Midnight Plus One

by Gavin Lyall

  Moonlight rippled over the zone and the concrete shapes turned a dim bluey-white like fresh damp bones.

  Harvey said: ‘It doesn’t look good.’

  I looked at him, wondering if he’d been thinking the same things. Then I realised what he meant. And it didn’t look good. Out in the zone, you could hide an army. It had been built to do precisely that.

  I said carefully: ‘They’ll be near the path. In this light, that means less than ten yards. So we get ourselves into the trench system and kind of creep up on them.’

  He thought about it for what seemed like a long time. Then he shook his head. ‘Sorry, Cane. If there’s shooting coming, I’ve got to be with him.’ He nodded at the car.

  ‘You’ll be doing a better job if you and me get the shooting done with before he gets near it.’

  ‘Or maybe they jump us and he’s sitting back here, naked. I can’t do it, Cane.’

  I said: ‘We were hired to get him through. I’m going to do that.’

  He shook his head again. ‘No. You were hired to get him through; I was hired to keep him, alive. If I don’t think he’ll make it alive, my advice is he don’t try.’ He stared at me. ‘Itold you at the beginning, Cane, this could happen. We’d end up wanting different things.’

  ‘Maganhard’ll want to try.’

  ‘You could be surprised how people don’t want to try things when I tell them it’ll get them killed.’

  I looked at him carefully. ‘D’you want to call the whole thing off?’

  He said quietly: ‘Yes. I want to call it off.’

  And then I knew. He was being honest – in the long, looping way that is the only way for a man like him to be honest about such things.

  I said: ‘Let’s see what Maganhard says,’ and turned back to the car.

  Maganhard was already leaning out of the window. I couldn’t see his expression, but I could guess. ‘Well?’ he crackled. ‘What’s the delay now?’

  Harvey said carefully and tonelessly: ‘The battle zone is very difficult ground, Mr Maganhard. It’s built for exactly the job the other side’s trying to do. I can’t guarantee your safety if you go on. I advise you not to go.’

  Maganhard’s spectacles glinted dully as he turned to me: ‘What d’you say, Cane?’

  ‘I don’t guarantee anything, either,’ I said smoothly. ‘I never did. But I’m ready to go. And in this light they’re as likely to hit me as you.’

  The flat metallic voice said: ‘That sounds reasonable.’ The spectacles glinted back at Harvey.

  Harvey said doggedly: ‘Cane and I are trying to do different jobs. He’s trying-‘

  ‘He seems to be doing the job I want done,’ Maganhard snapped. ‘Why aren’t you?’

  There was a long, slow silence, with just the tickover of the Rolls like a tired heartbeat.

  Then Harvey said: ‘I’ve drunk too much, Mr Maganhard. There’s no point in saying I’m sorry. But I’m slowed up. I’m not as good as I should be.’

  It must have cost him blood to say that. No alcoholic ever admits it, and no gunman ever admits he might be beaten. And he had.

  Maganhard looked at me again. I shrugged. ‘I still think we can do it.’

  The front door opened and the girl stepped down beside us.

  ‘If Harvey says he shouldn’t go, then you can’t make him-‘

  ‘I’m not asking Harvey to go. I’m going myself. It’s what I was hired for.’

  Harvey said dully: ‘You know who’s up there? Alain.’

  ‘Alain?’

  Then I thought about it, and he was right. Alain and Bernard – the two top gunmen, the men I’d first asked for. They always worked together. Only they hadn’t been together in the Auvergne – and Bernard had got killed. Yes: Alain would most certainly be here now. I should have thought of that.

  Harvey said: ‘You know Alain. You think you can beat him?’

  ‘Yes.’ I nodded. ‘I know him. I can beat him.’

  ‘You’re crazy.’

  ‘No – Alain didn’t set this thing up -I did. I put him out there. And he’s still thinking we’ll come walking down not expecting trouble. No – this is going to happen my way, not his. I can beat him.’

  Miss Jarman said viciously: ‘You must reallywant your money.’

  ‘No.’ Harvey shook his head wearily. ‘It’s not that, honey. He wants to be Caneton. And nobody ever beat Caneton. Yet.’

  I said quickly: ‘Bring the car through in fifteen minutes. Unless you hear shooting. Then you can decide for yourself.’

  I walked away down the bank to the right, looking for the entrance to the communication trench. I found it and turned in.

  THIRTY

  I took several fast steps, turned the first corner, and the close concrete walls shut in on me. After that, I moved more carefully, testing the walls at my side, the floor beneath.

  The trench was no more than an unroofed concrete tunnel, working its way forward in zigzags so that an invader couldn’t shoot down the length of it. The concrete had the samégritty-soft dampness of the blockhouse farther back, and mud had dribbled down the sides into heaps that were growing tufts of grass. The floor had once had a drainage channel down the middle, but now it was a series of slimy puddles where things moved and gurgled, but never seemed to break the thick surface.

  And where are you waiting, Alain? I should know. I worked with you, on your side, in the old days. I remember you: fast, cool, and ruthless. And since then, you’ve been practising, I hear.

  I found myself walking crouched. Stupid. The trench had been dug just deep enough so that you could walk upright and not be seen from outside. Seven feet deep. Just one foot deeper than the grave. And the view out wasn’t much better.

  At the next corner the turn was much sharper. I poked an eyebrow round, and I was in the third-line firing trench.

  It ran across square to the line of the communication trench. Again lined with concrete, but wider and with an eighteen-inch firestep on the front side for defenders to stand on. And above that, at the lip of the trench, there was an irregular humped line sprouting small bushes that must once have been a sandbag parapet.

  I took a step and trod on something that crunched. The walls picked up the sound and rang it like a peal of bells along the trench, and things moved suddenly in the puddles, leaving slow swirls and softglop noises.

  I froze, and the sounds died. Then I lifted my foot and I’d crushed the muddy-white skeleton of a frog. I took a deep breath and a long stride across on the firestep.

  The air felt suddenly sweet and the bushes rustled gently in the wind. But I couldn’t see a damn thing. Ahead of me, the whole battle zone was covered with small bushes, growing higher than I could stand from the trench.

  Are you out there, Alain, and not in the trenches at all? You could hide an army out in the bushes, too, by now. And you wouldn’t be alone; not you. At least two of you, one on either side of the path to give cross-fire. So if the first shots missed, whichever way we jumped, we’d be jumping into the guns. You’re professionals – this job’s no use if you don’t live to collect your pay. You don’t want a gun-battle; just a neat little murder.

  I moved along the firestep, where there were no puddles but just heaps of wet sand that had spilled down from the rotted sandbags. When I ducked my head, the wind shut off as if I’d closed a hatch, and the air was close, warm, and slimy.

  The firing trenches had their own pattern: the zigzags were squared off, like the shape of huge battlements laid flat on the ground. The front parallels were where you were supposed to win the war from; the rear ones (what the hell did they call them? – yes, ‘traverses’) for having a quiet smoke while somebody else won it.

  I walked round several corners, from traverse up to front and back again. Almost every front wall had something in it: dark, foul-smelling entrances to deep dugouts, or steps up to a squat pillbox sunk into the parapet. The pillboxes were always on the front parallels.

  Then I saw the tank
path. It crossed on a culvert built into a traverse: a heavy concrete affair to support the weight of a tank above, yet leaving a three-foot tunnel for crawling through underneath.

  I stayed where I was. I knew now that if Alain was in the trenches, he wasn’t in this third line. He’d have somebody on both sides… I shivered as I remembered how cheerfully I’d walked up round those corners.

  I walked back more carefully, found the communication trench leading to the second line. As I turned in, I looked at my watch: I’d used six of my fifteen minutes.

  The lines were supposed to be seventy yards apart, but the zigzag of the trench turned it into a hundred-yard trip. And at one point a barbed-wire entanglement laid across the top had collapsed into the trench itself. I slid through with no more than three or four injections of blood-poisoning off the rusted spikes.

  But at least it told me how far I’d come: barbed wire should be laid just outside grenade-throwing range of the trench it protects. Rules of War – before people started throwing dive-bombers and armoured columns instead of grenades…

  Grenades. Would Alain have grenades? Yes-if he was expecting a car. But he wasn’t. Just several people in the open – and there grenades are useless. All that time waiting for them to go off, and after the flash and bang, you don’t know if they’re dead or hiding in the ditch. So – no grenades.

  So what instead? A burst of Sten-gun fire. Just waiting until we were close enough to chop us down with one burst…And where had I thought of that idea before? Yes – in Quimper, the man in the car, the dead man. Resistance Sten-gunner.9 mm. cartridge on his key-ring – probably from the first time he killed with his nice new Sten. Sentimentalist. Realists fight for money. Like Alain. Like Caneton.

  I stopped at the corner, lowered my head, and peered carefully around three feet off the ground. Nothing. I hadn’t expected anything. But I’d remembered I was in a trench system built to have as many corners as possible for men with guns to wait behind…

  Was I here for twelve thousand francs? No. I’d insisted on being told that Maganhard was in the right-that he hadn’t raped anybody, that he wasn’t trying to kill anybody but people were trying to kill him. That made him in the right – and me too. Just an old sentimentalist.

  Or because I was Caneton?

  I looked quickly left and right into the second-line firing trench, stepped across on the firestep, and started moving left, towards the tank path.

  Suddenly it was a long, cold bright way to the next corner. I got there, but it cost me something that I wouldn’t have left to get me round the next. And the next after that.

  I moved carefully, feeling with my foot for obstacles before putting it down, keeping my eyes and the gun on the corner ahead.

  Put ‘He died for twelve thousand francs’ on a man’s tomb and nobody’ll sneer. They’ll reckon he knew what he was doing. Twelve thousand francs is something you can count; you can say it isn’t enough; you can change your mind and not earn it.

  But you can’t count being Caneton; you can’t back down from that. And for that, maybe you’ll do things you’d never do just for twelve thousand francs…

  Then the next corner was a long way off and horribly close, and I was moving towards it far too fast and much too slowly. And my time must be nearly up – but I daren’t look at my watch. I had to look at the corner. And the corner looked steadily back.

  I froze, with the Mauser up and aimed and the trigger a fraction away from loosing a bright, noisy, friendly blast of fire. And the quiet corner watched me.

  But Maganhard is right and Alain is wrong… And me? Then I knew that nothing I could do would ever change either of those things. All I could do was fix the cost – the cost of being right or wrong. And perhaps who paid.

  Slowly, very slowly, I lifted my left wrist and laid it across the barrel of the aimed gun and flickered my eyes for an instant at the luminous dial of my watch.

  Three minutes. Just time to go back, to say the hell with twelve thousand francsand being Caneton. To tell Maganhard he’ll still be in the right whether he gets through or not, and that what matters is the cost…

  But still time enough to fix the cost, to make that right. Because it was still the fight I’d planned and not what Alain was expecting. Because Iwas still Caneton – and nobody else was that. And I could get round that corner.

  I took three quick soft strides and was around it, pointing the Mauser into the long, dark loophole of a pillbox, staring down at me from the next front parallel.

  Nothing happened.

  I walked very carefully towards it, up a few yards of fore-and-aft trench without a firestep. There was another corner just before the pillbox, but I knew nobody would be around it. If they were anywhere in this trench, they were up behind the loophole. At the corner, I stopped and studied it.

  It was a six-sided affair sunk into the front parapet, with loopholes around five sides. The sixth was the way in from the trench: you climbed three steps and in through a low doorway. I didn’t climb anything. I just looked. Beside the pillbox the parapet had rotted and sand had poured down on the steps…

  If anybody had got into that pillbox in weeks, he’d done it hi a flying upwards dive. The sand on the steps hadn’t been touched. I scuttled up and inside.

  Like the blockhouse, you had to walk in around a blast wall. And inside, there were a lot of complicated bits of internal wall so that nobody could sneak up, shoot in through an unoccupied loophole, and hit everybody else in the back. A lot of thought had gone into this pillbox. I stepped quickly across to the rear left-hand loophole.

  It looked half-backwards: above and across the bushes -and just twenty yards away, there was the square outline of another pillbox. And running between across another culvert over the trench, the tank path.

  I saw the pattern now: the two pillboxes placed like gateposts to guard either side of the tank path, the one weak spot in the whole defence.

  And now I knew where Alain was – where he had to be. In the same twin pillboxes up on the front line; the only places where he could stand up to see above the bushes without being seen. And where he could catch us in the only place where a bunch of people on foot couldn’t be straggled out to make a difficult shot: crossing on the culvert.

  Behind me I heard the distant heartbeat of the Rolls. My time was up.

  I jumped the steps down into the trench and ran. The corners didn’t matter any more; now the corners weremy protection. Nor did the noise; the steep sides of the communication trench would channel my crashings and splashings straight up in the air. In a concrete pillbox, already intent on the throb of the Rolls, Alain would never hear me.

  I burst into the front line, turned left, rounded a couple of corners, and jumped on to the firestep. The sound of the car slapped at me.

  Over my shoulder, I saw it: a dim grey cloud drifting gently over the ground maybe seventy yards back. And perhaps a dark figure walking beside it: Harvey, herding it along like a ghost elephant.

  But across the bushes, I could see the pillbox on the next front parallel.

  Alain must have seen it by now, know something had gone wrong. Would he shoot sooner – or later? Wait until the car was on the culvert, ten yards off, or fire at long range, knowing the Rolls daren’t swing off the track?

  I ran along the firestep, turned left, turned right…

  Would Alain use lights? No – never. Why did I think that? Because we’d never used lights in the old days – lights meant throwing flares that would light us as well, would stop us pulling out if things got too tough…

  I jumped on the firestep below the pillbox and screamed: ‘Lights!’

  The Rolls paused, then the headlights came full on.

  Light, glaring blazing light, slammed against the pillbox like a silent explosion. Inside, a Sten fired into the blinding glare – but in the long wasteful howl of a man shooting at something he isn’t certain about and is scared of.

  I ran up the steps, threw the little Walther pistol
in around the blast wall and yelled:‘Grenade!’

  He must have been thinking about grenades already -wishing he had some, maybe. He came around the wall like a kicked cat.

  I pulled the trigger at a range of four feet. The burst lifted him, smashed him against the wall, hung him there. Then he pitched slowly forward and I stood aside and watched him fall past me into the trench.

  It was the man coming out behind him who shot me.

  THIRTY-ONE

  It was dark and my mouth was full of slime and there was a distant rattle like a large-tooth file dragged across my raw brain. And deep inside, pain. The sort of pain you don’t want to disturb, that you want to leave sleeping – but you know it won’t sleep. Butyou can sleep. Just lie there. And sleep. And maybe die.

  The idea jerked me awake. If I was dying, at least it meant I wasn’t dead yet. I spat and tried to roll up on to my side – and that hurt. A flare of pain like a lighted fuse ran clear through me.

  I kept very still and it died to a dull red ache around my stomach and a heavy feeling in my legs. God, not a stomach wound, not a bullet in the guts and living on milk the rest of my life. And you can bribe a doctor into patching up a bullet scrape and calling it a road accident, but a hole in the belly is going to get reported…

  At least I was thinking like Caneton again. And come to that, why should a stomach wound paralyse my legs? I screwed my head around and saw the dead man lying across the back of my knees.

  I looked carefully around. I was lying at the bottom of the pillbox steps, and just ahead of me was the body of the man I’d shot. The Rolls’ lights were out.

  The rattle started again, and this time it didn’t feel distant. Bullets crunched and screamed at the lip of the trench and somebody dropped into it with a heavy splash. I groped in the mud for the Mauser, found it, then Harvey said: ‘Cane – are you alive?’

  ‘Christ, I don’t know,’ I said crossly. The shock was beginning to wear on and it was making me angry. Mostly at myself.