Shadowplay

by Norman Hartley

  ‘Sounds like time for a second breakfast,’ I said. ‘Let’s find a café.’

  Cox had already rented a Peugeot 505 and he drove us to the industrial edge of Nice well away from the airport. The café had a pleasant little terrace opposite a street market where the housewives were beginning their early morning shopping, and we could have been in a different city altogether from the luxury tourist hotels of the Promenade des Anglais which were only a couple of miles away.

  We ordered coffee and croissants and Cox waited for a signal from me that I was ready for the bad news. When I gave it, he said, ‘Sellinger didn’t turn up in Brussels last night and no one’s canceled the lunch with the EEC president. It looks as though he plans just to have you not show up.’

  ‘You’re sure.’

  ‘I called the number two in the Brussels bureau, Rob Neilsen. He’s a close friend. He told me he’d heard a rumor that you were ill but wouldn’t admit it.’

  ‘Our beloved ally didn’t waste much time, did he.’

  Cox grinned. ‘You know what they say. Sellinger gets up early so he can be a bastard for a little longer each day.’

  As usual, Sellinger had made a stylish thrust. If he wanted to score some quick points off the situation, this was by far the best way to do it. The purpose of the Brussels talks was to renegotiate a series of unprofitable contracts with five European stock exchanges. Milner, my predecessor, had got us into them because he’d been overanxious to break into a new market, and as well as our losing money on them, they were also weakening our bargaining position elsewhere in Europe. The Belgians had been stalling renegotiations on the grounds that they were bound by EEC regulations, but I’d found some loopholes and after a lot of careful negotiation I’d managed to get Ludwig Gerstein, the German president of the EEC, to support my claim that circumstances had changed enough for there to be no bar to renegotiation.

  If I brought off a new deal, it would put our European stockbroking services back on a viable footing and within World News; it would prove that although I was a ‘general news’ president, I knew how to defend the Economic Division’s interests. If Sellinger had gone in my place, he could well have taken the credit which would have been infuriating, but this was far worse. If Gerstein took offense, or simply lost interest, the Chairman of the Belgian stock exchange, Jean le Mesurier, would simply backtrack and insist that the old contracts must run out their life. On top of which, the meeting with Gerstein, though technically a private working lunch, would be well publicized, and if I simply failed to turn up, with no reason or excuse, there would be a lot of damaging talk.

  I drank another cup of coffee, went over the situation carefully once more, then nodded to Cox.

  ‘Ready?’

  Cox took out a small note pad.

  ‘Call your secretary in New York. Don’t tell her where you are. If she wants to know, say you’re in Geneva. Get her to send a telex to Gerstein, personal from me, saying I have complete confidence in Sellinger and hope talks go well. Then ring your friend in Brussels. Tell him to call Gerstein’s secretary and ask if the message arrived. Tell him to say that I sent it because Gerstein knows how much I hate Sellinger and didn’t want him to feel I wouldn’t stand by any decisions made.

  ‘Then call my secretary in London. Tell her to send a telex to our Brussels bureau chief, Anne Mitchell, for onpassing to Sellinger.’ I reached into my briefcase and pulled out one of the documents I’d prepared for the Brussels trip. It contained a list of queries and the numbers of the files where I’d found the answers.

  ‘Tell her to list these file numbers in the telex and mention the queries and make it look as though I’m passing the information on to Sellinger ready for the talks. That should put the ball back in Sellinger’s court. Even if it’s too late to stop the embarrassment, at least everyone will be asking where Sellinger is instead of me.’

  I grinned at Cox. Now for a bit of bastardy.

  ‘Call the chairman of the Belgian stock exchange, Jean le Mesurier, direct. I’ll give you his private, unlisted number. Say you’re calling on my behalf. Say I’m worried because I’ve had to let Sellinger take over the talks but I’m still taking a personal interest and I’ll stick to our deal. If he drops his opposition to renegotiation, I’ll do my best to see that the British reconsider their opposition to him in the International Stockbroking Commission elections in October.’

  I grinned.

  ‘He’ll be a bit surprised because we haven’t made any such deal, but he’ll recognize blackmail when he hears it; he uses it often enough himself. But be blunt. He’s a thick-skinned old bastard and you have to really hit him over the head if you want to make a point.’

  I noticed that Cox had taken only very sketchy notes but I knew he’d get all the details right. He had an excellent short-term memory and, like many reporters, he only used notes as a reminder over the next half hour or so.

  When he came back he was grinning broadly. ‘I enjoyed the call to le Mesurier. He seemed to feel I was blackmailing him. Can’t think where he got that idea.’

  I grinned, ‘No. Neither can I. That takes care of Brussels. There’s nothing else that can be done before the lunch is supposed to take place. We’ll worry about fence-mending afterwards. Anything else needing attention?’

  ‘Not that I know of. Do you want me to check your signals? I’ve got my E Net terminal with me.’

  All WN correspondents carried these terminals. They could be hooked to telephone lines in most countries for filing copy or receiving service messages stored in the system. By using my private code letters, Cox could retrieve, on the café telephone, any signals that my private secretaries in either London or New York had left in the system for my personal attention.

  ‘If you use the E Net the Paris bureau will know where you are.’

  ‘I’ve arranged a bypass.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Someone in London will retrieve your messages. Then I’ll go on-line to her and, as they say, computer shall talk unto computer.’

  ‘Her? Who is she?’

  ‘Mary Rainham.’

  Rainham was another correspondent, and a friend of Cox.

  ‘That was risky,’ I said sharply. ‘How much does she know?’

  ‘Nothing, except that it’s a confidential assignment.’

  Cox paused and looked at me evenly. ‘You trusted me. You made a snap judgment. I made a similar judgment. I know everyone’s suspect, but there has to be some trust, otherwise the whole thing will just stall. You can’t cut yourself off from the network.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘You’re right. I’m sorry. But don’t call her yet. Save it until there’s more in the store. It’s time to go and tackle Seagull.’

  Cox nodded. ‘Hadn’t you better tell me a bit more about her?’

  ‘There isn’t a lot to tell, I’m afraid. The affair didn’t last all that long and we had a pact not to talk about the past. There were reasons that seemed good at the time—I was coming up to a divorce I didn’t really want and didn’t want to talk about. She told me she’d been married, that it had turned sour, and it suited her not to go into her past. So we lived in the present. Sex, friendship, each other’s company. It seemed natural while we were living it.’ I hesitated. ‘After Ryder’s photographs, it makes me look like a gold-plated, diamond-studded asshole. But that’s something I’m learning to live with.

  ‘However.’ I managed a grin. ‘The facts, such as they are. The lady Seagull. Real name—verified by Ryder—Jennifer Elisabeth Ross. Age, also verified by Ryder, thirty-six. He traced her birth certificate. Born in St. John’s Wood, London. There’s a record of her attending Maida Vale Primary School up to the age of eleven. Then a girls’ boarding school in Norfolk—Exton House. After that comes the London College of Art and her career as a freelance nature illustrator, but Ryder’s people say the details don’t quite hang together. I couldn’t help Ryder at all really.

  Jennifer and I never lived together, though I often stayed
at her flat and she stayed at my place in Little Venice several times, often for a week or more at a time. She dressed well, very casually, jeans, shirts, very good taste but nothing expensive. Same with the flat: comfortable, very colorful. Really nice, in fact, but nothing indicating big money.

  ‘She insisted on going Dutch a lot—we never spent that much anyway, ate in out-of-the-way pubs, little restaurants outside London. She liked to drive in the BMW. Didn’t own a car herself.’

  ‘How about some basic description?’ Cox said.

  ‘What can I say? You know how meaningless police-type descriptions are. I have no photos. About five feet eight inches, slender, short dark hair which she could have grown down to her waist by now. It’s more than a year since I saw her last.

  Good muscles, strong, lithe, very athletic. Moves beautifully. Though I hate to say this, I could just see her on some KGB assault course or in a gymnasium learning self-defense.’

  Cox grinned. ‘Reassuring.’

  ‘Very.’

  ‘What about the painting?’

  ‘I loved her work. I haven’t a very educated eye but I could have looked at it for hours. Exquisite, delicate drawings. Birds. Flowers. Every detail perfect, but when you stood back, there was always more than just a paintbrush playing at being a camera. Cover or not, she was an artist.’

  ‘Anything else?’

  ‘Nothing important.’

  ‘Give me a capsule description,’ Cox said. ‘Never mind the police forms. Come on now. Quick, what do you remember about her? Three lines.’

  ‘Capable of arousing me at a thousand yards on a foggy night. Didn’t see anything odd in giving up hash for Lent, and puts her feet on railway carriage seats.’

  Cox grinned. ‘Thanks. That helps.’

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘it doesn’t. The psychiatrist games don’t help because we may be dealing with an illusion. There are a hundred things I could tell you about her. Little intimate details. What she likes, her attitude to this or that. But everything I say has to be qualified— “apparently this,” “she seemed to believe that.” If she’s a professional, I may know nothing about her at all.’ I stood up. ‘Let’s head for St. Tropez.’

  ‘Tell me one thing,’ Cox said as we walked down to the parking zone. ‘Why Seagull? Did you give her the nickname?’

  I hesitated. ‘Yes. I gave it to her. But there was no special reason. It was just a nickname.’

  Cox knew I was lying, but he didn’t pursue it. There was no point in telling him it was because of the soft, mewing sound she made during lovemaking when things were happening to her that she especially liked. Or how she’d insisted with good-humored naturalist’s pedantry that it wasn’t accurate and seagulls had much harsher, higher-pitched cries.

  There was a lot more I’d held back in the café: how much I’d cared for her, how much I’d enjoyed making love with her, how proud I’d been—in the worst kind of cliché way—of how I’d conducted the affair. It had been my proving flight after the crash with Nancy. I’d shown myself that I could attract a beautiful woman, love her as she wanted to be loved, then end the affair without bitterness to spare her involvement in the divorce. A perfect episode, a memory I couldn’t bear to have spoiled; yet now I had to face the surreal possibility that it might have all come out of a KGB training manual, that even the mewing might have been done on cue, as part of a programmed fantasy seduction module IIA—the affair as confidence builder, suitable for use on middle-aged men suffering from pre-divorce depression.

  Intellectually, I knew such things happened. I’d known personally at least three men who had fallen into similar traps in Moscow, Prague, and New York, but I still couldn’t believe it. The ego fights against such humiliation beyond all logic, yet the pictures were there and I could think of no innocent explanation. She might have been a KGB target instead of a collaborator, but why would senior officers of the KGB bother with a young woman who illustrated books of roses and garden birds? And what had she been doing in Ankara and Stockholm and at the World Peace Congress?

  I closed off the train of thought. It could only lead to depression and anger when what was needed were simple, logical steps: find her, talk to her, try to find out what the connection was. No prejudgments.

  As we got in the car, I turned to Cox.

  ‘There’s one role you have in this that we haven’t talked about.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Keeper of the royal objectivity. Right now, I’m calm and I’m thinking clearly. But it could get messy. Personal. I may be finding out things about her, and myself, that I don’t want to know. You may have to help keep me straight.’ I grinned. ‘I don’t want a confessor. That’s not my style. Just a kick in the butt from time to time, if I seem to be going off track.’

  Cox looked at me seriously. No smile. No wisecracks.

  ‘I understand,’ he said. ‘You can count on it.’ Then his face cut into a grin. ‘What can a correspondent lose kicking his boss in the butt? I’ve always wanted to work out of the Reykjavik bureau anyway.’

  9

  Cox took AutoRoute 8, the Marseilles toll way, as far as Le Muy, and for the first part of the journey we discussed tactics for making the approach to Seagull.

  The doctor she was living with, Yves Guerard, was an intern at a fashionable clinic on the outskirts of St. Tropez specializing in plastic surgery and other medical concerns of the ultra-rich. He had apparently twice done summer internships there and Ryder’s people had the impression that he was more dedicated to acquiring an annual tan than to developing his professional skills. She shared a little flat with him but the CIA reports said they never seemed to be there and Seagull apparently spent a lot of time in the hills of the St. Tropez peninsula doing drawings of Mediterranean flowers. Guerard didn’t sound like a very flattering successor, but for all I knew he could have been another KGB assignment, and if he wasn’t, it sounded like a typical Seagull living arrangement—casual and impermanent, with painting and sex in about equal proportions.

  ‘What do you think?’ Cox said when we had compared notes from our separate briefings with Ryder.

  ‘I think an approach away from the flat,’ I said. ‘If we go there and they’re out—which seems likely—it’ll tip her off that someone is looking for her. If she’s there, and she really does have reasons to avoid me, she can stall better from inside her own place; refuse to let me in, make a scene, set a jealous boy-friend on me, call the police. There are all kinds of options, assuming she was desperate enough.’

  ‘And away from the flat?’

  ‘Still risky. She can still make a scene, but if we plan the approach carefully, we should be able to cut down the chances of her getting away.’ I grinned. ‘Especially if you look after Guerard.’

  ‘Ryder described him as a young, fit sun worshipper who spent more time looking after his own body than other people’s. Leaving aside the fact that he may have a black belt in something or other, he probably has a gang of friends—French kids always run in packs on holiday.’

  ‘Don’t worry. You’ll think of something,’ I said. ‘That’s why you’re a highly paid exec—resourceful, quick-thinking.’ I grinned. ‘And replaceable in case of damage.’

  Cox laughed. ‘Let’s start at the clinic. I’ll make the inquiries. Friend of a friend, looking for advice on behalf of an ugly sister. How much would it cost to put her nose back in the middle of her face? Some rubbish like that.’

  We came off the motorway at Le Muy and started down the winding road through the woods and limestone outcrops to join the coast road. Immediately the traffic started to build up, and by Ste. Maxime, we had been swallowed up in a bumper-to-bumper line of holiday traffic crawling through the town.

  ‘I thought the French were all supposed to start leaving the roads about now to have lunch,’ Cox said. ‘What happened to a great tradition?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said, ‘but at this rate, we’re going to miss Guerard at the clinic. My bet is he’ll spen
d the afternoon at the beach like everyone else in these latitudes.’

  Once through Ste. Maxime, the traffic began to speed up and we got directions to the Clinique Barbotin. After the first try, Cox learned not to pull off the road when he was asking a passerby, as forcing our way back into the line again practically needed a motorcycle escort. After the third attempt, we had our information—and I also began to get the feeling that we were being followed. At first I didn’t say anything. Silently, I rehearsed the words, ‘Cox, I think someone is tailing us.’ Immediately my ‘stop before you make a fool of yourself’ mechanism sounded the alarm, but I decided to trust my instincts. When I’ve looked back on most of the serious blunders of my life, the post mortem has usually shown the cause wasn’t recklessness but a failure to trust my ‘feel’ for a situation.

  ‘Cox,’ I said cautiously, ‘do you remember what they used to say back in the sixties?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Just because you’re paranoid, it doesn’t mean no one’s following you.’

  Cox nodded. ‘You mean the silver Citroen CX?’

  ‘You noticed?’

  ‘Yes. But it’s hard to tell. I make it two men, thirties, darkish-skinned. Cruising very slowly in places, but could just be girl-watching.’

  ‘When we stopped the first time, they stopped too.’

  ‘Yes. The passenger got out to chat with that topless teeny who’d just wandered off the beach to buy some cigarettes.’

  ‘You don’t miss much,’ I said.

  ‘No. But it could have been genuine. Two guys on holiday, looking to fill the passenger seats.’ He grinned. ‘If we weren’t on a mission to save the West from Ming the Merciless, I’d have stopped too. The young lady had a nice hungry look.’

  ‘And the second time we pulled up?’

  ‘I didn’t see them.’

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘neither did I, but we were stopped a couple of minutes and they should have gone by us. And they’re still behind.’

  ‘There was some congestion behind us when we stopped. They might have just caught up to us. What do you want to do?’