Get Off At Babylon Page 2

  As usual, they’d gotten some of the facts wrong. The story made my father “Captain James Sawyer, pilot of a U.S. Air force bomber shot down over southern France.” He’d been a sergeant, the bomber’s tail gunner. The story also said I’d resigned from my job as a federal narcotics officer to become an investigator in Europe for the U.S. Senate and then quit because I’d wanted to go into business on my own. The truth was that I’d been fired from both jobs. But I couldn’t object to that error. Made for a better image, businesswise.

  I finished reading and said, “Nothing in here about that girl I saw.”

  “The reporter turned in the story before you told me about that. We checked Bruno Ravic’s neighbors. They say he’s had a young girl visiting him over him the last few weeks. Used to hear what sounded like violent fights between them. None of the neighbors know her name. Could be the girl you saw. But your description could fit a thousand other teenagers.”

  “There’s those plaid patches on her dungarees. Thousands of girls don’t wear those.”

  “Sure,” Ricard said, “but none of the neighbors ever saw Ravic’s girlfriend wearing anything like that.”

  “What does Ravic say about her?”

  “That she’s just some girl he picked up in a bar and he never got around to asking her name. Says the heroin we found in his apartment must have been left behind by her. Claims it doesn’t belong to him, he never saw it.”

  “Not too likely.”

  “No. But he’s sticking to it. A cool customer. He doesn’t act worried enough, considering the trouble he’s in. That bothers me.”

  “How much heroin did you find in his place?”

  “Not much. One glassine bag of pure heroin, uncut. About an ounce. Less than twenty spoons. Plus a plastic envelope of quinine and a bag of mannite, for diluting the shit.”

  Ricard scowled and shook his head. “That’s another thing that bothers me. There’s not a needle mark anywhere on Ravic’s body, so he can’t claim to be a user. Which means we’ve got him for possession with intent to sell. But he’s never been arrested before. A first offense, for handling that small a quantity, he wouldn’t have gotten more than a year. If that long.”

  “Not enough to scare him into shooting a cop,” I said. “That’ll get him ten to fifteen years, even if Laurent doesn’t die. A lot more if he does.”

  “Against a maximum of a year if Ravic had just surrendered to us peacefully. It doesn’t make sense.”

  “Maybe he thought you had something bigger you were going to pin on him,” I suggested.

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I don’t either,” Ricard said. “And Ravic won’t talk about it. Or about anything else. No matter how hard we squeeze him. He knows we can help get his sentence reduced if he cooperates and tells us about the drug operation, gives us his boss. But he just grins and keeps his mouth shut. Like I said, he’s not as worried as he ought to be.”

  “Ravic might be figuring on his boss getting him out.”

  “After shooting Laurent? No way anyone’ll get him out of that charge. I don’t care how much leverage his boss can use.”

  “I mean out of prison,” I said. “Breaking him out. It’s been done before.”

  “It has,” Ricard admitted, and he scowled some more over that thought.

  When Domiti came back into the waiting room her round cheeks were wet with tears, but she was smiling tiredly. Laurent had come to briefly and squeezed her hand. She was convinced it meant he wasn’t going to die on her after all. We took her to have breakfast with us in a harbor cafe that opened early to serve commercial fishermen returning with their night’s haul.

  Dawn was spreading a rose-gold sheen across a flat sea undisturbed by the slightest breeze. You could see small clouds of seagulls wheeling above the incoming fishing boats long before the boats themselves came into view. After we’d eaten Domiti accepted Ricard’s offer to stay at his apartment over the next few days. It was only seven blocks from the hospital.

  It took me fifteen minutes to drive back to Cap D’Ail. I went up to Laurent and Domiti’s apartment to check on their daughter, Charlotte. An elderly widow who lived across the hall from them had moved in to take care of the seven-year-old. She assured me she’d be pleased to stay with her a few days more. I kept Charlotte on my lap and talked with her until she was convinced her father would be well enough to be back with her before long. In the end she was more convinced of it than I was.

  Then I drove to my house, a few minutes away.

  It was on a steep wooded slope below the Lower Corniche. A solid old house my mother had inherited from her father. Thick stone walls and a Provencal roof of weathered orange tiles, surrounded by flowering bushes and fruit trees heavy with lemons and oranges. I plucked some of the ripened oranges and squeezed enough to fill a large glass. I drank it outside, standing under the gnarled branches of a big olive tree that shaded the brick patio overlooking the Mediterranean.

  That tree had been growing there for over four hundred years. It radiated a permanence and continuity that was encouraging in times of stress.

  The sun was climbing into a mauve sky. It was going to be another hot day. I was tired as hell. But I didn’t want to go to bed with the poisons of that bad night in my brain and blood.

  Finally I put on bathing trunks and went down the path and swam out into the cove. When I was a good distance beyond the cove I rolled over and floated on the long, heavy swells, tasting the salty tang of the sea, feeling the sun hot on my face and the undercurrents cold against my back.

  From that far out you could see inland a long way past the shore cliffs with their fringes of palms and pines. All the way to the high peaks still glistening with the snows of the past winter.

  I swam back to the little pebble beach and climbed up to the house and slept away the rest of the morning.

  * * * *

  The next day Laurent was taken off St. Roch’s danger list. By the day after that his condition had improved enough for the law to decide which charge to dump on Bruno Ravic: attempting to kill a cop—instead of succeeding in killing him.

  Late the following night Bruno Ravic’s attorney dropped in on me unexpectedly. I’d already gone to bed. Ravic’s attorney climbed in with me and we became too preoccupied to discuss the case until breakfast.

  Chapter 3

  “According to Ravic, he didn’t believe Laurent Soumagnac and Yves Ricard were real police detectives. He thought they were killers sent by his political enemies to assassinate him.”

  “That’s brilliant,” I said dryly. “Ravic’s an ex-waiter, a would-be actor, and a small-time dope dealer. Any one of those three would naturally generate an enormous amount of high-level political hatred.”

  “A little less sarcasm would be nice. If I’m to defend a client, I can’t ignore his version of what happened.”

  “All right,” I said, “who are his political enemies?”

  “He won’t tell me.” Arlette Alfani frowned. “In fact, he hasn’t told me much of anything. Nothing, really, except the bit I just told you. And then he seemed to regret even having said that much. When I tried to push him about it he told me to forget it.”

  “Ravic must be smarter than he looks. Realized how ridiculous it sounded. Better do what he said, Arlette. Forget it.”

  She shook her head. “It’s the only possible line of defense he’s given me so far. He didn’t know Inspector Soumagnac was a flic. He thought he was shooting him in self-defense.”

  “Nobody’s going to believe that,” I told her. “Laurent shouted at him to stop and surrender. It was obvious he was trying to take him in without either of them getting hurt. He wasn’t even pointing his gun at Ravic when Ravic shot him.”

  “So you say.”

  “That’s the way it happened.”

  “You realize
I’ll have to do my best to break down that statement when I cross-examine you,” Arlette warned me. “I hope you’ll forgive me if I get a little brutal with you there in court.”

  I smiled at her. “You were pretty brutal in bed last night, and I’ve found it in my heart to forgive that.”

  She actually blushed. It always amazed me that she could still do that.

  We were having breakfast out on my patio. I’d put on jeans and a sweatshirt to go up to the village boulangerie for some fresh-baked pain de seigle while Arlette used my shower. She was wearing my old and rather threadbare terry cloth bathrobe, six sizes too big for her, and her hair was hidden inside the towel wrapped around her head. It didn’t make her look any less sultry. That was her only problem as a professional lawyer.

  Arlette Alfani was superb at both business law strategy and pretrial planning for criminal cases. But she still had trouble functioning effectively in court. She was too spectacular-looking. Even going without a trace of makeup and with her figure as concealed as she could manage under a loose-flowing attorney’s robe. People had difficulty paying attention to what she said through the highly charged excitement of just watching her.

  I could understand that. I’d been having something of the same difficulty since she’d been seventeen. Which made it more than ten years now. Of course, those years included a long hiatus during which she’d gone off to study law in Paris and then married a handsome Sicilian count. But the count had gone into shock when he realized Arlette intended to devote her education and near-genius I.Q. to something other than just keeping him amused. So now she was a divorced ex-countess, back on the Cote d’Azur as junior partner to the best husband-and-wife law team in southern France, Henri and Joelle Bonnet.

  And back in my life. On a hit-or-miss basis. Arlette’s round-the-clock dedication to establishing herself in her profession, and the unpredictable demands of mine, kept it from becoming a full-time affair. Maybe that contributed. Our get-togethers, when we chanced to be available at the same time, tended to develop into intensely erotic encounters. Arlette’s carnal appetite was up there on a level with her I.Q., and when she turned it loose on me I couldn’t have failed to respond in kind if I had tried. I sometimes doubted we could survive it full-time.

  If there’d been nothing to prevent it that morning, we would almost surely have found ourselves back in the bedroom after breakfast. But I had a date in an hour with a juge d’instruction—the examining magistrate in charge of the Bruno Ravic case. Arlette was scheduled to be present when her client was interviewed by the same juge immediately after that. Neither of us cared much for quickies. Full-length symphonies were more our style. So we stayed out on the patio and talked until it was time for me to head for the Palais de Justice in Nice.

  “I know Bruno Ravic can’t be found innocent of the charge,” Arlette said. “But it’s my job to try to get his sentence cut down as much as possible. Extenuating circumstances is the only plea I can use. That he thought Soumagnac and Ricard were criminals attempting to trick and kill him. If he’ll only give me enough information to make it believable.”

  I didn’t say she didn’t have much chance of pulling it off. She already knew the odds against it. I asked, “How did you wind up with Ravic for a client?”

  “He claims he doesn’t have any money to hire a lawyer. So the Ordre des Avocats had to appoint one to handle his defense from the rotating roster of available attorneys. It was the Bonnets’ turn, so they got Ravic.”

  And they’d turned him over to Arlette. Naturally. Henri and Joelle Bonnet had come to depend on her brilliant behind-the-scenes planning of case strategy. But they had to reward her with cases she could take into court on her own from time to time. She needed that practical experience to work out her own effective courtroom tactics. Until she did, however, it was not surprising that most of the cases they let her carry all the way on her own were ones that didn’t mean too much to them.

  “Just don’t put your heart into this one,” I advised Arlette. “Ravic doesn’t deserve it.”

  “Anyone charged with a crime deserves the best legal representation possible,” she answered fiercely. “That’s what justice is based on. The system of law can’t operate responsibly without that. And without a responsible system of law, democracy is a sham.”

  Arlette’s passion for the law was utterly real. It was probably her form of rebellion against the parental image. Her father had run a lot of the big rackets along the south coast of France. Though old Alfani had retired a few years back, other gangsters still worried he might change his mind and go back into business against them. That was why it was London he’d flown off to a couple days earlier, to undergo surgery for his ulcer. He suspected his old rivals in the underworld might be able to pressure French doctors to ensure he didn’t survive the operation.

  “Did Ravic tell you anything about the girl I saw leave his building?” I asked Arlette. “The one who probably aimed the cops at him?”

  “No. Nothing. Though I asked him about her, of course. As I said, so far he’s refused to tell me much of anything. In spite of my explaining that I can’t build any kind of defense for him without his cooperation. For some reason he seems confident that he’ll be all right without any help from me. I can’t understand his attitude.”

  I remembered Yves Ricard saying almost exactly the same thing. “Could be that he’s been in contact with somebody else he’s expecting help from.”

  “I’m the only one who’s had contact with Ravic in prison,” Arlette said. “He hasn’t got any family to visit him, and nobody else is allowed to.”

  “There’s the prison guards. Underpaid, like guards always are everywhere. Wouldn’t take much in the way of bribes from somebody outside to get one of them to pass messages to and from Ravic.”

  “That’s possible, of course,” Arlette acknowledged slowly. “But if Ravic is trusting in that kind of help, he’s a fool. He’s in too deep for any of his underworld contacts to get him out of it.”

  Yves Ricard had said something like that, too.

  Chapter 4

  I wore a blue gabardine suit for my meeting with the juge d’instruction. My shoes were polished, my shirt collar was buttoned, and I had on a soberly striped necktie instead of one of the less constricting silk scarves I usually wore to occasions calling for a certain amount of formality. I was not as impressed by the law as Arlette, but juges d’instruction are accustomed to respectful behavior. I usually give it to them. In my trade you have to deal with them fairly often, and they wield more power in a case than an American D.A., police captain, and chief magistrate combined.

  This one was Madame Simone Cayrol. She was about thirty-five, a chunky woman in a lightweight pantsuit, with beautiful blue eyes under exquisitely curved black brows. Her office was on the third floor of the Palais de Justice. Its tall window looked down into the narrow Rue de Prefecture, between the rear of the building and the edge of the Old Town.

  The steel bars outside Madame Cayrol’s office window were new. They’d been added to all the second- and third-floor windows on that side of the Palais after a famous bank robber escaped from the office of another juge d’instruction a few years before. He’d jumped through the window to a ledge below, from there to the street, and vanished into the labyrinth of the Old Town. He still hadn’t been recaptured.

  Madame Cayrol’s interrogation of me was little more than a required formality. She gave me a brisk handshake before settling behind her desk, with her back to a huge Air-Inter poster showing a jet winging over the Eiffel Tower. Opening her growing dossier on the Bruno Ravic case, she extracted my eyewitness statement and handed it to me. I sat across from her, read it, and confirmed that everything Inspector Ricard had typed over my signature was correct. Madame Cayrol asked for elaboration on several points, and a balding police stenographer seated to one side of the desk took down my answers. Another businesslike handshake
and I was out of her office.

  If she appreciated my wearing a tie, she neglected to mention it.

  I took it off and opened my shirt collar as I went down the steps of the building to the Place du Palais. Arlette was in the parking space out front, standing between my aging Peugeot and her glossy white Porsche, puffing on a Gauloise. She had a black briefcase tucked under her left arm and was wearing a linen business suit of a dull brownish color intended to make her inconspicuous. The skirt was modestly long, and she had several fountain pens sticking out of one breast pocket of her jacket and a small notebook protruding from the other. Her hair, which had flowed in sensuous waves to well below her shoulders before she got her law degree, was cropped extra short. None of it worked. Everyone who passed turned to look at her.

  “That was fast,” she said as I reached her.

  “Madame Cayrol isn’t much for idle chatter. You’ll have a tough time getting her to swallow your extenuating circumstances plea.”

  “I’m hoping Bruno Ravic will be more forthcoming about that once he’s faced with her.” Arlette glanced at her watch. “The police should have brought him from the prison by now.”

  They showed up seconds later in a blue Renault police sedan. A P.J. commissaire I knew was in the front seat beside the driver. Bruno Ravic was in the back seat between Inspector Ricard and a uniformed flic. The police car swung around the place, angling toward the Rue de Prefecture, which led to the drive-in gate of the Palais. It didn’t make it.

  A small delivery van appeared from the Rue du Marche, which curved out of the Old Town and ended at the corner of the Rue de Prefecture. It stalled in front of the police car, blocking its way. The police driver leaned out his side window to yell at the man driving the van before he realized the van driver was wearing a ski mask.