"Midnight Plus One" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lyall Gavin)

SIX

At four o'clock we were running down a tree-lined avenue into Vannes. It was the biggest town we'd meet for another hour.

'There's a Michelin Guide in the pocket in front of you,' I told Harvey. 'Look up this place and find me the post office. I want to ring Merlin, if there's a phone box there.'

'Why?'

'He wanted me to keep him in touch. And he may be able to find out something about the shooting in Quimper. It could help.'

After a while he said: 'Turn right in a moment. Alongside this square. Post office on your right in a couple of hundred yards.'

I drew up and switched off the engine alongside a dark telephone box. The silence was a sudden thing, rushing in on me, making me feel how noisy we must have been moving. Then I shook my head: it was far too early to start getting jumpy on this trip. I stepped out into the rain.

The box was open, and after a while I got the operator to wake up. I asked for Henri's private Paris number.

It rang several times, then a woman's voice said sleepily:'Allo?'

'Est il possible de parler à Henri? Voici Caneton.'

There was a pause, then: '//vous donnera un coup de téléphone dans quelques minutes. Quel est le numéro?'

I gave her the number, hung up, then went back to the car.

'Didn't get him yet,' I told Harvey. 'He's ringing back.' I slid into the front seat and started lighting a cigarette.

Maganhard asked: 'What are you ringing for?'

'To tell him what happened to his boy in Quimper. And see if that means anything to him. He might have some suggestions.'

Maganhard's voice got slightly harder, more metallic. 'I thought you were an expert?'

'An expert is a man who knows when to call in experts.'

The phone in the box jangled and I jumped for it.

Henri said:'Monsieur Caneton?'

'Hello, Henri. Bad news: your cousin in Brittany is ill, very ill.'

That is bad news. How did it happen?'

'Suddenly – very suddenly. Anything you think I should do?'

'Is he – he is well looked after, yes?'

'He's okay where he is for a day or two, anyhow.'

Then, perhaps I think you should go on as you go. You are at Vannes?'

'Yes. I'm just worried that what he's got might be – infectious. You haven't heard of any disease he's been near recently?'

'I have heard nothing. But now – in the morning – I will ask. You will ring me again?'

'Sure. Night, Henri.'

'Au 'voir, Caneton.'

I got back into the car. 'He doesn't know anything.' I started the engine again. 'We could turn off here and go for Rennes, then Le Mans and the northern route. But the road isn't as good. I think we'll keep going for Nantes.' A big yellow Berlietcamion growled round the corner ahead and trundled past us, shivering the ground.

Harvey said: 'Well, let's roll. The road'll be full of those things by breakfast.'

The road was straighter and faster now, the farmland around it looked thicker and richer in the headlights. We were almost off the Brittany peninsula.

But the spell had broken. I wasn't feeling the road as I had been before. We were covering ground, but the magic had gone.

There were occasionalcamions and farm lorries, the spray blowing away from their rear wheels like smoke. I realised we must be trailing a wake like a torpedo boat: nobody had a hope in hell of reading our number plate.

Nobody said anything. Just the flicker of light as Harvey or the girl behind me lit a cigarette. It was the last low hour before the dawn. The time when you know you haven't built up strength enough for a new day; the time when sick men decide the night has been too long, and give up and die. The time a good gunman knows to lay an ambush.

But nobody did. Soon after five we were winding through the industrial desert of Nantes, by-passing the centre through the northwest suburbs.

Harvey asked: 'How's the gas?'

'Wearing out. But I think we can make Angers. We've only done about two hundred and fifty kilometres so far.'

The girl asked: 'Can we stop to get some breakfast? '

'We'll get something in Tours.'

'Why wait till then?'

'It's more of a tourist town than anything this side of it: they aren't so likely to remember strangers.'

We went on. Up the valley of the Loire, on the N23. A good, fast road except where it suddenly twisted into descending turns down to the riverside villages. There was more traffic now; lorries carrying fish up from the sea, others bringing vegetables down from farmlands. And morecamions, carrying whatevercamions carry: Berliets, Somurs, Saviems, Unies, and Willeme tankers. All with the square, solid military look of French Légionnaires -and the same habit of walking over anything that got in their way.

The night began to wear thin around us; the shapes of trees and houses separated from the sky; the headlights grew pallid. Even the rain was thinning out; with the wind behind us, we were probably outrunning the front.

When it was light enough I twisted the rear-view mirror to have my first good look at our passengers.

Maganhard must have been about fifty and in one way he looked it: a heavy square face frozen in a suspicious frown. But the details were missing. The face was quite unmarked, unworn; the hair a thick pure-black mass swept carefully back from a sharp widow's peak. It looked like a metal sculpture from the twenties or thirties when they got the shape exactly right but made everything smooth and stylized to show that it was Really Art.'

He wore square glasses with thick black rims, a bronze-coloured raincoat of very simple cut, and his arms were folded across his chest showing a square wristwatch and a pair of angular gold cuff-links by one of those Scandinavian designers who can make stainless steel look like a million dollars and gold look like fifty cents.

The girl, Miss Jarman, was something else.

Her face was both innocent and haughty, which isn't a rare combination, but which rarely looks as good as it did on her. The face was a pure oval, rather pale, with thin arched eyebrows that were mostly pencilwork. Long brown hair in Garbo's Queen Christina cut, curled in under the chin. She was fast asleep, but doing it without letting her mouth come unbuttoned.

She didn't fit at all with Maganhard – or maybe she did, in a way. At least you could see why he wanted her in the front office, and somehow I was pretty sure that was the only place he did want her. She'd be very good at telling minor millionaires to go climb a tree without hurting their feelings. From her, they'd take it.

This had earned her a dark shaved-sealskin coat, probably on Maganhard's money but certainly not his design. It was a casual -wrap-around job held with a loose tie belt, as if it was just another coat. Under it, a white blouse.

I glanced at Harvey, twisted the mirror back, and went back to watching the road. We ran into Angers at about six o'clock. Despite the good road, our speed had dropped in overtaking thecamions, We drifted down the broad empty streets, past tall old houses with blind, shuttered windows. When a French town goes to sleep, it dies. It was like sneaking a short cut through the graveyard. I kept the speed down, the car as quiet as I could.

From here to Tours I had a choice of routes: the main road looping north or the tourist route alongside the river. In the end I reckoned that there'd be morecamions on the north route than tourists on the river at this time of day. We stayed alongside the Loire.

'We're stopping for petrol soon,' I announced, 'and fromnow on we may be meeting people. Cafés and so on. Better decide what parts we play.'

Harvey asked: 'You passing as French?'

'Unless anyone asks for my passport. I can do it. ' The French are so convinced that nobody else can speak the language properly, that once you know it well it never occurs to them that you could. be a foreigner. Useful.

Harvey said: 'My accent isn't good enough. So maybe I won't know any at all. Just a little old tourist from Moose Droppings, Iowa. First trip to Europe. Sure is a quaint little old place.'

I gave him a look, then asked the back seat: 'How about you, Mr Maganhard? What passport do you carry?'

'I am an Austrian citizen resident in Switzerland.'

'The passport's in your own name?'

'Of course.'

I hadn't expected much else, but there still seemed to be a disturbing amount of honesty going on.

'You'd better speak English,' I said. His accent wasn't perfect, and he didn't look particularly English – at least to me. But he was probably convincing enough for a French caféproprietor. I added: 'But if you have to show your passport, don't speak any English or French at all. Not knowing any languages'll make you seem rather smalltime.'

He grunted. I wasn't sure he liked the idea of seeming small-time, but he must have seen the sense of it.

'Miss Jarman?' I asked.

'I have an English passport, of course, but I believe I can speak French well enough.'

'I'd rather you stayed English. You look it. And act as upper-class as you like. If they're looking for a secretary they won't expect a Duchess. Be really snooty.'

T will behave as I want to behave, Mr Cane.' And the voice came from a lot farther off than just the back seat.

I nodded. That's perfect.'

Which left us as an English businessman, his upper-crust girl friend, an American tourist, and a French friend doing the driving. It wasn't particularly logical, but it was some distance from a couple of hired hands taking an Austrian businessman and secretary on a trip to Liechtenstein.

Probably none of it would help at all. But it was practice at remembering that we only needed to make one mistake to bring the ceiling down on us.

For the same reason, I reversed in a side road and turnedso as to come up to a petrol station from the East, as if we were going from Paris to the Atlantic coast.

I asked for forty-five litres, and the attendant wandered off round the back, still half asleep. I got out and stretched. Harvey slid out of his door and took a fast look round, then propped himself on the road side of the car.

I walked round the car, getting my first daylight look at it. As far as I could tell it hadn't got any scrapes or dents, and the tyres were nearly new Michelin X's – so no trouble there.

As I came back Harvey said: 'Sure a mighty pretty little place, this France of yours. Only trouble is the Goddamned fancy cooking. What I'd give now for a real deep-frozen chicken and some shrivelled-up black-eye peas. Yes, sir."

I gave him a look that should have sliced his head off, then had to go through with the joke; the attendant was looking at us.

I spread my hands. 'You are – making the pleasantry -yes? Or really you are -que dites vouz? – are homesick for your little town in Iowa?'

'Where my dear old pappy sits rockin' on his porch and figurin' new ways to cheat the Indians out of their oil-wells. You bet.'

I leered at the attendant and nodded at Harvey.'Américain… Il n'aime pas beaucoup la cuisine française.'

The attendant stared at Harvey as if he had escaped from the Insect House at the Zoo, then shrugged at me.'Quarante six.'

I dealt him fifty francs, and hopped into the car. We'd only fooled a sleepy garage hand, but at least it was a start.

I turned into a side road, did a swing round behind the garage and rejoined the main road east of it. The time was six-thirty-five, and the eastern sky was a mass of dirty ragged clouds ^with a tepid yellow light somewhere behind it. We hadn't seen the sun yet.

The road was a series of fast, gentle curves with just a wall on the right to keep the river off the road and me out of the river. The fields were green and lush; this is some of the finest French farmland.

We passed a couple of US Army trucks keeping nonunion hours and the first sign of Tours, a big Eiffel Tower-shaped power pylon, loomed up. Then the twin towers of the cathedral and the tall blocks of modern flats. Then I was stuck in a swarm of early workers on autocycles, buzzing like bees all over the road.

'Where are we eating?' Harvey asked.

'We'll find a place down by the market; they'll have been open for hours.'

I took the first bridge, weaved through more autocyclists, and went straight across into the old town. It was jammed with fruit and fish lorries. Just before the Place des Halles, I turned off into a side street and parked.

Harvey bounced out on to the pavement, holding up his left hand to stop Maganhard and Miss Jarman moving until he'd approved of the view. There were quite a number of people about.

'I could have done without the crowd,' he said quietly.

I shrugged. 'Or it could be protection.'

'I'mthe protection. Let's not make it a habit, hey?'

Maganhard and the girl got out and I locked up.

We were in a small, cramped square made of blank, scruffy flat-faced buildings, decorated with the gaudy tatters of last year's circus posters. On the far side of the square there was a small caféthat looked like standing room only. I led the way round the corner.

After a few yards, we found another café: small, dark, but warm and busy. We edged past a group of characters in smudged blue overalls or leather aprons talking about racing and drinking cognac, and found a table in the corner. The waiter zoomed up, bent an ear at me without looking at us, took an order for four coffees and croissants, and vanished.

Miss Jarman said: 'I'd've preferred mine white.'

'Sorry. It seemed to be a choice between quick service and no service.' I handed round my cigarettes; she took one, Harvey shook his head and went on keeping an inconspicuous watch on the door. Without me noticing it, he'd shunted us into the best pattern: himself with his back against the corner, facing the door, Maganhard on his right, me blocking the line from the door to Maganhard, the girl clear of the line.

Maganhard asked: 'What route are we going now?'

'Geneva, as direct as we can. We've done about four hundred and fifty kilometres; we've got nearly six hundred to go to the Swiss border.'

'What time will I be in Liech-'

'Don't! Not that name out loud, please.'

His mouth twitched. 'Aren't you being rather overcautious, Mr Cane?'

'How do we know? You can't tell me what trouble we'll meet, or where. I'm just trying to cover everything.' I looked at my watch. 'We should be there by nine or ten tonight – if nothing else happens.'