Back in the Real World

by Marvin Albert

  “It could be one of the other intelligence outfits,” I said. “The Police Nationale’s RG branch, for example. Or the Gendarmerie Nationale’s Groupement d’Intervention. France has quite a few. But the DST and the DGSE are the biggest, so they’re the most likely.”

  Arlette tooled her Porsche along the dark, wet roads with the easy competence she gave to everything she did, driving swiftly but with due regard to rain-slick surface conditions. “It doesn’t make sense,” she said. “A high-level service of that kind wouldn’t involve itself in petty blackmail with no political, military, or industrial purpose.”

  “It wouldn’t,” I agreed. “The purpose of whichever service set up the Dhalsten operation is to gather intelligence. On and from people in sensitive positions, French and foreign. Diplomats, government functionaries, businessmen, terrorists, anti-administration political figures, scientists, etc. To keep tabs on what they’re up to and to gather useful information. Probably also to catch some of them in indiscretions that can be used to exert leverage on them.”

  The night lights of the Côte d’Azur Airport were in sight ahead. The tails of two jumbos loomed above the palm trees bordering the end of the field.

  I said, “But the upper levels of those services don’t handle the day-to-day running of operations like that. Their low-level operatives do. Men like Jacques Morel.”

  “You think he’s been giving his service everything that falls into what they want while using some of the rest of what he gets to make himself extra money on the side.”

  “That’s what I think,” I said. “Anne-Marie talked to Christian Gardier about her fear of losing her son—in that hotel. Morel could use that threat to make her keep paying him off. With what she had in her savings, at first. Then by selling her jewels and securities. Finally she didn’t have anything left to sell, except Mona Vaillant’s designs—to Serge Lotis.”

  Arlette considered it briefly and shrugged. “Everything you’ve said would fit—but it’s just guesswork. Nothing I can work with. It’s not evidence.”

  “That’s true,” I acknowledged. “And even good guesses won’t pry Crow out of prison. I’ll have to get more.”

  “How?”

  “First by finding out if my guesswork is right. That includes finding out who Morel works with and for. I’ll have to start pushing them. Trying to make them expose themselves, forcing them to take bigger chances.”

  Arlette pulled up in front of the airport terminal, turned to look at me, and repeated, “How?”

  “The fastest way,” I told her, “is for me to go have a talk with Jacques Morel tomorrow. See if I can needle him into coming after me. If he isn’t doing that already. If he doesn’t react, my guesswork is wrong.”

  She narrowed her eyes. “If you’re right about what’s behind all this—that could be extremely dangerous for you. I don’t like it.”

  “I don’t much like it myself. And the more we talk about it, the less I like it.”

  “But you’re going to do it anyway.”

  I nodded. “So let’s drop the subject for a while.” I put my hand on her head and slid my fingers through the softness of her short-cropped hair. “Do you have more work to do tonight?”

  She regarded me gravely for a moment. Then she smiled one of those small smiles. “Yes, I do. But I can catch up on it in the morning.”

  I got out of the Porsche, taking my overnight bag with me. Arlette drove off. I went down to the underground garage, got my Peugeot, and headed for the Hotel Napoleon.

  Arlette was waiting for me in the small lobby, holding my room key. I took it from her, and she gave the night clerk a good night smile. I put my arm around her and drew her close as we took the elevator up to the room.

  She had booked one of the Napoleon’s best. The bathtub was built for two, and the bed was king-size. We found the bath a cozy fit and the bed just right.

  We had always been good for each other, and we still were.

  Problem-free mutual passion isn’t the same as being in love. But then, nothing is. Including breaking the bank at Monte Carlo. There are some things to be said, however, for just plain feeling good—without complications.

  Chapter 22

  I’d been right about the night’s change in the wind. The morning sky had been swept clean of clouds and mist. The wind was dwindling to a soft warm breeze at eight A.M. Everything outside was still glistening wet, but the sun was already at work on that. By noon the mobs would have dry beaches again.

  I went to my house first. By day its potential as a trap was lessened.

  Going down the drive, I stopped at the place of Bill and Judith Ruyter, a Dutch couple who were my nearest neighbors. Judith was in her garden with her two kids, picking up snails and dropping them into a shoe box. After a rain all the snails come out of their hiding places to feed, it’s a good time to get them before they eat up all your plants.

  Getting out of my car, I asked Judith if she and her husband had seen or heard anyone around my place last night. They hadn’t. I hadn’t really expected they would.

  I left my car there and walked the rest of the way down with my jacket open for quick access to my gun.

  Whoever might have been waiting for me at my house last night was probably gone. Day cut the chances of catching me unaware and disposing of me quietly. If it got noisy, it would be impossible for any attack party to get away unnoticed. There weren’t many ways off the Lower Corniche above the drive. A phone call from any of my neighbors to the police would block those few ways.

  But that didn’t mean nothing was waiting for me.

  I circled the house, scanning each part of my route before using it. From the patio out back there were two rear ways into the house. Both were floor-to-ceiling glass doors: one to the living room, the other into my bedroom. I peered through both and saw nothing unusual. At the living room door I put the side of my face against the glass and studied the parts inside around its edges and lock. Finally I took out one of my keys and unlocked it.

  I stepped inside with the P7 in my hand. The house seemed empty. I walked through it, searching. I didn’t have to search far.

  It was attached to the inside of the front door at the height of my face. From it a slack wire ran to a nail hammered into the ceiling.

  If I had come in that way, I would have pushed the door almost all the way open and taken a step inside when the wire pulled taught and the explosion tore me apart.

  * * * *

  I didn’t go near it. Backing away, I went through the rest of the house. There was nothing else. I went to the bedroom and packed a canvas suitcase, then carried it up the drive and put it in my car. I didn’t plan on coming back to the house until this was over.

  Driving back in the direction of Nice, I stopped at the Beaulieu post office and called the Cap d’Ail gendarmerie. The voice that answered was a familiar one: Adjutant Robert Ducret.

  I told him about the bomb attached to the inside of my front door.

  He was impressed. “I’ll contact the captain at the Brigade de Recherche immediately. He’ll get the army’s bomb disposal experts to your place as quickly as possible.”

  “Tell them to go through the back door to my living room. I left it closed but not locked.”

  “But you will be there to meet them when they…

  “I can’t get there right now,” I told him. “I’ll be in touch with you again as soon as I can.”

  “But—”

  I hung up on him. I would have amends to make when I returned to Cap d’Ail, but that couldn’t be helped.

  Next I called Fritz Donhoff’s apartment in Paris and brought him up to date. When I told him about the bomb he said, “These people are playing very rough, Peter. Be careful.”

  “You be careful,” I told him. “They know a lot about me by now, and that probably includes the fact that we’re partners and that you’re the one I check with for most of my Paris information. If they’re worried I’m finding out too much, they’ll wo
rry about what I might have told you. And you’re stuck in that apartment. You’ll need a bodyguard for a while.”

  “I appreciate your concern for me, Peter, but I am still quite capable of protecting myself.”

  In the war Fritz had probably killed more Nazi officials and collaborators than anyone else in the underground movement in Paris. But he was seventy-three now and had a bad leg. “I’ll get you a bodyguard,” I told him, and I hung up on his protests.

  The man I phoned to take care of him was Jean-Marie Reju, a private detective in Paris who specialized in personal protection work. Before going private Reju had been with the government’s V.O. service, which supplies bodyguards to foreign dignitaries visiting France and high French officials traveling abroad.

  After he’d said he was available I told him enough to know what he might be up against. “These people are serious professionals. There’ve been three killings in less than a week that I know about. They might come after Fritz next. I want you to stick with him twenty-four hours a day. He’s got a sofa in his living room that converts into a bed. And check my apartment next door now and then, just in case. Fritz has the key. And there’s a secret way between his place and mine. Have him show you how it works.”

  “How long is this job for?” Reju asked.

  “I don’t know at this point. Not long, I hope, with what you charge.”

  From Beaulieu I drove out past the airport to Cagnes-sur-Mer. Leaving my car four blocks from the Hotel Dhalsten, I walked the rest of the way. I phoned the hotel from a bistro across the street and asked for Jacques Morel. According to Captain Rinaldi, the hotel was where Morel lived as well as worked. The switchboard tried his room, got no answer, and rang his office. The man who answered there said Morel had gone out but was expected back shortly. If I would care to leave my name…

  I didn’t. I left and crossed to the hotel. The doorman was wearing the same uniform, but he wasn’t the one I’d talked to a couple evenings before. Neither was the desk clerk inside. He checked his register and informed me that they did just happen to have a room available for me. He said it as if he thought I was a lucky man. I let him have a look at my American passport, paid in advance with a credit card, and explained that my luggage would arrive later. After the bellboy took his tip and left me alone in my room I looked the place over.

  It was the same as hotel-chain guest rooms the world over. Spacious, comfortable, sterile. Abstract prints on the walls, TV and stereo, bar and refrigerator, three phones, including one in the bathroom. It took me several minutes to find it: a video eye, cunningly hidden in an ornamental molding that was part of the new ceiling and walls put in when the place had been renovated. It was aimed at the bed.

  I didn’t search for any others. Nor for bugs. I had what I’d booked the room for: confirmation that the Dhalsten’s guest rooms were under electronic surveillance. Going back down to the lobby, I used one of the public phone booths to call Jacques Morel’s office again. He still hadn’t come back.

  There was a coffee shop off the lobby, divided from it by a glass wall. I went in and sat at the counter where I could watch most of the lobby. I ordered a café creme, paid for it as soon as I got it, and waited.

  He came into the lobby through the front entrance a few minutes later.

  * * * *

  He was dressed in the same dark gray business suit. Long, thick body. Short, heavy legs that seemed to plant themselves briefly with each step. The hawk-like beak of a nose that Captain Rinaldi had described. His dark hair, I saw now, was streaked with gray.

  By the time he was two thirds of the way across the lobby I was close behind him.

  “Morel,” I said.

  He stopped and turned to face me. He was close to fifty, with a bull-like strength to him. His broad face had been coarsened by long exposure in extreme climates, hot and cold. There were deep trenches in his cheeks. His mouth was abnormally small and thin. His eyes were pale gray. There was an instant of surprise in his expression. Then it was gone.

  “No,” I said, “I’m not a ghost. The bomb didn’t work.”

  “What are you talking about?” Morel asked without emotion. “And who are you?”

  “You’re hurting my feelings,” I said. “Forgetting my memorable television performance so soon.” I gestured at one of the lobby’s more obvious video cameras. “But I have the feeling we met before that. Don’t you?”

  He never shifted his eyes away from mine. He had a hard stare. That never varied, even when his small mouth smiled. It wasn’t the stare of a man trying to impress you with how hard he was. It was his normal look, something acquired from a lifetime of dealing with violence and surviving it; of delivering violence and seeing his enemies fail to survive it.

  I said, “If you don’t want to talk to me…

  “But I do,” Morel said. So far his tone hadn’t varied from a flat monotone. “I have to drop by the office first, check my night staff’s reports and make sure all the day crew is in.”

  “You’re a man with heavy responsibilities.”

  “Yes.” Morel nodded toward the coffee shop. “It will only take a few minutes. Will you wait for me?”

  “Sure.” I watched him walk off between the registration desk and the porter’s counter and enter a door behind them.

  When I went back into the coffee shop I settled into a booth and ordered a citron presse. Morel, I figured, was using the time to make some quick phone calls. To associates, or employers, or underlings. Whichever, it would be to tell them where I was. Perhaps phoning wasn’t necessary. They could be there in the hotel, part of his staff.

  Some ten minutes went by. Morel wasn’t worried I’d walk out too soon. He’d be keeping tabs on me via his closed-circuit video system. He knew I was still there—giving him time to get his men into position. They wouldn’t try anything here. They’d tail me and wait until they had me someplace isolated and unobserved.

  As I’d told Arlette, that was one of the things I’d come to the Dhalsten for. It was sometimes the only way to get what you needed. Provoke the enemy into making the moves. Hope they’d take chances that gave you evidence of the who and why.

  It was a workable tactic, if you could survive the chances they took.

  Morel came into the coffee shop and sat down facing me. He placed his powerful hands on the table, resting them on their sides, the thick, short fingers curled. His thumbs were shaped like heavy-caliber bullets—the type palmistry experts call “Murderer’s Thumbs.”

  “Now,” Morel said, “what did you want to talk about?”

  “We could start with your telling me why Anne-Marie Vaillant and August Pilon had to be killed.”

  Morel frowned slightly, not looking away from me. He had a quiet sureness that demanded wary respect. You could hate him, but it would be stupid to underestimate him, even for a moment. A capable and dangerous man.

  He said, “Tell me what reason you have to think I might be able to answer that question.”

  “You missed a few things when you cleaned up her apartment,” I told him.

  Morel didn’t bite. “I’m waiting to hear why you believe I would have any interest in what you’ve said.”

  “Does your secret service know you’ve been using some of the stuff you tape here for your own personal blackmail operation?” I might not be able to make him bite, but I could make him wince—even if he kept it inside where I couldn’t see it. “I think I’ll have to discuss that with some of your superiors.”

  It was like trying to dig a reaction out of a block of granite with your fingertips. His expression didn’t alter. He looked at his watch and stood up. His men were where he’d told them to be now.

  “I don’t think you have anything to say that interests me,” he said. “Good-bye.”

  The way he said it, the good-bye had a certain finality. He turned his back on me and marched out of the coffee shop toward the rear of the lobby.

  I went out of the hotel to find out which one of us had ju
st made the wrong decision.

  Chapter 23

  I turned inland off the Grande Corniche onto narrow route D53. The two-lane road curled around a hump and then began skirting a series of high, rugged valleys cut off from any view of the sea.

  Trees became smaller there. Tangles of wild bushes grew more dense, covering much of the terrain. Boulders and spurs of jagged rock jutted out of the green slopes. Steeper slopes became bare stone, gleaming so white in the sunlight that from a distance they seemed covered with snow. There were only occasional houses, most of them weekend places now locked up and empty. Farms were few and tiny. The soil here is spread too thin over a base of porous limestone to support much cultivation. The limestone is like a sponge: rainwater sinks into it too quickly, below where roots can reach, leaving the earth bone-dry most of the year.

  Until then I hadn’t worried too much about which cars were behind me. The three corniches, and the roads connecting them, were too full of midsummer tourist traffic to spot a tail. And any car that was after me wouldn’t make its move with that many people around and traffic jams impeding swift escape.

  But few tourists venture inland behind the highest corniche. If they can’t see the Mediterranean, they don’t believe they’re on the Riviera.

  Routes like the D53 are used by residents of the coast who like to dine in high backcountry villages with cooler air and fewer vacation mobs. But that is mostly on weekends. During the week these roads are virtually empty.

  In the first four miles after leaving the Grande Corniche I met only two vehicles coming the other way. One was an aged Volkswagen filled with as much family as could be jammed into it. The other was one of the big construction trucks that brought sand and stones down from the quarries that are the only industry in that area.

  There were three cars behind me. The closest was a white two-door Audi Quattro with a license plate ending in 06, the number for the local Alpes Maritimes department. There was nobody in it except the driver. It wasn’t likely Morel would have sent only one man to take me out.