Pol stepped out of his trousers and laughed: ‘I take worse risks driving round Paris when I’m stewed at five in the morning!’ He stood naked now in his ankle socks like a monstrously inflated baby.
‘It’s all very well for you to take risks,’ said Neil, ‘but I’m staying here. I’ve been seen coming in with you.’
‘You’ll be all right,’ said Pol, taking out his tin of talcum powder and wobbling into the bathroom, ‘they won’t hurt an English journalist.’
‘I hope you’re right!’ said Neil, going into the corridor where he found a Moslem in an apron, rooting about in a cupboard near the stairs. He ordered a bottle of cognac and two glasses to be brought to Room 274. The man bowed and scuttled away.
Back in the room Pol shouted above the shower, ‘Tomorrow or the day after, Monsieur Ingleby, I will have something very interesting for your newspaper!’ He came out rubbing down his rolls of flesh: ‘As I said in Athens, I may have a scoop for you.’ He dropped the towel and began patting talcum powder under his arms.
Neil stared out towards the balcony. A nasty suspicion was beginning to nag at the back of his mind; it was like that first instinct he had had at the King George yesterday when he had been too light-headed with whisky to care. There was some very good reason why Pol wanted him in the Protectorate: and it wasn’t just to do him a good turn as a journalist.
The fog was closing in, dark over the dead sweep of the port. From far away he heard a faint burst of gun-fire. There was a sound in the room behind. The Moslem came in with a bottle of Hine, grinning nervously, and bowed himself out before either of them could give him a tip.
‘Poor little devil!’ said Pol buttoning up his trousers. ‘Probably comes down to work from the Casbah every day. Somebody’ll put a bullet in his head before long —’
Neil poured them both a brandy and they went out on the balcony. Pol was wearing vest and braces, his fat arms chalk-white with talcum powder liked salted hams. He looked ridiculous; but there was a hard look in his eyes which was very far from the jovial Pol swilling whisky and champagne, all in the merry course of duty for the French Secret Service. Neil realized suddenly that he knew very little about the man: that behind the fatuous exterior there must lie a core of professional ruthlessness. One did not reach the position Pol held — whatever that position exactly was — without it.
‘I shall be staying at the High Command Headquarters,’ he was saying, sipping his brandy, ‘I can’t move around as freely as you, I’m afraid, and it won’t be easy for us to meet. What I want you to do is phone me tomorrow afternoon at two o’clock at this number. Have you a pencil?’ Neil wrote the number down. ‘And don’t call me from the hotel — somebody might listen in. Use a callbox.’
The warning light was there again, and with it the whisper of danger. Neil said, ‘What sort of thing will you have to tell me?’
‘I’m not sure. I shall know more tomorrow.’ Pol’s eyes were fixed on some point in the indefinite distance across the sea: ‘Perhaps a meeting with somebody — somebody interesting. It depends what I can arrange.’
He paused; they heard another distant burst of gun-fire. ‘I must warn you,’ Pol went on, ‘that the Secret Army will know you are in the hotel. During the next twenty-four hours they will contact you. There’s nothing to worry about — they contact all journalists. Just be tactful and receptive, and avoid discussing politics with them. They’re very sensitive at the moment. And above all, don’t mention that you were on Athos. We just happened to meet in the King George Hotel.’
Neil stared out across the dim grey city. Pol had been in the hotel for nearly half an hour, and Neil was feeling strained and nervous. He had slept badly the night before, and the fog and silence now thrust him into a deep depression. He did not yet know what was at stake here but suddenly, desperately, he wanted to be rid of Pol. He could not analyse the feeling; perhaps it was mean and disloyal after the comradeship of the last two days, but his instinct warned him, with something visceral and emphatic, that he was becoming involved in a situation over which he had no control. He turned to Pol: ‘You’d better be going now. If they know downstairs who you are —’
Pol finished his drink, went back into the room and put on his shirt, tie and jacket. ‘Don’t forget,’ he called from the door, ‘two o’clock tomorrow afternoon.’
Neil nodded; ‘Careful how you go — don’t get a bullet in your head.’
Pol grinned, tapping his round pate: ‘Don’t worry, I’ve got a hard head, Monsieur Ingleby!’
CHAPTER 2
Only a few journalists had so far managed to penetrate the Protectorate since the revolt began. That afternoon a Paris-Match photographer had chartered a plane from Catania and parachuted just south of the capital, but had broken his leg on landing and was now in a military hospital. The airports of Paris and Tunis, Rome and Rabat were besieged by frantic hosts of reporters waiting for flights into the capital.
The doyen of the resident correspondents was a well-preserved Englishman, Mr. Winston St. Leger, now in his sixties. He had made a name for himself reporting the Munich putsch in 1923; but was now best renowned for his habit of sucking toothpaste from a tube which he kept permanently in his breast pocket. An American colleague had once challenged him on this: ‘Why d’yer suck
