The Quimper plane took off at exactly seven o’clock.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
THE WELCOMING COMMITTEE at Hotel L’Epée in Quimper consisted of a plump woman wearing a black dress, a geometrically precise beehive hairdo and a nervously innocent smile, and a gendarme in suntans and a starched blue cap like General de Gaulle’s.
The gendarme said something angrily. The only word I made out was “Interpol.”
It was a warm, clear morning, with the lobby doors of L’Epée open to the fresh air and the caterwauling sound of amplified bagpipe music. They were playing what I call Loch Lomond and what the Bretons, who, like the Scots, are Celtic and traditionally play the bagpipe, call something else. A loudspeaker on the grandstand at the foot of a hill across the narrow Odet River, on which the Hotel L’Epée fronted, blared the music all over Quimper. Its caterwauling drowned out the gendarme’s angry words.
“What?” I shouted.
The gendarme’s face got red. “I rang up Paris when Madame informed me of your long-distance call yesterday, m’sieu,” he shouted. “Interpol has never heard of you.”
“Oh,” I said. “Oh, that.”
“What? I can’t hear you!” bellowed the gendarme.
The porter, who had brought my B-4 bag in from the street, looked at Madame. Madame showed him the palms of her hands and shook her head.
“Well?” bawled the gendarme.
The bagpipes switched to Speed Bonnie Boat. The gendarme glared at the open doors, removed his hard blue hat and ran a forearm over his hair, jerked his head in my direction and started walking. I followed him through a door at the rear of the lobby and into a garage with whitewashed walls. A man in a white apron and a white chef’s cap sat on a crate between a Citroën 2CV and a Renault Dauphine, peeling potatoes. A man in a blue smock and wooden shoes stood near him polishing the Dauphine with a chamois.
We found a quiet corner and sat on crates there. The gendarme said: “To impersonate an Interpol officer, that is a serious offense.”
“Well, what would you have done?” I asked. “The woman was being kidnaped. The long-distance line was the only thing I had to tell me what was going on.”
“Kidnaped?” the gendarme said. “You have some proof?”
“I know who kidnaped her.”
“Yes? And who would that be?”
“An American named Farmer and an Italian artist named Novella Simonetta.”
“Yes?” In the same bland, disbelieving voice. “Why?”
“I’m not sure why. What difference does it make? Haven’t you done anything to find them?”
“I have seen no evidence of a violent abduction, m’sieu. But still I called Interpol, and Interpol never heard of you.”
I stood up. I felt restless and caged. A lot of time had passed since Kenny Farmer and Simonetta had taken Hilda from her room here at the Epée—maybe too much time.
“Sit down, m’sieu. I will tell you when we have finished.”
“We’re wasting each other’s time. I came here to find Mrs. Ryder.”
“Sit down. Impersonating an Interpol agent,” the gendarme repeated, “that is a serious offense.”
“More serious than kidnaping?”
“I could lock you up until we discover precisely why—”
“I left a message to have Colonel Talese called in Rome. Why didn’t you ask him about me?”
“We have contacted the Guardia Finanza,” the gendarme said, and dropped it.
“If kidnaping doesn’t mean anything to you,” I said, “maybe the appearance in Quimper of a notorious international gangster thought by the police of every country in Europe to be dead, does.”
He didn’t bat an eyelash. “Yourself, m’sieu?”
“His name is Andros. Pericles Andros.”
The name meant nothing to the gendarme. He leaned forward on his crate. “What would you have me believe? This is France, not America. Kidnaping, m’sieu, is a typically American crime, almost unknown in France. And international gangsters with fancy Greek names are the stuff of American thrillers. What would an international gangster want in Brittany? We are a simple seafaring people, we have our petty crimes and crimes of passion—but kidnaping and international gangsters, m’sieu? I assure you, no.”
“What did the Guardia say?”
He ignored my question and asked one of his own. “Why do you think this woman has been kidnaped?”
I felt like a man in a nightmare running for his life on a treadmill, but I told him. I left nothing out. He had a narrow face and a hooked nose and the small, close-set eyes which, as a stereotype, are supposed to mean a lack of imagination. He sat there holding a cigarette in his cupped hand, not believing a word of it.
Finally he said, confirming the stereotype: “In fifteen years of police work I have never heard such a story.” Smiling, he blew ash off his cigarette and took a deep drag. It was not a friendly smile. “At least if you had claimed the Communists had taken her, that I might have believed.” He smiled again. “Not that they had taken her, you understand. But that you believed they had taken her.” He ticked the points off on his fingers: “Kidnaping, international gangsters, Communist agents—all symptoms of the American postwar neurosis. Of course I have never been to America, but one can see it. One can plainly see it in the tourists. And you, m’sieu. What did you say your profession was?”
“I didn’t say.” I took a deep breath. “I’m a private detective.”
He stepped on his cigarette and just looked at me, while the smile built and built until it was a grin bisecting his face. “A private detective! But that makes it perfect! Kidnapers, international gangsters, Communist agents, and hot on the trail of all of them that typically American manifestation, the private detective! M’sieu, I love this. I love it.”
“I’m glad you love it. What are you going to do about it?”
“I called the Guardia Finanza in Rome. Fortunately for you, your friend Colonel Talese was there. We like to cooperate with organizations like the Italian Guardia, and it was Colonel Talese’s wish that we co-operate with you until his arrival.”
I stood up again. “Why the hell didn’t you say so in the first place?”
“Please, m’sieu. I like the Italians. But one does not have to visit Italy to know they are an emotional people unblessed with the cold light of logic, just as one does not have to go to America to know you Americans have the affliction of too much imagination in a materialistic country bereft of spiritual values. You will forgive this judgment, m’sieu?”
“A perceptive guy like you, you ought to write a book.”
He took it deadpan. “Precisely. As my wife says. But I am a man of action.”
“Prove it,” I said.
“M’sieu?”
“You’re a man of action. Prove it.”
He proved it first by taking me up to Room 217 in the Epée. It was a small room with a brass bedstead, ancient battered furniture and a view from the window of the cut-stone embankment of the Odet, the wood-planking grandstand for Les Grandes Fêtes de Cornouaille and the hills beyond. He said there were no indications of a struggle in the room, and he was right. He admitted that neither Mr. nor Mrs. Ryder had returned since late yesterday afternoon.
I asked him if Wolfgang Henlein had registered with them at L’Epée. He checked with Madame, and Madame said he had not. Nor had anyone matching the little Czech artist’s description been seen around the hotel.
“What now, m’sieu?” the gendarme shouted. We were in the lobby again. Outside on the loudspeaker the bagpipes caterwauled.
“Try to find Wolfgang Henlein,” I suggested. “He may be in Quimper.”
“You are not positive?”
“He left Rome with them for Paris. That’s all I’m sure of. And try to find Farmer and Simonetta. They’re in Quimper.”
He assured me that would be a simple task. “To register in a hotel in France, m’sieu, one must present his passport. Quimper is not a large city. We h
ave four hotels besides the Epée, perhaps a dozen pensions.” He turned to Madame. “May we use the phone in your office?”
Five minutes later we knew that Wolfgang Henlein had registered at a pension down the street from L’Epée. “Pension Cornouaille,” the gendarme told me. I got up to leave.
“A moment, m’sieu. I must accompany you, and I have not finished.”
I cooled my heels while he went through his list of hotels and pensions, checking them out for Farmer and Simonetta. They hadn’t registered anywhere in Quimper.
The gendarme also proved he was a man of action by going with me to the Pension Cornouaille. On the way over I wondered why Wolfgang hadn’t stayed with his sister and brother-in-law. I decided on the obvious answer: Kyle and Hilda had flown to Quimper on their honeymoon, and any way you shook it Wolfgang would be an extra thumb.
Then why had he come at all? He’d arranged their transportation out of Rome—Carnuvale and Carnuvale’s truck—when they’d been in a hurry to leave, afraid that Hodza would try to stop them, that Lederer would, that I would. Had Wolfgang planned to go with them all along? Whether he had or hadn’t, figure Carnuvale was supposed to drive them to Rome’s Ciampino Airport. But Carnuvale was working for Pericles Andros, and instead had taken them north on the Via Flaminia, earning himself a battered skull.
Was Andros’ plan to meet them, maybe in Domodossola or across the Alps in Switzerland? But why? The same question again, the one I hadn’t been able to answer: why would a fugitive international gangster risk exposure, as Andros had done, to make contact with the daughter of the man he had betrayed twenty years ago in Prague? Possibly Wolfgang knew the answer, and maybe his knowledge of it would explain why he’d flown to Quimper with his sister. “Ici le pension,” the gendarme said. His voice seemed very loud. I realized the bagpipes had stopped their blaring. Crowds thronged the riverfront street, waiting expectantly. Most of them were Bretons, the men in blue smocks and wooden shoes, the women in black dresses and those elaborate lace caps stiffly starched and some of them three feet high.
We entered the dim, small lobby of the Pension Cornouaille. An old porter munching on a roll popped his head out of a cubbyhole. I had that feeling you get when you think a case is going to break wide open for you.
The gendarme passed the time of day for a moment or two, then dropped his question. I had enough French to understand the porter’s prompt answer:
“M. Henlein? Mais vous êtes trop tard. Il est parti hier soir avec tout son bagage.”
“Gone,” the gendarme told me. “He left last night with all his baggage.” He smiled patronizingly. “Now what, my friend?”
It was a good question. The only trouble was, I didn’t have a good answer to it.
Outside, the sunlight was very bright. I heard drums and the jangle of bells. A man shouted: “Les Gilles Belges!”
“You won’t want to miss this,” the gendarme assured me. He steered me across the sidewalk through the crowd to the curb. “Every year Les Gilles de la Louvière perform at our folklore festival. An absolute fantasy, m’sieu.”
I wasn’t in a mood for his absolute fantasy. I almost turned and headed back up the street to L’Epée, to wait for Lois and Colonel Talese and tell them we’d reached dead end. Almost, but not quite, because then the gendarme tugged at my arm and we stood at the curb and I caught my first glimpse of Les Gilles Belges.
If I hadn’t, or if I’d decided they weren’t worth seeing anyway, none of what happened later would have happened.
The Gilles followed a drummer up the cobbled street. They wore belts of bells around their waists, and they jangled. There were about twenty of them, and they were absolute fantasy, all right.
On their heads they wore tall sprays of ostrich plumes, on their necks wide white lace collars. Padding puffed out their short orange jackets, making them look like barrels on legs. Jackets and trousers had red suns and black lions embroidered on them, and each of the marchers carried what looked like a fish trap full of oranges in one hand and played solitaire catch with a single orange in the other.
“Inca Indian and medieval Belgian motif,” the gendarme whispered in my ear. “Didn’t I tell you? Fantastic!”
Their march was a slow, almost hypnotic tapping, stepping, stamping shuffle. Every now and then and for no apparent reason, one of them would spin in a slow trembling circle. It seemed as if the rhythm of their tapping, shuffling dance had trapped them, as if the dance had produced the Gilles and not the Gilles the dance.
Half of them marched by, and then I saw a face in the crowd across the street near the Odet embankment.
She saw me at the same moment. She turned. The crowd swallowed her. With half the Gilles still to come, I ran straight into their line of march.
The gendarme called out. I felt his hand brush my arm. People shouted. I passed the second group of Gilles close enough to see the sweat on their faces, the glassy stare of their eyes. Tapping and shuffling and occasionally spinning, they ignored me completely.
The woman I had spotted on the other side of the street was Novella Simonetta.
I looked back once. If the gendarme had followed me, I’d lost him in the crowd. But where was Simonetta? I saw faces, berets, starched lace Breton caps, black dresses, blue smocks. I pushed through.
Then I spotted her on a narrow footbridge that arched across the Odet. Again she saw me at the same time. She started running.
I sprinted across the bridge, shoes clattering on its boards. At the far end a fisherman drew a squirming eel out of the water and gave me a disdainful look.
Simonetta was just disappearing down a narrow cobbled street that turned sharply to the left. When I rounded it I saw her again. Closer. She was wearing a pale lavender dress with a wide skirt that allowed flashing glimpses of her thighs as she ran. She craned her neck for a look at me. One of her heels caught on the cobblestones.
She tripped, stumbled along a few steps and went down. I reached her just as she got to her feet. A woman seated at an outdoor fruit-and-vegetable stand watched us gravely. Simonetta made a face and a hissing sound and tried to rake me with her fingernails. I caught her wrist. Then I had to catch both wrists, and then she tried to knee me.
“Cut it out,” I said. “There’s a cop following me. Or would you rather talk to both of us?”
She glared at me. Panting, she said: “I would tell him you have molest me.”
“Sure, and which one of us would tell him you and Kenny Farmer kidnaped Hilda from the Hotel L’Epée last night?”
I could feel the tension ease in her arms. “Let go of me.”
I let go. A pair of tourists who looked American came by, the man wearing aviator-style sunglasses and a camera on a strap around his neck, the woman wearing a drip-dry dress and carrying a pocketbook not quite the size of a steamer trunk.
“Great parade, ain’t it?” the man said. They both stopped, blocking the street. “I can always spot an American. Our name’s Frazer. From Philadelphia, P.A. Where are you folks from?”
I gave him an apologetic smile. “Sprechen sie deutsch?”
He frowned and shook his head. “I could of sworn,” he said. They both went on and around the corner.
“You’re so clever,” Simonetta said mockingly. “What do you want?”
“Hilda. And Kyle.”
She licked her lips, that were painted faintly with white lipstick. “I am staying at a pension a block from here.” The dark skin of her face was flushed from running. Her big dark eyes looked as sultry as I’d remembered them. “If the police … You will come with me, yes?”
She linked her arm in mine. She’d tried to get away, and I’d caught her. Her rage had evaporated. She even smiled up at me as we started walking.
“Well, after all,” she said, when she saw the expression on my face, “you will soon understand we have want the same thing all along.”
It was a large room overlooking a square, with a church on one side and shops and cafés lining the o
ther three sides. Simonetta sat on the edge of the bed and lit a cigarette. She crossed her legs. Her wide skirt was short enough for both knees to peek out. She had skinned one of them slightly in her fall.
I sat on an easy chair and said: “Let’s start with something easy. Like how did you register here without them filling out a police card on you?”
“Does it matter?”
“It doesn’t matter. I’m just curious.” It did matter. I wanted Simonetta to get used to answering my questions. A harmless one was a good place to start.
“There is the guest tax. To the police. If they don’t report me as a guest, they don’t pay the tax. And from me they get something besides.”
Simonetta crossed her legs the other way. Her dress slid up two more inches. She had gorgeous legs. She looked at me and kicked off her shoes suddenly and leaned back, lacing her hands behind her head and stretching out. The motion raised and then flattened her breasts. She took the cigarette from her lips and dropped it on the floor and laced her hands behind her head again. She’d done all that languidly, never taking her eyes off me; all of it with calculated feline indolence, to show me what Novella Simonetta had. Novella Simonetta had plenty. She smiled a little. “On the Margutta I paint my own portrait because—”
“Anyone can see why you painted your own portrait.” I leaned forward. “I spotted you on your way to Wolfgang’s place before, didn’t I?”
She was still smiling. “From me you can get answers to your questions. Simonetta has a weakness for big men, and I tell you already we are on the same side. But from me you can also get something besides.”
“The same thing your landlord got?”
“Funny man!” Simonetta laughed. “But all he got was money.”
“What would Wolfgang have got?”
Simonetta pouted. “Very well. When you see me I watch for him.”
“He took a powder last night. Bag and baggage.”
Simonetta’s eyes narrowed. “You know this as a certainty?”
I nodded. “Why’d you want to see him?”
She scratched the sole of her left foot with the toenails of her right. She raised her left knee to examine the slight bruise there. She was more distracting than a TV commercial.
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