Francesca

by Stephen Marlowe

  Pale of face, wide of eye, Francesca got up. She came to me. Piaget let out a long, shuddering sigh.

  I almost felt sorry for him, and I still wasn’t thinking on all cylinders. “Never know how some people get their kicks,” I told Francesca.

  “kicks? You talk of kicks? I talk of the pictures this man has. I examine his knee. I examine it very carefully. He yells for me to stop, but I do not stop until he begs me to let him tell where the pictures are. He tells me, and now I leave his knee alone. I will get them.”

  We went downstairs. I heaped the hearth high with logs again. I looked at my watch: ten minutes to two. Francesca wanted a drink, and that seemed like a good idea. She spread the rug in front of the fire, and we both felt its warmth and the warmth of the cognac. I was all in; I wondered how I would ski down after the gendarmes in the morning.

  Francesca parted her lips moistly. Her teeth gleamed. “Doing that,” she said, “it was ugly but necessary. And now I will have the pictures.” She stroked my cheek. “This makes Francesca feel very expensive.”

  “Expansive?” I suggested.

  She nodded gravely, and then smiled. “I could make very fine love now.”

  “Francesca,” I said, “I’m pooped. Someone’s got to ski down in the morning.”

  “I could ski down,” she urged. “And if you are really, how you say, pooped, I could go top with you. I like top. Why should the woman always be underneath, to be commanded, to be ridden, to be used like a beast?” Her eyes had narrowed to thin slits that reflected the firelight. She clenched the hand that had made Piaget scream. “Yes. Yes, Francesca likes top.”

  “Sure,” I said. “Upstairs I saw the way you liked it.”

  “You think it matters, what I do to this Genevois killer?” she demanded angrily.

  No, it didn’t matter. Hell, I was the one who’d busted Piaget’s kneecap for him, wasn’t I? And if ever a guy had a lot of grief coming to him, Piaget was the man. But maybe it was Francesca’s reaction that mattered: dealing out physical pain to one man had got her all worked up for a roll in the hay with another. Or maybe I was numbed by violence, mayhem and death, the way she was excited by them. After all, they were my stock in trade, not hers.

  I drew a chair up to the fire and tried to get comfortable in it. We had nothing more to say to each other. I listened to her irregular breathing, which meant she wasn’t asleep. She listened to mine, which meant the same.

  chapter fourteen

  THEY SENT THE first team up the mountain in half a dozen helicopters—an Inspector from the Sûreté National, flown in from Evian; a lab crew borrowed from Grenoble in the Dauphiné; a ’copter ambulance unit from the hospital in Chamonix; the chief of the Chamonix gendarmes, complete with three sidekicks armed to the teeth and looking as if they would need it, because they were the usual stoop-shouldered specimens who seem to gravitate to the gendarmerie in France; and a sauve and extroverted civilian named Jaques David, who had something or other to do with the skiing championships in Chamonix, and who was referred to deferentially, even by the Sûreté big shot, as M. David.

  It took them twenty-four hours to assemble the entire team, though the ambulance unit and the local gendarmes went up the mountain inside of an hour after I had skied down into town. After that it was more public relations than police work, or looked that way from my base of non-operations in the Chamonix gendarmerie. “No reporters,” M. David told anyone who would listen, and apparently everyone who could was eager to listen to him. “Not until I myself have seen what is to be seen.” He was a tall and slender number in a black worsted suit and black shell-rimmed glasses, with short-cropped hair graying at the temples, a deep and confident voice, and the relaxed manner of a man accustomed to giving orders and having them obeyed.

  “Now can I get away to make a few phone calls?” I asked him hopefully after the first contingent had buzzed off in their ‘copters. Nobody was holding me incommunicado. But I had never been let out of a gendarme’s sight either, and I had a hunch that any attempt on my part to pass through the front door of the gendarmerie would be met by a polite but firm rebuff.

  “Phone calls to whom?” he asked right back at me in English.

  “My client.”

  “Oh? And are you licensed here in France as an investigator?” He knew I was not.

  “No,” I said.

  “Then naturally you have no client.”

  “The Swiss Federal Police, then. Ridgway’s a fugitive across the border.”

  “I believe Inspector Mauriac quite capable of cooperating, when the time comes, with his colleagues in Switzerland.”

  “There’s always Interpol,” I suggested.

  M. David gave me a wistful smile. “Interpol,” he said, “is like the United States or Europe. The world needs both but has neither in anything more than rudimentary form. What can Interpol do that the Sûreté National cannot?”

  “Ridgway’s sitting on three million bucks. Piaget’s a murder suspect in Geneva. Why try to put the lid on them?”

  “My dear Mr. Drum,” M. David said with a faintly mocking smile, “as of this moment, all we know of the events that transpired above Flegère and the people involved in them is what you have told us. Would you be terribly crushed by our natural desire to explore the situation for ourselves?”

  “Which means no phone calls?”

  He shrugged and lit a Laurens Green, removing a tiny speck of tobacco from his tongue with the tip of his index finger. “If what you have told us is true, we could hold you as—what is the delightful American expression?—a material witness to murder.” He sighed. “But I would regret it if you forced us to do so.”

  I asked: “What’s this ‘us’ routine? You’re no cop.”

  He took his glasses off, held them up to the light and decided they were clean enough. Without them his suave face suddenly looked very tough. “I?” he said. “I am a director of seven anonymous societies—you call them corporations—here in France.” He rattled them off. I was impressed. He had his finger in every industrial pie in la belle France.

  “Does it strike you as odd that a man in my position should also be the director of public relations for the World Skiing Championships at Chamonix?” Before I could answer, he told me: “It shouldn’t. In Europe, Mr. Drum, skiing is no mere pastime to make the cold winter months tolerable and even pleasant. A champion in any Alpine or Nordic country, as you Americans so colorfully put it, can write his own ticket—this includes putting his own little village on the map, the ownership of a big hotel, eventually wealth. Did anyone ski at St. Anton until Tony Sailer won the downhill? Of course not, but now St. Anton is on the fashionable circuit, the entire Tyrol has profited, and Sailer is a national hero all over Austria.

  “These winter championships mean much to Chamonix, much to High Savoy and, even, to France. Thousands of tourists who might have gone to the Tyrol or Bavaria or the Engadine Valley will visit Savoy this winter. Additional thousands of skiers will purchase French equipment, in Europe and abroad, because the world’s best skiers have come to Chamonix to compete. Why, all this could even have political consequences it is my duty to exploit. France finds herself in an unenviable position in regard to her former colonies, Mr. Drum. The world press has not been gentle with my country. Could you see that stories in a thousand newspapers in fifty languages on every continent, mentioning France as host-nation to the biggest event of the year in one of the few truly uncontaminated sports, might be beneficial to my country?”

  “I can see that you’re a dedicated guy, M. David. But I don’t see what your dedication has to do with an embezzled three million bucks and a pair of killings.”

  “Nothing must happen to jeopardize the publicity to be reaped from these championships,” he said. That was the same argument I had used on the concierge at the Hotel Savoy, and it made sense. “If true, what you told me occurred on the mountain above Flegère is precisely the sort of sensational and sordid story that could drive the winter ch
ampionships off the front pages. This, with all our preparations behind us, at all costs must not happen.” He shrugged again and lit another Laurens Green. “I am here to see that it does not.”

  “By covering up a murder?”

  “By letting the wheels of the law grind exceedingly slow. Believe me, Inspector Mauriac is a dedicated and competent police official. What must be done now will be done. What can be postponed until later will be postponed. Who suffers as a consequence of that, can you tell me?”

  “Sit on your hands long enough,” I predicted, “and you could buy some trouble. Ridgway’s no timid embezzler who took a couple of thousand bucks out of his teller’s cage while the chief cashier’s back was turned. Piaget’s no Neanderthal man with a brain the size of a split pea.”

  “Trouble?” said M. David mildly. “Trouble is precisely what I wish to avoid.”

  With the conciliatory gesture of a good public relations man, he finally allowed me one phone call. It was to Axel Spade in Geneva. “But I must explain,” M. David told me, “it will be no ordinary telephone you are using. If you say the wrong thing, we can cut you off before your party hears it.”

  “The wrong thing being?”

  “A suggestion to Spade that he contact Interpol or the Swiss Federal Police before we are ready; a suggestion that he stir up problems of any kind before we are prepared to deal with them.”

  They took me to the Hotel Savoy, where a broadcasting studio had been set up in the basement. “There will be complete coverage of the championships for Eurovision and the various national radio networks,” M. David explained. “One special feature of the coverage will be an apparently live series of telephone conversations between a sports commentator here in Chamonix and various people in the home towns of many of the competitors. They can call and ask or say anything they wish, and our man will reply—off the cuff, as it were.”

  M. David grinned. “But who knows, for example, what an excitable Italian in Cortina d’Ampezzo might say were the pride and joy of his village disqualified for missing a gate in the slalom? We must be able to monitor out profanity, and this device permits us to do so.”

  The device he referred to looked enough like a telephone to be a telephone. In fact it looked exactly like a telephone. I said so.

  M. David pointed to a metal box in one corner of the makeshift studio. The box had four dials in front and a set of earphones on top. “When you speak,” M. David explained, “your words are recorded and then played back with a lapse of four seconds. It is the playback that is heard at the other end of the telephone connection. A four-second lapse between taping and broadcasting, I assure you, is sufficient time to monitor out any undesirable conversation. Do you still wish to make that call?”

  “The client expects a report. He’s paying me.”

  M. David sat down with the earphones. He fiddled with dials on the tape recorder. My call was put through.

  “I found him,” I was telling Axel Spade a few moments later—with a lapse of four seconds. “Ridgway.”

  “That is splendid. Really splendid.”

  “There’s been some trouble.”

  M. David glanced up at me sharply. I went on: “Helen’s here in High Savoy, of course. So’s Francesca Artemi. Ridgway was holing up in a chalet above Flegère.”

  There was a pause of several seconds. If it meant anything to Axel Spade, he didn’t comment on it. Then he asked: “Shall I notify Interpol that my man has found Ridgway, or will you do that?”

  Again M. David’s sharp glance, before I said: “Neither one of us, not just yet. I said there was trouble. Yves Piaget and an Englishman named Havill, who used to work for you, came looking for Ridgway, too. There was a gunfight. Piaget’s hurt, Ridgway’s hurt and Havill’s dead.” I didn’t tell him Helen had been wounded, too. It was hardly more than a scratch, so why worry the guy?

  “Mon Dieu,” Spade swore softly after a lapse of several seconds. “And the money?”

  “Ridgway stashed it in a numbered account in Geneva.”

  Jubilantly Spade said: “In the event of a crime falling under Swiss jurisdiction, the Swiss Federal Police have access to numbered accounts. You’ve done it, Drum. You’ve done it for me.”

  “It’s not that simple. Ridgway has an intermediary.”

  “Yes?” For some reason he asked: “Surely not Francesca?”

  “No. Helen.”

  More time elapsed than could be accounted for by the recording gismo. Then Spade said in a flat voice: “Let Interpol wait, and the Swiss Federal Police. I have to think. Can I reach you?”

  “I’ll be bouncing around. I’ll call you, Mr. Spade. Or see you in Geneva. You going to sit tight?”

  “What else can I do? My own daughter. If they indict Howard they would have to indict her also, as an accessory.”

  That was that. M. David removed the earphones. He looked pleased with himself. “D’accord,” he said. “It would seem that your client and I are in complete accord. Now I am glad you made that phone call. Will you cooperate?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I’ll co-operate.”

  Co-operating meant cooling my heels in Chamonix while M. David went up the mountain with the rest of the first team later that afternoon. Co-operating meant three long hours of hard drinking at the bar of the Savoy while the skiers drifted in, flushed of face and bright of eye. There were any number of dames in tight stretch-pants and sweaters as pretty as Helen Spade and in the same wholesome way—but only one of them was the client’s daughter. Co-operating meant downing a fourth martini and wondering if I could ever tell Axel Spade that Helen was there, ready to shoot, when Francesca and I were digging our own graves in the snow. Spade was a guy who could pull strings in Switzerland, and co-operating meant wondering what kind of strings he would try to pull to get Helen off the only hook he thought she was on. It also meant sharing a round of drinks with Al and Charlie, Helen’s impromptu goon-squad, and pretending I was drunk enough to make fending off their questions easy. And it also meant, in the lonely shank of night, staring at the ceiling with a cigarette going and a tray of butts on the night-table, wondering if I hadn’t been too hard on Francesca and myself.

  Friday evening I got the call from the gendarmerie. M. David had returned from Flegère and allowed as how he might be willing to spare me a few minutes of his time. I walked there from the Savoy, hunched down in my trenchcoat against a wind that was driving fine, icy particles more like ice than snow through Chamonix’s brightly-lit holiday streets. The few skiers I passed looked doleful and annoyed: what was more an icy rain than a snowfall would form a crust on the slopes, making skiing dangerous and slow.

  M. David stood at the window of a small office on the second story of the gendarmerie, tall and lean in ski-pants and a black parka. He turned slowly, scowling. “A crime of violence and now this,” he said unhappily. “It almost seems there is a conspiracy against a good beginning for the competition on Sunday.”

  “Maybe you can bribe the weatherman,” I suggested. “How’d it go up the mountain?”

  “It is finished,” M. David said, suddenly pleased with himself. “Tomorrow morning the second team goes up. Local gendarmes only, but they have been briefed on what to tell the reporters.”

  “Can you brief me too, M. David?”

  M. David smiled a small, satisfied, public relations smile. “A nameless, foreign, eccentric and extremely wealthy sportsman rented a chalet on the mountain. He used an assumed name, as indeed Ridgway did, for the rental. He is an internationally famous playboy and wanted to watch the championships in reasonable privacy. Among his eccentricities is the fact that he never travels without a small fortune in local currency and, far from bothering to hide his wealth, makes a considerable show of it. This particular display attracted a Genevois named Piaget, while our nameless sportsman was en route from Geneva to Chamonix.

  “Piaget made his move after our sportsman was ensconced in his chalet. He was thwarted in his attempt at robbery, his confederat
e—who has not as yet been identified—was killed, and the incognito millionaire sustained a minor injury. He has since departed High Savoy, as he shuns notoriety. The would-be thief is being held incommunicado until a formal indictment is made, the body of his unidentified confederate is being held at the hospital mortuary pending positive identification and the case is, for the time being, a simple one of attempted theft without international complications. There seemed no reason to mention either Miss Spade, Mlle. Artemi or yourself, and for whatever personal reasons, both women were eager to leave Chamonix. It is, as you can see, quite, quite simple. D’accord?”

  “Sure, it’s simple,” I said. “You get your hands on a suspected embezzler of three million bucks, and you let him go. You get your hands on his girlfriend, who can lead the Swiss police to the loot, and you let her go too.”

  M. David shrugged. “But you already told me the Spade girl will no longer co-operate with Ridgway. Indeed, you indicated her desire to turn the money over to her father, who naturally will give it to the authorities. Our position here has been protected. What harm has been done, Mr. Drum?”

  I said one word: “Ridgway.”

  “Since he is still traveling with his own passport, he cannot cross the Swiss frontier. Besides, did you think Inspector Mauriac would be so foolish as to let him go without keeping him under surveillance? No, my friend, Ridgway has a tail.” M. David beamed at me. “I love your American expressions. I love them. When Ridgway puts a sufficient number of kilometers between himself and Chamonix, he will be apprehended, and Interpol will be contacted. Needless to say, we will not go out of our way to make any connection between the wealthy sportsman of Flegère and the embezzler captured on French soil. Is it not a work of art, mon ami?”

  I did not think it was a work of art, and I said so. I also said: “I could have called my client and he could have got in touch with Interpol, and the first thing you would have known about it was when an Interpol agent came knocking at your Inspector Mauriac’s door. I didn’t. I played it straight, figuring the local cops were entitled to their cut of the cake. Hell, I’m not blaming you, David. You’re no lawman. You’re calling the shots as you see them, and maybe you’re giving a new Tony Sailer a chance to strike it rich and a new Alpine village a chance to get famous. But as for Inspector Mauriac, they ought to send him up to Brittany to use his leaded cape on the artichoke fanners. From where I’m sitting he’s a pretty poor excuse for a cop.”