‘I want you to be able to fire all six rounds,’ he told her, ‘if I gave you an ordinary silencer you would be able to fire safely only two before the barrel overheated. And you must make certain of this Englishman.’
He had placed the 100-sestertii piece on the table beside his pipe; and now, to keep his hands from shaking, he took a backgammon board from the side table and began laying out the red and white ivory counters. When he had them all in position, lined up along the bases of the black arrow-points, Anne-Marie came round and stood beside him. She was still very pale; laying her hand on his shoulder, she said gently, ‘Don’t worry — everything will be all right — after tonight.’ She kissed him on the forehead, and he slid his hand round to hers and held it for a moment. ‘Merci, ma petite!’
Serge came back with the small-calibre revolver with the barrel wrapped in a thick bandage. For five minutes he stood with Anne-Marie and loaded and unloaded the gun, explaining the sighting, safety-catch, and firmest firing position — at arm’s length, level with the breast. ‘You will have no difficulty,’ he said, ‘there’s no kick. But get as close as you can before you use it.’
She watched and listened in silence, and repeated his motions once, without error. Then she took the gun and went through the folding doors into her bedroom. She closed the shutters against the rising wind, pulled her skirt over her head, peeled off her stockings and brassiere, and sat on the bed in the half-darkness, waiting.
CHAPTER 4
The man’s blue-black gun, hanging from the greased strap, threw a finger of shadow that swung across the ground till it touched the edge of the fountain. He finished his cigarette and tossed it into the basin where it hissed like a snake among the shadows.
Across the boulevard the windows blazed with the setting sun. The man turned and went into the hotel. A hot wind was blowing up in bursts that rustled the palms and whipped the dust up along the pavements. He took up his place in a chair behind the reception desk.
He was a muscular, greying man of about forty, and had been a CRS territorial reservist for fifteen years. His wife ran a bar-tabac in the village just outside Juan-Les-Pins, and he worked during the summers as a swimming-instructor and life-saver along the coast. He usually did only about three months territorial work a year; but with this cursed crisis dragging on, he saw himself likely to be out in North Africa for the rest of the summer.
He didn’t dislike the country, or the people in it — they were very much like the local people in the Midi — but the work was hard, there were riots, continual guard-duties, arrests, house searches, and quite often street-battles in which several of his colleagues had been killed.
Tonight he was on a simple guard job detailed, so he had heard, by one of the barbouze leaders. There was a second CRS man inside the restaurant. They had been told to look out for commandos who might try to kill one of the clients.
He glanced around him and was faintly amused. Almost the entire clientele seemed to be foreign journalists. And very odd birds they were, too! A couple of them were at the desk now. One was tall and elderly, a real English Major Thompson, he thought, complete with homburg under his arm and those extraordinary striped trousers you usually saw only in cartoons of Englishmen. The fellow was bickering with the silver-haired receptionist over his bill.
The second man looked like a mangy lion. He had pushed past the receptionist, who was too busy arguing with the tall man to notice, and snatched a key and an envelope from one of the pigeon-holes. He came back and hurried across to the bar.
Ah, the bar! the CRS man thought. That’s where they all go. Drinking at the bar. Writing their stories at the bar. They should try a few years in the CRS. Try breaking up a few riots. He did not think this with bitterness, he was a sanguine man; and anyway, it probably meant an easy evening for him.
An American television film unit had just arrived outside, with two trucks mounted with cameras, sound-booms and folding canvas chairs with the team’s names on the back. They came in noisily, tearing off dark glasses and shouting for their keys. ‘We got sixty feet of battle film that would make old Zanuck sweat!’ one of them yelled. ‘And those goddam CRS grabbed the lot!’
He came striding past the desk, throwing a scowl at the CRS man who ignored him. The tall Major Thompson figure had finished his dispute with the receptionist, and the CRS man watched him walk across the foyer to join his red-headed colleague in the bar.
CHAPTER 5
In the bar Mallory opened the envelope which was addressed to ‘Monsieur Ingleby, Chambre 274’, and read, in a sloping feminine hand in French: ‘Mon cher, I have not seen much of you in the last few days and I have many things to tell you. Please, before you go back to England, I must see you and talk to you. Be in your room at the hotel tonight. I will come before the curfew. Please be there. Many kisses! A-M!’
He finished reading it just as Winston St. Leger came up. ‘Well done, you old decoy-duck!’ he croaked, holding up the key to Neil’s room.
St. Leger eyed it dubiously, ‘I suppose these cloak-and-dagger tactics are necessary,’ he muttered, ‘but I can hardly say it’s a métier I enjoy. Do you think it will work?’
Mallory shrugged: ‘It may make ’em think he’s still in the hotel — or
