‘Arabs, all shit!’ translated the young one, grinning too, proud of his English.
Neil knew that the Premier R.E.P. had been disbanded after the last putsch. ‘What do you do now?’ he said, trying to keep his voice steady.
‘You heard of “Gamma Commandos”?’
Neil nodded.
‘That’s us,’ said the young one, winking at the big blond man, ‘anybody fooling around, we put a bullet in his head. You see us driving past a bus stop — Moslems standing in a row with their veiled fatmas. We drive past — twenty-five, thirty kilometres an hour, wam-wam! — we get four, five Moslems in the head. The fatmas we leave standing. Good for bordels militaires!’
Neil suppressed a surge of nausea. He tried a new tactic. ‘I know your chief, Colonel Le Hir,’ he began, ‘I met him yesterday morning.’ They said nothing. Neil went on: ‘I’m supposed to be meeting one of his adjutants for lunch at half past one.’ It was ten past now.
‘You meet nobody,’ said the young one, ‘what you think we’re here for? You know Colonel Le Hir? O.K., you think you’re a big shot? Now shut your mouth!’
They drove on in silence, climbing into a hot, bleak street which Neil recognized as being near the place where he had crossed behind the barricades yesterday. The car stopped outside a café. The big man ordered him out and the young one followed, leaving the Citroën at the kerb.
The café was crowded with young men in blue shirts and leather jackets slamming pin-tables. A giant jukebox, like the control panel of an airliner, screamed out a number by Helen Shapiro. The record had a flaw in it that made a sound like tearing paper.
The big man pressed the pistol back into Neil’s kidney and the young one said, ‘Wir machen es hinten!’
Neil understood enough German to know what they meant: they were going to take him into the back of the café. They were going to kill him.
He felt a loosening in his bowels, blood pounding in his head, and an empty pain flowed through him, as the three of them began to walk down between the bar and the rows of flashing, clicking pin-tables. People turned and watched them: swarthy faces, sleek hair with Roman fringes, cowboys and smiling blondes in frilly panties lighting up along the tables behind them. The young legionnaire led the way, and some of the men in leather jackets smiled and joked with him as he passed. One of them jabbed him playfully in the solar plexus, and they both stopped for a moment, shadow-boxing with faces of mock pain. The legionnaire finally grabbed the man by the neck and called to the barman, ‘Give him a beer, Georges!’
Somebody said close to Neil’s ear, ‘Who’s the goose?’
‘Don’t ask questions,’ growled the big blond man, walking behind Neil with his ape’s arm dangling, the gun now at his side.
Helen Shapiro clicked off; there was a whir and clatter and a voice sang, ‘When I see you standing there — with the sunlight in your hair!’ Aren’t there any French pop songs? Neil thought.
The young legionnaire opened a door at the back of the café. Neil was pushed into a bare room with crates of bottles stacked along the wall. From behind him he heard laughter, the jukebox calling, ‘When I see your big blue eyes…’ The door slammed, shutting out the howl of the bar. The big man said, ‘Up to the wall!’
Neil started to turn and the man pushed him on the shoulder so that he lost his balance. ‘Up to the wall!’ he yelled.
Neil straightened up. The wall was white-washed and empty. There was a window to the left looking into a yard. Suddenly he felt quite calm. He was never going to see Caroline again. That didn’t matter, he’d lost her anyway. He was never going to sleep with a girl again, never have another drink, another meal, see another film, spend any more money, write another word, talk to anybody, drive his car onto the air-ferry at Lydd, off for a sunny Continental holiday. He felt like a little boy who is being kept in during school Sports Day. The treat was over. He was going out like Van Loon: stretched naked on a slab in the municipal morgue. He remembered that he still hadn’t registered with the British Consulate. He began to walk towards the wall. Without turning round he said, ‘This isn’t going to do you any good. Colonel Le Hir is a sensible man — he’s not going to like the publicity of killing a journalist.’
He was two feet from the wall. God what a waste, he thought. The Foreign Office would kick up a bit of a fuss. They’d catch these two eventually. They might even get the guillotine. The young one came up behind him and hit Neil twice, once in the kidney, with a burst of pain that spread through his gut to his groin, then hard across the back of the neck.
The white wall went red and black and broke up into sparkling fragments. Neil waited for the noise: the crash of the gun, the bullet boring through flesh and bone, out the other side into the white plaster. But there was only a roaring like wind, then nothing.
PART 5: THE PEACEMAKER
CHAPTER 1
Pol wiped his face and neck with a handkerchief soaked in sweat and looked wearily across the desk at the Sûreté man. The whisky bottle stood at his elbow three-quarters empty next to a dirty glass. The Sûreté man was not drinking. He was stout and balding, with damp patches under the armpits of his sand-coloured shirt. He looked
