Get Off At Babylon

by Marvin H. Albert

  I saw it at the same time. Arlette had started toward the Palais entrance. I grabbed her and yanked her back between our cars. In that instant a high-power rifle fired three times from inside the Rue du Marché.

  One of the shots went through both rear windows of the police car and spanged off the hood of a Mercedes parked behind Arlette’s Porsche. Only one. The other two bullets entered the police car and didn’t come out. I shoved Arlette down to the pavement with me. There was a lot of yelling but no further shots. Forcing Arlette to stay down by gripping the back of her neck with one hand, I peeked around the front of my Peugeot.

  The uniformed cop, handcuffed to Bruno Ravic, had kicked open his side door and jumped out, falling beside the car. He had difficulty dragging Ravic after him. Ravic spilled out finally and sprawled on his back, not moving again. Blood pumped out of his face and throat.

  Yves Ricard had gone out the other rear door and was crouched by it with his gun in both hands, aiming where the shots had come from in the Rue du Marche. But there were too many people crowded in there for him to fire. He shouted at them to drop flat. Some did. Most continued to stand there screaming. Ricard dodged into the street, shoving them aside in an effort to catch up with the fleeing marksman. His commissaire was on the run, too, with his own gun out, turning into an Old Town alley through which the van driver had disappeared.

  Ricard and the commissaire were followed by cops flocking out of the Palais. Other flics were taking up stations around the place. I let Arlette get up, and we walked over to the stranded police car. The uniformed cop sitting beside it was cursing as he unlocked the cuffs attaching him to Bruno Ravic’s corpse.

  Arlette gazed down at the bloody, bullet-shattered face, her expression grim but not unnerved. She’d grown up with daddy in a world that had included too much sudden violence for her to go into shock over one more example of it.

  “There’s one consolation,” I told her. “You’ve lost your client but not the case.”

  She gave me her Attila the Hun look and snarled, “Go stuff yourself with nettles!” She turned on her heel and marched away to where she’d dropped her briefcase.

  The cop picked himself up off the ground and gazed after Arlette with due respect for her temperament. “Your wife?”

  “No, just warm friends.”

  “Obviously.”

  * * * *

  Neither the marksman with the rifle nor the driver of the van were found. Witnesses who’d seen the marksman were no help. Like the van driver, he’d been wearing a ski mask.

  Intensive police investigation failed to turn up the source of the killing or pinpoint its motive. It also failed to prove any messages had been passed illegally between the imprisoned Bruno Ravic and anyone outside. But Yves Ricard and I agreed it was obvious. Ravic had sent a warning to someone that he would talk if he wasn’t freed. He’d gotten back word that he should keep his mouth shut and he’d be taken care of. He’d kept his mouth shut until they’d shut it permanently. Someone had decided it was easier to terminate him than to engineer his escape.

  I didn’t get a chance to discuss it with Arlette for some time. She flew off to London that night. The doctors there were worried that Marcel Alfani’s system was too old to handle the shock of having half his stomach cut out. Arlette went to help her father decide whether to live out the rest of his years as a semi-invalid or to take the chance of coming through the operation successfully and being able to live without pain.

  There was no reason for her to hurry back. The Bruno Ravic case had been the only urgent one on her agenda. And that was over and done with. Or seemed to be.

  The killing of Ravic in a police car in front of the Palais de Justice got more news coverage than the shooting of Laurent Soumagnac. National coverage, as well as in the local paper. The events leading up to Ravic’s startling murder were recapitulated. This time the media carried my description of the girl I’d seen leaving Ravic’s building. It was reported that the police were still searching for her, hoping she could supply them with some leads.

  I already knew that. I also knew they hadn’t been able to turn up a clue to her identity.

  As it developed, I became the first one to find out who the girl was—three days after Ravic’s murder.

  Chapter 5

  Her father was brought to me by two of my closest friends: Crow and Nathalie.

  “Crow” was what our squad in Nam had called Frank Crowley, and I still did. So did his wife, Nathalie, because that was how I’d first introduced him to her.

  I was finishing an early lunch under the shade of an orange-and-green umbrella outside a Cap d’Ail cafe called Edmonds. They showed up just as Louis Bebelin left my table.

  Bebelin was the manager of our village branch of the Banque Nationale de Paris, across the street. It was noon when he’d spotted me while closing the bank for the siesta break. He had come over to join me for a few minutes, ordering an express before sitting down.

  “You saw Laurent Soumagnac this morning?”

  I nodded. “They’ll be letting him come home in a week or so. But he won’t be doing any walking around for a while. It’ll be at least six months before he’s able to work again.”

  “At least he won’t be in difficulty financially. He’ll get full salary on disability leave. And there’s his wife’s income as a social worker.”

  Marie, the owner of the Edmonds, came out with Bebelin’s express. Bebelin stirred two sugars into the little cup of strong black coffee. “Speaking of financial difficulties, Monsieur Sawyer, your checking account was overdrawn by almost two thousand francs as of yesterday afternoon.”

  “I deposited a big check in that account less than a week ago.”

  “That check was from a Frankfurt bank. You should know by now it takes longer than that for a foreign check to clear.”

  “I’ll transfer some money from my savings this afternoon.”

  “I’ve already done that for you,” Bebelin informed me blandly. “I did it last evening. Before your overdraft got into the computer. Which would have forced me to make you pay a penalty. Just come over sometime in the next couple days and sign the transfer form I made out. To make it legal. So Paris doesn’t start wondering what kind of games I’m playing.”

  That’s one of the comfortable aspects of small-town living. People know one another. Bebelin could take initiatives that would terrify big-city bankers because he knew all his depositors personally and could judge which ones he could depend on not to leave him holding the bag.

  He looked at his watch and emptied his cup with one swallow before standing up. “My wife starts worrying about sexy depositors I might be entertaining in my office whenever I’m ten minutes late.”

  He was reaching into his pocket when I said, “My treat. Call it a bribe for services secretly rendered.”

  “Let’s not call it that too loudly,” he said, and he hiked up the hill to his apartment.

  That’s when I saw Crow and Nathalie cruise past slowly in his Citroen and turn into the village parking lot. Another car followed it: a classic Jaguar, superbly reconditioned. Its chassis was gorgeous, and the motor purred. I was too occupied in admiring the car to pay much attention to the man driving it.

  Crow led the way from the parking lot to my table: a stocky redhead with a freckled, blunt-featured face set in its habitual expression of quizzical cool. As usual, his clothes were casual to the point of sloppiness. “You weren’t home,” he said as he dropped into a chair beside me, “so I figured you might be around here.”

  Nathalie trailed behind, walking slowly with the driver of the Jag, speaking to him quietly about something that evidently troubled him. I’d known her a lot longer than Crow. Since we’d both been kids. Back in the years when my grandparents used to send me from Chicago every summer to spend my school vacations with my mother at the Riviera house. Now Nathalie was chief of mer
chandising for the worldwide interests of her mother’s fashion house. She was a slim, elegant woman, taller than Crow. But nowhere near as tall as the lean, wide-shouldered man with her.

  Now that I wasn’t distracted by his car, I recognized him. Egon Mulhausser. A former race car driver from Austria who had been living on the Cote d’Azur for the last two decades of his fifty years. He’d been one of the big stars of the Grand Prix circuit.

  It wasn’t age that had ended his career. The end had come after a spectacular crash on the Zandvoort track eight years before that had turned his Formula One car into a ball of fire. The face he had now, once seen, was impossible to forget. Plastic surgery had restored most of it, but the doctors hadn’t been able to remove all the burn scars that had left him without eyebrows or eyelashes. Mulhausser had been a handsome man before the Zandvoort crash. He still was, once you got over just seeing the scars.

  I stood up and kissed Nathalie. She made the introductions. “But you two have met before. My Christmas party two years ago?”

  Mulhausser and I nodded that we remembered, though we’d barely gotten a chance to talk to each other at that party.

  “Nathalie tells me you’re a racing fan,” he said.

  “I saw you win at Monte Carlo,” I told him. “The year you took the world championship.”

  “That was a good year,” he said modestly. “I had the best car.”

  “You won some races where the car wasn’t the best. Just the driver.” It was truth, not flattery. He’d been a dynamite driver.

  “Thank you. It’s kind of you to say so.” Egon Mulhausser’s smile wasn’t much. Partly because the scars and surgery restricted his facial mobility. But there was also a certain degree of stiff formality that was a basic part of his nature—and, at the moment, there was some worry he couldn’t shake off.

  We sat down with Crow, and I asked if they’d like something to eat or drink. Nathalie shook her head. “I think Egon will want to talk with you alone. Anyway, I’m due at my office in half an hour.”

  “And I,” Crow said, “have a date to shoot a big wedding party in Nice.” He grinned crookedly. “Most impressive assignment I’ve gotten in a couple weeks.”

  It was almost a year since Crow had begun trying to turn his photography hobby into a self-supporting career. Before that he’d been a prosperous computer programmer. First in California. Then with his own company in Nice, after he’d fallen for Nathalie while spending a holiday at my house and decided to become a fellow expatriate. But he’d gotten fed up with running a business and had sold his end of the company to his French partner last year and opened a photography studio. He hadn’t made a big thing of doing so, nor of the fact that so far it hadn’t paid off. That was Crow; he never made a big deal out of anything—on the surface.

  Like in Nam, where they’d made him an anti-sniper sniper. He’d shrugged off his prowess at it; claiming it was due to nothing but sheer cowardice.

  “You know approximately where the sniper is,” he’d explained once. “And while you’re moving into a position within range of him he gets to know about where you are. From then on it’s just a matter of outwaiting each other. The first one to move again after that gives away his exact position—and gets shot. Well, I don’t care how patient that other bastard is, he’s going to be the first to move. Even if it takes a week. I’m not going to budge. Not even a finger to brush a fire ant from my eye. Because I’m too terrified to move. Just plain frozen scared.”

  Nathalie had seated herself with Mulhausser across the table from Crow and me. She looked inquiringly at Mulhausser and then back to me. “Egon needs a private investigator to help with a personal problem. He came to us because he knows you’re my oldest friend.”

  She put a reassuring hand on his muscular wrist while she spoke. Mulhausser’s success with women, back when he’d been a Grand Prix star, had been notable even among other racing drivers, all of whom attract groupies the way a farm dog draws ticks. There’d been a time when Nathalie had been enamored of him. Before she’d married Crow. Perhaps it was because she was one of the few women Mulhausser hadn’t had to ease out of his life that there’d been no residual bitterness between them. I knew that Nathalie and Crow sometimes dined in the restaurant Mulhausser and his wife had in Eze and occasionally had the Mulhaussers over to their home.

  If there was any of their former affection in the way Nathalie’s hand remained on Mulhausser’s wrist, Crow appeared not to notice. He was looking at me. “The real reason Egon came to us first was to find out how much he can trust you, Pete. I told him I’d trust you with my life—” Crow paused just a fraction of a second and then added, with no particular intonation, “If not with my wife.”

  Nathalie was as good as her husband at registering undercurrents without appearing to. Her removal of her hand from Mulhausser’s wrist was entirely casual. “Egon thinks someone he cares about is in trouble,” she told me. “It may be trouble of a criminal nature. He’s worried about whether you’d keep what you find out from the police.”

  Crow cocked an eyebrow at me. “I explained to him about a private eye being like a priest. Or a lawyer or doctor. Sworn to secrecy, privileged information, et cetera.”

  “Not quite,” I said. “More like a journalist.” I looked to Egon Mulhausser. “The law doesn’t exempt us from answering police questions. But a private detective who spills his clients’ secrets won’t attract many more clients. It’s a matter of reputation—and staying in business.”

  He had been studying me with those lashless, scar-hedged eyes all this time. And he still was, trying to make up his mind. “Nathalie tells me you are the one who saved Crow from prison on that murder charge last year. And that you used some extremely unorthodox—perhaps even illegal—methods to do so.”

  “Crow and I have been protecting each other’s backs for quite a while,” I told him. “Going back to some nasty situations in Vietnam. You’re just a friend of a friend. So don’t expect me to take that kind of chance for you. What you can count on is this: I’ll listen to your problem. Everything you tell me stops with me, whether I take the job or not. If I do take it on, I’ll do what I can to get the person you’re worried about out of trouble. If the trouble eventually turns out to be something I don’t want to get further involved in, I’ll tell you and quit. But again, what I’ve learned won’t be used in any way that might hurt you. Good enough?”

  Egon Mulhausser studied me for another moment and nodded. “Good enough.”

  Crow got to his feet and flipped a hand at me. “See you, buddy.”

  Nathalie stood up, looking like she was going to kiss Mulhausser goodbye, but she didn’t. Instead she patted his shoulder and then put an arm around Crow’s waist and yanked him close to her as they went off to the parking lot.

  When they were gone, Mulhausser glanced around us. There were people at the other sidewalk tables, too close for him. “Can we talk someplace more private? Your office or…

  “I don’t have an office,” I told him. “I use a phone and answering machine instead and work out of my home. A few minutes from here.”

  He waited while I paid Marie for lunch. Then he got in his Jag and followed my Peugeot along the Lower Corniche and down the hairpin drive to the house.

  I resisted a temptation to see if I could take those turns fast enough to make a world championship Grand Prix driver fall behind.

  Chapter 6

  I left Mulhausser on the patio while I went inside to fix us drinks. Scotch and water for him, orange juice for me. I’d had half a bottle of wine with my lunch, and I’d recently decided to cut down on afternoon liquor before I succumbed to the popular French ailment of crise de foie. I was half French, after all. A doctor I knew in Paris had a theory that liver attacks fill the same role in France that psychiatrists do in America.

  Mulhausser was giving the exterior of the house some knowing study when I ca
me out. “It’s quite old, isn’t it?”

  “The walls are. Built there a couple centuries before my grandfather bought the place. The rest was a ruin. In the village it’s still called that: La Ruyne. He had to put on a new roof and all the rest.”

  “It is in good condition.”

  My partner in Paris, old Fritz Donhoff, had taught me it’s best to let a client find his own way to what’s worrying him. I usually go along with it, up to a point. I said, “They had good workmen in my grandfather’s time. And I try to keep up with maintenance and repairs.”

  “Yourself?”

  “I like to work with my hands once in a while. It’s a way of unwinding.”

  “For me, too.” Mulhausser pointed to the roof. “You’ll need to replace some of those tiles up there before long. Around the chimney.”

  “I know. I’ve been trying to find old used tiles that’ll blend with the rest.”

  “They’re tearing down an old hotel over near Menton. It has tiles like these, many of them still solid. I know some of the men doing the demolition. I’m sure I can get you as many of those tiles as you wish.”

  “I’d appreciate it,” I said, and I gave him a gentle nudge: “That automatically makes you a favored client.” He took a sip of his drink. I drank some of my orange juice.

  “How much do you charge, Monsieur Sawyer?”

  My rates varied, depending on whether the job was for a big business or somebody bloody rich—or someone to whom the kind of money you could carry in your wallet meant something. I knew that Mulhausser had a good income but wasn’t rich. And he was a friend of a friend. Plus he’d promised me the kind of roof tiles that were increasingly hard to get.

  I gave him a rate that took all of that into consideration. “Plus expenses, which mount up. And if I have to hire help, it could cost fees equal to mine for the days I use that help.”