Midnight Plus One

by Gavin Lyall

  I never saw any signal, but the first to move was the one at the end of the line. He jumped forward, then threw himself flat in the road. As Harvey swung to cover him, the fat man launched himself off the wall, his left hand groping under his coat.

  I was behind Harvey, with him blocking my line of fire, and a good chance of getting knocked over by him if the fat man hit him. I left off trying to get the Mauser into action and took a leap backwards.

  The fat man hit Harvey with his right shoulder just as he pulled an automatic with his left hand. They started to fall back towards me. Harvey planted his gun neatly on the man’s left shoulder and loosed the hammer.

  There was a nasty squashybang and the fat man spun in the air and fell on his back, his gun waving feebly towards the wall. Harvey rolled near my feet. The third party started around them to get at me.

  I finally got the Mauser untangled from my trousers and jammed my thumb hard on the single/automatic button; if ever I wanted to sound like a machine-gun, now seemed the time.

  Harvey shouted: ‘Don’t shoot that thing! ‘

  The third man saw the long magazine on the Mauser, and dropped any idea of drawing a gun. His hands went up before he’d got his feet to stop.

  I swung the gun side to side. ‘Venez chercher, mes amis.’

  I felt tensed up and ready to pull the trigger.

  Harvey rolled on to his feet. ‘Jesus Christmas, the war’s over. Take it easy, Cane.’ He flicked his short gun left and right, and the two men backed quickly up to the wall again. The fat man in the gutter let out a sudden moan.

  Harvey said: ‘Go get the car.’

  Rather reluctantly, I put the Mauser away under my raincoat, and walked back to the square.

  Nobody seemed to be looking for the source of a gun going off. I hadn’t made much noise; noise, after all, is only energy that’s got wasted on the surrounding air, and the fat man’s shoulder had got just about all the energy going from that shot. I didn’t want to examine that shoulder.

  I backed the Mercedes off a couple of yards, checked the tyres of the Citroën in case they’d tried two sorts of funny business, then drove it out to the corner.

  Harvey walked slowly up the far side of the street, his right hand tucked under his mac. He slid in and I whipped around the corner.

  ‘What’d you do with them?’

  He said: ‘Told them to pick him up and get him home. I was a damn fool.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘He was left-handed; I hadn’t thought of that. I knew he was the boss, I knew they wouldn’t start anything without him. But I thought I’d fixed him when I banged his right handinthe café. I should have thought of him being left-handed.’

  I pulled round the next corner and slowed. ‘Everybody makes mistakes.’

  ‘Not in my business.’

  I reached back to open the back-seat doors. Maganhard and the girl and my briefcase jumped in and, thank God, they didn’t waste time doing it.

  I pulled away and turned left into the Place des Halles, snaking between the last fruit and fish lorries.

  Miss Jarman suddenly leant forward and said to Harvey: ‘You smell of gunpowder.’

  Harvey nodded. ‘That’s right. I had to shoot a guy. He didn’t get killed.’

  She said coldly: ‘Bad luck.’

  ‘It was intentional.’

  I said: ‘We wouldn’t have got the same fun out of it, killing him without you watching.’

  She said: ‘Why didn’t you just throw your joke book at him?’

  Harvey chuckled. ‘I don’t think she appreciates us. But Jesus, you scared me.’

  ‘Me?’ I said.

  ‘You. Waving that machine-gun around and shouting “Come and Get It!” I thought you were going to loose it off – and me in front of you.’

  ‘Well. I told you I learnt this business in wartime.’

  ‘That’s a long time ago. Fashions have changed.’ I started into a zigzag of back streets leading southeast to the main road running south out of town. ‘Well,’ I said. ‘What did you think of the opposition?’

  ‘They’ll never make the First Team.’

  I nodded. ‘My own thoughts exactly. D’you know any of them?’

  ‘No.’

  Maganhard said: ‘What did they plan to do?’

  ‘I’d guess they were disobeying orders,’ Harvey said rapidly. ‘They’d probably been told to pick us up in Tours -and that wouldn’t be difficult. We had to cross the river here and there’s only two bridges. Then they were told to trail us out to somewhere quiet and jump us there. With that Mercedes, they could have hung on to us. But we stopped at the caféand they thought they’d got an easy chance. Crazy.’

  I nodded; that sounded good sense. ‘Was that why you didn’t kill anybody?’

  I felt his quick sideways look. ‘Didn’t seem necessary,’ he said evenly. ‘They were so slow, I had time.’

  Miss Jarman leant forward and said incredulously: ‘Did youwant somebody to get killed?’

  ‘No: I can take it or leave it.’ But that wasn’t quite true. Iwas a little worried that nobody had ended up dead.

  Being a good bodyguard-gunman isn’t being particularly fast with a gun, or even particularly accurate. These are just refinements. The real talent is being ready, at any time and without asking questions, to kill. A gunman can still be as fast as a cat and accurate as Robin Hood – but if he’s got to debate with his conscience whether he’s ready to kill or not, then he’s ready for unemployment pay. Or, quite likely, dead.

  Or perhaps drinking too much.

  I zipped across the Boulevard Béranger, still heading southeast. I shoved the clump of Michelin local maps across to him. ‘Pick me a course heading southeast and keeping on only the D roads.’

  Harvey said: ‘You want to get off the main line between Brittany and Switzerland?’

  ‘That’s right. That’s where the roadblocks’ll be.’

  He stared back at a map. ‘You’ll end up in the Auvergne.’

  I nodded. ‘That’s the idea. I have friends there. Or I did, once.’

  EIGHT

  For a moment I thought they’d caught us right there, two kilometres out of town on the bridge across the Cher into St Avertin. They were rebuilding the bridge and it was a nasty mess of grey, girders, plank surfacing – and a cop staring watchfully at every car.

  Then I realised he was just looking out for traffic tangles. I drove across quietly and carefully. A minute later we were heading due south on the D27, through a messy collection of vineyards and bright new suburban houses looking oddly naked as they waited for the neighbours to spring up around them.

  We crossed one Route Nationale – no roadblocks or roaming Sûretécars – and after that we were clear. I pushed the Citroën along the narrow over-cambered road, reaching ninety kilometres on the good straight stretches.

  On a job like this the Sûretédoesn’t block every road everywhere. They pin up a map in headquarters and say: ‘They startedthere atthat time, so they should be aroundhere bythis time.’ And that’s where they put the blocks and warn the cars. It’s like ripples on a pond: a line of defence getting wider and drawing farther back as time goes on. So far, I thought I was probably outrunning the ripples; they might not even think I’d reached Tours yet. But I didn’t dare take the risk. I had to hide in the side roads, and that meant the defence would overtake me. By tonight they’d have warned the Swiss frontier.

  Which was fine, because tonight I wouldn’t be within two hundred kilometres of Switzerland – and maybe tomorrow some of the ripples would have died down. Maybe.

  That reminded me: ‘We must ring Merlin.’

  Harvey asked: ‘What for?’

  ‘Just keep him in touch – and see if he’s heard anything. And I’d like him to send a telegram in your name, Mr Maganhard, if you don’t mind.’

  Maganhard asked: ‘Why? Who to?’

  To the captain of your yacht, or the crew or something. Just saying you’re sorry a
nd hope they’ll be released soon – something like that. The cops’ll see it and maybe they’ll be convinced you’re in Paris. It might help.’

  He chuckled his metallic chuckle. ‘A good idea.’

  The road got rougher and more winding as we climbed out of the lush farmland of the Loire valley. The verges straggled on to the roads, the trees and hedges looked in need of a haircut. And the road signs were the old Dunlop Touring Club de France’ jobs, battered and rusty from generations of small boys throwing stones.

  It had been raining inland and the streams were fat and fast, pocked with small whirlpools and sometimes breaking their banks to leave a row of poplars ankle deep in water like Guardsmen waiting for somebody to order them in out of the rain.

  Harvey picked up the maps again and said: ‘You want to go south of Clermont Ferrand, into the real Auvergne?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘We won’t be moving fast in that country.’

  ‘If we get lost, we can always ask a policeman.’ He just looked at me.

  Maganhard woke up suddenly and said: ‘Now we know the policeare looking for us, what will happen if they stop us?’

  I shrugged. ‘Unless it’s some character on a bike that we can run away from – we stay stopped.’

  The girl said coldly: ‘What happened to the brave gunmen? Are police too much for you?’

  ‘In a way, yes. We agreed before we started that we weren’t shooting at police.’

  ‘You agreed?’ Maganhard asked. ‘Who authorised you to agree?’

  ‘I thought you didn’t likeany shooting, Mr Maganhard.’

  His voice had the precise, toneless click of a teletype machine punching out the words. ‘Through Monsieur Merlin, I am paying your wages. Any agreement should have been reached with him or with me.’

  Harvey and I glanced at each other. He sighed and said: ‘You’ve hurt his feelings, now. Stop at the next crossroads and we’ll probably get a bus to Châteauroux and a train back to Paris.’

  I said: ‘Let’s put it another way, Mr Maganhard: do youwant us to shoot at policemen?’

  There was a pause, then: ‘I want to know why you agreed not to. That is all.’

  ‘If you don’t see the difference between some character who’s been hired to kill you and a gendarme who’s been told to arrest you – well, we can skip the moral question. But have you thought what it would do to your chances in the long run?’

  ‘I do not understand.’

  I took a deep breath. ‘I imagine this journey’s only half the battle for you. When it’s over, you don’t want to be any worse off than you are now. Right now the cops are looking for you – on a rape charge. They’ll look pretty hard, because you’re a big man and there’s always somebody to scream Influence when a big one gets away. But it’s still only a rape charge; we’re still sharing their time with a couple of bank robberies, a murder, a prison escape, stolen cars – whatever else has happened today.

  ‘But once we kill a cop, they’ll forget everything else. It’ll only be us they want. And even if we got away with it, they’d chase us to the hot end of Hell and then get us extradited. There isn’t a country in the world would stand up to protect a cop-killer; they’ve got their own police to worry about. Have I made my point?’

  ‘If what you say is true. It seems most peculiar that the police should react in that way.’

  Harvey lit a Gitane and said thoughtfully: ‘It’s the way cops think. They don’t really mind somebody breaking the law – not personally. They get to expect it. Sure, they work at their jobs, but they go home for dinner at six. They don’t think the world’s going to end just because some guy gives his wife a face-lift with a meat axe. Not even if he gets away with it.’

  He blew smoke at the windscreen. ‘Cops don’t mind people running away like we’re doing. They expect that, too – they rather like it. It shows respect. But the guy who kills a cop? He didn’t run. He didn’t show any respect. That way, he’s not just breaking the law, he’s trying to destroy it. He’s knocking at everything the cops think they stand for: law, order, civilization – and he’s knocking at every cop. That makes it personal. And he’s the man they’ve got to catch.’

  Maganhard said quietly: ‘That is very peculiar.’

  The car ran on. Now we were on open downland country: fields of green wheat with big three-sided stone farms enclosing yards that opened direct on to the road and spilled hens, geese, and ducks all over it. The geese and ducks just looked affronted and ruffled, like duchesses caught shoplifting; the hens decided the far side of the road looked safer.

  That apart, it was a lonely road. People turned to look at you, expecting a neighbour.

  Miss Jarman said: ‘How do you know these things? Are you – I mean, just whatare you both?’

  Harvey said: ‘I’m a bodyguard, Miss Jarman.’

  ‘But – how do you get to be one?’

  ‘Sounds like what guys are supposed to ask prostitutes,’ he said dryly.

  I said: ‘Just lucky, I guess.’

  Harvey grinned and said rapidly: ‘I was in the United States Secret Service, bodyguard detail. They sent me to Paris for when presidents came over to visit. I liked it. I quit. I stayed on, went into private practice.’

  I caught his eye and his face was quite expressionless. I asked: ‘When was this?’

  ‘Several years back.’ So perhaps he hadn’t collected his problem before he’d left. Perhaps it was the strain of ‘private practice’.

  The girl said: ‘What about you, Mr Cane?’

  ‘I’m a business agent, sort of. Mostly for British firms exporting to the Continent.’

  Maganhard said sharply: ‘I thought you had been in the French Resistance.’

  ‘No, Mr Maganhard. Contrary to certain legends in certain places, the French Resistance was French, not British or American. I was in the Special Operations Executive; I was dropped in to help organise supplies for the Resistance – that’s all. The French did the fighting; I just loaded guns for them.”

  Harvey asked: ‘Where were you?’

  ‘Paris and the Auvergne. But I got around quite a bit, delivering stuff and organising the supply lines.’

  Maganhard said: ‘Ahh,’ as if he’d seen just why Merlin had chosen me. Which was more than I’d seen for myself, yet.

  Harvey asked casually: ‘Get picked up at all?’

  ‘Once.’

  ‘How’re the legs?’

  ‘I’m walking.’

  The girl asked: ‘What are you talking about?’

  The Gestapo,’ Harvey explained. ‘Sometimes – I heard – when they’d questioned a guy and weren’t sure about him one way or another, they’d kind of tap on his legs with chains before they let him go. So when he got picked up again, maybe a year later with different papers, different name, all the new lot had to do was to look at his legs. They’d know he’d been questioned before. And in their tiny minds, I guess two suspicions made one proof.’

  After a moment the girl said: ‘Did they do this to you?’

  I said: ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  After another moment I said: ‘It was all a long time ago.’

  Harvey said softly: ‘But not very far away.’

  As we got south, the clouds broke up and there were bursts of sunlight, throwing vivid green patches on the hills. The roads got curlier and narrower and our average speed was cut right down. Suddenly we were on just a cart-track of sand and stones wiggling through a pine forest.

  I jerked down into second gear and snapped: ‘God, you’ve got us lost. Give me that map.’

  Harvey shook his head. ‘Just a bit ofvoie ordinaire. It gets better later.’

  ‘It had better.’ Then I shook my head. ‘Sorry.’.

  I was getting too irritable. I’d been driving for nine hours and awake a lot longer, and the D roads weren’t as soothing as the mainroutes nationales. By now I was tired and hungry – but most of all, I wanted a drink.

&n
bsp; I glanced sideways at Harvey. Well, maybe I could slide off round the corner by myself and gobble a couple of quick ones when I went to phone Merlin.

  The road turned into tarmac again and we wove down out of the pines.

  Harvey said: ‘Told you so. When do we lunch? ‘

  ‘I’ll stop in a village soon. Maybe Miss Jarman will go and buy something while I phone Merlin.’

  ‘I will if you like. I’d prefer something hot, but I suppose you’ll say it’s too dangerous going into restaurants.’

  ‘I just say it’s a risk, Miss Jarman – and all I can do on this job is cut down on as many risks as I can.’

  She waited a moment, then said: ‘Before this trip’s over, I may get rather tired of watching you avoid risks.’

  I nodded. ‘That’s likely. But you may get tired of risks, too.’

  Three-quarters of an hour later we reached a small village just before crossing the N140. It was just a square and a collection of houses and shops of old, solid stone huddled under the shoulder of the hill. I cruised quietly down into it, past the shop that was a combined newsagent and hairdresser, past the Gendarmerie Nationalewith its tricolour and a notice suggesting that if you wanted any law and order enforced at night you’d better call at the house twenty-five metres up on the right – and into the small, steep-sloped main square.

  ‘There’s no point in parking anywhere else,’ I explained, before anybody asked. ‘They’d notice a strange car more if it was parked in a side road. But we won’t stay longer than we need.’

  I walked across to the PTT building, set back behind its little railed courtyard from the days when the mail coach used to drive in to unload. I walked straight into the telephone box and asked for Merlin’s office number.

  Would his line be tapped? It wasn’t likely they’d do that to a big Paris lawyer, but by now the police must be wondering how much Merlin knew about Maganhard. They must know the connection.

  His secretary said he was occupied; I told her to get him unoccupied, quick. I gave my name as Caneton.

  Merlin came on the line, first as a distant voice saying apologetically: ‘… m’excuse. Inspecteur.‘A crafty lawyer doesn’t get overheard by accident: he was letting me know the cops were with him at the time. Then he said:‘Allo? Ah, monsieur: je suis désolé, mais l’arpenteur…‘I didn’t care how sorry he was what the surveyor had or hadn’t done; I ought to slam down the phone and run.