Soldier No More Page 19

  “Waiting for me out in the yard.”

  “Ah! It was permitted that I make contact with you through her, you understand?” Galles’s expression became serious, as if to reassure him that he had not approached Jilly casually, and Roche instantly regretted his impatience. Rather than scorn the little man’s enthusiasm for the big car, which was in itself possibly no more than a cover for being here now, he ought to remember that Galles had been fighting Nazis—real fascists— when he himself had been working for his grammar school entrance.

  “Of course, M’sieur Galles.”

  “Very well, m’sieur. You are to telephone Paris as soon as conveniently possible.”

  “There’s a phone in the house, I believe—“

  “More urgently, there is an American whom you are likely to meet, by name Bradford—“

  “Mike Bradford. He’s staying with Audley, yes?” Roche produced a polite frown. “A writer of some sort?”

  “You’ve met him already?”

  “No, just heard about him. He’s a writer?”

  “Of some sort—yes, m’sieur. And, it is thought, an agent of some sort also, of the American CIA.”

  Roche deepened the frown. “What the devil is a CIA man doing here? He can’t be interested in Audley, surely?”

  Galles shrugged. “If we are interested in Audley …?”

  “No.” Roche shook his head. But perhaps now was the time to start playing both ends against the middle. “There’s also an Israeli staying with him, an old RAF pilot—Stein. Do you know anything about him?”

  “No, m’sieur. He was not mentioned. Only Bradford.”

  So the British didn’t know about Meriel Stephanides. If they were on to Bradford, they would not have missed her if they’d known about her, now that they’d finally got round to warning him about the opposition. But there was nothing particularly surprising about their not knowing something that the Comrades knew only too well, he reflected sadly; and, to be fair, the Comrades hadn’t performed so well either, having ‘lost’ Steffy until he’d given them her location, and never having properly ‘found’ Bradford’s Category ‘A’ status.

  But Galles was frowning at him, as though there was something he was in two minds about saying.

  “Yes, m’sieur?” he pushed the Frenchman gently.

  “I don’t know …” Galles shook his head “… but there is one that I have—how shall I say it?—not reservations, not suspicions about… but … a feeling from the old times.”

  “About Stein—the Israeli?” Roche pushed harder, and deliberately in the wrong direction. He realised that he wanted the Frenchman to say d’Auberon something-something, to save him from having to do so.

  “No, m’sieur. I refer to the beautiful one, that Milady—Mademoiselle Lexy—speaks of as ‘Steffee’.”

  “Meriel Stephanides?”

  Galles nodded. “Mademoiselle Stephanides—yes. But I have no reason … except that there is this feeling from the old times, in the war, when no reason was often good reason.”

  Roche nodded back at him. “I understand.” And bully for you, Raymond Galles! “You know she’s a Cypriot? Or Anglo-Cypriot, anyway?”

  “Ah! And you have troubles in Cyprus—as we have in Algeria?”

  Roche nodded again. “And Israeli intelligence is very strong there … You may be right—I’ll see what Paris thinks about her…” He gave Galles his own version of the in-two-minds frown.

  “Yes, m’sieur?” The Frenchman picked up the signal.

  “I have a name for you also—and also with no reason. A French name.”

  “M’sieur?”

  Here I go then! “Etienne?”

  “Etienne?”

  “He’s a friend of Audley’s, and he comes from an old local family—a distinguished family—“

  Galles’s eyes widened.

  “—and he left the government service recently, I gather. Do you know of such a person?” Roche concentrated his soul into an expression of honest curiosity.

  “But yes, m’sieur! The Vicomte Etienne!”

  “The Vicomte?”

  “Of the Château du Cingle d’Enfer—above the river, on the bend.”

  Well, at least that made the identification certain: Lexy simply hadn’t been able to twist her Anglo-Saxon tongue round Etienne d’Auberon du Cingle d’Enfer, and had reduced him in typical Lexy-fashion to ‘Tienne!

  “What d’you know about him?”

  Conflicting loyalties strove with each other in Raymond Galles’s face, his sixteen-year commitment to the British against what might well be a more ancient identification with the Languedoc, which was older than either England or France, whose armies had each arrived here as foreign occupiers in their day.

  “What d’you know of him?” repeated Roche patiently.

  Galles shrugged. “He was with the General during the war—he passed through here once, in the spring of ‘44…” he ran out of steam prematurely at that point in the history of the Lord of Hell’s River Bend, so far as Roche could translate Something-Something.

  “He was in the Bureau Central de Renseignements—or the Organisation Civile?” prompted Roche.

  Galles spread his hands. “I do not know of such things—he was with the General, that I know. But I was going to say … he was very young then. And after the war he was of the Quai d’Orsay in Paris for many years, and seldom here.”

  “But now he’s back?” Galles nodded. “Now he is back, yes.”

  So the older loyalty was the stronger. Or, if that was merely a romantic historical illusion, perhaps Galles was only a garagiste and car-hirer now, and knew no better. But either way he would have to depend on London now, and Thompson in Paris before that.

  He grinned and shrugged at the Frenchman. With all the trouble and strife poor France had had since the end of the war—with the falling franc and Indo-China, and now Algeria, and most recently Suez and the impotence of the West during the Hungarian rising against the Russians … not to mention the endless succession of governments, each as short-lived as it was feeble … no one could find much comfort in the Fourth Republic, and a one-time follower of the ageing General de Gaulle would be more disillusioned than most.

  “He’s probably just pissed-off with politics altogether,” he confided. “And I can’t say I blame him … Mollet or Bourges-Maunoury—Eden or Macmillan … they’re all the same!”

  The addition of British prime ministers to French ones appeared to do the trick: the shrug-and-grin came back to him, only more eloquently, as only a true Frenchman could package such a mixture of regret and resignation.

  Nevertheless, in view of Galles’s equivocal attitude, an over-sudden loss of interest in d’Auberon might be unwise.

  “Still, you’d better check up on him, I suppose—why he’s here, what he’s doing, and so on. Let me know if you turn up anything of interest.” He raised his hand in farewell, and then checked himself as though an afterthought had struck him. “Presumably Madame Peyrony knows about him?”

  Galles gave him a guarded look. “That is very likely,” he agreed. “She knows a great many things.”

  “The young ladies seem scared of her—“

  As Roche spoke Galles turned without warning and began to polish an imaginary blemish on the gleaming bonnet of the car.

  “What’s she like, Madame Peyrony?” persisted Roche.

  Galles went on polishing for a few seconds. When he looked up at Roche again his eyes were still on guard, but the ghost of a smile had relaxed his mouth. “She is a great lady, M’sieur Roche. And my advice to you is …if you should decide to lie to her about anything, lie very carefully.”

  Roche left him to his polishing.

  XI

  IF IT WAS gloomy under the trees which overshadowed the Chateau Peyrony on all sides, it was positively sepulchral inside the house: what little evening light the leaves permitted to approach it was further checked by the heavy drapery at the windows; and the single electric bulb in the
chandelier high above Roche’s head, inadequately fed by Raymond Galles’s ancient generator, did little more than illuminate the crystal droplets around it.

  “Christ!” murmured Roche under his breath.

  “Yes,” whispered Jilly, who could hear him because she was standing very close to him. “Decor by Charles Addams, Lexy says. With additional advice from Boris Karloff. And it’s not much different in broad daylight, either.”

  “I was thinking of Dickens.” He could smell her perfume, but beyond it smells of dust and unopened rooms. By comparison, The Old House at Steeple Horley had smelt fresh and had been full of light and excitement.

  “Dickens?” She felt for his hand.

  “Miss Havisham’s house.” He squeezed her cold fingers.

  “With me as Jean Simmons and you as John Mills, you mean?” She squeezed back. “But you’re too tall for him … we’ll have to recast with Stewart Grainger as Pip—okay?”

  Her juvenile film-going must date from the same period as his own. “If there’s a choice I’d prefer to be James Mason,” he hissed down at her.

  She shook her head. “Sorry—no resemblance … apart from the miscasting.”

  Somewhere in the bowels of the house a door closed.

  “David Audley’s got an old house, Lexy says,” whispered Jilly. “Full of ghosts, she says it is. Like this one.”

  It was on the tip of Roche’s tongue to agree, with the only difference being that the most likely ghost in The Old House would be wearing smartly-pressed battle-dress. It also rather suprised him that Lexy, of all people, had picked up such vibrations.

  But neither of those thoughts would do. “This isn’t a very old house, not really …” He screwed up his eyes in an attempt to penetrate the gloom “… Second Empire, at a guess. The furniture looks like Second Empire—“

  “Sssh!” Her fingers tightened, and then let go.

  The crone-in-waiting, well camouflaged in her shapeless black dress, reappeared on the landing halfway up the staircase ahead of them, like one of the Chateau Peyrony’s resident spectres.

  But, ghost or not, she was beckoning them now.

  Their destination, as soon as they’d reached the main landing at the head of the stairs, was clearly marked by the bright strip of light under the door in front of them, even before the duty ghost tapped on it.

  “Entrez.”

  At least the voice was thoroughly unghostlike, with only the slightest quaver of age beneath its feminine strength.

  Roche followed Jilly Baker out of the gloom into the light.

  The first thing he saw, other than a general impression of a room full of things which only its size prevented from seeming cluttered, was the fire burning in a grate, set in a white marble fireplace surmounted by the inevitable ormolu clock and a huge portrait of what looked like the Empress Eugenie.

  “My dear Gillian—“ the voice, with its strangely softened ‘G’, orientated him immediately to the speaker “—how good of you to come!”

  Unlike Madame Goutard, the shopkeeper’s wife, Madame Peyrony had never been a great beauty—the face was too thin, the nose too Roman, even allowing for the depredations of time which had sharpened both. And the eye which settled on Roche, too, did not appraise him with anything like the once-upon-a-time might-have-been Goutard longing: either he was out of her class, too far below it for consideration, or sex had never figured largely in her calculations of worth and need.

  “English, Madame? Je crois … ici on parle français, n’est-ce pas?” The confidence had come back into Jilly’s voice, and into her face.

  “One speaks French to those who need to have French spoken to them, my dear—like the incorrigible Alexandra, who has a good ear, but no mind … and that young man, David Audley, who has too much mind, but no ear.” Her eyes, which had been darting back and forwards from Roche to Jilly, finally settled on Roche. “But there are those who do not need such instruction, so I gather … . Introduce me, Gillian, my dear.”

  There was something wrong with her English. It was idiomatically perfect, but there was something he couldn’t pin down in her pronunciation that wasn’t right. And yet, even after years of listening to Englishmen murder the French language, he couldn’t make out just where Madame Peyrony was wounding the English one.

  “Pardonnez-moi, Madame—I mean …” Gillian looked at Roche desperately. “Madame—Captain David Roche, of Supreme Headquarters NATO, attached OEECD liaison, Allied Forces Central Europe, Fontainebleau.”

  Roche almost smiled, almost wanted to hug her for trying to do her best for him with that mouthful. It was unfortunate that Lexy had already spoilt it, that was all.

  “Captain?” The demotion unsettled her momentarily.

  “Madame,” Roche willed himself forward to take the yellow hand, which was as thin-skinned as the carpet under his feet was thin, equally time-worn. “The incorrigible Lady Alexandra somewhat anticipated my promotion to higher rank, I believe.”

  She smiled at him then, showing small ivory-white teeth quite unlike Madame Goulard’s yellow fangs; and the smile was what he wanted, because what he wanted was what she knew about the Lord of the Devil’s River Bend, and betraying Lexy was a small price to pay for that.

  “But a para nevertheless? Is that the English?” The smile mixed hope with doubt now. “We never had a … a parachute soldier through here during the war, so I am unfamiliar with the correct word.” Those two old witches have both got nephews with the paras in Algeria, remembered Roche.

  Well—he would give her what she wanted, a para or a horse-marine, or a Bengal lancer if she wanted it.

  “Paratrooper, Madame.” He didn’t dare look at Jilly, he just hoped she wouldn’t give him away, that she would let him lie carefully And there was Lexy’s father’s advice on that subject, even on that same lie: Tell a whopper and make a proper job of it! “3rd Battalion, Parachute Regiment.”

  That was a big enough one, anyway: the 3rd had dropped at Suez last year, with Massu’s 2ième RPC.

  She looked at him proudly. “My nephew is a para, Captain Roche—at this moment in Algiers.”

  “With Massu?” Roche didn’t have to pretend to be impressed: the word from Suez had been that Massu and his men had been impressive.

  “With Massu, yes.” She inclined her head slightly. “And Bigeard.” Then she shifted her gaze to Jilly. “And now you may leave us, Gillian my dear.”

  Jilly blinked at her. “Madame?”

  “Sit down, Captain Roche,” commanded Madame Peyrony, pointing to the chair opposite her own, beside the fire.

  “But Madame—“ began Jilly huskily. “Madame—“

  Madame Peyrony transfixed her with a look, “I do not need a chaperone, at my age … You are going to the Tower tonight—is that not correct?”

  The orgy!

  “Yes, but—“ Jilly tried to look at Roche.

  “Very well!” The Orgy in the Tower didn’t appear to worry Madame Peyrony in the least. “Go and superintend Alexandra’s toilette, then. Somebody must do it—and the Jewess will not—so it must be you. So … allez-vous en, my dear, and don’t argue the toss with me.”

  Roche did a double-take. He had just been watching Jilly’s resistance crumble when don’t argue the toss was incongruously delivered in a strange nasal tone only a moment after he had puzzled out the Jewess— the Jewess was Meriel Stephanides, of course—it had to be … and the nuance of anti-semitism (never far away in this class—shades of Captain Dreyfus!) was really no surprise at all. But don’t argue the toss—?

  “Off you go, then!” Madame Peyrony gestured imperiously to dismiss the super-intelligent female ornament of the British Embassy in Paris.

  The super-intelligent ornament went like a lamb, without a second glance at the ersatz paratrooper from Fontainebleau, who sat down like another lamb as he had been told to do. “Now, Captain Roche—“ Captain Roche was a little bit too hot already after having been too cold, Captain Roche decided.

  “—
what exactly is it that you are doing here?” Much too hot—

  “Doing, Madame?” Hotter still. “I’m on leave—“

  “On leave, naturally. But why here?”

  Hot, to be precise, under the collar: she shouldn’t be asking a simple question like that—accusingly, as though she didn’t expect the first answer to be truthful, thereby ruling out any conventional response about the beauty of the countryside and the attraction of foie gras and truffles. So all he was left with was Thompson’s bloody bastides—

  “I’m by way of being a student of medieval history, Madame.” God! It sounded thin, and how he wished it was Thompson himself who had to spread it! “You have some very fine bastides round here—Beaumont and Monpazier and Domme, for example.”

  The only thing to say for the bastides was they were so unlikely that she might accept them …

  “In fact, I was only looking at the church in Neuville this afternoon, with Lady Alexandra—“ He paused as something changed in her expression.

  “There is wine on the table beside you. Captain. Please pour yourself a glass. Nothing for me, thank you.”

  The decanter weighed a ton and the long-stemmed glasses were as fragile as eggshells.

  He turned back to her finally, after having made heavy weather of pouring, like a peasant unused to such artefacts.

  The wine was golden-yellow, and much too sweet for him. She sat back in her chair, folding her hands on her lap. “Is it Alexandra, then?”

  “Madame?”

  “If it had been Gillian she would not have let me send her away.” It was almost as though she was talking to herself. “And you are not a mouse— paras are not mice … and it will not be the Jewess.”

  “I beg your pardon, Madame Peyrony?” It was well enough to relegate the bastides to the nearest wastepaper basket, where they belonged, but the repetition of Jewess was beginning to set his teeth on edge.

  “The question is, if it is Alexandra, is it with her father’s knowledge? The man, David Audley—he would be a mistake, but she is aware of that… but at least he would be suitable.”

  He was just about to say ‘What the hell are you talking about?’ suitably bowdlerised for the occasion, when he remembered Raymond Galles’s advice: he knew exactly what she was talking about, and that would be a stupid lie.