Whiff of Money Read online

  ‘Be careful, darling. He’s atoughie.’

  Girland slid off the table.

  ‘So am I.’ He grinned at Benny. ‘Well, thanks. I’ll go talk to Rosnold.’

  Benny rewound the film and gave it to Girland.

  ‘Anything else I can do, give me a call.’

  They walked together to the door and Benny slid back the bolt.

  As they moved out into the corridor, Vi Martin came from behind the screen. She ran silently across the studio to the dressing-room and began hurriedly to dress.

  * * *

  With sweat running down his face, Drina kept looking at his watch. Kovski had promised to rush a man down to where he was waiting, but up to now the man hadn’t arrived.

  What was he to do if the man didn’t arrive and Girland appeared and drove off in his car? He would be held responsible for losing Girland! He knew Kovski was already displeased with his work. He could get into serious trouble.

  He took off his shabby hat and wiped the sweat off his balding head. He moved from one foot to the other. His heart hammered and his mouth was dry.

  Then he saw Girland come out of the building.

  Drina was unprepared. He shouldn’t have been standing in the entrance to the courtyard. He should have concealed himself in one of the many doorways leading into the big apartment block. It was too late now. He lost his head and turned quickly, walking into the street.

  Had he not moved so quickly, Girland wouldn’t have noticed him, but that panicky movement alerted Girland. He saw the short, fat man wearing a greasy fur hat dart into the street and Girland’s eyes narrowed.

  He had decided, as he had descended the stairs from Benny’s studio, that as Rosnold’s studio was close by, he would walk rather than chance finding parking space. So he sauntered out of the courtyard and almost cannoned into Drina who wasn’t sure whether to dart to the right or left.

  The two men looked at each other.

  Girland too had a photographic memory. He placed Drina immediately: a washed-up, hack Soviet agent of the Security police. ‘Pardon,’ Girland said, moved around Drina and set off with his long strides towards Boulevard Pasteur.

  Hardly believing his luck, Drina went after him. He had to half-run to keep up with Girland’s swinging strides and sweat ran down his face as he bounced along, dodging people on the sidewalk, but keeping Girland in sight.

  Girland was thinking: is this a coincidence? I don’t think so. Have the Russians got onto Sherman?

  He reached Boulevard Pasteur and stopped at a busy bistro. It was lunch time and he decided to have lunch. He entered the Bistro and took a vacant table at the far end of the big room.

  Drina saw him enter the bistro and hesitated. He too was hungry. He again hesitated, then sat at one of the outside tables where he could watch the exit.

  From his table, Girland could see the outside terrace and he watched Drina take a seat at a table.

  When the waiter came, Girland ordered a steak and a lager. Drina, outside, ordered a ham roll and a vodka.

  Drina had placed himself in a bad position. He could watch the exit from the bistro, but he couldn’t see Girland. Aware of this, Girland got to his feet and went to a telephone kiosk. He called Dorey.

  When the connection was made, Girland said, ‘I think our Soviet friends have become interested in our movie. I have Drina on my tail.’ Dorey knew Drina as he knew every Soviet agent operating in Paris.

  ‘ You have the film on you?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Where are you?’

  Girland told him.

  ‘I’ll send two men down to cover you. Stay where you are.’

  ‘Hitch up your suspenders!’ Girland said impatiently. ‘I can handle this. Wake up! You can’t send two of your jerks down here to cover me unless you make this official.’

  Dorey swallowed this, knowing Girland was right.

  ‘But if they jump you and get that film…!’

  ‘They won’t get it. Stop laying an egg! I’ll lose this fat slob and I’ll call you later. I just thought I’d increase your blood pressure,’ and Girland hung up.

  When he returned to his table, his steak was placed before him. It looked very good. He made a leisurely lunch, paid the bill, then wandered out onto the busy boulevard.

  Drina gave him a few metres start, then went after him. Girland wandered along, taking his time. Satisfied now that Girland hadn’t spotted him, Drina loafed along in the rear.

  Girland was an expert at losing a tail. When he came upon a crowd of people staring at a TV programme showing in a radio shop window, he stepped around them swiftly and into a doorway. The movement was so quick Drina didn’t see it.

  Suddenly Girland had vanished. Drina paused, people pushing by him. In a panic, Drina rushed past the doorway in which Girland was standing to the cross-roads. He looked frantically to right and left.

  Watching the panic-stricken face of the fat agent, Girland grinned.

  Three

  On the top floors of most of the older apartment blocks in Paris there are a number of small rooms known as chambres de bonne where servants who worked for the owners of the apartments below used to live. But now servants were almost impossible to find, the owners rented these miserable little rooms to students or to those unable to afford higher rents.

  Vi Martin lived in one of these rooms on the eighth floor of an old-fashioned block in Rue Singer. The room was equipped with a toilet basin, a portable electric grill, a bed, one small battered armchair and a plastic wardrobe. There was a table under the attic window on which stood a small transistor radio that never ceased to churn out swing music from the moment Vi woke to the moment she went to sleep. She just could not imagine anyone not living in the perpetual din of swing music.

  There were eight other little rooms on her floor. Four of them were occupied by elderly women who went out early every day on cleaning jobs. There were two Spanish couples who worked as servants in the apartments below and two elderly widowers who worked at the post office, a few doors down the street.

  These people had the habit of leaving their doors open so they could converse with their neighbours without leaving their rooms.

  These conversations were carried on at the top of their voices so the din, plus Vi’s transistor, was a nightmare bedlam of noise.

  Vi shared her room with Paul Labrey. They had met at a Left Bank party and Vi had immediately fallen for Labrey. She thought he was terribly with it with his green tinted glasses and his long hair. He told her as they were dancing that he was sharing a room with a Senegalese who was planning to get married and he would have to move out. Did she know of a cheap room he could rent? Under the influence of six large gins and feeling sexually aroused by the way he was holding her, Vi suggested he should move into her pad and share the rent.

  Labrey’s hands moved down her back as he regarded her. He decided ‘ he could do a lot worse and moved in the following day, bringing with him an old battered suitcase and a few tattered paperbacks.

  When Vi asked him what he did for a living, he grinned. ‘I sell dirty postcards on Place de la Madeleine. It’s a good racket. I catch the tourists when they leave Cook’s.’

  She didn’t believe this, for often he wouldn’t return to the room until well after 03.00 hrs. and sometimes he would rush off, swearing, before 08.00 hrs. She was sure he did some shady work — probably in drugs — but she didn’t care. Vi was that kind of a girl. At least he always seemed to have a reasonable amount of money and wasn’t mean with it. After a little persuasion, and after living with her for two months, he even agreed to pay the whole of the rent, and when they ate out at the bistro in Rue Lekain, he always picked up the tab.

  She enjoyed sleeping with him in the single bed. He had a lot of technique and wasn’t selfish in his love-making. He was fairly easy to live with. There were times when he revealed a quick, dangerous temper, and once when she nagged him about his dirty fingernails, he slapped her bare bottom so viciou
sly, her screams brought their neighbours tapping on their door. That taught Vi, as nothing else could, not to nag. Until she was seventeen, Vi lived with her parents in Lyons. Her father was well off and retired. Vi had always been a rebel. She loathed the provincial life in Lyons. She dreamed of Paris. Finally, she persuaded

  her father to let her study English at the Sorbonne. She learned without regret that both her parents had been killed in a car crash. She inherited three hundred thousand francs. She promptly gave up her studies, hooked up with an American newspaper man, and between the two of them, they ran through the money in two years. The American faded and Vi found herself high and dry with no money. She spent the next two years studying the ceilings of sordid hotel bedrooms while any man with money grunted on top of her.

  It was pure luck that she ran across Benny Slade. He was searching for a blonde, long-haired beauty with good legs to work in his studio. Seeing Vi as she walked down Avenue des Champs Elysees looking for a client, he decided she was just what he was looking for.

  He put her under contract and paid her a thousand francs a month which covered her rent and food bills.

  Vi had no difficulty in dressing herself. When she was short of money she either visited one of the big stores and stole what she needed or found an American tourist who paid her well for her favours. When Labrey appeared on her horizon, she became so much better off, since he paid the rent, that she dropped her street-walking, but remained a nimble shop-lifter.

  Returning to her room this evening, her mind was full of Girland. Chez Garin! she thought as she dumped her handbag and coat on the bed. Had she a decent dress? She went to the plastic wardrobe and nicked through the dresses hanging there. She decided the Swiss silk red dress she had stolen from Aux Trois Quartiers store only last week would do. She checked on her store of stockings — also stolen, and then examined her collection of shoes. Satisfied that she had the right clothes, she turned on the radio and stretched out on the bed.

  She closed her eyes and thought of Girland. What a man! There was something about him that Paul just hadn’t got. Paul was tough, young, good-looking and dangerous, but there was no polish to him. Sometimes she got bored with his green tinted glasses and bis long hair. If he would only wash his hair more often perhaps he would look more attractive.

  Thinking of his hair, made her think of her own. She scrambled off the bed and regarded herself in the mirror over the washbasin. Her long blonde hair didn’t look all that hot, she decided, and she began to fill the basin with hot water.

  It was while she was bending over the basin, clad only in white panties and bra, her hair floating in the hot water, Labrey came in.

  ‘If you touch me, I’ll throw water over you,’ Vi said hastily, aware that her position was a strong temptation for his heavy hand.

  But Labrey wasn’t in the mood for fun and games. His face was sullen as he sat on the bed. The trip out to Orly had been a drag. Seeing Henry Sherman pass through the police barrier, he had assumed that he would board the New York flight. But when he telephoned Kovski and had reported, Kovski had flown in a rage. He wanted to know if Labrey was sure that Sherman had taken that flight.

  Impatiently, Labrey had pointed out that he couldn’t pass the police barrier himself, so how the hell could he really be sure? Kovski had called him an incompetent, idle idiot and had slammed down the receiver. This criticism infuriated Labrey who could never take any form of criticism.

  ‘What are you doing back at this time — I thought you were working,’ he said as Vi wrung her hair out over the basin.

  ‘Benny had an unexpected visitor,’ she explained, wrapping her hair in a towel and making herself a turban. ‘What a dreamof a man! He’s taking me out tonight.’

  Labrey wasn’t interested. They had an agreement that when either of them felt like a change of sex partners they need not consult each other.

  ‘You’re not bringing him back here!’ he snapped. ‘I’ll probably be in.’ ‘Bring him to this hole?’ Vi laughed. ‘As if I would! He has class! We’re going to Chez Garin… I bet you’ve never even heard of it.’

  I haven’t and couldn’t care less.’ Labrey lit a cigarette and let smoke drift down his narrow nostrils. He felt a pang of jealousy. Girls got taken to the top places if they were willing to lie on their backs, he thought bitterly. ‘You watch it.

  Any pal of Benny’s is a suspect.’

  ‘Not this one! He’s a real doll! After dinner, he is going to show me his Bukhara rug.’ Vi giggled excitedly as she began to dry her hair. ‘He has money. I could have myself a ball for a change.’

  ‘What’s he doing mixing with a slob like Benny then?’ Labrey asked, now a little curious.

  ‘He showed Benny a film… a stag film. He wanted to know who shot it and who the man in the film was… don’t ask me why.’ Behind the tinted glasses, Labrey’s eyes became alert. ‘Did you get this guy’s name?’

  ‘Why, of course! I told you he’s taking me out tonight.’ Vi looked indignant. ‘You don’t imagine I’d go out with a man without knowing his name?’

  Labrey sneered.

  ‘No, you wouldn’t go out with him, but you would sleep with him. What’s his name?’

  ‘Mark Girland, if it’s any of your business .’

  Labrey stiffened. He sat motionless, his brain racing. Drina had often talked of an ex-CIA agent named Mark Girland.

  ‘One of Dorey’s top men, but they fell out,’ Drina had said. ‘A good thing for us. Girland was a nuisance. You should hear what Malik thinks of him!’

  Once when Drina and Labrey were together on a job, Girland had passed them, and Drina had pointed him out to Labrey who had stared at the tall, dark man, envying him because he was now out of this rat race of a racket.

  ‘Have you swallowed a wasp or something?’ Vi asked, staring at Labrey.

  ‘Is he tall, dark with a big nose?’

  ‘I wouldn’t call it big… it’s a dreamy nose.’

  ‘Is he tall and dark?’ Labrey restrained his impatience with an effort.

  ‘Yes, and handsome.’

  Labrey had telephoned Drina before signing off. Drina had told him that Girland was now involved somehow with Sherman. Labrey felt a wave of excitement run through him.

  ‘Sit down,’ he said, patting the bed.

  ‘I’m busy, dopey… can’t you see?’ Vi turned to the mirror. I can hear what you say without sitting… ouch!’

  Labrey’s hand cracked across her buttocks, making a pistol-like report.

  ‘Ooooh! You beast!’ Vi cried, dancing with the sting and rubbing herself. She started towards the basin of water when Labrey snarled, ‘Come here and sit down or you’ll get a hiding!’

  The note in his voice brought her to an abrupt standstill. She looked at him. His thin, white face had that savage expression she didn’t often see, but when she did, it scared her.

  ‘All right, all right, you needn’t have hit that hard.’ She came hurriedly and sat by his side. ‘What is it? God! You hurt me!’

  I want to know exactly what happened between Girland and Benny. I want every detail… right from the beginning.’

  ‘What on earth for?’ Vi demanded, bewildered, her eyes opening wide.

  Labrey’s hand came down on her naked thigh with another vicious slap that made her squeal. ‘Talk!’

  Hurt and now really scared, Vi talked. At the end of her recital, Labrey said, ‘You’re definitely meeting him at this restaurant at nine o’clock tonight?’

  ‘Yes.’ Vi rubbed the red mark on her thigh. ‘Look what you’ve done to me, you stinking brute!’

  ‘Shut up!’ Labrey thought for a long moment. ‘You’re sure it was a blue film?’

  ‘I’ll say. They were on the bed, very busy.’

  Labrey got to his feet.

  ‘Now listen, don’t say a word to anyone about this… do you understand? Don’t go yakking as you always yak.’ He leaned forward, his eyes glittering to stare directly into her eyes. ‘This is imp
ortant. If you say one word to anyone, I’ll fix you and you’ll stay fixed!’

  Vi shrank away from him, horrified by the murderous expression in his eyes.

  ‘I won’t say a thing… honest’

  ‘You’d better not. Stay here until I come back. Don’t move from here!’ ‘I’ll stay.’

  Again he stared at her for a long chilling moment, then turned and went from the room. She heard him going down the stairs three at the time.

  What’s happening, she thought. Oh, God! He’s never been like this before! He looked as if he could kill me! Has he gone crazy! What does it all mean?

  She sat there, trembling, the water from the ends of her hair making patterns on the red, soiled bedspread.

  * * *

  Although he was satisfied that he had lost Drina, Girland was still cautious. He wanted to be certain there wasn’t a second tail. As Drina darted off down Rue de Vaugirard, Girland left the shop doorway and retraced his way towards Benny’s studio. He spotted a free taxi, crawling in the traffic, signalled and slid in as the taxi stopped. The taxi moved off again before the cars behind could begin any impatient hooting. Girland told the driver to take him to the American Embassy.

  Twenty minutes later, he walked into Mavis Paul’s office. The moment she saw him, she snatched up a heavy ruler and eyed him suspiciously. She had had one embarrassing experience with him and she had no intention of repeating it.

  ‘Hello, beautiful,’ Girland said, regarding the ruler and keeping his distance. ‘Long time no see. You’re looking as radiant as this May morning. When are we going to have dinner together? I have a new and wonderful Bukhara rug I want to show you.’

  Mavis snapped down a switch on the intercom.

  ‘Mr Girland is here, sir.’

  ‘ Send him in.’ Dorey ‘s voice was curt.

  Mavis flicked her pretty fingers to the door.

  ‘ On your way, Romeo.’

  Girland shook his head sadly.

  ‘If only you could realise what you are missing. A night out with me is an experience every beautiful girl dreams of.’

  I can imagine,’ Mavis said, unimpressed. ‘He’s waiting,’ and putting down the ruler where she could grab it, she continued with her typing.