Soldier No More Page 21

  “ ‘Occasion’?” Roche discovered that his mouth was dry from lack of use.

  “ ‘Occasion’?” She filed the verb away for checking, but without accepting it into her vocabulary, as though it might be another ‘bum steer’. “Very well … so you have given me your confidence, which I do not believe a man such as you gives easily, and least of all after you have been insulted to your face … and by ‘an old witch’, which is Alexandra’s favoured word for me, yes?”

  But Roche was back to tight-lipped silence. If she knew that then she probably knew the maker’s tag on his underpants, and she certainly knew too much for comfort.

  But how? And, just as important—or more important—why? “So … there will be a reason for that, because no young man from Fontainebleau, who is interested in bastides, but not in Alexandra, wastes his time with ‘an old witch’—to tell her that he is a para… and also in some sort maybe a policeman too—“

  She cut off there, at ‘policeman’, quite deliberately, to let him react. But of course she had known that all along, probably even without the scattered groundbait of Fontainebleau and what he had deliberately told her.

  “Policeman, Madame?” If she wanted him to react then he would do so. But he kept denial out of his voice.

  “Of a particular type. Does it surprise you that an old witch should know about policemen?”

  No, it didn’t surprise him—not this old witch … of all old witches. If she had run escaping aircrew through her backyard, the men who had left their vernacular in her vocabulary, and lived to tell the tale, then she would know about policemen indeed; and not just the village gendarme, who was probably in her pocket, but other more particular and deadly types, from Darnand’s original Vichy bully-boys and their Milice française successors to the professionals of the Abwehr and the Gestapo, who had decimated the resistance movement between them.

  So—no lies now, except life-and-death ones. Because if she had passed herself off to all those in-some-sort policemen as an innocent old lady, then an innocent old lady she most certainly wasn’t. “No, Madame. It doesn’t surprise me.”

  She stared at him in silence for a moment. “But naturally,” she said drily. “I am … like the bastides of course.”

  Madame?”

  “You have done your homework on me.”

  Well… here was a necessary lie, if not a life-and-death one: she would surely find the truth of the combined incompetence of the British and the Russians unflattering, if not unbelievable.

  “Not quite like the bastides, Madame.” Roche decided to outflank the lie with a compliment. “Your defences are in better order.”

  She accepted the statement with the ghost of a smile, but in silence. She wanted more than that.

  “But I would be fascinated to know …” he let himself trail off deliberately. “That is to say, I’ve never thought that I looked like a policeman— of any type.” He gave her a wry smile, as boyish as he could make it, backing his instinct that if she had a weakness it might be for a young ex-para, albeit an English ex-para and an in-some-sort policeman, who could take defeat like a gentleman, with good grace.

  Again, the moment’s stare in silence. “On the face of it you don’t, Captain. But also you remind me of someone, and in part it is because I see him in you, I think.” The ghost-smile remained, but now it haunted a sad memory. “I think also … perhaps I should not tell you.”

  “Tell me.” Roche knew, with self-revealing eagerness, that if she told him this then she would withhold nothing. “Please.”

  “He was an enemy.” She weakened.

  “A Frenchman?”

  “No. A German, I think.”

  “You … think?”

  “He claimed to be a Surf Efrican. Perhaps he was, though he was not the Surf Efrican whose identity discs he had.”

  Roche frowned. “A Surf—?”

  “From Trekkersburg in the province of Natal. Pete—Pi-et—Prinsloo was his name. Or not his name.”

  South African! Her impeccable ear had picked up the original sound, and had retained it across the years.

  “He was very young and very brave—to do what he was doing needed courage, even though he was our enemy. And handsome …” Her eyes glazed for an instant, then focussed sharply on Roche. “You understand, Captain, that we ran an escape route through this place during the war?”

  Roche nodded wordlessly.

  “Of course—you know!” She nodded back. “But what you do not know is how a good escape route works—not as a continuous road, but a series of independent links which do not touch each other, so that if one link is broken the others are still safe. And … and so the way to destroy the route is not to break it, but to introduce one of your men into it, to pass along it from link to link until the last one—and then …” She blinked at Roche. “But perhaps you know all this?”

  Roche said nothing.

  “No matter. We were on our guard against such men—we had our methods too. And we could not afford to have any mercy on them, for the sake of our own lives as well as our work.” She gazed at Roche sadly. “But he was beautiful, was Pi-et. He helped me cut—“ she frowned “—no, prune is the word—prune the roses in the garden, by the wall near the stables where the sun shines all the afternoon. And that is where he lies now, Captain—under the roses in the sunshine, whoever he is—whoever he was—under my beautiful roses. Which is a good place for a brave man, do you not think—even an enemy?”

  Roche’s backbone was made of ice. The Château Peyrony, with its garden planted so, was no place for double agents.

  “You are shocked?” Madame Peyrony shook her head slowly. “I should not have told you, do you see?”

  He licked his lips. “Only—“ the word came out as a croak “—only because I remind you of him, Madame. I wouldn’t like you to think that I’m brave enough to qualify for your rose garden—I’m much too frightened for that honour.”

  For an instant he was afraid that his nervousness had made him too flippant, but then she smiled—not a ghost-smile, but a genuine old-witch-smile of pleasure edged with a touch of malice.

  “He was frightened also, Captain—courage without fear is a counterfeit louis d’or made of lead, with heads on both sides. That is how you are both alike: you are both hunters who are also hunted, I think. That is what I see in you.”

  God! thought Roche—after what Jilly had said that was more than disquieting, it was positively macabre! If she could see his fear in his face—if both of them could see it, or smell it, or somehow sense it with some sixth sense—then what had Genghis Khan and Clinton seen?

  The malice became triumphant, and then abruptly vanished, leaving only a pure smile. “But do not despair, Captain—you are the true hunter, the honourable hunter, not like my late husband and his friends with their shotguns in the forest—you are the original hunter.”

  The original hunter? For once her strange but impeccable English must have deserted her, decided Roche.

  She observed his confusion. “You are going to the Tower tonight, to the orgy?”

  The original hunter’s confusion only became greater. “To stay with David Audley?” The original hunter managed to nod to that.

  “Good. So there you will meet another Jew—Professor Stein of Cambridge University—“

  The nuance of contempt in her voice snapped the hunter’s confusion. “Colonel Stein, you mean, Madame?”

  Colonel Stein?”

  “Late of the Israeli Air Force.” Roche heard his own voice sharpen with outrage. “And late of the Royal Air Force, DFC—Distinguished Flying Cross, Madame. Professor Colonel Stein—yes?” He wasn’t going to put up with that any longer, and she wouldn’t help him if she despised him.

  Her lips compressed into a thin line, puckering the wrinkled skin round her mouth with lines of displeasure. “He is a friend of yours?”

  He gave her the wry-boyish-English-gentleman’s smile, as near as he could resurrect it, instinct encouraging him t
o stake all he had left on it. “I shalln’t know that until I’ve met him. Maybe he is—maybe he isn’t.” He shrugged. “Does he know about original hunters, this … Colonel Professor Stein?”

  The frown disappeared, and the displeasure too. She gazed at him sardonically. “As a matter of fact, he does. He is an authority on them.”

  The penny dropped inside Roche’s memory. Stein was an expert on paleolithic art and this region was famous for its prehistoric remains. “Ah— the cave painters.”

  She shook her head. “The cave painters were not hunters, they were priests—their pictures were hunting-magic, to help the hunters.”

  “Indeed?” Roche was mightily relieved to be out of recent history and safely in prehistory.

  “So I am told.” The old-witch malice flashed. “Obviously you are not an expert in such matters, but only in bastides!”

  “Among other things.” He bowed. “But you see me as an ancient hunter, nevertheless?”

  “Ancient—of course! How foolish of me, Captain!”

  “Original will do. It’s the ‘true and honourable’ I don’t quite understand, Madame.”

  “It is simple. The hunters of today in these parts kill small game with big guns—my late husband’s gun room is still full of them. But ten thousand, twenty thousand years ago in these same parts … along this ridge and in the valleys below … they hunted big game with spears tipped with flint— and the lions and tigers hunted them at the same time.”

  Yes, thought Roche grimly, and being human, or nearly, they probably hunted each other too! Though, being poor savages, they only killed each other for the pot, not to keep the red flag flying or the world safe for democracy …

  “I see.” But she was still playing with him, and she had been doing that for long enough. “So I am the hunter and the hunted. And you have concluded that simply by looking at me?”

  “And listening to you, Captain. It seems to me that so far we have both been agreeably open with each other, up to a point. From which we may further conclude that we each want something from the other, would you not say?”

  The old—witch! But what could she possibly want?

  “Fair enough, Madame.” And what had he to offer? “I won’t… how shall we say? … trifle with Lady Alexandra’s affections?”

  “ ‘Trifle’?” She savoured the word. “You think you could?”

  “I don’t see why not. They’d be worth trifling with.”

  “You would do better with Gillian.”

  “She wouldn’t have me.”

  She nodded. “Yes—she’s a clever child. But you are not here for that.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Because I have been expecting you. Or someone like you.”

  What? Someone … like me?”

  “Of course. This is my territory, Captain—my ridge, my valleys, my villages. Since a child—my territory … child, young girl, young woman, wife, mother, old woman—old witch, as Alexandra would say. So the spells here are my spells, not yours—not David Audley’s, not the Jewess’s, not any stranger’s, but mine. You are a hunter, Captain, but now you are hunting in my territory. You are not the first of your kind, remember?” Roche remembered the rose garden, and the young German. “But I do not know everything any more—there was a time when I did, but times change—“

  And on whose side was Madame Peyrony, for God’s sake? “—yet I still feel the pulse—I know when there is something there in the dark which should not be there, that something is loose out there.” She pointed towards the window.

  The light in the room turned the late evening outside into inky blackness. But that ‘something loose’ was nothing so innocent as any sabre-toothed tiger or cave bear out of the original hunter’s deepest memory: it was the modern horror of man stalking man, the unknown enemy which Wimpy would have identified as negotium perambulans in tenebris—something wicked, to make the thumbs prick … something hunting out of human conviction, not out of honest hunger …

  Christ! If he continued along this road he would reduce himself to a quivering jelly of fear, out of pure imagination! There were only men and women out there, like himself; and Madame Peyrony was only a frightened old woman, by herself in a frightening old house in the dark; and she was only on her side, and he was only on his side; and all each of them wanted to do was to survive, and not go into the dark.

  He wanted to ask her how she knew all this, but there wasn’t time, and probably she wouldn’t tell him, and it didn’t matter because he believed her anyway, because what she had said fitted in with what he already knew.

  Much more to the point, she had something to give him—she would know things about Audley and all the rest of them, but most of all about Etienne d’Auberon du Cingle d’Enfer, about whom neither the British nor the Russians appeared to know. For now he had something to offer her in return, to bargain with, and he only had to make the offer, that was all. “Very well, Madame—I will hunt the thing for you—right?”

  She had expected him to say that. “And in return, Captain?”

  In return, you will make hunting-magic for me. You will make pictures for me.”

  XII

  NEITHER OF THE girls objected very strongly when Roche told them that he was going to Neuville to make his phone call.

  “You could have phoned from the château, you know,” said Jilly, demurring more for form’s sake than from genuine irritation, judging by the kindness of her tone. “La Peyrony lets us phone.”

  “But she also listens in on the extension,” said Lexy. “I distinctly heard the click when she did it last time—I jolly nearly asked her if she minded me speaking English on her line, just to let her know I was on to her. But then I thought ‘what the hell’, and I got my own back by referring to her throughout as ‘that old witch’… no, I don’t blame you one bit, David darling. The only thing is, we’re late already and it’s a quarter of an hour there if you step on the gas, and quarter of an hour back, so we’ll be even later still—“

  “Since when did you ever worry about being late?” murmured Jilly. “You’ll be late for your wedding, always supposing you get the day right.”

  “Chance would be a fine thing—if I should be so lucky!” Lexy tossed her head, and then grinned at Roche. “But she’s right—and Steffy’s still absent without leave, so we can always blame her… and it’ll give them time to get tanked up and good-tempered before we arrive—so what the hell!”

  “It’ll also give you time to bone up on Galla Placidia and the hairy Visigoths, Lexy dear,” said Jilly, rummaging among a pile of books on the chair beside her. “A bit of last minute swotting among the footnotes in the back is what you need—I bet you haven’t read them.”

  “Oh—eff Galla-bloody-Placidia!” exclaimed Lexy.

  “That’s undoubtedly what they did—or King Ataulf certainly did—but there’s no need to put it so crudely—“ Jilly continued to rummage “—ah!! Here we are!”

  “But I’m on holiday!” protested Lexy. “And I have a broken heart to mend!”

  “Broken fiddlesticks! You have a job to do, and I intend to see that you do it—here!” Jilly tossed a book at Lexy.

  Lexy made a clumsy attempt to catch the book, succeeding only in deflecting it onwards across the room to strike Roche painfully on the shin. “Oops! Sorry, David!”

  Roche bent down to retrieve the book, which had become separated from its dust-jacket. As he reassembled the two his eye was caught by the jacket’s design, which was dominated by the face and bare shoulders of a beautiful woman who appeared to be wearing only jewellery, and by two men, one heavily-bearded and blond and the other dark-haired and clean-shaven. All three were drawn in a mosaic background in which the title of the book itself was picked out in purple and gold—Princess in the Sunset by Antonia Palfrey. The whole effect was striking and yet somehow vulgar, oddly contrasting with the blurred photo of the bespectacled Miss Palfrey on the back flap.

  The book itself had fallen
open at its first page—

  “I, Sidonius Simplidus, Bishop of Ephesus and sometime secretary of the most illustrious lady, Galla Placidia—“

  It was not Roche’s kind of book, but it reminded him strangely of other scattered novels he had picked up from the ground, on the track leading to The Old House, which fitted David Audley’s tastes no better than his own. And there was another narrow strip of stiff paper that had also come adrift, which had fitted round the dustjacket: TENTH IMPRESSION: 250,000 COPIES SOLD! “ ‘Gone With The Wind’ restaged in Imperial Rome”—Daily Express.

  If it was not his kind of book he was clearly in the minority, thought Roche as he put the pieces together and handed them to Lexy.

  “Thanks, David.” Her arm sagged as she took the book from him. “Six hundred bloody pages!”

  “Just the chapter notes at the back, dear,” said Jilly sweetly.

  “But nobody reads them.”

  “They’re the only thing in the book worth reading.”

  “But—“

  Roche left them to it.

  To his surprise, Roche found himself talking to Thompson within a minute of establishing his credentials with the duty man.

  “You took your time,” said Thompson accusingly, as though he also had an orgy scheduled, for which he was now late thanks to Roche.

  “This isn’t a metropolis—it’s one of your sodding bastides,” Roche snapped back. “I had to find a phone.”

  “You received the word about Bradford, the American?”

  “Yes.” If they were beginning to run scared in Paris, as he was already running in the back-of-beyond in Neuville, then it was time to accelerate them. “What about Stephanides?”

  “Who’s he?”

  “She. Cypriot-Jewish. There’s a he in London—her father. I was just wondering if he and she might not be Mossad, that’s all.”