Max wanted Corinne to leave before the evening, not just because the sooner she left the better but because he knew he would then be able to concentrate on the task in hand. The Tomuras were coming. And he had to be ready for them.
When they reached the Gare St-Charles, enquiries revealed there was a 3.30 train to Montpellier, where the Bordeaux sleeper would call later. The booking was made.
‘I’ll see you off,’ said Max as they walked back out of the station.
‘So you can be sure I’ve gone?’
‘We must stop doing what Lemmer wants us to do, Corinne. For some reason, he wants you here. Don’t let him have his way.’
‘I don’t intend to.’
‘Good. Because neither do I.’
They were brave words. But what they amounted to was an open question. Anna Schmidt’s whereabouts were still unknown to Max. As far as breaking the code used in the Grey File went he had achieved less than nothing. And now Kuroda was dead. Max felt the sights of an invisible rifle were trained on him. Only Lemmer’s whim would determine when the fatal shot was fired. Until then, Max had a chance to cheat the bullet. He had to find a way to make the most of it.
After walking Corinne back to the Pension Marguerite, where she had packing to attend to, Max returned to the Grand.
A letter had been delivered for him in his absence. By hand. The deliverer had contrived to leave the letter at the reception desk without being noticed. Max did not recognize the handwriting on the envelope. But the writer knew the pseudonym he was using. That was worrying in its own right.
Max took the letter into the reading-room, sat down and opened it. His eye moved straight to the signature at the bottom. Pierre Dombreux. There it was, though whether authentic he had no immediate way to tell.
My dear Max
We have never met, though I feel I know you well. Your father spoke of you often. I saw you with Corinne near the basilica yesterday evening. I regret contacting her. It was a mistake – a surrender to sentiment. I should not have done it. She should leave Marseilles. As for you, I would have said the same until I heard the news from Port Said. They have crossed a boundary with this murder. It cannot go unpunished. That means I cannot stay in hiding. I must show myself. I will need help to defeat them – your help, Max. Meet me tomorrow morning at the Villa Orseis. I have the use of the place. It is on the Corniche, near Malmousque. Be there by nine. I will not wait long. I can tell you everything. I mean to tell you everything. The truth is terrible. But the truth is also freedom. Do not turn away from it, I beg you. And do not tell Corinne, I also beg you. Pierre Dombreux
Do not turn away. No. Max would not do that. He would never do that.
He took out his lighter, set the flame to the letter and watched it burn in the ashtray before him. The only person who could confirm the letter was from Dombreux was the only person he could not ask: Corinne. Therefore it was safer to destroy it.
Tomorrow morning, if Dombreux was to be believed, Max would know the truth. And if he was not to be believed . . .
That too was truth of a kind.
MAX SAT WITH Corinne in the buffet at the Gare St-Charles. Warm sunshine burnt sallowly through the grimy windows. The whistles and shouts and engine snorts and general hubbub of the concourse drifted in among the rattling crockery and the low burble of intermingled conversations. Corinne looked at Max, then up at the clock, then back at Max.
‘Do you think Pierre ever intended to contact me?’ she asked through a plume of nervously exhaled cigarette smoke.
‘I don’t know, Corinne,’ Max replied, which he reckoned was not altogether untrue.
‘If not, bringing me here was just a cruel hoax.’
‘No. It wasn’t that. I suspect Lemmer wanted you here to divert me from tracking down Anna Schmidt.’
‘Have you any way of finding her?’
‘Not yet.’
‘Promise me I won’t read in the newspaper that you’ve met with a fatal accident.’
He smiled gamely at her. ‘I promise.’
‘But you can’t, of course. I know that.’
Max said nothing, there being nothing to say. Farewells had often been thus in his experience: much left unspoken, though not unthought. In this case, there was an additional reason for reticence: the letter he had received from Corinne’s errant husband.
She looked at the clock again.
This time, so did he. ‘We should be going,’ he announced.
‘Yes.’ In her gaze was an unplumbed depth of soulfulness. ‘Of course.’
Max walked out onto the platform with Corinne, carrying her bag. Before boarding the train, she handed him a piece of paper with her address in Nantes written on it, along with her sister’s. ‘In case I move,’ she explained. She had tried to break off their acquaintance conclusively when leaving Paris, but seemed no longer to believe that was possible. ‘I’ll write or cable,’ he assured her, worthless though such an assurance was. The sun was warm on his back as he held a door open for her. The paintwork of the carriage was peeling. There was verdigris on the door handle. These details he felt he would remember. And tied to them would be either relief or regret that he had not told her about Dombreux’s letter. A decision was always a guess. And a guess was always a hope.
She kissed him once on the cheek and began to say something, then stifled the words, turned away and climbed hurriedly aboard. He passed the bag up to her and closed the door. She leant out through the window. Other doors were slamming the length of the train. A whistle blew. The engine gathered steam.
‘Don’t worry,’ he said, smiling at her. It seemed she could not speak. She grasped his hand, then released it. There was another blast on the whistle. The train clanked into motion. And she stepped back. She did not propose to watch as his figure receded on the platform. The parting was done.
But not for Max. He watched the train all the way out of the station, until it curved out of sight. Silence fell. In the emptiness of the afternoon, he turned and walked away.
Max had experienced a surge of anger on hearing of Kuroda’s death. His first instinct was to await the Tomuras’ arrival, then burst in on them and shoot them both dead. The idea held a strong appeal: to make an end of these people who had somehow ruined his father’s life and Corinne’s and the lives of numerous others he did not even know.
But though the death of Count Tomura might obstruct Lemmer, it would not defeat him, far less destroy him. And it would not give Max what he craved now above all else: the truth. Pierre Dombreux claimed he could give him that. Max had to take the chance Dombreux was in earnest. Until tomorrow morning, at least, he had to stay his hand.
It followed he had to keep MacGregor at bay by seeming to give him what he wanted. Close to the expiry of the twenty-four hours MacGregor had allowed him to consider his position, Max would indicate his willingness to make a sworn statement. It would not be possible to arrange a visit to a notaire until the following day. And by then . . .
As Max neared the Grand, a woman emerged from the hotel and stepped into a waiting car, which immediately drove away. It was such a fleeting and distant glimpse that he could not be sure, but his first impression was that the woman was Nadia Bukayeva. He hurried ahead, but the car was already lost to sight in the tangle of traffic on the Canebière.
Judicious questioning of the reception clerk established that a woman had just left after confirming Count Tomura and his son would be arriving that evening. She had not volunteered her name.
It was Nadia, of course. It had to be. She was Lemmer’s intermediary for communications with Count Tomura. The pieces were moving on the board. And she was one of them.
Max waited until six o’clock before heading for MacGregor’s hotel. Ideally, he would have waited until later, but he needed to be back at the Grand before the Tomuras arrived. Besides, it was already too late for MacGregor to act immediately on any agreement by Max to cooperate.
As it transpired, it was too late for another reason.
MacGregor was out. Max left a note for him proposing he call again at nine the following morning. He couched the suggestion meekly enough to delude MacGregor into supposing he had the better of Max, who would actually be elsewhere at nine the following morning – elsewhere and, with luck, more profitably engaged.
Returning to the Grand, Max caught Gaspard’s eye as he crossed the foyer. A few minutes after he had reached his room, there was a knock at the door.
‘I must ’ave this back by tomorrow morning,’ Gaspard said, slipping the pass-key into Max’s hand.
‘You will,’ said Max.
‘You worry me, monsieur.’
‘Just as well I don’t worry myself, then, isn’t it?’
From the balconette of his room, Max had a good if oblique view of the hotel’s main entrance. He kept it under discreet surveillance as the estimated time of the Tomuras’ arrival drew near.
They arrived when expected, transported from the station in the hotel’s limousine. Porters scurried out to receive them. Count Tomura’s party comprised himself, his son and a hulking, wasp-waistcoated factotum. The Count had his left arm in a sling, causing him to wear his overcoat with one sleeve empty. That and his baleful, imperious expression gave him the appearance of a wounded general. Noburo Tomura looked a softer, over-indulged product of the line – and just a little insecure in his show of arrogance towards the porters. Max suspected recent events might have shaken him rather more than they had his father. He had never seen either of them before. Yet with all he knew about them he felt he had their measure.
Max kept up his vigil by the window long after the Tomuras had gone in. He was waiting to see if Nadia would return to confer with them. That would be his chance to learn enough to give him some slender advantage. Whether the chance would amount to anything in reality he could not predict. Action – and reaction – would govern the outcome. When the time came.
THE ONLY FLYING Max had ever disliked was in fog.
Aside from the danger of misreading the altimeter, it was the opacity of the world the plane moved through that unnerved him. Enemy aircraft were less of a threat than an unanticipated hillock or an avenue of trees. He could see nothing. He could counter nothing. Hard-learnt skills of evasive manoeuvring did not matter a damn. His opponent was invisibility itself.
To Max, stiff-limbed in his seat by the window of his room, Nadia’s eventual arrival felt very much like the sudden lifting of a fog bank. Suddenly, the challenge was clear before him.
A car drew up and Nadia stepped out onto the pavement. Max could see nothing of the driver beyond a coated elbow. It hardly mattered which one of Lemmer’s minions he was. He drove on as Nadia entered the hotel.
Max sprang into action. He checked the pass-key in his pocket and the gun in his shoulder-holster, shrugged on his jacket and headed for the door.
He assumed Nadia had come to brief the Tomuras on Lemmer’s behalf. He further assumed they would communicate in English. The only other possibility was French and he could hope to learn something even from that. But he reckoned English was likelier.
They would probably meet in Count Tomura’s suite. Noburo would walk through from his adjoining room. That would place them some distance from the door of Noburo’s room, which Max proposed to enter by. To what extent he could eavesdrop on their conversation remained to be seen. As did what he would gain from it. But it was an opportunity he was determined to press to the limit.
He descended the stairs to the second floor cautiously, in case Nadia came up by the staircase, although he expected her to use the lift. He heard the whirring of its mechanism as he came to the landing and hung back, shielded by a wall. It seemed he had read her right.
The lift doors rattled open. The attendant said something. The doors closed. There were soft footsteps on carpet, like the padding of a panther; a knock; a faint creak as another door opened. No words were spoken.
Max risked a glance along the wide corridor. The door to the corner suite at the far end was closing. Nadia had entered.
Max waited a few moments, then started along the corridor, taking the pass-key out of his pocket as he went.
The whereabouts of the factotum were unknown to him, of course. He hoped the fellow had been sent up to his attic room for the duration of Nadia’s visit. Count Tomura would probably not want a servant to witness their meeting.
He reached the door of Noburo’s room. There was no sound from within. But the hotel’s doors were solid, its walls thick. Max would learn little by straining his ears out in the corridor. He tentatively inserted the key in the lock and turned it. There was resistance. He grasped the handle and pulled the door towards him. The key turned, with the faintest of clicks. He depressed the handle. The door opened.
He stepped inside and eased the door shut behind him. Nobody called out. There was no reaction to his entry.
He was in a shadowy vestibule, with a half-open door before him. He crept through it into the main part of the room. It was larger and more lavishly decorated than his own. And it was, as he had hoped, empty.
He heard voices then, carrying from rooms beyond, through the open door he could see diagonally opposite him. He could not distinguish any words, but it sounded as if English was being spoken.
He crossed the room as lightly as he could, wary of creaking floorboards. None betrayed him. Two vast gilt-framed mirrors on facing walls constructed a tunnel out of reflected and re-reflected images of Max that he did his best to ignore as he proceeded.
The voices grew steadily louder and more distinct as he neared the door. Beyond it he could see the window of a further room. A shadow moved somewhere within. A man coughed. The shadow moved again.
‘You must excuse me.’ The voice was low and gravelly, the accent well-bred English tinged with Japanese. ‘I do not take instructions readily from a woman.’
There was a drift of cigar smoke in the air. Through the crack of the door, Max saw, beyond the communicating doorway, Count Tomura standing by the window, gazing out, smoking with his right hand, while his left was cradled in the sling.
‘They are not my instructions, but his.’ It was Nadia’s voice. She was as calm and self-possessed as ever. The haughtiness she could never quite suppress was bound to annoy Count Tomura. But perhaps she did not care. ‘And he would want you to regard them as . . . recommendations.’
Tomura laughed mirthlessly. ‘He should remember what I am doing for him.’
‘I am sure he has not forgotten.’
‘And you, Nadia Mikhailovna? What have you not forgotten?’
‘Oh, many things.’
‘Do they include the tasks you performed for the Dragonfly in Keijo?’
‘Many of those tasks I would prefer to forget.’
Another laugh. ‘No doubt you would.’
‘But of course some matters . . . stick in my memory.’
Another voice cut in, younger and sharper, clearly that of Noburo Tomura. ‘Are you threatening us?’
‘We are all threatened by our past,’ his father said, turning round from the window. ‘You will learn that in time, musuko.’
‘Nothing that has happened since you arrived in Paris will cause difficulty for us in Tokyo, will it, my lord?’ asked Nadia, her tone unaffected by Noburo’s intervention.
‘No,’ Count Tomura replied emphatically. ‘Saionji has been luckier than he knows. But it is only a postponement of the reckoning. I hold Hara and most of his ministers in the palm of my hand. And what we bring will enable me to close my fingers around them.’ Max saw the fingers of Tomura’s left hand curl inwards as he spoke. ‘So, how many will you be?’
‘Three,’ said Nadia.
‘Who is the third?’
‘His secretary.’
‘Ah, so there is someone closer to him than you?’
‘I am as close to him as he needs me to be.’
‘There is an assurance my father is due,’ Noburo said suddenly. ‘Why do you not give it?’
‘Your f
ather knows it will be done,’ came Nadia’s unflustered reply.
‘Indeed,’ said Count Tomura. ‘But I will require proof that it has been done.’
‘You will—’
Nadia broke off. Someone had entered the suite. Max heard a door close. Words were spoken in Japanese between the newcomer and Noburo.
To Max’s horror, a figure appeared in his restricted view, moving past Count Tomura, bowing slightly as he did so. It was the burly factotum, carrying what looked like a suit or overcoat in a cover, complete with hanger.
He walked through the communicating doorway into Noburo’s room. Max shrank back, concealing himself in the angle between the door and the bed. The factotum padded across to another door, which he opened. Max heard clothes being parted on a wardrobe rail. He wondered if he should make a run for it, but decided against it. There was still a good chance he could slip out without anyone knowing he had ever been there.
‘It is a pity you had to leave Paris earlier than expected,’ said Nadia, almost conversationally, stalling, Max assumed, until the factotum had left.
‘I am a soldier,’ said Count Tomura. ‘I adapt to changing circumstances. As does my son.’
‘How wise of you.’
‘It is also wise of me to employ trustworthy servants. You may speak freely in Ishibashi’s presence.’
‘I believe I have said all that needs to be said.’
The factotum – Ishibashi – started padding back across the room. Then he stopped. Something had caught his eye. Max saw at once what it was: the coverlet of the bed was ruckled at one corner. Max must have brushed against it on his way to where he was now hiding.
‘There must be nothing that can connect me – or my son – to this,’ said Tomura. ‘I will not provide the necessary introductions unless I am convinced it has been dealt with in a manner that cannot touch us. Is that clear?’
‘It is,’ said Nadia. ‘And it will be so.’
Ishibashi moved into Max’s sight. His broad, flat-featured face, in which the eyes were barely visible between folds of flesh, wore a faint frown of dissatisfaction. He bent over the end of the bed and smoothed the coverlet.
The Corners of the Globe Page 35
