‘Yes, of course,’ said Neil. It was a quarter past one and his call to London had still not come through. He decided to cancel it. Van Loon and he were just leaving when they heard the shots. They seemed to come from just outside the hotel. The bar emptied as the whole Press Corps stampeded into the foyer.
An old Moslem who sold cigarettes at the hotel entrance was dead. He lay sprawled under the palms with his tray of French and American brands scattered round him near the base of the fountain. Neil had bought a packet of Chesterfields from him only that morning. Blood was oozing out of his head into the flinty gravel, and his hands were flung out beside him, thin as chicken claws. He had a wooden leg.
The journalists stepped gingerly round him. The receptionist with the yellow moustache pointed up the street. ‘They shot him from a car,’ he said casually, ‘just two shots, straight in the head.’ St. Leger looked away from the body, pulling a face of disgust: ‘Poor devil! It was bound to happen — I told him several times to keep away from here and stay in the Casbah.’
Mallory had stumbled up, roused from his sleep more by instinct than the actual sound of the shooting: ‘What’s happened? Killed a man with a wooden leg, have they? Sods! I could have killed him with a tennis racket.’
Van Loon tugged at Neil’s arm. ‘Come on, nothing to do here. We go for lunch with Anne-Marie.’
‘I don’t think I want to have lunch with her, or her friends. Bloody savages!’
‘If we do not go, she will be fed up with us,’ said Van Loon, ‘and she is an important girl, I think.’ They began to walk down the street, keeping to the margin of shade under the walls. ‘Don’t talk about that dead man,’ Van Loon said after a pause, ‘I don’t think they will like it.’
Neil had no wish to talk to anyone about it, least of all to Anne-Marie and her friends. He had no appetite, no wish to finish up with his head broken open with a pistol bullet. And in less than an hour he would have to ring Pol.
Le Berry restaurant faced the Front de Mer and the bay. There was a crowded café with wicker chairs and Dubonnet umbrellas out in front. The restaurant was behind a glass porch, hot and noisy, with the fans whirling and the people packed along tables under high gilt mirrors. Anne-Marie’s party was at the back of the room, at a table stacked with seafood and white wine in ice buckets.
There were five altogether in the party: Anne-Marie, and a slim, pretty girl with hair the colour of red Burgundy, called Annette, a broad man in a khaki shirt with sunglasses that curved round his face like black goggles, who was introduced as Lieutenant Carlos Morin. He sat beside a sensuous dark girl who reminded Neil of a bad-tempered starlet, her rampant breasts pointing like fingertips through her flimsy dress, who was introduced simply as Pip. And at the end of the table sat a solemn big-boned Jewish boy with a coal-black crewcut, in a grey flannel suit with a chalk pinstripe. He was Louis Rebot, leader of the city’s main student organization.
Apart from Pip, whose bosom was lolling dangerously close to her lobster soup, they all greeted Neil and Van Loon with smiles and broad gestures, squeezing up to make room and pushing glasses of wine at them. Neil was beside Anne-Marie, with Van Loon wedged between Annette and Lieutenant Morin. Anne-Marie gave Neil a glass of Pouilly Fuissé and cried: ‘à votre santé!’ sweeping her own glass round in a wide arc above her head and draining it off in a gulp. Neil asked her if they were celebrating something. She smiled slyly, then pounced out and kissed him on the cheek: ‘We are celebrating victory, mon cher!’ She lifted her glass again, and turning towards the whole restaurant, shouted in a ringing voice: ‘Vive Guérin! Guérin au pouvoir!’
Her words were greeted with a roar like an echo, followed by the brutal banging of cutlery on the tables to the rhythm of ‘Guérin au pouvoir!’ For a moment the restaurant was bedlam, like a school dining-room gone berserk. Neil had always loathed mass demonstrations — stamping, chanting, slow hand-clapping — and he sat cowed over his wine, feeling that the primeval barbarism of Man had suddenly been released to invade this smart French restaurant and provoke within these apparently civilized beings a savage hysteria.
Van Loon thought it rather amusing and even joined in the demonstration, using his knife and fork like drumsticks. When the noise had died down Neil asked Anne-Marie what had happened. She put a hand on his shoulder and said, ‘We’ve won! Two battalions of Army reservists have come over to our side. By tomorrow perhaps the whole Army will be with us, and Metz and his Gestapo, the Gardes Mobiles, will be running for their lives. Then we can go in and smash the Casbah and get Ali La Joconde and his murderers!’ She spoke with a gay ferocity as though discussing the prospects for the ‘Tour de France’.
‘When did this happen?’ said Neil.
‘Forty minutes ago, we got it through Louis Rebot there.’ She nodded towards the Jewish student leader, who lifted his glass in a toast.
Neil drank deeply. The Right-wing Revolution was about to triumph. He wondered whether Pol and his team had anything left up their sleeves. It should have been a sad moment — a military junta on the point of seizing power and overthrowing the French Republic: Broussard’s mob of paratroopers and degenerate legionnaires ready to go on the rampage through the Casbah.
He felt vaguely ashamed that his own worries should overshadow what might be a tragedy for Western civilization. But he was scared. He deplored everything that Anne-Marie and her friends stood for, yet in a curiously perverse way he felt more secure with them than he had with Pol, or even the Press Corps in the hotel.
Anne-Marie ordered him scampi and fat tournedos on cushions of toast with bearnaise sauce. She put her arm round his shoulder and announced to the table: ‘Monsieur Ingleby is a famous English writer — he is going to tell the people of England what is really happening here.’
They began asking him his opinions about the revolt. He tried to be shrewdly neutral, remembering the dead Moslem and the stump of leg frayed at the end like an old walking-stick. He felt no enthusiasm for talking to any of these people, noticing that Anne-Marie ate and drank with an appetite so healthy as to be almost coarse. Once during the discussion she grabbed his arm and pointed at Louis Rebot. ‘In France people call us Fascists!’ she cried; ‘but Louis there is with the Secret Army and he is a Jew! How can a Jew be a Fascist, Monsieur Ingleby? It is impossible, ridiculous!’
He nodded tactfully, and Rebot answered from the end of the table, ‘All the Jews here are one hundred per cent behind the Secret Army. It is a struggle for survival against Arab nationalism. It is simple: if we do not win, we will perish.’ He spoke with the melancholy passion of his race, an echo from generations of persecution, a new Moses leading an army of paratroopers to defend the Promised Land against the invader.
Van Loon was talking noisily to the slim red-headed girl Annette, who was giggling and feeling his blond beard. He was swallowing a great deal of wine, rolling his blue eyes, suddenly finding Borneo a long way off. When Lieutenant Morin asked him what he thought of the situation in the Protectorate, he grinned and said obscurely, ‘I make no trouble for anyone, I just like drinking and good food and nice girls!’ — he gave Annette a lewd wink — ‘but if someone makes trouble for me, I break him with my hands!’
They all laughed except Neil, and Lieutenant Morin clapped him on the back: ‘I can see you are one of us, Dutchman!’
Van Loon said, ‘I would like very much to be one of you, with all these girls around!’
Anne-Marie touched Neil’s elbow and whispered, ‘It is two o’clock. You have to telephone the fat man.’
Neil felt a sinking in his stomach; he had hoped he was free of this. What could he say to Pol? That he’d met Le Hir behind the barricades and was lunching at Le Berry with one of the Secret Army student leaders?
Anne-Marie said, ‘The telephones are through past the toilets. They’ll give you a jeton at the cash desk.’
Inside the padded booth he pulled the door firmly shut and dialled the number Pol had given him. He wondered if there were an ex
tension in the restaurant which could be listened in to. Perhaps that was why she had asked him to lunch in the first place. The line the other end did not give the normal ringing tone; there were three pips and a woman’s voice repeated the number he had dialled. He said, ‘Monsieur Pol, please.’ There was a click, silence, then Pol’s voice came on — warily, Neil thought, ‘Who is it?’
‘Ingleby.’
‘Ah Monsieur Ingleby, comment ça va?’ His voice cooed and chuckled deafeningly down the line, he was in his expansive mood. Neil wondered how many bottles of Johnny Walker had already been brought into the heavily guarded High Command headquarters.
‘Are you enjoying your stay here?’ Pol went on, with a trace of irony: the line was probably being tapped his end by the Sûreté.
‘I’m fine,’ said Neil, feeling the sweat itching down his nose in the heat of the booth.
‘Bien! Now where are you speaking from?’
Neil hesitated a second: ‘A tobacconist’s — near the hotel.’
‘Very well, now listen carefully. This is very important.’
Neil wedged his toes and buttocks between the narrow walls; the receiver was growing wet under his hand. Pol spoke with slow emphasis: ‘Tomorrow morning at ten o’clock you will walk out of your hotel and turn right into the rue Victor Hugo. At the end of it is a cinema called le Roxy — at the moment it is showing “Spartacus” with your English actor Laurence Olivier. Next to this cinema, down a small turning, is a place called “La Cintra Café”. It is very small and is usually empty at that time. You will go in and order a drink. At a quarter past ten a man will come in. He will be wearing a white shirt with no tie, and will carry a light blue linen jacket over his left arm. He will come up to your table and address you by name, but you will have no time to buy him a drink. Instead you will leave together and drive away in his car. Is that clear?’
Neil changed the dripping receiver from one hand to the other. He would have been amused had he had any sense of humour left. Pol had now descended to traditional amateur dramatics: secret assignations in cafés, men with no ties, coats over their left arm. Even the stage directions were absurdly gauche: ‘He will come up to you, but you will have no time to buy him a drink!’ Surely he should buy the man a drink! It was supposed to be a casual meeting. He was surprised that Pol had not included a password for good measure — something like ‘Il pleure dans mon coeur, comme il pleut sur la ville’ — with perhaps the reply … ‘Spartacus!’ He wondered again, with a sense of dull resignation, whether the line was being tapped at his end. St. Leger and Hudson had been right of course, he was now hopelessly involved.
He said wearily to Pol, ‘Where will I be taken?’
‘I would prefer that you find out tomorrow. It is a little delicate — from my point of view.’ There was a pause. ‘Just in case you decide not to turn up.’
Neil nodded at the receiver. So Pol was playing his own little game and was giving nothing away. If I had any sense, he thought, I should try to get out with the ‘Serafina’ this afternoon.
Pol said, ‘Entendu? Au revoir, Monsieur Ingleby!’ and rang off, and Neil went back to the brandy and coffee that Anne-Marie had ordered while he was out. The Secret Army was paying.
She smiled up at him and said, ‘Well, what did he say?’ There was nothing in any of the faces round the table to suggest that they knew what Pol had said. Rebot and Van Loon had lit up cigars and were both talking to Annette who was shaking her head and laughing; and Lieutenant Morin had his sunburnt jowls sunk in the neck of Pip the sulky starlet. They did not look a menacing gang.
Neil clasped his fingers round the tulip glass of brandy and said, not looking at Anne-Marie, ‘He didn’t tell me anything at all. He said he was too busy. I have to call him again tomorrow.’
He turned and looked at her. There were narrow streaks of bronze in her hair and her lips looked lighter than her face, drawn in a long curved line that did not smile.
She lifted her brandy and nodded. She spoke softly, but it was as though her voice were on a different wavelength that sounded clear above the noise of the restaurant. ‘I hope you will not lie to me, Monsieur Ingleby.’
CHAPTER 6
The white Simca drop-head was out in front, shrieking round the steep camber of the Corniche, past the sun-baked rocks on which the Arab bidonvilles grew: a rash of mud and corrugated-iron huts climbing up the raw earth to where the twelve-storey tenement blocks stood against the sky like mouth organs turned on end.
The car belonged to Anne-Marie; she was driving, with Neil beside her and Van Loon up in the casual seat buffeted by the hot salt wind. Lieutenant Morin and Pip were following in a red Austin Healey. Louis Rebot had had to leave them after lunch, taking — to Van Loon’s dismay — Annette with him into the Cité de l’Université behind the barricades.
Van Loon now sat with his meerschaum jammed between his teeth, glowering out at the lines of Army trucks rattling up the Corniche towards the city. Anne-Marie cheered and waved at them, and most of the troops waved back. It was not clear whether they were Guérin’s latest recruits from the dissident reservist battalions, or reinforcements belonging to General Metz. Probably many of the troops were not even sure themselves. They sat in tight rows facing inwards, craning their heads round to catch a glimpse of the pretty girls speeding past towards the beach.
Neil leant over and shouted to Anne-Marie above the slipstream, ‘Shouldn’t you be back behind the barricades too?’
She flashed her teeth at him, hair swirling across her face: ‘We have time to enjoy ourselves first, don’t worry!’ Time to finish her game of bowls, Neil thought: with the white sands curving into the horizon and the oiled guns coming up the road under the palms.
The Casino de la Plage was at the end of a private beach protected by barbed wire to keep the Arabs out. It looked like a Georgian mansion done up by Oliver Messel for the Shah of Persia, surrounded by a screen of bleached palms. There was a dance hall, a restaurant and gaming rooms and a terraced bar built out of bamboo poles where waiters in Mexican-style shirts shook up genuine mint juleps and daiquiris in frosted glasses at up to nine Nouveaux-Francs a time. Paths of coconut matting ran out across the scorching sands to the sea edge.
At this hour the place was quiet. The thé dansant did not begin for another hour. Neil and Van Loon hired bathing trunks and joined the other two under a sunshade on the sands. Anne-Marie wore strips of white bikini which showed up her dark body until Neil had to look away almost in pain. Pip lay provocatively on her front with her feet in the air, smoking Philip Morrises which she offered to no one while Lieutenant Carlos Morin, a polished muscular brown, rested his head on her splendid buttocks and read a back number of L’Equipe. He had brought a transistor radio with him which later in the afternoon played a pirate broadcast by General Guérin: long and metaphysical, promising France a renaissance of dignity and self-respect. It finished with Le Chant des Africains, followed by the thundering drumbeat of the Marseillaise. The sea was warm and calm and they swam and raced each other down the sands, while Van Loon sat like some Nordic seer, sucking his meerschaum and casting looks of haunted desire in the direction of Anne-Marie and Pip.
Neil swam out beyond the barbed wire barricade and called Anne-Marie after him; together they walked along the edge of the breaking sea, their bare feet pressing the spongy brown sand into pools of whiteness. The beach here was deserted. They came to a line of black rocks that ran out to sea, sheltering the sands from the scum of the city harbour. There was an abandoned pillbox higher up the rocks, its concrete wall scrawled with the words ‘Vive Le Front Arabe!’
Anne-Marie stopped: ‘Come on, let’s get away from here! The Moslems come to this part of the beach sometimes.’ She took his arm and they started back towards the barbed wire.
He looked down at her body: at the swelling breasts and deep fold in the rounded belly, and her long thighs streaked with threads of salt. He put his arm round her, and her skin felt like hot silk in the sun
. His emotions were confused, blunted by the heat and wine and events of the morning. His moral indignation at the slaughter he had seen earlier was beginning to ebb away. He found he could not judge these people by civilized standards. They were cruel and physical, they killed their fellow beings as a farmer kills rabbits. But they were friendly and attractive, and their simple passion for life was infectious. They believed only in the sun and health and the beauty of their own bodies. He wondered what would happen now if he kissed Anne-Marie.
They sat down on the wet sand with the surf curling round them, and she told him that she was an only child and that her father had been killed in Indo-China. Her mother had gone to France until the crisis was over, and Anne-Marie lived with her stepfather in a flat that was now behind the barricades. She was a student in her second year at the university, studying economics and political theory.
He looked at her, sitting there in the slanting sun with her knees drawn up under her chin and the sea-foam clinging to her toes and the edges of her bikini. Studying for Tripos Part One, he thought: Right-wing Revolutionary Theory: practice, terrorism and murder.
She did not discuss her love life and he did not ask her. She had been to France once, for a summer, to Paris and Tours, and for a weekend on the Riviera, but had not liked it. ‘They are all snobs over there,’ she told him, ‘they look down their noses at us — they think we are just stupid colonialists. Do they think the same thing in England?’
‘Most people in England don’t know about it,’ he said carefully; ‘this country doesn’t mean much to them.’
‘But what about Rhodesia?’ she said. ‘It will be the same there, with all those Africans attacking women with knives and trying to take over the country. I heard that in Kenya the blacks used to cut open pregnant women and eat their babies.’
He gave a shudder: ‘No, Anne-Marie, those are atrocity stories, they are made up by one side against the other. Things like that may have happened occasionally, but they’re very isolated incidents.’
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