“All right, but there’s a hell of a lot I want to talk to you about.”
“You want my answer, no. But you could have telephoned me.”
“Your answer? Oh, yes. Sure I want that. But there’s much more than that. Look, I’ve got to talk to you.”
She smiled, leaned forward and kissed me lightly on the cheek. “Where you stay?”
“Hotel Florida.”
“I will work something out and let you know. Right now I have to go back. She waits for me to rub her shoulder blades.”
“Do what?”
“She has fibrositis. I rub her, each morning, afternoon and evening. You know I am a trained Swedish masseuse?”
I said, “I can’t wait to stand in a good draught and get fibrositis. Do people only get it in the shoulder blades?”
“Rex, darling ... naughty.” She stood up and was away.
There was nothing I could do. I just sat, enchanted, watching her beautiful back and legs, and the sharp flick of ankles moving away from me. I did not believe for a moment that she was a trained masseuse. I had met quite a few congenital liars, men and women, but I’d never fallen in love with one before.
I went back to the flat, changed, and had a large whisky. Then I went down and got a taxi. We fought and hooted our way through the evening traffic up towards the Arc de Triomphe with the Le Chasseur rubbing gently against my lower left ribs, and myself wondering why the hell I was wearing it.
It was a small grocer’s shop right at the far end of the Avenue de la Grande Armée, on the Porte Maillot, with the green trees and worn grass of the Bois de Boulogne just around the corner. I walked the last hundred yards to it, and if the place were being watched or I were being followed, I couldn’t tell.
The place was badly lit and there was a pleasant smell of coffee grinding. There was a big advertisement runner for Suchard chocolates on one wall, a box of artichokes propped against the counter, and no room to swing a cat. An elderly, apple-cheeked woman, her black hair done in a bun on top of her head, was listening to a radio transmission of hot music. She turned it down a few decibels as I faced her. It still meant I had to shout.
“Monsieur Stebelson?”
She nodded, smiled, turned the volume up and flicked a finger to a glass-panelled door beyond the counter.
I went through into a sitting-room as crowded and as badly lit as the shop. Stebelson had his back to a window that looked out on to a small courtyard. He wore a black homburg and a light grey summer coat and smoked a cigar.
The plastic eyes went over me in the briefest of kit inspections and then he held out his hand. It felt like limp, synthetic rubber.
“Good,” he said. “Come with me.”
He turned and went out through a door into the courtyard. I followed. He took me on a quick tour of courtyards, alleyways and back passages. Then we were out in a small street and he was opening the door of a car for me. I tried to follow the route for a time. In London I could have held my own with the best taxi-driver, but Paris beat me. We ran south along the edge of the Bois for some time, then took a left-hand turn back into the maze of streets behind the Avenue Victor Hugo and after that I was lost.
“Neat,” I said. “If anyone was following you must have shaken them.”
He nodded but said nothing.
We finished up eventually in a narrow back street whose name I couldn’t get as we swung into it. There was a blue door with the number eight on it. We went through, across a small garden, and into a dark little hall. There was a service lift. Stebelson swung the grille back and waved me inside.
“You go up by yourself,” he said. “The fourth floor. You will be met.”
I went up alone. When I stepped out on the fourth floor a girl was waiting for me.
She said, “Monsieur Carver?”
I nodded, and she turned and began to lead me down a carpeted corridor. She was a tall, thin girl, the kind that can make a cheap dress look like a Jacques Fath number. Her hair was smooth ebony, and there was a sort of noli me tangere air about her.
She knocked on a door, pushed it open, and beckoned me in with a nice movement of hand and arm. I went in and she followed me. It was an office with a big, antique desk affair, all gold leather and ormolu legs and bits of carving, and a shaded green light above it. Behind it sat what must have been one of the tiniest men in the world. He had a powder-white face, a hooked nose, a thin mouth like a turned down bracket, sad grey eyes, and two irregular patches of grey fuzz flanking the lower slopes of a sharply pointed bald head. He wore a dinner jacket, and to get his elbows on the desk he must have been sitting on a couple of cushions. He had a huge cigar in one corner of his mouth and I began to worry that the weight of it would snap his thin neck in half.
He pointed a brittle finger at a chair and I sat down, wondering how he had managed to survive from Sax Rohmer days. Somewhere there had to be an octopus tank. The girl sat down somewhere behind me and ruffled the pages of a notebook. The sound was reassuring.
In a lightweight voice that went with his size, he said, “It is nice of you to come, Mr Carver, and I shall try to be as direct with you as I possibly can. My name is Avraam Malacod, I understand from Stebelson that you have certain reservations
