The Prisoner of the Riviera (The Francis Bacon Mysteries) (20 page)

All I could be sure of was that, after Paul Desmarais was shot in London, Joubert secured the notebook and letter, hoping to track their delivery to “Madame Renard” by yours truly. Serge Brun, who, like Joubert, had a profitable war and mysterious connections in café society, got wind of the scheme and murdered poor Madame Renard the First, aka Gustave Gravois, aka that great drag singer Mademoiselle Veronique, and substituted Cybèle, who got the package and almost wound up herself in the fish locker. A timely intervention by my first alter ego, Marcel Lepage, stopped that!

Paul, meanwhile, was back on his feet and out for revenge—and for the suitcases his old lover Mademoiselle Veronique had stashed for him. He’d have gotten clean away if my second alter ego, Eugène, hadn’t fancied singing lessons, which just goes to show that chance rules us all, even homicidal schemers like Paul Desmarais. Yes, indeed. And I haven’t even touched on who tried to stab me or whether the Chavanels really did break Paul’s bank code.

I doubted that I’d ever know more, but I was going home, back to Nan, whom I love and who would be entertained for weeks with these problems, and back to Arnold, who is good for me and who would give me sage advice, and back to painting, which I need like food and sex and drink, with new ideas and a couple of strange new images.

The train drew away from the platform, and I resolved to put doubts and questions behind me. My friends had survived; my enemies were vanquished. I was done with Marcel Lepage, furniture restorations, and genealogy, as well as with the unlamented Eugène Laroche, he of the smart repartee and the bizarre desire to sing lieder. I was well rid of them, and I decided to celebrate with a fine meal, which, thanks to a little last-minute largesse from Hector, I could well afford.

Into the restaurant car with its white tablecloths and uniformed waiters, one of whom indicated a seat near the entrance. The other tables held prosperous-looking businessmen and stylish couples and, far to the back, a single woman with a large black picture hat shadowing her face. I nodded a greeting to the assembled and focused on the menu: leek and potato soup—one of my favorites.
Coq au vin
with green beans and
pommes frites
. Also very nice. A
pêche melba
for dessert. There were things about France that I certainly would miss. The wines, too, of course. I ordered a bottle of white Burgundy, a pale-gold-and-green-tinged liquid that helped speed me along the French countryside. Some of the fields were planted; some were still stripped of trees and shattered like the killing fields of the First World War. I made a mental note to tell Nan.

I lingered at the table, any nagging discontent soothed with the fine vintage, and it was to prolong this pleasure that I ordered coffee and a liqueur. By the time I was finished, we were outside Rouen and headed north to Dieppe and the ferry. I started back to my compartment, walking a trifle unsteadily across the swaying connections between the cars. My seat was in the fourth car from the restaurant, and I had just reached the door of the second, when I felt something hard in the small of my back.

“Stop right there, Monsieur.”

Quite irrationally, I thought of my undertaking duties and jumped in alarm. I say irrationally, because the voice, though low and rather harsh, was definitely feminine. When I turned my head, I saw the black picture hat with a drooping ostrich feather. Underneath was a thin face with red lipstick and malevolent dark eyes. Yvette Lambert suddenly looked a great deal like her brother.

“On your way to the coast ahead of the gendarmes?” I asked to give myself a little time. “Off perhaps to England and points west?”

“Go to the door.”

I started toward the next compartment and felt the gun in my kidney. “The exit door,” she said.

I didn’t like this at all.

“Put down the window and hurry up.”

I lowered the window that occupied the upper half of the door. We were zipping through open fields bordered by thick hedgerows. The track was lined with crushed rock and bordered by shrubs and long grass.

“Jump,” she said.

I was so surprised that I forgot the gun and turned around to look at her. “Whatever for?”

“My brother,” she said. “This is for my brother.”

Just when I’d almost regained the illusion of normal life, I discover that, besides their other excesses, my French acquaintances believe in blood vengeance. I attempted righteous indignation. “As a matter of fact, I saved your brother’s life in London. He’d have bled to death if I hadn’t known first aid.”

“Your friends shot him.”

“Arnold had nothing to do with it.”

“Arnold, who is this Arnold? I’m talking about Hector and the bicycle boy. Didn’t you know? Oh, I see you didn’t. They’d plotted for years.”

I realized with a shock that was plausible, very plausible—
but don’t admit that now, Francis
. “I’d have thought your late pal, Serge Brun, a better bet.” Sooner or later someone would pass in the corridor, perhaps even one of the officious conductors. I only had to spin out the time. “And he had other enemies. Your husband’s grandfather, for one.”

“Yes, and he bankrolled the attack. He certainly did, though he plays with model houses and innuendo and walks with his nose in the air as if he’d never handled shit. I know he paid Hector and the bicycle boy to go to London. How else would they have gotten the money? A man on a small pension and a bike repairman with a mortgaged shop? No, Monsieur, and because they are beyond reach, you must jump. Or I shoot. Now open the door.”

I hesitated. Would she shoot? I decided she would. Could I survive the jump? Probably not. But I probably wouldn’t survive a shot at this range, either. The train doors opened from the outside; I reached out the window and turned the handle. The wind caught the door, banging it open flat against the side of the train. I descended one step, grabbed the vertical handrail next to the opening and swung away from the doorway.

Was this a good idea? I could see the ground flowing white, gray, and brown beneath my feet; the grass by the track was a green ribbon waving at oblivion.

“Jump!” she said. “Jump!” She stepped into the doorway and raised the gun.

I got a death grip on the handrail and swung toward her with both feet in the air. Perhaps we passed over some points or started into a turn, for I was already in motion when the carriage suddenly swayed. The gun discharged, but Yvette, stylishly dressed in high heels, lost her balance. She grabbed for the rail, for me, for the door, but with another rumble, the train shook her off like a horse with a fly. She was airborne and flowing backward with the ground, the grass. I heard a thump and then the train bent away on its tracks, and she disappeared.

I was left hanging from the handrail, the sleepers and gravel inches from my feet. My arms felt like jelly, but to fall now would be ridiculous. Wheezing and gasping, I hauled myself up level with the bottom step and got first one, then the other foot on the metal. I took a breath—never very deep with my asthmatic lungs—and risked taking one hand off the rail. My body gave a nasty dip toward the ground before I grabbed the doorframe. I pulled myself inside and stood in the open doorway, gasping and sweating. Then I closed the door and the window and staggered, rubber legged, to my compartment.

Fortunately, it was momentarily empty. I collapsed on the seat and gasped until my lungs calmed down. Then I straightened my tie, brushed off my jacket and trousers, wiped my face and hands. By the time the other passengers drifted in, I was leaning against the glass in a good imitation of postprandial drowsiness—
avoid eye contact, Francis
—and trying to make sense of the situation.

The last of Paul Desmarais’s associates was gone. He’d been the dying lion with his suitcases of cash and his Swiss account; his sister and Brun and Joubert were the jackals who’d come to feed on the carcass. What were they owed? Not much from me.

And Hector and Pierre? Could Yvette have been right, that Old Lambert had put aside his distaste for mechanics and paid the two of them? Was his violent reaction to Pierre just a ruse? Maybe. And could Hector have been the figure glimpsed from the portico of the gambling club? He was, as Shakespeare says, a man for all weathers, able to organize an ambush, an identity, or a dye job with equal aplomb. He had his reasons, and he admitted himself that his morals had become more flexible with the war. I could see everything but that a man of his capabilities would have failed to kill Paul outright. In Hector’s favor, I sincerely doubted that.

Then what about Pierre? A distasteful idea, but though I was reluctant to recast him as an assassin, I remembered his saying, “They are after me, too,” at Cannes. Fit and strong, he could have been the figure racing across the road to the saloon car—or the driver waiting inside. He could have been, and that raised questions about our fortuitous meeting on the road below the Villa Mimosa.

I was on the verge of total skepticism when I remembered how embarrassed Pierre had been when I showed up at his bike shop. Had there been some grand design, he would have been eager to see me, and he would have had a very good reason to lie to the police and to keep me from the clutches of the corrupt Inspector Chardin. No, I could not think quite so badly of Pierre. Which didn’t mean that he and Hector were innocent; rather that, like the rest of us, they mostly worked by improvisation. The London shooting? There were three or four candidates and for my friends, I gave a Scots verdict: not proven.

Just the same, I’d probably have worried the issue longer if I hadn’t been distracted by anxiety. Had some drowsy businessman seen Yvette Lambert’s precipitous departure from the Dieppe express? Was he even now searching out the conductor? Or had some old lady glanced from her knitting to see a black hat with an ostrich feather and something—could it be a woman—beside the tracks? Was she alerting her companions and asking if they should pull the alarm?

Excitement for sure, and for yours truly, too. I kept one eye on the corridor, expecting alarms and an unscheduled stop, expecting the conductor, expecting questions, expecting, somewhat irrationally, the police, until, as we approached Dieppe, I began to have real hopes of the crossing and of leaving France behind.

Of course, a good citizen would pull the emergency cord or summon the conductor for a quiet word. A good citizen would miss his connection to the boat train and home. As I watched the rolling land and caught the first faint whiffs of sea air, I thought how fortunate I was to be a bad citizen. I’d been a prisoner of the Riviera and escaped. I decided not to judge my friends, who’d been in a difficult place in a difficult time, and I owed my enemies nothing, not even another clandestine burial. This time I was not going to assist the police with their inquiries; this time I was going home.

All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this book or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2013 Janice Law

Cover design by Mauricio Díaz

ISBN 978-1-4804-3598-8

Published in 2013 by MysteriousPress.com/Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

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New York, NY 10014

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