Inside they found a two-roomed flat. The air was stale, the utility furniture thick with dust. There was a single bed with a bare mattress; a tiny bathroom with no towel, soap, or lavatory paper; the kitchenette had no crockery or utensils; the main room was bare of books, magazines, old newspapers, even ashtrays. The only individual features were a reproduction of Van Gogh’s ‘Sunflowers’ and a black telephone of unusual design, with four coloured buttons instead of a dial. The officers made an intensive search of the flat, even removing planks of uncarpeted floor and sounding every inch of the walls, but found nothing.
The DST now concentrated on the telephone. They had discovered that it was not a direct line, but connected to a scrambler — a device that is illegal in France, except where permission is granted under special circumstances, usually at the behest of the Embassy of a friendly power. In this case, no such permission had been given.
When the officers tried the number from an outside phone, it rang for a full two minutes; then a man’s voice, with a slight accent, answered, ‘Michel ici.’ The officer asked to whom he was speaking. The voice replied, ‘What number do you want?’ Careful not to alert suspicion, the officer quoted back the number with the last two digits reversed. ‘You have the wrong number,’ the voice said, and the line went dead.
Later that night a man strolled past the house, noticed the plain-clothes agent just inside the front door, and went on to a café at the corner, where he asked for a jeton and shut himself into the phone booth. Next morning, when the engineers arrived at the house to disintegrate the scrambler, they found the line had already been disconnected.
The DST, as well as the authorities in the Rue du Palais, provoked by the wide Press coverage, which was now degenerating into reckless speculation — including reports of a clandestine police operation against Arab terrorists in France — were working desperately to break the case.
But after five days the only further information they had obtained was the method by which Monsieur Bloch — who was again unknown to either the DST or Interpol — paid his rent. This was settled by a regular banker’s draft drawn on a small independent bank in Basel. The DST contacted the Swiss Police Financière, who replied that the money came from a numbered account, and that the payments had been stopped two days previously — on the same day that the scrambler had been disconnected.
The only consolation left to the authorities was the fact that the Press, also starved of further facts, was becoming bored with the story; and finally dropped it altogether.
The file marked ‘Chamaz/Bloch/Michel’, however, remained open but unsolved.
CHAPTER 13
Marmut bem Letif sat small and listless behind an enormous desk, which was bare except for a platinum pen set, a dictating machine, and three telephones — black, green, and red. From the wall opposite, the Ruler gazed impersonally down at him out of a heavy gilt frame.
He glanced at his watch yet again, and looked nervously at the red telephone. It was past seven o’clock: there must be news soon. He licked his lips and swallowed hard. He was still unacclimatized to the air-conditioning, which dried his nose and mouth and gave him a sore throat.
Behind him, beyond the huge picture window, the city lay nine floors below in the red haze of evening. Through the bulletproof glass the roar of rush hour traffic reached him only as a muted hum. He turned in his swivel chair and looked out across the flat baked brown roofs to the sweep of high sugar-white buildings rising along the old Front de Mer — now renamed the Avenue of the Glorious Reawakening — and could see the great emptiness of the tideless Gulf, its surface broken for a moment by a tiny white trail in the wake of a waterskier.
He spun back to the desk as the red telephone gave a single peal, and a green light began winking on the dial. He grabbed the receiver, listened, muttered something and hung up; then reaching into the desk drawer, brought out a bottle of Chivas Regal and poured himself half a tumbler, which he swallowed neat. It was a dangerous luxury, but one which seemed to fit the occasion. While alcohol was not officially outlawed in the country, it was severely disapproved of — particularly among the Ruler’s servants — and could only be obtained, at extravagant prices, in the more exclusive hotels and restaurants that catered for foreign tourists.
He sat sucking a peppermint to clear his breath, and waited for Colonel Sham Tamat, Chief of NAZAK and the Incorruptible Guardian of the Nation’s Public Safety.
Either from deference to Letif’s rank, or to emphasize his civilian as well as military status, the colonel was not in uniform. He wore an English suit of grey worsted, silk tie by Pucci and shoes by Gucci, while his big fleshy face bore an expression of smug contentment. He strode across the deep white carpet and clasped both hands round Letif’s limp wrist. Only the width of the desk seemed to prevent him embracing the little man.
‘Fortune smiles upon us today, Minister!’ He sank into a chair under the portrait of the Ruler. ‘The dirty Levantine — the one they call Chamaz — is departed this day to his maker. It was not easy — particularly at such short notice — but I had my best men on the job, and they cooked the cur good and proper! Roasted him, to be exact — with half a litre of
