An expatriate tomcat, Farmer had prowled around the back alleys of Europe long enough to know he didn’t want to make an enemy of Andros. Because once the Greek began to get his money, a phone call anywhere on the Continent or even to the States would be enough to send Farmer skin-diving in the nearest river with a block of cement for ballast.
“Carnuvale must have read him the riot act,” I said. “In the old days even the Mafia blew its nose when Andros sneezed.”
“I came here for dinner that night,” Wolf continued, “only to find that Hilda and Kyle were gone. The police questioned me. I couldn’t tell them anything. I didn’t know Farmer and Simonetta had flown to Quimper. The first thing I thought of was Andros. Andros must have taken them. I went to his hotel, and he knew nothing. That night I checked out of the Cornouaille. This was France and it was in Rome I had killed a man, but still—I was scared. I wanted nothing more to do with the police. I slept in a park, telling myself I had done everything I could to find them, and if they hadn’t returned to the Epée by morning I’d leave … fly to England, Spain … somewhere.”
He slept fitfully that night. He couldn’t get the idea out of his head that if anything happened to Hilda it was his fault. Making like a detective in the morning, he found a taxi driver who’d made a pickup up the Epée the day before. Yes, the hackie said, he had taken such a man and a woman as m’sieu had described from the Epée. Wolf shook his head. “I guess I didn’t offer him enough money. He said nothing about Farmer and Simonetta.”
The hackie drove Wolf out along the Odet. He stopped in the mud about a quarter of a mile from the cottage, as Lois and my driver had done.
Wolf walked right in on Kenny Farmer and a gun and a length of twine. The hackie, as hackies will anywhere, became impatient, turned around and drove back to Quimper.
“Farmer already had decided to play ball with Andros,” Wolf said. “He’d convinced Simonetta they had to keep their eye on me. If the Greek had seen them leave Quimper with Kyle and Hilda, he’d have followed them. But I’d been hanging around the Epée, and I might have witnessed the abduction. If so, and if I hadn’t told Andros yet, there might be a chance they could stop me from telling him at all.”
Simonetta had phoned for a taxi, and drove back to Quimper. I spotted her outside the Cornouaille.
“Novella Simonetta was no dope,” I said. “She had enough time to start wondering what Farmer had up his sleeve. If he intended selling out to Andros, she needed help—which was when I showed up. Sure, our motives were different, but the last thing either of us wanted was for Andros to get his claws into Hilda. So Simonetta took me back to the cottage.”
“Where the Greek had already showed up with three Breton henchmen in a truck,” Kyle said. “As soon as Simonetta drove off, Farmer got in touch with Andros. Carnuvale must have told him where the Greek would stay in Quimper, if he got that far. Simonetta had plenty to worry about, all right.”
“She didn’t worry soon enough or hard enough,” I said. “When we got out there Farmer did the one thing he could to convince Andros what side he was on. He ran her down.”
There was a silence. Colonel Talese got that look on his face a cop gets when all the pieces of a puzzle fall into place. He said triumphantly:
“Now we have it. We have it all, everything.”
If what we wanted was the answer to a puzzle that had taken us from Rome to Brittany, then we did have it. But Kyle said, “Sure, we have everything. Except the one thing that really matters.”
“Signore?” Talese said.
“We don’t have Hilda.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
JUST BEFORE MIDNIGHT A gendarme called and told us the truck had been found abandoned on a small side road near a village at the mouth of the Odet. It belonged to the Cerdans, three brothers who ran a bait-and-tackle store and had a record of petty smuggling.
“I heard them talking before they got into the truck,” Kyle said. “They weren’t wild about Wolf and me being left behind to stick them with a kidnaping rap. They wanted to kill us.”
“Why didn’t they?” Talese asked him.
“The Greek wouldn’t let them. Hilda—the Greek needs her co-operation. Kill us, and he’d lose her for good.”
“You mean,” I said, “there’s still a chance he hasn’t?”
“I told you. She’s all mixed up. Sure, we’d just got married in Rome the other day at the Ciampino Chapel—”
Talese grinned. “Then that helps explain why the police didn’t find you. What better place to hide while waiting for your plane than in church?”
“—and she wouldn’t have gone with Andros of her own free will, even after he soft-soaped her here in Quimper. She didn’t want any part of him. But she—”
Talese interrupted again: “When the police find the Cerdan brothers, we’ll learn where they took your wife.”
“They don’t know. No one does—except Andros.” Kyle stopped pacing suddenly in front of Wolf. He jabbed a finger in Wolf’s direction. “Unless he knows.”
“Not me,” Wolf said. “Nobody told me where they went.”
“You helped the Greek. I say you know where he’s heading, if anyone does.”
“That’s ridiculous,” Wolf said.
Kyle’s big fist bunched the front of Wolf’s shirt. He dragged the scrawny Czech to his feet. “She’s my wife,” he said, his voice husky with rage. “I love her. I want her back. I say you know where he’s taken her. If anything happens to her I’ll kill you, you son of a bitch.”
Colonel Talese pulled Kyle away from him. “Please control yourself, Mr. Ryder. The gendarmes have blocked all roads out of Quimper. They are watching the mouth of the Odet. The Greek won’t take your wife anywhere.”
That was when Wolf dopped a bombshell. “You’re wrong,” he said morosely. “He will. He already has.”
“Yes? How?” Talese fingered his mustache.
“A seaplane,” Wolf told him. “It was all arranged before we even got here.”
“Now,” Colonel Talese scoffed, “your imagination runs away with you. How could it have been arranged? The Greek hoped to take your sister north from Rome to Switzerland. He never had time to make plans here.”
“No?” Wolf said softly. “Then you don’t know Pericles Andros. He made his plans months ago. Plans for Italy and Switzerland. Plans for a freighter leaving Genoa, if that didn’t work. Plans for a quick escape from Quimper if Hilda succeeded in marrying Kyle. Plans for an overland journey from Quimper to Switzerland if Hilda decided to help him. Otherwise plans to fly from the Odet mouth to … all kinds of plans. The seaplane flew down from Boulogne. It was ready and waiting.”
“To fly where?” Kyle demanded.
“I don’t know,” Wolf said quickly.
“You started to say—”
“I don’t know. Leave me alone.” Wolf looked at Colonel Talese. “What happens to me now?”
“I must ask you to waive extradition and return to Rome with me.”
“Carnuvale?” Wolf said.
“Carnuvale, yes. But if you can prove a fight … self-defense.… Signor Carnuvale was no great loss to my country.”
“But I have to go back to Italy?”
Talese nodded.
Turning his back and staring out the window, Wolf said: “What if I can tell you where the Greek took my sister?”
Kyle crossed the room in three lunging strides, swung the Czech around and hit him, open-palmed, on the side of his face. It sounded like a pistol shot. Wolf’s knees buckled. He landed hard on his rump. Kyle stood over him, legs planted wide, shoulders heaving. “I knew it!” he shouted. “You do know! You’ve known all along.”
“Cut it out, Kyle,” I said. “We all know how big and tough you are. Give him a chance to say his piece.”
Kyle glared at me. “Yeah, it’s easy for you to talk, lying on your duff like that while Andros has my wife!”
Lois hadn’t been endowned with green eyes and red hair by accident.
She sprang off the bed. “Oh sure! Chet’s on his duff, as you put it, because he came within an inch of rescuing Hilda before Andros took a shot at him. Have you ever been shot in the head, Mr. Ryder?” Lois flounced back to the bed. Her lips were trembling. I winked at her.
Kyle gave me a wry smile. “I guess maybe I was a little out of line.”
“You were miles out of line—with Wolf. And I can tell you why. We know how the Greek operates. He used to insure smugglers’ contraband. He was so damned good at it he practically had a monopoly. Just what the hell do you think they paid him fifteen per cent of their gross profits for?”
“I don’t see what you’re driving at.”
“What Andros did, in the old days, was set up options for his insured smugglers. For fifteen per cent of the take he’d set up enough devious routes to give a mapmaker an ulcer. Say you had a shipment of cut heroin for delivery in New York. You picked it up in Turkey as opium, where you paid a farmer a few hundred bucks for it. By the time it reached New York it was worth two hundred grand. You could ship it overland from Turkey through Lebanon and the Sinai to Egypt and North Africa for processing, then overseas to Italy for transshipment to the States or maybe overseas direct from Tangier to New York. Or from Turkey by ship to Greece for processing, then to Italy and then the States. Or by plane from Turkey to France for processing, then transshipment to Italy or overseas direct from Boulogne to New York. A hurried conference, a tip from a cop living off the tin in any of a dozen countries, a quick phone call, and the route would be changed.
“That was the way Andros operated. Now Hilda is his contraband, and he’s had a year to sweat out what he’s going to do with her. Balk him anyplace along the line and he’d pop up with an alternative. Hilda’s the most valuable contraband he’s ever handled, and he knows it. First with Simonetta getting her hooks into him and now with Simonetta dead, Hilda’s worth three-quarters of a billion bucks to him. If Wolf’s right that they left Brittany by plane, you could have every cop in Europe looking for them from now till Judgment Day without finding them.”
Talese gaped at me. “No wonder you could track him down the last time. You know more about Andros than the Guardia does.”
“I was lucky. I had an inside contact.”
“Sure, okay,” Kyle said. “You’re both just backing me up. We all saw the way the Greek operated in Italy and here. Foul him up one way and he’d have another plan all ready to go. That’s just it. Unless Wolf tells us—”
“What are you going to do,” I said quietly, “beat it out of him?”
Kyle didn’t say anything. Wolf was on his feet again, an angry red handprint on his cheek. He touched it and winced.
“What’s bothering you, Wolf?” I said. “Scared of going back to Italy? I think you can have Colonel Talese’s guarantee the cops won’t lean on you hard enough to crease your collar.”
“It isn’t that.”
“Then what? You know where he took her, don’t you? It isn’t Switzerland, is it? No sense taking her there till she’s ready to co-operate, right?”
“Listen,” Wolf said, his voice very low. “You’ve got to understand how it is. To hell with Hilda, that’s what I thought. I betrayed her. I … she hates me. I want her to understand … I wish I could show her.…”
“You want to be in on it when we get her, is that what you mean?”
“I’m weak.… Even my own sister could … but I want to show her I’m no Judas. Not now. Not ever again. You understand? I told myself to hell with her, to hell with all of them, all the strong, confident ones, all the.…” He looked at Kyle, but Kyle wouldn’t meet his eyes now. Kyle wasn’t the most perceptive guy in the world, but for the first time I think he began to understand his brother-in-law. “If I could just show her, this once, that I.… But I have to go back to Italy. I killed a man. All her life she will say it was Kyle and the other big American—you, Mr. Drum—big men from a big country, and the clever Italian policeman.… All her life she will say it was you who rescued her after her brother, her weak brother, the little failure, the nobody, the Judas, betrayed her.”
Wolf stopped talking. His shoulders slumped. He stood there staring dejectedly first at me, then at Talese. Lois squeezed my hand. Her eyes were big and shiny while she waited for my answer, but I had no answer to give. It was up to Colonel Talese now.
Talese cleared his throat and said: “Tell us where they’ve gone and you can come with us. Then we’ll see about Italy.”
Wolf didn’t want us to see his face. He turned to the window again. He was sobbing.
A lifetime of habit was too much for Talese. He was a professional cop again. “Come, come,” he said impatiently. “Be a man.”
“Leave him alone a minute, for crying out loud,” Kyle said. “Maybe right now he’s more a man than anybody in this room. Maybe it’s about time I got some sense through my thick skull too.”
Wolf faced us. “Maria Mydlar,” he said. “My mother’s old friend. Her confidante. I cannot be positive, but if Andros still wants to convince Hilda, and he has to, he’d take her to Maria Mydlar.”
Talese said one word: “Where?”
“In Hamburg. She is living in Hamburg.”
Kyle solemnly shook Wolf’s hand.
Talese rushed for the phone. “The police will be waiting for him when he lands,” he said exultantly. “They’ll be held until we arrive. Is that satisfactory, Signor Henlein?”
Wolf said it was satisfactory. Talese spoke into the phone. “Get me Interpol on the Rue Valéry in Paris.”
For some reason, Lois kissed me full on the lips.
“What’s that for?”
“As if you didn’t know, Chester Drum.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
INTERPOL’S HAMBURG CONTACT was a small, bull-necked number named Koenig.
Late the next afternoon at the central police station in Hamburg he told Talese and me: “We received our instructions from the Rue Valéry this morning. The harbor was watched.” He waved his hands to show what a big job that was. “Except for Rotterdam, Hamburg harbor is the biggest in all Europe. Still, I can assure you that between the time of the call and this moment no seaplane we could not account for landed here.”
Talese scowled at me. “Is it possible we arrived before the Greek?”
I shrugged. Koenig shook his head. “Not if he left Quimper when you say he did. Even assuming he stopped three times for fuel, he would have arrived in Hamburg by now.”
“Assuming he flew direct,” Talese said.
“Why shouldn’t he?” I asked.
Talese couldn’t answer that one. Koenig couldn’t. We all stared at the walls of Koenig’s office. It isn’t every day you think you’re about to catch a Pericles Andros in your net. And, more important from my viewpoint if not Talese’s, there was Hilda. But where were they?
“Signor Henlein could have made the wrong guess,” Talese said glumly. “How you say, a wild-goose chase.”
“Wait a minute.” I stood up suddenly. I was frowning, and the frown reminded me I had sixteen stitches in my scalp. I stopped frowning. “Andros had himself back-stopped all down the line. Why not here too? Thanks to Hilda, he couldn’t kill Kyle and Wolf. And he couldn’t have them killed later, after they’d gone, because, even assuming he talks Hilda into co-operating with him, she might want to contact Kyle and Wolf to make sure they’re all right. And even if she can prove she’s the Greek’s daughter, no supercautious Swiss bank will let Hilda walk off with the whole Andros fortune in one visit. That’s going to take time. So any way you shake it, Andros never intended having Kyle and Wolf killed.”
“What are you driving at?” Talese asked me.
“Wolf. Figure Andros realizes Wolf will think of Maria Mydlar, knows or finds out she’s in Hamburg. Figure—”
“But in that case Andros would have taken Wolf with them.”
“Uh-huh. Not if he thought Wolf would try to talk Hilda out of playing ball. He had to do it just the way he did it
. Including running the risk that Wolf would know about Hamburg.”
“You mean—another alternative plan? He never intended landing in Hamburg?”
I nodded, and asked Koenig: “Got a map? Where else around here could a seaplane come down?”
Koenig spread a map on his desk. Jabbing a stubby index finger at it, he said: “Cuxhaven and Bremerhaven to the west. Southwest at Bremen on the Weser River. Glückstadt or any of a dozen other towns here on the Elbe. Or beyond Hamburg to the east in Lübeck.”
“All he’d have to do,” I told Talese, “is pick up a car and drive into Hamburg. “Even if we’d caught on earlier, we couldn’t have had every port on the Elbe and Weser staked out.”
Talese looked doubtful. Koenig gave his phone a workout. The fourth call was our baby. Koenig said: “Five hours ago. In Bremerhaven. A Sud Aviation seaplane, Boulogne registration, was cleared through douane control at Bremerhaven. The pilot was a Frenchman named Reynaud. He had two passengers. A Greek named Styrhos Metaxes and his daughter.” Koenig shook his head. “A businessman. Olive-oil exporter. All his papers in order.”
“More back-stopping,” I said. “The papers are phony, of course. He could have done all of it with the money Simonetta doled out to him.”
Talese smiled ruefully. “That’s our man,” he told Koenig. “What a mind! How can you stop a man like that?”
We were going to try. We could assume Andros and Hilda were in Hamburg now. Talese asked Koenig: “Tell us what you know about a Czech expatriate named Maria Mydlar.”
Koenig shrugged, making his bull neck all but disappear. “Two million people live in Hamburg, Herr. Naturally all aliens are registered, but.… Did you say Mydlar?”
“Yes, Mydlar,” Talese snapped impatiently. “When I phoned the Rue Valéry I mentioned her name.”
Again Koenig shrugged. “I don’t have the file here. Downstairs. But it doesn’t matter. I know Maria Mydlar. All Hamburg knows Maria Mydlar.…”
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