‘Not very. We met about a couple of weeks ago going round some monasteries in Greece.’ He said it idly, without thinking, and for a moment did not realize the effect his words had had on her. The glass stopped at her lips and her whole body stiffened. He turned and looked at her. There was a shocked, bleak look in her eyes. The bathrobe had fallen carelessly open and he saw, with distracted interest, that she was naked.
They stared at each other and Neil gulped down his drink.
‘So you were on Mount Athos?’ she said, almost in a whisper.
Neil said nothing; he leant back against the pillows, seeing the dark curves of her body under the white towelling. She put her glass down on the table, and with a slow deliberate movement stood up and faced him, drawing the edges of the bathrobe round her.
‘I don’t understand,’ she said, ‘you’re an Englishman — you have no reason to interfere in our affairs. Why are you working for this man Pol? Why have you chased us from Greece? And why do you play the fool with me, giving me cognac in your bedroom when you know…?’ Her voice caught and he thought she was going to cry.
He said: ‘You’re wrong. I’m not chasing you. I was on Athos for a holiday and they arrested me in Athens because they thought I was somebody else.’
‘That’s not what you told Colonel Le Hir.’
‘I know it’s not.’ He realized that it was hopeless to lie to her now, she knew too much. He began telling her about his meeting with Broussard; he had reached the incident of the lost coin at Zographou when she bent forward, her hands on his shoulders, and cried, ‘Oh God, I don’t know what to do! Please, tell me what to do? I don’t want all this killing!’ Her voice now had the cracked edge of hysteria. He put his arms round her and looked into her face, saying, ‘It’s all right, it’s all right,’ patting the small of her back as though placating an overwrought child.
She drew closer to him, pressing her belly against his cheek, and said again, her voice trembling with unshed tears, ‘I don’t want all this killing! But they will kill you if they find out!’
He pushed her away and stood up: ‘Find out what?’
She still clung to him, her face turned aside: ‘Everything! Everything you’ve just told me!’
‘But I’ve explained. I met Broussard on Athos — it was a coincidence.’
‘No! No!’ She shook her head violently; her whole body shuddered against him: ‘They are very suspicious. They won’t believe you. You are mad to have come here. Oh please go away! If they find out you were on Athos they will know you are a barbouze working for the fat man.’
‘But can’t you tell them I’m not?’ He tried to keep the fear out of his voice. This was worse than he had expected: ‘Can’t you tell Le Hir and Broussard?’
She looked at him, her fingers digging into his shoulder blades: ‘It won’t do any good. He won’t listen to me. He never listens to me. If he finds out I am here it will be terrible for me!’
‘Who? Le Hir?’
She shook her head and began to sob.
‘Broussard?’
She gave a choking cry and let go of him, sinking down on to the bed with her face in her hands.
‘Broussard?’ he repeated, almost savagely.
She turned her face up to him, crumpled, desperate, shouting, ‘Go away! Go away, please, before they kill you!’ — then suddenly reached out and touched his hand: ‘You are very sympathique! I like you very much, but go away!’
He turned and poured another brandy. She was sobbing hysterically now, curled up with her face to the wall. He gave her the brandy, but she pushed it away. He drank it himself. There was something here he did not understand: something she was frightened of, and was hiding from him. Perhaps he was not the only one who was in danger.
Telling her about Mount Athos had been a serious error. The only thing he could now do was to wait until she was calmer, then try to persuade her to keep the information to herself. He assumed that she was only a minor figure in the Secret Army: a pretty public relations girl specializing in the foreign Press. He hoped that, like most public relations people, her loyalties could be corrupted.
There was a knock on the door. The same Moslem from yesterday bowed himself in, grinning with gold tusks, and put the dinner tray on the table by the bed. Anne-Marie stirred round and saw him and gave him a venomous look, pointing towards the chair. ‘Take that dress downstairs,’ she ordered, ‘and have it cleaned! I want it by nine o’clock tomorrow morning.’
The man bowed again and collected the dress off the chair. ‘Sale umbe!’ she said, as the door closed. Neil knew the futility of trying to convert her, of trying to defend a hapless servant who was likely to be shot because he stayed at work to keep his family from starving. Nothing he could say would measure up to the gang of Moslems who had hidden three hundred kilos of plastic explosive under the bandstand, fused to go off at the height of thé dansant.
They sat side by side and started on the consommé. ‘You caught the sun today,’ she said, ‘your nose is red.’
He smiled and poured out the Chablis. There was a strained silence between them. The wine had a chilled iron taste, and after the third glass he said, ‘Anne-Marie, you will have to trust me. You will have to believe me — even if your leaders won’t.’
She said nothing, chewing a lump of white lobster meat.
‘I cannot leave this city until the airport opens again. That may not be until tomorrow night — even later. And you realize that if you tell your people about Athos before I can get on to a plane —’ He paused. ‘Well, you know even better than I do what’ll happen.’
She nodded, her black eyes slightly dimmed with wine and cognac. ‘That was a good meal,’ she whispered, pushing the tray away.
‘Anne-Marie, you haven’t answered me. Are you going to tell them about Athos?’
She took a deep breath and stretched out her legs, wriggling her toes: ‘Let’s discuss it tomorrow. I don’t want to talk about it now.’ She looked at him and her mouth turned down into a shy smile: ‘Let’s drink some more wine.’ She leant out and brushed her cheek against his, sliding her mouth round till her tongue touched his teeth.
‘Anne-Marie,’ he murmured, ‘do you really believe I’m a barbouze?’
She drew up her legs, pressing her thighs against him, her face tilted back: ‘I don’t know.’ Her voice had begun to thicken: ‘I don’t want to think about it. Je m’emmerde des barbouzes.’
He pulled her up to him and her mouth opened wide and her body closed against him, his hands rubbing down the rough towelling to the fold of her buttocks. But she broke from him and cried, ‘No, wait, wait! Take away all this food first.’
He carried the tray outside the door. When he came back she was walking naked to the bed. The bathrobe lay over the chair where her dress had been, and she slipped under the single sheet and lay looking at the ceiling. He sat beside her, lit her a cigarette, not very steadily, and passed it down to her, wondering, with a vague sense of dismay, whether this too was part of the Secret Service ritual.
He poured himself another Hine and waited. After a moment she said, ‘You know, if I loved you I would let you do anything to me. Anything you liked.’
He wished he could enjoy this scene more. In less than an hour he would have to dictate 500 words to his office in London, while on his bed lay a beautifully naked girl who needed to say only a couple of sentences to have him shot. She pushed back the sheet and curled against him, and he said, with a sense of tactics, ‘You don’t love me, Anne-Marie.’
‘No.’ She reached up and grabbed him by the neck, pulling his face down clumsily against hers. He remembered her taunts about Anglo-Saxons and kissed her on the mouth, then took hold of her breasts, transparent bluish-white against her dark shoulders and belly, and kissed the hard brown nipples, carefully, till he felt her tremble. He wondered again, with a closed part of his mind, whether she were acting on the orders of Le Hir or Broussard.
‘You are very sensuous,’ she sai
d, ‘I think I am rather drunk. Is there any more cognac?’
‘A little.’ He picked up the bottle. ‘I’ve got some work to do,’ he added.
‘All right, you do some work.’ She lay with her eyes closed, knees drawn up under her chin. He poured her another brandy and went over to the table to type his 500 words on the Casino bombing. When he had finished she was already asleep, the empty glass still in her hand. He lay on the bed beside her and began checking through his story, then rang down to Hudson, having the call put through to the hotel restaurant.
‘Hello — Hudson? This is Ingleby.’
‘You still here?’
‘I can’t get out — the airport’s closed.’
‘Oh yeah, I heard.’
‘Can you give me the latest official casualty figures from the Casino de la Plage?’
There was a pause. ‘A.F.P. put over between thirty-eight and forty-five. There’s nothing definite yet. What have you heard?’
Neil hesitated. If he announced that he had been an eyewitness to the disaster, he’d have the whole Press Corps up in his room in five minutes. There was nothing he could tell them except that he was about to sleep with a member of the Secret Army. He told Hudson, ‘The Arab Front put a bomb under the orchestra and blew the whole place up.’
‘That’s what I heard. By the way, are you getting out when the airport’s clear?’
Neil said nothing.
‘I heard another rumour, that’s all,’ said Hudson.
‘What did you hear?’
‘That you’d been meeting up today with some more big noises in the Secret Army.’
‘Hudson, are you jealous?’
‘What the hell do you mean?’
‘Have you got any contacts at all in this place?’
‘Listen, Ingleby, I thought I’d tried to get through your thick damned English skull —’
‘You keep your contacts, Hudson, I’ll keep mine!’ Neil slammed down the receiver. Anne-Marie stirred beside him. He lay back and lit a cigarette, picturing to himself Hudson’s nervous little face bouncing about, scrapping for information, always eager to scare his colleagues. Perhaps it was the cognac and Chablis, but he had decided he would not just tamely obey the windy advice of Messrs. Hudson and St. Leger. He remembered his rendezvous the next morning at ten o’clock at the Cintra Café and wondered what would happen if he didn’t turn up. If he did turn up, of course, he was jumping right into the fire. But the Hine was warm in his belly and the prospect of that café was not as fearful as perhaps it should have been. He still had twelve hours in which to make up his mind.
Anne-Marie stretched out along the bed and laid her hand casually, innocently, between his legs. ‘Get undressed,’ she said.
He put out his cigarette and switched off the bedside lamp. The moon was bright over the balcony. He undressed quickly and lay down beside her, and her mouth crept down his chest, over his stomach, lips fluttering against his raw skin. She said nothing; but with the dexterity of her race, a pairing of competence and delicacy, began caressing him, as he lay back and felt himself harden with her touch, watching the cubes of moonlight on the ceiling.
The telephone rang. It was London via Paris; the Fleet Street operator came on the line. Anne-Marie shifted slowly, like a smooth dark animal, her back curving away along his line of vision as he switched on the light again and settled himself ready to dictate.
Foster, the Foreign Editor, was on the line: ‘Must have been pretty frightful. Reuters say it’s the worst atrocity since the troubles began.’
‘Sounds about right,’ said Neil; ‘There are no definite figures, but I’ve heard there were more than forty dead.’
‘Reuters give forty-seven. We’ll go on that for the moment. What sort of reactions have there been?’
The connection was not good, Neil had to shout into the receiver: ‘Very quiet so far!’
‘Right, bang over everything you’ve got! And I’ve had a hundred pounds sent to the Credit Lyonnais to keep you going. Are you all right otherwise?’
‘I’m all right!’ Neil yelled, and Anne-Marie muttered, ‘Tu cries comme un foul’ — and went back to caressing him beautifully as Foster said, ‘Putting you over to copy!’
The memory of the afternoon became a dull emptiness. Later, with the light out, she murmured, ‘What a funny language English is! All in your nose.’ And as he splayed her arms wide across the sheet he thought guiltily of his second call to London, booked for midnight. He remembered how Caroline mewed in the dark like a kitten, and he tried to shut out her face, not asking Anne-Marie again if she loved him, but going into her savagely till she cried out and whimpered against the pillow, and later lay folded warm and wet against him, the sheet over them and the windows open, listening to the sounds beyond the balcony: the booms and sirens and the soft chatter of gunfire and grasshoppers.
CHAPTER 2
Neil sat with a black coffee and croissant, alone in the café except for the waiter wiping down the zinc bar beside the expresso machine. The time was 10.12. He had left Anne-Marie in the hotel combing out her hair in front of the balcony windows. At exactly nine o’clock her dress had been returned by the Moslem, faultlessly washed and ironed. She had not paid him.
Neil had pressed some money into his hand outside the door, and before leaving had telephoned the Dutch Legation and told them he wanted to attend Van Loon’s funeral. He had arranged to meet Anne-Marie for lunch in Le Berry restaurant at half past one. He had then left the hotel, followed the street round to the Roxy Cinema, and entered the Café Cintra.
He knew, with a sense of perverse pleasure, that in the next few minutes he would reach the point of no return. To have slept with Anne-Marie might be one thing: to deceive her in this ugly game of fratricidal strife was almost certainly fatal.
He sat over his coffee with a sensation of having been drugged against the effects of acute physical pain. At this moment all he wanted was some means of immediate, violent escape: something to get him through the next few hours, days, to stop him thinking, stop him remembering what he had heard in the early hours of the morning. He had come here to find adventure, and he was going to get it.
His midnight call to London had come through at a quarter to three. The number had taken a long time to answer. When it did, Caroline was yawning with sleep, telling him she was going to marry Tommy Drummond next Saturday. He had started to yell at her, and she had said drowsily, ‘No darling, I’m serious.’ He had bawled into the mouthpiece, ‘You must be mad!’ and she had said, ‘I’m very fond of him, and you haven’t written to me for over a month.’
‘I was in a monastery!’ he had protested. ‘I’m stuck in the middle of a revolution!’ — and she had said, ‘Oh darling, it’s too late and I’m so sleepy’ — and he had tried to plead with her, her voice fading with long-distance whines and hummings, as he fought to change her mind, to postpone it, to make her wait till he got back. And far away, beyond the bay and the barricades, she had said, ‘Neil darling, I’ve made up my mind. Really, I love Tommy.’ And so it had gone on, while Anne-Marie slept through it all, the sheet wound round her like a shroud; and all he wanted was Caroline, and in a week’s time Caroline would be stepping out in white (in white, if you please!) to be married at Holy Trinity, Brompton.
The man came up to the table and bowed: ‘Monsieur Ingleby?’ He smiled, holding out a gloved hand: a tall, pale man of about thirty, with rimless glasses, no tie, carrying a raincoat over his left arm. ‘I haven’t time for coffee,’ he added, before Neil had spoken, ‘the car’s outside.’
Neil left some money on the table and followed him into the street in a state of febrile exhilaration.
‘The weather seems to have improved for your visit,’ the man said, steering the car along the Front de Mer, ‘we’ve been having a lot of fog lately.’ He drove carefully, without hurrying. They turned up from the sea into the main shopping boulevard, past names like Windsor, Guerlain, Mercedes Benz, across a great square and into
a hive of dark streets, between arcades peeling with posters, deep in garbage, where Neil saw for the first time Moslems mixing with Europeans — mostly old men with turbans like dirty bandages, shuffling between fruit stalls. This was a fringe area of European and Arab streets just below the Casbah. There were many killings here.
They were stopped by the CRS at a movable barbed wire barricade. The street beyond narrowed into a steep alley. It was very quiet. The driver flashed a plastic disc at the CRS officer who saluted, peering curiously at Neil, then ordered the barbed wire to be rolled back. The car moved forward, its engine growling softly. Steel-shuttered doors stood on either side, bolted down into the flagstones, and barred windows looked down from the swelling walls below a strip of sky far above.
The driver nosed the car along at walking pace, scraped round a corner and stopped with the window on Neil’s side opposite an iron door fitted with a Yale lock.
He pointed with his gloved hand: ‘You go through there. I’ll be waiting here with the car. You won’t be more than an hour.’ Neil tried to fight down the rising fear: ‘Where is this?’ His hand tightened round the hot upholstery.
‘You have nothing to worry about,’ said the driver, ‘just knock on the door. I’ll be waiting here.’
Neil opened the car door. A cat flicked across the street a few yards away. He stood up and closed the door, not banging it, and something moved behind one of the barred windows above. He thought, in a mad moment, of the crowds at Brand’s Hatch: woollen caps and fumes and pretty girls jumping out of Lotuses.
You should see me now, Caroline, he thought grimly, and rapped on the iron door.
It was opened by a man with a complexion like a slice of brown bread. He wore a khaki shirt and his eyes were flat and slanting. He looked at Neil, at the driver, then stepped aside. Neil followed him across a bare stone room like a cellar, up some steps and into an alley that climbed under the mouth of an arch.
The air had a thick musky taste: of charcoal and sweet ripe fruit and mutton fat, and the bitter acid taste of urine and pepper spicing and cheap black tobacco. The ground shelved upwards over sloping stones, wet and slippery, into a web of turnings and steps and tunnels under the baked mud, past miniature doors and arabesques smooth with age and sudden corners of shining white against a patch of sky.
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