'And without it you wouldn't be sitting here, Heinie,' said the American savagely.
'Professor Botwyk,' said the German, 'I would remind you that we neither of us would be sitting here if twenty million Russians hadn't died. I would ask you to remember that also. And so, good night.'
He left the room and for a while Peregrine could hear the other man pacing the room above. He had understood nothing of what they had been talking about except that it had had something to do with the War. Presently, the American moved out of the room. Below him in the passage Peregrine followed the sound of his footsteps. Halfway along the passage they turned away. Peregrine stopped and flashed his torch briefly. Some steps led up to a door. Very cautiously he climbed them and softly opened the door. A figure was standing on the terrace and had lit a cigar. As Peregrine watched he walked away. Peregrine slipped after him. Here was the perfect opportunity to learn what had happened to Glodstone. As the man stood staring contemplatively over the valley puffing his cigar Peregrine struck. To be precise he sprang and locked one arm round his victim's throat while with the other he twisted his arm behind his back. For a second the cigar glowed and then grew dim.
'One word out of you and you'll die,' whispered Peregrine gratuitously. With rather more smoke in his lungs than he was in the habit of inhaling and with what felt like a hangman's noose in human form round his neck, the advocate of Machtpolitik was for once speechless. For a moment he writhed but Peregrine's grip tightened.
'What have you done with him?' he demanded when the struggling stopped. The American's only answer was a spasm of coughing. 'You can cut that out too,' continued Peregrine and promptly made the injunction entirely unnecessary. 'You're going to tell me where you've put him.'
'Put who, for Chrissake?' gasped the professor when he was allowed to breathe again.
'You know.'
'I swear '
'I shouldn't if I were you.'
'But who are you talking about?'
'Glodstone,' whispered Peregrine. 'Mr Glodstone.'
'Mr Gladstone?' gurgled the professor whose ears were now buzzing from lack of oxygen. 'You want me to tell you where Mr Gladstone is?'
Peregrine nodded.
'But he's been dead since '
He got no further. The confirmation that Glodstone had been murdered was all Peregrine needed. With his arm clamped across Professor Botwyk's windpipe he shoved him against the balustrade. For a moment the professor fought to break loose but it was no use. As he lost consciousness he was vaguely aware that he was falling. It was preferable to being strangled.
Peregrine watched him drop without interest. Glodstone was dead. One of the swine had paid for it but there was still the Countess to consider. With his mind filled with terrible clichés, Peregrine turned back towards the Château.
Chapter 14
For the next hour the occupants of the Château Carmagnac were subjected to some of the horrors of Peregrine's literary education. The fact that they were a strange mixture, of British holidaymakers who had answered advertisements in the Lady offering a quiet holiday au Château and a small group of self-styled International Thinkers sponsored by intensely nationalistic governments to attend a symposium on 'Detente or Destruction', added to the consequent misunderstanding. The Countess's absence didn't help either.
'Haven't the foggiest, old chap,' said Mr Hodgson, a scrap-iron merchant from Huddersfield whom Peregrine had caught in the corridor trying to find the lightswitch. 'You wouldn't happen to know where the loo is, would you?'
Peregrine jabbed him in the paunch with his revolver. 'I'm not asking again. Where's the Countess?'
'Look, old chap. If I knew I'd tell you. As I don't, I can't. All I'm interested in now is having a slash.'
Peregrine gave him one and stepping over his body went in search of someone more informative. He found Dimitri Abnekov.
'No capitalist. No roubles. No nothing,' he said taking hurriedly to broken English instead of his normally fluent American in the hope that this would identify him more readily on the side of whatever oppressed masses Peregrine's anti-social action might be said to express. In his pyjamas he felt particularly vulnerable.
'I want the Countess,' said Peregrine.
'Countess? Countess? I know nothing. Countess aristocratic scum. Should be abolished like in my country. Yes?'
'No,' said Peregrine. 'You're going to tell me where...'
Dr Abnekov wasn't. He broke into a spate of Russian and was rewarded by one of Major Fetherington's Specials which left him unable to say anything. Peregrine switched out the light and hurried from the room. Outside he encountered Signor Badiglioni, a Catholic Euro-Communist, who knew enough about terrorism to have the good sense to hurl himself through the nearest door and lock it behind him. That it happened to be the door to the room of Dr Hildegard Keister, a Danish expert on surgical therapy for sexual offenders, and that she was cutting her toenails with a pair of scissors and exposing a good deal of thigh in the process, rendered Signor Badiglioni totally incoherent.
'You want me? Yes?' asked the doctor in Danish, advancing on him with a Scandinavian broadmindedness Signor Badiglioni entirely misinterpreted. Babbling frantic apologies, he tried to unlock the door but the good doctor was already upon him.
'Terrorist outside,' he squealed.
'The reciprocated sensuality is natural,' said the doctor and dragged him back to the bed.
Further down the corridor, Peregrine was engaged in an attempted dialogue with Pastor Laudenbach, the German who had been through the Battle of the Kursk Salient and whose pacifism was consequently sufficiently earnest for him to refuse to give in to Peregrine's threat to blow his head off if he didn't stop saying his prayers and tell him where the Countess was. In the end, the Pastor's convictions prevailed and Peregrine left him unscathed.
He was even less successful with his next victim. Professor Zukacs, an economist of such austere Marxist-Leninist theoretical principles that he'd spent a great many years in Hungarian prisons to save the country's industrial progress and who had been sent to the conference in the vain hope that he would defect, was too used to young men with guns patrolling corridors to be in the least disconcerted.
'I help you find her,' he told Peregrine. 'My father was with Bela Kun in the First Revolution and he shot countesses. But not enough, you understand. The same now. The bourgeoisification of the masses is detrimental to the proletarian consciousness. It is only by '
They were interrupted by the Mexican delegate who poked his head round the door of his bedroom and expressed the wish that they would shoot countesses somewhere else and said that he had enough trouble with insomnia without having proletarian consciousness added to it.
'Trotskyite,' snapped Professor Zukacs, 'imperialist lackey...' In the ensuing row Peregrine made his escape. Even to his limited intellect it was obvious the Countess wasn't in this wing of the Château. He hurried along the corridor and found a passage to the right. He was just wondering which room to enter when the matter was decided for him. Someone was moaning nearby. Peregrine moved towards the sound and stopped outside a door. The moaning was quite distinct now. So was the creak of bedsprings.
Peregrine had no difficulty interpreting them. Someone who had been gagged and tied to a bed was struggling to escape. He knew who that someone was. Very gently he tried the handle of the door and was surprised to find it opened. The room was as dark as the passage and the sounds were even more heartrending. The Countess was obviously in agony. She was panting and moaning and the depth of her despair was rendered more poignant by the occasional grunt. Peregrine edged silently towards the bed and reached out a hand. An instant later he had withdrawn it. Whatever other physical peculiarities the Countess might have, one thing was certain, she had a remarkably hairy and muscular behind. She was also stark naked.