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Jean-Paul said, ‘And that’s how you now see me?’
‘Exactly. It’s laughable how I once worried that you were younger than me. You’re not younger than me at all. You are an old fogey. Now I no longer love you I can see that. You are an old fogey of twenty-eight and I am a young girl of thiry-two.’
‘You bitch.’
‘My poor little one. Don’t be angry. Think of what I tell you. Open your mind. Open your mind and you will discover what you want so much: how to be eternally a young man.’
Jean-Paul looked at her. He wasn’t as angry as I would have expected. ‘Perhaps I am a shallow and vain fool,’ he said. ‘But when I met you, Maria, I truly loved you. It didn’t last more than a week, but for me it was real. It was the only time in my life that I truly believed myself capable of something worthwhile. You were older than me but I liked that. I wanted you to show me the way out of the stupid labyrinth life I led. You are highly intelligent and you, I thought, could show me the solid good reasons for living. But you failed me, Maria. Like all women you are weak-willed and indecisive. You can be loyal only for a moment to whoever is near to you. You have never made one objective decision in your life. You have never really wanted to be strong and free. You have never done one decisive thing that you truly believed in. You are a puppet, Maria, with many puppeteers, and they quarrel over who shall operate you.’ His final words were sharp and bitter and he stared hard at Datt.
‘Children,’ Datt admonished. ‘Just as we were all getting along so well together.’
Jean-Paul smiled a tight, film-star smile. ‘Turn off your charm,’ he said to Datt. ‘You always patronize me.’
‘If I’ve done something to give offence …’ said Datt. He didn’t finish the sentence but looked around at his guests, raising his eyebrows to show how difficult it was to even imagine such a possibility.
‘You think you can switch me on and off as you please,’ said Jean-Paul. ‘You think you can treat me like a child; well you can’t. Without me you would be in big trouble now. If I had not brought you the information about Loiseau’s raid upon your clinic you would be in prison now.’
‘Perhaps,’ said Datt, ‘and perhaps not.’
‘Oh I know what you want people to believe,’ said Jean-Paul. ‘I know you like people to think you are mixed up with the SDECE and secret departments of the Government, but we know better. I saved you. Twice. Once with Annie, once with Maria.’
‘Maria saved me,’ said Datt, ‘if anyone did.’
‘Your precious daughter,’ said Jean-Paul, ‘is good for only one thing.’ He smiled. ‘And what’s more she hates you. She said you were foul and evil; that’s how much she wanted to save you before I persuaded her to help.’
‘Did you say that about me?’ Datt asked Maria, and even as she was about to reply he held up his hand. ‘No, don’t answer. I have no right to ask you such a question. We all say things in anger that later we regret.’ He smiled at Jean-Paul. ‘Relax, my good friend, and have another glass of wine.’
Datt filled Jean-Paul’s glass but Jean-Paul didn’t pick it up. Datt pointed the neck of the bottle at it. ‘Drink.’ He picked up the glass and held it to Jean-Paul. ‘Drink and say that these black thoughts are not your truly considered opinion of old Datt who has done so much for you.’
Jean-Paul brought the flat of his hand round in an angry sweeping gesture. Perhaps he didn’t like to be told that he owed Datt anything. He sent the full glass flying across the room and swept the bottle out of Datt’s hands. It slid across the table, felling the glasses like ninepins and flooding the cold blond liquid across the linen and cutlery. Datt stood up, awkwardly dabbing at his waistcoat with a table napkin. Jean-Paul stood up too. The only sound was of the wine, still chug-chugging out of the bottle.
‘Salaud!’ said Datt. ‘You attack me in my own home! You casse-pieds! You insult me in front of my guests and assault me when I offer you wine!’ He dabbed at himself and threw the wet napkin across the table as a sign that the meal would not continue. The cutlery jangled mournfully. ‘You will learn,’ said Datt. ‘You will learn here and now.’
Jean-Paul finally understood the hornet’s nest he had aroused in Datt’s brain. His face was set and defiant, but you didn’t have to be an amateur psychologist to know that if he could set the clock back ten minutes he’d rewrite his script.
‘Don’t touch me,’ Jean-Paul said. ‘I have villainous friends just as you do, and my friends and I can destroy you, Datt. I know all about you, the girl Annie Couzins and why she had to be killed. There are a few things you don’t know about that story. There are a few more things that the police would like to know too. Touch me, you fat old swine, and you’ll die as surely as the girl did.’ He looked around at us all. His forehead was moist with exertion and anxiety. He managed a grim smile. ‘Just touch me, just you try …!’
Datt said nothing, nor did any one of us. Jean-Paul gabbled on until his steam ran out. ‘You need me,’ he finally said to Datt, but Datt didn’t need him any more and there was no one in the room who didn’t know it.
‘Robert!’ shouted Datt. I don’t know if Robert was standing in the sideboard or in a crack in the floor, but he certainly came in fast. Robert was the tractor driver who had slapped the one-eared dog. He was as tall and broad as Jean-Paul but there the resemblance ended: Robert was teak against Jean-Paul’s papier-mâché.
Right behind Robert was the woman in the white apron. Now that they were standing side by side you could see a family resemblance: Robert was clearly the woman’s son. He walked forward and stood before Datt like a man waiting to be given a medal. The old woman stood in the doorway with a 12-bore shotgun held steady in her fists. It was a battered old relic, the butt was scorched and stained and there was a patch of rust around the muzzle as though it had been propped in a puddle. It was just the sort of thing that might be kept around the hall of a country house for dealing with rats and rabbits: an ill-finished mass-production job without styling or finish. It wasn’t at all the sort of gun I’d want to be shot with. That’s why I remained very, very still.
Datt nodded towards me, and Robert moved in and brushed me lightly but efficiently. ‘Nothing,’ he said. Robert walked over to Jean-Paul. In Jean-Paul’s suit he found a 6.35 Mauser automatic. He sniffed it and opened it, spilled the bullets out into his hand and passed the gun, magazine and bullets to Datt. Datt handled them as though they were some kind of virus. He reluctantly dropped them into his pocket.
‘Take him away, Robert,’ said Datt. ‘He makes too much noise in here. I can’t bear people shouting.’ Robert nodded and turned upon Jean-Paul. He made a movement of his chin and a clicking noise of the sort that encourages horses. Jean-Paul buttoned his jacket carefully and walked to the door.
‘We’ll have the meat course now,’ Datt said to the woman.
She smiled with more deference than humour and withdrew backwards, muzzle last.
‘Take him out, Robert,’ repeated Datt.
‘Maybe you think you don’t,’ said Jean-Paul earnestly, ‘but you’ll find …’ His words were lost as Robert pulled him gently through the door and closed it.
‘What are you going to do to him?’ asked Maria.
‘Nothing, my dear,’ said Datt. ‘But he’s become more and more tiresome. He must be taught a lesson. We must frighten him, it’s for the good of all of us.’
‘You’re going to kill him,’ said Maria.
‘No, my dear.’ He stood near the fireplace, and smiled reassuringly.
‘You are, I can feel it in the atmosphere.’
Datt turned his back on us. He toyed with the clock on the mantelpiece. He found the key for it and began to wind it up. It was a noisy ratchet.
Maria turned to me. ‘Are they going to kill him?’ she asked.
‘I think they are,’ I said.
She went across to Datt and grabbed his arm. ‘You mustn’t,’ she said. ‘It’s too horrible. Please don’t. Please father, please don’t, if you love me.’ Datt put his arm around her paternally but said nothing.
‘He’s a wonderful person,’ Maria said. She was speaking of Jean-Paul. ‘He would never betray you. Tell him,’ she asked me, ‘he must not kill Jean-Paul.’
‘You mustn’t kill him,’ I said.
‘You must make it more convincing than that,’ said Datt. He patted Maria. ‘If our friend here can tell us a way to guarantee his silence, some other way, then perhaps I’ll agree.’
He waited but I said nothing. ‘Exactly,’ said Datt.
‘But I love him,’ said Maria.
‘That can make no difference,’ said Datt. ‘I’m not a plenipotentiary from God, I’ve got no halos or citations to distribute. He stands in the way – not of me but of what I believe in: he stands in the way because he is spiteful and stupid. I do believe, Maria, that even if it were you I’d still do the same.’
Maria stopped being a suppliant. She had that icy calm that women take on just before using their nails.
‘I love him,’ said Maria. That meant that he should never be punished for anything except infidelity. She looked at me. ‘It’s your fault for bringing me here.’
Datt heaved a sigh and left the room.
‘And your fault that he’s in danger,’ she said.
‘Okay,’ I said, ‘blame me if you want to. On my colour soul the stains don’t show.’
‘Can’t you stop them?’ she said.
‘No,’ I told her, ‘it’s not that sort of film.’
Her face contorted as though cigar smoke was getting in her eyes. It went squashy and she began to sob. She didn’t cry. She didn’t do that mascara-respecting display of grief that winkles tear-drops out of the eyes with the corner of a tiny lace handkerchief while watching the whole thing in a well-placed mirror. She sobbed and her face collapsed. The mouth sagged, and the flesh puckered and wrinkled like blow-torched paintwork. Ugly sight, and ugly sound.
‘He’ll die,’ she said in a strange little voice.
I don’t know what happened next. I don’t know whether Maria began to move before the sound of the shot or after. Just as I don’t know whether Jean-Paul had really lunged at Robert, as Robert later told us. But I was right behind Maria as she opened the door. A .45 is a big pistol. The first shot had hit the dresser, ripping a hole in the carpentry and smashing half a dozen plates. They were still falling as the second shot fired. I heard Datt shouting about his plates and saw Jean-Paul spinning drunkenly like an exhausted whipping top. He fell against the dresser, supporting himself on his hand, and stared at me pop-eyed with hate and grimacing with pain, his cheeks bulging as though he was looking for a place to vomit. He grabbed at his white shirt and tugged it out of his trousers. He wrenched it so hard that the buttons popped and pinged away across the room. He had a great bundle of shirt in his hand now and he stuffed it into his mouth like a conjurer doing a trick called ‘how to swallow my white shirt’. Or how to swallow my pink-dotted shirt. How to swallow my pink shirt, my red, and finally dark-red shirt. But he never did the trick. The cloth fell away from his mouth and his blood poured over his chin, painting his teeth pink and dribbling down his neck and ruining his shirt. He knelt upon the ground as if to pray but his face sank to the floor and he died without a word, his ear flat against the ground, as if listening for hoof-beats pursuing him to another world.
He was dead. It’s difficult to wound a man with a .45. You either miss them or blow them in half.
The legacy the dead leave us are life-size effigies that only slightly resemble their former owners. Jean-Paul’s bloody body only slightly resembled him: its thin lips pressed together and the small circular plaster just visible on the chin.
Robert was stupefied. He was staring at the gun in horror. I stepped over to him and grabbed the gun away from him. I said, ‘You should be ashamed,’ and Datt repeated that.
The door opened suddenly and Hudson and Kuang stepped into the kitchen. They looked down at the body of Jean-Paul. He was a mess of blood and guts. No one spoke, they were waiting for me. I remembered that I was the one holding the gun. ‘I’m taking Kuang and Hudson and I’m leaving,’ I said. Through the open door to the hall I could see into the library, its table covered with their scientific documents: photos, maps and withered plants with large labels on them.
‘Oh no you don’t,’ said Datt.
‘I have to return Hudson intact because that’s part of the deal. The information he’s given Kuang has to be got back to the Chinese Government or else it wasn’t much good delivering it. So I must take Kuang too.’
‘I think he’s right,’ said Kuang. ‘It makes sense, what he says.’
‘How do you know what makes sense?’ said Datt. ‘I’m arranging your movements, not this fool; how can we trust him? He admits this task is for the Americans.’
‘It makes sense,’ said Kuang again. ‘Hudson’s information is genuine. I can tell: it fills out what I learnt from that incomplete set of papers you passed to me last week. If the Americans want me to have the information, then they must want it to be taken back home.’
‘Can’t you see that they might want to capture you for interrogation?’ said Datt.
‘Rubbish!’ I interrupted. ‘I could have arranged that at any time in Paris without risking Hudson out here in the middle of nowhere.’
‘They are probably waiting down the road,’ said Datt. ‘You could be dead and buried in five minutes. Out here in the middle of the country no one would hear, no one would see the diggings.’
‘I’ll take that chance,’ said Kuang. ‘If he can get Hudson into France on false papers, he can get me out.’
I watched Hudson, fearful that he would say I’d done no such thing for him, but he nodded sagely and Kuang seemed reassured.
‘Come with us,’ said Hudson, and Kuang nodded agreement. The two scientists seemed to be the only ones in the room with any mutual trust.
I was reluctant to leave Maria but she just waved her hand and said she’d be all right. She couldn’t take her eyes off Jean-Paul’s body.
‘Cover him, Robert,’ said Datt.
Robert took a table-cloth from a drawer and covered the body. ‘Go,’ Maria called again to me, and then she began to sob. Datt put his arm around her and pulled her close. Hudson and Kuang collected their data together and then, still waving the gun around, I showed them out and followed.
As we went across the hall the old woman emerged carrying a heavily laden tray. She said, ‘There’s still the poulet sauté chasseur.’
‘Vive le sport,’ I said.
31
From the garage we took the camionette – a tiny grey corrugated-metal van – because the roads of France are full of them. I had to change gear constantly for the small motor, and the tiny headlights did no more than probe the hedgerows. It was a cold night and I envied the warm grim-faced occupants of the big Mercs and Citroëns that roared past us with just a tiny peep of the horn, to tell us they had done so.
Kuang seemed perfectly content to rely upon my skill to get him out of France. He leaned well back in the hard upright seat, folded his arms and closed his eyes as though performing some oriental contemplative ritual. Now and again he spoke. Usually it was a request for a cigarette.
The frontier was little more than a formality. The Paris office had done us proud: three good British passports – although the photo of Hudson was a bit dodgy – over twenty-five pounds in small notes (Belgian and French), and some bills and receipts to correspond to each passport. I breathed more easily after we were through. I’d done a deal with Loiseau so he’d guaranteed no trouble, but I still breathed more easily after we’d gone through.
Hudson lay flat upon some old blankets in the rear. Soon he began to snore. Kuang spoke.
‘Are we going to an hotel or are you going to blow one of your agents to shelter me?’
‘This is Belgium,’ I said. ‘Going to an hotel is like going to a police station.’
‘What will happen to him?’
‘The agent?’ I hesitated. ‘He’ll be pensioned off. It’s bad luck but he was the next due to be blown.’
‘Age?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘And you have someone better in the area?’
‘You know we can’t talk about that,’ I said.
‘I’m not interested professionally,’ said Kuang. ‘I’m a scientist. What the British do in France or Belgium is nothing to do with me, but if we are blowing this man I owe him his job.’
‘You owe him nothing,’ I said. ‘What the hell do you think this is? He’ll be blown because it’s his job. Just as I’m conducting you because that’s my job. I’m doing it as a favour. You owe no one anything, so forget it. As far as I’m concerned you are a parcel.’
Kuang inhaled deeply on his cigarette, then removed it from his mouth with his long delicate fingers and stubbed it into the ashtray. I imagined him killing Annie Couzins. Passion or politics? He rubbed the tobacco shreds from his fingertips like a pianist practising trills.
As we passed through the tightly shuttered villages the rough pavé hammered the suspension and bright-eyed cats glared into our lights and fled. One a little slower than the others had been squashed as flat as an ink blot. Each successive set of wheels contributed a new pattern to the little tragedy that morning would reveal.
I had the camionette going at its top speed. The needles were still and the loud noise of the motor held a constant note. Everything was unchanging except a brief fusillade of loose gravel or the sudden smell of tar or the beep of a faster car.
‘We are near to Ypres,’ said Kuang.
‘This was the Ypres salient,’ I said. Hudson asked for a cigarette. He must have been awake for some time. ‘Ypres,’ said Hudson as he lit the cigarette, ‘was that the site of a World War One battle?’
‘One of the biggest,’ I said. ‘There’s scarcely an Englishman that didn’t have a relative die here. Perhaps a piece of Britain died here too.’
Hudson looked out of the rear windows of the van. ‘It’s quite a place to die,’ he said.
32
Across the Ypres salient the dawn sky was black and getting lower and blacker like a Bulldog Drummond ceiling. It’s a grim region, like a vast ill-lit military depot that goes on for miles. Across country go the roads: narrow slabs of concrete not much wider than a garden path, and you have the feeling that to go off the edge is to go into bottomless mud. It’s easy to go around in circles and even easier to imagine that you are. Every few yards there are the beady-eyed green-and-white notices that point the way to military cemeteries where regiments of Blanco-white headstones parade. Death pervades the topsoil but untidy little farms go on operating, planting their cabbages right up to ‘Private of the West Riding – Known only to God’. The living cows and dead soldiers share the land and there are no quarrels. Now in the hedges evergreen plants were laden with tiny red berries as though the ground was sweating blood. I stopped the car. Ahead was Passchendaele, a gentle upward slope.
‘Which way were your soldiers facing?’ Kuang said.
‘Up the slope,’ I said. ‘They advanced up the slope, sixty pounds on their backs and machine guns down their throats.’
Kuang opened the window and threw his cigarette butt on to the road. There was an icy gust of wind.
