Marouf and Boussid had sat down again, and the guards had lowered their guns, watching. Pol stopped in front of Neil and began patting him on the arm, grinning sublimely.
‘You bastard!’ said Neil, under his breath in English. ‘You fat French bastard!’
‘Qu’est-ce qu’tu dis?’ Pol crooned, still grinning and patting his arm.
‘You’re not going to get away with this,’ Neil said, this time in French, ‘I don’t know what you think you’re trying to do here, but whatever it is, it’s not going to work.’
Pol was still grinning, but his eyes now had a cold sly look. He flapped his hand towards the gate: ‘Is he out there?’
‘He won’t walk in here,’ said Neil. ‘I’m keeping my word, even if you’re not.’
The cherry-lipped smile set tightly at the edges: ‘He’s in the Jaguar, then?’
Neil said nothing. He nodded at the farmhouse windows, ‘Your men won’t be able to take him. If I’m not back in a few minutes, he’ll drive away. He won’t come here until I give him the word.’
Pol began patting Neil’s arm again, and his smile now became sad and wistful: ‘I’ve been counting on you, Monsieur Ingleby.’
‘And I on you,’ said Neil, ‘and you bring along half the French Army!’
Pol laughed: ‘Half the French Army! My dear Ingleby, they wouldn’t even spare me one conscript!’ He turned and kicked open the door. Inside were about a dozen men, all Europeans in civilian clothes, crouching along the walls and round the Douze-Sept that pointed at the window. They wore machine-pistols and grenades. Pol closed the door and looked at Neil, ‘Barbouzes,’ he said, ‘riff-raff, dregs of the nation.’
‘I thought you said you were a barbouze!’ Neil murmured, his anger weakening to a sense of futility.
Pol shrugged: ‘Ah, the status of the barbouzes has very much declined, I’m afraid. We don’t get the material we used to.’
‘What were you hoping to do?’ said Neil.
‘Kill Guérin when he came in.’ He nodded towards the watchtower: ‘There’s another Douze-Sept up there, and a bazooka. I was counting on them coming right up to the gates. Of course they’re out of range now — even with the Douze-Sept.’
‘You won’t get them anywhere near the gates,’ said Neil, ‘unless I tell them to come. And I’m not going to tell them.’
Pol nodded, holding Neil gently by the elbow. ‘The man out there in the Jaguar,’ he said, speaking with quiet intensity, ‘is a Fascist — a terrorist, Monsieur Ingleby. He is not an ordinary criminal, he does not merit ordinary personal loyalties. He threatens a great nation, a whole democratic tradition. We are at war with this man. You must understand that!’
Neil thought of Le Hir, the German legionnaires, the serpents of blood and flaying feet and the crowds smiling at death: and of the man who was responsible for it all, waiting out there in the Jaguar behind the Venetian blinds, old and tired, threatening the French nation. He said wretchedly, ‘What can I do? I gave my word!’ He looked over at Marouf, Boussid and Ali La Joconde: ‘They gave me their word too.’
‘Sometimes one is obliged to break one’s word,’ said Pol; his fat little fingers tightened round Neil’s arm. ‘Go back, Monsieur Ingleby, and tell General Guérin that all is well here.’
‘And then what?’
‘You will be protected.’
Neil laughed savagely: they were the same words Le Hir had used as the cars approached the farm. ‘As soon as you try to take Guérin they’ll kill me on the spot — and you know it! No, Monsieur Pol, you take Guérin any way you like, but not here — not while I’m around.’
Pol nodded and pulled out a pistol. ‘Monsieur Ingleby,’ he began, with studied formality, ‘I shall have to force you to do as I say.’ He poked the blunt barrel into Neil’s chest.
‘You can’t force me to do anything,’ said Neil, ‘and put that ridiculous thing away! You’re not going to kill me.’
Pol took a deep breath, looked down at the gun, sighed, and finally put it away again inside his rumpled jacket, shaking his head: ‘You are lucky I’m a humane man! It wouldn’t be difficult to have you shot. We could always say it had been done by the Secret Army.’
‘If you kill me,’ said Neil, ‘you lose your last chance of getting Guérin. If I don’t walk back out of that gate in a couple of minutes, Guérin will know something’s wrong. Your only hope is to let me go.’
‘Will you tell them it’s clear to come over?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Neil, ‘I haven’t made up my mind yet.’
Pol’s eyes flashed with sparks of rage: ‘Monsieur Ingleby, don’t play the comedy with me! I might shoot you just out of irritation. And you are being very irritating at this moment!’
Neil realized that he was not joking. The six armed Moslems stood all round, waiting for the order. Pol was angry: somehow Neil had touched him on the raw. Perhaps he had been too offhand, or too scrupulous. Why should Pol give a damn about ‘keeping one’s word’ when it came to catching a man like Guérin? For that matter, why should Neil?
He knew that if Pol thought he was going to walk out of here and tell Guérin that there was a trap waiting, he would be shot dead before he got beyond the gates. ‘All right,’ he said, ‘I accept. I’ll go back to the car and tell them to come.’ He nodded and turned and began to walk across the yard, down the whitewashed passage with its two bald tyres and the gates standing half-open. He had been in the farm for more than fifteen minutes. He would have to hurry.
Behind him he could feel Pol watching him, the pistol inside his coat,
