Barbouze

by Alan Williams

  The first Moslem lay on his face in the middle of the street. He wore a pair of dirty plimsols and faded blue trousers. The blood flowed from his head over the camber of the street and forked into two dark serpents, their blunt noses moving swiftly down the gutter collecting a film of dust. Neil remembered afterwards wondering how so much blood could come from the head of one human being.

  The second man sat on the pavement, his face in his hands. He was also a Moslem. A bicycle lay overturned beside him, its front wheel still turning. A bucket had rolled into the gutter. Blood was running out of his trouser legs and trickling towards the café tables. Neil saw a party of bronzed men with several pretty girls shift their chairs to avoid dirtying their espadrilles. One of the girls looked at the wounded man and laughed.

  He was trying to stand up. His head was still in his hands; he pulled in his legs and strained forward till he toppled into the gutter, his buttocks in the air. The Peugeot stopped, caught in another jam. The man was directly outside the window now. They sat and watched him perform his slow and terrible ritual, struggling to his feet with a bullet in his neck. Neil cried out, in English, ‘For God’s sake, we must do something!’

  ‘You do something, you get killed,’ said Van Loon.

  Neil turned to Anne-Marie: her head was resting on the back of the seat. She did not look at the Moslem. ‘We must do something!’ he said in French. ‘The man’s dying!’

  ‘Shut up,’ she said without moving. He noticed that her eyelids were lightly freckled like eggshell.

  The Moslem outside had begun to plod wearily up the street. His hands were still clutched across his face and the back of his head was dark and glistening. The crowds pressed round and watched. He made no sound. The street was full of the blare of hooters. The CRS were busy waving the traffic on again.

  ‘Why don’t those damned troops do something?’ said Neil, in English.

  ‘Don’t talk,’ said Van Loon.

  The Peugeot moved forward, past the Moslem as he dragged himself upwards, leaving a sprinkled trail of blood. A man came running down the street towards them. He passed the car and yelled, ‘Two Europeans just killed!’ He waved back up the street and went on, shouting at the crowd round the café.

  What happened next was very confused. The crowd closed in in a rush. People began to run; there was shouting, screaming, a glimpse of raised batons, uniforms struggling, children leaping past the windows of the car; the shriek of whistles, the dismal panting of sirens.

  The Moslem had disappeared. The crowds rolled back, and Neil saw two people lying in the café among the wreckage of overturned tables and smashed glass. The CRS were frog-marching two men up the street. The Moslem was lying several yards away, his arms flopped behind his back. He did not move. There was a broad smear along the pavement where he had been dragged face downwards.

  The traffic cleared and the Peugeot drove on, into a quiet street shaded by high white buildings. Neil looked dumbly at Anne-Marie; he was not even shocked or sickened, just puzzled. ‘Why?’ he said again. ‘Why did they do it?’ He remembered that the girl in the café who had laughed at the Moslem had been wearing magenta tights and open sandals. It made no sense.

  Anne-Marie stretched her arms along the back of the seat. ‘They were Moslems,’ she said, ‘we kill them if they come into the French quarters. We have to protect ourselves. Ali La Joconde sends his Arab Front terrorists down from the Casbah and they shoot Europeans all round here, and leave bombs in cafés and do horrible things.’ She yawned. ‘You must be careful round the Hotel Miramar,’ she added, ‘it’s one of the worst places. They killed a man there this morning, just before I came to collect you.’

  ‘So you kill Moslems in return?’ said Neil.

  ‘Certainly. We can’t lie down and sleep while these terrorists walk around in our city. They mutilate women and children, you know! You haven’t seen anything yet.’

  ‘But those two men back there,’ said Neil, ‘were they terrorists?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said, ‘perhaps, I don’t know. But they shouldn’t have been down in this quarter — they should have kept to the Casbah. That’s where they belong.’

  ‘The second man was lynched,’ said Neil, ‘kicked to death!’

  She nodded: ‘Yes, I know. That wasn’t good. Our commandos have orders only to shoot people. But sometimes the crowd gets excited — especially when they hear that Europeans have just been killed. They get angry, they lose their heads. It’s understandable.’

  Neil looked at the tiny hairs glinting along her sunburnt arms. She was a beautiful girl; and in the heat of the closed car he caught her warm, musky smell, healthy and alive, evidence that she lived well and slept well and took plenty of exercise and didn’t worry about men she saw lynched in the street.

  At the corner of the Miramar she took him and Van Loon by the hand. ‘Don’t forget,’ she said, ‘you telephone the fat man at two o’clock. I’ll come and collect you at half past and we’ll go to the beach. I want to introduce you to some of my friends, to show you that we are not all murderers and Fascists.’ She smiled at them both with her wide mouth, and her face was bright and innocent — a young girl planning to go to the beach and frisk about in a bikini, sitting now in a chauffeur-driven car with a telescopic rifle on the floor.

  They shook hands with her, and Van Loon stood and watched the Peugeot drive away, muttering, ‘What a fantastic girl, Neil! Completely sadistic, I think?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Neil, ‘I just don’t understand any of them. Let’s have a drink.’

  They went past the fountain into the air-conditioned darkness of the hotel: smells of oranges and old leather, with a crowd of journalists refreshing themselves at the bar. Winston St. Leger and Hudson were there, together with Tom Mallory, transplanted from El Vino in Fleet Street by way of a three-hundred-mile drive in a hired Hillman Minx across the desert. The chances against his getting through had seemed colossal, but he had made it: now holding up an empty glass and shouting ‘Nurse!’ at the sleek-haired barman.

  He was a journalist of erratic brilliance who had been sacked and rehired during his career by two large London papers, had been under sentence of death three times and expelled from altogether five countries. His face now had a gnarled furious look, purple with good living, framed by a halo of copper-red hair that dropped over his soup-stained jacket. Although a comparatively young man, most of his teeth had fallen out and his voice had sung to a croak which was the only impediment to his legendary rudeness. Neil had met him several times and thought him slightly mad. He murmured a greeting but Mallory took no notice. He was leaning across the bar waving his glass about his head: ‘Nurse!’ he cried again, in his terrible croak.

  St. Leger caught Neil’s eye: ‘You look a bit green about the gills, my dear fellow!’

  ‘I’ve just seen a man lynched,’ said Neil, sitting down with Van Loon. He explained in detail what they had seen and St. Leger nodded over his pink gin: ‘Yes, you’ll get used to that sort of thing — what is laughingly called here effervescence. What will you drink?’

  They ordered brandies. From down the bar came a hoarse cackle of laughter. St. Leger murmured, ‘As you can hear, Mr. Mallory is with us. A good reporter but in my view rather a hooligan. I hope he doesn’t make any trouble for us all.’

  ‘Trouble?’ said Neil.

  ‘Yes, trouble with the powers that be — the Secret Army. We have to be rather careful here, you know.’ He paused meaningfully and nibbled at an olive. Hudson had joined them. He glanced at Neil and Van Loon with a raised eyebrow, and St. Leger cleared his throat. When he spoke again it was with measured gravity, ‘Mister Ingleby, far be it from me to attempt to tell another journalist, especially one of your reputation, what he should and should not do. But in this case’ — and he sipped his pink gin — ‘I feel I ought to warn you.’

  ‘Warn me? What do you mean?’

  St. Leger picked up another olive and examined it carefully: ‘Warn you
about some of the people you know here.’

  Mallory’s voice came croaking down the bar: ‘So I told Butcher O’Brien to get knotted — told him he had a touch o’ the sun!’ Someone laughed.

  Winston St. Leger said gently, without looking at Neil, ‘You can trust me and Hudson here completely. What I want to tell you is for your own good.’

  Hudson was leaning forward, his worried face creased into a forked stick. The brandies came; Neil and Van Loon sat in silence and waited. St. Leger twirled the stem of his pink gin. ‘I’ve been in this city a number of years,’ he went on, ‘and I hear quite a lot of things that aren’t always for the record.’ He turned and looked Neil in the eye: ‘Somebody told me that you arrived in this hotel yesterday with a French secret agent called Charles Pol.’

  Neil nodded and drank his brandy. So he was in for a second interrogation, this time from his own colleagues. He said, ‘Well, what of it?’

  ‘What of it!’ cried Hudson. ‘Look here, Ingleby, you must know the score in this place. You arrive here with a man who just about tops the Secret Army’s black list. Did you know that? He’s seen coming into this hotel with a journalist! Where do y’think that puts the rest of us? We don’t like these Secret Army boys, but we got to live with ’em!’

  St. Leger nodded: ‘I’m afraid he’s right, Ingleby. This man Charles Pol could be very dangerous for us all. I don’t know how he picked you up, but I do know that he must have had some very good motive.’

  ‘He picked me up,’ said Neil, with an edge coming into his voice, ‘because he wanted someone to help him cross from Greece in a small boat. The Secret Army know all this, I’ve already explained it to them this morning.’

  ‘Who did y’see?’ asked Hudson.

  ‘I can’t tell you that.’

  ‘You can trust us,’ St. Leger said again.

  ‘I trust you,’ said Neil, ‘I just think it would be safer for us all if I didn’t tell you.’

  St. Leger nodded solemnly and there was a pause. Neil felt that he had won the discussion. He disliked being criticized by his colleagues for what amounted to professional ineptitude.

  Then St. Leger said, ‘It wasn’t by any chance a gentleman called Colonel Le Hir whom you met this morning?’

  Neil stared at him in shocked silence: ‘How did you know?’

  ‘I guessed,’ said St. Leger, ‘if you went to see anyone, he was the most likely person. He deals with what is politely called counter-espionage.’

  Hudson had drawn in his breath and gave a little whistle: ‘You saw the Colonel! O Jesus!’

  ‘You know him?’

  ‘I know of him,’ said Hudson, ‘did he tell you to get out of the country?’

  ‘No,’ said Neil, ‘he was very civil to me, we had coffee together, he asked me how I knew Pol, I told him, and he left it at that.’

  St. Leger smiled: ‘My dear fellow, if you imagine that Colonel Le Hir was prepared to “leave it at that”, as you put it, then — if you’ll excuse my being blunt — you must have a very simplified view of what is going on in this city.’

  Neil flushed but said nothing. Van Loon just stared at his empty brandy, hoping to be bought another. St. Leger was studying another olive, his face old and delicate and relaxed. ‘If Colonel Le Hir did not call you this morning in order to expel you,’ he went on, ‘then it’s not difficult to guess what he really wanted. Certainly not his picture in the paper.’

  ‘He wanted an explanation of how I came to know Pol,’ said Neil, ‘that was all.’

  St. Leger shook his head: ‘No, Mister Ingleby, that was not all. I think Colonel Le Hir asked you to get him information about Pol.’

  Neil said nothing. St. Leger continued, ‘And yesterday Pol asked you to get information for him — information about people you meet here in the course of your work. Isn’t that so?’

  ‘No,’ said Neil, ‘all he did was ask me to ring him this afternoon. He said he might have something to tell me for my paper.’

  ‘In exchange for what?’

  ‘For nothing — as a simple favour.’

  St. Leger had taken out his toothpaste tube and was sucking it thoughtfully. ‘Monsieur Charles Pol is a very deceptive man,’ he said at last. ‘I knew him in Barcelona in 1936. He was a leading Anarchist then, quite a flamboyant character. Among other escapades he organized the kidnapping of one of Franco’s generals. Then during the last war he became one of the Allies’ most successful double agents, working for the Vichy Government and spying for the Free French. He’s come out here to help break the Secret Army. And the fact that he arrives in a private boat with a well-known British journalist doesn’t strike me as altogether a coincidence. The Secret Army won’t think so either.’

  Neil finished his brandy and stared glumly at the bar: ‘So what do you suggest I do?’

  ‘Leave the country — before you get yourself, and perhaps the whole Press Corps, into serious trouble.’

  CHAPTER 5

  Neil lay on his bed smoking. It was now 12.40. He had one hour and twenty minutes left before telephoning Pol and finally committing himself.

  All morning he had worried over what action he should take. So far he had not been directly threatened; all he had been asked to do was to make a phone call and report on it. It was possible that Winston St. Leger had been wrong. Neil knew from experience that journalists are essentially creatures of temperament, enjoying a world of melodrama often of their own making, and often given to irresponsible judgments. St. Leger and Hudson had perhaps been in this city too long. What happened to luckless Moslems in the street was one thing; as Pol had said, the Secret Army did not harm distinguished members of the foreign Press. On the other hand, if Pol and Le Hir were seriously intending to use Neil as a pawn between them, then clearly he should swallow his pride, take St. Leger’s advice, and get out.

  Later in the morning he had gone to the offices of Agence France-Presse and studied the teleprinter reports. Several hundred new security troops were being flown in from France during the next twenty-four hours. That meant the airport would remain closed to civilian traffic until at least tomorrow night. All other means of escape — ports, road and railways — were still sealed off. The decision had been made for him. He would have to stay.

  A fat fly lobbed about on the ceiling, then whined away under the blinds. Twice the air shuddered with the shockwaves of plastic bombs set off in Arab shops in the European quarter.

  He was low in spirits. He did not have the bloody-minded resilience of a Tom Mallory who in similar circumstances would have got steadily drunk and profited from the intrigue and danger. In Greece, Neil had fancied himself as an adventurer, a man of action; but now that it was happening to him, he found he was not enjoying it. He had drunk a number of Pernods downstairs, but they had only depressed him more, and made him randy into the bargain. He thought longingly of Caroline, wanting to talk to her, touch her, fold her between clean sheets: smooth flat belly and breasts like lemons, pinching her soft buttocks to make her squeak.

  At noon he had booked a call to her London office, person to person. If the lines to Paris were not too busy he might get through before one of the executives took her out to lunch, to Prunier’s or Simpson’s in the Strand.

  To avoid thinking about her he began planning a colour piece for Sunday morning’s paper. The deadline was tomorrow evening. He knew he could not safely describe his meeting with Le Hir without risking a deportation order, even the closing of the paper’s Paris Bureau; and to write about Pol (‘France’s answer to James Bond’) would invite sure recriminations from the Secret Army. He would have to content himself, and about half-a-million of the better educated of Britain’s Sunday newspaper readers, with a bill of fare consisting of pretty girls, bombs, bright cafés and men kicked to death in broad daylight. Like Nice in a nightmare.

  The telephone was ringing by the bed. It was not Caroline, but Anne-Marie: ‘Monsieur Ingleby! Ça va bien?’ There was a lot of shouting and laughter in the backgr
ound. She sounded excited and rather tight: ‘Have you had lunch yet? We’re eating at a restaurant called Le Berry — corner of the Rue de la Liberté. It’s only a few minutes from your hotel. Come and join us! I’ve got some friends who want to meet you.’

  The militant determination of this morning had gone: now she was just another good-time girl like Caroline, enjoying herself in a restaurant. Neil said, ‘I’m waiting for a call to London.’

  She sounded disappointed: ‘Can’t you take it later?’

  He looked at his watch. It was almost one o’clock, time for Caroline’s lunch hour. He said, ‘I’ll be with you in about a quarter of an hour. Can I bring my Dutch friend?’

  ‘Certainly! And you call the fat man at two o’clock from the restaurant. Then we go down to the Casino de la Plage. It’s very chic, you’ll like it!’ The voices and laughter swelled suddenly and she shouted, ‘À bientôt!’ and the line clicked.

  Down in the bar the Press Corps were still buying one another rounds of drinks on their expense accounts and telling anecdotes about the Congo. In the corner Tom Mallory slept in an armchair, snoring with a noise like a bath running out. Van Loon was sitting alone over a chilled Alsace beer, looking bored.

  Neil said, ‘Pieter, we’ve been asked to lunch by Anne-Marie and her friend.’ He tried to sound flippant: ‘So no horseplay! There’s a lot of Corsican blood round here.’

  Van Loon nodded wisely: ‘I don’t fool around, old fellow. These girls here are pretty hot, I think? I know what to do.’

  Neil ordered another Pernod, waiting a few more minutes for his call to London. He wondered if lunch would be on the Secret Army. St. Leger came over and said gravely, ‘I suppose you’ve heard that the airport’s staying closed? Have you registered at the British Consulate? I should do that as soon as possible.’

  ‘And what sort of protection will they provide?’ said Neil wryly. ‘Are they armed?’

  St. Leger looked offended: ‘I don’t know. But they’ll have the support of the British Government, if anything happens to you.’