The Dave Bliss Quintet. James Hawkins
Bliss nodded appropriately, none the wiser.
“Precipitous action on your part could prove fatal,” Richards continued, his face saying he was well aware of Bliss’s proclivity for taking matters into his own hands when he believed the situation demanded it.
But what about me? wondered Bliss. Could it prove fatal to me as well? He didn’t ask, suspecting the unreliability of any possible answer.
“Just find him, and enjoy yourself while you’re at it,” Richards concluded, asking, “Is that a problem?”
“What’s he wanted for?” Bliss asked, but the senior officer’s blank expression and vague explanation left him hanging.
“Worldwide crackdown on the big boys. Someone upstairs pissed off with prisons full of petty criminals when the real villains are laughing all the way to the Caribbean and the Côtes du filthy rich.”
“Don’t we have special people for this?” asked Bliss.
“Yeah — you.”
“Give me a break, Guv. You need someone who can mingle with the hoi polloi. Why not pick someone with an aristocratic background?”
“Yeah — like they’re lining up to join the force, Dave. I can just see it: Lord Fotheringale hyphen Smythe the poxing third turning up at training school in a Ferrari, with his butler, valet, and personal chef dragging behind in a Range Rover.”
“I knew a cop who had a Ferrari once.”
“I remember his case,” Richards said. “Didn’t he go down for three years for extortion? Wasn’t he rolling over pimps for twenty percent of their takings and showing the new girls the ropes?”
“That’s him,” Bliss laughed, “but what about MI5, or whatever they call themselves these days?”
“Not their bag. This has nothing to do with national security. This guy’s just a crook.”
“Interpol then?”
“Waste of time, unless we know for sure where he is.”
The heady scent of oleanders, writes Bliss, restarting his journal as he strolls around the bay towards the lighthouse that dominates the town from its lofty outcrop, and the bouquet of mimosa and hibiscus fills the motionless parched air, already laden with the perfume of lavender and rosemary, and sweetens the stench of decaying seaweed and overburdened sewers.
He pauses, scrubs out the whole lot, and starts again. Oleanders, he writes, stops, and slams the book shut — his concentration sabotaged by the heat, the beauty, and a degree of apprehension. Worrisome thoughts of Chief Superintendent Edwards weigh him down as he struggles up the Chemin du Calvaire towards the Cap D’Antibes lighthouse. Rough stone steps, grooved by the feet of pilgrims since 981, according to the sign, lead him past the Stations of the Cross let into wayside niches, and he tags onto a group of straight-faced novitiates under the tutelage of a wimpled nun. They may be following the footsteps of a millennium of Christians, but he can’t help feeling they’ve been led to the Côte d’Azur as a warning against the sins of the flesh.
“Christ is condemned to die,” he translates, using the bas-relief carving as a guide at the first of the tableaux. The figures of Pontius Pilate’s court, assembled to pronounce the verdict with Judas skulking in the wings, are carved into the background, with the thorncrowned head of Christ taking centre stage. Turning away, he smiles at the ironic thought that were it today, Chief Superintendent Edwards would undoubtedly be the one in the middle with the toga and laurel wreath.
The walk back to his apartment should only take fifteen minutes along the narrow laneways fringed with oleander, mimosa, and grapevines, but his eyes and mind wander to the barely covered nymphs sashaying to and from the beach. Where are all the fat women? he is wondering, when a couple of grandes dames, with two hours of makeup and more glitz than a mirror ball, light up as they hobble by on four-inch stilettos. Their string thongs bite deeply into flabby behinds. He returns their smiles — just for a second. Oh, their agony and their ecstasy.
The afternoon drips by as he soaks up the sun on the apartment’s balcony.
Bollocks to Richards and the lot of them, he thinks to himself. Why should I put myself out? I think I’ll just stay here and write my book. It might even turn out to be a best-seller — Six months in Provence, or something similar.
Seeking inspiration, he peers over the balcony. Fifty feet below, a lemon tree straddles an unmarked fence line between the garden of the ground-floor apartment and the park beyond. Ripe lemons dot the tree like Christmas decorations, and he watches as one, fatigued by the heat, lets go of its branch and falls to the grass.
“Wow!” He laughs, startled by the synchronicity of the event, feeling that, in some way, he had been drawn to watch — as if the lemon were a gift to him. It is a Hollywood moment, he decides — lights, cameras … action! — but isn’t everything here a movie set?
The lemon, starkly yellow in the bright afternoon sun, shines like a beacon, and, pulling on shorts, he plops a fresh ice cube into his Perrier and heads for the elevator.
The click of a door latch catches his attention as he emerges on the ground floor. He spins — too late, the door has closed, but he knows which one — and stands in frustration as he feels the stare of the occupant through the spyhole. Now what? he wonders, knowing the apartment is the one that backs onto the garden bordered by the lemon tree. Returning to the elevator in disappointment, he is struck by a feeling of déjà vu and casts his mind over similar occasions during the previous week. The same door latch had clicked more than once. The same eye had spied.
“Weird,” he mumbles, sloughs off the temptation to squint through the spyhole, and takes the stairs up to his apartment, the climb giving him thinking time.
I’ll phone Samantha, he thinks, realizing he hasn’t spoken to his daughter since a brief call from the airport in Nice to report a terror-free flight. And tell her what? There’s a lemon on the grass and I want to pick it up.
What did Richards say? “No personal calls, Dave.” Though he pulled back at the sight of concern on Bliss’s face. “Except in emergencies, of course.”
This is an emergency, Bliss lies to himself, and calls.
Listening to the brrring of her phone, he works out how long it has been since he spoke to her. Two weeks, he realizes. What to tell?
I’m writing a book.
Great — what’s it about?
OK. Better not mention the book, but what else? Two weeks walking the streets and quays clutching a photograph of the wanted man. But what was he wanted for? Who wanted him? What would happen to him?
Two weeks and absolutely nothing has happened — apart from the woman on the beach this morning, and the lemon falling — hardly notable. Though maybe it is some sort of portent, signalling the start — but of what?
Samantha’s recorded voice breaks into his thoughts and invites him to leave a message. He puts the phone down. What could he have said? Love you — miss you.
And what would she think?
OK, so I’m a bit lonely. Lonely and bored, he admits to himself, wondering why he hadn’t given her his cellphone or apartment number for a return call. He would have to talk to her soon, though. It wasn’t as if she didn’t know where he was or what he was doing.
“This could take months, even years,” he explained to her before leaving, despite Richards’s admonition that he shouldn’t tell anyone. Samantha wasn’t just “anyone,” and a disquieting internal voice urged him to make sure someone knew — another reason he didn’t want her to call. Just in case they, whoever they were, had tapped the phone at either of their apartments.
“They are asking me to live in the South of France, all expenses paid, for