Brian Freemantle - The Predators

‘Like what?’

‘I don’t want to talk about them on the telephone.’ She was being listened to. She didn’t know by whom or why but everything they were saying – Hugo as well as herself – was being overheard. And Blake was in the room, as well, although he’d started searching again, disappearing into the bathroom.

‘What’s so mysterious?’

‘It’s far more difficult than we thought it was going to be: problems with the Americans.’

‘I thought you allowed for that.’

‘Not enough.’

‘What are you going to do about it?’

Blake appeared at the bathroom door, pointing with a jabbing finger at what she guessed to be the switch just inside the door.

‘I don’t know yet.’

‘The Americans send a negotiator?’

‘He’s the problem.’

Blake sat down on a chair by the door, stretching his legs in front of him.

‘Can you handle it?’

‘I’m going to have to.’

‘I’m missing you,’ said Rosetti.

‘I’m missing you, too,’ she made herself say, face burning. There was no reason for her to be embarrassed, not in front of Blake. This was awful: terrible.

‘It hardly sounds like it.’

‘I’ve got to go.’

‘It’s eleven o’clock at night!’

‘Something’s come up.’

From his chair Blake made warding-off gestures.

‘What?’

‘Something I’ve got to talk about with someone.’

‘Blake?’

Oh God! ‘Yes.’

‘Is he a problem?’

‘Of course not! That’s a silly question.’ Why had she said that!

‘Sorry!’ He stretched the word, to show he was offended.

‘You’re misunderstanding.’

‘It’s difficult not to.’

‘I said I didn’t want to talk on the telephone!’

‘I love you,’ said Rosetti.

‘I’ll call you back tomorrow. Say around seven.’

‘I said I loved you.’

‘I’ll explain later.’

‘What’s the matter?’

‘Nothing! I really do have to go.’

‘I thought I’d come down this weekend.’

‘Aren’t you going to Rome?’

‘Would it be inconvenient for me to come down? Apart from anything that might come up with the case, I mean.’

‘Of course not. I’d like you to come down. Let’s talk about it tomorrow. Goodnight.’ Claudine hurriedly replaced the receiver but remained standing by it.

Blake grinned and said: ‘How about that drink?’

Claudine’s hands were shaking, from anger not fear, rippling the brandy in her glass, which she held in both hands. She’d sat where he directed, at a table some way from the bar and other late night drinkers. She at once recalled the bizarre conversation about carrying a gun when he identified the night he’d detected the surveillance at La Maison du Cygne and said: ‘You thought it was on you!’

He nodded. ‘Had it been we probably wouldn’t have got back across the square, either of us. It was the fact that we did that made me doubt I was the target in the first place, even before I found my room was clean.’

He’d kept himself curiously apart from her, she remembered. ‘Norris?’

‘Obviously. It’s not the people who’d like to find me and it’ll hardly be the people holding Mary, will it? Norris will never admit responsibility, though. No one will.’

‘The paranoid bastard!’ she said, fresh anger surging through her. ‘How long’s it been there?’

He shrugged. ‘Sometime during that day, I expect. That was when you positively faced him down.’

Claudine forced herself to be calm, frowning. ‘I haven’t used the phone much: certainly haven’t talked about anything the Americans don’t know about.’

‘They’re open transmitters, in both the telephone and the bathroom light switch.’

‘You mean they’re live all the time: relaying everything that happens, not just the telephone calls?’

‘Yes.’

‘I don’t want to stay in that room any more.’

He smiled again, trying to relax her. ‘There’s mine but I’m not going to risk the rebuff. You know you’re being listened to now. Use it to our benefit.’

‘You think Harding knows?’

‘I’m not sure. He came a long way towards us with his concern about Norris. I think if he had, he might have said something.’

‘It’s so fucking stupid! So pointless!’

‘What are you going to do?’ he asked.

‘I don’t know, but I suppose it makes sense to pretend we’re unaware.’ She looked directly at him. ‘There were a lot of times tonight when you could have told me what you thought there was in my room. Why all the drama?’

‘I might have been wrong. Then I would have looked foolish.’

‘You still made it into a drama. And you must have been sure.’

He grinned. ‘I wanted to see if you’d let me in.’

‘Bastard!’

‘But not a paranoid one.’

Claudine put her glass down, relieved her hands had stopped shaking. ‘Are there really people who’d like to kill you?’

‘Not until they’d hurt me as much as they could.’

August Dehane’s wife was completely unaware of his membership of Felicite Galan’s group, which always made it difficult speaking to the man at home. The conversation was one-sided and led by Jean Smet. The lawyer impatiently dictated the message upon which Felicite insisted and said he did not, of course, expect it to be convenient for the telephone executive to meet the rest of them until the following evening. Dehane’s hesitation was obvious when Smet gave his address off the rue de Flandres as the meeting place.

‘Is Felicite going to be there?’ he asked in a whisper.

‘No. We’re going to settle things. Remove the problem,’ promised Smet.

‘That’s good,’ agreed Dehane.

There are in Paris a very small number of restaurants, three the most notable, renowned as much for their discretion as for their highest Guide Michelin awards. That on the rue du Miel, the first of the notable three, was a place of dark wood, small-paned windows, subdued lighting and conveniently anonymous rooms. The most conveniently anonymous of all were two on the very top floor. The epitome of belle epoque – as indeed the restaurant was – such salons particuliers were originally conceived as private rooms where the rich and famous could dine their mistresses in intimate mirrored luxury before moving to the only other furnishing, an opulent chaise-longue. Favours were expected to be returned for favours received. It was the practice for the courtesans to test the genuineness of their gifted diamond by inscribing their intitials round the mirrors’ edges: those inscriptions – anonymous, of course – are now officially decreed to be national monuments.

The salon particulier that Sanglier entered, five minutes late, was, like all the others, a place where favours were still expected to be exchanged, although no longer cut into the ancient, still reflecting glass which his hosts were studying when he arrived. There were three of them. Guy Coty, the chairman of the party, was the oldest although he did not look eighty-five. He was a small, tightly plump, totally bald man who had spent his life as a pilot fish for sharks in murky French political waters. The diminutive but exalted ribbon of the Legion d’honneur was in the left lapel of his immaculate dove-grey suit. Roger Castille was half the other man’s age, with the dark-haired, ivory-teethed, open-faced looks of a matinee idol disguising a ruthlessness inherited, along with Ff50,000,000, from a financier father. The third man, Lucien Bigot, was one of the few survivors of Castille’s tread-on-anyone ascent to the party leadership. Bigot was a beetle-browed man who used his size to intimidate. His official position was party secretary: like Coty he preferred power-brokering in back rooms to his public parliamentary work. It was Bigot, already known to Sanglier from their six months of political flirtation, who performed the introductions.