Get Off At Babylon

by Marvin H. Albert

“I’m sure I can take care of it,” he said. “Our restaurant is doing quite well lately, as you may have heard.”

  I had heard. The place was called La Grange. It had existed up there in the perched village of Eze for years without doing all that well—until it had been taken over by Mulhausser and his wife, Libby Arlen. Some years back she had been a sex symbol in Hollywood films, and then in France, where she’d been married for a time to a top director named Charles Jacquier. She’d drawn the movie crowd to their restaurant, while Mulhausser had pulled the luminaries of the sports world.

  That in turn drew the kind of people who like to go where they might find themselves dining and drinking next to celebrities. La Grange was becoming a jet set favorite. I hadn’t been there, although I’d been told it had a great chef and a pleasantly redone setting. I preferred restaurants where they just charged for a good meal, not for the privilege of watching famous faces eat.

  Mulhausser took another sip of his scotch and water and asked, “Did you know I was married before?”

  “No.” I could feel it: He was getting down to why he needed me.

  “Her name was Sabine. A French girl. It…was a painful marriage for her.” Mulhausser hesitated, as though seeking the easiest way to tell something that had no easy way. “I should never have gotten married. To Sabine or anyone else. I was too young for marriage. Not in age, you understand. In the kind of man I was. There were too many women. Beautiful, passionate, treating me as though I were a god. And I had to have them all. I married Sabine, and I think I loved her—but I had to have them. That’s what I mean by too young. I’m not like that now. But I was then.” He took a long swallow from his drink and set the glass down slowly on the patio table, looking at some point above and beyond me. From the direction of his gaze I guessed it was on the tiles around the chimney that needed replacing.

  “One night when she was expecting me and I didn’t come home, Sabine got in her car and drove out to look for me. It was raining. Perhaps a truck that had taken the road before her had spilled some oil. The car skidded and rammed against the side of a cliff. She was killed.”

  He fell silent, his gaze moving slowly along the top of my roof as though seeking more repair work that needed doing.

  “When was this?” I asked him.

  “Nine years ago.”

  “The year before you crashed in the Dutch Grand Prix.”

  “Yes.” Mulhausser looked at me then. It was hard to read expressions on that face. “That was all I could think of when I felt my car slide out of control toward that barrier alongside the Zandvoort track. That this was how my wife had died. And that fate had waited a year to show me what it felt like to die that way.”

  He finished the last of his drink. I said, “Like a refill?”

  He looked at his glass and was surprised to see it empty. “No. I don’t have to get drunk to say these things.”

  “Sometimes it makes the words hurt less.”

  “They should hurt. If they don’t, I am only an animal.”

  I waited.

  “We had a daughter. Sabine and I. I still have her—a daughter. Though I have hardly seen her in nine years. Odile is her name. She blamed me for her mother’s death. She refused to stay with me after that. Her aunt, Sabine’s older sister, finally took Odile to live with her. Ines—she had no children of her own. Partly because she often suffered from ill health. Also, her husband was much older than she. He died the year before Odile moved in with Ines. Left her an ample income and a good apartment in Paris, as well as some country property. Even a small vacation studio not far from here. In Villefranche. Odile going to live with her aunt in Paris did seem the best solution, at the time.”

  Mulhausser picked up his empty glass and held it in one hand, looking at it. Like Hamlet with the skull of Yorick. “Odile was ten years old when her mother died. She is nineteen now. Nine years. For seven of those years I had no contact with her at all. When I tried to see her Odile would run away and hide. When I called her aunt’s place in Paris Odile refused to come to the phone. When I sent her letters or presents—her aunt said Odile burned them.

  “Then, two years ago, Ines died. She left everything to Odile. Her income had just about ended by then, but there was her property. Odile got that and a small savings account put aside for her education. But Odile was only seventeen then. Too young to be left to live alone.”

  He put aside the empty glass and looked at me. “As you know, I married again. A former screen actress. Libby Arlen. A wonderful woman, but almost my age. I won’t have any other children. There’s only Odile. My daughter. So I forced her to come down here to live with us.”

  He became silent again. Finally I said, “But it didn’t work out.”

  “No. It didn’t. Odile got along well enough with Libby. Everyone does. But Odile couldn’t stand being near me. It made her act like a wild creature. She began running around with the kind of boys—and men—I couldn’t approve of as her father. I tried to stop her. And she left. Went to live for a time in the studio in Villefranche that she’d inherited from her aunt. And then went back to Paris.

  “What could I do? Get the police to drag her back because she was a minor? She would only have run off again. And soon she was no longer a minor. I learned that she had begun going to the College de France. I also learned that she no longer bore my name. She changed it. Took her mother’s maiden name, Garnier. Odile Garnier. My daughter. I didn’t see her again for two years.”

  He fell silent again. But this time he resumed without prompting. “Until one night last week. The same night that police detective was shot in Nice, by the man you caught. Bruno Ravic.”

  * * * *

  “Odile phoned me that night. From a public phone on the outskirts of Nice. I’d had no idea she was down here. She told me she was having a ‘little trouble.’ But when I asked what it was, she wouldn’t tell me. All she would say was that she needed my help.

  “She said she wanted to get back to Paris quickly. But she didn’t want to take a plane or train, or hire a car. She wanted me to come pick her up and drive her to Paris. That night.”

  “Which you did.”

  “Yes.” Mulhausser shrugged slightly. “I’ve never stopped wanting her to regard me as a real father, you see. Someone she could turn to…and finally she was giving me that chance. I couldn’t refuse her.

  “I drove most of the night. She wouldn’t answer my questions, would hardly look at me. At one point I did have a feeling she wanted to tell me something. But I could have been wrong about that. She just sat beside me for about the first hour, very tense, staring ahead and saying nothing. Then she climbed into the back and slept through the rest of the drive. Or perhaps she was only pretending to sleep—so she wouldn’t have to talk. I can’t be sure.

  “When we reached Paris, Odile wouldn’t let me take her to her apartment. She made me drop her off at a taxi stand. And that’s the last I’ve seen of her.”

  “You think your daughter’s the girl I saw leave Bruno Ravic’s building,” I said. “The one who probably let the police know they could find him with heroin in his apartment.”

  “Yes. I read your description of her a few days ago, after Ravic was killed. I think the girl was Odile.”

  “My description wasn’t much. It could fit so many others.”

  “Odile was wearing a leather jacket too big for her when I picked her up outside Nice,” Mulhausser told me. “She was carrying a knapsack. And she had on dungarees—with plaid patches on the knees. Exactly the way she was dressed in your description. There couldn’t have been too many girls that age running around Nice dressed like that, with both a knapsack and those patches, on that particular night.”

  “No,” I admitted. “But that still doesn’t make it certain it was your daughter I saw.”

  “I hope it wasn’t. That would be a relief. To learn Odile was telling t
he truth when she said she was in a little trouble. Not trouble involving dope dealers and killing. If that’s what you find out, I’ll be grateful. You’ll have more than earned whatever I have to pay you.”

  “Do you have a picture of your daughter?”

  “No. I tried to take some of her when she was staying with us two years ago. But whenever I approached her with a camera she walked away. She couldn’t tolerate my trying to act like a normal father.” He sighed and rubbed the scar tissue covering one cheekbone with blunt fingertips. “It is not pleasant, having someone around who dislikes you that much.”

  “My description of her was in the papers three days ago,” I said. “Why did you wait until now?”

  “The police are looking for her. I didn’t want to take any risk of their finding out who she is. If it is Odile. I tried to find her myself. By phone first. I called her Paris apartment, but there was no answer. I tried the studio in Villefranche, in case she’d come back down. I’ve continued to phone both places, but nobody ever answers. Finally I went back up to Paris. She’s not at her apartment, and I couldn’t find anyone who knows where she might be.”

  “Any idea how long your daughter was down here, before you picked her up outside Nice that night?”

  “I asked Odile that. She just said ‘for a while’—and that’s all I could get out of her.”

  “Was she using the Villefranche studio while she was here this time?”

  “I assume she was. But I can’t be sure.” Mulhausser leaned toward me, resting his forearms on the wicker table, his strong hands clasped together. “I need your help to find my daughter, Monsieur Sawyer. If she is in trouble, I want you to help me get her out of it. Will you do it? Will you try to help me?”

  I was remembering another parent who’d asked me that. Another daughter I’d tried to find and save from the trouble she’d gotten herself into. That had been more than a year ago, back in the previous April. I still got a heavy knot in the pit of my stomach when I thought about how that one had gone wrong—and about what I might have done differently to prevent it. Mulhausser’s problem with his daughter had the makings of family tragedy like that one. I didn’t want to get involved and risk failing to prevent this one. There were enough cases around that didn’t stick you with a feeling of person-to-person responsibility that vital.

  I drank the rest of my orange juice. I looked at Egon Mulhausser’s burn-scarred face.

  He looked straight back at me. Waiting.

  I said, “Yes.”

  Chapter 7

  Egon Mulhausser couldn’t give me much help. He had the addresses and phone numbers for his daughter’s Paris apartment and her studio in Villefranche. The country property inherited from her aunt—a small parcel of land without any dwelling—Odile had sold more than a year before. Mulhausser assumed she’d sold it to have more to live on while going through college.

  He had checked at the College de France while in Paris. Odile Garnier was still registered as a student there. But she hadn’t returned to any of her courses after the end of the Easter vacation the previous month.

  He’d also had a banker friend check with the Paris bank where Odile kept her accounts. Her savings account had been depleted for almost four months. Her checking account had been canceled two months earlier because she’d bounced too many checks. Which was another cause for her father to worry: “Odile should still have money left from the sale of the country property, and from her aunt’s savings account.”

  He didn’t know who any of her friends were. She didn’t have any relatives left other than him. When she’d stayed with him two years ago she’d gone to discos and the beaches, and sometimes to museums. He had no idea of what her other interests were.

  “And that’s all I know about my daughter,” Mulhausser said. “That doesn’t make me much of a father, does it?”

  “Not your fault.”

  “Yes it is. Odile was never able to forget that her mother died because of my irresponsibility.”

  “It was an accident. The kind that happens all the time. Your first wife could have gotten killed exactly the same way going out to do some shopping.”

  “But she didn’t. She got killed looking for me.” Mulhausser glanced at his watch and stood up. “I have to get back to the restaurant! I left Libby to deal with the lunch crowd and the cleaning up. I want to help her prepare everything for the dinner trade. We’re starting to be fully booked every day now.”

  That figured. May was the month that kicked off the Riviera’s summer season, because it included two of the biggest events of the year. The first was the Film Festival in Cannes, already starting. After that there’d be the Monte Carlo Grand Prix. It was in May that all the tourist businesses along the Cote d’Azur really got rolling.

  “You’ll let me know,” Mulhausser said, “as soon as you find out anything?”

  I assured him I would.

  When he was gone the first thing I did was to phone Fritz Donhoff in Paris. That was where Mulhausser had driven his daughter, and that was where she had her apartment and went to school. And this was Fritz’s kind of case. He had spent much of his seventy-four years specializing in finding missing persons.

  Fritz had been a police detective in Munich when the Nazi takeover had made it advisable to him to get out of his native country rather quickly. He’d settled in Paris and become part of the Resistance during the war. After the war Europe was full of people trying to find loved ones they’d lost. Fritz had discovered he was good at that kind of job, and it remained the kind he liked to do best, though there were other kinds of work that brought an investigator bigger financial rewards.

  We had been partners for some years before I’d decided to settle in the south. I still owned an apartment next to his in Paris, and we continued to operate as partners whenever one of us needed the other’s help. He didn’t get around as fast as he once had, but he made up for that with what he could accomplish with a telephone. The vast number of contacts he had accumulated, during the war and over the four decades since, was the envy of the biggest detective agencies in Europe.

  I gave Fritz the little I knew about Mulhausser’s daughter and Bruno Ravic. I explained the importance of preventing anyone from connecting the girl we were hunting with the girl the cops in Nice were looking for.

  I listened to his deep voice rumble its warning: “I’m afraid you are walking a shaky tightrope again, my boy. You could lose your license if they catch you at it one of these days.”

  “So could you, for helping me do it.”

  Fritz chuckled softly. “Yes, but at my age the danger is a therapeutic stimulant for the weary blood. Speaking of my age,” he added, “I attended a gathering of other elderly Resistance chaps the other evening. In honor of General Geoffrey. Your mother was there.”

  General Geoffrey had been a lieutenant in the French Foreign Legion at the end of the war. He had led the capture of a considerable body of Hitler’s forces in the Alpes Maritimes, which had saved the lives of a lot of Resistance members. He and my mother had both received their Legion d’honneur from de Gaulle, in person.

  “How is Babette?” I asked, like a dutiful son.

  “As ever. Beautiful, sparkling, and girlish, with all the men fawning on her.”

  Babette had a tendency to act very girlish around men who’d already been adults when she was a teenage Resistance terror—in spite of the fact that she was bigger than most of them. My mother had a statuesque, athletic build that would make an earth goddess green with envy.

  “She mentioned,” Fritz said, “that she hasn’t heard from you in some time.”

  “Did she mention she hasn’t called me, either?”

  “No. I didn’t realize you two were in one of those stages again.”

  Relations between Babette and me were apt to be variable, seesawing between wary affection and armed truce. The problem this
time was her husband. She’d married him after the war, while they were both students at the Sorbonne. That was long ago, but he and I had never managed to get beyond formal politeness with each other. Maybe if I’d gotten to know him better, earlier. But as a boy I’d spent most of each year with my father’s parents in Chicago so Babette could concentrate on her studies.

  Her husband had reacted to learning I’d become a cop with puzzled embarrassment. When I’d gone to work for the U.S. Senate he’d begun to feel there might be some hope for me after all. That hope had died when I got fired. A couple months back he’d suggested it was time for me to grow up and assume the responsibilities of an adult position in his shipping business. I had told him that most of the big businessmen I’d encountered acted as grown-up as toddlers trying to steal one another’s toys.

  I thought I’d said it with all due respect. He thought otherwise. Therefore, the present coolness between Babette and myself.

  “Don’t worry,” Fritz told me, “you know your mother always forgets these things completely after a while. One of these days she’ll be on the phone, wanting very much to see you.”

  “Fritz,” I said, “mind your own business.”

  “Certainly.” He let me hear one of his melodramatic and utterly phony sighs. “The way of the peacemaker was ever a thorny one.”

  We hung up at the same time. I figured his phone would stay hung up for about two seconds before he started using it to track down information on Odile Garnier and Bruno Ravic.

  I stuck a small burglary kit in my pocket, locked up the house, and drove off to see what I could find inside Odile’s studio in Villefranche.

  * * * *

  Afternoon traffic was just congested enough to make it a twenty-minute drive. After passing through Beaulieu I tooled around the long bend in the Lower Corniche—with the brown cliffs bulging above the right side of the road—and there was the dark blue bay of Villefranche spread out below on my left. One of the largest and deepest inlets on the Mediterranean. Crusader ships put in there for fresh supplies and recruits. In the more recent past, the entire Mediterranean fleet of the U.S. Navy used to anchor in its sheltered waters.