Shah-Mak

by Alan Williams

  He was afraid, for a moment, that he was going to be engaged in conversation. He drank his coffee, called for the bill; but when he glanced across, he saw the man intent on the paper, studying the financial page. He was a thin bony man, middle-aged, in a white shirt, shorts, plimsolls, and one of those caps with a flap over the neck which racing cyclists wear. He looked up only when Packer had settled his bill.

  ‘Monsieur, your newspaper.’

  Packer gave him a nod. ‘That’s all right, you can have it. I’ve read it.’ He felt vaguely puzzled as he walked out of the restaurant, and as he waited for the bus he felt a distinct unease. Something about the man — that absurd costume, perhaps?

  He found a seat at the back of the bus and slept almost into Béziers, waking with a stiff neck and a headache. The afternoon had grown prematurely dark, with the sullen smell of an approaching storm. Gusts of wind swept along the pavements. Across the street was a big hoarding advertising bonds in some industrial development.

  It was as though an electric current had passed through him. Christ, what a fool I’ve been! he thought. The financial pages, of course! It was so obvious that it might have been a sign. A sign of what? For him to make the first move, perhaps?

  The first drops of rain were splashing on the pavement and he began to run. He reached the Post Office just as the storm broke. At the Poste Restante counter, he heard the rain drumming against the windows.

  Both the morning and afternoon clerks knew him well enough by now not to ask for his passport, although he always carried it. The clerk was a waspish little man who gave a now familiar shrug. ‘Rien?’ asked Packer.

  ‘Rien.’

  Packer nodded and turned away. The marble hall was now full of the boom and sizzle of rain, and a crowd had come in for shelter. Packer stopped halfway across the floor and stood looking at a row of telephone kiosks marked ‘Internationaux’; then suddenly walked up to the woman at the desk and asked how long it would take to call London.

  ‘Not long,’ she replied.

  Packer wrote out the number of the Bond Street gallery where Sarah worked. The woman told him to go into the second cabin. It had a glass door and a mirror in which he watched the wet waiting crowd.

  The phone buzzed and he hesitated before lifting the receiver. A chirpy English voice said, ‘Rohmar and Mayhew.’

  ‘Miss Laval-Smith, please. Tell her it’s urgent, I’m calling from France.’

  ‘I’m sorry, sir. Miss Laval-Smith is no longer with us.’

  He didn’t even thank her; hung up and stumbled out of the cabin, bumped into somebody, growled an apology, and felt a hand on his arm.

  ‘It is I who should excuse myself — Monsieur Packer.’

  The man was very wet. His T-shirt and shorts were sodden grey and the flaps of his cyclist’s cap dripped down his neck. ‘I think it better that I introduce myself somewhere quieter. There is a café at the corner — if you don’t mind the rain?’ He was already guiding Packer towards the entrance.

  ‘You’ve been following me,’ Packer said, stopping just inside the door.

  ‘I have been following you for a week — although I prefer the expression “chaperoning”.’ As he spoke, Packer caught the gleam of gold teeth.

  ‘But why wait until now?’

  ‘I was waiting to see if you had unexpected company in Béziers. I also came to collect my telegram.’

  ‘What telegram?’

  ‘Come, we can talk better in the café.’ And he led Packer at a dog-trot out into the rain.

  Packer spread out the pale blue slip on the table and read the teleprinted message: BRT XL 9500/4/6 FRIENDS HAVE NOT YET ARRIVED BUT THE PARTY READY TO BEGIN — STOP — COLLEAGUE TO PROCEED AS ARRANGED — STOP — INFORM HIM PLEASANT SURPRISE AWAITING — GUIGNOL.

  Packer turned the telegram over and reread the name on the front. ‘He should have signed himself “Grand Guignol”. Or am I guessing, Monsieur Sully?’

  ‘You have guessed correctly. He is certainly fat enough!’ The man smiled over his coffee, which he had ordered for both of them — having no doubt observed Packer’s drinking habits. He had removed his white cap when he came in, and his toupee was less conspicuous now that his hair was lying flat.

  Packer turned the telegram over again and tapped the first letters of the message. ‘BRT — Beirut. Yes?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And “friends” means certain foreign gentlemen who might be less than friendly?’

  ‘Precisely. A stupid euphemism but — like many stupid tricks in our trade — it is often effective.’

  ‘And what are the arrangements, Monsieur Sully?’

  ‘You will take this evening’s train to Marseilles, and the overnight express to Paris, where you will leave tomorrow morning by Air France from Charles de Gaulle Airport for Beirut. I will deliver the tickets to your hotel before five o’clock.’

  ‘I’ll need a visa for the Lebanon.’

  ‘You will receive a twenty-four-hour transit visa on your arrival at Beirut Airport. After that, matters have been taken care of.’

  Packer looked again at the telegram. ‘And what’s the pleasant surprise awaiting me?’

  ‘That, Monsieur Guignol did not tell me.’

  Packer sipped his coffee in silence. He felt the dawning of a fearful excitement. ‘Who are you, Monsieur Sully?’

  ‘It is not necessary that you know.’

  ‘It is necessary.’

  The man shrugged. ‘As you may have guessed, I am an old friend and colleague of our mutual acquaintance with the beard. We met during the war. Since then our paths have somewhat diverged. But whenever possible I render our friend what services I can.’

  Packer nodded. ‘Meaning one of the French Government Services? And you put in a bit of overtime for an international crook? Must get risky sometimes. Either Charles Pol has got a pretty big hook into you — or else he’s keeping you sweet with something tasty, like a nice Swiss bank account?’

  Monsieur Sully gave his gilt-edged smile. ‘It is more simple than that. He saved my life during the war — twice. Now, finish your coffee and I suggest you return to your hotel.’ He stood up. ‘Someone else will deliver the tickets to the desk. I shall not see you again. Adieu.’

  They shook hands across the table. Packer turned and walked out into the street, which had turned into a canal blistered by the slashing rain. He put up his collar and began to run.

  CHAPTER 28

  The car seemed to set a new tone and style, even after the private sleeper to Paris and the first-class flight to Beirut, where Packer’s clearance through Customs and Immigration had seemed less a formality than a privilege.

  It was a midnight-blue Mercedes 600 SL, with a glass partition between him and the driver. The windows were closed and he tasted the chill tang of air-conditioning. The driver — who appeared to be symmetrically oblong from his shoulders to his ankles, with a neck as thick as his head — had greeted him at the gate without a word and carried his case to the car.

  After leaving the airport they had turned off the main highway into the city and followed an unmade road which skirted an automobile cemetery — a vast wasteland littered with the carcasses of taxis, trucks, cars, buses and military vehicles, all in various stages of decomposition. Their speed increased as they reached the edges of the shanty town — a sprawl of huts that looked like bits of broken biscuits, propped up with oil-drums and strips of corrugated iron. Through the shimmering midday heat, the only colour came from the slogan and political posters, which were uniformly red. The driver was using his horn continuously, executing a skilful slalom between donkeys, pushcarts, stray children, static beggars, and the occasional armoured car with its hatch shut. Through the window Packer caught fleeting faces turned to watch them, their eyes button-black with hatred.

  The landscape changed. The cracked dusty road was now metalled, between red earth and orange groves fringed with eucalyptus trees. They began to climb. Mountains grew ahead, a dark wall agai
nst the steel-blue glare of the sky. They drove for three-quarters of an hour, with the road winding out like an elongated intestine, twisting up the ribs of mountain into the shade of cedar trees that opened out over wide green valleys patterned with vineyards, moulting into black gullies which spouted thin waterfalls or were scarred with dry streams like shards of scraped bone.

  Snow had appeared, like a distant wreath of cloud, as the Mercedes plunged into an alley of cypress trees that ended between high white walls. A man of the same size and shape as the driver squeezed between the wall and the car, slipping his carbine down beside his leg. He stared in at Packer as though he were a piece of luggage; nodded to the driver and withdrew.

  The car slid under an archway in which a steel door had automatically opened. It closed behind them and the inside of the car was flooded with neon. Packer made to open the door and found that he was locked in. The driver released him, and he stepped out into a garage where he counted half a dozen long black cars and three jeeps painted with desert camouflage.

  The driver motioned him towards the door of a lift. Inside, the man pushed the bottom of five buttons and they began to move downwards. He stood, legs slightly apart, hands at his sides, facing the door; his only movement came from the shoulders, in slow heaves like a man doing breathing exercises. He smelled of camphor.

  They stopped, and Packer walked out into the cool sunlight. Shallow steps of white marble curved down to a patio, walled in on one side with green glass, and open on the other with a parapet overlooking the ridges of mountain rising to the snow. In the middle of the patio was a kidney-shaped swimming pool in which a girl in a polka-dotted bikini and a flowered bathing hat was basking face-down on a lilo. At a corner of the pool, three men sat in wicker chairs round a table on which stood an opened bottle of champagne.

  As Packer stood shading his eyes against the light, one of the men below raised his arm, and a familiar voice reached him like a clear bell. ‘Ah, mon cher! Welcome to your new home! You had a good journey? They looked after you at the airport? Meet my two friends.’

  Packer reached the foot of the steps and walked round the pool, where the girl had drifted away so that he could not see her face. Her body was small, well-rounded, lightly tanned; she reminded him, with a stab of bitterness, of Sarah. He reached the table where there was a fourth, empty chair.

  ‘Messieurs, I would like to present le Capitaine Packer —’ Pol’s fat little fingers closed tightly round Packer’s wrist — ‘Mon Capitaine, I present to you my good friends and associates, Monsieur Shiva Steiner, and le Docteur Zak.’

  Shiva Steiner nodded; otherwise the two men did not move. They were a strikingly incongruous pair: Steiner, in a grey mohair suit matching the colour and texture of his hair, exuded an aggressive opulence, while Dr Zak’s old thin body was exaggerated by a loose striped pyjama-like costume, with no collar or tie. He had large sad eyes and hair like wire wool.

  Pol drew Packer down on to the vacant chair and beamed at him, his silk suit shining under the filtered green sunlight like fish scales. ‘So? You have no complaints?’

  ‘No. But I’ve got some questions to ask.’

  Pol chuckled and his fingers played a trill along Packer’s arm. ‘Of course you have, mon cher! I too have questions to ask.’

  ‘Right, down to business. I made a deal with you, and we signed a contract in Aalau, and then things started to go wrong. You disappeared, for a start. Let’s begin there.’

  Pol shifted his buttocks with a crackle of cane. He reminded Packer of a porpoise, benign and playful, ready at any moment to splash into the pool. ‘I left for an excellent reason, mon cher — to save my life.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

  ‘Because I had no wish to advertise my fear.’ Pol removed his hand from Packer’s arm and poured himself some champagne. He was the only one who was drinking. He looked at Packer and smiled. ‘I can offer you coffee or mint tea.’

  ‘Neither. Charles, you left Sammy and me in a very awkward situation back in Switzerland.’

  ‘It was an agreed situation. We had discussed it fully in Klosters before I left. You were to proceed with the plan, as arranged. Unfortunately, the Ruler played a trick for which you cannot be blamed.’

  ‘Sammy was right, of course,’ said Packer. ‘The Ruler knew our whole drill from the start. And the only way he could have known was from you. He had a stand-in propped up on that T-bar like a red, white and blue target — but what for? To see if you and I carried out his orders, and I’d shoot Sammy? A pretty devious way of proving a point. And risky, too.’

  ‘The Ruler is a very devious man,’ replied Pol. ‘He is also prepared to take risks — provided they are calculated risks. This one was, and it paid off. No publicity — no scandal.’

  ‘The Ruler may be devious,’ said Packer, ‘but so are you. You hired Sammy for this operation because he was being a nuisance to you and you wanted him on a leash. So you paid him enough to keep him happy — and it doesn’t take much to keep Sammy Ryderbeit happy, as long as he’s given a gun and can play with it. As for you, I still don’t know what passed between you and the Ruler — and I don’t honestly care, as far as you’re concerned. What I do care about is the fact that the Ruler not only wanted Sammy out of the way, but was out to get me too. In fact, he was taking no chances. Apart from trying to get me to shoot Sammy on the mountain, he’d also laid on another scheme for both of us.’ And Packer went on to describe the two sets of booby-trapped ski sticks.

  Pol nodded gravely, while Shiva Steiner and Dr Zak sat watching the pool, as though they were no part of the conversation.

  ‘Surely you understood,’ Pol said at last, ‘that the Ruler was simply hedging his bets? If you had killed Sammy, that would have been convenient. You might even have been picked up by the Swiss police and gaoled for life. That too would have been fine. Whatever you confessed about the plot — even if it was believed — could not have hurt the Ruler. On the contrary, the Ruler wanted a plot. The perfect, bungled assassination attempt.’

  ‘So that’s why he sent a man who looked like him up the mountain to get his head blown off?’

  ‘My dear Capitaine Packer, you do not suppose the deaths of two servants would trouble the Ruler — even in Switzerland?’

  Packer leaned forward in his chair. ‘Charles, how the hell do you know there were two men killed? How the hell do you know anyone was killed on that mountain? I mentioned a red, white and blue target just now, and you didn’t take me up on it. Nor did you read about it in any newspaper or hear it on the radio. The Ruler gagged the Swiss police all down the line — including his attempt to kill Sammy and me on the road to Zürich.’ He stared hard at Pol, whose expression remained unchanged.

  ‘Mon cher,’ Pol said at last, ‘you must know that I am not an amateur — that I have much experience in these matters — many friends, many sources of information.’ He made a faint, ambiguous gesture in the direction of Shiva Steiner and Dr Zak. ‘How I found out need not concern you. The Ruler intended an attempt to be made on his life, but that does not mean he wished it to be publicized.’

  ‘Why go to the risk unless he could cash in on the publicity? It doesn’t make sense, Charles.’

  ‘Ah!’ Pol tilted his head back and stared at the sky, as if waiting for something to drop down. ‘It is all a matter of politics, mon cher. Delicate, internal politics —’ Packer heard a splash and the mutter of wet feet on marble, but his eyes were fixed on Pol — ‘politics of an intricate Byzantine nature which you and I would find hard to explain.’

  Packer was aware of a dripping behind him. He looked round and saw the girl from the pool, just as she snapped off her bathing cap. ‘Oh God,’ she said in English, ‘it’s terrible!’

  Packer gaped up at her. She laughed and shook out her black hair, every casual strand dry and falling into place. ‘Your moustache,’ she added, ‘is just about the most horrible thing I’ve ever seen. It makes you look like a seedy commercial traveller
.’

  Pol giggled. ‘Sarah, ma petite, sit down and make friends with Capitaine Packer. As for his moustache, it is like civilization — it takes a long time to grow, but can be destroyed within minutes.’

  Sarah perched her neat little haunch on the arm of Packer’s chair, her thigh touching the back of his hand. Pol poured her a glass of champagne. ‘Santé,’ she said, with a short nod to Shiva Steiner.

  Packer just sat. His emotional responses had been short-circuited by amazement. He had forgotten his fury and grief at losing her; and was too stunned to think of all the questions he needed to ask her.

  Pol was meanwhile shaking with quiet laughter, trying to look at them both, but hindered by the silk handkerchief which he was having to dab to his eyes.

  ‘Gentlemen, let us waste no more time.’ Shiva Steiner spoke with the measured command of the boardroom. ‘As Monsieur Pol has explained to you, the plan remains unchanged except for the location. Instead of Switzerland, we must now turn all our attention and resources to eliminating our subject on his own ground.’

  ‘In Mamounia?’ Packer glanced at Pol for reassurance. Sarah had left them, and he was alone with Pol, Zak, and Shiva Steiner. Zak had not spoken a word, while Shiva Steiner reminded Packer of a mamba dressed by Cerruti: he would give no warning before he struck, and he would strike without being provoked or frightened.

  ‘In your absence, Capitaine Packer,’ Steiner went on, without answering the question, ‘we have devised a provisional plan. It is unorthodox, and quite different from the one you attempted to execute in Switzerland.’ He turned to Pol. ‘I think, Charles, in view of certain delicate aspects of this affair, Capitaine Packer might prefer to hear the details from you.’