Barbouze Page 5

  He stood slopping whisky into three cut-glass tumblers, adding ice from a thermos bucket. ‘Now we can behave like free men!’ he cried, trotting back with three huge golden drinks. ‘These policemen are bores! They are also stupid. They wanted to arrest you formally and take you to headquarters for questioning. It was my idea you came here!’ He beamed at them both and took a deep drink.

  ‘You are not a policeman?’ said Van Loon suspiciously.

  ‘Merde, non! I’m a businessman. I run a supermarket behind the Gare St. Lazare.’

  Neil smiled. ‘Would it be indiscreet,’ he said, ‘to ask what you’re doing here in Athens?’

  The fat sweating face became suddenly sly. ‘Monsieur Ingleby, for a man with a secret there are never indiscreet questions, only indiscreet answers.’ He chuckled and finished half his drink: ‘Now, breakfast! They do a very good Greek dish here — or you can have bacon and eggs.’ He clapped Neil on the shoulder. ‘Le bon breakfast anglais avec du Johnny Walter!’ he cried, with his peal of girlish laughter.

  ‘I’ll settle for the Greek dish,’ said Neil. Van Loon chose the same, winking at Neil over his drink, as Pol waddled back to the table and spoke into one of the white telephones. Neil wondered who was paying for the suite: was it the Deuxième Bureau or the Paris housewives who shopped at the supermarket at St. Lazare?

  ‘Monsieur Ingleby, how long are you staying in Greece?’ Pol asked, coming back from the table after refilling his drink.

  ‘A month perhaps. And you?’

  ‘Ah, that rather depends on our friend Colonel Broussard, alias Monsieur Martel.’ He squinted quizzically at Neil across his glass: ‘In any case, we shall be seeing something of each other, I hope?’

  There was a knock at the door. A waiter wheeled the breakfast in on a trolley: jug of sweet, burnt-black coffee, bowls of yoghourt covered with a yellow crust and fat green figs wrapped in vine leaves.

  The three of them ate with silent concentration: it was the first civilized food that Neil and Van Loon had tasted for more than two weeks. Pol shovelled it in at a ferocious rate, yoghourt dribbling into his beard, washed it all down with another tumbler of Johnny Walker and returned to his row of telephones. ‘If you want a bath and shave,’ he called, ‘it’s straight through.’ He dialled a number and began a long conversation in French. From what Neil could hear from the bathroom he was giving a series of urgent instructions. His voice held a note of authority that had nothing to do with a cheerful businessman gorging himself on an expense account.

  Neil sank into the bath, finished his second whisky, scrubbed himself with the scented soap until the water turned grey, and decided there were worse ways to spend one’s first morning in a strange city. He shaved with Pol’s razor and dabbed on one of Pol’s aftershave lotions, noticing that the bathroom shelves were crowded with bottles of Eau de Cologne, creams, talcum powders, deodorants and vitamin pills. It amused Neil to realize that the man was vain.

  Back in the sitting-room Pol was listening excitedly on the phone, another full whisky in his hand. He motioned Neil into a chair, while Van Loon went through to the bathroom.

  ‘Oui! … Oui! Entendu! That’s all we can do for the moment, except wait.’ He hung up, came back streaming with sweat, and collapsed into his chair by the window. For a moment the two of them sat in silence, sipping their drinks and feeling the warm breeze stir through the blinds from the Aegean. It was Pol who spoke first: ‘Would you be interested in this affair professionally, Monsieur Ingleby?’

  ‘Of course. I’m going to write a piece about Broussard on Athos, if that’s what you mean.’

  ‘That is a good little story, I agree. But I was thinking of something that might be even more interesting.’ He paused.

  Neil sensed a sudden electric tension spring up between them. He said warily, ‘What sort of thing?’

  Pol made an ambiguous gesture with his pink hands: ‘I’m afraid I can’t be very precise at this stage. But I think, if my guess is right, that things will shortly be happening over in North Africa.’ He clinked the ice cubes in his glass. There was another pause, full of irrelevant sounds: a horn from the Piraeus, Van Loon in his bath.

  Pol wiped his brow, careful not to disarrange the kiss curl: ‘When I saw the name in your passport, Monsieur Ingleby, I recognized it at once. I have read several of your articles — they were reprinted in Le Canard Enchaîné.’

  Neil inclined his head, flattered.

  ‘There was one I particularly liked — about the crisis in the Protectorate last year.’

  Neil remembered the article. It had been a facetious piece written while General Guérin was threatening to drop paratroopers over Paris. Neil had suggested that one way to avert the danger, as well as effectively to humiliate the rebels themselves, would be for loyal French pilots to fly the paras across the Mediterranean, but instead of Paris, to drop them over Wigan and Blackpool and let them find their own way back.

  Pol chuckled and took a long drink: ‘I should like to have thought up that one myself! In moments of crisis the best solutions are often the most unorthodox.’

  ‘It wasn’t meant as a serious solution,’ said Neil.

  ‘No, not. Not serious perhaps. But as a plan it might have worked.’

  Neil looked at him with a superior smile: ‘It still wouldn’t have prevented those paras from killing a few hundred people — even in Wigan.’

  ‘Ah, les paras!’ said Pol, shaking his head sadly. ‘I’m afraid that France is obsessed with phantoms of military glory. We are becoming almost as morbid as the Germans.’ He took another deep drink: ‘You see, I have always been radical in my views. I think if the circumstances were right I might even be a revolutionary. I am hampered by the fact that I am also a capitalist. But don’t misunderstand me! When Fascism raises its head — when men like Guérin and Broussard try to ride the tide of history — then I draw my sword, Monsieur Ingleby! — I become a warrior!’ He sat back and mopped his face: ‘I think, from what I have read of your articles, that you are also something of a radical — a man of the Left?’

  Neil, with the instincts of breeding, disliked having his politics discussed by a stranger. He said evasively, ‘Well, more or less.’

  ‘And you hate Fascism?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Exactly!’ Pol smiled. ‘I think, Monsieur Ingleby, that you and I may be able to work a little together.’

  ‘Work together?’ Neil frowned: ‘I don’t quite follow you. Are you suggesting that I work for the French Secret Service?’

  ‘Ah, you are very suspicious!’ Pol sounded almost unhappy.

  ‘Certainly I’m suspicious — and with some reason, I think. Since putting foot in this city two hours ago I’ve been arrested, searched for arms, then brought to an hotel suite and questioned about a terrorist leader by a man who tells me he runs a supermarket for French ladies’ underwear. Doesn’t that sound suspicious to you?’

  ‘You exaggerate,’ said Pol. ‘I specialize in tinned foods and kitchen utensils. It is a perfectly respectable business.’

  ‘But you work for the Deuxième Bureau?’

  ‘I have told you that I am not a policeman. Please! I find policemen the most tedious brutes. They are even worse than soldiers — they drink less for one thing — and they are quite as corrupt as politicians, except they don’t do so well out of it.’ He paused and grinned.

  ‘Then who do you work for?’ Neil persisted.

  ‘I work,’ said Pol reluctantly, wiping his brow again, ‘for the French Government — not because I love them, but because France deserves to be ruled by better men than Guérin and Broussard. Besides, I enjoy the adventure of the work — it’s the only thing that keeps my fat down.’

  ‘You mean you’re a secret agent?’ said Neil, smiling suddenly at this preposterous man, with his kiss curl and white telephones and whiskies for breakfast.

  ‘I am an amateur agent,’ said Pol, heaving himself up to refill his drink, ‘I am not employed by any of
the security departments. What in France we rudely call a barbouze — a “false beard”.’ He tugged at his own little goatee and grinned hugely: ‘Only mine is real!’

  Neil followed him to the table, his head growing light. ‘Monsieur Pol, you mentioned just now that we might be able to work together. You obviously didn’t mean in your tinned food department.’

  Pol turned and rocked on his slippered feet. An impish smile illuminated his enormous face; he put a hand on Neil’s shoulder and pulled him closer till Neil could smell the whisky on his breath. ‘Monsieur Ingleby,’ he crooned, still smiling, but with eyes that had become peculiarly hard, ‘you are a journalist, you are interested in what goes on in the world — in what goes on behind the scenes. Now I like to help journalists whenever I can. I think in English you have an expression, the scoop? Well, I may be able to give you a scoop. In a week, two weeks, perhaps a few days. I cannot tell you about it now, but when it comes it will be worth writing about, believe me!’

  Neil felt exhilarated and amused and rather drunk. At the back of his mind a tiny instinct warned him that this burst of speculative generosity might not be as innocent as it sounded. But the whisky bottle was three-quarters empty, and Van Loon had come back into the room, and Pol, with his short little arms outstretched, was seeing them to the door, inviting them to lunch with him at the hotel at one o’clock.

  ‘We’ll meet in the bar,’ he cried, ‘for a good American cocktail!’ He laughed, and Van Loon laughed, and they all shook hands.

  ‘He is a terrific fellow, that!’ Van Loon said, as they rode down in the lift. ‘I think a sort of spy, huh?’

  ‘Something like that,’ Neil said; and they went out into the hot sun.

  CHAPTER 3

  They found a cheap hotel that looked down Kolokrotni Street towards the Acropolis. Their room had a stone floor and no hot water and smelt of charcoal and mutton. But there was a solid table in front of the window where Neil hoped he might work.

  The whisky had made them both drowsy, and they stretched out on the lumpy beds to rest before their lunch with Pol. Neil stared at the ceiling and dozed and thought; and the more he thought about Pol, the more intrigued he became. His own enthusiasm had been dissipated by the soft life; what he needed now was a crude dash of adventure. Pol was an adventurer, and Neil envied him for it.

  At exactly one o’clock, he and Van Loon were back at the King George Hotel. Neil went to the reception desk and changed a £10 travellers’ cheque from his remaining stock of £200. Beside him stood two corn-haired Americans in seersucker suits with cameras the size of binocular cases. ‘Can we do Delphi and Marathon in a day?’ one of them was asking.

  The foyer was empty, except for a slim man with dark glasses and steel-grey hair who was sitting opposite the lifts behind a copy of L’Aurore. The second American was saying, ‘What about that place Byron was at — Cap Sunion or something?’

  Neil stopped at the hotel bookstall on their way to the bar and bought yesterday’s Paris edition of the Herald Tribune. The bar was crowded, full of the subdued roar of lunchtime drinking, breaking about them like surf on a beach. They pressed past the crush of shantung and mohair, and found a place in the corner under a fan.

  Pol had not yet arrived. Neil ordered two Bloody Marys and glanced at the Herald Tribune. Guérin’s Secret Army was on the front page: during the past twenty-four hours thirty-nine Moslems had died in acts of street terrorism in the French Protectorate in North Africa. Six of them, including a woman and a fourteen-year-old boy, had been dragged from a tram in a European working-class suburb and beaten to death in front of a crowd of several hundred. Neil folded the paper up and felt sick and angry.

  Twenty minutes later, Pol had still not arrived. They were beginning to feel hungry. ‘I’ll go and see if he’s been delayed in his room,’ said Neil.

  The receptionist lifted the telephone and listened for a moment, then shook his head: ‘Sir, there is no reply from Monsieur Pol’s suite.’

  Neil detected a faint stir behind him; the slim steel-grey man had shifted his copy of L’Aurore. The receptionist added, ‘I have not seen Monsieur Pol go out this morning, sir. His key is gone — he should be somewhere in the hotel.’

  ‘There may be a message,’ said Neil, ‘the name’s Ingleby.’ He turned his head slightly and thought he caught the edge of the slim man’s eyes shining at him from behind their dark glasses. It gave him a queer, uneasy feeling, as though he had been surprised in some compromising act.

  The receptionist turned back: ‘I’m sorry, sir, there are no messages. Shall I have Monsieur Pol paged?’

  ‘Please,’ said Neil, ‘say he’s wanted in the bar.’

  He went through and bought Van Loon another drink and watched the bar empty for lunch: waiters whisking up glasses and flicking napkins and collecting ashtrays. And still Monsieur Pol did not come.

  ‘Perhaps he is drunk,’ Van Loon suggested.

  ‘Perhaps,’ said Neil, thinking that more likely Pol had just forgotten, or had had another engagement and hadn’t bothered to leave a message. He put down some money on the bar and was just leaving, when a bellboy touched his arm: ‘Mister Ingilbee?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Telephone please!’

  In the foyer Neil noticed that the slim grey man with L’Aurore had gone. He went into one of the airless cells and lifted the receiver. The line crackled as though it were long-distance.

  ‘Monsieur Ingleby? This is Charles — Charles Pol!’

  ‘Where are you?’

  ‘Monsieur Ingleby, can you hear me? I’m sorry I couldn’t meet you for lunch. Something has happened.’ The voice faded into static and Neil shouted again: ‘Where are you?’

  ‘I’m in a café near the Acropolis — in Kalidon Street. It’s called the Olympic. Have you got that? Take a taxi. And don’t tell anyone in the hotel. Hello!’

  ‘Hello!’ Neil shouted. ‘What’s happened?’

  ‘I will explain when you get here. And bring your Dutch friend. You understand?’ The line was so indistinct that it was hard to recognize Pol’s tone. ‘It is very important,’ the voice went on, ‘very important that you come, Monsieur Ingleby!’

  ‘Are you in any trouble?’ said Neil.

  ‘I shall wait for you, please hurry!’ The line went dead.

  Neil hung up and joined Van Loon outside. ‘Something’s happened to Pol,’ he explained, ‘he wants us to meet him in a café in Kalidon Street, wherever that is.’

  Van Loon stroked his blond beard and grinned: ‘A bit of horseplay, huh?’

  ‘I don’t know. Let’s go and see.’

  Outside, while the bellboy went for the taxi, Neil paced up and down in the hot sun and puzzled over what sort of scrape Pol could be in. He had the Greek police eating out of his hand, so why was he so urgently summoning him and Van Loon?

  It took just over a quarter of an hour to reach Kalidon Street, bouncing over alleys through the meat-markets, the cobbles wet with melting ice blocks. The Olympic Café was in a small street in the shadow of the Acropolis Rock. It was a barn-like building, full of sad-eyed men with black moustaches sitting in front of empty coffee cups and glasses of water, playing backgammon and dominoes.

  They saw him at once, his balloon-like back facing them from the far end of the room. He sat down at a marble-topped table over a glass of dubious brown liquid, sweating heavily.

  ‘Monsieur Pol!’

  He swung round: ‘Ah voilà, mes amis!’ he crowed with delight, grabbing up chairs and waving for the waiters.

  Neil said, ‘What’s happened, Monsieur Pol?’

  ‘I’ve had a bit of trouble at the hotel. A small complication. What will you drink?’

  A radio behind the bar began to blare out a deafening Greek lament. ‘What sort of trouble?’ said Neil.

  ‘There are two men at the hotel looking for me. That’s why I couldn’t meet you for lunch. I’d have left a message, but I didn’t want to risk them picking it up.’

&nb
sp; ‘Who are they?’

  ‘They belong to Broussard — Secret Army men. There was one at the front and one at the back. I had to slip out through the kitchens.’

  The waiter arrived; Neil and Van Loon ordered a list of Greek dishes at random and glasses of Fix beer. ‘Why didn’t you call up Captain Spyros and have them arrested?’ said Neil.

  Pol shook his head: ‘I don’t want them to know I suspect them. It’s better they think I’m still at the hotel — at least until tonight.’

  ‘But why are they after you?’

  ‘They want to make sure I don’t leave Athens.’

  ‘Why?’

  Pol looked at them both: ‘You haven’t heard the news?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘There’s been another military revolt in the Protectorate.’

  Neil sat back and said, ‘My God! When?’

  ‘Early this morning. The reports are still coming in. It’s all very confused, but it looks as though the Secret Army has taken over the whole centre of the capital and dug themselves in behind barricades. The airport’s been closed and all the frontiers are sealed off. Nobody really knows what’s happening yet. Broussard arrived sometime yesterday and is behind the barricades with General Guérin.’

  The waiter returned with dishes of shellfish in an oily grey sauce, shish-kebab on wooden skewers, a lot of dry white cheese and glasses of pale beer with a head like seafoam.

  ‘From what I can gather,’ Pol went on, ‘two regiments of paratroopers were supposed to move into the capital at dawn this morning to reinforce the security troops. Then at the last moment they went over and joined Guérin. They’ve seized all the administrative buildings and the university. Most of the paras and the Foreign Legion units are now with them behind the barricades. And the Army, of course, sits on its arse and does nothing — each half waiting to see what the other will do.’

  ‘And what are you going to do?’ said Neil.