Cautiously I moved up the track towards the wooden shack, keeping low and behind the scrub. I was on the very brink of the quarry before the door opened. Pina emerged, tight-lipped, dishevelled, her fur coat ripped so that its lining hung below the hem. The man she’d shot was dead: a dark-skinned youth in leather jacket and woollen hat, his tweed trousers still entangled in the thorns.
‘Charlie! Charlie! Oh, Charlie!’ Pina pushed the revolver into her pocket and then washed her dry hands, in some curious rite of abnegation. ‘They were going to kill me, Charlie. They were going to kill me. They said so.’
‘Are you all right, Pina?’
‘We must get away from here, Charlie.’
There was a flash of lightning and a prolonged rumble of thunder.
Pina mumbled a prayer into my shirt-front. I held her tight, but I didn’t relax. From here I could see right down to the puddles in the bottom of the quarry. It was a spooky place for me, its vast space brimful of memories and fears. In the war I’d hidden here, listening to the barking of the search dogs, and the whistles of the Feldgendarmerie as they came, shoulder to shoulder, across these very fields. Pina clutched my hand, and she felt there the anxious sweat that my memories provoked.
‘But where?’ she said. ‘Where can we go?’ Again, lightning lit up the underside of the dark clouds, and a perfect disc of its blue light flashed from the bracken a few yards in front of me. Violently I pushed Pina to the ground, and threw myself down into firing position. With one hand I pushed my spectacles against my face and capped one eye. With the other hand I put the pistol’s foresight near the place where I’d seen the glint of reflected light. I pulled the trigger three times.
The sound of the gunfire was reflected off the sloping ground: three loud bangs, and the echo of them came rolling back from the far side of the quarry. Pina crawled nearer. ‘Keep down,’ I said.
‘This grass! I’m soaked,’ she complained.
‘It’s a sniperscope, a perfect disc of light. It must have been sighted on us.’
I rolled over enough to get some bullets from my pocket and push them into the chamber. Then I picked up the empty cases and wrapped them in my handkerchief. There was no point in trying to be clever about powder traces – the bullet holes in my pocket would be enough.
‘They will try to get to the car,’ said Pina. ‘If you could get to that bracken you’d shoot anyone who tried to get down to the track where the car is.’
‘You’re riding the wrong sideshow,’ I growled. ‘I’m selling tickets for the tunnel of love.’
‘You’re going to let them take the car?’
‘I’ll check their oil, and polish the windscreen for them.’
Pina gave that sort of whistle that well-bred French ladies resort to when they want to swear. It was then that the Negro driver broke cover and went racing off down the slope towards the main road. If there was more than one man, this had to be the moment to rush them. I jumped up and ran as fast as I could to where I’d seen the glint of light. Pina followed me.
‘I don’t understand,’ she said.
I said nothing; I didn’t understand, either. There was no sniperscope, no high-powered rifle, no lethal weapons at all. The lightning had reflected from the front element of a zoom-lens fitted to a Beaulieu 16 mm movie camera. I fidgeted with the magazine until I got it open and then I pulled the grey film out into the daylight. A considerable footage had passed through the film-gate but the bulk of it was in the top magazine. Whatever it was intended to film had not yet happened.
I unlatched the camera from its pan and tilt head, and lifted it on to my shoulder. Then, in some irrational fit of destructive anger, I pitched the valuable movie camera over the side of the quarry. It hit an outcrop and bounced high into the air, spilling lenses and sprockets and trailing a long tail of film. It bounced a second time and then fell out of sight before landing with a thud.
Pina gave me the big pistol she had used. ‘It’s his,’ she said, indicating the body of the dark-skinned man, ‘I got it away from him.’ After wiping it carefully, I threw it into the wooden hut. There was a new plastic-topped table there and two kitchen chairs. Cigarette ends, pieces of loaf and the remains of hard-boiled egg littered the table top, and a length of rope was on the floor. ‘I tricked him,’ said Pina. ‘They had me tied up at first.’
‘Go and wait in the car, Pina,’ I said.
She shuffled off like a sleepwalker. Half-heartedly, I pressed my .38 into the dead Arab’s hand and threw my cotton gloves down alongside the body, to account for its powder-free hands. But I didn’t fool myself that I was achieving anything more than a couple of hours at double-time for some junior assistants in the local forensic lab.
I started the Citroën. There was a full minute of wheel-spinning before the old brute crawled out of the mire and waddled off down the track, spewing mud in every direction. We left everything the way it was, the fur-coated gunny head-down in the ditch, the camera-operator – for so I had decided was the man Pina had killed – stiff in the long grass.
‘What did it all mean?’ Pina asked me, as we reached the main road.
I looked at her and then back down the road. ‘You know what it means, Pina,’ I said. ‘And, by God, I’m going to wring it out of you, so just start getting used to the idea of telling me.’
We were both silent for a long time. I suppose we were both thinking about the Negro driver, and what he might do. Pina finally said, ‘He’ll not tell the police anything, unless they squeeze it out of him. They were there to kill you, Charlie. They grabbed me this morning on my way to the hairdresser’s.’
‘Why you, Pina?’
She didn’t answer. My thoughts moved on to more urgent matters.
‘Is there a plane service to Paris from Grenoble?’ I asked her.
‘Air Alpes fly Marseille-Grenoble-Metz, and connect with an Air France Düsseldorf flight. I did that last year.’
‘No good,’ I said, thinking better of it. ‘Passports, credit cards and cheques – a trail of paper.’
‘I’ve got a lot of cash,’ she said.
‘Give me a minute to think.’
‘You’d better think fast, petit, or we’ll be in Valence. And that’s on the autoroute. It will be thick with cops.’
‘I wish I knew whether this was a stolen car.’
‘Don’t be silly, Charlie. You saw those men. They don’t work with stolen cars: they are assassins – cent-mille francs a time men – they don’t use stolen cars.’
‘Who are they, Pina?’
She picked at the dried mud that was plastered on her fur coat. ‘It’s no good shouting at me as if I was a juvenile delinquent,’ she said.
‘You killed that man, Pina,’ I said.
She didn’t answer. I found it difficult to be patient with her, and yet I knew there was no other way. I said, ‘The Tix quarry … Pina, and not far away, the mine, and the house where Champion lives. What the hell are you doing there?’
A police car came speeding towards us, with siren and light going. I watched it in the mirror until it disappeared over the hill. ‘And the camera,’ I said. ‘I think you took it up there to spy on Champion. Is that it?’
She turned her head to see me more clearly.
‘You and Champion are in it together,’ she said, as if the idea had just occurred to her.
‘In what?’ I demanded.
She shook her head. Then she looked at her gold wristwatch and fidgeted with it, so that it jangled against the bracelets on her arm.
‘You tell me,’ she mumbled.
The rain mottled the windscreen and I switched on the wipers and the heater. She loosened her coat. ‘OK,’ I said, ‘I’ll tell you. You’ve always blamed Champion for the death of Marius. But your brother was arrested hours before Champion, and you know it because you saw it happen. And I saw it, too.’ I waited for her to admit it, but she didn’t.
She forced herself to smile. ‘I was mad about Champion,’ she protested.
‘I loved him, you know I did.’
‘And that’s all part of the vendetta,’ I said. ‘You never forgave him for marrying your sister.’
She gave a little hoot of laughter. ‘Jealousy!’ she said. ‘What a joker you are!’ She took out a tiny handkerchief and wiped her nose. Only after she had taken a quick look at herself, run a fingertip over her eyebrows and clicked her handbag closed, did she speak again. ‘It’s the way he’s treated Caterina that I resent so much. Have you seen her lately?’
‘A week or so ago.’
‘He’s made her life hell, and it shows on her face.’
‘No, Pina,’ I said. ‘She’s just getting old, that’s all.’
‘You’re pitiless, Charlie, do you know that?’ It was a pleasant conversational voice she used. ‘You don’t have flesh and blood, you have clockwork. You don’t live, you tick.’ She wiped her nose again. ‘Tell me, Charlie: do you ever love, or hate, or weep? Tell me!’
‘No,’ I said, ‘I just blow a fuse.’
‘And each time you do it, someone comes along and fits you with a bigger fuse, and finally you can tick-tock your life away, Charlie, without any problems of conscience, or morals, or thought of tomorrow.’
‘It’s a funny thing, Pina,’ I said. ‘Every time someone puts a bomb in a supermarket or machineguns a few airline passengers, it turns out that they are doing it on account of their conscience, or their morals, or some goddamned twisted idea of a new Jerusalem.’
I’d said it simply out of anger, but the reference to Jerusalem caused her to react.
‘Me?’
Her eyes opened wide and her mouth slackened with amazement and indignation. ‘You think I’m working with the Palestinian terrorists?’
‘Then who are you working for?’
‘The autoroute will be best,’ she said. ‘The car’s not stolen, I’m sure of it. We’d best make for Paris.’
‘Who?’ I said again. ‘Who are you working for, then?’
Pina had said too much and she knew it, and now she hunched forward in her seat and began to worry. The moment had passed.
For a few minutes she was very still. Then she turned her head to see the road behind us.
‘I’ll watch the road, Pina. You try and rest for a few minutes.’
‘I’m frightened, Charlie.’
‘It will be all right,’ I said. ‘Try to get some sleep.’
‘Sleep,’ she said. ‘It’s ten years since I was able to sleep without my pills.’
‘Well, don’t take any of those. We might need to be wide awake.’
A helicopter came over the road and then made off towards the autoroute. Pina leaned close to the window to watch it fly over.
‘Traffic police,’ I said.
She nodded and leaned back in her seat, her head resting against the window. I glanced at her. Her hair was knotted and her lipstick smudged. In her lap, her hands were clasped too tight, the knuckles criss-crossed with the marks of her nails. When she spoke it was in a different sort of voice, and I glanced across her to see that she had not opened her eyes. ‘I must have a drink, Charlie. I must.’
‘In Lyon.’
‘You don’t understand!’ She rummaged through the rubbish and dog-eared papers in the car, as if hoping to find a bottle or a hip-flask.
‘We’ll find somewhere,’ I said.
‘Soon, Charlie.’
Her hands were shaking, in spite of the strength she used to clench them together. And I saw the way that her face was stiff as if with pain.
‘The first place we see,’ I promised.
‘Oh, yes, petit.’
It was an elegant and yet a forbidding place. A pox of tourist-club badges studded the portals, and the flags of the world’s richest nations flew from the battlements. The gravel was freshly raked and the grass clipped short.
‘Let’s go,’ I said. I had already given her my lecture on being inconspicuous – don’t over-tip, thank anyone or converse too long with the waiter – and we’d stopped a moment or two while she combed her hair and used tissues to clean her face. After that, we’d gone a couple of miles up the road, in order to enter the drive from the north, and so be remembered as a southbound car.
She left her muddied coat in the car. We came, huffing and puffing from the cold, into the warmed and scented air of the lobby. The tiles were polished and the carpets brushed. Behind the desk a middle-aged man looked up and reached for his jacket. He put it on before greeting us. ‘Yes?’ he said, as if he could think of no possible reason why people should break their journey there.
‘Can we get a drink?’ I said.
‘I’ll see,’ he said, and disappeared through a door marked ‘Private’.
There was a smell of disaster in the air, along with the scent of tile polish and coffee. About thirty tables had been set with cloths and cutlery but only one table had been used. On it there were two used cups, a coffee-pot and a newspaper folded so that the classified columns could be read.
A second man appeared from the service doors. Behind him there was the sudden sound of water going into a pot and a clatter of plates.
‘A table for two?’ He gave us a dignified smile. He was about sixty, a balding man with pale face and red hands: the legacy of a lifetime of steamy kitchens and hot water.
‘Yes,’ I said.
He raised a hand, turned on his heel and led us through the empty dining-room to a table near the window, as if we’d have had little chance of finding an empty seat without his assistance.
‘Omelette fines herbes,’ he suggested. His collar was twisted, as if the coat had been put on hurriedly.
‘Give me a brandy,’ said Pina, ‘a fine. We just want a drink.’ She sighed, and dumped her handbag on the table with a thud that knocked the cutlery askew. Then she opened the bag and began to search for cigarettes.
The waiter was patient. He handed me a menu.
‘Two omelettes,’ I said. ‘And I’d like a glass of red wine.’
‘Fleurie,’ he suggested.
‘And a green salad.’
‘Perfect,’ said the old man.
Pina found her cigarettes and lit one. She watched the old man stride away with his order. ‘You just gave him his big moment of the week,’ she said.
‘The way you say it, it sounds like I gave him leprosy.’
She touched my hand on the table-top. ‘You were being nice. And I’m being …’ She shook her head, unable to think of a word, and inhaled on the cigarette again. She propped her hand under her chin, and did not turn her eyes away from the kitchen door, shivering so violently that, for a moment, her whole body trembled.
‘Relax, Pina, relax,’ I said. But she did not relax until the old man emerged with the drinks. When he placed the brandy before her, she reached out to touch the stem of the glass, and as she did so – just with the possession of the drink – I saw the tension die within her. As if exercising masterful restraint she raised the glass slowly and met my eyes before taking a sip of it.
‘It’s a good brandy,’ she said.
‘Drink it down, Pina, you need a drink.’
But she didn’t gulp it. She pushed her gold cigarette case towards me, to offer me one.
‘No thanks,’ I said. ‘I’m trying to give it up.’
She smiled, as if at some secret joke, and placed the jacket of the black Dior suit over the back of her chair, carefully enough for the label to be on display. ‘Have a cigarette.’ She touched her hair as if it was herself that she was offering.
‘I’m trying to give it up,’ I said again, but I opened the case and took one, in just the same way that I’d ordered the omelette: to be obliging.
The afternoon sun came through the window and lit up her hair. And it lit up the strange grey eyes. ‘And what else are you trying to give up?’ she said, and waved away her cigarette smoke and my answer with it. ‘No, don’t tell me, darling, let me find out.’
It would have been difficult to guess Pina’s age. She neede
d no girdle, nor skin treatments. Neither the tiny wrinkles around her eyes, nor the freckles on her cheeks, were disguised under make-up. And when she’d combed through her hair, and tidied up in the car mirror, she’d done so without the narcissistic alarm that you see in the eyes of so many women over thirty. In Pina I could still see quite a lot of the foul-mouthed tomboy who had so alarmed me when I was a teenage subaltern.
‘Go and wash your face,’ she commanded. ‘When I look at the mess you’re in, I’m surprised they didn’t ask us to pay for the meal in advance.’
I looked at my watch.
‘They’ll be ages yet,’ she added caustically. ‘They’ll have to go and buy some eggs.’
Unlike the French restaurants that persist in modernizing dining-rooms while retaining medieval toilets, this place had reversed that configuration. The antique wood carvings, dark panelling and worn flagstones of the dining-room ill prepared me for the brilliantly lit stainless-steel sinks, the tinted mirrors and scented air of a washroom designed to look like a space-station.
I used the silver-backed hairbrush provided by the management, and stared at my reflection as I went over the events for the thousandth time. I’d put on my gloves before being brought out of the hotel and I had not taken them off until the shooting was done. Therefore no dabs on the car or at the scene of the crime. My Centennial Airweight had been bought new – in 1968 from a man in Rue Paradis, Marseille. He was well known, and well paid, for his skill at removing numbers from metal, and going deep enough to remove the impacted metal under the numbers. The gun had lived in a rented cash-box deep under a bank in suburban Lyon, until I collected it a week before using it. The gun was all right. They’d discover nothing from that. I stopped brushing my hair to finger the blackened holes in my coat pocket. All that would go for nothing, if the police lab got a sniff at my clothes. Oh, well.