Beggarman, Thief (57 page)

Rudolph paced around the room, frowning. “Wesley,” he said, “what if I told you that the matter will be taken care of without your having to do anything about it?”

“What does that mean? Taken care of?”

“It means that right now, as we drink champagne in this room, a professional killer is looking for your man.”

“I’d say I don’t want anybody to do the job for me,” Wesley said coldly, “and I don’t want any more gifts from you or anyone else.”

“I intend to stay here in Cannes until the end of the festival,” Rudolph said. “That’s only ten days. If the job isn’t done by then, I’m going home and calling it quits. All I want from you is a promise that you won’t do anything until then. After that, you’re on your own.”

“I’m not promising anything,” Wesley said.

“Wesley …” Billy said.

Wesley turned on him sharply. “You keep out of this. You’ve meddled enough already.”

“Calm down,” Rudolph said. “Both of you. Another thing, Wesley. Your friend Miss Larkin called the other day. You owe her a lot, too.”

“More than you know,” Wesley said. “What did she have to say?”

“She wants to come over here. She thinks she can get leave from the magazine for two weeks. She’s waiting for a call from you.”

Wesley finished his glass of wine. “Let her wait,” he said.

“She said you knew she might come over. That you wanted her to come.”

“I thought the whole thing would be over by now,” Wesley said. “Well, it isn’t over. I’ll see her some other time.”

“Ah, the hell with it,” Rudolph said. “I’m not going to play Cupid with all the other things I’m doing. Let’s finish the bottle. I’m going to get some sleep.”

“What’re you going to do now?” Billy asked Wesley when they were alone in front of the hotel.

“Night patrol,” Wesley said. “Want to come along?”

“No.”

Wesley looked quizzically at Billy. “What do you think of all this?” he asked.

“I’m scared shitless,” Billy said. “For all of us.”

Wesley nodded solemnly.

“I’ll walk with you as far as the parking lot,” Billy said. “I forgot to put the top up on the car and it looks as though it might rain.”

Wesley helped as they put the top up and Billy rolled up the windows. “Wesley,” Billy said, “it still would be a nice idea if we two drove up to Paris, with a few stops for tennis and feasts along the way. You could ask your girl to meet you there. They’ll drive you bats down here in the next ten days. How much harm can another ten days do after all this time?”

“I’ll play tennis all right with you, Billy,” Wesley said. “Down here. Good night, pal.”

Billy watched the tall figure in the dark suit with the little bulge in the pocket stride off. He shook his head and walked back to the hotel. In his room he double-locked the door.

The next morning he awoke early and sent down for the newspapers. Along with the special sheets put out for the festival, the bellboy brought a copy of
Nice-Matin.
On the front page there was a photograph of a man who looked familiar. The man was wearing dark glasses in the photograph and he was between two policemen. It was Monika’s frozen-food friend from Diisseldorf. In the accompanying story, Billy read that he had been arrested on an anonymous tip over the telephone and that he had been caught with a bomb in his possession hidden in a motion picture camera case. The man who had phoned in the tip, the article continued, had spoken in a pronounced Midi accent.

Billy smiled as he read that. Wesley, he thought, was not the only actor in the family.

«  »

They played tennis the next morning, driving over to a quiet club in Juan-les-Pins in the little open car, Wesley, in blue jeans and faded cotton shirt and a tweed jacket with frayed cuffs, not looking so much like an actor who had been acclaimed in the press as a man with an exciting career ahead of him. Billy had touched the little bulge in the pocket with distaste and had said, “Can’t you leave that damn thing at home even when you play tennis? It gives me the willies. I have the feeling you’ll take it out and shoot me if I ace you once too often.”

Wesley smiled benignly. “Where I go, it goes,” he said. And when they went out to the court he wore the jacket over his tennis clothes and before they started to play laid it carefully over a bench near the net, where he could see it at all times.

The first day Wesley played with the same old wild abandon, hitting the ball savagely, more often than not into the net or to the backstop. After two hours of that Billy said, “That’s enough for today. If you
acted
like that they wouldn’t let you as much as
see
a movie even if you paid for the ticket.”

Wesley grinned. “Youthful high spirits,” he said, putting on the tweed coat over his soaked shirt. “I promise to reform.”

“Starting when?”

“Starting tomorrow,” Wesley promised.

When they went in to take their showers, although there was nobody else in the locker room, Wesley insisted that Billy stay in the room and watch his jacket while he took the first shower.

“I’ve done some foolish things in my time,” Billy complained, “but this is the first time I’ve hired out as a coat watcher.” He sat down on the bench in front of the lockers as Wesley stripped, the big muscles of his back standing out clearly, the long legs heavy, but perfectly proportioned. “If I had a build like yours,” Billy said, “I’d be in the finals at Wimbledon.”

“You can’t have everything,” Wesley said. “You have brains.”

“And you?”

“None to brag about.”

“You’ll go far in your chosen profession,” Billy said.

“If I choose it,” Wesley said, as he went into the shower room.

A moment later, Billy heard, over the splash of the water, Wesley’s voice, singing, “Raindrops keep falling on my head …” He had a strong, true voice and an accurate talent for phrasing on the lyrics. That, too, Billy thought, along with everything else he has. There was one sure thing, Billy thought, if anyone came into the locker room and saw and heard him, as though he hadn’t a care in the world, they’d never guess in a million years that he carried a pistol around with him day and night.

As they went to where the car was parked behind the clubhouse in the shadow of the trees there, Billy said, “If you piss it all away, my mother will never forgive you. Nor will I.”

Wesley didn’t say anything, but just plumped himself down in the bucket seat, whistling a melody from the score of his picture.

The next day Wesley kept his promise and played more calmly. Suddenly, he seemed to have found a sense of the tactics of the game and mixed up his shots, playing the percentages and not trying to kill every ball. At the end of the two hours Billy was exhausted, even though he had won all four sets. Wesley wasn’t even breathing hard, although he had run twice as much as Billy. And once again, he made Billy watch his coat while he took his shower.

The third day they could only play an hour because Billy had promised to get back early so that Donnelly and Gretchen could have the car to drive to Mougins for a quiet lunch. Since the running of the picture there was no chance of even a quiet fifteen minutes in Cannes for Gretchen, and she was showing the strain.

It took the whole hour just to play one set and Billy had to fight for every point, even though he won six-three. “Whew,” he said as they walked toward the locker room, “I’m beginning to feel sorry I asked you to calm down. You’ll wear me down to the bone if you keep this up.”

“Child’s play,” Wesley said complacently.

They were dressing after their showers when they heard the explosion outside.

“What the hell was that?” Billy asked.

Wesley shrugged. “Maybe a gas main,” he said.

“That wasn’t any gas main,” Billy said. He felt shaky and had to sit down for a moment. He was sitting there shirtless when the manager of the club came running into the locker room.
“Monsieur
Abbott,” he said, babbling, his voice high and frightened, “you’d better come quick. It was your car.… It’s horrible.”

“I’ll be right there,” Billy said, but didn’t move for a moment. In the distance, there was the sound of a police siren approaching. Billy put on his shirt and meticulously and slowly began to button it as Wesley rushed into his jeans. “Wesley,” Billy said, “don’t you go out there.”

“What do you mean, don’t go out there?”

“You heard me. The police’ll be there in a few seconds,” Billy spoke swiftly, biting out his words. “You’ll be all over the papers. Just stay right here. And hide that fucking pistol of yours. In an inconspicuous place. And if anybody asks you anything, you don’t know anything.”

“But I don’t know anything …” Wesley said.

“Good,” said Billy. “Stay that way. Now I have to go and see what happened.” He finished buttoning his shirt and walked, without hurrying, out of the locker room.

People from the nearby apartment buildings had begun to stream toward the trees behind the clubhouse where the car had been parked. A small police car, its siren wailing, sped through the club gates and squealed to a halt on the driveway. Two policemen got out and ran toward the car. As Billy approached he saw that the car was torn apart, its front wheels blown off and the hood lying some feet from the body of the car. Billy’s view of the scene was blocked by the people standing around it, but he could see and hear a woman gesticulating wildly and screaming at the policemen that she had been walking past the gates and had seen a man bending over the front of the car with the hood up and then a few seconds later, after she had passed the gate, had heard the explosion.

In the high babble of excited conversation, Billy could hear one of the policemen asking the manager of the tennis club who owned the car and the manager answering and turning to point at Billy. Billy pushed through the crowd and only then saw the body of a man lying facedown, mangled and bloody, next to what had been the radiator of the Peugeot.

“Messieurs,”
Billy said, “it is my car.” If the manager, who knew he spoke French, had not been there, he would have pretended he only spoke English.

As the two policemen started to turn the dead man’s body over, Billy turned his head. The people in the crowd recoiled and there was a woman’s scream.

“Monsieur,”
one of the policemen said to Billy, “do you recognize this man?”

“I prefer not to look,” Billy said, with his head still turned away.

“Please,
monsieur,”
the policeman said. He was young and he was pale with fright and horror. “You must tell us if you know this man. If you don’t look now you will be forced to come to the morgue later and look then.”

The second policeman was kneeling over the dead man, searching what remained of his pockets. The policeman shook his head and rose. “No papers,” he said.

“Please,
monsieur,”
the young policeman pleaded.

Finally, turning his head slowly, conscious first of looking at the stricken faces of the onlookers, of the tops of trees, of the blue of the sky, Billy made himself look down. There was a gaping red hole where the chest had been and the face was torn and there was a crooked grimace that bared broken teeth between charred lips, but Billy still could recognize the face. It was the man he had known as George in Brussels.

Billy shook his head. “I’m sorry,
messieurs,”
he said, “I’ve never seen this man before.”

VOLUME

FOUR

CHAPTER 1

Billy was sitting at his desk in the almost deserted city room, staring at his typewriter. It was late at night and he had done his work for the day and he was free to go home. But home was a nasty little one-room studio near the university and there was no one there to greet him. This was by choice. Since Juan-les-Pins he had avoided company of all kinds.

On his desk, there was a bulky letter from his Uncle Rudolph, from Cannes. It had been on his desk, unopened, for three days. His uncle wrote too many letters, with tempting descriptions of the fascinating life at high pay for bright young men in Washington, where Rudolph now spent a good part of his time, doing some sort of unpaid but seemingly important work for the Democratic Party. At least his name had begun to appear in the newspaper stories from Washington, linked sometimes with that of Helen Morison and that of the senator from Connecticut with whom he traveled on missions to Europe.