Devil May Care - Sebastian Faulks [63]
When the secretary returned with a brown cardboard file, it took Mathis only a few minutes to find a match. Side by side he placed the shiny new monochrome print of a man in a kepi standing next to a black Mercedes 300D Cabriolet and a faded eleven-year-old newspaper cutting showing Pham Sinh Quoc, whose Wanted picture had once been on
every wall in French Saigon. They were one and the same man.
Mathis, however, did not immediately lift the telephone or order a car to take him to Gorner’s chemical plant. He tried instead to work out whether the Far East connection might mean more to Gorner than having provided him with a psychopathic aidede-camp. Lighting a Gauloise filtre, he put his feet up on the desk and considered what commercial gain there might be for Gorner in having an entre´e to the dangerous triangle of Laos, Vietnam and Cambodia. Nine hours behind Paris, it was nine o’clock on a bright morning in Santa Monica, and Felix Leiter was making a house call to a Spanish-style home on Georgina Avenue. He limped over the grass and up to the front door.
The grizzled Texan, who had been a partner in some of the most testing cases in James Bond’s career, was working for Pinkerton’s detective agency, and made no secret of his boredom. He had been hired by a producer at one of the Hollywood studios to make inquiries about a missing person. She was called Trixie Rocket, had appeared in two B-pictures, then disappeared from sight, leaving no forwarding
address, no number, nothing. The girl’s parents, who came from Idaho, had been making threatening noises towards the studio. Suspicion had fallen on the producer who had cast Trixie and who was now anxious to find her so that he could clear his name before his wife got to hear anything.
It was tame work for a man of Leiter’s abilities, but since he’d lost his right leg and arm to a hammerhead shark while helping out Bond in Miami, he was limited in what he could do.
There was a furious barking from behind the front door of 1614 Georgina, then an attractive, darkhaired woman poked her head out. She was on the telephone and gestured to Felix to wait. He went to sit on the grass verge and opened his copy of the Los Angeles Times.
After about twenty minutes on the telephone, the woman, whose name was Louisa Shirer, finally called him in and showed him through to a small backyard, where she brought coffee. Mrs Shirer turned out to be a charming, voluble woman. Trixie Rocket had been her lodger and she remembered her well, but Trixie hadn’t lived there for three months now. She hadn’t left a forwarding address but . . . At that moment the telephone rang again, and Felix had to stare into his coffee for another fifteen minutes.
The visit had been pleasant but pointless. When he eventually got back to his cheap hotel in West Hollywood, he felt worn out. A slovenly ceiling fan rotated above the potted palms in the lobby and the elevator was stuck on the tenth floor. But there was a message for him at the desk, asking him to ring a number in Washington. Felix recognized the prefix and felt a sudden surge of excitement.
The last real action he had seen was on a train with Bond in Jamaica. Before that, he’d been redrafted by the CIA in the Bahamas when they ran short of manpower. Once you’d been on the books, you were a lifelong reserve.
When the revived elevator had finally taken him up to his room, Felix called the number on the piece of paper. After a barrage of security checks he was eventually put through. A voice spoke to him in a flat, serious tone for almost two minutes.
Leiter stood by the bed, smoking a cigarette, nodding at intervals. ‘Yup . . . yup . . . I see.’
Eventually the voice stopped and Leiter said, ‘And just where the hell is Tehran?’
Meanwhile, it was early evening in that city, and