CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Canny went straight to bed, but couldn’t sleep. Given that turning the pages of the old diary hadn’t relaxed him, it was hardly surprising that his unexpected conversation with Lissa Lo had woken him up to the full extent of which he was still capable—and even though her departure had let him down again dramatically, he couldn’t let go. The food for thought she had fed him had given him terrible mental indigestion, and he couldn’t even begin to attempt its coherent organization, but he couldn’t fall asleep. Eventually, he began to dream while he was still awake, and his dreams were hectic.

He didn’t drag himself out of bed until eleven-thirty the next day. Bentley didn’t call him for breakfast, and probably wouldn’t have called him for lunch either if he hadn’t made it on his own.

“How’s Daddy?” was the first thing he asked of his mother, when he went into the living-room to read the morning paper.

“Asleep,” she said. “Everyone appears to be keeping strange hours now. Actually, he seems much better—or, at any rate, much calmer. I don’t know what you said to him yesterday, but you obviously set his mind at rest. If only you could have....”

“Well, I couldn’t,” Canny said, cutting her off. “It wasn’t what I said so much as the timing. I’ll have another chat with him later—and I’ll try not to make things worse again.”

“You, on the other hand, look dreadful,” Lady Credesdale observed, by way of retaliation.

“Thanks,” he replied. “I’ll try to pull myself together before I go up to see Daddy again. Are you at home for lunch?”

“Yes, but I have to go down to the village this afternoon. The servants pass on all the available gossip at light-speed, of course, but I’m the source of official news. Everyone waits on my reports—even Maurice Rawtenstall at the Mill and Father Quimper.”

Mercifully, it wasn’t until his mother had left on her mission to inform that the telephone rang. Canny was still in the dining-room, lingering over a second cup of black coffee.

“Henri Meurdon,” Bentley reported to Canny, who was feeling slightly better now that lunch had revived him.

“Thanks,” Canny said, as he went into the drawing room and picked up the receiver. He waited for the butler to close the door behind him before saying: “Henri? You have some news?”

“Yes and no, Monsieur. The matter is more complicated than we thought.”

“What do you mean?”

“You have doubtless been distracted by the matter of your father’s illness, Monsieur, or you would have realized yourself that there was no time for the robbery to be arranged after you won the forty-seven thousand Euros. The thieves must already have made careful arrangements for getting in and out of your hotel, and your room. This was not an opportunistic crime. You, not the money you won that night, were their intended target; we suspect that they had been stalking you for some time, before you even arrived in Monte Carlo.”

Canny understood immediately that Meurdon had to be right, As soon as the casino manager pointed it out, Canny realized that he had been distracted by other matters from giving any significant thought to the mugging; in effect, he had handed over all responsibility with a single phone-call, and had promptly banished it from his mind. Now that it had been stated forthrightly, it was obvious that the gunman in his hotel could not have got there from some distant point, identified his room and found a means of discreet intrusion within the interval that had elapsed between his winning the money and his arrival in the hotel.

“You mean they intended to rob me anyway, no matter how much or how little I came away with that night?” Canny said. “But if I’d left immediately after receiving the call from home, they’d only have got three thousand. It wouldn’t have been worth the risk.”

“No, Monsieur Kilcannon—when I say that you must have been the target, that is what I mean. I suspect that they intended to kidnap you—but they changed their minds, and took the money instead. You were right about their having a man in the casino, who did indeed tell them that you were carrying the money—but he must also have told them what you said to the people at the roulette table as you left.”

For a moment, Canny couldn’t remember having said anything at all—but then he did. Daddy might not last the week, he’d announced, trying to sound uncaring. That—and the prospect of a forty-seven thousand Euro consolation prize—might have been just enough to subvert a kidnap gang’s scheme. Demanding a ransom from a man who was ill was one thing; attempting to demand a ransom from a man who might have died before the demand arrived was something else.

“Are you sure about this, Henri?” he asked, hesitantly.

“No, Monsieur—how can anyone be sure of such a thing? But we are not dealing with common fools, Monsieur. We are endeavoring to recover your money, and I think we might still succeed—but my associates do not normally operate as far afield as England, and you might like to make some enquiries of your own.”

“What? You mean the kidnap gang was English?”

“No, Monsieur. Eastern European, I believe. Since the collapse of communism, the Riviera has become the Wild West. But if you were a target, you must have been identified by something more than your reputation here. Someone in your own country—your own locality—might have given information as to your suitability. So it seems to me, at least. I cannot be sure...of anything. Kidnapping was a crime in danger of extinction in Europe only fifteen years ago, even in Sardinia, but things have changed. People in the old Soviet Republics watched too many bootleg American movies; they seem to model themselves on the worst sorts of imaginary gangsters. We shall do what we can, of course—but these are dangerous men, Monsieur Kilcannon. Perhaps you ought to take precautions of your own. I will call again if I have any further news—especially of your money.”

“Yes, of course,” Canny said. “Thank you, Henri. I appreciate your help—and your advice.”

When he had put the phone down he rang for Bentley. “This may seem like a stupid question, Bentley,” he said, “but does anyone in the village have any contacts in Eastern Europe? The former Soviet republics, in particular?”

“Yes sir,” the butler replied, promptly. “I believe some of the units in the Mill have extensive dealings with that part of the world. We have received trade delegations in the village, and our own representatives have visited such places as Kiev, Riga and Tbilisi. If you had paid more attention to....”

“You can forget the delicate criticism, Bentley. I take the point. Fast-changing world, fast-changing businesses. Daddy’s been banging on at me for years to get involved at the Mill, so I’d be ready to take over when the time came, but the pressure only served to increase my native stubbornness...and now the chickens are coming home to roost. So what kind of business is it? Not money-laundering for the Russian mafia, I hope.”

“I doubt it, sir—although I dare say that if there were anything clandestine going on, I’d be the last to hear of it. I believe that the former Warsaw Pact countries and ex-Soviet republics have become a significant market for the plastics and polymers units.”

“Really? Well, I suppose that Cockayne has to move with the times, just like everywhere else. And I suppose that if you live in Uzbekistan or Albania, the whole EU is the new Wild West.”

“Has something happened, sir?”

“Nothing important, probably. During my recent farewell trip to the Mediterranean coast I appear to have been targeted by a gang of East European kidnappers. When they heard that Daddy was dying they became anxious about the viability of a ransom demand, and decided to settle for a forty-thousand Euro heist instead, just to cover expenses. It was lucky for me that I happened to come by the alternative—but it was a bad move on their part, because I got it from a casino that pays protection to the Union Corse, who are already royally pissed off by the way that vagrant aspirant mafias are casually muscling in on their traditional territory, and tend to get very resentful indeed of rivals operating on their actual premises. The trouble with being lucky is that it’s a rare warm wind that blows no one any ill...and I guess that includes Daddy as well as the outlaws. Shit! Of all the times to discover that I’m living in interesting times....”

He trailed off, realizing that the most interesting aspect of his suddenly-interesting times was Lissa Lo, whose advent still did not seem at all unfortunate. Swings and roundabouts, as he had said to Bentley only yesterday...or yin and yang, as she might have put it. That multicolored streak he had seen in the casino had obviously sent ripples in every direction, stirring up all kinds of craziness.

“I thought the Union Corse was an insurance company, sir,” Bentley said, mildly.

“And I thought you knew what I meant,” Canny retorted. “They’re the Riviera’s most efficient racketeers—have been for a century and more, having settled in long before crime first got organized in America. They’ve never had total control, of course, but they’ve always considered themselves a cut above the gangs who followed southern ways. They’re not really Corsican any more, in spite of their name, but they have a sense of tradition and they still define themselves partly in terms of rivalry with Sardinia, where the local bandits used to be much more heavily biased towards such practices as kidnapping. It’s almost as complicated, in its way, as Yorkshire and Lancashire, and far more bizarre in its implications. The Union Corse will try to hunt down the people who stole my money because it’s a matter of honor—they take their protection racketeering very seriously—and pour encourager les autres. By which I mean that they’ll want to send a message to any other Eastern Europeans ambitious to muscle in.”

“I understand the Voltairean reference sir. A matter of hanging admirals, I believe. What you’re trying to imply is that someone here must have given away information about your family—not just its wealth, but about its situation, Only son, father ailing, old-fashioned concern about the succession. If anyone did, sir, I’m sure they had no idea what they were doing. It’s the sort of information that an unscrupulous inquirer could easily glean from casual gossip. The villagers are always proud to talk about Cockayne’s unique circumstances, enthusiastic to explain them to new business-partners. I don’t think you need assume that anyone you or I know was actually part of a plot to kidnap you. That seems very unlikely to me.”

“Unlikely,” Canny echoed. “Yes, you’re right. People do talk, quite innocently. And people listen—sometimes anything but innocently. We live in a cosmopolitan world, where there’s scope for all kinds of new commerce, and new misunderstanding. The spectrum of probability isn’t something constant. Being lucky is a much more complicated business than it used to be.”

“Pardon me for saying so, sir, but are you sure that Monsieur Meurdon is a wholly reliable source of information?”

Canny laughed, briefly. “Of course I’m not sure,” he said. “He may run an honest casino, but he pays protection money to the Union Corse. His situation is complicated. He practically dared me to place the bet that won me the stolen money, and he’s already investigated my betting patterns. Maybe he did set up the robbery, and made up all this stuff about Eastern European kidnappers as a cover story to distract me. I can’t be sure of anything—and to tell you the truth, I don’t give a damn about the forty-seven thousand Euros. I could do without any further complications and twists of fate, just for the time being.”

He knew as he said it that he was lying. What he really wanted was to pick and choose his complications, his twists of fate. He only wanted to hide from some essentially unlikely contingencies. Kidnap gangs and muggers he could do without; Lissa Lo was another matter. He wasn’t sure, any longer, that he could do without her...and if there was a price to be paid in strange ripples of uncertainty and whatever they might stir up, it was a price that he might have to pay, for the sake of simple curiosity as well as not-so-simple lust.

Bentley probably knew that he wasn’t telling the whole truth, but Bentley was used to that, and to being content with it.

“Your father is awake now,” the butler said, in a softer tone. “if you’d like to see him, I think you’d find him in a receptive frame of mind.”

“Yes, I would like to see him,” Canny said. “Thanks, Bentley. I appreciate what you’re doing—all of it. You’re a real tower of strength, and I don’t know what Mummy and I would do without you. Sorry about the clichés—but they really do mean what I want to say.”

Bentley nodded his head, to signify that he understood.