Vintage Stuff

In the back seat the Countess listened to the exchange with interest. It was beginning to dawn on her that, by comparison with Peregrine, Glodstone was practically a genius. More to the point, he was frightened and prepared to follow her orders. 'Stop the car here,' she said to test her authority, 'and switch the motor off.'

Glodstone did so and looked at her questioningly.

'This is a good a spot as any,' she said after they had sat in silence for a minute listening. 'Now then, you, trot off into the wood a couple of hundred metres and bury those gats before anyone comes.'

Peregrine looked at Glodstone. 'Must I?' he asked. But the look on Glodstone's face was enough.

'Not a very advanced form of life,' said the Countess when he'd gone. Glodstone didn't reply. From the depths of his exhausted mind the question had surfaced again. How had he ever come to be in the power of this foul woman? He wasn't going to put it to her now but if they ever got back to Britain he'd want an answer.

'One dead, another mutilated and how many missing?' asked Inspector Roudhon.

'Two,' said Dr Grenoy looking unhappily out of the window at the little helicopter perched on the terrace. 'Madame la Comtesse and an Englishman called Pringle.'

'An Englishman called Pringle? Description.'

'Middle-aged. Medium height. Balding. Small moustache. A typical Englishman of a certain class.'

'And he was staying here?'

'Not exactly. He rescued the dead American from the river yesterday morning and he was exhausted so he was given a room and a bed.'

'If he rescued the man who was shot he doesn't sound like a killer,' said the Inspector.

'Of course he wasn't a killer. Ask your own men. They had to get him back across the river with Professor Botwyk. He was on a walking tour.'

'And yet he has disappeared?'

'In the circumstances very sensibly, Inspector,' said Dr Grenoy. 'If you had been here last night you'd have tried to leave.' He was getting irritated by the Inspector's failure to appreciate the international consequences of the night's events. The Glory of France was at stake, not to mention his own career.

'And the night before a man was here looking for Madame la Comtesse,' continued the Inspector.

'That's what I've been told. But it must be said that he made the first attempt on Professor Botwyk then. Last night the Professor was shot down in cold blood, capote-wise. And your men were supposed to be on guard for his protection.'

'So they were, but they weren't to know they were about to be attacked by terrorists. You said it was Madame la Comtesse who was in danger.'

'Naturally. What else does one think when an Englishman with a gun...or an American, demands to know where she is? It was your responsibility.'

'If we had been told they were terrorists it would have helped, monsieur. We can only act on the information we are given. And the roads were guarded. They didn't come from Boosat or Frisson.'

'And what about the river? They could have slipped past your road blocks in canoes.'

'Perhaps. It was clearly a well organized operation. The aim was to assassinate the American, Botwyk, and...'

'Castrate the Soviet delegate. Presumably to put the Siberian gas pipe-line agreement in jeopardy,' said Dr Grenoy. His sarcasm was wasted on the Inspector.

'But it is the Americans who oppose the deal. It is more likely the Iranians who are involved.'

In the dining-room the exhausted delegates were being interrogated. They too were convinced they had been the victims of a terrorist attack.

'The crisis of capitalism expresses itself in these barbaric acts,' Dr Zukacs explained to a bemused gendarme. 'They are symptomatic of the degenerate bourgeois mentality and the alliance between monopoly fascism and sectors of the lumpen proletariat. Until a new consciousness is born...'

'And how many shots were fired?' asked the policeman, trying to get back to the facts.

Dr Zukacs didn't know.

'Fifteen,' said Pastor Laudenbach with the precision of a military expert. 'Medium-calibre pistol. Rate of fire, good. Extreme accuracy.'

The cop wrote this down. He'd been told to treat these members of the intelligentsia softly. They'd be in a state of shock. Pastor Laudenbach obviously wasn't.

'Your name, monsieur?'

The Pastor clicked his heels. 'Obergruppen...er...Pastor Laudenbach. I belong to the Lutheran Church.'

The policeman made a note of the fact. 'Did anyone see the assailant?'

Dr Hildegard Keister pushed Badiglioni forward. 'You met him in the passage,' she said.

The Professor cursed her under his breath. 'That was the night before. It may not have been the same man.'

'But you said he had a gun. You know you did. And when you '

'Yes,' said Badiglioni, to cut short the disclosure that he had taken refuge in her room, 'he was a young Englishman.'

'An Englishman? Can you describe him?'

Professor Badiglioni couldn't. 'It was dark.'

'Then how did you know he was a young Englishman?'

'By his accent. It was unmistakably English. I have made a study of the inter-relationship between phonetics and the socio-economic infrastructure in post-Imperial Britain and I would say categorically that the man you are looking for is of lower-upper-middle-class extraction with extreme right-wing Protestant inclinations.'

'Sod that for a lark,' said Sir Arnold. Ulster was going to be on the agenda again at this rate. 'You were into Dr Keister's room before he had a chance to speak to you. You told me that yourself.'

'I heard what he said to Dr Abnekov. That was enough.'

'And where did you pick up your astounding capacity for analysing the English language? As an Eyetie POW, no doubt.'

'As a matter of fact I was an interpreter for British prisoners of war in Italy,' said Professor Badiglioni stiffly.

'I'll put him down as English,' said the policeman.

Sir Arnold objected. 'Certainly not. I had a fairly lengthy discussion with the fellow and in my opinion he had a distinctly foreign accent.'

'English is a foreign language in France, monsieur.'

'Yes, well I daresay it is,' said Sir Arnold, getting flustered. 'What I meant was his accent was European-foreign if you see what I mean.'

The cop didn't. 'But he did speak in English?'

Sir Arnold admitted grudgingly that this had been the case. 'Doesn't mean he's British though. Probably a deliberate ploy to disguise his real nationality.'

Another helicopter clattered down onto the terrace and prevented any further questioning for the time being.

In Bordeaux Dr Abnekov was undergoing micro-surgery without a general anaesthetic. He wanted to make sure he kept what was left of his penis.

Chapter 21

'Shit, that's torn it,' said Major Fetherington as they ground to a halt at a road block beyond Boosat. Three gendarmes carrying sub-machine-guns circled the car while a fourth aimed a pistol at Slymne and demanded their passports. As the man flicked through the pages, Slymne stared in front of him. He had been staring at the road ahead for hundreds of miles while the Major had dozed beside him and it had all been in vain. Obviously something catastrophic had happened. Even the French police didn't man road-blocks and keep the occupants of cars covered with machine-guns without good cause, but Slymne was almost too tired to care. They'd have to send a cable back to the Headmaster and then find a hotel and he could get some sleep. That would be some consolation. What happened after that didn't matter now. He wasn't even worried about the letters. If Glodstone had kept them, nobody could prove he'd sent them. And in a sense he was relieved. It was all over.

It wasn't. He was woken from this rhapsody of exhaustion by the car doors being opened and with the guns aimed at them they were ordered out.