A Twist of Orchids (35 page)

“For pity’s sake!” Julian exclaimed. “Slow down. It’s somewhere around here.”

“It had better be,” Compagnon growled dangerously.

Eventually their headlights caught the wink of a reflector on a signpost ahead of them on the left.

“That’s it.” Julian pointed. “Turn there. Her house is at the top of the hill.”

“Pull off,” Compagnon ordered Albert. “We’ll go on foot from here. Don’t want to give the game away.”

Julian added silently,
If there’s anyone there to give the game away to.
He had no reason to believe there would be. Grimly, he put the probability of coming up empty-handed against the probability of success at ninety to ten. Too much time had elapsed. Compagnon’s growl was a pale forewarning of terrible things to come if the entire operation proved fruitless.

They left the cars at the roadside and went at a trot up the
long, steep lane leading to the house. A bright moon made it possible for them to find their way without the use of flashlights. At the gate set into the high stone wall surrounding the property, Compagnon called a halt.

“The entry is remote-controlled,” Julian informed him. “You have to ring the bell. She likes security.”

Compagnon said, “Security, eh? Do you know if the wall is wired? And if the grounds are equipped with motion sensors?”

“Er—no. I don’t know, that is,” said Julian lamely.

Laurent was shining his light along the top of the wall. “Looks clear, sir.”

Compagnon and his men were fit and well trained. Swiftly and silently they were up and over the barrier, which proved not to be wired, but their movement on the other side as they ran toward the house triggered a flood of outdoor lights. Julian, who was left hopping about on the outside, heard Compagnon swear.

Julian tried to scale the wall as the gendarmes had done, scrambling for hand-and footholds. Unfortunately, his repertoire did not run to vertical assaults. A second attempt was equally unsuccessful. The third time, he found a toehold, but it crumbled under his weight just as he flung an arm over the top. He hung in limbo for a moment, then slithered down painfully, scraping his hands and nose.

“You need a boost,” said a voice behind him.

He whirled around and stared into the shadows. “Mara? What the hell? What are you doing here? Christ, Compagnon will explode when he finds out you followed us.”

“Good. I’d like to see him all over in little bitty pieces. You came damned close to hitting me back there on the road, you know. Where did Albert learn to drive? Montreal?”

“Ah,” said Julian. “That was you.”

“Of course it was me. That was a rotten thing you did, leaving me behind.”

“I’m sorry, but you really shouldn’t be here.”

“And you should? Oh, forget it. Come on. Leg up.”

She made a platform with her hands, and Julian used it. This time, with a few additional shoves from Mara, he made it all the way to the top. From where he sat, straddling the crown of the wall, he saw lights coming on in room after room of the house. He glimpsed shadowy forms moving swiftly past the windows. Ever direct in his methods, Compagnon must have gained entry by knocking on the front door. So someone was at home, and the gendarmes had been admitted to search the premises.

“Hey, what about me?” Mara called up to him.

“Look,” Julian said. “You’d better stay where you are. You don’t know what they’re going to find in there. Ow! Let go, will you!”

“Like hell I will.” She was hauling herself up with the aid of his right leg. If he wasn’t going to help her, she would help herself. Julian had no choice, if he wanted his knee to remain intact, but to pull her the rest of the way.

“Do you mind telling me what this is all about?” Mara demanded once she was perched rather breathlessly beside him.

“Drugs. And orchids.” Briefly, he explained.

They jumped down together, landing on soft earth on the other side. The house went suddenly dark. Then the exterior lights went out.

“The greenhouse is at the back,” Julian said. “That’s where the action will be. If there
is
any action,” he added, revisiting the bad feeling he was having about the operation.

He led the way. Rounding the corner of the house, they nearly collided with Compagnon. Behind him were Albert and two other gendarmes.

“We’ve been over the entire property,” the brigade head told
Julian ominously. “No one’s here but a woman who says she’s the live-in plant assistant. She said she was expecting her employer back sometime this evening, but she hasn’t seen or heard from her. So where is Adelheid Besser, eh?”

“Ah,” said Julian stupidly.

“And what’s
she
doing here?” Compagnon flared, realizing who was with him. Then he said wearily, “Don’t tell me. I don’t want to know. In fact, the real question is what the devil are
we
doing here?”

Julian heard movement behind him. Laurent’s long shape appeared.

“Exterior sensor lights deactivated, sir,” said Laurent. “Jean-Louis is with the employee to make sure she doesn’t take off or make any phone calls.”

“This is nothing but a wild goose chase,” Compagnon sputtered at Julian. “A complete waste of police time. To say nothing of the hot water you’ll land me in if Madame Besser chooses to lodge a complaint. I’m treading a fine line here, making a night search based only on a hunch—a foreigner’s hunch, at that!”

Julian could feel the adjudant’s anger blasting him like heat from a furnace. The ninety–ten odds he had given himself collapsed completely. It had been his intuition, the gut level understanding one orchid freak has of another, that had brought them there. He had reasoned that Adelheid would want to get her plants bedded down as soon as possible after their stressful journey. But he had thought simplistically. There was no reason why she had to bring them back here. What was to prevent her from bedding them down in Marseille itself, or Montpellier, or Nice, or Cannes, or Zurich, for that matter? Except, the tiny intuitive voice in his head reasserted itself, she was fussy about her orchids, and they would take precedence over any non-botanical cargo she might be carrying. She would be especially
fussy if she were trying to smuggle in something rare. Her priority would be to get it into an optimum environment, and where better than here?

Then where, as Adjudant Compagnon had asked, was she? It was now twenty to twelve. The
Bosporus I
had docked almost eleven hours ago. The trip from Marseille took seven, maybe eight hours. There were many reasonable explanations for her delay. Traffic, car trouble, an accident. Or, if there had been some problem with her documentation, if she had encountered a very thorough inspector who had wanted to examine each plant, she could have been held up for any amount of time.

“Adjudant Compagnon,” Julian said. “I think you should wait.”

“For what?” snapped the seething brigade commander.

“I think Adelheid Besser isn’t here because she’s still on her way.”

“
Pah!
The woman’s had plenty of time to arrive. Plenty of time to go anywhere. She could be in Paris by now.”

“No, she’s coming here,” Julian said stubbornly. He was growing more certain of his conclusions by the second. “She needs to. For the orchids. Besides, she’d figure there’s no risk. They think you’ve fallen for the
passe-passe
.”

Compagnon’s scowl lunged at him out of the semi-darkness. “All right,” he said reluctantly. “But you’d better be right.”

Mara spoke up: “If you’re planning on taking anyone by surprise, shouldn’t you do something about your vehicles, adjudant? They’re sitting on the roadside like beacons.”

“
Merde!
” exclaimed Compagnon. “Albert, Roussel, on the double. Get them out of view. And take this—take her—with you!”

At a little past midnight, headlights flared among the trees lining the long approach to the house. A few minutes later, the automatic gate swung inward, and a vehicle passed through. Its tires crunched quietly over the gravel of the drive leading around to the greenhouse. The gate remained ajar.

Adelheid parked the Kangoo. She sat for a long moment, staring at the play of moonlight on the glass panels of the greenhouse. Briefly, she wondered why the motion sensor lights had not come on but concluded that the system had short-circuited again. It was always happening. She was too weary after a long day, a long drive, to give the matter much thought. She had gone through a very tense time with that damned
Compétence W
agent, who had wanted to impound her orchids. However, she had held her ground, had even threatened to lodge a formal complaint with his superiors, naming people on whose favors she knew she could not call. In the end, she had outlasted and outargued him.

She climbed stiffly out of the van and, with a jingle of keys, unlocked a side door leading into the anteroom of the greenhouse. She returned and opened the rear of the van. She reached inside, partly disappearing from view. As she reappeared, bearing a flat of plants covered by a clear, rigid plastic top, another car, its lights extinguished, pulled up alongside her. Serge lowered the driver’s window.

“Ah,” she said, “
c’est vous.
You came quickly. I haven’t unloaded yet.”

The doors of the Mercedes swung open. Serge’s thin form emerged from one side, the bulky figure of Ton-and-a-Half from the other.

“Forget it. We’ll take over from here,” the Ton said.

“No,” she said firmly. “You must wait until I unload.”

“I said, we’ll take over from here.”

“Wrong,” said Adjudant Compagnon, stepping out from the side of the greenhouse as the floodlights came on. “
We’ll
take over from here.” Gendarmes moved in swiftly from all directions. “If you would oblige us, Monsieur Luca?”

“What the hell?” snarled the Ton as Roussel and Albert pushed him and Serge against the Kangoo to frisk them. Laurent clamped a restraining hand on Adelheid.

Another gendarme, one Hubert Chauvin, checked the interior of the Mercedes. “Clear,
mon adjudant.
”

Adelheid stared about her, open-mouthed with shock.

“You!” she exclaimed, spotting Julian.

“Afraid so,” Julian said with some satisfaction.

“Funny time of night to be paying a visit,” Compagnon observed to Rocco Luca.

The Ton said coolly, “What’s funny about it? I ordered some plants. I’m collecting them. When I do it is my business.”

“You, a plant lover?” Compagnon snorted.

Luca shrugged. “Well, sergeant, you know how it is—”

“
Ad-ju-dant
,” Compagnon corrected, biting the word out in three syllables.

“Whatever. You got a conservatory, you fill it.”

“What’s in there?” Compagnon demanded of Adelheid, thrusting his chin in the direction of the van.

“Plants,” said Adelheid.

Laurent played the beam of his flashlight around the interior of the cargo area. Julian peered in. The shelves of the Kangoo
were crammed. Roughly twenty pots to a flat, ten flats in all, he counted swiftly, including the one Adelheid held.

“Orchids,” he corrected. He turned to her unbelievingly. “You supply
him
with orchids?”

“You got something against it?” said the Ton. “I’m not supposed to like flowers?”

“Orchids and what else?” demanded Compagnon. “All right,” he barked at Julian. “Don’t just stand there. Get on with it.”

Julian approached Adelheid. “Let’s start with these,” he grinned. He had to pry the flat from her fingers.

The plants were young, not in flower, and exhibited none of the uniformity of nursery-cultivated specimens. At this stage they consisted of rosettes of leaves, many blotched and lanceolate (some kind of
Orchis
, he guessed), others rounder and unmarked (probably a species of
Ophrys
). The fact that most were in terrible condition, limp and bruised from the jostling they had experienced in transport over many days, confirmed all of his suspicions: the orchids themselves were not the objective of the exercise. Moreover, if the objective was to carry out—what had she said?—root regeneration trials, why do it in France? Why not in Turkey? Or if it was necessary to run the trials in Adelheid’s laboratory, why subject the plants to the stress of a long sea and land journey when it would have been so much better to air freight them? Most significantly, why now? Why not wait until the plants were dormant and simply ship the tubers? None of this added up from a botanical perspective.

Julian set the flat on the ground, squatted down, and removed the pot closest to hand. He squeezed the flexible plastic sides and eased the single plant out into the palm of his hand. Gently, he probed with his finger. He saw nothing but soil and moss surrounding an immature root structure. He restored the orchid to its container, carefully tamping down the bedding around it.

Luca, who had been watching the proceedings with an expression of disdain mixed with puzzlement, said, “I’m leaving. You have no right to detain me. I’ll have the skin off your backside for this. I have friends who could have you busted down to
gendarme auxiliaire, ad-ju-dant.
” He stressed the title with muscular antagonism. He straightened his clothing and started to walk away.

Compagnon said sharply, “I suggest you remain where you are, monsieur.” To Julian, he snarled, “Speed it up, will you?”

Julian pulled out the next container. Again he turned up nothing more suspicious than potting soil. Behind him, Compagnon breathed with heavy impatience. When Luca asked sarcastically if this was going to take all night, Julian had to suppress an almost hysterical desire to giggle. Then he realized that it was a case of hiding the trees in the forest.
Go for the plants in the middle.
His hand hovered over a pot in the very center of the flat.

“Wait,” Adelheid broke in. For the first time, her voice sounded slightly shrill. “If you must, I will do it.”

Aha!
The hairs on the back of Julian’s neck rose up like tiny antennae. He was about to make Adjudant Compagnon a happy man. Unless … his orchid freak’s mind neatly sidestepped the matter at hand to pursue a mystery of its own. Her sudden desire to be helpful could also mean that there was something more than drugs in there, something that she wanted handled very carefully. An orchid, but not just any orchid. She had brought it in, slipping it past the eye of the inspecting agent. Maybe there was more than one, mixed in with the common specimens he saw before him. He took the flashlight from Laurent and directed it at the plant he had been about to pick up. There was nothing really unusual about it, except—yes—its leaves were slightly wider and more strongly veined than those of its neighbors. It
was also in considerably better health, as if it had received more careful treatment. And there, if he was not mistaken, was another like it. And another. So what were these little beauties that Adelheid had managed to smuggle in? Turkey, he knew, had orchids that grew nowhere else. Julian felt the woman stiffen as he lifted out the pot. Her tension communicated itself to the gendarmes. All of the officers watched mesmerized as Julian held his prize up. Suddenly, he paused.