Francesca Read online

  Francesca

  Stephen Marlowe

  A MysteriousPress.com

  Open Road Integrated Media Ebook

  For MAGGIE and AL

  chapter one

  A CREW of workmen were busy sliding lightweight plastic walls into place and fussing with glass brick space-dividers when I stepped off the elevator. In spotless white coveralls and blue or black berets, they looked more like beatnik surgeons than construction stiffs. They worked neatly, cleanly, quietly and efficiently. Why shouldn’t they? After all, this was Switzerland.

  Half a dozen pale and narrow-shouldered specimens were hunched over drafting tables drawing graphs; they ignored my arrival the way only mathematicians or professional gamblers can. They were not professional gamblers. One of them was busy feeding data cards into a small computer that lit up like a pinball machine.

  I went past them to the one finished inner wall of the suite. In the middle of it was a door that looked like a giant playing card, with the letter A and a spade in the upper left- and lower right-hand corners. In the middle of the door, in plain black lettering against the dazzling white playing-card surface, was the name AXEL SPADE. Under that, in French, German and English, were three words, all meaning the same thing: Conseil—Ratschlag—Advice.

  Axel Spade did not give advice to the lovelorn. He did not give advice on the market, or on snow conditions in the ski resorts across the border in French High Savoy, or on what number to call if you wanted a tooth pulled or a suit made to measure or an artful roll in the hay. He had an office on Wall Street in New York, in addition to this one here on Rue du Rhône in Geneva, and you bought his time, if you could afford it, at a cool hundred bucks or four hundred thirty Swiss francs per half hour. Since that is my going rate per day, when I’m working, I was impressed. I was even more impressed by the sort of advice Axel Spade gave.

  Axel Spade gave finanacial advise to smugglers and international criminals.

  The playing-card door opened out toward me just as I was reaching for the knob, and I stepped aside to let a woman pass. The men at the drafting tables looked up from their graph paper, the workmen removed their berets, shuffling their feet and gawking, and even the computer seemed to light up brighter than before.

  She was a tall and poised number in a breast- and hip-hugging cornflower-blue suit that exactly matched the color of her big and beautiful eyes. A silver mink was draped casually over one arm. Her titian-colored hair was thick and long, spilling in gentle waves halfway down her back. She wore a fluff of silk at her throat, the same color as her hair. The titian hair, the poise, the wry but sultry smile on her full red lips, the very white skin—Venice by way of Rome, I thought. But her classic profile, with almost no indent between brow and nose, was pure Greek.

  One of the workmen found a stub of pencil in a pocket of his coveralls and approached the dish shyly, holding out a scrap of paper. She signed her autograph, and he beamed and went back to his work, dropping a glass brick. She wiggled the cornflower blue skirt over to the elevator; at the same moment the door slid soundlessly back as if it had been waiting just for her. It slid silently shut, and she went down and out of the workmen’s lives, out of the mathematicians’ and the computer’s lives—but not out of mine.

  When I turned back to the big playing-card door, it was still ajar. A man stood there, short, broad of shoulder, dark, with a low hairline and sleek dark hair graying at the temples, and a suave and flashing white-toothed smile, as Continental as his business address.

  “Mr. Drum?” he said, looking up at me. “I see you are prompt. I appreciate that.” His accent was slight and hard to place. Middle Europe, with some years in the States, I guessed, but he probably had more countries in his background than I had fillings in my teeth.

  “Thank Swissair and Boeing,” I said as we shook hands and entered his office. “They flew on schedule.”

  “You have had time to check into a hotel?”

  “I’m at the Du Rhône across the river,” I said, and sat in a molded steel chair that looked as if it would be hell on the cossacks but was as comfortable as a feather mattress. From there I could see Axel Spade’s steel and linoleum desk as he eased himself behind it, opening the jacket of his Italian-cut mohair suit to remove two long panatella cigars from an inner pocket. He offered one to me while he went to work with a gold cutter on his own. I declined and lit a cigarette instead and stared past Spade at the green-tinted window-wall behind his head. A block away, over the low mansard roofs of the typical Genevois buildings, I could see a heavy mist on the surface of Lake Geneva. The headlights of cars crawling across Mont Blanc Bridge glowed in the mist. It was late afternoon of a dark and dismal day in early February.

  “You’re impressed by me,” Axel Spade said flatly. It wasn’t a question.

  “It isn’t every day I get to meet a guy wanted by the police in twenty countries—”

  “Twenty-six, to be quite precise,” Spade said with a faint and apologetic smile.

  “—but who’s free as a bird in Switzerland and the U.S.A.”

  “Please rest assured that I am equally impressed by you.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “You received my cable in Washington and flew here without knowing why I needed your services. I like a decisive man.”

  “Hell, you paid the fare. I needed a vacation anyway, and I was about to fly up to the Laurentians for some skiing when I got your cable. I hear the skiing’s pretty good in High Savoy,” I said, and smiled. He flashed his teeth at my understatement, too. “I brought my skis along.”

  “So you ski. Splendid, that is really splendid. Oddly enough, the work I have for you will take you into High Savoy.”

  “Right around here,” I told him, “is the time I’d better say I do all kinds of work a private dick can get, except two. I don’t handle divorce work, and I try to keep the cops happy. I’m in Europe pretty often, Mr. Spade.”

  “You feel it necessary to tell me that?”

  “You’ve been married five times, and from what I’ve read the fifth one’s on the rocks. And you said you were wanted by the police in twenty-six countries.”

  Spade laughed through his cigar smoke, coughed, took the cigar from his mouth, glared at it and said: “But this time, instead of being an accessory before or after the fact of smuggling or black-marketeering, I want to solve a crime.” His own statement seemed to surprise him, and he added: “You think that strange? Anything can happen in Geneva, Mr. Drum. Sooner or later it usually does.”

  “In my line of work I learned not to think anything is strange. What kind of crime?”

  Axel Spade stood up, turned his back on me and stared out through the green-tinted window-wall at the mansard roofs, the lake and the bridge. “The United States is my home,” he said slowly. “I have an American passport—I love my adopted country. Switzerland I also love; it is my second home, and I am welcome here as I am in America, because I have been careful not to commit, aid, or abet any crime in either country.” He sighed and told me very softly, “Until now.”

  Just then there were shouts, running footsteps and a loud thud in the outer office. Spade looked at me. I turned toward the door. It was jerked open and a man ran toward us, followed by two of Spade’s mathematicians. One of them got hold of the man’s black nylon windbreaker, but he broke loose and ran at us, waving his arms wildly and shouting, “Which one of you’s that sonofabitch Spade? Which one is it? Lemme at him, lemme get my hands on that cheap crook!”

  He was shouting almost incoherently, and his eyes had filled with tears of rage. He was only a kid, twenty-one or two, bare-headed and big, with sandy hair, freckles and a stubborn jaw. Spade hadn’t moved. Still swinging his arms wildly, the kid came at me. “Are you Spade?” he ranted. “I re
ad all about you in the Army and Air Force Times, buddy. I’m gonna make you eat your little old calculating machine.”

  His right fist shot past the side of my head. I caught his left and turned it and him, clamping a hammerlock between his shoulder blades. He craned his neck to glare at me, though it must have hurt his arm. I eased the pressure. He tried to writhe free but couldn’t. I could smell the beer on his breath. The tears spilled out of his eyes and down his freckled cheeks. “Take it easy, kid,” I said.

  “Six per cent interest,” he shouted. “Compounded quarterly. Private bank. Insured by Swiss underwriters. Who the hell in this man’s army could resist it? My life savings. Seventeen hundred bucks,” he cried. “How’m I gonna get married, you cheap crook? You think Mary’ll wait? There’s other guys in Peekskill. I want my money—I’ll get it out of your goddam hide.”

  The beer or his anger had given him courage. He said all that while he was still held helpless in the hammerlock, and he said more of same after I sat him down in a chair to wait for the cops. Pretty soon two gray-uniformed, municipal policemen came in, arriving as swiftly and efficiently as everything arrives in Switzerland. They knew Spade and were deferential to him. In French he told them, “Be gentle with the boy, he has had too much to drink. Give him a warning, no more.”

  Nodding but not liking it, the cops agreed. One of them told the kid to stand up. At the sight of their uniforms he had gone docile and limp in the chair. He stood, and the other cop rooted in his pockets and came up with U.S. Army leave papers. “Corporal Douglas Jones, on leave from Weisbaden, Germany,” the cop announced, having trouble with the name Jones, as all French-speaking people do, pronouncing it djo-nay. “It might be best, Monsieur Spade, if we were to contact the American consul.”

  “No. Just a warning. Then let him go.”

  “You haven’t seen the last of me,” Corporal Douglas Jones promised, shaking his fist as they dragged him out.

  Spade was upset. He looked glumly at his cigar, which had gone out. He gazed moodily through the window-wall at the mist, which was rising off the lake to swallow Mont Blanc Bridge. “Such a view when the mist goes,” he sighed. “The big hotels on the Quai, and the Jura Mountains rising behind. I may not see it much longer.”

  “Was Jones part of why I’m here?” I asked him.

  “Who can blame this young soldier? Seventeen hundred dollars, that’s a lot of money to him.”

  There were times, not too long ago, when it would have been a lot of money to me. I said nothing.

  Axel Spade relit his cigar. His nails were manicured but not tinted. His fingers were trembling. “In all,” he told me suddenly, “three million dollars are missing.”

  “Three million bucks. I’m listening.”

  But one of the phones on his desk rang. He listened with the receiver at his ear for a moment. “No, not Montevideo-Jakarta,” he said. “Try Manila-Bangkok. British sovereigns, no longer legal tender but a quarter ounce of gold in each. Twelve dollars in Manila, and you should be able to sell them for fifteen on the black market in Thailand.” He hung up, looking pleased with himself. Another phone rang, and he listened and said: “Fiat parts, Gibraltar-Málaga. There are more Fiats in Spain than anyplace else but Italy. They call them Seats. Same car. Your profit could run to two hundred per cent.” There were three more calls, one after the other. He told a man, with distaste and scorn, that he did not recommend beats for smugglers of heroin. He advised another man how to trade via Turkey and Malaya to exchange blocked Rumanian currency for British sterling. He said yes three times to another caller and no once. His eyes were glowing. This was his business. He loved it.

  “I receive incoming calls in the late afternoon,” he told me. “I’m afraid our interview will have to wait. Do you know the Brasserie Moderne on Rue Vieux College?”

  I said I could find it.

  “Then, at seven? They have splendid escargots and the best fondue in Switzerland. Three million dollars,” he said, and sighed. “If we don’t recover it, I’ll be a fugitive in Switzerland and America, too, or at least persona non grata.” He laughed harshly. “Maybe I could set up an office in Oubadougou.”

  “Where?” I said.

  “Oubadougou. That’s the capital of Upper Volta. A joke. Not a sad one, I hope.”

  The phone rang again. It was Hong Kong calling. I wouldn’t have been surprised if it was Mars.

  When I headed for the elevator, the mathematicians were still at work over their drafting boards. The computer winked at me.

  chapter two

  THE BRASSERIE MODERNE was a small bistro on Geneva’s left bank, up the street from the cathedral where Calvin had preached. It had paper tablecloths on which the waiters tallied their checks with soft lead pencils. In Switzerland that was a sure sign of good food, like a three-star Michelin rating in France.

  I picked up a stone shell in a pair of escargot-pincers, speared the snail with a small silver fork, chased it with white table wine, cold and dry but not acid, and heard Axel Spade say:

  “It is a piece of business routine for me to run a check on every subscriber to my Black Marketeer’s Quarterly. That is why, when I needed a private detective, I called on you. You subscribe. It surprised me, until I discovered you had once been in the FBI, and you sometimes handle assignments for government organizations in Washington when the situation is too delicate for their own agents. Also, you know your way around Europe.” He beamed at his own knowledge. “Time Magazine once did an article on you. ‘In these days of the organization man and brainstorming,’ he quoted, ‘a breed of lone wolves still rides the shrunken range of our planet in the tradition of the gun-toting heroes of the Western plains. More often than not, they are former FBI agents or T-men, usually based in Washington, happily working out of their hats and calling themselves private detectives because no other name has been invented for them. In reality they are footloose international adventurers, dedicated to justice as they see it, who make Lawrence of Arabia look like a guidebook-reading tourist. Such a man is Chester Drum, who has a small office on F Street in downtown Washington.’ Shall I go on?”

  I shook my head. “You can start the first Chester Drum fan club after we find your three million bucks. Let’s talk about them.”

  The waiter removed our plates of empty stone shells, lit the fondue-cooker and left us with a crock of bubbling cheese and wine and a basket of French bread. The brasserie wasn’t crowded. A few couples and one family group held down tables around us, and off in one corner, eating alone, was the ugliest man I have ever seen. He was small, with sparse, no-color hair, heavily-lidded eyes, a bitter mouth bracketed by deep grooves, a long and battered nose, one badly cauliflowered ear and a face covered all over with warts, like a cucumber. The brackets deepened around his mouth when he saw my inadvertent stare. I realized he was smiling. He saluted me mockingly with his fork, ducked his head and ate.

  “Since you subscribe to my Quarterly,” Axel Spade told me as he dipped bread into the fondue crock, raising it to twirl dripping cheese on his fork, “you know there are four types of black-market operations. Monetary transactions of better than local currencies where such transactions are illegal. Successful manipulation of blocked bank balances. Simple smuggling. Illegal refinement of gold. People engaged in such activities pay for my advice, and every time I give it I help them break the law in some country or other.” He went on to give me a long harangue about currency depreciation and out-dated customs regulations that make black-marketeering necessary. His eyes lit up with a crusader’s fervor. Axel Spade was a dedicated man. Currency control, he said, was a cancer eating at the world’s economy.

  “There is less in America than almost anywhere else,” he told me with satisfaction, “and almost none here in Switzerland. Which is why, though I’m a criminal in twenty-six countries.… Well,” he said with a self-depprecatory smile, “you didn’t come here for a lecture. At any rate, to those black-marketeers I will gladly give advice. Their illegal activities he
lp cure the disease. But then I made a mistake. I gave advice, you see, to a banker.”

  “A banker?”

  “Do you know the difference between a public and a private bank?”

  “I guess so. Public banks are backed by their governments and have to balance their assets to the last penny. Private blanks are backed by insurance underwriters with no official approval; they can play it cagey with their assets. Plenty of countries won’t license them, and they usually pay higher interest rates. When you can find the man with the key to the strongbox.”

  “Right,” Spade said. “Now here is what happened: An American named Howard Ridgway made a killing by counterfeiting old French gold coins and selling them at a premium. Frenchmen hoard gold. Ridgway was tried for counterfeiting, but I testified on his behalf, saying that since the coins were no longer legal tender he was in fact not counterfeiting at all but merely manufacturing gold trinkets. He was acquitted. The French government made an arrangement with him, as the French will, to keep his output small. That was when the ingenious idea of counterfeit money that wasn’t counterfeit and wasn’t even money began to bore him. He came to me. He wanted to start a bank, a savings bank for American GI’s stationed in Europe.”

  Spade shrugged. “The man is reckless, handsome and about as moral as a barracuda. I didn’t know that then. I advised him to set up his bank in Morocco. I even used my influence with a group of Swiss insurance underwriters, and they insured him.”

  “Why’d you do that? Weren’t you sticking your neck out?”

  “Worse than that. He offered me a one-third interest in his bank, and I took it. I thought perhaps I could curb his recklessness.”

  “Why did it matter one way or the other to you?” I asked.

  “Howard Ridgway is in love with my daughter, Mr. Drum.”

  I said nothing.

  “Five marriages, and just one child. By my second wife. The American. Helen is twenty-one and she’s as headstrong as her mother was. You’ll meet her at Chamonix in High Savoy. She’s with the American skiing team. She still loves the man and thinks I am persecuting him. She won’t come here and I am unable to visit her in High Savoy. I recently became adviser to … but that doesn’t matter. I am persona non grata in France. Helen knows where Ridgway is, if anyone does.”