The Roses of Picardie

by Simon Raven

  ‘Perhaps they just want somebody new to torment,’ Marigold said.

  ‘Perhaps. In which case we should do well to turn round and go home.’

  ‘Too late to turn round. You know that,’ Marigold said.

  ‘In any case,’ said Balbo, ‘if they do have some purpose for us, we are probably safer fulfilling it than trying to escape.’

  ‘Depends what the purpose is, cobber,’ said Sydney Jones. They drove into another of the countless tunnels of the Autostrada del Sol. Jacquiz switched on his headlights. Fifty yards ahead, side by side and hand in hand, facing into the headlights holding up their free hands to halt the Rolls, were David and Rebecca.

  ‘Okay,’ said the Kyrios Pandelios, ‘okay, Kyrie Len. My friend Balbo,’e says to give you the folder, so I give ’im.’ He put a fawn folder, badly stained, into Len’s lap, then went to the window and gazed lovingly out at the Venetian well-head in the little square.

  Len checked the folder. The notes he could not begin to understand, but the tea stain on the folder itself (and on some of the notes), as well as the penned inscription, confirmed it as the one which figured in Lady Constable’s delation.

  ‘’Ow is that old son of a w’ore?’ Pandelios turned and asked, as soon as Len had concluded his examination. ‘Still sucking up the juice?’

  ‘No,’ said Len, ‘He seems much healthier than I remember him and far more restrained.’

  ‘What ’it ’im? Some sort of vision at Damascus?’

  ‘He has found a new friend,’ said Len. ‘I know how he feels. Rather the same kind of thing has recently happened to me.’

  ‘’E must feel fucking grand to lay off the juice.’

  ‘I dare say… Well, Kyrios Pandelios, with many thanks for your kindness, I ought to be off.’

  Off to Kalamata in the morning, reflected Len as he crossed the little square. Early plane. Decent dinner – if they have such a thing in Heracleion (poor Len, they hadn’t) – and then bed. ‘Whoops, sorry.’ He had nearly blundered into a man in some kind of uniform. The man smiled and said something crisp. He went this way. Len went his.

  Telegram, thought Pandelios, as he watched the man in the uniform walk across the square; for me, by the look of it. High priority it must be, probably foreign, or they wouldn’t deliver it at this time of the evening. There was a colossal bang on his front door. Fuck you, thought Pandelios, crapping up my poxy paint and doubtless expecting a sod-arse tip. Down the bloody stairs he bumbled, like a fart out of a tube to get a gander at his telegram. It wasn’t every day, by jiminy, that some cunt sent him one.

  ‘And so, Provost,’ said Ivor Winstanley to Lord Constable of Reculver Castle, at about the same time as Len was walking away from the Kyrios Pandelios’ house, hoping for a nice dinner which he wasn’t going to get, ‘Blakeney supports Lady Constable’s story and has agreed to let us have the folder and the notes inside them. The Under-Collator rang me up to tell me earlier today, as soon as he arrived back in England from seeing Blakeney in Arles.’

  ‘Blakeney seems to be getting about a bit these days. What’s he doing in Arles?’

  ‘I don’t know, Provost.’

  ‘But you do know that the Secret Service is interested in him?’

  ‘Oh yes.’

  ‘Then doesn’t it occur to you that he may be rather a dangerous ally? People in whom the Secret Service is interested are apt to come croppers. Or worse, Ivor.’

  ‘Blakeney knows what he knows – and he is letting us have the folder. The Under-Collator has gone away to get it.’

  ‘Where from, Ivor?’

  ‘From Crete, Provost.’

  ‘Yes, I must admit that sounds very plausible. He’d have left his gear in Heracleion, I dare say, which is where he is based… in so far as such a fellow ever is based. I fear lest you are getting the better of me, Ivor.’

  ‘Then would you like to agree terms, Provost? The later you leave it, the stiffer they will be. Any number of little extras may crop up.’

  ‘No, no, I’ll bide a while yet. I have yet to be positively confronted with Blakeney or the folder. As I said at the end of our last little chat, Ivor, I’ll settle at this stage for an armed but static truce. Just let’s let the thing go on: one never knows what may or may not be in the cards.’

  ‘A gambling metaphor from you, Provost,’ said Ivor, who was genuinely shocked.

  ‘Oh yes, Ivor. I don’t think you realize – many people don’t – what a highly moral business gambling is. It destroys the greedy but sometimes exalts the humble. It occasionally rewards the daring but always crushes the headstrong. To him that hath it tends to give and from him that hath not it taketh away even that which he has – a proceeding for which it can claim the highest warranty. It is, on the whole, not unkind to the genuinely diffident but stern, very stern, with sycophants and time-servers. Oh yes. Ivor, gambling is a great school of virtue: why should I be ashamed to use, for once, its idiom?’

  There was no flight direct to Kalamata. Len had to go via Athens. As he was just about to board the aeroplane at Heracleion Airport for the first leg of his journey, he saw the Kyrios Pandelios join the queue.

  ‘Ah, Kyrie Len,’ said Pandelios. ‘Buggering off back to London, are you?’

  ‘Yes, Kyrios Pandelios. Where are you buggering off to?’

  ‘Only to Athens. I have some business appointments and shall hope to get in a little low copulation.’

  ‘Then the best of luck, Kyrios Pandelios.’

  ‘And to you, Kyrie Len.’

  ‘So that’s it,’ said Theta to Q and Lambda, as he put down the telephone receiver, ‘Dean and Chapter of Canterbury warned, Brigadier at Dover Castle well briefed, blessing from on high accorded. Troops will take post at 0630 hours tomorrow, and at precisely 0645 hours the Blakeney relics, i.e. two worn socks, one piece of Elastoplast and a few hairs of his head, will be reverently deposited near one of the holiest tombs in the Crypt, that of His Grace the Archbishop Morton.’

  Len was lucky, in that there was an aeroplane leaving for Kalamata that morning only minutes after he had flown into Athens. Somewhat to his annoyance, however, he found Pandelios beside him in the queue.

  ‘You said you had business and low copulation in Athens, Kyrios Pandelios. They do not appear to have engaged you long.’

  ‘You said you were buggering off back to London, Kyrie Len. You appear to ’ave missed your way.’

  Both grinned, in a foolish and not unfriendly fashion.

  ‘I ’ad a telegram from the Kyrios Blakeney,’ Pandelios said. ‘It came from Arezzo in Italy, and it tells me he may be nearing the end of a mission which he is making for me.’

  ‘I, too, know something of this mission,’ said Len.

  ‘You are ’is friend, you brought ’is letter to me, so I trust you – up to a fucking point,’ Pandelios said. ‘The Kyrios Blakeney and ’is friends embark at Ancona this noon time. They will be in Patras by noon time tomorrow.’

  Right, thought Len: that gives me good time to slip down the coast by car this afternoon, work out exactly where the latitude 36.53 intersects it, and have a good sniff round the place while Jake and his group are still on the briny. Only thing is, what to do with chummy Pandelios here? We don’t want him latching on.

  ‘I ’ave had very sure instructions,’ Pandelios went on. ‘I am to stop in Kalamata till they come through tomorrow afternoon and meanwhile I am to procure and have ready for them one bucket, of wood or steel and of the largest size I can find, one strong cable of at least thirty yards long, and one pulley.’

  ‘Sounds as if you’re all going pot-holing,’ said Len. ‘Pot-holing?’

  Len explained as they boarded the aircraft.

  ‘Then there is another thing,’ said Pandelios. ‘I am to buy one live sheep. Kyrie Len…do they propose to ’ave a picneek?’

  ‘You’ve got me there.’

  ‘Shall you too stay in Kalamata? We might ’ave dinner. The food in Kalamata is beyond words disgusting, unles
s one ’as feesh by the beach. We could go there.’

  ‘Sorry,’ said Len, feeling (to do him justice) rather awful. ‘I’d planned to hire a car and do a trip to Mistra and Monemvasia. I’ve got some research to do. Both places, you see, have been often used as subjects of illuminations in Greek manuscript prayer books.’ Rather a good improvisation, he thought; thank God he knew about Mistra and Monemvasia from having once planned a tour of the area with Ivor, when they were thinking of treats which they might enjoy after everything at Lancaster had been comfortably settled and Len himself had duly vanished from the scene by easy stages. ‘I’m sorry you can’t come too,’ he said, in one sense meaning it.

  ‘So am I sorry, Kyrie Len,’ Pandelios said, also partly meaning it and knowing that Len partly meant it. ‘But what with bloody buckets and torches and fornicating sheeps…’

  ‘Perhaps I shall see you later.’

  ‘Ah. Do the Kyrios Blakeney and his friends expect you?’

  ‘Not exactly,’ said Len, ‘but they won’t be surprised, I think – or at least one of them won’t – to see me.’ If they see me, he added to himself, if little Lenny hasn’t pocketed the prize and scarpered long before they get there. Because I know something which they don’t: what 36.53 means. But it rather looks, he told himself reluctantly, as if they know something which I don’t. What’s all this with buckets and pulleys and sheep?

  ‘Right,’ said Jacquiz as the car ferry stood out from Ancona at ten minutes past noon: ‘Who wants a cabin for tonight? I’ll have to fix them with the Purser!’

  Marigold. Balbo and Sydney nodded gratefully; David and Rebecca shook their heads with contempt.

  ‘We shall sleep under the sky,’ said Rebecca; ‘we are long since used to it.’

  Very tiresome, thought Marigold, this pose of superiority. Those two are too self-righteous by half. And yet, she thought, their halting of the Rolls in the tunnel the previous day had been a masterly performance. The boy had walked calmly some fifty yards to the rear of the car and had begun to divert the traffic round it and to its left. (Whooosh…WHOOOOSH: any minute now one of them will see him too late, Marigold thought, or just won’t believe it and panic. Cars simply don’t stop in tunnels.) The girl had come and spoken to Jacquiz through the driver’s window.

  ‘You have read what I gave you?’ she said.

  ‘Yes. Can we please get out of this tunnel?’

  ‘So now you understand?’

  ‘Yes. No. I don’t know. If we stay here there will be an accident. Why stop us here?’

  ‘To show you what manner of people we are. We shall stay here, all of us, until you promise to obey.’

  Despite the boy’s activities in the rear of the Rolls, other cars were swirling by within inches and hooting hysterically.

  ‘Obey?’ said Marigold.

  ‘Obey my brother and me in everything we ask. You will see.’

  ‘What’s in it for us?’ said Jones from the back.

  ‘Getting out of this bloody tunnel before we’re all killed,’ said Marigold. ‘Promise,’ she urged Jacquiz.

  Jacquiz nodded. ‘We promise,’ he said. ‘Get in. Room for one in the front and one in the back.’

  The girl whipped round into the back, next to Balbo. ‘Now drive,’ she said.

  ‘What about your friend?’

  ‘My brother. He has other business now. We pick him up where I shall tell you later.’

  And an hour later she had said: ‘Stop at this garage.’

  When they stopped, the boy came out of the bar, bowed to Marigold through the car window, opened the door, and settled gracefully on the cross-bench beside her.

  ‘How did you get here so quickly?’ Marigold said.

  ‘There are cars, madame, even faster than your Rolls Royce. Drive on, sir, please. You will of course have calculated that our journey is easily made from Ancona – or Bari, if the ship at Ancona is full. We shall go there, as you have doubtless decided already, by Arezzo. There will be no stopping until we reach Arezzo.’

  ‘A little food would be nice. We had a snack on the autoroute near Cannes, but –’

  ‘– No stopping until Arezzo. You may eat there what you wish,’ the boy had said coldly. ‘Now you tell him,’ he said to the girl in the back, indicating Balbo.

  ‘You have a friend in Crete?’ she said.

  ‘How would you know?’

  ‘His is connected by marriage with the Kommingi – what is left of them – so it is our affair to know. We keep watch on the Kommingi, we keep watch on his wife, who was a Kommingi before she married him, and so we hear that you are coming.’

  ‘How do you keep watch on them?’

  ‘By paying money, Monsignor’s money,’ said the girl patiently, ‘to someone in Heracleion who will see for us without being seen. And so in Nicopolis. Thus we watch and we know of them, although they know nothing of us. The Monsignor was a skilled genealogist. He was able to follow all the windings of his family, forward and back, forward to Greece, where they have almost forgotten who they are, back to before Andrea departed over the sea from Arles. And so, whoever comes and by whichever way, the approaches are guarded.’

  ‘Rather what we thought.’ Balbo said.

  ‘Then no more of this now. Pandelios. He is a man to trust, he is your friend. He will come without fail if you call on him?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then you will send him a telegram as soon as we reach Arezzo. You will tell him to wait for us at Kalamata, the next day after tomorrow, and have ready for us the following things…’

  That night they had spent at Arezzo, the adults in an hotel, the boy and the girl none save themselves knew where. And now, here they all were, en route for Patras, standing on the deck of the good ship Petrarch and being rejoined by Jacquiz, who handed over cabin tickets to Balbo and Sydney, told Marigold the number of the one she would be sharing with himself, and then courteously invited everybody to luncheon.

  ‘Isn’t he a love, when he’s being nice?’ said Marigold.

  But David and Rebecca shook their heads at the invitation. ‘Look here,’ said Marigold, ‘I’m sick of this rubbish. Don’t you have to eat?’

  The two children (for such they suddenly appeared) looked at her quietly, then turned, linked hands (fingers interlocking), and walked away along the deck. A very faint echo of the chilling laughter, which he had last heard in the Canon’s chamber, darted back to Jacquiz. No one else appeared to hear anything.

  ‘Those two are beginning to bug me,’ Marigold said.

  ‘By My Lord Archbishop’s side?’ said Theta. ‘Or do you think that the floor would be more effective?’

  ‘Scientifically it makes no difference,’ Lambda said. ‘Do what you think most appropriate.’

  Theta bent over the tomb and distributed the Blakeney relics on to the heads of the six little canons who were praying, three on either side, over His Grace’s recumbent effigy.

  ‘Now let it work,’ said Theta,

  As Theta and Lambda left the Crypt, there were myriad cheeps and scutterings. Once safe up the steps and into the South-West Transept, they turned with relief to watch two soldiers block the passage with thick close-hedge barbed wire.

  While Pandelios waited in Kalamata for Balbo and his party to arrive, Len had pushed on down into the Mani. Since it had taken longer than he expected to hire a car, and longer still to find a reasonably large-scale map of the area, he had not left Kalamata until late in the afternoon; and after an hour of winding through steep shadows and deserted villages he had prudently decided not to undertake his investigation along latitude 36.53 until the next morning.

  By the time he had spiralled down from the coastal hills past Itylus to Limini and spiralled up again to Areopolis, it was nearly dark; so he drove swiftly across the neck of the peninsula to the seaside resort of Gytheion, where he had spent a night of modest comfort in one of the still mercifully open hotels.

  And now, shortly after dawn, he was driving back from Gyt
heion to Areopolis, where he must turn South through the region of broken towers and crooked sea-chapels to the latitude he sought. Preliminary calculations had apprised him that this passed somewhere just South of the little port of Gerolimin. He would, therefore, motor through Gerolimin, and then explore, in detail, the strip of coast below it.

  ‘Sir,’ said a Signaller in the South-West Transept of Canterbury Cathedral, ‘the RT’s swamped.’

  ‘Swamped?’ the Brigadier said.

  ‘Can’t get a thing out of it. Like a mass of static but worse; just a continuous high-pitched bleep.’

  ‘Let me try…’

  A dispatch rider came through the side door into the Transept. He saluted, then made urgently for the Brigadier.

  ‘Well?’ said the Brigadier, abandoning the RT set with a worried shrug.

  ‘Heavy interference with RT, sir. Colonel de Courcy says we can’t get on to your HQ by wireless any more, nor can we get through the other way, down to our sub-units. So he’s sent me round with the news.’

  ‘And what is the news?’

  ‘The news is, sir, that not a single one of the – er – enemy has attempted to break through.’

  ‘I see.’

  The Brigadier crossed to where Theta and Lambda were admiring the triple tomb of Lady Margaret Holland and her two husbands.

  ‘Rather daring,’ Lambda was saying; ‘troilism in the grave, so to speak.’

  ‘I’ve just had a third report,’ the Brigadier said; ‘same as the first two: not a mouse stirring.’

  ‘They were stirring all right when we left the Crypt.’

  ‘Not now – or not according to these three reports. We shan’t get any more for a bit. Radio’s jammed.’

  Lambda considered this.

  ‘Buzzing?’ he inquired.

  ‘No. A piercing squeal.’

  ‘With a slight variation in pitch on a regular rhythm?’

  ‘Come and hear for yourself.’

  Lambda went and heard for himself.

  ‘Mutants,’ he said at last. ‘We knew they were a new strain. I should have expected something of the kind.’

  ‘What kind?’ said Theta and the Brigadier together.

  ‘I’m afraid they’re much too clever to fall for this dodge. They like it where they are. But they’ve got the message from those samples we laid out – and they’re passing it onto their mates outside. Their…neural means of transmission…is what’s interfering with your RT sets, Brigadier. Hence this abominable noise. Anyway, they’re not going to budge, not in my view at least.’