Midnight Plus One

by Gavin Lyall

  Miss Jarman said: ‘What about the man you had a fight with in Tours? Won’t they know about him?’

  Harvey said: ‘No. His pals’ll have hauled him off to some quack doctor to get him patched up. How would they explain to the cops what they were doing, anyway?’

  Maganhard said heavily: ‘I hope you are right.’

  ‘God, I only have to be right the whole time,’ I snapped. ‘The cops just need to be right once, that’s all.’

  Harvey smiled his twisted smile. ‘Your trouble is you’re just not enjoying the ride, chum.’

  I glared at him, but soon my jumpiness passed. A few kilometres out of Dinadan we passed through thick pine woods, fresh logs stacked by the roadside like huge peeled asparagus. Then the road climbed in wriggles towards the final rim of the central plateau before the drop to the Rhône.

  The farms died out as the country got steeper. The hilltops turned into bare grey rock, the slopes into rock slides stitched in place by a few bushes or tough grass.

  I swung up in an uphill left-hand curve over the shoulder of a hill, where the road was sunk across a small spur, with rough rock walls speckled with clumps of broom on either side.

  Two light-green Renault 4L’s blocked the road.

  They were carefully arranged, slanted across the road with their back ends almost touching in an arrowhead pointing at us. Whatever I did, I was going to hit them.

  I rammed my foot back on the accelerator; it was the only unexpected thing I had left to do. Just before we hit, Harvey snatched down at his ankle and fired two careful shots through the windscreen.

  There was a huge clang and jolt, turning into a scream of tearing metal. Then, suddenly, it was quiet.

  My face was resting on the steering-wheel, but I didn’t seem to have hit it hard. I grabbed for my door handle, had to kick it open, and pitched out on to the road, spilling maps, Mauser, and spare magazine from the open briefcase as I went.

  I heard Harvey tumble out of the other side.

  Lying flat in a puddle of broken glass, I was covered on three sides by the Citroen, the six-foot rock wall beside the road, and one of the Renaults which had got knocked aside and ended up just behind us. Under the Citroen, I could see Harvey flat against the wall on his side.

  He looked across, and said: ‘Cover above me.’

  I said: ‘Yes,’ and then looked to see what he was talking about.

  They’d planned a good ambush, in a place I should have remembered and worried about. The rock walls of the cutting meant we couldn’t have swerved, and couldn’t jump off the road once we’d hit the Renaults. Then we’d have been trapped in one precise spot, with them waiting up on the banks on either side to blaze away.

  But by hitting the Renaults as hard as I could, I’d shifted the whole scene several yards: now they’d have to move before they could shoot.

  But we were still trapped inside the cutting – and they were still on the banks above us.

  A gun banged over my head and a shot crunched into the Citroën’s roof. Harvey fired back. The steepness of the wall meant the people on my side couldn’t get at me; Harvey’s side couldn’t get at him. We would be shooting across, over each other’s heads.

  Suddenly somebody stuck his head and gun up from the rocks on the bank above Harvey and loosed off two shots in my direction. Broken shale clattered down the rock wall behind me. I ducked, and grabbed for the Mauser, clipped the holster on as a butt, and switched the button to Automatic.

  Another shot, from somewhere back up the road, slammed into the battered Renault beside me. And another. As if it were a signal – and it probably was – my first man jumped up from the rocks and started pumping shots past my head.

  I jammed the Mauser into my shoulder, clamped my left hand on the magazine, and fired.

  It went off in one shortbrrap, trying to rip out of my hands. The man was hit by a sudden wind: his arms flung out sideways, then his head snapped up, and he pitched back out of sight.

  Through the ringing in my ears I heard Harvey saying: ‘I keep telling you the war’s over. Keep it single shots.’

  ‘I got him.’ I was trying to work out how many rounds I’d fired; I couldn’t. The Mauser fires too fast for individual shots to echo in your brain. I guessed I’d fired ten – half the magazine.

  Harvey said: ‘I count three of them’s showed so far.’

  ‘Yes. Almost like a war, isn’t it?’

  ‘The hell with you.’ He fired over my head, uphill. By my reckoning, the ranges were a bit long for his short-barrelled gun but he was aiming as carefully as if he’d had a big target pistol.

  Then there was a pause. The mixture of three cars – the second Renault was jammed diagonally across the Citroen’s nose – gave us a lot of cover. If whoever-it-was had thought to bring a few grenades, they could have blasted us out without showing themselves. But since they’d been showing themselves, it looked as if they’d forgotten the grenades.

  A gun fired behind me. I’d thrown myself flat and twisted half round to look up the road before I realised the shot hadn’t struck anywhere near me.

  Standing there, in the middle of the road, was a man, holding a pistol aimed at the sky. He yelled:‘Arvi!’

  Through under the car, I saw Harvey’s arm straighten and the little gun blurred in his hand. He fired three shots. When I looked back up the road, the man was just a heap.

  Two more shots came from the hillside above me, one tearing into the Citroën’s roof. Harvey fired back over the top of the car, then shouted: ‘Give me that thing! ‘

  I tossed the Mauser over the Citroen and he grabbed it and fired two short bursts up the hill.

  Then he stood clear of the cars, still watching the hill. I climbed slowly on to my feet and walked round beside him, looking nervously over my shoulder. But the hillside was empty.

  Harvey said: ‘Last seen running like hell,’ and gave me the empty Mauser.

  ‘Glad you find it has its uses.’

  He didn’t say anything, just walked away up the road, thumbing fresh cartridges into the Smith and Wesson. I found the Mauser’s spare magazine, clipped it in, and followed.

  He was standing, staring down at the man he’d shot. ‘The stupid bastard,’ he said softly. ‘What was he trying to do? -Standing there shouting at me. The damn stupid bastard.’ He lifted his foot and I thought he was going to kick the dead face – but he just tipped the automatic out of the man’s hand.

  He looked up at me. ‘You know him?’

  I nodded. It was Bernard – one of the two top gunmen in Europe. One of the men I’d asked for in preference to Harvey himself.

  Harvey said: ‘Yeah, I knew him, too. He must’ve recognised me – shouted my name. What the hell did hewant?’

  I shrugged. ‘Maybe to arrange an armistice. Maybe he didn’t believe in dog eating dog. We give him Maganhard, we get away safe.’

  He stared. ‘You think so?’

  ‘Think up something better.’

  He looked back at the dead man. ‘The stupid bastard. Didn’t he know it was serious?’ Then his voice went soft again, almost puzzled. ‘I didn’t think I’d end up shootinghim.’

  I didn’t think Bernard had expected it, either – but all I said was: ‘They sent in the First Team this time.’

  Harvey nodded and walked back.

  That left me and Bernard. I was in a hurry to get away from this place – anybody who’d heard my Mauser go off wouldn’t have writtenthat down as a bit of poaching with a shotgun – but not in so much of a hurry to leave bodies in the middle of the road. I dragged him back up the road to where the downhill rock wall ended, then off it, and in among the rocks on the spur.

  Then, where Harvey couldn’t see me, I gave the pockets a quick once-over. I didn’t find anything useful. I climbed down to the cars.

  Maganhard was still sitting in the Citroen. The girl was out and, presumably because Harvey had told her to, was picking up the empty Mauser cartridge cases. Harvey himself was stud
ying the Renault jammed across the Citroën’s front.

  I got into the car and tried the engine. It caught at once, so that at least was okay. I switched off and went round to the front.

  Harvey said: ‘We can bounce it clear.’ The Renault looked as if it had been through the coffee-grinder. We’d punched in its back end, bounced its front off the rock wall, and then shunted it along ahead of us, sideways. Its rear left wheel was locked solid, wrapped up in torn bodywork like a chocolate in silver paper.

  We grabbed it by the rear bumper and bounced. There was a tearing sound and it came away from the Citroen. It was a nice light little car; a few more bounces and it was at the roadside. I’d have liked to have rolled it over and down the hill, but the locked rear wheel wouldn’t roll an inch.

  I studied the front of the Citroen. We’d lost both our headlights, which didn’t surprise me, and the wings around them looked fairly buckled, the left worse than the right. To me it looked as if it was touching the wheel. I looked underneath the car – and then knew what our real trouble was. There was a slow, steady drip into a sticky pink pool between the front wheels.

  ‘We’re bleeding,’ I said. ‘The main hydraulic reservoir’s leaking. We won’t get far – and if we want to get anywhere, we’d better start now.’

  The car had been stabbed in its hydraulic heart; the fluid – the life blood – that powered the steering, brakes, springing, gear-change, was dripping away from the main tank. ‘Right.’ Harvey turned to the girl: ‘All aboard.’ She came up, white-faced, and clutching a double handful of empty shells against her stomach. I opened my briefcase and she poured them in.

  Then she said: ‘I’m sorry – I’m not used to this sort of thing. I didn’t know it would be like this.’

  ‘Nobody knew,’ I said. She turned away and got into the back seat.

  I put on my driving gloves and twisted the front wing clear of the wheel. The main reservoir was just behind the wheel, so it was the same shock that had punctured it. I thought about topping it up with the can of hydraulic fluid in the boot, but it would just waste time. I climbed in.

  The hydraulic brake warning light came on – and stayed on. I shoved the lever into first gear, took a deep breath, and we crept forward. We weren’t dead yet – but we were dying.

  Maganhard asked: ‘Can we get the car repaired quickly?’ He sounded quite calm about it.

  I said: ‘No. We can’t get it repaired at all. We daren’t take it near a garage, not even through a village: we’re full of bullet-holes, and the trouble with a bullet-hole is that it looks like exactly what it is.’

  We had two holes through the windscreen on Harvey’s side, from his own shots just before we crashed, one through the boot lid, two through the roof, and another through Maganhard’s door.

  ‘What do we do next then?’

  ‘Get as far away as we can without meeting anybody, dump the car, find a phone, ring somebody up, and say “Help”.’

  I thought the next question would be ‘Ring who?’, and I hadn’t worked that out yet. But all he said was: ‘We’ll be late, then.’

  There wasn’t any answer to that. I glanced at Harvey. He was just staring bleakly out ahead, his eyes searching. He hadn’t forgotten there was still a gunman on the loose out there, though I didn’t think we’d see him again.

  I turned off up a narrow, winding road up over the hill. Already the steering was getting heavy as its power faded. Soon I’d have no gear-change left; then the springing would sag right down; finally, the power brakes would go, leaving just the mechanical foot-brake.

  The car would keep going, because the engine would keep turning – but it wouldn’t be comfortable, and once I’d stopped I wouldn’t get started again, not without a gear-change. I left the lever in second, as the gear I most wanted.

  Harvey said suddenly: ‘If we end up in the backwoods somewhere, how do we find a phone?’

  ‘I think I can end us up quite near one.’

  The second hydraulic warning light came on: amount of fluid dangerously low. The steering was really dragging at my hands, on those bends, and the springing was letting through jolts. The car was dying.

  The road straightened and flattened slightly. If it was the one I remembered, it led us up on to the top of a ridge, without a village for fifteen kilometres. It wasn’t getting us any closer to the Rhône, but that might be an advantage if the police started setting up roadblocks. I wanted to be away from our obvious line of escape.

  We crawled over on to the top of the ridge and I speeded up. The steering was entirely mechanical now, and we were running on square wheels. I hadn’t had to use the brakes uphill, so there should be one last stopping effort left in them.

  I went fast past a couple of farmhouses and a parked cart, then eased up and let the engine slow her down. We’d done about twelve kilometres since the ambush. To our left, the ridge sloped down to open, rolling country; on the right it was a steeper downslope of pine forests. At the bottom there was a minor main road with a fair selection of villages.

  I covered about another six kilometres before I recognised the track through the woods. I slowed on the mechanical foot-brake, but not enough. At the last moment I jabbed the pressure brake. The car stood on its nose and made the turn, the engine jerking unhappily at far too low revs. We started down the track.

  If we’d had square wheels before, now they were triangular. The car floor banged on the ground, and engine noise came up under my feet, so we’d crumpled the exhaust pipe. The slope got steeper. I pumped the brake: we slowed, but the slope got worse. I jammed the mechanical brake full down. The back wheels locked and we slid, slamming on to the ground. The exhaust pipe tore out with a clang.

  I grabbed for the ignition and switched the engine off; the car added a shudder. I picked a clump of young trees and wrenched the wheel. We left the track, hit the ground again with an enormous bang, and ran gently to a stop in the trees.

  ‘And that,’ I said, ‘is the end of the line.’

  I knocked open my door. We had fir trees over us, all round us, and the ones we’d knocked down underneath us. With any luck, the Citroen wouldn’t be found for a few days.

  I said to Harvey: ‘You better clean out the car,’ and went round to fight open the buckled bonnet. When I found a screwdriver I got off the Dinadan number plates, and took both them and the old ones with me.

  By then the luggage had been hauled out on to the track and Harvey was carefully wiping the car clean of fingerprints.

  Maganhard said: ‘That was my car. I doubt the insurance will pay for it.’

  I stared at him, then shook my head slowly. ‘No, if they can’t find an escape clause in some of the things we’ve been doing, they’re losing their touch.’ I walked back up the track to find and hide the exhaust pipe.

  When I got back Harvey was propping up a couple of flattened trees to cover the entry wound we’d made in the plantation. I kicked our skid-marks around and hoped it would rain soon. Then we were ready to go.

  TWELVE

  We walked down the track. The luggage was two soft leather Italian grips with long handles like overgrown handbags, my briefcase, and Harvey’s Air France case. It didn’t take much effort, but it was far too much to carry in public if we wanted to look like tourists out for a stroll. We’d have to hide it for a time.

  After half an hour we reached the stream at the bottom of the slope. I picked a muddy patch, shovelled a hole with one number plate, then planted all four in, and kicked the mud back on top.

  Maganhard said: They will trace the car by the engine number.’

  ‘Yes, but it’ll take them a few hours longer.’

  The trees ended at the stream, but a few hundred yards along to our left, they started again on the far side. We walked along there, crossed, and went up through more woods towards the road. By my reckoning that put us about a quarter of a mile from the nearest village.

  Harvey, who’d dropped naturally into place just behind Maganhard’s
right shoulder, turned round to me and said: ‘Well – what’s the plan?’

  ‘I don’t think we’d all better go into the village; four of us’ll look suspicious – and they may have got the word about the ambush by now.’ It was half past nine, over an hour since the shooting had started.

  Harvey said: ‘Okay. That means either just you or you and her. I stay with him.’ His voice was quite definite.

  I nodded, and turned to the girl. ‘Miss Jarman – if you’d like to come with me, I’d like you to. A man and a woman look more innocent than a single man on his own.’

  ‘Whatever you say.’ Not exactly a rush of enthusiasm, but not everybody feels all that good an hour after being shot at for the first time. It can be quite a shock realising that people are really trying to kill you, personally.

  Harvey said: ‘About who you ring – I have an opinion.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘You don’t ring Dinadan.’

  I hadn’t been going to; when you’re on the Rat-line you never change your mind and go back to the same place again. But I wanted to hear Harvey’s reasons as well. I said: ‘You tell me why.’

  ‘The mob who planted that ambush knew exactly where we were -exactly. They made it as far away from the village as they «ould, but they were still on the only road we could have taken, if we were going for the Rhône. They knew we were in Dinadan – and they hadn’t followed us from Tours.’

  I nodded slowly. ‘They knew all right. I think your ideas about Dinadan are wrong, but I won’t argue it now. I wasn’t going back, anyhow.’

  Harvey looked at me with cold carefulness. Then he 85 said: ‘Okay, we’re in a hurry. Anybody else from your Resistance days round here?’

  “There’s a man up in Lyons-‘

  ‘Too damn far,’ he said briskly. ‘What about this wine château you were talking about last night – the Pinel people? That’s a Côtes du Rhône wine; their place should be closer.’