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When he finally gave Roux the tip-off, it was too late. Roux telephoned the hotel at once under another name and asked if a Mr. Sha
Cross-examined, a thoroughly frightened Lambert claimed he had not actually visited the hotel but had simply received a call from Sha
Shortly after nine Roux’s man Henri Alain was at the reception desk of the Plaza-Surene and established that the only Englishman or Irishman who had stayed in the hotel the previous night exactly corresponded in description to Cat Sha
In the French mercenary leader’s flat, Roux, Henri Alain, and Raymond Thomard held a conference of war Roux made the final decision.
“Henri, we’ve missed him this time, but the chances are that he still knows nothing about it. So he may well return to that hotel next time he has to overnight in Paris. I want you to get friendly, real friendly, with someone on the staff there. The next time that man checks in there, I want to know, but at once. Understand?”
Alain nodded. “Sure, patron. I’ll have it staked out from the inside, and if he even calls to make a reservation, we’ll know.”
Roux turned to Thomard. “When he comes again, Raymond, you take the bastard. In the meantime, there’s one other little job. That shit Lambert lied his head off. He could have tipped me off last night, and we’d have been finished with this affair. So he probably took money off Sha
The floating of the company to be known as Tyrone Holdings was shorter than Sha
The other two directors shook hands with Sha
“When you and your associates wish to buy a company in the chosen field of operations, to be owned by Tyrone Holdings,” he told Sha
Sha
Mr. Stein as company chairman. Two hours later he caught the evening plane for Brussels, and he checked into the Holiday I
The man who accompanied Tiny Marc Vlaminck when they knocked at Sha
M. Boucher’s head appeared to be the only object to mar the contours of the otherwise uniformly globular mass. It was small at the top and flowed downward to engulf his collar and hide it from view, the flesh of the jowls resting thankfully on the shoulders. After several seconds Sha
“Please come in,” said Sha
Boucher entered first, turning slightly sideways to slip through the door, like a large ball of gray worsted fabric on castors. Marc followed, giving Sha
Sha
“Monsieur Boucher, my associate and friend may have told you that my name is Brown, I am English by nationality, and I am here representing a group of friends who would be interested in acquiring a quantity of submachine carbines or machine pistols. Monsieur Vlaminck kindly mentioned to me that he was in a position to introduce me to someone who might have a quantity of machine pistols for sale. I understand from him that these are Schmeisser nine-mm. machine pistols, of wartime manufacture but never used. I also understand and accept that there can be no question of obtaining an export license for them, but this is accepted by my people, and they are prepared to take all responsibility in this regard. Is that a fair assessment?”
Boucher nodded slowly. He could not nod fast. “I am in a position to make available a quantity of these pieces,” he said carefully. “You are right about the impossibility of an export license. For that reason the identity of my own people has to be protected. Any business arrangement we might come to would have to be on a cash basis, and with security arrangements for my own people.”
He’s lying, thought Sha
In fact M. Boucher in his younger and slimmer days had been a Belgian SS man and had worked as a cook in the SS barracks at Namur. His obsession with food had taken him into cooking, and before the war he had lost several jobs because he tasted more than he served through the hatch. In the starving conditions of wartime Belgium he had opted for the cookhouse of the Belgian SS unit, one of the several local SS groups the Nazis recruited in the occupied countries. In the SS, surmised the young Boucher, one could eat. In 1944, when the Germans pulled back from Namur toward the frontier, a truckload of unused Schmeissers from the armory had been on its way east when the truck broke down. There was no time to repair it, so the cargo was shifted into a nearby bunker and the entrance dynamited. Boucher watched it happen. Years later he had returned, shoveled away the rubble, and removed the thousand weapons.
Since then they had reposed beneath a trapdoor built into the floor of the garage of his country cottage, a building left him by his parents, who died in the mid-1950s. He had sold job lots of Schmeissers at various times and had “unloaded” half of his reserve.