“They depend on the kind we pick from the brochures I shall get. One depends on the other. But don’t worry. On the second thing we need, there are thousands of every kind and description in the shops along this coast. With spring coming, every shop in every port is stocking up with the latest models.”
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“Okay. Fine,” Shannon shouted. “Now listen. I need the name of a good export agent for shipping. I need it earlier than I thought. There will be a few crates to be sent from here in the near future, and another from Hamburg.”
“I can get that easy enough,” said Langarotti from the other end. “But I think it will be better in Toulon. You can guess why.”
Shannon could guess. Langarotti could use another name at his hotel, but for exporting goods from the port on a small freighter he would have to show his identity card. Moreover, in the past year or so Marseilles police had tightened up considerably in their watch on the port and a new customs chief had been drafted in, who was believed to be a holy terror. The aim of both operations was to clamp down on the heroin traffic that made Marseilles the start of the French connection with New York, but a search of a boat for drugs could just as easily turn up arms instead. It would be the worst irony to be caught because of something one was not even involved in.
“Fair enough. You know that area best,” said Shannon. “Cable me the name and address as soon as you have them. There is one other thing. I have sent a letter by express rate tonight, to you personally at the main post office in Marseilles. You’ll see what I want when you read it. Cable me the man’s name at once when you get the letter, which should be Friday morning.”
“Okay,” said Langarotti. “Is that all?”
“Yes, for the moment. Send me those brochures as soon as you get them, with your own comments and the prices. We must stay in budget.”
“Right. By-by,” called Langarotti, and Shannon hung up. He had dinner alone at the Bois de St. Jean and slept early.
Endean arrived at eleven the next morning and spent an hour reading the report and accounts and discussing both with Shannon.
“Fair enough,” he said at length. “How are things going?”
“Well,” said Shannon, “it’s early days yet, of course. I’ve only been on the job for ten days, but a lot of ground has been covered. I want to get all the orders placed by Day Twenty, which will leave forty days for them to be fulfilled. After that there must be an allowance of twenty days to collect all the component parts and get them safely and discreetly aboard the ship. Sailing date should be Day Eighty, if we are to strike on schedule. By the way, I shall need more money soon.”
“You have three and a half thousand in London, and seven thousand in Belgium,” objected Endean.
“Yes, I know. But there is going to be a spate of payments soon.”
He explained he would have to pay Johann, the Hamburg arms dealer, the outstanding $26,000 within twelve days to allow him forty days to get the consignment through the formalities in Madrid and ready for shipment; then there would be $4800, also to Johann, for the ancillary gear he needed for the attack. When he had the End User Certificate in Paris, he would have to send it to Alan, along with a credit transfer for $7200, 50 percent of the Yugoslav arms price.
“It all mounts up,” he said. “The big payments, of course, are the arms and the boat. They form over half the total budget.”
“All right,” said Endean. “I’ll consult and prepare a draft to your Belgian account for another twenty thousand pounds. Then the transfer can be made on a telephone call from me to Switzerland. In that way it will only take a matter of hours, when you need it.” He rose to go. “Anything else?”
“No,” said Shannon. “I’ll have to go away again at the weekend for another trip. I should be away most of next week. I want to check on the search for the boat, the choice of dinghies and outboards in Marseilles, and the submachine guns in Belgium.”
“Cable me at the usual address when you leave and when you get back,” said Endean.
The drawing room in the sprawling apartment above Cottesmore Gardens, not far from Kensington High Street, was gloomy in the extreme, with heavy drapes across the windows to shut out the spring sunshine. A gap a few inches wide between them allowed a little daylight to filter in through thick net curtains. Between the four formally placed and overstuffed chairs, each of them late-Victorian pieces, myriad small tables bore assorted bric-à-brac. There were buttons from long-punctured uniforms, medals won in long-past skirmishes with long-liquidated heathen tribes. Glass paperweights nudged Dresden china dolls, cameos of once demure Highland beauties, and fans that had cooled faces at balls whose music was no longer played.
Around the walls of discolored brocade hung portraits of ancestors, Montroses and Monteagles, Farquhars and Frazers, Murrays and Mintoes. Surely such a gathering could not be the ancestors of one old woman? Still, you never knew, with the Scots.
Bigger than them all, in a vast frame above the fire that clearly was never lit, stood a man in a kilt, a painting evidently much more recent than the other blackened antiques, but still discolored by age. The face, framed by two bristling ginger muttonchop whiskers, glared down into the room as if its owner had just spotted a coolie impudently collapsing from overwork at the other end of the plantation. “Sir Ian Macallister, K.B.E.,” read the plate beneath the portrait.
Martin Thorpe dragged his eyes back to Lady Macallister, who was slumped in a chair, fiddling as she constantly did with the hearing aid that hung on her chest. He tried to make out from the mumblings and ramblings, sudden digressions, and difficult accent what she was saying.
“People have come before, Mr. Martin,” she was saying; she insisted on calling him Mr. Martin, although he had introduced himself twice. “But I don’t see why I should sell. It was my husband’s company—don’t you see? He founded all these estates that they make their money from. It was all his work. Now people come and say they want to take the company away and do other things with it—build houses and play around with other things. I don’t understand it all, not at all, and I will not sell—”
“But, Lady Macallister—”
She went on as if she had not heard him, which indeed she had not, for her hearing aid was up to its usual tricks because of her constant fiddling with it. Thorpe began to understand why other suitors had eventually gone elsewhere for their shell companies.
“You see, my dear husband, God rest his poor soul, was not able to leave me very much, Mr. Martin. When those dreadful Chinese killed him, I was in Scotland on furlough, and I never went back. I was advised not to go. But they told me the estates belonged to the company, and he had left me a large part of the company. So that was his legacy to me—don’t you see? I could not sell his own legacy to me…”
Thorpe was about to point out that the company was worthless, but realized that would not be the right thing to say. “Lady Macallister—” he began again.
“You’ll have to speak directly into the hearing aid. She’s deaf as a post,” said Lady Macallister’s companion.
Thorpe nodded his thanks at her and really noticed her for the first time. In her late sixties, she had the careworn look of those who once had their own independence but who, through the strange turns of fortune, have fallen on harder times and to survive have to put themselves in bond to others, often to cantankerous, troublesome, exhausting employers whose money enables them to hire others to serve them.