Get Off At Babylon Page 9

  The hawk-faced Maurice was sitting up now, keeping the pistol steady on me through the open car window. He had a look I’d seen on other men; the gun was as essential a part of him as the hand that held it.

  I held still while Traikov began running his big hands over me, checking to make sure I wasn’t wearing a weapon. “This doesn’t have to get too serious,” he said while he frisked me. “Unless I get the feeling you’re stubborn. I figure you work for money. What you’re working on now’s earning it the hard way. Too hard, if you don’t drop it.” He was down to checking my ankles. He straightened up. His tone stayed businesslike, calm and steady. “There’s other jobs that’ll pay you the same without getting you hurt. Or worse than hurt. Am I getting through to you?”

  “Sure. You want me to stop bothering Tony. Do I have to stop looking for Odile Garnier, too?”

  “I said drop it.” Traikov’s tone got a cutting edge. “All of it. But maybe you are stubborn.”

  I turned my head enough to look at him again. He was studying me thoughtfully. I said, “Not that stubborn. I just didn’t realize it was something that important—enough for Didier Sabarly to worry about.”

  Traikov’s eyes narrowed. “I see you don’t understand.”

  “Yes I do,” I assured him fervently.

  “I’ll have to make sure you do. Sure you understand how bad you don’t want more of this job.” Traikov closed a hand around my upper arm and yanked me away from the Fiat. As easily as if I weighed twenty pounds. He let go of me and pointed a thick finger at the tunnel. “We’ll finish our talk in there.”

  I looked up and down the darkly shadowed street. I nodded and let my shoulders sag.

  Maurice opened the car door and started to get out.

  I swiveled on my left foot and rammed the heel of my right against the car door. Maurice yelped in pain as he slammed back inside the Fiat with one leg sticking out. I swiveled back and drove my elbow up at Traikov’s throat.

  He jerked his head down and aside too quickly. My elbow missed his throat and chin, skidding across his mouth. Blood spurted from his lower lip. I hit him in the gut, as hard as I could. It was like punching an elephant. He just grunted and got his own punch in. It struck me squarely in the middle of my chest.

  It wasn’t as bad as getting hit by a truck, but near enough. My heart spasmed, and I bounced off the Fiat’s hood. Traikov closed in. I tried to knee him in the valuables, but I was still off balance. He took it on his hip and his fist clubbed the side of my head.

  I stumbled across the narrow sidewalk and fetched up against the stone wall beside the tunnel. My brain was clouding up on me, and there was a ringing inside the cloud. I turned and braced my shoulders against the wall to hold myself up. I didn’t want to go down and get stomped. Traikov’s fists were bad enough. A full round with him and I’d be punchy or crippled. Or both.

  He came toward me, taking his time. His bleeding lip was already puffing up. He wasn’t invulnerable. But I knew I’d never been up against anyone stronger. Plus he was fast and knew all the moves.

  Maurice was coming out of the car. I sidestepped from the wall, to keep Traikov’s bulk between me and Maurice’s pistol, and launched a kick at Traikov’s knee. If I could tumble him against Maurice, and if I could snatch Maurice’s gun…

  But I’d become much too slow for any of it. Traikov stepped inside the kick and hit me again, this time just below the ribs. My knees bent to the pavement. I concentrated on getting back up and keeping my dinner down.

  Maurice stepped around Traikov and aimed his pistol at my face. “Let me kill him,” he whispered. There was passion in the whisper. He didn’t have Traikov’s businesslike control. Stupidity and brutality rested comfortably together in Maurice’s eyes.

  “I didn’t come down here to kill anybody,” Traikov said reflectively. He stood there with his huge fists dangling, squinting at me and considering it. “But maybe it’s necessary.”

  The cavalry finally arrived.

  Jean-Marie Reju’s flat voice had a quiet but unmistakable authority in it: “That’s enough of that.”

  * * * *

  From my point of view, that was the understatement of the year.

  Maurice spun around with his pistol and stopped himself just in time. If he’d turned another couple inches, he would have been dead.

  Traikov turned just his head at first. He regarded Reju and the big Colt. 45. Opening his hands, Traikov spread them away from his body, showing them empty. Then he turned the rest of his bulk to face Reju.

  I leaned against the wall and worked at clearing the dark mist out of my head and vision. It was slow work.

  Traikov nodded toward me and asked Reju, “Friend of yours?”

  “Sort of,” Reju admitted, and he told Maurice, “Put your gun down on the pavement and back away from it.”

  Maurice hesitated. Without his pistol he would be less than half a man.

  “Do it!” Traikov snapped at him. “This guy’ll put three bullets in your eye while you’re still trying to get pointed in the right direction.”

  Maurice took a draggy breath and forced himself. He bent and laid the pistol on the pavement, straightened, and backed off a couple steps.

  Reju asked me, without taking his attention off Traikov and Maurice, “Do you want to talk to them some more?”

  I couldn’t think of any trick questions that might net me more information. Not at that moment. My head was too swollen for that kind of effort. My chest and midsection ached horribly. I felt the thudding of my heart clear down to the soles of my feet. I took shallow breaths to keep from adding to the pain in my ribs, and I didn’t risk shaking my head. I said, “No.” My voice was all right.

  “Walk away,” Reju told Traikov and Maurice. “Through that tunnel. Don’t come back here for at least an hour.”

  Traikov nodded. He looked at me and spoke in an even, reasonable tone. “I hope you did understand me. If you don’t drop what you’re working on, you’ll need more than Reju to keep you alive.”

  He seized Maurice’s arm, turned him away from his pistol, and dragged him into the tunnel. Reju watched them go off through its gloom, under the railroad tracks. Then he looked at me. “You don’t look so good,” he announced in a matter-of-fact tone.

  “I’d look a lot better if you’d showed up sooner,” I told him.

  Reju looked mildly offended. “You told me to give you time to talk if they grabbed you. So I did. I’ve been behind you since you left that brasserie.”

  “I know, I spotted you,” I said. “Maybe you didn’t notice, but that gorilla stopped talking and started hitting a while back.”

  “He could have been roughing you up a little before talking some more,” Reju pointed out. “He didn’t hit you that much. It was the little one with the gun that got me worried.”

  I let it go. There was no point in hurting Reju’s feelings permanently. I moved away from the solid support of the wall and tested my legs. They held me up. “Let’s go,” I said.

  Reju used a handkerchief to pick up Maurice’s pistol, stepped off the curb, and dropped it down a storm drain. Then he walked me back in the direction of the beach, holding his .45 down against his thigh. I took it slow. With every step a throb expanded from my chest and sounded against the inside of my skull. Like someone giving a light kick to a bass drum. Reju matched his pace to mine with a phlegmatic expression that didn’t signify any relaxation of vigilance. He had his faults, but impatience was not one of them.

  I stopped when we reached the first bar. “I need a drink.”

  He slid the big Colt into its holster under his raincoat and followed me inside. I ordered brandy. Reju asked for a drink of water—from the tap. Bottled water costs money, but bars are required by law to supply a free drink of ordinary water to anyone who needs it.

  The brandy helped. Reju drank his free water
and said, “My room has twin beds. You can use the other one, if you need to.”

  “That’s good of you,” I told him.

  He nodded, agreeing it was good of him. I considered his offer. The night was still young, but I was in no condition to accomplish anything more with it. Besides, the people I wanted to see next were off working at night. Reju’s room was temptingly close, but I thought I could manage the drive home—and the way I felt, home was where I wanted to be.

  “Just convey me to my car,” I said. I paid for my brandy and left a tip for both of us.

  When we got to the Peugeot he watched with a disapproving frown as I took my emergency pistol from its hidden compartment inside the back seat. It was a Heckler & Koch P7. It cost me some extra pain to holster it under my left arm before settling behind the steering wheel.

  Reju bent down and told me, “You’re taking a terrible risk if the police catch you carrying that without a permit, Pierre-Ange.”

  “Not as terrible as what I’d risk not carrying it—after what just happened.”

  He shrugged somberly. “You could lose your right to work in France, you know.”

  “I can’t afford you all the time, Jean-Marie.”

  That reminded him: “Shall I mail you my bill for today?”

  I nodded wearily. “But not for the whole day. I didn’t use you for more than a couple hours.”

  “You know I don’t have hourly rates.” He considered it. “All right, since it’s you, I’ll only charge for half a day.”

  We agreed on that, and he stepped back and watched me drive off.

  I took the autoroute because that was fastest. But I stuck to the right-hand lane all the way, in case I started to black out and had to pull over. I didn’t.

  An hour after leaving Reju I was tucked into the comforting familiarity of my house, feeding myself a codeine. I filled the bathtub with water at body-temperature, poured in huile d’arnica for the bruises, and soaked for half an hour. By then the codeine was making the aches and pains seem somewhat remote. I drenched some big gauze pads with more of the huile d’arnica and fastened them on the worst of the bruises.

  Then I crawled into bed and floated off into a blissful, stoned sleep.

  * * * *

  When I got up next morning my neck was stiff, but the bruises had become localized and less painful. I took two aspirins with my breakfast, followed by a lukewarm shower. A third cup of coffee and I was functional enough to make a few phone calls.

  The first was to Egon Mulhausser. He hadn’t heard anything from or about his daughter.

  My call to Fritz didn’t get me much more. None of the other students he’d talked to so far at the College de France knew where Odile was—nor much of anything else about her. They said she’d been pretty much of a loner. Fritz hadn’t yet been able to pinpoint the troglodyte group that had sent her the postcard. A burglar he knew had gotten inside her apartment the previous night, but he hadn’t found an address book or anything else that might give us a lead to investigate.

  “About Tony Callega,” Fritz told me. “I haven’t turned up any indication of his having criminal connections here in Paris. His friends seem to be confined to the sort of well-to-do people who inhabit the sixteenth arrondissement, where his apartment is located. The BCBGs.”

  The bon chic, bon genre crowd—BCBG for short—is the fashionable Parisian set, people from good families. Always stylishly dressed and always seen at the latest in places. Never at places that used to be in. Cynics say such social blunders are prevented by special detection instruments implanted at birth, where souls used to be. The BCBGs are clannish and resent social climbers. Which led me to speculate on how a Tony Callega had managed to get accepted by them. Not money, as in the case of Charles Jacquier. BCBGs are never short of funds.

  Information on the other names I’d given Fritz was beginning to trickle in from his myriad telephone contacts. Including, from his connections in Italy, some little-known background on Fulvio Callega—personal as well as professional. Some of which inclined Fritz to instigate further in-depth inquiries in such unexpected places as Florida and Hong Kong.

  But nothing that helped us locate Odile Garnier.

  I gave Fritz two more names to research—Didier Sabarly and Boyan Traikov—and explained why.

  My final call was to Arlette in London, to ask how the conference with her father’s doctors had turned out. There was an undercurrent of anxiety in her voice, though she had it under control. Her father was in considerable pain, she told me, and a decision had been made to risk operating on him in a couple of days.

  I had a certain amount of grudging attachment to Marcel Alfani myself. I didn’t let that delude me into feeling the old gangster’s death, whenever it came, would be any loss to humanity. His contributions to the world could be counted on two fingers: He had helped my mother escape from the Gestapo during the war, and he was Arlette’s father. Otherwise his life had inflicted as much unpleasantness as that of a Fulvio Callega or Didier Sabarly. But I gave Arlette all the sympathy I could manage via a long-distance phone call.

  Then I strapped on the Heckler & Koch under my Levi’s jacket, got in my car, and went back to work.

  Chapter 16

  The cork oak where Andre Marchine met me was in the densely wooded volcanic hills of the Esterel Massif, nine miles west of Cannes.

  The tree was ancient and had been dead for the last half century. The iron spike protruding from its trunk was bent and encrusted with rust. According to local legend, the head of the notorious bandit, Gaspard de Besse, had been nailed to that tree with that spike after he’d been captured and beheaded two hundred years ago.

  Having that on his land didn’t seem to bother Andre Marchine. He wasn’t superstitious, which is as unusual for a professional criminal as it is for a professional actor.

  The tree was at the bottom of his property, beside a dirt road that wound through the sloped forests and farms. The road was as red as the boulders and rock formations looming out of the green of the pines and fruit trees. The Esterel Massif is thick with iron oxide.

  André’s battered old Renault 4 van was parked by the cork oak. I pulled up behind it as he emerged from the abandoned farmhouse he’d restored with his own hands. He came down the crooked red path, a man of sixty now, tall and bald, with a deeply seamed face.

  I got out of my car and he hugged me. “It’s been a long time, Pierre-Ange.”

  “Almost a year,” I said. “You’re looking better than you did then.”

  That was true. His cheeks had color, and his eyes were clear. He was still thin, but there was some meat on his bones now.

  “I haven’t touched any hard drugs in all that time,” he said with a shy, proud smile. “Just some hash or marijuana, now and then. And not too much of that, either.”

  His pride was justified. The last time I’d seen him he had been fighting his way out of a long-time addiction to heroin. And doing it the most painful way possible: cold turkey, with no medical help at all. I’d stayed with him through a week of that. One of the worst weeks of my life—but much worse for him.

  That had been several months after I’d helped prove him innocent of taking part in the armed holdup of a bank. I’d been certain he would never use a gun. He wasn’t a violent type of criminal; it just wasn’t in him. Andre Marchine was into milder forms of thievery: forging other people’s names on stolen checks and credit card vouchers.

  Before that he’d been a teacher at the Cap d’Ail grade school. Back when I’d first known him. It was his getting hooked on heroin that had turned him into a criminal. That was the only way he could earn enough to support his habit. And it had been Petar, the boy he’d adopted as his son, who’d finally given him the incentive—and the incredible willpower—to break the addiction. He’d gotten frightened the boy would pick up the habit from him.

  We cli
mbed the path together. The only sound was the buzzing of bees gorging themselves in the wild honeysuckle vines.

  It was late morning of my second day since I’d been waylaid by Traikov and Maurice. The day before had been a total loss. I’d spent that morning showing Odile Garnier’s picture around Villefranche. There were people who recognized her face, but none of them could give me anyone who knew her better than that. Then I’d spent that afternoon, evening, and much of the night talking to small-fry members of the underworld milieu I knew in Nice and Cannes, probing for the connection between Tony Callega, Bruno Ravic, and Odile Garnier. I’d come up empty.

  Andre Marchine was my latest try, and I was hoping he would prove more forthcoming.

  His house had been constructed for defense, back in the last century. The Esterel had been a favorite hiding place for convicts who escaped from the Toulon hulks. Many of them had joined together in bands that, like the famed de Besse, had continued to make the entire massif an area sensible travelers avoided. Its dangerous reputation hadn’t changed until after the turn of the century.

  The thick stone wall of the ground floor had no windows or door. Only several small loopholes. The door of the house was on the floor above. It could only be reached by a narrow stone stairway built into the front wall. Andre led me up the steps and inside.

  He stopped halfway along the inner corridor to look inside a small bedroom. Petar was in the bed, asleep. The boy was twelve now. He’d been ten when Andre had purchased him.

  According to Interpol’s figures, thousands of children have been bought from impoverished families in Yugoslavia and smuggled into the West by syndicates that train the kids as pickpockets before offering them for sale to professionals like Andre Marchine. One of the strongest syndicates is headquartered in Amsterdam. That was where Andre had gotten Petar.

  Before then, Andre’s stolen checks and credit cards had been supplied by thieves out of what they found in snatched purses and looted houses. They charged high prices, considering that he had to use the checks and cards very quickly, before the fact that they had been stolen showed up in all the computers. Andre had finally decided it would be more economical to get his own thief.