‘Who’s waiting?’
‘French sympathisers and a couple of Spaniards who will take the cargo on and land it.’
‘Not communists, I hope.’
‘Not a chance, they are Basques and they don’t like Madrid, whoever is in charge.’
‘Why the lorries?’
‘I had them as backup, just in case anything went wrong getting down the canal.’
Peter allowed himself a grim smile. ‘So it’s not a careful plan designed to go like clockwork?’
‘Take my word for it, Peter, should you ever indulge in the business of running guns, it never can be.’
‘Advice I shall cherish. Is there an alternative to moving them now?’
‘Not an easy one, given I’ve already sent a message to the freighter to enter port.’
‘Here comes our chum,’ Peter hissed.
Without being too obvious, they both observed the well-built suit returning to the car with his swaggering gait. If unable to hear what he said, it was a barked instruction that got both driver and passenger back in their seats, the engine firing with a bit of a roar through the twin exhausts, before it slipped out of the square heading inland.
Oil, vinegar and a basket of bread arriving allowed Cal to ask about the roads around the town and where they led, the conclusion, after much waving of hands, that there was any number of ways by which anyone could go anywhere, back to La Rochelle or inland to Niort on the route nationale. More importantly, he established that one of them would take the roadster back to that bridge without having to come back through the town.
‘So what’s the plan, Cal?’ asked Peter when the owner had gone.
‘Wait a mo,’ he replied, standing up and walking towards the tabac.
In an exaggerated fashion, Peter stretched out his legs and lifted his beer to his lips, calling loudly after Cal, ‘Do get a move on, old chap, this gun of yours is going to ruin the cut of my blazer. Oh, and fetch me some gaspers, will you, British if they have any.’
‘You’ll be lucky.’
Peter did sit up when his omelette came and he ordered two more beers before tucking into that and the bread. His plate was clean by the time Cal returned, his face set hard.
‘Something tells me the news isn’t good.’
‘No.’
‘Am I to assume whoever runs that shop overheard something?’
‘No, I bribed her to ask the telephone operator what number our suit just called. Told her to say he had left his wallet.’
Peter clicked his fingers. ‘As easy as that?’
‘Look around you, Peter. When do you think was the last time anyone in Dompierre saw a hundred-dollar note?’
‘I doubt anyone in this dump would recognise American currency of any denomination.’
‘They do, this was a country awash with rich Yanks until the Wall Street Crash. Anyway, our madame of a shopkeeper did and that’s all that matters.’
‘Which, I assume, you flashed under her nose.’
‘I just asked her if she knew anywhere close by where I could change one and waited for the reaction, which was pleasingly negative.’
It had been a pantomime of regrets, but Cal had seen avarice in the old woman’s eyes at the sight of the high-denomination foreign note, one that became more valuable with each passing day in a country with a falling exchange rate; it was probably equivalent to half a year’s profits in her petit magasin.
If his explanation of what he wanted had sounded false to the point of being risible in his ears, even in his perfect French, that La Patrie was in danger from foreign spies and he was offering a reward to thwart them, it had been enough to persuade her, once the note was in her hand, to call the operator with the required excuse. Having got the number, he then made a second call, pretending to be the fellow returned for his wallet, asking to be put through to allay any concerns.
What he heard from the other end set Cal Jardine’s mind racing; if you live on the edge of danger or discovery all the time it is easy to become paranoid, but it is also necessary to exclude nothing from your thinking, especially the very worst possibility, like that on which he was reflecting now as he began to pick on his salad and munch on his barely warm omelette.
‘So what did you find out?’
‘Our blond-haired chum phoned the La Rochelle headquarters of the Jeunesses Patriotes.’
CHAPTER FOUR
A period of silence followed while both mulled over the significance of that discovery, not least in the fact of how they had come to the attention of what was in essence a private army. Cal knew the name well, Peter Lanchester only vaguely from the not-very-comprehensive reports in the British press, but he was well aware of the fact that France, in this fractious decade, was no different to his home country when it came to political disruption.
Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts were only the most visible of those who demanded radical change in Britain; there were outfits even more extreme while France was awash with organisations like the Jeunesses Patriotes, Action Francaise and Solidarite Francaise or Les Camelots du Roi.
These groups ran through the gamut of right-wing monarchists all the way to the outright fascist, but they did have certain things in common. They were all aggressively anti-Semitic, anti-socialist gangs of thugs, the main difference between them being in the level of violence they employed.
When it came to causing mayhem, the hot-blooded French left the British fascists looking placid; indeed they would stand comparison with the Nazis when it came to challenging socialists, communists and Jews on the streets and taking on the government. Street battles were endemic and collectively they had sought to storm and torch their own parliament in Paris two years previously, which led to them being outlawed.
All it meant, in truth, was they went underground until the smoke cleared. Then they could come to the surface again and operate more or less openly in a country where the state authorities, the police and internal security outfits were more likely to have some sympathy for their aims than any great desire to forcibly curtail them.
That would be particularly true in an isolated city like La Rochelle, which, judging by the obvious wealth of the conurbation, was probably a bastion of right-wing conservatism, where oversight by the law had to be minimal given the Jeunesses Patriotes felt safe to the point of openly answering the headquarters phone with their name.
Regardless of their chosen designation the French right had one other thing in common: all the groups were solidly anti the Spanish republicans, whom they saw as bedfellows of the greater enemy, the Bolsheviks of the Soviet Union, and would act as unpaid spies when it came to stopping any weapons getting into anti-Franco hands.
The Jeunesses Patriotes were an ultra-violent paramilitary group modelled on Mussolini’s Fascist Youth or the Spanish Falangists. It was made up of university students and the sons and daughters of the rich and a higher bourgeoisie determined to protect their privileged existence and their money.
They espoused in particular a virulent hatred of communists, despised socialists, reviled Jews, and they were as an organisation known to be prepared to kill, their activities formed and funded by the champagne millionaire Pierre Taittinger and like-minded industrialists.
‘Who did you tell where you were headed, Peter?’ Cal asked finally, picking at his food.
‘Only the people who needed to know.’
‘From where did you tell them?’
‘The Paris embassy.’
‘In code?’
‘Of course.’
