‘If we do not go, she will be fed up with us,’ said Van Loon, ‘and she is an important girl, I think.’ They began to walk down the street, keeping to the margin of shade under the walls. ‘Don’t talk about that dead man,’ Van Loon said after a pause, ‘I don’t think they will like it.’
Neil had no wish to talk to anyone about it, least of all to Anne-Marie and her friends. He had no appetite, no wish to finish up with his head broken open with a pistol bullet. And in less than an hour he would have to ring Pol.
Le Berry restaurant faced the Front de Mer and the bay. There was a crowded café with wicker chairs and Dubonnet umbrellas out in front. The restaurant was behind a glass porch, hot and noisy, with the fans whirling and the people packed along tables under high gilt mirrors. Anne-Marie’s party was at the back of the room, at a table stacked with seafood and white wine in ice buckets.
There were five altogether in the party: Anne-Marie, and a slim, pretty girl with hair the colour of red Burgundy, called Annette, a broad man in a khaki shirt with sunglasses that curved round his face like black goggles, who was introduced as Lieutenant Carlos Morin. He sat beside a sensuous dark girl who reminded Neil of a bad-tempered starlet, her rampant breasts pointing like fingertips through her flimsy dress, who was introduced simply as Pip. And at the end of the table sat a solemn big-boned Jewish boy with a coal-black crewcut, in a grey flannel suit with a chalk pinstripe. He was Louis Rebot, leader of the city’s main student organization.
Apart from Pip, whose bosom was lolling dangerously close to her lobster soup, they all greeted Neil and Van Loon with smiles and broad gestures, squeezing up to make room and pushing glasses of wine at them. Neil was beside Anne-Marie, with Van Loon wedged between Annette and Lieutenant Morin. Anne-Marie gave Neil a glass of Pouilly Fuissé and cried: ‘à votre santé!’ sweeping her own glass round in a wide arc above her head and draining it off in a gulp. Neil asked her if they were celebrating something. She smiled slyly, then pounced out and kissed him on the cheek: ‘We are celebrating victory, mon cher!’ She lifted her glass again, and turning towards the whole restaurant, shouted in a ringing voice: ‘Vive Guérin! Guérin au pouvoir!’
Her words were greeted with a roar like an echo, followed by the brutal banging of cutlery on the tables to the rhythm of ‘Guérin au pouvoir!’ For a moment the restaurant was bedlam, like a school dining-room gone berserk. Neil had always loathed mass demonstrations — stamping, chanting, slow hand-clapping — and he sat cowed over his wine, feeling that the primeval barbarism of Man had suddenly been released to invade this smart French restaurant and provoke within these apparently civilized beings a savage hysteria.
Van Loon thought it rather amusing and even joined in the demonstration, using his knife and fork like drumsticks. When the noise had died down Neil asked Anne-Marie what had happened. She put a hand on his shoulder and said, ‘We’ve won! Two battalions of Army reservists have come over to our side. By tomorrow perhaps the whole Army will be with us, and Metz and his Gestapo, the Gardes Mobiles, will be running for their lives. Then we can go in and smash the Casbah and get Ali La Joconde and his murderers!’ She spoke with a gay ferocity as though discussing the prospects for the ‘Tour de France’.
‘When did this happen?’ said Neil.
‘Forty minutes ago, we got it through Louis Rebot there.’ She nodded towards the Jewish student leader, who lifted his glass in a toast.
Neil drank deeply. The Right-wing Revolution was about to triumph. He wondered whether Pol and his team had anything left up their sleeves. It should have been a sad moment — a military junta on the point of seizing power and overthrowing the French Republic: Broussard’s mob of paratroopers and degenerate legionnaires ready to go on the rampage through the Casbah.
He felt vaguely ashamed that his own worries should overshadow what might be a tragedy for Western civilization. But he was scared. He deplored everything that Anne-Marie and her friends stood for, yet in a curiously perverse way he felt more secure with them than he had with Pol, or even the Press Corps in the hotel.
Anne-Marie ordered him scampi and fat tournedos on cushions of toast with bearnaise sauce. She put her arm round his shoulder and announced to the table: ‘Monsieur Ingleby is a famous English writer — he is going to tell the people of England what is really happening here.’
They began asking him his opinions about the revolt. He tried to be shrewdly neutral, remembering the dead Moslem and the stump of leg frayed at the end like an old walking-stick. He felt no enthusiasm for talking to any of these people, noticing that Anne-Marie ate and drank with an appetite so healthy as to be almost coarse. Once during the discussion she grabbed his arm and pointed at Louis Rebot. ‘In France people call us Fascists!’ she cried; ‘but Louis there is with the Secret Army and he is a Jew! How can a Jew be a Fascist, Monsieur Ingleby? It is impossible, ridiculous!’
He nodded tactfully, and Rebot answered from the end of the table, ‘All the Jews here are one hundred per cent behind the Secret Army. It is a struggle for survival against Arab nationalism. It is simple: if we do not win, we will perish.’ He spoke with the melancholy passion of his race, an echo from generations of persecution, a new Moses leading an army of paratroopers to defend the Promised Land against the invader.
Van Loon
