The Melting Man rc-4 Read online

  The next morning I was glad that I had taken my simple security precautions. Around eight o'clock there was a knock on the door and the chambermaid came in with my breakfast coffee, hot rolls and croissants and two of those small pots of conserve, one apricot, the other raspberry, and a big dish of butter curls. Behind her came Aristide Marchissy la Dole. He looked as though he had gone without sleep for a week and hadn't had his brown suit pressed for a month. He had a little blue cornflower in his buttonhole and a shaving nick on his chin with a little fuzz of cotton wool stuck to it like penicillin mould. He gave me a slow, dubious smile and lit a cigarette while he waited for the maid to go out.

  I sat up in bed and said, 'There's one important thing I want to make clear. I'm hungry. So lay off my croissants.'

  The door closed on the maid. Aristide came over, took a hot roll and buttered it, flicked the silver foil off the raspberry conserve, put a spoonful inside the roll, removed the cigarette from his mouth and wolfed the lot.

  'I said lay off.'

  He said, 'You specified croissants, which by the way, were first made in Budapest in 1686. That was the year the Turks besieged the city. They dug underground passages under the walls at night, but the bakers — naturally working at that hour — heard them, gave the alarm and Johnny Turk was thrown out. In return the bakers were given the privilege of making a special pastry in the form of the crescent moon which, I believe, still decorates the Ottoman flag. Fascinating, no?'

  'Someday,' I said, 'I must buy myself a copy of Larousse Gastronomique.'

  But I was fascinated. Not by what he had said, but by what he was doing as he spoke. I've turned plenty of rooms over in my time, and seen experts turn rooms over, but I'd never seen an expert like Aristide turn a room over. He did it without any fuss, restricting himself to the probable size of the article he was looking for. He was neat and he was fast and afterwards there wasn't going to be a sign that anything had been disturbed. He found the gun I had taken from O'Dowda and pocketed it without comment.

  He disappeared into the bathroom and then came back and said, 'All right. Now the bed.'

  Reluctantly, I got out. He searched pillows, sheets, mattresses and the frame then replaced the stuff tidily and waved me to take up residence again, which I did. He buttered and jammed himself another roll.

  I said, 'Of course, you've checked the hotel safe and my car?'

  'Naturally. And of course, I know you've got it — somewhere. Let us just regard you for now as the custodian. If you lose it, of course, you could be in trouble.'

  The roll finished, he came back to the tray, tipped the wrapped sugar lumps from the bowl, and said, 'Do you mind if I share your coffee? I've been driving since four o'clock this morning.'

  'Ever since Guffy passed you my telephone number?'

  'Yes. Your Miss Wilkins, of course. She had no option.'

  'She didn't have to. She had my permission. That's why I've been expecting you — though not so soon. Perhaps now you will tell me on what score you are gunning for O'Dowda?'

  He smiled. 'I understand you've finished your work for him.'

  'I found the car, yes — and passed O'Dowda the location.'

  'O'Dowda, I gather, isn't very pleased with you.'

  'News travels fast in these parts. You must have a line to Durnford.'

  'Yes. He's had communication with us before — first anonymously — subsequently openly. He's not always been strictly honest about his objective. Isn't now, quite. But he's been helpful.'

  He raised the sugar bowl and made a horrible sucking noise at the coffee.

  I said, 'Was Durnford the only one who sent you anonymous letters?'

  'So far as I know. One came to me at Interpol. Guffy had two others at Scotland Yard.'

  'And naturally, even though there might not be any truth in them, the police couldn't altogether ignore them?'

  He nodded, squatted on the edge of a chair, and said, 'Guffy passed his to us. The subject concerned was, in a sense, an international figure. More particularly for us, a European figure.'

  'With a prototype in fiction?' Remembering Julia and the way she had behaved about Otto, I didn't think it was a shot in the dark.

  'If it was fiction. There was the Chevalier Raoul de Perrault's Contes du Temps.''

  'Or Giles de Retz, the Marquis of Laval. Holinshed, I believe. My sister used to scare me with the story at bedtime. For such a nice, gentle, green-fingered person she has a macabre taste in bedtime fairy stories.'

  'All fairy stories, the best, are macabre.'

  'Is this a fairy story, or fact?'

  'It remains to be seen.' He stood up and looked out of the window, at the terrace below with its cropped trees and the lake beyond. 'You have an expensive taste in hotels. De la terrasse ombragée belle vue sur le lac.'

  'Poetry?'

  'No, Michelin. It goes for any hotel near water. Repas sous Vombrage, face au lac.'

  'You want to change the subject?'

  'Not particularly.'

  I said, getting out of bed and beginning to hunt for my cigarettes, 'I can understand Guffy, with murder in mind, telling me to keep an eye open if I were working for O'Dowda, but what I don't understand — from an Interpol point of view is the interest in what may or may not have been in a submerged Mercedes?'

  'No?'

  'No.' I lit a cigarette, climbed back into bed and poured myself what was left of the coffee.

  Aristide came back from the window. 'You have finished with the croissants?'

  'Yes.'

  He helped himself to one of the remaining pastries. He masticated slowly, smiling at me. Then he said, 'There are many differences between Interpol and the semi-honest little business you run.'

  'Naturally. I don't get a pension at the end. That's why it's semi-honest. I have to work a handsome rake-off now and then.'

  'Resist the temptation this time. Interpol is a police organization. The International Criminal Police Organization. Inevitably, it deals with more than crimes. Any international organization must occasionally accept some political influence from its members. The little parcel which — I concede you this — you have so cleverly found and so cleverly hidden, is a political matter.'

  'And who are the interested parties exerting this influence?'

  He cocked a sleepy eye at me and then rolled a grey lid down in a tired wink.

  'That would be telling.'

  'You can do better than that.'

  'Not much — except that the interested governments prefer that neither Gonwalla nor O'Dowda should recover it. The interested governments could make good use of it — if they were ever forced to.'

  'I'm sure. Though they would never call it blackmail.'

  'In respectable hands, for respectable purposes, blackmail is a respectable weapon.'

  'Put it to music and you've got a hit.'

  I got out of bed.

  He said, 'Where do you go from here?' I said, 'To have a bath and a shave.' I stripped off my pyjama jacket.

  He looked at my arm and said, 'You have been wounded.'

  'You know what women are when they get excited.'

  He said, 'You could finish up with more than a scratch. There could be a murder charge against you.'

  I said, 'Even you can't say that with conviction. By the way, assuming I had the parcel, what sort of price would Interpol offer?'

  'They wouldn't. Not cash.'

  'They would. Tell them to forget the free pardon for murder and name a price.'

  He sighed. 'I'll pass on your request. Meanwhile, I have to inform you that the parcel must be handed to us within four days.'

  'Or else what?'

  He grinned. 'A special disciplinary sub-committee is considering that right now. You don't mind if I finish the rest of the croissants?'

  'Help yourself.'

  I went into the bathroom and turned on the taps. When I came back to dress he was gone.

  But that didn't mean I was going to be left unattended. The par
cel had political significance. Interpol was a crime organization but — much as Aristide might hate any political pressure, which I was sure he did because he was a professional crime man — if a directive had been given then no employee could do anything else but obey it. That's where the real difference lay between Interpol and my semi-honest little business. I didn't have to obey anyone. I was my own boss. I just did what I thought was best — most for me.

  I picked up the phone and put a call through to the Château de la Forclaz. If Durnford answered I was going to put a sugar lump in my mouth and do a little spluttering to disguise my voice. From now on, so far as I was concerned, Durnford had too many irons in the fire to be trusted. The call was answered by a girl on the château switchboard, and I asked for Miss Julia Yunge-Brown.

  When she came on I said, 'This is Carver here. If you want to help me, pack a bag, get in your car and ring Talloires 88.02 from an outside phone as soon as possible. If you don't call me within the hour I shall enter a monastery. Probably La Grande Chartreuse — it's not far away. Incidentally, I had a brief meeting with Otto Libsch.'

  I put the receiver down before she could say anything. Forty minutes later she rang back.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  'Rack well your hero's nerves and heart,

  And let your heroine take her part.'

  (Mary Alcock)

  I packed my bag and left it in my room. Then I went down to reception, paid my bill, said I wouldn't be in for lunch but would be back around five o'clock just to pick up my bag.

  Then I took a stroll along the lakeside and up into the village. I picked up one of Aristide's men quite quickly. Not because I was all that clever, but because he had meant me to spot him. That meant there was another one around somewhere. I would be lucky if I spotted him. The only thing to do was to isolate him, and I'd already made arrangements for this.

  The front man was a plumpish little number, wearing a beret, a sloppy linen suit, and had a camera slung round his neck. He worked overtime with the camera whenever I hung him up. There was probably no film in it anyway.

  I took him for a stroll around, hoping I might spot the other, but I never did, and after an hour I gave up trying because it had suddenly occurred to me that it wasn't a camera at all but a walkie-talkie and he was just giving a running commentary to his chum somewhere out of sight.

  About one o'clock I went back to the hotel and got the car. As I drove across the quay-side I saw the camera man sitting in a parked car by the pissoir. He was lucky to have got a parking space because the quay was crowded with visitors' cars. He took a nice little shot of me as I went by — f.11 at 250, with a heavy cloud overhead, what did he care? — to tell his hidden chum I was moving.

  I drove along the road to Annecy for a mile and then turned left-handed up to the Annecy golf course. I parked with three or four other cars outside the little club house and went in and had lunch. Halfway through, my camera man took a table well away from me and ordered beer and a sandwich. There were only a few other people eating and they had all been there before I arrived. That meant that number two was outside somewhere by now. I took my time. Julia had a longish drive ahead of her, even in the Facel Vega, and various things to do before we met.

  Finally I went downstairs, paid a green fee and hired a small bag of clubs from the professional. I was wearing a pullover and thick brown shoes so I had no changing to do, but I went into the dressing room to see a man about a poodle. There was the usual notice over the place asking you not to throw cigarette ends into it. Some wag had added underneath: Cela les rend si vachement difficile a fumer apres.

  I was more interested in a camera that was hanging from one of the coat-hooks in the changing room. I didn't examine it, but I made a note of the brown suit jacket which was also on the hook.

  When I went outside there was a man tapping balls about on the putting green. He was wearing brown trousers that matched the jacket inside. His shoes were suede moccasins. Never mind, like good policemen, they were doing their best.

  They couldn't have anticipated golf. He was a big man, with the height, bulk and look of a de Gaulle but with a nervous, hesitant smile on his face when I nodded to him that would never have done for a man of destiny. He didn't look as though he could say 'Non' to anyone. But appearances are deceptive — or Aristide wouldn't have chosen him. He was going to stick to me. Just for a moment I was tempted to ask him to join me, set the stakes high and hope that I'd got a pigeon. Then I thought of Julia and gave up the pleasure.

  I was lucky that I was operating on familiar ground. I'd once spent a memorable month in these parts and played the course a few times. I climbed the flagpole-decorated mound to the first tee and saw that my tail was wandering across to play round after me.

  I didn't hurry. I couldn't have done because it was one of those days when I was right off my game. If I'd been playing the whole course — which I wasn't going to do — something in my bones told me that I would never break a hundred. I lost a ball on the first hole, in the long grass of the right-hand slope down to the green. I sliced one out of bounds on the second, over a stone wall and trees into a bungalow garden. On the third, which was a short hole of about two hundred yards, and the farthest outward point on this section of the course, I hit a lucky screamer to within three yards of the green. I wasn't too happy about that because this was the point I had picked for operations. I didn't want par golf, I wanted manly work in the rough, so I took a seven iron and chipped the ball boldly across the green into the bushes ten yards behind it. Then I started to look for it, and couldn't find it naturally. Behind me my tail hit a bad shot halfway down the fairway, and then a few more bad ones, working to the green and giving me time to find my ball and play out.

  I stepped back from the bushes and politely waved him through. He had to come. It was a nice spot, low down and far out and not so easy to see from the clubhouse.

  My tail holed out on the green, and then, with the camaraderie of an afternoon potterer, strolled across to me to help look for my ball. He came up with that nervous smile that meant nothing except that he wasn't going to lose sight of me, and I hit him, hard, with the side of my hand across his windpipe and again across the side of the neck as he choked and fell back. He went down with a rattle of irons from his bag and stayed down.

  I ducked through the bushes and ran. Three hundred yards away, over a field and some small farm plots, was the road to Annecy.

  The timing was beautiful. As I hit the road, a horn honked behind me and the Facel Vega came screaming down from the direction of Talloires.

  * * *

  A couple of miles farther on, through Menthon on the road to Annecy, Julia swung hard right up the hill.

  I said, 'Where are we going?'

  She was driving fast, concentrating, and said without turning, 'I've got a ski-lodge near Megeve. There won't be anyone there.'

  'You collected all the things I wanted?'

  She nodded.

  I'd asked her to hire a projector and a tape recorder as she came through Annecy on her way down. She'd then gone to Talloires and picked up my bag from the hotel and the parcel from the safe at the Auberge du Pere Bise.

  When we hit Megeve, some hours later, she stopped in the main street, near the Casino.

  She said, 'There's no food in the place. You get coffee and bread. I'll do the rest.'

  She was being very brisk and efficient, playing the role of assistant conspirator and enjoying it.

  The shopping done, we went out of the town, along the road to Mont Arbois, past the golf course and then a mile further on she swung into a small open drive. Isolated in the middle of a small alp was a neat two-storey chalet, great stones wired to the roof, the facade polished boards, and the pink-and-grey shutters at all the windows cut with little heart-shaped openings. She parked the car round the back on bare gravel and we carried all our stuff in. There was a large main room with a tiled stove in the centre, comfortable chairs and a couple of settees, and an open
stairway running up to the top floor. In a way it was not unlike Ansermoz's place.

  When all our stuff was dumped in the middle of the floor, I said, 'I want a room to myself for half an hour. Okay?'

  'You can take the big spare bedroom.'

  I looked at her. She was worth looking at. She wore tight tartan trousers — I wouldn't know what clan, but there was a lot of red and yellow in them — a black sweater and a loose leather coat. On her head was a peaked black cap, shaped like an engine driver's. I could imagine the original photograph of it in Vogue.

  She looked good; just the sight of her did things for me — but there was no getting away from the fact that our wavelengths were different. However, I had an idea now of the station she was more or less permanently tuned in to. As though to confirm it, she said, 'What about Otto Libsch?'

  I said, 'We'll come to him in good time.'

  I lugged the projector, tape recorder and the parcel up to the spare room. I took a sheet off the big bed, hung it across the shuttered window and set up the projector. Then I locked the door and ran the two reels.

  They were more or less what I had expected; dramatis personae — Panda Bubakar and, a safe bet for the other two, General Seyfu Gonwalla and Mrs Falia Makse. It had all been shot from a hidden camera somewhere high up in the room. Either Durnford or Tich Kermode, I thought, could have been responsible for that. More probably Tich. As a display of acrobatics it had its limitations; as a fillip for a tired businessman it was just run-of-the-mill stuff, but for private showing to Gonwalla's cabinet it would have been a bomb, particularly under the seat of the Minister for Agriculture. The public image set up for Gonwalla in his country was that of the stern father-figure, determined to stamp out corruption, immorality, and all social and economic evils. Given selective showing in the General's home country, I could see that the film would lead to a speedy change of government. Which, of course, was what O'Dowda was after.