Francesca Read online

  At the request of a little brunette in jeans, who looked American, Juli played Never on Sunday. Then he passed the plate again. Then Douglas Jones was insisting he never went all the way with Mary and was glad of it. “‘If you marry me, Douglas Jones,’ she all the time says,” Jones told me with drunken approval, “‘you’re gonna marry a virgin.’ Ain’t that comment-commendable, Chet?”

  I agreed it was commendable. I was wondering how I could get him back to his hotel, if he could tell me where his hotel was, when I saw Francesca Artemi’s cornflower-blue eyes narrow and her red lips part with pain. The look passed quickly. I don’t think anyone else saw it. Piaget’s left hand and Francesca’s right were under the table. Their heads were close in conversation. It looked as if they were tête-à-tête-ing and holding hands, but then I saw that fleeting expression of pain cross Francesca’s face again. If Piaget was holding her hand, he was doing it with a pair of pliers.

  Douglas Jones said, “Gotta find the can fast,” and lurched to his feet, his face green. He went past the espresso machine and out of sight through a small archway. I got up and went over to Francesca Artemi’s table. Piaget was talking softly, nasally and angrily in French. The overhead light threw my pale shadow on the table. When he saw it, Piaget stopped talking and withdrew his hand quickly. Francesca raised her arm to the table. There were livid marks on her wrist, and she rubbed them.

  “I’ll bet when you were a kid you pulled the wings off flies,” I told Piaget.

  “Get lost,” he said in English. “The boss offered you a job. You didn’t want it. Now get lost.”

  “Was this part of the job?” I asked, and grabbed his wrist the way he must have been holding Francesca’s. She turned those cornflower-blue eyes on me in a worried frown.

  Piaget sighed and said very softly, “I asked you. Remember, I asked you.” There was a carafe of red wine near his arm on the table. He moved his elbow half an inch in a short, flicking motion. The carafe skidded across the table, overturned and sloshed wine on the snugly fitting jacket of Francesca Artemi’s suit. Piaget shoved his chair back, stood up and shouted at me in French, loud enough for heads to turn in our direction.

  “Oaf, ignorant clumsy oaf of an American! Why don’t you stay at the big tourist hotels on the quai, where you are tolerated? You are not wanted here. Look what you have done. Clumsy American, I’ll smash your head for this.”

  He took a swing at me with his free hand. I yanked him forward at the same time by his trapped wrist, and the edge of his palm judo-chopped nothing but air behind my head. He brought a knee up fast. I turned a thigh to meet it, released his wrist, got both hands in back of his knee, lifted him and tossed him on the table. He landed hard. Someone shouted, and I was aware of people moving toward us. Francesca Artemi and her chair fell backward and down. Piaget leaped off the table with a knife.

  Juli was playing a march, very loud, on his accordion. Hands grabbed me from behind, pinning my arms. A couple of big guys were holding Piaget too. He raked one of them with a scornful over-the-shoulder glance, but dropped his knife on the floor. The fat and merry-looking blonde who ran the cafe was dabbing at Francesca’s wine-stained suit with a napkin. The actress waved her away, and the blonde tried to sooth Piaget and me. She shook my hand, pumping it up and down mannishly. She shook Piaget’s hand the same way. She said, merrily: “Ah, these things happen, we Genevois are accustomed to them … a beautiful woman, two men, the inevitable … come, be friends, we are all a big family at the Café Rendezvous … drinks for everyone, courtesy of the management … come, smile at each other, we are all friends here. Or else,” she added, still merrily, “it is my necessary duty to call the police.”

  Piaget sneered at me. I leered at him. That seemed to satisfy the blonde. We were released; Piaget sat down with Francesca Artemi at their table and I returned to ours to wait for Douglas Jones. He came back in a couple of minutes, having missed all the fireworks. His face looked greener.

  “I don’t feel so good,” he admitted.

  “Could you hold down a coffee?”

  “Brandy,” he said out of the side of his mouth, dedicatedly tough. “The hair of the dog.”

  “That comes later. Have some coffee, then I’ll take you to your hotel.”

  “Brandy,” he insisted, and that was what he ordered. His face turned greener yet at the sight of it, but he took a tentative sip and held it down.

  Francesca got up and went over to Juli’s booth to whisper a request. She dropped some coins on his money-plate, and he played Sorrento while everyone looked at Francesca and applauded.

  “She was born in Sorrento, Francesca,” Douglas Jones informed me. He finished the rest of his brandy. I stared across the room at Francesca and Piaget. They seemed to be friends again. She was smiling at him.

  Juli took an intermission and came around with his money-plate again. He stopped near our table and I dropped two francs on the plate. He waited. I looked at the plate. Among the coins was a crumpled paper napkin. Juli raised his eyebrows a quarter of an inch. I dropped another franc on the plate and palmed the napkin.

  “Merci bien, monsieur,” Juli said, and headed for another table. I opened the napkin under the edge of the table and saw a penciled scrawl, bold but feminine. It said: Mr. Drum, most urgent, my flat tonight, any time after twelve. 17, Quai Gustav Ador. Very urgent. It was signed, Francesca Artemi.

  Francesca left the café a few minutes later with Piaget. I glanced at my watch: ten-fifty-five. Douglas Jones was resting his head on a bent arm on the table.

  “Come on, kid,” I said. “Time to go.”

  He smiled up at me dreamily. I had been right about what kind of a drunk he would make. “Sleep here,” he said.

  “You’ll sleep in a bed and see a doctor in the morning.”

  He didn’t answer. He snored politely through his broken nose. Where had he said he was staying? A little place near the station. Probably there were a dozen small hotels near the. station. There were two beds in my room at the Du Rhône. I sighed. All of a sudden I found myself Douglas Jones’ keeper.

  I asked the merry blonde to call a cab. When it came, I paid the check and the driver helped me get Jones aboard. “Ivrogne,” he said, grinning.

  “Yeah, he’s drunk all right.”

  The doorman at the Du Rhône was doubtful, as I had expected he would be. Ten francs made him a confirmed believer. “It’s a double room,” I told the night concierge when he stopped us on our way to the elevator. The taxi driver, holding up his half of Douglas Jones, was sweating. “Now we get to fill it.”

  “He must register. We must have his passport for the police. What happened to him?”

  “He tripped and fell climbing the tower stairs in St. Peter’s Cathedral.”

  “Drunk, where Calvin preached,” the concierge said reproachfully.

  I gave him fifty francs. He said, “Of course, we can have the passport in the morning. It wouldn’t go to the police until the morning, anyway. Good night, Mr. Drum.”

  The Swiss are the best hotel-keepers in the world—for a price.

  Douglas Jones was snoring. I had taken off his shoes, windbreaker and pants, loosened his collar and dumped him on one of the twin beds, covering him with a couple of blankets. I took off my own shoes. I felt a little guilty when I thought of Axel Spade, more than a little irritated when I thought of Piaget, and intrigued as hell when I thought of Francesca Artemi. It isn’t every night you get that kind of invitation from a gorgeous actress like Francesca. But what did she want? Most urgent, she had written. And how had she known my name? From Piaget? Or had she seen Axel Spade again after I’d left his office?

  My own restlessness and Jones’ snoring would keep me awake. I put my shoes back on, got my coat out of the closet and headed for the door.

  For someone who had turned down a case I was having a busy night.

  chapter four

  SEVENTEEN QUAI GUSTAV ADOR was a big stone apartment building overlooking the lake and the
Jetty des Eaux Vives, where the biggest fountain in the world sends its geyser a hundred yards into the air during the summer months when tourists flock to Geneva. But right now, of a cold February night, the jet was off, the quai was deserted and the mist had turned into a fine, icy rain.

  The concierge of the apartment building was a dour old dame in bathrobe and worn carpet slippers, who kept her lips zippered until I mentioned my name.

  “But yes,” she beamed on me, “certainly you are expected by Mlle. Artemi. The lift, can you run it yourself, monsieur? My husband, he is afflicted with arthritis.”

  I said I could run the lift myself. For no reason at all I asked, “She often have visitors this time of night?”

  The zipper shut, almost snagging a tooth. It opened long enough to say, “Troisième étage, monsieur,” and I took the creaking, open-caged elevator up to the third floor.

  Francesca Artemi opened the apartment door herself. She was wearing a big fluffy towel wrapped like a turban around her head and a dark blue silk robe trailing on the floor and belted casually at her waist.

  “Hello, ignorant, clumsy oaf of an American,” she said, and laughed throatily.

  “If I don’t spill any more wine on you,” I said, “will you promise not to send me back to the big tourist hotels?”

  Smiling, she led me into a living room where two matched, monogrammed suitcases, pigskin and expensive, were lying open on the big sofa facing the fireplace. It was a large room, and all the upholstered chairs except one were the same cornflower blue as the suit she had worn or, for that matter, the color of her eyes. So were the drapes on the window facing the lake, and so was the deep-pile carpet. Near the window was a big black lounge. Ceiling and walls were white, the hearth and mantle were white marble, the furniture wood was white. Everything else, except the black lounge, was the pale, slightly lavender shade of blue that is cornflower. The effect was startling.

  Francesca Artemi saw where I was looking. “When anyone ask,” she said in her sultry Italian accent, “I say it is my couch of love.”

  “Since when is black the color for—”

  “Whenever you make love, if you make love as you ought to make love, you die a little. Drink?” she asked me suddenly.

  “Whatever you’re having.”

  There was a little bar on wheels, and she poured Pernod over ice in two old-fashioned glasses and added just enough water to turn the yellow liquor milky.

  “Ouzo is my drink,” she said. “That is Greek, and I cannot get it here. Pernod, it is similar.” With both glasses in her hands she sat on the black lounge. Setting the glasses on the low table in front of it, she patted the lounge at her side. “Come join me on my couch of love,” she said with a very straight face, and with a very straight face I sat down beside her.

  We raised and clinked our glasses. “Cin-cin,” she said. It sounded like cheen-cheen; it is the latest fashionable Italian toast. She added, “And to thank you for what you do in the cafe tonight.” Seen close, the beauty of her eyes and flashing white teeth and classic Greek profile was almost scorching. I couldn’t get my eyes off her. She was aware of it, and her eyes smiled at me, but her lips remained sullen.

  “Why didn’t you raise a squawk?” I asked. “Fifty guys would have formed a line to stomp on Piaget’s face just to hear you say thanks.”

  “I could not squawk, as you say it.”

  “Why not?”

  “I could not squawk.”

  She shifted into a more comfortable position on the lounge. For an instant I felt the warm pressure of her thigh against mine, then it was gone. The blue silk robe parted at her throat. She was wearing the scent of bath salts and the skin of Francesca Artemi under it, and nothing else. It was the hardest interview I ever conducted, if it was an interview. Maybe she knew that. Maybe she wanted it.

  She raised her glass again. “To Chamonix. I leave on the morning bus. At eight-thirty behind the English Church. Do not disappoint me, Mr. Drum. Do not fail to be there.”

  “I turned Spade down.”

  “I know you did,” she said, shifting her position again so that our thighs touched again. “Would turning me down be as easy for you?”

  “Is this what you meant by very urgent? To ask me to take Spade’s job?”

  “But of course. Three million dollars, is that not an urgent matter?”

  “You and Spade,” I said. “What’s the connection?”

  “He wants to make me his sixth wife.”

  “Is that what you want?” I said. I shouldn’t have been surprised, but I was.

  She laughed. “I haven’t heard any better offers lately.” I remained silent. She said: “Make me one.”

  I drank the rest of my Pernod, which tasted like hundred-proof licorice candy, and set the glass down. “Lady,” I suggested hopefully, “say that again.”

  She shrugged. The robe slipped off her creamy left shoulder. “I was born in Sorrento,” she said. “My father was Greek. My mother was Neapolitan. I spend most of my life in Napoli. A Neapolitan woman, when she is attracted to a man, she tells him. You are very handsome, in a—how you say?—brutal way.” She downed her Pernod. The ice clinked against her teeth. “Why should I not say it again? How could I not? I haven’t heard any better offers lately. Make me one.”

  I touched her left shoulder with the index finger of my right hand. I drew the finger down across her throat. She purred contentedly and drew my hand further, inside the robe. Physiologically she was ready for the offer. That is always flattering. She turned and bit the lobe of my ear. Then she flung her head down on my lap, the towel coming loose from her titian hair, which spilled damply across my legs. I kissed her. She kissed me. We did other pleasant preliminary things. Her bare foot knocked a Pernod glass off the table. She swung both legs down lithely, adjusted her robe, jumped to her feet, laughed, crossed the room to a pair of ski-boots near the open suitcases and removed them from their iron tree. I sat there feeling slightly more foolish than I looked.

  She said calmly: “I asked you to make the offer. I did not say I would accept—now. But you are … very erotic, and Francesca likes that. Come to Chamonix. See Helen Spade. She will be my stepdaughter one day, who knows? Find Howard Ridgway. Find the three million dollars. I know you do not like this Piaget with the warts on his face. Does it occur to you I also do not like him? Or Axel does not? That he … never tell him I saw you here.”

  “Spade or Piaget? That he what?”

  “Yves. You must not mention this. He would be furious. He would … niente. Nothing.”

  She dumped the ski-boots into a suitcase and led me to the door. Only a gorgeous dish and an actress could have done it with such aplomb, making torrid love with you one moment and coolly leading you to the exit the next. It was as if her director had been satisfied with the sultry scene she had played, had instructed the cameramen and technicians to cut and print it, and had rewarded her with the rest of the night off.

  “Come to Chamonix,” she said. “The skiing will be fine.”

  She brushed my cheeks with her lips and gently shut the door in my face. I stood there looking at it like Douglas Jones had looked at her autograph and the imprint of her lips. The skiing, I thought, wasn’t the only thing that would be fine in Chamonix.

  The rain was coming down harder and a cold wind was blowing off the lake, the winter wind the Genevois call bise, which means kiss. That kept my thoughts on Francesca as I walked down the quai to the Promenade du Lac and across Mont Blanc bridge to the right bank. Most urgent, she had written in the Café Rendezvous, but all that meant was that she wanted to snare me for Axel Spade with the lure of her body. She hadn’t told me anything I didn’t already know, and all I knew were the facts as Spade had outlined them. But, reason unknown, she was afraid of Yves Piaget. Had she also tried to tell me Spade lost no love on the little judo expert? Then why keep him on as a bodyguard? The woods were full of bodyguards, some of whose faces wouldn’t stop all the cuckoo clocks in Switzerland.


  At the Du Rhône the night concierge gave me the sort of greeting reserved for guests who shell out fifty franc tips. He handed me my room key on its heavy brass identification plate and punched the call-button for the elevator himself. He said a sage thing or two about the bise blowing off the lake. I went up with an elevator operator in a uniform so starched it looked like a cardboard cut-out.

  On the fifth floor there were shoes set outside almost every door for the boot-boy to clean. That gave me the impression I always get from a hall at night in a European hotel: all the guests were preparing getaways and, at a signal, would leap into their waiting shoes and make a run for it.

  There were no shoes outside my own door. I looked down at my feet and unlaced my shoes, which were scuffed and wet. I lined them up alongside the door, unlocked it and went inside in my stockinged feet. No reason to be quiet, though. It would have taken the crack of doom to wake anybody snoring as resolutely as Douglas Jones had been snoring when I’d left earlier.

  But when I sat on the edge of my bed and peeled down to my shorts, I realized Douglas Jones wasn’t snoring now. Well, he was probably having a silent little private dream about Francesca Artemi. Who could blame him?

  I stared up at the dark ceiling, wondering if I would take the case. Axel Spade expected a call from me in the morning, though I’d already turned him down. I still felt guilty about my decision. I was a big boy now, so why let Piaget’s sadistic tendencies bother me? And Spade had paid my way across the big pond, no questions asked.

  What bothered me more than Spade’s choice of a bodyguard was the blind faith he seemed ready to give me as an investigator. No private eye ever bats a thousand, but what could I do that Interpol, the insurance investigators, the Swiss Federal Police and the U.S. Army couldn’t? Still, it made sense that Spade wanted his own man to reach Ridgway and the three million bucks first. Then Spade could make good and they’d call their dogs off.