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‘It’s the one where Groucho is mistaken for the Nazi spy,’ I said, ‘but there’s not much singing.’
Frankel clattered the teapot and the cups as he stacked them on the tray. ‘Our Mister Champion is very proud of himself,’ he said.
‘And pride comes before a fall,’ I said. ‘Is that what you mean, Serge?’
‘You said that!’ said Frankel. ‘Just don’t put words into my mouth, it’s something you’re too damned fond of doing, my friend.’
I’d touched a nerve.
Serge Frankel lived in an old building at the far end of the vegetable market. When I left his apartment that Monday afternoon, I walked up through the old part of Nice. There was brilliant sunshine and the narrow alleys were crowded with Algerians. I picked my way between strings of shoes, chickens, dates and figs. There was a peppery aroma of merguez sausages frying, and tiny bars where light-skinned workers drank pastis and talked football, and dark-skinned men listened to Arab melodies and talked politics.
From the Place Rosetti came the tolling of a church bell. Its sound echoed through the alleys, and stony-faced men in black suits hurried towards the funeral. Now and again, kids on mopeds came roaring through the alleys, making the shoppers leap into doorways. Sometimes there came cars, inch by inch, the drivers eyeing the scarred walls where so many bright-coloured vehicles had left samples of their paint. I reached the boulevard Jean Jaurès, which used to be the moat of the fortified medieval town, and is now fast becoming the world’s largest car park. There I turned, to continue along the alleys that form the perimeter of the old town. Behind me a white BMW was threading through the piles of oranges and stalls of charcuterie with only a fraction to spare. Twice the driver hooted, and on the third time I turned to glare.
‘Claude!’ I said.
‘Charles!’ said the driver. ‘I knew it was you.’
Claude had become quite bald. His face had reddened, perhaps from the weather, the wine or blood pressure. Or perhaps all three. But there was no mistaking the man. He still had the same infectious grin and the same piercing blue eyes. He wound the window down. ‘How are you? How long have you been in Nice? It’s early for a holiday, isn’t it?’ He drove on slowly. At the corner it was wide enough for him to open the passenger door. I got into the car alongside him. ‘The legal business looks like it’s flourishing,’ I said. I was fishing, for I had no way of knowing if the cheerful law student whom we called Claude l’avocat was still connected with the legal profession.
‘The legal business has been very kind to me,’ said Claude. He rubbed his cheek and chuckled as he looked me up and down. ‘Four grandchildren, a loving wife and my collection of Delftware. Who could ask for more.’ He chuckled again, this time in self-mockery. But he smoothed the lapel of his pearl-grey suit and adjusted the Cardin kerchief so that I would notice that it matched his tie. Even in the old days, when knitted pullovers were the height of chic, Claude had been a dandy. ‘And now Steve Champion lives here, too,’ he said.
‘So I hear.’
He smiled. ‘It must be the sunshine and the cooking.’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘And it was Steve who …’ He stopped.
‘Saved my life?’ I said irritably. ‘Saved my life up at the quarry.’
‘Put the réseau together, after the arrests in May,’ said Claude. ‘That’s what I was going to say.’
‘Well, strictly between the two of us, Claude, I wish I’d spent the war knitting socks,’ I said.
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘It means I wish I had never heard of the lousy réseau, the Guernica network and all the people in it.’
‘And Steve Champion?’
‘Steve Champion most of all,’ I said. ‘I wish I could just come down here on holiday and not be reminded of all that useless crappy idiocy!’
‘You don’t have to shout at me,’ Claude said. ‘I didn’t send for you, you came.’
‘I suppose so,’ I said. I regretted losing my cool if only for a moment.
‘We all want to forget,’ Claude said gently. ‘No one wants to forget it more than I want to.’
The car was halted while two men unloaded cartons of instant couscous from a grey van. In the Place St François the fish market was busy, too. A decapitated tunny was being sliced into steaks alongside the fountain, and a woman in a rubber apron was sharpening a set of knives.
‘So Steve is here?’ I said.
‘Living here. He lives out at the Tix house near the quarry.’
‘What a coincidence,’ I said. ‘All of us here again.’
‘Is it?’ said Claude.
‘Well, it sounds like a coincidence, doesn’t it?’
The driver’s sun-shield was drooping and Claude smiled as he reached up and pushed it flat against the roof of the car. In that moment I saw a gun in a shoulder holster under his arm. It wasn’t an impress-the-girlfriend, or frightened-of-burglars kind of instrument. The leather holster was soft and shiny, and the underside of the magazine was scratched from years of use. A Walther PPK! Things must have got very rough in the legal business in the last few years.
He turned and smiled the big smile that I remembered from the old days. ‘I don’t believe in anything any more,’ he confessed. ‘But most of all I don’t believe in coincidences. That’s why I’m here.’ He smoothed his tie again. ‘Where can I drop you, Charles?’
6
Tuesday morning was cold and very still, as if the world was waiting for something to happen. The ocean shone like steel, and from it successive tidal waves of mist engulfed the promenade. The elaborate façades of the great hotels and the disc of the sun were no more than patterns embossed upon a monochrome world.
Trapped between the low pock-marked sky and the grey Mediterranean, two Mirage jets buzzed like flies in a bottle, the vibrations continuing long after they had disappeared out to sea. I walked past the seafood restaurants on the quai, where they were skimming the oil and slicing the frites. It was a long time until the tourist season but already there were a few Germans in the heated terraces, eating cream cakes and pointing with their forks, and a few British on the beach, with Thermos flasks of strong tea, and cucumber sandwiches wrapped up in The Observer.
I was on my way to Frankel’s apartment. As I came level with the market entrance I stopped at the traffic lights. A dune buggy with a broken silencer roared past, and then a black Mercedes flashed its main beams. I waited as it crawled past me, its driver gesturing. It was Steve Champion. He was looking for a place to park but all the meter spaces were filled. Just as I thought he’d have to give up the idea, he swerved and bumped over the kerb and on to the promenade. The police allowed tourists to park there, and Champion’s Mercedes had Swiss plates.
‘You crazy bastard!’ said Champion, with a smile. ‘Why didn’t you tell me? Where are you staying?’ The flesh under his eye was scratched and swollen and his smile was hesitant and pained.
‘With the Princess,’ I said.
He shook his head. ‘You’re a masochist, Charlie. That’s a filthy hole.’
‘She can do with the money,’ I said.
‘Don’t you believe it, Charlie. She’s probably a major shareholder in IBM or something. Look here – have you time for a drink?’
‘Why not?’
He turned up the collar of his dark-grey silk trench coat and tied the belt carelessly. He came round the car to me. ‘There’s a sort of club,’ he said.
‘For expatriates?’
‘For brothel proprietors and pimps.’
‘Let’s hope it’s not too crowded,’ I said.
Champion turned to have a better view of an Italian cruise-liner sailing past towards Marseille. It seemed almost close enough to touch, but the weather had discouraged all but the most intrepid passengers from venturing on deck. A man in oilskins waved. Champion waved back.
‘Fancy a walk?’ Champion asked me. He saw me looking at his bruised cheek and he touched it self-consciously.
‘Yes,’ I said. He locked the door of the car and pulled his scarf tight around his throat.
We walked north, through the old town, and through the back alleys that smelled of wood-smoke and shashlik, and past the dark bars where Arab workers drink beer and watch the slot-machine movies of blonde strippers.
But it was no cramped bar, with menu in Arabic, to which Champion took me. It was a fine mansion on the fringe of the ‘musicians’ quarter’. It stood well back from the street, screened by full-grown palm trees, and guarded by stone cherubs on the porch. A uniformed doorman saluted us, and a pretty girl took our coats. Steve put his hand on my shoulder and guided me through the hall and the bar, to a lounge that was furnished with black leather sofas and abstract paintings in stainless-steel frames. ‘The usual,’ he told the waiter.
On the low table in front of us there was an array of financial magazines. Champion toyed with them. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ he said. ‘You let me make a fool of myself.’
It was Steve who’d taught me the value of such direct openings. To continue to deny that I worked for the department was almost an admission that I’d been assigned to seek him out. ‘True-life confessions? For those chance meetings once or twice a year? That wasn’t in the Steve Champion crash-course when I took it.’
He smiled and winced and, with only the tip of his finger, touched his bruised cheek. ‘You did it well, old son. Asking me if I was recruiting you. That was a subtle touch, Charlie.’ He was telling me that he now knew it had been no chance meeting that day in Piccadilly. And Steve was telling me that from now on there’d be no half-price admissions for boys under sixteen.
‘Tell me one thing,’ Steve said, as if he was going to ask nothing else, ‘did you volunteer to come out here after me?’
‘It’s better that it’s me,’ I said. A waiter brought a tray with silver coffee-pot, Limoges china and a sealed bottle of private-label cognac. It was that sort of club.
‘One day you might find out what it’s like,’ said Steve.
‘There was the girl, Steve.’
‘What about the girl?’
‘It’s a Kill File, Steve,’ I told him. ‘Melodie Page is dead.’
‘Death of an operative?’ He looked at me for a long time. He knew how the department felt about Kill File investigations. He spooned a lot of sugar into his coffee, and took his time in stirring it. ‘So they are playing rough,’ he said. ‘Have they applied for extradition?’
‘If the investigating officer decides …’
‘Jesus Christ!’ said Steve angrily. ‘Don’t give me that Moriarty Police Law crap. Are you telling me that there is a murder investigation being conducted by C.1 at the Yard?’
‘Not yet,’ I said. ‘There were complications.’
Champion screwed up his face and sucked his coffee spoon. ‘So Melodie was working for the department?’
I didn’t answer. I didn’t have to.
Champion nodded. ‘Of course. What a clown I am. And she’s dead? You saw the body?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘Level with me, Charlie,’ said Champion.
I said, ‘No, I didn’t see the body.’ Champion poured coffee, then he snapped the seal on the cognac and poured two large tots.
‘Neat. Effective. And not at all gaudy,’ said Champion eventually, with some measure of admiration. He waggled the coffee spoon at me.
It seemed a bit disloyal to the department to understand his meaning too quickly. ‘I don’t understand,’ I said.
‘You understand, old boy,’ said Champion. ‘You understand. But not as well as I bloody understand.’ He paused while a waiter brought the cigarettes he’d ordered. When the waiter departed, Steve said softly, ‘There’s no dead girl – or if there is, your people have killed her – this is just a stunt, a frame-up, to get me back to London.’ Champion moved his cigarettes and his gold Dunhill lighter about on the magazines in front of him, pushing them like a little train from The Financial Times and on to Forbes and Figaro.
‘They are pressing me,’ I said. ‘It’s a Minister-wants-to-know inquiry.’
‘Ministers never want to know,’ said Champion bitterly. ‘All Ministers want is answers to give.’ He sighed. ‘And someone decided that I was the right answer for this one.’
‘I wish you’d come back to London with me,’ I said.
‘Spend a month or more kicking my heels in Whitehall? And what could I get out of it? An apology, if I’m lucky, or fifteen years, if that suits them better. No, you’ll not get me going back with you.’
‘But suppose they extradite you – it’ll be worse then.’
‘So you say.’ He inhaled deeply on his cigarette. ‘But the more I think about it, the less frightened I am. The fact they’ve sent you down here is a tacit admission that they won’t pull an extradition order on me.’
‘I wouldn’t bet on it.’
‘Well, that’s because you’re too damned naïve. The department don’t want me back in London, explaining to them all the details of the frame-up they themselves organized. This is all part of an elaborate game … a softening-up for something big.’
‘Something that London wants you to do for them?’ I asked. ‘Is that what you mean?’
‘Let’s stop beating around the bush, shall we? The department has given me jobs from time to time. They do that with pensioned-off operatives because it keeps them signing the Act, and also because their pensions make them the most needy – and so the cheapest – people around.’
‘Come back to London, Steve.’
‘Can’t you understand plain bloody King’s English, Charlie? Either the girl is not dead, and the department have put her on ice in order to finger me …’
‘Or?’
‘Or she’s dead and the department arranged it.’
‘No.’
‘How can you say no. Do they let you read the Daily Yellows?’
‘It’s no good, Steve,’ I said. ‘The department would never do it this way and both of us know it.’
‘The confidence you show in those bastards …’ said Champion. ‘We know only a fraction of what goes on up there. They’ve told you that Melodie was a departmental employee – have you ever heard of her or seen any documents?’
‘The documents of an operative in the field? Of course I haven’t.’
‘Exactly. Well, suppose I tell you that she was never an employee and the department have wanted her killed for the last three months. Suppose I told you that they ordered me to kill her, and that I refused. And that that was when the row blew up.’
‘Go on,’ I said.
‘The department made that contact for me. They said she was from the Palestinian terrorists. They told me that she was a nutty American student, the London contact for five hundred stolen Armalites and two tons of gelignite.’ Champion was excited now and smiling nervously, as I remembered him from the old days.
He sipped his drink. ‘They sent an American chap to see me. Is his name Schindler? Drinks that Underberg stuff, I remember. I wouldn’t believe he was from the department at first. Then they sent a Mutual down to confirm him as OK. Is it Schroder?’
‘Something like that,’ I said.
‘He mentioned the killing end. I didn’t take him seriously at first. I mean, they must still have special people for that game, surely. But he was in earnest. Ten thousand pounds, he said. He had it all set up, too. He’d organized a flat in Barons Court stacked up with beer and whisky and cans of beans and soup. I’m telling you, it was equipped like a fall-out shelter. And he showed me this hypodermic syringe, killing wire and rubber gloves. Talk about horror movies, I needed a couple of big whiskies when I got out of there.’ He drank some coffee. ‘And then I realized how I’d put my prints on everything he’d shown me.’ He sighed. ‘No fool like an old fool.’
‘Did they pay the bill for the tweed jacket we found there?’
