Get Off At Babylon

by Marvin H. Albert

  “Except Gilbert Lucca.”

  “Yes. The card being signed with a heart seems to confirm that he was the one who sent it. To remind her of that rendezvous. Though, as a matter of fact, neither he nor Odile showed up there that time. Regis doesn’t know why.”

  “Does he have anything else on either of them?”

  “Only a bit of background on Gilbert Lucca,” Fritz told me. “By the way, if you’re hungry, I’ve left the makings of an omelette in your kitchen. Breakfast for you, lunch for me.”

  I put on bathrobe and slippers, took my empty cup into the kitchen, and refilled it from the pot Fritz had prepared. He sat down at the table with his own cup but refused a refill. I downed some of my second cup, took a bite out of the fresh baguette he’d left on the counter, and began whipping together the omelette. Six eggs, a good amount of ham and grated cheese, a dash of milk, and a generous sprinkling of herbs. While I worked Fritz told me what little Regis knew of Gilbert Lucca’s background.

  He’d been born somewhere in the provinces, the son of Italian immigrants. His father had died when Gilbert Lucca was very young, and his mother a few years ago. He’d moved to Paris shortly after that. By then he’d already begun earning money with his jewelry. Enough to pay for his first year at the Beaux Arts. But his income wasn’t steady enough for him to continue in the school—although, according to Regis, the work he did was unusually good. And that was all Regis had been able to give Fritz. He and Gilbert Lucca were not close, just friendly acquaintances.

  The omelette was ready by then. I divided it between two plates and put the plates on the table with the baguette and a pot of butter. “Records here in town might have something useful on him,” I said as we ate.

  “I’ve already checked around for that,” Fritz said. “Naturally.”

  “Naturally,” I agreed dryly. “I apologize for implying you needed me to suggest it.”

  “You are forgiven,” Fritz said blandly. “Gilbert Lucca is registered as both ‘Student’ and ‘Artisan.’ He has never had a problem with the law. The only year he earned enough to pay taxes was the year he attended the Beaux Arts. Judging by what that left of his income, I understand his not being able to afford a second year at the school. And he owns a second-hand van. One of those little Fiat camionnettes.”

  He pushed a slip of paper with its license number across to me. “Also,” he added, “Gilbert Lucca was born in Menton.”

  I got one of those shivery feelings that hit you sometimes—when an investigation suddenly starts turning you back toward the point you started from.

  “Menton,” I said, “is only forty minutes from Villefranche along the Lower Corniche. Even by bus. Five minutes more to Nice.”

  “Which may be significant,” Fritz acknowledged. “So I made a call to one of my police contacts down there.”

  “Naturally.”

  Fritz smiled benignly. “My contact is with the gendarmerie in Menton. He will call me back soon, after making a thorough check on Gilbet Lucca in the files there and at the central records office in Nice.”

  I finished my breakfast slowly, considering what could be made of the proximity of Menton—where Gilbert Lucca was born—to the studio of Odile’s aunt in Villefranche. The possibility that Odile and Gilbert had known each other before he’d moved to Paris.

  “Is that all you’ve got for me?” I asked Fritz. “I don’t want to ask any more questions you might regard as insulting.”

  “I did accept your apology, my boy. Yes, that’s all.”

  I told him about my long night—including what I’d found and done at the apartment Odile had borrowed from her absent friend.

  He pursed his lips in a soundless whistle, gazing at me with a certain amount of wonder. “The tightrope you are walking,” he said, “is becoming dangerously frayed.”

  “You can quit now, if you’re worried about taking the tumble with me.”

  “I am worried,” Fritz said, without sounding it. “But more interested in seeing how it turns out. And you’ll need all the help you can get, if anyone discovers you’ve distorted murder evidence.”

  “If they kick me out of France, I’ll just have to go back to work in America. Maybe that’s where I belong, anyway.”

  “But maybe they won’t have you, either.”

  That was not unlikely.

  “Also,” Fritz said, “you just may have misinterpreted what you found in that apartment. It’s possible someone else killed Maurice. Even possible that Odile doesn’t know of it.”

  “You don’t really believe that.”

  “No. But it is not entirely unlikely. She could be back there now, wondering if she forgot to close those windows.”

  I got up abruptly and dialed the number of the apartment Odile had borrowed from Monique Orban. There was no answer. I put down the phone and frowned at Fritz. “You’re wrong.”

  “Probably. It was merely a stray thought.”

  I cleared my nerves of his stray thought and asked him, “How long ago was your last call to Gilbert Lucca’s place?”

  “Just before I woke you.” Fritz gave me the phone number.

  I tried it. Still no response there. I went to my jacket and took out the two snapshots I’d lifted from Maurice.

  Fritz regarded them and nodded. “These are better than the ones we have. We should get some quick copies made at the camera shop down the street.”

  I asked if he would take care of that. He said he would. He didn’t ask what I would be doing because he already knew.

  I shaved and dressed, took Gilbert Lucca’s address, and went to see what I could find there.

  Chapter 22

  No Parisian BCBG would be caught dead buying anything in the Passage du Prado.

  It’s not on a par with such fashionable shopping arcades as the Passage des Princes and the Galerie Vivienne. The cluttered shops under its long, dark glass roof lean heavily toward cheap imports from rock-bottom countries, offered at bargain basement prices. The Prado belongs where it is, in the congested quarter just above the Porte Saint Denis. A neighborhood of people who make do by counting every franc, very carefully.

  The way up to Gilbert Lucca’s place was a sagging stairway recessed between a Turkish cafe and a Pakistani clothing and cosmetics shop. I climbed to the third floor and turned into a wide, high-ceilinged hallway that had been recently whitewashed.

  There was an open window on one side that looked down on the cracked, soot-covered roof of the Passage du Prado. Between the high building walls, rising on either side, it looked like a river of mud flowing through the bottom of a straight, narrow canyon. The river seemed to be in movement—the illusion caused by the crowds walking past the lighted shops underneath it.

  On the other side of the hallway were numbered apartment doors. Gilbert Lucca’s was number eight. I knocked, waited, and then inserted my pick into the lock’s keyhold. Half a minute’s work and I had the tumblers turned. I slid my right hand under my jacket, gripped the Beretta, and went in.

  The apartment was a large single room with a ceiling as high as the hallway’s. I could see every part of it from the doorway. It was empty. I shut and relocked the door behind me.

  Gilbert Lucca’s place was bigger and better than what most students from the provinces find when they move to Paris to attend the universities. It even had its own little bathroom. A lot of the college students get by with communal toilets out in the hall. And without windows. This room had two—one on the street side, another looking over the top of the glass roof of the passage at a section of blank wall.

  Another interloper had been there before me. The damage was the same as that at Odile’s studio in Villefrance and at her Paris apartment. An easy chair and the mattress of the wide brass bed had been gutted. Furniture was overturned and broken open. The contents of cardboard boxes containing materials for Gilbert’s jew
elry had been dumped on the linoleum floor: colored bits of glass and beads, wire and patterned stones, cutouts from sheets of metal.

  The emptied boxes had been pulled from a section of built-in shelves. Among them were a few completed samples of Gilbert Lucca’s jewelry. I picked up a couple of them. An earring, fashioned out of a 1920s ornamental button. A pendant made from beads, strung together so their delicate colors were skillfully integrated. Regis was right: superb craftsmanship with inexpensive materials.

  I put them on a shelf and began a methodical prowl of the room.

  I found three Polaroid snapshots. One of Odile, a second of her with Gilbert Lucca, a third of him with another man. They were wearing the same outfits as in the two pictures I’d found in Villefranche. In the shot of Odile alone she was standing in front of the same stone wall.

  What I didn’t find were certain items that were conspicuous by their absence. There was no address book, no letters, nothing to tell me who his friends or business contacts were. No copies of sales slips. No record of checks he’d received. No list of boutiques to which he sold his work.

  Even a very small one-man business has to keep books—some record of sales and expenses and customers.

  The reason they were missing wasn’t hard to figure. If I’d found them first, Fritz and I would have used them to contact Gilbert Lucca’s clients, in Paris and elsewhere. Any of whom might know something recent about him that could lead to Odile Garnier.

  Getting in touch with all of them and questioning each one would have been a very time-consuming job for just the two of us. But it wouldn’t take as long with all the people Didier Sabarly and Fulvio Callega could put on it.

  That was how Maurice had gotten to Monique Orban’s place before me. And how they’d gotten to this apartment before I had. They’d started with people Tony Callega knew among Odile’s friends and contacts—and put a lot of manpower into following all the connections from those. Somewhere along one of those lines they’d hit someone who knew about her relationship with Gilbert Lucca.

  But they’d missed something. They hadn’t seen what I saw in two of the Polaroids, or they wouldn’t have left them behind for me to find.

  I studied them again. Seen together, their backgrounds were unmistakable. It helped that Fritz had just told me where Gilbert Lucca was from. But there was no way I could have missed recognizing it even without that. Menton, the last town on the French Riviera before the Italian border, was less than a half hour’s drive from my house. I’d been there often enough. The thieves who’d taken the other items obviously hadn’t.

  In the shot of Odile and Gilbert Lucca together, they were sitting at the top of a wide, cobbled stairway with an orange-colored wall behind them. The cobbles, some dark and some light, were arranged to form graceful patterns. In the oldest section of Menton there was a stairway like that, leading down from the orange-walled church of Saint Michel.

  The other picture was of Gilbert Lucca and a fat young man wearing a red apron, standing with their arms around each other’s shoulders, grinning. They were outside a bistro with a red awning and red shade umbrellas over the terrace tables. To one side was a stone archway with a tiled roof, and through the arch could be seen a parking lot with a palm tree.

  Menton’s Place aux Herbes had an archway like that, separating it from the parking area. It also had a bistro whose awning, umbrellas, and waiters’ aprons were all red. I probed my memory until I came up with the bistro’s name: Le Lido.

  Gilbert Lucca’s phone was still working. I phoned Fritz Donhoff. “Has your friend in Menton called back yet?”

  “Fifteen minutes ago. With only routine background, I’m sorry to say. Nothing exciting. Gilbert Lucca’s parents were originally from Naples. His father was a commercial fisherman who was drowned in a storm when the boy was five. His mother worked as a seamstress until her death, from an illness, when he was eighteen. He is twenty-one now, and he started adding to his mother’s small income by making jewelry when he was fifteen. He began selling it at the flea market in Menton. He left Menton for Paris three years ago—and there’s nothing further on record about him down there after that.”

  “That flea market he used for selling his work,” I told Fritz, “is only in Menton one day each week. The other days it moves to other towns. A different one each day. Every Sunday it’s in Villefranche.”

  “Ah,” Fritz said, “that I didn’t know. It does strengthen the possibility he and the girl met well before his move to Paris. If he was showing his wares in Villefranche at some time when Odile was down there with her aunt.”

  “When that flea market is in Menton,” I said, “it’s held on the Place aux Herbes. Which has a bistro called the Lido. One of the waiters there might be an old friend of Gilbert Lucca.” I explained about the snapshot.

  Fritz agreed it was worth another phone call to his gendarmerie contact in Menton. “I’ll ask him to check with the people in the Lido.”

  “I’ll be back with you in about twenty minutes.” I hung up the phone and left Gilbert Lucca’s apartment.

  As I stepped out into the hallway I caught a flash of movement: a man disappearing quickly down the stairway before I could see his face. All I got was an impression of someone not too tall and fairly thin in a gray suit and cloth cap.

  I strolled along the hallway and took my time going down the stairway into the Passage du Prado.

  A thin man in a gray suit and cap stood at the bottom with his back to me, apparently absorbed in the articles displayed in the Pakistani shop. I’d seen him before. When I’d gone up the stairs he’d been sitting at a window table inside the Turkish cafe.

  I walked out of the passage and along the crowded pavement to my Renault, parked half a block away. I didn’t look back until I could do so without it being obvious, while I was unlocking my car.

  The thin man in gray had stopped beside a white four-door Lada and bent to speak to someone inside it. The Lada was eight cars back from mine, parked facing the same direction.

  I got into the Renault, started it, and kept an eye on my rearview mirror while I did some tight maneuvering to get free of the cars parked in front and back of mine. As I drove away the thin man walked back to the Passage du Prado.

  The Lada came after me.

  Chapter 23

  I drove across the city to Babylon. The white Lada stayed about half a block behind me the whole way. Too far back for me to make out the face of the man driving it. But the important thing I did see: He was alone.

  Swinging past the Métro station, I drove into the entrance of the underground parking garage across from the Bon Marche. I stopped at the barrier and pressed the meter button. It fed me a timed parking stub and raised the striped yellow-and-black boom. I drove through and down the spiral ramp.

  I went all the way down. To the fifth level, where the ramp ended. Taking a flat flashlight from the glove compartment, I walked between other parked cars to the ladder that led down to the partially excavated sixth level. I’d counted on none of the construction crew being at work on a Saturday. None was there.

  The white Lada came around the bottom of the ramp. The instant I was sure the driver had seen me, I switched on my flashlight and went down the ladder. From the foot of it there was nowhere to go except through the low tunnel. I went to my hands and knees and crawled into it. The last time, with Karine leading, I hadn’t known what was ahead. This time I did.

  I reached the other end of the crawl space, where it opened into the abandoned military shelter. My tail hadn’t come into the tunnel behind me yet. I stretched to the right of its opening and put the flash on the ground, its beam pointed away from the tunnel. Then I moved to my left and stood up near that side of the tunnel, drawing my Beretta from its holster. I waited, listening to the faint scraping noises of his crawling approach.

  His fist poked through first, holding a revolver. Even with the f
lashlight beam aimed in the opposite direction, there was enough light from it to see the short, thick barrel. A .45. Then he pushed his head out of the low opening, cautiously, turning both his face and gun toward where I’d put the flashlight.

  I bent down and stuck the muzzle of my Beretta in his ear. The shock made his head jerk a fraction. Then he froze in position.

  “Put it down,” I said thinly.

  He placed the revolver on the concrete floor, spread his fingers, and raised them well away from it. “Don’t get nervous,” he whispered. “I’m no trouble.”

  “I’ve got no reason to be nervous,” I told him unpleasantly. “You’re the one with a gun in your ear.” I picked up his snub-nosed revolver and stuck it in my belt. “Now crawl all the way out and stand up.”

  As he crawled into the bunker I withdrew my gun from his ear and moved back a step. When he got to his feet and turned to face me I was holding the Beretta level with his stomach.

  It was a fairly large stomach, but a lot of that was still heavy muscle that went with the rest of his squat, powerful build. He had a strong-boned face that had taken a lot of punishment in its time without losing any of its menace. At the moment, the menace was confined to the broken sculpture of his features. His expression was apprehensive.

  He raised his hands over his head without being asked to. “No reason to get rough,” he whispered. “All I did was follow you, nothing else.”

  There had to be something wrong with his vocal chords. This deep under the streets there was no reason to whisper. Nobody would have heard if we’d yelled at the top of our lungs.

  I said, “You followed me with a gun. You were going to use it to ask me some questions. And then kill me.”

  “No,” he said, “I’m not a shooter. The gun’s just insurance.”

  “Your policy just ran out,” I told him. “Move to the middle of the room. Five steps, no more.”

  He measured off five steps exactly, backing up, afraid to take his eyes off me and the gun in my hand. I picked up the flashlight with my free hand. “Go to that metal partition against the wall,” I ordered. “Face it and put your hands against it, shoulder level.”