Anything Considered (21 page)

“Eh?”

“Polluce forgot to ask for his money back.”

Tuzzi smacked his forehead with the palm of his hand, then opened his arms wide. “Maestro! I kiss your feet!”

“Please don’t,” said Glebe. “The crew will start to talk.”

POE looked up from his desk as he heard the chop of the helicopter coming in from Monaco, bringing with it a million dollars that he was determined Bennett and that ungrateful bitch would never spend. Normally, he was a man who was prepared to wait for his satisfactions, a man who subscribed to the view that revenge was a dish best eaten cold. But this was trying his patience. There had been years of humoring the dreary little scientist, with his constant demands for more time, more money, more praise. Then to have it all threatened by a clown like Tuzzi. And now to be double-crossed by two amateurs, with their pathetic games of hide-and-seek. Well, they had a surprise coming their way. The thought of it improved his mood, and he was whistling as he went downstairs to meet Shimo.

The Japanese unzipped the cheap nylon case, and Poe watched as he emptied the neat bundles of hundred-dollar bills onto the table. “I hope you’ll be taking those back very shortly, Shimo. I’d hate to lose them. They have great sentimental value.”

Shimo nodded. “This will bring them into the open, and then we have them. Has the Englishman called?”

“Not yet.” Poe picked up the bag and examined the inside. “Where do you think we should put it?”

Shimo took from his pocket a small plastic box, half the size of a pack of cards. “We can sew it into the bottom lining, here in the corner, under the money. Range is not long, maybe five hundred meters, but anything more powerful would be too big to hide.”

Poe smiled as he looked at the homing device in Shimo’s hand. “Watch out, Bennett. You’re being paged.”

“Mr. Julian, something worries me.” Shimo put down the homing device and lit a cigarette. “Suppose the Englishman is dealing with others, for more money. Suppose he is dealing with Tuzzi.”

Poe had to admit that it was possible. In fact, it was exactly what he would do if he were Bennett: try his luck, see if he could make an extra few hundred thousand dollars from a couple of phone calls. “You’re right, Shimo,” he said. “Perhaps I’ll have a word with Mr. Tuzzi. He might let something slip. God knows, he’s stupid enough.”

——

Tuzzi and Poe exchanged elaborately courteous greetings on the phone, as though they were old colleagues catching up after a prolonged separation. They were delighted to find each other in good health—Tuzzi avoiding any mention of the painful matter of his still tender testicles—and reassured each other about the continuing success of their businesses. Then Poe came to the point.

“Enzo,” he said, “it appears that you and I have been the victims of a robbery. I think you know what I mean.”

“The formula?”

“Exactly. It has been stolen from you once, and from me twice—although I’m prepared to overlook that and let bygones be bygones.”

“
Bene, bene
. We are practical men, you and I. Civilized men.”

Poe tried to keep the contempt out of his voice. “Indeed we are, Enzo. And above all, we are businessmen. So what I propose is that we join forces to find the Englishman and the girl, pool information, that sort of thing. What do you say?”

“My dear friend”—Poe recoiled at the phrase—“this is for me great honor, to work hand and glove with such a man as yourself.” His voice became conspiratorial. “Tell me, do you hear anything from them? Has there been any contact?”

Poe looked at the piles of banknotes stacked in front of him. “Not a word. How about you? Anything to go on?”

Tuzzi thought about the passports, now on their way to Polluce in Marseille, and the imminent involvement of several Corsican police officers. He sighed loudly. “
Niente
. They disappear into the air,
pouf
, and leave us nothing. Now we must look for a pin in a haystack, no?”

“You have men out looking?”

“Of course. And you?”

“Of course. Well, we’ll keep in touch, then, shall we?”

“My information is yours, my friend. On my mother’s head.”

Tuzzi was smiling broadly as he put down the phone. It had crossed his mind more than once that Bennett and the girl might have gone straight to Poe with the formula, which would have been a serious complication. But now all he had to do was find them first, and with Polluce and his friends in the police, the odds were promising. He gave orders for the
Ragazza
to turn back to Marseille. The girls on Ibiza could wait.

Poe hadn’t expected too much from the conversation, and on principle distrusted anything Tuzzi said. But he was sure that if the Italian had held a trump card, he would have been unable to resist hinting at it, or trying to sell it. So it was a race to find Bennett and the girl, and they’d already made contact. Poe, too, estimated the odds as promising. He resigned himself to spending the rest of the day by the phone, waiting for news.

——

Anna and Bennett had slept late, and they found the monastery deserted by the time they came to the kitchen in search of coffee. The brothers were all at work in the vineyard, the distant chug of their tractors as steady and soporific as the buzz of bees in the lavender.

Anna waited for a pan of water to boil on the wood-burning stove, while Bennett hacked at the remains of a
boule
of unleavened bread. Their morning so far had been
a mixture—slightly awkward for both of them—of intimacy and self-conscious, polite formality. They had taken turns in the large, open stone bathing area at the end of the dormitory, each staying discreetly in the cell as the other stood under the biting cold water. They had shared soap. They had shared a rough towel. A tension had developed between them that hadn’t been there before, a nervous anticipation of what might or might not come next. A Frenchman or an Italian would have made a pass. Bennett made toast.

Anna looked at him as he frowned with concentration at the hunks of bread slowly browning on the cast-iron hob. His hair, still wet from the shower, was combed straight back from his tanned forehead, giving him the look of a sepia photograph from the 1920s. She could imagine him in baggy whites, swinging a wooden tennis racket. He speared the bread with the point of a knife and flipped the slices over. “Tricky stuff, toast,” he said, looking up at her. “It’s all a question of timing.”

“Isn’t everything?”

Bennett looked at her for a moment without speaking, and realized he was smiling at her smiling at him. “Yes,” he said. “I suppose it is.”

The water in the pan bubbled, and Anna looked away. “Where do you think monks keep their coffee?”

They had breakfast on a stone bench in the shade of the cloisters and considered the next move. It was one thing to demand a million dollars; it was quite another to work out a safe way to collect it. Poe would have a man
watching for the pickup, probably more than one. A public place, such as a railway station, would provide temporary security, but the minute they left, they’d be at risk. An isolated spot, with no witnesses, would be even more dangerous. As the morning wore on, and possibilities were examined and discarded, they began to feel that they had maneuvered themselves into a cage.

With a final mechanical shudder, a tractor came to a stop by the cypress trees. Brother Yves, who was on cooking duty, had returned early from the vineyard to prepare the midday meal. Bennett watched the monk hurry up the path to the entrance, mopping his head with a large spotted handkerchief. It must be damned hot in that habit, Bennett thought. And then it came to him.

He got to his feet and began to pace, head down, his hands clasped in front of him. “Anna,” he said, “listen to this. It could work. We tell Poe to leave the money in a church—there are dozens around here, all shapes and sizes, most of them deserted except on Sundays.”

Anna frowned. “I don’t know,” she said. “A church would be good, but they’d catch us coming out.” She saw the expression on Bennett’s face. “Wouldn’t they?”

“That’s just it. We won’t go in. We’ll get Father Gilbert to pick up the cash for us. They’re expecting a man and a woman. They won’t look twice at a monk going into a church.”

Anna nodded slowly, then raised an imaginary hat. “Bennett, you crook, it’s a pleasure doing business with you.”

“We need a guidebook for church-spotters. Come on. We’ll get one in Forcalquier.”

——

With a guide to churches and historic monuments open on the table between them, they sat in a café behind the Place du Bourget and drank
rosé
and allowed themselves to feel hopeful. Bennett had selected three or four possible churches, which they would reconnoiter in the afternoon. They’d choose one, call Poe, and then deal with the task of persuading Father Gilbert to become an ecclesiastical bagman. And this, unfortunately for Bennett, was where Anna began to have misgivings.

“It’s an awful lot of cash,” she said. “And you hardly know the guy. Do you trust him?”

Bennett stared into his glass. He himself had said that Gilbert was an old scoundrel, a tax dodger, a businessman masquerading as a monk. He remembered trusting Brynford-Smith with the boat, and sighed. “Well, I’m not sure.”

“That means you don’t.” Anna shook her head. “And neither do I. Not with a million bucks.”

Deflation set in. Bennett finished his wine, and signaled the waiter for more. The café was beginning to fill up for lunch—shopgirls in their summer dresses, beefy, broad-faced men taking the obligatory two-hour break from their offices, a pair of off-duty
gendarmes
. The smell of garlic and steak and frying potatoes came from the
kitchen, and a scrawny dog stopped in the doorway, his nose twitching hopefully before the waiter cursed him away.

Anna suddenly snorted with laughter, and covered her mouth with her hand.

“Now what?” said Bennett. “It was almost a great idea.”

“It still is. Don’t you see? All we need is the right monk, a reliable monk, the kind of monk you’d trust with a million dollars. And I happen to know just the guy.” She leaned forward and put her hand on his shoulder. “Brother Bennett.” She laughed again. “I love it.”

——

Polluce and Captain Bonfils took an inside table at the back of the Poisson d’Argent, one of the half-dozen restaurants clustered around the Palais des Festivals, and ordered Ricard. Bonfils was known here, known to use the restaurant as a setting for confidential business discussions. The owner, who valued the patronage of the police in these dangerous times, would make sure that the tables next to them would remain empty. They could talk.

“Chin.”
Bonfils sipped his pastis, his eyes, from years of habit, never still, always watching the room. His progress from a uniformed
flic
on the Croisette to a captain in a suit had been rapid—helped, it had to be admitted, by Polluce and his friends in the Union. Strings had been pulled. Occasionally, such favors had to be repaid.
This was normal. He looked at the dapper old man across the table and inclined his head respectfully. “You have come from Marseille in this heat. The matter is urgent,
non?
”

Polluce studied his manicure for a moment while he decided how much it was necessary to tell. “Urgent, and perhaps delicate. Something valuable has been stolen from my friends and me, something very valuable. It is essential that it’s recovered.” He traced a line with his finger down the sweating glass in front of him. “Luckily, we know who has it, a man and a woman, traveling together. By tonight you shall have their passports.” He gave Bonfils a thin smile. “Useful clues, I would imagine.”

“If they’re genuine. Of course, Monsieur Polluce, you realize that with the EEC, it is not as good for us as it used to be—Italy, Spain, Belgium, they can drive straight through, no controls.” Bonfils took a pack of Gitanes from his pocket and broke the filter off a cigarette before lighting it. “But the passports will be helpful, certainly. Are they French?”

“One British, one American.”

Bonfils clicked his tongue against his teeth. He hated anything involving foreigners. One had to be so careful. He remembered the young
connard
who had been picked up as a vagabond last year and thrown in the can. It turned out that his uncle was the German ambassador, and the desk sergeant had been hauled over the coals and put back on the beat. “That’s not good—unless they’re French residents. You know? Registered. If they are, they’ll be in the
computers, and we can pull everything, from the date of birth to the color of their car.”

“And of course, you’ll have their photographs.” Polluce leaned forward, tapping his finger on the table for emphasis. “They must be found. It would be most beneficial for your career, I can promise you.”

BENNETT hadn’t set foot in a church for years. Like many Englishmen of his background, he felt that any business he might have with the Almighty could be conducted with a minimum number of appearances at the head office. He paused inside the doorway to accustom himself to the unfamiliar surroundings.

Memories often return through the nose. As he inhaled the odor of sanctity, a blend of ancient dust, mildewed prayer books, and crumbling stone, Bennett was taken back instantly and vividly to his school days. He remembered Sunday mornings spent fidgeting on hard pews while the chaplain ranted from the pulpit, delivering impassioned warnings about the sins of the flesh that served only to inflame the curiosity of his youthful flock. Bennett’s father, a man who preferred funerals to weddings—“Shorter service, and you don’t have to send a present”—had provided a poor spiritual example on his infrequent visits to the school. These had ended one day after he informed the chaplain, over a glass of tepid sherry, that religion was responsible for more war, torture, death,
and misery than anything else in recorded history. Bennett had then enjoyed a brief period of fame as the only boy whose father had ever been expelled from the school.

He shook his head to clear away the ghosts, and started to assess the church’s suitability as a drop zone. He would be arriving and leaving on foot; they needed to find a church that was not too isolated from its environment, one that didn’t require a long, exposed walk while clutching a million dollars. On the other hand, a busy church, filled with pious but sharp-eyed and curious worshipers, would be equally risky. This one certainly wasn’t right. He called across to Anna, who was studying a stained-glass window depicting the mortification of a backcountry saint. “I don’t think this is it, do you? It’s too small. Maybe we should go for a cathedral.”