Red Crystal (7 page)

She’d only been held for two days, of course. And then they’d let her go. At the time she’d been relieved. Only later had she realized her mistake. It would have been much better to admit some part in the demonstration. Then they would have charged her. At her trial she could have defended herself, made a long impassioned speech, got publicity for the cause and shown her contempt for the judicial machinery.

It had been an incredible opportunity. And she had missed it.

Now everyone was talking about Stephie. Already there was a campaign to get her released. Already everyone knew her name …

At last the train crept into the Gare du Nord. In the main concourse Gabriele bought a copy of
Le Monde
and read it on the Métro. Thirty thousand people had marched up the Champs-Élysées the previous day in sympathy with the students and had brought Paris to a complete halt. Five Nobel prize winners had asked de Gaulle for an amnesty for the imprisoned students. And - Gabriele took special note - an opinion poll put four in five Parisians behind the students.

Gabriele had talked flippantly about revolution, but she realized with a slight shock that there was a good chance of it really happening. She wasn’t sure that she was pleased; she wanted to be involved, to be an essential part of the movement and she vaguely resented the fact that she was not.

They got off at the Odeon and walked into the Latin Quarter. Police were everywhere - in large vans, in cars with screaming sirens, and manning the barriers leading to the Sorbonne, which had been sealed off since the weekend.

At the Students’ Union in the Rue Soufflot, they were redirected to the Salle de la Mutualite, a large hall off the Boulevard St Germain.

They arrived to find crowds thronging the doorways. They pushed their way through. Inside there must have been at least three thousand students, chanting,
‘Libérez nos camarades! Libérez nos camarades!’

Gabriele and Max made their way down the aisle to the platform, where forty or fifty of the organizers were gathered, standing in groups. Max led the way up on to the stage and Gabriele was relieved when he greeted several people by name, and introduced her. She had a fear of being left out.

A young man went to the front of the platform and raised his hand for silence. Everyone sat down.

Gabriele realized that it was Cohn-Bendit himself at the microphone. He began to give a dazzling display of the rhetoric and nerve which had made him leader of the
enragés,
the discontents who had started the protests against the university system. It was Cohn-Bendit who had stepped in front of the Minister of Youth and Sport at the Nanterre campus and asked him what he was going to do about the students’ sexual problems – a reference to the strict segregation between girls’ and boys’ residential blocks. The Minister had replied that Cohn-Bendit should jump in a pool. ‘That’s what the Hitler Youth used to say,’ retorted Cohn-Bendit. The conversation had been widely reported all over Europe and had become a part of student folklore.

Now, as he talked about immediate reforms, Gabriele caught the electric atmosphere in the hall, the feeling that the changes he was urging would actually take place.

After long and enthusiastic applause a German went to the microphone, pledging solidarity from the students of West Germany. Then came a Belgian. Max whispered in her ear, ‘Leader of the International Trotskyists.’

The next introduction was made, but it took a few moments for the name to sink in.

‘Antonio Petrini.’

Gabriele tried to reconcile the figure standing at the microphone with the author of
The Revolutionary Society
. She had imagined him to be – well, more dynamic-looking. He was about fifty, and small, with a bald crown surrounded by a fringe of long straggly hair. His nose was large and he wore thick, black-rimmed glasses. Gabriele was disappointed.

But the audience had no doubts. They greeted him with loud applause, some rising to their feet and clapping their hands above their heads.

The moment Petrini began to speak, there was a hush. He spoke for less than five minutes in heavily accented French, pledging his support to the cause. He had a calm dignity and an impassive detachment that gave his words a tremendous authority. Gabriele thought: He isn’t disappointing at all.

When he sat down again, she applauded loudly.

One of the organizers came over to Max and spoke in his ear. Max shook his head and, turning to Gabriele, said, ‘You speak.’

Gabriele stared, aghast. ‘But I’ve nothing prepared!’

The organizer shrugged and started to move away.

Gabriele heard herself say, ‘Wait -
je viens. Je parlerais.
’

She quelled the mounting panic and walked to the front of the stage, forcing herself to move with exaggerated confidence.

At the microphone she calmed herself and began in her best French: ‘My friends, I bring you greetings from the students of Britain!’ There was a small cheer. ‘We too suffer from a repressive system.’ She paused, aware that it sounded dull after Petrini’s powerful words. Something different was needed. She licked her lips. ‘You are an example to us all.’ She raised her voice. ‘Only two months ago I had a policeman astride me!’ A roar of amusement and mock horror went up; she waited for it to fall away. ‘… The pig was pinning me to the ground, trying to make me see sense.
But,
my friends, all
I
could see was his great’ - she searched for the appropriate word and hoped that
‘cu
’ was right for backside -
‘son gros cul
!’ They screamed with delight. ‘Next time, I will follow your example, and give him a hail of bricks before he ever gets near me! You are our example. Long live the student movement.
Solidarité
! ’

She raised a fist to the roof and walked away.

The applause rose in a great wave and roared over her. She grinned in pleasure. As she sat down Max patted her shoulder.

The next speaker went forward, and Gabriele tried to concentrate on what he was saying. After a time she became aware of being watched from the other side of the platform. It was a young man sitting immediately beside Petrini, a dark bearded man, lounging coolly in his chair. As she met his gaze he nodded at her and smiled. She was about to return the smile when she realized his admiration had more than a little suggestiveness to it. He was trying to attract her. She thought: What a nerve.

But she was in too good a mood to be angry. She gave him a brief dismissive smile and looked away.

It was only later, after the meeting had finished, that she realized the bearded man was with Petrini. That changed things considerably. The next time he looked at her, she held his gaze.

Two other men had particular reason to stare at Gabriele.

One was carefully dressed in casual clothes and held some text-books rather self-consciously in his lap. He was aged about twenty-five and had entered the meeting on a forged student identity card. He sat in the body of the hall and stared at Gabriele, trying hard to memorize her face so that he could pick her out from the central DST files back at headquarters. If he didn’t find her there one of his informants would give her name and he would check with Special Branch in London to see if she was known there.

The man didn’t worry about identifying the other speakers. He knew exactly who they were. Most of them had been on the DST files for some time. Cohn-Bendit, Petrini … The Italian had been involved with extremists for years, not just as mentor and guru to left-wing thinkers, but, it was suspected, in more concrete ways. He was known to visit Cuba frequently, also, more recently, Czechoslovakia.

The DST watcher had placed most of the others on the platform too, which pleased him. That was his job: to keep a track on the foreigners. France was a haven for deposed rulers and political refugees and had always been proud of it. Traditionally, these people had been welcome as long as they did not interfere in France’s internal affairs. But appearing at this rally was interference of a serious kind, and most certainly would not be tolerated.

He stared at the girl again. Dark, very striking. Yes, he’d remember her face all right. Whether he’d ever manage to discover her name was a different matter. Many of his informants were difficult to track down at the moment.

The second man, also more observant than most, sat in the body of the hall, but further back and to one side. At fifty-four he was far too old to pass as a student, but then he didn’t need to. Several of the people on the platform were acquainted with him and regarded him with great respect. He had dedicated his life to a cause of which they approved wholeheartedly. He was the champion of oppressed people, particularly in the Third World; the defender of those under the tyranny of imperialism and dictatorship; the protector of the poor and downtrodden.

He ran an organization called Aide et Solidarité whose official function was purely humanitarian, helping refugees, exiles and those who were being persecuted for their political beliefs.

That was on the official level.

However, Aide et Solidarité had a second and distinctly unofficial function. It provided arms, papers, liaison, and every sort of logistical support for subversive groups in the free world.

The man, an Egyptian-born Jew named Duteil, was well known to the security services as an admitted communist who’d been involved in numerous liberation movements. He entered France clandestinely in 1953 and had actively backed the FLN, the Algerian nationalist liberation organization, providing them with papers and arms. He had been imprisoned by the French until the general amnesty of 1962. Since then he had been deeply involved in national liberation movements in numerous countries – Angola, Mozambique, Haiti, Santo Domingo and Kurdistan.

In France itself, however, he had done nothing illegal, nor had he done anything to suggest he was interfering in the country’s internal affairs. Thus he remained free to go about his business.

And now he watched. And listened. He knew Petrini well; they were old acquaintances. But he wondered which of these vociferous young people would in the years to come forget their anger and become model citizens, and which would never forget, but move forward to the point where they felt impelled to become active against capitalist society – which of them, in fact, he should get to know. The dazzling Cohn-Bendit? The next speaker, the earnest Belgian theorist? The funny, uncertain young English girl?

The only thing he knew from experience was that you could never tell.

It was four in the morning. Gabriele was in the young Italian’s room.

She sat in a chair, regarding him with open interest. He was better looking than she had thought. The beard suited his distinctive features: the rich black hair, the long straight nose and dark hooded eyes. Very physical.

Yes, Gabriele decided, he would round the day off nicely.

His name was Giorgio.

He appeared to be Petrini’s helper, his orderer of food and fetcher of information, a role he played with the lazy amused feebleness of a child humouring a parent.

After the rally she and Max had met the student leaders – Cohn-Bendit, Sauvageot, Dutschke, the Germans, Belgians and Italians – over long discussions at the students’ union.

Later Petrini had bought dinner for at least twenty of them. There was fillet steak and spring vegetables and plenty of good wine. Afterwards they went back to Petrini’s room to talk again. In a series of brilliant submissions he had argued for the need to polarize the two halves of society and to demonstrate to people how empty and meaningless their lives really were. To do this dissidents had to be properly organized in active units. If necessary they must be prepared to use force to highlight the ruthless repression of the system …

Gabriele had followed his arguments carefully, grasping each thought and storing it carefully away in the back of her mind.

Afterwards she remembered one phrase in particular: ‘… people need to have the injustices of the world demonstrated to them, so that their own thoughts, which may be no more than suspicions, shall be crystallized in their minds …’

Crystallized … That word again.

But now it was four in the morning, and the talking had stopped. Everyone had gone to bed. Max had found a floor somewhere. And she was here, with Giorgio. She had already decided to sleep with him. She liked making these decisions in isolation, at her own whim. That way she kept control.

Now she glanced around the comfortable hotel room. ‘This is very grand,’ she remarked. ‘Do you always live like this?’

‘Petrini does,’ Giorgio replied slowly. ‘So when he pays, I live like this too.’ He spoke English with a heavy Italian accent which she liked.

She wandered round the room to show that she hadn’t made up her mind to stay. She was still high on the wine and the charge she’d got from the speech, and she wanted him to make a play for her, so that she could hold back and exasperate him a little. It would be more exciting that way.

‘Do you work for Petrini?’ she asked.

He seemed amused by the question. ‘No. I work for myself.’

‘Well? What is it you do?’

He shrugged, immediately bored by the question. ‘I do what I want.’

‘Are you …’ She hesitated. The question she wanted to ask was difficult to put directly. ‘Are you an
activist
?’

He gave her a long stare, as if considering whether or not to take her into his confidence. Then he raised his eyebrows and smiled suggestively. ‘Of course.’

She realized he had purposely misunderstood her. She said impatiently, ‘I mean, are you involved in a dissident group?’

He sighed. Deliberately ignoring the question he said, ‘I’m tired. I’m going to bed.’ He turned and walked into the bathroom.

Gabriele stood in the centre of the room feeling piqued. He was deliberately excluding her. Her vanity was hurt. She had almost made up her mind to leave when he reappeared in the bathroom doorway.

‘Please,’ he said reasonably. ‘We’ve talked enough … All of us. Enough for a long long time.’ Examining her face he added suddenly, ‘But if you insist – yes, I am committed to direct action. Of course!’