Siege at the Villa Lipp (25 page)

‘The first thing I saw was a flashing of light of the kind you get when sun reflects off lenses, but it was difficult to see because the flashing was coming from behind the bushes.’

‘Someone keeping the same sort of watch on this place as you were keeping from the attic?’

‘That’s what I
thought.
I also thought that it must be an amateur, someone who didn’t know enough to keep in the shadow of a tree to avoid reflections of the sun. So, when Melanie brought me coffee, I told her what I had seen and went down to take a closer look at the watcher. I thought too that perhaps I might frighten this amateur a little.’

‘And?’

‘It wasn’t an amateur there and I didn’t frighten anyone but myself.’ He put on some clean undershorts and a pair of slacks as he continued. ‘What I had seen flashing was the bottom of two new, shiny cans of tomato-juice cocktail mixture. They had been taped together and hung by black thread from a tree branch so that they were just behind a bush. Attached to the tape was a cord going back through the other bushes for perhaps thirty metres. This served two purposes. It kept the cans pointing in this direction, and it enabled the person hidden at the other end to move the cans slightly as they would have moved if they had been hand-held binoculars.’

‘So you followed the cord back and found that the person had gone.’

Yves sat on the edge of the bed and, reaching beneath it, picked up a shoe. ‘That is not all I found.’ He held up the shoe. ‘Please look at that.’

It was a blue canvas espadrille of the kind which used to have plain rope soles but which now have soles of crepe rubber. What was odd about this one was that there were extensive burn marks on it, the sort of marks that you would expect to see if it had been worn to stamp out the embers of a brush fire.

‘What happened?’

‘I followed the cord to where it ended along a narrow path and then I trod on this.’ He reached under the bed again and pulled out a square of charred plywood the size of a chess board, with a long bolt attached to the centre.

‘What is it?’

‘The pressure plate of a very small, insultingly innocuous, incendiary bomb.’

‘What do you mean by innocuous? It burnt your espadrille.’

‘If they had wanted to, they could have blown a foot off. This bolt broke a small tube of sulphuric acid when I trod on the board. All it ignited, judging from the smell, was a very small amount of chlorate of potash mixed with sugar. I was glad I was wearing socks though.’ He took the shoe from me and poked a finger through a burnt spot. ‘They were just having fun, you see, Patron. I don’t like practical jokes of this sort being played at my expense.’

‘You didn’t see
anybody?
’

‘No one in particular. The motor cruiser arrived, the big one that anchors off the sand beach near the point.’

‘At
that
time in the morning?’

‘They like a swim before breakfast. I’ve watched them through the glasses. A crewman lowers the dinghy for them to go to the beach. One man, two women. They swim in the morning and early evening every day.’

‘Did you see anything unusual apart from the booby-trap? Or
hear
anything, like a getaway car starting, for instance?’

‘Patron, have you been across the road there?’

‘No.’

‘All you can see from where I ended up is part of the bay, the part with the little pier where we could bring in a launch for water-skiing, if we had a launch. All you can hear are the sounds of waves breaking on the rocks below and, very faintly because of the bushes, passing traffic on the road. And I will tell you this. After that little
pétard
had gone off I wasn’t listening very carefully to anything. I have had time to think, however, and come to some conclusions if you would care to hear them.’

‘Of course.’

‘We were told last night that we are blown. We have now been told for a second time, and given one or two additional bits of bad news.’

‘For instance?’

‘That we are not just a little blown, but completely. They know, for instance, how we are organized, Patron.’

‘Explain, please.’

‘As I understand it, you are here to give information to this Krom and the others. No, I am not trying to pry. I don’t want to know more. It’s better the way it is. But you are the key figure, the one who is giving out the information to these educated half-wits. Those outside can only want to stop what is being done inside. At the moment, they
seem
to be trying to do this by scaring us into breaking up the meeting. Why? They can only wish to make us run so that they can more easily dispose of you.’

‘By “dispose of”, you mean kill, I take it. Aren’t you imagining things?’

‘You’re the one with the information, Patron. How else are they going to stop you?’

‘You said that they know how we are organized. What do you mean by that?’

‘There are
at least
six of them and they are not amateurs. That we know for certain. Six pros cost money. You don’t use them only to play practical jokes. Patron, they
knew
that I would see those reflections and go down to find the source of them. I and I alone.’

‘What makes you so sure?’

‘Because if they had thought that there was any chance of your going down, they would have left something a little more important for you to tread on. They would have left something that would have killed you.’

I thought for a moment. He was wrong, and I could have told him why.

In Italy during the war I had seen a lot of booby-traps and the effects on those who hadn’t made the right allowances for them. There was one trick the Germans had played that I have never forgotten. The hand-guns that their officers and senior NCOs carried had been much prized by Allied troops. The forward area people used to sell them for two or three hundred dollars a time to the chairborne warriors back in the lines-of-communications and base jobs. When the Germans found this out, they used to leave Lugers or Walthers behind when they moved out of a village and booby-trap them with grenades. The Allied engineer patrols got wise to that soon enough and used to carry lengths of cord with hooks on them. Then, when they saw a pistol left behind, they would put a hook on it and pay out the cord until they found a nearby foxhole to take cover in. Even if the pull of the cord set the grenade off, the pistol was usually undamaged. That game went on until the Germans found out, from some prisoner they took I suppose, what was happening. So then they used a bit more ingenuity. They’d still leave a pistol lying around, but it was no longer the pistol that they would booby-trap. Instead, it would be that convenient, nearby foxhole they’d fix; and not just with a grenade; they’d plant an S-mine in it that could cut a man in half. That’s why Yves was wrong. If I’d seen a cord there leading invitingly into the bushes, I’d have been off, scared shitless, scrambling back to the house as fast as I could go. Once you become boobytrap conscious, or get land-mine jitters, you stay that way for life.

I decided to keep all that to myself though. My convenient protection-racket theory had, since I had left the terrace and Krom’s indignation a few minutes earlier, ceased to make even a little sense. Yves was on edge, and now so was I The immediate needs were calm and as much sense as we could bring to dealing with a difficulty we didn’t yet understand.

‘What would you advise?’ I asked.

‘That we should stop covering for certain persons who aren’t here and start thinking of our own skins again.’

I didn’t ask him who it was he thought we were covering for, because I preferred not to know that he had guessed correctly.

‘By doing what, Yves?’

‘That’s a very conspicuous car we came in.’

He was quite right; a white Lincoln Continental with Liechtenstein plates is a conspicuous object; but he knew that the one in the garage was part of our cover story as tenants of the Villa Lipp and I didn’t immediately read his thinking.

‘What of it?’

‘You asked for my advice. I say we forget our guests, take their small car, just the three of us, and make a quick break for it. Then we hole up in the safe-house and hire help to take care of the opposition.’

‘How do you know that there
is
a safe-house?’

‘With Melanie planning a set-up, there’s always a safe-house.’

‘I’ll bear the suggestion in mind, but I don’t like it at the moment. We know too little. Supposing the opposition turned out to be a government agency. You couldn’t hire help to take care of that.’

‘It isn’t the French. They wouldn’t play practical jokes. On their own ground, as we are, they’d have a complete frame-up ready - drug-smuggling or arras-dealing charges, something like that - and we’d be in police hands while they took us to pieces one at a time until they had what they thought they wanted. If it’s a foreign government outfit operating with French permission, the last thing they’d want is the sort of trouble we could organize.’

‘Maybe. I don’t like the jokes any more than you do, but they bother me in a different way. I can’t help feeling that whoever’s out there must be waiting, hardly able to keep from laughing aloud, to see how soon we start walking like good boys into whatever stew-pot he’s got waiting. We’ve let him know that we’re not asleep. Before we do anything more positive than that, I want to know who’s paying him or them and for what.’

‘Perhaps Melanie was right after all. Perhaps we should try asking them.’

‘The first persons we ask are the ones downstairs on the terrace. If any of them knows anything that we don’t, it’s time we found out. Besides, even if none of them knows anything new, they’ll all have to be told what’s going on. I don’t fancy any more meals on the terrace. We make too easy a target. You’ll probably be up again tonight, Yves. Why don’t you just get some rest now?’

‘Thank you, Paul. Later perhaps. At the moment I would prefer to hear the answers you get downstairs.’

‘In that case you’d better bring your shoe and that other piece of evidence. Krom may be more inclined to believe you than me.’

Krom was not inclined to believe either of us.

At first all he did was cackle with laughter. That ended in a fit of coughing, then, the spluttering and hawking over, he went into a stern-father act broken by giggles whenever his own wit proved too much for him. Not until he had realized that his witnesses had ceased to be even mildly amused did he simmer down sufficiently to deliver a coherent verdict.

‘No, Mr Firman,’ he declared sonorously; ‘yesterday we were tired, and so let you off lightly. Today, things are very different. Today, you will have to lie with much more skill if you expect to be taken seriously, much less believed. Diversionary tactics as elementary as these - sinister watchers lurking in the bushes armed with walkie-talkies, binoculars, booby-traps and bombs - will not help you for an instant. I beg you not to waste our time with them. Let us return to Oberholzer and the account you give of the ways in which the material he gave you was used.’

I glanced at Yves and Melanie to see how they were taking it. Melanie was wearing the expression of mindless impassivity that was her normal response to boredom or stress; and I had expected to see Yves sunk in his habitual gloom. To my surprise and concern, his sallow complexion had gone a shade lighter and his lips were pinched in a peculiar way. It took me a moment or two to realize that he was in a towering rage.

As he caught my eye he stood up suddenly and looked down at me.

‘Patron, I apologise. I came down, against your advice, because I expected to hear some questions answered or at least discussed. I now see that I underrated the difficulties.’ He pointed at Krom. ‘This old bag of piss and wind is too much in love with himself to be able to think, and these others only lick his feet. If you still think you can persuade any of them to listen to sense, that’s your affair. I don’t think it’s worth the sweat. I think, with respect, Patron, that we should now take seriously the suggestion I made upstairs, and simply warn those you are covering for that from now on they’ll have to take their own chances. These people here don’t matter. We do. It’s up to you, though, and I’m still at your orders. You told me to get some rest. That’s what I should have done at once. So, that’s what I will do now.’

He started to walk away. It was Henson who stopped him.

‘Mr Boularis?’ She spoke sharply but with a rising inflection, as if she were asking a visitor who was expected but who had not yet been introduced to identify himself.

He paused and half-turned his head.

‘Mr Boularis,’ she went on quickly, ‘I’m sure that you’re tired, but I would be grateful if you would repeat the explanation you gave us about this pressure-plate device.’

Yves turned round now to look at her suspiciously.

‘I’ know,’ she added, ‘that the explanation you gave ought to have been sufficient, but for someone who doesn’t know much about explosives it was a little puzzling.’

Yves answered her with his eyes on Krom. ‘I’m surprised that with so much bleating going on you heard anything. What don’t you understand?’

‘Well, for instance, you described the thing as having been arranged so that the long bolt in the centre of the board acted as a sort of plunger going down into a small bottle holding the incendiary material. The end rested on a tube containing sulphuric acid which it broke when you trod on the board. Is that right?’

‘That’s how I reconstruct it from what was left.’

‘Thank you. What I don’t understand, though, is how hard it would be to make and set up such a thing.’

‘Quite easy, if you have the stuff.’

‘You mean if you know in advance that you’re going to make it and roughly when you’re going to use it?’

‘Yes.’

‘How long would it take to make and how long to install?’

Yves walked back slowly, deciding how to answer her.

For a few delicious moments I was able to forget about Krom. One of our guests had suddenly started talking sense and the whole atmosphere had changed. Melanie, I saw, had felt the same. I wondered how long the improvement would last and concentrated on looking as if I hadn’t noticed it.