The Dave Bliss Quintet (10 page)

What to do? He could call the police, but finds himself
drawn back to the unoccupied mat problem:
There's a boy in a cage with his dog, you say? So?

Nothing harmful is going to happen to the kid for a day or so, he concludes eventually. So, why not complete the current case and keep tabs on him until the French legions show up with an extradition warrant for Johnson, then put them in the picture? In the meantime, identify Johnson as soon as possible and let Grimes and his wife worry about their daughter. Once Johnson is in custody and on his way to the U.K., it shouldn't be too difficult to rescue her.

With his plan formulated, Bliss slips on his swimming trunks and grabs a towel. Might as well take advantage of my last few days, he is thinking as he heads for the elevator.

Cannes is already awake when Bliss arrives to look for Johnson. The window displays of butchers, bakers, and candle-stick makers of the Rue Meynadier have been plumped up and the staff outfitted in stiffly starched uniforms with clinically white aprons. Fifty varieties of cheese, most coated in mould, overflow onto a sidewalk display outside a
fromag
è
rie
, and a surprised American voice pipes up, “Wow! And I thought all cheese came from Wisconsin.”

Stopping to eat his morning croissant on the beach, Bliss is struck by the constant hum of excitement as adverplanes buzz the beaches trailing billboards, Jet Skis and Sea-Doos bother the big yachts in the harbour, and rust-streaked passenger ferries zoom back and forth to the offshore islands. Behind him, a three-mile wall of hotels, restaurants, and casinos stretch around the bay and stolidly keep watch on the exuberance from behind the curtains of their daunting Victorian facades.

An Englishman with rolled-up trousers paddles in the gently lapping wavelets and says, “No trace of the storm,” with the conversational ease of someone who's just arrived at the office.

“What storm?” starts Bliss, taken by surprise, then freezes, concerned he's been discovered by a neighbour or colleague. “How did you know I spoke English?”

“Doesn't everyone here?” says the man rhetorically, then exclaims, “Oh dear God!” as a woman in translucent pants strolls by. “That girl's mother should really make her wear knickers.”

“You've just arrived?” chuckles Bliss knowingly.

“Yes — overnight train from Paris. How did you know?”

“Lucky guess.” He laughs and goes in search of Morgan Johnson.

Johnson's yacht, stern first against the harbour's inner wall, snuggles tightly between two similar behemoths. The
Sea-Quester
, while not the largest privateer in the world, dwarfs many of the others owned by winners in life's lottery, and distinguishes its moniker by the two-man mini-sub lashed to its aft deck.

Strolling along the quay with the nonchalant inquisitiveness of a well-travelled sightseer, Bliss takes a mental snapshot of his quarry's yacht and senses a laissez-faire attitude amongst the deck crew, who are playfully dousing each other while scrubbing the deck. Adding to the casual air, a CD player indiscreetly pumps disco music over the surrounding vessels, where demure stewardesses in fresh white shirts are trying not to walk with a dance as they serve deck breakfasts to their guests with the solemnity of royal household staff.

Wait a minute, he thinks, looking along the lines of multi-million dollar yachts. Many of them probably
are
royal households.

With Johnson's yacht identified, Bliss settles himself into an observation point in the shade of the Palais des Festivals, clicks on his walkman, and listens to Brubeck playing “All By Myself” as he watches the sun rising high over the islands of Sainte-Marguerite and Saint-Honorat in the bay. Then, realizing his shelter on the wide quay is quickly disappearing, and figuring that the lackadaisical attitude of the
Sea-Quester
's crew suggests the owner is not aboard, he seeks a better surveillance spot.

The Suquet, like a castle, with its château and fortified ramparts, sits in ancient grandeur overseeing the port from its perch on a rocky outcrop at the west end of the bay. Binoculars in hand, Bliss struggles up its steeply winding stone staircases until he has a grandstand view of the entire bay, with the old harbour lying at his feet. “Typical,” he moans to himself, checking out the binoculars. “They send me out to search for a major drug dealer who's done a bunk with a hundred million quid, and all they give me is a crappy pair of binoculars.”

So? What else do you need? he asks, playing devil's advocate.

That's not the point …

You've got the credit card — buy what you want.

OK. Valid argument.

The force-issue binoculars pick out the
Sea-Quester
with ease, and, reassured that nothing aboard has changed, he settles down in the partial shade of a spindly tree to direct his glasses on the town's cramped thoroughfares. The maze of streets, designed for peasants'
donkey carts, coil tightly around the Suquet before relaxing as they stretch around the bay and follow the railway line that once brought trainloads of Edwardian Brits escaping their northern summers and intolerable food.

“God — that's Edwards,” he murmurs, spotting a suspect as he peers intently at the crowds, but gives up when he realizes he sees him everywhere. He'll wait to hear from Samantha, he decides, and spends his time enjoying the view.

A masked mime, dressed like a seventeenth-century
mousquetaire
in a flambouyant purple robe, complete with French falls boots and feathered hat, creates an instant stage on the Suquet's quadrangle with an old beer crate and pulls a fluffy tabby cat from each of his coat's capacious pockets. Motionless, with his arms set like tree branches, he stands as the cats mime a duet in perfect tandem, and Bliss is so rapt in the performance he misses the arrival of a chauffeured limousine at Johnson's yacht. Joining the applause for the musketeer, Bliss rises to donate a few coins, when his eye is caught by movement on the quay below and he grabs his binoculars in time to catch two ant-like figures scurrying across the
passerelle
to the aft deck of the
Sea-Quester
.

“Shit,” he shouts, takes off, and races headlong down the awkwardly spaced steps, praying no one will suddenly step out of a doorway or side street. Stopping for breath after the third flight, he swigs a mouthful of spring water from one of the gargoyle-faced fountains, then rushes on — but he has taken the wrong path and has to fight his way through the narrow lanes, thronged with holidaymakers rooting through the bric-a-brac of tourist trash in the expensively named emporiums.

Cutting across the
p
é
tanque
courts of the Pantiero he kicks up a dust cloud.

“
Merde
,” shouts an irate player, slapping his crooked arm in anger as he rants, “
Va te faire foutre
!” Bliss misses the foul-mouthed insult as he plays car drivers at their own game and forces three lanes of traffic to a halt by dashing erratically across the busy seafront road.

The long run along the harbour wall, constantly leaping mooring ropes, bollards, and abandoned chandlery, leaves him breathless as he nears the
Sea-Quester
's berth — but he's too late. The gangway has been slid aboard, the moorings cast, and the vessel has edged off her berth, turned hard to port, and is heading for the open sea.

“
Putain
,” swears Bliss, as he focuses his binoculars on the departing vessel, but he's foiled by the tinted bridge windows. He shrugs. Oh well, at least it gives me time to do something about the boy in the cage, and maybe I'll make some more enquiries about Marcia's daughter.

The boy in the cage plays on his mind as he edges his way through the tight laneways crammed with a potpourri of tourists. Every English voice turns him, until he decides to act and, finding a pay phone, fishes out his Amex card to call Samantha.

Chief Superintendent Michael Edwards was not only home, Samantha tells her father, but cheerfully answered her “absolutely confidential” phone survey and was more than happy to spend a few minutes outlining his opinions on gays in public service. “Thanks so much. Your views are very valuable to us,” she cooed, thinking: very valuable, indeed, especially to a defence lawyer with a difficult police discrimination case in the wings.

“Then who was in the car?” Bliss muses aloud, and his mind rambles on in answer: I s'pose it could have been anybody. The speed they drive here, you never get more than a glimpse. They're crazy. Driving like maniacs from A to B, then they spend an hour in a traffic jam. Everyone's the same — rush, rush, rush. Why? So they have more time to do nothing, of course. Or more time to do it again.

“So,” says Samantha, “is that it, or do you think you're being followed by someone else?”

“That's it,” he answers, then, with no sign of a quick resolution to the Johnson case, tells her about his encounter with the prisoner in the ground-floor apartment. Samantha, still on the defensive, suggests the boy might be happy in the cage.

“You can't be serious.”

“What about that kidnapped American girl who'd spent years in a box under the bed in a trailer?”

“I remember,” he says. “She escaped, but missed her box and went back — weird.”

“And you're not in a cage — not weird?”

“No,” he starts, then rounds on her. “What do you mean?”

“Dad. Face it. Edwards has barricaded you in. You escaped to the South of France, but you're still in his box. Still worrying he's stitched you up or is traipsing around Europe following you.”

Trapped, he tries worming his way out. “That's different —” but she cuts in to let him off the hook. “Dad … we all have our cages.”

“We do?”

“Sure — most people make their own. They pen themselves in and never stop bleating about it. Half my
colleagues are lumbered with a husband, two cars, three kids, and four beds. And they're locked into jobs they hate. And what about all the poor schmucks holed up with partners they despise but are too scared to escape from? Yeah — we all have cages.”

“So what are you suggesting? That I just leave him there?”

“Find out first — don't assume that because you wouldn't want to live in his cage neither does he. He probably wouldn't want to live in your cage.”

“I don't live in —” he starts angrily, but she laughs it off.

“All right, Dad.”

“Kids,” he moans as he puts the phone down. “Find out,” she said. How the hell am I supposed to do that? Creep up to him when he's taking his dog for a crap in the garden and say, “Excuse me. Do you like living in a cage?” And he says, “Of course I do.”

Then what? he questions himself. But isn't that always the problem with abuse — all abuse: children, spouses, elderly? Nine out of ten they'll say there's nothing going on.

Walking the coast road back to St-Juan-sur-Mer, Bliss flips through his Brubeck CD to find “Prisoner's Song,” then finds himself thinking in circles as he tries to come up with an answer, realizing he's suddenly confronting the same dilemma as so many people he's interviewed in a career-spanning basket of abuse and neglect cases.

“Such nice people,” they say, adding disbelievingly, “I never would have thought it. Quiet, mind you, kept themselves to themselves.”

But wouldn't you keep your head down if were up to something like that? he thinks.

“He is Engleesh,” explains the concierge, when Bliss returns to the apartments and makes an off-hand remark about the “nice young man with the little dog” on the ground floor. There's a certain guardedness — evidence of a tacit awareness, perhaps — in the old man's manner as he keeps his head down over a drain in the parking lot, angling for a tenant's lost set of car's keys with a bent wire coat hanger.

“English,” echoes Bliss, trying to see over the big man's shoulder, but, with Samantha's words still in his ear, doesn't take it further.

“
Le mollusque
lives zhere wiz his mother,” sneers the concierge in answer to Bliss's silence, leaving little doubt as to his feelings. The fact isn't particularly startling to Bliss — he has assumed it is a close family member; it usually is. Although an alternative has crossed his mind, that the young man was involved in some sort of bizarre sexual tryst — a
ménage à deux et demi —
if a dog could be considered a “half.”

“Let me help,” says Bliss, gently nudging the concierge aside as he simply lifts the drain cover and picks out the keys.

“
Merci
,” he says, taking the keys grudgingly, as if he'd been enjoying the fishing, and in return agrees to open the tenant's register.

“I think they may be friends of my mother,” Bliss prattles on. “I'm sure I'll recognize the name … embarrassing not being able to remember … sure you understand …”

“
C'est bizarre
,” exclaims the concierge a minute later, pointing to the fact that no current entry exists
for apartment 101. “
Ce n'est pas possible
,” he carries on, furiously scratching his forehead, then shouts, “
Merde
,” in comprehension of the situation. He was on holiday, he explains, at the time the English arrived, and made no entry.

“So what is their name?”

“
Bof
.” He shrugs, making it clear it is of no interest to him.

“But who pays the rent?”

He shrugs again. It's not his problem — he is only there to keep the place clean. A sore point, apparently, as he takes off in complaint about the young man's dog fouling his garden. “Zhe leetle sheet machine,” he explodes, “
chie partout dans le jardin
,” then rants on about the inordinate quantity of “sheets” from one small dog: “
Merde
!”