The man gave him a flat stare and nodded past him towards the girl in the armchair. Neil turned, frowning, and walked over to her; he stopped with a slight bow and said, ‘I’m Monsieur Ingleby. Were you asking for me?’
She looked impassively up at him: ‘You are the English journalist who came by boat yesterday from Greece.’ It was not a question, but a statement of fact. Neil nodded, swallowing hard.
‘Sit down, Monsieur Ingleby.’ She took out a packet of Gitanes, lit one, tossed the match on the floor and sat watching him through the curling smoke. She had fine black eyes that sloped upwards in a wide face, and her nose was straight, in a bold line with her forehead, giving her a dramatic Grecian profile. She wore a crimson sheath of shot-silk cut low over her sunburnt breasts. Her arms were bare and her hands slender and brown; she wore no make-up and no ring. On her left wrist was a loose, heavy bracelet of Berber silver.
‘You represent a famous English newspaper,’ she began, speaking with the deliberation of a set speech, ‘it is important that while you are here you write the truth. Many of the foreigners here tell lies about us. They accuse us of being murderers and Fascists and traitors. That is not true. This is our country. We built it out of the sand. Before the French came there was nothing! The Arabs were nomads — tribesmen who came from outside and profited from what we had built, and now they say the country is theirs. It is not theirs, Monsieur Ingleby! This country is French, and we shall keep it French!’ Her eyes were fierce and beautiful, and they confused him: he was not used to political passion so early in the morning. He nodded again and said nothing. There was something both absurd and rather frightening about this lovely girl mouthing political abstractions, while outside she and her friends wielded the weapons of violence and death.
‘You must write in your newspaper that we are not Fascists and murderers,’ she went on, ‘we are patriots!’ She paused, inhaling deeply, and Neil mumbled something about trying to be objective and seeing all sides of the problem; then added, ‘What is your name?’
‘Anne-Marie. You don’t have to know my family name.’ She looked up sharply. Van Loon was coming towards them across the foyer. He stopped in front of her and gave a jerky bow. Neil said, ‘This is my Dutch friend who came with me from Greece.’
She said, ‘I know. You’re Monsieur Van Loon. Sit down please.’
Van Loon fumbled for an armchair, ogling her with his huge blue eyes. She flicked some ash on the carpet and said to Neil, ‘There was a third man with you on the boat from Greece.’
He stiffened and felt that tightening again in his stomach as he thought of Jadot and wondered, how much do these people know? His neck and forehead grew damp. She was watching him carefully now, and smiling a small teasing smile. ‘A fat man with a beard,’ she added, and her sloping black eyes flashed, almost with amusement, ‘he is called Charles Pol.’
Neil licked his lips. ‘How do you know all this?’
‘We know everything, Monsieur Ingleby. And we want to ask you some questions about this fat man.’ She squashed out her cigarette on the arm of the chair and brushed the ash to the floor. ‘The car is outside,’ she said, standing up.
‘Where are we going?’
‘You’ll find out.’ She led the way across the foyer, She was a tall girl, large-boned but graceful, and she walked like a dancer, with beautiful legs, long and suntanned, and without too much muscle; her buttocks were high and firm and slightly pointed under the tight red silk. After three iron weeks on Mount Athos Neil began to feel an uneasy stirring in his loins.
Outside, the sea-fog had cleared and the sun burned down out of a hard blue sky. A big man in dark glasses with an open-necked denim shirt stood in front of the hotel leaning against a black Peugeot 403 saloon. He straightened up and opened the doors. Anne-Marie waved them both into the back seats. Neil’s foot stubbed against something on the floor as he sat down. It was a sporting rifle with telescopic sights.
The car accelerated with a skid of gravel and drove fast along the Front de Mer. Now that the strike was over, people were beginning to come out again into the streets. Shops and cafés were opening, and the Gardes Mobiles were at every corner with machine-guns and walkie-talkies; and in the squares and down the main boulevards armoured cars stood with the long barrels of the Douze-Septs trained on the balconies above.
The morning smelt fresh and clean, as they climbed from the Front de Mer, above the white dazzle of the city, into a series of poorer, working-class streets full of slogans and grubby little men idling in the mouths of bars and bistros. They turned another corner, still climbing, and two men in khaki uniforms with no insignia stepped out and waved them to a halt. One of them began talking to the driver and Neil caught the word barbouze several times; then the man handed in a sheet of notepaper scrawled with what looked to Neil like a list of serial numbers. Anne-Marie took the paper and began studying it, as the car drove on. She turned to Neil. ‘Car numbers belonging to the barbouzes,’ she said, pointing to the paper, ‘filthy Government agents!’ She laughed: ‘We’ll find them all before this evening.’
‘What’ll happen to them?’
She smiled, showing very even white teeth, and drew a finger across her throat: ‘Kill them. The Government pays these barbouze vermin ten times what ordinary gendarmes get. They’re just hired murderers.’
‘They never get paid,’ said the driver; ‘we kill the bastards first.’
‘Do you know,’ said Anne-Marie, ‘that when they first sent in the barbouzes, the Government agreed to pay them every three months. That way they could wait till most of them got killed, and save themselves the money!’
They turned into a tall street strung across with lines of washing between the tenement blocks. The walls shut out the sun and there was a warm stench of garbage. Anne-Marie smiled at Neil again, her head tilted sideways, and said, ‘You know, your fat friend Charles Pol is a barbouze.’
Neil said nothing. It was hot inside the car and he began to sweat. A group of young men in leather jackets were lounging against the corner of one of the tenement blocks. The Peugeot stopped. Anne-Marie got out and led Neil and Van Loon into a side entrance, along a cement passage. The driver stayed with the car.
They heard voices and radio music coming from behind closed doors. At the end of the passage a soldier stood against the sunlight, wearing the mottled battle-dress and white kepi of the Foreign Legion. He stepped out and prodded his machine-pistol into Anne-Marie’s stomach. She pushed the gun aside and said something to him, and he grinned at her. He had a thin face with very blue eyes, his neck rough with dead acne. He looked at Neil and Van Loon and spat on the floor: ‘Journalists, eh? You be careful what you write here or we put a bullet in your necks!’ He spoke with a middle-European accent: ‘Go on, get moving!’ He grinned again as they went past him, out into the sun.
The street was full of armed men, most of them in baggy leopard camouflage strapped across with grenades and belts of machinegun rounds that gleamed like gold teeth. A hundred yards up the street was the first barricade: a double wall of paving stones, topped with barbed wire skewered down with iron staples. A couple of paratroopers sat behind machineguns inside a nest of sand bags. Loudspeakers, hung from streetlamps, were blaring out martial music: rather gay, facetious music, Neil thought, full of fanfares of bugles and images of men in blue cloaks on prancing horses.
The troops squatted on the pavements, smoking and playing cards, or strolled in groups and sprawled in bars drinking beer and Fastis. There was an atmosphere of idleness and tension.
Anne-Marie led the way down the street away from the barricade. A large group of Foreign Legionnaires, in the flat-visored khaki caps of paratroopers, stared at her, grinning and hooting and shouting after her; and as she walked between them with a provocative swing of the hips, Neil thought sadly of the legend that had grown up round the Legion — of the romantic buccaneers and soldiers of fortune who stole heirlooms to save the family honour, or fled to Africa from an unhapp
y love affair. But there was nothing romantic about these men, they were just blunt, brutal soldiers. They square-bashed and polished equipment and dug latrines and got drunk and went out on savage raids into the Bled, taking no prisoners and leaving behind them a population stunned and full of hatred for the French. Neil wondered what Colonel Broussard, with his love of Persian poetry and old coins, really thought of them. Perhaps to him they were just the crude instruments of force to ensure him his place of power in the Elysée Palace.
As though reflecting his thoughts, Anne-Marie turned to him: ‘These paras are not very polite — but they’re good soldiers. They make the Arabs run!’
Van Loon whispered to Neil, ‘A tremendous girl, huh?’
Neil nodded, thinking that she was also a dangerous girl.
She led them into a slender apartment-house at the end of the street. In the foyer two paras with heavy machineguns checked their papers, then showed them to the lifts. They hummed up to the tenth floor. A solemn man in a grey flannel suit let them into a wide cool room with a wall of French windows opening on to a balcony that looked down over chequered terraces to the sea. A girl in leopard skin trousers, with a heavy Jewish face, lay on a sofa under a reproduction of Matisse, turning the pages of Marie Claire. She scarcely looked up as they entered. The room was full of the tinkle of the Modern Jazz Quartet from an invisible hi-fi system.
Against the glare of the balcony a large man rose from a chair and came towards them. He wore a hound’s-tooth jacket, yellow silk scarf and cavalry-twill trousers, and held a silver-topped riding crop against his knee. He gave Anne-Marie a light kiss on the cheek, then turned to Neil and Van Loon and said pleasantly, ‘Make yourselves comfortable, messieurs!’ — pointing his riding crop at a semicircle of shallow wicker chairs near the window. He sat down in front of them and smiled. He had big square teeth and the weathered face of a sportsman. A welted scar ran from the corner of his mouth to just below his left ear, and his hair, which was normally black, had been dyed bright orange.
‘My name is Colonel Le Hir,’ he began, addressing Neil, ‘you have probably heard of me?’
Neil gave a stiff nod; he was excited and scared. Le Hir was head of a murder squad known as the ‘Gamma Commandos’. They specialized in killing Europeans who were unsympathetic to the Secret Army; it was they who had scored most of the successes against the barbouzes.
‘I’d have called you at a more civilized hour,’ the colonel continued easily, ‘but unfortunately I have a very full programme today.’ He turned to the Jewish girl in the leopard skin trousers: ‘Nadia, make some coffee!’
The girl unfolded her legs and slunk sulkily out of the room. Le Hir said to Neil, ‘We try to be as helpful as we can to the foreign Press during these difficult times. After all, if it was not for you’ — he gave a condescending nod — ‘the world would be obliged to believe the Paris propaganda machine.’ He paused. Anne-Marie shifted in her chair with a crackle of wicker, exposing an inch of shadowed thigh. Le Hir had begun tapping the riding crop against his ankle.
‘However, Monsieur Ingleby’ — and his voice now became sharp as a razor — ‘in your case there is one small matter which rather disturbs me. It concerns the man you arrived with yesterday from Greece. A man named Pol.’
The only sound in the room now was the tapping of the riding crop. Le Hir’s eyes, which were pale brown with a bright yellow light in them, watched Neil without blinking: ‘Do you know this man well, Monsieur Ingleby?’
Neil felt his pulse begin to race, and in the silence there was a singing in his ears. He knew that if Le Hir had heard of what happened to Jadot, neither he nor Van Loon would leave this building alive.
He said to Le Hir, ‘I hardly know him at all. We met in a hotel in Athens and he offered to take me over here in his boat.’ He turned to Van Loon, who was busy igniting his meerschaum as though it were some complicated machine: ‘He wanted Monsieur Van Loon here to navigate. That’s the only way we got to know him.’
Anne-Marie sat with her legs carefully crossed, staring at a point somewhere just above Neil’s head. Le Hir did not move his eyes from Neil’s face. The girl Nadia slipped in with a tray of filter coffees. Nobody spoke as the cups were passed round. Le Hir removed the filter bowl, placed it in a metal stand beside him, helped himself to two spoonsful of sugar, and sat stirring his cup slowly, still not moving his eyes from Neil. When he spoke his voice was very soft: ‘Do you know who this man is?’
Neil shrugged: ‘He told me he was a Paris businessman.’
Le Hir shook his head: ‘No, Monsieur Ingleby. He is what we call here a barbouze. Do you know what a barbouze is?’
Neil nodded.
Le Hir smacked the riding crop against his shin and sprang up, looming huge above Neil, legs apart, arms akimbo, his big teeth bared in a grin: ‘Listen to me carefully, Monsieur Ingleby. I am a reasonable man. I don’t believe in interfering with journalists who come here to do their job. But when you and your Dutch friend arrive in this city with a leading French secret agent I begin to have doubts. I begin to wonder whether you are here merely as a journalist, or for some other motive. You had better explain. As I said, my programme today is very full.’ He glanced at his watch.
‘I can assure you,’ said Neil, in a small hoarse voice, ‘that my meeting with Monsieur Pol was entirely accidental. I had no idea what sort of work he was doing here. We didn’t discuss it.’
‘But he went with you to your hotel last night. Why?’
‘He came up to have a shower in my room. He sweats a lot.’
Anne-Marie smiled. Le Hir stood above Neil sipping his coffee: ‘Monsieur Ingleby, in normal circumstances I would order you out of this country within twelve hours, under pain of death if you stayed. However, I am satisfied that your explanation is an honest one. I am prepared to let you stay — on one condition. I want to know if this man Pol has made any arrangement to see you again while you are here.’
At that moment Neil panicked. He was still not sure just how much Le Hir knew: whether the news of Jadot’s death had reached the Secret Army. Perhaps this was a trap to test the truth of his story. Rashly, he began telling Le Hir about the telephone call Pol had asked him to make at two o’clock that afternoon. Even as he spoke he realized that Le Hir almost certainly did not know about Jadot. But the damage had been done.
‘Why does he want you to make this call?’
‘He said he might have something important to tell me for my newspaper.’
‘What number did he ask you to ring?’
Neil showed him the number Pol had given him. Le Hir nodded. ‘That’s one of the coded lines to the High Command headquarters,’ he said, handing Neil’s pocketbook back. ‘Very well! Now this is what you are going to do. You will ring this man Pol at two o’clock this afternoon. I want to know exactly what he says to you. Anne-Marie will call at your hotel, and whatever information you have you will give to her.’ He finished his coffee and handed the cup to Nadia. ‘Messieurs,’ he said, ‘it has been my pleasure to meet you!’
Neil and Van Loon stood up. Around them the hi-fi released the mewing tones of Johnny Mathis. Le Hir took their hands in a grip like iron. ‘Remember,’ he said, with his square-toothed smile, ‘that when you see this man Pol you say nothing about your visit here. You have never met me — you have never met Anne-Marie.’ He paused, and a nasty glare showed at the edges of his eyes. ‘But if you do say anything, or if you try to conceal from me anything that Pol says to you, then I shall know about it. I promise you.’
It seemed to Neil that he spoke with the studied melodrama of someone who has seen a great many bad films. Neil was reminded suddenly of a games master he had had at his prep school: a big healthy man who expended charm and flattery on the parents, and used to beat boys with a billiard cue if they failed to get ten runs in a cricket match. There was something grotesque about the man which should have been amusing, but wasn’t. And as Anne-Marie led the way with secretarial efficiency down the ten flo
ors to the street, Neil had an urge to run, to escape from this white city where the preposterous Pol on one side and this orange-haired colonel on the other were fighting out the last ferocious act in French colonial history, with N. Ingleby trapped somewhere in the middle.
CHAPTER 4
It was going to be a hot day. The streets already shimmered with a white glare and the sun burned into the bay with diamond brilliance. Outside the barricades a restive unnatural holiday atmosphere was spreading through the city. The squares and boulevards were filling with great crowds. The pavement cafés were packed with almond-eyed girls and dark young men in beach hats and sunglasses, breakfasting under striped awnings, watched by the Gardes Mobiles who stood at the door of every shop and bank and bar, eyes like stone, guns at the ready. And along the Front de Mer sports cars, bright with scarves and sunburned arms, were setting out for the beaches, dodging between the jeeps and half-tracks.
The Peugeot turned down towards the Hotel Miramar. Anne-Marie smiled at Neil: ‘It’s a good day for swimming!’
‘And for fishing,’ said the driver morosely, glaring out at the helmeted troops. He braked suddenly. In front of them a large crowd had collected on the corner. Cars stood bumper to bumper, hooting in angry chorus. A group of ragged European children came running down the pavement, laughing and waving their arms.
Neil glanced at Anne-Marie: ‘What’s happened?’
She shrugged, looking indifferently out of the window: ‘A ratonnade, I think — some Moslem. Or perhaps a barbouze.’
A Garde Mobile came down the street, blowing a whistle and signalling the cars forward. He reached the Peugeot and the driver leant out and said, ‘What’s up?’
‘Attentat,’ said the man, ‘don’t stay around to watch. Get moving!’ He had a huge face, of the same metal-grey as his helmet. The Peugeot crept forward to the corner where a cordon of CRS troops had linked arms and were trying to push the crowds back against the edge of the café.
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