His entire plan for the night ahead was based on this—that Anna and Willy would head for Willy’s beach hut at the end of a three-mile track across the inhospitable salt pans close to Marseille’s industrial area. It was where Willy had hidden Finn and Anna. Neither the British nor the Russians knew of it. But Burt did. In a moment of revelation between them, Finn had told Burt that Willy’s beach hut was where they had stayed for a night or two when Anna had fled from Russia. And back then, Burt saw that Finn was being only partially open. It was Finn’s and Anna’s hole-in-the-wall. Burt could tell that. Willy’s beach hut was the perfect hiding place—if you didn’t know about it.
The rib crunched gently onto the beach. Larry was on the phone again.
“They’re going for exit seventeen,” he said.
“What did I tell you, boys?” Burt said. “They’re making for a spot eleven miles inland from this very beach. All the tails, all the vanloads of gun-toting CIA hoodlums like yourselves, all the watchers and all the satellites that clog up the pleasant skies above us, couldn’t tell you where they were heading. It’s Burt’s line to God that counts. Give me that phone.”
Burt placed the cell phone delicately in his large hand and spoke in clear, unmistakably authoritative tones.
“You don’t follow them, right? You stay on the tramlines. All the way down to Marseille. No more tails. Lose them.”
There was a brief pause as this settled in.
“The truck goes behind them,” Burt said. “Then it drops its load right at the foot of the slip road. Let me hear it.”
There was a lengthy pause.
Burt put his hand over the speaker and looked at the three jocks who stood on the sand as if they were about to set off on a hundred-metre dash. Burt was chuckling to himself, to them, to the universe.
“This is better than the bouncing bomb,” he said. “Not that you’d know about that.”
Finally, and with no more words from his end, Burt clipped the phone shut.
“It’s an old French farmer’s trick,” he explained. “When they go on strike for greater subsidies in this beautiful country, they clog the main intersections with watermelons. Thousands and thousands of watermelons. Beautiful. Believe me, boys, this is God’s own country,” he said, and watched with amusement the shock of the youthful muscle that surrounded him, who thought that God was born and raised in the US of A.
But Burt was laughing. “Anyone following that blue Merc is fruit salad,” he said.
He handed back the phone and took a long, slow piss in the dunes. When he returned, he spoke carefully, serious now.
“I want the two of you”—he indicated Joe and Christoff—“to walk with me down the beach. You will wait at intervals that I will show you. Anyone approaching from the west—in other words towards the beach hut—you politely stop. Though God knows how you can be polite in black spandex pants,” he added. “Just try. If they aren’t polite in return, you take them down, as silently as possible. We don’t expect anyone, but just suppose the Russians or the British, or maybe some extraterrestrial group that’s also interested in the woman, do know about this place, be prepared. Larry, you go over the back of the beach. Approach from the land side. Stay down in the dunes. Do not be visible at any time. When they’re out of the car—the both of them—when they’re out of sight, disable their vehicle. Okay. Me? When I drop you two off at your posts, I will go alone right along this beach to meet them.”
Burt lit a cigar, against general blackout procedures, and waved Larry off into the darkness with its glowing tip.
A
NNA SENSED HER MIND
sliding with increasing speed down a black crevice. Its departure was taking her sanity with it. She was no longer aware that she was standing in a courtyard, her own garden; she no longer felt the clothes against her skin or the sun on her face.
She felt something violent at her shoulders, something that shook her so hard the fragments of thought that had scattered with her mind were jumbled up in twos and threes until some of them were thrown together in the violence and began to process signals in some kind of informational order. Something began to make a vague sort of sense.
It was Willy that was shaking her, that was her first clear impression. Her vision began to function dimly. She saw his face. Felt his big hands on her. He was staring at her intensely, but his eyes seemed pulled out sideways in a panic, as if they were on elastic bands. She felt his physical power. She had feeling. It was getting more real. His mouth was open. She began to hear the sounds, but not the words. Then her name. Anna! Anna!
She was suddenly overwhelmed by the aftershock from the trauma that had struck a single second before. Little Finn. Not in the garden. Not in the house. Disappeared.
A bolt of adrenaline-induced heat rose up through her core, and she broke away, rushing straight ahead at a closed shed door. She began to pull it frantically, but the catch was on, and it wouldn’t budge. She didn’t notice the catch that prevented her opening the dilapidated door. Only he must be inside. That was the answer. That was all there was, nothing else. The shed was the only place he could be.
Willy caught up with her and grabbed her firmly by the shoulders.
“Anna! Anna!”
He was clearer. Her dissolved senses began to coalesce into recognisable forms. The disappearance of her mind went into rapid reverse and her consciousness shot through her in one clear shattering image, like random streams of iron filings flying across the smooth surface of a table towards the point of a magnet.
They’d taken him. They’d taken her son.
“Get your phone! Be quick! I’ll start the car.” She heard him this time. She looked dully at the shed door. It was padlocked, she now saw. There was nobody inside.
Without thinking now, she ran into the house, picked her phone up off the table by the door, snatched up the gun, and heard the metal gates clanking open and the engine start. She ran out. They didn’t close the house or the metal gates. Willy behind the wheel turned the blue Mercedes out onto the lane down the hill.
“We may catch them,” he said. “They must be close.”
“Stop!” she screamed at him. Her mind was now blinding white, absolutely clear. She was functioning like a machine, with a relentless, automated attention to detail.
Willy slammed on the brakes. They were by the wrought iron fence where the palm tree reached up past the roof of the house. She ran out of the car and picked up something off the road, a small green plastic object that was part of the ant house.
She ran into the car.
“Now we know,” she said with unnatural loudness. “They took him through the railings. He was small enough to fit through the railings.”
She cried out with an animal anguish and wrapped her hands around the top of her head.
“They took him through the fucking railings, Willy,” she moaned through the blur of her arms. “Why didn’t we think of that? He’s so small, they could pull him through.”
Willy put his foot down and slammed the car to the right, into the village square, past the barn with the weighbridge, onto the road down the hill. He began to throw the car into the corners in a screamingly low gear until, finally, they flattened out onto the straight road with the plane trees that led to the town.
She dialled the phone. It was answered immediately.
“They’ve taken my son,” she said with icy calm now. The reversal was complete. “They’ve taken my son, where were you? Where was our protection?”
She listened.
“It’s too late. You’re too late.”
There was silence again.
“That’s where we’re going now. We’ll be there in a few minutes. But it’s too late, isn’t it.”
Another silence.
“Ten minutes, then,” she said, and clipped the phone shut.
It was Wednesday. The dusty car park that was full on Saturday market day was empty but for two unmarked cars. Four men seemed to be on four phones, but she saw that only two of them had phones in their hands as she and Willy drew up in a billow of dust.
Willy was out of the car first, shouting at them in Hungarian, then French, berating them with every obscenity he could come up with. Now it was she who put her hand on his shoulder.
“We have to think, Willy,” she said, and he quietened under her hand as if he’d been given a dose of morphine.
On their way into the town, they’d looked in every car along the road, but there was nothing, nobody, who alerted any suspicions.
At one point as they sped from the flashes of light to shade, light to shade, under the spreading branches of the plane trees, Willy said: “It was the women at the bed and breakfast. The so-called Danish lesbians.”
“Yes,” she replied. “They sent women. Of course they sent women.”
And now they were standing in the dusty car park with four French intelligence officers and no plan.
The elder of the four men broke away.
“We’re putting up roadblocks on every road from the town, twenty miles out,” he said. “We’re checking any private air movements in the area this morning. Alerts are going out to air and sea ports. We’ll find your son.”
“Will you?” she said.
The officer didn’t reply to the question.
“There’ll be two men stationed at the house. You mustn’t stay there, but we need to have a presence. They’ll contact you via there.”
She could see he was keeping himself under control. He understood. He had children of his own, perhaps. He knew what was happening to her. For the first time, she felt like weeping. There was someone else in the world, someone she didn’t even know, who understood.
“One of us will come with you. In your car. The rest will go, one ahead, one behind, in these two cars. We’ll be joined by others. Helicopters are being scrambled at Nîmes. We’ll take you to a safe place.”
A lot, a little too late, she thought. Anna’s mind flitted across the possibilities like the eyes of a gambler at a roulette table. But they were all losing numbers. The banker always won.
The Foreign Legion headquarters was at Nîmes, she realised. There’d be men, equipment. But whoever had taken Little Finn would know the alert would be almost immediate. They would have a route out, roadblocks or no roadblocks. And nobody could begin to attempt a search of the summer traffic that sped bumper to bumper down the autoroute to the beaches.
Willy took her arm and pulled her aside.
“There’s one place we can go that you know.”
“I’d thought the same thing,” she said.
They turned back to the officer.
“We’ll have a house for you . . . ,” he began.
“We know where we’re going,” Willy said. “We’ll need all the backup you say you have. I have a place near Marseille. It’s completely private. Believe me. Between you and me, even the immigration authorities know nothing about it.”
The officer had his orders, but Anna and Willy were climbing into their car. He had no time to persuade them one way or the other, only to order his men into the two cars and follow.
“Head for the intersection of the autoroute, the first one south of Avignon,” Willy shouted.
He started the car, and Anna saw men running to the two other cars. One pulled out ahead of them, one tucked in behind. She heard the sound of one of the men fitting a magazine into what was unmistakably a bolt-action rifle.
They drove with unreasoning speed, as if they were going to meet someone, rather than running away. At the intersection south of Avignon, a French electricity truck with an engine several grades above its usual requirements joined them to one side on the three-lane motorway, and a black Audi took the inside lane. They were boxed in neatly by their protectors.
At the next intersection beyond the meeting place, three police cars pulled onto the road, ensuring that the massed traffic slowed, giving the watchers more eyes and more time to search the flow.
There were tourists on their way to the sea this side of Marseille, all of Marseille’s own commercial traffic, and yet another stream of commercial and tourist vehicles heading for Ventimiglia and the Italian border. There was no chance of finding anyone in this exodus.
“We’ll find him,” Willy said at one point. “We’ll find him, Anna.”
But Anna was already sitting on a hard chair in a bare interrogation room at the Forest east of Moscow, with Little Finn crying in a corner. It was her they wanted, and they would have her. All that remained to be decided now was how they would contact her, and when. The sooner the better, she thought.
From time to time, glancing in the mirrors, Willy would say, “Check the green Peugeot three cars behind our tail.” Or “Watch that truck on the outside. I don’t like it.”
“Just drive, please, Willy. You can’t do more than that.”
“All eyes now are important,” he’d say. “You cannot watch too much.”
She let him do what he wanted. She knew she couldn’t argue anymore. In her mind, they had won. They would put Little Finn in some filthy orphanage in Krasnoyarsk, or bring him up in an unkind KGB family for indoctrination.
All she had to defend him with was Mikhail. Would she sentence Mikhail to death to get her son back? Of course—of course she would.
The police cars dampened the lawless holiday elation of the tourists, and they crawled at a sedate pace within the speed limit like a presidential procession, three lanes wide.
She saw their exit looming ahead, three kilometres, two, there it was, the lane to the exit on the right and then up to the roundabout and onto the country roads.
Willy pulled into the exit lane and the electricity truck gave way and hung behind them. The Audi stayed out to the left and swung in at the last minute, to block anyone else with the same idea. The two cars of the intelligence team that had started out with them were in front and behind.
“Watch that truck. I tell you, watch that truck,” Willy urged.
She looked behind them and saw a truck that had been with them for an hour now. It was pulling onto the exit road.
The sky was darkening in readiness for the night. A huge swath of pinks and purples fired the horizon to the west behind them. Ahead, the smokestacks of Marseille’s industrial zone pumped white smoke up from half a dozen stacks, the smoke turning pink in the reflected night sky.
They reached the top of the exit lane. They had their protection car in front and one behind, but it and the black Audi had fallen back. The lights of the truck Willy had asked her to watch were right behind them.
It suddenly slowed as she watched in the mirror and Willy pulled up behind the car in front, at the roundabout. She saw the truck’s bed tip up to the sky, and it squealed to a halt, sliding slightly on the hot tarmac. It had stopped. She didn’t see what came out of the back of it, the thousands of watermelons that tipped and rolled down the slight incline of the exit road. But she saw that, now, nothing was following. There was only the car in front and the electricity truck that was with them. Their protection had been reduced to just these two.
Neither of them uttered a word. It was clear the game was in play. Was it a French game or a Russian game? She didn’t know. She noted that the helicopters that had accompanied them and were going about their own tasks in the search had turned for home with the onset of darkness.
Night had fallen.
She saw Willy’s tight face in the reflection of lights. She knew he was concerned only to save her. But either he didn’t dare say, or he just refused to admit it. Her safety was irrelevant now, with Little Finn gone. She was as good as theirs. It was all over.
Willy talked on the phone to the car in front of them and gave instructions. They weaved through country roads, turning right and left with little logic. It was Willy’s own devised maze, the way he’d always approached the salt pans when she and Finn had stayed there. Confuse and lose. But there was nothing behind them. It would take twenty minutes, probably, to clear the road by the exit.
Ahead, the night shadows of the smokestacks lightly bleached the darkness with their white smoke, as the Mercedes, the point car, and the electricity truck approached an old gravel pit to the right. They turned in and descended into the pit, along sand-covered tracks.
The car in front pulled up, and the elder officer stepped out. Willy swung round and halted behind them. The electricity truck followed suit. They were at the start of the hidden road across the salt pans, and completely concealed from view.
The officer stepped forward and indicated the electricity truck.
“They’ll stay here and close the entrance, just in case,” he said. Then he looked at Willy. “It seems a good place,” he said. “What’s down there?” He waved his head in the direction of the sea.
“There’s a half-hour ride across a broken salt road,” Willy said. “There’s nothing on the way, just the pans running out to either side, for as far as you can see in daylight. At the end are just dunes. And beyond that, my hut. I came here in ’fifty-six,” he said. “From Hungary.”
“I know when you came,” the officer said.
“There are a few hippies who’ll be there,” Willy said. “They pay me for campsites in the summer, go to India in the winter. Like the birds. But it’s all concealed from the land side, and mostly from the sea. I make them keep their tents down in the dunes. No one else comes here. To the left along the beach, there’s nothing until you reach the industrial zone; to the right, there’s three miles to the first tourist beach. Too far for anyone to bother to walk. No roads lead to the beach on either side of the camp for three miles. It’s a beautiful beach,” he added. “With a fine view of Marseille’s factories and occasionally a filthy smell that comes from them too, when the wind’s in the wrong direction. It’s no tourist trap. It’s a place of exiles.”