But he wasn’t paying the driver; he was asking him to wait. Bolan hoped the quote from Hegel was a long one.
Following Severine along a corridor that led to the back of the house, Bolan passed Raoul, one of Smiler’s lieutenants, in a white linen butler’s jacket, on his way to answer the doorbell.
Coralie was in a den, sitting at a table strewn with textbooks and papers. “Surprise,” Bolan said. “What seems to be the linguistic trouble?”
“As you’re being paid, anyway,” the girl said dismissively, “I didn’t see why you shouldn’t do some work for me.”
“Coralie!” Severine sounded shocked.
“It’s okay,” Bolan said, smiling. “Mademoiselle Sanguinetti and I are old adversaries!”
In fact there were very few translation difficulties in the Hegel passage, but Coralie managed to keep the questions coming until they heard the distant slam of a car door, and Antonin’s taxi drove away.
She accompanied him back to the sun room to apologize to J-P for the length of time she had kept him.
“Why did you do it?” Bolan whispered as they crossed the hallway. “That was a put-up job, wasn’t it? You had Severine come in and ask for me deliberately, to keep me out of the way of the Russian? Thanks — but why?”
She glanced at him from the corner of her eye. “I think they call it woman’s intuition,” she said demurely. “I saw your face when you had to pass near him the night of my father’s... party. I figured anyone who looked that apprehensive must be in need of care and protection.”
Before Bolan could think of a suitable reply, they were back in the sun room.
“It was of no importance,” J-P told Bolan when the girl had made her excuses and left. “Antonin’s going to be away a couple of days, that’s all. He wanted me to know: he’s been recalled for consultations.”
“To Moscow?”
“Hell, no. To his base. They fly him here in a chopper from one of those so-called Soviet factory ships — they’re electronic surveillance vessels really — outside the twelve-mile limit.”
“You were going to tell me,” Bolan said, “about the contract for your cop.”
“Oh, yeah,” Jean-Paul said, “The cop. His face has been seen around here too much recently, A wise guy, asking questions. I figure he’s dangerous to the project, so he must go. You can waste the others any way you want, but this one I want shot down in public. As a warning to others.”
“What’s his name?” Bolan asked. He could see the muscles in Jean-Paul’s jaw working before he almost spat the word.
“Telder.”
11
The phone calls that Bolan made were urgent. Antonin would be back in a couple of days. He would expect to find the mafiosi ready to sign on the dotted line. With all their internal problems settled. Which meant that Jean-Paul would expect his highly-paid German hit man to have wrapped up his first four contracts.
The Executioner had no wish to massacre four innocent men, but to contrive the satisfactory “death” — or at least disappearance — of the columnist, the lawyer and the TV personality, with or without their cooperation, depending on how scared he could make them, would be difficult enough in two days.
The “murder” of Telder would be something else.
“There’s a convention of cops and criminologists and special services meeting in Avignon,” Jean-Paul had told Bolan. “It ends tomorrow. Your man Telder is one of the guys on the platform. I’d like you to take him out during the windup session.”
Bolan knew about the convention. The last call he’d made had been patched in to a secret number in the city. Ironically, the experts had been called together to discuss more effective measures against terrorism, skyjacking, juvenile delinquence and the increase in organized crime. “I want to make a point,” J-P said. “Go chase the Arabs, the Armenians, the Libyans and all the other bomb-happy crackshots, but leave us alone. Do that and we leave you alone: otherwise... well, see what happens.”
“You want this guy Telder wasted as an example of what we could do?” Bolan asked.
“Right.”
“But... in the conference hall itself? While they’re all there?”
The gang leader nodded.
“How many at the convention?”
“Around two hundred. Security’s tight, of course. But we can get you an official pass. And we have friends inside.”
“You’re kidding,” Bolan said. “This is a 561 Express that I use. Hell, the barrel’s two feet long! I can’t hobble in there with the gun stuffed down my pant leg, pretending I got too close to a bomb in Beirut!”
“So?”
“So I have to find some way of zapping the guy inside while I’m on the outside. If it has to be while he’s on the platform.”
“It does. That’s the way I want it. But I don’t see why you have to use the rifle. Why not go in close and use a handgun? We can get you in there, gun and all.”
“It’s getting out that has me worried,” Bolan said. “I don’t want to be lynched by a couple of hundred mad cop lovers. And that’s what would happen if I tried anything from that close.”
“I don’t see how it could be done from outside.”
“Let’s go see the place,” Bolan said. “If I’m the triggerman, I decide where; you just decide when. Okay?”
Jean-Paul shrugged. He glared at the hired gun. Goddamn nerve. “I’ll drive you there,” he said curtly.
They went in the white Mercedes convertible. Like a spoiled child refused a second ice-cream, J-P ventilated his ill temper via the car. They covered the sixty-odd miles of expressway between Marseilles and the Avignon turnoff in twenty-nine minutes, hitting an average of just over 120 mph. And that included two stops demanded by highway patrolmen who handed out speeding tickets. Bolan was amused.
The convention was being held in the lecture hall of a modern high school, which was closed for the summer vacation. The hall was a large free-standing rectangle with a serrated, asymmetrically pitch roof like a factory workshop. The shorter, near-vertical slope of each serration was glass, to capture the north light and minimize the glare of the sun.
Behind the hall were the school buildings; in front there was a parking lot — glittering now with ranks of expensive cars — and the main gates that opened off a traffic circle fed by five broad avenues.
Bolan was interested in a narrow side street that led off one of the avenues, north of the school and less than one hundred yards from the intersection. The street was fronted by tall nineteenth-century houses with gray slate roofs and iron balconies on each of the six floors. Each building was ranged around a central courtyard with an archway that led to the street. Between the archways, small shops shaded their display windows against the sun.
Bolan walked through to the cobblestone yard behind the third archway and looked up at the apartments stacked on each side. The facade opposite the arch had been modernized: wide picture windows, flower-strewn concrete terraces, a flat roof. “Who owns that part of the building?” he asked.
“Friends of mine, as it happens,” J-P said.
“And this side, backing onto the street?”
“Friends of friends.”
“Great. Is there anyone in either of those two blocks that you or your friends could lean on a little? Anyone you have a lever on? I don’t mean for muscle; just a helping hand for a few minutes.”
“Listen, Sondermann,” said J-P, “there isn’t anyone in this town, or my town, that I can’t get some kind of a lever on.”