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  For Maurice Crillon, life ambles along in a more or less perfunctory manner. A man of some contradiction, Maurice is an artist of considerable talent and an accomplished restorer of fine paintings. His main occupation in life, however, is making high-quality forgeries of paintings. That and maintaining his various mistresses.

  When Maurice’s mother dies, he discovers an intriguing and baffling fact about himself: he is not French, as he has always thought, but English, born of aristocratic blood.

  A visit to his English father, an elderly, delightful eccentric, plunges Crillon into a series of complications reaching through France, Switzerland, and Italy. His curiosity about his parents entangles him in an adventure in which he unwittingly becomes the quarry of the security services of two nations as well as the Mafia, all of them bent on recovering certain incriminating documents that have fallen into his possession.

  Vanishing Point

  VICTOR CANNING

  Copyright © 1982 by Victor Canning

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher.

  Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

  Canning, Victor.

  Vanishing point.

  I. Title.

  PR6005.A486V3 1983 823.912 82-18845

  ISBN 0-688-01107-1

  Secret de deux, secret de Dieu

  Secret de trois, secret de Tous

  French proverb

  Vanishing Point

  PROLOGUE

  AT MIDNIGHT ON Monday, June the Tenth, Nineteen Hundred and Forty, Italy declared war on France, and on the following Thursday Italian SM81 three-engined bombers attacked Toulon. Turning away from their attack one of the bombers developed engine trouble and rapidly losing height crashed on the rising ground just north of the coastal road between the resorts of Aiguebelle and Cavaliere.

  The bomber ploughed into the facade of the Villa Colombier and within three minutes the whole place was ablaze, burning like a great pyre. The heavy pall of smoke drifted on a light southerly breeze out over the purple darkness of the sea while the leaping flames from the burning building cast erratic, twisting shadows from the gnarled olive trees that covered the slopes around it.

  Within half an hour, and long before any effective help arrived, walls and roof had collapsed, as supporting timbers and the rafters were burned away. Oleanders and other shrubs in the garden and nearby olive trees flared up to encircle the holocaust and to set the dry grasses and heather clumps of the hillside alight to form a barrier which barred any close approach to the villa. At daybreak the smoke rose in an unwavering column into the calm morning air while small tongues and sporadic runs of fire still lived and leapt from heath clump to bush and tree on the tinder dry hillside. The villa was the property of an Englishman, Andrew Starr, the only son of Sir Albert Starr, Bt, of Avoncourt Abbey in the county of Wiltshire.

  On that morning the Germans were poised to capture Verdun and their 7th Army about to cross the Rhine opposite Colmar while the French Army General Headquarters was moving south from Briare on the Loire to Vichy. Far away in North-West France Captain Andrew Starr was helping in Operation Cycle, which was designed to evacuate over thirty thousand British troops from Cherbourg. He himself never left for he had received secret orders to remain behind. On Monday, June 17th, while Rommel was racing towards Cherbourg, covering two hundred and forty kilometres a day, he went to a small hotel in Cherbourg, said one word to the proprietor, was shown without comment to a top floor bedroom, and shortly after emerged from the hotel in French workman’s clothes. Mounting a bicycle which leaned against the hotel wall – a bicycle which had not been there when he entered – he rode off.

  In the South of France at that moment, his wife, Christine, dumb to all feeling, stood some distance from the blackened pile of fallen masonry and charred wood and metal which had once been the Villa Colombier and the Italian SM81 bomber. Stiff-faced, her eyes wide and black shadowed, her grief was still so great that her beaten spirit was to be denied the balm of any tears for days to come. Pray she could but weep she could not for the grief she held had numbed all within her. Somewhere under the great pyre – burnt beyond any hope of recognition or formal burial – were the ashes and dust of her near-month-old child Angus Starr and his French wet nurse. The two had been alone in the house while she had been away in St-Tropez arranging for a fishing boat to take her and her son and nurse to Spain.

  She crossed herself and turned away. Far out on the line of meeting sea and sky Port-Cros and its islands lay like a still cloud of pale smoke. On the path down the hill a bearded goat, forefeet raised against the trunk of a gnarled olive, turned from its browsing and watched her. A bee-eater flashed across her path but she saw nothing of its brilliance. Her eyes were veiled with a grief which had yet to be muted by time and tears.

  CHAPTER ONE

  THROUGH THE LEADED lights of the small bedroom window Monsieur Louis Bonivard, the curé of the scattered Dordogne living of Cragnac, could see the narrow stretch of garden freshly planted with young lettuces and onions and the green growths of hazel-staked peas and runner beans. Madame Crillon loved her garden. There were few times when he passed on his pastoral duties that, despite her age, she could not be seen there, heavy-booted, skirts tucked up and, in the summer, wearing a wide-brimmed straw hat, tending to her crops, watering and hoeing and, although old, seeming indestructible . . . until, as now, the day had come when the good Lord smiled and gave the call for the end of all her labour and all the frets and cares of her earthly life.

  Almost automatically he wrote slowly and in a neat, precise hand as she spoke, her voice clear mostly, but sometimes wavering into silence while she caught her breath and found fresh vigour. Sometimes he held up a hand and stopped her speaking while he re-shaped her words into ordered sequence and form, so that her statement should be coherent and without ambiguity. And sometimes when she was silent, regaining her strength, he looked out of the window at the garden until she was ready to go on.

  At the end of the garden beneath a row of poplars was a small seat of roughly trimmed birch lengths where many, many times he had walked down to greet her and to sit with her and watch the waters of the Vezere idling past in summer drought, sometimes in autumn flood. Once she had said to him, “Monsieur, I know all the voices of the river. Sometimes they speak angrily . . . scolding. And another they sing gently . . . giving peace and a little time of forgetfulness for our sins.”

  Out of the corner of his eye he caught the movement of a pair of siskins moving in the top branches of a laburnum tree looking for a nesting site. He wrote on to her dictation and there was no surprise in him at the words which came from her. There had been a time when confessions stirred him to extreme compassion and, sometimes, to unworthy anger. Now . . . he accepted all calmly, knowing that behind each human act and thought God worked and there was no questioning His ways.

  When she had finished, he said, “There is much here maybe to cause unhappiness to others. You must think on that, my child. Your son for instance. Sometimes it is better to bury one’s past for the sake of others’ futures.”

  “No, monsieur. It must be this way. God does not want any truth hidden. I have been too long in accepting that. With this done I can go with more of peace in my heart than I have known for years. God has spoken to me. It is His will. And I wish you to do as I have said. This you will promise me and then give me your blessing. Now, give me my glasses so that I can read it and then I will sign it.”

  She smiled suddenly and through the crabbed, wrinkled face he saw briefly the phantom of the
young woman who had once been tempted and now at the last moment would put herself right with her God and he knew that there was to be no turning her, nor perhaps could there be for behind her stood the years which God had ordained for her and who could make quarrel with that?

  He went to her, gave her her glasses, and helped her up to read and sign the statement she had made and was surprised momentarily at the firmness with which she wrote her name until he realized that it came from a new strength and peace within her since she had now unburdened herself of a sin which had haunted her for so long.

  This done, he gave her the last rites and was mildly amused that even in his ritual she turned her head and through the window watched her garden and the bright flow of water between the riverside bushes, knowing that her garden had been her place of peace and her work in it a happy penance which she made for Him, not in hope of forgiveness, but as an act of service and charity since most of what she grew she gave away to the surrounding villagers.

  When he returned that afternoon she was dead. Two days later she was buried and the villagers,, who all loved her, filled his church in a way that seldom happened for any other of his services. Her son, to whom he had written in Switzerland, was not present, nor was there any communication from him. Angry a little at the son’s absence, but with charity enough to know that the man might well have been away from home, he stopped at the Postes et Telegraphes and sent a telegram to the same address advising the son of his mother’s death. Until he could meet or speak with him he knew that there was nothing further he could do.

  On his way back to his own place he stopped at Madame Crillon’s cottage to make sure all was locked and secure. An old man was in the garden, hoeing slowly down between the rows. He went down to him, knowing him, knowing, too, that he was an atheist who would loudly proclaim so after a few drinks too many.

  He said gently, “Gaston, you were not at the service . . . not even for her?”

  Gaston eased himself on his hoe and said, “No, father. Why should I have been? She was not there. I told her that when she went I would still take care of her garden. If she is anywhere, she is here. Was her son Maurice there?”

  “No. He obviously cannot have got my letter telling of her illness.”

  Gaston spat. “You waste your charity, father.”

  Monsieur Bonivard smiled. “I hope I have more than enough to miss it.”

  Gaston shrugged his shoulders and turned back to his hoeing.

  * * * *

  The ringing of his telephone brought Maurice Crillon slowly from sleep. Naked he rolled out of bed, squatted on its edge, and yawning rubbed his hands through his hair and then slowly massaged his still sleep-filled eyes. A glance at the wall clock told him that it was seven-thirty. He went through into his studio and picked up the telephone receiver from the ledge of the great north-facing window which looked out over the Lungarno Soderini and the River Arno. Florence was well awake with the movement of cars and pedestrians, and the river-mud coloured – had risen during the night from rains up in the mountains. The whole city was grey and gold and scarred with black shadows in the streets where the sun had yet to reach.

  A woman’s voice over the telephone said, “Telegram for Signor Crillon.”

  “That’s me. One moment.” He reached out and took a pencil from ajar filled with pencils and brushes. “All right. Go ahead.” He spoke Italian well, but the girl at the other end knew at once that it was not his native tongue.

  He wrote the brief message on the plaster of the wall at the side of the window and as he did so was touched with deep grief but knew no surprise. His mother had long been ailing – and now her days were over. As the girl finished, he said, “Grazie – there’s no need to confirm it.”

  He stood by the window and blacked out the few words he had written down. As he did so he acknowledged the gesture with a wry twist of self-recognition. In this life it was safer to give nothing of importance away or to leave traces of one’s private life, no matter how trivial they might seem. The instinct of selfpreservation had long become habit. What you give to other people may be turned against you. Don’t let people pry even marginally into your private life – particularly (he smiled to himself) since there were too many parts of his that would not bear examination. Even in love, a man should watch his words.

  He turned away from the window and paused for a moment or two at a canvas that lay free of its old frame on his work table. It was a mid-eighteenth-century country scene by Giuseppe Zais – a paesaggio with villagers dancing on a green bluff, a rushing, mountain torrent in the background and distantly a river bridge below a hill-town golden in the afternoon light. It was a variation of a much better known example of the artist’s works at the Accademia in Venice. On an easel alongside the table was a copy he was making. His eyes went from one to the other. He smiled to himself. The world was full of vain, undiscriminating, gullible fools.

  He went back into the bedroom, picked up a towel from a chair and was moving towards the bathroom when the woman in the bed sat up, yawned with the backs of her hands across her mouth and smiled over them at him.

  “I heard the telephone, Maurice. What was it?”

  “Nothing, Carla mia.”

  “Not my brother?”

  “No.”

  She grinned. “Or someone telling you the end of the world was coming? Surely you would tell me if it were that?”

  “That, yes.”

  Her hands came away from her mouth and she yawned and spread her arms wide so that her naked breasts momentarily flattened against her chest and her dark hair fell backwards, freeing to sight the long upthrust of her neck. Momentarily he felt the itch to have in his hands red crayon and dark paper to catch the beauty of her body.

  “Between us,” she said casually, “it would be nice to have nothing but truth.”

  He smiled. “There is that already, Carla. Stupid little facts are not truth. You and I are truth.”

  “Poof! You escape in words. I shall come and shower with you and you shall soap me. When you do that I feel that I am a baby again. And after that, you shall towel me dry. And after that I shall make coffee and —”

  “And then you will go back to your brother, Aldo. I have to go to France.”

  “France? Why?”

  Pausing before replying he was tempted to tell her the truth, but resisted it. She would be all over him with the tenderness of concern and consolation – and this he did not want.

  He said, “It is a matter of business. I will be back as soon as I can. I will finish the Giuseppe Zais then.”

  Standing under the shower as the water began to run she put her arms around him and said, “You know I would leave him. Come with you now were it not for the money. I cannot touch it until I am thirty-five without his consent.”

  He grinned. “You could forget the money and come with me now.”

  “You would accept that?”

  “Of course.”

  She shook her head. “It would be stupid . . . all for the sake of a few years. Caro, money is money – and with you it goes through your fingers like sand. You need me and you need my money. Then I will look after both.”

  She bit the side of his chin gently and went on, “You should not treat money as though it lay there like fallen leaves for the gathering.”

  “You think so? It is spring now – not all the money in the world could buy you a basket full of autumn leaves at this moment. But money is always there, somewhere, for the gathering.” He ran his hands over her body and went on, teasing, “Now you are like Correggio’s Danae. But one day —” Before he could say more she raised her head to the shower fall, filled her mouth with water and blew it into his face.

  He laughed and went on, “But one day you will be beautifully fat and I shall love you the more.”

  “You swear?”

  He grinned. “I swear.”

  An hour later when he had packed and driven off she stayed on in the studio apartment to tidy and clean it. A
t the window by the telephone she searched the wall which was where he usually scribbled notes during a telephone conversation if it were of importance. They were all, as usual, blacked out with thick pencil. Three years she had known him and through all that time she had learned little of him. What knowledge and memories she had of him had all been created in those years and the knowledge was scanty; an old mother somewhere in the Dordogne whom he partly supported, some years in Paris and Zurich . . . art schools, an obligatory period in the French Army. . . other women, too, she guessed but never mentioned . . . a man almost twice her age, a man with magic in his fingers when he caressed her, but with more magic when he picked up palette and brush. Mamma mia . . . that was all her brother cared about. But for that he would never have allowed their relationship – he still adamantly refused to release her money from their mother, hoping one day she would never be able to hold him here in Florence, that one day the ties between them would break and she would marry a man of his choosing . . . Porca miseria!

  She went over to the table where the Giuseppe Zais lay free of its frame, still only partly cleaned and restored, the dirt of years gone mostly from it, bright and luminous as the day probably when Zais’ elderly idol, Marco Ricci, with a few years to live, might have seen it. One day her brother, Aldo, would take the family picture back to its owner, some obscure Italian aristocrat or jumped-up Milan millionaire and – according to her brother’s whim, for sometimes when his bank balance pleased him he had bouts of conscience – it might be the original or it might not. But in the studio would be resting the original or the copy to be shipped and sold through her brother’s friends abroad, or to buyers elsewhere who asked no questions and kept their own collections private. Maurice often said that vanity of possession clouded most eyes, but more importantly that most people went through life not using their eyes properly because they had never bothered to look long and hard for the signs of truth. At this thought she smiled to herself for in so many other ways Maurice was a greater stranger to truth than most men. There was no moment when one could be sure of his word . . . not even when he swore he loved her and would love her still when she grew fat. It could be true . . . and in love, if one did not believe, then there was no true ecstasy of spirit or body. So when they married, and if she grew fat and he wandered now and then, what would it matter? She had love enough for two. In no relationship was there ever true perfection. Nowhere in the world at any time, he had once said, had any man or machine drawn a perfect circle and had added, which had surprised her, ‘It is against God’s will.’