Barbouze
Page 24
They passed a mosque with a mud wall crumbled like biscuit. A bald dog limped across the road in front of them, cowering against the broken pavement as they roared past.
There was only the one street. Halfway down they passed a café with a single table outside the door and a row of scrawny, dry-brown Moslems squatting barefoot in the dust, doing nothing.
As the Simca drove by, one of them leapt up and drew a finger across his throat, teeth bared. Anne-Marie saw him and shrugged. Neil remembered that she had made just the same gesture on that first morning when he had asked her what happened to the barbouzes.
‘Those are Moslems!’ he blurted out, stupidly.
‘It’s only a small village,’ she said, ‘afterwards, behind the trees, we get on to the road to the frontier.’
They were almost out of the village now, and the road narrowed between stone walls, winding into the trees ahead. Two Moslems in jellabahs sat on the wall staring at them.
‘How far is it to the frontier?’ said Neil.
‘Two hundred and eighty kilometres.’
He looked at the petrol gauge. It was showing a quarter empty. He said nervously, ‘Are we going to have any difficulty getting petrol outside the city?’
Without turning her head she replied, ‘We don’t need any petrol.’
He stared at her: ‘But we’ve got a hundred and eighty kilometres to go!’
She said nothing. They were driving under the trees now: tall eucalyptuses with silver-green leaves bending, falling gracefully like a girl’s hair, tossed and parted by the wind, the branches flattened back against the slender trunks. The soil here was deep red, and behind the trees Neil caught a glimpse of bony white-haired goats.
He said, ‘Were not going to the frontier, are we? We were never going there?’
She swung the wheel and braked, with the leafy branches slithering over the canvas roof. The car stopped. Calmly she switched off the ignition and sat back, smoothing her green skirt over her knees. In the silence after the engine noise they listened to the trees sighing, throwing flashing streaks of sunlight into the dirt.
Neil waited, staring at Anne-Marie, feeling a sudden unreasonable panic: ‘Why have we stopped?’
She turned to him. Her face was a handsome mask; he hardly recognized her. ‘Monsieur Ingleby, you are a traitor.’
He heard a buzzing in his head. Leaves swept across the windshield, and he thought he saw something move under the trees ahead. The hairs on his neck felt like wet dog’s fur. ‘What do you mean?’ he said.
‘You know what I mean.’ She leant down and lifted the handbag. He grabbed at it, She flinched away, and he felt her fingernails sting against his cheek. He lunged at her, and something hit him over the eye. ‘Sale lâche! Sale traître!’ she screamed
He put his hand to his head, sitting back, feeling dizzy. Then he realized that she had suddenly become very still. He looked at her, and saw her staring ahead out of the window. Her face was as white as the edges of her eyes.
There were men coming out of the trees towards them, from all sides, closing round. She slammed up the handle of her door, locking it. Instinctively he took hold of the handle on his side.
‘Lock, it!’ she shrieked. ‘Lock it!’ She switched on the ignition, her foot stamping on the throttle, and the car lurched forward, bumping into one of the men who let out a yelp and jumped aside, shaking his fists.
The wheels skidded out into the road, leaping over the broken ground, under the waving trees, round a corner.
A roll of barbed wire stood across the track a few feet ahead. She could not stop in time; the wire scraped over the bonnet, up against the windshield. The engine stalled. She switched on again. The car was still in gear and it bucked forward further into the wire, puncturing both front tyres.
Neil seized her arm: ‘Stop, for God’s sake!’ He turned and saw them coming round the bend, running. They were laughing and waving sticks and scythes that flashed in the sun. Neil had snatched out his passport and international Press card. He pushed down the handle on his side and started to open the door. She threw herself across his lap, screaming, ‘No, no!’
It was too late. One of them had pulled the door open, and he felt himself being dragged out, shouting, ‘Anglais! Suis anglais!’
One of the men was wearing an open khaki tunic with no buttons and dungarees tied up with string. He had bare feet, scaly with dust, and the vest under his tunic was blotched with oil stains. He was grinning, pressing a revolver into Neil’s stomach. Neil looked into a broad brown face with hair chopped so short that he could see the man’s scalp. He shouted again ‘Suis anglais!’ — waving his passport.
The man went on grinning. Neil had a glimpse of nickel teeth and black eyes glittering; and he heard Anne-Marie scream.
They were dragging her out, head first, down into the dust, wrenching the handbag from her, laughing. The green skirt was pulled up over her thighs and he saw her face, brown with dust, giving him one desperate half-mad look as he tried to duck down and run towards her.
Something hit him from behind and his arm went numb. A thin man in a woollen cap had grabbed her legs and was dragging her under the trees. One of her shoes came off and lay on its side in the road.
Neil had dropped his passport, noticing dimly that his arm was wet, the sleeve dripping into the dust. He stood shouting in English and French, ‘I’m English! I’m a journalist! English journalist!’
They laughed, not understanding. One of them was emptying Anne-Marie’s handbag on to the road. A purse and mirror fell out, a comb and handkerchief. The man held the bag up and shook it, and a pistol, lodged in a pocket of the bag, dropped with a thud. The barrel was wrapped in a thick bandage.
They all began shouting together in Arabic. Neil was rushed towards the side of the road. He saw Anne-Marie’s legs kicking out across the sun-scorched grass. She writhed round, her face dappled with moving shadows from the trees, and he saw her eyes turn to him again, the whites long and shining, her mouth opening in a scream.
The air exploded round him, and he watched the bullets smacking against her tight green dress. And her face crumpled and fell away under the waving branches of the eucalyptus tree.
He tried to run to her again but they were all round him, lifting sticks and knives, one of them moving forward with a burp-gun, across where Anne-Marie’s legs lay motionless under the leafy branches.
Then the sky grew dark.
CHAPTER 8
The man came through the swing-doors out of the rain down Fleet Street, into the bar of El Vino. They were there at the back of the room, round a table near the glass partition that closes off the rear saloon where guests are allowed to bring women in to drink.
He was a tall man with carefully combed grey hair and a worried face. ‘I’m sorry I’m late,’ he said, ‘there’s a jam right across Aldwych.’
‘What will you have?’ asked one of them, a florid man with a bowtie.
‘Hock and seltzer, please.’ He hung up his coat and began dusting the rain from his hair. Opposite him a small dewy man sat sucking the tip of his thumb: ‘Nothing new, I suppose?’
‘Nothing.’
The florid man returned with the glass of hock. ‘The nationals have been on all morning,’ he said, sitting down, ‘I told them to wait for a statement from you or the editor.’
The tall man nodded: ‘That’s right. I’m seeing David at three. We’ll be putting one out after we’ve heard officially from the Foreign Office.’ He took a deep breath: ‘I still don’t understand it! We know from Tom Mallory that he was out at the airport with a pass on to the first plane — and that left the next afternoon. Why on earth wasn’t he on it?’
The dewy man said, ‘We must bear in mind that there was a lot of confusion. The French admit that it looked pretty doubtful right up to the last moment, what with all the crews on strike. It’s possible he just didn’t think any planes would take off that day.’
‘But what was he doing riding off
into the country with that girl?’ cried the tall man. ‘Did he know who she was?’
‘Obviously he didn’t,’ said the dewy man. ‘Perhaps she was offering to drive him out of the country?’
The florid man leant forward and said, ‘What I don’t understand is why he was out there in the first place. I thought he’d gone to Greece to write a book?’
‘He did,’ said the tall man, ‘but he met some Frenchman in Athens who got him over there in a boat. He was one of the first people in — we can’t hold that against him.’
‘Who are you sending now?’ said the dewy man.
‘Saunders, from the Paris office. He’s a pretty tough reporter — he should be able to get to the bottom of it all. The trouble with these sophisticated university graduates is they get too involved.’ He sat staring at the rows of wine-casks behind the bar. ‘It’s all quite frightful!’ he added suddenly. ‘And the only copy I got from him was that eye-witness piece about the Casino. I wanted him to do some intelligent digging into the political background.’
‘He seems to have done enough of that,’ said the dewy man, ‘too much, in fact!’
‘As far as I can see,’ said the tall man, ‘he spent most of his time running around with the stepdaughter of one of the terrorist leaders and getting himself tied up in every kind of dirty deal in the country. That’s all right if you’re writing a book about it perhaps, but my job is to get out a newspaper!’
They all looked up as a black-haired man in a raincoat approached and said with a grave smile, ‘Ah, Foster, there you are.’
The tall man nodded to an empty chair: ‘Well, have you heard anything your end?’
‘Yes.’ He took off his raincoat and sat down, taking his time: ‘A.P. have just put over some pictures of the bodies. At least, what was found. They’re not very nice.’
The tall man, Foster, put his hand to his eyes. ‘Oh, God!’ he murmured.
‘The French think they may have been shot first,’ the black-haired man added. ‘They found quite a lot of clothing and part of a British passport. I don’t think there can be any more doubt about identity. There were French troops on the other side of the village. They saw the car go through and apparently tried to warn them.’ He looked round the table: ‘The other thing is that a French engineer from the Sahara was shot dead in the hotel the night before in the room directly above Ingleby’s. I don’t know if there’s any connection there.’
Foster stood up and began putting on his coat: ‘I’ll have to get in touch with the editor right away.’ He paused just as he was leaving: ‘Ingleby was a good lobby correspondent — he should have stuck to it!’ He shook his head wearily: ‘What did the damned fool think he was trying to do out there?’
‘Perhaps,’ said the dewy man, ‘he was trying to help?’
***
Want to carry on the adventure? Read THE TALE OF THE LAZY DOG — Book Two in the Charles Pol Espionage Thriller series.
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ALSO BY ALAN WILLIAMS
THE CHARLES POL SERIES
The Tale of the Lazy Dog
Gentleman Traitor
Shah-Mak
Dead Secret
Holy of Holies
OTHER NOVELS
Long Run South
The Widow’s War
Snake Water
The Beria Papers
The Brotherhood
Published by Sapere Books.
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Copyright © Alan Williams, 1963.
Alan Williams has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work.
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in any retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publishers.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organisations, places and events, other than those clearly in the public domain, are either the product of the author’s imagination, or are used fictitiously.
Any resemblances to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales are purely coincidental.
eBook ISBN: 9781913335885