by Tom Sharpe
‘Shut up,’ said Peregrine, and forced him through the nearest doorway and shut the door. ‘Any funny tricks and your brains will be all over the ceiling.’
‘Now look here, if you’d kindly remove that firearm from my left nostril we might be able to get down to the agenda,’ said Sir Arnold, jumping to the natural conclusion that he was either dealing with one of the other delegates who’d gone clean off his head or, more probably, with the IRA.
‘I said where’s the Countess,’ growled Peregrine.
‘What Countess?’
‘You know. If you don’t answer it’s curtains.’
‘It rather sounds like it,’ said Sir Arnold, buying time.
Upstairs a fresh problem had obviously arisen. ‘Let me out,’ bawled the erstwhile lover.
‘I can’t,’ screamed the woman, ‘I’m all tensed up.’
‘As if I didn’t know. And stop pulling my legs, you bastards. You want me to be disembowelled or something? Can’t you see I’m dog-knotted?’
‘Dear God,’ said Sir Arnold, ‘this is terrible.’
‘Answer the question.’
‘It rather depends on which countess you mean.’
‘The Countess of Montcon.’
‘Really? An unusually revealing name, and one that by the sound of things upstairs that young man would have found infinitely more inviting, don’t you think?’
‘Right,’ said Peregrine. ‘You’ve asked for it and you’re going to get it.’ And shoving Sir Arnold against the wall he aimed the revolver at him with both hands.
‘All right, all right. As a matter of fact she’s not here,’ said the expert on bilharzia, deciding that, while he hadn’t asked for anything, the time had come to invent something in preference to being shot. ‘She’s at Antibes.’
‘And where’s she live, this aunt?’ asked Peregrine.
‘Live?’ said Sir Arnold, his sangfroid crumbling under this line of questioning and the discussion going on above. Some voluble woman who claimed to know all about dog-knotting from personal experience with her bull terriers had just tried throwing a bucket of cold water over the loving couple with predictably aggravating results.
‘Shit,’ yelled the young man. ‘Get it into your stupid head I’m not a fucking bull terrier. Do that again and I’ll be clamped in a corpse.’
Sir Arnold dragged his attention away from this academic question and faced up to his imminent death. Peregrine had begun the countdown.
‘Antibes is a place, for God’s sake,’ he said, beginning to gibber.
‘I know that, but where?’ demanded Peregrine.
‘Near St Tropez.’
‘And what’s the address?’
‘What address?’
‘Aunt Heeb’s.’
But the strain of being held at gunpoint by a maniac who thought that Antibes was a person while a couple who claimed they weren’t bull terriers were being drowned upstairs was proving too much for Sir Arnold.
‘I can’t stand it. I can’t stand it,’ he gibbered, and proved his point by slumping down the wall. For a moment Peregrine hesitated. He was tempted to kick some life into the swine but the sound of footsteps and someone talking excitedly in the hall deterred him. Besides, he was fairly sure now that the Countess wasn’t in the Château, and there was no point in risking capture. Opening a window, he checked that the courtyard was clear and then jumped lightly across the flowerbed. Five minutes later he had reached the roof and was scrambling down the lightning conductor with a lack of vertigo that would have appalled Glodstone.
Not that Glodstone needed appalling. Ever since he had scrambled on to the ledge at the bottom of the cliff he had came to feel differently about adventures. They were not the splendid affairs he had read about. Quite the contrary, they were bloody nightmares in which one stumbled across miles of foul countryside carrying an overweight rucksack, spent sleepless nights shivering with cold in the rain, ate burnt corned beef out of tins, learnt what it felt like to be drowned and ended up soaked to the skin on rock ledges from which the only escape had to be by drowning. Having experienced the Boose’s horrid habit of sucking things down like some torrential lavatory pan, he knew he’d never be able to swim across.
On the other hand, there was little enough to be said for staying where he was. The simile of the lavatory didn’t apply there; it was literal. The Château’s sewage system was extremely primitive and, in Glodstone’s opinion, typically French. Everything it carried issued from some encrusted pipe in the cliff above and was discharged into the river. In practice, a good deal of it landed on Glodstone and he was just wondering if it wouldn’t be preferable to risk drowning than be treated as a human cesspit when he became aware that something more substantial was bouncing down the cliff. For a moment it seemed to hang on the pipe and then slid forward out into the river. With the demented thought that this would teach Peregrine not to be such a stupid idiot as to climb cliffs in the middle of the night, Glodstone reached for the body and dragged it on to the ledge. Then he groped for its mouth and had already given it the kiss of life for half a minute before it occurred to him that there were one or two discrepancies between whatever he was trying to resuscitate and Peregrine. Certainly Peregrine didn’t have a moustache and wasn’t entirely bald, added to which it seemed unlikely that he had suddenly developed a taste for brandy and cigars.
For a moment or two Glodstone stopped before his sense of duty forced him to carry on. He couldn’t let the bastard die without doing anything. Besides, he’d begun to have a horrid suspicion what had happened. Peregrine must have assumed he’d been drowned while trying to cross the river and instead of coming to his rescue had somehow got into the Château and was evidently bent on murdering everyone he could lay his hands on. Glodstone wanted to dissociate himself from the process. Rescuing countesses was one thing, but bunging bald-headed men off the top of cliffs was quite another. In any case the blithering idiot would never make it. He’d get himself killed and then … For the first time in his life Glodstone had a glimmering sense of reality.
That was more than could be said for Professor Botwyk. Thanks to Peregrine’s gruesome handling he had been unconscious during his fall and his limpness had saved him. Now he began to come round. It was a doubtful relief. For all his convictions that the future of the world depended on stock-piling weapons of mass, not to say universal, destruction, the Professor was an otherwise conventional family man and to find himself lying soaked to the skin being inflated by someone who hadn’t shaved for three days and stank like a public urinal was almost as traumatic as being strangled with a lungful of cigar smoke still inside him. With a desperate effort he tore his mouth away from Glodstone’s.
‘What the fucking hell do you think you’re doing?’ he snarled feebly. Glodstone recoiled. He knew exactly what he’d been doing, reviving one of the most dangerous gangsters in the world. It didn’t seem the time to say so.
‘Now just take it easy,’ he muttered, and hoped to hell the swine wasn’t carrying a gun. He should have thought of that before. ‘You’ve had a nasty fall and you may have broken something.’
‘Like what?’ said Botwyk, peering at his shape.
‘Well, I don’t really know. I’m not an expert in these things but you don’t want to move in your condition.’
‘That’s what you fucking think,’ said Botwyk, whose memory of some of the horrors he had been through was slowly returning. ‘Just wait till I lay my hands on the bastard who strangled me.’
‘That’s not what I mean,’ said Glodstone, who shared his feelings about Peregrine. ‘I’m just advising you not to move. You could do yourself an injury.’
‘When I get out of here I’m going to do more than an injury to that son of a bitch. You’d better believe me. I’m going to—’
‘Quite,’ said Glodstone to prevent hearing the gory details. He didn’t want any part of that retribution. ‘Anyway, it was a good thing I happened to be passing and saw you fall. You’d have been d
ead by now if I hadn’t rescued you.’
‘I guess that’s so,’ said Professor Botwyk grudgingly. ‘And you say you saw me fall?’
‘Yes. I dived in and swam across and managed to pull you out,’ said Glodstone, and felt a little better. At least he’d established an alibi. Professor Botwyk’s next remark questioned it.
‘Let me tell you something, brother. I didn’t fall. I was pushed.’
‘Really?’ said Glodstone, trying to mix belief with a reasonable scepticism. ‘I mean, you’re sure you’re not suffering from shock and concussion?’
‘Sure I’m not sure,’ said Botwyk, whose latent hypochondria had been understandably aroused, ‘the way I feel I could have anything. But one thing’s certain. Some goon jumped me and the next thing I’m down here. In between being strangled, of course.’
‘Good Lord,’ said Glodstone, ‘and did you … er … see who … er … jumped you?’
‘No,’ said Botwyk grimly, ‘but I sure as shit mean to find out and when I do …’
He tried to raise himself on to an elbow but Glodstone intervened. It was awful enough to be stranded on a ledge with a murderous gangster without the swine learning there was nothing much the matter with him.
‘Don’t move,’ he squawked, ‘it’s vital you don’t move. Especially your head.’
‘My head? What’s so special about my head?’ asked Botwyk. ‘It’s not bleeding or something?’
‘Not as far as I can tell,’ said Glodstone, edging round towards the Professor’s feet. ‘Of course, it’s too dark to see exactly but I’d—’
‘So why the spiel about not moving it?’ said Botwyk, eyeing him nervously.
‘I’d rather not say,’ said Glodstone, ‘I’m just going to …’
‘Hold it there,’ said Botwyk, now in a state of panic, ‘I don’t give a dimestore damn what you’d rather not say. I want to hear it.’
‘I’m not sure you do.’
‘Well, I fucking am. And what the hell are you taking my shoes off for?’
‘Just making a few tests,’ said Glodstone.
‘On my feet? So what’s with my head? You start yapping about my fucking head and not moving it and all and now you’re doing some tests down there. Where’s the goddam connection?’
‘Your spine,’ said Glodstone sombrely. The next moment he was having to hold the Professor down. ‘For Heaven’s sake, don’t move. I mean …’
‘I know what you mean,’ squealed Botwyk. ‘Don’t I just. Sweet Jesus, I’ve got to. You’re telling me … oh my God!’ He fell back on the rock and lay still.
‘Right,’ said Glodstone, delighted that at last he’d gained the upper hand. ‘Now I’m going to ask you to tell me if you feel anything when …’
‘Yes, I do,’ screamed Botwyk, ‘definitely.’
‘But I haven’t done anything yet.’
‘Guy tells me he hasn’t done anything yet! Just tells me my spine’s broken. And that’s nothing? How would you feel if you’d been strangled and dropped over a cliff and some limey at the bottom gives you mouth-to-mouth and then says you’ve got a broken spine and not to move your fucking head? You think I don’t feel nothing? And what about my fucking wife? She’s going to love having me around the house all day and not being able to get it up at night. You don’t know her. She’s going to be hot-tailing it with every …’ The prospect was evidently too much for him. He stopped and glared up at the sky.
‘Now then,’ said Glodstone, getting his own back for being called a limey, ‘if you feel …’
‘Don’t say it,’ said Botwyk, ‘no way. I’m going to lie here and not move until it’s light enough for you to swim back over there and get an ambulance and the best medical rescue team money can buy and …’
It was Glodstone’s turn to panic. ‘Now wait a minute,’ he said, wishing to hell he hadn’t boasted about swimming across so readily, ‘I’ve sprained my ankle rescuing you. I can’t go back into …’
‘Ankle yankle,’ shouted Botwyk, ‘you think I care about ankles in my fucking condition, you’ve got to be crazy. Somebody is for sure.’
‘Oh well, if you feel like that about it,’ said Glodstone rather huffily, only to be stopped by Botwyk.
‘Feel?’ he yelled. ‘You use that fucking word again and someone’s going to be sorry.’
‘Sorry,’ said Glodstone. ‘All the same …’
‘Listen, bud,’ said Botwyk, ‘it’s not all the same. Not to me it isn’t. Your ankle and my spine are in two different categories, right?’
‘I suppose they’d have to be,’ said Glodstone.
‘You don’t need a fucking ankle to get it up and feel and all. Well, it’s not that way with spines. Not the way I read it. So lay off the feeling part.’
‘Yes,’ said Glodstone, not too sure now if he’d been wise to raise the issue in the first place. ‘All the same …’
‘Don’t,’ said Botwyk menacingly.
‘I was going to say …’
‘I know what you were going to say. And I’ve answered that one already. It’s not the fucking same. Same is out, same as feel is.’
‘Even so,’ said Glodstone after a pause in which he had searched for a phrase which wouldn’t infuriate the blighter, ‘for all we know there may be nothing the matter with your spine. The way to find out is to …’
‘Take my fucking shoes off like you did just now,’ said Botwyk, ‘I’ve got news for you …’
But whatever he was about to impart was drowned by the sound of sirens. A car followed by an ambulance hurtled along the road opposite and turned over the bridge to the Château.
‘For hell’s sake do something,’ yelled Botwyk, ‘we’ve got to get their attention.’
But Glodstone was to preoccupied to answer. Whatever Peregrine had done had included more than dumping this foul-mouthed swine over the cliff and if he was caught … The notion horrified him. In the meantime, he had better keep on good terms, or as near good as he could get, with the sod.
‘Did you notice that?’ he enquired, jabbing his finger into the sole of Botwyk’s foot when the Professor had stopped shouting.
Botwyk sat bolt upright. ‘Of course I fucking did,’ he snarled, ‘what do you expect me to fucking notice if you do a thing like that? I’ve got sensitive feet for Chrissake.’
‘That’s a relief,’ said Glodstone, ‘for a while there I thought you’d really broken your back.’
‘Jesus,’ said Botwyk, and sank back speechless on the rock.
15
He was not alone in this. Mr Hodgson, the scrap-iron merchant who had been dying for a slash and bad been the recipient of one of Major Fetherington’s Specials, was still incapable of doing more than scribble that he’d been the victim of an attack by one of those damned foreigners and the sooner he got home to Huddersfield the safer he’d feel. Dimitri Abnekov’s opinion, also given in writing, was that a deliberate attempt had been made by a CIA hit-team to silence the Soviet delegate and was a violation of the UN Charter and the Helsinki Agreement as regards the freedom of speech. Signor Badiglioni, having been subjected to Dr Keister’s clinical approach to what she called ‘reciprocated sensuality’ and he didn’t, wasn’t prepared to say anything. And Sir Arnold Brymay preferred not to. Professor Zukas had been too engaged in a polemic with the Mexican delegate on the question of Trotsky’s murder and the failure of the Mexican government to collectivize farms it had already distributed to the peasants to remember anything so contemporary as his encounter with Peregrine. Finally, Mrs Rutherby and Mr Coombe, once they had been extricated from one another by Dr Voisin, were blaming their agonizing ordeal on Mrs Branscombe, the bull terrier judge, who denied that she made a habit of entering other people’s bedrooms to indulge her latent lesbianism by hurling buckets of water over heterosexual couples.
Only Pastor Laudenbach approached the problem at all rationally. ‘The question we must ask ourselves is why a young man should want so desperately to find a countess. It is a phenomeno
n not easily explicable. Particularly when he was obviously British.’
‘Oh, I wouldn’t say that,’ said Sir Arnold, who could see an extremely awkward international incident heading his way.
‘I would,’ said Dr Grenoy, the French delegate. He had slept through the whole affair but the honour of France was at stake and in any case he was looking for an opportunity to divert the symposium away from his country’s role in Central Africa. On the other hand, he was anxious to prevent the scandal reaching the media. ‘I am sure there is a simple hooliganistic explanation for this regrettable occurrence,’ he continued. ‘The essential factor is that while we have all been put to some inconvenience, no one has actually been hurt. In the morning, you may rest assured that adequate protective measures will have been taken. I myself will guarantee it. For the moment, I suggest we return to our rooms and …’
The Soviet delegate was protesting. ‘Where is the American Botwyk?’ he whispered. ‘In the name of the Union of—’
‘Let’s not get too excited,’ pleaded Dr Grenoy, now as anxious as Sir Arnold to avoid an international incident. ‘The Professor’s absence is doubtless due to a comprehensible prudence on his part. If someone will go to his room …’
Pastor Laudenbach volunteered but returned in a few minutes to announce that Professor Botwyk’s room was empty and that his bed had not been slept in.
‘What did I say?’ said Dr Abnekov. ‘There has been a deliberate conspiracy to destabilize the conference by elements …’
‘Oh Lord,’ said Sir Arnold, appealing uncharacteristically to his French counterpart, ‘can’t someone bring an element of commonsense to this trivial affair? If that damned Yank had instigated anything he wouldn’t have been idiotic enough to disappear. Anyway, there were no political implications. The lunatic simply wanted to know where some countess was. I told him she was in Antibes. He’s probably pushed off there by now.’
‘Countess? Countess? Mere subterfuge,’ said Dr Abnekov, finding his voice. ‘Typical imperialistic tactics to obscure the real issue. There are no countesses here.’