Young Petrella (31 page)

Then he went out into the street. At the door of the café, he paused for a quick look. All seemed in order. Twenty yards away, on the other side of the road, was parked an old, ivy-green Renault saloon, which had not been there when he went in. Nothing suspicious about that. Plenty of Renaults in Paris.

He crossed the road, and made for the gardens of the Palais Royal. He wanted time to think.

He was fairly clear now what had happened. He had gone to the wrong address. What he had said had been construed as a password, and he had been entrusted, by some part of the Algerian terrorist organisation, with a very valuable piece of property, probably stolen, and designed to be sold for their funds.

So much was clear.

What was far less clear was what he was going to do next. He could go to the police. And tell them what? At best, be held for endless questioning. If the snake had been less valuable or less attractive, he might have pushed it down behind a seat in the Métro and left it.

In the end, he went out, bought a stamped envelope, addressed it to his great-aunt, and slipped the snake into it. He added a note, asking her to place the snake in her own bank for safekeeping, and added that he had changed his plans, and was leaving for Spain that night by the ten o’clock train.

When he had posted the envelope he felt better. A good lunch at the Ruban Bleu completed the cure. In the afternoon he walked out to the Bois de Boulogne, went off the path into a clearing in the bushes, lay on his back, and went to sleep.

He was woken by a soft thud in his stomach. He came straight out of sleep and up on his feet, ready for anything.

Standing a few paces away, staring at him, was a small girl. It was her ball which had hit him. His sudden movement had frightened the child, and she started to cry.

“There, there,” said Petrella. “Do not be alarmed.”

A stout lady, dressed, despite the heat of the afternoon, in a sealskin coat, arrived upon the scene, panting. She swept up the girl, like a baby seal, into her flippers and glowered at Petrella.

“I alarmed her, I am afraid,” he said. “I woke up.”

“Chérie does not cry because a man wakes up,” said the lady. “What did you do to her?”

For the second time that day Petrella’s discretion got the better of his valour. He walked rapidly off into the bushes, but not so rapidly that he did not hear the lady say, “There are men of a certain type who should not be allowed to enjoy their liberty.”

He got back to the Place de la Concorde by early dusk, and chose himself a restaurant for his evening meal. His train went at ten. The change of plan would mean abandoning his reserved sleeper, but a night in a first-class railway carriage was not a great ordeal.

He had his baggage to collect from the Gare du Nord. If he allowed an hour, that should be ample. He ordered his meal with care and ate it with deep satisfaction.

It was while he was drinking his coffee and turning the pages of his
Paris Soir
that his eye was caught by the announcement in the Stop Press. The print was smudgy, but the meaning was clear enough.

“Just after midday today, a party of Algerian terrorists forced a letterbox in the Boulevard Poissonière. The affair was elaborately organised. A heavy lorry was backed up to the box, a grapnel inserted, and the front of the box ripped out. The contents were collected and removed. An armed party kept watch to prevent interference. By the time the police arrived, those guilty of this outrage had taken themselves off. The precise object of this latest manoeuvre of the terrorists is not known.”

Petrella felt suddenly cold.

It was not the fact that the snake was now back with its original owners. This was rough justice. It was the thought that, since they had known precisely which box to open, they could never have lost sight of him for a moment.

He got up and walked to the window.

Twenty yards up the street, on the other side of the road, was parked an ivy-green Renault saloon.

Now that danger was at his elbow, Petrella’s mind worked with clarity. Get hold of the police? Impossible, now, to explain why he had not handed the snake over to them at once. Get out of the restaurant and keep moving until his train left? Their organisation was clearly better, far better, than he had imagined. But once he was in the street, surely he could use the cover of darkness to slip them for the few vital hours.

He took out enough money to cover his meal, with a generous tip, and pushed it under the plate. Then he got up, purposely leaving his hat and paper in full view on the chair beside him, and strolled towards the vestibule.

“Have you a telephone?” he said to the girl behind the desk. She pointed to the far end of the hall. He walked towards it. To the left was a side door, bolted. To the right, a flight of stairs. At the end, a telephone booth.

At the last moment, he darted to his right, up the stairs. The girl in the desk, who had evidently been watching, called out after him, but he took no notice.

At the top of the stairs a corridor presented itself, closed doors on both sides. Footsteps were coming up the stairs behind him. He picked a door on the right-hand side, and went in. It was a bedroom, unoccupied, and almost unfurnished. There was a bolt on the inside of the door, and this he shot.

The only window in the room opened on to a very narrow, flat open space, ahead of which was darkness of perhaps six feet in width, and uncertain depth. Not knowing what lay below made it curiously difficult to jump.

It was a rattling on the handle of the door which launched him. He shot upwards and outwards and landed, on hands and knees, on the roof opposite. Here the going was fairly easy. He walked cautiously to the far end, lowered himself on to a sort of penthouse which stuck out into the back alley behind the restaurant, and dropped from that to the pavement.

As he picked himself up he realised the futility of his manoeuvre. His opponents were all round the building. Ten yards up the alleyway a cigarette glowed; and he heard, once again, the twittering whistle.

He turned and ran. The alley forked, and he went left at random. It was damnably dark, and in ten paces he realised that he was in a cul-de-sac. Next moment something hit him in the back, and three figures jumped at him, and he went down. He hit out blindly and went on hitting, long after he knew that it was useless.

A cloth was round his mouth, his left arm was already pinned. Strong, cruel hands were feeling for his other hand, for his nostrils, for his eyes.

Then a very bright light came on and, with explosive suddenness, a machine pistol opened fire, the bullets thudding into the wall behind them.

Like bees unclustering from a swarm at the first whiff of smoke, his assailants left him. The last to go slid his hand down, but Petrella saw the knife and had enough strength left to wrench his head back out of reach. He felt the point, like the touch of a white-hot wire, slide down the back of his head, and lodge against the collarbone with an agonising jolt.

Then the man was gone. Petrella lay quite flat and still on the cobbles, under the bright light now centred upon him.

At no point did he completely lose consciousness. He knew that he was being picked up, none too gently. He realised that he was being placed in the car, to which the bright light was in some way attached. And when he finally opened his eyes and sat up, it was no surprise to him to find himself sprawled in a chair in the back room of a Bureau de Police.

It was a surprise, however, to find that he recognised the man who was looking down at him.

“Commissaire,” he said. “Commissaire Michel, of Bordeaux.”

“Formerly of Bordeaux, now of Paris. And your name is Petrella. You are, or were, a member of the British police.”

“I still am,” said Petrella. “What’s left of me.”

“You are very lucky,” said the Commissaire, “that the damage is not greater. Perhaps you would care to explain why you are tackling, single-handed and, as far as I know, unaccredited, the Algerian terrorist organisation or, perhaps I should say, private army.”

“I’m on holiday,” said Petrella.

“I see,” said the Commissaire. “A vigorous commencement to your vacation. I would suggest that you drink this – and tell us exactly what you have been up to.”

Petrella drank the proffered wine thirstily; then he talked.

Commissaire Michel said, “I re-name you, The Cat. You have nine lives. How you came alive out of the Rue Antoine I cannot say. Would you mind letting me see the paper on which your compatriot wrote the young lady’s address.”

Petrella took out the piece of paper from his pocket and Commissaire Michel, after one glance at it, said, “It is, of course, not the Rue Antoine you wanted, but the Rue St. Antoine, in the Fourth Arrondissement. A very different street, in a very different type of district.”

“And the snake?”

“As you suppose. A gift for the terrorist funds. It would, eventually, have been sold for its true value in the Rue St. Honoré – after it had passed through three or four pairs of hands. Perhaps you gave some password. Or seeing you were alone and unarmed, in a quarter where an armed patrol will penetrate only if another armed patrol is covering it – they jumped to conclusions. A messenger to take charge of the snake was expected. You arrived. Therefore you
were
the messenger. A not uncommon form of reasoning.”

“They’d got it back. What were they worrying about?”

“Your crime did not lie in taking the snake. It was that you could recognise the man who had given it to you.”

“I see,” said Petrella. “You haven’t got some more of that wine, have you? By the way, how was it that you happened to be on the spot so conveniently? I haven’t really thanked you for that yet.”

“We observed that the organisation was in pursuit of someone. Therefore we watched them. Can you use your arm?”

“I don’t think there’s anything broken.”

“You understand that the man who used the knife was trying to blind you? To blind you, or mark the front of your face so deeply that you would be recognisable if you came to Paris again.”

“No,” said Petrella. “I didn’t understand.”

He realised that there was a lot that he did not understand, and would probably never understand about the secretive bitter warfare into the fringes of which he had trespassed.

“I have made arrangements,” said the Commissaire, “for you to be taken by ambulance to the station. You will be put into a special sleeper, and two ‘male nurses’ will travel with you as far as the Spanish frontier.”

He saw the look on Petrella’s face, and began to laugh.

“Cheer up,” he said. “Memories are not long. It would be well, I think, if you were to stay out of Paris for six months. You have an aged relative in Paris. I will arrange that she is informed – very discreetly.”

“You won’t shock
her
,”
said Petrella. “She’s got no more nerves than a bull-terrier. What I was wondering – it’s a great impertinence. But might one of your subordinates be able to take a letter to the Rue St. Antoine? Mademoiselle Arture will perhaps be expecting a communication.”

“Of course,” said the Commissaire. “In an affair of the heart, no effort must be spared.”

It was two weeks later and Petrella was lying back in a long wicker chair on the verandah of the Villa Hernandez, listening to the cracked bell of the monastery on the hill, and waiting for his evening drink. When the man brought it to him, there was a letter beside it on the tray. And the envelope bore a French stamp.

It was from Commissaire Michel. It concluded, “So I dispatched one of my own men, Agent Crozier, to the Rue St. Antoine. I should judge that Mademoiselle Arture is a lady of uncommon attractions since Crozier has repeated his visit three times in the past week. I should suggest that perhaps your friend should visit Paris in person, or he may find that Mademoiselle Natalie prefers a French policeman in the flesh to an English one on paper.”

He was still laughing when his father stepped on to the verandah.

“Paris is such a wonderful place,” he said.