The Other Side of Silence

TWELVE

As I drove up the gravel drive, the tall green front door was opened by Ernest, the butler, and a moment later there was Maugham wearing an open-necked blue shirt, white linen trousers, and espadrilles. He was carrying a Pan American flight bag over one shoulder. I didn’t get out of the car. I switched off the engine, wound down the window, and then Maugham leaned in. It was a beautiful deep summer evening—the kind of evening for talk of love, not blackmail money and an incriminating photograph.

Behind a hedge of thick pink and white oleanders I could hear the water trickling into the swimming pool, and the air was thick with the smell of orange blossom, which was preferable to the absinthe martini and the cigarette corrupting the old man’s mephitic breath, which now poured over me like chlorine gas drifting across no-man’s-land.

“Do you want a d-drink before you go?” he asked.

“No thanks. I’d best keep a clear head for the rubber I’m about to play with Herr Hebel. But I’ll certainly have one on my return. In fact, tell Ernest I might have several.”

“Of course. We’ll even save some dinner for you.”

He dropped the bag onto the passenger seat and, taking out a folded handkerchief, wiped his forehead, which was glistening with sweat. Robin appeared in the doorway, and then so did Alan Searle. Maugham sensed their lingering presence and glanced over his shoulder with a hint of displeasure, as if he were being minded like someone who was senile; he was anything but that.

“Where are you meeting him?”

“He’s rented a room at the Voile. That was his suggestion, not mine. But it’s neutral territory, you might say. Harder for me to lay any kind of trap for him there.”

“Robin and Alan are both of the opinion that one of them should accompany you. And, more importantly, the money.”

“Those aren’t Hebel’s instructions.”

“I know.”

“But sure, why not? As long as Robin or Alan stays in the car, I guess it would be all right.”

“Aren’t you a bit nervous?”

“No.” But this was a lie. For some reason, I had a strange feeling of foreboding, as if something dreadful was going to happen. I’d even started to question the whole damn arrangement. Was it possible that this was all some kind of elaborate setup designed to put me in the frame for Hebel’s murder, which the wily old Englishman had somehow arranged separately? He was a supremely gifted author, after all, and it would not have been beyond his fertile imagination to have devised some labyrinthine plot. It certainly wouldn’t have been the first time that I’d been played for a fool. After all, I had only Maugham’s word that it was actually Harold Heinz Hebel who’d asked me to take charge of the handover. I even wondered if Spinola’s gun was still sitting on top of my bathroom cistern where I’d left it and if Spinola’s death was somehow connected to all this. A double cross in a woman is something you can never really hold against her; you have to factor it in, like the weather; it’s just the way they’re made. To my old-fashioned way of thinking, W. Somerset Maugham was like a wily old woman in so many respects.

“No? You surprise me. You’re a man of very cool temperament, I must say, and I’m beginning to understand why Hebel thought you might be the right chap for the job.”

“I’ll be all right,” I said. “I have a friend coming with me to make sure everything goes smoothly.” And then, just to scare him a little, I flipped open the glove box and let him see the Sig that was in there.

“Christ, is that thing loaded?”

“Of course it’s loaded. Without bullets guns are only good as paperweights.”

“What I mean is, you wouldn’t use that unless you had to, would you?” he said. “Unless your own life was in danger.”

I grinned and lit a cigarette. “The other night you were in favor of me killing him, Mr. Maugham.”

“I was. Still am. But not in cold blood. I suggested a car accident. I certainly didn’t want you to kill him immediately after coming here to the villa. How would that look to the police? Besides, you said yourself he may have taken the precaution of lodging some kind of letter with a local lawyer that incriminates me, and perhaps even you.”

“The gun’s just an edge that he’s not expecting,” I said. “You see, it’s his gun. I searched his room at the Grand Hôtel just before I came here and found it in his drawer. Which answers your question about how trustworthy he is. The man is a criminal.” I glanced at my wristwatch and then back at Robin and Alan in the doorway. “You’d best make up your mind, sir. Do you want one of them to come or not?”

“Would it make a difference?”

“Not if I really was planning to take off with the money, no. Best they both stay here out of harm’s way. Believe me, I know a lot about harm’s way. It turns sharp left off the road to Shitsville when you’re least expecting it.”

I drove back down the hill to the port, which was still busy with small boats coming and going under the early-evening moon like bees collecting pollen. I parked the car near the harbor and walked up the slope of the esplanade toward the hotel entrance with the airline bag slung over my shoulder and the gun tucked underneath the waistband of my trousers. If anything was going to go wrong, I thought it best my car was elsewhere when it happened. The bell tower at the little church was marking eight o’clock as if time on the Cap was important. For anyone but me it probably wasn’t. Red and pink people who looked as if they’d had too much sun were coming ashore and heading to the many restaurants in search of a good dinner, but it didn’t matter at what hour they ate and really there was only one good restaurant and that was at La Voile d’Or. Although it was, perhaps, a little too formal for most tourists, which is probably why I liked it in the first place.

My first thought as I went through the front door of the hotel was not about Hebel or the money in the bag I was carrying, but of poor Spinola and how he and I were never going to sit down in the bar again and talk about nothing much before a friendly game of cards. I always felt alone, but suddenly the realization that I’d lost my one remaining friend hit me as hard as if I’d lost an arm or a leg. I liked Anne French, but I wasn’t in any doubt that she was hardly a friend; she was just using me to get close to Somerset Maugham. I didn’t mind that. People do what they have to do and what they think they have to do, and mostly there’s no way around that. It certainly makes life interesting, if perhaps a little less enjoyable. I sighed as I realized I was probably going to have to tell the Roses that Spinola was dead and that our bridge evenings were at an end; and then I considered that I could ask Anne French to be my partner instead. She’d like that. Not as much as if I’d asked her to come and make up a four with Somerset Maugham, but then, she had to start somewhere.

I went to the front desk, where a man with a pimp mustache and a blue bow tie was reading the latest on the Tour de France in L’Équipe, although his girth told me it had been a long time since he’d ridden a racing bicycle. We knew each other. His name was Henri and, according to Spinola, he’d been in the Resistance, which was an organization that seemed to be growing all the time. Certainly it was twice the size it had ever been throughout the war.

“That’s the newspaper that believed Captain Dreyfus was guilty of selling us secrets, isn’t it?” I said.

Henri shrugged. “These days, there’s no politics in it. Just cycling.”

“In France? That is politics.”

“You know, sometimes you are very French, for a German.”

“I’ll take that as a compliment. So is there another German here? Monsieur Hebel?”

“He’s in room 28,” said Henri. “Second floor. You’re to go straight up, Monsieur Wolf.”

I nodded. “You know Robin Maugham, don’t you?”

“Of course.”

“How well does he know Monsieur Hebel?”

“Well enough to have a drink with him.”

“Once? Or more than once?”

“More than once, I should say.”

I paused for a moment, wondering if I should tell him about Spinola, and then rejected the idea. I wasn’t in the mood to field a lot of questions to which I had no answers. All I wanted was to get the negative and the photographs and then leave without any complications.

“I suppose you heard about poor Spinola?” he said.

“Yes. The cops came to see me at the Grand, asking about our game tomorrow night.”

“He was a nice man and a good customer. I’ll miss him.”

“Me, too. How did you hear?”

“I have a friend in Maréchal Foch.”

The Avenue Maréchal Foch was where the Nice Commissariat of Police was headquartered.

“He’s an inspector in the Police Judiciaire. He seems to think there was a woman involved.”

“According to all your best writers, there usually is. But did he say why?”

“No. Only this and the fact that he was shot. With a small-caliber pistol.”

“Maybe that’s what makes them think it was a woman. The small-caliber pistol, I suppose.”

“Monsieur, small or large, it makes little difference when the bullet goes straight through your heart. There was almost five liters of blood on the floor where they found him.” Henri shrugged in that Gallic way, which is as eloquent as anything ever written by Voltaire or Montaigne. “I suppose that this is the end of your weekly bridge games with Mr. and Mrs. Rose. Pity. I shall miss you all.”

I shrugged. “You know, Henri, there’s an unwritten rule in bridge that when your partner gets killed you’re supposed to try and find out who did it.”

“Sounds more like the Mafia.”

“It just makes it easier to replace a partner if you can find out why the previous one was killed. No one likes to take the seat of someone who’s been shot.”

“I can imagine.”

“What I’m saying is that if your friend in the PJ finds out any more about what happened to Spinola, then I’d like to know about it. You know? For old times’ sake. Italy and Germany. The Axis.”

“And perhaps to even the score?”

“That was yesterday. Today, I’d just like to help, if I can. But to help, I need more information.”

He nodded. “This I can understand. Sure. I’ll ask him.”

“Discreetly. I wouldn’t like his answers to turn into awkward questions for you or me, or anyone else for that matter.”

“Of course. And you can trust me. During the war we used to say that deliberation is the work of many, but action of one man alone.”

“It’s been a while since I saw myself in that light. But I am qualified in one respect. I am a man alone.”