The Templar Cross

5

It was like stepping into a Humphrey Bogart movie; any minute now you expected a sloe-eyed Lauren Bacall to appear with a cigarette in her hand, looking for someone to light her up. The interior of the Bar Maritime in the Vieux Port of Marseilles was all brown wood and thirties- style, down-at-the-heels and I-don't-give-a-damn decor complete with a sleepy bartender and just as sleepy patrons nodding on their high stools over their pastis and Stella Artois, with hungrier patrons chowing down on escargots or petit quiche or a big bowl of local steamed mussels, the coquillage that formed the mainstay of the bouillabaisse that was the foundation of every menu on the Azure Coast.

Holliday and Rafi Wanounou were sitting at a small round table at the front window, soaking up the atmosphere. The remains of lunch were still on the table as well as their coffee cups. Seated with them was Louis Japrisot, a captain in the Police Nationale de France, formerly known as the Surete. Japrisot was short and stocky with a broad, jowled face, a lot of gray-stubbled five o'clock shadow and a bristling salt-and-pepper Stalin mustache, of the soup strainer variety. He appeared to be in his late fifties.

He had fierce black eyes, eyebrows like his mustache and a military-style short back and sides crew cut. Somewhere along the line he'd had his nose broken and he had a bull neck. Underneath the wrinkled brown suit the muscles of his arms and shoulders flexed like a boxer's. Sitting still was something he didn't do very well. He smoked Gitanes continuously, the harsh cigarettes disappearing into his big butcher's hands.

"Been a cop long?" Holliday asked, looking for something to say. Japrisot wasn't the most voluble person he'd ever met, even though his English was excellent.

"Thirty-one years. Before that the Prevotales in Algeria."

"Prevotales? Provost Corp? Military Police?"

"Yes, Le Legion etrangere, what you call the Foreign Legion."

"Bad times," commented Holliday.

"Very bad," said Japrisot. He shrugged. "Better for me than others however," he murmured.

"How so?"

Japrisot's heavy shoulders lifted again.

"I wasn't at Dien Bien Phu."

"There is that," Holliday said and nodded. The Battle of Dien Bien Phu had been the last encounter of the war in Indochina for the French and a ghastly preview of the coming war in Vietnam for the United States. More than a thousand soldiers died during the prolonged battle and several thousand more were taken prisoner, never to be heard from again.

Japrisot stared out the window and smoked. Across the quay the Vieux Port was a forest of masts. Once the central port of the city, the Vieux Port was now reserved for pleasure craft and the local fishing fleet. On the far side of the narrow harbor a line of pale yellow seventeenth- and eighteenth-century buildings rose in a solid wall. At the far end of the harbor was a narrow plaza where the daily fish market was staged, and rising away from it was la Canebiere, a broad triumphant avenue that led up the steep hill the old city was built on, leading to the basilica on the summit. The only thing Holliday remembered about Marseille was that King Alexander Karageorgevich I of Serbia had been assassinated there in 1934, the first political murder ever caught on film.

"All I know about Marseille is The French Connection," offered Rafi.

"Popeye-goddamn-bloody-Doyle," muttered Japrisot, stubbing out his cigarette in a big enameled Cinzano ashtray in the middle of the table. "He put a curse on this place. Connard!"

"Things aren't as bad as the movie made out?" Holliday asked.

"They are actually much worse," said Japrisot. "Sometimes I think the film made it that way with all the publicity it was given. Still, the tourists come and ask if they can see where the heroin is made. Merde! It gives the place a reputation, yes? Not a good one. We have Disney cruise ships and you hear them talking, Gene Hackman this, Gene Hackman that."

"They don't smuggle drugs here?" Rafi asked.

"Of course they smuggle drugs here. They smuggle everything here," answered Japrisot. "Morphine, pornography, girls, Africans, toothpaste, cigarettes. Cigarettes. A great many cigarettes. Le Milieu smuggles anything to make a profit. Last year it was false teeth from the Ukraine."

"Le Milieu?" Holliday asked.

"Marseille's version of the Mafia, the underworld," explained Japrisot. "They started off mostly as stevedores, controlling the waterfront in the late forties and early fifties, then moved from there. After the war they got into drugs in a big way."

"Is our guy Valador one of this Milieu?" Rafi asked.

Japrisot let out a snorting laugh, smoke rushing out of his nostrils like an animated bull in a cartoon.

"Little Felix!?" Japrisot said. "Felix Valador barely knows his mother's name, let alone anyone in Le Milieu. He's strictly small-time. Sometimes he brings a few hundred cartons of cigarettes in for the Corsicans, sometimes knockoff Rolexes from a Hong Kong freighter. Connecting with La Santa is a big step up for him, believe me. We got lucky, my friends-of that, I have no doubt."

A boat came through the narrow entrance to the Vieux Port. It was an old- fashioned harbor trawler, perhaps forty-two feet long, the high deckhouse set far back toward the stern. Once upon a time she'd been painted blue and white; now she was just dirty, rusty tear tracks running down from her ironwork, dark stains everywhere from bilge runoff, her brightwork dull under a layer of grease. Her license number was painted in large figures on her bow and there was a nameplate on her transom as she passed, heading toward the tent-covered fish market on the plaza at the end of the harbor.

"That's her, Valador's boat, La Fougueux," said Japrisot. "In English, Tempestuous, I think."

"Now what?" Rafi asked.

"Perhaps we should go for a little stroll," suggested the French policeman. He lit another cigarette, stood up, flicked ash off his bright yellow tie and stepped out into the sun-dappled afternoon. Rafi followed. Sighing, Holliday dropped three fifty-euro notes on the table to cover their tab and went after them. Japrisot hadn't shown the slightest sign of paying for his own lunch even though he'd been the one to order wine. Apparently whatever his obligation was to the old lawyer Ducos it didn't include cash.

The Rive Nueve, the New Side of the old port, seemed to be wall-to-wall restaurants and bars. There was everything from a Moroccan place called Habib's to an Irish pub and a German beer garden called Kanter's. They made their way down the broad quayside, keeping on the shady side, threading their way around cafe tables full of patrons finishing lunch and enjoying the weather.

Holliday watched as La Fougueux tied up at the dock, nestled beside the little double-ended, black-hulled ferry that took tourists from one side of the harbor to the other for a few euro. A blond-haired man stepped out onto the foredeck wearing a bright red nylon shell. He looked tall and athletic, somewhere in his thirties. Another man appeared, shorter, heavier and older. Together they started hauling fifty-kilo rope-handled fish boxes up on deck.

Holliday, Rafi and Japrisot walked across the Rive Nueve and stood looking out over the water, leaning on the beige metal fence that ran around the seawall. Japrisot flicked the butt of one cigarette down into the oily water and lit another. A young woman was sunbathing topless on a sail-boat almost directly below them. The boat was a Contessa 32, named Dirty Girl. The sunbathing woman was much larger than that, at least a 38. Japrisot paid no attention.

"The one in the red shell is Valador," he said. "The older man is Kerim Zituni. A Tunisian. Some people say he was Black September once upon a time. Others that he was one of the Tunisian Black Suits-their secret police."

"Is that signifigant?" Holliday asked.

"He's old enough for it to mean that he probably worked with Walter Rauff," answered Japrisot.

"Never heard of him." Holliday shrugged.

"I have," said Rafi, his voice dull. "He murdered my grandparents. He was one of the men who invented the mobile gas trucks the Nazis used in the sub-camps. He was also in charge of the Final Solution in North Africa. He rounded up all the Jews in Morocco and Tunisia and exterminated them. If Rommel had taken Egypt, Rauff's next step would have been Palestine."

"What happened to him?"

"He died in Chile in 1984. Peacefully, in his sleep," answered Japrisot. "He was seventy-eight. He was an intelligence advisor to Pinochet."

"So we take it this Zituni is not a nice man," said Holliday dryly.

"And potentially very dangerous," Japrisot said and nodded.

They kept watching the ship as Felix Valador and his Tunisian companion continued to stack fish boxes on the deck. At forty boxes they stopped and Valador began humping the boxes down onto the narrow plaza and loading them into a bright red boxy old Citroen HY van with corrugated sheet metal sides. A sign on the side of the van read Poissonnerie Valador in gold with a phone number beneath. He loaded the first ten boxes through the side door and the rest through the doors at the back of the van.

"Notice the order," commented Japrisot, watching as Valador loaded the boxes one at a time.

"Last ones out of the hold went into the truck first," said Rafi.

"Remember that," said Japrisot.

"He's almost done," said Holliday.

"Bien," murmured Japrisot. He flipped yet another cigarette butt into the greasy water, nodded pleasantly to the young lady on the deck of the Dirty Girl and turned away. "Attendez-moi," he instructed. He climbed into an angle-parked, dark blue Peugeot 607 four-door sedan, probably the most ubiquitous car on the highways of France. This one was almost ten years old and looked like a well-used taxi, which was probably the point.

Rafi got into the back and Holliday slid in beside Japrisot. He wrinkled his nose. The inside of the car smelled like an ashtray and the windshield was fogged with a slightly yellow film of old nicotine. Japrisot lit another Gitane and switched on the ignition. The car chugged to life. The French cop watched as Valador finished loading the fish boxes into the rattletrap van and then had a brief conversation with Kerim Zituni. Conversation over, Zituni climbed back onto La Fougueux while Valador started up the Citroen and drove off. Japrisot followed the square-nosed little truck. They headed east, staying well behind the van, moving steadily away from the center of town.

"He's not going on the Autoroute," commented Rafi. On their right hand the Mediterranean glowed like an immense blue jewel, bright light bursting off the sun-dazzled facets of the waves sweeping in to crash against the base of the craggy limestone cliffs.

"No," answered Japrisot, "he's following the coast."

"You've done this before," said Holliday.

"Bien sur," answered Japrisot. "Several times."

They spent the rest of the afternoon and into the early evening tracking the Citroen along the length of the Cote d'Azur, stopping to make deliveries in the towns of Cassis and La Ciotat, then bypassing the larger city of Toulon before stopping again in Hyeres, Bregancon, Le Rayol and Frejus.

In Cassis the van stopped in front of Chez Nino's on the harbor front, delivered a box of fish and then moved on. It was the same each time they stopped. In Ciotat it was Kitch and Cook; in Hyeres it was the Hotel Ceinturon. Bregancon was a motel-style place called Les Palmiers; in Le Rayol it was a rustic-looking old winery called l'Huitre et la Vigne-the Oyster and the Vine. In Frejus it was a gaudy Moroccan dining room called La Medina. In none of these places did he leave more than three of the boxes and usually only one. By the time the sun was beginning to set they had reached suburban Cannes and the huge Florida white slab of the Royal Casino Hotel in Mandelieu-la-Napoule, complete with a six-story-high blue and yellow flashing neon image of a slot machine on the side of the building. A little bit of Vegas on the French Riviera.

The Casino Hotel was part of a complex of interconnected buildings right on the beach beside a river estuary that led back to the Cannes Marina and the Mandelieu Golf Course. Japrisot parked the Peugeot in the fifteen-minute lot in front of the hotel and they watched as Felix Valador took a dolly loaded with two boxes of fish around to a side entrance. Presumably he was going to the hotel kitchen.

At the main entrance a good-looking, well-dressed European with a neatly trimmed Vandyke beard climbed out of a blue Audi Quattro with his beautiful companion and slipped one of the car jockeys a folded bill. The valet parker looked at the bill, saluted the bearded man and climbed into the Audi.

"He paid him not to park the car in the big lot under the overpass," explained the French cop, nodding toward the busy Avenue General de Gaulle behind them. "It's blackmail, really. Local boys sneak into the parking lot and sometimes roll cars right into the water. P'tit loubards! Little hooligans. Worse than the English football yobs sometimes."

The elegant couple strolled into the hotel and the car jockey drove the Audi a hundred feet up the driveway. A few minutes later Valador reappeared with the empty dolly.

"That's eighteen boxes of fish spread over almost a hundred miles," said Rafi from the backseat. "He can't be making much money."

"It's the last stop that's the important one," said Japrisot obscurely.

Valador climbed wearily up into the Citroen and drove off. He headed for the service road that led to the parking lot on the other side of the overpass. The little truck disappeared.

"Where the hell is he going?" Holliday asked.

"Watch," murmured Japrisot.

A few minutes later the van reappeared. The gold lettering on the side of the truck had been covered by a magnetic sign that read Camille Guimard-Antiquaire, 28, rue Felix Faure Le Suquet, Cannes.

"Who's Camille Guimard?" Rafi asked from the "Who's Camille Guimard?" Rafi asked from the backseat.

"Felix is," said the French policeman. "In Marseille Valador is a smelly fisherman. In Cannes he is a sophisticated antique dealer named Guimard. Une grandes blague, n'est-ce pas? A neat trick, yes?"

"And Le Suquet?" Holliday asked.

"Like El Souk in the Kasbah of Marrakech," explained Japrisot as Valador's transformed Citroen rattled by. "The old quarter of the city, up on the hill." He put the Peugeot in Drive and followed the van at a discreet distance. Ten minutes later, driving along the Boulevard du Midi at the water's edge, they reached Cannes and Le Suquet, a rabbit warren of narrow, twisting streets that rose up from the stone quays of the Old Port to the formidable square tower of the eleventh-century castle built by the Cistercian monks of Lerins.

"Cistercians again," said Rafi after Japrisot explained the geography. "They're everywhere."

"Pardon?" the Frenchman asked, frowning.

"A private joke," said Holliday.

They followed the Citroen around the harbor then turned up the lush treelined boulevard of rue Louis Pasteur and started to climb the hill. Valador turned right onto rue Meynadier. They crossed the wider rue Louis Blanc, then turned abruptly into an alley that seemed to take them down the hill again. It was fully dark now but Japrisot was driving with only his parking lights.

"I'm lost," said Holliday.

"I'm not," said Japrisot.

"We're going around in circles."

"It's the one-way streets," said Japrisot, cocking one bushy eyebrow. "They're everywhere."

The policeman slowed and they watched Valador turn right and disappear from view.

"He's getting away," said Rafi.

"No, he's not," answered Japrisot, his voice calm. He cracked his window, flipped out his cigarette butt and lit another. Holliday had long ago lost track of how many the burly man had smoked, but strangely enough he found himself enjoying the rich earthy scent of the tabac noir. They waited in the alley for almost ten minutes. Holliday could hear Rafi fidgeting in the backseat. The French cop smoked. Finally Japrisot glanced at the illuminated dial of his wristwatch.

"Bien," he said and nodded. "On y va." Let's go. He eased the shift back and they rolled slowly out of the alley. According to the sign they were now on the rue Felix Faure, another one-way street, this one lined with small shops. Japrisot slid the Peugeot into a parking space on the far side of the street. At the end of the block Valador was unloading the van. He was parked in front of a narrow shuttered storefront, unloading the last of the fish boxes. Beside the store, taking up the entire corner, was the awning-covered facade of a restaurant with a brightly lit green and yellow sign that read Huitres Astoux amp; Brun.

"An oyster bar," said Holliday, realizing that they hadn't eaten since lunch in Marseille.

There were a dozen or so plastic tables under the white fabric awning, all empty. A fat man in a long white apron was chaining plastic stacking chairs. The restaurant was closing.

"What now?" Rafi asked.

Japrisot shrugged.

"We wait. We smoke. Perhaps we talk about women." He paused and smiled. "Who knows? The night is long."

Valador finished his unloading, locked up the van and disappeared inside the store. A few seconds later a light could be seen behind the shutters. Almost half an hour passed. Then the light in the shop went out, and after a few moments another light went on, this time in the apartment above the store.

"He's gone to bed," said Rafi, a note of anger in his voice.

"I think perhaps you are right," said Japrisot.

Rafi snorted.

"So we spent half the day following a guy all the way along the Riviera delivering fish and this is what it amounts to? Watching him get ready for sleep?"

"Police work is mostly waiting," answered Japrisot. "And very boring. I'm afraid you must be patient."

"Rafi's right," said Holliday finally. "My cousin has been taken hostage. We don't have time for staking out some low-level smuggler. We need information. Now."

"Stakeout?" the French cop said. "You mean comme le bifteck? Une barbeque?" Japrisot lifted his caterpillar eyebrows and winked. Holliday scowled, realizing that he was being teased.

The headlights of an approaching car washed through the rear window of the Peugeot.

"Attendez," said Japrisot, and hunched down in his seat. Holliday and Rafi did the same. The car went past, then parked between a pair of wrought iron stanchions at the curb in front of the dark, deserted restaurant. There was an old-fashioned streetlight on the corner and Holliday could see the car clearly. It was a dark blue Audi Quattro. Two people got out: a well-dressed man with a Vandyke beard and a highly attractive woman in a short black cocktail dress.

"That's the couple I saw at the casino," whispered Holliday. "What are they doing here?"

"As they say in my country, Colonel Holliday, Tout vient a point a qui sait attendre. Good things come to those who wait."