The Whip Hand

by Victor Canning

  Raincoat said, “You’ll be met the other end and they’ve fixed a room for you. Hotels are out.”

  I did not like the sound of that. I said, “I was jumped by a couple of five-star bastards last night.”

  “I know,” he said calmly. “We watched.”

  “Thanks.”

  “What did they get?”

  “The Paris address.”

  “That’s what we thought.”

  “You going to kick up a fuss when I claim for a cigarette burn in the collar of my suit?”

  He yawned a little, but said nothing.

  The plane was half-empty. The air hostess was pretty, but had no conversation, so I had a large dry martini and went to sleep.

  At Le Bourget I was picked up by a man called Robert Casalis. He was a youthful looking forty, but a shade overblown with muscular fat, the way some ex-rowing men get, and fair-haired, with honest brown eyes which I knew nothing in the world could possibly shock. I’d met him once before, briefly, with Manston. He was no raincoat number. He was out of a much higher security bracket.

  He drove me to a flat near the Palais Royal and tossed the key to me when we were in the sitting-room.

  “I don’t imagine you’ll be here long. But it’s all yours while you are. Grub in the kitchen. Everything works. We’ve booked a room in your name at the Hotel Florida, a two-star place on the Boulevard Malesherbes – in case anyone asks you for an address. Any messages left for you there I’ll pass when I ring you at eight each morning. I got some whisky in for you.” As he moved to the door, he added, “There’s no law against it, but I wouldn’t bring any visitors up here unless it’s an emergency. And if you get unwelcome ones, the place is entirely soundproof.”

  I nodded, and said without hope of an honest reply, “Where’s Manston these days?”

  “God knows, and there’s nothing more top secret than that rating. But I’ve no doubt he’s enjoying himself in that quiet country gentleman way of his. Cheerio.”

  He was gone.

  I took a shower. It was June and hot and sticky. I put on a nice, sober suit and went out. I bought six pairs of pants at a Monoprix and then went and sat in a quiet corner of the lounge of the Hotel George V, nursing my parcel and watching the world go by. I had three hours before my appointment.

  They came in after about half an hour, and from the look of them I knew that they had been shopping, probably in the Rue de Rivoli. They were discreetly festooned with those slim, flat carriers and tiny square parcels that you could crook easily on a little finger. Katerina was wearing an inconspicuous suit that obviously had cost the earth, and a hat that held every eye in the lounge. She had suddenly jumped right out of the Brighton ton-up mob into another world ... the glossy, cosmopolitan crowd which was always wondering where it could go and play next. The elderly woman with her looked as though she dressed herself from a junk shop – except that a closer look showed that it was all good.

  Mrs Vadarci had a black felt hat, rather like the jobs Roman Catholic priests wear, perched right on top of a mass of closely-curled red hair. She had a square, almost mannish face, all dewlaps and wrinkles, and under a pair of shabby brows were set a pair of bright blue eyes. She wore some kind of green, slightly old-fashioned summer dress that drooped around her like a theatre curtain, all fringes and loops with a suggestion of dust in the creases. A plump strip of pearls cascaded over an enormous bosom, and she held in her right hand a long ivory-topped black ebony cane. She looked a comfortable old biddy, but there was a feeling about her that announced quite clearly that, when she wanted, she could be as tough as old boots. I got every word of her instructions to the hotel clerk to get someone out quickly to pay off her cabby. She beat time to her instructions with the tip of her cane on the floor. As she made for the lifts with Katerina she looked like some formidable old duenna trailing the Infanta of Spain behind her. If I had known how near I was to the truth then, I might have considered taking the next plane back to London.

  As they went into the lift Katerina turned and saw me. She looked straight at me and just for a moment there was the faintest smile of recognition on her lips.

  I gave her half an hour after that while I tried out my French on a copy of Paris-Soir. She came down just as I was deciding to give it up.

  She came straight over and sat down beside me, and with a warm, little gesture, which hauled me right back into the magic circle again, she took one of my hands and fondled it.

  “Darling,” she said, “how wunderbar. But I can only stay for a few seconds. Mrs Vadarci would be furious.”

  “What is she? A jailer?”

  “No. But one of the conditions of my engagement is that I don’t have ... how do you say it?”

  “Followers? That’s me, all right.”

  “So when I am with her, you must not expect me to recognize you.”

  “All right, but there’s a hell of a lot I want to talk to you about.”

  “You want my answer, no. But you could have telephoned me.”

  “Your answer? Oh, yes. Sure I want that. But there’s much more than that. Look, I’ve got to talk to you.”

  She smiled, leaned forward and kissed me lightly on the cheek. “Where you stay?”

  “Hotel Florida.”

  “I will work something out and let you know. Right now I have to go back. She waits for me to rub her shoulder blades.”

  “Do what?”

  “She has fibrositis. I rub her, each morning, afternoon and evening. You know I am a trained Swedish masseuse?”

  I said, “I can’t wait to stand in a good draught and get fibrositis. Do people only get it in the shoulder blades?”

  “Rex, darling ... naughty.” She stood up and was away.

  There was nothing I could do. I just sat, enchanted, watching her beautiful back and legs, and the sharp flick of ankles moving away from me. I did not believe for a moment that she was a trained masseuse. I had met quite a few congenital liars, men and women, but I’d never fallen in love with one before.

  I went back to the flat, changed, and had a large whisky. Then I went down and got a taxi. We fought and hooted our way through the evening traffic up towards the Arc de Triomphe with the Le Chasseur rubbing gently against my lower left ribs, and myself wondering why the hell I was wearing it.

  It was a small grocer’s shop right at the far end of the Avenue de la Grande Armée, on the Porte Maillot, with the green trees and worn grass of the Bois de Boulogne just around the corner. I walked the last hundred yards to it, and if the place were being watched or I were being followed, I couldn’t tell.

  The place was badly lit and there was a pleasant smell of coffee grinding. There was a big advertisement runner for Suchard chocolates on one wall, a box of artichokes propped against the counter, and no room to swing a cat. An elderly, apple-cheeked woman, her black hair done in a bun on top of her head, was listening to a radio transmission of hot music. She turned it down a few decibels as I faced her. It still meant I had to shout.

  “Monsieur Stebelson?”

  She nodded, smiled, turned the volume up and flicked a finger to a glass-panelled door beyond the counter.

  I went through into a sitting-room as crowded and as badly lit as the shop. Stebelson had his back to a window that looked out on to a small courtyard. He wore a black homburg and a light grey summer coat and smoked a cigar.

  The plastic eyes went over me in the briefest of kit inspections and then he held out his hand. It felt like limp, synthetic rubber.

  “Good,” he said. “Come with me.”

  He turned and went out through a door into the courtyard. I followed. He took me on a quick tour of courtyards, alleyways and back passages. Then we were out in a small street and he was opening the door of a car for me. I tried to follow the route for a time. In London I could have held my own with the best taxi-driver, but Paris beat me. We ran south along the edge of the Bois for some time, then took a left-hand turn back into the maze of streets behind the Avenue
Victor Hugo and after that I was lost.

  “Neat,” I said. “If anyone was following you must have shaken them.”

  He nodded but said nothing.

  We finished up eventually in a narrow back street whose name I couldn’t get as we swung into it. There was a blue door with the number eight on it. We went through, across a small garden, and into a dark little hall. There was a service lift. Stebelson swung the grille back and waved me inside.

  “You go up by yourself,” he said. “The fourth floor. You will be met.”

  I went up alone. When I stepped out on the fourth floor a girl was waiting for me.

  She said, “Monsieur Carver?”

  I nodded, and she turned and began to lead me down a carpeted corridor. She was a tall, thin girl, the kind that can make a cheap dress look like a Jacques Fath number. Her hair was smooth ebony, and there was a sort of noli me tangere air about her.

  She knocked on a door, pushed it open, and beckoned me in with a nice movement of hand and arm. I went in and she followed me. It was an office with a big, antique desk affair, all gold leather and ormolu legs and bits of carving, and a shaded green light above it. Behind it sat what must have been one of the tiniest men in the world. He had a powder-white face, a hooked nose, a thin mouth like a turned down bracket, sad grey eyes, and two irregular patches of grey fuzz flanking the lower slopes of a sharply pointed bald head. He wore a dinner jacket, and to get his elbows on the desk he must have been sitting on a couple of cushions. He had a huge cigar in one corner of his mouth and I began to worry that the weight of it would snap his thin neck in half.

  He pointed a brittle finger at a chair and I sat down, wondering how he had managed to survive from Sax Rohmer days. Somewhere there had to be an octopus tank. The girl sat down somewhere behind me and ruffled the pages of a notebook. The sound was reassuring.

  In a lightweight voice that went with his size, he said, “It is nice of you to come, Mr Carver, and I shall try to be as direct with you as I possibly can. My name is Avraam Malacod, I understand from Stebelson that you have certain reservations about accepting this commission?”

  “I’d just like to have some working idea of what I’m getting into. Stebelson, I take it, is your agent?”

  “Yes.”

  He looked hard at me then, and he went on looking, and it was hard to say whether he was waiting for me to speak or whether he was making up his mind about something. I decided for the latter, and waited. After a moment or two he took the cigar from his mouth and laid it gently on a silver tray. Then he smiled and a tiny miracle happened. He was no longer grotesque. It was a heartening smile that I’d have taken odds could be trusted from Paris to Timbuktu. Perhaps he sensed the moment of confidence in me, perhaps he knew all about the effect of that smile on people ... anyway, he spoke.

  He said, “Before you came, Mr Carver, I had made up my mind to lie to you. Not because I wanted to use you to accomplish anything illegal for me ... but simply because this matter is of great importance to me and many other people. Quite simply I was going to give you some story ... fabricated of course ... that would satisfy you and ensure that you continued in my service. However, I have now changed my mind.”

  “In the last three minutes?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  I got the smile again.

  “When you leave here, Mr Carver, you know my name. You can make inquiries about me and you will know what kind of man I am. One of the factors which have made me what I am is an ability to judge men quickly. You have been judged.”

  I liked the way he said it. Somehow it made me feel good. I liked the way he spoke, too, in his soft, gently modulated English, no mother tongue obviously, but for him something not to be abused.

  “And what does the judgement mean, Mr Malacod? That I get the truth? Or that you are going to ask me to work for you in the dark and rely on your good faith?”

  “The truth,” he said, picking up his cigar, “cannot be told yet. But I have no wish to deal in lies. So, I am going to ask you to work for me and be content with the knowledge that, when you know the truth, as you will eventually, you will concede that I am a man of good faith.”

  I smiled. “It’s a lot to ask. Faith in human nature wears very thin in my profession.”

  “In all professions. But this is the way I would prefer it to be between us. You can make your own terms about payment. After all, faith should be rewarded.” He smiled, but it was a different one this time, worldly, acknowledging that people have to eat, drink and pay bills. “And in return, all I ask is that you follow Mrs Vadarci and this girl, Katerina. Just follow them, and report their movements to me?”

  “Who is this Mrs Vadarci?”

  “Someone who intends to use Katerina Saxmann – though the girl doesn’t know this at the moment. What I want to know is how and where.”

  “And you just want me to follow them?”

  “Yes. Eventually, they will settle down somewhere. And I can tell you that it will be somewhere remote. Not the kind of place where visitors will be welcomed.”

  “I’m sure you want this done discreetly – but Katerina knows me. If I follow her around she’s going to say something about it to Mrs Vadarci.”

  His smile was the worldly one again.

  “I think not – if you handle her correctly. She’s an unusual girl. An expert in using people, I understand. You shouldn’t find it difficult to come to some arrangement with her. A financial one if necessary. All I insist on is that Mrs Vadarci doesn’t know she’s being followed. Well?” He lobbed the last word at me, and I knew that I was going to get no more from him.

  I heard the notebook pages flip behind me and knew that she was making a record of the conversation. What was I to do? I had trusted people before and it had usually finished by increasing my overdraft. But there was something about this tiny figure with its domed head and matchstick arms, about the smile, and the soft voice, that impressed me, rang the hidden bell inside which signals only when genuine contact is made.

  Like a fool, charmed, ensnared, I said, “All right, I accept the terms.”

  He nodded, and said, “Good. And thank you for your confidence in me.”

  I said, “What about the details? Reporting to you and so on? I’ve a feeling I shall be travelling around.”

  “Quite, Mr Carver. And naturally, you don’t want to be encumbered with administrative details. Madame Latour-Mesmin will accompany you and handle all your reports, and deal with all your travel and hotel arrangements. From now on you may call on her for any duties you consider necessary.”

  I turned then and looked at her. Latour-Mesmin. It was a hell of a name. She looked up briefly from her notebook. It was one of those long oval faces with big brown eyes that most of the time say nothing in a kind of dumb spaniel way, an attractive face, but without a great deal of life in it, though I got the feeling that at some time there had been a great deal of life there until she had decided against it.

  “But I may not want her with me all the time,” I said.

  “Then, you tell her where to stay, what to do until you do want her. She’s entirely at your disposal, and will send your reports either to me or to Herr Stebelson.”

  And that was that. I walked back down the corridor behind her, wondering just how far out of my depth I was. She pressed the lift push and, as we waited, I said, “I can’t go around saying Latour-Mesmin. It sounds like a bottle of Burgundy. What comes in front of it?”

  “Vérité,” she said.

  “We seem to be a little short on that around here,” I said, but I got no smile from her. She handed me a sheet from her notebook on which she had written an address and telephone number.

  She said, “Where can I get in touch with you?”

  I hesitated for a moment and then said, “Well, I’m wandering round a bit. That’s how Paris takes me. But you can always leave a message at the Hotel Florida.”

  The lift clanked to a stop, and she put o
ut a hand to pull the grille back for me. I stepped in, turned and put my foot down so that the door could not close.

  I said, “You approve of this arrangement, Vérité?”

  “I approve of all Herr Malacod’s instructions.”

  “You do? Even the bit about any duties I may consider necessary and being entirely at my disposal?”

  All I wanted was either a smile or a flicker of anger in the deep brown eyes. All I got was a ten degree drop in temperature as the ice-age closed in.

  I went down and the last thing I saw of her was a pair of neat black shoes, nylon ankles, and the toe of the right shoe tapping with either impatience or boredom.

  Stebelson and the car had gone. I strolled round the corner and found myself on the Seine side, the Avenue de Tokio to be exact. I got a taxi back to the flat, had a couple of whiskies, made myself an omelette, and went to bed just as Paris began to wake up for the night. What I should have done, of course, was to have called up Vérité Latour-Mesmin and taken her to a night club. It would have been a riot.

  *

  I woke at three o’clock. I knew it was three because as I lay there I heard the chimes go from a couple of church clocks somewhere. And as the last bong went, his shadow slid smoothly between me and the window. I heard the bathroom door sigh open, the handle held first against the flick of the catch, and then gently eased back. He did it nicely, professionally, and one had to be awake to hear it.