Shayne was beginning to show his impatience with the stylish Frenchman. “Do you really want to touch him?”
“Oh, very much. I admire the man, in a way, I think about him constantly, but nothing would please me more than seeing him on trial for his life at the Old Bailey. But look at this gold thing. How do we stop it? We can’t search every fishing boat in the Arabian Sea. If the Pakistani police arrest a Karachi merchant with gold in his possession, how do we connect him with Sir Geoffrey Adam, in London?”
“Sir Geoffrey?”
“He has recently been knighted. There are too many links in the chain, you see. The Saudi sheikhdom is sovereign. The sheikh and half his subjects are profiting from the gold trade. The Damascus banks won’t let us inside the door. The Swiss numbered accounts are sacrosanct.”
“Do you mind if we get back to a place I know something about? Where does Miami come into this?”
“Fetch the bottles, will you, and I’ll tell you my scheme.” Shayne replenished the drinks while LeFevre ladled caviar onto several crackers.
“Quite decent caviar. Come, Michael, eat. Nothing like expense-account living, after all.” He downed a cracker in two swift bites and licked his fingers. “I said Adam couldn’t be touched as long as he stayed in London. But he isn’t content to stay in London. He’s a gifted businessman, an excellent psychologist, incredibly lucky. He’s perfectly capable of making a fortune in any legitimate business. So why should he choose to make his money illegally? The illegality itself, the danger, must be what attracts him. The legal export-import business, after all-you import cocoa and export needles. You deal in arbitrage or foreign exchange. You borrow money at six and lend it at six and a half. You buy sterling at two thirty-eight, turn it into francs, then into lira, back into sterling at two thirty-nine. Predictable. Boring. Compare it to false-bottom holds on an Arabian dhow, dawn unloadings on the coast of India, beaten-gold necklaces for a Hindu girl’s dowry-”
“Miami,” Shayne growled.
The Frenchman drank deeply. “I’m quite sure he was in the crowd at the football game this afternoon, probably in your section.”
Shayne lifted his cognac with a steady hand. “What makes you think so?”
“Because at last I’m beginning to know him. I’m not yet in a position to write his biography, but whenever a new fact or a new rumor or a new lead comes along, I pop it into the file. After a time, it begins to add up. A pattern emerges.”
“Can I look at it?”
“At the dossier? Why not? I brought it for that purpose. It’s in the hotel safe. I’ll show it to you when we return after wallowing in the fleshpots. At the moment the gold markets are chaotic. The Persian Gulf route has been interrupted because of political trouble in the Middle East, coups and countercoups and threats of war. Adam himself, I understand, suffered a bad loss some three months ago, when one of his dhows went down in a storm. Meanwhile, in India and Pakistan, people are clamoring for gold and the price is rising. There has been a series of gold thefts in American airports-”
Shayne made a quick movement. “Was Adam behind those?”
“We think not. But they took place. Stolen gold bars to a value of perhaps one million dollars has been offered for sale. Our information is that people working for Adam have bought it at a price of seventeen dollars an ounce. It can be resold in India at eighty, eighty-five. The only problem is to get it there. We are quite sure that this gold is at present in this city.”
Shayne waited while LeFevre drank.
“In September,” the Frenchman went on with mounting excitement, “through agents working for a dummy corporation, he purchased a Miami travel agency, Three-Seas Travel, a perfect cover, with correspondents and offices in all parts of the world. Three-Seas has a jet tour of South America leaving Miami International at eight o’clock tomorrow morning, using a rented DC-8 fanjet, and we have reason to believe that the gold will be on it.”
“A million bucks’ worth. That’s a lot of gold.”
“In bulk, not so much. It would weigh out at about six hundred pounds. The travel-agency people control the baggage. Dummy suitcases can be mixed with the real ones. I’m suggesting that what will happen is that at one of the stopovers, Brazil would be my guess, where the officials are known for their poverty and their approachability, the gold will be unloaded and transshipped aboard a tramp freighter, which will then head straight for Asia.” He swallowed more caviar. “I hope I can persuade you to join the group of tourists on that plane.”
“And then what?”
“Keep your eyes open and do as common sense dictates.”
Shayne frowned. “I’ll have to know a lot more about it first.”
“I’ll tell you all I know, which isn’t much. We can make the seizure ourselves, without your help, by keeping close surveillance on the plane at every stop. If we’re clever, and don’t move too soon, I think we can hurt him. But it isn’t enough. Everything I know about him convinces me that he’ll be on the scene when the gold is transferred. Think of the opportunity, Michael! Tie him into this, even at second hand, and there’s a chance that we can put him out of business for good.”
“How?” Shayne said bluntly.
“You’re interested?”
“Why wouldn’t I be interested? Before you go any farther, how would you cut up the seizure fee?”
“That would be negotiable, depending on the scope of your contribution. Our original informer is demanding three percent. I don’t insist on enough hard evidence to justify an arrest. Let’s speak of possibilities. Bring in enough facts so Adam will have to write off this travel agency. Show him up publicly. Leave him with his jaw hanging open. Do that, and I’ll recommend that you get the remaining seven percent, which would bring us up to the maximum. That would be seventy thousand for you. We still have details to thrash out, but are we in agreement in principle?”
Shayne shook his head decisively and poured more cognac. “A long way from it. Will you have anybody else on the plane?”
“A very competent person, named Christa Hochberg. Of the West German police-a beautifully constructed female, if that would weigh with you, and I think it might. An Amazon, and at the same time very feminine.” He licked a globule of caviar off his lips. “To put it another way, very, very sexy and yet a crack shot with a pistol. I can say definitely that she is not known to the opposition. This all blew up in the early hours of yesterday morning. We have had no chance to do any staff work on it. Christa was available, luckily. She flew here from Lisbon. Here’s your passport.” He dropped an American passport on the table between them. “No picture as yet but that presents no problem. There are eight or ten unsold seats on the plane. We’d better collect Christa and have a conference, plan your cover story while my brain’s still working with some small degree of efficiency. She’s been reconnoitering the airport, their system of handling luggage.”
Shayne, his face thoughtful, spread a cracker with pate while he reviewed what the Frenchman had told him. LeFevre lifted his glass in a half-salute and smiled loosely. He had absorbed four ounces of Scotch in fifteen minutes and was beginning to show it.
“I know you only from the Adam dossier,” he said, “but still it seems to me that I know you very well. I have wondered whether we could ever take common action against our mutual enemy. Now to meet you at last.”
One of the reasons Shayne was still alive and healthy was that, bit by bit, as the years passed, he had developed a kind of distant-early-warning radar, and he was getting a strong set of signals now. Something was seriously wrong with the story LeFevre had told him. The Frenchman’s smile concealed a hard edge of anxiety.
“What makes you so sure Adam’s going to be there?” Shayne said.
“Because I’ve spent the last two years studying the man. That’s the good thing about Interpol. Anything that has a bearing on the subject, no matter how trivial, no matter in what country it happens, ends up in the one central file.” He spooned out more caviar and ate it greedily. “His deals are sometimes almost too clever. I think he would prefer to lose ten thousand pounds on a brilliant conception than earn five thousand on a stupid one. He likes to pull off several tricks at a time. He likes to be in on the denouement, to see the look on his adversary’s face when he realizes he’s been beaten.” He reached for his glass, nearly knocking it over. “I know things about him he may not know about himself.”