Anne-Marie had come to see him on the first evening and they had dined together in his room. She had been quiet and reticent, refusing to discuss her presence that afternoon in the flat with Colonel Broussard, and had left early, kissing him quickly on the lips and promising to call again some time the next day. He had resisted the temptation to ask her to stay the night, knowing by her manner that she would refuse.
The intervals between her visits and his own trips into the Casbah began to hang heavily, making him nervous and irritable.
He had too much time to ponder the many possibilities and perils of the venture. The worst moments were always just before entering and leaving the Casbah, with the walk through the narrow alleys, the tall dark walls and the memory of the pale man in the Aronde with his throat gaping open. Le Hir promised that he would not be harmed by any member of the Secret Army; and Boussid supplied a regular escort inside the Casbah. But there was always the chance that someone — a pistol-touting European teenager or a Moslem fanatic — might decide to take a shot at him from one of a thousand black corners. He would return from each trip exhausted, the back of his neck itching with an overdeveloped instinct for danger, and try to distract himself with Le Hir’s meagre selection of reading matter: cheap magazines and romans policiers, and a few popular novels. He slogged through Angelique et le Sultan, fighting away the thought of Caroline which stabbed at him systematically with a physical wrenching of his stomach.
Occasionally Nadia would wander in and sit on his bed, smoking and chatting in a desultory way to pass the long hours she herself spent cooped up in the flat. Neil decided to forget that she had volunteered her opinion that he should be killed. She had a sulky, sluttish charm, but she was not a bad girl. One afternoon she began to tell him that she was fed up with the revolt: she wanted to get out of the city and travel, to go to Paris and New York. He ventured to ask her, as tactfully as possible, about her relations with Le Hir. She shrugged: ‘Perhaps we get married one day — when his divorce comes through. He has an Italian wife, you see. She’s gone back to Rome, and there are terrible troubles with the Church.’
He nodded. She stared glumly at her cigarette and said, ‘It’s not much fun being kept in this flat all day long. Just serving drinks for his men when they come up. I’ve had no fun since all this trouble started. I never go out — never go dancing.’
‘Do you love him?’ he asked, with sudden curiosity.
‘Ah, moi je n’sais pas!’ She pulled a sad ugly face: ‘It would be all right if I could get out of here. We have terrible rows stuck in this place. Sometimes he beats me. Last night he really whipped me! I think he enjoys it. I told him that if he does it again I’ll leave him. Only I haven’t anywhere to go.’
CHAPTER 5
On the last evening — Tuesday — Le Hir gave a party. The final details for the truce talks had been agreed in the afternoon: Paul Guérin was to meet the three leaders of the Arab Front in the farmhouse soon after dawn tomorrow.
The afternoon had grown heavy, with sullen purplish clouds rolling down from the mountains; and a thundery light filled the city, setting up an electric tension, a sense of malaise and impending crisis. Brown-bellied helicopters chugged overhead like fat dragonflies; shops began to close early; troops roamed the streets, slowly, purposefully, as though responding to the gathering storm. In an outlying European suburb a car full of Moslems had driven past a cinema queue and machine-gunned eight men and three girls before tossing a grenade into a flower stall and killing an old woman.
Up in his flat, ten floors above the city, Le Hir was in high spirits. He had laid on pink champagne and Beluga caviar, and Neil was called in to enjoy the festivities. Anne-Marie was there, with the two German legionnaires and half-a-dozen ex-Army officers, and a couple of polished middle-aged civilians who looked like well-to-do businessmen. One of them was the proprietor of an extreme right-wing newspaper in the city which had been suspended by the authorities.
They drank champagne and laughed and talked cheerfully; and Neil had a long academic conversation with the newspaper proprietor who spoke English and had the studied good manners of the French commercial classes who have entered the ranks of society. Neil imagined him playing golf at Le Touquet and skiing above Marrakesh. As though by conspiracy they did not mention the crisis, let alone the plans for the peace talks tomorrow; instead, the man boasted to Neil of how he had met Lord Beaverbrook several times at Cap d’Ail.
Nadia served the drinks, while across the room Anne-Marie sat morosely sipping her champagne, taking nearly half-an-hour to finish one glass. Neil was now not only puzzled by her behaviour — the radical change from the wild lithe creature he had met at Le Berry, to this solemn girl who sat at the right-hand of Le Hir and Broussard — but was now also worried by her. He managed at
