CHAPTER 13

 

 

Fortunately for me, Labrosse was in the lead car. Any other gendarme finding Frenchmen with my bullets in them would have locked me up first, taken a statement second. But Labrosse was a pro. He took me aside and listened to my story without interrupting. He got a little tight-lipped when I told him I’d found Constance’s body the night before and made the decision to wait for morning before reporting it, but he said nothing until I’d finished.

Then he had two of his men carry the survivor into the apartment and set Amy to work on reviving him. I’d put the guy to sleep pretty deeply, but as soon as he opened his eyes, Labrosse started asking questions.

Wainwright had surrendered the Colt, and I gave up the Galil, and we sat on the couch waiting for Labrosse to get around to us. Wainwright was listening intently as the injured man talked. I couldn’t follow the conversation— it was too fast and idiomatic for me—but I could tell from a little nod that Wainwright gave that he felt justified in whatever he’d been thinking. However, it was Labrosse who spoke to me first.

“This man says he was out hunting rabbits when you attacked him.”

“How big do your rabbits grow that he needed double O buckshot?”

Labrosse’s face creased in a microscopic grin. “Not the usual load.” He turned back to the man, jabbing a finger into his face.

The man was recovered enough by now to realize the jam he was in, and he changed his tune. He sang it for five full minutes. At last Labrosse turned to me again. “Now he remembers better,” he said.

“Does he remember who sent him?”

“A gentleman from Marseilles. No name, unfortunately, but there is time for him to think more.”

“If it was Marseilles, then it had to be Orsini.”

Labrosse clicked his tongue impatiently. “Venez!” he commanded, then translated for me, although I had understood. “Come.” He led the way downstairs and outside to the flat area behind the house, where the bodies of Chretien and the second man I’d shot were still lying, covered now with sheets from the apartment’s linen closet.

“I have heard that Orsini visited Miss Roger yesterday.”

“He did. And he was charming to her. No hint of this kind of badness. I find it hard to understand what’s happening, Captain.”

“Me also.” He paced slowly, looking up the hill to the bush, where I had wounded the first man. Watching him work was like watching a hunting dog. Nothing about him was idle. Every glance seemed to have a purpose; I wondered if he ever relaxed, ever forgot what he did for a living.

“I have heard many things since we spoke yesterday,” he said. “For example, I have heard that two injured men were found in a Mercedes with no keys not twenty kilometers from here. One of them says that a blond Englishman attacked them.”

I waited for the other shoe to drop. He had something a little delicate in his head; otherwise, he would simply have arrested me. Hell, I’d caused enough commotion that sticking me inside would have earned him stars on his work. The charges would probably have been dropped later, but right now I’d look good on ice. I stood there, waiting for him to make the running. Finally, he went on, speaking slowly, as if he were still working things out.

“I also had a talk to Gregoire, the manager for M’sieur Armand. He tells me that two men came to the house last night and that an Englishman staying with the family hit them both on the head.”

“These are violent times, Captain.”

“Indeed. One is reminded of Algeria.” He was musing now, almost as if I weren’t there. “The only difference is that I have men now who have never fought a war. They have taken training, as I have, but they are police, not true soldiers.”

He paused a moment, and I stood waiting, listening to the cicadas sawing away, waiting for him to make his point. At last he said, “If this blond Englishman would work for me, I would find out many things. I would find, for example, the name of the man who employs other men to kill an old woman.”

“Perhaps the Englishman would not want to do such a thing.” Two can play at the third-person game. It was just a hair less worrying than talking turkey. But he soon put an end to that feeling.

“Then I would have to look for him and put him in my cells,” he said. “These men he hit have told me how he looks; he would not be hard to find.”

So there it was. Good news and bad news. The good news was I could stay out of jail. The bad news was that I had to buy my freedom by wrestling an alligator.

“I believe I know this man, Captain. He could be convinced if I spoke to him. What would you want him to do?”

“I would want him to take Orsini somewhere and talk to him, without lawyers and newspapers and photographs and all the things that would prevent a gendarme from finding the truth.”

Well, now I knew which alligator I would be wrestling; that was a start. But I didn’t roll over and play dead. “This man does not speak French well enough to talk to Orsini.”

“That is of no importance. A French speaker will go also.”

A French speaker—not a Frenchman. I wondered who he had in mind. “What will happen to Miss Roger while I am away talking to my friend?”

“She will be in no danger while your friend talks to Orsini, and she will be permitted to continue her work.”

“In that case, I will talk to this man. But first you must tell me where Orsini is so I can brief him.”

“Good.” He dropped his cigarette and stepped on it. And for the next few minutes he filled me in. Orsini was staying at a château near Avignon. Labrosse figured he was in the region to deal with the people who were doing his work here, the enforcers and loan sharks. He did not customarily carry weapons himself, but he would have at least one armed bodyguard, and it was likely that the other men with him would be carrying. When captured, he should be blindfolded and brought to the Armands’ house, where he would be interrogated.

The choice of venue surprised me. I had guessed the day before that there was no love lost between Armand and Orsini, but it seemed like a security risk to take an illegal prisoner to a spot where there were so many potential witnesses. But I didn’t question it. Instead, I asked who was to go with this friend of mine.

“I believe that M’sieur Wainwright will volunteer,” Labrosse said. “Let us go and tell them the plan.”

We went back in, and Labrosse did the talking in machine-gun bursts of French that made Wainwright and Amy look at one another in consternation.

They both had things to say, but Labrosse talked them down, using management skills, wearing a tight little smile to indicate that this was all friendly and relaxed, that it was just a suggestion. But his tone was a reminder not to forget who was doing the suggesting.

When Labrosse finished, Wainwright looked at me. “All right, then, old chap, let’s go and find this friend of yours.”

Amy broke in immediately. “This is ridiculous, Eric. You shouldn’t be doing this. Neither should John. It’s dangerous.”

“It’s a preemptive strike,” I said. “Believe me, this is less dangerous than hanging around waiting for Orsini to send someone else.”

Amy burst into tears and clung to Wainwright, but he disengaged her hands and patted her gently on the shoulder. “Don’t worry, my dear. John is very good at this kind of thing. We’ll be fine.”

“We’ll be finer if you can take the Colt you had this morning,” I suggested. Labrosse looked at me without speaking, then picked up the Colt from the table, where he had set it down, broke it open for safety, and handed it to Wainwright without a word. The old man checked the load and snapped it shut, shoving it into his jacket pocket.

“Right,” he said. “Let’s get cracking, shall we?” Get cracking! I could see he was still mentally fighting World War II.

We left them and went down to my car. I drove, with Wainwright sitting up straight in his seat, looking all around as if we were on patrol in enemy country. When we got to the road, he asked, “Where are we going?”

“To Avignon—near there, anyway. There’s a château where Orsini stays. The object of the exercise is to bring him out—unharmed, if possible—and transport him to the Armands’, where he’s to be blindfolded and questioned. I thought Labrosse explained that.”

“He did,” Wainwright said. “But this is ridiculous. If we get caught, it means twenty years in prison. I’d never get out alive.”

“Then why didn’t you say no to Labrosse?”

“He said only that I was to go with this mythical friend of yours and talk to Orsini. He wants to know what’s going on.”

“Don’t tell me you bought a line of crap like that.” I glanced at him in dismay. Why was he lying to me? I had no doubt that Labrosse had made it perfectly clear. I wondered if he was going to chicken out on me now that Amy wasn’t around to watch him playing hero. But he was all the help I had, and I needed a plan. “Any suggestions on how we can get in without getting searched?”

The question helped Wainwright get his head together. He sat back in his seat, frowning gently. At last he said, “The best thing might be to bring a gift of some kind. That might put them off guard.”

“What kind of gift?” My mind was jumping ahead. Perhaps we could set ourselves up a Trojan horse.

“A really excellent wine is always welcome,” he said at last. “Yes, that would be it.” He glanced around at the road with new interest. “Pity we’re here, the Côtes du Rhône aren’t impressive. We need a Burgundy.”

I cut through the oenophilia. “Can we pick up something passable anywhere around here?”

He frowned and looked as if he were going to argue, so I cut in again. “We’re not catering a royal wedding, we’re looking for a Trojan horse. In fact, for the thing I’ve got in mind, cognac would be better.”

“Cognac? Are you planning to drink him under the table?”

“Cognac,” I repeated. “Let’s do it my way.”

Cognac proved more of a problem than wine. We couldn’t just drive into a cave and pick the best of their stock. Down this far south the only cognac to be had is from the supermarket or the bars. We ended up in the big supermarché in Vaison, buying a case of reasonable stuff. It wasn’t a grande marque, at least nothing I’d heard of, but Wainwright was satisfied.

I put the car in gear and headed out onto the street. “So far, so good. Next stop is somewhere they sell fireworks.”

“Fireworks.” Wainwright looked at me, narrowing his eyes, then laughed suddenly. “I say. What a marvelous idea.”

“The country should be full of the things. Next week is the bicentennial of Bastille Day. Someone ought to be able to spare us some firepower.”

In fact, it wasn’t as easy as that, but Wainwright was able to talk some hardware storekeeper into parting with a few rockets. We went to a different store to buy the rest of the things I needed. They included a stout plastic jar, some batteries, wire, a burglar-alarm device, a roll of friction tape, and a couple of cheap disposable cigarette lighters.

We pulled off the road about ten kilometers from Orsini’s place, and I worked for half an hour, sweating like a bull in the heat of the car. First I broke the fireworks in half and stuffed them into the plastic jar. Then I taped down the control on one of the cigarette lighters so it leaked butane nonstop. I dropped it into the jar, then the intact one. I’d already set up the electrical contacts, and now I laid them inside the jar and screwed the top on, sealing the jar with electrical tape so that some oxygen would remain inside, enough to support the combustion when the spark flew. Finally, I set up the triggering device so it would operate when the top of the case of cognac was opened. The top looked untouched, as if it had never been tampered with. I’d done all my insertions from the bottom.

Wainwright had been out of the car, at my suggestion, playing it safe in case anything went wrong.

“Right,” I told him, making a typical British military joke, using the proper nomenclature for description of equipment. “Traps, booby, one, hoodlums for the entrapment of.”

“Are you sure it will detonate?” His war was almost fifty years in the past. He knew that equipment had changed since then, but he didn’t trust it.

“Yes.” I didn’t expand on it, just stepped out of the car for a moment to allow the sweat to dry on my back. I caught a whiff of myself and realized I needed a shower. Later. I had a lot more sweat to work up first.

Wainwright stood looking at me across the roof of the car. “Were you an explosives man in the army?”

“No. We had an expert on our team. I was the weapons man. Particularly pistol.” It’s not gentlemanly to talk up your achievements, but if asked nicely, I would have been glad of the chance to tell him that my nickname had been Cowboy. Partly because I was the only North American on the team but mostly because I generally hit what I aim at.

Wainwright was nostalgic for his own salad days. “It was more or less the same in my day. Each man had a specific task, but any one of us could fill in for any other.”

“What was your speciality?”

“Languages and unarmed combat,” he said, and grinned. “Seems silly now, with all my joints starting to creak, but I used to be very good.”

“How stiff are your joints?” I dropped down into the seat and started the motor, then turned and set the booby- trapped case carefully on the backseat. Wainwright got in and answered my question.

“Given the element of surprise, I could still take out a man at close quarters. Probably permanently.”

I knew what that meant. He had been trained on the breakneck holds. Left arm around a victim’s neck, right hand shoving, using the left elbow as the fulcrum, unhinging the victim’s neck neatly. A two-second murder. Great while Hitler was the captain of the opposing team, but if we did that here, Labrosse would start getting annoyed.

“Better cool it. We’re up to quota on dead Frenchmen.”

He snorted with amusement, and we drove on to the château where Orsini was staying. It was unexceptional, a two-hundred-year-old country mansion with a fifty-meter driveway leading to it from the road.

“Here goes,” I said, and turned into the drive and headed for the house, moving fast enough to be a tough target but not so fast as to look guilty. I could see Orsini’s car standing outside the front door, and I recognized the chauffeur. He was my sparring partner from the day before. He looked up at our car as I drove in, and I saw his hand go around to the back of his belt. Then the other front door of the car opened, and a second man slipped out, staying low behind the car. There was a third man in the back, sitting up curiously in the seat. Orsini!

“Bingo,” I said. “Hold on to your hat.” I wheeled up the wrong way around the circular drive in front of the house, coming up nose on to Orsini’s car and a few feet to the left side. The chauffeur took a step back as I approached, but I slammed my door open, catching him broadside. He flew back against his car, and I jammed my brakes on and rolled out of the front seat before the guy behind the car had chance to draw a bead on me. I pulled my weapon as I rolled, coming up on the far side of Orsini’s car, level with the bodyguard. He had his gun in his hand, but he was way out of sequence with the speed of events, craning up over his own car, expecting me to be standing up beside my door, as if we’d called socially. I had the drop on him, and he knew it. I guess my reputation had been talked up downstairs in the Orsini menage. He looked at me cunningly but lowered his gun.

“Drop it,” I told him. He probably didn’t speak English, but he looked at me for a long moment, then let the gun fall. I walked over and kicked it away. “A bas,” I said, and gestured to the ground. The man sat but I motioned impatiently with the gun and he rolled over and lay facedown. “Restez là,” I told him. Stay there. I wanted to make sure the other man was disarmed, for I’d learned to mistrust Wainwright’s abilities.

I stepped to where I could see both sides of the car at once, covering both my guy and the chauffeur. He didn’t seem much of a threat. He was lying on his back with his feet drawn up, clutching his gut where the door had winded him. Wainwright was standing over him, his gun drawn.

“Cover him and frisk him carefully. He’s carrying,” I ordered.

Wainwright crouched and spoke to the man sharply in French, and the guy groaned and rolled over painfully. Wainwright patted him down. He drew a gun from a belt holster and held it up triumphantly. I patted him on the shoulder and went back to the bodyguard. He was on his hands and knees now, but he subsided when he saw me again, and I frisked him, taking a knife from his left sock. All the time I was working I stayed alert, waiting for reinforcements to show up from the door of the house, but it stayed closed, and Orsini stayed where he was, in the backseat, sitting impassively. For all the emotion he was showing, he might have been waiting for a green light.

The bodyguard was wearing slip-on shoes, so there were no laces I could use to tie his thumbs together. “Bring the electrical tape from the car,” I called, and Wainwright brought it to me. I quickly wrapped the guy’s wrists. It wasn’t ideal. He would be free in twenty minutes, but with luck we would be long gone by then.

“Get Orsini out and stand him beside our car,” I told Wainwright. “Look menacing or he won’t buy it.”

“Right.” He tapped on Orsini’s window with his gun, and Orsini looked at him, not stirring. I ignored them both and went and taped the chauffeur’s wrists. I could hear Wainwright talking in French, but there was no sound of a door opening.

“What’s going on?” I asked when the second man was secure.

“He says he won’t get out. The glass is bulletproof.”

“Ask him if it’s fireproof,” I instructed. “Tell him he’s got ten seconds to get out or I stuff a rag in the gas tank and strike a match.”

Wainwright spoke rapidly, and I saw a flicker in Orsini’s eyes. Not fear—he was too much of a man for that—but respect for an idea as ruthless as something he might have come up with. He held both hands palms up in a gesture of acceptance, I wouldn’t have called it surrender; he was too proud for that. Then he opened the door, and I grabbed him and pushed him up against the car, searching him quickly for a weapon. He was clean, and I stuck my gun back in its holster and taped his hands together behind his back. Then I pulled the handkerchief from his top pocket and laid it over his eyes, taping it in place with enough strips to mask his vision completely.

Wainwright earned his keep. He was acting like a soldier, keeping his eyes open, checking the two men on the ground and the house for any sign of interference. He had his gun in his hand the whole time, ready for use. The guy who got the drop on him at the farm earlier in the day had given him a refresher course in all the soldierly skills he had learned in the Guards fifty years earlier.

When I had Orsini blindfolded properly, I paused to stick my knife into both back tires of the Mercedes; then we steered Orsini into the backseat of my car and drove out.

“Somebody indoors may have seen us and called the cops,” I said. “I’m going to turn off this road and take back ways.”

“I doubt if anyone in this man’s employ would call the police,” Wainwright said. “But they may have called in reinforcements, other men from somewhere else. It’s wise to take evasive action.”

There is not a big choice of roads in the area, but I managed to loop around enough different ways that there was no logic to our track, no obvious direction established. If anyone should try to backtrack us, they would go crazy trying to pick a destination. The maneuvering took me an hour or so, and it was after twelve before we came close to the Armand house.

“Soon be there,” Wainwright said.

“I’m not anxious to wheel up to the front door like this,” I said. Now that we had done what Labrosse had asked for, I was starting to wonder why he had needed me at all. The French police have wider powers than their equivalents in our country. He could have pulled Orsini in and talked to him through normal channels. His little speech about newspapers and lawyers was starting to sound phony now that I’d broken the law in his behalf.

“What’s the problem?” Wainwright asked. “You didn’t have any reservations earlier on, when we were picking this chap up.”

“Labrosse blackmailed me,” I argued. “When he said what he wanted, I was too concerned about what I’d already done to argue with him. Now I’ve had time to think.”

“There’s nothing to worry about.” Wainwright shook his head firmly. “You’ve got me—and Amy, for that matter—as witnesses. We’ll testify that you were coerced into doing this.”

The gates of the Armand château were looming ahead of us. I flicked on the turn signals and pulled into the driveway. “Let’s just hope you’re right,” I said.

“Count on it, old boy,” Wainwright said, but he seemed tense.

I crunched the car slowly up the driveway, wondering what was different about the place. And then I realized there were no children playing around the front of the house. Armand must have shipped the family out so they wouldn’t witness Orsini’s arrival.

Labrosse was standing on the patio. He stooped to see into the car, then signaled to me to keep on going, around to the stables. I nodded and drove on. I didn’t speak. Orsini did not need to know where he was. If I made any comments, he might realize where he had been taken, and that could mean reprisals later.

I drove into the stable yard and saw Armand standing at the mouth of one of the double garages. It was empty, and he beckoned me over, indicating that I should pull in to the right. I did as he wanted, and he pressed a button that rolled the garage door down behind us.

I turned off the ignition and got out of the car warily. My personal alarm system was on red alert. It seemed that Labrosse and Armand were planning for Orsini to make a lot of noise. That was something for me to size up as it happened. Interrogations aren’t usually social occasions, but I wouldn’t sit still for torture no matter what Orsini was supposed to have done.

I looked at Armand closely. He was standing beside the door, arms folded, face set. He was wearing a gray suit, a city suit, not like the more countrified clothes he had worn the day before. He looked formal, as if he had business to attend to. And in the lapel he sported a tiny insignia. I glanced at it, as I do at anybody’s self-advertisement. This one startled me. It was the double-bladed cross of Lorraine, the symbol of the French Resistance. From what he’d said, I had thought he was a prisoner throughout the war. Apparently not.

Wainwright got out of the car more slowly and spoke to Armand. I didn’t understand what he said, but I recognized that he used the familiar pronoun tu. That’s a privilege you don’t get from doing business with another man’s company. It’s either a sign of contempt, as it had been when I used it on the man I’d captured earlier, or it’s a privilege, denoting familiarity, either family or the kind of association you earn by serving together in the same military unit.

“What happens now?” I asked Wainwright.

“We wait for Captain Labrosse,” he said. “Would you be so kind as to get Mr. Orsini out of the car, please.”

I nodded and opened the back door of the car. Orsini turned his head toward me behind its blind black mask. I was reminded of a falcon under its hood, all the hunting and killing skills on hold, until the eyes were uncovered.

Wainwright and Armand were talking, standing close together, clattering at one another in rapid, angry-sounding French. And suddenly I understood what was happening. This was not a criminal investigation of Orsini. This was to be an inquiry, a trial even, for crimes committed forty- five years ago, when Armand and Wainwright and Labrosse’s father had been young men, young Resistance fighters. The three of them, and their victim, the man I had risked my life to bring into this place, were caught up in a time lock that had snapped shut in 1944. I wondered if they would include me in the events, having me execute Orsini so that I would never dare to mention what happened here this day.

I pretended to have trouble hauling Orsini out. As I worked, I pulled my clasp knife and flipped it open. “Faisez rieri maintenant. Attendez!” I whispered to Orsini. Do nothing now, wait! I slit the tape on the top side, where it was pressed against his back and would not be apparent to a casual glance.

He did not reply, but his head moved in a microscopic nod, his chin firm. I coughed to cover the click of my knife’s closing and shoved it into my sleeve as I drew Orsini out of the car, keeping one hand on his wrists so they would not tear free and waste the advantage I’d given him.

“Where do you want him?” I asked.

“Here,” Armand said. He gestured to a planked-in area in the floor. I recognized it as the pit from which a mechanic could work on the engine or underside of a car. I moved Orsini out onto the boards, and then Wainwright proved my theory. He stooped and removed some of the boards over the pit. There was a chain hanging from the ceiling, the block and tackle used for hoisting out engines. Armand stepped forward and looped it around Orsini’s neck.

It was time to get involved. “Okay, what’s going on?”

“Justice.” Armand said. “A traitor to France is about to die.”