‘Take him away, Robert,’ said Datt. ‘He makes too much noise in here. I can’t bear people shouting.’ Robert nodded and turned upon Jean-Paul. He made a movement of his chin and a clicking noise of the sort that encourages horses. Jean-Paul buttoned his jacket carefully and walked to the door.
‘We’ll have the meat course now,’ Datt said to the woman.
She smiled with more deference than humour and withdrew backwards, muzzle last.
‘Take him out, Robert,’ repeated Datt.
‘Maybe you think you don’t,’ said Jean-Paul earnestly, ‘but you’ll find …’ His words were lost as Robert pulled him gently through the door and closed it.
‘What are you going to do to him?’ asked Maria.
‘Nothing, my dear,’ said Datt. ‘But he’s become more and more tiresome. He must be taught a lesson. We must frighten him, it’s for the good of all of us.’
‘You’re going to kill him,’ said Maria.
‘No, my dear.’ He stood near the fireplace, and smiled reassuringly.
‘You are, I can feel it in the atmosphere.’
Datt turned his back on us. He toyed with the clock on the mantelpiece. He found the key for it and began to wind it up. It was a noisy ratchet.
Maria turned to me. ‘Are they going to kill him?’ she asked.
‘I think they are,’ I said.
She went across to Datt and grabbed his arm. ‘You mustn’t,’ she said. ‘It’s too horrible. Please don’t. Please father, please don’t, if you love me.’ Datt put his arm around her paternally but said nothing.
‘He’s a wonderful person,’ Maria said. She was speaking of Jean-Paul. ‘He would never betray you. Tell him,’ she asked me, ‘he must not kill Jean-Paul.’
‘You mustn’t kill him,’ I said.
‘You must make it more convincing than that,’ said Datt. He patted Maria. ‘If our friend here can tell us a way to guarantee his silence, some other way, then perhaps I’ll agree.’
He waited but I said nothing. ‘Exactly,’ said Datt.
‘But I love him,’ said Maria.
‘That can make no difference,’ said Datt. ‘I’m not a plenipotentiary from God, I’ve got no halos or citations to distribute. He stands in the way – not of me but of what I believe in: he stands in the way because he is spiteful and stupid. I do believe, Maria, that even if it were you I’d still do the same.’
Maria stopped being a suppliant. She had that icy calm that women take on just before using their nails.
‘I love him,’ said Maria. That meant that he should never be punished for anything except infidelity. She looked at me. ‘It’s your fault for bringing me here.’
Datt heaved a sigh and left the room.
‘And your fault that he’s in danger,’ she said.
‘Okay,’ I said, ‘blame me if you want to. On my colour soul the stains don’t show.’
‘Can’t you stop them?’ she said.
‘No,’ I told her, ‘it’s not that sort of film.’
Her face contorted as though cigar smoke was getting in her eyes. It went squashy and she began to sob. She didn’t cry. She didn’t do that mascara-respecting display of grief that winkles tear-drops out of the eyes with the corner of a tiny lace handkerchief while watching the whole thing in a well-placed mirror. She sobbed and her face collapsed. The mouth sagged, and the flesh puckered and wrinkled like blow-torched paintwork. Ugly sight, and ugly sound.
‘He’ll die,’ she said in a strange little voice.
I don’t know what happened next. I don’t know whether Maria began to move before the sound of the shot or after. Just as I don’t know whether Jean-Paul had really lunged at Robert, as Robert later told us. But I was right behind Maria as she opened the door. A .45 is a big pistol. The first shot had hit the dresser, ripping a hole in the carpentry and smashing half a dozen plates. They were still falling as the second shot fired. I heard Datt shouting about his plates and saw Jean-Paul spinning drunkenly like an exhausted whipping top. He fell against the dresser, supporting himself on his hand, and stared at me pop-eyed with hate and grimacing with pain, his cheeks bulging as though he was looking for a place to vomit. He grabbed at his white shirt and tugged it out of his trousers. He wrenched it so hard that the buttons popped and pinged away across the room. He had a great bundle of shirt in his hand now and he stuffed it into his mouth like a conjurer doing a trick called ‘how to swallow my white shirt’. Or how to swallow my pink-dotted shirt. How to swallow my pink shirt, my red, and finally dark-red shirt. But he never did the trick. The cloth fell away from his mouth and his blood poured over his chin, painting his teeth pink and dribbling down his neck and ruining his shirt. He knelt upon the ground as if to pray but his face sank to the floor and he died without a word, his ear flat against the ground, as if listening for hoof-beats pursuing him to another world.
He was dead. It’s difficult to wound a man with a .45. You either miss them or blow them in half.
The legacy the dead leave us are life-size effigies that only slightly resemble their former owners. Jean-Paul’s bloody body only slightly resembled him: its thin lips pressed together and the small circular plaster just visible on the chin.
Robert was stupefied. He was staring at the gun in horror. I stepped over to him and grabbed the gun away from him. I said, ‘You should be ashamed,’ and Datt repeated that.
The door opened suddenly and Hudson and Kuang stepped into the kitchen. They looked down at the body of Jean-Paul. He was a mess of blood and guts. No one spoke, they were waiting for me. I remembered that I was the one holding the gun. ‘I’m taking Kuang and Hudson and I’m leaving,’ I said. Through the open door to the hall I could see into the library, its table covered with their scientific documents: photos, maps and withered plants with large labels on them.
‘Oh no you don’t,’ said Datt.
‘I have to return Hudson intact because that’s part of the deal. The information he’s given Kuang has to be got back to the Chinese Government or else it wasn’t much good delivering it. So I must take Kuang too.’
‘I think he’s right,’ said Kuang. ‘It makes sense, what he says.’
‘How do you know what makes sense?’ said Datt. ‘I’m arranging your movements, not this fool; how can we trust him? He admits this task is for the Americans.’
‘It makes sense,’ said Kuang again. ‘Hudson’s information is genuine. I can tell: it fills out what I learnt from that incomplete set of papers you passed to me last week. If the Americans want me to have the information, then they must want it to be taken back home.’
‘Can’t you see that they might want to capture you for interrogation?’ said Datt.
‘Rubbish!’ I interrupted. ‘I could have arranged that at any time in Paris without risking Hudson out here in the middle of nowhere.’
‘They are probably waiting down the road,’ said Datt. ‘You could be dead and buried in five minutes. Out here in the middle of the country no one would hear, no one would see the diggings.’
‘I’ll take that chance,’ said Kuang. ‘If he can get Hudson into France on false papers, he can get me out.’
I watched Hudson, fearful that he would say I’d done no such thing for him, but he nodded sagely and Kuang seemed reassured.
‘Come with us,’ said Hudson, and Kuang nodded agreement. The two scientists seemed to be the only ones in the room with any mutual trust.
I was reluctant to leave Maria but she just waved her hand and said she’d be all right. She couldn’t take her eyes off Jean-Paul’s body.
‘Cover him, Robert,’ said Datt.
Robert took a table-cloth from a drawer and covered the body. ‘Go,’ Maria called again to me, and then she began to sob. Datt put his arm around her and pulled her close. Hudson and Kuang collected their data together and then, still waving the gun around, I showed them out and followed.
As we went across the hall the old woman emerged carrying a heavily laden tray. She said, ‘Th
ere’s still the poulet sauté chasseur.’
‘Vive le sport,’ I said.
31
From the garage we took the camionette – a tiny grey corrugated-metal van – because the roads of France are full of them. I had to change gear constantly for the small motor, and the tiny headlights did no more than probe the hedgerows. It was a cold night and I envied the warm grim-faced occupants of the big Mercs and Citroëns that roared past us with just a tiny peep of the horn, to tell us they had done so.
Kuang seemed perfectly content to rely upon my skill to get him out of France. He leaned well back in the hard upright seat, folded his arms and closed his eyes as though performing some oriental contemplative ritual. Now and again he spoke. Usually it was a request for a cigarette.
The frontier was little more than a formality. The Paris office had done us proud: three good British passports – although the photo of Hudson was a bit dodgy – over twenty-five pounds in small notes (Belgian and French), and some bills and receipts to correspond to each passport. I breathed more easily after we were through. I’d done a deal with Loiseau so he’d guaranteed no trouble, but I still breathed more easily after we’d gone through.
Hudson lay flat upon some old blankets in the rear. Soon he began to snore. Kuang spoke.
‘Are we going to an hotel or are you going to blow one of your agents to shelter me?’
‘This is Belgium,’ I said. ‘Going to an hotel is like going to a police station.’
‘What will happen to him?’
‘The agent?’ I hesitated. ‘He’ll be pensioned off. It’s bad luck but he was the next due to be blown.’
‘Age?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘And you have someone better in the area?’
‘You know we can’t talk about that,’ I said.
‘I’m not interested professionally,’ said Kuang. ‘I’m a scientist. What the British do in France or Belgium is nothing to do with me, but if we are blowing this man I owe him his job.’
‘You owe him nothing,’ I said. ‘What the hell do you think this is? He’ll be blown because it’s his job. Just as I’m conducting you because that’s my job. I’m doing it as a favour. You owe no one anything, so forget it. As far as I’m concerned you are a parcel.’
Kuang inhaled deeply on his cigarette, then removed it from his mouth with his long delicate fingers and stubbed it into the ashtray. I imagined him killing Annie Couzins. Passion or politics? He rubbed the tobacco shreds from his fingertips like a pianist practising trills.
As we passed through the tightly shuttered villages the rough pavé hammered the suspension and bright-eyed cats glared into our lights and fled. One a little slower than the others had been squashed as flat as an ink blot. Each successive set of wheels contributed a new pattern to the little tragedy that morning would reveal.
I had the camionette going at its top speed. The needles were still and the loud noise of the motor held a constant note. Everything was unchanging except a brief fusillade of loose gravel or the sudden smell of tar or the beep of a faster car.
‘We are near to Ypres,’ said Kuang.
‘This was the Ypres salient,’ I said. Hudson asked for a cigarette. He must have been awake for some time. ‘Ypres,’ said Hudson as he lit the cigarette, ‘was that the site of a World War One battle?’
‘One of the biggest,’ I said. ‘There’s scarcely an Englishman that didn’t have a relative die here. Perhaps a piece of Britain died here too.’
Hudson looked out of the rear windows of the van. ‘It’s quite a place to die,’ he said.
32
Across the Ypres salient the dawn sky was black and getting lower and blacker like a Bulldog Drummond ceiling. It’s a grim region, like a vast ill-lit military depot that goes on for miles. Across country go the roads: narrow slabs of concrete not much wider than a garden path, and you have the feeling that to go off the edge is to go into bottomless mud. It’s easy to go around in circles and even easier to imagine that you are. Every few yards there are the beady-eyed green-and-white notices that point the way to military cemeteries where regiments of Blanco-white headstones parade. Death pervades the topsoil but untidy little farms go on operating, planting their cabbages right up to ‘Private of the West Riding – Known only to God’. The living cows and dead soldiers share the land and there are no quarrels. Now in the hedges evergreen plants were laden with tiny red berries as though the ground was sweating blood. I stopped the car. Ahead was Passchendaele, a gentle upward slope.
‘Which way were your soldiers facing?’ Kuang said.
‘Up the slope,’ I said. ‘They advanced up the slope, sixty pounds on their backs and machine guns down their throats.’
Kuang opened the window and threw his cigarette butt on to the road. There was an icy gust of wind.
‘It’s cold,’ said Kuang. ‘When the wind drops it will rain.’
Hudson leaned close to the window again. ‘Oh boy,’ he said, ‘trench warfare here,’ and shook his head when no word came. ‘For them it must have seemed like for ever.’
‘For a lot of them it was for ever,’ I said. ‘They are still here.’
‘In Hiroshima even more died,’ said Kuang.
‘I don’t measure death by numbers,’ I said.
‘Then it’s a pity you were so careful not to use your atom bomb on the Germans or Italians,’ said Kuang.
I started the motor again to get some heat in the car, but Kuang got out and stamped around on the concrete roadway. He did not seem to mind the cold wind and rain. He picked up a chunk of the shiny, clay-heavy soil peculiar to this region, studied it and then broke it up and threw it aimlessly across the field of cabbages.
‘Are we expecting to rendezvous with another car?’ he asked.
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘You must have been very confident that I would come with you.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I was. It was logical.’
Kuang nodded. ‘Can I have another cigarette?’ I gave him one.
‘We’re early,’ complained Hudson. ‘That’s a sure way to attract attention.’
‘Hudson fancies his chances as a secret agent,’ I said to Kuang.
‘I don’t take to your sarcasm,’ said Hudson.
‘Well that’s real old-fashioned bad luck, Hudson,’ I said, ‘because you are stuck with it.’
Grey clouds rushed across the salient. Here and there old windmills – static in spite of the wind – stood across the skyline, like crosses waiting for someone to be nailed upon them. Over the hill came a car with its headlights on.
They were thirty minutes late. Two men in a Renault 16, a man and his son. They didn’t introduce themselves, in fact they didn’t seem keen to show their faces at all. The older man got out of the car and came across to me. He spat upon the road and cleared his throat.
‘You two get into the other car. The American stays in this one. Don’t speak to the boy.’ He smiled and gave a short, croaky, mirthless laugh. ‘In fact don’t speak to me even. There’s a large-scale map in the dashboard. Make sure that’s what you want.’ He gripped my arm as he said it. ‘The boy will take the camionette and dump it somewhere near the Dutch border. The American stays in this car. Someone will meet them at the other end. It’s all arranged.’
Hudson said to me, ‘Going with you is one thing, but taking off into the blue with this kid is another. I think I can find my own way …’
‘Don’t think about it,’ I told him. ‘We just follow the directions on the label. Hold your nose and swallow.’ Hudson nodded.
We got out of the car and the boy came across, slowly detouring around us as though his father had told him to keep his face averted. The Renault was nice and warm inside. I felt in the glove compartment and found not only a map but a pistol.
‘No prints,’ I called to the Fleming. ‘Make sure there’s nothing else, no sweet wrappers or handkerchiefs.’
‘Yes,’ said the man. ‘And none of those
special cigarettes that are made specially for me in one of those exclusive shops in Jermyn Street.’ He smiled sarcastically. ‘He knows all that.’ His accent was so thick as to be almost unintelligible. I guessed that normally he spoke Flemish and the French was not natural to him. The man spat again in the roadway before climbing into the driver’s seat alongside us. ‘He’s a good boy,’ the man said. ‘He knows what to do.’ By the time he got the Renault started the camionette was out of sight.
I’d reached the worrying stage of the journey. ‘Did you take notes?’ I asked Kuang suddenly. He looked at me without answering. ‘Be sensible,’ I said. ‘I must know if you are carrying anything that would need to be destroyed. I know there’s the box of stuff Hudson gave you.’ I drummed upon it. ‘Is there anything else?’
‘A small notebook taped to my leg. It’s a thin book. I could be searched and they would not find it.’
I nodded. It was something more to worry about.
The car moved at high speed over the narrow concrete lanes. Soon we turned on to the wider main road that led north to Ostend. We had left the over-fertilized salient behind us. The fearful names: Tyne Cot, St Julien, Poelcapelle, Westerhoek and Pilckem faded behind us as they had faded from memory, for fifty years had passed and the women who had wept for the countless dead were also dead. Time and TV, frozen food and transistor radios had healed the wounds and filled the places that once seemed unfillable.
‘What’s happening?’ I said to the driver. He was the sort of man who had to be questioned or else he would offer no information.
‘His people,’ he jerked his head towards Kuang, ‘want him in Ostend. Twenty-three hundred hours tonight at the harbour. I’ll show you on the city plan.’
‘Harbour? What’s happening? Is he going aboard a boat tonight?’
‘They don’t tell me things like that,’ said the man. ‘I’m just conducting you to my place to see your case officer, then on to Ostend to see his case officer. It’s all so bloody boring. My wife thinks I get paid because it’s dangerous but I’m always telling her: I get paid because it’s so bloody boring. Tired?’ I nodded. ‘We’ll make good time, that’s one advantage, there’s not much traffic about at this time of morning. There’s not much commercial traffic if you avoid the inter-city routes.’