The Prisoner of the Riviera Read online

  Cybèle crossed her arms. “It was as I told you. Someone was sending a package, I was to be there to collect it. That was all.”

  “And the name, Mademoiselle? Renard. Your aunts felt that came from you. That the name was a message for them.”

  “Did they?” She looked thoughtful. “Maybe it was, but not from me. I was told the name; I was offered the job. I accepted. I think one’s first impulses are always best.”

  Yours truly agreed, though I sensed that Marcel Lepage had his reservations. “I saw the man called Renard shot in London.”

  “A scandal and an outrage, I’m sure.” She was an odd combination, half genteel bourgeois and half tough artiste.

  “No one knows whether he is alive or dead.”

  “All Europe is a graveyard, Monsieur.”

  My feelings exactly and a great line for my pals at the Europa, but this was no time to sit around trading profundities. “It is a coincidence impossible to ignore.”

  “Perhaps he knew the aunts or knew of them. Their papers were always first-rate, real works of art.”

  “Attracting clients both desirable and undesirable?”

  “I wouldn’t know,” she said. “The aunts did not share that side of the business with me. I had other functions.”

  I would have liked to learn some more about those, but her face darkened, closing off that line of inquiry. “Your aunts are prudent; maybe you are not. You seemed nervous at the villa. I thought that you were tempted to delay my departure.”

  “Dream on,” she said. “Though it was certainly boring in the villa. I’d been told a day, an evening at the most.”

  “You were relieved after the package had been examined.”

  “I was relieved my job was done. It was a favor. For a friend of a friend. One of those things.”

  “And now you keep a gun in your dressing room. The aunts will not be pleased to learn about that.”

  “The aunts are fanciful and not to be trusted. That’s free advice you would be wise to take.”

  “People can be dishonest and still care about you.”

  “You can tell them that I am alive and well and earning my living on the boards. How’s that for your report?”

  “I think they would like you to give them that report in person. If you feel able to return, that is.”

  “What do you mean, ‘able to return’?”

  “They told me about your—misfortune at the end of the war.”

  “Really.” She narrowed her eyes in a way that reminded me strongly of Agathe Chavanel. If nothing else, I believed that she was their niece. “What did they tell you?”

  “About the young German soldier, his loss, the revenge of your neighbors.”

  She laughed then, a hoarse, bitter laugh that seemed years older than her fresh face.

  “Your short hair suggested—”

  “A mere theatrical convenience. Mademoiselle Justine is a woman of infinite variety.” She came over to the dressing table and fiddled with her coiffeur. “The aunts are incredible.”

  “None of this was true?”

  “None of it is true and all of it. A paradox, Monsieur, that I do not intend to explore with you. Get on the morning train, tell the aunts, and collect your pay.” She gave me a serious look. “You would be wise to do that.”

  Just then a small bulb flashed once, twice, dyeing our faces red. At this signal from the barman Cybèle froze.

  “A visitor?” I stood up but she shook her head.

  “The back exit is locked.”

  I grabbed a scarf, wrapped it around my hand, and loosened two of the four bare lightbulbs burning over her dressing table. The room, which had been deeply shadowed beyond their glare now sank into a brown twilight pierced by the two solitary lights. She pulled me over to the large coatrack and pushed me behind her evening gowns. I draped one over my head, pulled my arms into my sides, and hid behind the rest. Whoops. Feet showing. I stepped up on the base of the rack and let one dress down to the ground. I was precariously balanced, trapped in satin and surrounded by sequins, when someone knocked on the door.

  “Entrez.” Her voice was steady. The aunts, I thought, would be pleased.

  “You alone?” A low masculine voice edged with menace. Normally just my dish but under the present circumstances more excitement than I needed.

  “Of course.”

  “Jean said you had a visitor.”

  “He left. Jean must have been in the cellar. The usual.” She gave a little barking laugh. “I have my admirers, but so many are peculiar.”

  “This place is dark as a tomb. How do you see to put on your makeup?”

  “Long practice. What do you want, Richard?”

  “To see you, of course.”

  “You could have come to my show, chérie. I was rather good tonight.” She hummed a tune and, through a fringe of feathers, I saw her pivot into a dance turn dangerously near my flimsy barricade. I hoped she wouldn’t get carried away.

  Her visitor made no reply. He lingered by the door, a heavy presence like a storm front. I could just see his silhouette reflected in the mirror, and I realized that, with a step or two to the left, he would undoubtedly spot me in the glass.

  “I need a better venue,” Cybèle continued. “Look at this dressing room.” Perhaps she had spotted the danger of the mirror, too, for she perched on the dressing table, careless of her cosmetics and paints. She crossed her legs cool as could be and unwrapped a chocolate. I began to see how the Chavanels had survived the war. “You did say you had contacts at good clubs.”

  “Sure, sure,” he said impatiently. “If all goes well, we can buy a club, never mind get you booked into one. Serge told you that.”

  “You got what you wanted, didn’t you? I thought everything was set.”

  “There have been some complications.”

  “Not my worry,” she said. “And I’m not sure I want to know about them.” Out of the corner of my eye, I saw her tilt her head. She had a nice line of movie star gestures, and I had the unsettling feeling that every move she made was for effect, that the whole personality of Mademoiselle Justine, chanteuse and danseuse, was a conscious construction.

  “Serge says the cop has let us down. He had a suspect, he had witnesses. Now the suspect’s done a bunk, and he says the evidence isn’t good enough, anyway. No magistrate would accept it.”

  I was so angry that I almost gave myself away. I should be off, passport in hand, with the inspector waving bon voyage. Instead I was torturing my sinuses with stale perfume and hiding in drag like an extra in a French farce.

  “Whose fault is that?” she asked.

  “Look, you let people cross you in this business and pretty soon you have no business left.”

  “Like the theatrical business. You let people use you, and they don’t know when to stop.”

  “It’s not like that, baby,” he said. His voice practically creaked with exertion, as if romantic charm wasn’t natural to him. He leaned toward her, and in the harsh light of the dressing table I caught a strongly featured face, a deep tan, short black hair. He was older than she was, and I guessed more my type than hers. “You’ve got to talk to the old ladies. They’re in this somehow, the cop says.”

  “I will not involve them.”

  He grabbed the front of her dressing gown. “It’s not up to you. You do what you’re told or there’s space in the fish locker. Understand?”

  I took a deep breath. With one word, even a gesture, she could clear the aunts and rid herself of me.

  Instead, she said, “Get yourself another ‘Madame Renard.’ ”

  He reached down and there was the dull glint of something in his hand. I stepped off the rack and gave it a shove. He had barely registered my appearance in red-and-black satin when a thunderous explosion pounded into my ears, the tiny dressing r
oom shuddered, and Cybèle’s visitor listed toward the dressing table. The knife rattled onto the floor followed by a dark wash of blood, while the smell of gunpowder and various bodily wastes expanded in the air. Still, he seemed suspended, falling in slow motion. Then his head crashed the corner of the dressing table; his hand cleared a collection of powders, paints, lipsticks, perfumes; a rain of little bottles and pots bounced onto the floor. Cybèle stood frozen with the gun in her hand. No surprise: Violent death is an all-encompassing experience.

  When I said, “Best put that down,” she swung the weapon toward me. “Marcel Lepage,” I reminded her, as I disentangled myself from a feather boa and a long black number with beading, “dispatched from the aunts, at your service.”

  She came back to herself after a few seconds, took a deep breath, and looked at the revolver, which she laid on the dressing table. “Is he dead, do you think?”

  I tightened up the bulbs to give us more light and stepped back into the Blitz with its bomb victims and blackout accidents. I checked for a pulse in the carotid artery and in the wrist, checked the heartbeat, checked for any signs of breath. Strictly routine in this case, because she had shot him from a foot away with a heavy military revolver, another little souvenir of a rotten time. I stood up and nodded my head.

  “I’m not sorry,” she said, though her voice wavered. “He murdered that woman for nothing and kept her body in the fish locker. I don’t know why that makes it worse, but it does.”

  I had to agree. “Who was he?”

  “Richard Malet. He worked in the black market then for Serge Brun, who went from the Resistance to running dodgy clubs.” She folded her arms across her body and began to sway back and forth.

  “You need a drink,” I said. “Have you anything?”

  She shook her head. Figuring that if the shot hadn’t brought the barman, he must be long gone, I went through to the club and liberated a bottle of brandy and two glasses. When she had drunk enough to stop shivering, I said, “What now? It was self-defense, you have a witness. We have the knife. I think we call the gendarmes.”

  She shook her head violently. “He has associates, including at least one flic.”

  “Inspector Chardin.”

  “So I believe.”

  “You have somewhere to go? We pretend this all happened after you left?”

  “Nowhere far enough.” She took a breath. “I think he must disappear, and I’ll need your help. One way or the other.” She picked up the revolver again.

  Another little moment of decision for yours truly. I didn’t think she’d shoot—though doubtless the late Richard Malet had labored under the same impression—but I didn’t much fancy meeting the gendarmes either.

  “Count me in,” I said. “What do you want me to do?”

  “We need to get him out of here. Clean up the floor, lose the knife.”

  “The knife stays with him. If he’s found, it’s your defense.”

  She thought for a minute and agreed to this. I was sent to fetch the key to the rear door and the curtain from the small stage in the club, while she changed into a pair of slacks and a sweater and fetched a bucket and water to clean the floor. That was patently hopeless—the floor had been filthy even before Richard’s sudden demise. We mopped up the worst of the blood, wrapped Richard in the curtain, and hauled him to the back exit.

  The rear door led to a combined alley and parking space. There were trash cans, a broken umbrella, empty wine crates, and a small van with the name of the club emblazoned on its sides. We stood looking at the vehicle for a minute. The ultimate result of circumventing the UK postal service was the projected disposal of a body with La Fille Dorée’s van. Fortunately, my researches in the clubs and cafés had left me in a semianesthetized state, and a good jolt of brandy had somewhat detached Cybèle from the bizarre here and now. “Can you drive?” she asked.

  “Sorry, no. I’m strictly Tube and taxis in London.”

  “The aunts might have sprung for someone professional,” she said sourly.

  “Someone professional would have ended this caper an hour ago.” That shut her up. Cybèle opened the back of the van, and we lifted Richard, trussed in red velvet like a dead cardinal and stinking like an abattoir, into the back. She returned to the club, locked the rear door from the inside, and emerged at the front door wearing, I was thankful to see, a pair of spectacles. Though they gave her an air of intellect and competence, I asked if she could drive.

  “Theoretically,” she said. She put her large shoulder bag behind the seat and started the motor. Her difficulties with the clutch and the gears revealed the gap between theory and practice. The little van hopped like a bunny, snarled, creaked, and backfired like a whole menagerie. On the third try, she hit the right combination, and we rolled out of the alley and onto the deserted streets.

  “Next stop the fish locker?”

  “Poetic justice, but no. He would be found too soon by the wrong people, and they might guess who’d put him there.”

  “The water?” I asked hopefully, because I could not imagine that the van’s halting progress was going to get us very far.

  “The tide would bring him back in. He needs to disappear,” she added, “as if he had never been.”

  “Like Victor Renard?”

  “Very like,” she said. “We have to get up into the hills.”

  “And back before the club workers return.”

  “Exactly.” She ground the gears again.

  After a circuitous route through the streets of the old quarter, we reached the road north to Saint-André-de-la-Roche, Falicon, and Les Moulins. Once away from cross-streets and traffic lights, Cybèle did better, though as the road grew steeper, downshifting became an adventure. However, she knew where she wanted to go, turning with difficulty but without hesitation onto narrower and steeper roads as we climbed farther and farther from the coast.

  We went so far that I asked. “Do we have enough gas?”

  She looked down at the gauge. “There should be a can in the back,” she said in a way that did not reassure me. The only thing worse than driving to the back of beyond with Richard would be getting stranded with him in the desolate hills.

  All at once, Cybèle hit the brakes, stalling the van. “Missed our turn,” she said and began the serious business of reversing. Apparently reverse is a tricky gear, for we jerked forward and stalled several times, before the stars aligned for us and we shot backward toward a track that only she could see. “Voilà!” she shouted.

  The waning moonlight revealed a faint indentation running between the brush and grasses. Two tries later, she steered the van into the opening, and we went bouncing along what it would have been a courtesy to call a goat track.

  “Wouldn’t anywhere do here?” I asked.

  “We have to be able to turn around,” she said, “and we don’t have a shovel.”

  Too true. At last, after a gauntlet of overgrown brush, rocks, and ruts, we approached a low, stone building with a small cleared area in front. Cybèle managed to turn the van so its nose pointed in the general direction of the track, the road, and civilization. She hopped out and opened the back. Richard had come partly unrolled, which was disagreeable, and we found the gas can was only half full, which might be serious.

  We laid Richard out on the ground, and while I filled the van’s tank, Cybèle went to a sort of lean-to attached to one end of the building. She lit a match and checked the door before summoning me for help. While I lit one match after another, she fiddled with the latch until the door swung loose. Inside, we found an old rake, some miscellaneous machine parts, and, toward the back in a cobwebbed alcove, a pickax. I carried this outside to where we’d left Richard. “Anywhere in particular?” I asked.

  She hesitated for the first time and stood for a moment considering our options. “The back, I think. There’s an old goat pen.”
/>   Great. It’s amazing how often life throws me an agricultural googly. I escaped horses and dogs and cows and country life with my lungs semi-intact at sixteen, yet no escape is permanent. I followed her behind the building into what had once been a stone-walled pen and was now drifting back into scrub. “Easier digging but harder to conceal,” I said.

  “Perhaps under the stones,” she said.

  There was that. I moved a couple of the stones that had tumbled from the wall and tested the earth beneath with the pickax. Have I mentioned that manual labor is another thing I detest? This was dusty work, and after we carried Richard around and I started coughing and wheezing, Cybèle had to take a turn with the pickax.

  “You won’t die, will you?” She was a cool customer, but the idea of two corpses in one night was more than she wanted to handle.

  “Dust,” I gasped. “Old agricultural dust is the absolute worst.”

  I watched her labor for a while, and then we organized to divide the work. I swung the pickax, and she pulled the earth away with her hands. The dry ground was hard, and Richard seemed unconscionably tall, but at last we had excavated one of the shallow graves that so often show up in Nan’s favored crime stories. I now understood why, but given that the sky was lightening in the east we could do no better. We dragged Richard to what I hoped would be his final resting place, and we were ready to lay him in, when I thought about his pockets. “Better if he has no papers on him,” I said.

  Cybèle straightened up and nodded. She unwrapped the curtain, but said, “I don’t want to touch him.”

  Although I didn’t much like the idea myself, I gingerly patted his shirt and slid my hand quickly in and out of his pants pockets. I came up with a wallet and a set of keys.

  There was no time for examination. We tipped him in, and Cybèle pushed and kicked the dirt over him, lamenting her chipped nails and damaged shoes, before, with what I feared might be my last few good breaths, I wrestled the fallen stones over the raw dirt.

  “It looks like a grave with a few stones over it,” she said, which I thought was true but unhelpful. She scrambled over the remains of wall and started banging at the stones with the pickax. I joined her and, by leaning with all our weight on the loosened stones, we precipitated a small landslide. With this, she was satisfied. We returned the pickax, brushed off our clothes and hands the best we could, and got back in the van. As she was warming up the van’s engine, Cybèle looked at me. “Tell the aunts you deserve that passport,” she said.