Riviera Blues

by Jack Batten

  I switched my gaze upwards. Three estates further down the road, I got a reward. Against the early night sky, I was staring at the shape of an enormous apple. It swelled above the wall like a float at the Rose Bowl Parade, a cedar meticulously clipped into an apple shape complete with a stem at the top.

  A name was embedded in the stone of the wall close to the gate. “Villa Pomme.” On the house side of the gate, there were smaller trees and bushes trimmed in the rounded contours of Spys and Macintoshes and Deliciouses.

  From the road, between the gate’s metal bars, I could see all the signs of folks at home. Three cars were parked in an open space at the end of a short driveway. A large Mercedes, a Jag runabout, and some kind of outsized Japanese Jeep. And lights shone from both floors of the house. I applied a gentle shove to the gate. It had no give.

  I slunk past Mike’s place to the neighbouring mansion. No lights, no cars, no movement. Its gate was wood and had pointy spikes on top, but it was only chest-high. I boosted myself up and over gate and spikes. The house on the property could have been transported from Mecca. It had windows in crescent shapes and roofs like minarets. I trotted around the building and across the grounds to the wooden fence at the far end. The fence was taller, just above my head. I grabbed the top, swung my legs upward, and rolled over. Piece of cake.

  I landed hard. And felt my heart do cartwheels in my chest. I’d come down, none too steadily, on a path that separated me from a long dive into the Mediterranean by no more than a yard and a half. Not such a piece of cake.

  I was on the sea walk Annie had talked about. But she hadn’t talked enough about crucial details like peril and danger and risk to one’s life. By day, it was probably a frisky jaunt. By night, it was for fools and knaves.

  I held my position, feet planted on the path, hands flat on the fence behind me. I waited until my eyes got used to the dimmer lights, until my nerves adjusted to the height. The path, from what I could make out, was manmade in some parts; big chunks of stone were cemented level to the ground. In other parts, it was earth and uneven, easier for goats to stroll than anything two-legged. The path had no railing, nothing between it and a plunge over the side of the cliff to the rocks and sea.

  I looked down. Pretty impressive. In fact, incredibly dramatic. Whitecaps flicked on the surface of the black water that reached way beyond my sight in the direction of Muammar Qaddafi’s kingdom. And it was noisy down there when the waves crashed against the craggy shoreline.

  I turned north. Keeping my right hand on the fence for reassurance, I followed the path’s twists and turns and rises and falls. I crept ahead until the shape of a big apple came back on the skyline.

  Mike Rolland’s fence on the path side was brick and seven feet high. A hardy bush grew out of the path next to the wall. I got a foothold in the bush and jumped for a grip on the wall’s top. Pulling with my hands, pushing with my feet on the bush, I raised my head for a survey of Mike’s domain.

  He had two or three acres. The house was set a couple of hundred yards back from the wall. Between house and wall, there was an expanse of lawn, a swimming pool, and many more bushes and trees a la pomme. The house was white, cube-shaped, and had a lot of sliding glass doors. An architectural cross between Mies van der Rohe and Miami Moderne.

  I dropped over the wall on Mike’s side. Nobody saw me. At least nobody raised an alarm. I ran half the length of the lawn to a Granny Smith replica. I ducked behind it. Still no movement up ahead. The grass was cut as fine as the greens at Pebble Beach.

  I slipped from cover, darted all the way to the swimming pool, picked up a lightweight aluminum chair from the pool side, and raced with it back to the wall. If I had to beat a hasty retreat from Mike’s place, the chair would assist a quick scaling of the wall.

  I made a return dash to the house. Most of the ground floor was visible behind the sliding glass doors. Inside, in a sprawling living room, there were tables, chairs, sofas, lamps, artistic knickknacks, cabinets, rifles mounted on walls, and an air of furnished busyness. The lamps were switched on, but nobody was occupying the chairs and sofas.

  I tried one of the sliding glass doors. Locked. There were doors inside the living room leading to the right. And there was a semicircular staircase built into the wall on the left. It went up to the second floor.

  I stepped back and looked upward. The second floor had two long but narrow balconies. The room behind the balcony on the right was in darkness. On the left, the window streamed out light. I chose the dark one on the right.

  I climbed onto a very large white box, probably a cover for machines that kept the swimming pool heated to Babette’s choice of temperature. Or did she actually go swimming in that string thing of hers? I stood on my toes on the box and locked my hands on the railings around the balcony. I vaulted softly to the floor of the balcony. A vintage Cary Grant vault.

  Another sliding glass door led off the balcony. I tried to open it. No dice. It was locked. What would Cary Grant have done? Easy question. He would have swung over to the next balcony. A swing wasn’t precisely necessary in my case. A mere foot separated the balconies. I stepped across to the lighted balcony.

  Another sliding glass door. It gaped wide open. I peeped in. It was a master bedroom for a master with inflated notions of space. It had about the same dimensions as the parquet floor at Boston Garden. At first, I thought the huge room was empty. The sounds told me I was mistaken. Whimpers and soft moans. They were coming from the far end of the room. Two people were on the bed. Making love.

  At the moment I caught sight of them, they had assumed the female-superior position. The superior female’s buttocks were aimed at me. I pulled my head out of the bedroom. Where did I stand on the topic of voyeurism? Against, for the most part. But this was a special instance. I was engaged in a necessary and dangerous mission.

  I peeped back in. Tan lines ran very close to the crack dividing the two buttocks. They undoubtedly belonged to Babette. I was pleased to record that I had been correct that morning about the absence of cellulite.

  If that was Babette on top, it must be Mike on the bottom. I was probably safe in assuming they would be occupied for the next several minutes. Good manners dictated I should leave them to their sighs and whimpers. I dropped to my hands and knees, and started across the floor to the open bedroom door.

  Broadloom covered the floor, rust-coloured and thick. My progress was silent and as swift as my hands and knees could make it. I encountered obstacles along the way, clothes discarded in haste. Mike’s silver-white pants. Babette’s white dress. Mike’s silver-white shirt. My hand got caught in a garment that was small, white, and silky. I shook it, but it insisted on sticking to my hand. Static-cling maybe. The garment had to be either Mike’s breast-pocket handkerchief or Babette’s knickers. There was no time to dwell on further identification. I crawled ahead with the object, whatever it was, fastened to my hand.

  I got within two crawls of the door when there was much rustling from the bed. I flashed a look. The couple was shifting to the male-superior position. The male was Mike right enough. He didn’t notice me. Neither did Babette. Too absorbed in the task at hand. I crawled into the corridor.

  The small, white, silk garment had stuck with me. I stood up and peeled it off my hand. It was a Babette underthing. The label said it came from a Parisian house of couture, but the designer’s name was universal. Mr. Sexy. And Mr. Sexy wasn’t just kidding. I stuffed the underwear in the pocket of my black windbreaker.

  The stairs were to the left. I tiptoed down them. I heard voices speaking French. Their source was a room beyond the living room. I stayed on tiptoes across the living room’s length. It was fatiguing work, tiptoeing.

  In the middle of the living room, I had an angle view into a section of the kitchen. A squat woman stood at the stove in an apron that trailed to the floor. The lanky Clutch brother with the greying beard sat at a table to the right.
He was talking to someone out of my viewing angle. It didn’t take a Sam Spade to conclude that the squat woman was the cook and that Lanky Clutch was talking across the table to his brother, Stove Clutch.

  The kitchen was off the living room on the street side of the house. I opened the door that led into a room on the swimming pool side. It was Mike’s den. It was dominated by a noble oak desk. Among other objects it dominated were the heads of many stuffed and mounted endangered species. All had their eyes fixed on me. I felt like the fall guy in a Gary Larsen cartoon.

  The centre drawer in the desk was locked. So were the side drawers. No key sat in plain sight. Probably upstairs among the clothing strewn on the rust broadloom.

  There was a letter opener on the desk, silver and slender and as pointy as a needle. I slipped the letter opener into the crack in the centre drawer and flicked at the lock. Two or three slow minutes went by, and I was still flicking. The burglar’s touch eluded me until a pair of events occurred simultaneously. The letter opener broke in two, and the lock on the desk drawer clicked over. I checked the stuffed guys on the walls. They didn’t seem to be interested in my triumph.

  I eased the drawer toward me. Jamie Haddon’s disk, Operation Freeload, waited in one corner like an old friend. I started to jam the disk into my windbreaker pocket, but encountered a problem. Babette’s underwear was taking up most of the pocket space. What to do with the underwear? A calling card maybe? Zorro left a Z wherever he went. The Lone Ranger had silver bullets. With me, it’d be silk panties. I folded the underwear into Mike’s drawer, transferred the disk to my windbreaker pocket, and left the library.

  It was a cinch to release the lock on the sliding glass door in the living room. The principle was the same as on the sliding glass door to the balcony at the apartment on Avenue Denis Semeria. Push a small button under the door’s handle. Pull on the handle. I pushed and pulled. The door opened.

  A loud, insistent bell jangled through the house.

  The damn lock was rigged to an alarm.

  I took off like a sprinter on steroids. My feet skimmed over the ground. Across the patio, around the swimming pool, onto the lawn. Behind me, the clanging bell cancelled out other sounds.

  I risked a look over my shoulder. Upstairs, Babette stepped on to the balcony. Not a stitch on her. The woman had no modesty. Mike Rolland wasn’t in sight. Maybe coitus interruptus didn’t agree with him.

  Downstairs, both Clutches were steaming across the patio. The lanky Clutch, Georges, was in the lead, Emile right on his heels. Neither had impressive velocity. But they had numbers on their side. And a gun. It was in Emile’s hand.

  I scampered across the grass. The aluminum chair waited for me against the wall. Ten yards to go.

  I heard the crack of a gunshot. I heard the whine of a bullet. It seemed to be far over my head. Emile must have fired his pistol. As a marksman, he wasn’t up to the standards of his boss, the Deadeye Dick who had slaughtered half the pheasant population of Scotland.

  Two yards to the chair. I drove into it with my left foot. In the same motion, I brought my right leg up to the wall in a high-jumper’s kick. The chair acted with a trampoline effect. I went up, brushed the top of the wall, and thumped down on the other side.

  It wasn’t a graceful landing. And it wasn’t on my feet. I hit ass-first. But I was on the sea path. And I was in one piece.

  I scrabbled along the path, heading back the way I’d come. I kept moving past the high fence around the mansion from Arabian Nights. It was too close to Mike Rolland’s place to serve as a refuge. Better to put distance between me and the scene of my theft.

  Surefootedness, not speed was the number-one requisite on the sea walk. And considering the darkness, the skitteriness of the path, the prospect of a tumble into the Mediterranean, the possibility of the Clutches on my tail, I wasn’t doing badly at putting my feet in the right places.

  I covered about four hundred yards of path. My bum had a mild kink from its contact with the ground. My breath was coming in wheezes. I stopped to catch some air and check for pursuers. I leaned against a chain link fence on the inner side of the path. I inhaled deeply. My view back was impeded by the path’s route in and out of the face of the cliff.

  I waited. I watched. And I made out the beams of a couple of flashlights bobbing on the path about fifty yards back. The Clutches. My cue to skedaddle.

  I took one more deep breath and felt something clamp down hard and wet on the left shoulder of my windbreaker. I turned my head. I was looking into the crazed eyes of a big, black, fanged, drooling, foul-mouthed dog. Its snout jutted through a space in the chain link fence. It snarled and tugged at the back of my windbreaker.

  “Down, boy,” I whispered. “Nice doggie.”

  Nice doggie? Who did I think I was talking to? Lassie? This beast was from the killer school.

  “Goddamn it,” I snapped, “it’s my good windbreaker.”

  The dog pulled its muzzle back in a ferocious wrench. It slammed my shoulder against the fence. I made my own counter yank. The dog took that as a challenge. It jerked on my windbreaker. I banged backwards into the chain fence again.

  Terrific. I was playing tug-of-war at night on a path over the Mediterranean with a dog whose grandfather had probably worked for the Gestapo.

  I looked down the path. The winking flashlights were twenty yards closer. The Clutches’ progress wasn’t rapid, but it was steady. The tortoises and the hare.

  “Okay, Rover,” I croaked at the dog, “get ready for your best shot.”

  I gathered my forces for one Arnold Schwarzenegger heave. So did the dog. Both of us went at it. I won. It was something of a Pyrrhic victory. I left a chunk of my windbreaker in the dog’s mouth, and I came close to pitching off the cliff. But I had reclaimed my freedom.

  I scooted south on the path. At the same time, the dog broke into piercing yowls. Damn mutt was a sore loser. I took another glance back. The dog’s racket seemed to have spurred on Georges and Emile. The flashlights were dancing ahead at a faster rate.

  I stepped up my pace as much as I dared. The dog switched from yowls to yaps. Maybe the stupid beast would develop laryngitis. I pressed on.

  The path dipped away from the outer edges of the cliff. It turned inland to a stretch where thick bushes grew on either side of the path and where the light was marginally dimmer.

  I stopped.

  Maybe this was the place and moment to mount an ambush.

  I whipped off my belt. The bushes had sturdy little trunks. I looped the belt around the base of one of the sturdiest on the west side of the path. The belt was just long enough to reach across the path’s width. I crouched in the bushes on the east side. I held the belt slack on the ground. I waited.

  Georges and Emile thumped along the path. The winking from the flashlights preceded them. So did the sound of their gasping. The two guys weren’t in tiptop shape for nighttime forays.

  Georges came into my field of vision first. About three feet back, Emile followed. Neither guy was shining his flashlight on the path directly in front. Both were pointing the beams at longer range, probably hoping to catch me in the light up ahead. I couldn’t tell whether Emile had his pistol at the ready.

  Georges was three yards from me, coming at a jerky half-run.

  Two yards. Emile, not quite on Georges’s rear but close enough, had a slightly smoother stride.

  One yard. Georges was almost opposite my crouching spot.

  I yanked on the belt. It jerked off the ground. The taut belt caught Georges above his right ankle. He fell forward. His face made a smacking noise on the path. The flashlight flipped from his hand. It bounced across the ground out of his reach.

  Emile pulled up fast, on his feet, but surprised and off-balance. He had the flashlight in his left hand, the pistol in his right.

  I rose out of the bushes and the darkness. Emile did
n’t see me. He was concentrating on his flattened brother. I threw a right at his unprotected left cheekbone. It landed on target. A jolt of pain shot up my arm. The punch hurt me, but it inflicted more short-term damage on Emile. He crumpled into the bushes on the west side of the path. His flashlight flew somewhere beyond him. His gun dropped on the path at my feet. I kicked it in the same direction the flashlight had taken.

  Georges was pushing himself off the path. He had his back to me. I slammed a Rockport Walker between his shoulder blades. Georges went down again. I stepped over his prostrate form. His flashlight was still shining. It lay a couple of yards along the path. I picked it up. Georges was giving himself another push off the ground. I cracked the flashlight across his nose. He sank back to earth. I hurled the flashlight over the path, over the bushes, over the side of the cliff, into the Mediterranean.

  Georges was groaning. Emile was thrashing in the bushes. Both guys were temporarily on the disabled list. I got my feet churning and headed south again. I was alone on the path.

  Ten minutes further on, around a sharp bend, something tall and slim with a knob on top rose against the sky. My first thought was more topiary. Maybe an ice-cream-cone tree? It wasn’t. It was the old and historic lighthouse. Alongside it, stone stairs branched upwards from the sea walk. I climbed them as far as they went. Where they went was back to the residential streets of Cap Ferrat.

  I chose a short road that bore to the right. It steered me straight at the inevitable wall around the inevitable mansion. Except this wall had a figure carved into it that set a memory tinkling. I moved closer. Two words, “Le Mauresque,” were printed in the wall above the figure. I remembered where I’d seen the figure before. On the jacket of Somerset Maugham’s novels. The mansion behind the wall was the old Maugham place.

  Standing there, I got my bearings. Annie’s map had indicated a street called Avenue Somerset Maugham. It ran down the middle of the cape comfortably east of the street Mike Rolland lived on. I was standing in front of the Maugham house, ergo, I was on the Maugham avenue.