The Guardian

by Christopher Kenworthy

  “I would like you to tell me your version,” she said. “It is a convenient way to check your identity.”

  Carver was nettled, but had to admit that the idea made sense.

  “I can come to your hotel,” she suggested. “Or you could come to my office in the Rue Halbert?”

  “No,” said Carver. “We can meet in the street. Do you know the Rue Saint-Dominique?”

  “Near the Tour Eiffel? I know where it is, anyway.”

  “At number 131, there is a fountain. Stand by it at mid-day, and I will come and buy you some lunch,” he said, putting the telephone down before she could argue.

  *

  Far more important than the fountain at the Rue Saint-Denis was the tiny, quiet street which joined the Rue Saint-Denis just behind it. The junction of the two had been marked off with a line of bollards, which meant that a fleeing man could disappear down it certain that a pursuing car could not follow him. Carver was not of a trusting nature.

  He left his own car where it was and took a taxi to the Invalides. Wearing a raincoat over an open necked shirt and lightweight tan trousers, he strolled down the Rue Saint-Denis from the direction of the Eiffel Tower, stopping now and again to peer into the windows of the expensive grocers and clothes shops which served the area.

  She was standing by the fountain, reading a newspaper and looking like a successful businesswoman who dressed in Chanel. Carver stood outside the wine shop on the opposite side of the road and for a few moments indulged himself simply in admiring the view.

  Amy Varzon was pencil slender and must have cost the product of a modest oil well to dress.

  She was wearing a white roll-necked silk shirt under a dark grey double-breasted tailored jacket, a slim, two-decked skirt, black stockings and polished black shoes with wide bows on the toes.

  She had a broad black leather belt round a narrow waist, huge translucent hoop earrings and a wide gold bracelet round the wrist of her black kid gloves.

  Her black hair was out down to a schoolboy crop and under arched black brows hot black eyes snapped, furious, from a smooth olive face. Carver crossed the road to her and peered over the top of the newspaper she was pretending to read.

  “Morning, sweetie,” he said with a leer.

  She told him what to do with Gallic pithiness.

  “And I came so far to meet you. Lovegod sends his love,” said Carver.

  She gave him a quick rundown on Lovegod’s possible ancestry and probable sexual predilections. They sounded unlikely as well as being illegal.

  “What’s the problem?” said Carver, amiably. “Didn’t I say I’d be here at midday?”

  “Midi? I have been waiting for twenty five minutes,” she said in a strangulated voice. “Nobody keeps me waiting twenty five minutes! Understand? Nobody!”

  “Wrong,” said Carver, ignoring a cab which seemed overeager to be hailed.

  He took her arm affectionately and steered her around the fountain and between the bollards behind it. At first, she seemed disposed to resist the pressure of his guiding hand, but when Carver insisted, reluctance was futile.

  “Where are we going?” she asked, still furious but now also startled.

  “To lunch, where else?”

  He flagged down a second cab, handed her into the rear seat and told the driver: “Rue de l’Ancienne-Comédie.”

  “You have somewhere in mind?” At least the heat was going out of the dark eyes now. It was understandable that a beautiful woman would resent being kept waiting, but she had been angry rather out of proportion with the offence, and he wondered.

  “Le Procope,” he told her. It was something of a tourist trap, with its faded plush seats and fixed price menu, but it was fun, and he liked it. It also had history, claiming to be the world’s first cafe, and he liked that, too. Like many Americans he was unnaturally aware of his own country’s relatively short history, and could not repress certain awe for the ancient.

  Le Procope had been serving coffee to Parisians since before America was born.

  “Eh, bien,” she said, with a sigh, and remained silent until they were sitting on the overstuffed banquettes and she had a glass of kir in front of her.

  “Lovegod says you need help,” she prodded, when their order had been taken and their wine ordered.

  Carver sipped his Scotch – the white wine laced with Cassis liqueur which the French universally favored as an aperitif was too sweet for him – and explained the disappearance of Irene and his discovery of the picture.

  She listened in well schooled silence, and ate her way through the various courses as they arrived. When he had finished, she pushed away her plate. She might be slender, but she ate, thought Carver, like a starving wolf.

  “And from me you want?”

  “Help, finding Irene.”

  “And the slavers?”

  He still found it odd to be discussing, in the second half of the Twentieth Century, a problem using the language of the Eighteenth.

  She gave him a fleeting smile when he commented.

  “It is a problem of the Twentieth Century, too,” she said.

  “There are more slaves now than there ever have been. I will take you later to see some in Paris.”

  “Can we question them?”

  She shook her head.

  “There would be no point. They know nothing and to take one away would be to condemn him to death. His master would never risk having him back. All he could do would be to reveal to you to whom he belonged.”

  That would serve very well, Carver thought grimly. But he kept it to himself, and followed when she led.

  The paved and fenced area in front of the vast cathedral of the Sacré-Coeur perched like an oversized Easter Egg on the hill of Montmartre was an unlikely place to seek a slave, but they found some almost instantly.

  Among the milling crowd of Japanese tourists who had just issued from their bus, the children flitted like mosquitoes. And like mosquitoes they stung and bit.

  Standing well back, Carver and the girl watched as the urchins, dirty and ragged, homed in on their first victim.

  He was thickset, stolid Japanese with eyes almost buried in the folds of his face.

  He wore a lightweight sweater, slacks and a wrist bag, and he was trying to photograph the front of the cathedral from an impossibly close angle. Because his attention was on the viewfinder, he did not notice the children until it was too late.

  “Watch,” said Amy, and pressed Carver’s arm.

  The children had their technique off to a fine art. They closed on their intended victim with smoothly synchronised movements, which looked random but brought them all to the same place at the same instant.

  The tallest of them caught their victim’s attention by offering an opened newspaper on outstretched arm.

  “Monsieur! Monsieur!” He piped, his eyes fixed beseechingly on the viewfinder.

  At the same time the other children closed on the Japanese, all shouting at once for his attention. Their hands patted and stroked at his shoulders, arms, hips.

  As he slapped and swore at them, their leader’s hand, invisible to his victim under the newspaper, indistinguishable from touch among all the other exploring paws, ran expertly through his pockets. Carver saw a wallet flicker quick as a lizard from hand to hand, and a small girl in a tattered dress broke away from the crowd and ran lightly between the other tourists, face alight with glee. By the time she disappeared round the corner of the great church, the leather folder had been abandoned, and its contents had vanished under her clothes.

  Attracted by the tourist’s roaring, his courier ran across the open space shouting, and the children swirled like gnats and were gone, down the steps towards the twisting streets, across the front of the church and between the easels of the artists in the Place du Tertre, or simply behind the waiting coaches and cars.

  At one moment they were there, clamorous and larcenous. The next, they were go
ne. Behind them, the Japanese tourists gathered round their looted friend, exclaiming with indignation as his personal inventory revealed the extent of his losses.

  Gone was his wrist bag, its denuded strap hanging still from the strong brown wrist. Gone his credit cards, as Carver had seen. Gone was the camera from the neatly snipped end of its retaining chain.

  “Thirty seconds,” murmured the girl next to him, her eyes on a surprisingly robust wrist watch. She flicked the cuff of her glove back over the watch face and turned to face him.

  “They were good,” she said. “He should at least have felt the camera go. But they took that last – even so, he did not miss it until he saw the end of the chain. Good. They were very good.”

  They certainly had been. Carver had been watching closely, knowing precisely what the children were about to do and he had still missed both wrist bag and camera.

  Keening miserably in Japanese, the tourists returned to their coach. As it pulled away, another wheeled round the corner and another disparate set of tourists spewed onto the forecourt.

  This time, Carver was able to see where the children came from. One small group came up the steps from Montmartre itself, another from the Place du Tertre. A third – containing the ringleader and his newspaper – came down the steps of the Cathedral itself.

  This time, Carver did not bother watching the tiny pickpockets. Instead he carefully searched the forecourt and the front of the Cathedral. And within seconds he had found what he was looking for.

  “What’s down there?” he asked, jerking his head.

  “It is the funicular. It takes people up and down the hill,” she said without taking her eyes off the children.

  “Merci.”

  It was a split-second before she realised he was gone, and then she threw herself down the steps after him, shouting “Non!” in a strangulated whisper.

  She was far too late. Travelling at a surprising speed, Carver was already halfway down the steps to the cable oar station.

  “Goddamnit,” he said as she caught up with him.

  “What is it?”

  “I thought I saw a guy with a walkie-talkie standing up here. But he went as soon as I moved.”

  “Well, of course he did,” she said crossly. “That is why he positions himself here. So that he can go if he is seen.”

  “He was calling the shots for those kids.”

  “Well, naturally he was.”

  “He could tell us something.”

  “Possibly, But how can we find him now that you have shown you would recognise him again?”

  Carver shrugged, angry with himself, and turned away to watch the children again. But with the removal of their controller, they had disappeared into the surrounding streets, and after a half hour of fruitless search, the only thing to do was to start down the hill of Montmartre again, towards the Pigalle.

  They started down the steep flights of steps that led away from the Place du Tertre, both of them out of temper.

  The attack was beautifully timed and perfectly placed. They had turned the corner and started on a downward flight, Amy in the lead, when Carver heard the faintest whisper of movement behind his head.

  The man’s very stealth was what undid him. A tourist would have made more noise, and Carver leaned forward on the steep stair and grabbed Amy, pulling her back against the hand rail.

  As he did so, a foot scraped sharply behind him, and a man gave a startled grunt. A foot fell heavily on Carver’s shoulder and he straightened, shooting the attacker forward and into the smooth ramp which ran beside the stair.

  The attacker went over his head in a flurry of wind milling arms and pedaling legs, falling headfirst down the steep drop, hitting the pavement below with considerable force.

  From the moment he put his foot off the steps and onto the slope, the unknown man was a dead man, and from his frenzied shriek, he knew it.

  Carver and Amy continued down, and as they did so, he bent his knees and picked up something from the steps between them, slipping it into his pocket.

  People were gathered around the crumpled form on the way down.

  He lay face down on the pavement, his neck at an impossible angle. There was a small pool of blood near his nostrils.

  A shopkeeper came from a doorway, shouting importantly that he had called an ambulance.

  “What happened?”

  Carver shrugged.

  “He was behind us and seemed to lose his footing. He almost brought us down with him. I didn’t even see what happened. Did you?”

  An unknown tourist was already excitedly reconstructing the accident in speculative terms as they slipped quietly away.

  “I would rather not be involved,” was all Carver had to say.

  Amy stared at him for a moment, then shrugged and excused herself to make a telephone call.

  “I am still responsible to my boss,” was all she would say.

  Carver watched her talking animatedly into the phone from the vantage point of a nearby bar, and thought he saw a remarkable similarity between her and Lovegod.

  It would not be visible, he realised, to most observers. But then he had a quite different insight into Lovegod’s egocentric attitude to policing than most observers.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Across the vineyards, Bram baked in the afternoon sunlight, an untidy huddle of dusty red roofs and ochre walls, shimmering slightly in the heat from the fields.

  Behind it from Luther’s point of view the Black Mountains bulked like storm clouds on the horizon, hunching over the far side of the wide sprawling valley which swept down through France from sea to sea, carrying with it one of the world’s most remarkable canals and one of France’s most remarkable roads.

  When the Cathar heretics pursued their weird suicidal creed in those mountains, and Simon de Montfort hunted them with the aid of the Inquisition from farmhouse to castle, Bram must have looked very similar to the way it does today.

  Looked at from the mountaintop fortress to which Sigmund Dark referred euphemistically as his “house at Bram”, Bram was a jigsaw of circular streets, concentrically surrounding its stubby church and market place.

  Luther could see the extent of the medieval town clearly defined. The main road now followed the original circle of the town wall. But at some time in the past the canny burghers of Bram had dismantled their defences and turned them instead into profitable housing.

  Outside that old circle, more recent streets formed more orthodox squares, until the tiny town petered out into the countryside.

  Luther moved his point of vantage along the tower to the corner. From here, his eagle’s-eye view of the town was replaced by a view instead of the castle below.

  At one time, Château Bram had been a Cathar stronghold. From the fighting deck on the top of its second tallest tower, even Luther could appreciate why.

  The old Cathar parfaits had planned their eyrie well. The Rocher de Bram was a geological anomaly, a broken tusk of rock standing alone in the gentle rolling swells on the valley floor.

  From its summit, a man with keen eyes could see almost to the Mediterranean, forty miles away to the southeast.

  Between the castle and the sea, away in the light haze of heat, Luther could see the sprawling mass of the town of Carcassonne, and when he put binoculars to his eyes, even make out the towers and massive walls of the Cité, that lump of living history restored to its medieval glories in the last century and sitting like an echo from the middle ages, beside the motorway which today channels motorised hordes past its walls and down to the Cap d’Agde.

  Luther swept the binoculars’ field of view across the surrounding vineyards, and down to the courtyard spread below the tower in the heart of the castle.

  Château Bram was tailored into the promontory of the mountain by a master builder. Its curtain wall clung to the very outer ramparts of the mountain itself, threading its mossy way over the natural rocks. In three places the cu
rtain was reinforced, where footholds on the cliff face permitted, with vast towers which also served as the living quarters within the castle.

  One, which was built against the mountain itself, was the gatehouse. Outside its shoulders, the castle builders had cut out a causeway from the living rock, interrupted outside the gate by a drawbridge.

  The castle was thus isolated even from the mountain itself, standing a little apart on a separate crag, massive and unassailable.

  And yet de Montfort had winkled his troublesome Cathars out of their fortress and condemned them to a death so hideous that only a man directly in touch with God could have contemplated it.

  “Take a look around and then come to my office in the Blue Tower,” Dark had told him, handing over the binoculars.

  Looking around him even cursorily, Luther had been impressed. Everything that he saw in his tour had impressed him more; and everything had made him more determined that one day this would all be his.

  The gatehouse tower, the Tour Argent, was living quarters for the permanent staff of the place, all of whom seemed to have been turned out by some small factory and from roughly the same mould.

  They were big, muscular men whose shoulders seemed to slope outwards for an inordinately long way from just below their ears. There were two of them standing just inside the gatehouse arch, a few feet apart, hands clasped loosely in the small of their backs. They were dressed in light tan trousers and shirts, with the sleeves rolled up to the biceps. They had boots on their feet and circular peaked caps on their heads, and they reminded Luther strongly of something from his youth.

  He remembered what it was when Sigmund Dark jerked a thumb at them and said tersely: “Ex French Foreign Legionnaires. The Legion has a barracks at Castelnaudary, just up the road, and I have a good friend among the senior NCOs. He aims the right ones in my direction on discharge.”

  Luther recalled the film of Beau Geste he had seen when he was nine, and took another long look. The two men ignored him.

  “I thought they had long blue coats and hankies down the back of their necks,” he protested.

  “Only when Gary Cooper was in the Legion,” said Dark, amused. “They’ve changed since then. They are France’s toughest soldiers. Arguably, the world’s toughest. They can take orders, work on their own initiative, and keep their eyes and ears shut when they are told to. Best of all, they look after themselves and their own.”