Yesterday's Spy (10 page)

I grunted.

‘Park in the usual space, Ahmed,' he told the driver, as we turned into the Place du Palais. To me he said, ‘I'll be as quick as I can. You wait with Ahmed.'

I nodded.

‘What's wrong with you?' he said. ‘A pain in the guts? Indigestion?'

‘Could you get me something? It's an acid stomach. There's a chemist at the end of the street.'

Fabre looked at me for what seemed like a long time. Then he reached into a pocket of his fur coat and found a plastic box. ‘You need two of these,' he said. ‘I carry all that kind of junk; I'm a hypochondriac.'

‘Thanks,' I said. He tipped two small multi-coloured capsules into the palm of my gloved hand.

‘They melt at different times,' he explained, ‘so you get this continuous anti-acid together with minute doses of regular aspirin and buffer – you must have seen the adverts …'

I put them into my mouth with my left hand and tried to look like a man who was holding on to his belly-ache with the other hand, rather than one who had been a little too premature in checking the butt of a .38 Centennial Airweight.

‘Shellfish,' I said. ‘That always does it. I'm a fool, really.'

Fabre nodded his agreement, slammed the car door, and walked off across the square to the police offices. The driver was still looking at me. I smiled at him. He touched the evil-eye beads that dangled from the driving mirror, and then gave his whole attention to the horse-racing section of his paper.

Whatever Fabre did inside that imposing building took no more than five minutes. The driver had the engine running by the time Fabre got back in. ‘We'll take the autoroute, Ahmed,' Fabre told the Negro. ‘You'll see the Grasse exit marked.'

We followed the Mediterranean coast as far as Cannes, and then turned north, into the land of truffles, baccarat and fast cars that stretches from Mougins to Vence. No one spoke. I looked out of the window.

‘This is Grasse,' said the driver. He turned to look back over his shoulder, and gave me a sad smile.

Palm Springs on a French hill-top. Daubed on a wall there was a slogan: ‘Arabs Keep Out of Grasse.' It was raining in Grasse. We didn't stop.

‘We'll be there by lunchtime,' said Fabre.

I tried to wet my lips and smile back, but my tongue was dry. These boys were all soft lights and sweet music, but I had the feeling that it was going to go dark and quiet at some chosen place on the highway north. And they weren't planning to leave long-stemmed roses to mark the spot.

‘I'm sorry,' he said.

The driver kept to a steady speed and showed impeccable road manners. To them, it might have seemed convincingly like police procedure, but to me it looked as though they were extremely careful not to be booked on a traffic offence at a time when they had another crime in operation.

‘Sorry about what?' I croaked.

‘Mentioning food – when you have a
crise de foie,'
he said.

‘Is that what I have?'

‘I think so,' he said.

Instinct said use the gun and get out of here, but training said find out who, what and where.

The driver chose the N85, the
route Napoléon
. As we climbed away from the sheltered Riviera coast, a hell's kitchen of boiling storm-clouds came into view. The mountain peaks were white, like burned soufflés that some chef had hidden under too much powdered sugar. The sky became darker and darker, and the cars coming south had their headlights on. The rain turned to hail that beat a tattoo on the roof of the car, and at the La Faye pass the mountains echoed with the sound of thunder. Great lightning flashes froze an endless line of toy motor-cars that were crawling up the far side of the gorge. The wiper blades stropped the glass, and the engine's note changed to a whine that provided an undertone of hysteria.

‘We'll be late,' the driver warned. It was the hard consonantal French of the Arab.

‘It will be clear beyond Barrême.'

‘Barrême is a long way,' said the driver. ‘We'll be late.' He paddled the brake and swung the steering wheel as the tyres slid on a patch of ice. He lost enough speed to have to change down. There was the scream of a power-horn, and a small Renault sped past us on the wrong side of the road. There was a thud as his slush hit the door, and a fanfare of horns as the Renault prised open the traffic to avoid an oncoming bus. ‘Bloody idiot,' said the driver. ‘He won't get to Castellane, except in a hearse.'

The equinoctial storms that lash the great limestone plateau of Provence provide Nice with a rainfall higher than even London. But as we hurried north the black clouds sped over us, tearing themselves to shreds to reveal their sulphur-yellow interiors and, eventually, the sun. The inland roads were dry, and as the traffic thinned out we increased speed. I watched the fields, and the huge flocks of birds that circled like dust-storms, but my mind calculated every possible way in which the threat of death might come.

At first they pretended that it would be faster to take to the minor roads, but by the time we were as far as the military exercise zone they had grown tired of their game, or had decided that it was no longer necessary.

Fabre, in the back seat with me, was watching the road with unusual attention. ‘You missed the turn-off,' he told the driver. He tugged at his finger joints one by one, as if he was field-stripping his hand to clear a blockage.

The driver made no sign that he'd heard, until finally he said, ‘I didn't miss
anything.
There's that tumbledown shrine and the wire,
then
comes the turn-off.'

‘Perhaps you are right,' said Fabre. His face was even whiter than white, and he chewed down on one of his tablets in a rare display of emotion. He became conscious of my stare and turned to me. ‘We must get the right road or we'll be lost – it's one of those short-cuts.'

‘Oh, one of
those
short-cuts,' I said. I nodded.

He rubbed his hands together and smiled. Perhaps he'd realized that there had been undertones in that last exchange which denied any last chance that they were policemen.

Fabre spotted a wayside shrine with a few miserable wild flowers in a tin at the foot of a tormented Christ. ‘You're right,' he told the driver. We turned on to the narrow side road.

‘Take it easy,' Fabre said to the driver, his face tightening as the suspension thumped the rutted track. He was nervous now, as the time came closer. They were both nervous. The driver had stiffened at the wheel, and he seemed to shrink even as I watched him.

‘Not the right-hand fork,' Fabre warned the driver. And then I suddenly recognized the landscape. A few stunted trees on rolling hills: I'd not seen this place since the war. We were taking the high road to the west side of the Tix quarry: Champion's quarry, as it now was. The old open-cast workings had been abandoned since the late 'fifties, and the mine had proved so expensive that it had closed a few years later. The quarry: it would be an ideal place.

As we came up the slope to the brink of the quarry I saw the same dilapidated wooden huts that had been there ever since I could remember. Fabre squirmed. He thought he was a hell of a hard kid, pulses racing and eyes narrowed. I saw him as a grotesque caricature of myself when young. Well, perhaps I was the same ‘yesterday's spy' that Champion was, but my heart wasn't pounding. Shakespeare got me all wrong: no stiffening of the sinews, no summoning of the blood, not even ‘hard favour'd rage'. There was only a cold sad ache in the gut – no longer any need to simulate it. And – such was the monumental ego a job like mine needs – I was already consoling myself for the distress that killing them would inevitably cause me.

I was concentrating on the pros and cons of striking while the driver had his hands full of car, and Fabre had his attention distracted. But because they were watching the road ahead, they took in the scene some five seconds before I did – and five seconds in this job is a long weekend elsewhere – ten seconds is for ever!

‘
Merde
!' said Fabre softly. ‘She's escaped.' Then I saw all: the woman in the short fur coat, identical to the one that Fabre was wearing, and the man on his knees, almost hidden in the thorns and long grass. The man kicked frantically to free himself. There were two loud bangs. The man in the grass convulsed at each gunshot and fell flat and out of sight. Then there came the thump of the wooden door, as the fur-coated woman disappeared into the hut.

Fabre had the car door open by that time. The car slewed to a stop in thick mud, almost sliding into a ditch. Even before he was out of the car Fabre had his Browning Model Ten automatic in his hand. Well, that was the right pistol! I knew plenty of French cops with those: smooth finish, three safeties and only twenty ounces in your pocket. A pro gun, and this one had long since lost its blueing. It was scratched, worn shiny at the edges, and I didn't like it. Fabre stood behind the open car door, ballooning his body gently, so as never to be a static target. He was squinting into the dark shadows under the trees. Only men who have been in gunfire do that instinctively as this man was doing it.

The clouds parted to let the sun through. I glimpsed the face at the hut window. I remember thinking that it must be Madame Baroni, the mother of Caty and Pina, but she had died in Ravensbrück in 1944. Two more shots: one of them banged into the car body, and made the metal sing. Not Pina's mother but Pina herself, Caty's sister, her face drawn tight in fear. There was a flash of reflected light as the sun caught the nickel-finish revolver that she levelled through the broken window.

She depressed the gun and fired again at the man in the undergrowth. I remembered the German courier she'd killed, when we were together at the farmhouse. She'd shot him six times.

‘You cow!' Fabre's face contorted, and he brought his Browning up in a two-hand clasp, bending his knees slightly, FBI target-shooting style. He'd need only one shot at this range. His knuckles were white before I made my decision.

I pulled the trigger of my revolver. The noise inside the car was deafening. At a range of less than two yards, the first bullet lifted him under the arm like a bouncer's grip. He was four yards away, and tilted at forty-five degrees, as the second shot collapsed him like a deckchair and threw him into the ditch. My ears rang with the noise. There was the smell of scorched cloth, and two holes in my coat.

Ahmed jumped out of the car at the same moment I did. With the car between us, he was able to cover a lot of ground before I was able to shoot. The bullet howled into the sky, miles away from him. I cursed, and moved back to the place where Fabre had fallen. I was cautious, but I needn't have been. He was dead. The Browning was still gripped tight in his hands. He was a real gunny. His mouth was open, teeth clenched, and his eyes askew. I knew it was another nightmare. I steeled myself to see that face again in many dreams, and I was not to be wrong about it.

Cautiously I moved up the track towards the wooden shack, keeping low and behind the scrub. I was on the very brink of the quarry before the door opened. Pina emerged, tight-lipped, dishevelled, her fur coat ripped so that its lining hung below the hem. The man she'd shot was dead: a dark-skinned youth in leather jacket and woollen hat, his tweed trousers still entangled in the thorns.

‘Charlie! Charlie! Oh, Charlie!' Pina pushed the revolver into her pocket and then washed her dry hands, in some curious rite of abnegation. ‘They were going to kill me, Charlie. They were going to kill me. They said so.'

‘Are you all right, Pina?'

‘We must get away from here, Charlie.'

There was a flash of lightning and a prolonged rumble of thunder.

Pina mumbled a prayer into my shirt-front. I held her tight, but I didn't relax. From here I could see right down to the puddles in the bottom of the quarry. It was a spooky place for me, its vast space brimful of memories and fears. In the war I'd hidden here, listening to the barking of the search dogs, and the whistles of the Feldgendarmerie as they came, shoulder to shoulder, across these very fields. Pina clutched my hand, and she felt there the anxious sweat that my memories provoked.

‘But where?' she said. ‘Where can we go?' Again, lightning lit up the underside of the dark clouds, and a perfect disc of its blue light flashed from the bracken a few yards in front of me. Violently I pushed Pina to the ground, and threw myself down into firing position. With one hand I pushed my spectacles against my face and capped one eye. With the other hand I put the pistol's foresight near the place where I'd seen the glint of reflected light. I pulled the trigger three times.

The sound of the gunfire was reflected off the sloping ground: three loud bangs, and the echo of them came rolling back from the far side of the quarry. Pina crawled nearer. ‘Keep down,' I said.

‘This grass! I'm soaked,' she complained.

‘It's a sniperscope, a perfect disc of light. It must have been sighted on us.'

I rolled over enough to get some bullets from my pocket and push them into the chamber. Then I picked up the empty cases and wrapped them in my handkerchief. There was no point in trying to be clever about powder traces – the bullet holes in my pocket would be enough.

‘They will try to get to the car,' said Pina. ‘If you could get to that bracken you'd shoot anyone who tried to get down to the track where the car is.'

‘You're riding the wrong sideshow,' I growled. ‘I'm selling tickets for the tunnel of love.'

‘You're going to let them take the car?'

‘I'll check their oil, and polish the windscreen for them.'

Pina gave that sort of whistle that well-bred French ladies resort to when they want to swear. It was then that the Negro driver broke cover and went racing off down the slope towards the main road. If there was more than one man, this had to be the moment to rush them. I jumped up and ran as fast as I could to where I'd seen the glint of light. Pina followed me.