Odds On: A Novel Read online

  Peter stared drunkenly at his glass window-wall, streaked with water which lashed it and drenched the balcony. It was a miserable night and a miserable life. He had taken the washed-out bridge as the final omen that everything was wrong, that everything was conspiring against him.

  He picked up the empty shell of his suitcase and tossed it on the bed. He would leave her, God damn her. That’s all, just leave. He staggered into the bathroom to collect his shaving gear. He paused as he picked up his razor blades, briefly composing a suicide note in his mind. But no, it wasn’t worth it. She wasn’t worth it. She would just shrug it off.

  He threw the shaving kit into the suitcase. Another thought occurred to him—he couldn’t get his XKE off the island, with the bridge blown. And he certainly couldn’t go without it. He would have to wait until the bridge was rebuilt.

  How long would that take? He went to the closet and brought out his clothes, throwing them haphazardly on the bed.

  Maybe not so long. They could throw up a temporary affair, just to get the cars off. Then he would drive back to the Riviera, and stay in St. Tropez. Hot girls were a dime a dozen, wandering around the port, lying on the beaches. He’d show up in the Jag and knock them dead. He’d make four girls a night—five, even. Jenny could go to hell. There were other girls in the world.

  He would have a good time, eating bouillabaisse and fingering chicks under the table with his free hand. He needed a little action. Spain was the wrong country—too reserved, too formal, and inhibited. He’d go back to France, where the girls knew what it was all about.

  Feeling slightly better, he undressed and climbed into bed.

  Miss Shaw fretted. This was all most inconvenient, it really was. Completely unexpected and possibly quite serious. There was bound to be a lot of official rigmarole, and if it made the papers in Brighton—and she was sure it would—her sister would be terribly upset. And there was no way to communicate, to send a telegram, to reassure her. They were stranded, for God only knew how long.

  And, of course, the police. They must be taken into account. She got up and took the rest of the stuff from her purse, and meticulously flushed it down the toilet. It made her feel a little more peaceful. She wouldn’t look well in jail; her health would suffer terribly.

  That dreadful bridge. There was no getting around it; it was a damnable nuisance. She raised her small fist and shook it at the storm beating against her window. Thunder, rumbling and imperturbable, replied.

  The bedroom was dark.

  “Oh,” Cynthia said. “That’s good.”

  Jean-Paul, still smelling of the smoky fire, was reaching into her, tickling her, probing her, heating her. He was good, but she admitted slight disappointment. It had been better with kef. Next time, they’d do it with kef again, and they would really have a session. The storm and the wind howled outside. She began to feel deep stirrings. This wasn’t going to be so disappointing, after all.

  Jencks sat at his desk, his room lit by flickering candlelight, and struggled to understand. For the last hour, he had been in a state of shock; all his plans, his careful preparations, had been foiled. It was not easy to accept, to admit, and he considered every other possibility first.

  The computer had been wrong. But no, that was ridiculous. Perhaps it was capable of a minor error, the result of mis-programming, but a major catastrophe of this magnitude was unthinkable.

  Bryan and Miguel were holding out on him. That, too, was ridiculous. Only Jencks knew how to unload the stuff quickly and safely enough to make it worth their while. He was in sole possession of that information, and without it, the robbery was pointless. Besides, the safe had been empty. Neither of them could have robbed the safe.

  Who had? The whole thing sounded to Jencks like an inside job. Maybe it was Bonnard himself—he had been acting pretty nervous lately. Maybe that girl at the desk. Maybe an enterprising and quick-witted member of the staff.

  He dismissed each of these possibilities in turn. The planning and timing required for an operation of this size made any amateur effort unlikely. This was a professional piece of work, and he would have to approach it in that light.

  Miguel burst into the room. He said one word: “Brady.”

  “Perhaps,” Jencks said.

  “What do you mean, ‘perhaps’? Who else could it be?”

  “That’s the question,” Jencks said, shaking his head. He had a headache; he went to the bathroom and groped for aspirins in the dark. When he came out, he found Bryan sitting on the bed, looking very tired.

  “I dumped the gear,” Jencks said. “The flashlight, the rubber sacs, the gloves—everything. By now it’s washed out to sea. We’re clear.”

  “So’s that bastard Brady,” Miguel said. “I could kill him. I’d snap his fat neck like—”

  “Just a minute,” Jencks said. “Don’t jump to conclusions.”

  “For Christ’s sake—”

  “Quiet,” Jencks said. “Suck your thumb.”

  Miguel lapsed into wounded silence. Jencks stood and paced up and down the room, forcing his mind to work logically.

  “Brady didn’t do it,” Bryan said quietly.

  “How do you know?”

  “I ran into Mrs. Cleeves in the middle of the afternoon. She told me she was feeling much better—she had just deposited her jewels in the hotel safe.”

  That meant the safe had been opened after Brady had gone. In a way, it didn’t matter—Brady couldn’t have pulled the job alone. He wasn’t necessarily in the clear, but he wasn’t directly implicated.

  “What time did you see Mrs. Cleeves?”

  Bryan shrugged. “Tea time. Around four, I’d say.”

  It was unlikely that anyone would check out of the hotel after four on a Saturday afternoon. Which meant the robbers were still here. He turned to Bryan.

  “Describe a room. Any room, just a typical room you searched today.”

  “Well, there isn’t much to say. I’d go in, memorize things, and begin to look for—”

  “Did the rooms have anything in common?”

  Bryan looked helpless. He couldn’t explain it to Jencks. Only a man who has examined one hotel room after another could understand it—the way each room reflected the personality of its occupants, despite the uniformity of furniture and decor. Some rooms were messy, some neat; some smelled of sweat, some perfume, some were antiseptic and neutral; some had the unmistakable stamp of French fastidiousness, some of Italian flair. But each room, in its own way, was unique.

  “They weren’t disordered, ruffled?”

  “Didn’t seem to be.”

  “No signs of a search at all?”

  “None.”

  Jencks stopped pacing and sat down again. He irritably rapped a pencil against the arm of his chair. He was nervous, damned nervous; usually, he would fight to control his tension, to hide it. Tonight he couldn’t care less.

  “Are you sure you searched thoroughly?”

  “Son of a bitch,” Miguel exploded. “Of course we’re sure. The first few rooms, maybe, I was a little casual. I expected it to be easy. Later on, when I still wasn’t coming up with anything, I gave them a real once-over. Everything but pulling out the drawers to see if money was taped to the back. There just wasn’t anything to find.”

  “All right,” Jencks said. “Don’t take it personally.”

  “How the hell am I supposed to take it?”

  “We’ve had a big day,” Jencks said. “I’m sorry.

  Miguel laughed bitterly, and pulled a flask out of his hip pocket. He downed a swig and passed it to Bryan, who gulped noisily and held it out to Jencks.

  “What is it?”

  “Tequila,” Miguel said. “Imported.”

  Jencks took the flask and knocked back a mouthful. It burned harshly and warmed his stomach.

  “Better with lemon and salt,” Miguel said, “but we gotta improvise.”

  Once again, Jencks thought over the events of the day. He was beginning to feel groggy fr
om the effort, like a man viewing the same film over and over. He forced himself to concentrate. He saw himself jam the elevator, talk to the doorman, light his cigarette three times, enter the phone booth, cross the lobby in darkness, open the safe.…

  “Dinner time,” Jencks said. “They must have done it at dinner time, around seven or eight. I considered doing it that way myself. It would have saved using all the explosives and bothering with the lights and fires. It’s a much more elegant solution, but risky. It means you have to get into the office in full view of anyone who might be in the corridors and out again without being seen. It means you had to take a great chance, because Bonnard often has dinner in his office.”

  “Somebody obviously took the chance,” Miguel said.

  There was a long, depressed silence.

  “Look,” Jencks said. “It seems clear that this robbery was almost a mirror image of the one we planned. Did you see anyone unusual in the halls while you were searching the rooms? Somebody else who might be searching, too?”

  “Hell no,” Bryan said. “I never went into a room if there was a soul in sight.” Miguel nodded.

  Dead end, Jencks thought. Right smack up against a dead end. No clues, no leads. How had they done it? Who could have gotten into Bonnard’s office during dinner? Who could have searched the rooms? Chambermaids? Repairmen? He shook his head. It must have been done by some group of guests like themselves.

  “I’m sure they’re still here,” Jencks said.

  Bryan nodded. “I think so, too.”

  “They’re still here, and they can’t get away—because we blew up the bridge.” Jencks laughed. “They’re trapped here, just like everybody else. And I’ll give you odds the stuff is still here with them.”

  He tapped his chair again with the pencil.

  “For Christ’s sake,” Miguel said. “I’m tired.”

  Jencks put the pencil down.

  “Nobody knows,” Bryan said, “that there’s been a robbery. Not yet. The management thinks the bridge was destroyed by the storm. That means we are the only ones who know that a robbery has been committed.”

  “Let’s try to build up a composite picture of the thieves,” Jencks said, “Try to figure out what they must be like.”

  He frowned, thinking that if he could feed facts into the computer, the machine would come up with a composite picture of the criminals. How fast? Forty seconds, maybe.

  “We’ve been calling them them,” Bryan said, “and I think that’s probably true.”

  “They can’t be too old,” Miguel said. “It’s hard work, searching all those rooms.”

  “That’s a start,” Jencks said. “More than one, and not too old. Let’s say there are three, just like us.”

  “I don’t think there are any groups of three at the hotel,” Bryan said, “Except for a few families with kids.”

  “Nobody would ever think of us as a group of three, either,” Jencks pointed out, but he could already see Bryan’s point. The idea of building up a picture of the robbers was doomed.

  “Let’s try something else,” he said. “Three people. What do they do?”

  “Just what we did,” Miguel said. “Nose around and talk to people. Pry.”

  “And whom do you remember doing that?”

  “Brady,” Miguel said.

  It all seemed to come back to Brady, Jencks had to admit. And there it ended. Brady was gone, neat as a whistle. He couldn’t have pulled the robbery.

  “Who else?”

  Bryan shrugged. “Nobody. Everybody. You know how it is—when you’re talking to someone, you’re so busy thinking ahead, trying to figure out how to slip in the next question, you don’t pay much attention to what they’re saying to you. And you prime the pump with some information about yourself. I’ve probably told a dozen people my room number.”

  Jencks knew he had done the same. One of those dozen people now held the answer—and the money. He thought about the people he had met and came up with nothing. He glanced at his watch.

  “It’s nearly four,” he said. “I think we’d better break for the night and meet tomorrow morning. At the pool, around ten. We might as well forget about appearances; there isn’t time to be fancy. Okay?”

  The two men stood. They were exhausted and trying to smile. They left, leaving Jencks to stare alone into the rumbling night. Lightning crackled briefly. Otherwise it was dark.

  After breakfast, Peter went to the underground garage, which was cut into the rock beneath the hotel. It was a cheerless, vast cavern of gray concrete, smelling of oil and exhaust fumes. The cars were parked in neat rows, illuminated by overhead fluorescent lights. Thank God, he thought, they had gotten the electricity going. This place would be a dungeon without it.

  To one side was a glass-walled attendant’s booth and a gasoline pump. The attendant, wearing spotless white coveralls, came up to Peter.

  “Senor?”

  “I want to see my car.”

  The attendant shook his head, not understanding. Idiot Spaniard. Peter dangled the keys to his Jaguar in front of the man’s face. Recognition flickered across the dark features. Then the man shook his head again and motioned outside.

  “Why not? You can’t just throw me out.”

  “Puenta, puenta,” the man said. He made a motion with his hand to indicate that the bridge had collapsed.

  “I know, I know. I’m not going anywhere. I just want to see my car, to look at it. It’s right over there. Okay?”

  Confused by the babble of words, the man shrugged and walked off. Peter squeezed past the other cars until he came to his own. It was beautiful, he thought, running his fingers over the sleek curve of the front bumper. Beautiful and graceful and sexy. It made him feel sexy, just to drive it. He had been worried about it, absurdly fearful that it would be damaged during the storm.

  He walked around and slipped behind the wheel. The attendant paid no attention to him as he held the polished wood rim in his fingers. He turned the wheel and heard the squeak of rubber on the concrete. The car responded so eagerly. Like a perfect woman, an ideal mistress. And it was his, all his.

  Whistling, he climbed out and returned to the hotel.

  Mr. Bonnard stood with Annette at the edge of the island, looking down at the collapsed bridge. The storm had blown out to sea in the early hours of the morning and now, in the clear light of day, the bridge looked, if possible, worse than it had the night before. Partially submerged, it was a tangled gray mass of bent girders and twisted struts; it looked as if it had been wrenched from its foundations by the hand of a giant.

  “What do you think?” Annette asked, lighting a cigarette.

  “I don’t know what to think. We were assured that there wasn’t a storm in the world that could do this, but I’m not an engineer. I just don’t know.”

  “Can we ferry people across by boat?”

  “I think so. I sent Juan over in the boat two hours ago. He’s going to walk to Playa del Rio and call the police from there.” Playa del Rio was a little town on the coast, at the mouth of a river. It was the nearest town to the Reina, but it was still four kilometers away over very rough terrain.

  “How soon can we get cars to the mainland?”

  “It looks too far for a temporary bridge,” Mr. Bonnard said, squinting at the gap. “Maybe the police will have an idea—a derrick or some such. In any event, it will be expensive. We’ll have insurance people around our necks for the next three months.” Mr. Bonnard shuddered at the thought of Cranz, the dapper and obnoxious little investigator from Bern who had visited the hotel when it had first opened. Cranz and his associates would make life miserable for Mr. Bonnard.

  Annette took a deep breath. “I’d better get back to the desk and face the angry hordes. What can I tell them?”

  “Help is on the way,” he said, brisk and businesslike. “We expect to begin ferrying people to the mainland shortly after lunch. Damage claims can be forwarded to Hotelsa, Madrid. I suppose we may have a few lawsuits
as well.” He sighed. “Such a difficult thing.”

  Jenny Cameron, looking fresh and youthful in a navy-blue jumper, came up just as they were turning back to the hotel. Her eyes widened when she saw the wreckage of the bridge.

  “How did it happen?”

  Mr. Bonnard, not wanting to give the impression of uncertainty, said, “Blew down in the storm. We suspect wave action weakened the concrete supports.”

  “It’s really a shame,” Jenny said, trying to sound concerned.

  “We are doing everything possible to restore a normal situation, I assure you,” he said, a trifle pompously. Mr. Bonnard always retreated into stuffy formality when he felt he had no other alternatives.

  “I’m glad to hear that,” Jenny said.

  Annette and the manager left her looking down at the bridge. She had a faint and enigmatic smile on her face. She seemed almost pleased about the wreckage.

  Irritably, Jencks looked at his watch. It was after ten, and neither of the others had showed up yet. Discipline was shot to hell, he thought. It would never have happened the day before. Across the pool, he saw Jenny, who waved and seemed about to come over. He shook his head and frowned; she shrugged and walked off. It was a remarkably docile display, he thought. He must have trained her better than he had thought.

  It gave him little comfort. Jencks had slept the sleep of a tormented man, and he felt grumpy and miserable this morning. The clear, bright sunshine only seemed to accentuate and underline his state of mind, which was black and gloomy. He could think of only one good thing—from his point of view—which had happened the day before, and that was the storm. From snatches of conversation he’d overheard at breakfast, it appeared that most people, including the hotel staff, believed the bridge had collapsed as a result of the storm. An expert, Jencks knew, would see in a minute that this was not so, but experts would not arrive for a day or two. Until then, nobody was suspicious, including the real robbers.

  That was their only advantage.

  He examined the other people sitting around the pool. Some he had never seen before—the weekend visitors from Barcelona, he guessed. Any of them might have pulled the robbery, particularly that grim-looking couple several yards away. He looked mean, darkly handsome and somewhat crude; she had a highly polished, glossy elegance which Jencks guessed disguised an ignoble background. But it was impossible to say, to be sure, to find even a foundation for suspicion. Just because a man looked like a thief didn’t mean anything; Jencks prided himself on the fact that he looked like anything but a thief.