The Melting Man rc-4 Read online

  The Château de la Forclaz was about ten miles due south of Evian, out along the road to a place called Abondance. It had a mile of road frontage, a high wire fence studded with the usual notices, Chasse Interdit, Defence d'Entrer, Propriete Privee, and so on. There was a lodge, a lodge gate with a wide cattle-grid across the road, and then half a mile of private drive up through pine woods, curving and banking, and with more notices telling one to take it easy on the curves and not exceed thirty kilometres an hour. The rich are great ones for notices telling you what not to do, which is odd, really, when you consider that they take no account of warning notices themselves.

  The château, with a facade almost as long as that of Buckingham Palace, was big enough to give a millionaire a feeling of not being too cramped. From the corners and roof spaces of the building — which was built of a pleasant grey-yellow stone — a series of round towers with blue slate roofs fingered their way skywards. There was a terrace along, the front with wide steps leading up from either end. In the centre of the terrace a bronze fountain spouted water twenty feet high over a centrepiece of mixed-up mermen, mermaids and dolphins engaged in some nautical frolic that in real life would certainly have led to trouble. Naturally, being O'Dowda's place, there were no goldfish in the fast swirling waters of the fountain's bowl. Just brown trout.

  I had a room in one of the towers with a view reaching way back to Lac Leman. I took lunch in a small, sub-guest dining room with Durnford, who was still twitching his eyes and was not particularly friendly towards me. He told me that O'Dowda was in residence and would send for me after lunch.

  I said, 'Did you get that list of people in residence here at the time Miss Zelia left?'

  'I am working on it.'

  It occurred to me that it wasn't something that required all that much work, but I made no comment because I could see that he was in no mood for comments.

  I lingered over my coffee much too long for him, so he got up and excused himself, making for the door. But from the door he did a Wilkins on me, turning and saying, 'I think I should warn you that Mr O'Dowda is in a particular mood today.'

  I looked at him inquiringly. 'You care to enlarge on that?'

  'No.' He opened the door. 'But I thought it only fair to warn you. His staff are used to him but it sometimes disconcerts strangers.' He went.

  I sat there and, after a few moments, it occurred to me that perhaps he wasn't as unfriendly as he always appeared and sounded. If he disliked me he would have been happy for me to meet any awkward mood of O'Dowda's head on.

  Half an hour later a footman in green livery, silver buttons, and with the face of a professional mourner, came to conduct me to O'Dowda. We went through and up what seemed a quarter of a mile of corridors, picture galleries and stairs and finally landed up in front of a tall pair of doors covered in red leather and ornamented with copper studs.

  From a niche in the wall alongside the door he pulled out a hand microphone and announced, 'Mr Carver is here, sir.'

  Almost immediately, the double-doors slid back, and the footman nodded to me to enter, looking as though he were muttering a requiem for me under his breath.

  I went through the door, heard it whisper to a close behind me, and faced a long room full of people, not one of whom took the slightest notice of me.

  It was an enormous room, originally intended for stately balls, masques, routs, assemblages, minor coronations or, maybe, indoor joustings. Tall mullioned windows ran along one wall, draped with heavy red velvet curtains. From the barrel-vaulted ceiling hung three Venetian glass chandeliers. The floor under my feet was polished Carrera marble, and on the wall opposite the window hung four Velasquez portraits.

  Although the place was full of people there wasn't a sound to be heard. There were about fifty of them — men and women, more men than women, some black, most white and a few yellow. Their dress was everything from evening gown and tiaras, court dress, rough old working suits, shirt sleeves and denims, military uniforms to national costumes. Some of them were sitting, some standing, and one couple were down on one knee in the act of obeisance, and they were all looking towards the far end of the room. Not a muscle among them moved because they were all made of wax. Nearest to me was a woman in a low-cut evening gown whose shoulders wanted dusting.

  At the far end of the room was a raised platform, half-crescented at each side with a pierced marble balustrade. Three low steps ran upwards to a final dais on which was an enormous throne-chair in gold stucco with a back that ran up into a kind of baldachin affair overhead from which fell silver-and-gold curtains. On either side of the throne-chair stood a pair of seven-branched candelabra, all the candles lit. In the chair sat a wax figure, double life-size, of O'Dowda. The big head was decked out with a chaplet of laurel leaves, a purple toga swathed the huge body, and there were gold sandals on the big feet. One fat hand held a silver drinking goblet and the other a long roll of parchment. Take the parchment away and stick a lyre in it and you could ring the changes: Caesar or Nero, according to mood.

  Just at that moment, having got over the shock of the Madame Tussaud collection in the room, I was wondering what was the particular mood of the man who sat on the edge of the platform below the effigy. Normally it might have been difficult to guess. It could have been his day to be Caesar, Nero, Hitler, Napoleon, Karl Marx, Sam Goldwyn or Kruschev. But it wasn't. He was all togged up from ankle to neck in one of those blue siren suits Winston Churchill used to wear, and there was a fat cigar stuck in his mouth and a fat scowl overhanging his eyes. In his right hand he held a whippy little cane with which he was gently smacking his right leg.

  He just stared at me across a hundred yards of marble floor, waiting for me to speak, I imagined. But I knew my place. You do not speak to royalty until they speak to you first. I knew something else, too. Despite this show, he wasn't mad. He wasn't even eccentric. Everything he did, he did from reason; cold, hard, cash-registering reason. Only the failures in life go mad. It's their way of opting out of the rat-race.

  He got up and slowly made his way down the room. He stopped once alongside the figure of a London policeman and gave the blue serge of the man's seat a whippy slash with the cane.

  Then, coming up to me, he said, careful all the time to keep the scowl on his face, 'Know why I did that, Carver?'

  I said, 'I should think because years ago he was the one who around midnight nobbled you as you came out of the neighbourhood grocer's with the contents of the till in your pocket.'

  O'Dowda grinned, but he still managed somehow to keep the scowl going.

  'Bad guess. Sure, before I had real hairs on my chest I knocked off a till or two. How the hell do you get capital to start otherwise? No — he nobbled me for drunken driving when I was twenty-two. Licence taken away for six months, meant I couldn't drive the van. Business kaput. They're all like that.' He waved the cane around the crowd.

  'You brought me all the way up here to tell me about the people who've crossed you in your life?'

  'You'll learn why I brought you up here soon enough. Sure, yes, they are all people who crossed or tried to cross me. I like to come in here sometimes and talk to them, let 'em see where I am now. You know how much one of these figures costs?'

  'No.'

  'Kermode does them. Clever sod, is Kermode. Used to work for Tussaud's once. Two hundred quid, he charges me.'

  'You could save money by having them done in miniature. Keep 'em all in a glass case. That way the dust wouldn't settle on them.' I ran my finger down the V-back of the tiara number and showed the tip to him. 'Now stop trying to impress me.'

  'You're fired, boyo.'

  'Splendid.'

  'You were going to cross me up.'

  'You should have let me do it — then you could have stuck me in here. I'd have sent you one of my old suits to make it authentic'

  'Watch your tongue when you speak to me. You're just the hired man.'

  'You fired me a moment ago. Remember? Anyway, hired or fired I spe
ak as I find. Stop playing games, O'Dowda.'

  For a moment I thought he was going to hit me with the cane. He stood there and bulged his big face at me, little blue eyes boring at me, the afternoon sun sparkling on the short copper scruff of his hair, the end of his cigar glowing like a Stop light. Then he wheeled away and went up to the figure of a coloured gent wearing a tarboosh and ten yards of white Manchester cotton robe and swiped the tarboosh off with his cane.

  'What did he do?' I asked. 'Sell you a dud lot of dirty photos?'

  'As a matter of fact it was a dud lot of industrial diamonds during the war. He lived to regret it. And don't think I'm trying to impress you. For me this is therapy. Every so often I like to review 'em, talk to 'em. Afterwards I fell as clean and pink inside as a baby. And when I'm not here they still have to face me.' He nodded towards the outsize Caesar figure.

  I said, 'You should open it to the public. Cover your costs in a couple of years. Kermode could sell hot-dogs and ice-cream on the terrace.'

  He scowled at me.

  'You're fired,' he said.

  I turned and made for the door. He let me reach it, and then said, 'Don't you want to know why?'

  I looked at him over my shoulder. 'If you feel you've got to tell me — okay. But in that case let's do it over a drink and a smoke.' I fished out my cigarette case. 'The drink,' I said, 'is up to you.'

  He gave me a grin then.

  'You're a lippy bastard. But it's a change. You're still fired, though.'

  He went back to the other end of the room, smacking the odd rump and shoulder here and there and stopped in front of what was probably a Louis-the-something console and produced brandy and glasses. Again, he gave himself the bigger helping. I went up and sat in an armchair with an elderly diplomatic type in court dress resting one elbow nonchalantly on the back. (He'd probably blocked O'Dowda's bid for a knighthood.)

  I breathed the brandy aroma, sipped, let the liquid roll around my mouth like a mixture of ginger and fire, swallowed it, and felt it like the beginning of a young volcano in my stomach.

  I said, 'This is bloody awful stuff.'

  O'Dowda said, 'You think I'd waste my best brandy on a man I've just fired?' I said, 'Why am I fired?'

  'Because, Carver, when I employ someone I demand complete loyalty for my money. Nobody has to love me for it. But they have to earn it.'

  'So far as I know I haven't even got round to cheating you on a hotel bill yet. But I'll make a note to do so when you reinstate me.'

  He whipped the cane through the air in front of him angrily and said, 'Bejasus, you try me hard.'

  I said, 'You're the first Irishman outside of a music-hall I ever heard say Bejasus. Just let me have a few facts about my disloyalty.'

  'Two days ago I had a visit from a black number called Alakwe—'

  'Was this in England or over here?'

  'Why?'

  'Because then I'll know whether it was Jimbo Alakwe or Najib.'

  'In London.'

  'Good old Jimbo, still trying hard. Don't tell me — I can guess the kind of line he would take. I've taken a bribe of, say, two thousand guineas, not pounds, to double-cross you by letting him know before you where the Mercedes is when I find it? Something like that?'

  'More or less. You're damned frank about it, aren't you?'

  'I'll be even franker. Jimbo's the simpler of the two brothers — twins actually. God knows what the people he works for make of him. He should have known that my price for a double-cross like that would be in the region of ten thousand. I'm happy in my work with you. It gives me a change of scene, luxury living, new faces — some of 'em pretty and feminine — and a life expectancy that would have me booted out of any insurance office. Take a look at this.'

  I reached into my pocket and tossed it across to him. It was the size and shape of a half grapefruit, but a good deal heavier.

  He held it in one gorilla paw and said, 'What's this?'

  I said, 'It's a magnetic limpet bomb, thermo-activated. There's a little sliding pointer on the side which you can set against the scale to any temperature. The temperature readings are calibrated in Fahrenheit, Centigrade and Reamur. No detail overlooked. At the moment it's set to "safe". It was stuck on the side of my car engine in Geneva, set to a reading that would have blown me sky-high after a couple of kilometres.'

  'Boyo, what a damned useful gadget.'

  'You can keep it. But if I'd taken cash to double-cross you, why would they want to knock me off? Waste of money. They were annoyed because I wouldn't double-cross you. I suppose you've now paid Jimbo good money to double-cross them, whoever they are?'

  'Yes, I have.'

  I shook my head. 'You'll have him all mixed up. He isn't the kind to carry a double disloyalty in his mind without getting the wires crossed. All right, am I back at work?'

  He reached round and put the bomb on the console affair behind him. Then he slewed his big head back at me, lowering it like a bull sighting on the middle point of a matador's cummerbund, and heaved a great sniff of air out of his nostrils.

  'What the hell goes on?' he said. 'I just want that car back.'

  I said, 'You're going to get it. It was pinched by a crook called Otto Libsch.' I paused, watching him closely as I mentioned the name. It had, I was sure, meant something to Julia. It could mean something to him. If it did he didn't show it. I went on, 'He had a respray job done on it and some weeks after used it to carry out a payroll hold-up somewhere in France. Since then, neither he nor the car has been seen. But I'll lay you ten to one in hundreds — pounds not francs — that I find the car in the next few days. On?'

  'No.'

  'It's nice you have such confidence in me. Am I reinstated?'

  'Temporarily, yes. But by God — you put one foot wrong and—'

  'You're jumping the gun,' I said. 'If you want me back, there's a condition on this side. No, two conditions.'

  'Nobody makes conditions with me.' He said it with a rumble like a runaway steamroller. As I knew better than to argue with a steamroller I began to get up to leave.

  He waved me down. 'Let's hear them.'

  I sat back. 'First, I don't want to be badgered with questions about how I traced Otto and the car. And I don't want your stepdaughter Zelia badgered. Like she says, she knows nothing. Secondly, I want to know what's in the secret compartment of that car and who the people are who are employing Najib and Jimbo Alakwe. This I have to know for my own protection. What do you say?'

  He stood up slowly and gave me a warm smile. You wouldn't believe it possible, but suddenly that big brute of a face was transformed. He was a solid, bearlike father-figure reaching out his arms with a benign smile, ready to take and comfort the world's weary and sick at heart, the oppressed, the poor and the homeless. It didn't impress me at all, because I knew that he would take them all and make a profit out of it somehow.

  'What I say, Carver, is that I've obviously been mistaken in you. Just get on with the job. I've complete trust in you, boyo. And as far as Zelia's concerned, I'll never mention the car to her again.'

  'Good.'

  He shook his head. 'I'll never understand why you haven't made a million for yourself already. You've got all the gall in the world.'

  'What I haven't got is an answer to the second condition. What's in the car and who wants it?'

  'Ah, yes, that. Well, that's a little more difficult. Delicate, in fact.'

  'Try.'

  He chewed the end of his cigar for a while, working up in his mind the lie he was going to tell me. After the write-up he'd just given me he knew it would have to be good. He wasn't long about it.

  'In the car,' he said, 'is a very considerable parcel of bonds. Gold bonds. To be exact they're Imperial Japanese Government external loan bonds of 1930, sinking fund 5½ per cent, which are due for final redemption in May 1975, but these bonds are ones that have been drawn for redemption in January of next year. Naturally no further interest accrues to them after that date, but their redemption
value is around twenty thousand pounds. Originally they belonged to me. But I was passing them over to a friend in return for services rendered. You with this, so far?'

  'Yes. But I shall check that there are such bonds, naturally.'

  'Do that, you careful bastard.' He grinned.

  'And the friend?'

  'He is an important figure in the opposition party of one of the new African states. At the material time this opposition party was the ruling party. Times change. The present ruling party considers that the bonds belong to them since, they argue, the favour done for me by my friend when he was in power was done in his official, not private, capacity.'

  'What do you think of that argument?'

  'I don't care a damn. I promised him the bonds, and he gets them. And that's all the damned details you're going to get about it.'

  I said, 'Where do these bonds have to be delivered for redemption?' It was a quick one but he was up to it, the answer rolling out smoothly.

  'The Bank of Tokyo Trust Company, 100 Broadway, New York, NY 10005. Naturally you'll check that, too. But do it on your own time, not mine. Now get the hell out of here and find me that Mercedes.'

  I stood up. 'And where is the secret compartment in the car?'

  He puffed his cheeks out like a grotesque cherub, exploded air gently, and said, 'That's no affair of yours. You're all right in my book so far, but not so far that I would trust you with twenty thousand pounds' worth of bonds.'

  I looked sad, but only for the record, and I went towards the door, past the bobby who had flagged him down for drunken driving, past the Syrian diamond merchant who had switched stones on him, past a slick looking South American type who'd probably sold him a salted gold mine, past men and women who once, for a brief while, had got in his way, shaken him down, held him up, and had eventually lived or died to regret it. And not for one moment did I believe a word about the bonds… that is, that that was what was in the car. Imperial Japanese Bonds existed all right. He'd just used the fact to get rid of me. And I'd accepted it. Why not? A job is a job, and this one paid well, and when I got the car somebody — I wasn't sure who yet — was going to pay well for whatever was in the secret compartment.