Anne-Marie stretched her arms along the back of the seat. ‘They were Moslems,’ she said, ‘we kill them if they come into the French quarters. We have to protect ourselves. Ali La Joconde sends his Arab Front terrorists down from the Casbah and they shoot Europeans all round here, and leave bombs in cafés and do horrible things.’ She yawned. ‘You must be careful round the Hotel Miramar,’ she added, ‘it’s one of the worst places. They killed a man there this morning, just before I came to collect you.’
‘So you kill Moslems in return?’ said Neil.
‘Certainly. We can’t lie down and sleep while these terrorists walk around in our city. They mutilate women and children, you know! You haven’t seen anything yet.’
‘But those two men back there,’ said Neil, ‘were they terrorists?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said, ‘perhaps, I don’t know. But they shouldn’t have been down in this quarter — they should have kept to the Casbah. That’s where they belong.’
‘The second man was lynched,’ said Neil, ‘kicked to death!’
She nodded: ‘Yes, I know. That wasn’t good. Our commandos have orders only to shoot people. But sometimes the crowd gets excited — especially when they hear that Europeans have just been killed. They get angry, they lose their heads. It’s understandable.’
Neil looked at the tiny hairs glinting along her sunburnt arms. She was a beautiful girl; and in the heat of the closed car he caught her warm, musky smell, healthy and alive, evidence that she lived well and slept well and took plenty of exercise and didn’t worry about men she saw lynched in the street.
At the corner of the Miramar she took him and Van Loon by the hand. ‘Don’t forget,’ she said, ‘you telephone the fat man at two o’clock. I’ll come and collect you at half past and we’ll go to the beach. I want to introduce you to some of my friends, to show you that we are not all murderers and Fascists.’ She smiled at them both with her wide mouth, and her face was bright and innocent — a young girl planning to go to the beach and frisk about in a bikini, sitting now in a chauffeur-driven car with a telescopic rifle on the floor.
They shook hands with her, and Van Loon stood and watched the Peugeot drive away, muttering, ‘What a fantastic girl, Neil! Completely sadistic, I think?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Neil, ‘I just don’t understand any of them. Let’s have a drink.’
They went past the fountain into the air-conditioned darkness of the hotel: smells of oranges and old leather, with a crowd of journalists refreshing themselves at the bar. Winston St. Leger and Hudson were there, together with Tom Mallory, transplanted from El Vino in Fleet Street by way of a three-hundred-mile drive in a hired Hillman Minx across the desert. The chances against his getting through had seemed colossal, but he had made it: now holding up an empty glass and shouting ‘Nurse!’ at the sleek-haired barman.
He was a journalist of erratic brilliance who had been sacked and rehired during his career by two large London papers, had been under sentence of death three times and expelled from altogether five countries. His face now had a gnarled furious look, purple with good living, framed by a halo of copper-red hair that dropped over his soup-stained jacket. Although a comparatively young man, most of his teeth had fallen out and his voice had sung to a croak which was the only impediment to his legendary rudeness. Neil had met him several times and thought him slightly mad. He murmured a greeting but Mallory took no notice. He was leaning across the bar waving his glass about his head: ‘Nurse!’ he cried again, in his terrible croak.
St. Leger caught Neil’s eye: ‘You look a bit green about the gills, my dear fellow!’
‘I’ve just seen a man lynched,’ said Neil, sitting down with Van Loon. He explained in detail what they had seen and St. Leger nodded over his pink gin: ‘Yes, you’ll get used to that sort of thing — what is laughingly called here effervescence. What will you drink?’
They ordered brandies. From down the bar came a hoarse cackle of laughter. St. Leger murmured, ‘As you can hear, Mr. Mallory is with us. A good reporter but in my view rather a hooligan. I hope he doesn’t make any trouble for us all.’
‘Trouble?’ said Neil.
‘Yes, trouble with the powers that be — the Secret Army. We have to be rather careful here, you know.’ He paused meaningfully and nibbled at an olive. Hudson had joined them. He glanced at Neil and Van Loon with a raised eyebrow, and St. Leger cleared his throat. When he spoke again it was with measured gravity, ‘Mister Ingleby, far be it from me to attempt to tell another journalist, especially one of your reputation, what he should and should not do. But in this case’ — and he sipped his pink gin — ‘I feel I ought to warn you.’
‘Warn me? What do you mean?’
St. Leger picked up another olive and examined it carefully: ‘Warn you about some of the people you know here.’
Mallory’s voice came croaking down the bar: ‘So I told Butcher O’Brien to get knotted — told him he had a touch o’ the sun!’ Someone laughed.
Winston St. Leger said gently, without looking at Neil, ‘You can trust me and Hudson here completely. What I want to tell you is for your own good.’
Hudson was leaning forward, his worried face creased into a forked stick. The brandies came; Neil and Van Loon sat in silence and waited. St. Leger twirled the stem of his pink gin.
