‘What’ll happen to them?’
She smiled, showing very even white teeth, and drew a finger across her throat: ‘Kill them. The Government pays these barbouze vermin ten times what ordinary gendarmes get. They’re just hired murderers.’
‘They never get paid,’ said the driver; ‘we kill the bastards first.’
‘Do you know,’ said Anne-Marie, ‘that when they first sent in the barbouzes, the Government agreed to pay them every three months. That way they could wait till most of them got killed, and save themselves the money!’
They turned into a tall street strung across with lines of washing between the tenement blocks. The walls shut out the sun and there was a warm stench of garbage. Anne-Marie smiled at Neil again, her head tilted sideways, and said, ‘You know, your fat friend Charles Pol is a barbouze.’
Neil said nothing. It was hot inside the car and he began to sweat. A group of young men in leather jackets were lounging against the corner of one of the tenement blocks. The Peugeot stopped. Anne-Marie got out and led Neil and Van Loon into a side entrance, along a cement passage. The driver stayed with the car.
They heard voices and radio music coming from behind closed doors. At the end of the passage a soldier stood against the sunlight, wearing the mottled battle-dress and white kepi of the Foreign Legion. He stepped out and prodded his machine-pistol into Anne-Marie’s stomach. She pushed the gun aside and said something to him, and he grinned at her. He had a thin face with very blue eyes, his neck rough with dead acne. He looked at Neil and Van Loon and spat on the floor: ‘Journalists, eh? You be careful what you write here or we put a bullet in your necks!’ He spoke with a middle-European accent: ‘Go on, get moving!’ He grinned again as they went past him, out into the sun.
The street was full of armed men, most of them in baggy leopard camouflage strapped across with grenades and belts of machinegun rounds that gleamed like gold teeth. A hundred yards up the street was the first barricade: a double wall of paving stones, topped with barbed wire skewered down with iron staples. A couple of paratroopers sat behind machineguns inside a nest of sand bags. Loudspeakers, hung from streetlamps, were blaring out martial music: rather gay, facetious music, Neil thought, full of fanfares of bugles and images of men in blue cloaks on prancing horses.
The troops squatted on the pavements, smoking and playing cards, or strolled in groups and sprawled in bars drinking beer and Fastis. There was an atmosphere of idleness and tension.
Anne-Marie led the way down the street away from the barricade. A large group of Foreign Legionnaires, in the flat-visored khaki caps of paratroopers, stared at her, grinning and hooting and shouting after her; and as she walked between them with a provocative swing of the hips, Neil thought sadly of the legend that had grown up round the Legion — of the romantic buccaneers and soldiers of fortune who stole heirlooms to save the family honour, or fled to Africa from an unhappy love affair. But there was nothing romantic about these men, they were just blunt, brutal soldiers. They square-bashed and polished equipment and dug latrines and got drunk and went out on savage raids into the Bled, taking no prisoners and leaving behind them a population stunned and full of hatred for the French. Neil wondered what Colonel Broussard, with his love of Persian poetry and old coins, really thought of them. Perhaps to him they were just the crude instruments of force to ensure him his place of power in the Elysée Palace.
As though reflecting his thoughts, Anne-Marie turned to him: ‘These paras are not very polite — but they’re good soldiers. They make the Arabs run!’
Van Loon whispered to Neil, ‘A tremendous girl, huh?’
Neil nodded, thinking that she was also a dangerous girl.
She led them into a slender apartment-house at the end of the street. In the foyer two paras with heavy machineguns checked their papers, then showed them to the lifts. They hummed up to the tenth floor. A solemn man in a grey flannel suit let them into a wide cool room with a wall of French windows opening on to a balcony that looked down over chequered terraces to the sea. A girl in leopard skin trousers, with a heavy Jewish face, lay on a sofa under a reproduction of Matisse, turning the pages of Marie Claire. She scarcely looked up as they entered. The room was full of the tinkle of the Modern Jazz Quartet from an invisible hi-fi system.
Against the glare of the balcony a large man rose from a chair and came towards them. He wore a hound’s-tooth jacket, yellow silk scarf and cavalry-twill trousers, and held a silver-topped riding crop against his knee. He gave Anne-Marie a light kiss on the cheek, then turned to Neil and Van Loon and said pleasantly, ‘Make yourselves comfortable, messieurs!’ — pointing his riding crop at a semicircle of shallow wicker chairs near the window. He sat down in front of them and smiled. He had big square teeth and the weathered face of a sportsman. A welted scar ran from the corner of his mouth to just below his left ear, and his hair, which was normally black, had been dyed bright orange.
‘My name is Colonel Le Hir,’ he began, addressing Neil, ‘you have probably heard of me?’
Neil gave a stiff nod; he was excited and scared. Le Hir was head of a murder squad known as the ‘Gamma Commandos’. They specialized in killing Europeans who were unsympathetic to the Secret Army; it was they who had scored most of the successes against the barbouzes.
‘I’d
