Barbouze

by Alan Williams

Neil glanced at Van Loon, who grinned ‘The old Frenchman, huh?’

  ‘You know this man?’ the boy asked.

  ‘I think so,’ said Neil, ‘we met him in the monasteries. Is it a serious matter?’

  ‘The police make a report. They tell Salonika.’ The boy shrugged: ‘Perhaps it is serious. I don’t care. I hate this place.’

  They finished their ouzos and got up to leave. The boy wanted to go on talking, offering to pay for all the drinks, but they told him they had to be down in Daphne to take the afternoon boat to Athens. He waved goodbye, looking small and miserable, sitting there in the morning sun in his hot uniform, starting on his fourth glass of ouzo.

  They left the town, tramping down the mule tracks towards the sea. After an hour they came to an opening in the trees where they could see the steamer approaching, its wash spreading out in a silver fan towards the horizon. They reached Daphne just as the ship was tying up. There were only two passengers — Greek officials with briefcases who had come to check the wine quotas. There was no sign of any police in the town. They had their visas stamped by a little man in a peaked cap with a black moustache who looked like Stalin; then bought deck-class tickets for the night trip to Athens. Neil would have liked a cabin, but did not want to offend Van Loon who couldn’t afford one.

  They had to wait an hour before the steamer left. They bought some bread and cheese and a wicker-bound jar with four litres of retsina which they lugged between them up the gangway past a brass plate engraved with the name of John MacIntyre & Sons, Glasgow, 1907.

  ‘This should last us the night,’ said Neil, as they set down the monster jar on the deck and settled against the bulkheads, using their rucksacks as cushions.

  ‘I think perhaps if we stay on Athos a few months we become drunkards,’ said Van Loon, drawing the cork which was the size of his fist.

  ‘And live to be a hundred years old,’ said Neil, smiling.

  ‘It is because they have no women,’ said Van Loon; ‘if I had no women I would go crazy.’ He heaved up the jar with both hands and took a long drink. ‘I think after Athens I go to Beirut,’ he added. ‘The girls there are pretty good, huh?’

  ‘That’ll cost you money,’ said Neil.

  The Dutchman shook his head: ‘Ah, I wish I had some bloody money!’

  They sat watching the mules jog down to the jetty laden with wine casks which were exchanged for coffee, sugar and paraffin. Just after five o’clock the two Greek officials came up the gangway. A moment later the rusted smokestack gave a boom that bounced off the mountain, and the engines started up.

  ‘You know that old white-haired Frenchman?’ said Van Loon, as they pulled away from the shore. ‘I think he is a smuggler.’

  ‘Oh yes?’ said Neil, lifting the jar which was growing lighter.

  ‘He has a black box and gold coins and a boat that comes in the night to take him away,’ said Van Loon; ‘that is like a smuggler.’

  ‘And what was he smuggling?’

  ‘Gold coins.’

  Neil laughed: ‘Those were all collectors’ pieces. Besides, most of them weren’t even gold.’

  Van Loon stared at the receding mountain. ‘Well, perhaps he smuggles diamonds. Whatever it is, he is a bloody odd fellow!’

  Neil thought that M. Martel was indeed an odd fellow; but he didn’t think he was a smuggler.

  PART 2: THE FAT MAN

  CHAPTER 1

  They woke as the edge of the sky began to whiten over the hills of Attica; and they sat on the deck, drinking Turkish coffee and watched Athens grow out of the dry dawn.

  The sky-line straggled, the colour of dust and sand, from the jumbled port of the Piraeus, where Van Loon’s mind was already planning some low debauch, to the gaunt square rock on which the Acropolis stands — looking, Neil thought, like a piece of broken balustrade.

  They drew closer, to the groan of ships’ horns, smells of tar and tobacco, with gulls gliding over the oily water. There were two men waiting on the quayside as the boat tied up. One was thin, in a brown suit with dark glasses. The other wore the blue-grey uniform of the Greek police.

  As Neil and Van Loon came ashore, the plainclothes man stepped in front of them. ‘Les papiers!’ He stood with his hand thrust out, while the uniformed man watched with a dark closed face. Neil and Van Loon took out their passports; the plainclothes man flipped through them, snapped them shut and put them away in his pocket. He looked up, his glasses glinting in the sun. ‘Suivez-nous!’ he said, jabbing his thumb towards the customs shed. The uniformed man fell in behind, and the little squad began to march briskly across the quay.

  After a few yards Neil said to Van Loon, ‘Peter, we’re under arrest.’

  The Dutchman shrugged: ‘Oh, some bureaucratic idiocy. It is nothing.’

  Neil, who had never been detained by the police before, did not feel the same composure. He turned to the plainclothes man and tried — in French, then in English — to ask what was happening.

  The Greek replied brusquely, ‘Affaire de police!’ and nodded again towards the customs shed.

  But they were not taken into the customs shed. Instead they were led round into a yard where a black Ford sedan stood parked behind locked gates leading into the street. A second policeman, who had been waiting by the car door, came forward to meet them. He was a stout man with a severe puffy grey face. He stepped up to Van Loon and frisked him under the arms and down his hips and thighs. Van Loon laughed. The policeman straightened up and snarled something, then turned and repeated the operation on Neil, who stood very still and did not laugh. The man’s breath had a rancid smell and his fingers felt hard and prepared for violence. The first policeman was searching both rucksacks.

  Finally the stout man stepped back; they were both handed their luggage and pushed into the rear seats of the Ford. The plainclothes Greek climbed into the front next to the stout man who was driving; the other policeman unlocked the gates, and they purred into a white street where shutters were being rattled up and waiters were sprinkling the pavements and setting tables out in the early sun.

  Neil was beginning to feel very uneasy. He whispered to Van Loon, who was relaxing in the deep seats, ‘I don’t like it, Peter! What the hell’s happening?’

  ‘Some idiot formality. We find out.’ He grinned: ‘Nice taxi, huh!’

  They turned into a square, past a brown Byzantine church with a humped brick dome where an old man was selling lemons under the wall. The two Greeks rode in silence.

  ‘This isn’t any formality,’ said Neil, ‘the Greek police don’t arrest tourists unless it’s something serious.’

  ‘O.K., they think we are dangerous gangsters. It is a joke for us.’

  Neil sat back and said nothing. It was too early for him to have a sense of humour. He needed a shave, and his mouth felt black and dried up after the retsina of the night before. The car drummed over cobbles, past trams sparking along the waterfront into Athens. In the seat in front, the driver’s neck bulged over his collar like a swollen lead pipe.

  ‘Perhaps they find something wrong with our papers,’ Van Loon added, lighting up his meerschaum.

  ‘There’s nothing wrong with our papers,’ said Neil. He was becoming irritated now with the Dutchman’s complacency.

  They drove past banks and shipping offices and down dusty treeless avenues into Constitution Square, lined with concrete pillars and the blue shields and white cross of the Hellenic Kingdom. The Ford pulled up in front of the King George Hotel. The policeman who had been driving stayed behind the wheel, while a doorman bowed the other three through the revolving doors. Van Loon, rucksack on his back and pipe between his teeth, grinned ecstatically at the marble and chandeliers, his roughshod feet sinking half an inch into the carpets over to the lifts.

  ‘Perhaps they send us up champagne and dancing girls!’ he cried, as the lift doors hissed shut and they rose, as gently as mercury in a barometer, to the top floor. A door at the end of the passage was opened by a small neat man with
a nut-brown head. The plainclothes Greek handed him the two passports, and Neil and Van Loon were shown into a suite with bars of sunlight across a wine-red carpet.

  In front of the French windows sat an enormously fat man. His head was the shape of an egg, with a sharp little beard and a lick of hair pasted across his brow in a kiss curl. He looked to Neil like a French professor out of some nineteenth-century farce.

  The nut-brown man waved a hand at two armchairs in the centre of the floor. ‘Asseyez-vous!’ he said, strutting over to a table near the wall. The plainclothes man had taken up his place beside the door.

  The nut-brown man stood looking down at Neil and Van Loon, thumping his thick fingers on the two passports: ‘Messieurs, I am Captain Spyros of the Athens police.’ He spoke French with a strong accent.

  Neil interrupted, in English: ‘Just a minute. We’re not French. I’m English and my friend here is Dutch. And we’d like to know what all this is about.’

  Captain Spyros held up his hand and continued, in French: ‘Please, my colleague here, Monsieur Charles Pol’ — he nodded towards the fat man — ‘speaks only French. You are both familiar with the French language? Exactly! So we will proceed.’ He opened the two passports.

  All this time the fat man, M. Pol, had been watching them with an amused expression which rather unsettled Neil. His moist red lips were parted like two cherries, showing a pair of glistening front teeth.

  Captain Spyros looked at the passports. ‘You have both been on Athos, I see? You applied for permission in Salonika three weeks ago?’

  Neil nodded.

  ‘Which of the monasteries did you visit, please?’

  Neil told him the names of the ones he could remember, then added, ‘I think we’re still entitled to know what all this is about.’

  The Greek raised his hand again: ‘Please, first we must determine certain facts. Why did you visit Athos?’

  Neil shrugged. ‘To see the monasteries. Tourism.’

  ‘Tourism?’ said Captain Spyros, fixing Neil with small black eyes. ‘You did not perhaps have business to do on Athos?’

  ‘Business? What sort of business would I have there?’ Neil glanced round at M. Pol, who sat passively watching him with his cherry-lipped smile.

  Captain Spyros was looking again at Neil’s passport. ‘It says here that you are a journalist. Perhaps you visited Athos in order to interview someone?’

  ‘No, I told you, I went as a tourist.’

  At that moment M. Pol leant out and whispered something to Captain Spyros, who handed him Neil’s passport. The Greek now turned to Van Loon: ‘It says here you are a sailor by profession?’

  ‘Oh, I am many things in my life,’ said Van Loon, shaking his head slowly like some mystic.

  ‘What were you doing on Athos?’

  ‘Escaping from a girl.’

  Monsieur Pol looked up and gave a small peal of laughter, shrill, almost a woman’s laugh.

  Captain Spyros frowned and adjusted his cuffs. ‘You have known each other how long?’ he said, with stiff dignity.

  ‘We met on the bus to Ierrissou three weeks ago,’ said Van Loon.

  The Greek nodded with a look of disappointment, laid the passport back on the desk, and turned again to Neil: ‘Did you meet any other tourists while you were on Athos?’

  Neil hesitated. Monsieur Pol had leant forward, his chair giving a little crack under his weight. ‘Yes, there was a Frenchman we met,’ said Neil, ‘a Monsieur Martel. He said he was a retired professor.’

  ‘What did this man look like?’ It was Pol who spoke, in a rich melodious voice like a tenor.

  ‘Tall — white-haired — about fifty.’

  The fat man leant out and picked a folder off the table in front of Captain Spyros. He opened it and handed it to Neil. Inside lay two photographs. They were both of M. Martel; one showed him in a dark suit with the ribbon of the Legion of Honour, standing at attention in a parade in a Paris street. In the other he was behind a desk in the uniform of a French Army officer. Neil knew now where he had seen the face before. It had appeared on the front pages of the world’s Press some eight months earlier.

  Pol said softly, ‘Was it this man?’

  Neil nodded and handed the folder back.

  CHAPTER 2

  The man was Colonel Pierre Broussard, commander of a crack paratroop regiment which had been involved in an abortive coup the year before in one of France’s less happy North African Protectorates.

  It had been the climax of several years’ guerrilla warfare between the French and the Moslem Nationalists, who called themselves the Arab Front. An exhausted French nation had finally agreed to open tentative peace talks as a prelude to granting the Protectorate independence. The European population, a strong minority of nearly a million, had reacted at first with hopeless anger — rioting, burning official buildings, calling strikes.

  Then, eight months ago, a clique of Army officers, headed by General Paul Guérin, a former Commander-in-Chief in the Protectorate, had defied the Government and for four days had threatened to drop paratroopers over Paris and seize the city. The revolt had collapsed when the rest of the Army, undecided to the last, had finally failed to give the rebels their support.

  Paul Guérin and a number of high-ranking officers, including his second-in-command, Colonel Broussard, had gone underground and been sentenced to death in absentia. Out of the rump of eighteen-hundred disbanded paratroopers and Foreign Legionnaires, and the leaders of extremist civilian groups, Guérin had founded a clandestine organization calling itself the Secret Army.

  France now found herself trapped in a three-cornered fight. Burdened with mutinous officers, she was trying to extricate herself with the remnants of dignity, from between two fanatical terrorist organizations. While her struggle against the Arab Front still continued, the power of the Secret Army had been growing to frightening proportions, steadily eroding the foundations of law and order within the Protectorate until now even the stability of Metropolitan France was threatened.

  Monsieur Pol now explained that during the last two weeks, while Neil had been on Athos, innocent of world affairs, the Secret Army had begun an indiscriminate terrorist campaign against Moslems in the capital of the Protectorate. Their aim was to disrupt any future peace talks between Paris and the Arab Nationalists. French security forces — the CRS (the Campagnie Républicaine de Sécurité) and the shock troops of the Gardes Mobiles — had tried, with the dubious backing of the Army, to break the organization, but with no great success. Many arrests had been made, but the main conspirators, including Colonel Broussard, had slipped out of the Protectorate to Spain, Sicily and Greece, where they were now believed to be planning a new coup to overthrow the French Government.

  Pol confessed to Neil that the Deuxième Bureau had known for a while that Broussard was operating from somewhere in Greece; then, the night before, an agent in Salonika had reported that he might be hiding on Mount Athos. Instructions had been given for the Greek police to detain all travellers leaving the peninsula.

  Pol spread his fat fingers across his knees: ‘So you see, gentlemen, it was necessary to bring you here this morning in the interests, let us say, of security… Many of Broussard’s men were in the Foreign Legion — Germans and Spaniards, Dutchmen, even Englishmen. We couldn’t take any chances — these people are very well organized.’ He clapped his hands against his enormous thighs: ‘However, now you are here, perhaps you could tell us something about this Monsieur Martel. Was he alone?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Neil.

  ‘What did he talk about?’

  Neil paused: ‘The only things he talked to me about were Arabic semantics and old coins.’

  Pol chuckled, wagging his head: ‘Ah, our friend Broussard is an intellectual! An intellectual killer. One must not underestimate him. He was one of the great heroes of the French Army — a survivor of Dien Bien Phu, decorated with the Legion of Honour, the Médaille Militaire — an expert on psychological warfare an
d a leading French authority on classical Arabic. He wrote an excellent book on the history of Persian poetry. Formidable man. Unfortunately, in Saigon he began relying too much on opium. After Dien Bien Phu he had a nervous collapse and spent a lot of time in a psychiatric clinic near Grenoble. He’s a little insane.’

  Neil told Pol about the night at St. Panteleimon and the black box that the colonel had lugged about the mountain.

  ‘That would have been radio transmitting equipment,’ said Pol, ‘he was keeping in touch with the Secret Army agents here in Greece.’

  Neil remembered now the whining sound and the voice behind the wall that he had heard at Zographou on that first night he had met M. Martel. Finally he told Pol of the conversation he had had with the gendarme at Karyes, and about the boat that had arrived during the night.

  Pol listened solemnly to this. When Neil finished, he nodded and said glumly, ‘So it looks as though our friend Broussard has flown. You say two nights ago?’ He turned to Captain Spyros, who had been staring at his manicured nails. ‘Captain, we must still check all the boats and roads from Athos. Keep the Salonika police alerted — warn the coastguards, the ports, the airfields. It is just possible that the man is still in Greece.’

  Captain Spyros bowed, smiled obsequiously round him, and hurried from the room, followed by the plainclothes man. The door closed. Neil and Van Loon rose to leave, but Pol jumped up with amazing agility and clutched them both by the elbow with his pink fleshy fingers.

  ‘One moment!’ he cried. ‘I have a debt to pay! I have had you both seized in error as common criminals in a land which is neither mine nor yours. I owe you at least a drink’ — he glanced at his watch, it was not yet nine o’clock — ‘and a good breakfast.’ He pushed them back into their chairs and waddled over to a side table where there were three white telephones and several bottles of Scotch and Perrier water.

  Standing up, he reminded Neil of the man in the Michelin tyre advertisement: his great body bulged out of a shiny blue suit and balanced on a pair of delicate feet in soft slippers like ballet shoes. He was sweating heavily and the hair on the back of his head grew in damp rings like a whirlpool.