Authors: Eric Ambler
Simone had done as I had asked and Jasmin was standing by the station-wagon with my raincoat rolled up under one arm and her tooled-leather bag slung over the other. I signalled and she came over. I took the raincoat. Two of the packages we had made up, and boldly marked with a 1 and a 2, went into the raincoat side pockets. The other two, similarly but less boldly numbered, disappeared into the tooled-leather bag. I had opened my coat out as if to refold it so that nobody higher up near the house could have seen that last move.
As Jasmin returned to the station-wagon and I shook hands all round with the Dutchmen, Simone joined us on the pretext of doing the same thing. But her goodbyes were mainly for show. She patted the packages in my raincoat pockets and managed to look smugly satisfied as she did so. She also had a message to deliver.
‘The patron says that we must leave soon. It is nearly four o’clock and we should do what we have to do while there is still plenty of daylight.’
‘Let the Dutchmen go first to see what happens. Five minutes. Okay?’
‘All right. Agreed. The more secure they feel here the better.’
We said goodbye to Kluvers and the Viser-Damrak crew
all over again and watched them go down to the gate. There, they were stopped by the security guards and there was an angry-looking argument accompanied by a lot of arm-waving and pointing in our direction. Kluvers and his crew had to wait by the gate while the security captain came up to harangue me in German.
Zander was with us now. ‘This security captain,’ he explained, ‘has received special orders from the Chief Secretary. The film of the interview you had with The Ruler is to be held for censoring.’
‘It was to be released by me personally to ORF, the Austrian broadcasting service, for processing.’
‘It will be released later after it has been censored.’
‘It can’t be censored before it has been processed,’ I bawled angrily. ‘I demand to see the Chief Secretary.’
Zander obligingly translated this too. The security captain beckoned to me and we walked back up to the house. The two bodyguards on duty stiffened as we approached. Clearly, they spoke no German and didn’t much care for the security captain anyway. However, when he made signs indicating that I was to remain there while he went inside to make a report, they let him through.
I stood there for several minutes before the Chief Secretary came out. He looked at me, and spoke too, as if he had never seen me before.
‘We want the film,’ he said. ‘His Highness’s orders. It is his property. It will not be allowed to leave these premises. You will hand it over immediately.’
‘It is to be processed by ORF, Vienna. That has all been arranged.’ I hugged my raincoat protectively to my breast.
‘It will be processed as we decide. Hand it over immediately.’ He came down the steps to confront me with his stomach. ‘I would not like to have to use force to compel you to return His Highness’s property.’
‘This is Austrian territory, Chief Secretary, not the Gulf.’
‘And the film still belongs to His Highness. No more
nonsense please, Mr Halliday. You were employed and have been paid. If you don’t want to give me the film you shot, I will have it taken from you.’
I hesitated a moment longer, then shrugged and gave him the package marked 1.
He took it, ripped off the paper to see that there was indeed a 16mm film pack inside, then held out his hand again. ‘All of it, please. There is a second magazine. I saw the cameraman put it in the camera.’
With a sigh I emptied the other raincoat pocket and gave him the package marked 2. ‘Where are you going to get it processed?’ I asked as he tore the wrappings off to check again.
‘That is no business of yours, Mr Halliday. You have been paid. Now you may go.’
I started to do so, then turned. ‘Just a word of advice, Chief Secretary,’ I said. ‘Don’t try to burn it. That kind of film doesn’t burn easily and makes a bad smell. If you want to destroy it quickly, just open it up and let the light in. My regards to His Highness.’
I started down again and this time kept going. I didn’t think that the Chief Secretary would know enough when he opened the cartons to realize that the film I had given him hadn’t been exposed.
From the car-park the security captain signalled an okay to the gate below. The two Dutch vehicles promptly restarted and drove out as the gates opened. From the security captain I received an amiable nod. I, too, could go now if I wished. My friends as well. Discipline had been enforced, and everyone knew it.
‘The station-wagon will go first,’ Zander said. ‘Jean-Pierre will follow. We will keep close together until we see what we have to deal with. Where are we to expect these ORF friends of yours, Mr Halliday?’
‘At the junction with the lower road. There’s a wooden sign saying that it’s Petrucher territory a few metres this side
of the road. We should watch for that, I guess. We’ll be turning right towards Judenburg. They will have an ORF camera-car waiting to stay ahead of us and a heavy ORF location truck to stay right behind us. Near Judenburg, when we get to the main road, we’ll make a sharp right and head for Klagenfurt. This side of Klagenfurt we pick up the Autobahn to Villach. Rainer will be in the camera-car. His orders to his drivers will be to keep us boxed in, as if they’re preventing us from getting away with something they want. If any other car tries to pass or get in between his vehicles and ours, it’s to be squeezed out. That means a lot of tail-gating, lousy driving of all sorts and maybe some bumps or a graze. If ORF don’t mind, why should we?’
‘Where do you propose to hand over the film?’
‘At the frontier. It’s just beyond Arnoldstein at a village called Thöl.’
‘Well, we’ll see if we can get that far. Simone, you drive. And don’t let the Austrians bump us too much.’
We all got in and followed the Dutchmen down the track past the temporary buildings to the gates. They still had them open for us but the dog-handlers were out again with their charges snarling and trying to snap at our tyres as we went by.
‘Jean-Pierre at least will be glad to see the road again,’ Zander said. ‘Poor fellow. Why should he be frightened of attack dogs? They can be killed so easily by someone who has good shoes, knows how to use his feet and is not frightened.’
We lurched slowly down the lane to the lower road. As we approached it, a bright blue ORF limousine camera-car with a reinforced roof and flashing amber light on top backed up, blocking the turn completely. We jolted to a standstill, I wound down a rear window and looked out. The man beside the camera-car driver was Rainer. I gave him an okay sign and he raised a hand in acknowledgement. Then the camera-car moved forward and we followed. Jean-Pierre in the van was only a couple of yards behind us. The ORF location truck that followed him looked enormous.
Driving in convoy, especially when the vehicles in it have[unclear] widely different powers of acceleration and braking, is not a[unclear] easy as a good armoured division on the move can make [unclear] look. Even with our little convoy of four, the concertina[unclear] effect was noticeable from the start. Then Rainer decided to take it slower – a steady fifty kph – and we got on better. By the time we reached the reasonably straight bit beyond Unterzeiring the drivers were all beginning to get the hang of it.
The Rasmuk team picked us up, with no trouble at all, near Judenburg as we turned on to the road to Klagenfurt.
They were in a beige Citroën CX with Vorarlberg plates, and the first we heard of them was a long horn blast as they tried to pass the ORF truck and failed to make it. The road through Neumarkt and Friesach south to Klagenfurt is a main road but not a very modern one. There are stretches where fast traffic can pass the slow stuff, but not many, and a lot depends on the slow stuff being kind enough to co-operate. The ORF truck at the rear of our convoy was being unkind and unco-operative. It was also making playful little efforts of its own to pass the Ortofilm van, or pretending to make them. The Citroën team made three abortive, and increasingly noisy, attempts to pass the truck before deciding that they would have to bide their time.
It was Zander who identified them positively as the hit team and not just a group of four impatient Austrians. After the first horn blast he said something over his shoulder to the kids riding with me. Jasmin rummaged under the seat where the ammunition boxes were and came up with a leather case containing one of those telescopes that look like half of a pair of big binoculars. They are called, not surprisingly, monoculars and people who go in for target shooting or who have only one good eye prefer them to binoculars. Zander checked the eye-piece adjustment carefully.
There were quite a lot of bends in the road and it was possible every now and then to see the Citroën edge out from behind the truck. Finally, Zander said: ‘I know the front-seat passenger. He’s a man named Raoul Bourger. You remember him, Simone?’
‘I remember him only too well, patron.’
He turned in his seat again and balanced the telescope on
the head-rest for a longer look at the occupants of the Citroën. ‘Bourger’s father,’ he explained to me, ‘was a
pied noir
killed in the Algiers street fighting of January ’sixty. The boy, Raoul, was fourteen then. During the next year he killed four officers of the gendarmerie. He alone, though there were witnesses to the killings. The thing became an open secret.’
‘But he wasn’t caught?’
‘Oh, he was well protected. Then he tried to kill himself, but the gun he used misfired.’
‘He didn’t try twice,’ said Simone briskly. ‘There were those who doubted that he had really tried the first time.’
‘You were jealous of the attention he received, my child.’
‘How could a nine-year-old girl be jealous of a fourteen-year-old Nechayev?’
He grinned. ‘You were jealous, child. Don’t pretend you weren’t. Nine-year-old girls often are. Anyway, I wasn’t the only one who tried to help him. Many of us tried. He would just smile politely. He hated the lot of us, of course, because his real father was dead and we who didn’t fight the battles of the streets were alive.’
‘He might smile politely to your face,’ she retorted, ‘but behind your back he would mimic your sympathy. You can be mimicked, you know, patron. A Nechayev manqué, that’s what he was. A pretty young con-boy killer, but without the other one’s intellectual pretensions or his knack of political phrase-making. You would have adopted him if his mother had let you.’
‘That is a lie, Simone, and you are impertinent.’
In her anger she was beginning to take her eyes off the road. I tried to cool them both down. ‘So it came to this,’ I said. ‘Having failed, or tried insufficiently hard, to kill himself, he went back happily to killing other people. A typical success story of our time. Right?’
Simone contented herself with a nasty little laugh.
Zander sighed. ‘Friends and relatives gave the family
money and saw to his education,’ he said sombrely. ‘Later, he went into business.’
‘What kind?’ I asked. ‘To start with I mean. Do concerns like Rasmuk have a bottom of the ladder, or do youngsters of proved ability get the stock options right away?’
He lowered the telescope then passed it to Mokhtar so that he too could have a look at the Citroën before he turned to me. His eyes told me that he wasn’t going to waste words on my cheap sarcasms.
‘Mr Halliday,’ he said, ‘revenge isn’t a lasting pleasure. It isn’t nearly as sweet and satisfying as it’s said to be, not even for fourteen-year-old boys with blood-feud grudges to nurse.’
‘You didn’t favour me with that solemn thought in your letter to me on the Baghdad postcard.’
‘Did the hint of revenge that I offered make any difference to your thinking? Did it influence your decision to accept?’
‘It set off a few day-dreams, of course. The person whose thinking it influenced was the police chief. Was it for him, or someone in authority like him, that you put it in?’
‘Simone’s idea. We had to remind authority of your past.’
‘You did. The police chief even gave me a kindly warning. He said that some sweet things can be bad for one’s health.’
‘Revenge can be fatal.’ He retrieved the telescope and gave it to me. ‘Have a look. It helps to know the enemy’s face.’
But from where I was sitting I found it almost impossible to hold the telescope steady when the Citroën became visible on the bends.
‘How would you describe Raoul Bourger?’ Zander asked.
‘I think he has a black moustache. I think the driver has one too.’
‘They’ve all got black moustaches,’ Simone said impatiently. ‘When the sun catches them, even I can see that, just in the mirror.’
‘Did you notice how many black moustaches there were in The Ruler’s entourage?’ Zander asked as I gave him back the
telescope. ‘Some would like beards, but The Ruler reserves that mark of virility to himself. Of course, he has no other proof. No children. Just a beard. Anyway moustaches are the new thing. In some Middle East circles these days, black moustaches are absolutely de rigueur, and if the real hair is a little brown or red it is dyed.’
‘Patron,’ Simone said, ‘I know you believe that on a day of battle it is best to talk only nonsense, but don’t you owe it to Mr Halliday to talk a
little
sense. He has come a long way with us. He is entitled to know where the road leads. Rasmuk was not mentioned in his contract.’
He polished the telescope with his handkerchief while he thought about it, then had another look at the enemy behind us. ‘You know why I selected you in particular for this task, Mr Halliday? You don’t still have any illusions?’
‘You tell me. I had old links with the CIA that could be reactivated by sending cute letters and package bombs through the mail. I’m a freelance who could be tempted with an offer of fifty thousand dollars for doing very little work in a cause that would appeal to a child’s tit-for-tat conception of justice. And I knew enough about the mechanics of making television to fit into that too-easily-blown cover story that you had manufactured in one of your least-inspired moments. I don’t think I’m the one who should be worrying about illusions at this stage, Mr Zander. If that’s a Rasmuk hit team back there, the exact colour of their moustaches seems to me as unimportant as the brands of aftershave they’re using.’