The Predators Part 19

Claudine nodded back, comprehending at last. An absurd charade unfolded in which Claudine remained by the door, discussing the evening apologizing even for not having anything to drink while Blake swept the room, keeping up the empty conversation with her as he did so. She'd never seen it done before and occasionally faltered in what she was saying, distracted by his obvious expertise. He came back to where she remained standing to unscrew the light switch just inside the door. From there he moved on to every light fitting and socket and every electrical plug and connection, using a handkerchief pad to remove hot bulbs.

The bedside telephone was clean but there was a listening device in the extension phone on a table, in front of the curtained window. It was so minute, little more than a pinhead fitting snugly into one of the tiny diaphragm holes, that she had difficulty seeing it when he pointed it out to her and wouldn't have suspected it even if she'd unscrewed the instrument herself.

Blake rea.s.sembled the telephone without removing the bug, moving some way away before saying: 'As you haven't got any booze here I guess we'll have to go back to the bar.'

'OK,' Claudine accepted at once.

At that moment the telephone rang.

'I left messages,' said Hugo Rosetti accusingly.

'It was too late to return them when I got back.'

'What about today? Tonight?'

'There are a lot of problems we didn't expect.' Go away! she thought, hating herself for thinking it.

'Like what?'

'I don't want to talk about them on the telephone.' She was being listened to. She didn't know by whom or why but everything they were saying Hugo as well as herself was being overheard. And Blake was in the room, as well, although he'd started searching again, disappearing into the bathroom.

'What's so mysterious?'

'It's far more difficult than we thought it was going to be: problems with the Americans.'

'I thought you allowed for that.'

'Not enough.'

'What are you going to do about it?'

Blake appeared at the bathroom door, pointing with a jabbing finger at what she guessed to be the switch just inside the door.

'I don't know yet.'

'The Americans send a negotiator?'

'He's the problem.'

Blake sat down on a chair by the door, stretching his legs in front of him.

'Can you handle it?'

'I'm going to have to.'

'I'm missing you,' said Rosetti.

'I'm missing you, too,' she made herself say, face burning. There was no reason for her to be embarra.s.sed, not in front of Blake. This was awful: terrible.

'It hardly sounds like it.'

'I've got to go.'

'It's eleven o'clock at night!'

'Something's come up.'

From his chair Blake made warding-off gestures.

'What?'

'Something I've got to talk about with someone.'

'Blake?'

Oh G.o.d! 'Yes.'

'Is he a problem?'

'Of course not! That's a silly question.' Why had she said that!

'Sorry!' He stretched the word, to show he was offended.

'You're misunderstanding.'

'It's difficult not to.'

'I said I didn't want to talk on the telephone!'

'I love you,' said Rosetti.

'I'll call you back tomorrow. Say around seven.'

'I said I loved you.'

'I'll explain later.'

'What's the matter?'

'Nothing! I really do have to go.'

'I thought I'd come down this weekend.'

'Aren't you going to Rome?'

'Would it be inconvenient for me to come down? Apart from anything that might come up with the case, I mean.'

'Of course not. I'd like you to come down. Let's talk about it tomorrow. Goodnight.' Claudine hurriedly replaced the receiver but remained standing by it.

Blake grinned and said: 'How about that drink?'

Claudine's hands were shaking, from anger not fear, rippling the brandy in her gla.s.s, which she held in both hands. She'd sat where he directed, at a table some way from the bar and other late night drinkers. She at once recalled the bizarre conversation about carrying a gun when he identified the night he'd detected the surveillance at La Maison du Cygne and said: 'You thought it was on you!'

He nodded. 'Had it been we probably wouldn't have got back across the square, either of us. It was the fact that we did that made me doubt I was the target in the first place, even before I found my room was clean.'

He'd kept himself curiously apart from her, she remembered. 'Norris?'

'Obviously. It's not the people who'd like to find me and it'll hardly be the people holding Mary, will it? Norris will never admit responsibility, though. No one will.'

'The paranoid b.a.s.t.a.r.d!' she said, fresh anger surging through her. 'How long's it been there?'

He shrugged. 'Sometime during that day, I expect. That was when you positively faced him down.'

Claudine forced herself to be calm, frowning. 'I haven't used the phone much: certainly haven't talked about anything the Americans don't know about.'

'They're open transmitters, in both the telephone and the bathroom light switch.'

'You mean they're live all the time: relaying everything that happens, not just the telephone calls?'

'Yes.'

'I don't want to stay in that room any more.'

He smiled again, trying to relax her. 'There's mine but I'm not going to risk the rebuff. You know you're being listened to now. Use it to our benefit.'

'You think Harding knows?'

'I'm not sure. He came a long way towards us with his concern about Norris. I think if he had, he might have said something.'

'It's so f.u.c.king stupid! So pointless!'

'What are you going to do?' he asked.

'I don't know, but I suppose it makes sense to pretend we're unaware.' She looked directly at him. 'There were a lot of times tonight when you could have told me what you thought there was in my room. Why all the drama?'

'I might have been wrong. Then I would have looked foolish.'

'You still made it into a drama. And you must have been sure.'

He grinned. 'I wanted to see if you'd let me in.'

'b.a.s.t.a.r.d!'

'But not a paranoid one.'

Claudine put her gla.s.s down, relieved her hands had stopped shaking. 'Are there really people who'd like to kill you?'

'Not until they'd hurt me as much as they could.'

August Dehane's wife was completely unaware of his membership of Felicite Galan's group, which always made it difficult speaking to the man at home. The conversation was one-sided and led by Jean Smet. The lawyer impatiently dictated the message upon which Felicite insisted and said he did not, of course, expect it to be convenient for the telephone executive to meet the rest of them until the following evening. Dehane's hesitation was obvious when Smet gave his address off the rue de Flandres as the meeting place.

'Is Felicite going to be there?' he asked in a whisper.

'No. We're going to settle things. Remove the problem,' promised Smet.

'That's good,' agreed Dehane.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN.

There are in Paris a very small number of restaurants, three the most notable, renowned as much for their discretion as for their highest Guide Michelin awards. That on the rue du Miel, the first of the notable three, was a place of dark wood, small-paned windows, subdued lighting and conveniently anonymous rooms. The most conveniently anonymous of all were two on the very top floor. The epitome of belle epoque as indeed the restaurant was such salons particuliers were originally conceived as private rooms where the rich and famous could dine their mistresses in intimate mirrored luxury before moving to the only other furnishing, an opulent chaise-longue. Favours were expected to be returned for favours received. It was the practice for the courtesans to test the genuineness of their gifted diamond by inscribing their int.i.tials round the mirrors' edges: those inscriptions anonymous, of course are now officially decreed to be national monuments.

The salon particulier that Sanglier entered, five minutes late, was, like all the others, a place where favours were still expected to be exchanged, although no longer cut into the ancient, still reflecting gla.s.s which his hosts were studying when he arrived. There were three of them. Guy Coty, the chairman of the party, was the oldest although he did not look eighty-five. He was a small, tightly plump, totally bald man who had spent his life as a pilot fish for sharks in murky French political waters. The diminutive but exalted ribbon of the Legion d'honneur was in the left lapel of his immaculate dove-grey suit. Roger Castille was half the other man's age, with the dark-haired, ivory-teethed, open-faced looks of a matinee idol disguising a ruthlessness inherited, along with Ff50,000,000, from a financier father. The third man, Lucien Bigot, was one of the few survivors of Castille's tread-on-anyone ascent to the party leadership. Bigot was a beetle-browed man who used his size to intimidate. His official position was party secretary: like Coty he preferred power-brokering in back rooms to his public parliamentary work. It was Bigot, already known to Sanglier from their six months of political flirtation, who performed the introductions.

There was pre-luncheon champagne but no pretence of toasts: as yet there was nothing to celebrate. As aware as he'd always been of the significance of the Legion d'honneur and the expectations of the recipients, Sanglier accorded Coty the necessary respect, conscious of how it was being properly shown by Castille and Bigot. And it wasn't stopping there, Sanglier realized. To a far lesser but still discernible degree the two politicians were acknowledging himself as the son of a man who had also gained France's highest honour.

'I knew your father,' said Coty, in a voice clouded by too many cigarettes. 'Not during the war, of course: I was in London, with de Gaulle, after I escaped the Gestapo. But afterwards, when the sanglier's bravery became known. De Gaulle invited him to come into government but he declined.'

It seemed odd, hearing the name like that, properly used as the code designation by which his father had worked before officially adopting it as the family's legal surname after the war, like several other Resistance heroes. Coty was almost an exception for not having done so. It was the first time Sanglier had heard of the political invitation: another aspect of his father's life that had been secret. He said: 'He was a very modest man.'

'And now you've got the opportunity to take up the offer he refused,' said Castille, seizing the way to move on from reminiscence without offending the elder statesman.

Could he take the risk? Sanglier asked himself for the thousandth time. He didn't know that his father's exploits, re-routing n.a.z.i labour-camp trains and execution orders, weren't totally true: there were, in fact, provable Gestapo records of the failed hunt for the mysterious sanglier. But there were so many gaps, verging on inconsistencies, in those and other records, omissions blamed on Claudine Carter's father who, as Interpol's chief archivist, had by almost unbelievable coincidence prepared Sanglier's wartime history for France's archive of heroes.

His emergence into political life would inevitably re-focus attention upon his father's history: maybe, even, rekindle interest in a new biography by a new, more determined literary investigator than the authors of those that already existed, and who had unquestioningly accepted his uncooperative father's explanation that apparent discrepancies were unavoidable in the chaos of the war's end.

Cautiously, determined upon a.s.surances that went far beyond his fear of the past, Sanglier said, with false diffidence: 'I'm very flattered to have received this approach, and I have had several months to consider it. But there are important matters for us to discuss before I can give you my reply.'

'Food first,' growled the husky-voiced Coty, pressing the waiter's bell just inside the door of the private room. He was smoking through a small malacca holder.

The others had already studied the menu, before occupying themselves with the initials of long-ago wh.o.r.es. Sanglier refused to hurry, keeping the attendant waiting while he carefully considered his meal. By the time his choice was made Castille was scuffing his chair impatiently.

As soon as the waiter left the room Castille said: 'There's no doubt the present government will fall within six months. No doubt, either, that we'll succeed them. And we'll remain in power for a very long time, after the scandals and failed policies of the last ten years-'

'But with a difference this time,' Coty broke in. 'Virtually every minor party making up the current coalition is a.s.sociated with the disgrace and failures, either part of them or by a.s.sociation. We're not. We're clean: above it all. That's going to be our manifesto: how we're going to be seen by the electorate. It's going to give us an overwhelming, una.s.sailable majority so that there'll be no need to rely on any of the smaller groupings.'

'We're going to be the clean party for a new Republic,' announced Castille, almost too obviously practising an election slogan.

This encounter was just as well rehea.r.s.ed, decided Sanglier. 'I have been extremely fortunate in my profession,' he ventured, 'but until your approach I'd never considered a political career.'

'Consider it now!' urged Bigot. 'We'll guarantee you an electable const.i.tuency.'

'And I can also guarantee that I will never forget those who declare for me at this stage,' said Castille.