slowly, “that I have purposely refrained from telling you. I am afraid, too, that I have no intention of telling you now.”
“I see. Very clever. I shall have to come with you and see for myself. And then I suppose I shall be expected to make this false identification of the camera. Is that it?”
But before he could reply there was a sharp knock at the door and an agent came in, nodded meaningly at Beghin, and went out again.
“That,” said Beghin, “means that our man has passed through Sanary. It’s time we went.” He walked to the door and looked back. “Are you coming, Vadassy?”
I slipped the envelope into my pocket and stood up.
“Of course,” I said, and followed him out of the room.
18
At ten forty-five that night a big Renault saloon swung out of the short side road leading from the Commissariat and sped east along the main coast road.
In the car besides Beghin and myself were two plain-clothes men. One was driving. The other I had recognized as he had sat down beside me in the back. It was my friend of the limonade gazeuse. He refused steadfastly to remember me.
The clouds had gone. The moon, high in the sky, shed a light that made the beams of the headlamps seem pale. As we left the outskirts of St. Gatien, the hum of the engine rose in pitch and the tires slithered on the wet road as we rounded the “S” bends beyond the Reserve headland. I leaned back on the cushions, trying to resolve the chaos of my thoughts.
Here was I, Josef Vadassy, a man who, not two hours before, had been resigned to the loss of his work, his liberty, and his hopes, calmly sitting in the back seat of a French police car on its way to catch a spy!
Calmly? No, that was not quite true. I was anything but calm. I wanted to sing. And yet I was not quite sure what I wanted to sing about. Was it the knowledge that tomorrow, in almost exactly twenty-four hours’ time, I should be sitting in a train nearing Paris? Or was it that soon, tonight, I was to learn the answer to a question, that my problem was to be solved for me, without a pencil and paper? I worried over these alternatives.
I think that all this was part of my body’s reaction to the tension of the last three days. All the evidence points to that conclusion. My stomach rumbled incessantly. I was very thirsty. I kept lighting cigarettes and then pitching them out of the window before I had smoked them. Also, and this was most significant, I had that curious feeling of having forgotten something, of having left something behind in St. Gatien, something that I should need. All nonsense, of course. I had left nothing in St. Gatien that could have been the slightest use to me that night in Toulon.
The car hummed on through moonlit avenues of trees. Then we left the trees behind and the country became more open. There were plantations of olives, their leaves a silvery gray in the light of the headlamps. We flashed through villages. Then we came into a small town. A man in the square shouted angrily at us as we shot past him. “Soon,” I thought, “we shall be at Toulon.” I had a sudden desire to talk to someone. I turned to the man beside me.
“What was that place?”
He removed his pipe from his mouth. “La Cadiere.”
“Do you know who it is that we are going to arrest?”
“No.” He put his pipe back in his mouth and stared straight ahead.
“I’m sorry,” I said, “about the lemonade.”
He grunted. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
I gave it up. The Renault swung to the right and accelerated along a straight road. I stared at Beghin’s head and shoulders outlined against the glare of the headlights. I saw him light a cigarette. Then he half turned his head.
“It’s no use trying to pump Henri,” he said. “He is discretion itself.”
“Yes, I see that.”
He threw the match out of the window. “You spent four days at the Reserve, Vadassy. Haven’t you any idea of the man we’re going to arrest?”
“None.”
He chuckled wheezily. “Not even a guess?”
“Not even a guess.”
Henri stirred. “You’d make a bad detective.”
“I sincerely hope so,” I retorted coldly.
He grunted. Beghin chuckled again. “Be careful, Henri. Monsieur has a forked tongue in his head and he is still angry with the police.” He turned to the driver. “Stop at the poste at Ollioules.”
A few minutes later we entered the town in question and pulled up outside a small building in the square. A uniformed agent was waiting at the door. He walked over, saluted, and leaned through the window of the car.
“Monsieur Beghin?”
“Yes.”
“They are waiting for you at the junction of the main road and the road from Sablettes, Monsieur. The car from the garage at St. Gatien returned five minutes ago.”
“Good!”
We drove on again. Five minutes later I saw the rear light of a stationary car on the road in front of us. The Renault slowed and came to a standstill behind it. Beghin got out.
A tall thin man was standing by the side of the car in front. He walked towards Beghin and they shook hands. For a moment or two they stood talking, then the tall man walked back to his car and Beghin returned to the Renault.
“That is Inspector Fournier of the dock police,” said Beghin to me as he climbed in. “We are going to his territory.” He slammed the door and turned to the driver. “Follow the Inspector’s car.”
We moved off again. Soon now the lines of trees through which we had been driving since Ollioules thinned and we passed a factory or two. Finally we swung on to a brightly lighted road with tram tracks down the center and cafes on the pavements. Then we turned to the right and I saw the name “Boulevard de Strasbourg” on the corner building. We were in Toulon.
The cafes were full. Groups of French sailors strolled along the pavements. There were many girls. A handsome young colored woman with a picture hat and a tight black dress walked serenely across the road in front of us, causing our driver to brake hard and swear. An old man was wandering along in the gutter playing a mandolin. I saw a dark, fat man stop a sailor, say something to him, and receive a shove that sent him cannoning into a woman with a tray of sweets. Farther down we passed a naval patrol going in and out of the cafes warning the sailors that it was time to get down to the tenders waiting to return to the warships. Then we came to a less frequented part of the Boulevard and the car in front slowed down and turned to the right. A moment or two later we were threading our way cautiously through a network of dark, narrow streets of houses and steel-shuttered shops. Then the houses became less frequent and there were whole streets lined only with the high blank walls of warehouses. It was in such a street that we eventually stopped.
“We get out here,” said Beghin.
It was a warm night, but as I stood on the damp cobbles I shivered. It may have been excitement, but I think that it was fear. There was something eerie about those blank walls.
Beghin touched me on the arm.
“Come on, Vadassy, a little walk now.”
Ahead of us the Inspector and three other men were standing waiting.
“It’s very quiet,” I said.
He grunted. “What do you expect at this time of night among a lot of warehouses? Stay in the rear with Henri and don’t make a noise.”
He joined the Inspector and the three men fell in behind him. Henri and I brought up the rear. The drivers
