Дональд Уэстлейк - Castle in the Air

On the Quai Mégisserie, on the Right Bank of the Seine, Bruddy and Charles and Renee leaned on the railing and looked across the sparkling water to the Ile de la Cité, where the walled boat had just come to a stop at another narrow flight of stone steps. Rosa and Angelo, tying the boat in place, seemed to be involved in a not-entirely-friendly debate, though they were too far away for Bruddy and Charles and Renee to hear their voices.

“Now we’ve got you, sweethearts,” Bruddy said. “If only that bloody Eustace gets there in time.”

“Our friend,” pointed out Renee, “is speaking English again.”

“It seems habitual with him,” Charles said. “But pay no attention; he will soon cease to be a nuisance to us.”

Frowning at them, Bruddy said, “What are you two plotting? You’re up to something.”

Across the water, the debate seemed at last to have resolved itself; Rosa and Angelo climbed the steps together, leaving the boat tied up behind them. Half a dozen steps, and they were out of sight.

“Good,” said Charles. To Bruddy he said, “Come along, before your friend Eustace doublecrosses us.” And he trotted off in the direction of Pont Neuf, the nearest bridge to the island.

Bruddy, not having understood what had just been said to him, was startled and not at all pleased when first Charles and then Renee took to their heels, running away from him. “Here!” he shouted, haring off after them. “Hi! Come back! What you trying to pull?”

Very quickly Bruddy overtook the trotting Charles, grabbed him by the arm, and began to wrestle with him. Charles, bewildered and angry, naturally defended himself, shouting, “What are you doing? We’ve got to get over there!”

Bruddy had a good grip, and wasn’t about to let go: “Try to run out on me , will you?”

Renee ran in little circles around the combatants, screaming, “Stop! Stop! Have you gone crazy?”

“We’ve got to get the loot!” Charles yelled. “They’ll get away with the loot!” he repeated, at the top of his voice, and only then did he become aware of the three gendarmes standing at the curb, attracted by the fracas.

The change in Charles’ reaction alerted Bruddy, who looked over his shoulder and also saw the gendarmes; smiling, calm, observing, patiently awaiting their turn to enter the conversation.

“Um,” said Bruddy, and released Charles, and stood there smoothing down his jacket and shirt.

The gendarmes approached. Pleasantly, one of them said to Charles, “And what is it we are fighting about, on such a lovely day?”

“Um,” said Charles, in French.

“ ‘Loot?’ ” quoted a second gendarme. “Was there a reference to ‘loot’?”

“Alas,” said Charles.

Eustace, Vito and Lida, prowling the Ile de la Cité, had first discovered Rosa and Angelo in the process of stealing a truck. Themselves remaining out of sight, they had followed the truck thieves back to the Quai de l’Horloge, where the boat was tied up, and now from a nearby vantage point they watched their two former allies unload all the building blocks from the boat, carry them up the steps, and load them into the back of the truck. Eustace observed all this with the purest of pleasure, Vito with extremely mixed feelings, and Lida kept looking about in apprehension, finally saying, “Where are the others? Renee, and Charles, and Bruddy?”

Delighted as much by their absence as by the blocks’ presence, Eustace smiled and said, “I really couldn’t say.”

“Perhaps something has happened to them.”

Trying without success to look sad, Eustace agreed: “It is possible.”

Continuing to look around, Lida suddenly lit up, saying, “Oh, look! Here’s Jean and Rudi!”

Startled, anything but pleased, Eustace whipped around, and, by God, it was true. Here came Jean and Rudi, an unlikely couple at the best of times, both smiling. Lida echoed their smile, but Eustace and Vito both looked rather glum as Jean and Rudi joined them, Jean saying, “We meet again.”

“How lucky,” Eustace said sourly. “I was afraid we’d lost you.”

“And look who I found,” Jean said, with a gesture at Rudi, whose fierce smile seemed to indicate that he really didn’t mind at all if no one spoke a language he could understand.

“I see him,” Eustace said. “And you brought him along.”

Jean’s smile turned rueful. “He more or less insisted.”

“You can talk all you want,” Rudi said, in German, smiling like a swordsman in all directions, “but I’m here.”

Muttering in Italian, observing his countrymen and listening to all these other people, Vito said, “I’ve never felt so alone in all my life.”

“Look,” Lida said, pointing toward Angelo and Rosa. “They’re finishing.”

“Good,” said Eustace. “Time for us to take over.”

Angelo put a block in the half-full back of the truck, then trotted down the steps to Rosa, struggling upward with a block in her arms. “This,” she said, “is the last of them.”

“Good.” Angelo took the block from her, carried it up to the truck, and was about to put it in when Rudi reached from inside the truck and took the block, saying, “Thanks. You’re a sweetheart.”

Angelo was to astounded he let Rudi take the block, then stared at Jean and Vito, also in the back of the truck.

“Au revoir,” said Jean.

“Go back to Italy, you bad people,” Vito said, and shook his bony old fist at them.

“Angelo!” cried Rosa. “Stop them!”

But it was too late. Eustace, in the cab of the truck with Lida, pressed the accelerator and the truck drove away, bouncing on the pavement, turning out of sight on the Rue de Harley and driving on around the Palais de Justice.

Rosa actually ran after the truck for half a block, yelling and shouting, but the effort was so patently useless that she quickly gave it up and turned back to yell at Angelo instead. “They’re getting away!” she screamed. “They’re going off with our money and you’re just standing there!”

Angelo, expressionless, stood on the narrow sidewalk, arms folded, and let Rosa rave on. She yelled, she screamed, she tore her hair, she beat her breast, she kicked parked cars, and at last she wound down and merely stood there panting, staring at Angelo, who continued to watch her as though she were a television set. “Well?” she finally gasped. “Well? What have you to say for yourself?”

“You,” Angelo told her, “are a female impersonator.” And he turned and walked away.

In the parking garage where first the gang had assembled, in the lowest parking level deep, deep beneath the city, the twice-stolen truck rumbled at last to a stop. Rudi and Vito and Jean, all very cheerful, hopped down from the back. “We’ll unload and make the split right here,” Jean said, and turned to see the truck in motion again. “Wait!” he yelled.

In the truck cab, Lida looked at Eustace in some astonishment. “Eustace? Our friends aren’t with us.”

“Dear, dear,” Eustace said.

“Stop!” yelled Jean and Rudi and Vito, in three languages, but the truck didn’t stop. They ran after it, and the truck made a great sweeping U-turn in the nearly empty concrete space, and roared away again up the ramp it had just come down. The three men, knowing it was hopeless, stopped running at the base of the ramp and looked upward, hearing the truck engine quickly fade into silence.

“Bastard!” Vito yelled, shaking his fist at emptiness. “You took me out of retirement for this?”

Quietly, to the air, Rudi said, “I never trusted him. Never.”

In English, Jean told the other two, “We can’t let him get away with this.”