Barbouze

by Alan Williams

  ‘Where are we going?’ said Neil.

  ‘The airport.’

  CHAPTER 2

  Out on the shimmering tarmac the Caravelles lay like sleeping swans. Neil sat watching them, twisted round on his high stool, drinking Pernod. After a moment he began to imagine that they were silver fish in a vast sunlit tank behind the plate-glass of the airport building. And to escape from the airport he would somehow have to swim into the belly of those fish and rise with them thousands of fathoms, high above the distant mountains, into the purple stratosphere where he would be cool and free, away from the crowds and sweat and danger.

  He and Mallory were at the upstairs bar overlooking the departure hall. They had been here for more than three hours now; and Mallory had written, in bold letters with his gold-topped Parker 51, the word ‘EXODUS’ twenty times down the back of the price-list.

  From somewhere in the ceiling came the stereophonic PING PING! and the seductive purr of a girl’s voice: ‘Air France regrette d’annoncer qu’aucun depart est prévu pour Paris’. The words floated down among the lozenge lamps, past the cases of perfume and silks and over-priced Kabyle jewellery, to the dove-grey couches and parquet flooring packed with scared, crumpled people: women weeping and children spewing and shrieking, squatting nerve-racked and exhausted over the pitiful litter of refugees — bundles wrapped in newspaper, and prams and dolls and strapped-up trunks too heavy to carry.

  Airhostesses, in trim tailored blue with sharply shelved hips, tapped across the floors carrying flight schedules. Only there were no flights. It was now 4.15 and no plane had left since the airport reopened shortly after midday.

  As soon as the barricades had fallen, the flight of the Europeans had begun. There were now more than two thousand of them inside the airport; and another five thousand waited along the roads outside, where threads of barbed wire and columns of CRS troops guarded the queues of cars and crowds.

  The Secret Army had broadcast an order that any European — man, woman or child — who tried to flee the country would be punished with death. The threat had now been extended to crews and ground staff who attempted to man a refugee flight. Shortly after one o’clock most of the airport staff had gone on strike; they had been followed by several of the Caravelle crews who came from France. Each plane was now being searched for bombs; crews, staff and airport officials were being questioned; and everywhere there was slow spreading chaos and panic.

  Neil watched the Caravelles and thought of boiled sweets before take-off, hostesses smiling like nurses, frozen lunches, orange streetlamps down the Great West Road. In his pocket next to his passport he had a white card with the number 57. Pol had at least managed to do that much for him. No air tickets were being sold or accepted; instead, everyone who arrived at the airport was given a numbered card, against a list kept by the CRS. Only five hundred numbers had so far been issued, and the list was now closed. The lucky ones might be able to get away that night. Neil’s number guaranteed him a place on the first flight.

  Mallory was explaining, almost inaudibly, his theory of expenses. As the day had drawn on his voice bad sunk from a croak to a whisper, punctuated by bursts of bronchial laughter that showed a few isolated teeth, like rusted nails at the back of his mouth.

  ‘Always stick to the small items,’ he was saying, in a low hiss, ‘confuse ’em with little things — thousands of ’em. They mount up. In Leopoldville I got away with “Five pounds, sending bananas to Congolese Parliamentarians”.’ He opened his mouth wide and laughed with a sound like toast being scraped, ‘Never try to make a big coup. I was chasing old Fuchs round the Antarctic. Bought myself a great fur coat — had to, I wasn’t going to freeze in a bloody sports jacket. Charged ’em almost what it cost — a hundred and fifty quid from Fortnum’s. I also went to town on the little items. You know, “hire of sleigh, hire of huskies, purchase of food to feed the huskies, fee for interpreter to give orders to the huskies, petrol for motorized sleigh when the huskies died”. Got most of it through, but the sods in the office wouldn’t pass the coat. Said the office never pays for reporters’ clothes. So they sent all the expense sheets back — exactly eight hundred and seventy-nine pounds six shillings’ worth, and I started all over again — sleighs, huskies, husky meat, interpreter’s fee, with purchase of radio transmitting equipment thrown in, adding a few quid to every item. Got it up to exactly eight hundred and seventy-nine pounds, six shillings.’ He paused, grinning vilely with his empty gums. ‘Then I put a little note at the bottom,’ he hissed, ‘I wrote: “Find the fur coat in this!”’

  His laugh broke into a hacking cough which almost shook him off his stool. Neil stared into his glass. The ice had melted and the dull green liquid was tepid and bitter-sweet and his head was beginning to sing. Mallory had called over one of the airhostesses. She was a delicate-boned girl with ash-blonde hair in a neat helmet-cut. She paused by the bar, head turned, listening as Mallory hissed at her in his abominable French, ‘Any chance of a flight?’

  ‘What number do you have, please?’

  ‘Fifty-seven.’

  She gave a contemptuous shrug: ‘Perhaps. I don’t know. The Secret Army say they’re going to blow up the planes if we try to take off. You’re not from here, are you?’

  ‘Journalists,’ said Mallory.

  ‘Ah, journalists!’ She nodded, looking suddenly fierce: ‘I’m not from here either, I live in Paris. I’m not getting mixed up in this mess. I want to get back alive!’

  Mallory cackled at her and she walked away. ‘You see, old boy, she’s intelligent — she wants to get back to her nice civilized sex-life in Paris. She doesn’t want to get blown up. Pity to see a girl like that blown up, don’t you think?’

  Neil nodded, focusing giddily. His Pernod glass had gently reproduced itself into two glasses, and there were two barmen and two dark faces with flaming hair. He squinted across the bar, watching the airhostess stepping down the shallow stairs, past the rows of refugees, babies on their backs screaming, the CRS prowling with guns at the hip — watching her slim legs and neat little haunches disappear behind one of the departure desks. Air France, TWA, El Al, BEA. Pictures of a beefeater in colour; Manhattan skyline at dusk, patterned with dominoes of light.

  He thought, if I don’t get out of this place in the next few hours, I’m going to die.

  He began trying to tell Mallory about Caroline. Mallory was coughing and spitting into his drink, hissing, ‘Well out of it, old boy! Well out of it! Sounds like a bed-and-breakfast girl.’ Somewhere close by a baby began a scratchy shriek, followed by other babies, all beginning to howl together with the instinct of dogs barking. Mallory was banging the bar for more drinks. Neil said slowly, trying to get the words out as if they were plums in his mouth, ‘She’s getting married on Saturday morning to a racing-motorist.’

  ‘Good! You’re all right, old boy. You skip your first marriage — get on with your second when you’re forty.’

  Down in the departure hall a group of CRS were grappling with a burly middle-aged man with grey hair and dark glasses. They had him by both arms, swinging him round with his legs splayed out absurdly behind him, as they began dragging him over to the airport police offices.

  The ash-blonde airhostess came out from behind the departure desk and trotted over to a glass partition in the Garderie d’Enfants. Neil watched her mistily, miserably, imagining the brass bedstead and flowered wallpaper in a Paris hotel: her slim body crisp as celery, wearing nothing but seamless stockings. Harmless sex fantasies of an English intellectual about to die. ‘Drink up!’ croaked Mallory, clinking glasses: two glasses, four, eight, multiplying and dividing, and Neil murmured, ‘Do you like sleeping with girls wearing only stockings?’

  ‘Don’t mind. With or without.’ Mallory looked at his watch. ‘I’ll have to go soon, old boy. Got to file copy.’

  Neil felt a griping panic, a terror of being left alone among these thousands of destitute helpless people. He knew suddenly that he was going to die. Mallory
was finishing his drink, saying, ‘By the way, I heard you had a nice little bird in your room last week?’

  Neil stared at nothing. Mallory went on, ‘There was a funny rumour going round. I don’t know where it started — there’s a lot of gossip in the hotel. Receptionists don’t miss much.’

  Neil was trying to exercise his stiffening face muscles, while Mallory gave him a rusty leer, speaking now with a crafty look in his eyes: ‘Only hearsay, old boy, but the rumour got around. Those bloody receptionists. You want to know what it was?’

  ‘What? What are you talking about?’

  ‘The girl you had up in your room.’

  ‘Oh yes.’

  ‘D’ye know what they’ve been saying?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘In the hotel. People in the hotel. Gossip, old boy. Evil gossip.’

  ‘What did they say?’

  ‘Somebody heard that the girl was the stepdaughter —’ He broke off with a violent bout of coughing that seemed to send bits of his face flying off in all directions, his whole physiognomy breaking up like a jigsaw puzzle.

  ‘Stepdaughter?’ said Neil.

  ‘Stepdaughter of none other than the illustrious Colonel Pierre Broussard.’

  Mallory’s two purple faces quickly elided. Neil blinked, swallowed drily, tried to think. Mallory was saying, ‘Who is she? It would be a bloody magnificent story if it was true.’

  Neil held on to the edge of the bar. It made sense: she had been in Broussard’s flat, she had been on friendly terms with Le Hir, she had known all about Athos. And she had tried to warn him that night in the hotel; then later, in Le Hir’s flat, she had refused to talk about anything. She would have known what was going to happen: the plan for the flashed headlamps and the mortars in the mountains.

  Mallory said again, ‘Who was she, you randy old lecher?’

  ‘I don’t know. Some girl from the Secret Army. She had supper with me. Very innocent.’

  Mallory made a gurgling noise: ‘There was an American in Leopoldville who managed to lay one of Lumumba’s Belgian lady advisers, so-called.’

  Neil wondered: if it were true would it make things better or worse? Would she believe that he had betrayed Guérin? Perhaps it didn’t matter in the long run. Distantly, through layers of numb brain tissue, he heard a girl’s voice calling to him: ‘Air France annonce le depart de leur premier vol vers Paris —’

  The atmosphere suddenly intensified. From the main hall came a surging sound like the sea. Mallory was tugging at Neil’s elbow, calling for the barman: ‘Come on, you’re off!’

  Neil slid from the stool and felt the floor lurch under him like the deck of a fast ship. He walked carefully, with a slight keel to port, down the shallow stairs behind Mallory, listening to the girl’s voice all round him: ‘Tons les passagers munis de cartes de police numerotées l’un jusqu’au quatre-vingt-douze doivent se présenter au Guichet Zéro!’

  Numbers One to Four — Twenties-and-Twelve. Ninety-two. And he had number Fifty-seven. It was like the incantation of some sinister lottery.

  Across the main hall the crowds were stirring with restless anticipation. Those who were among the lucky numbers were hurrying, pushing, shouting, scrambling to get into the untidy column forming outside Guichet Zéro. An illuminated board had flashed on above the head of a bull-necked CRS with horn-rimmed sunglasses: ‘DEPART ORLY 1900 H.’

  At the far end of the hall, beyond the main entrance, Neil caught a glimpse of more crowds, and cars jammed three abreast along the dual-carriageway into the city, with motorcycle escorts droning up and down beside them in the dusty heat. Like an August Bank Holiday, he thought, with guns.

  Now that he was standing up he realized that he was very drunk indeed, but with no sense of elation or release — only a giddy nausea, accentuated by the feverish sobriety all round him.

  Since they had no luggage, they found themselves near the head of the swelling queue which edged slowly, under growing pressure, towards the departure desk. Here the passengers were being examined by three CRS. The first studied each passport, checking names against a list of Secret Army suspects; the second checked the numbered cards, and the third searched the passengers for arms and explosives. The bull-necked CRS man with the sunglasses stood beside the desk covering the queue with his machine-pistol.

  Most of the passengers were either old, or very young children. Behind Neil was a fragile man of about seventy with a white waxed moustache, standing next to a pasty-faced woman who looked like a Spanish fishwife. She was laden with a heap of parcels and cardboard boxes, while he struggled with an enormous Empire clock. The pendulum stuck out from under the mechanism like a spear. While they were standing still the old man guarded it between his bow-legs, bending slowly down whenever the queue began to move, heaving it up to the level of his knees. Each time he laid it down his face had turned blue about the lips and his old watery eyes would fall on Neil and Mallory with a look of faint shock.

  Mallory’s appearance had become fearful, and his bouts of asthmatic coughing were now exploding at regular intervals, between which he kept up a hissing, spluttering conversation. Neil made muddled efforts to follow what he was saying, knowing vaguely that they should be helping the old couple with their luggage. He thought, if I take more than two parcels I may fall over. Mallory’ll have to take the clock.

  They were coming close to the desk. Neil looked at his watch and saw that it had stopped at twenty past four. ‘Have you got your card ready?’ Mallory croaked close to his ear. Neil fumbled inside his jacket, got out his passport, numbered card and deportation order.

  ‘All right for money?’

  Neil nodded: ‘I’ve got traveller’s cheques.’

  ‘You’ll be all right,’ said Mallory, ‘if anything goes wrong and you can’t get away after all, give me a ring at the Miramar.’

  Neil focused on him with difficulty and held out a hand; ‘You’ve been very good, Tom. Thanks. Thanks for everything.’ Behind him the old man was again grappling with his monstrous clock. Neil leant down and murmured, ‘Permettez-moi.’ He stood up clasping the edifice to his chest, peering at Mallory’s baroque face: ‘I’ll buy you a drink back in London. Bottle of champagne.’

  ‘Never touch the stuff, old boy. Gives me wind. You can buy me a bottle of whisky at Raymond’s Revue Bar.’

  ‘I’ll do that,’ said Neil.

  Mallory shook him by the arm, and Neil watched him shamble away across the hall, walking like an old man whose limbs are not perfectly co-ordinated.

  The CRS guard said, ‘Passeport! Carte de depart!’

  Neil lowered the clock and handed over his papers. The man studied them, then passed the deportation order to his colleague, who lifted a telephone, spoke a few inaudible words, nodded and hung up. The first CRS man waved his hand: ‘Ça va, passez!’ The third man stepped up and patted Neil under the elbows, on his hips and between his thighs and knees. Neil remembered that this was how it had all begun: six days ago at the Piraeus, with the puffy-faced policeman frisking him and Van Loon. Only this time it was done more gently, almost as though he were being measured for a suit.

  He was still holding the Empire clock. The old man and the fishwife were coming through behind him, ready to be searched. Neil took a step sideways and tripped over the woman’s heap of parcels. His elbow, sank deep into one of the cardboard boxes which was full of crockery. He heard a soft crunch, and the fishwife shrieked something, and the CRS man glared down at him: ‘What’s going on?’

  He realized that he must be looking conspicuously drunk. He murmured something about tripping: ‘Lost my balance — fell over the luggage.’ He struggled up, and the little old man grabbed back the clock, touching it all over to make sure it had not been damaged. Neil could hear him muttering to himself, making no effort to thank Neil for his trouble. But Neil felt relieved, his conscience salved; he had carried the old man’s clock, and he was through the CRS checkpoint, walking up the sloping corridor to the departure loung
e.

  From the tall windows over the airport he could see the Caravelles being nosed slowly round, taking up their positions in line at the end runway. Men in blue-and-white overalls scuttled round the planes with flags, and black-helmeted CRS weaved about on motorcycles, while more CRS foot-patrols stood under the wings and near the doors. A caterpillar convoy of Total oil trucks was winding across the tarmac towards the first Caravelle, ‘La Princess d’Aquitaine’.

  The departure lounge was quiet and restful, except for the burbling of a few infants in arms. The bar and the souvenir counter were open, presided over by a handsome middle-aged woman with a gleaming bell of dyed-blonde hair. Neil went to the bar and ordered a black coffee; and wondered whether it would do any good at all buying Caroline a four-ounce bottle of Balenciaga perfume. Next to him a harassed mother with a small girl was pleading with the blonde woman at the counter. The child was pointing at a doll in Kabyle national costume, whining softly and tugging her mother’s sleeve. The blonde woman shook her head: ‘I am sorry, madame, but the company does not give away presents.’

  The mother had her purse out and was hunting through some loose change. ‘I’m expecting some money when we get to Paris,’ she muttered.

  Neil moved forward and said, with a pronounced slur that seemed to come from behind his left ear, ‘Do you want to borrow some money, madame?’

  Both women glanced suspiciously at him. The mother looked embarrassed and the blonde woman’s face hardened as Neil went on, ‘Does your little girl want to buy a doll?’

  The mother was confused, tired and pale, glancing at the whining wide-eyed child. Neil took an ironic pleasure in the scene: the floor was still swaying, his head throbbed, the faces blurred, the child went on gaping at him. He realized that he was not a prepossessing character to meet in a crisis; but he persevered, enjoying his philanthropic role, asking the blonde woman, ‘How much is the doll?’