‘There’s a general strike,’ said Neil.
During the trip they had followed the developing crisis on radio news bulletins from all over Europe. The night before, Guérin had ordered a general strike from dawn till midnight to commemorate the Secret Army’s dead in clashes with the security forces during the last forty-eight hours. The French High Command, under a General Metz, had responded by extending the night curfew throughout the day. The city was now in a state of total paralysis.
‘Even the seagulls are on strike,’ said Van Loon, as they watched the empty wharves grow closer, with the ocean liners and cargo ships lying like coffins among the cranes.
They could now see the white flecks of the CRS police sashes, standing at intervals along the Front de Mer. The ‘Serafina’ chugged across the dark water under the sea-wall and was less than thirty yards away before they were challenged.
Three CRS men, in blue uniforms with machine-pistols strapped to the hip, came down the steps and stood waiting for them to tie up. There was an officer in front: a small straight man with a tanned face creased with tiny furrows that showed white against his brown skin when he spoke. The metal of his machine-pistol was sweating in the fog: ‘Where are you coming from? You know the port’s closed?’
Pol took out a plastic disc with a red and blue stripe. The officer saw it and saluted at once: ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t realize.’ He turned and signalled to his men. ‘You’ve chosen a nice time to visit us!’ he added, leading the way up the steps.
‘It is very bad?’ said Pol.
The officer pulled a wry face: ‘There’s been a lot of effervescence — fighting all last night. They’ve been killing the Arabs off like flies. And it’s going to get worse! How far are you going?’ he added, when they reached the Front de Mer.
‘The Hotel Miramar,’ said Pol, ‘is it clear?’
‘It’s all right till the Place Lyautey, but after that there are Gardes Mobiles. Some of them are shooting on sight — they lost a lot of men yesterday. Are you walking?’
Pol grinned: ‘How else?’
‘I’m sorry I can’t offer you any transport,’ said the officer, ‘all our vehicles are commandeered.’ He saluted and moved away.
The three of them began to walk down the Front de Mer, under the tiers of rococo balconies on one side, the palm trees hanging limp and wet on the other; and all round there was a hush as though they were walking in snow. Somewhere ahead a jeep squealed round a corner and drove away into the fog. The streets that climbed from the Front de Mer were choked with garbage, and the only things that moved were furtive, springing cats.
Suddenly a shot rang out, its echo cracking off the walls like a whip. Neil jumped sideways and Pol laughed. The silence folded back, and they came to the last of the CRS troops and started out across a square with the blackened carcasses of two cars lying beside a statue of General Lyautey. The air was thick and clammy with the smell of salt and orange-blossom. Neil was beginning to sweat. ‘How much further?’ he asked.
‘Five hundred metres,’ said Pol.
A car passed in one of the back streets, crashing gears. The walls round the square were scrawled with huge slogans where the paint had trickled to the pavement. Neil read, ‘Vive Guérin!’ ‘Aux Armes Citoyens!’ ‘The True France is Divided Only by the Mediterranean!’
From here on, the Front de Mer became an uneasy stretch of No-Man’s-Land where the Secret Army commandos played a deadly game of hide-and-seek with the Gardes Mobiles. Pol was leading the way down the centre of the boulevard when they heard the armoured car. It came grinding out of a side-street about fifty yards away, swerved round and stopped. They could just make out the white pineapple, emblem of the Gardes Mobiles, painted on the armoured plating above the wheels. There was a heavy machinegun at the rear: a Douze-Sept, known locally as La Doucette (‘the Sweet One’). Every twelfth round was an explosive shell, and its bullets could pierce eight inches of masonry and still kill a man.
Pol cried, ‘Get back!’
They ducked under the arcades facing the sea. Neil crouched against a shop window, keeping his face turned from the boulevard, listening to the chugging of the armoured car engine. He pressed his face to the steel grating across the window. It was a women’s clothes shop. He stared at a slim wax effigy of a girl’s torso in nylon brassiere and briefs. Beside him Pol puffed hard, getting his breath back. Van Loon was calm, motionless. On the floor of the shop window lay a pair of scarlet pants with a triangle of lacework over the crotch. Neil glanced back up the boulevard: the armoured car had not moved. He closed his eyes, imagined the noise and pain and death.
They waited under the arcades for ten minutes, before the motor roared and the armoured car began to move off into the fog. Pol grinned: ‘If they’d decided to come this way, we might have had some fun!’ They kept under the arcades for the rest of the way to the hotel.
The Miramar stood behind a grove of palm trees. Candles were burning in the gloomy foyer, with its mirrors and mock-Moorish arches of brown marble. It was five o’clock and already growing dark. All electricity had been cut off. An Army officer sat alone among the armchairs, staring across the empty floor.
The receptionists, those suave custodians of the international high life, performed their duties now with resigned boredom. There were no more fat tips from the money-men weekending from Paris by Caravelle with their girls and golf clubs. Now there was just a scattering of journalists and military personnel.
Pol made no attempt to avoid these hotel officials, who eyed him suspiciously as he stood with Neil and Van Loon at the desk.
‘You are not taking a room?’ inquired the head receptionist, a silver-haired man with cool mandarin eyes.
‘I’m just seeing my friends in,’ said Pol smiling, and walked up with Neil and Van Loon to the two rooms they had taken on the third floor, each with a green-tiled bathroom and a balcony over the sea. Pol had agreed to settle Van Loon’s bill as payment for his services on the ‘Serafina’. To Neil’s mind it was cheap at the price.
‘So you’re not staying here?’ Neil said, as Pol followed him into his room and closed the door.
‘Here? My dear Ingleby, I wouldn’t last the night. The hotel’s full of Secret Army informers.’ He stood sweating, loosening his collar: ‘Do you mind if I have a shower?’
‘Go ahead. I’ll ring for something to drink.’
‘The phones aren’t working,’ said Pol.
‘I’ll see if I can find a floor waiter,’ said Neil. At the door he paused: ‘You didn’t make much effort to keep out of sight downstairs. Do the hotel people know who you are?’
Pol chuckled, unbuttoning his shirt: ‘Ah, I’m a very notorious fellow!’
‘Aren’t you taking a bit of a risk coming up here?’
Pol stepped out of his trousers and laughed: ‘I take worse risks driving round Paris when I’m stewed at five in the morning!’ He stood naked now in his ankle socks like a monstrously inflated baby.
‘It’s all very well for you to take risks,’ said Neil, ‘but I’m staying here. I’ve been seen coming in with you.’
‘You’ll be all right,’ said Pol, taking out his tin of talcum powder and wobbling into the bathroom, ‘they won’t hurt an English journalist.’
‘I hope you’re right!’ said Neil, going into the corridor where he found a Moslem in an apron, rooting about in a cupboard near the stairs. He ordered a bottle of cognac and two glasses to be brought to Room 274. The man bowed and scuttled away.
Back in the room Pol shouted above the shower, ‘Tomorrow or the day after, Monsieur Ingleby, I will have something very interesting for your newspaper!’ He came out rubbing down his rolls of flesh: ‘As I said in Athens, I may have a scoop for you.’ He dropped the towel and began patting talcum powder under his arms.
Neil stared out towards the balcony. A nasty suspicion was beginning to nag at the back of his mind; it was like that first instinct he had had at the King George yesterday when he had been too
light-headed with whisky to care. There was some very good reason why Pol wanted him in the Protectorate: and it wasn’t just to do him a good turn as a journalist.
The fog was closing in, dark over the dead sweep of the port. From far away he heard a faint burst of gun-fire. There was a sound in the room behind. The Moslem came in with a bottle of Hine, grinning nervously, and bowed himself out before either of them could give him a tip.
‘Poor little devil!’ said Pol buttoning up his trousers. ‘Probably comes down to work from the Casbah every day. Somebody’ll put a bullet in his head before long —’
Neil poured them both a brandy and they went out on the balcony. Pol was wearing vest and braces, his fat arms chalk-white with talcum powder liked salted hams. He looked ridiculous; but there was a hard look in his eyes which was very far from the jovial Pol swilling whisky and champagne, all in the merry course of duty for the French Secret Service. Neil realized suddenly that he knew very little about the man: that behind the fatuous exterior there must lie a core of professional ruthlessness. One did not reach the position Pol held — whatever that position exactly was — without it.
‘I shall be staying at the High Command Headquarters,’ he was saying, sipping his brandy, ‘I can’t move around as freely as you, I’m afraid, and it won’t be easy for us to meet. What I want you to do is phone me tomorrow afternoon at two o’clock at this number. Have you a pencil?’ Neil wrote the number down. ‘And don’t call me from the hotel — somebody might listen in. Use a callbox.’
The warning light was there again, and with it the whisper of danger. Neil said, ‘What sort of thing will you have to tell me?’
‘I’m not sure. I shall know more tomorrow.’ Pol’s eyes were fixed on some point in the indefinite distance across the sea: ‘Perhaps a meeting with somebody — somebody interesting. It depends what I can arrange.’
He paused; they heard another distant burst of gun-fire. ‘I must warn you,’ Pol went on, ‘that the Secret Army will know you are in the hotel. During the next twenty-four hours they will contact you. There’s nothing to worry about — they contact all journalists. Just be tactful and receptive, and avoid discussing politics with them. They’re very sensitive at the moment. And above all, don’t mention that you were on Athos. We just happened to meet in the King George Hotel.’
Neil stared out across the dim grey city. Pol had been in the hotel for nearly half an hour, and Neil was feeling strained and nervous. He had slept badly the night before, and the fog and silence now thrust him into a deep depression. He did not yet know what was at stake here but suddenly, desperately, he wanted to be rid of Pol. He could not analyse the feeling; perhaps it was mean and disloyal after the comradeship of the last two days, but his instinct warned him, with something visceral and emphatic, that he was becoming involved in a situation over which he had no control. He turned to Pol: ‘You’d better be going now. If they know downstairs who you are —’
Pol finished his drink, went back into the room and put on his shirt, tie and jacket. ‘Don’t forget,’ he called from the door, ‘two o’clock tomorrow afternoon.’
Neil nodded; ‘Careful how you go — don’t get a bullet in your head.’
Pol grinned, tapping his round pate: ‘Don’t worry, I’ve got a hard head, Monsieur Ingleby!’
CHAPTER 2
Only a few journalists had so far managed to penetrate the Protectorate since the revolt began. That afternoon a Paris-Match photographer had chartered a plane from Catania and parachuted just south of the capital, but had broken his leg on landing and was now in a military hospital. The airports of Paris and Tunis, Rome and Rabat were besieged by frantic hosts of reporters waiting for flights into the capital.
The doyen of the resident correspondents was a well-preserved Englishman, Mr. Winston St. Leger, now in his sixties. He had made a name for himself reporting the Munich putsch in 1923; but was now best renowned for his habit of sucking toothpaste from a tube which he kept permanently in his breast pocket. An American colleague had once challenged him on this: ‘Why d’yer suck that stuff, Winston?’ ‘Because I like it,’ St. Leger had replied, silencing further comment. The habit had originated while he was a correspondent in Moscow after the war and had been unable to obtain indigestion pills. One day someone had suggested that certain brands of toothpaste had the desired effect, and Winston St. Leger had become a toothpaste addict. He admitted that he got through two tubes a week.
He, Neil and Van Loon, and a jumpy little American called Hudson from one of the agencies, were sitting up at the bar on the second floor of the hotel, looking over the empty gaming tables in the salon de jeu. St. Leger wore a waistcoat and pinstriped trousers; only at the height of the summer did he leave them off in favour of ducks and a blazer. He was saying, ‘I met Paul Guérin three years ago in Paris. Charming fellow. Very formal, of course — very much the St. Cyr officer class. Not much gaiety there.’
They watched the candles flickering in the tall mirrors across the room. ‘What’s going to happen now?’ asked Neil.
‘Death and bloodshed,’ said St. Leger evenly, ‘they’ve got Guérin behind those barricades, while the whole Army’s on the fence waiting to see what he’ll do. But of course there’s nothing he can do until the Army does something. Then, when the Government’s moved up enough reliable security troops, they’ll go in and smash the barricades.’
‘Then you’ll see the shit start to fly,’ said Hudson.
‘It won’t be the end of it, though,’ said St. Leger, ‘the killing will go on. The combinations of terrorism in this place are almost infinite. The Secret Army commandos will go back underground. Then you’ve got the Arab Front — their terrorists are commanded by a dear little chap called Ali La Joconde. His men have been killing about a dozen Europeans a day right in the centre of the city. We’ve even had to watch our step going outside the hotel. And on top of that you’ve got the barbouzes.’
‘Barbouzes?’ said Neil. He remembered that Pol had said he was a barbouze.
‘Yes, “false beards”,’ said St. Leger, ‘special gunmen the Government’s been sending in to fight the Secret Army on its own terms. They’ve become almost a legend out here — none of the Ministries will officially admit their existence. They’re licensed to kill without any questions being asked. Some of them are reputed to be Indo-Chinese — agents recruited during the war there to infiltrate the Viet-Minh lines. But most of them are just hired thugs — police informers, ex-convicts, gendarmes who’ve been kicked out of the force for misconduct. Delightful types.’
‘How many of them are here now?’ said Neil.
St. Leger took a lick of toothpaste, rolled it round his tongue as though it were a vintage wine, and said, ‘Not easy to say — the Secret Army’s killed so many of them off. But a few days ago it was thought there were about two hundred of them operating in the city. Their favourite method of working is to get in with some Secret Army commandos and go out and shoot a few Moslems — just to show they’re in the spirit of the thing, you know — and then, when they’ve got the names of the commandos, they either move in and kill them on the spot, or take them off and question them for the names of other commandos.’
‘They use torture,’ said Hudson, his worried face bobbing about like a tennis ball.
Neil was listening gravely; he tried to form a mental picture of Pol, gun in hand in the wardroom of the ‘Serafina’; but somehow the image became distorted with Pol the Michelin Man, rubbing down his rolls of fat with a bath towel. It didn’t seem to fit.
‘Of course, one might say that any methods of fighting the Secret Army are justified,’ St. Leger was saying, ‘and using the barbouzes is just one of them.’
‘How’s it all going to end?’ said Neil.
‘Personally,’ said St. Leger, stroking his long dry neck, ‘I see no end to it. Except, perhaps, send in the Brigade of Guards and impose fifty years of paternal British rule.’ He spoke without a trace of humour, and Neil did not know whet
her he should laugh or not.
Outside, the night had closed in and there was a black silence over the city, interrupted by the tapping of machinegun fire. Up in his room Neil began to write a long letter to Caroline by candle light; but he was distracted by thoughts of Pol and Jadot and the barbouzes, and he knew she wouldn’t be interested in them. He thought of telling her that he had a colleague here who ate toothpaste, but she probably wouldn’t believe him. He went to bed.
CHAPTER 3
Neil woke with the telephone purring by his ear. He lifted the receiver from its cradle and a man’s voice said in French, ‘Monsieur Ingleby, you are wanted downstairs.’
‘Who by?’
The voice repeated, ‘You are wanted downstairs. This is reception.’ The line clicked dead.
Neil sat up and looked at his watch; it was a quarter to seven. Too early for any of the journalists to be up asking for him, and he didn’t think Pol would risk coming to the hotel again. Whoever was downstairs was from the Secret Army.
He felt a tightening in his stomach as he showered, dressed and went through to Van Loon. The Dutchman lay naked on his back, snoring. Neil shook him awake: ‘Peter! There’s someone downstairs to see me — from the Secret Army. You join me in the foyer in five minutes — not later!’
Van Loon opened one eye and said, ‘O.K., five minutes. Don’t get killed!’
Neil went out and along to the lifts. The hotel was very quiet. In the foyer the two receptionists stood like sentinels against the sunlight from the door. A dark handsome girl sat alone in one of the armchairs, and a Moslem fluttered about with a duster at the end of the room. Neil went up to the desk. The silver-haired receptionist had been replaced by a thin man with a yellow moustache. Neil tried to keep his voice calm: ‘I understand someone is here to see me — Monsieur Ingleby.’
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