Midnight Plus One

by Gavin Lyall

  ‘You didn’t tell me Mr Lovell was a drinker.’

  ‘I didn’t know myself until after we’d started.’ I leant against the bannisters and reached for a cigarette.

  ‘Then I will speak to Merlin about this. I could have been killed just because-‘

  ‘Shut up, Maganhard,’ I said wearily. ‘We’ve lived through yesterday and today, and if you don’t think that’s an achievement, then you didn’t know what was going on. We couldn’t have done more with anybody else. Now go to bed.’

  ‘I have not had my dinner yet,’ he said huffily. He had Austrian blood in him, all right.

  Ginette said soothingly: ‘Maurice will serve you very soon, Herr Maganhard: He will give you a drink now, if you wish.’

  He gave me a stare that he’d been keeping at the back of the freezer compartment, then marched downstairs, his back very straight.

  I stayed leaning on the bannisters, found my matches, and lit the cigarette. ‘I’d forgotten dinner. I thought today had gone on long enough already.’

  ‘Is that the way the Agency Cane usually treats its clients?’

  ‘Pretty usual. I told you I didn’t have to like them.’

  ‘I think you had better take the work here – quickly.’

  I looked at her, but she didn’t meet it. She just propped herself against the bannisters beside me; the movement brought her hands up in front of her, and she seemed to notice that she still had the Mauser.

  She looked it over. ‘Do you remember, Louis, what these once meant to us? Liberation… freedom… words like that?’

  ‘I remember.’

  ‘Perhaps things have changed since then.’ She sighted the gun casually down the stairway, her thumb sweeping instinctively over the safety catch and the single/automatic button. She knew about Mausers.

  ‘Pistols haven’t changed.’

  ‘You believe the Resistance was always just pistols – not the words?’

  ‘Nothing is ever just pistols; men don’t die by guns alone. Guns always need words behind them, telling them they’re doing the right thing.’

  She glanced quickly at me. Maybe I’d sounded a little sour; maybe Iwas a little sour, thinking of riding north at midnight and the state Harvey would be in then. And perhaps wishing it wasn’t all just to save a man like Maganhard from a few deaths, a few taxes.

  Or maybe I was just feeling old and tired.

  ‘In the war,’ she said thoughtfully, ‘we never asked if we were right. The answer was too easy. But – perhaps sometimes we were wrong. We helped make men like Bernard, and Alain.’ She lowered the gun. ‘You believe because your Maganhard is right, you must be right? ‘

  I said cautiously: ‘Something like that.’

  But she just nodded to herself. After a while she said: ‘But perhaps your next Maganhard will be wrong – and you will not have stepped aside.’

  It wasn’t a new idea; it was an old familiar ghost at the back of my mind, that I remembered only when I was feeling tired and low. On the nights when you dream of the faces of men you knew and who are dead.

  I’d been right about Maganhard. I’d trusted Merlin and Maganhard himself and my own judgement – and I’d been right. But one day, I could be wrong. One day I’d have a client as crooked as a mountain road and the men jumping up in ambush would be plain-clothes cops…

  A lawyer can say his client deceived him. But I’d be standing there with the Mauser warm in my hand.

  I shook my head wearily. ‘Maybe, Ginette. But not this time. And next time is next time.’

  ‘There is going to be a next time?’ She was watching me with her steady sad eyes, with the glint of lamplight on her chestnut hair, like the sheen of old, polished wood.

  ‘Ginette – it’s fifteen years. You aren’t in love with me.’

  ‘I do not know,’ she said simply. ‘All I can do is remember, and wait – and perhaps make sure you do not get killed.’

  ‘I’m not going to get-‘ I knew it was the wrong thing as soon as I’d said it.

  But she said: ‘No – tell me it won’t happen. That it can’t, not to you, not to Caneton.’ And her fight was over. If I was going on, then she wanted to believe it could never happen to me; that if there had to be dragons, there would never be a last one. She wanted to think like a gunman -again. And forget that she had believed it before – and been wrong.

  I winced. I should never have come back. Fifteen years I’d stayed away from this quiet house where she had tried, so hard, to find an end to war. And when I’d come back, it had only been because I was still at war.

  ‘You can’t be sure,’ I said slowly. ‘In the end, it depends on me.’

  ‘I know.’ She nodded and smiled gently. ‘I remember.’

  There were footsteps on the stairs. Maurice was walking carefully up, carrying a loaded tray, including a bottle in a wicker cradle.

  I said: ‘Harvey won’t want anything. He’s probably asleep already.’

  She straightened up from the bannisters, moving with the lazy grace of a cat. ‘I told Maurice you and I would have dinner in my room.’

  I stared at her, then opened my mouth. She shook her head. The argument is over, Louis. You are going on; I understand. That is all.’

  There were a thousand reasons why not – but suddenly I couldn’t remember any of them. Only that I’d been away so long.

  ‘I’ll come back,’ I said thickly.

  She smiled her half-sad smile. ‘Don’t promise anything, Louis. I am not asking for promises.’

  She walked down the corridor after Maurice. After a moment I followed.

  NINETEEN

  We headed north on the N92. We were in the same Citroen delivery van, with Ginette and I sharing the driving. And a stack of crated bottles across the back of the van to block anybody’s view of the other three passengers if the rear doors were opened.

  We’d practically had to pour Harvey aboard. He’d been in a deep, drugged sleep, and by now was probably in it again; we’d dumped a couple of old mattresses and a few blankets in there. But I’d guessed Maganhard wasn’t asleep even before he stuck his little iron voice out of the window behind my neck.

  ‘How are we entering Switzerland, Mr Cane?’

  ‘We are going up to near a place called Gex, just a few miles northwest of Geneva. We’ll drop off there and just walk across near the airport.’

  He tasted this and – as I’d expected – didn’t much like it. ‘I understand we must arrive in a big town where we can hire a car, but why not go to Evian and cross the lake by boat to Lausanne?’

  ‘Because that’s exactly the sort of tricky thing they’d expect us to do. The Geneva frontier’s what we want: it’s almost impossible to guard. There’s about twenty different roads going across, and most of the frontier’s farmland. We’ll just walk through.’

  ‘It must have been guarded in the war,’ he objected.

  ‘Sure, but even then you’d be surprised at the number who got across. The Swiss kept a big internment camp up there, all ready for them.’

  ‘Mr Cane,’ he said coldly, ‘if we arrive in a Swiss jail, it will not be any better than being in a French jail.’

  ‘Probably a lot cleaner. But I’m hoping the Swiss police won’t be looking for us: they can’t do anything until the French ask for it – and the French may not want to admit they might have missed us. Not just yet.’

  I had a private hope that we might break the Une of evidence here – out-run the ripples again. If we could cross the border unseen and leave the Gendarmerie believing we were still in France, we’d have done it. A lot depended on whether or not they’d identified the wrecked Citroën DS as Maganhard’s. I was pretty sure they must have found it by now: the extra shooting and the wrecked Renault would have started them combing the area more thoroughly than I’d first expected.

  In one way, I hoped theyhad identified it. It would switch suspicion away from the northern route from Paris, but it might also convince them that we were stuck som
ewhere, hiding out, without transport. I wasn’t worried about them thinking of the old Rat-line or Clos Pinel: they wouldn’t think of them unless they knew I was involved -and I still believed they didn’t know about me.

  Unless Harvey had loused up cleaning the car and they’d got a set of my fingerprints. But they wouldn’t know theywere mine – I’d never been arrested in France. Or had the Deuxième Bureautaken the trouble of getting my prints when I was ‘attached to the Embassy’ in Paris? They’d known about me, of course. And if they knew about me now, they might think of the old Resistance routes across the Geneva frontier…

  I shook my head. You can get too clever with any police force, as well as too stupid. You’ve got it all worked out that they must have heard of X so they’ll have stopped watching Y. And you roll up at Y, straight into their loving arms – all because the report about X has been sitting on the Superintendent’s desk for three hours and nobody’s remembered to tell him about it.

  It’s the same as systems at roulette: the wheel ain’t heard of them. I’d decided to cross at Geneva. That was still the number to put my money on.

  The night droned past us. Beside me, Ginette swung the big flat wheel like aroutier, her face now and then lit by the reflection of the headlights. I lit a cigarette and watchedher, serene and controlled, as the van buzzed up the steepening road into the Savoie.

  ‘If you get stopped,’ I asked, ‘what’s your story?’

  ‘I shall deliver some wine in Geneva, anyway: two restaurants there take Pinel. And there is a good one in Gex. I will try to sell some there first, after I have had breakfast.’

  ‘Why did you have to arrive there so early?’

  ‘Because, Monsieur le Gendarme, I have an appointment at Pinel soon after lunch.’

  ‘And have you?’

  ‘I told Maurice to fix one – a safe one.’

  ‘And you still think you need a manager?’

  She smiled faintly. ‘I need somebody to look after the wine while I look after the old Resistance friends who come through.’

  ‘Touché.’

  Soon after that, I fell asleep. I woke up as we came into thezone francheand started skirting round, with the frontier a kilometre or two on our right, to approach Geneva from the northwest.

  She should have woken me: I’d missed my turn at the wheel. But it would have been hypocritical to complain. Liechtenstein was still nearly four hundred kilometres away; it could be a long day yet.

  Ginette said: ‘I think we are close, Louis.’

  She’d turned right a few kilometres before Gex and was heading down towards Ferney-Voltaire, just about on the frontier.

  ‘Don’t get too near,’ I said. The cops were likely to be prowling well inside the frontier, not just on it. And I didn’t want them to wonder about a van that they heard come close, stop, and go back.

  She said: ‘Here, then,’ and drew up. She kept the engine running. I swung down, ran round and opened the doors at the back. Somebody started pulling the crates of wine aside. Maganhard stepped down, then the girl. Then Harvey.

  He was like somebody who’d been dragged out of the rubble of a bombed building. Weaving and staggering and shaking his head and then obviously wishing he hadn’t. As a gunman, he looked just about fit enough to tackle a rather tired kitten.

  I shut the doors quietly and went back to the cab. ‘Thanks, Ginette. On your way.’

  She reached across to my window. ‘Look after yourself, Louis – please.’

  ‘I’ll let you know. Probably tonight.’

  ‘Please.’

  We touched hands, and then the van was growling off into the night. I waved a hand at the roadside. ‘Over there, into the field. Quick.’

  ‘Quick’ was a pretty optimistic word for this crew. It took us a full minute to get through the hedge and up to our shins in long, dew-soaked grass. The only thing you could count on in this job was getting your feet wet every twelve hours.

  I’d insisted on leaving all the luggage except my briefcase back at Pinel – and I’d only hung on to that because of the Mauser and the maps. I took it in one hand, grabbed Harvey’s arm with the other, and led off along the hedge.

  The van’s engine died in the distance. The night was cold and thick, without stars. The weather we’d left behind in Brittany had caught up with us again, but at least it seemed to have dropped all its rain already. Ahead, there was an intermittent glow, alternately white and green, reflecting on the low clouds. The Geneva-Cointrin airport beacon. I headed towards it.

  It was a quarter to five; three-quarters of an hour to first light.

  For a time nobody said anything. We weren’t walking very quietly, but you can’t teach people to make no noise just by telling them not to. It takes practice. But the heavy damp air meant that sounds wouldn’t carry far.

  The girl said softly: ‘What’s that?’

  I snapped my head around, butthat was just a big dark house on the horizon a few hundred yards away, with a line of trees leading up to it.

  ‘Voltaire’s château.’ I wished I’d remembered it myself: it was a useful landmark.

  She lifted a foot from the grass, shook it, scattering drops of moisture. ‘How about a pithy quotation from the master?’ she said softly but sourly. ‘Such as “All’s for the best in this best of all possible worlds”?’

  ‘Or Dieu est toujours pour les gros bataillons.’

  ‘Somehow, I don’t find that very encouraging.’

  ‘Jesus,’ Harvey said thickly, ‘are we on a literary coach tour or crossing a frontier quietly?’

  ‘You mean you’d notice the difference?’ I said, and started moving again.

  Right then, Harvey wasn’t my best friend. Awake and without his hangover, he could have looked after Maganhard – telling him when to move, when to stay still – leaving me just to do the same for Miss Jarman. As it was, I had to worry about all three of them – and particularly about how Harvey would react to trouble. For all I knew, he might be dopey enough to pull a gun and start shooting down gendarmes.

  What I’d thought had been a hedge ahead turned into an orchard of small neat apple trees, growing just over head-high. And a fence of plain wire strands. The leaves weren’t out yet – we were back in the northern spring up here – but the branches had been pruned so that they grew in close tangles, and the trees themselves were crowded together to make the most of the ground. In the dark, they gave plenty of cover from view.

  But that works both ways. If I’d been commanding a frontier guard, I’d have posted a squad in that orchard. Spread them out a bit, tell them to stay still and quiet, and we could walk over them before we knew they were there.

  And if I was commanding a real frontier-running party, I wouldn’t be leading them through any orchards. We’d go round, and we’d do it on our bellies. What Iwas commanding – if that was the word – was a middle-aged businessman, a girl in a sealskin coat, and a gunman with a five-star hangover. I was dreading the moment when I had to tell that sealskin coat to get down and crawl in the mud.

  We were going through the orchard.

  I turned to the girl and asked softly: ‘Were you ever captain of the school?’

  ‘No.’ A surprised whisper. ‘I wasn’t good enough at hockey or anything.’

  ‘Congratulations. Well, you’re captain of those two now. Bring them about ten yards behind me – keep me in view down the une of trees. When I stop, you stop. If I turn off, you turn off immediately – don’t come up to where I turned. You see what I mean?’

  ‘Yees. But shouldn’t it be Harvey-?’

  ‘Itshould be,’ I said grimly. ‘But as things are, I’d rather it was you. All right?’

  She nodded. I stood on one strand of wire, pulled up another, and they climbed through without much more noise trían a bad car crash. I moved out ahead and started through the precise files of trees.

  I made twenty yards, then thirty, then forty. In among the trees, it was lighter than I’d expected. And when
I looked back, the girl had used the light, and her head, and was keeping them farther behind than the ten yards I’d specified.

  I made fifty yards, and guessed I must be in the middle of the orchard by now. I looked ahead for the skyline between the trees that would mark the next fence, but all I could see was the regular glow of the beacon.

  I stopped. It took me a moment to think why, and in that moment the three behind me sounded a stampede of wild elephants. Then they stopped. And I knew why I had: a faint scent of tobacco smoke.

  The sergeant would have told them not to smoke, of course – but that had probably been back around midnight, five-hours ago. Cold, wet, dull hours. So you lie down on your side and strike a match under your jacket, then keep the burning end hidden in the grass, leaning down to take a puff. But you can’t hide the smell.

  But where was it coming from? I licked a finger and held it up to test the wind, and, as usual, it felt cold all the way round. I breathed out, but it wasn’t cold enough to condense my breath. All I knew was that there hadn’t been much wind out in the field and there was even less among the trees.

  Next move, please.

  I tried to remember the voice of an ex-sergeant of the Foreign Legion who’d instructed on small arms to the Resistance in the Auvergne, and bellowed:‘II y a un idiot qui fume! C’est comme un bistro, ici! Où êtes-vous?’

  There was a startled rustling ahead on my right, then a hush that was almost as loud.

  I tiptoed gently away to the left. When I looked back, Miss Jarman was moving them parallel to me.

  I let out another shout of:‘Où est l’idiot qui fume?‘in the hope that if they realised I was moving away from them, the last thing they’d do would be answer or come and find me.

  We moved sideways almost to the edge of the orchard, then I turned back towards the airport beacon. After another forty yards, I could see a hedge. I turned back to bring up the other three.

  Miss Jarman whispered: ‘I thoughtwe were making a noise – until I heard you.’

  ‘We nearly walked into a squad of gendarmes. Sounding like the sergeant is a good password.’ I nodded at the hedge. ‘There’s a road there, and a French customs post just down on the right. It’s a straight road and we’ve got to cross without being spotted.’ I turned to Harvey. ‘How are you feeling?’