Caravan to Vaccares

by Alistair MacLean

  ‘To the letter, Monsieur le Duc.’

  ‘And the reply?’

  ‘Ninety minutes, with luck. Without it, two and a half hours.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Replies in quadruplicate, Monsieur le Duc. Poste Restante, Arles, Saintes-Maries, AiguesMortes and Grau du Roi. That is satisfactory, I hope?’

  ‘Eminently.’ Le Grand Duc smiled in satisfaction. ‘There are times, my dear Carita, when I hardly know what I’d do without you.’ The window slid silently up, the Rolls whispered away on the green light and Le Grand Duc, cigar in hand, leaned back and surveyed the world with his customary patriarchal air. Abruptly, after a rather puzzled glance through the windscreen of the car, he bent forward all of two inches, an action which, in Le Grand Duc, indicated an extraordinarily high degree of interest. He pressed the dividing window button.

  ‘There’s a parking space behind that blue Citroën. Pull in there.’

  The Rolls slowed to a stop and the Duke performed the almost unheard-of feat of opening the door and getting out all by himself. He strolled leisurely forward, halted and looked at the pieces of yellow telegram paper lying in the gutter, then at the Chinese who was slowly straightening with some of the pieces in his hand.

  ‘You seem to have lost something,’ Le Grand Duc said courteously. ‘Can I be of help?’

  ‘You are too kind.’ The man’s English was immaculate, Oxbridge at its most flawless. ‘It is nothing. My wife has just lost one of her earrings. But it is not here.’

  ‘I am sorry to hear it.’ Le Grand Duc carried on, sauntered through the patio entrance, passed by the seated wife of the Chinese and nodded fractionally in gracious acknowledgement of her presence. She was, Le Grand Duc noted, unmistakably Eurasian and quite beautiful. Not blonde, of course, but beautiful. She was also wearing two earrings. Le Grand Duc paced with measured stride across the patio and joined Lila, who was just seating herself at a table. Le Grand Duc regarded her gravely.

  ‘You are unhappy, my dear.’

  ‘No, no.’

  ‘Oh, yes, you are. I have an infallible instinct for such things. For some extraordinary reason you have some reservations about me. Me! Me, if I may say so, the Duc de Croytor!’ He took her hand. ‘Phone your father, my friend the Count Delafont, and phone him now. He will reassure you, you’ve my word for that. Me! The Duc de Croytor!’

  ‘Please, Charles. Please.’

  ‘That’s better. Prepare to leave at once. A matter of urgency. The gypsies are leaving – at least the ones we’re interested in are leaving – and where they go we must follow.’ Lila made to rise but he put out a restraining hand. ‘“Urgency” is a relative term. In about, say, an hour’s time – we must have a quick snack before departing for the inhospitable wastes of the Camargue.’

  CHAPTER 7

  To the newcomer the Camargue does indeed appear to be an inhospitable wasteland, an empty wasteland, a desolation of enormous skies and limitless horizons, a flat and arid nothingness, a land long abandoned by life and left to linger and wither and die all summer long under a pitiless sun suspended in the washed-out steel-blue dome above. But if the newcomer remains long enough, he will find that first impressions, as they almost invariably do, give a false and misleading impression. It is, it is true, a harsh land and a bleak land, but one that is neither hostile nor dead, a land that is possessed of none of the uniformly dreadful lifelessness of a tropical desert or a Siberian tundra. There is water here, and no land is dead where water is: there are large lakes and small lakes and lakes that are no lakes at all but marshes sometimes no more than fetlock deep to a horse, others deep enough to drown a house. There are colours here, the ever-changing blues and greys of the wind-rippled waters, the faded yellows of the beds of marshes that line the étangs, the nearblackness of smooth-crowned cypresses, the dark green of windbreak pines, the startlingly bright green of occasional lush grazing pastures, strikingly vivid against the brown and harsh aridity of the tough sparse vegetation and salt-flats hardbaked under the sun that occupy so much the larger part of the land area. And, above all, there is life here: birds in great number, very occasional small groups of black cattle and, even more rarely, white horses: there are farms, too, and ranches, but these are set so far back from roads or so wellconcealed by windbreaks that the traveller rarely sees them. But one indisputable fact about the Camargue remains, one first impression that never changes, one that wholly justifies its timeand-time again description as being an endless plain: the Camargue is as featurelessly smooth and flat as a sun-warmed summer sea.

  For Cecile, as the blue Citroën moved south between Arles and Saintes-Maries, the Camargue was nothing but an increasingly featureless desolation: her spirits became correspondingly increasingly depressed. Occasionally she glanced at Bowman but found no help there: he seemed relaxed, almost cheerful, and if the consideration of the recently spilled blood he had on his hands bore heavily on him he was concealing his feelings remarkably well. Probably, Cecile thought, he had forgotten all about it: the thought had made her feel more depressed than ever. She surveyed the bleak landscape again and turned to Bowman.

  ‘People live here?’

  ‘They live here, they love here, they die here. Let’s hope we won’t today. Die here, I mean.’

  ‘Oh, do be quiet. Where are all the cowboys I’ve heard of – the gardiens as you call them?’

  ‘In the pubs, I should imagine. This is fiesta day, remember – a holiday.’ He smiled at her. ‘I wish it was for us too.’

  ‘But your life is one long holiday. You said so.’

  ‘For us, I said.’

  ‘A pretty compliment.’ She looked at him consideringly. ‘Can you tell me, offhand, when you last had a holiday?’

  ‘Offhand, no.’

  Cecile nodded, looked ahead again. Half a mile away, on the left-hand side of the road, was a fairly large group of buildings, some of them quite substantial.

  ‘Life at last,’ she said. ‘What’s that?’

  ‘A mas. A farm, more of a ranch. Also a bit of a dude ranch – living accommodation, restaurant, riding school. Mas de Lavignolle, they call it.’

  ‘You’ve been here before, then?’

  ‘All those holidays,’ Bowman said apologetically.

  ‘What else?’ She turned her attention to the scene ahead again, then suddenly leaned forward. Just beyond the farm was a windbreak of pines and just beyond that again there was coming into view a scene that showed that there could, indeed, be plenty of life in the Camargue. At least a score of caravans and perhaps a hundred cars were parked haphazardly on the hard-packed earth on the right-hand side of the road. On the left, in a field which was more dust than grass, there were lines of what appeared to be brightly coloured tents. Some of the tents were no more than striped awnings with, below them, trestle tables which, dependent on what was piled on them, acted as either bars or snack-bars. Other and smaller canvas-topped stalls were selling souvenirs or clothes or candy, while still others had been converted into shooting galleries, roulette stands and other games of chance. There were several hundred people milling around among the stalls, obviously enjoying and making the most of the amenities offered. Cecile turned to Bowman as he slowed to let people cross the road.

  ‘What’s all this, then?’

  ‘Obvious, isn’t it? A country fair. Arles isn’t the only place in the Camargue – some of the people hereabouts don’t even consider it as being part of the Camargue and act accordingly. Some communities prefer to provide their own diversions and amusements at fiesta time – the Mas de Lavignolle is one of them.’

  ‘My, my, we are well-informed, aren’t we?’ She looked ahead again and pointed to a large ovalshaped arena with its sides made, apparently, of mud and wattles.

  ‘What’s that? A corral?’

  ‘That,’ Bowman said, ‘is a genuine old-fashioned bull-ring where the main attraction of the afternoon will take place.’

  She made a face. ‘Drive on.’


  He drove on. After less than fifteen minutes, at the end of a long straight stretch of dusty road, he pulled the blue Citroën off the road and got out. Cecile looked at him enquiringly.

  ‘Two straight miles of road,’ he explained. ‘Gypsy caravans travel at thirty miles an hour. So, four minutes’ warning.’

  ‘And a panic-stricken Bowman can be on his way in less than fifteen seconds?’

  ‘Less. If I haven’t finished off the champagne, longer. But enough. Come. Lunch.’

  Ten miles to the north, on the same road, a long convoy of gypsy caravans were heading south, raising an immense cloud of dust in their passing. The caravans, normally far from inhibited in the brightness and diversity of their colours, seemed now, in their striking contrast to the bleakness of the landscape around them, more gay and exotic than ever.

  The leading, vehicle in the convoy, the yellow breakdown truck that had been pressed into the service of hauling Czerda’s caravan, was the only one that was completely dust-free. Czerda himself was driving, with Searl and El Brocador seated beside him. Czerda was looking at El Brocador with an expression on his face that came as close to admiration as his presently rather battered features were capable of expressing.

  He said: ‘By heavens, El Brocador, I’d rather have you by my side than a dozen incompetent unfrocked priests.’

  ‘I am not a man of action,’ Searl protested. ‘I never have claimed to be.’

  ‘You’re supposed to have brains,’ Czerda said contemptuously. ‘What happened to them?’

  ‘We musn’t be too hard on Searl,’ El Brocador said soothingly. ‘We all know he’s under great pressure, he’s not, as he says, a man of action and he doesn’t know Arles. I was born there, it is the back of my hand to me. I know every shop in Arles that sells gypsy costumes, fiesta costumes and gardien clothes. There are not so many as you might think. The men I picked to help me were all natives too. But I was the lucky one. First time, first shop – just the kind of shop Bowman would choose, a seedy old draper’s in a sidestreet.’

  ‘I hope, El Brocador, that you didn’t have to use too much – ah – persuasion?’ Czerda was almost arch about it and it didn’t become him at all.

  ‘If you mean violence, no. Those aren’t my methods, you know that, and besides I’m far too well known in Arles to try anything of the sort. Anyway, I didn’t have to, nobody would have to. I know Madame Bouvier, everyone knows her, she’d throw her own mother in the Rhône for ten francs. I gave her fifty.’ El Brocador grinned. ‘She couldn’t tell me enough fast enough.’

  ‘A blue and white polka-dotted shirt, white sombrero and black embroidered waistcoat.’ Czerda smiled in anticipation. ‘It’ll be easier than identifying a circus clown at a funeral.’

  ‘True, true. But first we must catch our hare.’

  ‘He’ll be there,’ Czerda said confidently. He jerked a thumb in the direction of the following caravans. ‘As long as they are here, he’ll be here. We all know that by this time. You just worry about your part, El Brocador.’

  ‘No worry there.’ El Brocador’s confidence matched Czerda’s own. ‘Everyone knows what mad Englishmen are like. Just another crazy idiot who tried to show off before the crowd. And dozens of witnesses will have seen him tear free from us in spite of all we could do to stop him.’

  ‘The bull will have specially sharpened horns? As we arranged?’

  ‘I have seen to it myself.’ El Brocador glanced at his watch. ‘Can we not make better time? You know I have an appointment in twenty minutes.’

  ‘Never fear,’ Czerda said. ‘We shall be in Mas de Lavignolle in ten minutes.’

  At a discreet distance behind the settling dust the lime-green Rolls swept along in its customary majestic silence. The cabriolet hood was down, with Le Grand Duc sitting regally under the shade of a parasol which Lila held over him.

  ‘You slept well?’ she asked solicitously.

  ‘Sleep? I never sleep in the afternoons. I merely had my eyes closed. I have many things, far too many things, on my mind and I think better that way.’

  ‘Ah! I didn’t understand.’ The first quality one required in dealing with Le Grand Duc, she had learned, was diplomacy. She changed the subject rapidly. ‘Why are we following so few caravans when we’ve left so many behind in Arles?’

  ‘I told you, those are the ones I am interested in.’

  ‘But why – ’

  ‘Hungarian and Rumanian gypsies are my special field.’ There was a finality about the way he spoke that effectively sealed off that particular line of discussion.

  ‘And Cecile. I’m worried about – ’

  ‘Your friend Miss Dubois has already left and unless I am much mistaken – ’ his tone left no room to doubt the impiety of any such thought – ‘she is also on this road and considerably ahead of us. She was, I must concede,’ he added reflectively, ‘attired in a very fetching Arlésienne fiesta dress.’

  ‘A gypsy dress, Charles.’

  ‘Arlésienne fiesta,’ Le Grand Duc said firmly. ‘I miss very little, my dear. Gypsy costume when you saw her, perhaps. But Arlésienne when she left.’

  ‘But why should she – ’

  ‘How should I know?’

  ‘You saw her go?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then how – ’

  ‘Our Carita here also misses very little. She left with, it seems, a shady-looking individual in gardien clothes. One wonders what happened to that other ruffian – Bowman, wasn’t it? Your friend appears to possess a unique talent for picking up undesirables.’

  ‘And me?’ Lila was suddenly tight-lipped.

  ‘Touché! I deserved that. Sorry, I did not intend to slight your friend.’ He gestured with a hand ahead and to the left where a long narrow line of water gleamed like burnished steel under the early afternoon sun. ‘And what is that, my dear?’

  Lila glanced at it briefly. ‘I don’t know,’ she said huffily.

  ‘Le Grand Duc never apologizes twice.’

  ‘The sea?’

  ‘Journey’s end, my dear. Journey’s end for all the gypsies who have come hundreds, even thousands of miles from all over Europe. The Etang de Vaccarès.’

  ‘Etang?’

  ‘Lake. Lake Vaccarès. The most famous wildlife sanctuary in Western Europe.’

  ‘You do know a lot, Charles.’

  ‘Yes, I do,’ Le Grand Duc conceded.

  Bowman packed up the remains of lunch in a wicker basket, disposed of what was left of a bottle of champagne and closed the boot of the car.

  ‘That was delightful,’ Cecile said. ‘And how very thoughtful of you.’

  ‘Don’t thank me, thank Czerda. He paid for it.’ Bowman looked north along the two-mile stretch of road. It was quite empty of traffic. ‘Well, back to Mas de Lavignolle. The caravans must have stopped at the fair. Heigh-Ho for the bullfight.’

  ‘But I hate bullfights.’

  ‘You won’t hate this one.’

  He reversed the Citroën and drove back to Mas de Lavignolle. There seemed to be many fewer people there than there had been when they had passed through even although the number of cars and caravans had almost doubled, a discrepancy easily and immediately accounted for as soon as the Citroën had stopped by the sound of laughter and shouting and cheering coming from the nearby bullring. For the moment Bowman ignored the bullring: remaining seated in the car, he looked carefully around him. He did not have to look for long.

  ‘To nobody’s surprise,’ he announced, ‘Czerda and his missionary pals have turned up in force. At least, their caravans have, so one assumes that Czerda and company have also.’ He drummed his fingers thoughtfully on the steering wheel. ‘To nobody’s surprise, that is, except mine. Curious, curious. One wonders why?’

  ‘Why what?’ Cecile asked.

  ‘Why they’re here.’

  ‘What do you mean? You expected to find them here. That’s why you turned back, wasn’t it?’

  ‘I turned back because the time-facto
r, their delay in overtaking us, convinced me that they must have stopped somewhere and this seemed as likely a place as any. The point is that I would not have expected them to stop at all until they reached some of the lonely encampments on one of the étangs to the south where they could have the whole wide Camargue all to themselves. But instead they choose to stop here.’

  He sat in silence and she said: ‘So?’

  ‘Remember I explained in some detail back in Arles just why I thought the gypsies were pulling out so quickly?’

  ‘I remember some of it. It was a bit confusing.’

  ‘Maybe I was confusing myself. Somewhere a flaw in the reasoning. My reasoning. But where?’ ‘I’m sorry. I don’t understand.’

  ‘I don’t think I’m exaggerating my own importance,’ Bowman said slowly. ‘Not, at least, as far as they are concerned. I’m convinced they’re under pressure, under very heavy pressure, to kill me as quickly as humanly possible. When you’re engaged on a job of great urgency you don’t stop off and spend a peaceful summer’s afternoon watching a bullfight. You press on and with all speed. You entice Bowman to a lonely camp-site at the back of beyond where, because he’s the only person who’s not a member of your group, he can be detected and isolated with ease and disposed of at leisure. You do not stop at a faircum-bullfight where he would be but one among thousands of people, thereby making isolation impossible.’ Bowman paused. ‘Not, that is, unless you knew something that he didn’t know, and knew that you could isolate him even among that thousand. Do I make myself clear?’

  ‘This time I’m not confused.’ Her voice had dropped almost to a whisper. ‘You make yourself very clear. You’re as certain as can be that they’ll get you here. There’s only one thing you can do.’

  ‘Only one thing,’ Bowman agreed. He reached for the door handle. ‘I’ve got to go and find out for sure.’

  ‘Neil.’ She gripped his right wrist with surprising strength.