The Prisoner of the Riviera (The Francis Bacon Mysteries) (17 page)

I sat down on the floor of the balcony and waited until I was pretty sure that no one was afoot. Then I examined Cybèle’s apartment. While the shutters had been left half open, the French doors were locked. The first window I tried was secured, but though the other one had both shutters closed, they were not hooked and the window behind was wide open: Cybèle was a wonderful girl. I maneuvered over the sill into a once spacious room broken up into a bedroom and a jutting cubicle that proved to be a WC/bath combination. The bed was empty, the bathroom likewise. I moved through the kitchenette and the living room, closed the shutters, and checked that the main door was locked before turning on a light.

Some shabby furniture, some good dresses, and piles of sheet music that suggested Cybèle was conscientious. I approved; performers should work hard as should painters. Some dishes drying in a rack. She was tidy and had expected to be back after her evening performance. I saw that she was thrifty and ate some of her meals at home, because I found the end of a baguette, a bit of cheese, and a melon. A few phone numbers were scribbled on a pad. One was “Serge” and I guessed that was Serge Brun. No surprise; she had worked for him. Her purse was with her, so no money in the flat and no passport, though I found her bankbook. Either she was doing rather well at the clubs or Serge had paid her lavishly to impersonate Madame Renard.

That was the sum total of my discoveries; I had risked my neck for nothing. I wandered back to the kitchen and squeezed the baguette experimentally. It was going stale but it wasn’t rock hard as it should be after several days on the kitchen counter. I got a knife and opened the melon and found it delicious. Even the cheese was edible, and that fact, combined with the missing passport, made me wonder if Cybèle had come back to the apartment. Would she carry a passport to work? I didn’t think so, though perhaps she feared she’d have to make a quick exit. But either way, she’d been back for some reason. I was sure of it.

I turned off the light. All was quiet. I could leave and make my report tomorrow, but at near two a.m., I’d still have to find a hotel or sleep in the
gare
. I decided that my encounters with rickety balconies and hysterical dogs deserved some reward. I went through to Cybèle’s bedroom and flopped down on the spread, which smelled of face powder and her flowery perfume, echoes of a life through the looking glass. Was that what Gravois had liked? Had Mademoiselle Veronique been the door to an alternate life for him, a life with fabulous clothes and a first-rate talent and a gangster lover? I tried to imagine what that would be like, and I felt an irrational desire to see his apartment. In the morning, I told myself, and within minutes I was sound asleep.

Sparrows in the trees, a moped puttering off, a car door slamming, thin silver bars between the shutters. Was that what woke me? I registered the fuchsia silk spread, a maroon light shade, pale lavender walls, a ceiling too high and ornate to belong to the truncated room below: Cybèle’s flat. Early. And then I heard it again, the sound that, out of all the urban noise, had awakened me. Someone was moving about in the flat above: number 42, residence of P. Moreau, music teacher. Whoever it was had a heavy, uneven, and rather slow tread like the man who had come in behind me last night. Perhaps he really was Monsieur Moreau, up and ready for a day of scales and squalling. Or perhaps, like me, he wanted access to Gravois’s old apartment. Eugène would soon find out.

I got out of bed, used the en suite, and stepped into the hall. All quiet. Outside, shopkeepers were opening their metal grills and hosing off the sidewalks. I stopped at the first
tabac
for a coffee and the phone. I called the number Hector had given me and left the message that Eugène would attempt a music lesson from P. Moreau, flat 42, and repeated the address twice. The keeper of the zinc promised to give Hector the information.

I hung up and went in search of a
boulangerie
, bought croissants, and loitered under the plane trees to keep an eye on the apartment building. I told myself that I was just going to await the appearance of the man with the limp. That I would see if he was my “Victor Renard” from London. That all I wanted was a complete report for Hector. That I was going to be sensible.

Two women left with baskets and string bags for some early shopping. A dark sedan passed twice, but the man with the limp did not appear. Neither did Hector’s promised “surveillance” or any curious gendarmes. Prudence said, wait, but Eugène was in an antic mood. People who know me would mostly say that I need sex and drink and fooling about to live. All true, but what I need to keep on anything like an even keel is painting, an unending fascination that sops up excess energy and channels the imagination onto canvas. Without it, I’m inclined to take risks and get up to capers like imagining myself Eugène Laroche, who, at precisely eight o’clock, walked up the four flights to P. Moreau’s flat and knocked on the door.

I was confident that I would know at once if this were the right apartment, if this was where Gravois had transformed himself and entered other worlds. I liked the idea, but there was no response. Had he left in the few minutes while I phoned from the
tabac
? I knocked again and waited. Then I recognized the step that had awakened me earlier. The door opened a few inches.

“Monsieur Moreau?”

There was the briefest hesitation, but it told me that whoever he was, he was not Moreau. “What do you want?”

“Eugène Laroche. I’ve heard you’re a marvelous teacher. I was talking with someone just last night, singer I heard, really quite good, and I was saying how I wished I could sing and he said, try Monsieur Moreau. And gave me your address.”

The door opened a little more—was my assumption wrong? Was I about to have to pay for an actual lesson in the fine art of caterwauling?

“It’s barely eight a.m.”

Even though the shutters were half closed and his face was against the morning light, he had the same black hair, same lean face, same malevolent black eyes. I recognized Victor Renard, last seen with his life’s blood pouring out of him, Victor Renard, who was almost certainly a long time lowlife named Paul Desmarais, back from the nearly dead.

“Commercial traveler. Art supplies, don’t you know. Linseed oil, damar varnish, hand-ground colors from all the best manufacturers. Here today, Marseille tomorrow, up in Montpellier the day after. Time and tide and the SNCF wait for no man. I thought I could meet you and set up a lesson for, say, next week?”

I half expected that he would slam the door in my face and that would have been quite all right with me; I wasn’t sure I fancied any closer contact with him.

“Come in,” he said and opened the door wide.

The flat had taken some damage—I saw cracked glass on some pictures, slashed upholstered furniture, a broken vase, drawers pulled out. Could that have been Cybèle’s work? Could she have tried the same balcony route I’d used and turned over the flat in quest for bank documents? It was a thought. I guessed that Paul had spent the night tidying up, for though the bookcases were empty, their contents were now in neat piles on the floor, and there was a brush and shovel and a large wastebasket full of debris. I thought a trifle better of him for that. But only a trifle.

“I see you are redecorating. I can come back next week without any trouble.”

He went over to the piano, a white baby grand, surely the instrument of Mademoiselle Veronique, who looked down from a large and handsomely framed poster reminiscent of the handbill Hector had given me. It had survived the search untouched. “You’ve never sung?” Paul asked.

“No, no, this is just a whim, old chap. But under the influence of wine and song, I thought, ‘Have a go, Eugène.’ ” I hoped I wouldn’t have to be Eugène too long. I found his taste for jolly slang irritating.

To my surprise, Paul sat down at the piano and played a snatch of something. I smiled as if I recognized the damn thing and said, “very nice.” I got a vicious look in return, and I guessed that it was one of Mademoiselle Veronique’s songs.

“Scales,” he said. “Scales are the foundation. Key of C.” He began hitting one key after another. Now you.”

“Ahhh.”

“Not ‘ah,’ ‘do.’ Do, re, mi. Like this.” And he demonstrated. His voice sounded no worse than my informant of last night. Presumably he’d picked up some tips from Gravois, if not the Mademoiselle. Then he hit C again and waited until I found the note.

“
Bien
. We have C! Seven notes to go.” He gave me another “I could eat your liver” look. He did not have what I’d say was a gift for pedagogy, but then he didn’t have much of a pupil. “Next note.”

I began to wish that I’d paid even minimal attention to music instruction at school. “Do, re …” I sounded like a donkey and felt like one too.

“Mi, mi, mi, mi.” He pounded the key emphatically, but I couldn’t help noticing that he seemed to be listening for more than my desperate attempts to match the noises from the piano. A life of vigilance? Or something more?

I found “mi” and we struggled all the way to “do” again. The damn thing repeated: the horrors of math combined with noise! “Perhaps enough for today,” I suggested. “Your fee?”

He leaned back on the piano bench and looked at me closely. “I’m not sure you are suitable for a pupil,” he said. He reached into the instrument and pulled out a revolver.

“I hadn’t realized music was such a demanding profession,” I said. “I’m rethinking torch songs and lieder.”

Paul did not have a sense of humor, and I would have faced severe difficulties if someone hadn’t knocked on the door. My spirits rose. My surveillance? A handsome squad of gendarmes? Too soon, I thought.

“Sing,” Paul commanded, and he hit the keys noisily.

My dry throat did not improve my performance.

“Again!”

Back to do, re, mi. The third time through, Paul rose from the piano. He put my hands on the keys and motioned with the revolver for my singing to continue. Great. Struggling vocally, I’d been launched into instrumental music. What were the black keys? Stick to white. “… fa, so, la …” What came next? Do? No, ti. “Ti, do.”

He waved the revolver again and moved softly to the door. As I searched for C, I gauged the quickest way to get myself safely behind the piano. Paul checked the spy hole, flipped the lock, and, keeping himself back against the wall, jerked the door open. Serge Brun stood in the doorway. When I dived off the bench, he fired at the movement. The shot echoed around the room, followed by two, three more. I scuttled back from the piano to the shelter of a substantial bureau. Paul shouted and I looked up. Through a cloud of smoke, I saw Brun twitching on the floor, and Paul standing impassively with the revolver in his hand.

“We leave now,” he said.

I stood up, still half protected by the bureau. Serge Brun had stopped flopping like a landed fish, and my semiexpert diagnosis was that he was beyond anything this ex-ARP warden could offer. I took that as an excuse to stay where I was, with no need to be officious and perhaps jog Paul’s memory of another good Samaritan.

He jerked his head and swung his revolver: time to move out. Involuntarily, I edged back toward the French doors. I definitely did not want to go anywhere with Paul Desmarais. He raised the weapon, and I froze, but either Eugène or I or both of us were beyond panic, because it came into my mind that Paul must need me for something. Otherwise, why hadn’t he already fired?

Eugène began nattering about his sales route and difficult connections with the SNCF. Paul cut him off. “Go into the bedroom,” he said.

Were outré adventures with sex and death in my future? I backed uneasily around the bureau and made my way to the rear of the apartment. It had acquired the same awkward mod-com as Cybèle’s, but the décor was elegant and expensive, anchored by a fine brass four-poster with a ruffled canopy. A sign of Mademoiselle Veronique’s taste, I was sure. The bed sported a paisley spread in a variety of purples, and sitting on top were two large leather suitcases bound up with straps.

“Hurry up.” Paul gestured toward the cases. My function suddenly became clear: porter extraordinaire. I picked up the heavy luggage and staggered through to the living room. “Understand if you run, I will kill you.”

I didn’t feel able to debate this, though I could not help pausing as we passed the late Serge Brun.

“No blood, no blood,” Paul warned. He opened the door and gestured down the hall. “Back stairs, quickly.”

I thought I heard voices below; four shots could hardly have been ignored. The neighbors would be asking one another if that had really been a gun, and someone would hustle off to summon the police. I felt the barrel of the revolver in the small of my back and went along to the stairwell. Paul limped painfully behind me, but hampered by the big cases, I could not move fast enough to get beyond the range of his revolver, and I guessed that he would shoot immediately if I jettisoned the luggage. On the ground floor, I set down the cases. Paul waved his revolver. “One more,” he said.

My adventures in the hinterlands had put me off basements, and I was set to balk when there was a commotion in the lobby. Had someone telephoned? Had police arrived already? I wondered if I could swing a case into Paul or drop one to distract him and raise the alarm. Most likely the result would be more shots, some aimed at me. I started down the stairs, which was steep and narrow, without any landing. At the bottom, Paul opened the door into the basement. I had bad images of darkness and death, but he forced me toward the faint glimmer of one of the light wells and opened the exterior door beside it. “Remember what I told you,” he said.

We climbed out to an alley, my arms stretched to the ground with the weight of the cases, and reached the street that ran behind the apartment building. Paul seemed unconcerned by the shooting, nosy neighbors, and the imminent arrival of gendarmes. But, of course, he was not P. Moreau; he was unknown and so was I. We might be a couple of provincial visitors, perhaps father and son or uncle and nephew. He was ill or convalescent—notice his limp and the one hand in his pocket—and I was the dutiful assistant carrying all the luggage. Really, there was nothing to worry about. I told myself that and repeated it to Eugène.

We walked to the street corner. “Put down one case and flag a cab,” he said, adding, “I shoot the driver, if you try anything.”

I stepped to the curb and scanned the street both ways. Naturally when you want a cab, there are none. And when, as at that moment, you don’t particularly want a cab—or can’t decide whether escape or capture will be best—one appears. The driver made a dashing U-turn and pulled up beside us. He hopped out to open the trunk, but Paul insisted that we keep the luggage inside with us.

“Certainly, Monsieur,” the driver said. He was short and stocky with a broad, dark face and the liquid black eyes so common in the south. His nose was aquiline, his mouth thin, his expression, skeptical. He looked like a man of experience, and I guessed some of it was dubious. He opened the rear door. Paul motioned me in and the cabbie piled the cases on top of me, then helped Paul, still with one hand in his pocket, into the cab. Paul gave him the address, and we pulled into the early morning traffic. As we rode, I considered various escape scenarios. Throw the cases onto Paul, shout a warning to the cabbie? I could barely move under the weight, and there was little room to maneuver in the small backseat.

Open the door? Throw a case out and follow it, tumbling onto the ground like a cowboy in the westerns Arnold enjoys? Cars and trucks passing and a landing on cement were all against that plan, and I tended to believe Paul when he threatened to shoot the driver; he seemed beyond fear—or maybe beyond hope. I occupied myself with possibilities, none good, until to my surprise, I heard Paul say, “Turn in here.”

I’d expected another run to the mountains—or at least some quiet suburb; instead, we’d arrived at an area of warehouses and small works near the docks. I thought of the fish locker, and had I seen any sign of fins or delivery vans, I’d have opened the door and taken my chances.

The cab bounced over the rutted and potholed entranceway and came to a halt. “The cases,” Paul said to me. He climbed out to pay the driver, which he managed one handed, the cabbie kindly helping him with his wallet, while all the time he had both of us within range of his weapon.

The cab drove away in a cloud of fine white dust, and we were left standing in front of a garage with a loading dock at the side. Paul motioned toward this building with his head; he rationed his words as if he were paying by the syllable. We climbed up the ramp, and he told me to put down the cases and lift one of the doors. Inside were a pickup truck and several vans. After a brief inspection, Paul selected a high, boxy olive-green van and had me open the passenger door. Then he took the revolver from his pocket. This is it, I thought, and I picked up a case, quick as I could, and held it in front of my body.

“Put it in the cab,” he said, “and get in the back.”

I didn’t move. He lifted the weapon. “I’m a very good shot,” he said.

He’d fired three times at Brun, but this didn’t seem to be the right time to discuss marksmanship. I put the case on the passenger’s seat and moved to the back of the vehicle. Space to run? Anywhere to hide? Good-sized rear windows lit the garage, but there was no back exit visible. Paul had guessed my thought, because he was right behind me. He gestured for me to open the back of the van, and when I’d climbed inside, he slammed the door shut and dropped the latch in place. I was in the body of the van, which had been closed off from the driver’s compartment by a sturdy wood and metal barrier. The only light came from two dirty oval windows in the rear doors.

I heard Paul move around the van; he threw in the second case, closed the passenger door, opened the driver’s, then started the vehicle. Where to now? I braced myself against the rear doors and watched the rutted parking lot meld into the busy city streets. I was safe enough in town, I decided, and as the van swayed and lurched, I stopped worrying about our route and began to examine the interior.

It was some sort of work van with a variety of odd holes and patches and a series of floor braces and brackets seemingly designed to trip up any unfortunate passenger. After my second tumble, I remembered Pierre’s informative discussion of alternate wartime fuels. This machine had probably been fitted with a boiler or some big receptacle for burning wood or charcoal and now, with better times, had been restored to gasoline power. Unfortunately, the conversion seemed to have been carried out carefully; none of the closed-off openings were accessible and the whole business was depressingly sturdy.

There was a familiar smell, however. I recognized it nearly at once, and my newest alter ego, Eugène, did too, as well he might, because it combined turpentine, linseed oil, and paint of one sort or another. Holding on to the interior ribs of the van, I made my way toward the front. A few old paint rags, a mostly empty can of thinner. A pothole in the road threw me against the barrier dividing the driver’s compartment from the body of the van.

As my eyes became accustomed to the dim light, I saw that the barrier had been fitted up with shelves to hold paints and supplies. Most were empty, but on the lowest shelf I found two gallon cans of paint—Paul’s cursory examination had missed those. From their weight, I figured both were more than half full. I swung one experimentally and narrowly missed striking the side of the van. Though the can was heavy enough to do damage, I was sure that Paul was too cautious to let me approach with any potential weapon.

I shook first one can and then the other. Still liquid. I tried to lift the tops with my fingernails, but slops of old paint had sealed them up tight. After a frantic search for something to pry off the lids, I settled on a stray penny that I found in my trouser pocket. It bent and twisted, but I managed to pry off both lids. Leathery skins the color of rancid cream covered the paint. With a thick splinter from a floorboard as a stirrer, I punctured the paint surface and began to turn messes of white lead, one of my favorite pigments, into the resinous vehicle. Once I had the paint reconstituted and the pigment liquefied, I poured one can into the other, gave a final stir, and made my way—awkwardly and with slopping paint—to the rear of the van.

Paul would stop. He would open the rear door as he had before, gun in his right hand, left hand on the door. Saving his breath for something more precious, he would gesture with the gun. That would be the moment. Alternately, he might open the door, again with his left hand, and step back behind it.
Be alert for that, Francis!
Then I would wait until he leaned in to threaten me. Yes, I thought either tack would do; I would just have to guess correctly. And hope we were alone, though if he had associates in crime, all was up anyway, for I was convinced that I was only alive because of his debility.

So, time to wait. I sat down by the door, the paint bucket to hand, and—as Nan likes to say—“possessed my soul in patience.” The Mediterranean sun beat down on the metal roof and streamed in the rear windows. I deduced we were heading northwest, back toward the Var and the Villa Mimosa, Paul’s territory where everything had started so long ago. I wondered if Hector’s “surveillance,” the reality of which I half doubted, had any idea what had happened and whether he had received my message.

As we rode farther and the van grew hotter, I grew less sanguine about my prospects. A trick with the paint can seemed increasingly feeble, and I began thinking of last messages, which brought me back to Paul Desmarais, who had written a message when he thought he was dying but hadn’t died after all. There were still some very queer things about that and about Paul, who had been hit in the upper chest and nearly bled to death, but who had survived with a limp. Where had that come from?

I tried to remember the scene at the gambling club, at how the man in the blue overcoat had turned up his collar and hunched his shoulders, but I couldn’t bring up a vision of his gait. I’d been fascinated by the gesture, by the way his back curved and his neck sank back into his shoulders; I hadn’t picked up the way he moved his legs. Joking with Arnold, “flying on the wings of Champagne” like the chanteuse, I’d seen the man descending the stairs with one hand, I now remembered, on the banister.

Just that, nothing more. I closed my eyes, and I was trying to focus on black hair, a blue overcoat, long shadows from the lights of the façade, when, after starts and stops in traffic, struggles with the steep grades of the hills, and many jolts for shifting gears, the van slowed down, bumped onto what must be a drive or a very secondary road and came to a halt, the motor idling. I got to my feet and glanced out the porthole-like window. We were up in the hills again, late Van Gogh territory, all dry yellows and olive greens; rural life will be the death of me.

Paul stepped out of the van; I heard his feet crunching on gravel.
Pick a door, Francis
. His left, my right. I lifted the can of paint and flattened myself against the right-hand door. A rattle as he moved the latch, a creak as he struggled to open the door; there was something awkward about him that none of his associates had mentioned. I gripped the paint can with both hands and drew it back, ready. When he leaned in, revolver in hand, I threw the paint in his face, a white solvent-laden wave that staggered and blinded him. The gun discharged, the bullet ricocheting off the back of the van. I swung the now empty paint can against his hand, and he dropped the weapon.

I don’t think I’ve ever moved faster. Off the back of the van, round behind Paul, who was clawing at his face and trying to rub the paint from his eyes with his sleeve. I grabbed him by the scruff of the neck, and though he was both taller and heavier, I threw him toward the open door of the van, then grabbed his legs, tipped him in, and slammed the door shut. He had the presence of mind to kick back, trying to force the doors open, but I rammed them into alignment and dropped the latch.

I wiped my paint-covered hands on the grass, then leaned against the van to catch my breath. Right enough, we were out in the back of beyond with nothing but scrub, grass, rocks, and a distant grove of pines that looked no more promising than the rest of the landscape. The high, white sun had dried up the sky, and we were alone with the insect chorus. It would be a long hike back to civilization.

Inside the van, Paul was making a fine row, kicking at the doors, rattling the sides, and enlarging my vocabulary of gutter French. Although the van was sturdy, I had the uneasy feeling that a man described as a top flight mechanic might show more ingenuity than I had. I picked up the revolver, which still had a couple of bullets, and fetched one of the cases. I cocked the weapon, aimed at the big, sturdy lock, and pulled the trigger. Bits of metal and leather sprayed around and left the shattered lock hot to the touch. I flipped open the lid to see neat bundles of francs.