‘Come with us,’ said Hudson, and Kuang nodded agreement. The two scientists seemed to be the only ones in the room with any mutual trust.
I was reluctant to leave Maria but she just waved her hand and said she’d be all right. She couldn’t take her eyes off Jean-Paul’s body.
‘Cover him, Robert,’ said Datt.
Robert took a table-cloth from a drawer and covered the body. ‘Go,’ Maria called again to me, and then she began to sob. Datt put his arm around her and pulled her close. Hudson and Kuang collected their data together and then, still waving the gun around, I showed them out and followed.
As we went across the hall the old woman emerged carrying a heavily laden tray. She said, ‘There’s still the poulet sauté chasseur.’
‘Vive le sport,’ I said.
31
From the garage we took the camionette – a tiny grey corrugated-metal van – because the roads of France are full of them. I had to change gear constantly for the small motor, and the tiny headlights did no more than probe the hedgerows. It was a cold night and I envied the warm grim-faced occupants of the big Mercs and Citroëns that roared past us with just a tiny peep of the horn, to tell us they had done so.
Kuang seemed perfectly content to rely upon my skill to get him out of France. He leaned well back in the hard upright seat, folded his arms and closed his eyes as though performing some oriental contemplative ritual. Now and again he spoke. Usually it was a request for a cigarette.
The frontier was little more than a formality. The Paris office had done us proud: three good British passports – although the photo of Hudson was a bit dodgy – over twenty-five pounds in small notes (Belgian and French), and some bills and receipts to correspond to each passport. I breathed more easily after we were through. I’d done a deal with Loiseau so he’d guaranteed no trouble, but I still breathed more easily after we’d gone through.
Hudson lay flat upon some old blankets in the rear. Soon he began to snore. Kuang spoke.
‘Are we going to an hotel or are you going to blow one of your agents to shelter me?’
‘This is Belgium,’ I said. ‘Going to an hotel is like going to a police station.’
‘What will happen to him?’
‘The agent?’ I hesitated. ‘He’ll be pensioned off. It’s bad luck but he was the next due to be blown.’
‘Age?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘And you have someone better in the area?’
‘You know we can’t talk about that,’ I said.
‘I’m not interested professionally,’ said Kuang. ‘I’m a scientist. What the British do in France or Belgium is nothing to do with me, but if we are blowing this man I owe him his job.’
‘You owe him nothing,’ I said. ‘What the hell do you think this is? He’ll be blown because it’s his job. Just as I’m conducting you because that’s my job. I’m doing it as a favour. You owe no one anything, so forget it. As far as I’m concerned you are a parcel.’
Kuang inhaled deeply on his cigarette, then removed it from his mouth with his long delicate fingers and stubbed it into the ashtray. I imagined him killing Annie Couzins. Passion or politics? He rubbed the tobacco shreds from his fingertips like a pianist practising trills.
As we passed through the tightly shuttered villages the rough pavé hammered the suspension and bright-eyed cats glared into our lights and fled. One a little slower than the others had been squashed as flat as an ink blot. Each successive set of wheels contributed a new pattern to the little tragedy that morning would reveal.
I had the camionette going at its top speed. The needles were still and the loud noise of the motor held a constant note. Everything was unchanging except a brief fusillade of loose gravel or the sudden smell of tar or the beep of a faster car.
‘We are near to Ypres,’ said Kuang.
‘This was the Ypres salient,’ I said. Hudson asked for a cigarette. He must have been awake for some time. ‘Ypres,’ said Hudson as he lit the cigarette, ‘was that the site of a World War One battle?’
‘One of the biggest,’ I said. ‘There’s scarcely an Englishman that didn’t have a relative die here. Perhaps a piece of Britain died here too.’
Hudson looked out of the rear windows of the van. ‘It’s quite a place to die,’ he said.
32
Across the Ypres salient the dawn sky was black and getting lower and blacker like a Bulldog Drummond ceiling. It’s a grim region, like a vast ill-lit military depot that goes on for miles. Across country go the roads: narrow slabs of concrete not much wider than a garden path, and you have the feeling that to go off the edge is to go into bottomless mud. It’s easy to go around in circles and even easier to imagine that you are. Every few yards there are the beady-eyed green-and-white notices that point the way to military cemeteries where regiments of Blanco-white headstones parade. Death pervades the topsoil but untidy little farms go on operating, planting their cabbages right up to ‘Private of the West Riding – Known only to God’. The living cows and dead soldiers share the land and there are no quarrels. Now in the hedges evergreen plants were laden with tiny red berries as though the ground was sweating blood. I stopped the car. Ahead was Passchendaele, a gentle upward slope.
‘Which way were your soldiers facing?’ Kuang said.
‘Up the slope,’ I said. ‘They advanced up the slope, sixty pounds on their backs and machine guns down their throats.’
Kuang opened the window and threw his cigarette butt on to the road. There was an icy gust of wind.
‘It’s cold,’ said Kuang. ‘When the wind drops it will rain.’
Hudson leaned close to the window again. ‘Oh boy,’ he said, ‘trench warfare here,’ and shook his head when no word came. ‘For them it must have seemed like for ever.’
‘For a lot of them it was for ever,’ I said. ‘They are still here.’
‘In Hiroshima even more died,’ said Kuang.
‘I don’t measure death by numbers,’ I said.
‘Then it’s a pity you were so careful not to use your atom bomb on the Germans or Italians,’ said Kuang.
I started the motor again to get some heat in the car, but Kuang got out and stamped around on the concrete roadway. He did not seem to mind the cold wind and rain. He picked up a chunk of the shiny, clay-heavy soil peculiar to this region, studied it and then broke it up and threw it aimlessly across the field of cabbages.
‘Are we expecting to rendezvous with another car?’ he asked.
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘You
