Алистер Маклин - Caravan to Vaccares

‘We have to move quickly.’ His voice was brusque, authoritative and as cold as his face. ‘I have received cabled information that the police are becoming suspicious and may well by this time be certain of us – thanks to you, Czerda, and that bungling fool Searl there. Are you mad, Czerda?’

‘I do not understand, sir.’

‘That’s precisely it. You understand nothing. You were going to kill Bowman before he’d told us how he broke our ring, who his contacts are, where my eighty thousand francs are. Worst of all, you cretins, you were going to kill him publicly. Can’t you see the enormous publicity that would have received? Secrecy, stealth, those are my watch-words.’

‘We know where the eighty thousand francs are, sir.’ Czerda tried to salvage something from the wreck.

‘Do we? Do we? I suspect you have been fooled again, Czerda. But that can wait. Do you know what will happen to you if the French police get you?’ Silence. ‘Do you know the rigorous penalties French courts impose on kidnappers?’ Still silence. ‘Not one of you here can hope to escape with less than ten years in prison. And if they can trace Alexandre’s murder to you. . .’

Le Grand Duc looked at El Brocador and the four gypsies in turn. From the expression on their faces it was quite clear that they knew what would happen if the murder could be traced to them.

‘Very well, then. From this moment on your futures and your lives depend entirely on doing exactly what I order – it is not beyond my powers to rescue you from the consequences of your own folly. Exactly. Is that understood?’

All five men nodded. No one said anything.

‘Very well. Unchain those men. Untie Bowman. If the police find them like that – well, it’s all over. We use guns and knives to guard them from now on. Bring all their womenfolk in here – I want all our eggs in one basket. Go over our proposed plans, Searl. Go over them briefly and clearly so that even the most incompetent nincompoop, and that includes you, can understand what we have in mind. Bring me some beer, someone.’

Searl cleared his throat self-consciously and looked distinctly unhappy. The arrogance, the quietly cold competence with which he’d confronted Czerda in the confessional booth that morning had vanished as if it had never existed.

‘Rendezvous any time between last night and Monday night. Fast motor-boat waiting–’

Le Grand Duc sighed in despair and held up a hand.

‘Briefly and clearly, Searl. Clearly. Rendezvous where, you fool? With whom?’

‘Sorry, sir.’ The Adam’s apple in the thin scraggy neck bobbed up and down as Searl swallowed nervously. ‘Off Palavas in the Gulf of Aigues-Mortes. Freighter Canton.’

‘Bound for?’

‘Canton.’

‘Precisely.’

‘Recognition signals–’

‘Never mind that. The motor-boat?’

‘At Aigues-Mortes on the Canal du Rhône à Sète. I was going to have it moved down to Le Grau du Roi tomorrow – I didn’t think – I–’

‘You never have done,’ Le Grand Duc said wearily. ‘Why aren’t those damned women here? And those manacles still fixed? Hurry.’ For the first time he relaxed and smiled slightly. ‘I’ll wager our friend Bowman still doesn’t know who our three other friends are. Eh, Searl?’

‘I can tell him?’ Searl asked eagerly. The prospect of climbing out of the hot seat and transferring the spotlight elsewhere was clearly an attractive one.

‘Suit yourself.’ Le Grand Duc drank deeply of his beer. ‘Can it matter now?’

‘Of course not.’ Searl smiled widely. ‘Let me introduce Count le Hobenaut, Henri Tangevec and Serge Daymel. The three leading rocket fuel experts on the other side of the Iron Curtain. The Chinese wanted them badly, they have been so far unable to develop a vehicle to carry their nuclear warheads. Those men could do it. But there wasn’t a single land border between China and Russia that could be used, not a single neutral country that was friendly to both the great powers and wouldn’t have looked too closely at irregular happenings. So Czerda brought them out. To the West. No one would ever dream that such men would defect to the West – the West has its own fuel experts. And, at the frontiers, no one ever asks questions of gypsies. Of course, if the three men had clever ideas, their wives would have been killed. If the women got clever ideas, the men would have been killed.’

‘Or so the women were told,’ Le Grand Duc said contemptuously. ‘The last thing that we wanted was that any harm should come to those men. But women – they’ll believe anything.’ He permitted himself a small smile of satisfaction. ‘The simplicity – if I may say so myself, the staggering simplicity of true genius. Ah, the women. Aigues-Mortes, and with speed. Tell your other caravans, Czerda, that you will rendezvous with them in the morning in Saintes-Maries. Come, Lila, my dear.’

‘With you?’ She stared at him in revulsion. ‘You must be mad. Go with you?’

‘Appearances must be maintained, now more than ever. What suspicion is going to attach to a man with so beautiful a young lady by his side? Besides, it’s very hot and I require someone to hold my parasol.’

Just over an hour later, still fuming and tight-lipped, she lowered the parasol as the green Rolls-Royce drew up outside the frowning walls of Aigues-Mortes, the most perfectly preserved Crusader walled city in Europe. Le Grand Duc descended from the car and waited till Czerda had brought the breakdown truck towing the caravan to a halt.

‘Wait here,’ he ordered. ‘I shall not be long.’ He nodded to the Rolls. ‘Keep a sharp eye on Miss Delafont there. You apart, no others are on any account to show themselves.’

He glanced up the road towards Saintes-Maries. Momentarily, it was deserted. He marched quickly away and entered the bleak and forbidding town by the north gate, turned right into the car park and took up position in the concealment of a barrel organ. The operator, a decrepit ancient who, in spite of the heat of the day, was wearing two overcoats and a felt hat, looked up from the stool where he had been drowsing and scowled. Le Grand Duc gave him ten francs. The operator stopped scowling, adjusted a switch and began to crank a handle: the screeching cacophonous result was an atonal travesty of a waltz that no composer alive or dead would ever have acknowledged as his. Le Grand Duc winced, but remained where he was.

Within two minutes a black Mercedes passed in through the archway, turned right and stopped. The Chinese couple got out, looked neither to left or right, and walked hurriedly down the main street – indeed, Aigues-Mortes’s only street, towards the tiny café-lined square near the centre of the town. More leisurely and at a discreet distance Le Grand Duc followed.

The Chinese couple reached the square and halted uncertainly on a corner by a souvenir shop, not far from the statue of St Louis. No sooner had they done so than four large men in plain dark clothes emerged from the shop, two from each door, and closed in on them. One of the men showed the Chinese man something cupped in the palm of his hand. The Chinese man gesticulated and appeared to protest violently but the four large men just shook their heads firmly and led the couple away to a pair of waiting Citroëns.

Le Grand Duc nodded his head in what could not easily have been mistaken for anything other than satisfaction, turned and retraced his steps to the waiting car and caravan.

Less than sixty seconds’ drive took them to a small jetty on the Canal du Rhône à Sète, a canal that links the Rhône to the Mediterranean at Le Grau du Roi and runs parallel to the western wall of Aigues-Mortes. At the end of the jetty was moored a thirty-five-foot powerboat with a large glassed-in cabin and an only slightly smaller cockpit aft. From the lines of the broad flaring bows it appeared to be a vessel capable of something unusual in terms of speed.