'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 parcel 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.'
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.