‘Isolated!’ she cried; ‘you should see what happens here. Almost every day. When they catch a French soldier or a European farmer in the Bled, they tie him down and cut off his manhood.’ She looked pointedly between his legs: ‘How would you like that to happen to you?’ But without waiting for him to answer, she sprang up and ran leaping into the waves. He followed her, feeling the hopeless gap of understanding between them as they swam past the barbed wire to join the others on the beach.
Lieutenant Morin’s transistor was twanging out canned jazz; it stopped for an official Government bulletin declaring the situation ‘normal’. There was no mention of the reservists going over to Guérin. ‘They are frightened to tell us about it,’ said Anne-Marie, ‘never believe anything the Government says, they tell only lies.’
Van Loon came prowling along the beach, his hair stiff with salt and his eyes scouring the sands for lone girls. He slumped down on the towel beside Neil. ‘Those bloody girls,’ he muttered, ‘all completely monopolized! You are lucky, old fellow. You have Anne-Marie. You take her back to the hotel — one bottle of wine and you are O.K.’
Neil lay in the sun and tried to drive out memories of Caroline on the beach at Ostia last summer: motoring back into Rome for a lazy dinner at Alfredo’s.
They dressed and went into the Casino. There was a dancefloor not much bigger than a card table, with a five-man band in sombreros playing a vigorous repertoire of Twist, Cha-Cha, Madison and Twist again. It was crowded and dark, even at five in the afternoon, and Neil and Anne-Marie danced for a long time. She moved beautifully. When the music stopped they stood with their fingers curled together, listening to the ivory ball clicking round the roulette wheel.
Later they went down and played: he cautiously, betting only on columns of dozens, and she with reckless panache, placing ten N.F. plaques on single numbers, quickly losing the equivalent of nearly twenty pounds. He had won about three. She came away in a black temper and he bought her a half-bottle of champagne on his winnings. Their table was empty, stacked with Coca-Cola bottles and piled ashtrays. Lieutenant Morin and Pip had gone back to the city in their Austin Healey; and Van Loon was at the bar drinking elaborate cocktails he could not afford.
‘We ought to go,’ said Neil, ‘in case something happens.’
She shook her head: ‘If something is going to happen, Monsieur Ingleby’ — she still called him Monsieur Ingleby — ‘we will know about it.’
‘Supposing the Army tries to break the barricades?’
‘We will know that too. Our intelligence service is very good. Nothing is going to happen today.’
They finished the champagne and wandered through to the terrace where they caught a glimpse of Van Loon bent over a glass full of fruit and green leaves. ‘He seems very sad, your Dutch friend,’ she said, as they walked out on to the cooling sands.
‘His girl left him back in Holland,’ said Neil, ‘he needs someone to console him.’
She smiled: ‘He should be able to find someone here. There are thousands of girls! We are a very warm-hearted people, Monsieur Ingleby — we don’t have hearts of stone like you Anglo-Saxons!’
She gave his arm a squeeze that might have been just in fun, but sent a quick needle of excitement up his spine.
‘Are you married?’ she said suddenly.
He turned and saw the sly whites of her eyes smiling at him. He shook his head.
‘You ought to get married,’ she said; ‘you are a nice man, I like you. Why haven’t you got married?’
He laughed without humour: ‘I haven’t found anybody.’
The sun was hanging low and the sea broke lazily along the sand. She stopped and took out a packet of cigarettes. She gave him one and bent forward till he caught the scent of her hair. There was no breeze. He struck the match and held it to her cigarette. He could hear the thump of music from the Casino: ‘Twist! Twist! Everybody’s doing the…’ The tip flared and went out. The cigarette flicked from her mouth and the box of matches was torn from his fingers. He stared at her and her face jerked out of his vision and was gone, reflected only in his memory. The music and the sea had stopped and the setting sun had turned black and the air was beaten with thundering waves of noise that pressed his head like an orange about to burst.
His mouth was full of sand. His back ached against the beach which was rocking under him, and all round him was a red darkness pierced by a wailing sound, rising and falling, growing louder, till he recognized the scream of an ambulance siren.
He crawled on to his knees and looked up at the Casino. There were dim figures jerking about in a fog of brown smoke. Anne-Marie had gone. He was alone on the beach. He began walking lamely up the coconut matting towards the splintered bamboo shoots and the shrieks and smell of burning. His shoes crunched on glass and torn palm fronds; a young man bumped into him yelling; two soldiers hurried past carrying something on a stretcher. The doors into the gaming-room had been smashed like matchwood. He went through into the choking smoke and sound of weeping and groaning and men shouting orders. The roulette table had sunk down at an angle and vomit dribbled over the red and black diamonds of impair and manque with the wheel broken loose, propped up on the sleeve of a dinner-jacket white with plaster. There was a face under the table and Neil’s foot slipped on something wet; then a fierce light cut through the chaos, swinging over the wreckage and rising dust, and he saw at the end of the room, where the orchestra and dance floor had been, the ceiling sagging down in a canopy of plaster and lattice-work, splashed in one corner with what looked like squashed grapes.
He picked his way through a forest of table-legs and smashed bottles and jagged strips of flooring and half a double bass, the torn wood a bright naked colour against the varnish. He came to the edge of the dais where the orchestra had stood. Through the settling dust, which shone in the searchlight beams like falling snow, he could just make out odd shapes lumped together against the wall. He stopped and thought about Anne-Marie, and about Van Loon who had been at the bar behind the collapsed ceiling. Just in front of him, next to a table, lay a woman’s leg severed above the knee; the bloodied stocking trailed away under the table like the skin of a liver-sausage. The carpet was scattered with spilt cigarette butts, many of them marked with lipstick.
Neil turned giddily away, tripping over a fallen chair. He put out his hand to stop himself falling and touched the wall. It was sticky with a red stain that extended from the floor to above his head. A French officer was standing beside him, steadying him by the arm. Neil stared at the smear on his hand and heard the officer mutter, ‘Ce nest pas du vin rouge, Monsieur!’
CHAPTER 7
‘They must have used two or three hundred kilos of the stuff,’ said the doctor; ‘I’ve counted twenty-seven dead already.’ He turned to Neil, speaking with quiet fury: ‘Monsieur le journalist, you write it all down — all of it!’ He swept his arm round the wrecked hall. ‘This is what the Arabs do to us! This is what the United Nations are asking us to put up with! — to live with these people! — these assassins!’
Neil looked down at Van Loon, feeling a sudden anger against the doctor. What right had he to start ranting about politics now? The Dutchman lay on the floor with his head resting against a corner of the bar, his arms folded in his lap. His eyes were open and he grinned at Neil with a glazed blue look. He was very drunk. When the bomb had exploded he had been at the end of his seventh Bacardi cocktail. He had woken up on the floor with one of the bamboo poles through his back. The doctor had given him a jab of morphine; the bamboo had pierced his intestine.
He gave a hoarse giggle: ‘Hey, Neil, I did not pay for any of those bloody drinks!’
‘Try not to talk,’ said Neil.
The doctor said, ‘I’ll speak to one of the ambulance men. You’re both staying at the Miramar, aren’t you?’
‘Hey, give me a drink!’ cried Van Loon.
‘You mustn’t drink,’ said Neil. He leant down and looked sadly at the Dutchman; there was blood
seeping out of his mouth into his beard. ‘How do you feel?’ he said.
‘Oh I would like a drink, old fellow!’ he muttered, ‘I would like some ouzo.’ He smiled: ‘I should have gone to Beirut. I would have found lots of girls in Beirut.’
Neil tried to smile back, then hurried off to fetch the doctor again. He found him standing near the smashed roulette table, giving orders to some stretcher-bearers. The man turned impatiently; he was middle-aged with a grey-chopped head as round as a football. ‘What do you want?’ he snapped.
‘My Dutch friend,’ said Neil, ‘he’s bleeding badly.’
The doctor threw up his hands: ‘What do you expect? He has an abdomen wound. Everyone is bleeding.’ His face was exhausted, miserable. ‘I’m sorry,’ he added, ‘but there’s nothing I can do until we get him to hospital. There are more than a hundred as bad as him.’
‘Can I give him something to drink? Some cognac?’
‘If you want to kill him,’ said the doctor.
Neil went back to the broken bar and found Anne-Marie bending over Van Loon. He was smiling up at her and asking her for a drink.
‘Don’t give him anything,’ Neil whispered; ‘the doctor’s already seen him. They’re taking him to hospital.’
She nodded. Her face was a dull white under her suntan, her eyes round and wild.
‘Are you all right?’ he said.
‘Yes, I’m all right.’ She looked round the room and her face quivered. ‘This is the work of Ali La Joconde,’ she said softly, ‘this is the sort of thing he does — then they call a patriot like General Guérin a traitor!’
Neil grabbed her arm. Van Loon had closed his eyes again and his face had suddenly turned the colour of a mushroom. ‘Peter!’ he called, grasping one of his huge limp hands. Van Loon opened one eye and muttered, ‘I must have another bloody drink.’
‘You can’t, you crazy Dutchman. Just lie still. The ambulance is coming.’
‘Bloody ambulance,’ Van Loon growled, ‘where is that girl Annette? I want her.’
Anne-Marie took his other hand and said gently, ‘We’ll find her. She’ll come and see you in hospital.’
He smiled, his eyes closed, and they both sat with him waiting for the ambulance until he died.
Neil went out to see the doctor, feeling numb and baffled and wanting to cry. He passed a magazine rack near the door full of back numbers of Paris Match and Elle and Ciné with lumps of red meat stuck between the crumpled, blasted pages. The vendeuse was lying under the counter. He did not look. In the twilight outside the grasshoppers had started up.
PART 4: THE KILLERS
CHAPTER 1
Neil poured out two glasses from the bottle of Hine, just as he had done twenty-four hours ago for agent-extraordinary Charles Pol, a dangerous naked man spilling talcum powder on the carpet. This time it was for Anne-Marie; he could hear her slow splashing behind the bathroom door. Her crimson dress lay over a chair caked with dust and plaster.
The perfect host, he thought: impartial, easy-going, handing out drinks to both sides. He sat on the bed staring at his bare feet. He had put his shoes outside for the Moslem floor waiter to clean. They had picked up a lot of blood.
His skin burned taut with the sun, his back was bruised and aching, he felt weak in the legs and needed a drink badly. He tried not to think about Van Loon. They had waited at the Casino till the ambulance came to take the body to the Municipal Hospital; then he had driven Anne-Marie back in the Simca. She had wept silently all the way, with the moon coming up and the palms sighing past along the twisting edge of the Corniche. They had only just arrived before the curfew fell; it had been advanced to nine o’clock to prevent riots following the Casino bombing. The news had already spread through the city and large crowds had formed, roaming the streets waiting for something to happen. But nothing had happened. The Gardes Mobiles and CRS troops had been slightly strengthened; the barricades stood firm; there were small outbreaks of shooting in the suburbs; and a rumour was about that two of the colonels commanding the reservists had been arrested.
For the fourth night of the revolt a sullen calm lay over the city.
Neil sipped his medicinal helping of brandy and waited for Anne-Marie. He had booked two telephone calls to London: one to his office to give the story of the bombing while the impact was still fresh in his mind, the other to Caroline, to be put through after midnight, trusting that she was not out at Brad’s or The 400. Calling her now seemed a superfluous, egotistical gesture, but he needed somebody to talk to — somebody removed as far as possible from this butchery and madness. He knew Caroline could be relied upon to say something utterly irrelevant and frivolous, but it was better than listening to the dismal passion of the doctor at the Casino, or even to Anne-Marie. With Caroline there was something very refreshing about her silliness.
Anne-Marie came in from the bathroom wearing a towelling robe and sat beside him on the bed, not too close. He gave her the glass of brandy, and she took it without looking at him, her face quiet with sudden translucent purity. After a pause she murmured, ‘I shouldn’t be here.’
‘You can’t get back behind the barricades now,’ he said, ‘we can order cold supper up here. They do very good chicken and salads. And we can have a bottle of wine.’
She nodded, still not looking at him. ‘I want to get drunk,’ she said, ‘in the bath I washed myself all over three times, but it didn’t seem to make any difference.’ She looked round at him, her eyes sad, without violence or passion: ‘You don’t like the Secret Army, do you? You don’t know what it really stands for, what it’s trying to do?’ Her glass was almost empty; he poured her some more. She went on, ‘Can you imagine what it’s like for us here? For five years the Government tells us we are French — that they will defend this country. Then one day they turn to us and say they are going to hand us all over to people like Ali La Joconde and his friends. Can’t you understand what we feel — what it will be like for us when men like that get into power?’
He stared back at his feet, not knowing what to say, and she went on: ‘You don’t like us, do you? You think the same about us as everyone else?’
He looked up at her and frowned. ‘This morning,’ he said, ‘your people murdered an old man with a wooden leg outside this hotel. Can’t you understand what sort of impression that makes on us? How can we like you when you do things like that?’
‘He was probably an Arab Front spy.’
‘Oh for God’s sake!’ he cried. ‘He was selling cigarettes to keep himself alive!’
‘Many of their spies do that. It’s one of their favourite tricks. They find old beggars with wooden legs and send them down here to report on us.’
He said nothing; he could no longer be bothered to argue. It didn’t seem to matter anyway, something had gone tragically wrong in this country and there was nothing he could do about it. It only worried him to realize that in a funny way he liked Anne-Marie and her friends. He wondered whether they would receive the same hospitality if they were to arrive suddenly in England. He tried to imagine her and Lieutenant Morin and Pip putting up at the Dorchester and seeing some old man selling the Evening Standard shot in Park Lane.
He poured more brandy, and she slid her hand along the bed and touched his with her cool brown fingers. ‘Try to understand,’ she said, ‘I was brought up a Catholic. My father was not born in this country — he came from France. He was a very good man. He believed deeply and I used to go to church every Sunday. That was when I was a little girl. Then he was killed and my mother married again. My stepfather is very strong and brave but he is not such a good Catholic. He is one of those people who doesn’t know whether God exists or not.’
‘An agnostic,’ said Neil.
‘Yes, that’s right. After he married my mother I stopped going to church so often. In this country we are not very religious, and when I went to the university I began doing things that are not allowed. I mean, sometimes I went to bed with other students. I don’t thin
k that is really wrong — not if you like them.’
He looked at her quickly: her face was pale and absurdly earnest. She went on: ‘My stepfather is with the Secret Army. He is very serious about it. But when we started killing the Moslems last year I was worried. I felt like you did this morning. I was shocked. I went to the priest and he told me that the only way to defend ourselves and to defend the Christian faith was to fight the Moslems. He was right, because all we are doing now is what they are doing to us. There was never any trouble until they started killing Europeans — like they did at the Casino today. We didn’t start the terrorism — they did!’
‘The priest told you all this?’ said Neil.
She nodded: ‘He said what my stepfather says — what everybody here says. Even the Archbishop is with the Secret Army.’ Her glass was empty again. He began refilling it, but she held his arm: ‘You’re trying to get me drunk?’
‘You said you wanted to get drunk?’
‘Not yet. Let’s eat first.’ Her face was almost touching his. He turned away, picked up the telephone and ordered consommé, chicken and lobster-in-the-basket for two, with a bottle of Chablis. As he spoke she squeezed his arm. Her eyes had a dry glitter in them. She suddenly smiled. He bent forward and kissed her on the cheek. Her skin was cold and she did not move.
He sat back feeling awkward, frightened to go too far, desiring her with the fumbling, heart-thumping lust of an adolescent. He realized that he found the prospect of making love to a member of the Secret Army faintly terrifying.
She sat crouched forward beside him, holding her glass in both hands. He poured her a small drop: ‘As an aperitif,’ he said.
She nodded. There was a pause. ‘I’m sorry about your Dutch friend,’ she said, ‘he was a nice boy. It must be terrible to see someone you know die like that. Did you know him well?’
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