle.

  He was fast. But not that fast.

  I shot him in the chest, dead center. Morel was kicked against the base of the boulder, the force of impact jarring the rifle out of his hands.

  He slid down on his knees and then surged up again, staring at where his rifle had fallen. It lay a few yards from him. Morel tried to go to it. But his legs didn’t have enough left in them for that kind of work. He sagged back against the boulder, bracing himself there to stay up, his hands pressing hard against the place where my bullet had penetrated his chest.

  The two men below had come to a halt. Staying low. Squinting up past the chateau, trying to make out what was happening on the ridge.

  I fired four fast shots down the slope at them, driving them back to better cover. They would start to work their way up again, but slowly, having to find cover all the way. Well before they could reach the ridge I would be gone down that other slope Mor
el had used to come up. Heading back to my car.

  I walked to Jacques Morel. He was sliding down the side of the boulder, sagging to his spread knees. His hands, still pressed against his chest, were wet with blood.

  I gazed down at him, my face so stiff it hurt, thinking of the year of hell he’d given Anne-Marie before finally ending it with two bullets.

  Morel glared up at me with dimming eyes. He tried to say something, but all that came out of his mouth was a froth of pink bubbles.

  “What you didn’t understand,” I told him, “is that I don’t need you alive anymore.”

  I didn’t leave until he was dead.

  Chapter 34

  On the following Monday, at a few minutes before noon, I was on the Rue de la Gendarmerie, across from the main gate of the Nice prison.

  I had plenty of company there. Mostly women, some with children and babies, waiting for afternoon visiting hours so they could go into the prison to see husbands, fathers, sons.

  At noon a door in the gate opened. The families began filing in to visit the prisoners. I stood there waiting for a prisoner to come out.

  It was twenty minutes past noon when Crow emerged.

  Nathalie was at his side, clutching his arm, looking happy but dazed.

  Arlette was on his other side, wearing a puzzled frown.

  They crossed the street to me.

  “The juge d’instruction even apologized to Crow,” Nathalie told me. “He said he’d made an honest mistake, and he hoped we’d forgive any inconvenience he’s caused us. That is actually what he called it—an inconvenience.”

  Crow was squinting at me thoughtfully. “You look tired.”

  I said, “I’ve been working a little too hard.”

  “In a good cause,” he said. And then: “How’d you do it?”

  I shrugged. “Had a heart-to-heart with Escorel. Persuaded him of the error of his ways.”

  “Sure you did.” Crow reached out and put a hand against my chest. “See you, buddy.” Then he put his arm around Nathalie and walked off with her toward her car. Arlette and I stayed behind, watching them go.