Barbouze
Page 18
Neil breathed slowly, deeply, trying to keep his heart steady, as he walked over the last few yards to the gates. He could now clearly see the man in the watchtower, with two others peering at him through the embrasures on either side. They had small dark faces under khaki forage caps, and the muzzles of their burp-guns were trained on his head.
The gate was of broad timbers clamped together with rusted bolts. He pushed, and it swung inwards with a wooden creak, showing a whitewashed passage leading into the courtyard. He stepped inside, past a couple of bald tyres propped against the wall. There was a dead silence in the building that made him want to shout and run and show himself, like a child playing hide-and-seek who longs to precipitate the inevitable shock of discovery.
For this was no ordinary silence; not the silence of solitude, of no sound, but of a crowd, of sounds suppressed, of silent breathing and watching and waiting: a fearful, furtive hush, as he walked almost on tiptoe, through the passage, out into the yard.
They were there by the wall, sitting in the open behind a green baize table laid with notepaper, carafe of water and upturned tumblers, like three people waiting to make up a bridge party.
Dr. Marouf rose and bowed; beside him Abdel Boussid gave his pouting, fish-eyed smile, while Ali La Joconde simpered frozenly at the table.
Three Moslems in grubby, makeshift uniforms and forage caps stood beside the table holding their burp-guns at the ready. Neil looked carefully to make sure they were not also carrying pistols or grenades. Three on the walls, he thought, three down in the yard. Dr. Marouf said, ‘We welcome you, Monsieur Ingleby, and trust everything is in order?’
Neil looked round the yard. ‘You have only these six men?’
‘That is correct,’ said Marouf.
‘I should like to look round for a moment,’ said Neil, taking a sudden officious pride in his task, determined not to skimp any final detail. Marouf’s face remained pleasantly inscrutable; he said, ‘You have our word, Monsieur Ingleby.’
The dull light of the yard shone on Boussid’s upturned pebble-glasses. He said gently, ‘There is not much time, m’sieur. We cannot wait here all morning. You have seen our escort — they are armed as we agreed. There are no more of them. So if General Guérin’s delegation is ready, let them come in and we can begin our discussion.’
Neil hesitated. There was something that worried him about the silence of the place. He remembered Colonel Broussard’s words: ‘They are brilliant liars.’ And what were they doing sitting outside as well as at the preposterous green baize table? Why weren’t they inside? He looked round at the windows of the farmhouse. They were opaque with dust, and several panes were cracked and boarded up with newspaper. There was an outside staircase up to the rampart round the walls. Both the Moslem guards in the embrasures, as well as the one in the watchtower, were still covering him with their guns.
He turned to Boussid: ‘If I am to trust you, tell your men to take their guns off me.’
Boussid gave a guttural order, and the three men moved back to their places overlooking the plain.
Neil began to walk over to one of the ground-floor windows. Behind him Dr. Marouf called, ‘I must warn you, monsieur, that you are wasting our time!’
Neil peered through the window and saw a bare room with an iron stove against the wall. He moved on to the next window, ignoring Marouf. A few inches beyond the grimy panes he found himself looking down the funnel-shaped barrel of a Douze-Sept machinegun. The room behind was full of men.
He stepped back and dodged sideways, flattening himself against the wall by the window. The Douze-Sept did not fire. Across the yard both Boussid and Dr. Marouf were on their feet, and the three guards by the table were coming forward with their guns up, pointing at Neil’s stomach. Only Ali La Joconde seemed unaware of what was happening, crouched forward staring at the green baize.
Neil drew in his breath and yelled in English, ‘You damned traitors! You bloody little —!’
Marouf snapped an order in Arabic and the three guards stopped. Neil, in fury and confusion, went on swearing at them in English.
A door opened beside him and someone laughed, shrill and lilting like a woman’s laugh.
CHAPTER 7
Pol stood there in the doorway swaying on the balls of his tiny feet, smiling his cherry-lipped smile, with the kiss curl pasted down in an elegant loop across his shining brow and an outrageous mauve hibiscus flopping from the lapel of his rumpled suit, with tie askew.
He thrust out his short little arms and walked up to Neil, clucking like a hen: ‘Ah, you look surprised, my dear Ingleby! I gave you a bit of a turn perhaps?’
Marouf and Boussid had sat down again, and the guards had lowered their guns, watching. Pol stopped in front of Neil and began patting him on the arm, grinning sublimely.
‘You bastard!’ said Neil, under his breath in English. ‘You fat French bastard!’
‘Qu’est-ce qu’tu dis?’ Pol crooned, still grinning and patting his arm.
‘You’re not going to get away with this,’ Neil said, this time in French, ‘I don’t know what you think you’re trying to do here, but whatever it is, it’s not going to work.’
Pol was still grinning, but his eyes now had a cold sly look. He flapped his hand towards the gate: ‘Is he out there?’
‘He won’t walk in here,’ said Neil. ‘I’m keeping my word, even if you’re not.’
The cherry-lipped smile set tightly at the edges: ‘He’s in the Jaguar, then?’
Neil said nothing. He nodded at the farmhouse windows, ‘Your men won’t be able to take him. If I’m not back in a few minutes, he’ll drive away. He won’t come here until I give him the word.’
Pol began patting Neil’s arm again, and his smile now became sad and wistful: ‘I’ve been counting on you, Monsieur Ingleby.’
‘And I on you,’ said Neil, ‘and you bring along half the French Army!’
Pol laughed: ‘Half the French Army! My dear Ingleby, they wouldn’t even spare me one conscript!’ He turned and kicked open the door. Inside were about a dozen men, all Europeans in civilian clothes, crouching along the walls and round the Douze-Sept that pointed at the window. They wore machine-pistols and grenades. Pol closed the door and looked at Neil, ‘Barbouzes,’ he said, ‘riff-raff, dregs of the nation.’
‘I thought you said you were a barbouze!’ Neil murmured, his anger weakening to a sense of futility.
Pol shrugged: ‘Ah, the status of the barbouzes has very much declined, I’m afraid. We don’t get the material we used to.’
‘What were you hoping to do?’ said Neil.
‘Kill Guérin when he came in.’ He nodded towards the watchtower: ‘There’s another Douze-Sept up there, and a bazooka. I was counting on them coming right up to the gates. Of course they’re out of range now — even with the Douze-Sept.’
‘You won’t get them anywhere near the gates,’ said Neil, ‘unless I tell them to come. And I’m not going to tell them.’
Pol nodded, holding Neil gently by the elbow. ‘The man out there in the Jaguar,’ he said, speaking with quiet intensity, ‘is a Fascist — a terrorist, Monsieur Ingleby. He is not an ordinary criminal, he does not merit ordinary personal loyalties. He threatens a great nation, a whole democratic tradition. We are at war with this man. You must understand that!’
Neil thought of Le Hir, the German legionnaires, the serpents of blood and flaying feet and the crowds smiling at death: and of the man who was responsible for it all, waiting out there in the Jaguar behind the Venetian blinds, old and tired, threatening the French nation. He said wretchedly, ‘What can I do? I gave my word!’ He looked over at Marouf, Boussid and Ali La Joconde: ‘They gave me their word too.’
‘Sometimes one is obliged to break one’s word,’ said Pol; his fat little fingers tightened round Neil’s arm. ‘Go back, Monsieur Ingleby, and tell General Guérin that all is well here.’
‘And then what?’
‘You will be protected.’
Pol nodded and pulled out a pistol. ‘Monsieur Ingleby,’ he began, with studied formality, ‘I shall have to force you to do as I say.’ He poked the blunt barrel into Neil’s chest.
‘You can’t force me to do anything,’ said Neil, ‘and put that ridiculous thing away! You’re not going to kill me.’
Pol took a deep breath, looked down at the gun, sighed, and finally put it away again inside his rumpled jacket, shaking his head: ‘You are lucky I’m a humane man! It wouldn’t be difficult to have you shot. We could always say it had been done by the Secret Army.’
‘If you kill me,’ said Neil, ‘you lose your last chance of getting Guérin. If I don’t walk back out of that gate in a couple of minutes, Guérin will know something’s wrong. Your only hope is to let me go.’
‘Will you tell them it’s clear to come over?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Neil, ‘I haven’t made up my mind yet.’
Pol’s eyes flashed with sparks of rage: ‘Monsieur Ingleby, don’t play the comedy with me! I might shoot you just out of irritation. And you are being very irritating at this moment!’
Neil realized that he was not joking. The six armed Moslems stood all round, waiting for the order. Pol was angry: somehow Neil had touched him on the raw. Perhaps he had been too offhand, or too scrupulous. Why should Pol give a damn about ‘keeping one’s word’ when it came to catching a man like Guérin? For that matter, why should Neil?
He knew that if Pol thought he was going to walk out of here and tell Guérin that there was a trap waiting, he would be shot dead before he got beyond the gates. ‘All right,’ he said, ‘I accept. I’ll go back to the car and tell them to come.’ He nodded and turned and began to walk across the yard, down the whitewashed passage with its two bald tyres and the gates standing half-open. He had been in the farm for more than fifteen minutes. He would have to hurry.
Behind him he could feel Pol watching him, the pistol inside his coat, his eyes hard and thoughtful. Pol waited until Neil was past the gates, then turned and went up the outside staircase to a room on the first floor where a radio-transmitter stood with an aerial trailing out of the window like a fishing rod.
One of the barbouzes followed him: a slouching oaf of a man who had been thrown out of the national gendarmerie after a prisoner in his charge had died of a brain haemorrhage. Pol felt dejected and ashamed at having to deal with such men.
‘So what happens now?’ asked the barbouze.
‘We wait,’ said Pol, ‘the Englishman is going to tell them it’s all clear.’
‘Supposing he warns them? He’s under their orders, not ours.’
‘If he warns them, it’ll be just too bad!’ Pol growled, switching on the transmitter.
‘We could still shoot the cars up.’
‘They’re out of range.’
‘For the bazooka, perhaps, but we might get them with the Douze-Sept.’
Pol shook his head: ‘The car’s got armoured plating. Anyway, even if he does warn them and they try to get away, they won’t get far.’
The radio came on with a high swooping moan.
CHAPTER 8
Neil walked away from the farm at a brisk but controlled pace, resisting the urge to run. He knew he had not convinced Pol; but he also knew that Pol would have to take a chance on him. He would not dare shoot him now. Nevertheless, as Neil walked on, he was conscious of that over-sensitive itching at the back of his neck, just below the cranium. He felt more at ease when he was a few hundred yards away, out of range of the Moslem guards’ burp-guns.
The mist was beginning to lift, and he could see the three cars standing just as he had left them — the pale slender Jaguar as impressive here as in its showroom in Piccadilly.
He slogged over the last stretch of dirt track, and the silence was again total. He remembered that in four days and about four hours, Caroline would be a married woman. He now noticed that the number plates on the two Citroëns had been changed. It was Le Hir who appeared first, slamming the car door. ‘Where the hell have you been?’ he yelled. ‘You were in there nearly twenty minutes!’
Neil took his time before answering. He walked almost past Le Hir, towards the Jaguar, and said, ‘I had to make sure everything was in order.’
‘Well, was it? Are the three of them there?’
‘Yes, they’re there,’ said Neil.
‘And their escort? How many men have they got?’
‘Six men,’ said Neil, ‘they’re armed with machineguns — as we agreed.’
‘Are they waiting?’
‘Yes, they’re waiting. They told me they don’t want to waste any time. They want to get on with the talks.’
Le Hir nodded, with a curious secret smile; and Neil opened the door of the Jaguar.
General Guérin sat with his hands folded in his lap, his face strained and grey, preserving a deceptive calm. He looked eagerly at Neil, but Le Hir thrust his head in first and said something that Neil did not catch. Guérin leant forward and rapped on the glass partition. Neil saw the driver flick down the headlamp switch twice, dipping the beam with each flash with his foot.
Three seconds later there came a series of quick rasping sounds far off through the fog, like iron scraping on iron, followed by a thudding echo. Neil looked in the direction that General Guérin was looking towards the farm.
The mist was rising swiftly now, and he could see the white outline of the walls, which shimmered and seemed to break up like a smudge of smoke across the fields. At the same time there came a rapid clonk! clonk! clonk! CLONK! — and as he stood by the car door, the sound waves bounced through the mist and seemed to touch him like lapping water.
He heard the rasping WANG! WANG! from the direction of the mountains, and the shape of the farm now collapsed visibly, like a card-house going down, the speck of the watchtower suddenly gone.
Guérin was out of the Jaguar, getting into the second of the Citroëns, its engine roaring, and Le Hir was pushing Neil through the other door, climbing in afterwards, as the car, began to turn off the track, followed by the other Citroën, with the Jaguar behind.
The explosions now followed fast: the rasping of the mortar fire and the bombs exploding with thick clonking bursts, in a field of fire measured to a couple of feet.
Le Hir was giving orders to the driver. At the turning into the dual-carriageway, Neil saw the Jaguar streak off towards the city. The two Citroëns bumped over the centre verge and screeched round, facing down the coast. In the first car Guérin, Le Hir and Neil were thrown back as the driver accelerated, foot flat on the floor, with the lead-grey road climbing towards them, as the hydraulic springs lowered the chassis to within a few inches of the shrieking tarmac.
Le Hir began to laugh. He turned to Neil: ‘They weren’t expecting that! Where were they, by the way? In the farmhouse?’
‘They were in the courtyard,’ said Neil, ‘they had a green baize table out, with a carafe of water, glasses, everything.’
Le Hir shook his head, still laughing: ‘Ah, c’était vraiment trop facile.’
Neil stared out at the maize and tobacco fields, watching the mist rise into the pale sun, experiencing an odd, abstracted sensation, like the weightlessness that follows a night of heavy drinking. He no longer cared about Guérin or Pol or Ali La Joconde. What had happened back in the farmhouse seemed suddenly unreal, unimportant. He wondered where Caroline would go for her honeymoon. He said to Le Hir: ‘I suppose you consider it a pretty good operation?’
‘Five mortars,’ said Le Hir, ‘four for each corner of the yard, and one for the centre. Twenty shells, with an expanding arc of fire!’ He laughed again.
‘It might have gone wrong,’ said Neil.
Guérin was
not listening; he too sat watching the fields swing past the windows.
‘One has to take risks,’ said Le Hir cheerfully, ‘but why should it have gone wrong? After all, they trusted us!’
CHAPTER 9
The driver had hidden the machine-pistols in a rug under the front seat. They were driving again at more than one hundred miles an hour, heading for the bridge across the Oued Zain and the highway south into the mountains to the town of El Mansour.
It was twelve minutes since they had left the road up to the farm. The second Citroën, with the two legionnaires, was fifty yards behind, as the road began to spread out like a slender hand into three, four, five lanes, sweeping into the clover leaf or flyovers just before the Oued Zain Bridge. White arrows flashed out across the tarmac, south to El Mansour, to the mountains and the desert, and west, back towards the capital.
The Citroën slowed with a sigh, as they came in sight of the bridge: a single span of concrete like a white bone reaching across the parched bed of the Oued Zain. The sun peered through the mists, a silvery yellow shining on the stony channels that forked towards the sea.
There were several cars approaching them in the oncoming lane, as they swooped into the booming darkness of the underpass and rose into the steep bend that looped up to the head of the bridge.
The driver braked hard. They had not been able to see the road block from below the clover leaf. There were squat concrete pillboxes at either end of the bridge, and a convoy of Army trucks was lined up on the far side. A couple of jeeps and a mixed unit of three soldiers and three CRS was guarding the entrance to the bridge, turning back the traffic.
A queue of cars stood in front of them. A young NCO was examining papers, and a couple of CRS men strolled round the cars, looking at number plates and poking about in the boots.