Solo. Jack Higgins
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‘But what do I do?’ Jarrot demanded. ‘If you saw the news on television, you know what he’s capable of.’
‘Fantastic,’ Deville said. ‘I’ve often heard him play, of course. He’s quite brilliant. I remember vaguely reading in some magazine that he’d served in the Legion for a couple of years as a boy.’
Jarrot said, ‘He was never a boy, that one. If I told you some of the things he pulled off out there in Algiers in the old days. Why, at Kasfa, he took two bullets in the lung and still managed to kill four fellagha with a handgun. A handgun, for Christ’s sake.’
Deville poured him another brandy. ‘Tell me more.’
Which Jarrot did. By the time he was finished, he was thoroughly drunk. ‘So what do I do?’
‘Eleven o’clock, I think he said he’d return.’ Deville glanced at his watch. ‘It’s ten now. I’ll get my coat and we’ll go back to the garage. I’d better drive. You’re in no fit state to cross the street on your own.’
‘The garage?’ Jarrot’s speech was slow and heavy. ‘Why the garage?’
‘Because I want to meet him. Reason with him on your behalf.’ He slapped Jarrot on the shoulder. ‘Trust me, Claude, to help you. After all, that is the reason you came to see me, isn’t it?’
He went into his bedroom, pulled on a dark overcoat and took down the black Homburg hat he always wore. He opened the drawer in his bedside bureau and took out an automatic pistol. He was, after all, going to confront a man who, if everything he had heard tonight was true, was a psychopathic killer of the first order.
He weighed the pistol in his hand, then taking, on hunch alone, the biggest chance of his life, he put it back in the drawer. He returned to the other room where he found Jarrot at the brandy again.
‘Right, Claude,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Let’s go.’
The concert was a total success. Mikali was called back again and again with many sections of the audience clamouring for an encore. Finally, he obliged. There was an excited murmur, then complete stillness as he seated himself at the piano. A pause and he started to play ‘Le Pastour’ by Gabriel Grovlez.
He parked the hire car some distance from the garage and walked the rest of the way on foot through the heavy rain, letting himself in quietly through the judas in the main gate. He still had the Colt in the right-hand pocket of his raincoat. He felt for the butt as he stood there in the darkness listening to music faintly playing in the apartment above.
He went upstairs quietly and opened the door. The living-room was in half-darkness, the only light the lamp on the table at which Jarrot snored gently in a drunken sleep.
One bottle of Napoleon beside him was empty, another already a quarter down. A portable radio played music softly and then the announcer’s voice interrupted with more details on the massive police hunt for the assassin of Vassilikos and his men.
He reached over and switched it off, then took the Colt from his pocket. A soft voice said in excellent English with a slight French accent, ‘If that’s the gun I think it is, it would be really an error of the first magnitude to kill him with it.’
Deville stepped from the shadows at the back of the room. He still wore his dark overcoat and carried a walking stick in one hand, his Homburg in the other.
‘They would extract the bullet from his corpse, forensic tests would show it had come from the same gun which was used on Vassilikos and his men. I am right, am I not? It is the same gun?’ He shrugged. ‘Which still doesn’t mean they would stand much chance of tracing you, but silly to spoil such a brilliant operation with even a single act of stupidity.’
Mikali waited, the Colt against his thigh. ‘Who are you?’
‘Jean Paul Deville. By profession, criminal lawyer. This creature here is a client of mine. He came to me earlier tonight in considerable agitation and told me everything. You see, we have a special relationship. I am, you might say, his father confessor. He’d been a naughty boy with the OAS a year or two back, I got him off the hook.’
He reached inside his coat, the Colt swung up instantly. ‘A cigarette only, I assure you.’ Deville produced a silver case. ‘I haven’t fired a gun in years. No blunt instruments. Nothing up my sleeve at all. This whole affair is between you and me and this poor drunken swine here. He hasn’t spoken to another living soul.’
‘And you believe him?’
‘Who could he run to? Like a scared rabbit, he came to the only safe burrow he knew.’
‘To tell you?’
‘He was afraid that you intended to kill him. Quite terrified. He told me everything about you. Algeria, the Legion. Kasfa, for example. That little affair made a deep impression on him. He gave me the reason for the whole thing as well. The fact that Vassilikos had tortured and murdered your grandfather.’
‘So?’ Mikali waited patiently.
‘I could have written a letter detailing all these acts before leaving my apartment tonight. Posted it with a covering note to my secretary asking for it to be passed on to the right people at SDECE.’
‘But you didn’t.’
‘No.’
‘Why not?’
Deville walked over to the window and opened it. Rain poured down relentlessly. There was the sound of traffic in the night.
‘Tell me something – do you usually speak Greek with a Cretan accent like you did in the park?’
‘No.’
‘I thought not. A brilliant stroke that, coupled with your reference to Vassilikos and his men as fascists, to the chauffeur. Of course it does mean that all over Greece tonight, they’ll be hauling in every Communist, every agitator, every member of the Democratic Front they can lay their hands on.’
‘That’s their hard luck,’ Mikali said. ‘Politics bore me, so could you kindly get to the point.’
‘It’s really quite simple, Mr Mikali. Chaos – chaos is my business. I have a vested interest, as do my masters, in creating as much of it as possible in the Western world. Chaos and disorder and fear and uncertainty, like you have created, because what’s happening in Athens tonight is also happening in Paris. There isn’t a left-wing agitator in the city who won’t be either under cover or in police hands by morning. Not only Communists, but Socialists. The Socialist Party won’t like that and very soon, the workers won’t like it either, which makes things rather difficult for the government with an election coming up.’
Mikali said softly, ‘Who are you?’
‘Like you, not what I seem.’
‘From way back east? As far as Moscow perhaps?’
‘Does that matter?’
‘Like I said, politics bore me.’
‘An excellent basis for the sort of relationship I’m seeking.’
‘So what do you want?’
‘You, my friend, to repeat your performance in the Bois de Meudon when I require it. Very special occasions only. A unique and totally private arrangement between the two of us.’
Mikali said softly, ‘Blackmail, is that it?’
‘Don’t be stupid. You could kill me now – and Jarrot. Walk away from here with an excellent chance of no one ever being the wiser. Who on earth would ever suspect you? Good God, you even played for the Queen of England at a special reception at Buckingham Palace last year, isn’t it so? When you’re in London, passing through Heathrow, what happens to you?’
‘They take me to the VIP lounge.’
‘Exactly. Can you remember when Customs