The Python Project

by Victor Canning

  He smacked the man on the back of the neck and the gun jumped out of his hand and skittered across to my feet. I took my time picking it up. It was a .380 pistolet automatique, MAB breveté, model F, I discovered later. But at that moment I only had eyes for Paulet as he grabbed the man, jerked him to his feet and slammed a big right fist in his face and followed it with the left in his stomach. After that he went through a simple routine of throwing the man against one wall and then another, bouncing him once or twice on the floor and finally slinging him like a roll of limp carpet into a chair.

  He stood over him and began to interrogate him in Italian, too fast for my limited knowledge of the language to give me any help. At first the man was reluctant in his replies. Paulet encouraged him with short jabs of his right fist and eventually they had a conversation which seemed to be satisfying Paulet. Paulet rounded it off by suddenly slipping his own gun out of his pocket and cracking the man above the left ear with the butt. My friend went out like a light.

  Paulet turned and grinned to me.

  CI did well, no?’

  ‘It was a pleasure to watch. Have a drink.’

  I held out the bottle. He drank without benefit of glass but with the thirst of a man conscious that he has done a good job and merits refreshment.

  He nodded at the man. ‘This canaille—your word for that escapes me at the moment—’

  ‘Scum might do.’

  ‘Yes, scum. Well, he is a professional killer who comes up from Rome today. Employed by a man here in Florence whose name he does not give. This I did not press because he had ethics like us and—’

  ‘I know who the man is. And I think we ought to go right now and have a chat with him.’

  ‘It will be a pleasure,’ said Paulet. Then, rubbing the tip of his big nose with one finger, he looked down at the man. ‘But first we must dispose of this. You think there is any more useful information to be had from him?’

  ‘I doubt it. He was just trying to do a job.’

  ‘You would like to hand him over to the police?’

  ‘Don’t be crazy. I wouldn’t get out of this town for days with all their enquiries and processes.’

  ‘In that case, we just get rid of him.’

  He bent down, lifted the man and threw him over his shoulder. It sounds easy, but you try it. The man must have weighed over two hundred pounds. Paulet almost did it one-handed.

  I followed him out of the room into the corridor. At the lift he rang. It came up and the doors opened. Paulet slung the man inside, reached round the corner of the lift and pressed one of the buttons, and jerked his arm back as the doors began to close.

  ‘We,’ he said, ‘will walk down, while he goes up to the top floor. When he is able to, he can make his own explanations.’

  We went down the stairs and there was a spring in Paulet’s step. He was pleased with himself, pleased that he had given a demonstration of his potential usefulness to me.

  I said, ‘Thank you for getting me out of that.’

  ‘A pleasure, Monsieur Carvay.’

  I said, ‘My room door was locked automatically when I went in with our friend. How did you get in?’

  ‘I have, over the years, acquired a very large collection of hotel pass keys. Maybe it was a touch of vanity, but I wanted to come in and surprise you, to impress you. Perhaps because I sensed that there was a little reluctance in you to accept my minor services.’

  ‘How did you know I was in Florence at this hotel?’

  ‘I telephone your London office and tell the lady there that I have important news about Freeman for you and must get in contact. She gave me your address.’

  I didn’t tell him that I would check that. I did the next day, and Mrs Burtenshaw confirmed it. In my book Paulet was beginning to win his spurs but I still had a lingering doubt, probably unworthy, about which horse he was intending to ride.

  We took a gentle stroll through the night, over the Arno to the Piazza Santo Spirito.

  Repeated banging of David’s bottom on Pelegrina’s door brought no response.

  I looked at Paulet. ‘It’s a very thick door.’

  ‘We try the keys first.’

  From his jacket pocket he brought out a bunch that was so big it would have made any ordinary man walk lopsided. He bent down, examined the keyhole, and tried one or two keys experimentally.

  He half turned and smiled up at me. ‘Locks, too, I have studied. This is a Continental variation of the English lever lock which your great Jeremiah Chubb invented in 1818. The important thing is not to lift the detector lever too high by using the wrong key.’ He examined his bunch, selected a key and began fiddling with the lock. A few moments and two keys later, the door was open. He waved me in, beaming, his narrow-set eyes sparkling with frank vanity.

  Leon Pelegrina was not there. He had packed and gone, and obviously taken his time about it. In the bedroom, which was off to the left of the hall, all his clothes had gone except an old dressing gown and a pair of pyjamas. The only things of interest—but not as far as Freeman was concerned—were the contents of the bottom drawer of the dressing table. It held a woman’s silk nightdress, some female underclothes and a couple of whippy school canes.

  Paulet put on a stiff, disapproving face, and said, ‘One of those.’

  There was nothing to be learned from the bathroom or the kitchen. In the big main room Pelegrina had done a thorough tidying-up job. There wasn’t a personal paper or letter in the desk, though there was a pile of thoroughly burnt and stirred-up paper ash in the fireplace. The silver-framed photograph of La Piroletta had gone, and the box of Turkish cigarettes was empty. Missing, too, were the framed photographs of the tramp steamer from over the fireplace and the steam yacht from the wall behind the desk. Both pictures had been hanging some time because the wallpaper was less faded from light where they had hung.

  I sat down in a chair by the fire and lit a cigarette.

  ‘Who lived here?’ Paulet dropped to the divan and the springs creaked.

  I told him, gave him a brief outline of my conversation with Pelegrina, and explained about the New Year’s card I had found in the cottage.

  I said, ‘I’m sorry I kept that from you. But at the time I didn’t know what a sterling chap you were going to turn out to be.’

  It mollified him a bit, but not entirely.

  ‘Let us,’ he said, ‘have no secrets from one another in future. I wish to help and I wish to be frank with you. No?’

  I nodded agreement. Well, that was all right. A nod is not binding. He could have been, for all I knew, putting some unspoken clause to the end of his declaration. If he were a good professional man he had to be, because frankness in our line never paid a dividend that raised the pulse rate through joy.

  I said, ‘He takes his daughter’s photograph. Why?’

  ‘Maybe it was a publicity photograph originally and would have her agent’s name and address on the back.’

  ‘You think that Marrini Fratelli are an invention?’

  ‘I would bet on it.’

  ‘You needn’t. I checked the Rome directory at my hotel this afternoon. They don’t exist. Now—why did he take the photographs? One coastwise steamer, pretty ancient craft by the look of it. Can’t remember the name. And the steam yacht. I never got to have a close look at that.’

  ‘There must have been a reason. Some day, we know. Clearly he was worried by your presence here and your questions about Freeman. Otherwise, why try to kill you? This Freeman begins to interest me.’

  ‘That began with me a long time ago. I think you’d better get in touch with your Monsieur Duchêne and see what you can dig out of him. You can tell him about all this. In fact, it might be a good idea if I could talk to him.’

  ‘I will try to arrange that.’

  ‘You speak Italian well?’

  ‘Fluently. In my youth I was a kitchen boy in the Hotel Principi di Piemonte at Turin and later a waiter at many other Italian hotels.’

  It a
ll came out pat. I knew he was a good guy, anxious to help me—but since suspicion had often meant the breath of life to me I couldn’t forget the phoney list of coins.

  ‘Have a poke around here tomorrow morning and see what you can learn about Pelegrina from the other people in the building.’

  ‘A pleasure.’

  As he spoke, an idea struck me. They did from rare time to time, out of the blue, like the first swallow of summer. I got up and went over to the bookshelves and nearly broke my wrist picking up the fat red leather-bound Lloyds Register of Shipping, Volume I.

  I was hoping that there would be an index of ship owners. There wasn’t. The whole thing was arranged alphabetically by the names of ships. I didn’t feel like ploughing through the names of nearly four thousand ships and checking the owners to see if I could find a Pelegrina amongst them. I didn’t have to. Sticking out from the top pages of the register was a small piece of marking paper. I opened the register at the marked place.

  I ran my finger down the first of the two pages that lay open and found what I wanted at the bottom almost. The ship’s name was Suna, but in 1959 she had been called the Pelox, and before that in 1948 the Nordwell. Under her earlier names she had flown the Liberian flag, port of registry Monrovia. Her present owners—this was a 1962-63 register—were listed as ‘Leon Pelegrina and Others’. Her gross tonnage was 1,366 tons, summer deadweight 662 tons. She’d been built by the Burrard D.D. Co. Ltd of Vancouver, engines by John Inglis Co. Ltd of Toronto, and her classification at Lloyds was marked ‘LC class withdrawn’. A key to symbols at the front of the register said that this indicated that the class had been withdrawn by the Committee for non-compliance with the Society’s regulations. From what I had seen of Leon Pelegrina, and knew of Freeman, if they were connected, that seemed about the right form. Non-compliance with regulations would have made a fine family motto for both of them. At the moment the Suna carried Greek registration.

  I explained the details to Paulet.

  He said, ‘Pelegrina could still be in shipping. This I find out tomorrow, perhaps.’

  I was about to tell him not to bother. I could do it by a phone call the next day to a friend of mine at Lloyds and, what is more, have him check in the Lloyd’s register of yachts whether Pelegrina owned a steam yacht. Normally I wouldn’t have been at all interested in Pelegrina’s shipping connections. It was only the fact that he had troubled to take the framed photographs that made it seem possibly significant so far as Freeman was concerned. As I say, I was about to tell Paulet this when I heard footsteps coming down the small hallway.

  Paulet and I stood up and turned at the same moment.

  A woman appeared in the doorway of the room. She wore a loose, very short-sleeved white coat over a green silk dress that showed her knees and a nice run of legs. She held a small white pigskin case in one hand and a big white handbag in the other. Full under the light she was a treat to look at and would have passed A1 at Lloyds or any other place. Her skin had a dusky, velvety suggestion about it, and her eyes were wide and dark. Her hair fell just short of her shoulders and had a gloss on it like fine old mahogany.

  Putting in all the charm I could, I said, ‘Good evening, Miss Pelegrina.’

  She said, ‘How the bloody hell did you get in here?’ It was a beautiful voice, low, vibrant, full of dark tones that really sent a chill down my spine without making me stop to think whether I needed my head examined. She hadn’t said ‘bloody’ either. It was something Anglo-Saxon and straight from the barrack room. I was charmed, bewitched by her.

  ‘The door was open and—forgive us—we walked in. We had an appointment with your father.’

  ‘Is that so? Well, the bloody door is still bloody open—so just walk straight out. I don’t want any friends or business acquaintances of my father’s in my flat.’

  She stood back to give us room to pass. I didn’t move, though Paulet shuffled a few paces.

  ‘I understood this was his flat. It’s listed in the telephone directory as—’

  ‘If it suited him he’d list it under the name of President bloody Johnson. But it’s my flat, and I want a good night’s sleep, so get the hell out of here.’

  She dropped her case and made a gesture with her right arm towards the hall. I was going to argue, but her right arm made me change my mind. Around her wrist and encroaching on the end of her dress sleeve was a python gold bracelet which I would have known anywhere.

  I glanced at Paulet. I knew at once that he had seen it.

  ‘Come on, Paulet,’ I said. ‘We’ll come back tomorrow when Miss Pelegrina has had a good night’s sleep and is in a better mood.’

  ‘Just get out and stay out. And when you next see my father tell him also not to come back. Tell him I’m having the lock changed.’

  Her right arm waved again, imperiously, and we shuffled by. I’m good at scents, but I couldn’t get hers. It was delicious, heady with all the magic and fascination of the East. I winked at her and she gave me a basilisk stare that would have put any of Wilkins’s efforts in the kindergarten class.

  Standing in the square outside was a white Ford Thunderbird that hadn’t been there when we came in. It had a Rome number plate and thrown across the back seat was a mink coat. Before moving on I checked that the doors were locked against theft. They were.

  CHAPTER 5

  The Hour of Cowdust

  From my room the next morning I telephoned Mrs Burtenshaw at the office. She was to contact my friend at Lloyds and get a list of Leon Pelegrina’s shipping interests if he still had any. I said I wanted a reply by the afternoon.

  After that I called Gloriana and told her that I had met Leon Pelegrina but he had been unable to help me about Freeman. This was true enough and I did not bother her with the incidental details. In fact, enjoying myself as I was beginning to, feeling the old elan vital coming back and not wanting to lose it, I had decided that I was not handing over any incidental details to anyone. I would stick to bald and, as far as possible, true facts. At the moment I didn’t think that Gloriana was letting me in on the whole truth or, more charitably, didn’t know it all herself. The Treasury angle seemed unnatural. So did the attitude of my friend the Chief Superintendent in ‘C’ Department of New Scotland Yard. Usually if I came up on the inside of any horse they were running I could expect to be bumped into the rails. Here they’d hauled off and let me through. Monsieur Robert Duchêne for my money was a phoney. Just at the moment I wasn’t prepared to lump Paulet in the same category, but if I got a chance I was going to carry out an analysis for purity.

  I phoned him too. He was staying in a cheap hotel near the Stazione Centrale. I told him to get round to Piazza Santo Spirito and keep an eye on things. Also, later, he was to try and contact Monsieur Duchêne. He said yes, yes, yes, full of eagerness. Too much eagerness, perhaps.

  I gave him twenty minutes, and then I walked around to his hotel. On the way I thought about La Piroletta, and the python bracelet. Freeman was married to Jane Judd, and Jane Judd had been instructed that no matter what she heard she was to wait for the call from him to take off for pastures new. Pelegrina, I felt, could have been the man who had spoken to her and Gloriana on the phone, reassuring them about Freeman. As for Freeman . . . well, maybe he was the kind that kept one woman on a string while he played around with others, a game that usually ends up with a man getting the string snarled up around his feet and tripping over. In my book I was prepared to lay odds that the python bracelet was no love gift, but had been sold for hard cash.

  At Paulet’s hotel the reception desk was empty. The number of his room was 17. I took a look at the key rack. Number 17 wasn’t there. Paulet had taken it out with him. That didn’t worry me. I reached over and took Number 15.

  On the second floor I fiddled around at the door of Number 17 with the Number 15 key, cursed aloud because I couldn’t open it and then went to the chambermaid’s room at the end of the corridor and asked her to open my room for me. I’d been given the wron
g key at the desk. She obliged and took key Number 15 off me. The world is full of unsuspecting women always ready to help a man out of trouble.

  I did a quick and neat turnover of Paulet’s room. Quick, because there wasn’t much to see, and neat because I didn’t want him to know anyone had been in the place rummaging. I learned that he was in a poor way so far as pants and shirts were concerned, and was halfway through a livre de poche called Vipère au Poing by Herve Bazin; that his second pair of shoes wanted resoling, and that men have a way of stuffing things in their dressing-gown pockets and forgetting them. For him I suppose there was some excuse because he had actually found the letter in his pocket. It had been put there by the woman he lived with in Paris—his estranged wife would never have written in the same terms. I sat down and applied my rather fractured French to it. The first sentence explained that she was packing it, unknown to him, in his dressing-gown pocket—so that he would have a nice surprise when he found it. After that it was mildly erotic in a pleasant way. The woman was obviously stuck on him. She signed herself Thérèse and had added a footnote which came out in my translation as:

  You rightly have a high regard for Monsieur Carver’s reputation, so please be careful. Men who are both pleasant and clever can be dangerous. I know this because that is the way you are. So watch yourself. To lose you, my darling, would make life empty for me. A thousand embraces. T.

  Pleasant, clever, dangerous. I didn’t know whether to be flattered. It was interesting to know, however, that she put Paulet in the same category. Very interesting. I made a mental note of the address on the headed notepaper. You never knew when a detail like that might be useful. If I had been Paulet, knowing me as he was supposed to do, I would —if I’d been up to anything—have destroyed the letter. That he hadn’t was a point in his favour. Or did it mean that he just wasn’t quite clever enough to appreciate how clever I was? I decided to defer a decision but to keep my eyes open.