At Geneva the wind was even colder than that in Zurich, but there was no snow and the sun was shining. I walked to the rendezvous, an English tea-room in the rue des Alpes.
I had to wait an hour before the courier arrived. She was a small, stocky Frenchwoman in her mid-sixties, very lady-like but also quite formidable. A few months earlier two louts had attempted to snatch her handbag in the Paris Metro. Both had had to receive hospital attention for severe cuts and bruises before being charged by the police. The cuts appeared to have been inflicted with a razor blade.
She came into the tea-room, paused for a split second to locate me and then beckoned.
‘You’d better come now,’ she said. ‘I’m double-parked.’ With that she left.
I had the money to pay the bill ready on the table. All I had to do was get my coat from the rack by the door and follow.
She had a Renault with Paris registration, and the moment I was in the passenger seat beside her she was off. There was no conversation; she just drove, quickly and carefully, until she came to a main crossing where she turned on to the Avenue Henri-Dunant. Unless you drive north or north-east to Lausanne or the Jura, practically every main road out of Geneva will very soon take you out of Switzerland and into France. The Avenue Henri-Dunant joins the road to Annecy and I thought she was going to take that. Instead, she turned suddenly into a big filling-station with an automatic car-wash.
It was one of the men couriers, who, when those things began to be introduced, first pointed out what an excellent security device they could be. For the space of about a minute and a half it was possible to cut yourself off completely from the world outside. There was no bug yet invented that could penetrate the defences of a car going through a tunnel of steel and concrete to the accompaniment of the sounds of huge brushes spinning against a car body and water being sprayed through dozens of high-pressure jets.
So, for a time, even though the chances of a courier’s car having been bugged were small, all message exchanges of a confidential nature were delivered, whenever possible, inside cars travelling through car-washes. Silly really, because the message either had to be shouted above the din or written out and handed over. After one or two mistakes had occurred messages were always written and, since no bug was going to pick them up anyway, the use of car-washes for security purposes died out. One of the fringe benefits of the experiment, though, was that for the year or two it lasted, the trade-value of couriers’ cars showed a slight increase.
This courier had written the message out before we got to the car-wash.
Carlo had been brief: Phase out entire Paris operation, repeat entire, then come and see me soonest.
Before the car was under the blast of the hot-air dryer she had retrieved the message, put a match to it and mashed the remains in the ashtray.
We left Switzerland and entered France in the early-evening commuter traffic. Nobody on either side bothered with passports or anything else. Once over the frontier, the courier made a right turn and drove via Bourg to Chalon. From there I went by train to Paris.
When Carlo had told me to ‘phase out’ the Paris operation he had meant that he wanted every possible paper trail cleaned up; and when he had emphasized ‘entire’ he had been referring to something that not even the couriers knew about. This was that we rented a furnished two-room garçonnière in Paris. The object had been to enable me to come and go without registering in hotels. The place was rented on a year-to-year basis so that no question of residence arose. The gérant, who handled the apartment concerned was a crook, naturally, and I dare say that if he could have found out who the mistress was for whom I kept the place, there would have been a little gentle blackmail. She didn’t exist, though, except as a phantom presence represented by half-used make-up containers and scent bottles, some clothing, and a passion for the works of Simone de Beauvoir evidenced by a whole shelf of them, mostly falling to pieces from much re-reading. Melanie had done an excellent job in that case too.
The reason for Carlo’s decision to close down the apartment as well as cutting off our accommodation service contacts was clearly based on the fact that all the clients monitored by Kramer had been dealt with through Paris, coupled with the conclusion arrived at by Carlo that everything even remotely to do with Kramer had become a threat to our security and must, therefore, instantly be discarded or neutralized. Why he should have come to that conclusion I did not then know, but it was not the sort of matter one could discuss at length over an open international telephone circuit.
The immediate difficulty was the weekend.
The accommodation service was relatively easy to cut off, because that was paid for quarterly in advance and all I had to do was write them an Oberholzer letter terminating the agreement on the last day of the year. Any communications received henceforth should be reported or forwarded to our Rome office — another accommodation service which relayed correspondence to Frankfurt.
Getting rid of the apartment was not so easy, because the gérant headed for the country on Friday morning and was not to reached again until Monday afternoon. It was no use my just walking out, leaving everything and hoping for the best. A new tenant, or a policeman, or a forensic expert, must be able to walk into that place when I, and my true love, had vacated it and find no trace whatsoever there of any identifiable human beings. In addition, the gérant must be utterly convinced not only that he knew all, but also that he was going to have to forgo the kick-backs he had once received from the now grief-stricken Oberholzer and look around promptly for a replacement sucker.
During the weekend all I could to was enlist the sympathy of the concierge’s wife, who had used to keep the apartment clean for me, and get her to pick up the belongings of the woman who had betrayed me by going back to her husband, as I could not bear to touch them. Quite an affecting moment it was when I took the suitcases down and put them in the taxi.
I got rid of them by going to the air terminal and buying a one-way ticket to Toulouse. I can’t recall the name I used — something like Souchet, I think — but I remember that I had to pay excess when I checked the bags in because of the weight of Simone de Beauvoir; but with one lot of baggage on its way to Toulouse and limbo, all I had to do then was pack up the spare suit and other things I had kept there for my own use, and wait for Monday afternoon.
It was Tuesday before I reached Milan.
Carlo looked down as he listened to my report, and after I had finished he was silent for a while.
Finally, he stirred, heaved a sigh and said bleakly: ‘I think we are in trouble, Paul.’
‘We’ve been put to some inconvenience and expense, yes. We may also consider it necessary and advisable to abandon some profitable clients. The Oberholzer cover will have to go, of course. But we’ve had these spots of bother before, Carlo. No doubt we’ll have others in the future. This is a nuisance, yes. Trouble? I don’t think so.’
‘We have been lucky,’ he said contemptuously. Luck was something he had always despised. ‘But you miss the point, Paul. I say that we are in trouble.’
‘You mean our partnership?’
‘As it exists now, yes.’
‘Carlo, I didn’t kill Kramer.’
‘Did you take steps to enquire into the circumstances of the death?’
‘No point. He was dead and his wife and daughter were making it clear that the less they saw of me the better.’
‘I wasn’t suggesting that you should have enquired from them. I myself enquired through Lugano.’
‘And?’
‘Kramer was taken ill in his office. He had a heart attack, as you heard. But, an hour earlier he had been questioned at length by men from the police section concerned with offences against the banking laws. The strain on him must have been considerable, don’t you think?’