Shape of Fear (21 page)

It seemed that everybody knew what the score was but me and I resented it. But the hand hadn’t been quite played out, and in the turning up of the cards, it was all to come clear.

When Chambrun and Bernardel and I climbed out of our taxi and went into the lobby, Harry Clark and Delacroix, the Ambassador, were waiting for us. Bernardel went quickly to Delacroix, and the two men embraced in the fashion of their country.

“It is finished, Jacques,” I heard Bernardel say. “The money is in the hands of the police—and the drugs.”

“And Juliet?” Delacroix asked.

“Caught in possession,” Bernardel said.

“I find it still difficult to believe,” Delacroix said. “I was so sure that it was Charles, that she was completely innocent.”

“Innocent as a cobra,” Bernardel said. “But there is still Charles to deal with.”

“Does he know?”

Bernardel turned, his raised eyebrows asking Chambrun the question. Jerry Dodd had appeared from somewhere and was talking to the boss.

“No phone calls in or out,” Chambrun said. “It seems unlikely that he knows.”

“Let’s go,” Clark said.

We went up in the elevator, all six of us, to the Girard suite. Clark knocked on the door. Girard opened the door promptly, stared at us in shocked surprise, and slowly turned a sickish gray-white.

“Juliet?” he whispered.

“The charade is over, Charles,” Delacroix said.

“She’s alive?”

“As you can see from my face,” Bernardel said, blotting at his wounds with a linen handkerchief.

Girard turned away and walked back into the room like a man who doesn’t know where he’s going.

“The money and the drugs are in the hands of the authorities, Charles,” Delacroix said.

Girard turned, and I was astonished to see that there were tears in his eyes. “If I told you, Delacroix, that I am glad, would you believe me?”

“Perhaps I would, Charles.”

“She will be charged with smuggling drugs?” Girard asked.

“No, Mr. Girard, she’ll be charged with the murder of Sam Loring,” Clark said.

I guess I must have looked about as stunned as Girard did.

“What kind of story has Sullivan told you?” Girard asked, his voice shaken. “Murder! What are you saying?”

“Sullivan is still in a coma,” Clark said.

“My dear Charles, in a long, long bitter struggle Juliet made just one small mistake,” Delacroix said, “and thanks to Mr. Chambrun it was discovered.”

“Chambrun?” Girard’s haggard eyes turned toward Chambrun.

“And but for Chambrun you might have got away with the whole thing, my dear Charles,” Bernardel said, ironic where the Ambassador had been sincere. “I tried to play the hero and ran into an honest, earnest, and disastrously troublesome Mr. Haskell. But I, too, still have to learn how Mr. Chambrun knew.”

Chambrun, those heavy lids almost concealing his eyes, looked unhappy. “I might never have been involved in this at all,” he said, “if it hadn’t been for the senseless killing of my old friend, Murray Cardew. But I became convinced early that there was a connection between his death and the struggle between two groups of Frenchmen for money and power. My attention was drawn to you, Monsieur Girard, before any of this started, when Sullivan was discovered searching this suite.”

“It was Sullivan!” Girard said. “We supposed it was simply some small-time thief! Nothing was taken.”

“Because what he was looking for was always in the possession of Madame Girard,” Chambrun said. “Mr. Clark tells me that the most difficult smuggler of narcotics to detect is a lady with luscious curves. So much of the deadly powder can be concealed on her person without its being noticeable. She was not searched when she came through Customs. No one suspected her of being involved in the narcotics trade. Why should they? Wasn’t she the daughter of Colonel Valmont, the great hero who had given his life fighting the drug traders?”

“Ah, yes,” Bernardel said sardonically. “The great hero! The great supporter of de Gaulle! The deadly enemy of the terrorists. How wildly comic!”

I looked at him, not understanding.

“Yes, it would all have been very simple if Monsieur Delacroix had chosen to take us into his confidence,” Chambrun said.

“It was a French problem, Monsieur,” Delacroix said, “to be handled by Frenchmen.”

“Until you tried to handle it in our ball park,” Clark said. “If I knew a way, Mr. Delacroix, I’d have the lot of you for Sam Loring’s murder.”

“It was difficult for me to confide in you,” Delacroix said. “I was, after all, suspected by your man Loring. And I had no proof about Juliet. Of us all, she was the one person not under suspicion. You would have laughed at me.”

“I think we’ll find she was suspected,” Chambrun said. “By Sullivan! He suspected her and at the same time he wanted to save her. That’s why he tried to play it alone and why he may die for having tried it.” Chambrun glanced at me. “What all of us have learned in the last hour, Mark, is that Colonel George Valmont was not what he seemed to be. He said he suspected someone high up in the councils of the de Gaulle government was a traitor. He was right. It was himself. He played the role of dogged enemy of the terrorists when he was, in fact, one of their top operatives. He professed to be fighting the drug traffic when he was actually running it to raise funds for his cause. And he was assassinated, not by the terrorists but by an agent of the government he was betraying.”

“Things were touch and go at the time,” Delacroix said. “We in the government didn’t choose to have Valmont’s treachery made public. He had been a great hero in the Resistance. His death, apparently at the hands of the terrorists, outraged the general public. It did us more good than to reveal him as a traitor.”

Chambrun nodded. “So Sullivan was used, not by a villainous Monsieur Bernardel, who is actually a staunch supporter of the government as he always claimed to be, but by Valmont, who had two faces. But with Valmont’s death, the drug traffic was not stopped as had been hoped. Instead it went on, just as efficiently, just as secretly. And the search went on again for the new key figure, the new master mind. Am I right, gentlemen?”

Delacroix nodded, gravely.

“It was Charles, here, whom we rated as the number one suspect,” Bernardel said. “Charles, who had been Valmont’s closest friend, his lieutenant in the Resistance. Juliet never crossed our minds as a possibility in the beginning.”

“Nor mine,” Girard said in a hollow voice. “Nor mine!”

“There are two things we must assume at the moment,” Chambrun said, “until Madame Girard and Sullivan can confirm it for us. The love affair between Juliet Valmont and Sullivan was real. They were on opposite sides in the struggle for power in France, but they were in love. The second thing we can assume is that Juliet really believed Sullivan had murdered her father. She believed it because she knew the true positions of her father and Sullivan. She believed it, because she, in her position, wouldn’t have hesitated to kill a good friend if he stood in the way of the Cause.” Chambrun shook his head. “The Cause, the Cause!” he said.

“When her true position was revealed to me,” Girard said, “I realized she was a fanatic. She had loved her father deeply. It was his cause. It was as if she had to win to revenge his death.”

“Her position was unique,” Chambrun said, “Her best friend in time of trouble was Monsieur Girard, a trusted member of the other side. Every day she knew from him how things were going. And she also knew, from her agents, that Sullivan was doggedly trying to get at the truth. Someone must have been getting dangerously close to her. Perhaps Monsieur Girard can help us with that. In any case, Girard might at any moment become dangerous to her. And so, not kindly, not gratefully, Juliet offered to marry him, and he, desperately in love with her, jumped at the chance. And when his emotions were hopelessly entangled, she told him the truth about herself. Was that the way it was, Monsieur?”

Girard nodded.

“And you, Charles, were no longer a Frenchman. You were Juliet’s husband,” Bernardel said.

“Nothing else much mattered,” Girard said in a low voice. “It was—it is a kind of sickness.”

“But you knew none of this a few hours ago,” I said to Chambrun.

“There were things I knew, Mark,” he said. “Knew but couldn’t prove. One thing I never considered for a moment was that Digger Sullivan was on the side of the terrorists. In my business we learn to read people pretty well. Why would Sullivan, an American, be fighting on either side in the political struggle? He could have no strong feelings about it. For money? He was independently wealthy. He told us he would have fought for any cause of Juliet’s. You remember? He said he would have fought the President of the United States if she’d asked him. But he meant that as any man in love might mean it. It was inconceivable to him that Juliet would ask him to fight for anything wrong. I believed Loring would have reported it if he’d suspected Sullivan. But one thing I knew: Sullivan would never have killed Loring unless he was threatening Juliet’s life. That’s why I kept insisting there must have been a third man in the garden.”

“But ballistics proved you were wrong about that.”

“And solved the case for us,” Chambrun said. He held his gold lighter to an Egyptian cigarette. “Trying to make that ballistics report fit my convictions brought us the answer. For the first time I began to think in terms of Juliet. It was the only other handle to the problem. Juliet might be in love with Sullivan, but if she was one of the fanatical terrorists, the Cause would come first. If he was getting a whiff of the truth, she would see him die without flinching. And suddenly I saw that she was at the center of everything. The fight in your office. It was because she was there. If she and Girard were working together, the fight had a real meaning. Girard could kill Digger and be let off very lightly, perhaps, let off entirely. Was that how it was, Monsieur Girard? You and Juliet staged the whole thing?”

Girard nodded slowly.

“It had to be,” Chambrun said. “Then your troubles were doubled when that failed. Sullivan was still a threat, and the hotel here was suddenly a trap. How to make the transfer of the drugs for the money? You must have been aware that a hundred eyes were focused on you. But Juliet, coldly efficient, saw a way. Shelda says she offered her apartment. When she thinks about it, Mark, she’ll realize that somehow Juliet suggested it. In the apartment Juliet could telephone whom she pleased, make her plans without interference. Only Shelda wouldn’t leave!” Chambrun laughed mirthlessly. “Shelda wanted to protect and help her. So Juliet sent for you. One way or another, she would have gotten you to take Shelda away as you did.

“Then she could make her contact, arrange to deliver the drugs and collect the money. Only when the time came she wasn’t alone. Loring was the unexpected. He had followed her. He was in the garden. And when she was alone, he came in, perhaps to arrest her, perhaps to question her. Perhaps she had actually made a call to which he’d listened. In any event, she shot him. She killed him. Then what to do? She couldn’t dispose of his body. She couldn’t just walk out and leave him to be found. The police would be down on her with endless questioning, and he had a contact to make. And so she called Sullivan, and he came running to the woman he loved.

“I suspect we’ll find that when he got there, she took him out into the garden. Now she was armed with Loring’s gun. Digger never had a chance. She shot him. She thought she had killed him. She then put Loring’s gun back in his hand, and her own gun, with which she’d killed Loring, in Digger’s hand. Then, calmly, she called for help.”

“But this is only a guess, sir,” I said.

“No, Mark. I told you the ballistics report solved the case for us. I had to make the facts fit my convictions about Loring and Sullivan. The way I’ve described it was the only possible answer. I persuaded Clark to check it out and we came on Juliet’s only mistake. When she came through the Customs four days ago with eight kilos of heroin concealed on her body, she was most co-operative. She declared her jewels, her furs—and her gun. Her history justified her having a gun. She had a French permit. The local authorities permitted her to bring it in after carefully registering its serial number and make. That proved to us that the gun that was supposedly Sullivan’s was hers. What I believe to be true, had to be true.”

“Oh, she’s a cool one, that Juliet,” Bernardel said.

“She was desperate now to get rid of the drugs and collect the money,” Chambrun said. “How to manage it? She couldn’t leave the hotel without being followed and watched. Or could she? Would anyone prevent her from going to see the man she loved? How was it, Monsieur Girard? Did she call from Shelda’s apartment, before sending for Mark, to make a rendezvous at whatever place they took Digger—the hospital or the morgue?”

“Yes—she called our contact from the apartment. It seemed certain she’d be permitted to go to Sullivan,” Girard said. “The presence of Haskell was a hazard, but she was sure she could get rid of him long enough to slip away. The man with the money only had to check on where Sullivan was taken, go there, wait for Juliet to appear and complete the deal.”

“Which is when I became the hero with donkey’s ears,” Bernardel said. “I had been sure about Juliet for some time. When she disappeared after the fight, I was afraid I’d blown the whole game. That I had arrived too late. But I watched—and when she left the hotel to go to the hospital with Mr. Haskell, I followed, praying I might still be in time. I was in time, but she would have gotten away if Mr. Chambrun hadn’t been thinking even faster than I. He was waiting for her, too, but not being inclined to be a hero, he had brought help.”

“That’s the way it is, Mark,” Chambrun said. “We’re guessing at some of the details, but in the main that’s the way it is.”

“What about Murray Cardew?” I said.

“Poor Murray. We were right about him from the start. LaCoste and Kroll—they were both members of Juliet’s organization—LaCoste in a position to spy on Monsieur Delacroix, Kroll on Monsieur Bernardel. LaCoste had prepared the ground in advance. He and Kroll have both been arrested by Hardy, charged with Murray’s murder. Juliet, it seems, called LaCoste from a pay phone at Philharmonic Hall. It was that conversation that Murray heard. A revelation of the whole plot! He did speak when he tried to get disconnected and LaCoste recognized his voice and realized Murray might have heard much too much. He had to be silenced instantly. So LaCoste called Kroll here at the Beaumont, and Kroll got to the old man before he could tell his story to anyone.”