Vascard looked steadily at them. “But the second consideration is more serious. The Associates may choose to be less artful in their assassination—they may merely shoot Jenning. And if they decide to do that, it could happen anywhere along the course. Anywhere at all.”
Chapter XXII
ROGER CARR AWOKE THE next morning feeling terrible. He was exhausted, cramped, and cold; his eyes hurt and his shoulders were stiff—probably from his drive in the Alfa, he reflected. His tongue was thick from smoking so much, and his nose had chosen to ache again. He sat up on the cot and looked around the cell.
It was all right, as cells went. It was reasonably large and clean, and it did not smell. He had no reason to complain. He would have complained the night before, when Vascard had locked him in, but he had been too tired to argue.
“I want you safe, my friend,” Vascard had said. “See you in the morning.”
He was swinging his feet onto the cold floor when Vascard peered through the bars at him.
“Good morning,” he said in a grim voice. Vascard’s eyes were bloodshot, and there were deep circles down to his cheekbones. His jaw was slack, his hair rumpled. “Sleep well?”
Carr nodded.
“Coffee in my office.”
They went upstairs to Vascard’s office. The desk had been cleared of books and papers, and a large map of Monaco set out on it. There were four coffeecups on the edges of the desk; all had cigarettes stubbed out on the saucers. A large ashtray, full of butts, rested at one corner. There had obviously been an all-night conference.
A plug-in percolator was bubbling to one side of the room. Vascard rummaged in his desk and came up with a fresh cup for each of them. He poured the coffee, then added a shot of brandy from a hip flask into his own cup.
“Join me?”
“No, thanks.”
“If you will excuse me, I need it. Please sit down.”
Carr sat, holding the warm cup in his hands.
“Mr. Carr, you have been most cooperative thus far. I had originally hoped not to involve you further.” Vascard shifted uneasily in his chair. “However, several things occurred during the night, and I think you should be informed.
“First, as I had expected, our check of Monaco has been fruitless. The magnitude of the problem is staggering—apartments and hotels line the course. There are thousands of windows, hundreds of possible firing points overlooking the race. Our only hope, and it was a slim one, was to stumble upon Brauer, or to find someone who recognized his description. We had no luck.”
“You make it sound as if Jenning is already dead.”
Vascard shrugged.
“Shouldn’t we try to see him? Convince him not to race?”
“We did. Again, it was as I expected. He does not scare easily, Mr. Carr.”
“What about his wife?”
“We will arrest her at the race. She is crucial.”
“Why is that?”
“For the present, it is better if you do not know. However: to proceed. We have done some checking, and discovered that the girl quit her job yesterday, much to the irritation of the Palm Beach casino. No explanations, no forwarding address. Air France reports a block of four tickets sold for this evening’s flight from Nice to Athens with connections to New Delhi and Hong Kong. Three men and one woman—all fictitious names.”
“I see.”
“Half an hour ago, the ticket for the woman was canceled.”
Carr sat up quickly. “What does that mean?”
“I’m not sure. It may mean that she will be left behind. It may mean she will leave the country another way. Or it may mean—”
“All right,” Carr said. “What do you want me to do?”
Vascard spread his hands on the desk. “The problem, you see, is how the Associates may choose to leave. I doubt that they will use their plane tickets, since we know about them. They will leave the country another way. They could drive across the border into Italy or Switzerland, since the mountain passes are all open now. They could go to Spain, or north to Germany or Holland, and fly from there. They could take a yacht from Cannes; Liseau has friends. Or they could go by private plane—there’s an airport, a private one, near Antibes. We can’t bottle them up. It’s too big a country. There are too many ways.”
Carr gulped back his coffee, feeling the liquid burn down his throat. It helped wake him up.
“There is just a single hope,” Vascard said. “We must find Liseau today.”
“How? Where?”
“At the race, of course.”
“You think he’ll be there?”
“He’ll be there. He’s the type.”
Carr nodded. “And you want me to help find him, is that it?”
“Yes,” Vascard said, draining his cup and refilling it with brandy. “Better than anyone else, you know Liseau. You know his walk, his mannerisms, his gestures—and that helps in spotting a man at a distance. There will be more than one hundred thousand people at the race today. We’ll need you badly.”
“Why not simply look for his car? It’s very distinctive.”
“It is—so distinctive that the customs officers at Ventimiglia remembered it crossing over into Italy at two this morning. Liseau wasn’t driving it—someone else, a skinny pale man. The papers were in order; he was allowed through.”
“You think Liseau knows where Anne is?”
“He does, if anybody does.”
“All right,” Carr said. “Tell me what you want done.”
Vascard stood. “I think I’d better explain on the way.”
As they left the room, Carr took a last look at the map, with the course marked out in heavy black pencil.
The green pine-wooded hills above Villefranche slipped by beneath them. Carr looked out of the bubble cockpit as Vascard shouted into his ear, trying to make himself heard over the high-pitched whine of the helicopter. Carr had never been in a copter before, and the experience had impressed him—running up to the cockpit beneath the thumping blades, which produced a dusty wind of gale force; sitting and hearing the scream of the engines mount until he thought it could go no higher, and yet did; feeling the vibration shake the little craft with increasing force, to the point where it seemed the plane must fall apart.
Abruptly, the pilot had lifted off and headed east toward Monaco, moving fast and low, skimming the hills and little resort towns. Down below, people looked up, startled, as the shadow of the machine raced over the ground.
“One of the Associates owns an apartment block overlooking the race,” Vascard was saying. “It’s being searched at this moment, though I doubt we’ll find anything. They’re too smart for that.”
Vascard’s voice warbled from the vibration that shook them all. The pilot, taciturn behind sunglasses, ignored them. The helicopter came over a small rise, and they found themselves overlooking Monaco. The neat, high hotels and apartments crowded the land, which sloped steeply down to the water. Yachts jammed the port to see the race.
Vascard leaned toward the pilot and shouted something; the pilot nodded.
“We’re going to follow the course. Watch carefully. It begins here, just beneath us, and runs uphill. There’s Tribune R.” They skimmed over a section of bleachers set along the road. Spectators were already gathering, though it was only eleven—three and a half hours before the race. “Now we come past the casino.” The copter dipped and swerved left, then right. “You can see how dangerous the curves are. But after the casino, along here, are the really difficult ones.”
Looking down, Carr saw a sharp S-curve which zigzagged down the hillside toward the water. “I don’t think it will be here,” Vascard said. “Too slow at this point to do damage. But look now—we’re coming around to the tunnel. As the cars come out of the tunnel, they follow the straightaway to this slight curve—see it?—called Le Chicane.” Carr saw that it was less a curve than a kink in the straight road. “Le Chicane is murderous. It’s bumpy, and the cars take it fast. Anyone who went int
o it wrong would go right into the water.”
The pilot pulled up abruptly, turning in the air. He looked questioningly at Vascard, who shook his head.
“Once is enough,” Vascard shouted to Carr. “Let’s land and get to work.”
The Grand Prix de Monaco is one of the most viciously exciting motor races in the world. It is not a fast course—not until 1964 did anyone do a lap at an average speed of one hundred miles an hour, and that was Graham Hill in a B.R.M. But it is a twisting, strenuous, dangerous track, with ten major curves to a lap, a thousand to the race. The driver is forced to shift on an average every five seconds.
At the end of nearly three hours of racing, it is not uncommon for a driver’s right hand to be raw and bloody from shifting. He is constantly changing from roughly 200 kilometers an hour on the straights to 50-70 in the turns, and then back. If it is a hard race for the drivers, it is sheer torture for the machines.
And the drivers take punishment enough. If it is a hot day, cockpit temperatures soar to 150 degrees, and more; a driver can sweat off ten pounds in one hundred laps. Because it is a confined circuit, hemmed in by buildings and trees, there is danger of carbon-monoxide poisoning—and the dangers of a crash. Some circuits are padded by earth embankments and grass; Monaco greets the driver with sharp-edged buildings, concrete, glass, and trees. Frogmen are always standing by to pull drivers from the waters; they did this for Alberto Ascari. Another driver was killed in 1962 when he struck a tree, and the debris of still another crash killed a track official.
These thoughts ran through Roger Carr’s mind as he stood on the hill near the Royal Palace and fingered his yellow armband stamped “Presse.” It would allow him to go anywhere, Vascard had assured him—even down to the pits if he wanted. Vascard had one as well, and they set off in different directions.
It was eleven-thirty.
Crowds choked the streets and walked along the course, past banners and brightly colored signs erected to advertise drinks—Cinzano, Martini, Dubonnet—or automobile products—EP Longlife, Total, Antar Molygraphite, Castrol. Over the starting line hung a banner which read: “C’est Shell Que J’aime.”
Race attendants were adjusting the last of the straw bales at the curves. The general atmosphere was one of gaiety, festivity, expectancy.
Carr watched the crowds through binoculars. He had seen the license plates of the cars coming into the city, and he knew the variety of people who had arrived for the race—Italians from Genoa, Torino, and Milano; Frenchmen with plates numbered 06 and 13, from the provinces of Alpes-Maritimes and Bouches-du-Rhône; a great many GB cars, which was to be expected, since so many Grand Prix drivers were English; a handful of Germans, Austrians, and Spaniards.
The loudspeakers on the track blared something in French; Carr couldn’t understand it. The message was repeated, and then a calm British voice announced that the circuit would be closed in several minutes. Policemen were erecting barricades to keep traffic off the streets used in the race. Drivers of passenger cars got out to argue, and were turned away.
At noon exactly, the voices in French and English reported that the course had been sealed. People dressed in bright sports clothes still walked along the streets of the race, but policemen were shooing them off. A sweeper began to make slow circuits of the track.
Carr went down to the course, and was allowed onto the track by the guards. A high, frightfully loud scream burst over the chattering of the crowds, and the first of the cars pulled onto the track and came around to the pits. One by one, the sixteen competitors drove around to their respective pits.
The crews, men in coveralls and girls with clipboards and sexy expressions, clustered around the cars. So did newsmen and photographers. Carr walked over to the car which was attracting most attention, Graham Hill’s B.R.M. Hill was standing next to it, in a tight-necked racing suit which reminded Carr of an intern’s jacket. He was a tall man, with swept-back hair, a neat moustache beneath a rather hawk nose, and intensely serious eyes. He had qualified second in the trials.
Hill signed autographs absently as he answered the questions of newsmen. Microphones were stuck toward his face, notepads were out, pencils scribbling. “How does it feel, Graham?” “What are your thoughts just a few minutes before—” “How do you rate your chances to win an unprecedented—”
Hill answered quietly, almost offhandedly, and seemed justifiably preoccupied. He managed to ignore one little man who kept demanding in a squeaky voice, “Do you miss England? Do you miss England?”
Carr had never seen a Formula 1 racer close up, and his attention shifted to the car. Mechanics were removing the shell of the little cigar-shaped body, painted green with a circle of orange around the snout. Carr was astonished to see how low it was—the driver’s head was bare inches above the level of the wheels. The car looked mean, low, fast.
A van drove along the track, stopping at each pit to allow men in light blue tunics to jump off and set down stretchers and first-aid kits. It added a morbid note to the proceedings. The girls walked around, talking gaily, fiddling with their stopwatches and clipboards.
Carr moved on to Jenning’s pit. Jenning seemed in an expansive mood, and if he felt tension he did not allow it to show. Newsmen greeted him like an old friend, with the amity that Carr suspected was reserved for time-honored and reliable copy. Jenning’s racing suit was not white, like most of the other drivers’; it was a spectacular fiery red. Carr recognized the woman in the pit as Jenning’s wife—the woman he had seen at the villa the night before. She paid no attention to him, and seemed absorbed with thoughts of her own, standing apart from the crowd, smoking a cigarette held in long lacquered fingers.
An official limousine, escorted by motorcycles, came down to the red velvet box of honor as the loudspeaker announced that Prince Rainier and Princess Grace had arrived at the track. They waved to the crowd, and took their seats. It was now less than half an hour to the start of the race. Carr left the pits and started up the hill toward Tribune R.
The bleachers were temporary; throngs milled among the metal struts which supported the wooden slabs that served as benches. Carr watched the spectators carefully, pausing often to look behind him. He felt that his behavior must seem unusual, but nobody noticed him. People walked in small groups of three or four, talking animatedly, caught up in the air of anticipation which was rapidly growing to a fever pitch.
He saw Liseau.
For a moment he couldn’t believe it, and stood unsure among the crowds. Liseau was dressed in a black suit, and wore his sunglasses. He was talking to a middle-aged couple about one hundred yards away. It appeared to be a friendly, inconsequential discussion—perhaps they were old patients, Carr thought, as he pushed forward. His hand reached up unconsciously to his shirt pocket, feeling the small bulge of the whistle Vascard had given him.
“Don’t blow it unless you have him,” Vascard had warned. “And if you do have him, blow like hell.”
As Carr approached, Liseau looked casually over and caught sight of him. Seemingly undisturbed, he excused himself, shook hands, and moved off. Carr tried to follow, but the crowd seemed suddenly turned to molasses. Everyone moved so slowly!
Liseau was slipping away. Carr began to run, knocking people aside, no longer pretending politeness, but this only made his situation more difficult. The crowd, startled and annoyed, impeded him. Men plucked at his sleeve, demanded apologies. He tried to shake them off, tried to keep his eyes on Liseau, who was heading away from the bleachers, up the back streets of the town. Carr followed, falling farther and farther behind.
Liseau ducked down a street to the left; when Carr reached the corner, the man was gone.
It was two-thirty. The loudspeaker announced that the course would be opened by a series of vintage racing cars: a Mercedes 196S, driven by Juan Fangio, a 2.5-liter Lotus Climax, driven by Stirling Moss, a 2.3-liter Bugatti and a 2.7-liter Ferrari. The list of cars and drivers rambled on. Frustrated, Carr returned to the course.
By the time he had made his way to a viewing position, the antique cars had completed their lap and left the circuit. The automobiles in this year’s competition were being pushed by mechanics to their positions—two abreast, for eight rows—at the start. The drivers walked along behind, waving to the spectators, who cheered wildly. Carr lit a cigarette and wondered if Liseau would reappear.
One after another, the engines roared to life. The starting line was hidden in a thick cloud of gray smoke, the noise reminiscent of a swarm of giant hornets. The loudspeaker came on.
“The starter is giving his final instructions to the drivers. He wishes them a good race, and a safe race, and reminds them that the cup is not won in the first lap.” The lap was touchy, since the cars were close together, and jockeying for initial positions.
The starter, flag in hand, ran forward, leading the cars to the starting line. He reached the line, held the flag high for one dramatic instant, and whipped it down.
Sixteen cars tore forward with a cloud of smoke and a banshee scream. Tightly clustered, they came into the first turn, took it, and ran up the hill out of his view. The smell of gasoline and exhaust hung in the air. Carr’s ears rang from the noise.
“A good start,” the loudspeaker declared. “From our spotter at the casino, the positions are as follows: first, Jack Brabham, in a Brabham-Coventry-Climax; second, Gennaro Mollini, in a Ferrari; third, Jackie Stewart, in a B.R.M. Graham Hill got off to a poor start, and is fifth behind John Surtees of the Ferrari team.”
The spectators nodded wisely at the news. Ferraris second and fourth—the Ferraris usually did well at Monaco, but rarely won. It had happened only twice, in 1952 and 1955. Still, they were fast cars, there was no denying that. Hadn’t Ferraris run the fastest lap times five times since ’52?
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