‘My brother-in-law, of course.’
‘Of course,’ I said. His brother-in-law was a one-star general in Cairo’s Department of Political Intelligence that fills – and overflows from – a seven-storey building in Heliopolis.
Aziz was watching me closely as I turned away from the window. ‘I can get you Xerox copies of anything special,’ he offered. ‘But it will take at least two weeks.’
‘We’ll see, Aziz.’
‘Oh, yes, Champion’s deep into it.’ He stubbed out the cigarette and watched me as I figured out what to do next. ‘It’s upset you, hasn’t it,’ said Aziz, with more friendliness than I would have thought him capable of. ‘I’m sorry about that, but Champion has gone a lot too far for London to be running him still – he’s Cairo’s man. He’s ours.’
Ours, I thought, good old Aziz, consummate schizoid, that’s the way to be. I sat down on the leather armchair and closed my eyes. ‘There’s got to be a better way than this to earn a living, Aziz,’ I said. I had to be back in Villefranche that evening. It was a long drive and I was suddenly very, very tired.
‘No doubt about that, old boy,’ said Aziz. ‘Trouble is … a chap’s got to have a little bread, while he’s figuring out what the better way is.’
10
He was wearing a short fur coat, and a black kerchief knotted cowboy-style, right against the throat. It was a measure of their subtlety that they sent along a man so unlike any policeman I’d ever seen. This youngster was completely different from the wrestlers of the Police Judiciaire in Marseille, or the hatchet-faced PJ boys who work in Nice. I’d noticed him the previous evening. He’d been drinking straight cognac at the far end of the bar when I went in to ask the Princess for the key of my room. It was a bad sign – cognac, I mean; I like my cops to stick to rot-gut.
He was in the same seat next morning, drinking coffee and smiling apologetically, as if he’d been there all night. ‘Monsieur Charles Bonnard?’ he said.
That was my wartime name: I thought I’d seen the last reel of that one, but now the nightmares came back. He didn’t wait for my reply. ‘My name is Fabre. Inspector Fabre, Renseignements Généraux, Lyon.’
‘That’s a relief,’ I said. ‘Just for a moment I thought you were from the Gestapo.’
He smiled again. ‘We weren’t quite sure what name you’d be using this time.’
‘Well, I’m glad to hear someone wasn’t,’ I said.
‘You’ll have to come to Lyon, I’m afraid,’ he said.
He could have been no older than twenty-five, but his youth, like his bizarre outfit, made him a likely recruit for the political undercover work of the RG. He was tall and broad-shouldered, but the slim hips would have suited a dancer or acrobat. His handsome bony face was white. In the north it would have gone unremarked, but here in the Riviera it seemed almost perverse that anyone should so avoid the sunshine.
He rubbed his fingers nervously. ‘You’ll have to come with us,’ he said apologetically. ‘To Lyon,’ he told me again. He stopped rubbing his hands together for long enough to reach into an inside pocket for a tin of throat lozenges. He tore the silver wrapping from two of them, and popped them into his mouth in swift succession.
‘You’ll need overnight things,’ he said.
I smiled. The Princess came in and put my coffee on the counter. She looked from one to the other of us and left without speaking. ‘Why not pay your bill now?’ he said. ‘I’ll make sure they hold your room for a few days. I mean, if you are not back tonight, why pay these hotel bastards?’
I nodded and drank some more coffee. ‘Have you worked very long for the RG?’ I asked.
He swallowed his throat lozenges. ‘Forget checking me out,’ he said. ‘I don’t know anybody important there. That’s why I get lousy jobs like bringing you in.’
There was no sign of the Princess. From behind the cash register I took the handful of cash slips that were marked ‘Charles’. I added fifteen per cent and signed. ‘No need to hold the room,’ I said. ‘They are not expecting a tour-bus.’
He looked around the bar. There was enough daylight to expose the sleazy fly-blown wallpaper and the cracked lino. He smiled, and I smiled back, and then we went up to get my baggage.
Once inside my room, he became more confidential. ‘You must be someone important,’ he told me, ‘judging by all the teleprinter messages and what I hear about the cabinet du préfet complaining to London.’
‘Why are you telling me?’ I asked.
‘Cops should stick together,’ he said. He opened the door of the battered wardrobe, and spent a moment or two looking at his brown-speckled reflection. ‘Last year I followed a suspect to Aachen, in Germany. I grabbed him and brought him back across the border in my car. There was no end of fuss. But luckily the Aachen CID lied their heads off for me. Cops have to stick together; bureaucrats arrest only pieces of paper.’
He pulled my suit out of the wardrobe and folded it carefully while I packed my case. ‘They’ll take you up to Paris, I think. If you want to make a quick phone call, I won’t hear you.’
‘No, thanks,’ I said. I went into the bathroom and threw my shaving gear into the zip bag. His voice was louder when he next spoke and I could tell he’d started a new throat lozenge. ‘And if you have a gun, I’d get rid of it. It will just give them something to hold you for.’
‘I don’t carry a gun,’ I called from the bathroom. I could hear him going all through the drawers of the wardrobe.
I closed the bathroom door. Then I released the plastic bath panels with my knife. I reached into the dust and dead spiders to get the plastic bag I’d hidden there. I didn’t have to swing out the cylinder, I could see the 125 grain round-nosed bullets that I’d loaded into the .38 Centennial Airweight. I stuffed the pistol into the waistband of my trousers and quickly replaced the panel. Then I flushed the toilet and emerged from the bathroom. It had taken me no more than ten seconds.
Fabre said, ‘Because if they find a pistol anywhere in the room here, they can hold you under the new emergency laws – one month it is.’ He slammed the last drawer closed, as if to punctuate the warning.
‘I don’t carry a pistol. I don’t even own a pistol. You know English policemen don’t have guns.’
‘I was forgetting,’ he said. ‘And you have habeas corpus and all that crap, too. Hell, what a life for a cop. Are you sure you don’t want to make a phone call? Call London if you want, but make it snappy.’
‘Are you in traffic?’
‘Renseignements Généraux,’ he said. ‘I told you I was from RG. Why?’
‘Because you come on like a courtesy cop,’ I said.
He smiled. ‘I’m one of the graduate entries,’ he said. He gave a self-conscious smile. ‘I don’t believe in rough stuff, unless it’s absolutely necessary.’
‘Have you got a car here?’
‘And a driver. We must stop in Nice, at the Palais de Justice. I must sign the forms and go through the formalities. You don’t need gloves: it’s not that cold.’
‘I’ve got a circulation problem,’ I said.
It was a black Citroën. The driver was a mournful Negro of about fifty. He took my case and locked it in the boot. His skin was bluish black and his eyes heavy-lidded. He wore a shabby raincoat and battered hat. He hardly looked at us as we got into the car. The young one continued talking. ‘The other day someone said that we were the Jews of Western Europe. Palais de Justice, Ahmed.’
‘Who?’ I said.
‘Cops. The Jews of Western Europe; we’re blamed for everything, aren’t we? Everything, from traffic jams to strike-breaking – it’s convenient to have someone to blame.’
I grunted.
‘Park in the usual space, Ahmed,’ he told the driver, as we turned into the Place du Palais. To me he said, ‘I’ll be as quick as I can. You wait with Ahmed.’
I nodded.
‘What’s wrong with you?’ he said. ‘A pain in the guts? Indigestion?’
‘Coul
d you get me something? It’s an acid stomach. There’s a chemist at the end of the street.’
Fabre looked at me for what seemed like a long time. Then he reached into a pocket of his fur coat and found a plastic box. ‘You need two of these,’ he said. ‘I carry all that kind of junk; I’m a hypochondriac.’
‘Thanks,’ I said. He tipped two small multi-coloured capsules into the palm of my gloved hand.
‘They melt at different times,’ he explained, ‘so you get this continuous anti-acid together with minute doses of regular aspirin and buffer – you must have seen the adverts …’
I put them into my mouth with my left hand and tried to look like a man who was holding on to his belly-ache with the other hand, rather than one who had been a little too premature in checking the butt of a .38 Centennial Airweight.
‘Shellfish,’ I said. ‘That always does it. I’m a fool, really.’
Fabre nodded his agreement, slammed the car door, and walked off across the square to the police offices. The driver was still looking at me. I smiled at him. He touched the evil-eye beads that dangled from the driving mirror, and then gave his whole attention to the horse-racing section of his paper.
Whatever Fabre did inside that imposing building took no more than five minutes. The driver had the engine running by the time Fabre got back in. ‘We’ll take the autoroute, Ahmed,’ Fabre told the Negro. ‘You’ll see the Grasse exit marked.’
We followed the Mediterranean coast as far as Cannes, and then turned north, into the land of truffles, baccarat and fast cars that stretches from Mougins to Vence. No one spoke. I looked out of the window.
‘This is Grasse,’ said the driver. He turned to look back over his shoulder, and gave me a sad smile.
Palm Springs on a French hill-top. Daubed on a wall there was a slogan: ‘Arabs Keep Out of Grasse.’ It was raining in Grasse. We didn’t stop.
‘We’ll be there by lunchtime,’ said Fabre.
I tried to wet my lips and smile back, but my tongue was dry. These boys were all soft lights and sweet music, but I had the feeling that it was going to go dark and quiet at some chosen place on the highway north. And they weren’t planning to leave long-stemmed roses to mark the spot.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said.
The driver kept to a steady speed and showed impeccable road manners. To them, it might have seemed convincingly like police procedure, but to me it looked as though they were extremely careful not to be booked on a traffic offence at a time when they had another crime in operation.
‘Sorry about what?’ I croaked.
‘Mentioning food – when you have a crise de foie,’ he said.
‘Is that what I have?’
‘I think so,’ he said.
Instinct said use the gun and get out of here, but training said find out who, what and where.
The driver chose the N85, the route Napoléon. As we climbed away from the sheltered Riviera coast, a hell’s kitchen of boiling storm-clouds came into view. The mountain peaks were white, like burned soufflés that some chef had hidden under too much powdered sugar. The sky became darker and darker, and the cars coming south had their headlights on. The rain turned to hail that beat a tattoo on the roof of the car, and at the La Faye pass the mountains echoed with the sound of thunder. Great lightning flashes froze an endless line of toy motor-cars that were crawling up the far side of the gorge. The wiper blades stropped the glass, and the engine’s note changed to a whine that provided an undertone of hysteria.
‘We’ll be late,’ the driver warned. It was the hard consonantal French of the Arab.
‘It will be clear beyond Barrême.’
‘Barrême is a long way,’ said the driver. ‘We’ll be late.’ He paddled the brake and swung the steering wheel as the tyres slid on a patch of ice. He lost enough speed to have to change down. There was the scream of a power-horn, and a small Renault sped past us on the wrong side of the road. There was a thud as his slush hit the door, and a fanfare of horns as the Renault prised open the traffic to avoid an oncoming bus. ‘Bloody idiot,’ said the driver. ‘He won’t get to Castellane, except in a hearse.’
The equinoctial storms that lash the great limestone plateau of Provence provide Nice with a rainfall higher than even London. But as we hurried north the black clouds sped over us, tearing themselves to shreds to reveal their sulphur-yellow interiors and, eventually, the sun. The inland roads were dry, and as the traffic thinned out we increased speed. I watched the fields, and the huge flocks of birds that circled like dust-storms, but my mind calculated every possible way in which the threat of death might come.
At first they pretended that it would be faster to take to the minor roads, but by the time we were as far as the military exercise zone they had grown tired of their game, or had decided that it was no longer necessary.
Fabre, in the back seat with me, was watching the road with unusual attention. ‘You missed the turn-off,’ he told the driver. He tugged at his finger joints one by one, as if he was field-stripping his hand to clear a blockage.
The driver made no sign that he’d heard, until finally he said, ‘I didn’t miss anything. There’s that tumbledown shrine and the wire, then comes the turn-off.’
‘Perhaps you are right,’ said Fabre. His face was even whiter than white, and he chewed down on one of his tablets in a rare display of emotion. He became conscious of my stare and turned to me. ‘We must get the right road or we’ll be lost – it’s one of those short-cuts.’
‘Oh, one of those short-cuts,’ I said. I nodded.
He rubbed his hands together and smiled. Perhaps he’d realized that there had been undertones in that last exchange which denied any last chance that they were policemen.
Fabre spotted a wayside shrine with a few miserable wild flowers in a tin at the foot of a tormented Christ. ‘You’re right,’ he told the driver. We turned on to the narrow side road.
‘Take it easy,’ Fabre said to the driver, his face tightening as the suspension thumped the rutted track. He was nervous now, as the time came closer. They were both nervous. The driver had stiffened at the wheel, and he seemed to shrink even as I watched him.
‘Not the right-hand fork,’ Fabre warned the driver. And then I suddenly recognized the landscape. A few stunted trees on rolling hills: I’d not seen this place since the war. We were taking the high road to the west side of the Tix quarry: Champion’s quarry, as it now was. The old open-cast workings had been abandoned since the late ’fifties, and the mine had proved so expensive that it had closed a few years later. The quarry: it would be an ideal place.
As we came up the slope to the brink of the quarry I saw the same dilapidated wooden huts that had been there ever since I could remember. Fabre squirmed. He thought he was a hell of a hard kid, pulses racing and eyes narrowed. I saw him as a grotesque caricature of myself when young. Well, perhaps I was the same ‘yesterday’s spy’ that Champion was, but my heart wasn’t pounding. Shakespeare got me all wrong: no stiffening of the sinews, no summoning of the blood, not even ‘hard favour’d rage’. There was only a cold sad ache in the gut – no longer any need to simulate it. And – such was the monumental ego a job like mine needs – I was already consoling myself for the distress that killing them would inevitably cause me.
I was concentrating on the pros and cons of striking while the driver had his hands full of car, and Fabre had his attention distracted. But because they were watching the road ahead, they took in the scene some five seconds before I did – and five seconds in this job is a long weekend elsewhere – ten seconds is for ever!
‘Merde!’ said Fabre softly. ‘She’s escaped.’ Then I saw all: the woman in the short fur coat, identical to the one that Fabre was wearing, and the man on his knees, almost hidden in the thorns and long grass. The man kicked frantically to free himself. There were two loud bangs. The man in the grass convulsed at each gunshot and fell flat and out of sight. Then there came the thump of the wooden door, as the fur-coated woman dis
appeared into the hut.
Fabre had the car door open by that time. The car slewed to a stop in thick mud, almost sliding into a ditch. Even before he was out of the car Fabre had his Browning Model Ten automatic in his hand. Well, that was the right pistol! I knew plenty of French cops with those: smooth finish, three safeties and only twenty ounces in your pocket. A pro gun, and this one had long since lost its blueing. It was scratched, worn shiny at the edges, and I didn’t like it. Fabre stood behind the open car door, ballooning his body gently, so as never to be a static target. He was squinting into the dark shadows under the trees. Only men who have been in gunfire do that instinctively as this man was doing it.
The clouds parted to let the sun through. I glimpsed the face at the hut window. I remember thinking that it must be Madame Baroni, the mother of Caty and Pina, but she had died in Ravensbrück in 1944. Two more shots: one of them banged into the car body, and made the metal sing. Not Pina’s mother but Pina herself, Caty’s sister, her face drawn tight in fear. There was a flash of reflected light as the sun caught the nickel-finish revolver that she levelled through the broken window.
She depressed the gun and fired again at the man in the undergrowth. I remembered the German courier she’d killed, when we were together at the farmhouse. She’d shot him six times.
‘You cow!’ Fabre’s face contorted, and he brought his Browning up in a two-hand clasp, bending his knees slightly, FBI target-shooting style. He’d need only one shot at this range. His knuckles were white before I made my decision.
I pulled the trigger of my revolver. The noise inside the car was deafening. At a range of less than two yards, the first bullet lifted him under the arm like a bouncer’s grip. He was four yards away, and tilted at forty-five degrees, as the second shot collapsed him like a deckchair and threw him into the ditch. My ears rang with the noise. There was the smell of scorched cloth, and two holes in my coat.
Ahmed jumped out of the car at the same moment I did. With the car between us, he was able to cover a lot of ground before I was able to shoot. The bullet howled into the sky, miles away from him. I cursed, and moved back to the place where Fabre had fallen. I was cautious, but I needn’t have been. He was dead. The Browning was still gripped tight in his hands. He was a real gunny. His mouth was open, teeth clenched, and his eyes askew. I knew it was another nightmare. I steeled myself to see that face again in many dreams, and I was not to be wrong about it.