Barbouze Page 6

  ‘Go over there.’

  ‘But how?’

  ‘By sea.’ Pol took a gulp of his muddy-brown drink and grinned: ‘And you and Monsieur Van Loon are coming with me — tonight.’

  ‘Huh!’ cried Van Loon.

  ‘I’ve only a small boat and I need a sailor. The crossing will take two days and two nights.’ He turned to Van Loon, whose eyes burned with a fierce blue light. ‘Can you get us across?’

  The Dutchman smacked the table with his huge hand: ‘Bloody hell, I get you five times round the world if you want!’

  Pol leant over and patted him affectionately under the ear, then turned to Neil: ‘The boat belongs to an old friend of mine, Monsieur Biaggi, who lives in the King George most of the summer. He knows all about it, I’ve been prepared for this to happen for some time. You’ll go to the French Consulate first and collect your visas and military permits. Ask for a man called Molyneux, he’s very discreet. I’ve already warned him by phone that you’re coming.’

  ‘You think of everything,’ said Neil, with a grain of sarcasm. Perhaps it was the man’s appearance, but he still found it difficult to take Pol quite seriously.

  ‘Then go back to the King George,’ Pol went on, ‘and get the boat’s logbook and harbour permits from Monsieur Biaggi. Suite 24. I’ve phoned him too and he’s expecting you. He’s very rich,’ he added. ‘No problems. I’ve told him we’re going down to Crete with some female company for a long weekend — doing a bit of archaeological research!’ He let out his peal of laughter, and Van Loon laughed with him.

  Neil said earnestly: ‘So he doesn’t know we’re going to Africa?’

  Pol gave a grand gesture: ‘Ah, Monsieur Biaggi is very broadminded. He comes from Marseilles — we’ve known each other since the old Vichy days.’ He looked at his watch. ‘It’s now ten past three. I want to be out of Athens by sunset. I shall wait here, and expect you both back not later than six.’

  ‘What about your luggage?’ said Neil.

  Pol produced from inside his jacket the proverbial toothbrush, plus a tin of Max Factor talcum powder. ‘I travel light,’ he said, holding up the tin, ‘a necessary luxury. One sweats so much in this climate. I could borrow your razor, perhaps?’ he added.

  Neil nodded, then just as he was leaving, he pointed down at Pol’s glass: ‘By the way, what is that stuff you’re drinking?’

  ‘This, my dear Ingleby,’ said Pol, lifting the muddy glass to the sunlight, ‘is Hellenic Excelsior Scotch!’

  They left him shaking with quiet laughter.

  CHAPTER 4

  The door was unlocked. A voice called from the darkened bedroom: ‘Who are you? Sit down.’ Heavy curtains were drawn against the afternoon sun. Monsieur Biaggi lay on the bed in his underpants, propped up on a heap of pillows. Neil could just make out a brown body running to fat, its chest and legs fledged with black hairs like seaweed.

  He stepped in and said, ‘I’ve come from Charles Pol. I’m Monsieur Ingleby.’

  ‘Ah, you’re the Englishman!’ A hand groped out and switched on the bedside light: ‘So Charles is off to Crete at last, is he? The old dog!’ Monsieur Biaggi gave Neil a tired grin and poured himself a glass of Vichy water from the side table. He had a ruined face, creased like an old glove. ‘Is she pretty?’ he added.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Charles’ girl. He told me he’d found a girl to take to Crete.’

  ‘Oh yes. Not bad.’

  ‘Ah! He’s been looking round for that girl for weeks. I hope she treats him well.’ He took a sip of water and closed his eyes. ‘I’m sick,’ he added, ‘are you a sailor, Monsieur Ingleby?’

  ‘No,’ said Neil, ‘but we’ve got a sailor with us.’

  ‘Ah!’ Monsieur Biaggi nodded, eyes still closed. ‘You want the ship’s papers? They’re on the desk.’ He flapped a hand in the direction of the window. The documents and the ignition key were in a greaseproof envelope marked ‘Serafina’. Neil checked through them to make sure they were in order.

  ‘I want her back after the weekend,’ Monsieur Biaggi murmured, ‘I’ve got a couple of girls I’m taking over to Naxos on Monday.’ He opened his bloodshot eyes and smiled with a row of gunmetal teeth: ‘What’s today?’

  ‘Wednesday.’

  ‘Ah!’ He lay back and patted his hairy stomach. ‘I’m sick,’ he said again, ‘haven’t eaten since February.’

  Neil looked at him lying there with eyes closed, his head sunk back in the pillows: ‘Thank you, Monsieur Biaggi.’

  ‘Salut!’ the man called, lifting one hand up a few inches above the bed. ‘Take care of her — the “Serafina”, I mean.’

  Neil paused by the door, feeling guilty and sorry for M. Biaggi. He disapproved heartily of rich idle men who spent their lives whisking girls off in pleasure-boats. But M. Biaggi was not going to whisk his girl down to Naxos on Monday. His pleasure-boat had been commandeered for a revolution in North Africa and would probably never be seen again. Still, it was Neil’s job to get across to the Protectorate by the quickest means available. The responsibility of the boat was Pol’s; and Neil held his tongue and left M. Biaggi, closing the door gently behind him.

  Van Loon was waiting in the foyer with the luggage which they had collected from their hotel on the way from the French Embassy. Monsieur Molyneux had turned out to be a quiet-mannered little man who had spoken about a dozen words and given them their visas and permits in ten minutes.

  Neil went over to reception to cable his office that he was on his way to North Africa. There were two men at the desk. One was the slim grey man who had been reading L’Aurore in the armchair before lunch. The other was heavily-built, with a rubbery face and cropped black hair like a wire brush. As Neil reached them the receptionist nodded towards him. Both men turned. The slim one took a step forward and addressed Neil in French: ‘I understand you have been asking for a Monsieur Pol?’

  Neil hesitated. The man’s face was smooth and steel-grey like his hair, his expression dead behind the dark glasses.

  Neil nodded.

  ‘We are also looking for Monsieur Pol,’ said the man, ‘would you happen to know where he is?’

  ‘I’m sorry’ — Neil saw the man turn his head a fraction and glance at Van Loon — ‘I haven’t seen Monsieur Pol since this morning. I don’t think he’ll be back until later tonight.’

  The two men looked hard at him, then nodded together and left the hotel without another word. Neil filled in the cable-form and called for a taxi, then explained to Van Loon: ‘I think those two men may be the ones who are after Pol.’

  The Dutchman shook his head and grinned: ‘It’s all crazy! That old fellow Pol is completely crazy!’

  The taxi was a Chrysler with a radio and a gramophone shaped like a toaster under the dashboard. As he was getting in, Neil noticed a dark-blue Renault Gordini parked about fifty yards down the street behind them. The taxi driver pushed a button above his knee and they rode off listening to ‘Never on Sunday’, with English lyrics.

  Neil sat back and glanced out of the rear window: the little blue Renault was behind them, winding between the traffic about thirty yards away. He frowned. The Chrysler drifted across Omonious Square; a dock chimed half past five. The Renault accelerated, cutting across a lane of traffic, and Neil could see now that it had a Paris TT registration number. There were two men inside: the driver wore dark glasses.

  They had turned into Democracy Avenue. The Renault was still behind, keeping its distance of about thirty yards. Neil felt a prickle of fear and his pulse quickened. He turned to the driver: ‘Can you go faster!’

  The driver spoke English: ‘O.K.! I go real fast!’ The Chrysler hummed and swerved out in front of a dusty bus; a policeman waved a baton; lights above the street turned red; the Chrysler slowed down with a moan and stood ticking over. The Renault was directly behind.

  ‘Damn them!’ said Neil. The lights changed.

  ‘What do they want?’ said Van Loon, watching the Renault pulling away af
ter them from the lights.

  ‘They want Pol.’

  ‘Why him?’

  ‘Presumably because he’s dangerous to them. These boys have just started a revolution. They don’t want him getting over there and cocking the whole thing up!’

  The driver had his hand down on the horn, and all the cars round them were blowing their horns too and nobody was moving. ‘This is a bad time for traffic,’ said the driver, ‘no good for going fast.’

  Van Loon sat stroking his beard. ‘But that fat fellow cannot be so dangerous,’ he said.

  ‘Well, those boys in the car behind obviously think he is!’ Neil looked anxiously round again. The Renault was still there. Ahead the traffic was strung across the avenue in a wedge of bicycles, buses, American limousines and old dog-carts. The driver told Neil he was going to cut down into one of the side-streets leading to the vegetable market. They honked and jerked their way through the ambling crowds, braking every few yards, the Chrysler rocking on its springs like a motorboat in a heavy swell. They seemed to have lost the Renault. They turned into a quiet street that curved away under a wall enclosing a garden of cypress trees.

  ‘Now fast!’ Neil yelled, and the car roared gently and slid away with a wake of dust.

  They had gone perhaps two hundred yards when Neil saw the Renault again. It was coming after them through the dust like a torpedo, slowing and dropping back when it came in sight of them.

  ‘That was a mistake,’ Neil muttered. ‘Now they know we’re trying to lose them.’

  ‘Oh to hell with them!’ said Van Loon. ‘Let’s just stop here and see what the idiots will do.’

  Neil hesitated. Ahead there was another main street and a stream of traffic. He told the driver to pull up and wait just before the intersection. The Chrysler bumped softly on to the edge of the road and stopped. The driver slipped a new record into the machine under the dashboard and they listened to the opening bars of ‘Venus in Blue Jeans’, as the Renault came up alongside and passed them. They watched it reach the intersection, stop for a moment, turn left and disappear.

  Neil sat up and sighed. ‘Go on to Kalidon Street,’ he told the driver, who was beginning to look puzzled. They crossed the intersection and headed down towards the meat-markets huddled under the Acropolis. It was 5.50. Neil calculated that if all went well they could be out at sea by half past seven.

  Van Loon gave a shout and grabbed Neil’s arm. The driver turned his head in surprise and they missed a cyclist by less than an inch, the rider wobbling away, shaking his fist. The Renault was coming up behind them again, its little Gordini engine whining like an angry insect.

  Neil rammed his fist into his palm and swore. They were back now in narrow crowded streets where speed was impossible. Neil was trying to think hard, feeling the wet ridge of sweat round his collar. Whatever happened they must not lead the Renault to the Olympic Café. He told the driver to stop again. They could get out and try to slip away on foot; or telephone Pol and arrange to meet him later at the Piraeus.

  They were outside a pastry shop in a crooked, sloping street. A moment later the Renault drove past. They watched it go on down the street for about fifty yards, then stop. Nobody got out. An old man with white stubble was hobbling towards them, following his shadow along the wall. The gramophone in the Chrysler switched itself off; and the two cars stood in the narrow street and nothing happened.

  ‘You wanna stop or go on?’ said the driver, shifting uneasily, as though he expected to be hit over the head.

  Neil looked at his watch: it was three minutes to six.

  ‘You wanna go on to Kalidon Street?’ asked the driver.

  ‘Wait a minute,’ said Neil. Still nobody had moved inside the French car. The old man with the white stubble shuffled past them. Suddenly Van Loon seized the door handle and jumped out. ‘I’m going to see what they bloody want!’ he cried, and before Neil could stop him he was striding down the street towards the Renault. Neil was about to follow, when the driver caught him by the sleeve: ‘You wanna go on?’

  ‘You wait here,’ said Neil, ‘you’ve got our luggage. Just wait!’ The driver sucked at a knuckle and nodded. Neil got out and hurried after Van Loon, who had reached the Renault.

  The steel-grey man had the window rolled down and was listening with a tight nasty look on his face, while Van Loon shouted in his ugly French: ‘You come from the hotel! You follow us here! What are you doing here? Huh?’

  The man muttered something to his companion with the black crewcut, who shrugged and went on staring ahead.

  Neil came up. He looked awkwardly at the Frenchman and said, ‘Good afternoon!’

  The man said nothing.

  ‘We met back at the King George,’ said Neil.

  Van Loon yelled, ‘You follow us here, don’t you!’

  The man did not look at Van Loon. He said to Neil, in a measured voice, ‘You are quite sure, Monsieur, that you do not know where the man Pol is?’

  Neil edged Van Loon aside and bent down till his face was a few inches from the Frenchman’s.

  ‘I’ve already told you I don’t know where he is. Nor do I know why you have been following us here. But if you’re not on your way within thirty seconds I’ll call the police.’

  The man stared at him, quite expressionless. Neil straightened up and said to Van Loon. ‘Come on, let’s get out of here!’ As they were walking away, the Dutchman turned and shouted into the car, ‘Vive Guérin!’ and blew a raspberry through the window.

  The Frenchman reacted as though he had been struck. He leapt out and slammed the door, standing in front of Van Loon with a little nerve tugging at the edge of his mouth: ‘Monsieur, be careful. Be very careful. We don’t like those sort of jokes.’

  Neil took Van Loon’s arm and muttered, ‘Come on, let’s get out of here!’

  Van Loon grinned: ‘Oh, to hell with these people! Stupid white kaffirs!’

  The Frenchman stood rigid for a moment, then turned and got back into the Renault. The car shot away down the street.

  ‘You’re a damned fool!’ said Neil, as they walked back to the taxi.

  ‘To hell with them! They were following us, weren’t they?’

  ‘That’s not the point. You’ve now told them we know they’re members of the Secret Army. For Christ’s sake, these people aren’t fooling around!’

  Van Loon shrugged and got into the Chrysler: ‘O.K., they have gone now.’

  ‘They may be back,’ said Neil. He told the driver to go on to the end of the street, then return to Omonious Square. But there was no sign now of the Renault. They headed back towards Kalidon Street. Neil paid the taxi off at the corner and they walked the last hundred yards to the Olympic Café.

  Pol was sitting just as they had left him, smoking a cheroot and drawing wet rings on the marble table with another glass of Excelsior Scotch. When he saw them he raised both arms with a roar of welcome, splashing whisky on to the floor. ‘You’re six minutes late!’ he cried.

  Neil sat down and told him about the Renault. Pol chuckled: ‘Ah, that’s old Jadot! Former paratroop captain who served under Broussard in Indo-China. He disappeared after the coup last year. I thought he’d turn up sooner or later.’

  ‘Is he dangerous?’

  Pol chuckled again, his eyes beginning to look a little glazed: ‘Captain Jadot, my dear Ingleby, has the reputation of being able to hit a man in the head with a pistol from forty metres.’ He thumped the table: ‘We’ll get him one day!’

  ‘You still don’t want to call Captain Spyros?’

  Pol shook his head: ‘Too much trouble. We couldn’t hold Jadot for long — there’s no proper warrant out for him, In France we might get him under the emergency regulations, but not here.’ He belched. ‘No, the only real way to deal with men like that is shoot them down like dogs when they’re not looking. But unfortunately one can’t do that sort of thing in a nice city like Athens.

  ‘We’re all right, though,’ he added, ‘as long as you’re sur
e you got rid of him.’

  ‘I think we got rid of him,’ said Neil.

  ‘And the papers?’

  Neil patted the greaseproof envelope: ‘All here.’

  ‘How was old Biaggi?’

  ‘In bed. He’s not well.’

  ‘Ah, yes. His stomach’s bad. He thinks too much about women.’ Pol stood up and snapped his fingers for the bill, then swayed and lurched heavily backwards into the table. Neil saw with some misgiving that he was very drunk.

  The waiter arrived with a fistful of chits which Pol paid for out of a wallet stuffed with five hundred and thousand drachma notes.

  Outside, special editions of the Athens evening papers were carrying photographs of ex-General Paul Guérin. Neil could make out a distinguished, middle-aged face with a square jaw under a five-starred képi.

  There was no sign of the Renault Gordini. They walked down the street and caught a taxi to the Piraeus.

  CHAPTER 5

  Monsieur Biaggi’s boat, the ‘Serafina’, was moored under a jetty at the end of the yacht-basin where the tramlines finished. There were a number of other smart private craft tied up beside her, shielded from the rest of the port by a seawall. Behind this lay a row of noisy bars and open-air cafés strung with naked lights where there was dancing and handclapping to the strumming of bazoukis. Two harbour police stood at the end of the jetty, smoking; they wore revolvers.

  The ‘Serafina’ was a thirty-foot converted rescue launch, painted blue and white with plenty of deck room for sunbathing and a good deal of fancy brass fittings. There was a covered wheelhouse with a curved windshield leading into a chromium-plated galley and a carpeted wardroom with leather couches round the walls. Below was a second wardroom with twin bunks under velvet curtains, a radiogram and a cocktail cabinet. The shower cubicle and toilet lay under the steps up to the deck.

  Van Loon inspected the boat with awe. She was driven by two Perkins diesels, capable of more than twenty knots. The levers and control knobs were ivory, and the wheel was of dark polished wood. There was a panel of luminous green dials, a navigation table covered with charts of the Aegean and Mediterranean, a giro-compass the size of an atlas globe, shortwave radio, cigar lighter and a sliding shelf fitted with slots to hold M. Biaggi’s drinks as he steered himself from one pleasure-dome to the next.