Francesca Read online

  “You mean he disappeared?”

  “He hired salesmen who canvassed American GI’s in off-post housing all over Europe and North Africa. He offered six per cent interest on their savings. For two quarters he compounded and paid it, and then he walked off with the assets of the Moroccan-American bank. Three million dollars. He’s not in Morocco. I have agents there, and they’ve established that. Meanwhile, to use the American idiom, they’ve fallen on me like a ton of bricks—the insurance underwriters, the Swiss federal police, the Criminal Investigation Division of the American Military Police, even Interpol.”

  “Can you make good?”

  “I’m not a poor man, but I don’t have three million dollars.”

  “The federal police, CID, Interpol—all that and Corpora] Douglas Jones,” I said.

  “You seem more intrigued than dismayed. You’ll take the case?”

  He smiled. His hand, holding a long fondue fork with a chunk of bread spitted on the tines, wavered when I said: “A few little details bother me, Mr. Spade.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “A private eye rings bells and sticks his feet in doors to keep them from slamming in his face when he asks his questions. He expects people to hold out on him—but not the client.”

  “I beg your pardon?” he said again, with a slight edge to his voice.

  “Three little details,” I said. “First, a guy like me usually gets a missing-person case dumped in his lap when the principals don’t want the authorities poking their noses in. That’s the only reason. What can one man working alone accomplish that a police force can’t? But if you count the insurance underwriters, who’ll have to shell out three million bucks unless they poke under a stone and find Howard Ridgway nesting there, that makes four pretty sharp outfits looking for your partner. If you think I can beat them all to him, I’d like to smoke what you’re smoking.”

  “Say ‘hope’ rather than ‘think’, Mr. Drum. Three million dollars is a lot of money to spend—even for a high-liver like Howard RidgWay. If you find him—and the money—I could make restitution. No criminal charges have been brought against me as yet, you see. But if Interpol finds him, or the insurance people.… Don’t you realize the spot I’m in? Twenty-six countries are waiting to get their hands on me; Interpol has an Axel Spade dossier as thick as an encyclopedia. Still, according to Swiss and American law I’ve never done anything I can be extradited for. Indeed,” he said with a dry smile, “I have performed certain services for the Swiss Minister of Finance and the American Treasury Department that have earned me their gratitude. Involvement in a theft of three million dollars would abrogate that. Interpol would be delighted.”

  “Are you involved?”

  “To the extent I told you.”

  “Then there’s this business of the insurance. If Jones got the setup from the Army and Air Force Times, why doesn’t he just sit back and wait for the underwriters to pay off?”

  “They insure bankers against the vagaries of investment, not depositors against the embezzlements of bank officers. At least that is their contention, and Jones must have read it in his service newspaper. Any further questions?”

  When I didn’t answer, Axel Spade paid our check, took my silence as approval of his answers, and told me I could pick up my retainer in the morning at the Union Bank Suisse. The ugly man with the cucumber face paid his check at the same time. He was a few steps behind us as we went out into the cold mist on Rue Vieux Collège.

  Spade chopped his hand at the mist. “This usually means it is snowing in the mountains. The skiing will be good. You’re lucky.”

  “Not yet,” I told him as we started walking. “I said that three little details bothered me. We only batted two of them around.”

  He sighed. “The third is?”

  “Describe our waiter,” I said.

  “What?”

  “Describe our waiter.”

  He shrugged and did so, down to the liver spots on the backs of the man’s hands. “What about that group sitting to our left in the brasserie?” I asked.

  Again he shrugged. “Six people. Two elderly, two I would say mature, and two quite young. Sexes paired in each age group, and from their features I would say a family—grandparents, parents, children. But why on earth—?”

  “You’re a guy who likes to look around, Mr. Spade. That makes two of us. But sitting across the brasserie from us was the ugliest guy from here to Vladivostok, and you never glimmed him once. If you turn around you’ll see him trying his best not to look furtive. Who’s your friend?”

  Spade laughed. He seemed genuinely relieved. “Of course I know him, and again I’m impressed with you. He’s a Genevois named Yves Piaget. I asked him to be on hand after what happened this afternoon. He is my bodyguard. Yves!” Spade called, and said something in French too rapid for me to follow. Cucumber-face hurried toward us through the mist.

  At the same time a man in a black windbreaker ducked out of the lighted doorway of an apartment hotel across Rue Vieux Collége and came running toward us, waving his arms and shouting.

  It was Corporal Douglas Jones again.

  chapter three

  I’M BIG, and fast for a big man, but Yves Piaget was small, and fast for a small man. He reached the wildly waving and shouting Jones before Jones could get his hands on Axel Spade and before I could intercept Jones. The American solther had time to voice his familiar refrain, “I’ll get you, Spade, you cheap crook!” and time to show us he knew which one was Spade this time, for he ran straight at the financial expert, and then Yves Piaget was on him.

  What happened to Jones then, in the few seconds before I could break it up, was brutal. There is something pathetic in seeing a big but unskilled man being cut down to size by a small but skilled man. Piaget used the stiffened edges of his palms, the right on the side of Jones’ neck and the left in a short, swift chop diagonally across Jones’ face, smashing his nose and bringing a sudden spurt of black blood. Jones’ knees buckled. That dropped his head low enough for Piaget to lace his fingers behind Jones’ neck, bringing the head down and his own knee up. There was a pulpy thud and the loud click of teeth, and Jones’ feet came up as he flipped over on his back down on the sidewalk. Piaget pounced on him to administer more punishment, but I grabbed the back of the ugly little man’s trenchcoat collar and yanked him to his feet, twisting the gabardine in my clenched fist so that he suddenly found it hard to breathe. He shoved an elbow toward my stomach, but I caught his arm with my free hand and circled the small, sinewy biceps with my fingers, squeezing until he managed a strangled sound of pain.

  “Stand still,” I said, “and you won’t choke yourself to death.”

  I felt the tension leave his arm. I released collar and biceps and he turned his ugly face slowly toward me. A small head-shake, a palm turned up toward me, even a weak smile to show me we both were on the side of the angels—and then he made a dive for the pocket of his trenchcoat.

  “That’s enough, Yves,” Axel Spade said in French, but Piaget drew an automatic big enough to blow his head, or my head, or anybody’s head off, and we had to do our dance again. This time I clamped his wrist and forced his arm up and back. When the muzzle of the automatic was pointing at his own right ear I suggested. “Go ahead and pull the trigger now.”

  “Please, gentlemen,” Axel Spade said in English, which meant Piaget understood English, “you are both working for me—there is no reason to fight each other.”

  With a contemptuous shrug, Piaget dropped the automatic in my hand. A fat woman, carrying a basket in one hand and a long French bread in the other, passed us, took a swift glance at Corporal Douglas Jones, who was just getting to his feet, and hurried by. Otherwise, we had the clammy evening mist all to ourselves.

  “We don’t both work for you,” I said. I was mad. There is no thug worse than a small one, and no small one worse than a small ugly one. They are often sadistic, and they make dedicated killers. I had seen Yves Piaget in operation. If I
hadn’t been with, Spade, the American kid would have looked like the product of a meat-grinder by the time Piaget was finished with him. “He sits there in the brasserie and he watches us, but you don’t watch him,” I told Spade. “Left hand doesn’t know what the right hand’s doing, huh? I’m not working for you, Mr. Spade. I wouldn’t like the company I’d have to keep.”

  “You are disturbed, I’m sure in the morning we could—” His accent thickened with his own lack of composure.

  I cut him off. “Thanks for the plane ride. I’ll send you a card from Chamonix or Megeve.”

  He looked at me and shook his head disappointedly. Yves Piaget looked at him and shrugged again, contemptuously, as if to say, “You have me. What do you need the American for?”

  “At least please call me in the morning,” Spade requested.

  I owed him that much anyway. I nodded, wondering if I’d give him the cost of a round-trip ticket from Washington to Geneva and back via New York. The one you have to answer to, finally, is yourself.

  Pulling the clip from the butt of Piaget’s automatic, I tapped the slugs onto my palm and pocketed them. Piaget reached for the gun, but I gave it to Spade instead. He handled it gingerly, flashing an unexpected grin at me, and shoved the automatic in his own pocket. He went solicitously to Douglas Jones. “I know a good doctor who … perhaps you would like.…”

  “I don’t want nothing from you except the money you stole,” Jones said, shaking his fist. Yves Piaget stared at him speculatively and longingly until I got between them.

  “These big pretty boys who think they are so tough,” Piaget said scornfully in English almost as good as Spade’s, “a good small man can always cut them down to size.”

  I told Spade: “Take angel-face away before I bust his wings for him.”

  Spade followed my advice. The mist swallowed them. Douglas Jones stuthed me: “American, ain’t you?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “They con you out of your savings, too? Gosh, this afternoon I figured you for Spadé.”

  “Let’s have a look at that nose,” I said. It was swollen and blue, but the bleeding had stopped.

  Jones touched it even more gingerly than Spade had handled the automatic. He winced. “It feels like an elephant’s hind leg,” he said.

  “It’s broken. Maybe you should have taken Spade up on his doctor.”

  Corporal Douglas Jones managed an ingenuous and engaging grin. “I guess I’ve kind of led with my nose before. In football in high school, and once when I got belted out of my first and only Golden Gloves fight in round one. I’m used to it. This makes the third time I got it broke. You’d think a guy would like learn.”

  “That little guy was a pro,” I said. Jones was a nice kid. I liked him and felt sorry for him. Just because a guy was big didn’t mean he was tough. Jones probably had had to fight the impression he gave all his young life.

  “So’re you,” he said. “A pro, I mean. It was kinda misty for a while, but I saw the way you took the little guy off my back. Thanks, mister—”

  “Drum. Chet Drum. The concierge at my hotel ought to be able to rustle up a doctor for you.”

  “No. Honest, it’ll keep till morning anyhow. But man, I could use a drink.”

  “Where you staying?”

  “Little place near the station.”

  “Feel up to wandering over that way and finding a bar? Drinks are on me.”

  “Man, I can taste that booze now.”

  “I haven’t heard anyone say that in years,” I said. “Booze.”

  Jones grinned ingenuously again. “Neither have I, I guess. Let’s go.”

  I found myself hoping Jones would get his seventeen hundred bucks soon and send it home to his Mary in Peekskill, if that was her name. Because he was big he tried to talk tough. It was expected of him, but it didn’t fit him. He was as tough as a toasted marshmallow.

  We crossed Mont Blanc Bridge on foot and saw the lights of the big hotels on the quai glowing through the mist ahead of us. Douglas Jones was walking like a careful drunk, taking great sobbing breaths of the wet, cold night air, and telling me about his Mary. I steered him left along the Quai des Bergues and got my first good look at Piaget’s handiwork under a lamp post. Jones’ face looked all nose, swollen and blue. His lips were puffed and cut. His left eye was developing a lovely shiner. I asked him if he wanted to take a rain-check and settle for a good night’s sleep in his hotel. He shook his head. “Some sauce is what I need, pal,” he said.

  At Place St. Gervais I looked along the quai to the gleaming glass façade of the Hotel Du Rhône, where I had checked in. I decided they wouldn’t let Jones past the door without a fuss, and anyway this time of year and this time of night the big bar would be deserted. The least I could do for Jones, if he insisted on the tough guy routine, was take him someplace cheerful. We cut around the square and doubled back on Rue des Étuves, a narrow street a block in from the water.

  It was a street of small shops and workmen’s cafés. Through the mist we heard accordion music and homed in on it. That brought us to a smudged and painted plate-glass window with a small sign that said Café Rendezvous. Jones chuckled, cocking an ear to the accordion music. “I feel like I’m back in Weisbaden,” he said. “They’ve been playing that tune on every juke for weeks. Francesca.” He began to hum along with the music and stopped long enough to tell me, as I opened the door: “It’s Francesca Artemi’s theme song in that picture about the hard-case Naples whore who’s really got a heart of gold. You see it?”

  “I don’t get to the movies often,” I said, and added dryly: “But the plot sounds familiar.”

  “She doubles in brass as a fashion model, and this guy falls in love with her picture in a magazine, never dreaming she’s a whore, and … Holy Mackerel!” Douglas Jones cried. “There she is.”

  We were inside the Café Rendezvous and looking for a couple of chairs. It was a typical small, dingy but somehow cheerful bistro, the kind you find on every side street in Paris and Geneva, where the drink is usually beer or harsh brandy taken in brave little swallows with a lump of sugar clamped between the teeth. There were tattered old travel posters on the walls, like the flags of defeated armies. The small room was thick with tobacco smoke and crowded with wooden tables and chairs, most of them occupied by the blue-collar set. A bar in the rear was held down at one end by a gleaming espresso machine. In a high booth near the door sat a red-cheeked and roly-poly accordionist with curly hair, steel-rimmed glasses and a benign smile on his face, who was playing Francesca. According to the lettering painted slantwise on the front of the booth, his name was Juli.

  The only thing missing was the animation you usually find in such places. The fat and merry-looking blonde behind the bar didn’t rush out to shake our hands in the customary Genevois café greeting, the dominoes and cards had been left to the a slow death on the bare wood tables, and the expected hum of conversation and laughter was absent. Juli’s rendition of Francesca was the only sound in the café. When I looked where Douglas Jones and everyone else was looking, I saw why.

  A gorgeous dish in a cornflower-blue suit, with eyes to match it, titian hair and a Greek profile, was sitting alone at a table near the espresso machine. She rewarded Juli with a smile that spread color from his cheeks all over his face. In a tinny voice in a mike with the volume too high he sang: “Francesca, Francesca, ti voglio.…”

  Then there was a roar of applause from all the tables, drowning him out, and Douglas Jones was shouting in my ear: “That’s her, how about that, that’s Francesca Artemi”

  It was also the girl I had seen leaving Axel Spade’s office that afternoon.

  We sat down, and the patrons of the café lined up for Francesca Artemi’s autograph when the music stopped. Douglas Jones had two quick brandies, downing them fast and making a face each time. I nursed one, letting it melt the sugar between my teeth and dissolve the enamel off them. They make a lot of things well in Switzerland, but brandy is not one of them.<
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  Douglas Jones joined the autograph hounds, returning with Francesca Artemi’s signature and the red imprint of her lipstick on a small napkin. He stared at it raptly. “Wait’ll I send this home to Mary,” he crowed. “She’s a real Artemi fan.”

  Juli climbed down from his high booth and wandered around with a plate which the customers quickly filled with franc and half-franc pieces. Then everyone chanted Francesca, and he shrugged, smiled and played it again. This time Francesca Artemi rose sinuously to her feet, swayed and sang a few bars herself in a husky, provocative voice.

  I felt a cold draft on the back of my neck. I was sitting with my back to the door, which had opened. Yves Piaget came into the cafe. His eyes met mine, and he shrugged a small, contemptuous shrug. He went straight to Francesca Artemi’s table, took off his trenchcoat and sat down. She stopped singing and joined him there. They spoke with their heads close together. From where I sat I could see the girl’s face, not Piaget’s. She was trying very hard to smile and just as hard not to look frightened.

  “Beauty and the beast,” Douglas Jones said. He ordered another brandy and so did I. He was getting high. I figured he needed it and figured him for the kind of drunk who would slip off to sleep with a dreamy expression on his freckled face, broken nose and all.

  I smoked a few cigarettes and listened to the music and got used to the brandy. Piaget had all of Francesca Artemi’s attention. The animation had left her face. She was pouting sullenly at him. Dominoes began to click around the café.

  Douglas Jones was telling me about the first time he and his Mary had seen an Artemi picture. It was also the first time he had held his Mary’s hand and kissed her. He was drunk and sentimental about it. “Now I know I’m gonna get that seventeen hundred bucks back. My life savings,” he said in a maudlin croak.