He reached the corner of the corridor leading to his room. There was still no one in sight. A sudden instinctive terror warned him to run. He looked up the dim rows of doors to an oblique shaft of sunlight from a window at the end of the passage.
He turned and fled, back to the lifts. The one he had come up in was on the way down. He began to run down the stairs. He now felt very drunk, and once he slipped on the marble and nearly fell. He was sweating and out of breath when he reached the bar.
A crowd of reporters had collected, with Mallory in the middle buying drinks. ‘What happened?’ he croaked. ‘You seen a ghost?’
‘Come on, let’s go!’ Neil said.
‘Where’s your gear?’
‘I didn’t get it. Come on!’
Mallory tipped back his drink and heaved himself off his stool, and Winston St. Leger smiled nobly at Neil and said, ‘Good luck! Hope you get away!’
Mallory had his Hillman Minx parked behind the hotel. They got in and headed down the Front de Mer. ‘You think there might be someone up in your room?’ he said.
‘There might be. There was last time. Two Foreign Legion boys. Germans. That was the start of it all.’
‘Disgusting Krauts,’ Mallory muttered, ‘all over the bloody place. I heard they’ve got some ex-Waffen SS boys here leading Jewish commandos in the Gambetta suburb. What would our modern sociologists make of that?’
They had reached the end of the Front de Mer where the ‘Serafina’ had been moored under the sea-wall. It seemed a long time ago: less than a week. Neil climbed out into the sunlight and thought, God I feel drunk, as he watched the CRS men come forward from under the palms.
‘You can’t stay there!’ shouted the officer. ‘Go on, get moving!’
Mallory had produced a reel of international Press passes like a postcard rack, growling at the guards who only shook their heads and waved him on with the muzzles of their machine-pistols. ‘Allez, passez, messieurs, passez!’
Neil stood weakly against the parapet of the sea-wall and watched the ‘Serafina’ below, bobbing white against the brilliant blue, feeling the glow of whisky dying in him with a flat sour taste as he listened to Mallory croaking at the CRS with mock rage. But the guards only shook their heads again and began to hustle him towards his car. For a moment Neil thought he was going to hit one of them. It gave him a gloomy inspiration: why not assault one of the CRS and get himself arrested?
Finally Mallory relented. He shook himself free and turned to Neil, hair flaming gold in the noon sun, his face like a flaking gargoyle: ‘Come on, old boy! Port’s closed. Nobody gets in, nobody gets out!’
They climbed back into the Hillman and turned back down the Front de Mer: palms curving sharp against the sun like scimitars, balconies rising layer on layer, shutters clattering up and people coming down into the streets. Some of them might belong to Le Hir: anonymous black-jacketed toughs mixing with the crowds. Or perhaps Ali La Joconde’s men. But they’d have difficulty slipping into the European area. They certainly wouldn’t get past the receptionists at the Miramar. He wondered about Anne-Marie: was there some way in which he could contact her? Explain to her that he hadn’t been responsible for General Guérin’s arrest?
‘So you left your luggage at the hotel,’ said Mallory, ‘and you gave your key up, didn’t you?’ He frowned and thumped the horn at a couple of Gardes Mobiles in a jeep; they threw him a furious look as he swerved round them on the wrong side of the road. ‘Cretins can’t even drive straight! You know, you ought to have held on to that key. Best thing is pretend you’re still in the hotel. Then if the airport’s open, just sit tight till you get on a plane.’
‘I suppose I’ll have to collect the key, then?’ said Neil faintly. They were crossing the Place Lyautey. The two burnt-out cars they had passed on that first afternoon were still there, lying beside the statue of France’s greatest colonial pioneer, his bronze whiskers whitened with gull droppings.
Another hundred yards and they’d be at the hotel.
‘No, forget about the key!’ said Mallory. ‘We’ll fix something for you.’ They were driving past the palm-groves at the entrance to the Miramar: ‘And even if you do get killed, you’ll still make the front pages. Blood and glory, old boy! Your photograph and everything.’
‘Where are we going?’ said Neil.
‘The airport.’
CHAPTER 2
Out on the shimmering tarmac the Caravelles lay like sleeping swans. Neil sat watching them, twisted round on his high stool, drinking Pernod. After a moment he began to imagine that they were silver fish in a vast sunlit tank behind the plate-glass of the airport building. And to escape from the airport he would somehow have to swim into the belly of those fish and rise with them thousands of fathoms, high above the distant mountains, into the purple stratosphere where he would be cool and free, away from the crowds and sweat and danger.
He and Mallory were at the upstairs bar overlooking the departure hall. They had been here for more than three hours now; and Mallory had written, in bold letters with his gold-topped Parker 51, the word ‘EXODUS’
