No Comebacks

Sitting in the bright July sunshine, two men ordered a drink one day at a café in the Rue Miollin. The Englishman's name was not Barrie---that was borrowed from a dimly remembered writer---and the Corsican's name was not Calvi---that was a village in Corsica where he had been born, but these were the names they used for the moment. A voice on the telephone, belonging to a man they had never seen, had arranged the precise time and place of this meeting. It was to last no more than 20 minutes.

After their drinks had been brought, the Englishman laid two snapshots on the table. The first one was in black and white, a photo of the dust jacket of a book. From the print peered a middleaged man with weedy hair, a clipped mustache and a chin in despondent retreat. Beneath the face, a caption read: ''Major Archibald Summers has again added to our knowledge of and delight in our avian friends with his new volume on the birds of the Western Mediterranean lands. I read it with much pleasure.---Lady Clara Whitehope Smith.'' The Corsican turned the picture over. A caption on the back read: ''Villa San Crispin, Playa Caldera, Ondara, Alicante, Spain.''

The other photo was in color. It showed a small villa with white walls and lemon-yellow shutters. Next to it was a rose garden with a number of bird feeders among the bushes.

''He's always at home between three and four in the afternoon. There are no servants and he should be alone,'' Barrie said.

''Five thousand pounds,'' Calvi said. ''Border crossings are treacherous and the Spanish police are like wolves.''

''Half now,'' said the Englishman and he laid a flat pasteboard box on the table. It was labeled as a box of photographic film. ''Here is a London number where you can ring me between seven-thirty and eight any morning. Just say, 'Your picture is ready.' Written next to the number is the name of a café near the Invalides. I'll give you another box of film at two P.M. the day of your call.''

''D'accord,'' said the Corsican. He put the box and the photos into his jacket pocket.

''Most important of all---no witnesses. He must be quite alone when it happens. Don't let yourself be seen by anyone who could identify you in connection with the villa.''

The Corsican sighed and spread his huge hands. ''Thus far, we had managed to proceed without platitudes, monsieur. I can only reply that I have a very vivid notion of life inside Tolédo Penal. Would you warn a noted surgeon that he must sterilize his instruments before an operation?''

After Barrie had gone, the Corsican rose and walked slowly in the direction of the Place Vendôme. In his mind, he was trying to get two things across a border in a perfectly normal, inconspicuous way. One was a package and the other was himself---but every time they attempted to cross together, his mind came to an impasse. At Orly nowadays, what with all the hijackings, every parcel was minutely checked. The Paris-Barcelona train entailed a customs check. The obvious problem was how A and B could enter separately and successfully and become AB again on the other side.

Now he noticed that, without being aware of her, he had been following a pretty girl. She was probably an American tourist---she was carrying a large, illustrated guidebook with a title in English. Excellent! he thought suddenly. What is more boring than a book? When he came to a bookshop near the Place Vendôme, he entered and began to browse.

About a half hour later, now carrying a bulky package under his arm, he paid a visit to the Spanish tourist office. His next stop was at the Iberia Air Lines office; from there, he took a taxi to his flat in Neuilly.

That evening, he rang the Astoria Palace, the best hotel in Valencia, and introduced himself as Monsieur Calvi, who desired two rooms for one night only, a fortnight hence. One was for himself and one was booked for another gentleman---and the name he gave was the name he used on his own passport. He told the registration clerk that he would write a letter of confirmation at once.

In fact, he had already written the letter. It reiterated his directions and added, as a postscript, that he'd ordered a book from a Paris bookstore. It should be held for his arrival. At the bottom of the letter, he wrote Calvi's signature with his left hand.

Then he rolled up his sleeves, unwrapped his purchase of the afternoon, weighed it and set to work to create a solander. The book for the purpose was a history of Spain in French, a thick quarto volume on heavy paper, bound in tan buckram. He bent the two covers and the first ten pages back and fastened them with a stout band. Then he took two carpenter's clamps and secured the remaining 400 pages at the edge of his kitchen table.

He produced a pair of flat steel L bars and a surgeon's scalpel. Leaving a margin of an inch and a half all around, he began to slice a neat rectangular cavity in the body of the book. After about an hour, 2973 years of Spanish history had been excised and reduced to ashes in the fireplace. He now had a box with a hollow measuring 6 1/2'' x 9 1/2''. He now applied bookbinder's glue in a thin coat to what remained of the pages and to the inner edges. He smoked three cigarettes as he waited for it to dry. As soon as it had hardened, his solander was ready for special fitting.

In the hollow, he carefully glued a cushion of foam rubber, cut to size for each surface. Then, from a concealed drawer in his desk, he produced a ninemillimeter ''Le Français'' model automatic he'd never employed before. The front sight had been ground off and a half inch of the Browning's barrel had been threaded to take a silencer---he had done this job some months before with his own lathe. He was a man with a number of specialized skills, of which he was rather proud.

A silencer on an automatic is never truly quiet, despite the delusion of scriptwriters and sound-effects men in television thrillers. An automatic makes a very respectable bang---because, as the bullet leaves the barrel, the jacket is forced back to expel the spent cartridge and to inject a fresh one. In this split second, half the noise of the explosion comes out through the open breech, making the silencer only 50 percent effective. Thus, Calvi would have preferred a revolver, but he needed a flat weapon for this particular purpose.

The silencers seen on television---usually about the size of a champagne cork---are about as useful for secrecy as a home fire extinguisher would be against Vesuvius in eruption. His was a heavy cylinder about six and a half inches long. He thrust the loaded magazine into the automatic's handle to save space.

Then, with a felt-nib pen, he marked out a place on the foam rubber for each component of the disassembled Browning. With a new scalpel, he cut neat beds for each part. By midnight, all the pieces lay snugly in their foam nests, the long silencer vertical along the book's spine, the barrel, frame and slide in a neat pattern. It made a deadly book, but one could hardly call it boring.

He covered the aperture with a small slab of foam rubber that protruded just slightly above the edges of the cavity. Over this he fastened a precisely cut sheet of firm plastic and secured it with six long, slender, brass screws. The last loose page was pasted over the plastic. Now the cover and the first pages could be opened---as a casual inspector might glance at them---but the rest of the book was a solid block that would require a knife to penetrate.

He weighed the solander; it was now just a half ounce heavier than the original. Next, he slipped it into a polyethylene case of the kind publishers use to protect expensive books from wear and scratching. The open end of this case he bonded together with a soldering iron heated over the flame of his gas stove. If a mildly curious official opened the outer wrapping, he would see a history volume and would let it go at that. If a somewhat more inquisitive type actually opened the plastic covering, he would find a book whose cover and first pages turned easily. The odds were a million to one that the Spanish postal system embraced a scholar so interested in the history of Spain in French that he would pursue the matter as far as page ten.

Calvi now brought out a page of Letraset letters in 12-point Caslon and a small instrument, like a pen, with a tiny brass knob at one end. He carefully placed the sheet over a shipping label and began to transfer, by pressure, the letters to the surface of the label. When he had finished, the legend read: ''Galignani, Livres, 224 Rue de Rivoli, Paris,'' and its look was indistinguishable from real printing. He typed the address---M. Alfred Calvi, Hotel Astoria Palace, Calle de Rodrigo Botet, Valencia, Espagne. With a rubber-stamp printing set, he made up the words Libros---Impresos---Livres and stamped that on the outside wrapping.

The following morning, he mailed the letter by airmail and the package by surface post, which meant shipment by train and a ten-day delay.

• • •

Mark Sanderson was nervous as he let himself into the small London flat he had rented under the name of Barrie. Dark shabbiness made him uncomfortable and the flat was his momentary prison. Its only function was to enclose the telephone that stood on a rickety little table. And the telephone's only function was to receive one ten-second call. Sanderson loved telephones---in his Regent's Park penthouse, his Elizabethan manor in Worcestershire, his château on the Loire and his villa at Cap d'Antibes, there were telephones everywhere. His Riviera servants even had a joke about the apocryphal telephone under the surface in his swimming pool. But the fact was that he'd closed many deals worth millions of pounds, dollars or francs on the telephone; he was waiting for the greatest, the most golden deal of all.

The rather bizarre fact was that Mark Sanderson was in love. He'd been in love many times, of course, but never before with a woman. There'd been a passionate affair with South African gold-mining stock, an infatuation with his own jet plane, a romance with a huge resort-property investment in the West Indies and many others. There was also a continuing love for travel, fine food and wines, an art collection and flattering newspaper publicity. Most of these loves had been ornamented by one or another expensive beauty in female form---an actress, a model, a society girl. But their attentions and their well-acted gasps of arousal in bed had never been any more to him than a passing compliment paid to wealth and power. Then he had met Angela Summers.

The season had been Maytime, the place a fashionable house in Belgravia, the occasion a cocktail party in aid of some charity---and his hostess was saying in a casual way, ''I don't believe you've met Mrs. Summers.'' He had looked at Mrs. Summers and suddenly had become 16 years old, a gawky lover, all the selfassurance of wealth and command suddenly vanished. Had he actually said, ''An angel of summer!'' to her? And had he actually blushed? That was the way he recollected it later.

She was startlingly out of vogue for the thin lines and the high-fashion affectations of the Seventies. She had a deep bosom, slender waist, rounded hips. Her shining chestnut hair was drawn back and coiled. She wore a simple white dress that set off her medium-gold suntan and she had just a hint of make-up around her eyes. A Renoir in a room full of Helmut Newton photos.

He blundered into conversation on the subject of suntan. Was it from a skiing vacation that had been prolonged into spring? Or a Caribbean cruise?

Wrong on both counts, she replied with charming honesty---she simply didn't have that sort of money. She'd managed it mostly while working in the garden. That and her daily swim every afternoon from three to four while her husband worked on his book. They lived in a little house on the Costa Blanca.

''An author?'' Sanderson asked. ''Should I know his books?''

Not really, she explained, Archie was a retired Signals major who wrote books about birds. ''Rather good books of their kind,'' she said bravely and defensively. They lived on his retirement pay and the small earnings she got from teaching English. Not a terribly glamorous life, she supposed, but they did like their privacy, the climate and the small house. ''And Archie is mad about the Costa Blanca birds---he says they're rather special,'' she added with a slightly forlorn note coming into her voice.

Sanderson immediately asked her to go out to dinner with him that evening. ''Oh, yes!'' she whispered, almost as if she had been waiting for that. There was a minute of silence between them. Then she said in a cool and normal voice, ''I must make some excuses to the friends who brought me. And we shouldn't leave together. Where shall we meet?''

The week that followed was the strangest in Sanderson's life. It was a little like a Georgian romance, rescued from time, illicit but not sinful. His other girls, modern girls, had been impressed by the chauffeured Rolls-Royce, the elegant dinner at the Mirabelle, his spacious penthouse---but for them these things all made up a dotted line that led directly to an episode in his bed. Not Angela. It seemed to occur to her not at all.

She noticed and she admired, but she was not overwhelmed. She would return his kiss warmly, but when he tried to put his hand inside her dress, she stopped him firmly. She was affectionate, but there was an old-fashioned boundary in her mind beyond which she would not go. Sanderson was dazed with love and rejection.

The evening before she was to fly back to Spain, as they were sitting over brandy in his flat, he suddenly asked her to divorce her husband and to marry him.

She smiled her usual, candid smile. ''It would be nice, wouldn't it?'' she said, ''but I'm afraid not.''

''Oh, don't be so bloody cool and English,'' he said. ''I love you in a perfectly honest, simple-minded way. I admit that I've been trying to seduce you by all the old gambits---but being rich, enough to have everybody do what I want has made me stupid. I don't even know enough to convince you that all of that was a sham. But there is one true thing: I love you. And I think that you love me.''

She shook her head gently. ''Now I'll say something perfectly simple-minded. I'm married to Archie. I can't destroy him. Have you ever seen a child whose puppy has been run over by a motorcar? That comparison sounds a bit grotesque, but it's close to what I mean.''

''He has his birds, after all,'' said Sanderson.

She smiled and was silent. After a while, she said, ''Would it help any if I went to bed with you just once and then never saw you again?''

''No,'' he said. ''It wouldn't.''

''Very well, now I believe what you've been saying,'' Angela answered, ''and just in order to give our little story a firm ending, I'll say yes twice. Yes, I've fallen in love with you. And yes, I am going back to Archie in spite of it.''

At the airport the next day, she was more heartbreakingly beautiful than ever. Before she kissed him goodbye, she said, ''Mark, you can stop thinking and go back to being rich. In Spain, I'll have a lot of lonely time to think and remember.'' She was crying as she went to the plane.

• • •

The Iberia Caravelle drifted into the airport at Valencia and touched down as the sun was setting. It was still furiously hot and the 30 passengers, mostly villa owners from Paris arriving for six weeks' vacation, grumbled at the usual baggage delays in the customs shed.

Calvi carried one medium-sized suitcase as hand baggage. It was opened and inspected carefully, then he was out of the airport building and into the taxi rank. First he wandered over to the airport car park and was glad to see that a large area of it was screened by trees from the airport buildings. The cars stood in rows beneath the trees waiting for their owners. He decided to return the next morning and take his transport from there. Then he took a taxi into town.

The clerk at the hotel was more than helpful. As soon as the Corsican presented himself and his passport, the desk clerk recalled the booking and the letter of confirmation written by Monsieur Calvi and dived into the back office to emerge with the package containing the book. The Corsican explained that, unfortunately, his friend Calvi would not be joining him but that he would settle both room bills when he left the following morning. He produced a letter from the absent Calvi authorizing him to take receipt of the book awaiting collection. The clerk glanced at the letter, thanked the Corsican for offering to settle both room bills and handed over the package.

In his room, Calvi checked the padded envelope. It had been opened: The metal staples had been bent together to pass through the sealing aperture and then bent back again. The blob of glue he had placed on one of the metal lugs was missing. But inside, the book was still in its polyethylene wrapper untouched, for it would have been impossible to open it without tearing or distorting it.

He opened it, forced the book covers apart with the blade of his penknife and extracted the parts of his gun. These he assembled back together, then he screwed on the silencer and checked the bullets in the magazine. They were all there---his special cartridges, with half the load removed to cut down the noise to a low crack. Even with half the usual load behind it, a nine-millimeter slug still goes straight into a human head at ten-foot range, and Calvi never fired at more than ten feet on a job.

He locked the gun into the bottom of the wardrobe, pocketed the key and smoked a cigarette on the balcony, gazing out at the bull ring in front of the hotel and thinking of the day ahead. From the hotel clerk he learned there was a plane to Madrid at eight in the (concluded on page 106) No Comebacks (continued from page 96) morning and he had himself called at six.

The next morning he checked out at seven and took a taxi to the airport. Standing at the gate, he watched a dozen cars arrive, noting the make and number of the car and the appearance of the driver. Seven cars were driven by men without passengers, in what looked like business suits. From the observation terrace of the airport building, he watched the passengers stream out to the plane for Madrid, and four of the drivers were among them. He looked at the notes on the back of an envelope in his hand and found he had a choice of a Simca, a Mercedes, a Jaguar and an old Spanish SEAT, the local version of the Fiat 600.

After the plane had taken off, he went to the men's room and changed from his gray suit into jeans, pale-blue sport shirt and blue zip-front nylon windbreaker. The gun he wrapped in a towel and stowed in the soft airline bag he took from his suitcase. He checked the case, confirmed his evening booking for the Paris flight and walked back to the car park.

He tried the Mercedes and the Simca and found them both locked. Luckily, the third car, a well-worn SEAT, was not. He preferred a SEAT, in any case, because it is the most common car on Spanish streets. He opened the engine compartment and clipped two wires to the voltage regulator. One of these he attached to the engine coil, the other to the engine solenoid. He climbed into the car quickly. There was no hitch---the engine turned over at once and he bowled out of the car park onto the road to Valencia and the new seaboard highway N. 332 south to Alicante.

It is 92 kilometers or 57 miles from Valencia to Ondara, through the orange-growing centers of Gandia and Oliva, and he took it easy, making the trip in two hours. The whole coast was blistering in the morning sun, a long ribbon of golden sand dotted with brown bodies and splashing swimmers. The heat was oppressive, without a breath of wind, and along the sea horizon lay a faint and misty haze.

In Ondara's town center, he had no trouble asking the way to Playa Caldera, which, he was told by helpful townspeople, lay four miles out of town. He drove into the residential sprawl of villas just before noon and began to cruise, looking for the Villa San Crispin. To ask directions to the beach was one thing, to ask them to the villa might stick in someone's memory.

He found the yellow shutters and the white painted terra-cotta walls just before one o'clock, checked the name painted on a tile set into the pillar by the front gate and parked the car 200 yards farther on. Walking idly, his bag slung over one shoulder like a tourist heading for the beach, he cased the back entrance. It was easy. From farther up the earth road on which the villa stood, a small footpath led away into a plantation of orange trees behind the row of houses. From the cover of the trees he could see that only a low fence separated the red earth of the orange orchard from the unshaded patio at the back of the villa with the yellow shutters, and he could see his man pottering about the garden with a watering can. There were French windows leading from the back garden into the main ground-floor room, wide open to allow a draft to blow through, if there should be a breath of wind. He checked his watch---time for lunch---and drove back to Ondara.

He sat till three in the Bar Valencia on Calle Doctor Fleming and had a large plate of enormous grilled prawns and two glasses of the local light white wine. Then he paid and left.

As he drove back to the playa, the rain clouds finally moved in off the sea and there was a dull rumble of thunder across the oil-smooth water, very unusual for the Costa Blanca in mid-July. He parked the car close to the path into the orange grove, tucked the silenced Browning into his belt, zipped the wind-breaker up to the neck and headed into the trees. It was very quiet when he came back out of the grove and stepped across the low wall into the garden of the villa. The locals were all taking siestas in the heat, and the rain began to patter onto the leaves of the orange trees; large drops hit his shoulders as he crossed the flagstones, and when he reached the French windows, the shower broke at last, drumming into the pink tiles of the roof. He was glad, no one would hear a thing.

From a room to the left of the sitting room he heard a typewriter clack several times. He eased the gun out, standing immobile in the center of the lounge. Then he walked across the rush matting to the open study door.

Major Summers probably never knew what happened or why. He must have seen a man standing in the doorway of his study, and he half rose to ask what he wanted. Then he could see what was in the stranger's hand. There were two soft plops, hardly louder than the sound of the rain outside, and the major took two bullets in his chest. The third was fired vertically downward into his temple, but it was unlikely that he felt that one at all. The Corsican knelt and put a forefinger on the major's wrist. Then, rising to a crouch, he swiveled around toward the sitting-room door.

& bull; & bull; & bull;

Sanderson arrived at the Café Grognard just a few minutes late. As soon as he had hung up the telephone in the shabby flat, he had taken a taxi to the airport, but there had been several delays. Calvi, in a pair of dark sunglasses, was sitting inside the café. All the other customers had chosen the sidewalk tables and the sun.

Sanderson sat down and, with a briskness he didn't feel, asked, ''Done?''

Calvi nodded slowly.

Sanderson waited for a moment to hear if Calvi would add anything. Finally, he asked, ''Any problems? The kind we spoke of?''

Calvi nodded ponderously again. ''One. But I solved it.''

''Explain!'' said Sanderson sharply.

''A small mishap---simply that a woman came into the room just after I'd done the job. But there is no need for alarm, monsieur. As you ordered, no witnesses. I finished her off and concealed them both.''

Sanderson seized the Corsican by his upper arms; his face was suddenly distorted and red; his jaw was working strangely. Finally, he was able to say, ''What woman? Who? Tell me!''

Calvi stared at him and was afraid. All at once, it struck him that he had been hired by a madman. This English gentleman who had seemed so self-possessed was actually a maniac. Even though Calvi had powerful biceps, the pressure on them was crushing. ''A woman. Just a woman,'' he said in confusion.

''Tall, beautiful, chestnut-colored hair?'' asked Sanderson wildly. Calvi, who knew a great deal about such things, saw death in the other man's eyes. He knew that he was going to be killed by this madman. Here at this table in the Café Grognard. Then, in a flash, something came back to him about the photograph of the book jacket with the major's picture.

''I have no notion of what you mean,'' he said. ''As I say, a woman came into the room. It was a bright, sunny day and there were many birds in the garden. She had a pair of binoculars around her neck. She was quite short, had white hair and a bony face. She said something in English.''

Sanderson's grip relaxed, but it was several minutes before he could calm himself enough to extract the film box from his pocket, rise and walk out of the café.

Calvi watched him go. It was a near miss, that one, he told himself. Thinking it over, he sincerely regretted that it hadn't been a little, white-haired woman with binoculars who had come into the room. The other had been truly beautiful. Beautiful enough to do murder for.