20

  “THE glasses and hats. Take them off.”

  The gendarmes, brawny in their summer blues, stood in a loose semicircle in front of the car. The opaque mirror lenses of their sunglasses—motorcycle cop sunglasses, impenetrable and sinister—glinted beneath the peaks of their képis. As Anna and Bennett stood bareheaded and blinking against the glare, one of the gendarmes took a sheet of paper from his shirt pocket, unfolded it, compared the photographs with the faces, and grunted.

  “Bon. No doubt about it. Make sure they’re clean.” Probing, suspicious hands, moving slowly and methodically, made their tours of inspection, and came up with nothing more lethal than Bennett’s car keys. The senior officer jerked his head in the direction of the van. “Get in.” He turned to the youngest gendarme. “Desfosses—you follow us in their car.”

  The van was a Saturday-night-roundup special, with a heavy steel-mesh partition separating the front compartment from the passengers. There were no seats in the rear. A bar ran down the center of the ceiling at head height, to which anyone considered dangerous or unruly could be handcuffed. As the driver pulled away, Anna stumbled, and caught hold of Bennett’s arm for support. They looked at each other, eyes glazed with shock. It had happened so quickly. Now it was all over. Above the crackle and whine of static, they could hear the driver talking to headquarters. “The Englishman and the girl, we just picked them up. No problems. Get the medals ready, eh? Tell the captain. We’ll be there in ten minutes.”

  The van picked up speed as it left Apt and took the N100 heading west. The three gendarmes in the front lit cigarettes and started to argue about Marseille’s chances in the next soccer season. Anna and Bennett might have been two sacks of potatoes in the back, bundles of no particular interest to be delivered.

  “What are we going to say?”

  Bennett shook his head. “I wish I knew. As little as possible, I suppose. Plead ignorance. Demand to see the British consul. I don’t know.”

  “How about telling them the truth?” Anna thought for a moment. “All we’ve done is try to recover stolen property and give it back to the owner.”

  “Give it?”

  “Well, something like that.”

  They fell into a dejected silence for the remainder of the journey, and there was nothing cheering about their destination. The gendarmerie at Les Beaumettes, despite its window boxes bright with flowers, had the same effect on Bennett as all official institutions. It made him feel guilty. And this time, he was.

  They were taken to a windowless room at the back of the building, where they were asked to confirm that their names were Hersh, Anna, American, and Bennett, Luciano, English. Their monosyllabic answers were noted down. They were locked in and left alone to wait. An uneasy hour passed.

  For the captain of the gendarmerie, it had been an hour of triumph, an hour to be savored. Moreau, over in Cannes, had been most generous with his compliments about the diligence and alertness of the men from Les Beaumettes. The captain had done his best to be modest. Part of it was always luck, he’d said, but he allowed himself to admit that he’d trained his lads well: check, check, and check again. There was no substitute for dogged, routine police work. And young Desfosses, barely dry behind the ears, had proved it. After examining the plates of every white Peugeot 205 he could find, more than thirty of them, he’d hit the jackpot.

  Best of all, from the captain’s point of view, a helicopter was on the way from Cannes to pick up the two suspects and relieve him of any further responsibility. An uncomfortable thing, responsibility, particularly if foreigners were involved in what seemed to be an important case. One never knew. He looked at his watch, glad that he’d tipped off the boys in Cavaillon. The photographer and the reporter should have arrived by now, ready to record a dramatic moment in the fight against crime.

  The captain was well aware of the stimulating effect of publicity on a police officer’s career, and this, no doubt about it, would be front-page stuff. Pity it was going to be too late for the Sunday edition. He went over to the small mirror hanging on the back of his office door. Should he wear his uniform jacket? Perhaps not—best to be seen as the working cop, indifferent to appearances. He made some minor adjustments to his mustache, and went outside to add his authority to the controlled chaos taking place on the N100.

  The problem had been finding somewhere for the helicopter to land. The hill behind the gendarmerie was impossible, the vineyard on the opposite side of the road being sacred and untouchable. And so the decision had been made to block off the road in both directions so that the helicopter could touch down within twenty yards of the building. The N100 being an important trunk road, and Saturday being a market day, the ensuing dislocation of traffic was, as the captain noted approvingly, impressionant.

  Lines of cars and trucks and mobile homes stretched away in both directions under a wavering cloud of fumes. Several drivers had left their cars and walked up to the cordon of bright-orange cones that blocked the road, hopeful of seeing the remains of a spectacular accident. On finding the tarmac disappointingly free of bloodstains and wreckage, they demanded information from the gendarmes, who took considerable officious satisfaction in telling them nothing. There was much gesticulating. Shoulders, hands, and voices were raised. Tempers frayed audibly.

  All of which was recorded by the reporter and photographer, who, acting under instructions from the captain, had installed themselves on the roof of the building, the better to appreciate the vue panoramique of the great clog of vehicles that extended as far as the eye could see. And now, right on time, thrashing its way in from the east, came the helicopter.

  It hovered, dropped, and settled itself gingerly, as if it were testing the temperature of the tarmac. With a nod in the direction of the photographer—it would be tragic if he missed the moment—the captain gave orders for the suspects to be brought out. He personally led the escort group, giving the camera a long, tough, crime-fighting glare en passant.

  Anna and Bennett felt as though they had stumbled into a war zone. Surrounded by armed and uniformed men, they walked to the squat military helicopter, its olive-drab paintwork flat and dull in the sunlight. Inside, more armed and uniformed men directed them to two steel-framed seats in the back and strapped them in. The helicopter lifted off, and tilted back toward the east. Below them, they could see the diminishing figures of gendarmes removing the road cones and beginning to wave the traffic through. Nobody had spoken to them. They had barely spoken to each other. There was nothing much to say.

  ——

  The front page of Saturday’s edition of Le Provençal had attracted greater interest than usual among certain of its readers in the Vaucluse. The entire village of Saint-Martin was in a stew of speculation about the activities of its English resident. The table of old men in the café had clubbed together and, for the first time in Léon’s memory, actually paid for a newspaper. They huddled over it like buzzards around dead meat, shaking their heads and sucking what remained of their teeth. Foreigners. An unpredictable bunch, foreigners, more than likely up to no good. What had he stolen, this Bennett?

  Papin at the post office, the one-man intelligence bureau, had his theories, which he was more than happy to share with his clientele, who were more than happy to listen. Drugs, he said, with the conviction that comes from total ignorance. A quiet enough fellow, the Englishman, but appearances were often deceptive. Still waters ran deep. Beh oui. It was undoubtedly an affair of narcotics. Ordinary, everyday burglary, of the kind that flourished in that sink of iniquity, that cesspit of depravity on the coast, would never have made the front page.

  Georgette, of course, her intimate domestic connections with the fugitive giving her a certain cachet, was assumed to know more than anyone else, which she did. The case buried under the gravel in her cave was, she was certain, the stolen item. Having closed her shutters and locked her door against the insufferable curiosity of her neighbors—why couldn’t they mind their own business?—she disinterred the case and spent an extremely frustrating half hour trying to find the combination that would reveal the secret. She was quite sure that her Englishman, her little milor, hadn’t committed anything more serious than a misdemeanor; it wasn’t in his nature. And yet … well, there was never an omelet without some broken eggs. She shook the case in frustration, hoping to hear a clue—the chink of coins, the rich rattle of jewelry—but the contents, whatever they were, had been too tightly packed. She knelt on the floor of the cave, put the case back in the shallow depression she had scooped out, and smoothed the gravel level. She would try again later, when there was less chance of being disturbed by people with nothing better to do than pry.

  ——

  Julian Poe, whose taste in newspapers ran more to the Wall Street Journal than Le Provençal, had read the piece on Anna and Bennett with great interest but no particular alarm. After all, he knew where they were. He had them bottled up in Haute-Provence, under close surveillance. Gérard had called in to say that the signals from the homing device were still coming through, regular as a heartbeat. Nevertheless, this waiting was tiresome. If they hadn’t made a move by nightfall, he’d send Gérard in to pick them up and bring them in. As a rule, he avoided violence, which he considered a crude last resort. But his patience wasn’t infinite, and he had decided that Bennett should spend a few hours with Shimo, an irresistibly persuasive man when he put his mind to it. By this time tomorrow, both the case and the money would be back where they belonged. With the sense of satisfaction that comes from a problem neatly solved, Poe turned his attention to Tuzzi, and revenge. That Italian clod needed to be taught a lesson.

  ——

  Two police cars were waiting at Mandelieu airport to meet the helicopter, and the ride into Cannes, with traffic melting away in obedience to the blare of klaxons, was brief. Anna and Bennett, still dazed by the speed with which they had become official captured criminals, still bewildered by high-security treatment more suited to terrorists than to amateur thieves, clutched hands for comfort in the back of the car, their emotions deep-frozen. They might have been driving to their own execution.

  They were taken into what is euphemistically known as the reception area of police headquarters in Cannes—hard-edged and hostile, with a whiff of fear hanging in the air—and booked. Pockets were emptied, prints taken; they were processed like two pieces of human flotsam. The desk sergeant reached up to the bulletin board where their photographs were on display, ripped the sheet down, and tossed it into a bin. Another hunt over, another case solved.

  Captain Bonfils, casual in blue jeans and open-neck shirt, came through from his office in the back and stood scowling at them. If the cretins had to be caught, why couldn’t they have let it happen on a sacré weekday, instead of screwing up his weekend? He motioned them over with an irritable flick of his hand, and led them down the corridor to Moreau’s office.

  ——

  Moreau thought of himself, with some justification, as a man with a gift for cross-examination. Over the many years and thousands of hours he had spent squeezing information out of criminals, sifting lies from half-truths, coaxing confessions, he had developed his technique, refined the rhythm of his questioning, sharpened his skills of observation. The instinctive clenching of a hand, the sudden blink of an eye, the involuntary shift of position in a chair—these said as much to him as words. He thought of interrogation as a form of chess, a gradual, often indirect, series of moves that ultimately led to a position of no escape. Checkmate. He liked to take his time, something Bonfils seemed incapable of learning. Bonfils, now sitting over to one side, notebook on one knee, was essentially a shouter, a threatened a man who wore his violence on his face.

  Moreau studied the couple sitting opposite him. Good-looking, he thought, both of them, but showing signs of strain around the mouth and eyes. That was encouraging. He took his pipe from his mouth, and smiled.

  “So, Monsieur Bennett. It appears you no longer have the Rolls-Royce.”

  Bennett hadn’t known what to expect, but certainly not this. “The Rolls-Royce?” His mouth was dry, his voice thin and defensive. “What Rolls-Royce?”

  Moreau pointed with the stem of his pipe at the objects arranged on his desk: passports, cash and credit cards, and, attached to a well-worn leather-and-enamel fob decorated with the RR symbol, Bennett’s car keys.

  “Oh, that. Just a present from someone in London, a long time ago.”

  Moreau turned to Anna, and his expression became sympathetic. “I must offer you my condolences, mademoiselle. I understand that your mother is not at all well.”

  Anna felt exactly what Moreau wanted her to feel: wrong-footed, shaken. “How do you know?”

  “We have telephones. I have very helpful colleagues in New York. Information is so easy to obtain nowadays, now that the world has shrunk. Personal privacy hardly exists anymore. It’s terrible—isn’t that right, Bonfils?” The master glanced over at the novice.

  Shut up and get on with it, you pompous old connard. “That’s right, chief. Terrible.”

  Moreau suddenly seemed to find the contents of his pipe engrossing, scraping the bowl with a tool the shape of a narrow spoon, tapping the charred fragments into an ashtray, blowing gently through the mouthpiece. Apart from the small sounds he made, the room was still. Bonfils glowered in his corner. Anna and Bennett exchanged puzzled looks. Was this why they’d been rushed to Cannes—to watch a police inspector servicing his pipe? Bennett cleared his throat. Moreau ignored him and began feeding his pipe with tobacco from a wrinkled oilskin pouch.

  At last, Bennett could stand the silence no longer. “Could you tell us why we’ve been arrested? What have we done?”

  Moreau looked up with an air of faint surprise, as though he’d forgotten they were there. “Why don’t you tell me?”

  Bennett thought for a moment before giving what he hoped was a harmless answer. “Well, we were asked to pick up a case from this boat.”

  “Asked by whom?”

  “An old chum of Mademoiselle Hersh. Actually, it was a job. We were going to be paid.”

  “By the old chum.”

  “That’s right.”

  “And the old chum, who is this?”

  “A man called Poe. Julian Poe.”

  “Ah yes.” Moreau returned to his pipe, using three matches before he was satisfied the tobacco was drawing evenly. “And this case that was on the boat, the case that Monsieur Poe was paying you to collect. What was in it?”

  Bennett hesitated before the first lie. “It was locked. I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know.” Moreau picked up the two passports. “You left these on the boat.” He put them in a drawer of his desk. “Careless of you. Did you leave the boat unexpectedly? In a hurry?” He took a bunch of keys from his pocket and locked the passports in the desk drawer.

  “Must have forgotten them.” The second lie.

  “I see. What time was it when you left the boat? Approximately.”

  “Oh, I don’t know. After dinner sometime.”

  “With the case?”

  “Yes.”

  “Now, that would have been—what? Two days ago?

  Three days ago?”

  Bennett honestly couldn’t remember. “Something like that, yes.”

  “And then, of course, you took the case to Monsieur Poe, and he paid you.”

  “Well, we haven’t actually had a chance to—”

  “Bennett.” Anna interrupted him, shaking her head. “Forget it. This is crazy. It won’t work.”

  Moreau peered at her through a cloud of smoke and nodded with approval. “What a very sensible young woman you are. Now then, Monsieur Bennett, we’ll start again. Before you do, I’m going to tell you certain things that should influence your statement.” He took the pipe from his mouth and pointed the stem at Bennett. “One: the case contains a formula for the cultivation of truffles, which I’m sure you know. Two: you stole the case.”

  “But it had already been—”

  Moreau held up his hand for silence. “I’m simply telling you the facts as we know them. You can add to our knowledge, and for your own sakes, I hope you will. At the moment, both of you are under suspicion of robbery. I have no doubt we shall be able to prove the case against you, but the preparations will take several months, and naturally during that time you will be in jail.” Moreau fussed with his matches, and relit his pipe. “Then you will be sentenced—and here there are circumstances that are not in your favor. Once the French government takes an interest in a case, as it has done on this occasion, it is no longer a simple question of common theft. It becomes more serious and will obviously carry a more serious sentence.”

  “But that’s outrageous. It’s got nothing to do with the government.”

  “It has now.” Moreau smiled, a thin-lipped, humorless smile. “I see from your records that you’ve lived in France for many years, Monsieur Bennett. I’m sure you will have noticed that the authorities here have considerable powers—powers which some foreigners feel are quite extreme. Very useful to us in the police, I must admit.”

  Moreau allowed the threat a few moments to sink in. He had exaggerated a little, but only a little. The two faces opposite him were looking drawn and dispirited. He felt he was almost there. Now for the promise of a more pleasant alternative.

  “Should you decide to cooperate with us fully, it can be arranged for charges to be dropped. Misunderstandings occur from time to time, as we all know, and this would be treated as an unfortunate case of mistaken identity, with official apologies for any inconvenience.”

  Bennett looked at Anna. All he wanted to do was take her away, and leave Poe and Tuzzi and the bloody French police to argue among themselves. “Well? What’s it to be?” He touched her cheek with his hand. “I’ll go along with you.”

  All the air seemed to leave her body in a single, sobbing sigh. She leaned over, turning away from Moreau, and rested her head on Bennett’s shoulder, the picture of defeat. Faintly, very faintly, he heard—he thought he heard—her whisper, barely louder than breath against his neck: “Don’t tell him about the bag.”