‘All right,’ said Neil, ‘what do you want?’
The big man began to swing the pistol between his knees. The young one said, ‘Er is ein dummer lump, glaub’ich!’ He looked back at Neil, still grinning: ‘You been up in the Casbah?’ He took a drink of brandy: ‘What yer been doing up there?’
‘I’m a journalist,’ Neil began.
‘We know you’re a journalist,’ said the young one, ‘what you think we been doing in yer goddam room for half an hour?’
‘It’s my job to go into the Casbah.’
‘Not with the guy you go in with, it isn’t,’ said the young one, turning his glass round in his hand, ‘you go in with a barbouze. You know what happens to barbouzes!’ The big blond man finished his drink and stood up: ‘Geh’wir los!’ He waved a hand at Neil: ‘Good cognac, this! Must have cost you a bit!’ He came across the room, his thick arms bent like an ape’s: ‘Come on, Englishman, we go downstairs.’
‘I’ve got to meet somebody,’ said Neil, ‘at half past one.’
They both laughed. The young one swung himself off the bed and mimicked in French: ‘I have to meet somebody!’
‘I’m meeting somebody from the Secret Army,’ said Neil.
‘You are not meeting anybody,’ said the big blond man, taking him by the arm and turning him round. Neil felt the pistol prod against his kidney.
The young one opened the door and they walked down the corridor, taking the stairs instead of the lift. The big man put the pistol away when they reached the foyer. Neil looked round him hopelessly, trying to find a face he knew — Hudson, St. Leger, Tom Mallory drunk or sober. The only person in sight was a tall stringy man with yellow hair, standing at the reception desk with a Gladstone bag and typewriter in a waterproof case. Just as they were crossing to the entrance the man picked up his luggage and turned. For an instant his eyes met Neil’s. It was a pleasant, dried-brown face the colour of an old leaf with very pale blue eyes. There must have been something about the way Neil looked at him, for the man gave a faint, confused smile.
‘Are you a journalist?’ Neil asked loudly, desperately, as he passed the stranger. It was his only hope. He felt the big blond man’s hand press into the small of his back, hurrying him towards the plate-glass doors.
The newcomer stopped: ‘Yes, I am indeed.’ He spoke English with a slight accent. ‘I am Nielsen,’ he went on, holding out a hand, ‘Carl Nielsen, Svens Dagblatt. I only just arrived now.’
Before Neil could take the man’s hand, the young one behind him said, ‘Sorry, sir, we got business! See yer later!’ He pushed Neil towards the entrance, past the receptionists who kept their eyes carefully averted. The Swede looked puzzled, waving a hand: ‘I will see you then. Goodbye!’
‘Goodbye!’ chanted the young one as they went through the plate-glass doors, then laughed, squeezing Neil’s arm: ‘Not much help, was he?’
Neil said nothing. They took him across the gravel to a black Citroën DS. A huge man who looked like a Corsican, with a square face and heavy moustache, sat behind the wheel; his brown suit bulged under the elbow. The blond man pushed Neil into the back and climbed in beside him. The young one sat up in front, and they drove away.
‘May I ask where we’re going?’ said Neil.
‘You find out,’ said the young one.
They passed two jeeps, an armoured car, guns and men in steel helmets. Neil stared out at them, and none of them looked back.
The young one turned suddenly: ‘You got a British passport?’
Neil nodded, trying to swallow; the inside of his mouth felt like scuffed leather.
The young one took out a cigarette. ‘You from London?’ he went on, sounding almost friendly.
‘That’s right,’ said Neil, his voice far outside him. The big man had the pistol lying against his knee again.
‘I know plenty journalists,’ the young one said, lighting his cigarette, ‘here — in Saigon — all full o’ shit!’ He sat there looking like a well-scrubbed American college boy. ‘You bastards know nothing,’ he added.
‘You must have been very young to have been in Saigon?’ said Neil, hoping to keep the conversation as polite as possible.
The young one nodded. ‘I was legionnaire first at seventeen years old in Saigon. I lied to ’em — told ’em I was twenty.’
‘Where do you come from?’
‘From Dresden. Now under the Bolsheviks.’ He smiled broadly: ‘For fifteen days I was a Werewolf in the Hitlerjugend. Ach, das war toll! Crazy days!’ He nodded towards the big blond man: ‘We two, we are in the Premier R.E.P. — Foreign Legion paratroopers. Best regiment in the world!’
The big man said, ‘Thirteen years I am in the Legion. Vetminh, Araben, alle Scheiss!’ He grinned with teeth like peanuts and spat on the carpet of the car.
‘Arabs, all shit!’ translated the young one, grinning too, proud of his English.
Neil knew that the Premier R.E.P. had been disbanded after the last putsch. ‘What do you do now?’ he said, trying to keep his voice steady.
‘You heard of “Gamma Commandos”?’
Neil nodded.
‘That’s us,’ said the young one, winking at the big blond man, ‘anybody fooling around, we put a bullet in his head. You see us driving past a bus stop — Moslems standing in a row with their veiled fatmas. We drive past — twenty-five, thirty kilometres an hour, wam-wam! — we get four, five Moslems in the head. The fatmas we leave standing. Good for bordels militaires!’
Neil suppressed a surge of nausea. He tried a new tactic. ‘I know your chief, Colonel Le Hir,’ he began, ‘I met him yesterday morning.’ They said nothing. Neil went on: ‘I’m supposed to be meeting one of his adjutants for lunch at half past one.’ It was ten past now.
‘You meet nobody,’ said the young one, ‘what you think we’re here for? You know Colonel Le Hir? O.K., you think you’re a big shot? Now shut your mouth!’
They drove on in silence, climbing into a hot, bleak street which Neil recognized as being near the place where he had crossed behind the barricades yesterday. The car stopped outside a café. The big man ordered him out and the young one followed, leaving the Citroën at the kerb.
The café was crowded with young men in blue shirts and leather jackets slamming pin-tables. A giant jukebox, like the control panel of an airliner, screamed out a number by Helen Shapiro. The record had a flaw in it that made a sound like tearing paper.
The big man pressed the pistol back into Neil’s kidney and the young one said, ‘Wir machen es hinten!’
Neil understood enough German to know what they meant: they were going to take him into the back of the café. They were going to kill him.
He felt a loosening in his bowels, blood pounding in his head, and an empty pain flowed through him, as the three of them began to walk down between the bar and the rows of flashing, clicking pin-tables. People turned and watched them: swarthy faces, sleek hair with Roman fringes, cowboys and smiling blondes in frilly panties lighting up along the tables behind them. The young legionnaire led the way, and some of the men in leather jackets smiled and joked with him as he passed. One of them jabbed him playfully in the solar plexus, and they both stopped for a moment, shadow-boxing with faces of mock pain. The legionnaire finally grabbed the man by the neck and called to the barman, ‘Give him a beer, Georges!’
Somebody said close to Neil’s ear, ‘Who’s the goose?’
‘Don’t ask questions,’ growled the big blond man, walking behind Neil with his ape’s arm dangling, the gun now at his side.
Helen Shapiro clicked off; there was a whir and clatter and a voice sang, ‘When I see you standing there — with the sunlight in your hair!’ Aren’t there any French pop songs? Neil thought.
The young legionnaire opened a door at the back of the café. Neil was pushed into a bare room with crates of bottles stacked along the wall. From behind him he heard laughter, the jukebox calling, ‘When I see your big blue eyes…’ The door slammed, shutting out the
howl of the bar. The big man said, ‘Up to the wall!’
Neil started to turn and the man pushed him on the shoulder so that he lost his balance. ‘Up to the wall!’ he yelled.
Neil straightened up. The wall was white-washed and empty. There was a window to the left looking into a yard. Suddenly he felt quite calm. He was never going to see Caroline again. That didn’t matter, he’d lost her anyway. He was never going to sleep with a girl again, never have another drink, another meal, see another film, spend any more money, write another word, talk to anybody, drive his car onto the air-ferry at Lydd, off for a sunny Continental holiday. He felt like a little boy who is being kept in during school Sports Day. The treat was over. He was going out like Van Loon: stretched naked on a slab in the municipal morgue. He remembered that he still hadn’t registered with the British Consulate. He began to walk towards the wall. Without turning round he said, ‘This isn’t going to do you any good. Colonel Le Hir is a sensible man — he’s not going to like the publicity of killing a journalist.’
He was two feet from the wall. God what a waste, he thought. The Foreign Office would kick up a bit of a fuss. They’d catch these two eventually. They might even get the guillotine. The young one came up behind him and hit Neil twice, once in the kidney, with a burst of pain that spread through his gut to his groin, then hard across the back of the neck.
The white wall went red and black and broke up into sparkling fragments. Neil waited for the noise: the crash of the gun, the bullet boring through flesh and bone, out the other side into the white plaster. But there was only a roaring like wind, then nothing.
PART 5: THE PEACEMAKER
CHAPTER 1
Pol wiped his face and neck with a handkerchief soaked in sweat and looked wearily across the desk at the Sûreté man. The whisky bottle stood at his elbow three-quarters empty next to a dirty glass. The Sûreté man was not drinking. He was stout and balding, with damp patches under the armpits of his sand-coloured shirt. He looked back at Pol and shook his head. ‘No, Charles, I’m sorry. There’s nothing I can do. The plan is impossible — a fantasy!’
‘A fantasy, perhaps,’ said Pol, ‘but it might work.’
They were on the eleventh floor of the High Command headquarters, an ugly concrete building on the wooded hills above the city. The room was stifling and stank of latrines. Two days earlier the plumbing, lift-shafts and generating plant had been destroyed by plastic bombs smuggled in by some of the three hundred employees. The incident had amused Pol when he first heard of it. The explosives had been secreted on the girl secretaries in places which even the CRS were too delicate to search, and the detonators had been brought in disguised as biros. The engineers estimated it would take at least a week to repair the damage. A mobile generator was supplying emergency current for telephones and lighting. There was no sanitation, no air-conditioning; and eleven flights of stairs to be climbed twice a day, were beginning to destroy even Pol’s sense of humour. He was obliged to wash and shave in cold Vichy water, and the Venetian blinds had to remain drawn all day. This was because somebody in the building had taken the trouble to paint white crosses level with a man’s chest on the windows facing the hills, where a sniper would have little difficulty using a telescopic rifle. Pol did not know whether it were meant simply as a gesture to intimidate him; but twice the crosses had been scraped off, and twice they had reappeared. He now drew the blinds and tried to ignore them.
The Sûreté man was saying, ‘The Department is quite definite about it. The final veto even came from Paris. We can’t go along with you, Charles.’
Pol lunged out and pounded his fat fist on the desktop, his eyes sore with sweat: ‘But we’re halfway there! Two more moves and we have them in the bag!’
‘I’m sorry,’ said the Sûreté man, turning his eyes to the floor. His hands shook with the effect of too many black coffees: ‘Your plan has been given every consideration, but the Department cannot sanction it. It’s too dangerous.’
Pol splashed an inch of whisky into the dirty glass, drained down half of it and sank back breathing hard: ‘I’m not suggesting a simple police exercise. Of course it’s dangerous! The people we’re dealing with are dangerous. Everything we do in this city is dangerous.’
‘But this is dangerous in a special way,’ the Sûreté man said patiently, ‘it could embarrass the Government and the local administration, that we cannot afford. Commandant Duxelles said so himself this morning.’
‘Damn Duxelles! He’s just a thick-headed policeman,’
‘He’s head of the Sûreté here. One should not speak too lightly of him. His decisions have to be accepted.’
‘Duxelles doesn’t make decisions,’ said Pol, ‘they’re made for him in Paris by a bunch of diplomats who know nothing about what’s really happening here.’
‘That may well be,’ said the Sûreté man, ‘but Duxelles is still responsible for the Department. I couldn’t possibly offer you my support without his authority.’
Pol grunted and relapsed into a moody silence. The Sûreté man went on looking at the floor. ‘And what about this Englishman?’ he said at last. ‘Supposing he gets killed?’
‘He won’t get killed.’
‘You’re taking a chance on that.’
‘It’s a chance worth taking. They wouldn’t shoot an Englishman.’
‘I hope not,’ said the Sûreté man, ‘we’ve got enough troubles without the British Government standing on our feet. What sort of fellow is he?’
Pol shrugged: ‘Insular, over-educated, rather stupid.’
‘I heard he was intelligent. He’s quite a well-known journalist, isn’t he?’
‘Well, intelligent perhaps, but not clever. Pas une fine mouche. These English don’t have a very catholic view of the world, you know. But at least he’s a genuine Englishman, not one of those people with Commonwealth passports. He’s a true gentleman.’ He used the word with a certain old-fashioned reverence. ‘That is the beauty of it,’ he added, ‘everyone still trusts an English gentleman.’
‘It’s as well they trust someone,’ the Sûreté man said grimly, ‘but your plan, Charles, is still out of the question. General Metz and the other commanders have political obligations here. If we go into something at this stage involving the Arab Front, we could swing the whole Army against us. It would be tantamount to political recognition.’
Pol roared and slammed the desk: ‘But we won’t have anything to do directly with the Arab Front!’
‘Perhaps, but if the full story ever leaked out it could precipitate a political scandal.’
Pol made a crowing noise and glared up at the motionless fan on the ceiling. ‘Political scandal!’ he muttered. ‘That’s all you policemen worry about! You’ve got a full-scale military revolt on your hands! Isn’t that a political scandal? What difference does it make if you get one more dirty editorial in Le Monde, when you have the big fish in the net? Is it going to spoil your chances of promotion?’ He swallowed the rest of his drink and poured himself another, licking the sweat off his upper lip: ‘I’m going ahead with it, anyway, whether I get your support or not.’
The Sûreté man nodded: ‘And who will you use?’
Pol gave a despairing shrug: ‘I shall use the barbouzes — those that are still alive. I have to do something to justify my salary.’
The Sûreté man shook his head and stood up: ‘It won’t work, Charles. And when it fails, understand that everyone involved — including this wretched Englishman — will get no help from any of the Departments. I have Duxelles’ word for that.’
‘Entendu,’ said Pol, finishing his whisky.
CHAPTER 2
Neil’s eyeballs felt like smooth heavy stones, and when he tried to open them the pain raced from his head to his spine, making him retch.
He could make out a white ceiling with patterns of shadow. From somewhere behind him came the clonk of ice cubes, the mewing of clarinet. He was lying on a sofa. His shoes and jacket had been removed and the fr
ont of his shirt was wet with vomit. He turned his head slightly and tried to sit up: there was a stiff ridge of muscle across the back of his neck. He raised himself on one elbow and peered across the room.
A girl in tight trousers stood at a table against the wall shaking a silver flask. At the end of the room windows opened on to the balcony where three men sat under sunshades drinking.
The girl turned and looked at him. He recognized the Jewish girl, Nadia. She went on shaking the flask and called out, ‘He’s awake!’
One of the men came in from the balcony: it was Colonel Le Hir. He came across the room in easy strides with a cut-glass tumbler in his hand. He stood in front of Neil, his pale-brown eyes flecked with yellow, and said, ‘Are you ready to talk?’
Neil put his stockinged feet on the floor and murmured, ‘Give me a drink.’
‘Nadia, one martini!’
‘I don’t want a martini,’ said Neil feebly, ‘I want a glass of water.’ He felt ashamed of the vomit down his shirt. ‘Is there somewhere I can wash?’ he added, as the girl came over with his drink. He felt sick and dizzy and half-asleep. The girl handed him a tumbler of water with a proud sneer and walked sinuously away towards the balcony. He saw now that the other men outside were the two legionnaires.
‘You can clean up later,’ said Le Hir; ‘first we’re going to have a little talk about what you were doing in the Casbah this morning —’
Neil was beyond subterfuge now. He was alive, on a sofa, not on a slab in the morgue; and the water was ice-cold, clearing his head, making him feel almost happy. He began telling Le Hir about his telephone call yesterday to Pol and the meeting that morning in the Cintra Café. Le Hir looked like a schoolmaster listening to one of his pupils confess to a serious misdemeanour.
‘I decided not to go,’ said Neil, ‘I didn’t want to get involved with Pol. That’s not what I’m here for.’
Le Hir nodded gravely.
‘But I changed my mind. I went after all. A man came and drove me up to the entrance into the Casbah. I can’t tell you where it was, except that it was behind a lot of fruit markets.’ He sipped the iced water: ‘When I came out the driver had had his throat cut, and your two boys were waiting for me at the hotel. Nice morning.’
Barbouze Page 15