by Gavin Lyall
It took time and it took memory. When I looked up from one inscription Miss Jarman was at my shoulder. She’d worn better on the ride than I had, but even her soft sealskin was showing creases.
‘I wanted a breath of fresh air,’ she said. ‘I thought I’d better keep you in sight so that I wouldn’t be late. D’you mind?’
I shook my head and walked on down the row. She followed.
After a while she asked: ‘What are you doing?’
‘Finding out what’s happened in the village since I was last here.’
She gaped at me, then thought about it, then smiled and nodded.
I pointed at one tomb that wouldn’t have disgraced a Florentine nobleman. ‘They finally made old de Gorremairebefore he died. He’d been trying for it for thirty years, he told me.’ I nodded at de Gorre and walked on, thinking that they should have planted vines instead of roses around his tomb. He’d have beenmaireyears before if anybody had been confident of finding him sober on inauguration day. Well, give the old boy time and the vines would grow naturally.
I pointed at a smaller affair in marble. ‘He kept the garage; if his son’s got the place now, at least we can get our number plates changed. The father was a law-abiding old bastard.’
We walked on. Finally, I found the Meliot plots and started checking carefully.
After a moment she said: ‘Was he a soldier? It just sayspour la France.’
I looked at the slab she was reading off: Giles Meliot. ‘Look at the date,’ I said. It was in April 1944. ‘He was with me: we ran into a roadblock up north of here, carrying some guns up to Lyons. He got hit; I didn’t.’ I hadn’t seen the slab before; you weren’t allowed to go putting patriotic tombs over Resistance corpses during the war. And all they’d put was ‘For France’. Well, by now that was all anybody wanted to know. It was all a long time ago. And I was still running through roadblocks.
Maybe on my slab they’d write:Pour les12,000francs.
The girl had said something. I said: ‘What?’
‘Did the guns get through?’
‘The-? Oh, yes. I got them through. I wasn’t hurt.’
She seemed about to say something else, then didn’t. I went on checking up on Meliot tombs.
‘Well,’ I said, ‘with luck we’ll be staying with the Meliots tonight. His parents. It looks as if they’re both still around.’
I started back to the car, stopping to read the newest-looking tornbs as I went. When I got to the wall, Miss Jarman had vanished. I went down to the car; she wasn’t there.
Harvey watched me climb in, but didn’t say anything. His face was grey and tired, and the lines were deeper in it. He was almost burned out, but at least he was keeping the last of his energy for something more important than asking what the hell I’d been up to. And at least he’d stayed dry.
The girl hurried down out of the cemetery a few minutes later, and dived into the car. ‘Sorry I’m late.’
I wasn’t feeling strong enough to start asking What The Hell myself. I switched on, started up, and we rolled up round the corner of the hill into Dinadan.
It was a small, cramped place of cold slate-coloured stone that looked wintery and always would, in any weather. The houses, narrow enough to look tall, huddled shoulder-to-shoulder for warmth; at bends in the main street you could see behind them the tall skeletons of elms, not yet in leaf, against the grey evening.
Nothing much seemed to have happened to it since the war – certainly nobody had swept the roadside, or filled in the potholes or cleared away any of the stacks of logs and empty oil drums. But Dinadan had more important things to do: first survive, then get rich. Cleaning the place up came a bad third; besides, it would attract the tax inspectors.
Harvey said in a dull voice: ‘Well, nobody’ll think of looking for international finance here.’
I turned left at the big fortress of a church, into a side street hardly wider than the Citroen itself. After fifty yards I stopped beside a narrow three-storey house with a first-floor balcony and cracked stone steps leading down from it. Under the steps, there were two lean grey cats feeding off the same saucer as a bunch of chickens. The chickens ignored me; the cats stared as if I’d come to steal their supper.
I stood outside the car for a minute, just lighting a cigarette and giving anyone inside the house a chance to look me over. Then the door at the top of the stairs banged open and a fat bundle of aprons waddled down.
‘C’est Caneton,‘she squawked back over her shoulder,‘c’est Monsieur Caneton.‘Then she stopped dead at the bottom of the steps and the smile fell straight off her face. ‘Iln’y pas déjàune autre guerre?’
‘Non, non, non.‘I waved my hands and dragged a reassuring smile on to my face.
Behind me, Miss Jarman asked:‘What did she say?’
‘She asked if my being here meant another war starting. I suppose I’ve never been good news to these people.’
Madame Meliot waddled forward and hugged me. She was a fat old biddy, but not soft; she nearly bust my ribs. Her brown face was full of lines like a road map, her tough grey hair pulled back into something that might have been a bun. She stood back and smiled and looked me over carefully with pale-grey eyes.
I grinned weakly at her and started explaining: I wasn’t Canetonany longer, I wasn’t withle Baker Street, orl’Intelligence, I was just me: Lewis Cane. On the other hand, I did happen to be being chased by the police, and we needed a place to spend the night.
She absorbed it all perfectly calmly.
Over my shoulder, Maganhard said quietly: ‘You can tell her that I’ll pay.’
‘Don’t be stupid,’ I snapped. ‘She’ll do it for me or not at all. If we try and make it a business deal, she’ll charge us Ritz prices and then sell us out to the cops in the morning.’
Meliot himself came out to the top of the steps: tall, thin, bent, with a long bald head, a big straggling moustache and two days of beard. His collarless shirt and baggy trousers would have cost about five francs, but he could probably have reached into a pocket and pulled out enough cash to buy the Citroen there and then.
She didn’t consult him; she never had even when we were using the place as a ‘safe house’ on the Rat-line. The house was her business; the acres of grazing and woodland over the hill were his.
Then she said:‘Pour Caneton, c’est normal,‘and led the way. I winced and followed. For me, perhaps being on the run from troublewas a habit.
We sat straight down at the table. The room wasn’t big, but it was warm and bright; the furniture wasn’t up to the standard of the Good Taste magazines, but it was comfortable and where they’d wanted to spend money, it had got spent. Alongside a tinted photograph of Giles, in a frame so ornate and dull that it must have been solid silver, there was a radio set that looked like the dashboard of a space ship. That made me wince again; I’d been thinking of Dinadan as isolated from newspapers, which it probably still was. But I’d also thought of-it in its wartime state, with hardly any radios. On that thing, she could have overheard us on the beach at Quimper.
She confirmed it by nodding her head at Maganhard and saying to me:‘C’est Maganhard, n’est ce pas?’
I nodded. I didn’t feel guilty about not telling her before; it wouldn’t have been natural for us to discuss just what I was up to, anyway.
She looked him over critically, then said: ‘Iln’est pas un violeur – pas le type.’
I agreed that he wasn’t the raping type, and added that the whole thing was a phoney charge brought by business rivals. She nodded; she knew about phoney charges brought by business rivals. Then she said that Maganhard didn’t look capable of rape, or, indeed, much else in that line.
Maganhard went as rigid as a post; he’d been following even her accent pretty well.
She chuckled and started out. I yelled after her that if she wasn’t careful I’d send him along after midnight and she could find out for herself. She nearly blew the house down laughing.
Mag
anhard said stiffly: ‘I cannot stand that sort of conversation, Mr Cane.’
‘Tough luck, chum, but it comes with the house. You can always sleep out under the trees.’ I was too tired to want to get complicated. Miss Jarman was wearing a blank, ununderstanding expression that the English girls’ schools are so good at teaching.
Harvey was sitting slumped, staring at the tablecloth. We could have been talking economics in Chinese for all he cared.
There obviously wasn’t much conversation to be got there. I followed Madame Meliot, found that the local garagehad passed from father to son, and went down to see him.
He remembered me, all right, and I just about remembered him: he’d been a bit young for the war, and unhappy that he was missing it. Now, he was delighted to get started at last.
I asked if he could do me a couple of new number plates, belonging to this part of France, but not to do them too professionally for fear, if we got caught, that they were traced back to him. He had a better idea: why didn’t I simply take the plates off his own Citroen ID? They should fit.
I pointed out that if we got pinched, those certainlywould be traced back to him. He grinned; cops didn’t bother him, and, anyway, if he left the car parked out that night, why shouldn’t I simply have stolen them? Behind it all was obviously the thought that the great Caneton would never get caught, anyway.
It was a nice compliment, but it was based on a view of me he’d formed when he was twelve and it showed he didn’t know much about the Sûreté Nationale, either. But in the end, on the promise that hewould leave the car out all night, I took the plates.
He was bubbling with curiosity, but he was also keen to show me he knew the old Resistance rule of never asking unnecessary questions. I didn’t tell him anything; just winked secretly and went my way.
I drove Maganhard’s Citroën round the corner of the house out of sight of the main road, changed the plates with a screwdriver, and went back upstairs.
They were halfway through some sort of birdpaté, a long block of the stuff cut in the middle so as to preserve the tasteful decoration of a dead bird’s head sticking out one end, and its tail feathers the other. It looked something like a thrush, which suited me fine: I prefer eating them to being woken by them.
I helped myself to a reasonable slice and told Harvey: ‘I’ve changed plates on the car.’
He turned slowly to look at me. ‘You won’t get it across the frontier with the old papers.’
I nodded with my mouth full. ‘We weren’t going to get it across anyway. The customs’ll have the number by now.’
Maganhard stared at me: ‘What will you do, then?’
‘You should have thought of that when you brought your damn boat inside the three-mile limit. Well – if nobody knows we’re in Geneva, we may be able to hire a car there. Or, of course, there’s always the Swiss railways.’
Harvey said thickly: T prefer a car.’
I looked at him and nodded. For his side of the business, trains provided too many witnesses.
Madame Meliot waddled in and scooped up a bottle of red wine from the table and poured me a dose. Maganhard and the girl had glasses of it already; Harvey was on water.
She nodded at him and shrugged.
‘Américain,‘I explained, if she’d take that for an explanation.
She did, then turned the label to show me.‘Pinel, ha?’ And she grinned knowingly, and waddled out with thepate.
Miss Jarman asked: ‘Does Pinel have some special significance?’
I nodded. ‘In a way. The family that makes it: their château used to be a “safe house” on the same Rat-line. Across the Rhône from here.’
I glanced at the closed kitchen door. I hadn’t realised Madame even knew about the château – but these things must have got talked about openly after the war. Still, even that wouldn’t account for the knowingness of her grin. She must have heard I stayed at the château for a better reason than just that it was ‘safe’. Did they talk aboutthat as well?
Maganhard said: ‘An overrated wine.’
I nodded. True enough – but they knew what they were doing at Pinel. You can’t start overpricing a wine until first you’ve got somebody to overrate it.
Madame came back with a vast earthenware pot ofcassoulet: a mixture of goose, beans, mutton, and God-knows-what that she probably started in September and kept going with additions through to the end of May.
Harvey took a couple of forkfuls, then reached into his pocket, decanted a couple of pills, and swallowed them. Then he stood up, ‘I need some sleep.’ He looked at Maganhard: ‘If you get shot, I’m sorry.’
He didn’t need sleep nearly so much as he needed a stack of stiff drinks, but in the morning I’d rather have him dozy from barbiturates than weary from spending the night fighting a screaming thirst.
Madame shrugged at me, then led Harvey upstairs.
After dinner Maganhard decided he wanted to pass a message to Liechtenstein, and I remembered I’d promised to call Merlin again. Madame assured us there was a ‘safe’ phone down with the newmaire’, it sounded as if he owed the Meliots money from how sure she was that he was ‘safe’.
Maganhard was quite certain he couldn’t give me the message to give to Merlin to give to Liechtenstein. I wasn’t keen on phoning any Liechtenstein number direct, but the object of the whole trip was to save Maganhard’s business, so I couldn’t really argue. Miss Jarman came down with me to themaire’s house; Maganhard didn’t make his own calls, of course.
She asked for her number, then turned to me. ‘What time shall I say we will be in Liechtenstein?’
‘By tomorrow evening – with luck.’
‘How much luck?’
‘A certain amount. If they’re watching the frontier, we might have to wait until dark to cross.’
She frowned, puzzled. ‘If they don’t catch us tonight, won’t they assume they’ve missed us?’
I shook my head. ‘Wrong approach to police mentality. If they don’t catch us, they’ll assume we haven’t tried yet. Unfortunately, they’ll be right.’
Then her number came through and I drifted off to chat with themaire.
ELEVEN
At half past seven the next morning I was drinking black coffee with Madame Meliot and Miss Jarman.
I wouldn’t say life seemed much fun right then, but at least I had that feeling that you know you’re going to feel okay sooner or later. I’d sat up for an hour after the telephone calls drinkingmarc with Meliot himself and recalling the Resistance days and asking what had happened to old so-and-so? We hadn’t mentioned Giles.
Meliot came in from somewhere outside, clapped me on the shoulder, and then said something I missed to Madame. She turned round and kissed me.
That woke me. I started to say:‘Mais, pourquoi-?’
The girl said: ‘I think it must be those flowers – the wild daffodils – you left on their son’s grave yesterday. He must have seen them.’
‘I did? Oh – so that’s what you were doing when I lost you.’
I smiled back at Madame and shrugged meaninglessly. She called me an Englishman and went to get more coffee. Meliot had vanished, too.
I looked at the girl: ‘Thanks. I suppose I should have thought of it.’
‘Englishmen never think of flowers. But the gesture wasn’t out of character. For a moment I wondered why you’d expect them to put us up, when you’d got their son killed on a job you were doing.’ She sipped her coffee. ‘Then, when you said you’d gone on with the guns to Lyons, I understood: you could have thrown his body out at the roadside. Instead, you took it up to Lyons and then brought it all the way back here. It must have been quite a risk. I see why they like you.’
Madame came back with the coffee; Meliot came back and poured a shot ofmarc into it. I tried protesting, but it didn’t help. They stood around grinning at me while I drank it. Well, there are worse ways to start a day.
Harvey and Maganhard came down, neither of them looking as bright
as the desert sun, but at least on their feet. They’d got stuck sharing a room; Madame had made it clear she was entertaining them because they were with me. Therefore, I got the best single room. Logical.
Harvey took a cup of coffee. ‘You ring Merlin last night?’ he asked.
‘Yes.’ I studied him carefully sideways. He looked a little bleared and slow, but his hands on the cup were quite steady.
‘What did he say?’
‘Said he’d try and get to Geneva overnight on the Simplon-Orient. Then if we get stuck on the frontier, without the car, he’ll try and think of ways of getting us across. He could be some help.’
He frowned into his cup. ‘He could be dangerous, too – if the cops are really watching him.’
I nodded. ‘Yes – or he could just lead them away from us. We don’thave to get in touch with him.’
Maganhard looked up quickly. ‘Monsieur Merlin must be with me in Liechtenstein.’
I waved my head meaninglessly. I’d take my own decision – and we could always ring him when we were well past Geneva. He’d reach Liechtenstein in a couple of hours by plane to Zürich and then a train or hired car.
Maganhard said: ‘I am ready to go on.’ It sounded like an order.
Getting away from the Meliots wasn’t difficult. They’d never known me except as a person who had to go when he said so, and with no fuss made. We were rolling by a quarter to eight.
Harvey slipped his gun down to his ankle, then started juggling with the maps. ‘About seventy kilometres to the Rhône: where do we cross?’
‘Le Pouzin, probably.’
‘It’s a big river,’ he said doubtfully. ‘They could be watching all the bridges.’
‘I hope they’ll think we’ll be crossing north of Lyons. Merlin said he’d sent that telegram to the yacht, so they think we’re going from Paris. And Le Pouzin’s about ten bridges down from Lyons.’
He made a non-committalmmm noise.
Maganhard leant forward and asked: ‘How much do you think the police know, Mr Cane?’
‘Well-‘ I tried to count up. They know we’re in France. They know there’s four of us: the crew of that yacht probably talked their heads off. As sailors, the police’d be able to put the screws on by threatening to ban them from France for ever. So they know you and Miss Jarman, but they probably can’t describe Harvey or me. Not after just a glimpse on that beach. But apart from the telegram, that’s about all.’