Shape of Fear (7 page)

“Help yourself. It’s Turkish.”

“Old friend,” Sullivan said, and walked over to the sideboard.

“You don’t have to be a party to this if you don’t want to, Mark,” Chambrun said to me.

“You’re the boss,” I said.

Digger turned his head. “Don’t be so glib about it, Mark. It could be dangerous. As the old lady said, what you don’t know can’t hurt you.”

“What old lady?” I said.

Digger shrugged. “Have it your way,” he said. He came back and sat down in the big green leather armchair by Chambrun’s desk. He put his coffee cup down on a little side table. He leaned his head back and closed his eyes. He spoke without opening them.

“The next corpse they wheel out along these sacred corridors, Chambrun, will, in all probability, be me.”

“I shall do everything in my power to prevent it,” Chambrun said. “The Beaumont can’t afford it”

“Neither can I,” Digger said. He waved vaguely toward his coffee cup. “I am involved in a war,” he said, “which starts in the country responsible for that elegant brew. There a farmer grows a field of poppies. He collects the seeds, which, in effect, are pure opium. Let us trace twenty-two pounds of that pure opium economically. You need to understand the economics of death, gentlemen—Murray Cardew’s death, probably mine, and God knows how many others. Our Turkish farmer sells his twenty-two pounds of opium for five hundred dollars. It’s a simple matter to turn opium into morphine, but converting the base into heroin is a delicate chemical operation and requires a secret laboratory and a skilled chemist. The laboratory costs money to maintain and protect, the chemist must be paid a good deal more than the going rate for chemists. He’s running risks. By the time he has processed our farmer’s produce into a kilo of heroin, which is just over two pounds, it is worth five thousand dollars. Let us say that laboratory is in France. The kilo of heroin is sent to Italy where the largest distributors of narcotics to the world markets make their headquarters. These businessmen—” and Digger’s voice went harsh—“because international crime of this sort is the biggest unseen business in the world—these businessmen send that kilo of heroin to New York, the prime market, by ships from Naples or Genoa or Palermo or send it by plane from Rome’s Fiumicino airport. At dockside in New York, our kilo of heroin is now worth sixteen thousand dollars. There it is passed along to a series of dealers and ‘pushers,’ cut a number of times until it makes approximately seventy thousand ‘fixes,’ valued at about five dollars apiece. Simple mathematics now show us that the twenty-two pounds of opium for which our Turkish farmer got five hundred dollars is now worth three hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Sound like big business?”

Neither Chambrun or I spoke.

“The U.S. Bureau of Narcotics estimates that there are over forty-five thousand addicts in this country,” Digger went on. “Twenty dollars a day is about the minimum these addicts must spend to keep from going screaming crazy. Many of them spend much more. About five hundred million dollars a year, much of it stolen, is paid to the illicit narcotics trader. It
is
big business. So big, friends, that there wouldn’t be a second’s hesitation about the life of a tired old man like Murry Cardew if he was any kind of threat to it. Nor any hesitation about the life of a very untired gent named Sullivan, or the life of a hotel manager named Chambrun, or that of a young man who doesn’t believe what the old lady said.”

Digger reached for his coffee cup. “I sketch this financial picture for you so that you’ll understand the stakes. To the men who run this business anyone who gets in the way by threatening the main machinery for distributing death and disaster to thousands of people must, without any question, be eliminated. Not by legal means because there is no law. In Murray’s case, his head bashed in; in mine, a knife in the back straight through to the heart; in yours, Chambrun, an accidental fall off the roof of your penthouse; in Mark’s, a taxi running out of control on Madison Avenue.” He drained the cup of coffee and put it down in its saucer. “If I were in your shoes, Chambrun, I’d turn Michael Digby Sullivan over to the police as a sneak thief and be done with it. Because if you start to play ball with me, someone may pin the donkey’s tail on you in a vital spot. And get one other thing through your heads, gentlemen. The villains I’m after don’t hang out in cafés on the Marseilles water front or on New York’s Lower East Side or among the organized pilferers on the North River piers. They wear white ties and tails and their women wear jewels, and they attend receptions for ambassadors and
VIP
’s.”

The room was silent.

“Well, gentlemen,” Digger said, starting to rise from his chair, “it’s been nice to have known you.”

“Sit down, Mr. Sullivan,” Chambrun said. He didn’t move or lift his eyes to Digger’s face. “I’m not particularly interested in turning the Beaumont into a shooting gallery, but there are wars and wars. If any of the big wheels in the narcotics trade are using this hotel as a base of operations, then, by God, I want in. I need to know more, Sullivan.”

Digger sank slowly back into the armchair. “I got into it just the way you two may get into it,” he said. “Accident. Just stumbled over it. Standing on a street corner, minding my own business, and—there it was.” He let his breath out in a long sigh. “I could have run away from it, just as you can.”

“But you didn’t,” Chambrun said matter-of-factly.

“I didn’t, but I wish to God I had. Not because I’m afraid of danger. But because—because I got a taste for something myself that I can’t shake. Something harder to kick than the drug habit.”

“Juliet Valmont?” Chambrun said.

“Yes,” Digger said. He turned his head from side to side. “Yes, yes, yes!”

It began during a big international road race in southern France, Sullivan told us. A driver he knew well—a fellow American from Texas named Al Jenkins—had a bad crackup and was carted off to a French hospital on the critical list. After the race, in which Digger finished second, he went to the hospital to see Jenkins. Before he got to see Jenkins, the doctor on the case told him Jenkins had only a long shot chance of pulling through. He’d been given drugs to ease the pain of severe internal injuries; Digger wasn’t even sure Jenkins recognized him. But that Texas boy was a tough kid. He hung on day after day, and finally the doctors began to believe he might make it. Digger visited him regularly. At the end of a couple of weeks Jenkins was actually sitting up in a wheel chair and the medical report was that he’d won. But there was something wrong with Jenkins. The more hopeful the medical reports, the more disturbed he seemed to be emotionally.

Then one day he broke down and confessed to Digger what the trouble was. He was on H—heroin. As he grew physically better and the doctors took him off morphine, his personal problem was driving him crazy. He begged Digger in a kind of jabbering hysteria to get him a supply of heroin without which he couldn’t live. He’d kill himself if he had to go another twenty-four hours without it.

“You can be awfully pure and moral in a situation like that,” Digger told us. “You can use a lot of silly phrases like ‘grin and bear it.’ Unless you’ve been involved in that kind of torture, you don’t know what you’re talking about. I pacified Al Jenkins as best I could. I let him tell me the name of the man who would supply me with a fix for him. It was something of a shock. The pusher was a fellow named Langlois who was chief mechanic for the racing cars operated by the Bernardel Auto Company. I knew this Langlois well from a dozen races. I told Jenkins I’d do what I could. That, I thought, would keep him alive for another day.

“Then I hunted up the doctor. He knew Al Jenkins was an addict. He frankly sympathized with him, but he couldn’t help him. He couldn’t get drugs for Al without its being called to the attention of his superiors. They wouldn’t approve it. The doctor’s immediate superior was a bug on drug addiction. He seemed to believe the only cure was will power. The doctor told me if I could help Al, he’d turn his back on it. ‘Your Monsieur Jenkins can fight his personal fight some other time,’ he told me, ‘when he has his strength and health back.’ ”

So Digger went to the man named Langlois and after a lot of backing and filling, he got help for Al Jenkins.

“It wasn’t very dangerous,” Digger said. “Drug addiction isn’t a big deal in France. The authorities admit to only about three hundred addicts in the whole country. That’s why France is a great place for those secret laboratories I mentioned. Oh, the police co-operate with Interpol and our Bureau of Narcotics by cracking down on a laboratory maybe once a year. But they aren’t constantly looking for dealers and pushers the way we are. This fellow Langlois, who in his job rubbed elbows with the international sports crowd, was servicing people from abroad who were part of the tourist-sports world. Langlois knew how badly Al needed help because Al was an old customer. He dealt with me without too much hesitation. I got a supply of heroin for Al—and a needle—and went back to the hospital.” Digger’s voice hardened. “Al was dead. Jumped off the solarium roof on the tenth floor of the hospital when a nurse turned her back for a moment.”

Digger twisted in his chair. “I don’t know. Something clicked inside me then. Langlois and a whole line of sons of bitches like him were responsible for what had happened to Al Jenkins. You understand—he hadn’t done Al a favor by supplying me with H. I paid him plenty for it.”

Digger wasn’t a Frenchman or a French citizen. He didn’t want to get involved, but he felt it was his duty to put a stop to Langlois’ business. So he went to Paul Bernardel, Langlois’ boss and an old personal friend. Bernardel was shocked to hear what his chief mechanic was up to. He and Digger drove to the testing grounds where Langlois was working out some of Bernarde’s cars. They were too late. Someone had walked into the testing-ground garage and shot Langlois five times through the head. No one had seen it happen, and the killer was gone, free as air.

“Two men violently dead in the space of a few hours,” Digger said. “Just small fry—both of them. Just a user and a pusher. I don’t know why, but I was boiling. I felt Al had been murdered just as definitely as Langlois.”

In that angry state Digger got his first view of the big picture. “Bernardel knew a lot about it. I learned about the economics—that many of the secret laboratories for processing opium were in France—all the rest of what I’ve already told you. And more. It was suspected that the Secret Army terrorists in Algeria had turned to the drug traffic to raise money for arms and ammunition. Millions of dollars could be pried out of the despairing and the hooked in the United States.” Digger laughed mirthlessly. “It got to be a kind of patriotic cause with me then. Bernardel said if I was interested in knowing more, he could introduce me to a man who really knew the score. He was a Colonel Georges Valmont, a strong de Gaullist, who was trying to smash the drug traffic by the terrorists. He was trying to smash it, not for moral reasons but to keep guns and bullets out of their hands. And so—and so I went to see Colonel Georges Valmont. I was cordially received and I—I was introduced to his daughter, Juliet.”

Juliet Valmont had a great deal more to do with Digger’s immediate actions after that than any “cause.” This girl, so French and yet so American, was a new experience. He had been involved with a lot of women in his time, but the idea of permanence had never been a part of those relationships.

“The first time I laid eyes on Juliet I knew she was going to be a part of my life for the rest of time. I guess I wouldn’t have been so sure of it if something of the same thing hadn’t happened to her. We were in love. We had no questions. We had no doubts. There was only one small hitch—her devotion to her father. She didn’t want to go away and leave him. Not a neurotic fixation, you understand. The old man was living in deadly danger from day to day—the Algerian terrorists were out to get him, and they were allied with a completely ruthless gang, the drug peddlers. I liked Georges Valmont, not just because he’d produced the miracle that was Juliet. If he wanted to fight the terrorists, I was on his side. If he wanted to fight the narcotics boys, I was on his side. At that moment, if he’d wanted to fight Lyndon B. Johnson, I was on his side. That’s how gone I was.”

There was a way in which Digger could be useful to Valmont. Someone would have to take Langlois’ place as a pusher for the international set. Digger, moving in that crowd, might come up with a lead. Identifying the new pusher could lead to the higher-ups Colonel Valmont was so anxious to nail. It was a grimly important job, but Digger enjoyed every moment of it because it meant that he and Juliet went places together, worked together toward the same end, and grew closer and closer. But they didn’t have much luck. They worked at it; Paul Bernardel gave them help; and secret agents of Colonel Valmont’s were at it night and day.

About a month after this adventure began, a serious attempt was made on Colonel Valmont’s life. Valmont in a chauffeur-driven car was cruising along the Champs Elysées when, Chicago fashion, a car edged them off to the side and its passengers opened fire on the colonel with Tommy guns. Whether the chauffeur was a hero or whether it was a freak miracle was an unanswered question. Valmont’s car swerved right, struck a tree, and turned over. The chauffeur was killed, but Valmont, pinned under the car, was shielded by it from the bullets that were meant to kill him.

It was clear then that the terrorists meant to let nothing stand in their way. Monsieur Delacroix, then in the Ministry of Justice, Bernardel, and Charles Girard, chief prosecutor for Delacroix’s office, all urged Valmont to leave France and go into hiding far away from the center of danger. Valmont refused. He felt he was close to identifying the big shots in the drug traffic who were supplying the terrorists with funds. But he did go into hiding in the city. Not even Delacroix and Bernardel and Girard knew where. The location of the little apartment on the Left Bank was a secret shared by only one person—Digger.

“He could have chosen any one of half a dozen trusted agents,” Digger said. “He chose me. Oh, he trusted me, but mainly he knew how much in love Juliet and I were, and he didn’t want to separate us. So I knew where the apartment was and I acted as a courier for him, carrying messages to people on the outside and bringing messages back to him. It was on the wild side. I could never approach the apartment openly. I had to look as little like myself as I could. I dressed like a workman, like a bus conductor; I even wore the uniform of a French soldier. As far as I could tell, I was never tailed except when I was myself, and I never went anywhere near the apartment as Digger Sullivan.