“Before Yves went to France,” she rasped, “he came here with this Englishman, this Geoffrey Havill. A big man, but not so big as you. And with a mustache. I do not know who you are, but I know who you are not. If Yves’ brothers were here, they would find out for me soon enough.”
Her hard eyes and the muzzle of the automatic stared at me. Just to be saying something I said: “They ’re not here? Where are they?”
She shrugged her broad shoulders. “Chamonix. We are a loyal family. Yves will not be in prison long. But since his brothers are not here now, I will have to do what they would have done in my place. What is it you want?”
“I told you. The package.”
She laughed. I did not laugh. Her right arm, for all its size, snaked out quickly. The automatic slammed against the side of my head. I had to grab the top of the refrigerator and hold on to keep my feet. My head rang. Blood trickled down past my ear. Madame Piaget stood before me like a mountain with the gun in her hand pointing at me, as if she hadn’t moved.
“This package, what does it contain?” she asked me.
“You mean you haven’t looked?” I asked. I should have kept my big fat mouth shut. Why antagonize her? But I was punchy. She used the barrel of the automatic against the side of my head again. I hugged the refrigerator, telling myself the next time she did it I would make a grab for the gun. But you don’t mess with a loaded automatic, not even in the hands of a woman, and especially not in the hands of a fat woman who was quick and quite indifferent to the blood dripping on the linoleum floor of her kitchen. I began to wish Yves’ three brothers had been around. Maybe their technique would have been more gentle, like pulling out my fingernails. It was going to be a long night.
Again Madame Piaget looked as if she hadn’t moved. “I will ask you only once more,” she said, and then I heard a flat, cracking sound, not very loud, a shot, small-calibre something or other, and the automatic leaped from her hand, hit the floor and skidded under the table while she howled and clutched the fingers of her right hand with the fingers of her left hand.
I swung around slowly and saw Francesca Artemi standing in the doorway. White raincoat, titian hair covered by a white scarf, cornflower-blue eyes narrowed to angry slits, a white leather handbag in her left hand and what looked like a .22 target pistol in her right. It had been an incredible shot, and probably all luck. She’d had to angle it past me and also angle it in such a way so as not to hit anything but the gun in Madame Piaget’s hand. Probably shot from the hip, too, I thought.
“You’re a sight for sore eyes,” I said.
“Get out of my way,” she told me crisply, and the rest of what she said was for Madame Piaget’s ears. Madame Piaget was still nursing her hand. Francesca’s French was too fast for me, and I only caught what she had to say in snatches. She knew Madame Piaget had a can of film that belonged to her, she said. Madame Piaget could keep the can of film, if this was what she really wished. But the can of film meant much to Francesca, more than it did to Madame Piaget, and what Francesca wished was that she would not have to put a bullet, a small bullet that would not bring death swiftly, in each of several of Madame Piaget’s internal organs. “I am a very good shot,” Francesca said. “As you have observed. I think you are a fat, blood-sucking slug on the underbelly of a worm, and whether I shoot you or not is of no importance to me, but I want that film. You have only to answer with one word. Do I get the film? Here and now?” Francesca’s voice had slowed down by then, and gone very soft. She was a talented actress and really living this role. I had no idea whether she was bluffing or not. Sweat beaded Madame Piaget’s upper lip. “Well, you fat old whore of a sow? If you think I am bluffing, all you have to do is say no. Try it. Please, I almost look forward to it. Do I get the film?”
Madame Piaget looked at her. A small shudder moved through that great body. “Yes,” Madame Piaget said.
The can was behind some food staples in the same cabinet where the automatic had been. “Open it,” Francesca said, and Madame Piaget did so. “Hold it up to the light.” Madame Piaget did that too. Francesca squinted up at the film; Madame Piaget looked longingly at the little target pistol, but by then the Magnum was in my hand and she did nothing. Francesca was satisfied with what she saw. “Now shut it. Give it to me.”
Two minutes later I was on Rue Ferdinand Hodler with Francesca. It was still raining. I had Madame Piaget’s automatic to go along with the Magnum. I also had a headache. Francesca had the can of film, the target pistol and an E Jag waiting at the curb.
She clutched my arm. Her fingers were trembling. She pulled my arm against her side. Her whole body was shaking. “Can you drive after what happened to you?” she asked me. “I am suddenly feeling weak.”
“I can drive,” I said. She gave me the keys to the E Jag and we got in. When we roared away from the curb she struck four matches to light one cigarette. It kept bobbing in her mouth. Even her lips were trembling.
Suddenly I knew why the reaction had set in. “Let me see that pistol,” I said.
“Better if you watch your driving. We are weaving.”
“Little old target pistol. Not really a weapon at all. Just one shot, huh?”
“One shot,” Francesca said, “and I do not even have another bullet to reload—not that the big one would have given me time. I told you I had to get this film.”
What she had done to Piaget was in perspective now. We drove to the Quai Gustav Ador. At the curb she told me: “Once again, this makes Francesca feel very expensive.”
“Expansive,” I said.
We were friends again.
chapter seventeen
FRANCESCA WAS SUPINE on the black couch, wearing a languid smile on her lips, which was quickly replaced by a pout when I got up and crossed the cornflower-blue carpet to the telephone stand.
“What is this thing you do?” she asked me.
“Going to make a phone call. I should have made it right away.”
“Could you have?”
I looked at her. “No,” I admitted.
“Then bring us some pernod and come back here. It is as I have said, isn’t it? Making love the only way you should make love, it is like dying a little. We are very fine together. Come die with Francesca a little more.”
But I put the call through to Chamonix while she fetched and donned a cornflower-blue peignoir, lit a cigarette and blew smoke rings in my direction from her pouting lips. After a while she got up, made a couple of pernods and water, and brought me mine.
When a voice identified itself as something or other at the gendarmerie in Chamonix, Francesca’s breasts were softly firm against my back. Her fingertips were tracing small patterns on my chest. “Go away,” I said, not very firmly.
“Monsieur?” the voice from Chamonix asked, surprised.
Francesca laughed; and did not obey my instructions. I asked for M. David, not expecting to find him at the gendarmerie in the middle of the night, but hoping they could tell me where to reach him. He had not been staying at the Savoy. “It’s urgent,” I said. “My name is Drum.”
A moment later I heard M. David’s voice. “Everything happens,” he complained. “Everything, at the wrong time. How can I be expected to attend—”
“Piaget,” I said. “He’s got three brothers. They’re going to Chamonix to spring him.”
M. David sighed. “It would be more accurate for you to use the past tense. They were here. Three hours ago. They struck the gendarmerie like an army. It was after midnight, and who expects trouble in a village gendarmerie after midnight? Three men were on duty, probably playing dominoes and drinking wine. The prisoner was upstairs, wearing a cast from his groin to his ankle. What could he do? Why should they worry?”
“They got away with it?”
“Tear-gas grenades, monsieur. And they were wearing gasmasks. They carried Piaget downstairs. All four are gone. Gone, and a reporter from France Soir witnessed the whole thing. He had been out on the town. His car was ticketed fo
r parking in a blue zone, and he had just come in to complain that he was a member of the press. By morning the world will be calling this village Chicago, not Chamonix. Tear-gas grenades,” M. David said again, dolefully.
“But rest assured, they will be taken. All of them. Inspector Mauriac has called for road blocks, for additional men from Megève and elsewhere. How all this will affect the skiing championships, I hate to contemplate. How—”
Though he hated to contemplate it, he began to contemplate it out loud. I held the receiver away from my ear. His voice rattled on. Francesca took the receiver from my hand, listened a moment and looked a question at me. I nodded. She hung up.
“Piaget’s loose,” I said.
“First Howard Ridgway, now the Genevois. Do you think he’ll return here?”
“His best bet would be to go into hiding, the way Ridgway tried to in Flegère. He’s a fugitive in France, and he’s wanted for questioning on the Douglas Jones murder here in Switzerland. But that three million bucks isn’t going to stay put long, and he’ll know it. Depends on which he values more, his safety or the money.”
“It is now Saturday,” Francesca said philosophically. “Nothing can happen to the money over the weekend, caro. Not until the bank opens on Monday.” Her fingertips traced patterns on my chest again. “Once I have a Spanish lover. He teaches me a very fine toast.” Francesca raised her pernod glass. “‘Salud, dinero y tiempo a gustarlos.’ That means, ‘Health, money and time to enjoy them.’ We have our health, everybody wants the money, and this weekend gives us time. Besides, the toast often ends with, ‘y amor sobre todo.’ That means—”
“That means, ‘and love over all.’”
“Yes, caro” she purred.
She was a dame with a philosophy, but gorgeous. I was a guy who worked alone and spent too many nights alone. But suddenly I was thinking of the client. “Hi there, Axel Spade. Well, we got Francesca’s can of film back for her. Took some doing. See these lumps on my head? See those horns on yours? Not that you’re married yet, but after all the dame is your fiancée.”
It had happened to me before, and would again. It had happened to other guys in my line of work and guys not in my line of work. White hunters have it worst—or maybe best—of all. The husband, red-faced and sweaty and with a pot belly, and not knowing one end of a big-game rifle from the other. The white hunter, cool, lean, sure of himself. A shade too much drink, a shade too much propinquity, a shade too much comparison by the wife, and before the safari wends its happy way back to Nairobi, another notch for the white hunter’s personal rifle.
Casual promiscuity, the mark of the successful bachelor. But the only kind of bachelor who likes living alone is the one who thinks so damn much of himself that anyone else would be superfluous.
“Caro, why so serious?”
“Nothing,” I said.
“A man with a conscience. I like a man with a conscience. I could say we almost the on Flegère, and again tonight the Piaget woman could have shoot us. I could say your life, it is full of danger—and mine, it is not quiet. I could say—very Latin, yes?—we must drink of the cup while we can. But instead I will say what is true. I, Francesca, wish again to go to bed with you. It is simple. It is enough.”
The weekend stretched ahead of us, invitingly. We finished our pernod and waded together across the soft, deep-piled cornflower-blue carpet. Francesca had long legs. Our hips bumped.
chapter eighteen
“MORE COFFEE, caro?”
I nodded. The coffee was delicious.
“I brew it in a Napolitana. Almost as rich as espresso, yes? Many restaurants serve it and call it espresso. Croissants?”
Francesca passed the plate of sweet, cresent-shaped rolls. It was Monday morning, the sky had been washed clear, the drapes were drawn back, and through the window and across the lake I could see the dazzling white ridges of the Jura Mountains.
“Well, one more,” I said. “Time for me to see the client. We’ll have to work out something with Hoffmann at the bank.”
Francesca got up. I followed her lovely and now familiar form to the window. The folds of her peignoir only half hid the contours of her hips and buttocks. She lit a cigarette and stood at the window a long time. I placed my hands on her hips and she shivered slightly. Her own hands covered my hands for an instant, but then she stiffened and drew my hands away and turned to face me. She looked beautiful but very grave. Her eyes wouldn’t meet mine.
“The weekend,” she said, her voice flat, “it was wonderful.” She blew smoke past my left ear. “But caro, you will not have to see Hoffmann at the bank.”
I just looked at her and waited. “Why must life be so complicated?” she asked me after a while. “I like you very much, caro. I want you to like me.”
“That’s easy,” I said.
“Yes?” Her slight smile mocked both of us. “Now, in a moment, you are going to hate me. But still I want you to hear this from me. I think—”
“Hear what from you?”
She turned to stub her cigarette out in an ashtray on the window sill. Silhouetted against the bright daylight outside I could see the high curving contour of her breasts through the peignoir. “Axel, he knew you were here. He tell me to do this.” She walked to the cocktail table and finished her coffee standing up. “What does that make me in your eyes, caro? Some kind of whore? But I like it, I like this weekend with you.”
After that she was silent. “Let’s hear the rest of it,” I said.
Francesca sighed. “On Friday Howard Ridgway sees Axel.”
“Here in Geneva?”
“Yes. He tells Axel if he is captured, the crime it is now worse than embezzlement. In France it is attempted murder. For how he tries to kill you and me above Flegère. But not Howard Ridgway alone, caro. Helen, too. Axel Spade’s daughter. She is as guilty as he is. They must escape together. If they are taken, if you are called on to testify—”
“Spade swallowed that?”
“More. Helen, she will walk into the Union Bank Suisse on Saturday, Howard tells Axel, she will see Hoffmann. She will make arrangements regarding the money.”
“The bank’s closed on Saturday.”
“For normal transactions. But for numbered accounts, for more than thirteen million Swiss francs, the bank is open every day, twenty-four hours a day. Helen saw Hoffmann on Saturday.”
“And got the money?”
Francesca shrugged. “What else could Axel do? Ridgway had him, how you say, over a barrel.”
“Now he’s got himself over one. What does he do next, help them flee the country?”
“But of course,” Francesca nodded. “He must do that, too. If they are captured, it is as I have said: Helen is implicated in a crime worse than embezzlement.”
I looked at her. “Why the hell didn’t Spade just tell me my services no longer were required?”
“Would that have stopped you?” Francesca smiled.
“I don’t know,” I admitted.
“The weekend, did you find it painful?” Her eyes met mine for the first time.
“Sure,” I said. “Every minute of it hurt.”
Francesca laughed throatily. I didn’t laugh.
“Well, I just want you to know. From me, caro.”
There was a silence. Her hands closed on my biceps. She gazed up at me. “I want you to love me once more. Now. After you know. So you will also know Francesca is sorry this had to happen the way it happened—but glad for the weekend.”
“Okay,” I said. “Where do I put the money, on the cocktail table?”
She slapped my face, not hard. Tears sprang to her eyes. I got my trenchcoat and headed for the door and shut it behind me without looking back.
Axel Spade said: “Very well, you know. I regret that Francesca had to tell you. But what else could I have done?”
“Maybe there’s something else you’ll have to do now,” I suggested, “Maybe I’m here for the payoff.”
He missed the sarcas
m in my voice. Reaching into a drawer of his desk he came up with a checkbook. “How much? Or would you prefer cash?”
“Shove it,” I said. “A beautiful woman and a rich man. She offers me her body and you offer me your checkbook. Life’s simple for a woman if she’s got looks or a man if he’s got money. Does she lay for the cops when they pick her up for complicity in Ridgway’s escape? Do you give them a check?”
“I can understand your bitterness. Will you go to the police?”
“Why shouldn’t I?” I said. He reached for the checkbook again. With an angry gesture I. shoved it off the desk.
“I want Howard Ridgway,” I said. “He made me dig a hole in the snow, and Francesca. When it was deep enough, he was going to shoot us in the back. When that didn’t work and it looked like the jig was up for him, because Piaget and Geoffrey Havill popped up in their helicopter, he took a pot-shot at Helen to get at Havill. He’ll make her a great husband, Mr. Spade. If she overcooks their breakfast eggs he’ll probably throw the plate at her. Unless he’s got a knife handy.”
He ignored my diatribe. “Then if you don’t want money, what do you want?”
“I told you. Ridgway. Where are they?”
He shook his head.
“And what happens to you if they’re picked up despite your best efforts to spirit them away somewhere?”
“I’ll take my chances. I must.” He lit a cigar and glared at it the way he had done the first time I met him. “What will you do?”
“Hell, I’m finished here. What difference does it make to you?”
“I wish to pay you for how you helped Francesca. The films.”
“I was up to my ears in trouble. Francesca didn’t need any help from me. I still don’t want your dough.”
“You will leave Switzerland? Soon?”
He was still worried I’d go to the police with what I knew. I was angry enough to see no reason to get him off ‘that imaginary hook. I grinned. “Maybe I’ll take another look in at Chamonix. The championships started yesterday.” Chamonix was where I could implicate Helen in attempted murder. He knew that. He said nothing. I said nothing more.
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