by William Boyd
That night in Grenoble I sat in the bar of a hotel near the station watching the evening news. A Lufthansa jet had been hijacked at Palma Airport. The hijackers – four Arabs, two men and two women – demanded the release of all political prisoners held in West German gaols.
I lay in bed that night and wondered what Petra and Ingeborg – my girls – would be doing. I felt a bit of a cheat running out on them that way but I was only following John Vivian’s instructions. But in any event, I reasoned, they were too volatile and unpredictable – for all I knew they might have insisted on coming back to London with me. Imagine: life in Turpentine Lane with Petra and Ingeborg9…
The suitcase Jürgen had given me was not only heavy but also securely locked.
The next morning, with the aid of a small screwdriver and a bent piece of wire, I opened Jürgen’s case. It was filled with an assortment of second-hand clothes and forty sticks of what I took to be gelignite. Each stick was marked: GOMMEL ASTIGEL DYNAMITE, EXPLOSIF ROCHER, SOCIÉTÉ FRANÇAISE DES EXPLOSIFS. USINE DE CUGNY. I closed the case and thought about what I was going to do. I had about £70 of French francs on me, enough to keep me going for days on my frugal standard of living and allow me to reach home. I obviously couldn’t afford to stay in hotels: perhaps if I bought a tent and a sleeping bag campsites would be the answer? Then I remembered where I was – France. I owned property in this country. I picked up the phone and put in a call to Noel Lange’s office in London.
Friday evening. I was in Toulouse and stayed at the cheapest hotel I could find. Saturday morning. I caught a bus to Villefranche-sur-Lot. The newspaper I bought was full of news about the Lufthansa hijacking. The plane was now in Dubai and the demands were more detailed: the release of eleven Baader-Meinhof gang members, two Palestinians gaoled in Turkey and a ransom for the hostages on board of $15.5 million.
I took another bus from Villefranche along the valley of the Lot to Puy I’Évêque, where I would find the office of the notaire, Monsieur Polle, who had the keys to Cyprien’s house in Sainte-Sabine. Monsieur Polle, a genial man with stiff cropped grey hair, offered to drive me the forty kilometres or so south to Sainte-Sabine. We travelled through rolling wooded country along minor roads, the sun appearing from time to time through large, rapidly moving clouds, heading eastward on a stiffish breeze.
The house, my house, was called Cinq Cyprès and had been on the market since I had learned it was bequeathed to me. I was soon to find out why no one had made an offer. The five cypresses themselves were as old as the house, planted when it was built, I imagined, in the last decade of the last century. They were towering, shaggy mature trees, some forty feet high, and strategically positioned around the house and its sole outbuilding, a stone barn, considerably older. The house was semi-derelict, its unattractive nineteenth-century provincial features more or less hidden by smothering growths of ivy and Virginia creeper. It was set in the middle of a small park with many mature deciduous trees – chestnut, oak, plane – which was reached through rusty old gates, fixed open, only a plastic red and white chain notionally barring passage to the property.
Monsieur Polle opened the front door and led me in, handing me a thickly labelled bunch of keys and muttering, ‘Felicitations’ as I symbolically took possession. Old terracotta tiles clicked underfoot as I looked in on a large ground-floor room containing two leather armchairs, some moth-ravaged curtains and a boarded-up fireplace. I put down my grip and my suitcase filled with dynamite and listened as Monsieur Polle explained that there was no water or electricity connected and he could recommend an excellent hotel in Puy I’Évêque. No, no, I said, I intended to spend the night here before I returned to England. ‘Comme vous voulez, Monsieur Mountstuart.’ I liked the way my name sounded in French. Monsieur Polle dropped me in Sainte-Sabine, which was only a kilometre away, and I found a little supermarket there where I bought some bread, a tin of pâté, red wine (screwtop), a bottle of water and some candles. I walked slowly back through the gathering dusk to my new home.
In candlelight I ate my bread and pâté and drank my bottle of wine. I pushed the two leather armchairs together and lay there under my overcoat, watching the light from the candle flame wash over the ceiling and listening to the absolute silence. Absolute until I blew out the candle, when in the impenetrable darkness I began to hear the tiny crepitations of rodents and insects and the strange shiftings and creakings that any old house produces as the temperature drops. I felt very secure.
I spent another two days and nights in Cinq Cyprès pottering around, acquainting myself with the house and its grounds. It was far from beautiful, this maison de maître, three storeys high, covered in a grey crépi with an out-of-proportion ornamental wrought-iron balcony on the first floor. Built by some prosperous burgher relative of Cyprien who wanted to impress his neighbours, no doubt. Nature had softened its outlines by the overwhelming growth of creeper and ivy – many of the shuttered windows higher up were completely hidden. The ground floor was in reasonable repair – it needed a good clean more than anything else – but as you climbed higher through the house you could see the damage inflicted by damp and mould. There was obviously a bad leak in the roof, and one window had a shutter missing and panes broken that had been letting in the weather for years. The rooms were dark from all the mature trees round about, and it was impossible to tell where the lawns merged with the meadow that surrounded the property. Beyond the meadow, oak woods loomed on three sides and behind the house, slightly offset, was the old stone barn with a small two-roomed labourer’s bothy attached.
I found the key to the barn and, poking around inside, discovered some rickety spades and hoes amongst other ancient rust-rotted farm implements. I took a spade and dug a hole in the small overgrown orchard behind the barn and buried my suitcase of gelignite there. I did not mark the spot. Then I walked into Sainte-Sabine for more provisions.
Sainte-Sabine possessed a main street and a small square around which stood a church (badly restored), a post office, a mairie and the Superette. In side streets off the square were a couple of bars, a couple of pharmacies, a couple of butchers and a couple of bakers. There was a medical centre with a doctor’s consulting rooms and a dentist’s surgery; there was a newsagent and a taxi service that doubled as an undertaker’s. Just about everything, in fact, that a village of three hundred people might need. The denizens of Sainte-Sabine could feed themselves, run their affairs, be tended when they fell ill, and be disposed of when they died. The main square, place du 8 Mai, was shaded by ruthlessly pollarded plane trees whose leaves were ankle deep on the ground as I walked through it, heading for the Superette. When I was paying for my goods, the woman at the till said, ‘Vous êtes le propriétaire de Cinq Cyprès?’ I admitted I was and we shook hands. ‘Je suis Monsieur Mountstuart,’ I said. ‘Je suis écrivain.’ I don’t know what made me add that last sentence, but I suppose I thought that if word about me was travelling that fast then I might as well establish my credentials.
On Tuesday morning I shaved in an enamel tin filled with Evian water, locked up the house, and walked into Sainte-Sabine to catch the bus to Penne, where I joined the local stopper to Agen. From Agen I took an express train for Paris and from Paris journeyed on to Calais. It was in Calais that my heart, as they say, almost stopped beating when, in a maison de la presse, I saw every newspaper headline shouting one word – ‘MOGADISHU!’ I bought several papers and began to read, slowly beginning to understand something of what I had been involved in.
The Lufthansa Boeing 737 that had been hijacked in Palma on October 13th had made its way from Dubai to Aden. There the captain had been shot dead by the leader of the hijackers (they suspected him of clandestinely passing information to the authorities). The co-pilot had flown the plane from Aden on to Mogadishu in Somalia, always intended to be its final destination. A new deadline was set for the ransom demands. At the last moment a message was received from the control tower saying that the eleven Baader-Meinhof gang members had been relea
sed and were now on board a plane bound for Mogadishu. A German air force transport plane landed at Mogadishu Airport in the small hours of Tuesday morning, but there were no Baader-Meinhof members on board. Instead there was a detachment of German commandos from the GSG-9 unit (Grenzschutz Gruppe Neun) and two members of the British SAS. Stun grenades were thrown, the Lufthansa jet was stormed, and in the swift and sudden firefight that followed three of the terrorists were killed and one was wounded. The passengers were all released, unharmed.
In Germany, in the gaol in Stammheim where the Baader-Meinhof members were imprisoned, the news quickly broke that the hostages had been rescued. Andreas Baader and Jan-Carl Raspe shot themselves in the head (with guns that had been smuggled into their cells); Gudrun Ensslin, like Ulrike Meinhof,10 hanged herself.
The failure of the hijacking had always been considered a possibility and the three original members of the B-M gang had alerted their supporters that, if indeed it failed, they might be killed. Their suicides were meant to look like murders and were to be a last act of revenge against the fascist state. When the news of their deaths broke, there were riots in Rome, Athens, the Hague and Paris. On the next day Dr Schleyer’s body was found in a green Audi in Mulhouse. He had been shot in the head as soon as the news of the rescue at Mogadishu had been broadcast.
So what did John Vivian and the Napier Street Mob have to do with Mogadishu? Why had I been sent across Europe to be a courier for forty sticks of dynamite? My own hunch is that they were intended to be part of the reaction to the potential failure of the hijacking. I suspect they planned to attack specific German targets in England – the embassy, Mercedes-Benz dealerships, perhaps a Goethe Institut or two – to show solidarity and outrage. All that presupposing they could have made the bombs (Ian Halliday’s role, I suspect) and that Anna, Tina and John Vivian himself could have planted the devices without blowing themselves up. As I crossed the Channel towards Dover, I was pleased that I had buried those sticks of explosive in my orchard in France. They could decompose quietly there, not cause any harm.
And I wasn’t apprehensive about confronting Vivian. I was going to say that Jürgen had sold me a case full of old newspapers. By the time I’d grown suspicious and picked the locks and looked inside he was long gone. What else was I meant to do but come home? I was ready to feign further innocence: what was meant to be in that case, John? Drugs? I was actually curious to see what his reply might be but in the event it never came about: as I stepped off the ferry at Dover I was arrested by two Special Branch officers and taken to the Royal Army Medical Hospital, beside the Tate Gallery, where I was questioned for two hours by a young and pushily aggressive detective called Deakin.
I told Deakin why I had joined the SPK and what I did for them. I said I was returning from a short holiday in Europe, looking at a piece of property I owned there. Did you meet anyone on your travels, Deakin asked? You meet all sorts of people when you travel alone, I said. I mentioned, for good measure, that I had been a commander in the RNVR during the war and a member of the Naval Intelligence Division and I demanded to know what was going on. He didn’t believe me. When some underling checked – and reported that it was true – his manner changed dramatically. He said that they had raided Napier Street on the basis of intelligence ‘received from abroad’. My name was discovered on documents seized. Anna Roth and Tina Brownwell had been arrested. Ian Halliday was in Amsterdam. John Vivian had disappeared. I was released at 11.00 that evening. Turpentine Lane was a convenient ten-minutes’ walk away. I strolled home through the chilly night. My days with the Socialist Patients’ Kollective, and my paper round, were no more, clearly: the dog-food years were about to begin again.
POSTSCRIPT TO THE MEMORANDUM
I saw John Vivian about two weeks after my return. I was in the Cornwallis, sipping my lager with its sweet sherry chaser, when he came in and sidled over. His hair was cut short and dyed grey, he wore a sports jacket with a shirt and tie.
‘John,’ I said. ‘My God, you look smart.’
‘I’ve gone underground,’ he said. ‘At least I’m trying to go underground. You can go underground in Germany, no bother, but try doing it in this fucking country.’
‘The disguise is good, though.’
‘Thanks. You got the suitcase?’
‘I dumped it in France.’
His jaw muscles clenched. ‘Just as well. Listen, you got any of the money left?’
‘I gave it all to Jürgen.’
‘Jürgen?’
The guy in Zurich. I was going to tell you. After he’d given me the suitcase and gone I got suspicious. Picked the lock – it was full of old newspapers.’
John Vivian’s face seemed to go into spasm. ‘Cunt!’ he said, several times. Then he sat there for a while massaging his temples.
‘What should have been in the suitcase, John?’
‘Doesn’t matter. Not now. You couldn’t lend me ten quid, could you? I’m broke.’
‘Not as broke as I am. I’ve got £1.75 that has to last me until Friday. I’m poor, John. Poorer than you.’
He looked at me. ‘Flower of the nation, eh? Jesus College, Oxford.’
‘Gonville and Caius, Cambridge.’
We had to laugh. I gave him a pound and he went away11 without a backward glance.
1Tommy.
2Cyprien Dieudonné had died in 1974, aged eighty-seven.
3This can only have been the fatal machine-gun attack on the federal prosecutor, Siegfried Buback, by the Red Army Faction. As well as Buback two others also died.
4On 28 April Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin and Jan-Carl Raspe – all founder members of the Baader-Meinhof terrorist gang – had been found guilty at a special court in Stammheim. Each received a long prison sentence.
5Philby, the KGB spy, was an iconic figure to the radical left in the sixties and seventies: the ultimate insider – the ultimate betrayer.
6Dr Harnns-Martin Schleyer, President of the West German Federation of Industries – kidnapped by the Red Army Faction.
7Starring Robert Redford and Dunaway. Directed by Sydney Pollack.
8She was probably referring to one Iain McLeod, an Englishman who was shot dead by West German police during a raid on his flat in Stuttgart in 1972. It was alleged he was a member of the Red Army Faction – this has never been proved.
9‘Petra’ – Hanna Hauptbeck. Arrested by West German police in Hamburg 1978. Sentenced to seven years’ imprisonment for bank robbery and conspiracy to plant explosives. ‘Ingeborg – Renate Müller-Gras. Disappeared in 1978 after a shoot-out with police in Stuttgart. Went underground. There are suggestions that she is dead.
10Ulrike Meinhof had committed suicide in 1976.
11John Vivian was arrested six weeks later after an abortive raid on a sub-post office in Llangyfellach near Swansea. The postmaster, an ex-soldier, recognizing that the gun Vivian was pointing at him was fake, punched him in the face and broke his nose. Vivian was sentenced to seven years in prison for attempted robbery.
The French Journal
On 4 May 1979 Logan Mountstuart went to the designated polling station for his Pimlico ward, voted Labour and left the country. By the time Margaret Thatcher was declared the new prime minister he was on French soil. When he learned the result of the general election he was even more convinced that his move to Sainte-Sabine had been the wisest and most judicious course of action.
Turpentine Lane was sold to LMS’s upstairs neighbour, ‘Subadar’ Singh, for £28,000 – cash. Of which approximately £5,000 was designated for the renovation of Cinq Cyprès. Most of the work was to be done on the ground floor – which LMS decided to make his living quarters, not fancying having to negotiate a steep staircase as his age advanced, contenting himself with merely making good the upper floors, staunching leaks, replacing rotten timbers and the like. He created a fairly commodious apartment on the ground floor, consisting of a sitting room with a large fireplace, a study, a large kitchen-dining room and a bedroom with
a bathroom next door. His furniture from Turpentine Lane was easily installed, and two walls in his study were lined with bookshelves to accommodate his library and archive. More work was done to the ‘labourer’s bothy’ attached to the barn, which was transformed into a small two-bedroom house, somewhat cramped but neat and clean. This he intended to rent out to holiday-makers in the summer to supplement the income he would receive from the remainder of the Singh cash, now safely banked in a high-interest account at the Société Générale in Puy I’Évêque.
LMS calculated he could live relatively comfortably at Cinq Cyprès on £2,000 a year – in any event it would be a better life than anything he could have managed at Turpentine Lane. And, as it turned out, he was able to rent the bothy without difficulty in July and August, tenants returning regularly, year after year.
He acquired a cat (female – to deal with the rodent problem in the house), which he called ‘Hodge’, and a dog, for security and companionship (male, three quarters beagle, one quarter spaniel), which he named, for obvious reasons, ‘Bowser’.
He settled into Cinq Cyprès with little fuss and soon became well known in the commune of Sainte-Sabine. The proximity of the village meant that it was easy for him to walk there, which he often did, maintaining that walking was the best exercise for those of advancing years. On market day, Wednesday, he would ride in on his mobylette and load its saddlebags with provisions for the following week.
He discreetly let it be known that he was embarked on a major work of fiction (Octet), assuming that this would discourage casual visitors and avert questions about what he was up to. His cousin Lucy Sansom would come for a fortnight’s holiday each year at the end of May. She always stayed in the bothy and often the day would go by without them seeing each other until they met for an aperitif before supper: both found the situation ideal.
