Barbouze

by Alan Williams

  ‘You must have some influence!’ Neil cried. ‘Surely they’re not just going to leave me here to be killed, are they? Can’t you contact Paris and get them to do something?’

  Pol cleared his throat and spat on to the linoleum close to Neil’s foot. ‘The only thing you can do,’ he said, ‘is go to your Consulate. Perhaps they can bring pressure to bear. I can’t do anything.’

  ‘You did plenty earlier this morning!’

  Pol nodded, sipping whisky.

  ‘I suppose you planned it all back in Athens — using me as bait?’

  Pol looked up at him, and for a moment Neil thought he saw tears forming in his eyes. He realized that the man was in considerable pain. ‘Yes, I got the idea in Athens,’ Pol said feebly, ‘I thought it might work. The situation was getting desperate. We had to catch Guérin somehow, and I wasn’t particularly concerned about who did it. I’m not like these policemen — I don’t mind who gets the credit.’

  ‘Or who gets killed!’ said Neil, glaring at him as he lay there propped on his elbow, with the hibiscus drooping like a soiled napkin from his lapel. ‘You great fat lout!’ he snarled. ‘If you weren’t so fat, and could walk, I’d kick you down those eleven flights of stairs!’

  ‘Ah, you have an unkind tongue, Monsieur Ingleby!’ said Pol miserably, in pain.

  ‘I’m not feeling in a kind mood,’ said Neil. It was becoming like some preposterous lovers’ quarrel. ‘It’s a pity Peter Van Loon didn’t let Jadot kill you on the boat,’ he added, and Pol’s eyes rolled upwards, sad and swimming with tears: ‘Ah, don’t talk like that! I didn’t want to see you in danger, but you did ask for it.’

  ‘Ask for it!’ Neil yelled; ‘what the hell do you mean?’ He clenched his fists and took a step forward.

  Pol flinched slightly, took a gulp of whisky, and said. ‘This morning you told Guérin that I was waiting for him, didn’t you?’

  Neil stopped and gaped at him. The anger had suddenly gone: now he just felt tired and frightened and desperately in need of help. ‘No, Monsieur Pol. I told General Guérin that it was all right to go into the farm. I told him that the three Arab leaders were there and that the escort was in order. You convinced me. I broke my word.’

  For a moment Pol did not speak. The two of them drank in silence.

  ‘Very well,’ said Pol at last, ‘I will do what I can for you. I can talk to a couple of CRS I know here — they may be able to arrange to get you on to a plane. Or perhaps send an escort to your hotel. I can’t promise much, but it may help you.’

  At that moment a man came in to tell Neil that the car was waiting outside. He went without another word to Pol, down the eleven flights and past the three lines of CRS guards and the sandbags in the courtyard, with more troops and mounted machineguns, and down the steps to where the armoured cars waited facing the road into the capital.

  In the distance he could hear gunfire: not the sporadic crackle of small-arms, but a continuous rumble, slow and heavy, rolling through the humid air like thunder.

  The car was a small Renault and the driver a nervous-looking corporal who saluted as Neil got in and muttered, ‘It’s a bad time — they’ve started attacking the barricades.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘About half-an-hour ago.’

  Neil looked at his watch. It was 10.35. They had told him nothing about it at High Command headquarters. At nine o’clock, the corporal said, the radio had announced that General Guérin had been arrested and was on his way by military Caravelle to Paris. The rebels had been given one hour in which to surrender. They had stood firm; now 5,000 Gardes Mobiles, supported by fresh troops from France, were moving in to break the barricade.

  The corporal shook his head with dismal ferocity: ‘Ah, that it should come to this — French against French!’

  They passed long lines of troops in battle order and armoured vehicles along the road out of the hills into the city. There were roadblocks now at every corner and the troops grew thicker, colour of mud and olives, with guns on tripods up the boulevards, shutters down and cafés empty, jeeps sprouting radio antennae like squat brown insects.

  The streets up from the sea cracked and popped and stuttered with obscure echoes; then came the tearing crash of heavy artillery that made windows rattle, and the corporal cried, ‘That’s a cannon Trente-Six — they must be murdering them in there!’

  They turned into the wide curving boulevard towards the Front de Mer and looked down on the truckloads of troops below, helmeted, like wedges of green caviar. The corporal was pale and began crashing his gears, and Neil thought: perhaps this is how Duxelles wants it done. One Englishman, and one French corporal to spare, shot in action.

  There was a tank in the middle of the street outside the Miramar and a line of troops stretched away under the arcades opposite. The corporal pulled up in front of the hotel and cried, ‘Hurry! I want to get out of here!’

  ‘Could you take me to the airport?’ said Neil. ‘I’ve just got to pick up my luggage.’

  The corporal smacked the wheel with both hands: ‘You think I’m mad? — risk getting shot down by my own countrymen? No! I’m getting out of here!’

  Neil sat and said, ‘I’ll give you money. Plenty, just take me to the airport. The road there’ll be as safe as the one we’ve just come on.’

  The corporal pointed up the street: ‘That’s where the shooting is! Up there — the way to the airport! Go on, get out of here!’

  Neil got out and said, ‘Go to hell!’ slamming the door, and the little car bolted away like a frightened colt.

  At the desk the silver-haired receptionist gave him an odd, dead-eyed look as he handed him his key and a couple of telegrams. Neil said, ‘Can you call a taxi?’

  The receptionist shook his head: ‘You won’t get a taxi on a day like this, sir.’

  Neil went through into the downstairs bar. It was empty except for the sleek-haired boy who was putting out salted nuts on the tables. He could hear Hudson’s muffled voice bawling from one of the nearby telephone booths: ‘Yeah, it’s started — tanks, bazookas! No jets — yes. O.K.!’

  The first telegram he opened read ‘No reply explanation absence must assume serious situation Foster.’ It was dated the day before. The second telegram had been sent three days ago, late on Saturday night. ‘No copy or follow-up stop other correspondents filing stop where the devil are you reply immediately Foster!’

  He screwed the cables into little blue balls and bowled them across the bar at a spittoon against the wall. Both missed. Hudson’s voice bellowed out, ‘Yeah for Christ’s sake — G for George — U for Uncle — E for Edward — yeah, the big boy! — arrested this morning…’

  Neil went through and said: ‘Hudson, I’ve got to talk to you!’

  A hand waved angrily, head into the mouthpiece: ‘“After fierce gun battle” — not now, for Christ’s sake!’

  There was something about the way that receptionist looked at me, Neil thought. He would go up and pack, then find one of the other reporters. He started down the passage and met Tom Mallory coming from the lifts.

  ‘What a bloody din!’ Mallory’s hair rose like flames round a dark sun.

  ‘Have you been outside?’ said Neil.

  ‘Hell, I was trying to get a bit of kip! Woken up by those bloody guns. Let’s have a drink.’

  ‘You’re not going out to have a look at the fighting?’ Neil said, following him into the bar.

  ‘What’s the point? You can’t get near the barricades. Most of the Press boys are up on the roof. There’s nothing to see — just a lot o’ stupid buggers shooting at each other.’

  The sleek-haired barman poured two Scotch-on-the-rocks. They could still hear the crash of gunfire outside, but it seemed to be slackening now.

  ‘I heard you were down in the Bled,’ said Mallory, ‘anything doing?’

  ‘Nothing much.’ Neil was trying to decide how much he could safely confide in Mallory; for if he were to get out of this country alive he was goin
g to need help. Tom Mallory was hardly a rock of responsibility, but he possessed a certain reckless courage that Neil badly needed at this moment.

  ‘It’s all right for you, old boy,’ Mallory was croaking over his whisky, ‘you don’t have to file till the weekend. I have to give the sods a story every evening at six. You heard, by the way, that Guérin’s been arrested?’

  ‘Yes, I heard,’ said Neil. ‘I was there.’

  Mallory nodded. He was too old a hand to show surprise at anything anymore. He just said, ‘You’d better tell me about it.’ Neil gave him the brief outline, and Mallory listened with his huge hairy head down near the bar, breathing like a dog after a run. When Neil had finished he said glumly, ‘You’re in a fine bloody mess, aren’t you? Better have another drink.’

  ‘Officially, I’ve got till midnight to get out.’

  ‘I think you’d better get out before that,’ said Mallory.

  Hudson came skidding in, his tight little face forked with tension. ‘I heard at least a hundred dead!’ he cried. ‘They shelled the university.’

  ‘Well done,’ said Mallory, ‘have a drink.’

  Neil said, ‘I came in by boat. It should still be down at the dock.’

  ‘We’ll try that first, then the airport. But the last I heard, it was still closed when the fighting started.’

  ‘What is all this?’ said Hudson.

  ‘You’ll find out,’ said Mallory, ‘best story of the day.’

  ‘What do you think they’ll do?’ Neil asked.

  ‘Try and kill you. Both sides think you betrayed them. And these boys don’t let you off with just a warning.’

  Neil took a long drink and Hudson whined, ‘Hell, Tom! What’s all this?’

  ‘You’re not drinking your drink, Hudson,’ Mallory growled. He turned back to Neil: ‘Did reception see you come in?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘About a quarter of an hour ago.’

  Mallory nodded his great mane and said slowly, ‘They’re not likely to try anything before dark — at least not until the city quietens down. That gives us a bit of time. All the trains have stopped and the roads are closed. You might just manage to get out by boat. But your best bet is still the airport — if it opens in time.’

  Winston St. Leger came in, groomed and urbane as though it were Boodle’s. ‘I heard they’ve just packed it in, surrendered,’ he said, placing his homburg on the bar and popping an olive into his mouth.

  ‘That official?’ snapped Hudson.

  ‘I gather so.’

  ‘Have a drink, Winston,’ said Mallory.

  ‘Thank you, pink gin.’

  ‘We’re having a little talk about our friend Ingleby,’ Mallory went on, ‘he’s in a spot of trouble.’

  The drinks and the company made Neil feel better. He told his story again, in more detail this time, to Hudson and St. Leger. Hudson scribbled furious shorthand throughout, and at the end said knowingly, ‘Well, we warned you! Now you’re right in it.’

  ‘Drop dead,’ said Mallory, without venom. He turned to Stu Leger: ‘What do you think?’

  ‘It seems quite astonishing to me,’ said Winston, squeezing a blob of toothpaste on to an olive, ‘that the authorities refuse to give you any protection. Outrageous, in fact.’

  ‘You get yourself screwed up in this sort of situation, you can’t expect help from anybody,’ said Hudson. ‘You’re sure Ali La Joconde’s dead?’ he added. ‘Good! I gotta phone.’

  ‘Don’t mind him,’ said Mallory, tipping his stool recklessly on to one leg, ‘agency man — his ulcers start bursting on a story like this.’

  ‘Have you tried the Consulate?’ said St. Leger, sucking the nipple of his toothpaste tube.

  ‘To hell with the Consulate,’ said Mallory, ‘they can kill you as easily in there as in here. Only here it’s bigger and there are more of us.’

  Neil remembered Pol’s suggestion: ‘The Consulate might be able to persuade the French Government to get me out.’

  ‘They might,’ said Mallory, ‘but not in the time you need. You’ve got to be out of here tonight — or at the latest, tomorrow morning.’

  ‘Still, it would be a matter of form to contact the Consulate,’ St. Leger persisted.

  ‘Matter of form!’ Neil mimicked — ‘a lot of good that’s going to do me when I’ve got a bullet in my head!’

  ‘Yes, you’ve a point there, I grant you.’

  ‘Have another drink,’ said Mallory.

  ‘I ought to be going.’ Neil was beginning to feel drunk. Hudson’s voice came trumpeting through, amid a burble of foreign tongues on telephones: ‘Yeah for Chrissake, O C O N — French for Giaconda, like Mona Lisa with a J…!’

  Mallory held his empty glass up to the barman and screeched, ‘Nurse!’ His tilted stool suddenly crashed sideways, nearly rolling Winston St. Leger to the floor.

  ‘I saw that was going to happen,’ said Winston rather testily, and Neil said again, ‘I ought to go — I’ve got to pack.’

  ‘Stay and have another. Plenty of time.’

  ‘He ought to go,’ said Winston, ‘to be on the safe side.’

  The safe side! thought Neil. Winston St. Leger, sir, you overestimate the power of understatement.

  A number of reporters were coming down from the roof. The fighting had stopped altogether now. Neil rode up in the lift and began to walk down the corridor. He met no one and the only sound was the whirring of the air-conditioners. He remembered the last time he had been in his room. They had been there waiting for him. The receptionists had let them in, and they had sat there drinking his cognac, taking their time till he unlocked the door and walked in. If they came to kill him again — somebody other than the two legionnaires now this would be the first place they’d try. They’d be in there waiting. And Tom Mallory and Hudson and the rest would get a good story almost without having to step out of the bar.

  He reached the corner of the corridor leading to his room. There was still no one in sight. A sudden instinctive terror warned him to run. He looked up the dim rows of doors to an oblique shaft of sunlight from a window at the end of the passage.

  He turned and fled, back to the lifts. The one he had come up in was on the way down. He began to run down the stairs. He now felt very drunk, and once he slipped on the marble and nearly fell. He was sweating and out of breath when he reached the bar.

  A crowd of reporters had collected, with Mallory in the middle buying drinks. ‘What happened?’ he croaked. ‘You seen a ghost?’

  ‘Come on, let’s go!’ Neil said.

  ‘Where’s your gear?’

  ‘I didn’t get it. Come on!’

  Mallory tipped back his drink and heaved himself off his stool, and Winston St. Leger smiled nobly at Neil and said, ‘Good luck! Hope you get away!’

  Mallory had his Hillman Minx parked behind the hotel. They got in and headed down the Front de Mer. ‘You think there might be someone up in your room?’ he said.

  ‘There might be. There was last time. Two Foreign Legion boys. Germans. That was the start of it all.’

  ‘Disgusting Krauts,’ Mallory muttered, ‘all over the bloody place. I heard they’ve got some ex-Waffen SS boys here leading Jewish commandos in the Gambetta suburb. What would our modern sociologists make of that?’

  They had reached the end of the Front de Mer where the ‘Serafina’ had been moored under the sea-wall. It seemed a long time ago: less than a week. Neil climbed out into the sunlight and thought, God I feel drunk, as he watched the CRS men come forward from under the palms.

  ‘You can’t stay there!’ shouted the officer. ‘Go on, get moving!’

  Mallory had produced a reel of international Press passes like a postcard rack, growling at the guards who only shook their heads and waved him on with the muzzles of their machine-pistols. ‘Allez, passez, messieurs, passez!’

  Neil stood weakly against the parapet of the sea-wall and watched the ‘Serafina’ below, bobbing whi
te against the brilliant blue, feeling the glow of whisky dying in him with a flat sour taste as he listened to Mallory croaking at the CRS with mock rage. But the guards only shook their heads again and began to hustle him towards his car. For a moment Neil thought he was going to hit one of them. It gave him a gloomy inspiration: why not assault one of the CRS and get himself arrested?

  Finally Mallory relented. He shook himself free and turned to Neil, hair flaming gold in the noon sun, his face like a flaking gargoyle: ‘Come on, old boy! Port’s closed. Nobody gets in, nobody gets out!’

  They climbed back into the Hillman and turned back down the Front de Mer: palms curving sharp against the sun like scimitars, balconies rising layer on layer, shutters clattering up and people coming down into the streets. Some of them might belong to Le Hir: anonymous black-jacketed toughs mixing with the crowds. Or perhaps Ali La Joconde’s men. But they’d have difficulty slipping into the European area. They certainly wouldn’t get past the receptionists at the Miramar. He wondered about Anne-Marie: was there some way in which he could contact her? Explain to her that he hadn’t been responsible for General Guérin’s arrest?

  ‘So you left your luggage at the hotel,’ said Mallory, ‘and you gave your key up, didn’t you?’ He frowned and thumped the horn at a couple of Gardes Mobiles in a jeep; they threw him a furious look as he swerved round them on the wrong side of the road. ‘Cretins can’t even drive straight! You know, you ought to have held on to that key. Best thing is pretend you’re still in the hotel. Then if the airport’s open, just sit tight till you get on a plane.’

  ‘I suppose I’ll have to collect the key, then?’ said Neil faintly. They were crossing the Place Lyautey. The two burnt-out cars they had passed on that first afternoon were still there, lying beside the statue of France’s greatest colonial pioneer, his bronze whiskers whitened with gull droppings.

  Another hundred yards and they’d be at the hotel.

  ‘No, forget about the key!’ said Mallory. ‘We’ll fix something for you.’ They were driving past the palm-groves at the entrance to the Miramar: ‘And even if you do get killed, you’ll still make the front pages. Blood and glory, old boy! Your photograph and everything.’