Дональд Уэстлейк - Castle in the Air

And forthcoming. Jean went on, “I’m just showing the young lady around.” Hugging Renee even tighter, smiling down on her fondly — and a bit lecherously — he added, “Let her see how things work.”

Wide-eyed, Renee looked at the three men. “The trains are so big ,” she said, in the tiny sexy-innocent voice of the utterly depraved little girl.

And now the three workmen understood; or at least thought they understood. Armed with this information — or misinformation — all three relaxed and began to smile, both in complicity with Jean and in pleasure at Renee.

The usual state of the traffic entering and circling and leaving the area of the Arc de Triomphe is perilous in the extreme, but the situation was just about to get much worse, hard as it was to believe. Nevertheless, it was true, and it all began when the two orange trucks we have seen before growled and slouched their way amid the Simcas and Citroëns, up from the south and out onto the dizzy circle surrounding the Arc. Little did the drivers of those trucks know, but their presence was the cue for several other actions to commence.

The first of these was that Rosa Palermo took her foot off the accelerator. “And there they are at last,” she said, ignoring the banshee wails of horns behind her prompted by the Renault’s loss of momentum. “Thank God, I can stop circling this stupid letter ‘o’.” And she angled across the traffic, intending to get into a lane to the right of the two slow-moving, smoke-belching orange behemoths.

“We should have had Vito do this part,” Angelo said. “He likes being in one place all the time.”

“In jail,” Rosa commented.

“I don’t think it matters,” Angelo said. “Just so it’s the same place every minute.”

“There he is,” Rosa said, cutting off a Peugeot and coming up beside the orange trucks on their right.

Yes, there was Vito, looking even older and wearier and sicker than usual, all bundled and blanketed inside a motorized wheelchair, tentatively and nervously driving his fragile little vehicle right out into all that traffic. He looked terrified, and he’d never been known for his acting ability, so he probably was terrified.

“On second thought,” Angelo said, as they flashed past Vito, “I’m just as happy to be here and have him out there.”

“The Germans,” Rosa said, looking in the rearview mirror.

Angelo looked around: “Where?”

“Behind us. Where they’re supposed to be.”

And so they were; or at least two of them were. The black Volkswagen had fallen into line behind the white Renault, Rudi at the wheel and Herman in the front seat beside him. As for Otto, why, there was Otto over there, the Boche near the Avenue Hoche — Otto was on foot, his chunky torso festooned with cameras, another camera ready in his hands. And Otto was backing away from the sidewalk directly into the line of traffic, ignoring all those cars and frowning instead at whatever it was over by Avenue Hoche that he had decided he must at once permanently record on film.

Meantime, the driver of the first orange truck, having entered the Place Charles de Gaulle from Avenue Kléber and desiring to continue his northward journey by exiting onto Avenue de Wagram, and seeing Avenue de Wagram nearing up ahead, attempted to flow across the traffic rightward, thus leaving the busy circling rush of cars; but a little white Renault was in his way. Nestling against the truck’s huge right front fender, the Renault seemed as happy with this propinquity as a baby chick under the wing of its mother. The driver of the truck tapped his brakes, intending to ease in behind the white Renault, but all of a sudden a black Volkswagen convertible beetle was also in the way. And the Renault had slowed down, just as a baby chick might when discovering it had rashly leaped out from under its mother’s wing.

Avenue de Wagram; it was right there . The truck driver braked even more, sounding his horn, edging over rightward as far as he dared, but the Renault and Volkswagen both seemed utterly oblivious of him. No matter how slowly he traveled, both were right there, next to him. He couldn’t come to a dead stop, could he?

Too late. Avenue de Wagram was behind him. The damn Renault and the s.o.b. Volkswagen were still next to him. And he would have to go all the way around the Arc and exit onto Avenue de Wagram on the next circuit.

Hell!

Grinding slowly up the hilly streets of Ménilmontant came a very large, very long truck, its contents covered with a series of silver tarpaulins all tied down with thick ropes. It was a distinctive truck, and Bruddy, looking at it in the rearview mirror of the parked cab, smiled and muttered, “And there you are, right on time.” He and Andrew and Sir Mortimer had watched this truck loaded this morning, out at Le Bourget: all the crates and cartons and anonymous packages from the Yerbadoroan plane being shifted onto this truck, then covered with the tarpaulins. A little “us drivers together” conversation between Bruddy and the truck’s driver had elicited the man’s planned route and expected timetable, and the fellow’s estimates had been exact; he was where he’d said he would be, at the time he’d guessed.

Bruddy let the big silver truck grind by, struggling its way up the steep hill, then eased the cab into gear and slowly followed.

Meantime, much farther up the hill, Andrew stood leaning against the side of a large dirty delivery van, trying to look like a loafing French workman and managing only to look like an English civil servant dressed for gardening. Checking his watch, looking downhill, Andrew sighed and shifted position. Waiting was always the hardest.

Even farther up the hill, Sir Mortimer was purchasing watermelons; half a dozen big juicy ones. He had equipped himself with a baby carriage, sans baby, and while the vegetable peddler watched in frank bewilderment and curiosity, Sir Mortimer gently placed the six watermelons inside the baby carriage. Noticing the vegetable woman’s expression, Sir Mortimer told her, “I am English, Madam, which explains everything. Eccentric, you see.”

“Ah!” said the vegetable woman, her brow clearing, a smile of understanding glowing on her face. “L’eccen -trick !”

Renee, apparently unaware that one too many buttons of her blouse was undone, leaned forward and pointed: “And what is this, with all the lights?”

The three workmen assigned to the freight yard switching office reluctantly diverted their attention from Renee’s front to the machine under question: “This tells us,” one of the workmen said, smiling at Renee’s breasts, “where our locomotives are.”

Of those in the switching office, only Jean, over by the window, was at the moment aware that one of their locomotives was in motion down there in the freight yards, with Charles at the controls. Rapidly the locomotive was backing toward the track containing, among others, the two yellow boxcars. Jean surreptitiously moved a lever, while Renee continued to distract the three workmen, and down in the freight yard a switch shifted position just before the locomotive reached it.

The driver of the second orange truck had no idea why they just kept going around and around the Arc de Triomphe; was Jacques lost up there? How can you be lost at the Arc de Triomphe? The driver of the second truck tried honking his horn, to attract his compatriot Jacques’ attention to the fact that Avenue de Wagram was going by yet again, over there on the right, like an unattainable brass ring at a merry-go-round, but so many other horns were being honked in this area (including the lead truck’s, though the second driver couldn’t know that) that it had no effect at all.

And there was the girl again. The driver had noticed her the last time around, a very good-looking dark-haired girl on a bicycle, very obviously in terror of her life amid all this traffic. A very good-looking girl. The driver smiled at the sight of her, and followed his friend on around the Arc yet again.