Siege at the Villa Lipp (22 page)

Still, he had been able to get a look at both cars by waiting for the headlights of the occasional passing car to show them up. Each had two persons in it, though of what sex he had not been able to see, and each had a local Alpes Maritimes registration. Each also had its front wheels on full left lock. In addition, both on the lower road and the upper, the places at which the cars were parked were where the roads widened slightly. If you wanted to park on those roads for any ordinary reason - you wanted a smoke and a chat, you wanted to neck or eat a sandwich - those were the places you would logically choose. Not as logically, perhaps, if you wanted to mount a simple surveillance operation against the Villa Lipp because your view of it would be so restricted; but if you wanted to prevent any of the occupants leaving the place without your knowing or, if you wanted to prevent their leaving by car altogether, you were in exactly the right position. You had the lower gateway under observation if they tried leaving on foot, and with your two cars on the upper road you could foil any attempt at a get-away by road simply by starting up, driving four metres and then standing on the brakes. If you kept your ears open for the sound of engines from below, you could have the road blocked on both sides of the entrance before the escaping cars could reach it.

And, of course, we, or rather Melanie, could be imagining things.

I would not have blamed Yves in the slightest if he had thought that possibility as being one at least worthy of discussion. In fact, he did not even hint at it. He appeared to respect Melanie’s instincts as much as he respected his own.

‘One parked car would be of no importance,’ he said; ‘two would be an interesting coincidence. Three parked cars at this time and in those places and postures I will not accept as explainable in terms other than those of surveillance until I hear that explanation. Then if I am able to snap my fingers and say, “Of course, how stupid of me,” I will go to bed. Meanwhile, I must continue to ask obvious questions. Who are they? Who are they working for? What are their orders? Why are they behaving as they are?’

‘There’s one other explanation you might try on yourself,’ I said. ‘This is a rich neighbourhood. Oh, I
know there may not be much in the way of valuables in the Villa Lipp, but one or two of the pictures ought to be marketable. The owner is known to be absent. They could be a gang casing the joint.’

‘Then why aren’t they doing so? Why are they just sitting there, all six of them, where they can see so very little but can so easily be seen? And why six? Locking a house over before deciding to rob it is a one-man job and he comes in the daytime with credentials from an insurance company. One is forced to conclude that these people mean to advertise their presence, that they mean to be seen.’

‘Perhaps they’re selling protection. There used to be a gang along this coast who’d strip your house of everything, including the carpets and kitchen stove, if you didn’t pay them.’

This was ignored. Yves had turned to Melanie again.

‘I might not have gone for a walk,’ she said doubtfully.

‘But they
did
see you?’ he asked.

‘Oh yes.’

‘Did they see that you had found them interesting or suspect?’

‘I doubt it. I can’t be sure.’

‘Then I think,’ he said, ‘that we should see what happens when they know that they have been spotted.’ He thought for a moment. ‘Patron, either they are very close in because they intend to do something violent almost at once and will not allow anyone to escape, or they are applying psychological pressure to make us leave.’

‘They might be out there to make us run, but I
don’t think they could be meaning to do anything violent unless they knew that, apart from your revolver, we aren’t armed. There aren’t enough of them. It really comes back to your first question. Who are they?’

‘I could go and ask them,’ Melanie said.

She does sometimes say stupid things. ‘All you’d get would be a blank stare,’ I
said.

‘I think,’ said Yves, tactful as ever, ‘that there may be a simpler way of letting them know that we are aware of them. We could just close the entrance gates. They can be seen from where the cars are parked.’

‘Do they close? With all those shrubs growing through and around them, I would say that nobody ever closed them. They’re probably rusted open.’

Yves tried not to look reproachful. ‘When we moved in, Paul, oiling the hinges was one of the first things I did. The lower road gate also.’

‘Sorry. Can they be locked? I know there are plenty of ways of getting into this place, but if one were going to be violent, charging in by car with a bunch of armed hoodlums would be the most intimidating.’

“There is a chain in the garage. I could arrange things so that undoing the chain from the closed gates would be a noisy operation.’

“Then do that, please. The lower road gate, too, if you can.’

‘That has a lock and a key.’

He went off. I heard the distant sound of the front gates closing and then a rattling of chain. Almost immediately afterward, Melanie, who had been sitting by an open window in a room nearer the driveway, came to report that, on the gates being closed, both cars had at once started up and been driven away.

After Yves had dealt with the lower road gate, he returned to report that, on his opening and slamming it noisily before locking it, the third car had also left. He had one additional item to report. Just before he had done his opening and slamming act, he had heard someone’s voice. It had been his impression that the voice had been coming through a small loud-speaker of the kind you would expect on a miniature walkie-talkie set, and that the set had been in the hands of the car passenger. He had glimpsed for a moment a short, chromium-plated whip-antenna, of the kind used on such sets, sticking at an angle through the passenger-side window space. The words he had heard the voice uttering had been: ‘ . . . now. Okay. Out.’

The three words had been spoken in English, though by what nationality of English-speaker he firmly declined to guess at. All that seemed likely was that he had been hearing the end of a conversation between an occupant of one of the two cars which had been on the upper road and the passenger in the single car on the lower. The rest of the conversation had taken place while he had been moving from the main gate down to the one in the wall.

‘So,’ he concluded. ‘What is the next move, Paul?’

‘You could get some sleep. We all could.’

‘Someone must keep watch in case there is an alarm to be sounded. You have our guests to deal with in the morning and so you must be rested. If had better be me who mounts guard. Melanie could relieve me for an hour, perhaps, so that I don’t begin to see things that aren’t there.’

‘All right,’ said Melanie. ‘At two o’clock, say?’

‘Okay, Paul?’

‘Very well. Divide the watch between you as you like. I shall have to take a sleeping-pill now, I’m afraid, but I shall set my clock for six-thirty unless either of you wakes me before. I’ll also monitor our guests’ get-together at seven-thirty. If anything of interest happens outside, one of you will let me know, eh?’

In spite of the pill I had a poor night.

This wasn’t because of the watchers outside the villa; at least, not directly because of them. Yves had brushed aside what I had said about protection racketeers, but that was the explanation I had settled for in my own mind; and I
had done so because, at that point, I had believed it to be the most likely one.

There
are
such racketeers operating on the French Riviera, and, as their demands are not really exorbitant, it is, especially for foreigners, simpler to pay up than to take moralistic stands and suffer the consequences. The latter can be tiresome as well as costly. A German I know who has a house on Cap Ferrat, but who refused to pay a few thousand francs for protection, had the whole place emptied while he was away, the gang having brought in removal vans to do the job. The police received the owner’s complaint sympathetically but without surprise. These things sometimes happened. After such forceful demonstrations the protection people obviously had much less trouble collecting dues, even from hard cases like my German friend. Though I could see that a man of Yves’s temper might well find it unacceptable, my assumption that, with the cost of everything going up, it had become customary to put the bite on summer-season tenants as well as owners seemed reasonable enough. I quite expected to receive by mail the following morning, in addition to the good news that a protection service was available, a subscription form to fill in and return with my cheque.

So, it wasn’t worry that kept me awake, but my old trouble; the inability to wait before trying to solve a problem until all the available facts are in. Strange as it may seem, the problem that nagged, and went on nagging long after its solution had ceased to matter, was that of figuring out how best to use the presence of external enemies to get Krom and his witnesses out of my hair.

At seven, I went down to the kitchen, complained to the cook that indigestion from the dinner the night before had kept me awake, and appropriated the pot of coffee she had made for her husband and herself. Along with it, I had one of the petit-pains just delivered by the village bakery. The husband told me that during the night some unauthorized person had shut the outer gates. I said that it had been I who had shut them in order to keep out stray dogs. Obviously, and not surprisingly, he thought I was off my head.

I had one cup of coffee in my bedroom and took a second through to the garage loft.

Krom’s seven-thirty meeting started more or less on time. Connell was the first to arrive.

After they had exchanged greetings and told one another how tired they had been and how well they had slept, Krom said: ‘I chose this room for our meeting because it is free of listening devices.’

‘You know that for a fact, eh, Professor?’

‘I have examined the whole room carefully myself.’

‘And didn’t find a thing. Ah, well . . . ‘ Connell left his doubts at that. ‘Do you think we could get a cup of coffee if we rang that bell there? Until I’ve had coffee in the morning, I don’t feel altogether . . . ‘

He broke off as Dr Henson arrived. More good mornings. She, too, had slept well.

Krom said: ‘Coffee would be desirable, but I think it is more important that we get down to business before we meet Firman. I take it that you have both read this paper? Yes? Then, I would like first to hear your general views on it.’

‘On the whole true? On the whole false? Or on the whole half-and-half?’ asked Henson.

‘That for a start, yes.’

‘I say half-and-half.’

Connell said: ‘So do I, but I can’t make up my mind which half is which. I’m hoping for help there from you, Professor. The part about the actual confrontation a: the crematorium must be true because you were there and saw it. But how did you actually come to be there? It would help a bit if we could now be told, I think.’

‘It would indeed,’ Henson’s voice.

Krom cleared his throat. ‘This will all, of course, be in my book, but I think I can trust you two.’

He could have said right out that, if they dared repeal as much as a word, he would arrange slow and painful deaths for them, but his tone conveyed the message plainly enough.

Henson uttered a strange sound which was probably an involuntary giggle quickly masked by a cough.

‘That’s what we’re here for, Professor,’ said Connell. He managed suddenly to sound like the sheriff of Bodge City in a television western.

Krom hesitated, unsure how to take the performance.

Then, deciding to ignore it, he went ahead. ‘I had obtained the permission of the Federal judicial authorities in Berne to look into the background of a number of cases of blackmail or, to be more precise, extortion, involving persons and corporate entities who banked in Switzerland. These cases had been brought to my notice by an international private enquiry agent who had sometimes made use of tips I have been able to give him. This time, as well as giving
me
information he thought I should have, he sought advice. These cases of extortion in which he had been asked to act, sometimes in a defensive role, sometimes as a negotiator, covered a period of three years or so. The cases all had two elements in common. They involved tax evasion or breaches of exchange-control regulations under a variety of national jurisdictions, and they involved an organization calling itself a debt-collection agency with branches in most of the countries of Western Europe. Unfortunately, he had had little success to report to his various clients. Given a defensive role, there was nothing he could do except advise them to pay up. Told to negotiate, he encountered nothing but blank walls. He realized quite early on that he was dealing with a front, a facade, in this collection agency, but that those behind it were both well informed and impeccably disciplined. His clients, on the other hand, were mostly, as he put it, ‘at sixes-and-sevens’ from the moment they became victims until they eventually decided to pay. None of them was ever able to deny the allegations of evasion or breach of regulations, at least not for long, and only one or two had the will or gall to fight anyway. There are always a few men and women who prefer fighting to surrendering, even in a cause they well know to be defective, even when they know that they cannot win or draw, that they have to lose. One can only marvel at such lunacy.’

It might have been Carlo speaking.

For a moment or two I
found myself wondering what sort of a man Krom would have become without the burden of that overweight super-ego he carries around. What would have happened to all the ‘anarchy’ of which he is so afraid? Might he not have become one of our less scrupulous competitors?

An agreeable day-dream, but still a day-dream; he was on again about the troubles of his fat-headed friend, the private enquiry agent, who had unwittingly caused me so much inconvenience. I made myself pay attention.

‘It was these diehards among his clients about whom he was specially concerned. And not simply because well-publicized losers were, if known to be his clients, bad for business. He feared too - as we shall see, rightly - that such unbalanced persons could easily decide to take the law into their own hands and commit criminal acts of violence. He wanted the whole matter properly investigated by some responsible police authority.
He
could do nothing more. The essential initiatives, he though, could only be taken in Switzerland, though obviously not by him. With my academic connections there I might do better.’