Get Off At Babylon

by Marvin H. Albert

  He’d made himself into a shadowy power, operating out of two main bases: a palazzo in Milan and a large villa just across the border between Ospedaletti and Bordighera.

  A quiet spider, spinning barely visible, far-flung webs. Rumor had it that one of those webs involved an illegal operation he hadn’t dropped: major-league international traffic in dope and armaments. No proof of that had ever surfaced, however. A number of people who might have been able to supply some proof had died before they could get around to doing so.

  I’d never heard of his kid brother before. “Where does this Tony Callega live?” I asked them.

  “He’s got a house in Cannes,” Libby Arlen told me. “And an apartment up in Paris. Wanders back and forth between the two.”

  “Does his brother ever come out of Italy to visit him?” Not that they knew of.

  * * * *

  I left Egon Mulhausser and Libby Arlen and walked away from their restaurant putting together an intriguing line of connections:

  Fulvio Callega was rumored to have a drug-smuggling ring among his activities, and had a reputation for silencing people who might pose a disturbance to his tranquility.

  Bruno Ravic had been involved with a drug ring and had been caught and then silenced.

  Odile Garnier had been involved with Bruno Ravic.

  Odile Garnier’s father, Egon Mulhausser, was married to Libby Arlen.

  Libby Arlen was the mother of Chantal Jacquier.

  Chantal Jacquier was about to marry Tony Callega, the kid brother of Fulvio Callega.

  Chantal Jacquier’s father was Charles Jacquier, whose comeback film was probably being financed by Fulvio Callega.

  The line formed a circle.

  A peculiar three-family circle.

  Chapter 9

  “Odile Garnier hasn’t been seen around either the College de France or her apartment since her father drove her up to Paris,” Fritz Donhoff told me when I phoned him from the tiny Eze post office at the foot of the hill.

  “She isn’t likely to show up anyplace that obvious,” I said, “not if she’s afraid somebody’s after her.”

  “Her fear appears to be justified,” Fritz said. “Her apartment was broken into four nights ago. A neighbor coming home late surprised a man leaving it. The man hid his face with his hand and rushed past down the stairs. In such a hurry he left the apartment door open. The neighbor saw the mess inside and phoned the police. They’re calling it a burglary attempt, for lack of anything else. But it was obviously a search for something specific. Mattresses and cushions shredded, furniture broken.”

  The same as at the Villefranche studio.

  I told Fritz what I’d found there—and what I thought about the postcard message.

  “You may be right,” he said. “Those people who get a sense of adventure out of exploring the subterranean passages of Paris are often referred to as troglodytes.”

  “Trogs or troglos for short. And most of them belong to groups. Very young people, generally.”

  “Yes. With an agreement to meet once a week, or once a month, to go underground together. A fixed time but a different place for each get-together.”

  “If Odile does belong to one of these groups, the postcard was notifying its members to meet at the Babylon Métro station: ‘Get off at Babylon.’”

  “I’ll make inquiries,” Fritz promised. “But it is going to be difficult. None of those groups have any sort of organization. Merely an informal arrangement among people who know one another.”

  On Bruno Ravic he already had some background information: According to the police, if Ravic had gone bad, it wasn’t until after he’d left Paris. They had nothing at all against him up there. He’d established a good reputation as a waiter. Good enough so he could count on getting hired by another restaurant whenever he left one to act in a film.

  “He only worked in three films,” Fritz told me. “Small parts. He was introduced into that world by a fellow Yugoslav exile, Stefan Cikoja, a movie crew electrician. He’s dead now. Somebody shot him a couple years ago. Probably agents from Yugoslavia. Cikoja was active in a secret organization of anti-Tito émigrés here in Paris.”

  “The Ustashi?”

  “One of the smaller groups. The Matika.”

  “Was Bruno Ravic part of it, too?”

  “Not according to what I’ve learned so far. That excuse he gave for shooting at the police—that he thought they were political enemies come to kill him—I’d say that was probably just a notion he took from what happened to his friend. It’s always possible new information will prove me wrong, of course.”

  I doubted it. I told Fritz about the line of connections I’d just gotten from Egon Mulhausser and Libby Arlen. The line that formed a circle. That gave him new names to research: Fulvio Callega and his brother Tony, Charles Jacquier and his daughter Chantal.

  “I admit some of the connections in that circle are a little loose,” I said.

  “Not as loose as you think,” Fritz told me, and he paused to relish whatever it was he now knew and I didn’t.

  “Are you going to tell me,” I growled, “or is this one of your days for testing my psychic powers?”

  “Charles Jacquier. He used the same crew of technicians for most of the pictures he made. Bruno Ravic’s friend Cikoja was a regular in that crew.”

  “The films Ravic acted in were for Jacquier?”

  “All three of them.”

  I got back in my car and drove to Cannes, twenty-five miles west along the coast.

  Chapter 10

  There was only an hour left before sunset when I reached Cannes.

  I’d stopped at Crow’s studio in Nice. Long enough for him to make fast black-and-white copies of Odiles’s photo and enlargements of the face of the boy she was with in the other snapshot. I’d taken a few of each with me and left the others for Crow to messenger up to Fritz in Paris.

  I parked above the Cannes railroad station and walked the remaining ten blocks to the hub of the action along the Croisette. With the film festival in full swing it would have taken three times as long to drive the same ten blocks. Every back street intersection was a traffic snarl. Down at the Croisette’s divided boulevard the cars were jammed to a standstill in both directions between the beach and the palatial beachfront hotels.

  But there was plenty of movement: thousands of people on foot, mobbing the six short blocks where everything important went on. I joined the crush.

  It’s never hard to find anybody who matters during the festival. They’ve come there from all over the world for the purpose of pushing their current films and working out deals for future ones. They can’t do either by hiding. At the festival’s information center they told me Charles Jacquier was staying at the Martinez. I also got a look at his photograph in an advertisement touting the film he was about to make.

  At his hotel he’d left a message for all and sundry that he would return in an hour. He was attending the late-afternoon showing of a German movie competing for that year’s awards.

  I left the lobby and worked my way through the sidewalk crowds toward the festival hall where the film was being shown. Across from it I managed to snag a tiny outside table at a brasserie called Le Harem. It was doing peak business. None of the waiters was likely to get around to me for at least half an hour. I sat back in my chair and watched the passing parade.

  Casually dressed stars and filmmakers were striding from one appointment to the next, trailed by their hangers-on. Movie fans of all ages milled about, wearing everything from evening clothes to maximum exposure bikinis. Autograph hounds prowled for that year’s big names. Flamboyant punks showed off their latest outfits and hairstyles, hoping some magazine photographer would find them worth snapping. Stoned teenagers stared blearily at the gigantic movie posters lining the Croisette while the noise and color flowed around them. Rag
ged child pickpockets drifted among the crowds. Young Riviera hoodlums leaned against the palm trees wearing expressions they’d learned from studying old Jean Gabin films on TV.

  I didn’t expect to spot Odile Garnier in that carnival, though it was always possible. By then she could have been anywhere. Still up in Paris, or back down here, or just about anyplace in France. She could also be as far away as Chicago or Singapore. But I didn’t think she’d left the country. I had a hunch about that knapsack Odile had been carrying. If the hunch was right, she wouldn’t risk carrying it through frontier controls.

  But lacking a clue to her present whereabouts, the best preliminary procedure was the one you worked in most missing person cases. Learn as much as possible about Odile Garnier and the circumstances behind her disappearance. Try to find out what and who she was running from—and whom she might run to.

  Fritz was handling the groundwork in Paris. My job at that early stage was to try it from the other end. Whatever trouble Odile had gotten herself into, it had boiled over down on the Cote d’Azur. That was also where most of the three-family circle she belonged to was centered.

  And that was where Bruno Ravic had been killed. Which had severed whatever relationship he’d had with Odile Garnier—and with Charles Jacquier.

  That didn’t make Jacquier the kind of hot lead that races your hunter’s blood. Just a possibility. Coming to Cannes could prove to be a waste of time. But I had to start somewhere.

  At the table next to mine two middle-aged men were arguing fiercely about a planned motion picture. The one who intended to produce it demanded six million dollars to let the other in on it. The other kept refusing to cough up that much unless he got exclusive rights to market the film in both Asia and South America.

  A pack of news photographers went past and headed across the Croisette. They were escorting a nubile starlet in a red halter and silver hot pants. She whipped off the halter before they reached the beach, to ensure a sufficient background audience for her sunset photo session. It worked. Even some of the small-fry desperadoes left their palm trees to go watch.

  I got a surprise. A harried waiter arrived at my table. He leaned a hip against it, resting his weary legs for a moment. I gave him the moment and then ordered a croque madame and demi-bottle of rosé. As he trudged away someone I knew strutted into view: Sonia Galeazzo—better known to her victims as the Milanese Monster.

  Sonia was short and wiry, with huge dark eyes in the face of a starving urchin. Her outfit was the usual one: old fishing cap, safari jacket, khaki pants, running shoes. The Nikon with its flash attachment and motor drive hung by a neck-strap against her chest. A spare Rolleiflex was slung from one shoulder, a bulky photo-accessories bag from the other. Sonia was one of the most dreaded of the paparazzi, her nickname earned by her talent for catching celebrities at their worst—or provoking them to it.

  She spotted me, glanced around to make sure there were no potential victims to go after, and sauntered over. I looked at what she had in tow. Sonia often used a living prop to help stimulate embarrassing situations for her camera. The Prop today had the look of a Playboy bunny. She had a fresh, friendly, doll-like face. Her nipples poked out through an open-weave fishnet blouse. Her denim shorts had been scissored to show her naval and display ample portions of her pert buttocks.

  Sonia plopped herself down in the other chair at my table. “Hi, Pete, what’re you doing in this madhouse?” Her English was as good as her native Italian. So was her French and German. She used French on her prop: “Go find yourself something to sit on, Murielle.”

  Murielle wandered inside the brasseire in search of a vacant chair, oblivious to all the eyes fastened on her nipples and ass. I stopped watching her when Sonia asked again what I was doing in Cannes.

  “Broadening my cultural horizons,” I told her.

  “No, I mean it. Are you on anything I’d be interested in?”

  “I doubt it, Sonia. Just something I have to ask Charles Jacquier about. He’s across there in the theater, and I’m waiting for the picture to end so I can talk to him.”

  “You’re right, no interest.” She couldn’t sell pictures of directors, producers, or anybody else who worked behind the camera. Photo editors only bought faces their readers knew from TV and movie screens. “But you won’t have to wait until the film lets out,” Sonia said. “Jacquier’ll slip out before then. Nobody at the festival watches all of any movie. Except the ones who made it and people with nothing else to do.”

  Her eyes kept shifting while she spoke, taking in everybody in range, hunting for her next victim. Murielle came back dragging a chair. She sat down with us and folded her hands on her bare thighs, looking like a well-behaved schoolchild waiting for orders.

  “Do you know Tony Callega?” I asked Sonia.

  “I’ve seen him around,” she said indifferently. “Antonio—calls himself Antonio here in France. He’s nobody. Good looking, though.”

  “What’s he do for a living?”

  “I don’t think he has to. All I’ve ever heard of him working at is picking up girls. And he doesn’t have to work too hard to do that.”

  “I guess he’ll have to do a little less of that,” I said. “Now that he’s going to marry Jacquier’s daughter.”

  “Is he? That’s interesting… Sonia thought about it for a fraction of a second and changed her mind. “No it’s not. Jacquier’s daughter isn’t anybody, either. Not even pretty.” She focused again on the crowds.

  “What do you know about Tony’s big brother?” I asked her. “Fulvio Callega.”

  Sonia turned her head to give me her full attention. “Not a thing,” she said evenly. “I spend too much time in Italy to know anything about Fulvio Callega.”

  “He that dangerous to talk about?”

  “Who?”

  “That’s a surprise,” I told her, “finding out there’s somebody in the world you’re afraid of.”

  “How can I be afraid of somebody I never even heard of?”

  “Okay, forget it.”

  “You bet.” Sonia looked around again. Her gaze rested for a moment on the two producers arguing millions at the next table. “Look at those poor guys,” she said, lowering her voice. “It’s been over ten years since anybody let either of them get in smelling distance of a movie. And every year they come down here to Cannes and pretend. Now they’re down to pretending to each other. A guy without dough trying to con another guy without dough. It’s a lousy business to get old in.”

  “So is yours,” I said.

  She gave me an elfin grin. “I’ll never grow old. Somebody’ll kill me before then.”

  I asked her, “Ever heard of Bruno Ravic?”

  “No… Oh, sure, I read the name in the papers. That drug pusher or something that shot a cop in Nice and then got himself killed.”

  “That’s all you know about him, what you read?”

  “That’s all.”

  “What about Odile Garnier?”

  “Doesn’t ring a bell.”

  “She used to be Odile Mulhausser.”

  That didn’t mean anything to Sonia either. I showed her the snapshot of Odile alone, but she didn’t recall ever having seen her. And Sonia was someone with a memory for faces.

  She nodded toward the festival hall across the way. “What’d I tell you? There’s Jacquier coming out now.” Sonia stiffened suddenly, like a hungry tiger scenting a lone gazelle. “And look who’s with him—Gillian Gale.”

  They were coming across the street in our general direction.

  Charles Jacquier was in his mid-fifties, a lean, gray man with a sharp-featured, intellectual face. He was dressed in a charcoal-gray cardigan and black turtleneck shirt, designer jeans, and Gucci loafers.

  Gillian Gale, the voluptuous red-haired actress walking beside him, had become an overnight sensation playing the major threat to a fi
lthy-rich marriage in a new television series manufactured to compete with “Dallas” and “Dynasty.” Which made her ripe for a star role in movies. She wore a blue silk dress that clung to her assets. Jade earrings set off the red of her hair, and high spike heels made her as tall as Jacquier.

  There was another man with them: an athletic-looking, earnest type in his thirties wearing a neatly-tailored seersucker business suit and maroon necktie. I asked Sonia who he was.

  “Gillian’s P.R.,” she said, but what little attention she’d given me up till then was gone. She fished an autograph book and pencil from her bag and gave them to Murielle. “Go to work,” Sonia told her. “Gillian Gale, the redhead between the two men coming this way.”

  Murielle got up and went to work. Before Gillian Gale could pass our table with Jacquier and her press agent, Murielle was blocking her way, holding out the autograph book and pencil with a pleading smile. The actress blinked at Murielle’s nipples but then automatically reached for the book and pencil. She hadn’t been famous long enough to ignore adoring fans.

  Murielle slipped inside Gillian Gale’s reaching arms with the swift agility of a boxer and threw her the arms around the actress’s neck, pressing bosom to bosom as she kissed her passionately on the mouth.

  Sonia was on her feet with her Nikon, snapping away at full speed, shifting position to record the embrace from several angles.

  Gillian Gale yanked herself free of Murielle. “You filthy pervert!” she screamed, and she swung a roundhouse at Muriell’s pretty face.

  Sonia’s camera kept clicking, recording the punch and the ease with which Murielle dodged it.

  Charles Jacquier stood there with a calm, sardonic smile. It wouldn’t do his reputation any harm if some of the pictures showed him in Gillian Gale’s company.

  Her press agent made a belated grab at Murielle, and the next thing he knew his arms were full of her luscious semi-nudity, with Murielle smiling blissfully. Sonia shot that, too.