“I just received it in a package.”
“I see, sir. Is it yours?”
“What?”
“The finger.”
“God, no!”
“I see, sir. I think we can arrange an appointment for you tomorrow morning. If you will just hold the line, I’ll—”
“It can’t be tomorrow! Don’t you understand? This is serious: I’m not accustomed to getting fingers in packages.”
“I see, sir.” There was a pause. “What is your name, please?”
“Roger Carr. C-a-r-r.”
“Carr … Carr … Roger … Carr, Roger.” Obviously she was checking his name against some sort of list. But he was startled to hear her say briskly, “I’m sorry, sir. You can see someone here immediately. Do you wish to meet at the consulate, or elsewhere?”
“At the consulate, of course. Why the hell would I want to meet anywhere else?”
This seemed to confuse her. She made little flustered noises at the other end of the line. Then: “Yes, sir. We will be expecting you.”
“Fine,” Carr said, and hung up.
The American consulate, 3 Rue Dr. Barety, had the clean, rather friendly look of a place that had no function more unpleasant or difficult than extending an occasional visa or renewing an expired passport. Carr went through the swinging glass doors and stopped in front of a pert, uplifted receptionist.
“Ah, Mr. Morgan,” the girl said. “Everyone here will be very glad to see you.” She pointed down the hall, flashed a clean little smile, and pressed a button on her desk console. “Third door on the right.”
“My name isn’t Morgan,” Carr said. “It’s Roger Carr.”
The receptionist blushed. “I’m sorry, sir. Of course. I’m new at the job, you see, and these things are so complicated.”
Carr stood dumbfounded.
“I promise it won’t happen again,” the girl said. “You can count on me.” She watched him patiently, expecting him to leave. “It is the third door on the right.”
Feeling strange, Carr walked down the hall, which was narrow, painted white, and spotlessly clean. Solid pine doors opened off both sides. The third door on the right had a shiny brass nameplate that said “Mr. Gorman.” Carr knocked.
“Come in.”
He opened the door, to see a compact man with a crew-cut rising from his desk. “Well, isn’t this a jolly surprise? Coming back in from the cold, eh? After raising hell with my ulcers, you decide to pop up. High time, Morgan, high time. I must say frankly that you’ve given me more bad moments—”
Carr said nothing. The little man peered intently at him, screwing up his eyes.
“You’re not Morgan, are you?” He paused, then seemed to think better of his statement “I mean,” he said hurriedly, “I don’t want to be insulting, for all I know you’ve had a little PS, or been in a scrape of some kind and gotten bashed up. I hope you haven’t been bashed up.”
“No,” Carr said.
The two men stood looking across the room at each other. Gorman was wearing a dark blue, chalk-stripe suit, with a gray tie. On another man it would have looked solidly diplomatic; on Gorman, it gave the impression he was trying to play Little Caesar. There was an uncomfortable silence.
“You never were much of a talker, were you?” Gorman said.
“What’s PS?”
“Plastic surgery. … Say, you’re not Morgan, are you?”
“I never said I was.”
Gorman scratched his head. “That’s strange,” he said. He seemed suddenly embarrassed and looked down at his desk. He poked among the papers strewn across it, and finally unearthed his pipe. “How do you like that?” He continued to scratch his head while he examined the pipe minutely. Then he seemed to remember Carr, and looked up.
“Well,” he said. “That changes things, doesn’t it? If you’re not Morgan, you must be somebody else. I don’t know who you are. Who are you? Do come in, and shut the door behind you. Thanks. Nasty draft, that’s the reason—for the door, I mean. My name is Ralph Gorman. Good to meet you. Have a seat.”
Carr shook hands and dropped into a tan leather chair. The other man sat down and carefully filled his pipe. “What can I do for you?”
“I have a problem,” Carr began.
“Oh well, I would have expected that. Nearly everybody who comes here has a problem.” He chuckled nervously. “After all, when do you turn to your consulate? When you have a problem. That’s what we’re here for.” Gorman hesitated. “You do look a hell of a lot like Morgan,” he said. “You’re not kidding me, are you? I mean, it’s not very funny. Really it’s not.” He looked at Carr, pleading.
“No, I’m not Morgan,” Carr said. “Who’s Morgan?”
“An attaché who is coming to the office. We expected him two days ago, and now—but that’s not important. You have a problem.”
“Yes,” Carr said. “There was a shooting near the flower market yesterday. I was involved.”
All right, Gorman thought to himself. Here we go. Now you have to decide how to play it. Now you have to decide whether you’re going to let this guy off the hook.
“Oh, you’re the one,” he said. “I’m surprised. I thought you would have come straight here afterward.”
You might have done that, he thought. It would have saved all sorts of problems.
“Well, it was very confusing,” Carr said.
“I’m sure. I read about it in the papers,” Gorman said, lighting his pipe. “Terrible thing. Awful.”
“There’s more.”
Gorman’s eyebrows went up over the pipe.
Carr told him about the interview with the swarthy man, and then about the package. “This is it,” he said, tossing it onto the desk.
“What’s this? A finger?”
“Yes,” Carr said.
“I’ll be damned,” Gorman said, holding it under the desk lamp. “It is a finger.”
Carr waited.
“Isn’t that amazing!”
“Yes,” Carr said.
“Is that all?”
“Isn’t that enough?”
“I meant, was there anything else—any further incidents?”
“No. I came straight here after I received the package. There was this note with it.”
Gorman took the note. Then there was a buzz from the intercom.
“Yes?” Gorman said.
“Amory on line one,” the secretary said. “Eggs.”
“All right.” Gorman picked up the phone. Eggs meant that he would have to use the scrambler. Gorman enjoyed talking over the scrambler; it gave him an important feeling. He pressed the button and said, “Hello?”
The Paris chief wasted no time. He demanded to know why the hell Gorman had been sitting on his ass for two days, doing nothing.
“A small confusion,” Gorman said. “We thought Morgan was here.”
The chief pointed out that Gorman had been told he wasn’t. Morgan was, in fact, still in London.
“I know,” Gorman said. “Things have just been cleared up at this end.” He did not look at Carr.
The chief wanted to know what the trouble had been.
“Double-take. Overhang.”
The chief interpreted this correctly to mean that it was mistaken identity, and that Gorman had somebody in the room, so he couldn’t be specific. Amory asked how close the similarity was.
“Very.”
Too bad, the chief said.
“What should I do?”
What did Gorman think he should do? There wasn’t much choice, was there?
“No, I guess not.”
Had anybody attempted to murder the poor bastard?
“No. It looks like intact recovery.”
Well, that was all right. They’d kidnap him, and find out he wasn’t the real thing. Or maybe they wouldn’t bother, if he kept his nose clean. If the guy wasn’t dead already, the chief said, it probably meant there was some confusion in their minds.
“I suppose so,” Gorman
said doubtfully.
Well, it was just too damned bad, the chief said. But it was also convenient as hell. Paris would get a new killer down right away for Gorman. This look-alike would be a perfect decoy to divert them while they slipped a new man onto the scene. Was that all right?
“Fine,” Gorman said. He still didn’t look at Carr.
Try to cheer the bastard up, the chief said. Give him confidence. Have him go about his business and be normal. As long as he stays away from the Associates, he ought to be just fine.
“All right,” Gorman said.
The chief hung up.
Carr had been listening with absolute attention. He had a feeling this conversation was somehow involved with him, but he couldn’t figure it out.
“Now then, Mr. Carr, about your own problem.” Gorman bent forward over his desk and doodled on a pad. He was frowning. “As I understand it, you have received a great deal of annoyance since your arrival in Nice, and you want to know what to do about it, and what it all means.”
Carr nodded, and lit a cigarette.
“I’ve given those up,” Gorman said.
“What?”
“Cigarettes. Given them up. Bad for you. You know the surgeon general’s report, all that—it’s been very influential within the government. None of the top diplomatic or military people smoke cigarettes anymore. Not if they want to get ahead. You just have to cut them out. Why, at parties, the aides don’t carry lighters anymore. Makes it a little hard on the wives who haven’t quit, I can tell you.”
“Look,” Carr said, “I don’t want to change the subject—”
“Of course, of course. Your problem. I assume you’ve seen the police?”
“Yes.”
“Do you remember the name of the officer who interviewed you?”
“He was a big brute named Vascard.”
“Hmmm. I don’t think I know him. I’m still rather new to the office, you see. Recently in from Amsterdam. You have to give a man time to adjust, learn the ropes, the office routine. I keep telling the staff here—” He broke off and looked curiously at Carr. “What explanation did they give you?”
“Who?”
“The police, of course.”
“None. None at all, as a matter of fact. There were no explanations offered.”
“Well, now, you know, this is one of those ticklish situations we often encounter in diplomatic work. Tact, patience, sensitivity—that’s what it takes.” He drummed his fingers on the table, apparently in a demonstration of his sensitivity. “Reading between the lines, that sort of thing.” He looked at Carr and cocked his head. “Surely they told you something.”
“Nothing at all.”
Gorman was reassured. “Well, then, perhaps I should explain the situation as I see it.”
“You’re very kind,” Carr said, a little annoyed.
“Yes. Well. I’m still feeling my way in this part of the world, bear that in mind. But the situation is something like this: the Riviera is a very rich area, and a gambling area. That is a rare and unbeatable combination. It draws unsavory characters like flies. Gangsters, con men, second-story men, card sharps. The whole range. In Nice, the police like to think these people have their headquarters in Marseilles, with the smugglers. In Marseilles, they like to think the headquarters is in Nice, with the Corsicans. The fact is, both towns have grave problems. Feuds are common. I think you have somehow managed to get involved, and that you have therefore suffered these … indignities. Now, I remember a somewhat similar case we had in Amsterdam. Not really similar, of course. Say analogous. But we handled that one quite well, and I think the same solution may apply here. Frankly, if I were you, I would ignore the whole thing. Go about your business. Act naturally.”
“You’re kidding,” Carr said. “Act naturally?”
“That’s right,” Gorman said, puffing at his pipe. “It strikes me as the only sensible thing to do. This will all blow over in a day or so, I’m sure. In the meantime, just pretend nothing has happened. Just act naturally.”
When Carr had gone, Gorman sat forward in his chair and doodled furiously. He knew, just as Amory knew, that Carr’s chances of remaining alive were less than even. He was convenient, no doubt about that. But it was very, very ugly.
He sighed again. Scratch one nice, confused American, he thought. He picked up the finger and looked at it again, noticing the clean way it had been severed. The work of a scalpel, for sure.
“Act naturally,” he said aloud, to himself.
What a laugh.
Carr was laughing. The music blasted through the small, darkened room, amplified by several hundred watts of stereo equipment. Across from him on the dance floor, Anne was doing the monkey with a vengeance, whipping her pelvis in a precise, exciting way. She, too, was laughing, because he amused her.
They were in a Saint-Tropez discothèque called, inevitably, Whiskey à Go-Go. There were hundreds of places all along the coast with the same name, and he had never found anyone who knew what the name meant.
The crowd here was typical—men in tuxedos and women in floor-length gowns, dancing hip to hip with young boys in jeans and child-women in tight striped sweaters and unbelievably tight stretch pants. Half the dancers were barefooted. Many of the girls wore the clinging jerseys with the embroidered white ship’s steering wheel right between their breasts; in recent years, this had become a Saint-Trop symbol.
The record changed, and Carr recognized it as “Carol,” a Chuck Berry tune sung by Johnny Hallyday in French. It was loud, and the place swung. He was feeling good.
They had had a pleasant dinner at Mouscardins, after a rapid drive from Cannes along Route 98. It had been a beautiful drive, twisting first along the rocky, rugged coastline known as the Esterel, then to the flatland from Saint Raphael and Fréjus to Saint-Tropez. They could have taken the high-speed auto route, of course, but that was inland, and Anne wanted to go along the coast.
Now, with a good meal and several drinks inside him, Carr was feeling very good indeed. Anne’s face was flushed with exertion. Anne was a good dancer—as he might have expected—moving expertly on high heels, her movements perfectly controlled. He knew that girls who danced well were good in bed.
It was funny, he thought, as the record switched to the Rolling Stones, doing “Route 66.” He didn’t think about getting her into the sack anymore. He felt no urgency; partly because a sort of unspoken agreement had grown up between them that they would eventually go to bed, and partly because, quite simply, he liked her. He enjoyed being with her, doing almost anything with her. Nothing else seemed to matter.
Victor Jenning, accompanied by two blank-faced bodyguards, stepped into the garage on the outskirts of Monaco. It was a large place, smelling of grease and gasoline, paint and oil. Yet despite its size, the little car dominated the room.
It was low, cigar-shaped, with huge wheels that nonetheless left it a bare three feet off the ground. The snout was oval, the body running sleekly back to the cramped cockpit, set in front of the engine. In the rear, the car ended abruptly, squarely, with two exhaust pipes protruding rather oddly.
This was Jenning’s car, and he had come to love and hate it. He turned to the single mechanic who was standing by the tool bench.
“What’s the problem?”
“It’s Gerard. He hasn’t come in since yesterday morning.”
Jenning thought back. Gerard was an assistant mechanic, a new man, one he did not remember well. He was a short fellow, swarthy, cocky. “You’ve called his home?”
“Yes. His wife hasn’t seen him. She’s upset.”
Jenning frowned. The Monaco race was less than a week away. “Can you get somebody else?”
The mechanic shrugged. “I think so.”
“Good?”
“Good enough.”
“All right. I’ll try to look into this business.” Damned hired help. Always running out on you. It was so difficult to get a good, steady man. Jenning nodded toward the car. “How is
it?”
“Okay. I think we’ve licked the timing. And third has been beefed up.”
Jenning nodded. The transmission was crucial in the Monaco G.P.; it took a tremendous beating over the short, twisting course.
He gave the mechanic a few words of encouragement and left the garage.
Jenning was a Formula 1 race driver, and reasonably good. Not first rank—that took more than he had, both in ability and dedication. He was unusual, in that racing was not his life; he made his money in guns, and raced only for his own amusement. At least, that was how he preferred to look at it; he did not like to think of himself as hooked, though he knew he was.
Sooner or later, that car—or another like it—would kill him. At thirty-nine he was getting old, and the lap times were faster with each succeeding year. He knew, in an isolated corner of his mind, that more than 180 drivers had been killed racing since the war. He knew it, and he did not think about it, any more than he thought about the necessity for the two men walking with him in the cool night air of Monte Carlo. One was to his left, a little in front. The other, to his right, a little behind. Both were armed, and he needed them.
It was all a matter of risks—what interested you, and what you were prepared to put up with. Victor Jenning had chosen his life many years ago, and he was satisfied with it.
Preparation for the shipment was going smoothly. Sunday evening, after the Monaco race, he would sign the final papers, and his job would be finished. He dismissed the possibility that he would not be there to pick up his pen.
Liseau scanned the faces of his five associates and sipped a lait grenadine to settle his stomach.
“He will sign the papers after the race,” he said. “That has been confirmed by our most charming and close source.”
There was mild laughter in the room. He allowed himself a smile.
“Thus we can proceed with the final planning.”
He looked again at these men, carefully. His mind was not on the plans. He was almost certain that, in the next twenty-four hours, the plans would have to be changed radically. He had considered carefully the stubborn little man who had not talked, and he was quite sure what was going on.
Someone in their midst, one of the five faces before him, was going to go over. At first, it had seemed impossible to him, but now he had grown accustomed to the idea. The shipment was worth over thirty million dollars American, and its significance was still greater. Betrayal, he thought grimly, would be very good business.
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