Get Off At Babylon Read online

  Contents

  Copyright Information

  The Stone Angel Series

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Copyright Information

  Copyright © 1987 by Marvin H. Albert.

  All rights reserved.

  Published by

  Wildside Press LLC

  www.wildsidepress.com

  The Stone Angel Series

  Stone Angel

  Back in the Real World

  Get Off at Babylon

  Long Teeth

  The Last Smile

  The Midnight Sister

  Bimbo Heaven

  The Zig-Zag Man

  The Riviera Contract

  Dedication

  This one is for Joan Gabel, the loveliest attorney I know.

  Chapter 1

  It began with my meeting with Bruno Ravic that evening in May. His name meant nothing to me at the time. It wasn’t until later that his tenuous connections to people I did know began to surface.

  We didn’t exactly meet. Collide describes it better.

  I was at a table outside my favorite crêperie in Nice when it happened. It was in the section known as the Old Town: a dense jigsaw puzzle of aging stone buildings facing one another across short, twisty streets too narrow to have sidewalks. Seven of those Old Town streets converge on the Place Rossetti, a square fronting the seventeenth-century Cathedral of Sainte Réparate. The crêperie was on the corner of the one called the Rue du Vieux Pont. I was its first customer that evening.

  The place and street were empty. The outdoor food and clothing stalls had closed for the day. Most of the quarter’s restaurants were only beginning to open for dinner trade. The tiny sanitation car with its train of wheeled garbage bins had gone through, followed by the two-man team with the hose, leaving everything clean and damp. There was no other traffic. You don’t get much of that in the Old Town. Few of its streets are wide enough for automobiles. Even in those, only one at a time can worm through. And if you don’t know the neighborhood intimately, you find yourself having to back out of one dead end after another.

  I sat at my outdoor table giving my taste buds a treat. My crepe was a Spéciale: wrapped around a succulent mix of ham, mushrooms, eggs, and crème fraiche. I was eating it slowly, savoring each mouthful, when a girl came hurrying out of a seven-story apartment building four doors down the street from the crêperie.

  She was small and slender, about eighteen. She wore dungarees with plaid patches on the knees, a much-scuffed leather field jacket several sizes too large for her, and suede boots. A canvas knapsack was slung over her left shoulder. She went past me into the place, moving as fast as she could without running.

  I caught a glimpse of an uncommonly pretty, snub-nosed profile framed by thick, dark-brown hair that cascaded uncombed to her shoulders. She looked scared.

  I wondered if it was before or after scared. Whether she was late for a date with a boyfriend or had just left him and expected trouble when she got home to her parents. Maybe it should have occurred to me that she might be scared by something worse—but that’s hindsight.

  I watched her pop into a phone booth on the other side of the cathedral. The conversation was extremely brief. Then she was out of the booth and into the street next to it. This time she was running.

  She vanished from my sight and out of my mind. I didn’t know of any reason, at that point, to go on thinking about her.

  I polished off my crepe, drank the last of the extra-dry cider I’d ordered with it, and leaned back full of nothing but good mood.

  It had been one of those balmy days the Cote d’Azur is famous for. The case I’d been working on had reached a satisfactory conclusion that afternoon, earning me a healthy bonus. I’d unwound with a long swim in the sea below my house on the coast near Monaco. After sunset the air had turned pleasantly cool. I’d put on a sleeveless lamb’s wool sweater and a Levi’s jacket over my open-necked shirt and denim slacks, changed from espadrilles into socks and sneakers, and driven into Nice feeling nicely relaxed. France was having its usual share of the world’s troubles. But one of the sins and joys of being an expatriate American is that headlines about the stupidities of your host country’s government don’t raise your blood pressure too much.

  I savored the moment, not letting past or future intrude. No nagging worries. No uneasy premonitions.

  The waitress, a saucy twenty-year-old named Julienne Coppolani, came out to see how I was doing. She wore one of the customary Riviera youth costumes: skin-tight faded jeans, cowboy boots, and loose sweatshirt. This evening her sweatshirt had “BROADWAY” printed on it in red across her pointy, braless breasts. The last time I’d seen her she’d been wearing the one that said “HOLLYWOOD.”

  She looked at my empty plate and said, in slow English, “You eat too swift.”

  “Too fast,” I corrected her. She was in her third year at the University of Nice and worked evenings to pay her way. Sometimes, over those three years, I’d helped her with translations for her courses on English literature.

  She nodded. “Too fast. You eat too fast. Do you want coffee now?”

  “And a Breton gaufre with honey. Don’t be stingy with the honey this time.”

  She stuck out a hip, braced her fist on it, and gave me a disapproving frown as she reverted to French. “You have a dinner date. You said you only wanted a snack to tide you over until then.”

  “Dinner’s not for almost three hours, Julienne. If you want to mother someone, go get yourself pregnant.”

  That didn’t faze her. “I’ll get pregnant when I meet a man who deserves me. And you’ll get fat if you eat so much. Be a shame, a man with a grand build like yours.”

  “I’m not getting any younger,” I told her. “Eating well is one of the few pleasures left.”

  Julienne gave me the standard Mediterranean sign for “Who are you trying to fool?”—pulling her lower eyelid down with a fingertip. She sauntered back inside with a deliberately insolent twitch of her cute little derrière.

  I smiled and relaxed some more.

  Then a black four-door Renault maneuvered around a tight corner on the opposite side of the place and stopped beside the small fountain. The two men inside climbed out.

  They were dressed alike: brown leather jackets and black jeans. Both in their mid-thirties. Brigade Criminelle inspectors with the Police Judiciare. One I knew slightly, the other well.

  The shorter one with the strong, heavy figure was Yves Ricard, a tough, slow-moving detective who’d recently grown a short, pointy beard to make his round face look leaner.

  His tall, wiry partner was Laurent Sou
magnac, a neighbor and friend. He lived with his wife and daughter in Cap d’Ail, the village a few minutes from my house. Like me, he was only half French. The Oriental eyes and quick mind were from his Vietnamese mother. Another thing we had in common was Saigon. He’d been born there but remembered it only dimly, from his childhood during what the French had called their Indo-China War. I remembered it vividly from a couple periods of rest-and-recuperation during the Vietnam War. Same war, same place, same lessons unlearned.

  Laurent and I had cemented our friendship over sporadic flipper competitions in our local bistros. Flipper is what they call pinball in France. French boys are passionate about it, and a lot of them remain so after graduating into an otherwise serious adult life. Almost every café and brasserie has at least one machine, and some have as many as five. All the machines were from America, which gave me an advantage. Laurent couldn’t read the game instructions, printed in English. But he usually snuck around and played each newly installed machine long enough to get the hang of it before I showed up. So far we were about even.

  He and Ricard crossed the place and entered the street where I sat. Laurent winked at me but said nothing as they went past my table. I watched them enter the building that the pretty girl with the knapsack had come hurrying out of.

  Julienne brought out my cafe noir and dessert. There was an outrageous amount of honey on my gaufre. She set it down with a wicked grin. “Go ahead and get fat. See if I care.” She left me with another provocative swing of her butt.

  I scraped most of the honey aside and went to work on the gaufre. Delicious. It was settling nicely inside me and I was finishing my coffee when Laurent ran out of the building four doors away.

  He halted in the middle of the narrow street and looked both ways. He had his gun out but was holding it pointed up at the sky. Laurent had nightmares about shooting too quickly and killing someone by mistake. So far in his career he’d shot two men that I knew of. But very carefully: one in the leg, the other in the arm.

  A man erupted from the next door down, wearing tight leather pants, his torso and feet bare. He was about thirty, broad in the chest and shoulders, his arms thickly muscled, his face rough-hewn and hot-tempered.

  Laurent shouted at him to stop and surrender, starting to lower his gun but hesitating to take dead aim.

  The other man brought his fist up from beside his thigh. It was a large fist, and it held a short-barreled revolver that neither I nor Laurent had seen until that instant.

  He shot Laurent twice.

  The impact of the bullets jolted him off his feet, twisted him around in mid-air, and sprawled him in the middle of the street. His hands clutched at his chest and stomach, his gun forgotten six feet away from him.

  At that point I didn’t see any more flipper battles in our future. More likely I’d be helping his wife and child get through his funeral.

  The one who’d shot him leaped over Laurent and came sprinting in my direction. If he could make it across the place and into the maze of little streets on the other side, he had a good chance of disappearing.

  I didn’t have a gun. He did, and he was holding it ready to use against any interference as he neared me. I continued to sit there like any sensible citizen making a point of minding his own business. I kept my hands where he could see them, empty, on top of my table. When he came abreast of me I dumped the table over in his path.

  His legs rammed into it and his forward momentum somersaulted him over it. He landed hard on his back. I landed on his midsection with both knees and all my weight. The air gushed out of him and his body shuddered. But he didn’t drop the revolver.

  I grabbed its barrel with my left hand, forced it away from me, and clubbed him across the ear with the side of my right fist. I had to hit him twice more before he went limp under me.

  An instant later Yves Ricard burst out of the same building as the man I’d stopped. He took one look at Laurent and dashed to the black Renault to summon aid.

  Laurent was unconscious when the ambulance sped off with him to the nearest hospital: St. Roch. The man who’d shot him was starting to come to when they locked him inside the back of a police van with his wrists and ankles shackled to a belt chain. It was Ricard who first told me his name: Bruno Ravic.

  Chapter 2

  The French Riviera has a number of gleaming glass-and-stainless-steel hospitals where patients from the international set can recuperate or die in a reassuringly ultramodern ambience. St. Roch is not one of them. Its medical facilities and staff are excellent, but the place is very old and shows it. Interior walls are cracked and long overdue for fresh paint. The grime of generations of anxious footsteps is ground too deeply into the flooring tiles for any amount of scrubbing to get it out. The yellowish lighting gets soaked up by the walls and floors, making for a depressing dimness. It is not the best atmosphere in which to wait to find out if someone you care about is going to survive the night.

  Laurent’s wife, Domiti, got there shortly after I did. Laurent was still in the operating room with the surgeons, who were doing their best to keep him among the living. Domiti joined me in a small waiting room crowded with what looked like cast-off lawn furniture bought cheaply from a flea market. She was a short, plump woman of twenty-nine. Her normally cheerful round face was frozen with rigidly controlled fear.

  We settled down together on a frayed wicker couch with battered floral-print cushions. I kept my arm around her, and she finally relaxed a little and rested her head against my shoulder. After that we just stayed put and waited.

  I hadn’t been able to get to the hospital until I’d finished dictating my account of the shooting in Yves Ricard’s office at the commissariat. He’d let me use his phone first to cancel my dinner date. Then he’d typed up my statement, I’d signed it, and he’d filled me in on the background.

  Bruno Ravic was originally from Yugoslavia. He’d slipped out when he was twenty, reached France and asked for asylum as a political refugee. That had been granted, along with a French residence card and work permit. For several years he’d worked in Paris as a waiter, but with ambitions to become a film actor. He’d gotten small parts in a few pictures. Not enough to support himself. Finally he’d moved down to the Cote d’Azur and continued to work as a waiter for a while.

  Then he’d stopped working at that or anything else—though he’d managed to live pretty well on some unknown source of income. About six months back the police had begun to pick up hints that Bruno Ravic might be involved with large-scale drug smuggling but they hadn’t been able to get any evidence against him. Nor even to determine what smuggling ring he might be attached to.

  Last evening, while I’d been having my snack outside the crêperie, the Police Judiciare had received an anonymous phone tip. The caller sounded like a young woman. She’d said they could catch Bruno Ravic in his apartment with a cache of heroin if they moved quickly. The P.J. had assigned Laurent and Ricard to check out the tip.

  According to Ricard, Bruno Ravic had sounded groggy when he had demanded to know who was knocking at his door. As though he’d been asleep. If so, he’d snapped out of it fast. They’d heard him run across his apartment and throw open a window on the airshaft. By the time they’d broken in he was out the window and heading up to the roof. All the roofs in the block were connected. Ricard had gone up after him. Laurent had run back down to trap him if he made it to the street though another building. The rest I knew.

  Ricard agreed that the girl I’d seen hurrying from Bruno Ravic’s building to the phone booth was likely to have been the tipster. But he didn’t know any more than I did about who she could be or why she’d made the call.

  * * * *

  It was almost midnight when one of the surgeons came into the room where Domiti and I were waiting. His news was encouraging. Laurent had been moved out of the operating theater to a recovery room and had a better-than-even chance. Shortly after that
Domiti fell asleep against me. I eased her down on the couch and went to sit in a wicker chair with my legs up on the top of a wrought-iron coffee table. Within minutes I was asleep, too.

  The doctor who woke us around 4 A.M. was actually smiling. “Your husband is doing remarkably well,” he told Domiti. “His vital signs are all strong. If he continues to improve at this rate, we’ll be able to take him off the critical list in a day or so.”

  Domiti took a couple of deep breaths before she got her voice under control. “Can I see him now?”

  The doctor escorted her off to the recovery room. I was doing some stretching to get the kinks out of my back when Yves Ricard came in with a bag of fresh-baked croissants, two containers of coffee, and that morning’s edition of Nice-Matin, the newspaper that covers all of the Riviera. “Where’s Domiti?”

  “In with Laurent. Looks like he’s going to stay with us.”

  Ricard smiled. “He’s tougher than he looks.”

  I opened a container and burned my tongue taking a long swallow of coffee. While I wolfed down one of the croissants Ricard opened the paper to the third page.

  “They had to go to press before we could give them much beyond the fact Laurent was shot by a suspected drug dealer named Ravic. So most of the story’s about you. What they call your heroic bare-handed capture of the armed gangster. Makes you sound like Rambo.”

  I nodded modestly. “Just a typical American boy.”

  He gave me a sour look. “Should bring in a lot of new clients.”

  “Never hurts,” I agreed. I bit into a second croissant and snagged the paper from Ricard to check whether they’d spelled my name right.

  They had: “Pierre-Ange Sawyer, known in America as Peter Sawyer.” It was nice they thought I was known.

  Richard was right about the story romanticizing me: “American private detective in the tradition of Bogart, now operating in France.” They made much of the fact that my French mother, Babette, currently a respected scholar in Paris, had been a Resistance hero in World War II. And that my American father had been killed helping to liberate France at the end of that war, four months before I was born. Also that I had been raised mostly in Chicago (“of Al Capone fame”), where my paternal grandfather had been a captain on the police force.