Never Trust A Lady

Prologue

Tom Hawkins hit the steering wheel with the heel of his hand as a silver Peugeot zipped around him on the right with barely inches to spare. “Idiot!” he snapped, adding his favorite filthy epithet in French.

The traffic on the Comiche President John F. Kennedy had come to a halt once more, to the symphonic accompaniment of blaring horns and shouted insults. Hawk glanced at his watch and swore again, softly and this time in English. No way around it, he was going to be late for his meeting with Loizeau.

He settled back with a resigned sigh and reached for his cigarettes, deliberately avoiding even a glance at the spectacular Mediterranean view on his left, where windsurfers’ sails swooped and darted like butterflies over molten copper breakers. It was just such scenes of almost searing beauty that made him hate this city so much. Marseilles reminded Hawk of New Orleans. It seemed to him that there was something false about both places… something sinister and treacherous lurking just beyond the raucous gaiety. The face of evil behind a Mardi Gras mask.

Death riding on a carousel, smiling and waving to the children as she goes round and round, biding her time…

Hawk’s cigarette broke in two as he stubbed it out in the car’s ashtray. He’d blocked the image almost before it had formed in his mind, but the lapse, however brief, left him shaken.

It was full dusk when he pulled up in front of Loizeau’s antique and curio shop, inconveniently located in the labyrinthine quarter of old Marseilles known as Le Panier. The streets in The Basket were largely deserted at this hour, most of its presidents locked up safe and snug in their upstairs apartments, and all sensible tourists apparently heeding their guidebooks’ warnings against being caught in the area after dark.

It was very quiet; he could barely hear the clanking of the masts in the harbor below. What sounds there were carried through the narrow, sloping streets on dancing tendrils of the mistral, along with the smells of fish, fuel and cooking. Somewhere a baby cried, a radio screeled Middle Eastern dissonances; rival cats sang threats to each other in a nearby alley. A lone car engine gunned, shifting gears, then growled away into silence.

As he stepped out of the car and turned the key in the door lock, Hawk found himself discreetly, and out of old habit, checking to make sure his weapon, a nice Walther 9-millimeter pistol, was where it should be, nestled in its holster against the small of his back.

He paused, fingers still curled around the car keys, to study the building in front of him. Gray stone and stucco, pocked with patches of decay like open sores, but fresh white paint, he noticed, on the wooden door and on the louvered shutters that flanked both second-story and street-level windows. A bedraggled red geranium bloomed in a warped wooden box right below a hand-lettered sign in the downstairs shop window that said, FERMÉ. The other ground-floor windows along the gently curving street were dark and tightly shuttered, while the second- and third-floor shutters stood open to the warm spring wind, spilling yellow light and looping ropes of softly swaying laundry across the darkening canyon below.

Loizeau’s shop was dark, too, but the shutters were still folded back, open and welcoming, and above Hawk’s head the living quarters’ windows were closed up tightly, with not the faintest gleam of light leaking through the slats.

Noting-even enjoying a tittle-the small frisson of unease that stirred across the back of his neck, Hawk stepped to the door of the shop and raised a hand to knock. For a moment more he hesitated, then tapped lightly on the thick, ageroughened wood. He listened, then, calling out, “Loizeau? Ouvrez, s‘il vous plaît,” tapped once more.

He drew a breath, held it and closed his fingers around the doorknob. It turned easily. He froze, but only for an instant. His gun was already warm and heavy in the palm of his hand as he eased the door open and slipped silently through it.

He knew at once. He could smell it. Death had been here, recently and almost certainly with violence.

Every sense-including a well-developed sixth-on full alert, Hawk crouched low and waited. He listened with every nerve, every cell in his body, listened for the sounds of fear and menace, stifled breathing, adrenaline-driven heartbeats, the brush of fabric over gooseflesh, the trickle of sweat, the stirring of hackles. Nothing. But his instincts had already told him the room was empty. Whoever had brought Death into it was gone.

But not long gone. If he needed more evidence of that fact, it came when his free hand, braced on the floor for balance, encountered a sticky warmth. He noted it automatically and without revulsion, while another part of his mind was on instant replay, reviewing every detail of every impression it had recorded from the moment he’d driven into that street. Crying baby, radio, fighting cats…a car shifting gears, driving away…

Five minutes, he thought. If I’d been five minutes sooner…

He stood, his movements brisk and efficient now, hitting the light switch with his elbow as he tucked his gun back into its holster. The shopkeeper, Loizeau, lay on his back near the door and stared sightlessly at the ceiling. He appeared to do so with three eyes; the one in the center of his forehead oozed a dark, congealing trickle. Other than that, oddly enough, his face was untouched. It was the back of his head and most of its contents that had splattered over the glass case immediately behind him. A glass case filled with lovely things gathered from the far corners of the world, trinkets made in cloisonné. beautiful objects of ivory, jade and gold.

Hawk didn’t bother to feel for a pulse. An easy death, he thought, gazing dispassionately at the iron-gray moustache that framed a mouth frozen in an 0 of eternal surprise. The man probably hadn’t even seen it coming. So the killer was a real pro-a thought that didn’t cheer Hawk. It meant that, in all likelihood, he wasn’t going to find what he’d come for.

Still, he had to be sure. Regretfully aware of what he was doing to someone else’s crime scene, he began a careful search of the body and its vicinity. After giving the same attention to the cluttered desk, with as much success, he paused, fingers drumming restlessly on the blotter. Hawk didn’t suffer defeat well. His mind was once again on rewind, zapping back to this afternoon’s telephone conversation with Loizeau…

“Oui, monsieur, I can have the information for you, but you understand, the time difference in the United States-”

“I understand. You are absolutely certain the item I am interested in was shipped-”

“Oh, yes, yes, quite certain. I remember that consignment very well. The seller insisted it was to go to Rathskeller’s and to no one else. But there will be no problem, monsieur, no problem at all. I have here the shipping receipt, I am certain they will have no problem tracing it. Perhaps you wish to make a telephone bid-”

“I might just do that. I’m interested in the one painting, as I believe I mentioned. My wife-you understand, she has her heart set on it. I’d like to surprise her. If you can get me the lot number-”

“Yes, yes, of course, monsieur. I understand very well. If you would care to call again after sieste…shall we say, four o’clock? I will have the information for you by that time.”

“I’d rather come by the shop, if that’s okay. How late are you open?”

“Until six, monsieur. Bon…bon…I look forward to being of service…”

Hawk stared down at his restlessly drumming fingers and at the thick paper blotter beneath them, willing his mind to methodical processes.

“I have here the shipping receipt.” Okay, if the shopkeeper had had it, where was it now? Gone, of course, having almost certainly left with whoever had left the man’s blood and brain tissue congealing on the glass display case. Why? Because the information the killer-and Hawk-needed was written on it.

Hawk’s fingers stopped drumming and began instead to stroke the surface of the blotter, slowly, delicately, like a lover’s caress. He could see Loizeau, picture him sitting here in this very spot, pulling the phone closer as he checked the telephone number on the shipping receipt. Picking up a pen, poising it over that same receipt while he waited for the overseas connection. Smiling, nodding as he jotted down the lot number. That piece of paper, the shipping receipt, was gone. But the blotter…

It took him longer than he would have liked. He kept having to remind himself to go slowly. Be careful. Take it easy, Hawkins… don’t blow this. He even felt a little silly doing it, painstakingly rubbing graphite over a small piece of white paper, like making leaf rubbings in kindergarten.

Silly? There was a dead body cooling at his feet. And maybe a lot more lives-uncounted thousands of lives-at stake.

So he kept at it, while darkness crawled like a villain through the streets outside the shop and tension cramped his hand and coiled around the back of his neck, and in the end his hunch and his patience paid off. It was there, all right, imprinted in the blotter where Loizeau’s hand would have rested as he sat at his desk with the telephone cradled between his ear and shoulder, busily making notes. Hawk’s rubbing produced a perfect negative in the shopkeeper’s neat, if somewhat prissy, hand: Rathskeller’s -Lot #187, 3/22, Arlington, Virginia.

He sat for a moment, looking down at the piece of paper in his hand. Then, releasing his breath with a soft hissing sound, he folded it once and tucked it away in his shirt pocket. Like it or not, it looked as though he was going home.