Get Off At Babylon Read online

  This afternoon there were only a French aircraft carrier and a cruise ship in the bay. Little sailboats were practicing figure eights around them.

  I turned down off the corniche to the Citadel, the seventeenth-century fort that dominates the bay. The high walls on one side were built straight up out of the water. On the land side the first line of defense was a deep, wide moat—now used as the town’s largest parking lot. I left my Peugeot there and walked through the depths of the moat to the fort’s sea gate. There I took a sharp left and climbed past the old pink customs house to the Rue Obscure. An apt name: The cobbled passage tunnels underneath buildings on the lower slope of the town.

  The address was near the end of the tunnel. I went into a doorway and up flights of dim stairways in which the smell of the sea fought the odors of rotting wood and damp stone. Odile Garnier’s door was the only one on the narrow fourth-floor landing.

  The little burglary kit I’d brought along wasn’t needed. When I knocked to make sure the studio was empty, the door swung open. A small wad of cardboard fluttered to the floor. It had been used to wedge the door shut when previous visitors had left. They’d broken the lock getting in.

  I stepped inside and used the cardboard wedge to shut the door firmly behind me. There was a single window that looked out over the bay and let in plenty of sunshine. The place wasn’t big. A single room serving as living room and sleeping quarters, a little bathroom, a cramped kitchenette. A lower-middle-income studio. All of it had been thoroughly ransacked by people who’d been in a hurry to find something and hadn’t cared how much damage they did.

  The sofa bed and a studio couch against the opposite wall had been slashed apart and gutted. So had pillows and cushions. Their stuffing was all over the floor. Scattered among the stuffing were clothes yanked from the studio’s single closet, the emptied contents of a suitcase and flight bag, things dumped from an overturned bookcase, drawers yanked out of a bureau that had been laid front-down so its back could be pried open.

  In the kitchenette the floor was heaped with stuff removed from the cabinets and oven. In the bathroom the lid of the toilet tank had been removed so the searchers could rip open the float ball and tank ball. A hanging medicine cabinet had been thrown into the shower stall, but the smaller jars and boxes from it hadn’t been opened. What they’d been looking for wasn’t that little.

  I spent over half an hour doing my own search through the mess in the studio. And found three items that hadn’t been of interest to the previous searchers. They were to me.

  They were among the things dumped out of the flight bag. First of all there were two Polaroid snapshots. The girl I’d seen leaving Bruno Ravic’s building was in both of them.

  In one she was standing beside a nice-looking boy of about twenty. He had his arm around her, holding her close. They were smiling at each other with what was obviously deep affection. Perhaps more than affection.

  The other picture was a close shot of her alone, smiling at the camera and squinting against the sunlight.

  The background of both pictures was a stone wall. There was nothing that told me where they had been taken. Not even whether it was city or country. Wherever it was, the weather had been cool but not cold: They were wearing padded jackets, but had them unzipped.

  The other item was a plain postcard. It was addressed with a ballpoint pen to Odile Garnier—at her Villefranche studio. I read the postmark. It had been mailed from Paris on April 10.

  On the other side of the card was a short message, signed only with a tiny line drawing of a heart. The message read:

  “Trog—Get off at Babylon.”

  Chapter 8

  The drive from Villefranche up to Eze took me fifteen minutes. Most of it was via a winding road that climbed the slopes between small farms and clusters of villas—and then skirted the vast Agnelli estate, a home away from home for Italy’s wealthiest family. After that I was onto the Moyenne Corniche with Eze coming into sight ahead.

  If you didn’t know it was there, you could miss seeing it was a village. At a distance it just looked like rocky outcroppings around the summit of a hill shaped like an inverted ice cream cone. When you got closer you saw the outcrops were houses built from the same brown stone as the hill. All bunched close together with the sides of the lowest ones forming parts of the defense wall.

  There were three Riviera tour buses in the lower parking lot when I swung off the corniche past it. Their passengers were trudging up the steep slope to snap pictures of one of the best preserved specimens of a fortified hilltop village of the Middle Ages. I drove up to the highest parking area and walked the rest of the way.

  You couldn’t get a car inside the old village. It had been built so any attackers who got in found themselves in a confusing series of death traps. Extremely narrow passages climbed and descended and zigzagged sharply every few yards. That slowed and divided the invaders while defenders atop the buildings hemming them in rained stones and arrows down on them.

  I went through the rampart gateway, passing under its murder hole. In days of yore that had been used to pour boiling oil and powdered quicklime on unwelcome visitors. Now it was choked with hanging weeds. I went along a short passageway lined with little souvenir and antique shops. When I turned into the next passage I got slowed by a traffic jam. A donkey in no hurry was ambling along ahead of me, with no way around it.

  I didn’t blame it for taking its time. It was lugging a big new refrigerator on its back. Donkeys are the only way the inhabitants of Eze can get anything heavy transported through the village to their houses. Hiring one costs more than renting a truck.

  We soon parted company. The donkey zigged left into an alleyway. I zagged right up a flight of stone steps grooved by centuries of climbers, turned sharp left into another passage, and cut right down another flight of steps. La Grange was in a tunnel passage at the bottom.

  The restaurant had been fashioned out of several connecting houses that were part of the section of rampart wall that overlooked the sea. The solid door was of polished oak, studded with ancient nail heads painted black. It was closed but not locked. I went in through a small arched entry foyer. Beyond that was a large bar and lounge. Its heavy wooden furniture and the tapestries hanging on its paneled walls were imitation medieval. But they blended well with the real stuff: the stone columns and vaulted ceiling. A doorway to the right led into the dining room, another to the left out to a patio with white-painted wrought-iron tables and chairs.

  The young man behind the bar had his jacket off, the cuffs of his pleated powder-blue shirt turned up, and his black bow tie hanging undone. “I’m sorry, Monsieur,” he said politely, “but we are closed until dinner time. That begins at seven, if you wish to reserve a table.”

  “I’m looking for Monsieur Mulhausser,” I told him. “My name is Sawyer.”

  A woman was coming out of the restaurant section. She spoke to the barman in throaty, slightly accented French: “That’s all right, Georges, I’ll take care of Monsieur.” To me she said in pure American, with a Midwest flavor: “Egon’s told me about you. He’s off doing some last-minute dinner shopping, but he should be back any minute.”

  I took my time looking at her. She was worth the time.

  She was wearing a ruffled white peasant blouse, dark blue slacks, and an open cashmere cardigan of a lighter blue that matched her eyes. Nothing special. She didn’t need to wear anything special. Libby Arlen made clothes look good, not the other way around.

  “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Madame Mulhausser,” I told her.

  She’d long ago learned to measure the exact degree of turn-on in a man’s eyes. She dimpled and said, “That’s always nice to hear. Especially from an attractive fella. But nobody calls me Madame Mulhausser. Libby Arlen. Better for business. The face and figure may be going, but the name’s still holding up, thanks to those old movies on TV. Call me Libby. What
do I call you? Pierre-Ange is ridiculous between a couple of Yanks. Peter or Pete?”

  “Pete’s good,” I told her.

  She held out her hand and let me hold onto it just a bit longer than necessary, giving me a gracious smile, a queen accustomed to homage but never bored by it.

  “What’ll you have to drink, Pete?”

  “A cafe noir, if the machine’s working.”

  She told the barman to bring it out to the patio, along with a citron pressé for her, and she took me out to one of the wrought-iron tables. The view from the patio of La Grange was spectacular. Fifteen hundred feet below, a Paris-Rome express was speeding along the track that followed the shoreline. It looked like one of those extra-small model trains people run under Christmas trees. Off to the west you could see beyond the airport on the other side of Nice, all the way to the Esterel Mountains. To the east you were looking into Italy, as far as San Remo. But even that view couldn’t distract one’s attention from Libby Arlen for long.

  Her husband had said she was slightly younger than he, but that was old-world chivalry—or what some preferred to regard as outmoded male chauvinism. Going by the dates of the early Libby Arlen films, she had to be a couple years older than Mulhausser. There was a softening around the famous cheekbones and jawline, and her figure had gotten rounder. But she’d never belonged to the lean-and-hungry variety of sex symbols. When women’s magazines ran those articles about how you and life could be beautiful after middle age, Libby Arlen’s pictures were sure to be there along with those of Ursula Andress, Gina Lollobrigida, and Sophia Loren.

  “Egon said he liked you,” she told me. “And, of course, the Crowleys speak highly of you. I sure hope you can help, because Egon’s pretty upset. Not that I blame him, with a daughter like Odile. Won’t have anything to do with him and suddenly asks for his help because she’s in trouble. But won’t tell him what it’s all about. Some daughter.”

  “Rebellious daughters are a problem you run into a lot in my line of work,” I told her. “Parents don’t get so worried about sons who go their own way. Figure it’s part of their growing up. But when their daughters do the same it scares them.”

  “I wouldn’t know. I don’t have any sons. And my daughter, Chantal—she’s never created problems. At least for me. Chantal lives with her father. I guess you know I was married to Charles Jacquier?”

  I nodded. The young barman was bringing our orders out on a silver tray. When he went back inside Libby Arlen said, “It wasn’t the hottest marriage. Except temper-wise.” She seemed more amused than bitter about it. “We got married under a couple mistaken notions, you see. Charles thought he was getting a big American star to perk up international sales for his films. He didn’t realize my star was already setting. And I grabbed him because I thought he could teach me to act. I was tired of being in Hollywood epics where all I did was wear tight clothes and pant at the camera. Charles had a rep for getting the best out of actors.”

  She laughed softly, remembering. “I’ve got to admit he didn’t make me wear tight clothes too much. Usually I was stripped to the buff through half of each film he put me in. But before long I was getting too old for that. And too old to be an actress who couldn’t really act.” She drank from her glass and shrugged. “So we said goodbye and lots of luck. With mutual insincerity. Probably for the best, the way it turned out. Being married to Egon’s a lot more pleasant, and running a restaurant’s a lot easier on the ego and expectations.”

  * * * *

  Egon Mulhausser came out of the restaurant at that point. “Have you found out something already?” he asked me as he sat down with us.

  “Maybe.” I took out the two Polaroid snapshots. “Is this your daughter?”

  Mulhausser put on reading glasses to study the photos. They looked incongruous on that face. “Yes,” he said. “This is Odile.”

  “Then she is the girl I saw. And that means you’re right to worry about the kind of trouble she’s in.”

  His nod was grim. He’d been fairly sure of it before. But the confirmation made it worse. “Where did you get these pictures?”

  “Your daughter’s place in Villefranche.”

  “You broke in?”

  “It wasn’t difficult,” I said, and I didn’t elaborate on that. “The fellow with her in one of the pictures—do you know him?”

  Mulhausser looked at that snapshot again. “No.”

  He passed it to his wife, who shook her head. “But he looks nice,” she said to Mulhausser. “Well-bred, intelligent face. If that’s Odile’s boyfriend, she isn’t doing badly.”

  I took the postcard from my pocket and showed them the message written on it. “This mean anything to either of you?”

  Mulhausser read it aloud: “‘Trog—Get off at Babylon.’”

  Libby Arlen said, “It sounds like some kind of private joke.”

  Mulhausser told me, “Sorry, I have no idea what it means.”

  I thought I did. But there was no point in saying what I thought unless and until it led to something useful.

  “Funny coincidence,” Libby Arlen said to her husband. “Chantal called while you were out. She wants to find Odile, too. Chantal asked if we know where she is or how to get in touch with her.”

  Mulhausser looked puzzled. “Why?”

  “Chantal just thought they might get together, if Odile was down here. Or planning to come down. Since Chantal will be in Cannes for another couple weeks, while Charles does his annual thing at the Film Festival there.”

  She looked to me. “Chantal still sticks pretty close to her father most of the time, though she’s twenty now. It’s sort of the reverse of the situation between Egon and his daughter. When I split with Charles Jacquier, Chantal was very definite about preferring to be with her father, not me.”

  “It’s not the same as my problem with Odile,” Mulhausser reminded her. “Chantal doesn’t hate you. She just gets upset if people see the two of you together.”

  Libby Arlen looked at me with a rueful smile. “She just didn’t grow up pretty, poor thing. Pretty isn’t everything, of course. I’ve seen girls with strong personalities make prettier girls fade into the wallpaper. But Chantal isn’t too strong a personality, either. I’m not the kind of mother she can be comfortable around.”

  “Can’t blame her,” Mulhausser said. “It’s impossible for her to relax when she knows people are comparing the two of you and feeling sorry for her.”

  I asked them, “Are your daughters close friends?”

  Libby Arlen answered me. “I don’t think they’ve even seen each other more than a few times in all their lives.”

  Mulhausser nodded agreement and asked her, “So why does Chantal want to get in touch with her now?”

  “She said they’re relatives, in a way. And she just decided it was time to act like it. She wants to invite Odile to her wedding next month.”

  “Is she really going to go ahead with that marriage?” he asked disgustedly.

  “Sure. Why not? After all, looks, charm and money—Tony Callega does have all three.”

  The last name made me sit up a little straighter.

  “Though I do think,” Libby Arlen went on, “that Chantal’s letting herself in for more of her old problem. Marrying somebody who’s prettier than her.”

  Mulhausser said quietly, “I didn’t realize you were so taken with him.”

  “I’m not, darling, so don’t get jealous.” She picked up one of her husband’s hands in both of hers. “You know my taste runs to men with that battered look, earned through a lot of tough experience.”

  Mulhausser touched his scarred face with his free hand. “Battered—that’s a kind way of putting it.”

  “It’s the face of a man, baby. Tony likes to act tough, but nobody would take the act seriously if it wasn’t for his big brother.”

  “Tony Cal
lega is garbage,” Mulhausser said flatly. He turned to me. “Back when Odile was staying with us he dropped by one day and saw her. She was only seventeen at the time. He was already thirty. But he tried to make a pass at her. I caught him at it.”

  Libby Arlen grinned at the memory and told me, “Egon threw him out. Bodily. Tony looked stunned. He’s not used to being treated that way.”

  “Maybe I overreacted,” her husband admitted grudgingly. “But I just don’t like him. I don’t like what he comes from, and I don’t like the kind of crowd he runs with. The spoiled types that’ve gotten bored with normal things their money can buy. Always looking for something crazy to inject new excitement into their lives.”

  I said, “This Tony Callega you’re talking about. Any relation to Fulvio Callega?”

  “That’s Tony’s older brother,” Libby Arlen told me. “I see you know about him.”

  “A little.” I sat silent again, chewing on what I knew.

  Mulhausser told his wife, “I know you can’t stop Chantal from marrying Tony, but her father could.”

  “My guess is he’s encouraging it. Been almost four years since Charles has been able to get financing for a film. Now he’s finally about to get one started. I’d give odds Fulvio Callega’s his chief backer.”

  “You make it sound like Jacquier is selling Chantal.”

  Libby Arlen raised her shoulders in a cynical shrug. “Well, there’s no stigma attached to that—not here in good old-fashioned Europe. Downright traditional. Your practical marriage, arranged by the heads of the two families to unite their assets. Distinguished but broke aristocrat and grubby but rich merchant. The name Charles Jacquier does command respect in the cultural world, even if he’s not exactly an aristocrat.”

  And Fulvio Callega wasn’t exactly a grubby merchant. A relative newcomer among the quasi-legal heavyweights of Italy, he’d climbed fast and high. High enough to shuck the more conspicuous of the illegal activities through which he’d risen so fast. Nowadays he channeled most of his energies into manipulating legitimate big businesses and exerting behind-the-scenes leverage on Italian politics.