Scratch One, Page 3

  On the second floor of the same hotel, the telephone rang. Groping for the sound, Roger Carr reached out and clutched a firm breast. Surprised, he opened his eyes.

  “Ouch!” the girl said, sitting upright in bed. “What was that for?”

  Carr groaned. The telephone was still ringing. Dazed, he looked around. It was over there, on the night table. “Sorry,” he mumbled, and picked up the receiver.

  “Nine o’clock, Mr. Carr.”

  “All right.” He replaced the receiver.

  The girl was annoyed: “Was that your idea of a joke?”

  “No,” he said, rubbing his eyes. He felt absolutely stinking aching horrible. “Just a mistake.”

  “Some mistake.” She rubbed herself gingerly. She was a well-built girl, he thought, looking at her as she sat naked, the sheet fallen to her waist. Where the hell had she come from?

  Then he remembered. The Green Dragon Pub. She was the one with the aloof air and the tight sweater. And those black boots. She had smiled at him, and he had picked her up. Or was it the other way around? He couldn’t remember.

  He stood up cautiously, then lurched into the bathroom and started the shower. Cold: it was better that way. Snap yourself awake. Rinse off the booze feeling. He shivered, and sighed.

  In an hour and a half, he’d be on an Air France flight to Nice. He was ready for the sunny Riviera. He’d had it with London.

  Roger Carr had spent the last twenty-four hours in London, doing some minor business for his law firm, Harrison, Bentley and Reed. Carr always did minor business for them; in fact, he would never have been hired were it not for his connections. Roger Carr had excellent connections.

  First, there was his father, the distinguished Senator Carr. He had been a partner in Harrison, Bentley and Reed for many years before running for the Senate at age fifty-nine. The firm kept his son as a gesture; the senior partners regarded the younger Carr’s salary as a business expense, nothing more.

  Then there was the Governor. Roger and the Governor got along famously, and the Governor was one of the biggest clients in the firm. The Governor had met Carr one afternoon when Roger was carrying some papers over to him; the two had struck it off instantly, and were now fast friends. The Governor claimed that all lawyers bored hell out of him. Roger was an exception. Slightly debauched with a cherubic face and a mildly satyric air, he reminded the Governor of his own hell-raising youth. The Governor appreciated that.

  And so, when it came time to send a lawyer to southern France to purchase a villa for the Governor, Roger Carr had been the obvious choice.

  “You have taste, goddammit,” the Governor had said, chomping down on his Havana cigar. “I want something tasteful. Take your time about it—four weeks, six weeks if you want to. And see that you don’t waste all your energy working for me.”

  “I will carry out your instructions to the letter,” Carr had replied.

  And he intended to.

  He smiled at his lathered image in the mirror as he shaved. He was a likable, engaging man who was both intelligent and perceptive. He enjoyed his work—what there was of it—and principally attributed his failure to go farther in the firm to an overriding sense of boredom with the law. It was a feeling which had afflicted him since his graduation, at the bottom of his class, from the Harvard Law School. On principle, he was opposed to stuffiness, weekends in Connecticut, suspenders, and waistcoats. Unfortunately they were de rigueur in his profession, a fact which he accepted rather gracelessly.

  Friends were always urging him to “get hold of yourself” and “make something of yourself.” He found such solicitousness embarrassing; he did not want to make something of himself if it meant he must wear suspenders and clear his throat judiciously whenever he met a client. He had always felt that there was another road to success, another sort of impetus.

  And, in his own peculiar way, he had always felt that the impetus would someday come to him.

  He caught an early cab, and arrived at the air terminal on Cromwell Road thirty minutes before the flight. He got out on the ramp, engaged a porter, and went inside through the automatic doors.

  This terminal was depressing. The girl at the Air France desk was a welcome relief. He handed over his ticket, and his passport, and she dug into a clutter of forms, hunting his name. Carr leaned over the counter and tried to get a look at her legs.

  When she straightened, so did he.

  “Fine, sir,” she said in a soft accent. “The bus to the airport leaves in twenty minutes. Do you have any luggage to check through?”

  “Yes, I do,” Carr said, and suddenly realized that his porter had not arrived. He looked around, but did not see the man. “It’s coming,” he said.

  “Very good. I’ll just fill out your embarkation form.” She thumbed through the passport, looking for the rectangular entry stamp. “You have been in England only since yesterday?”

  “Right.”

  She scribbled on the yellow card. “Flight 703, to Nice. You’ll have to sign here.”

  Carr took the form and the offered pen, and signed. He put the card in his passport, and they both looked at each other.

  The porter had not arrived.

  “I’m sure he will be right here,” the girl said, echoing his own thoughts. “It’s a new building, and they sometimes get confused.”

  “I understand.” He reached in his pocket. “Cigarette?”

  “No thank you.” She had a nice smile.

  Carr lit a cigarette, blew a stream of smoke upward, and checked his watch. He had been here five minutes. “Maybe I could go look—”

  “No, no. It’s better if you wait here.”

  “Okay.” He put his hand in his pocket and jiggled his keys, then stopped. There was no sense in getting impatient. The girl smiled at him, and he smiled back. He wondered if he had locked his suitcase; he thought he had, but he couldn’t remember for sure.

  About that time the porter arrived, looking chagrined. “There you are, sir. Bit of confusion, you know, sir. Thought you’d said BEA desk. Sorry, sir. Accent, you know.” He seemed to grow even more embarrassed, and would not look at Carr as he swung the bags onto the scale. Feeling magnanimous, Carr gave him five shillings. It occurred to him as he did this that, had he been in New York, he would have chewed the porter out.

  The man blushed, touched his cap, and disappeared.

  “Twenty kilos exactly,” the girl said, reading the scale. She put a tag on the handle. Carr went downstairs to get his bus, feeling strange. He could have sworn his suitcase wasn’t that heavy when he had checked in at New York the day before. But he wasn’t sure, and it didn’t matter. He shrugged, and stopped at the gift shop to buy a paperback book. He wanted something light and amusing, of no consequence.

  The copilot of Air France Flight 703 had just spilled hot coffee on his pants, as a result of sudden turbulence. He was swearing loudly, so the pilot could not hear the message that was coming direct from Orly control, relayed from Heathrow, London. Static was bad; the pilot asked for a repeat, turned aside, and told the copilot to shut the hell up.

  The rest of the crew became instantly alert, and pulled on their headphones. Their faces were grave as the message was repeated. The pilot began to sweat.

  “What is your ETA Nice?” Orly asked, with maddening calmness.

  “Screw the ETA. Do you have confirmation of this message from London?”

  “Affirmative. What is your ETA?”

  Angrily, the pilot broke contact and turned to the copilot. With a curious kind of relief, he noticed large drops of sweat on the man’s brow, “When do we go into the pattern?” As he spoke, he realized that this was the wrong man to ask. He felt foolish.

  The navigator answered. “We are two minutes past Lyons. Three minutes before we go into the Nice landing pattern.”

  The pilot nodded sadly. There was no decision to be made, no alternatives, no choice. It would take too long to arrange an emergency landing at Lyons, and Marseilles was too far
away. “We have to ride it in,” he said. “Merde!”

  Meticulously, the copilot was brushing the dark stain on his trousers with a handkerchief. His fingers were trembling.

  The pilot understood the reaction; it was an attempt to act normally, to proceed with little things, to pretend nothing was happening.

  “Call up Nice control,” he said. “And get Adrienne in here.” Adrienne was a very stable, unperturbably sexy stewardess. At least, thought the pilot, she won’t go to pieces.

  He had a sudden vision of everything going to pieces, in a great burst. It was a nightmare vision, and he shook his head to clear it.

  Adrienne walked down the aisle, checking passengers to be sure their seat belts were fastened and their cigarettes out. Her smile was rigidly fixed, but she was confident it would do.

  “We’re ahead of schedule,” one man said, glancing at his watch. “What a nice surprise.”

  Adrienne nodded, and said nothing. The aisle was beginning to tilt sharply as the big Caravelle jet came down. Through the window, she glimpsed blue water and the curving four-mile beach of Nice. The apartments along the waterfront were familiar and white, safe-looking.

  A little American boy with freckles plucked at her sleeve. “Don’t I get any gum? I want some gum—or candy. Candy.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said. How could she worry about gum at time like this?

  “I always get gum,” the boy insisted, “whenever we land.”

  She had to move on, to check the other passengers.

  “We don’t have any more,” she explained, looking down the aisle. His small hand still clutched her Dior-designed uniform.

  “You’re mean.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Rat.”

  Wrinkling his nose, he released her, and she continued down the aisle. One bluff woman, old and heavy, was still smoking a cigarette. Adrienne requested in English that it be put out, and the woman answered, haughtily and deeply insulted, in French. But she put out the cigarette.

  Roger Carr had slept through most of the flight. He awoke when he felt fingers in his lap, and opened his eyes to see a very lovely girl bending over him. Say, he thought, this is service.

  He realized that the plane was tilted down; they must be landing. And then he saw that the stewardess was only tightening his seat belt. Oh well.

  She cinched it rather tight, almost painfully. He winced and began to loosen it.

  “It’s for your own protection.”

  It was then that he noticed how nervous she was. Probably her first flight, he thought. But if it will make her happy … He left the seat belt the way it was, and watched the girl walk forward, swishing her hips in a subtle, interesting way. Do girls become sexier when frightened? He wondered.

  Moments later, the wheels touched down with a shriek of rubber. It was a sloppy, bouncing landing, very unprofessional. If he had been an old lady, it would have made him nervous.

  The moment the plane came to a halt, the stewardess was up, marching down the aisle. “Everyone out, please,” she said. “There is no cause for alarm, but please leave your coats and hand luggage inside the aircraft.”

  Carr saw daylight behind him. The ramp had already been lowered. That was awfully quick. Looking out the window, he saw that the plane was stopped on the runway, a good half-mile from the airport itself.

  “We’re stopping here?” an annoyed British voice asked.

  “All out, please. This way. Your luggage will be collected for you, and brought to the baggage-claim area.” The stewardess was losing her control; her voice was rising.

  “What’s wrong? Is something wrong?” A woman.

  “Everyone out, please. Toward the rear, please. Thank you. That way, please.”

  Confused and tense, the passengers were filing out. Carr, seated toward the rear, was one of the first to step onto the concrete of the runway. He saw, parked in a line several hundred yards from the plane, three vans for carrying passengers to the main building. Why weren’t they closer?

  A uniformed man stood at the end of the gangway, pointing toward the vans. “That way, please. Move along, if you will. That way.” He was obviously nervous, and his face had a twitching smile.

  Why didn’t they bring the vans right up? What kind of a bush racket was this, anyway?

  And then Carr saw the fire truck, racing across the pavement toward them. The other passengers saw it, too. A sudden sense of urgency seemed to strike them all, and many began to run toward the vans. Carr, vaguely sensing what was happening, began to run, too.

  And then, behind him, there was an ugly sound, and he was knocked flat on his face by a rush of hot gas. He picked himself up and looked back to see the tail of the aircraft hidden by boiling flames and dense black smoke. There was another muffled roar. More smoke, then shouting, and sirens. Men in white asbestos suits appeared. Carr was hustled into a van by a frantic airport official. Looking around him, he saw that many of his fellow passengers had singed eyebrows and hair, and several had bad cuts. One man was wrapped in a blanket, unconscious. People were trying to prop his feet up. The van rumbled off toward the airport, and nobody spoke except for one little boy, with freckles, who kept his nose pressed against the glass window as he watched the fire.

  “Wow,” said the boy, in an awed voice. “Wowie.”

  Chapter IV

  IN A SMALL, WINDOWLESS room of the Nice Airport, five policemen sat hunched over desks going through the passports of every person, including the crew, who had been on Flight 703. It was a painfully slow business of checking through phonebook-sized directories, check sheets, number lists. Most of the passengers were British, on early holiday; there were a handful of Frenchmen, back from business in London, and an occasional Dutchman, German, and American. Mostly men, mostly impeccable.

  One policeman, at a corner desk, came to an American passport. He gave it a routine check—looking first for obvious signs of forgery, evidence that the punched number had been altered (making a 9 or a 6 into an 8 was a favorite), or indication that pages had been removed or substituted. That finished, he checked his lists. The number, D099177, was okay as far as he was concerned. He fed it through the direct teletype line to Paris, to see if they had anything, then continued his own examination.

  Roger Alan Carr, born in New York, U.S.A., on October 23, 1928. Height six feet, hair brown, eyes brown. Passport issued April 4, 1964. The picture showed a youngish-looking man, who appeared amused. The officer smiled as he looked at the picture, then he frowned. There was something about the face…

  “Henri.”

  Another man looked over.

  “You recognize this man?”

  A frown. “I am not sure. Is it the one?” To answer his own question, the second man thumbed quickly through the entry stamps. Not much there: entrance and exit stamps for England, within the last twenty-four hours; entrance stamp from Orly airport on an earlier trip, 6 June 1964; some Greek stamps which he couldn’t read; an embarkation stamp from Roma Airport, July 15, 1964. No entry into Italy, or exit from France, which meant that he had probably crossed the border by car. He checked the last page of the passport to satisfy himself that Mr. Carr had entered Greece with an automobile in 1964. The Greek customs stamp was there.

  It did not look much like the passport of an agent. There was nothing, really, except for the picture. “The resemblance is striking. What does Paris say about the number?”

  The first man consulted the clattering teletype, feeding back cleared numbers.

  “It’s okay.”

  The policeman shrugged. “He looks the same, that’s all. All Americans look the same.” He glanced again at the picture, critically. “He is smiling so much, he must be sleeping with the boss’s wife.”

  There was coarse laughter in the room. The passport was tossed onto the “cleared” stack.

  To Roger Carr, it seemed to take hours. Questions by the police, forms to fill out, claims and statements of damages, prodding by reporters, obsequi
es from white-faced airline representatives. The whole proceeding reminded Carr of his induction into the army, and it was not an experience he recalled fondly.

  From the gossip and rumors running wild among the huddled passengers, he was able to determine that a bomb had been planted on the airplane; one blazingly angry woman announced that they knew, the pilots knew, and yet they went through with the flight. It was absolutely criminal, and she intended to sue. It would be her last experience on a European airline, she could tell you that here and now. Carr listened and said nothing. He felt peculiarly passive about it all, and could detect only detached curiosity in himself. That, and the desire for a drink. It was nearly four o’clock when he was released by the last cop, and allowed to make his way through the broad glass doors, past the sign that read: “Welcome to Nice, Capital of the Côte d’Azur.”

  Two men lounged in the comfortable leather chairs near the entrance doors to the airport. They had been there a long time, reading magazines, not speaking. Nobody paid any attention to them, for they were well-dressed and unobtrusive men. Perhaps a porter might have noticed that they did not seem interested in the explosion aboard Flight 703; in fact, they almost gave the impression that they had expected it, they were so calm.

  One man was heavyset, with blond hair and florid skin, and very small blue eyes. He looked Germanic, rather ugly, with a studied neatness about him. It was a businessman’s look, efficient and collected, totally self-assured. He was reading a copy of Der Spiegel magazine.

  The other was slim, dark-skinned, dressed in a dark blue suit. He wore sunglasses which he did not remove, even to read Réalités. He looked like the kind of man who would enjoy such a magazine, the kind of man who could comfortably dabble in art and minor expensive fads, the kind of man who lived graciously, intellectually, and very fashionably.

  On occasion, the two men would look at each other, questioningly, as a man left the airport. Their eyes would meet, one would shrug, and they would resume reading.

  Liseau, lighting a cigarette, admitted to himself that he was tired. He marveled at Brauer—the German had gone to Paris the night before, killed a man, and returned. He couldn’t have managed more than a few hours’ sleep, yet he was alert and awake today. His endurance must be incredible, Liseau thought. He tried to read an article on the Countess Barsini’s redecorated villa, but he could not concentrate.