She said: “One thing more, Jan. Between now and then, will you promise me something?”
“Well?”
“Take the lead, Jan! Start telling me what to do and meaning it!”
“How about Raoul?”
“Stand up to him, too! He isn’t always right. Damn it Jan, Britain’s still fighting and we ought to have some real say in what happens!”
I thought about this for a moment, particularly her emphasis on my leadership and reflected how much grief might have been avoided if she had given me this advice years ago. But perhaps it wasn’t her fault at all, perhaps it was mine.
Chapter Five
RAOUL DE Royden appeared about eleven o’clock. Two of his hatchet men were with him, as chilling a pair as I had ever hoped to meet, one shortish, barrel-chested and sallow-skinned, the other tall, drooping and badly scarred about the face. They looked like a sinister comedy team and neither of them spoke a single word while they were with us, although the fat one coughed so persistently that conversation between Raoul, Diana and myself was interrupted from time to time.
Raoul looked aghast at the mess in the front room. After unwrapping the curtains and satisfying himself as regards Rance, he addressed me unsmilingly: “How did you kill him? With a bomb?”
Diana spoke up. “Your plan wasn’t so bright after all, Raoul! If Jan hadn’t come down that way your ghouls would have had two bodies to dispose of, one of them mine!”
He looked interested. “So? What happened?”
I told him as much as I wanted him to know and I didn’t care a damn whether he believed it or not. All I wanted now was for Diana and me to be out of the house and into the fresh air. To me the whole place stank of blood and filth. I could look at Rance’s shattered head unmoved but I could not forget what he had represented in Diana’s life. This was going to take time, a lot of time.
I gave Raoul all the personal effects I had taken from Rance, together with the briefcase. He raised his eyebrows when he came to the postcards and passed them without comment to his henchmen, who sat against the wall like a pair of bored patients in a doctor’s waiting-room and studied them with quiet detachment. When they had seen them all the fat one shuffled them and then dealt them out like a hand of cards. They retained about half-a-dozen apiece.
“There’s nothing here that will help us much except the keys,” said Raoul, at length, closing the briefcase.
“You wouldn’t expect him to carry the kind of documents you want on his person,” said Diana, and it struck me that she was beginning to tire of her cousin’s patronage.
Raoul got up and walked about the room, tapping his teeth with his fingernails. “Maybe I was wrong,” he admitted, presently, “maybe I should have let Pepe cut his throat in a back alley, but I abominate disorder!”
“Rance didn’t strike me as a man who would be caught in a back alley,” I said and realised that I too was beginning to question the infallibility of this man. “My advice, for what it’s worth, is to get him out of here as quickly as possible and then concentrate on the factories or Yves!”
He made a sign to his two acolytes and they went out, returning a moment later with an old-fashioned black trunk, the kind of trunk suburban murderers leave in left luggage offices. It was all so theatrical that I winked at Diana.
The thin man threw open the trunk and I noticed that it had been lined with oiled paper, to avoid leakage, I imagine; they dumped the body inside with about as much ceremony as a pair of butchers handling a carcass after closing time. They stuffed the bloodstained curtains on top and then slammed the lid, locking it and lacing it with rope. I had the impression that they had earned their living doing this sort of thing since they were little boys. Then they marched out carrying the trunk and I saw, on glancing through the window, that they had arrived at the villa in a removal van. They did not return to the house but sat on the tailboard, munching slabs of bread. Raoul noticed my morbid interest in these characters.
“They are good boys,” he said, “they do what they are told without comment!”
Diana and I made no reply to this but sat watching him uneasily as he sifted through the many keys on Rance’s key-ring.
“The question is, which is which?” he said, finally, and made the remark sound as if it was a profound summing-up of the situation.
Diana made an impatient gesture. “It doesn’t matter a damn which is which,” she said. “Why don’t you leave the rest of it to Jan and me? You can tidy up here one way or another, strip the place and dump it all somewhere, or set it on fire and cover our tracks for a few days. The point is, whatever you do, for God’s sake take us into your confidence, Raoul! We’ve eliminated Rance but that isn’t what Jan came over for, any one of you could have done that sooner or later. We want Yves and we want a blueprint Well, let’s get to hell out of here and try for both! I don’t know about Jan, but I’m bored with all this wait-until-you’re-a-little-older routine!”
The speech expressed my sentiments so exactly that I gave a grunt of approval and was relieved to notice that Raoul seemed to take her advice in good part. He had been shocked by the disorder in the house and perhaps Diana’s frankness helped him to marshal his thoughts.
“Let’s all have a drink,” he suggested and rummaged about in what was left of the cocktail cabinet, pouring three brandies and motioning us to join him at the table.
“There have been some new developments,” he said, when we were seated. “First of all there is no prototype in existence, of that we are now certain. Secondly, the major part of the work has been concentrated at the Lyons factory, and has an S.S. guard right round the clock! Diana’s father-in-law spends most of his time down there so it is useless to go there and try these keys on the offices and safes of the premises unless we can be sure he is absent. The thing to do would be to entice him away while our friend here impersonated Rance and made a discreet search. It is just possible that one or more of the guard detail know Rance well, but that is a chance we might have to take. If we drew blank there, we could go on and try the keys in the Paris offices. There are five all told but the most likely is at Vincennes. It would mean hit and miss but sooner or later we should stumble on what we were looking for!”
“Stumble is about right!” said Diana, brutally. “What is Yves supposed to be doing all this time? You don’t imagine he would be taken in by Jan? We couldn’t call at a single one of those factories without the chance of coming face to face with Yves. The whole plan is suicidal, but quite apart from that, it’s woolly! I thought you people had things lined up a lot better than this!”
Raoul shrugged: “Have you an alternative plan?” he asked.
“Yes, I have,” said Diana. “I suggest we go straight for Yves and make him lead us to the right safe at gunpoint! That’s the only way you can make real use of me, isn’t it? Otherwise I’m a mere hanger-on and now that Jan’s involved it won’t do, Raoul! I mean to have a say in this, do you understand? I can smuggle Jan into the house and if any of the servants see him they’ll accept him as Pierre. Not one of them knows him well and we can choose our time and maybe get in without any of them seeing him at all. Then I’ll manoeuvre Yves on the spot for Jan and we’ll go the rounds of the factories in the Mercedes. Two of us can take care of Yves and you can follow at a distance. Once we’ve found what we’re looking for, you can take over and we’ll rely on you to get us home with the loot!”
It delighted me to hear her in this kind of form. It was like listening to the old Diana planning mischief in and about her father’s estate. Her eye was bright and she radiated confidence. It was almost impossible to imagine that a few hours ago this woman had been dominated by a man like Pierre Rance and I noticed that Raoul was impressed in spite of himself. He was a proud man but he was very far from being a stupid one, liable to adopt a mulishly obstinate attitude to a plan because it was somebody else’s. He sipped his brandy slowly exploring the various situations that might develop from the direct approach she sugges
ted, weighing up chances and balancing them against risks. His passion for neatness and orderliness was an integral part of him. Confusion ruffled his natural civility so that he could seem petulant and intractable but I now decided that I was correct in my earlier surmise, Diana could handle him if she was given half a chance.
He said, “I must sleep on this. I must admit it has possibilities. You and Jan will drive back to Paris at once. I will meet you there at my apartment. Tomorrow night.”
“How will you get there? By train?”
He smiled. “I am still nominally in command!” he said. “Leave me the crumbs of authority!”
“Do I notify Yves, or bounce in on him?” Diana asked.
“You must telephone Yves en route,” he said, “from Avignon or Orange. You will say Rance is otherwise engaged down here and has ordered you to return.”
He stood up abruptly, and held out his hand to me.
“Next time, try and make less mess, my friend!” He looked up at the hole in the ceiling and clicked his tongue rapidly, reminding me of Aunt Thirza when she came upon her husband littering the kitchen with wildflowers and birds’ eggs. “What else can we do with this place but burn it?”
I watched him descend the drive and motion to his thugs on the tailboard. It must have distressed him to note that they were eating their bread without first having washed their hands.
Diana spoke over my shoulder. “He is rather a sweetie, isn’t he Jan?” She might have been drawing my attention to one of Heronslea’s elderly rustics, pottering into the public-bar of the “Rifleman” in Shepherdshey Village.
That was the very beginning of the best time of all between us, the long, leisurely journey across France, from the Mediterranean to Paris, with Rance’s elimination behind us and the unpredictable ahead. Now we were far closer than we had ever been, even in the best of the good days. There was a reflowering of the old relationship speeded by the stimulus of achieving something together, even though there seemed every likelihood of sacrificing our lives. The nagging fear of death, capture and torture left us for good. I was excited but it was almost a pleasurable excitement. Looking back on that time I know that even the most alarming moments were far preferable to the empty years we had passed in isolation.
We travelled leisurely. There was no need to hurry for little could be done until Raoul had had time to prepare the ground in Paris. He had to check on Yves’ movements, consult the technical men of his group and get our minimum terms of reference as it were; after that, he had to set up some kind of escape route on our behalf. As regards what we hoped to find on de Royden premises my original briefing was already out-of-date and Raoul was not a technician himself, relying upon information supplied him by undercover men such as de Royden’s ex-foreman. None of these could take part in the actual raid for every one of them was suspect, as indeed Raoul would have been had he actually presented himself at one of the factories. The security checks on all these establishments were stringent. That was why the group had gone to such extravagant lengths to obtain a passable double for Rance. His identity had a double advantage, his person was familiar at the checkpoints and would hardly be questioned if he tried to pass them in company of Yves but his papers, which we now possessed, were more important still, for security guards would be certain to pay more attention to written permits and to the changing rota of stamps, passmarks and signatures, than to a physical recognition of the man. Under German occupation, Diana warned me, possession of the correct documents was more vital than any actual resemblance I might or might not possess to the faceless thing now lying in Raoul’s black trunk.
We set out in Diana’s sports car, the white Cadillac convertible that I had seen in the garage of the villa and Diana drove all the way. She was an excellent driver and we could have covered the distance in half the time, but the Provençal sunshine was inviting and as I had never been through this part of France, I welcomed an opportunity to look about me and listen to her lively commentary on the area and her comparisons with our own southwestern region.
I had never realised until then how Continental-minded she was, or how insular most British provincials, myself included, had become in the turbulent pre-war decade. She had spent a good deal of her girlhood down here and her perfect French, plus the fact that she had been here since the first day of the Occupation, enabled her to take a detached view of the effect of total defeat upon the French nation. She was very fond of the French peasant and small business man but she had nothing but contempt for the rich industrialists and politicians who had sold the country to the Germans. She knew both these classes very well, having lived and moved among them since her marriage, but since the war she had taken pains to study the outlook of the ordinary folk in the departments. When I remarked that signs of enemy occupation were not obvious in the small towns we passed through, Diana laughed.
“What did you expect, Jan? Squads of Gestapo men ransacking houses? Firing parties in the market places? Why, ninety-nine out of a hundred of these poor devils are far too occupied getting two square meals a day to bother with war! Many of them still don’t know what really happened in the summer of 1940. Ever since the ‘twenties’, France has been run by a shady company based on Paris and Jacques and his wife had to grow cynical or go mad! Resistance only concerns the odd romantic like Raoul, or the person who has a very practical reason for hating the Nazis, like the families of the prisoners-of-war they still hold. But it’s much deeper than that really, this distrust of politicians and power groups and fat businessmen and stiff-necked soldiers. Particularly soldiers! For hundreds of years now these people have seen armies come and go, pillaging and exacting, bullying and cadging. We British made hay down here, didn’t we? During the Hundred Years’ War and since? Then there were the religious wars, the Wars of the Fronde, the Seven Years’ War, the Napoleonic Wars, the Franco-Prussian War and God knows how many others, all excuses for free billets, impressments, confiscations, conscriptions and every other harassment. Our people in Devon haven’t faced this kind of thing since the Monmouth Rebellion and that was only a ripple lasting a few weeks. I can prove my point as a matter of fact. I was taking some horses down south a year or so ago and I had to stop for forage at a farm near Blois. It was an isolated place and just as I was coming away a French military convoy drove up. It was quite obvious that they were French but judging by the panic you might easily have imagined they were Tartars bent on rape and loot! The family ran in all directions, shouting warnings and concealing everything they valued. It was an interesting object lesson, I can tell you!”
This was how Diana looked at things. She had never been a scholar, an amateur politician or even a wide reader but she had a remarkable facility for standing outside everyday life, looking in on it and learning something of interest from every personal encounter. She had watched garage hands repair her cars and could now strip a car like a professional. She could fly an aeroplane and distinguish at a glance between the genuine and the spurious in a room full of antiques. She knew the background history of every country she had visited. She was a first-class judge of horse-flesh, an expert rider and a passable linguist and if you were alone with her for any length of time you were continually surprised by her casual skills and the extent of her general information on all manner of unexpected subjects.
Beyond Orange, where she put through a personal call to Yves, we bought some food and a bottle of wine and drove off the road to picnic in a wood of flowering chestnuts. It was very still and pleasant in there under the arched branches, with greenish light filtering through the leaves and sunlight teasing the long grass and bracken fronds. The peace of the wood discouraged chatter and for a long time we sat watching the lightest of breezes ripple through the grass stems, bending and chivvying them the way the south-west wind behaved in Big Oak Paddock above Heronslea larchwood. I knew that she was comparing this place to Sennacharib and balancing our chances of ever getting home to Heronslea together. I watched her closely as she sat with her back
braced against a chestnut bole, her eyes fixed on the mock-panic of the grass army under the gentle onslaught of the breeze. Then, my love for her and my joy in its rebirth, spilled over me like a giant summer wave and I rolled over and laid my head in her lap, revelling in the softness of her thighs and the caress of her fingers in my hair. For several minutes she continued to stroke, absently and vaguely and then awareness returned to her and she looked down, smiling, and I thought I had never seen anything so pretty and engaging as her slightly parted lips and the sun-gleam on her teeth.
“Do you want me, Jan? Here? Like in Sennacharib?”
“No, Di, not here, not yet!” And the strange thing was that I did not, for any expression of the yearning I felt for her would have seemed futile and trivial, an exercise in the humdrum physical domination of the female by the male. I sought no such domination, only the fusing of two human beings and blessed relief from the torment of eternal loneliness.
It was when we had crossed the former Vichy demarcation line that I began to be aware of the shadow over France. Every soldier who had been involved in the 1940 debacle had returned to Britain with an understanding of Nazis that one could never distill from propaganda and radio news bulletins, or from the bellicose thunderings of Churchill. I had witnessed the panic out of Paris that summer but even these memories were not so chilling as the sight of a young German officer lounging against a big, black car parked outside a town hall displaying a notice board printed in German. To me, imaginary or not, there was a kind of twilight about the towns we passed through and the only time it lifted was at a checkpoint outside Paris, where French police inspected our papers and the gendarme who returned them winked in blameless recognition of the fact that a German sentry occupying the sentry-box immediately behind him was staring at us with unwinking hostility, based no doubt upon his resentment at having to stand in full kit under the warm sun whilst his comrades were swilling beer in the guard-post. I mentioned this to Diana, as we drove through St. Cloud and she laughed.
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