From the depths of his exhausted mind the question had surfaced again. How had he ever come to be in the power of this foul woman? He wasn't going to put it to her now but if they ever got back to Britain he'd want an answer.
'One dead, another mutilated and how many missing?' asked Inspector Roudhon.
'Two,' said Dr Grenoy looking unhappily out of the window at the little helicopter perched on the terrace. 'Madame la Comtesse and an Englishman called Pringle.'
'An Englishman called Pringle? Description.'
'Middle-aged. Medium height. Balding. Small moustache. A typical Englishman of a certain class.'
'And he was staying here?'
'Not exactly. He rescued the dead American from the river yesterday morning and he was exhausted so he was given a room and a bed.'
'If he rescued the man who was shot he doesn't sound like a killer,' said the Inspector.
'Of course he wasn't a killer. Ask your own men. They had to get him back across the river with Professor Botwyk. He was on a walking tour.'
'And yet he has disappeared?'
'In the circumstances very sensibly, Inspector,' said Dr Grenoy. 'If you had been here last night you'd have tried to leave.' He was getting irritated by the Inspector's failure to appreciate the international consequences of the night's events. The Glory of France was at stake, not to mention his own career.
'And the night before a man was here looking for Madame la Comtesse,' continued the Inspector.
'That's what I've been told. But it must be said that he made the first attempt on Professor Botwyk then. Last night the Professor was shot down in cold blood, capote-wise. And your men were supposed to be on guard for his protection.'
'So they were, but they weren't to know they were about to be attacked by terrorists. You said it was Madame la Comtesse who was in danger.'
'Naturally. What else does one think when an Englishman with a gun...or an American, demands to know where she is? It was your responsibility.'
'If we had been told they were terrorists it would have helped, monsieur. We can only act on the information we are given. And the roads were guarded. They didn't come from Boosat or Frisson.'
'And what about the river? They could have slipped past your road blocks in canoes.'
'Perhaps. It was clearly a well organized operation. The aim was to assassinate the American, Botwyk, and...'
'Castrate the Soviet delegate. Presumably to put the Siberian gas pipe-line agreement in jeopardy,' said Dr Grenoy. His sarcasm was wasted on the Inspector.
'But it is the Americans who oppose the deal. It is more likely the Iranians who are involved.'
In the dining-room the exhausted delegates were being interrogated. They too were convinced they had been the victims of a terrorist attack.
'The crisis of capitalism expresses itself in these barbaric acts,' Dr Zukacs explained to a bemused gendarme. 'They are symptomatic of the degenerate bourgeois mentality and the alliance between monopoly fascism and sectors of the lumpen proletariat. Until a new consciousness is born...'
'And how many shots were fired?' asked the policeman, trying to get back to the facts.
Dr Zukacs didn't know.
'Fifteen,' said Pastor Laudenbach with the precision of a military expert. 'Medium-calibre pistol. Rate of fire, good. Extreme accuracy.'
The cop wrote this down. He'd been told to treat these members of the intelligentsia softly. They'd be in a state of shock. Pastor Laudenbach obviously wasn't.
