Small roadside altar, or shrine. Figure, carved wood, is of Madonna and Child. No distinguishing features, but probably local workmanship (possibly Bavarian?).
OVERALL
Somewhere Germany, Switzerland, Austria or poss. Haute Savoie. Part of mountain peak background, snow showing.
Before I rang off, I said, “I’ll let you know any change of address. How are things?”
“Some small jobs came up, so I called in Fisk.”
“That’s fine.” Fisk was an ex-policeman who gave me a hand now and then. “That the lot?”
“No. Harvald is coming home at the end of the month on leave.”
I smiled. Harvald was her Suez pilot boy-friend. When he turned up Wilkins took off. A royal command would not have stopped her.
“Don’t worry. If I’m not back, shut up shop or leave it to Fisk. Give Harvald my love. Tell him it’s time he made an honest woman of you.”
There was a snort and the receiver went down at the other end.
I got up from the little table by the window at which I had been speaking and went into the bathroom. As I closed the door behind me, I saw Howard Johnson sitting on the turned down lid of the lavatory seat. He lit a cigarette and grinned at me, no malice showing at all.
I said, “How long have you been here?”
“Idle question.”
I went over to the basin and turned the tap to wash my hands, watching him. “How’s the arm?”
“It wasn’t broken, only badly sprained. It’s almost a hundred per cent now. Interesting talk on the phone with your Wilkins?”
“Yes. Her fiancé is coming back. Means I’ve got to close the office up for a while.” I washed my hands, briefly, watching him, and stepped to the towel rail and picked up a towel. There was nothing I could do about the notes on the slide out by the telephone. And there was nothing I could do for myself, because in addition to the cigarette in his left hand, he was covering me with an automatic in his right.
He said, “All nice and clean now, lover-boy?”
“Sure.” I tossed the towel at the rail and it fell to the ground in a tangle.
“Good,” he said. “Not to worry, though. They haven’t come to a decision on Spiegel yet. I’ve just got a limited set of instructions.”
“We must be thankful for small mercies,” I said.
“That’s the attitude.” He took a step towards me. “Turn round,” he said.
I turned. You can’t make any headway against a force ten blow when you’re in a coracle. He smacked me on the back of the head and I went out like a high-voltage bulb giving up the ghost.
CHAPTER TWELVE
THE BORGIA TOUCH
Casalis took me through the back entrance of 35 Rue du Faubourg St. Honoré and left me alone in an attic room which was being repapered. There were two deal chairs in it, spotted with whitewash from the redecorating of the ceiling. My kind don’t go boldly up the front steps of the Embassy. It gives the place a bad name. Still, I’d come up in the world a little. The last time, I’d been taken through the back entrance of 37 in the same street, which is the Consulate.
I sat and watched a spider wrapping gummy threads around a fly in a web as though he’d just had the idea of inventing a golf ball. I smoked one cigarette and then Manston came in. He was in a cutaway morning coat and striped trousers, soft grey cravat with a pearl-mounted pin, and he looked hot. His hair was still dyed blond, but he was good to see.
He winked at me and said, “What did you think of the Yugoslav wines?”
“Not much. Where’s Sutcliffe?”
“Keeping well away from you to protect his blood pressure.”
I nodded. “You might be interested to know that Howard Johnson paid me a visit at my hotel.”
“What did he get?”
“Nothing.” In fact he’d gone off with my notes on the slide from Wilkins. But I had a good memory.
He looked at me for a long time while he quietly tapped a cigarette on the flat of his gold case.
Then he said understandingly, “All right. What do you want?”
“I’m hired by Malacod to follow Mrs Vadarci and Katerina Saxmann. Then I’m hired by your lot to do the same. I’ve got a feeling that I’m chasing shadows. It makes me uneasy, and slightly unreliable.”
Manston grinned. “That’s what we’re all doing. Chasing shadows.”
“Then I quit.”
“Us and Malacod, or just us?”
“You. If you want a run-of-the-mill tail, get somebody else from the correct category. I’m a big boy with a reasonable I.Q.”
“I sympathize with you. I get the same frustrations.”
“But at a higher level. Either you want me in or you don’t care a damn.”
Manston smiled. “How wise I was to keep Sutcliffe away from you. He doesn’t really understand your type. Not even after all these years.”
“But you do?”
“I think so.”
“So where do we go from here?” I asked.
He studied the tooling on his gold cigarette case and after a moment said, “This thing has a security rating which is used once in a blue moon. You ask the questions – and I’ll decide which to answer.”
I lit a cigarette and saw that the spider was still carefully wrapping up the fly. I knew exactly how the fly felt.
I decided to pitch into the middle and try working out to one end or the other.
“Old Baldy, the cook aboard the Komira?”
“He’s an East Berliner who works for Spiegel’s lot.”
“Spiegel’s lot, and you – you’re all gunning for the same thing?”
“Yes.”
“Why don’t you co-operate?”
He made a wry mouth. “We would if we had any common sense. But that’s a rare quality in State Departments. No trust. Professional pride. We all want to get there first – on our own. Malacod has the same idea.”
“You’re operating against private individuals?”
“Partly.”
“They have political backing?”
“Of a kind.”
“Lead packing-case. What’s inside? The missing Goya?”
He gave me a fractional smile, and then he said, “I suppose you could call it a work of art.”
“Period,” I said. “Well, if that door’s shut, try telling me something about the Siegfried type on the Komira. Scratch golfer, if I know one. And handy with his dukes as they used to say when I read boys’ stories.”
“Well, he’s also first class with foils and sabre. Wimbledon standard tennis, Olympic standard swimming, and a double-first Oxford – but not under any name you could trace. Don’t ever let him back you up into a corner. He’ll kill you laughing and pronounce your requiem in any language you want, including Sanskrit.”
“Stebelson?”
“Small beer. He could be hoping to double-cross Malacod eventually ... if he sees a chance. You guessed this?”
“My nasty mind suggested it. Katerina?”
“She might have the same idea. But she shifts her ground rapidly. My guess is that she’s waiting to decide which is really the big play. Meanwhile, she keeps you coming.”
“I’ll say she does. I’ve just followed a paper chase – big markers, half across Europe, dropped by her. I’m surprised she hasn’t given me a lead to Venice – if that’s where the Komira is going.”
“She hasn’t let you down. She wants you to keep coming.” He fished in his pocket and handed me a cablegram slip.
It read:
Lots of bridges Venice. Love. K.
It was addressed to me at the Hotel Florida, Paris – my old address.
“Long shot,” I said. “She could have missed.”
“There was one waiting for you at the airport. Same message. You just didn’t see your name on the board. And don’t think she didn’t take a chance somewhere to get them off. She’s cold steel in smooth silk.”
“Nice phrase. Sort of nineteen-twenty ring.”
> “That’s when I gave up reading thrillers.”
“So what do you want me to do? Keep coming on the miserable handful of information you’ve dished out?”
“You get two choices. You aren’t going to like one of them.”
He’d got his case out again and was tapping one of his thumbs with it. I knew the gesture. It was as near to showing emotion as he ever came.
“Lay them out.”
He looked straight at me and I didn’t like the long bracket shape of his mouth.
“You’re a bloody fool,” he said. “Generally – about women. Chiefly – about the main chance. This thing is big – and you’re playing around with it.”
“Who, me?” I gave him a big, open-eyed surprised look.
“Cut it out.” The way he said it was like being hit across the face, and coming from him it hurt, hard and lasting.
“I’m going,” I said angrily.
“The only way you go out of here – unless you come clean – is in a box with brass handles.”
I wasn’t angry then. I was scared.
I said, “You mean that?” I didn’t recognize my voice.
“Unless you have something that will drop Sutcliffe’s blood pressure. Get it straight, Carver. It’s out of my hands, unless you come to heel – and damned fast.”
I swallowed what was left of the saliva in my mouth and protested, “You can’t just bloody well bump off unreliable servants. This is the twentieth century.”
He smiled then. “That’s just what makes it easy. Walk out and try it. You won’t get down the first flight of stairs, and there will never be a coroner’s inquest on you. So come clean, quickly.”
“You tell me how. Hell, you can’t mean this!” But I knew he did. It wasn’t his line in jokes. I’d been in far before, searching for the dishonest penny, but never as far as this. My intestines were coiling about like a nest of snakes. He meant it ... grey cravat, pearl pin, striped trousers, popping up here for a few minutes from some reception for an oil sheik. Pardon me, while I ring for someone to put the knife into you – and then back to the champagne diplomacy and the spread of democracy in underdeveloped countries – and the dirty finger sign to any crap about the liberty of the subject.
He said, “I mean every word of it. You’re nothing in this. Absolutely nothing. The thing we’re after is that lead case that was lifted from the Adriatic – and if we don’t get it within the next three weeks all hell is going to break loose. And I mean hell – blue, bloody murdering hell! So start talking – and make it the truth!”
I’d never heard him like this before. I swallowed hard, my throat like a rusty pipe, and I croaked, “But where do I begin?”
“Try Lancing.”
“What about him?”
“He went ashore when the Komira reached Venice to report to SKD. He never made it. He was found in the Grand Canal just below the Rialto bridge with a knife in his back.”
“Poor sod.”
“That isn’t the point. Lancing’s code name was WWK. He put it on the notes you got from him. Only it read WWK/2. Know what that means?”
“No.” I’d never thought about it and it was too late now.
“It meant that there were two enclosures in his message. We got one – the photograph of Lottie Bemans. If you want to stay on your feet and go on working for us – just hand over the other, you mercenary magpie.”
“But—”
“Carver, for Christ’s sake! I’m not fooling. I like you, you know that. That’s why I’m here instead of Sutcliffe. You’re worth more than most of the types we’ve got. But stop playing funny Bs with us. You aren’t going to get a chance to make one extra nickel out of this deal on the side. Hand it over – and go back to work for us and Malacod. Find that lead case. All arrangements as before.”
“Everything forgiven – but not forgotten.”
“Exactly. And you say nothing to Malacod about what you held back. What was it?”
I wanted to get out in the street again, walking, so I kissed the fast buck good-bye, and went all out for frankness.
“It was a colour slide,” I said. “Slightly over-exposed. Lancing thought it might be a clue to the place where the lead case is going.” I went on, describing it for him, and finished, “Wilkins has it. I’ll phone her and tell her to hand it over to whoever you send.” I sat down on the chair, feeling the back of my knees aching as though I’d been on parade at attention for two hours. And I hoped there was not worse to come.
Manston killed that hope at once. “What did Howard Johnson get from your room?”
“Nothing....”
He looked at me, right through me. The chill from his look refrigerated the room.
“Don’t play about with me.”
“All right....” I didn’t want to play with anyone. I just wanted my feet on hard pavement, pitter-pattering towards the nearest large brandy. “He got the notes I took from Wilkins about the slide.”
“Did he?” It sounded like two short sharp funeral knells going.
He walked to the window and looked out, and he said no more for a very long time. Then he came back and right up to me and he said in a frozen, gravelly kind of voice, “Get this straight – because it’s something I never thought I’d do for anyone in my life. You haven’t said what you’ve just said. Johnson got nothing. Nothing.”
“That’s it. Johnson got nothing.”
I was cold all over and felt the size of a worm-cast.
“Good.”
He moved towards the door, paused with his hand on it and said, “If you should run across me anywhere after this, you play the same rules as you did in the bar of the George Cinq.”
I staggered out to the street and tottered to the nearest zinc, and called for a triple cognac. It went down like iced flame and I had another and this time there was a feeble warmth to it, and all the time I was telling myself that the bastards really would have done it, they would have written me off with no regret from anyone except Manston.... Don’t ever let anyone tell you that the Borgia touch has been wiped out in politics.
I had thought that I was going to Herr Malacod with Vérité. But I had a phone call from Stebelson saying he would pick me up at the hotel at a quarter to six. He took me to a block of offices in a turning off the Champs Élysées.
We went up in a private lift to a flat at the top of the building. I was taken into a large sitting-room and through a long run of window I had half Paris lying at my feet. There were a couple of Picassos on the back wall behind me, a sideboard that looked like the tomb of Napoleon to my right, a gilt-legged sofa to my left on which the Empress Josephine had, maybe, curled up comfortably, and under my feet a selection of Persian rugs which most millionaires would have hung on the walls.
Stebelson went to the tomb and fetched me a large brandy while I watched the traffic rat-race up to the Arc de Triomphe. Stebelson had been very quiet and went on that way. But there was no long awkwardness between us for Herr Malacod came in almost at once.
He was dressed for some official government function, I guessed: dark blue knee breeches, white tie, and a red ribbon with some order dangling on it making a broad diagonal across his chest. He looked about knee high to a young grasshopper and I watched him with the same fascination which had taken me at our first meeting ... the domed head, matchstick arms, powder-white face, hooked nose, and the turned down bracket of a mouth with a huge cigar stuck in it. He smiled a greeting at me, and the same tiny miracle happened again, making me ready to put all my trust and faith in him.
He went to the sideboard, stretched up to it, and filled himself a glass of Vichy water.
I sat on the edge of the sofa and he moved the window so that the evening light behind him put his face in shadow.
He said to me, “Are you a member of the British Secret Service?”
I was not altogether surprised at the question.
I said, “No. But I have worked for them on a temporary basis in the past. As a matter o
f fact, they have been in touch with me over this job. They seem interested in it.”
“No doubt. And what have you passed to them?” The smile came again, “It’s all right. I know you must have. I’m well aware of the kind of pressure they can bring.”
“Are you?”
“Yes. I’ve known it myself in the past. If I trusted them completely I should not be employing you. Expediency is the only god they acknowledge: What did you pass to them?”
“Everything I handed to you. Mademoiselle Latour-Mesmin will have reported to you what happened in Yugoslavia.”
He nodded and sipped the Vichy.
At this stage, I thought I might have trouble explaining to him my contact with Lancing. But if it did concern him he wasn’t showing it. Maybe it suited him just then not to embarrass me.
He said, “You know where the Komira has gone?”
I nodded. “Venice. One could have presumed that from Lancing’s notes. But also I’ve had a telegram from there sent by Katerina to my old Paris address. She knows I’m following Mrs Vadarci, and I took the liberty of hinting to her that there might be a substantial payment for her if she helped me to keep on the trail. I hope I did right?”
He nodded.
Somewhere behind me I heard Stebelson help himself to a drink.
I said, “I don’t think she’s likely to pass that information on to Mrs Vadarci, though. In fact I’m sure of it.”
“Why?”
“Because until she knows exactly what Mrs Vadarci intends for her she is giving nothing away. She wants to see what her role is. At the moment – though perhaps she doesn’t know it – I think there’s another candidate in Lottie Bemans.”
He nodded again then, but not the miracle smile. Just a slightly worn businessman’s smile. Then, to my surprise, he said, “They are both candidates for marriage. To the young man you saw on the Komira. Both have been carefully chosen, but I think Katerina will be given the honours. But I am not particularly interested in that. I want to know where she is eventually taken.”
“It will be the same place as the lead packing-case. I’m beginning to have dreams about this case.”
“Weren’t your British friends forthcoming about that?”
The Whip Hand Page 13