Barbouze

by Alan Williams

  The mother cut in hastily, ‘Non, monsieur, je vous en prie —!’ Her words were broken off by a loud thud from outside. They all looked at the windows. Men were running across the apron, away from the Caravelles. The CRS motorcycles snarled out from under the wings and two men leapt from the driver’s cabin of the Total fuel convoy.

  White smoke was drifting along the belly of the ‘La Princesse d’Aquitaine’, crawling up the sides of the fuselage close to the jets. In the lounge somebody screamed. There was a movement, shouting, pressing round the windows.

  Neil was halfway across the floor when it happened: a roaring boom, followed by a crack that shook the plate-glass. The slim silver body of the Caravelle had burst into black billows of smoke that opened into swelling cauliflowers of orange flame, spreading across the runway, covering the second and third Caravelles, while the sirens started up and bells began to ring inside the terminal. The seductive girl’s voice purred from the ceiling, unobtrusive, undisturbed: ‘Tous les passagers munis de cartes de police numerotées —’

  They were ordered back to the main hall. The little girl was trotting after her mother, still whining about the doll. The mother turned at the door and slapped her, and the child set up a high artificial scream of pain that wailed down the corridor towards the departure desks.

  Neil took a last look across the lounge and wondered if he would ever see it again. Perhaps in another hour, two hours, after nightfall. He saw the little old man stumbling across the floor with his Empire clock, at the heels of the black-haired fishwife who led the way with her pile of parcels held aloft, like some ludicrous offering to the gods. To answer what prayer? Neil wondered, walking slowly, drunkenly, wanting to curl up in a corner and sleep.

  He passed the three CRS at the departure desk and asked wearily, ‘Have you any idea at all when we’ll be leaving?’

  One of them grinned: ‘Next year perhaps — if it goes on like this.’

  Neil walked on into the main hall, between the hunched waiting crowds; and he wondered how long the end would now be, and how it would come, and who would do it.

  CHAPTER 3

  The sun went down and Colonel Broussard sat up in his cramped rented flat, smoking opium and staring at his reflection in the table varnished like a dark mirror. In his left hand he held a long-stemmed pipe of china clay; in his right, in the closed palm, lay the 100-sestertii piece that had once paid off Brutus’ troops in Egypt.

  Across the table sat two para troop captains, their adjutants, and Broussard’s personal bodyguard and chauffeur, Serge Rassini — the big black-haired Corsican with the bandit moustache. They had been in conference all afternoon, passing orders on the heavy transmitter concealed in the metal box that Broussard had carried on Atnos. After Guérin’s arrest Broussard had taken command of the Secret Army, organizing first the defence of the barricades, and later the dispersal of the combat units, hiding of arms and explosives, and regrouping of the commando units.

  He had first learnt of the surrender of the barricades on a transistor radio inside the Préfecture. The broadcast, seven hours ago, had been shrill and confused, on a pirate channel operating from the Cité de l’Université. The collapse had come almost before any resistance could be given. He had known that the students would be the first to break, but had hoped that the paras and the legionnaires would hold out at least until nightfall, when the Army might come over to their side.

  But the Army had not come over. Instead, the students had panicked, allowing the Gardes Mobiles to storm the Cité de l’Université with heavy artillery, battering through whole buildings, leaving lanes of rubble, trailing tram-wires, buckled lamp-standards and bodies bleached with dust and plaster. The assault had taken even the paras and Foreign Legion units by surprise; they had pulled back in confusion, dispersed, fought sporadic gun-battles through cellars and across rooftops, and finally followed the students in a chaotic surrender.

  Broussard had fled through the back of the Préfecture and set up headquarters in his flat, where he had sat at first bitter and dejected, cursing the students for their cowardice, cursing the treachery that had delivered up General Guérin, knowing that it was Guérin’s arrest, and not the guns of the Gardes Mobiles, which had really broken the barricades. The opium had gradually soothed him. The conference was now almost over. There remained only one thing to be settled: the affair of the Englishman who had betrayed Guérin.

  Broussard sucked at his clay pipe, breathing out a sweet smoke that filled the room like incense. The bowl of the pipe was small and shallow as a salt-spoon, holding the shrivelled kernel of burnt opium which bubbled slightly as he inhaled.

  The paratroop officers folded their files into briefcases, stood up and saluted, the door held open by their adjutants. Broussard saluted them with his closed fist holding the gold sestertii coin. His mind was dulled, his nerves rested, the machinery of thought working slowly, pleasantly, clear in purpose, knowing precisely what must be done. His power remained, orders and responsibility had been delegated. He smoked in silence.

  Only Serge Rassini stayed seated opposite him across the polished table, checking the latest report from the airfield.

  Anne-Marie came in with a pot of coffee and placed it on the table between them. Broussard made a faint motion with his hand and murmured, ‘Stay a moment!’ She sat down beside him, saying nothing.

  Serge Rassini read out, ‘All the Caravelles were grounded at 1650 hours. One was destroyed, and the rest are being searched for the second time. There’s full co-operation from the airport staff, and from most of the Air-France personnel.’

  Broussard nodded: ‘So there will be no problem. No chance of a flight at least until tomorrow?’

  ‘Absolutely none.’

  They sat listening to the wind outside blowing up from the south. Broussard considered the chances, disadvantages and dangers of his decision. Relations between the Secret Army and the foreign Press would be damaged badly; but to Broussard’s mind journalists were of little concern. The execution of one of them would serve ‘pour encourager les autres!’ He was a mean, morbid man who took a natural pleasure in vengeance. The Englishman had betrayed them and must pay the penalty. The only problem was the hotel. They had put special guards on the door, and the area was full of CRS. Broussard was reluctant to risk his hard-pressed commandos in breaking into the Miramar to kill a squalid English journalist. It might be difficult to get him alone: the man would be certainly on his guard.

  Broussard raised his head and spoke to Serge Rassini. His voice was relaxed, his eyes huge and full of a dull white light, almost the eyes of a blind man: ‘Who is on reception at the Miramar tonight?’

  ‘Marc-Claude — until curfew.’

  ‘Telephone him every hour to check if the Englishman gives up his key and takes his luggage. He may try to wait at the airport.’ He paused, lifting the pipe again to his lips. As he considered the final decision he did not look at Anne-Marie. His eyes were again cast down at his reflection in the polished table, and his thoughts wandered with a twinge of conscience to his duties as a husband and father.

  Five years ago he had married the widow of a fellow commander in Saigon who had fallen at Dien Bien Phu. She was Broussard’s first wife, and Anne-Marie was her only daughter. She was now living in France until the crisis was over.

  Broussard had married her as much out of duty to a dead comrade as from real love; his method of loving was to be faithful and provide her and Anne-Marie with money and material comfort. In return, he exacted from them both an absolute loyalty. For one of them to have disobeyed him would have been as outrageous in his eyes as if his authority had been flouted by a junior officer.

  He looked now at Anne-Marie: ‘I understand you have met this Englishman several times before he was brought here?’

  She nodded: ‘Le Hir sent me down to meet him.’ She kept her voice under control.

  ‘Have you been to his room in the Miramar?’

  There was a tense pause, while the shut
ters groaned in their frames. Broussard laid down the opium pipe, his fingers drumming restlessly against the table.

  ‘Once,’ she said. ‘He has Room 274.’ She had gone very pale, knowing what was coming, but felt no fear: rather, a sense of painful pleasure. Unlike her stepfather she had an uncomplicated character. Even if she had tried, she would have been unable to analyse her feelings towards Neil on that night in the Miramar. She had been hysterical and lonely and rather drunk, and had enjoyed feeling him stab deep inside her and churn out some of the memories of that ghastly afternoon on the beach, with death coming with the twilight. She had not thought at the time she would ever see him again, and it did not worry her. She was not in the least in love with him.

  But with Guérin’s arrest her attitude had drastically changed. Now, instead of having passed a pleasant physical night with Neil, she saw herself humiliated, seduced and ridiculed, while all the time he had been laughing at her, plotting to betray both her stepfather’s cause and her country; and she hated Neil now with a cold, terrible hatred, and waited for Broussard to speak.

  ‘I have decided that this Englishman must be killed. As far as we know, he has not yet left the hotel. But there are guards there, and the Front de Mer is being heavily patrolled. I cannot spare any regular commandos for the job — they would almost certainly get caught.’ He paused and picked up the slender clay pipe. Anne-Marie said nothing. Broussard stared at her with his sunken white eyes, as the pale smoke curled out of his nostrils. When he spoke again his words were ponderous, like stones plopping into water. ‘I want him killed tonight — quickly — privately — in his room. You are the only person who can do it.’

  Still she said nothing. It was Serge Rassini who replied: ‘She can’t do it! Send in one of the “Gamma” men —!’

  ‘Shut up!’ said Broussard, still staring at his stepdaughter. ‘Are you on friendly terms with this Englishman?’ he asked her.

  She lowered her eyes to the table. ‘Yes. He won’t suspect me.’

  ‘Very well. You must try to delay him in the hotel tonight. Write him a letter and arrange to meet him in his room just before curfew. I can have the letter delivered this evening. You will leave here at eleven o’clock.’ He turned to Rassini: ‘Prepare the pistol, Serge. A cloth silencer will be sufficient in this wind.’

  Serge saluted and disappeared into the back room. Broussard turned back to Anne-Marie. His fist, holding the gold Roman coin, clenched and unclenched. His mind felt cold, disembodied, a superior force controlling and commanding, detached from the scrambling chaos of the city. He was pleased with how well she was reacting. He had never thought of her as his own daughter: to him she had always been just another attractive spirited young girl to whom he had a special responsibility. As he looked at her now he felt a stirring of pride.

  ‘I want you to be able to fire all six rounds,’ he told her, ‘if I gave you an ordinary silencer you would be able to fire safely only two before the barrel overheated. And you must make certain of this Englishman.’

  He had placed the 100-sestertii piece on the table beside his pipe; and now, to keep his hands from shaking, he took a backgammon board from the side table and began laying out the red and white ivory counters. When he had them all in position, lined up along the bases of the black arrow-points, Anne-Marie came round and stood beside him. She was still very pale; laying her hand on his shoulder, she said gently, ‘Don’t worry — everything will be all right — after tonight.’ She kissed him on the forehead, and he slid his hand round to hers and held it for a moment. ‘Merci, ma petite!’

  Serge came back with the small-calibre revolver with the barrel wrapped in a thick bandage. For five minutes he stood with Anne-Marie and loaded and unloaded the gun, explaining the sighting, safety-catch, and firmest firing position — at arm’s length, level with the breast. ‘You will have no difficulty,’ he said, ‘there’s no kick. But get as close as you can before you use it.’

  She watched and listened in silence, and repeated his motions once, without error. Then she took the gun and went through the folding doors into her bedroom. She closed the shutters against the rising wind, pulled her skirt over her head, peeled off her stockings and brassiere, and sat on the bed in the half-darkness, waiting.

  CHAPTER 4

  The man’s blue-black gun, hanging from the greased strap, threw a finger of shadow that swung across the ground till it touched the edge of the fountain. He finished his cigarette and tossed it into the basin where it hissed like a snake among the shadows.

  Across the boulevard the windows blazed with the setting sun. The man turned and went into the hotel. A hot wind was blowing up in bursts that rustled the palms and whipped the dust up along the pavements. He took up his place in a chair behind the reception desk.

  He was a muscular, greying man of about forty, and had been a CRS territorial reservist for fifteen years. His wife ran a bar-tabac in the village just outside Juan-Les-Pins, and he worked during the summers as a swimming-instructor and life-saver along the coast. He usually did only about three months territorial work a year; but with this cursed crisis dragging on, he saw himself likely to be out in North Africa for the rest of the summer.

  He didn’t dislike the country, or the people in it — they were very much like the local people in the Midi — but the work was hard, there were riots, continual guard-duties, arrests, house searches, and quite often street-battles in which several of his colleagues had been killed.

  Tonight he was on a simple guard job detailed, so he had heard, by one of the barbouze leaders. There was a second CRS man inside the restaurant. They had been told to look out for commandos who might try to kill one of the clients.

  He glanced around him and was faintly amused. Almost the entire clientele seemed to be foreign journalists. And very odd birds they were, too! A couple of them were at the desk now. One was tall and elderly, a real English Major Thompson, he thought, complete with homburg under his arm and those extraordinary striped trousers you usually saw only in cartoons of Englishmen. The fellow was bickering with the silver-haired receptionist over his bill.

  The second man looked like a mangy lion. He had pushed past the receptionist, who was too busy arguing with the tall man to notice, and snatched a key and an envelope from one of the pigeon-holes. He came back and hurried across to the bar.

  Ah, the bar! the CRS man thought. That’s where they all go. Drinking at the bar. Writing their stories at the bar. They should try a few years in the CRS. Try breaking up a few riots. He did not think this with bitterness, he was a sanguine man; and anyway, it probably meant an easy evening for him.

  An American television film unit had just arrived outside, with two trucks mounted with cameras, sound-booms and folding canvas chairs with the team’s names on the back. They came in noisily, tearing off dark glasses and shouting for their keys. ‘We got sixty feet of battle film that would make old Zanuck sweat!’ one of them yelled. ‘And those goddam CRS grabbed the lot!’

  He came striding past the desk, throwing a scowl at the CRS man who ignored him. The tall Major Thompson figure had finished his dispute with the receptionist, and the CRS man watched him walk across the foyer to join his red-headed colleague in the bar.

  CHAPTER 5

  In the bar Mallory opened the envelope which was addressed to ‘Monsieur Ingleby, Chambre 274’, and read, in a sloping feminine hand in French: ‘Mon cher, I have not seen much of you in the last few days and I have many things to tell you. Please, before you go back to England, I must see you and talk to you. Be in your room at the hotel tonight. I will come before the curfew. Please be there. Many kisses! A-M!’

  He finished reading it just as Winston St. Leger came up. ‘Well done, you old decoy-duck!’ he croaked, holding up the key to Neil’s room.

  St. Leger eyed it dubiously, ‘I suppose these cloak-and-dagger tactics are necessary,’ he muttered, ‘but I can hardly say it’s a métier I enjoy. Do you think it will work?’

  Mallory
shrugged: ‘It may make ’em think he’s still in the hotel — or at least that he’s due back and not at the airport. It’s a chance, anyway. Drink?’

  ‘Thank you. Pink gin.’

  ‘Poor old Ingleby,’ Mallory went on, ‘he’ll just have to miss his oats this time.’ He passed the letter to St. Leger, who glanced at it with a hint of distaste. ‘A little birdie he had up in his room the other night,’ Mallory explained, ‘the one somebody said was old Broussard’s stepdaughter.’

  St. Leger nodded and passed the letter back. ‘Whoever started that rumour is a malicious fool. I admit that Ingleby’s made a pretty big ass of himself out here, but that story’s going too far!’

  Close by, a despondent BBC man was prowling about with a tape-recorder, fretting over his transmission to London. Mallory heard him say, ‘I wanted to get gunfire fading into the sound of grasshoppers for Radio Newsreel. Well, I got plenty of gunfire all right, but the damned grasshoppers wouldn’t make a bleep.’

  Mallory laughed: ‘And old Ingleby’s sitting out there worrying about the best scoop of the year.’

  ‘I hope he gets away,’ St. Leger said gravely, sipping his gin. ‘You think he’s in real danger?’

  Mallory shrugged: ‘Could be.’

  ‘How was he when you left him?’

  ‘Pissed. Kept on babbling about girls. I don’t think his nerves are too good.’

  CHAPTER 6

  Neil watched the rim of fire die out in the green sky, as the sun went down behind the mountains and a swift submarine darkness fell that made the mountains look very close and the airfield no wider than a boulevard. The sabotaged Caravelle still glowed on the tarmac, a frail black wreck like burnt paper in a grate.

  He stayed at the bar till it grew dark. He drank only coffee, feeling cold and shivering, although outside the desert wind boomed against the walls and the air in the main hall became stale, stifling, full of the wailing of terrified children.