The Negotiator (43 page)

Quinn plied Kuyper with beer until mid-afternoon. He had to be careful. Too little and the man’s tongue would not be loosed enough to overcome his natural wariness and surliness; too much and he would simply pass out. He was that sort of drinker.

“I lost sight of him in ’67,” said Quinn, of their missing and mutual buddy Paul Marchais. “I got out when it all turned nasty for us mercs. I bet he never got out. Probably ended up dead in some rain ditch.”

Kuyper chortled, looked around, and tapped the side of his nose in the gesture of the foolish who think they know something special.

“He came back,” he said with glee. “He got out. Came back here.”

“To Belgium?”

“Yup—1968, must have been. I’d just got out of the nick. Saw him myself.”

Twenty-three years, thought Quinn. He could be anywhere. “Wouldn’t mind having a beer with Big Paul, for old times’ sake,” he mused.

Kuyper shook his head. “No chance,” he said drunkenly. “He’s disappeared. Had to, didn’t he, with the police thing and all that. Last I heard, he was working on a fun fair somewhere in the South.”

Five minutes later he was asleep. Quinn returned to the hotel, somewhat unsteadily. He, too, felt the need to sleep.

“Time to earn your keep,” he told Sam. “Go to the tourist information office and ask about fun fairs, theme parks, whatever. In the South of the country.”

It was 6:00
P.M.
He slept for twelve hours.

“There are two,” Sam told him as they had breakfast in their room. “There’s Bellewaerde. That’s outside the town of Ieper in the extreme West, up near the coast and the French border. Or there’s Walibi outside Wavre. That’s south of Brussels. I’ve got the brochures.”

“I don’t suppose the brochures announce they might have an ex-Congo mercenary working there,” said Quinn. “That cretin said ‘South.’ We’ll try Walibi first. Plot a route and let’s check out.”

Just before ten he hoisted their luggage into the car. Once they picked up the motorway system it was another fast run, due south past Mechelen, around Brussels on the orbital ring road, and south again on the E.40 to Wavre. After that the theme park was signposted.

It was closed, of course. All fun fairs look sad in the grim chill of winter, with the dodgem cars huddled in canvas shrouds, the pavilions cold and empty, the gray rain tumbling off the girders of the roller coaster, and the wind running wet brown leaves into Ali Baba’s cave. Because of the rain, even maintenance work was suspended. There was no one in the administration office either. They repaired to a café farther down the road.

“What now?” asked Sam.

“Mr. Van Eyck, at his home,” said Quinn and asked for the local telephone directory.

The jovial face of the theme park’s director, Bertie Van Eyck, beamed out of the title page of the brochure, above his written welcome to all visitors. Being a Flemish name, and Wavre being deep in French-speaking country, there were only three Van Eycks listed. One was listed as Albert. Bertie. An address out of town. They lunched and drove out there, Quinn asking for directions several times.

It was a pleasant detached house on a long country road called the Chemin des Charrons. Mrs. Van Eyck answered the door and called for her husband, who soon appeared in cardigan and carpet slippers. From behind him came the sound of a sports program on the television.

Though Flemish-born, Bertie Van Eyck was in the tourist business and so was bilingual in French and Flemish. His English was also perfect. He summed up his visitors as Americans at a glance and said, “Yes, I am Van Eyck. Can I help you?”

“I sure hope you can, sir. Yes, I surely do,” said Quinn. He had dropped into his pose of folksy American innocence, which had fooled the receptionist at Blackwood’s Hotel. “Me and my lady wife here, we’re over in Belgium trying to look up relatives from the old country. See, my grandpa on my mother’s side, he came from Belgium, so I have cousins in these parts and I thought maybe if I could find one or two, that would be real nice to tell the family back Stateside. ...”

There was a roar from the television. Van Eyck looked visibly worried. The Belgian league leaders Tournai were playing French champions Sainte Étienne, a real needle match not to be missed by a football buff.

“I fear I am not related to any Americans,” he began.

“No, sir, you do not understand. I’ve been told up in Antwerp my mother’s nephew could be working in these parts, in a fun fair. Paul Marchais?”

Van Eyck’s brow furrowed and he shook his head.

“I know all my staff. We have no one of that name.”

“Great big guy. Big Paul, they call him. Six feet six, wide as this, tattoo on his left hand ...”

“
Ja, ja
, but he is not Marchais. Paul Lefort, you mean.”

“Well now, maybe I do mean that,” said Quinn. “I seem to recall his ma, my mom’s sister,
did
marry twice, so probably his name was changed. Would you by any chance know where he lives?”

“Wait, please,”

Bertie Van Eyck was back in two minutes with a slip of paper. Then he fled back to his football match. Tournai had scored and he had missed it.

“I have never,” said Sam as they drove back into Wavre town, “heard such an appalling caricature of an American meathead on a visit to Europe.”

Quinn grinned.

“Worked, didn’t it?”

They found the boardinghouse of Madame Garnier behind the railway station. It was already getting dark. She was a desiccated little widow who began by telling Quinn that she had no rooms vacant, but relented when he told her he sought none, but simply a chance to talk to his old friend Paul Lefort. His French was so fluent she took him for a Frenchman.

“But he is out, monsieur. He has gone to work.”

“At the Walibi?” asked Quinn.

“But of course. The Big Wheel. He overhauls the engine for the winter months.”

Quinn made a Gallic gesture of frustration.

“Always I miss my friend,” he complained. “Early last month I came by the fair, and he was on vacation.”

“Ah, not vacation, monsieur. His poor mother died. A long illness. He nursed her to the end. In Antwerp.”

So that was what he had told them. For the second half of September and all of October he had been away from his dwelling and his workplace. I bet he was, thought Quinn, but he beamed and thanked Madame Gamier, and they drove back the four kilometers to the fun fair.

It was as abandoned as it had been six hours earlier, but now in the darkness it seemed like a ghost town. Quinn scaled the outer fence and helped Sam over after him. Against the deep velvet of the night sky he could see the inky girders of the Ferris wheel, the highest structure in the park.

They walked past the dismantled carrousel, whose antique wooden horses would now be in storage, the shuttered hot-dog stand. The Ferris wheel towered above them in the night.

“Stay here,” murmured Quinn. Leaving Sam in the shadows, he walked forward to the base of the machine.

“Lefort,” he called softly. There was no reply.

The double seats, hanging on their steel bars, were canvas-shrouded to protect the interiors. There was no one in or under the bottommost seats. Perhaps the man was crouching in the shadows waiting for them. Quinn glanced behind him.

To one side of the structure was the machine house, a big green steel shed housing the electric motor, and on top of it the control cabin in yellow. The doors of both opened to the touch. There was not a sound from the generator. Quinn touched it lightly. The machine contained a residual warmth.

He climbed to the control booth, flicked on a pilot light above the console, studied the levers, and depressed a switch. Beneath him the engine purred into life. He engaged the gears and moved the forward lever to “slow.” Ahead of him the giant wheel began to turn through the darkness. He found a floodlight control, touched it, and the area around the base of the wheel was bathed in white light.

Quinn descended and stood by the boarding ramp as the bucket seats swung silently by him. Sam joined him.

“What are you doing?” she whispered.

“There was a spare canvas seat-cover in the engine house,” he said. To their right, the booth that had once been at the zenith of the wheel began to appear. The man in it was not enjoying the ride.

He lay on his back across the double seat, his huge frame filling most of the space destined for two passengers. The hand with the tattoo lay limply across his belly, his head lolled back against the seat, sightless eyes staring up at the girders and the sky. He passed slowly in front of them, a few feet away. His mouth was half open, the nicotine-stained teeth glinting wetly in the floodlight. In the center of his forehead was a drilled round hole, its edges darkened by scorch marks. He passed and began his climb back into the night sky.

Quinn returned to the control booth and stopped the Ferris wheel where it had been, the single occupied booth at the very top out of sight in the darkness. He closed down the motor, switched off the lights, and locked both doors; took the ignition key and both door keys and hurled them far into the ornamental lake. The spare canvas seat-cover was locked inside the engine room. He was very thoughtful; Sam, when he glanced at her, looked pale and shaken.

On the road out of Wavre and back to the motorway they passed down the Chemin des Charrons again, past the house of the fun-fair director who had just lost a worker. It began to rain again.

Half a mile farther on they spotted the Domaine des Champs hotel, its lights beaming a welcome through the wet darkness.

When they had checked in, Quinn suggested Sam take her bath first. She made no objection. While she was in the tub he went through her luggage. The garment bag was no problem; the suitcase was soft-sided and took him thirty seconds to check out.

The square, hard-framed vanity case was heavy. He tipped out the collection of hair spray, shampoo, perfume, makeup kit, mirrors, brushes, and combs. It was still heavy. He measured its depth from rim to base on the outside and again on the inside. There are reasons why people hate to fly, and X-ray machines can be one of them. There was a two-inch difference in height. Quinn took his penknife and found the crack in the interior floor of the case.

Sam came out of the bathroom ten minutes later, brushing her wet hair. She was about to say something when she saw what lay on the bed, and stopped. Her face crumpled.

It was not what tradition calls a lady’s weapon. It was a Smith & Wesson long-barreled .38 revolver, and the shells laid on the coverlet beside it were hollow-point. A man-stopper.

Chapter 13

“Quinn,” said Sam, “I swear to God, Brown sicked that piece onto me before he’d agree to let me come with you. In case things got rough, he said.”

Quinn nodded and toyed with his food, which was excellent. But he had lost his appetite.

“Look, you know it hasn’t been fired. And I haven’t been out of your sight since Antwerp.”

She was right, of course. Though he had slept for twelve hours the previous night, long enough for someone to motor from Antwerp to Wavre and back with time to spare, Madame Gamier had said her lodger left for work on the Ferris wheel that morning after breakfast. Sam had been in bed with Quinn when he woke at six.

But there
are
telephones in Belgium.

Sam had not got to Marchais before him; but someone had. Brown and his FBI hunters? Quinn knew they, too, were out in Europe, with the full backing of the national police forces behind them. But Brown would want his man alive, able to talk, able to identify the accomplices. Maybe. He pushed his plate away.

“Been a long day,” he said. “Let’s go sleep.”

But he lay in the darkness and stared at the ceiling. At midnight he slept; he had decided to believe her.

They left in the morning after breakfast. Sam took the wheel.

“Where to, O Master?”

“Hamburg,” said Quinn.

“Hamburg? What’s with Hamburg?”

“I know a man in Hamburg” was all he would say.

They took the motorways again, south to cut into the E.41 north of Namur, then the long die-straight highway due east, to pass Liège and cross the German frontier at Aachen. She turned north through the dense industrial sprawl of the Ruhr past Düsseldorf, Duisburg, and Essen, to emerge finally into the agricultural plains of Lower Saxony.

Quinn spelled her at the wheel after three hours, and after two more they paused for fuel and a lunch of meaty Westphalian sausages and potato salad at a
Gasthaus
, one of the myriad that appear every two or three miles along the major German routes. It was already getting dark when they joined the columns of traffic moving through the southern suburbs of Hamburg.

The old Hanseatic port city on the Elbe was much as Quinn recalled it. They found a small, anonymous, but comfortable hotel behind the Steindammtor and checked in.

“I didn’t know you spoke German too,” said Sam when they reached their room.

“You never asked,” said Quinn. In fact he had taught himself the language years before, because in the days when the Baader-Meinhof gang was on the rampage, and then its successor, the Red Army Faction, was in business, kidnaps had been frequent in Germany, and often very bloody. Three times in the late seventies he had worked on cases in the Federal Republic.

He made two phone calls, but learned the man he wanted to speak to would not be in his office until the following morning.

General Vadim Vassilievich Kirpichenko stood in the outer office and waited. Despite his impassive exterior he felt a twinge of nervousness. Not that the man he wished to see was unapproachable; his reputation was the opposite and they had met several times, though always formally and in public. His qualms stemmed from another factor: To go over the heads of his superiors in the KGB, to ask for a personal and private meeting with the General Secretary without telling them, was risky. If it went wrong, badly wrong, his career would be on the line.

A secretary came to the door of the private office and stood there.

“The General Secretary will see you now, Comrade General,” he said.