so that this protection should endure and others stand between him and primitive realities such as death by bullet or torture.
Although his image was that of a free-wheeling, all-American he-man and although he was in danger of believing his own press-clippings, he was aware in the dim recesses of his being that this image was fraudulent, and from time to time he had wondered vaguely what kind of a man he really was. He had banished these thoughts as soon as they were consciously formulated because he had an uneasy feeling that he was really a weak man after all, and the thought disturbed him deeply. The public image he had formed was the man he wanted to be and he could not bear the thought that perhaps he was nothing like that. And he had no way of proving it one way or the other – he had never been put to the test.
Wyatt’s hardly concealed contempt had stung and he felt something approaching shame at his attempt to steal the car – that was not the way a man should behave. So that when his testing-time came something deep inside him made him square his shoulders and briskly tell Sous-Inspecteur Roseau to go to hell and make it damn’ fast, buddy.
So it was that now, lying in bed with all hell breaking loose around him, he felt astonished at himself. He had stood up to such physical pain as he had never believed possible and he felt proud that his last conscious act in Roseau’s office had been to look across at the implacable face before him and mumble, ‘I still say it – go to hell, you son of a bitch!’
He had recovered consciousness in a clean bed with his hands bandaged and his wounds tended. Why that should be he did not know, nor did he know why he could not raise his body from the bed. He tried several times and then gave up the effort and turned his attention to his new and wondrous self. In one brief hour he had discovered that he would never need a public image again, that he would never shrink from self-analysis.
‘I’ll never be afraid again,’ he whispered aloud through bruised lips. ‘By God, I stood it – I need never be afraid again.’
But he was afraid again when the artillery barrage opened up. He could not control the primitive reaction of his body; his glands worked normally and fear entered him as the hail of steel fell upon the Place de la Libération Noire. He shrank back on to the bed and looked up at the ceiling and wondered helplessly if the next shell would plunge down to take away his new-found manhood.
V
Not far away, Wyatt sat in the corner of his cell with his hands over his ears because the din was indescribably deafening. His face was cut about where broken glass had driven at him, but luckily his eyes were untouched. He had spent some time delicately digging out small slivers of glass from his skin – a very painful process – and the concentration needed had driven everything else out of his mind. But now he was sharply aware of what was going on.
Every gun Favel had appeared to be firing on the Place de la Libération Noire. Explosion followed explosion without ceasing and an acrid chemical stink drifted through the small window into the cell. The Poste de Police had not yet been hit, or at least Wyatt did not think so. And he was sure he would know. As he crouched in the corner with his legs up, grasshopper fashion, and his face dropped between his knees, he was busy making plans as to what he would do when the Poste was hit – if he still remained alive to do anything at all.
Suddenly there was an almighty clang that shivered the air in the cell. Wyatt felt like a mouse that had crawled into a big drum – he was completely deafened for a time and heard the tumult outside as though through a hundred layers of cloth. He staggered to his feet, shaking his head dizzily, and leaned against the wall. After a while he felt better and began to look more closely at the small room in which he was imprisoned. The Poste had been hit – that was certain – and surely to God something must have given way.
He looked at the opposite wall. Surely it had not had that bulge in it before? He went closer to examine it and saw a long crack zigzagging up the wall. He put his hand out and pushed tentatively, and then applied his shoulder and pushed harder. Nothing gave.
He stepped back and looked around the cell for something with which to attack the wall. He looked at the stool and rejected it – it was lightly built of wood, a good enough weapon against a man but not against the wall. There remained the bed. It was made of iron of the type where the main frame lifts out of sockets in the head and foot. The bed head, of tubular metal, was bolted together, but the bolts had rusted and it was quite a task to withdraw them. However, at the end of half an hour he had a goodly selection of tools with which to work – two primitive crowbars, several scrapers devised from the bed springs and an object which was quite unnameable but for which, no doubt, he could find a use.
Feeling rather like Edmond Dantes, he knelt before the wall and began to use one of the scrapers to detach loose mortar from the crack. The mortar, centuries old, was hard and ungiving, but the explosion had not done the wall any good and gradually he excavated a small hole, wide enough and deep enough to insert the end of his crowbar. Then he heaved until his muscles cracked and was rewarded with the minutest movement of the stone block which he was attacking.
He stood back to inspect the problem and became conscious that the intense shellfire directed at the square had ceased. The shell which had cracked the wall must have been one of the last fired in that direction, and all that could be heard now was a generalized battle noise away to the north of the town.
He dismissed the war from his mind and looked thoughtfully at his improvised crowbar. A crowbar is a lever, or rather, part of a lever – the other part is a fulcrum, and he had no fulcrum. He took the foot of the bed and placed it against the wall; it could be used as a fulcrum but not in the place he had made the hole. He would have to begin again and make another hole.
Again it took a long time. Patiently he scraped away at the iron-hard mortar, chipping and picking it to pieces, and when he had finished his knuckles were bruised and bleeding and his fingertips felt as though someone had sand-papered them raw. He was also beginning to suffer from thirst; he had drunk the small carafe of water that had been in the cell, and no one had come near since that last colossal explosion – a good sign.
He inserted the tip of his crowbar into the new hole and heaved again. Again he felt the infinitesimal shift in the wall. He took the bed foot and placed it within six inches of the wall and then plunged his crowbar into the hole. It rested nicely just on top of the metal frame of the bed. Then he took a deep breath and swung his whole weight on to the crow-bar. Something had to give – the crowbar, the bed, the wall – or – maybe – Wyatt. He hoped it would be the wall.
He felt the metal tube of the crowbar bending under his weight but still bore down heavily, lifting his feet from the floor. There came a sudden grating noise and a sharp shift in pressure and he found himself abruptly deposited on the floor. He turned over and coughed and waved his hand to disperse the dust which eddied and swirled through the cell illuminated by a bright beam of sunlight which shone through the gaping hole he had made.
He rested for a few minutes, then went to look at the damage. By his calculations, he should merely have broken through to the next cell and it had been a calculated risk whether he would find the door to that cell locked. But to his surprise, when he looked through the hole he could see, though not very clearly, a part of the square partly obscured by a ragged exterior wall.
The shell that had hit the Poste had totally destroyed the next cell and it was only by the mercy of the excellent and forgotten builders of his prison that he had not been blown to kingdom come.
He had dislodged only two of the heavy ashlar blocks that made up the wall and the hole would be a tight fit, but luckily he was slim and managed to wriggle through with nothing more than a few additional scrapes. It was tricky finding a footing
