by Wilbur Smith
The back eddy beyond the bridge swung them in towards the bank. Gasping and swallowing with cold and exhaustion and pain, Peter fought for footing on gravel and rock. The machine-gunner had found bottom also and was stumbling desperately towards the bank. In the headlights of the limousine Peter saw Magda’s two bodyguards racing back across the bridge to head him off.
Peter realized that he would not be able to catch the man before he reached the bank.
‘Carl!’ he screamed at the bodyguard who was leading. ‘Stop him. Don’t let him get away.’
The bodyguard vaulted over the guardrail, landing catlike in complete balance, with the pistol double-handed at the level of his navel.
Below him the machine-gunner dragged himself waist deep towards the bank. It was only then that Peter realized what was going to happen.
‘No!’ He choked on blood and water. Take him alive. Don’t kill him, Carl!’
The bodyguard had not heard, or had not understood. The muzzle blast seemed to join him and the wallowing figure in the river below him, a blood-orange rope of flame and thunderous explosion. The bullets smacked into the machine-gunner’s chest and belly like an axeman cutting down a tree.
‘No!’ Peter yelled helplessly. ‘Oh Jesus, no! No!’
Peter lunged forward and caught the corpse before it slid below the black water, and he dragged it by one arm to the bank. The bodyguards took it from him and hauled it up, the head lolling like an idiot’s, and the blood diluted to pale pink in the reflected headlights.
Peter made three attempts to climb the bank, each time slithering back tiredly into the water, then Carl reached down and gripped his wrist.
Peter knelt on the muddy bank, still choking with the water and blood he had swallowed, and he retched weakly.
‘Peter!’ Magda’s voice rang with concern, and he looked up and wiped his mouth on the back of his forearm. She had slipped out of the back door of the limousine and was running back along the bridge, long-legged in black boots and ski-pants, her face dead white with concern and her eyes frantic with worry.
Peter pushed himself onto his feet and swayed drunkenly. She reached him and caught him, steadying him as he teetered.
‘Peter, oh God, darling. What happened—’
‘This beauty and some of his friends wanted to take you for a ride – and they got the wrong address.’
They stared down at the corpse. Carl had used a .357 magnum and the damage was massive. Magda turned her head away.
‘Nice work,’ Peter told the bodyguard bitterly. ‘He’s not going to answer any questions now, is he?’
‘You said to stop him.’ Carl growled as he reloaded the pistol.
‘I wonder what you would have done if I’d said to really clobber him.’ Peter began to turn away with disgust, and pain checked him. He gasped.
‘You’re hurt.’ Magda’s concern returned in full strength. ‘Take his other arm,’ she ordered Carl, and they helped him over the parapet to the limousine.
Peter stripped off the torn and sodden remains of his clothing and Magda wrapped him in the Angora wool travel rug before examining his wound under the interior light of the cab.
The bullet hole was a perfect little blue puncture in the smooth skin, already surrounded by a halo of inflammation, and the bullet was trapped between his ribs and the sheet of flat, hard trapezium muscles. She could see the outline of it quite clearly, the size of a ripe acorn in his flesh, swollen out angry purple.
‘Thank God—’ she whispered, and unwound the Jean Patou scarf from her long pale throat. She bound the wound carefully. ‘We’ll take you directly to the hospital at Versailles. Drive fast, Carl.’
She opened the walnut-fronted cocktail cabinet in the bodywork beside her and poured half a tumbler of whisky from the crystal decanter.
It washed the taste of blood from Peter’s mouth and then went warmly all the way down his throat to soothe the cramps of cold and shock in his belly.
‘What made you come?’ he asked, his voice still rough with the fierce spirit, the timely arrival nagged at his sense of rightness.
‘The police at Rambouillet had a report of a car smash – they knew the Maserati, and the inspector rang La Pierre Bénite immediately. I guessed something bad—’
At that moment they reached the gates at the main road. The remains of the Maserati lay smouldering on the side of the road; around it like boy scouts around a camp fire were half a dozen gendarmes in their white plastic capes and pillbox kepis. They seemed uncertain of what they should do next.
Carl slowed the limousine and Magda spoke tersely through the window to a sergeant, who treated her with immense respect. ‘Oui, madame la Baronne, d’accord Tout à fait vrai—’ She dismissed him with a final nod, and he and his men saluted the departing limousine.
‘They will find the body at the bridge—’
‘There may be another one on the edge of the forest there—’
‘You are very good, aren’t you?’ She slanted her eyes at him.
‘The really good ones don’t get hit,’ he said, and smiled at her. The whisky had taken some of the sting and stiffness out of the wound and unknotted his guts. It was good to still be alive, he started to appreciate that again.
‘You were right about the Maserati then – they were waiting for it.’
‘That’s why I burned it,’ he told her, but she did not answer his smile
‘Oh, Peter. You’ll never know how I felt. The police told me that the driver of the Maserati was still in it and had been burned. I thought – I felt as though part of me had been destroyed. It was the most terrifying feeling—’ She shivered. ‘I nearly did not come, I didn’t want to see it. I nearly sent my wolves, but then I had to know – Carl saw you in the river as we turned onto the bridge. He said it was you, I just couldn’t believe it—’ She stopped herself and shuddered at the memory. ‘Tell me what happened, tell me all of it,’ she demanded and poured more whisky into his tumbler.
For some reason that he was not sure of himself, Peter did not mention the Citroën that had followed him out of Paris. He told himself that it could not have been relevant. It must have been a coincidence, for if the driver of the Citroën had been one of them he would have been able to telephone ahead and warn the others that Baroness Magda Altmann was not in the Maserati, so that would have meant that they were not after her – but after him, Peter Stride, and that didn’t make sense because he had only set himself up as bait that very morning, and they would not have had time yet. He stopped the giddy carousel of thoughts – shock and whisky, he told himself. There would be time later to think it all out more carefully. Now he would simply believe that they were waiting for Magda, and he had run into their net. He told it that way, beginning from the moment that he had seen the police van parked in the road. Magda listened with complete attention, the huge eyes clinging to his face, and she touched him every few moments as if to reassure herself.
When Carl parked under the portico of the emergency entrance of the hospital, the police had radioed ahead and there were an intern and two nurses waiting for Peter with a theatre trolley.
Before she opened the door to let them take Peter, Magda leaned to him and kissed him full on the lips.
‘I’m so very glad to have you still,’ she whispered, and then with her lips still very close to his ear she went on. ‘It was Caliph again, wasn’t it?’
He shrugged slightly, grimaced at the stab of pain, and answered, ‘I can’t think of anyone else offhand that would do such a professional job.’
Magda walked beside the trolley as far as the theatre doors, and she was beside his bed in the curtained cubicle as he struggled up through the deadening, suffocating false death of the anaesthetic.
The French doctor was with her, and he produced the gruesome blood-clotted souvenir with a magician’s flourish.
‘I did not have to cut,’ he told Peter proudly. ‘Probe only.’ The bullet had mushroomed impressively, had certainly lost much
of its velocity in penetrating the bodywork of the Maserati, ‘You are a very lucky man,’ the doctor went on. ‘You are in fine condition, muscles like a racehorse that stopped the bullet going deep. You will be well again very soon.’
‘I have promised to look after you, so he is letting you come home now.’ Magda hovered over him also. ‘Aren’t you, doctor?’
‘You will have one of the world’s most beautiful nurses.’ The doctor bowed gallantly towards Magda with a certain wistfulness in his expression.
The doctor was right, the bullet wound gave him less discomfort than the tears in his thighs from the barbed wire, but Magda Altmann behaved as though he were suffering from an irreversible and terminal disease.
When she did have to go up to her office suite in the Boulevard des Capucines the next day, she telephoned three times for no other reason than to make sure he was still alive and to ask for his size in shoes and clothing. The cavalcade of automobiles carrying her and her entourage were back at La Pierre Bénite while it was still daylight.
‘You are keeping civil service hours,’ he accused when she came directly to the main guest suite overlooking the terraced lawns and the artificial lake.
‘I knew you were missing me,’ she explained, and kissed him before beginning to scold him. ‘Roberto tells me you have been wandering around in the rain. The doctor said you were to stay in bed. Tomorrow I will have to stay here to take care of you myself.’
‘Is that a threat?’ he grinned at her. ‘For that sort of punishment I would let Caliph shoot another hole—’
Swiftly she laid her fingers on his lips. ‘Peter, chéri, don’t joke like that.’ And the shadow that passed across her eyes was touched with fear, then immediately she was smiling again. ‘Look what I have bought you.’
Peter’s valise had been in the trunk of the Maserati, and she had replaced it with one in black crocodile from Hermes. To fill it she must have started at the top end of the Faubourg St Honoré and worked her way down to the Place Vendôme.
‘I had forgotten how much fun it is to buy presents for one who you—’ She did not finish the sentence, but held up a brocade silk dressing-gown. ‘– Everybody in St Laurent knew what I was thinking when I chose this.’
She had forgotten nothing. Shaving gear, silk handkerchiefs and underwear, a blue blazer, slacks and shoes from Gucci, even cufflinks in plain gold, each set with a small sapphire.
‘You have such blue eyes,’ she explained. ‘Now I will go and make myself respectable for dinner I told Roberto we would eat here, for there are no other guests tonight.’
She had changed from the gunmetal business suit and turban into floating cloud-light layers of gossamer silk, and her hair was down to her waist, more lustrous than the cloth.
‘I will open the champagne,’ she said. ‘It needs two hands.’
He wore the brocade gown, with his left arm still in a sling, and they stood and admired each other over the top of the champagne glasses.
‘I was right.’ She nodded comfortably. ‘Blue is your colour. You must wear it more often.’ And he had to smile at the quaint compliment, and touched her glass with his. The crystal pinged musically and they saluted each other before they drank. Immediately she set the glass aside, and her expression became serious.
‘I spoke with my friends in the Sûreté. They agree that it was a kidnap attempt against me, and because I asked it, they will not trouble you to make a statement until you feel better. I told them to send a man tomorrow to speak to you. There was no sign of the second man you shot at on the edge of the woods, he must have been able to walk or been carried by his friends.’
‘And the other man?’ Peter asked. ‘The dead one.’
‘They know him well. He had a very ugly past. Algeria with the paras. The mutiny.’ She spread her hands eloquently. ‘My friends were very surprised that he had not killed you when he tried to do so. I did not say too much about your own past. It is better, I think?’
‘It’s better,’ Peter agreed
‘When I am with you like this, I forget that you also are a very dangerous man.’ She stopped and examined his face carefully. ‘Or is it part of the reason I find you so—’ she searched for the word’ – so compelling? You have such a gentle manner, Peter. Your voice is so soft and—’ She shrugged. ‘But there is something in the way you smile sometimes, and in certain light your eyes are so blue and hard and cruel. Then I remember that you have killed many men. Do you think that is what attracts me?’
‘I hope it is not.’
‘Some women are excited by blood and violence – the bullfight, the prize ring, there are always as many women as men at these, and I have watched their faces. I have thought about myself, and still I do not know it all. I know only that I am attracted by strong men, powerful men. Aaron was such a man. I have not found many others since then.’
‘Cruelty is not strength,’ Peter told her.
‘No, a truly strong man has that streak of gentleness and compassion. You are so strong, and yet when you make love to me it is with extreme gentleness, though I can always feel the strength and cruelty there, held in bate, like the falcon under the hood.’
She moved away across the room furnished in cream and chocolate and gold, and she tugged the embroidered bell-pull that dangled from the corniced ceiling with its hand-painted panels, pastoral scenes of the type that Marie Antoinette had so admired. Peter knew that much of the furnishing of La Pierre Bénite had been purchased at the auction sales with which the revolutionary committee dispersed the accumulated treasures of the House of Bourbon. With the other treasures there were flowers, wherever Magda Altmann went there were flowers.
She came back to him as Roberto, the Italian butler, supervised the entry of the dinner trolley, and then Roberto filled the wine glasses himself, handling the bottles with white gloves as though they were part of the sacrament, and stationed himself ready to serve the meal, but Magda dismissed him with a curt gesture and he bowed himself out silently.
There was a presentation-wrapped parcel at Peter’s place setting, tissue paper and an elaborately tied red ribbon. He looked up at her inquiringly as she served the soup into fragile Limoges bowls.
‘Once I began buying presents, I could not stop myself,’ she explained. ‘Besides, I kept thinking that bullet might have been in my back.’ Then she was impatient. ‘Are you not going to open it?’
He did so carefully, and then was silent.
‘Africa, it is your speciality, is it not?’ she asked anxiously. ‘Nineteenth-century Africa?’
He nodded, and reverently opened the cover of the volume in its bed of tissue paper. It was fully bound in maroon leather, and the state of preservation was quite extraordinary, only the dedication on the flyleaf in the author’s handwriting was faded yellow.
‘Where on earth did you find this?’ he demanded. ‘It was at Sotheby’s in 1971. I bid on it then.’ He had dropped out of the bidding at five thousand pounds.
‘You do not have a first edition of Cornwallis Harris?’ she asked again anxiously, and he shook his head, examining one of the perfectly preserved colour plates of African big game.
‘No, I do not. But how did you know that?’
‘Oh, I know as much about you as you do yourself,’ she laughed. ‘Do you like it?’
‘It is magnificent. I am speechless.’ The gift was too extravagant, even for someone of her fortune. It troubled him, and he was reminded of the comedy situation of the husband who brings home flowers unexpectedly and is immediately accused by his wife. ‘Why do you have a guilty conscience?’
‘Do you truly like it? I know so little about books.’
‘It is the one edition I need to complete my major works,’ he said. ‘And it is probably the finest specimen left outside the British Museum.’
‘I’m so glad.’ She was genuinely relieved. ‘I was truly worried.’ And she put down the silver soup ladle and lifted both arms to welcome his embrace.
During t
he meal she was gay and talkative, and only when Roberto had wheeled away the trolley and they settled side by side on the down-filled couch before the fire did her mood change again.
‘Peter, today I have been unable to think of anything but this business – you and me and Caliph. I have been afraid, and I am still afraid. I keep thinking of Aaron, what they did to him – and then I think of you and what nearly happened.’
They were silent, staring into the flames and sipping coffee from the demi-tasses, then suddenly she had changed direction again. He was growing accustomed to these mercurial switches in thought.
‘I have an island – not one island, but nine little islands – and in the centre of them is a lagoon nine kilometres wide. The water is so clear you can see the fish fifty feet down. There is an airstrip on the main atoll. Just under two hours’ flying time to Tahiti. Nobody would ever know we were there. We could swim all day, walk in the sand, make love under the stars. You would be king of the islands, and I would be your queen. No more Altmann Industries – I would find somebody as good or better than myself to run it. No more danger. No more fear. No more Caliph – no more—’ She stopped abruptly, as though she had been about to commit herself too far, but she went on quickly. ‘Let’s go there, Peter. Let’s forget all this. Let’s just run away and be happy together, for ever.’
‘It’s a pretty thought.’ He turned to her, feeling deep and genuine regret.
‘It would work for us. We would make it work.’
And he said nothing, just watching her eyes, until she looked away and sighed.
‘No.’ She mirrored his regret. ‘You are right. Neither of us could ever give up living like that. We have to go on – but, Peter, I am so afraid. I am afraid of what I know about you and of what I do not know I am afraid of what you do not know about me, and what I never can tell you – but we must go on. You are right. We have to find Caliph, and then destroy him. But, oh God, I pray we do not destroy ourselves, what we have found together – I pray we will be able to keep that intact.’