‘Not yet,’ I said.
‘I see her in the market here sometimes,’ said Frankel. ‘Her little boutique in the Rue de la Buffa is a flourishing concern, I’m told. She’s over the other business by now, and I’m glad …’
The ‘other business’ was a hand-grenade thrown into a café in Algiers in 1961. It killed her soldier husband and both her children. Pina escaped without a scratch, unless you looked inside her head. ‘Poor Pina,’ I said.
‘And Ercole …’ Frankel continued, as if he didn’t want to talk of Pina, ‘… his restaurant prospers – they say his grandson will inherit; and “the Princess” still dyes her hair red and gets raided by the social division.’
I nodded. The ‘social division’ was the delicate French term for vice squad.
‘And Claude l’avocat?’
‘It’s Champion you want to know about,’ said Frankel.
‘Then tell me about Champion.’
He smiled. ‘We were all taken in by him, weren’t we? And yet when you look back, he’s the same now as he was then. A charming sponger who could twist any woman round his little finger.’
‘Yes?’ I said doubtfully.
‘Old Tix’s widow, she could have sold out for a big lump sum, but Champion persuaded her to accept instalments. So Champion is living out there in the Tix mansion, with servants to wait on him hand and foot, while Madame Tix is in three rooms with an outdoor toilet, and inflation has devoured what little she does get.’
‘Is that so?’
‘And now that he sees the Arabs getting rich on the payments for oil, Champion is licking the boots of new masters. His domestic staff are all Arabs, they serve Arab food out there at the house, they talk Arabic all the time and when he visits anywhere in North Africa he gets VIP treatment.’
I nodded. ‘I saw him in London,’ I said. ‘He was wearing a fez and standing in line to see “A Night in Casablanca”.’
‘It’s not funny,’ said Frankel irritably.
‘It’s the one where Groucho is mistaken for the Nazi spy,’ I said, ‘but there’s not much singing.’
Frankel clattered the teapot and the cups as he stacked them on the tray. ‘Our Mister Champion is very proud of himself,’ he said.
‘And pride comes before a fall,’ I said. ‘Is that what you mean, Serge?’
‘You said that!’ said Frankel. ‘Just don’t put words into my mouth, it’s something you’re too damned fond of doing, my friend.’
I’d touched a nerve.
Serge Frankel lived in an old building at the far end of the vegetable market. When I left his apartment that Monday afternoon, I walked up through the old part of Nice. There was brilliant sunshine and the narrow alleys were crowded with Algerians. I picked my way between strings of shoes, chickens, dates and figs. There was a peppery aroma of merguez sausages frying, and tiny bars where light-skinned workers drank pastis and talked football, and dark-skinned men listened to Arab melodies and talked politics.
From the Place Rosetti came the tolling of a church bell. Its sound echoed through the alleys, and stony-faced men in black suits hurried towards the funeral. Now and again, kids on mopeds came roaring through the alleys, making the shoppers leap into doorways. Sometimes there came cars, inch by inch, the drivers eyeing the scarred walls where so many bright-coloured vehicles had left samples of their paint. I reached the boulevard Jean Jaurès, which used to be the moat of the fortified medieval town, and is now fast becoming the world’s largest car park. There I turned, to continue along the alleys that form the perimeter of the old town. Behind me a white BMW was threading through the piles of oranges and stalls of charcuterie with only a fraction to spare. Twice the driver hooted, and on the third time I turned to glare.
‘Claude!’ I said.
‘Charles!’ said the driver. ‘I knew it was you.’
Claude had become quite bald. His face had reddened, perhaps from the weather, the wine or blood pressure. Or perhaps all three. But there was no mistaking the man. He still had the same infectious grin and the same piercing blue eyes. He wound the window down. ‘How are you? How long have you been in Nice? It’s early for a holiday, isn’t it?’ He drove on slowly. At the corner it was wide enough for him to open the passenger door. I got into the car alongside him. ‘The legal business looks like it’s flourishing,’ I said. I was fishing, for I had no way of knowing if the cheerful law student whom we called Claude l’avocat was still connected with the legal profession.
‘The legal business has been very kind to me,’ said Claude. He rubbed his cheek and chuckled as he looked me up and down. ‘Four grandchildren, a loving wife and my collection of Delftware. Who could ask for more.’ He chuckled again, this time in self-mockery. But he smoothed the lapel of his pearl-grey suit and adjusted the Cardin kerchief so that I would notice that it matched his tie. Even in the old days, when knitted pullovers were the height of chic, Claude had been a dandy. ‘And now Steve Champion lives here, too,’ he said.
‘So I hear.’
He smiled. ‘It must be the sunshine and the cooking.’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘And it was Steve who …’ He stopped.
‘Saved my life?’ I said irritably. ‘Saved my life up at the quarry.’
‘Put the réseau together, after the arrests in May,’ said Claude. ‘That’s what I was going to say.’
‘Well, strictly between the two of us, Claude, I wish I’d spent the war knitting socks,’ I said.
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘It means I wish I had never heard of the lousy réseau, the Guernica network and all the people in it.’
‘And Steve Champion?’
‘Steve Champion most of all,’ I said. ‘I wish I could just come down here on holiday and not be reminded of all that useless crappy idiocy!’
‘You don’t have to shout at me,’ Claude said. ‘I didn’t send for you, you came.’
‘I suppose so,’ I said. I regretted losing my cool if only for a moment.
‘We all want to forget,’ Claude said gently. ‘No one wants to forget it more than I want to.’
The car was halted while two men unloaded cartons of instant couscous from a grey van. In the Place St François the fish market was busy, too. A decapitated tunny was being sliced into steaks alongside the fountain, and a woman in a rubber apron was sharpening a set of knives.
‘So Steve is here?’ I said.
‘Living here. He lives out at the Tix house near the quarry.’
‘What a coincidence,’ I said. ‘All of us here again.’
‘Is it?’ said Claude.
‘Well, it sounds like a coincidence, doesn’t it?’
The driver’s sun-shield was drooping and Claude smiled as he reached up and pushed it flat against the roof of the car. In that moment I saw a gun in a shoulder holster under his arm. It wasn’t an impress-the-girlfriend, or frightened-of-burglars kind of instrument. The leather holster was soft and shiny, and the underside of the magazine was scratched from years of use. A Walther PPK! Things must have got very rough in the legal business in the last few years.
He turned and smiled the big smile that I remembered from the old days. ‘I don’t believe in anything any more,’ he confessed. ‘But most of all I don’t believe in coincidences. That’s why I’m here.’