by Tom Sharpe
With all the stealth of a dangerous predator Peregrine put the coil over his shoulder, stuffed one revolver in his belt, cocked the other one and began the slow ascent of the hillside. Every few yards he stopped and listened but apart from a goat that scurried off across the rocks he heard and saw nothing suspicious. At the end of twenty minutes he had reached the top and was standing in the dry moat under the walls of the Château itself. To his left was the cliff while to his right was a corner tower. For a moment he hesitated. The notion of climbing in by way of the cliff still appealed to him but it was too easy now. He was about to move round the tower when he found what he wanted to make a genuinely dangerous entry. A metal strip ran down the wall of the tower. A lightning conductor. Shoving his hands behind it, he pulled, but the copper strip held. Five minutes later he had reached the top of the tower and was on the roof. He crawled forward and peered down into the courtyard. It was empty but a few windows on the first floor were still alight and opposite him under the archway that led to the main gates a lamp shone down on the cobbles. That put paid to his idea of letting himself down on the rope. He’d be seen too easily.
He got up and moved across the roof towards the tower, and saw a square box-shaped trap protruding from the lead. Kneeling down beside it, he eased the top up and peered down into the darkness. It was obviously a means of access to the roof but what was below? Shoving it still further over, he lay down and put his head through the opening. Silence. Nothing stirred below and after listening carefully he took out his torch and flashed it briefly down. He was looking into a corridor but, best of all, some metal rungs were set into the wall. Peregrine switched off the flashlight, swung his legs over the edge and, hanging on to the top rung, eased the cover back over the trap. Then he climbed down and, moving with the utmost caution, crept along the passage to a door at the end. Again he waited with every sense alert for danger but the place was silent. He opened the door and by the light shining through a slit window found himself at the head of a curved turret staircase.
Keeping close to the outer wall, he went down until he came to another door. Still silence. He opened it a fraction and saw a long corridor at the end of which a light was shining on a landing. Peregrine closed the door and went on down. If Glodstone was imprisoned anywhere it would be in an underground cell. Perhaps the Countess would be there too. Anyway, it was the first place to look. Peregrine reached the ground floor and, ignoring the door into the courtyard, followed the steps down below ground. Here everything was pitch dark and, after taking the precaution of waiting and listening again, he switched on his torch. The base of the turret had brought him to the junction of two tunnels. One led off to his right under the east wing while the other disappeared into the distance below the main body of the Château. Peregrine chose the latter and was halfway along it when through an open doorway on one side he heard the murmur of voices. That they didn’t come from the room itself was obvious. It was rather that people in the room above could be heard down there. He flashed his torch briefly and saw that the place had once been a kitchen.
An old black iron range stood in the chimney breast and in the middle of the room a large wooden table stood covered with dust. Beyond it was a large stone sink and a window and a door which led out into a sunken area. To one side of the sink, a chain hung down over the walled lip of what seemed to be a well. A wooden lid covered it now. Peregrine crossed the room, lifted the lid and shone the torch down and very faintly saw, far below, its reflected light. It might come in handy for a hiding place in an emergency but in the meantime he was more interested in the voices. The sound of them came, he realized, from what looked like a small lift-shaft set into the wall at the far end of the kitchen. Peregrine switched off his torch and stuck his head through the opening. Two men in the room above were engaged in heated argument.
‘You’re not reading me, Hans,’ said an American, ‘you’re taking a non-power-oriented standpoint. Now what I’m saying is that from the proven experimental evidence of the past there is no alternative to Realpolitik or Machtpolitik if you like …’
‘I don’t like,’ said a man with a foreign accent, ‘and I should know. I was there at the Battle of the Kursk. You think I liked that?’
‘Sure, sure. I guess not. But what happened there was the breakdown of Machtpolitik powerwise.’
‘You can say that again,’ said the German. ‘You know how many Tigers we lost?’
‘Jews, I’m not talking logistically. You had a pre-war situation which was unbalanced.’
‘We had a man who was unbalanced too. That’s what you fail to take into account. The human psyche. All you can see is the material, the non-personalistic and dehumanized product of an economically dependent species. But never psychical impulses which transcend the material.’
‘That is not true. I admit the interdependency of the individual and the socio-economic environment but the basis remains the same, the person is the process.’
The German laughed. ‘You know, when I hear you talk that way I am reminded of our Soviet colleague. The individual is free by virtue of the very collectivity which makes him unfree. With you the collective imposes a freedom on the individual which he does not want. In the Soviet case there is the stasis of state capitalism and in the American the chaos of the free-market economy, and in both the individual is tied with the halter of militaristic power monopolies over which he has no control. And that you rationalize as Realpolitik?’
‘And without it you wouldn’t be sitting here, Heinie,’ said the American savagely.
‘Professor Botwyk,’ said the German, ‘I would remind you that we neither of us would be sitting here if twenty million Russians hadn’t died. I would ask you to remember that also. And so, good night.’
He left the room and for a while Peregrine could hear the other man pacing the room above. He had understood nothing of what they had been talking about except that it had had something to do with the war. Presently, the American moved out of the room. Below him in the passage Peregrine followed the sound of his footsteps. Halfway along the passage they turned away. Peregrine stopped and flashed his torch briefly. Some steps led up to a door. Very cautiously he climbed them and softly opened the door. A figure was standing on the terrace and had lit a cigar. As Peregrine watched he walked away. Peregrine slipped after him. Here was the perfect opportunity to learn what had happened to Glodstone. As the man stood staring contemplatively over the valley puffing his cigar Peregrine struck. To be precise he sprang and locked one arm round his victim’s throat while with the other he twisted his arm behind his back. For a second the cigar glowed and then grew dim.
‘One word out of you and you’ll die,’ whispered Peregrine gratuitously. With rather more smoke in his lungs than he was in the habit of inhaling and with what felt like a hangman’s noose in human form round his neck, the advocate of Machtpolitik was for once speechless. For a moment he writhed but Peregrine’s grip tightened.
‘What have you done with him?’ he demanded when the struggling stopped. The American’s only answer was a spasm of coughing. ‘You can cut that out too,’ continued Peregrine, and promptly made the injunction entirely unnecessary. ‘You’re going to tell me where you’ve put him.’
‘Put who, for Chrissake?’ gasped the Professor when he was allowed to breathe again.
‘You know.’
‘I swear—’
‘I shouldn’t if I were you.’
‘But who are you talking about?’
‘Glodstone,’ whispered Peregrine. ‘Mr Glodstone.’
‘Mr Gladstone?’ gurgled the Professor whose ears were now burning from lack of oxygen. ‘You want me to tell you where Mr Gladstone is?’
Peregrine nodded.
‘But he’s been dead since—’
He got no further. The confirmation that Glodstone had been murdered was all Peregrine needed. With his arm clamped across Professor Botwyk’s windpipe he shoved him against the balustrade. For a moment the Professor foug
ht to break loose but it was no use. As he lost consciousness he was vaguely aware that he was falling. It was preferable to being strangled.
Peregrine watched him drop without interest. Glodstone was dead. One of the swine had paid for it but there was still the Countess to consider. With his mind filled with terrible clichés, Peregrine turned back towards the Château.
14
For the next hour the occupants of the Château Carmagnac were subjected to some of the horrors of Peregrine’s literary education. The fact that they were a strange mixture, of British holidaymakers who had answered advertisements in the Lady offering a quiet holiday au château and a small group of self-styled International Thinkers sponsored by intensely nationalistic governments to attend a symposium on ‘Détente or Destruction’, added to the consequent misunderstanding. The Countess’s absence didn’t help either.
‘Haven’t the foggiest, old chap,’ said Mr Hodgson, a scrap-iron merchant from Huddersfield whom Peregrine had caught in the corridor trying to find the lightswitch. ‘You wouldn’t happen to know where the loo is, would you?’
Peregrine jabbed him in the paunch with his revolver. ‘I’m not asking again. Where’s the Countess?’
‘Look, old chap. If I knew I’d tell you. As I don’t, I can’t. All I’m interested in now is having a slash.’
Peregrine gave him one and stepping over his body went in search of someone more informative. He found Dimitri Abnekov.
‘No capitalist. No roubles. No nothing,’ he said, taking hurriedly to broken English instead of his normally fluent American in the hope that this would identify him more readily on the side of whatever oppressed masses Peregrine’s anti-social action might be said to express. In his pyjamas he felt particularly vulnerable.
‘I want the Countess,’ said Peregrine.
‘Countess? Countess? I know nothing. Countess aristocratic scum. Should be abolished like in my country. Yes?’
‘No,’ said Peregrine. ‘You’re going to tell me where …’
Dr Abnekov wasn’t. He broke into a spate of Russian and was rewarded by one of Major Fetherington’s Specials which left him unable to say anything. Peregrine switched out the light and hurried from the room. Outside he encountered Signor Badiglioni, a Catholic Euro-Communist, who knew enough about terrorism to have the good sense to hurl himself through the nearest door and lock it behind him. That it happened to be the door to the room of Dr Hildegard Keister, a Danish expert on surgical therapy for sexual offenders, and that she was cutting her toenails with a pair of scissors and exposing a good deal of thigh in the process, rendered Signor Badiglioni totally incoherent.
‘You want me? Yes?’ asked the doctor in Danish, advancing on him with a Scandinavian broadmindedness Signor Badiglioni entirely misinterpreted. Babbling frantic apologies, he tried to unlock the door but the good doctor was already upon him.
‘Terrorist outside,’ he squealed.
‘The reciprocated sensuality is natural,’ said the doctor, and dragged him back to the bed.
Further down the corridor, Peregrine was engaged in an attempted dialogue with Pastor Laudenbach, the German who had been through the Battle of the Kursk Salient and whose pacifism was consequently sufficiently earnest for him to refuse to give in to Peregrine’s threat to blow his head off if he didn’t stop saying his prayers and tell him where the Countess was. In the end, the Pastor’s convictions prevailed and Peregrine left him unscathed.
He was even less successful with his next victim. Professor Zukacs, an economist of such austere Marxist-Leninist theoretical principles that he’d spent a great many years in Hungarian prisons to save the country’s industrial progress and who had been sent to the conference in the vain hope that he would defect, was too used to young men with guns patrolling corridors to be in the least disconcerted.
‘I help you find her,’ he told Peregrine. ‘My father was with Bela Kun in the First Revolution and he shot countesses. But not enough, you understand. The same now. The bourgeoisification of the masses is detrimental to the proletarian consciousness. It is only by—’
They were interrupted by the Mexican delegate who poked his head round the door of his bedroom and expressed the wish that they would shoot countesses somewhere else and said that he had enough trouble with insomnia without having proletarian consciousness added to it.
‘Trotskyite,’ snapped Professor Zukacs, ‘imperialist lackey …’ In the ensuing row Peregrine made his escape. Even to his limited intellect it was obvious the Countess wasn’t in this wing of the Château. He hurried along the corridor and found a passage to the right. He was just wondering which room to enter when the matter was decided for him. Someone was moaning near by. Peregrine moved towards the sound and stopped outside a door. The moaning was quite distinct now. So was the creak of bedsprings.
Peregrine had no difficulty interpreting them. Someone who had been gagged and tied to a bed was struggling to escape. He knew who that someone was. Very gently he tried the handle of the door and was surprised to find it opened. The room was as dark as the passage and the sounds were even more heartrending. The Countess was obviously in agony. She was panting and moaning and the depth of her despair was rendered more poignant by the occasional grunt. Peregrine edged silently towards the bed and reached out a hand. An instant later he had withdrawn it. Whatever other physical peculiarities the Countess might have, one thing was certain, she had a remarkably hairy and muscular behind. She was also stark naked.
Anyway, she had got the message that help was on the way. She’d stopped bouncing on the bed and Peregrine was about to explain that he’d have her out of there in a jiffy when she moaned again and spoke.
‘More, more. Why’ve you stopped? I was just coming.’ It was on the tip of Peregrine’s tongue to say that she didn’t have to because he was there and would untie her when a man’s voice answered.
‘How many hands have you got?’ he asked.
‘Hands? Hands? How many hands? Is that what you said?’
‘That’s exactly it.’
‘That’s what I thought,’ muttered the woman, ‘at a time like this you’ve got to ask fool questions? How the hell many hands do you think I’ve got, three?’
‘Yes,’ said the man, ‘and one of them is cold and horny.’
‘Jeepers, horny! Only thing round here that’s horny has got to be you. I should know. So come on, honey, lay off the gags and give it to me.’
‘All right,’ said the man doubtfully, ‘all the same, I could have sworn …’
‘Don’t be crazy, lover. Get with it.’
The bouncing began again though this time it was accompanied by rather less enthusiastic grunts from the man and by frantic requests for more from the woman. Crouching in the darkness by the bed, Peregrine dimly understood that for the first time in his life he was in the presence of a sexual act. He wondered what to do. The only thing he was sure of was that this couldn’t be the Countess. Countesses didn’t writhe and moan on beds with hairy men bouncing on top of them. All the same, he was interested to see what they were doing but he couldn’t stay there when the Countess’s life was at stake. He was just getting up when the mat on the floor slid away from him. To stop himself from falling Peregrine reached out and this time grasped the woman’s raised knee. A strangled yell came from the bed and the bouncing stopped. Peregrine let go hurriedly and tiptoed to the door.
‘What’s the matter?’ asked the man.
‘Hands,’ gasped the woman. ‘You did say hands?’
‘I said one hand.’
‘I believe you. It just grabbed my knee.’
‘Well, it wasn’t mine.’
‘I know that. Where’s the light switch? Get the light switch.’
As her voice rose hysterically, Peregrine groped for the door-handle and knocked over a vase. The sound of breaking china added to the din.
‘Let me go,’ shrieked the woman, ‘I’ve got to get out of here. There’s something awful in the room. Oh, my God. Som
eone do something!’
Peregrine did. He wasn’t waiting around while she screamed blue murder. He found the door and shot into the corridor. Behind him the woman’s screams had been joined by those of her lover.
‘How the hell can I do anything if you won’t let me go?’ he bawled.
‘Help,’ yelled the woman.
As doors along the passage opened and lights came on, Peregrine disappeared round the corner and was hurtling down a large marble staircase towards the faint light illuminating the open doorway when he collided with the British delegate, Sir Arnold Brymay, who had been trying to think of some rational argument to the assertions of all the other delegates that Britain’s colonial role in Ulster was as detrimental to world peace as the Middle East question, US involvement in South America and Russia’s in Afghanistan and Poland, about which topics there was no such agreement. Since his expertise was in tropical medicine, he hadn’t come up with an answer.
‘What on earth …’ he began as Peregrine ran into him but this time Peregrine was determined to get a straight answer.
‘See this?’ he said, jamming the revolver under Sir Arnold’s nose with a ferocity that left no doubt what it was. ‘Well, one sound out of you and I’m going to pull the trigger. Now, where’s the Countess?’
‘You tell me not to utter a sound and then you ask me a question? How do you expect me to answer?’ asked Sir Arnold, who hadn’t been debating the Irish question for nothing.