Caravan to Vaccares, Page 2

  A man, highlit under the bright moon, was seated on the rim of the rockfall. His face was partly in shadow but Alexandre had little difficulty in making out the bushy moustache, the gleam of white teeth. He looked as if he was smiling. Maybe he was smiling. The knife in his left hand was as easily visible as the torch in his right. The man pressed the button of his torch as he came sliding over the rim.

  Alexandre’s face showed no reaction for he had nothing left to react with. For a few moments he remained immobile as the man with the moustache came sliding down towards him, triggering off a small avalanche of boulders as he came, then tried to fling himself despairingly to one side to avoid the impact and the knife of his pursuer, but because of his frantic haste and the fact that he was now being severely buffeted about the body by the bounding limestone rocks he lost his footing and began to slide helplessly downwards, rolling over and over quite uncontrollably with no hope in the world of stopping himself. So treacherously loose had the surface of the rockfall become that even his pursuer was able to preserve his balance only by taking huge bounding leaps down the rockfall and the volume of the torrent of stones now crashing on to the floor of the cavern was indicated clearly enough by the alacrity with which the three men at the foot of the rockfall moved back at least ten paces. As they did so they were joined by a fourth man who had just come through the cavern entrance, then immediately afterwards by Alexandre’s pursuer, whose great leaping steps had taken him past the still tumbling boy.

  Alexandre landed heavily on the floor, arms instinctively clutched over his head to protect it from the cascading stones that continued to strike his body for a period of several seconds until the rain of rocks ceased. For as long again he remained dazed, uncomprehending, then he propped himself to his hands and knees before rising shakily to his feet. He looked at the semi-circle of five men, each with a knife in hand, closing in inexorably on him and now his mind was no longer uncomprehending. But he no longer had the look of a hunted animal, for he had already been through all the terrors of death and he was now beyond that. Now, unafraid, for there was nothing left of which to be afraid, he could look into the face of death. He stood there quietly and waited for it to come to him.

  Czerda stooped, laid a final limestone rock on top of the mound that had now grown at the foot of the rockfall, straightened, looked at the handiwork of his men and himself, nodded in apparent satisfaction and gestured towards the others to leave the cavern. They left. Czerda took one last look at the oblong mound of stones, nodded again, and followed.

  Once outside the entrance cave and into what now appeared to be the intolerably harsh glare of bright moonlight that bathed the Alpilles, Czerda beckoned to his son who slowed his pace and let the others precede them.

  Czerda asked quietly: ‘Any more would-be informers amongst us, do you think, Ferenc?’

  I don’t know.’ Ferenc shrugged his doubt. ‘Josef and Pauli I do not trust. But who can be sure?’

  ‘But you will watch them, Ferenc, won’t you? As you watched poor Alexandre.’ Czerda crossed himself. ‘God rest his soul.’

  ‘I will watch them, Father.’ Ferenc dismissed the answer to the question as being too obvious for further elaboration. ‘We’ll be at the hotel inside the hour. Do you think we shall make much money tonight?’

  ‘Who cares what pennies the idle and foolish rich throw our way? Our paymaster is not in that damned hotel, but that damned hotel we have visited for a generation and must keep on visiting.’ Czerda sighed heavily. ‘Appearances are all, Ferenc, my son, appearances are all. That you must never forget.’

  ‘Yes, Father,’ Ferenc said dutifully. He hastily stuck his knife out of sight.

  Unobtrusively, unseen, the five gypsies made their way back to the encampment and sat down, at a discreet distance from one another, just outside the perimeter of an audience still lost in the sadly-happy rapture of nostalgia as the volume and pace of the violin music mounted to a crescendo. The braziers were burning low now, a faint red glow barely visible in the bright moonlight. Then, abruptly and with a splendid flourish, the music ceased, the violinists bowed low and the audience called out their appreciation and clapped enthusiastically, none more so than Czerda who buffeted his palms together as if he had just heard Heifetz giving of his best in the Carnegie Hall. But even as he clapped, his eyes wandered, away from the violinists, away from the audience and the gypsy camp, until he was gazing again at the honeycombed face of the limestone cliffs where a cave had so lately become a tomb.

  CHAPTER 1

  ‘The cliff battlements of Les Baux, cleft and rent as by a giant axe, and the shattered, gaunt and terrible remnants of the ancient fortress itself are the most awesomely desolate of all ruins in Europe.’ Or so the local guide-book said. It went on: ‘Centuries after its death Les Baux is still an open tomb, a dreadful and dreadfully fitting memorial to a medieval city that lived most violently and perished in agony: to look upon Les Baux is to look upon the face of death imperishably carved in stone.’

  Well, it was pitching it a bit high, perhaps, guide-books do tend towards the hyperbolic, but the average uncertified reader of the guide would take the point and turn no somersaults if some wealthy uncle had left him the place in his will. It was indisputably the most inhospitable, barren and altogether uninviting collection of fractured and misshapen masonry in western Europe, a total and awesome destruction that was the work of seventeenth-century demolition squads who had taken a month and heaven alone knew how many tons of gunpowder to reduce Les Baux to its present state of utter devastation: one would have been equally prepared to believe that the same effect had been achieved in a couple of seconds that afternoon with the aid of an atom bomb: the annihilation of the old fortress was as total as that. But people still lived up there, lived and worked and died.

  At the foot of the western vertical cliff face of Les Baux lay a very fittingly complementary feature of the landscape which was sombrely and justifiably called the Valley of Hell, partly because the barren desolation of its setting between the battlements of Les Baux to the east and a spur of the Alpilles to the west, partly because in summer time this deeply-sunk gorge, which opened only to the south, could become almost unbearably hot.

  But there was one area, right at the northern extremity of this grim cul-de-sac, that was in complete and unbelievably startling contrast to the bleakly forlorn wastes that surrounded it, a green and lovely and luxurious oasis that, in the context, could have been taken straight out of the pages of a fairy-tale book.

  It was, in brief, an hotel, an hotel with gratefully tree-lined precincts, exotically designed gardens and a gleamingly blue swimming pool. The gardens lay to the south, the immaculate pool was in the centre, beyond that a large tree-shaded patio and finally the hotel itself with its architectural ancestry apparently stemming from a cross between a Trappist monastery and a Spanish hacienda. It was, in point of fact, one of the best and – almost by definition – one of the most exclusive and expensive hotel-restaurants in Southern Europe: The Hotel Baumanière.

  To the right of the patio, approached by a flight of steps, was a very large forecourt and leading off from this to the south, through an archway in a magnificently sculptured hedge, was a large and rectangular parking area, all the parking places being more than adequately shaded from the hot summer sun by closely interwoven wicker-work roofing.

  The patio was discreetly illuminated by all but invisible lights hung in the two large trees which dominated most of the area, overhanging the fifteen tables scattered in expensively sophisticated separation across the stone flags. Even the tables were something to behold. The cutlery gleamed. The crockery shone. The crystal glittered. And one did not have to be told that the food was superb, that the Châteauneuf had ambrosia whacked to the wide: the absorbed silence that had fallen upon the entranced diners could be matched only by the reverential hush one finds in the great cathedrals of the world. But even in this gastronomical paradise there existed a discordant note.

/>   This discordant note weighed about 220 pounds and he talked all the time, whether his mouth was full or not. Clearly, he was distracting all the other guests, he’d have distracted them even if they had been falling en masse down the north face of the Eiger. To begin with, his voice was uncommonly loud, but not in the artificial fashion of the nouveau riche or the more impoverished members of the lesser aristocracy who feel it incumbent upon them to call to the attention of the lesser orders of the existence of another and superior strain of Homo sapiens. Here was the genuine article: he didn’t give a damn whether people heard him or not. He was a big man, tall, broad and heavily built: the buttons anchoring the straining folds of his double-breasted dinner-jacket must have been sewn on with piano wire. He had black hair, a black moustache, a neatly-trimmed goatee beard and a black-beribboned monocle through which he was peering closely at the large menu-card in his hand. His table companion was a girl in her mid-twenties, clad in a blue mini-dress and quite extravagantly beautiful in a rather languorous fashion. At that moment she was gazing in mild astonishment at her bearded escort who was clapping his hands imperiously, an action which resulted in the most instantaneous appearance of a dark-jacketed restaurant manager, a white-tied head waiter and a black-tied assistant waiter.

  ‘Encore,’ said the man with the beard. In retrospect, his gesture of summoning the waiting staff seemed quite superfluous: they could have heard him in the kitchen without any trouble.

  ‘Of course.’ The restaurant manager bowed. ‘Another entrecôte for the Duc de Croytor. Immediately.’ The head waiter and his assistant bowed in unison, turned and broke into a discreet trot while still less than twelve feet distant. The blonde girl stared at the Duc de Croytor with a bemused expression on her face.

  ‘But, Monsieur le Duc – ’

  ‘Charles to you,’ the Duc de Croytor interrupted firmly. ‘Titles do not impress me even although hereabouts I’m referred to as Le Grand Duc, no doubt because of my impressive girth, my impressive appetite and my viceregal manner of dealing with the lower orders. But Charles to you, Lila, my dear.’

  The girl, clearly embarrassed, said something in a low voice which apparently her companion couldn’t hear for he lost no time in letting his ducal impatience show through.

  ‘Speak up, speak up! Bit deaf in this ear, you know.’

  She spoke up. ‘I mean – you’ve just had an enormous entrecôte steak.’

  ‘One never knows when the years of famine will strike,’ Le Grand Duc said gravely. ‘Think of Egypt. Ah!’

  An impressively escorted head waiter placed a huge steak before him with all the ritual solemnity of the presentation of crown jewels except that, quite clearly, both the waiter and Le Grand Duc obviously regarded the entrecôte as having the edge on such empty baubles any time. An assistant waiter set down a large ashet of creamed potatoes and another of vegetables while yet another waiter reverently placed an ice bucket containing two bottles of rosé on a serving table close by.

  ‘Bread for Monsieur le Duc?’ the restaurant manager enquired.

  ‘You know very well I’m on a diet.’ He spoke as if he meant it, too, then, clearly as an after-thought, turned to the blonde girl. ‘Perhaps Mademoiselle Delafont – ’

  ‘I couldn’t possibly.’ As the waiters left she gazed in fascination at his plate. ‘In twenty seconds – ’

  ‘They know my little ways,’ Le Grand Duc mumbled. It is difficult to speak clearly when one’s mouth is full of entrecôte steak.

  ‘And I don’t.’ Lila Delafont looked at him speculatively. I don’t know, for instance, why you should invite me – ’

  ‘Apart from the fact that no one ever denies Le Grand Duc anything, four reasons.’ When you’re a Duke you can interrupt without apology. He drained about half a pint of wine and his enunciation improved noticeably. ‘As I say, one never knows when the years of famine will strike.’ He eyed her appreciatively so that she shouldn’t miss his point. ‘I knew – I know – your father, the Count Delafont well – my credentials are impeccable. You are the most beautiful girl in sight. And you are alone.’

  Lila, clearly embarrassed, lowered her voice, but it was no good. By this time the other diners clearly regarded it as lèse-majesté to indulge in any conversation themselves while the Duc de Croytor was holding the floor, and the silence was pretty impressive.

  ‘I’m not alone. Nor the most beautiful girl in sight. Neither.’ She smiled apologetically, as if afraid she had been overheard, and nodded in the direction of a near-by table. ‘Not while my friend Cecile Dubois is here.’

  ‘The girl you were with earlier this evening?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘My ancestors and I have always preferred blondes.’ His tone left little room for doubt that brunettes were for the plebs only. Reluctantly, he laid down his knife and fork and peered sideways. ‘Passable, passable, I must say.’ He lowered his voice to a conspiratorial whisper that couldn’t have been heard more than twenty feet away. ‘Your friend, you say. Then who’s that dissipatedlooking layabout with her?’

  Seated at a table about ten feet away and clearly well within earshot of Le Grand Duc, a man removed his horn-rimmed glasses and folded them with an air of finality: he was conservatively and expensively dressed in grey gaberdine, was tall, broad-shouldered, black-haired and just escaped being handsome because of the slightly battered irregularity of his deeply tanned face. The girl opposite him, tall, dark, smiling and with amusement in her green eyes, put a restraining hand on his wrist.

  ‘Please, Mr Bowman. It’s not worth it, is it?

  Really?’

  Bowman looked into the smiling face and subsided. ‘I am strongly tempted, Miss Dubois, strongly tempted.’ He reached for his wine but his hand stopped half-way. He heard Lila’s voice, disapproving, defensive.

  ‘He looks more like a heavy-weight boxer to me.’

  Bowman smiled at Cecile Dubois and raised his glass.

  ‘Indeed.’ Le Grand Duc quaffed another half goblet of rosé. ‘One about twenty years past his prime.’

  Wine spilled on the table as Bowman set down his glass with a force that should have shattered the delicate crystal. He rose abruptly to his feet, only to find that Cecile, in addition to all her other obviously fine points, was possessed of a set of excellent reflexes. She was on her feet as quickly as he was, had insinuated herself between Bowman and Le Grand Duc’s table, took his arm and urged him gently but firmly in the direction of the swimming pool: they looked for all the world like a couple who had just finished dinner and decided to go for a stroll for the digestion’s sake.

  Bowman, though with obvious reluctance, went along with this. He had about him the air of a man for whom the creation of a disturbance with Le Grand Duc would have been a positive pleasure but who drew the line at having street brawls with young ladies.

  ‘I’m sorry.’ She squeezed his arm. ‘But Lila is my friend. I didn’t want her embarrassed.’

  ‘Ha! You didn’t want her embarrassed. Doesn’t matter, I suppose, how embarrassed I am?’

  ‘Oh, come on. Just sticks and stones, you know. You really don’t look the least little bit dissipated to me.’ Bowman stared at her suspiciously, but there was no malicious amusement in her eyes: she was pursing her lips in mock but friendly seriousness. ‘Mind you, I can see that not everyone would like to be called a layabout. By the way, what do you do? Just in case I have to defend you to the Dulce – verbally, that is.’

  ‘Hell with the Duke.’

  ‘That’s not an answer to my question.’

  ‘And a very good question it is too.’ Bowman paused reflectively, took off his glasses and polished them. ‘Fact is, I don’t do anything.’

  They were now at the farther end of the pool. Cecile took her hand away from his arm and looked at him without any marked enthusiasm.

  ‘DO you mean to tell me, Mr Bowman – ’

  ‘Call me Neil. All my friends do.’

  ‘You make friends very easily, don’
t you?’ she asked with inconsequential illogic.

  ‘I’m like that,’ Bowman said simply.

  She wasn’t listening or, if she was, she ignored him. ‘Do you mean to tell me you never work? You never do anything!’

  ‘Never.’

  ‘You’ve no job?’ You’ve been trained for nothing? You can’t do anything?’

  ‘Why should I spin and toil?’ Bowman said reasonably. ‘My old man’s made millions. Still making them, come to that. Every other generation should take it easy, don’t you think – a sort of recharging of the family batteries. Besides, I don’t need a job. Far be it from me,’ he finished piously, ‘to deprive some poor fellow who really needs it.’

  ‘Of all the specious arguments . . . How could I have misjudged a man like that?’

  ‘People are always misjudging me,’ Bowman said sadly.

  ‘Not you. The Duke. His perception.’ She shook her head, but in a way that looked curiously more like an exasperated affection than cold condemnation. ‘You really are an idle layabout, Mr Bowman.’

  ‘Neil.’

  ‘Oh, you’re incorrigible.’ For the first time, irritation.

  ‘And envious.’ Bowman took her arm as they approached the patio again and because he wasn’t smiling she made no attempt to remove it. ‘Envious of you. Your spirit, I mean. Your yearlong economy and thrift. For you two English girls to be able to struggle by here at £200 a week each on your typists’ salaries or whatever – ’