The King of the Rainy Country (21 page)

There came Canisius; talking to two other dim financial fellows, one doubtless the echo of himself, probably the Paris office of the
Sopexique. The other was more sunburnt, and much more wrapped up – local man, in a tweed jacket. Local manager or supervisor in charge of the building work, or possibly the architect. The city types were dressed the way city types do dress at seaside resorts full of palm trees and casinos and singing sunshine. Canisius made a marvellous target, thought Van der Valk gloomily; cream tussore suit like Mr Khruschev, oh dear, and a Panama hat! He was wearing straw-coloured plaited shoes too, and had something of Mr K's world-familiar waddle. The other, a smaller, thinner type with sleek shiny hair and a bald top, was fanning himself with his hat – in the sunshine it was a good twenty degrees, though it was still only March.

And the auto! That perhaps belonged to the Paris man; one of the gigantic six-litre Mercedes battleships that are longer than a Cadillac – and the top down! A chauffeur in riding boots and a peaked hat shaped like a German policeman's was holding doors open, and the porter of the Prince de Galles was making dignified fluttering movements and making sure there was no orange peel under the feet of his distinguished guests. The tweed coat got in at the front – the two from the Sopex at the very back. Van der Valk got a sudden sinking feeling as he thought that from nearly any of the hotel balconies it was a dead easy shot, a sitting cock pheasant if ever there was one. But no shot came: Anne-Marie had not booked in to the Prince de Galles.

The Mercedes rippled off with a noise like a woman's fingers smoothing a satin evening skirt and Van der Valk climbed into the hired Renault, which made a noise like a dock hand stacking empty oil drums, but the employees of the Prince de Galles were far too distinguished to look.

Keeping up was easy: the huge black car was very sedate. They slid through St Jean de Luz without as much as a toot, Van der Valk the regulation hundred metres in the rear, in his shirt sleeves. They crossed the bridge – but instead of sailing on along the coast to Hendaye the Mercedes suddenly swung abruptly to the left at a main road junction and Van der Valk grabbed at the Michelin on the seat beside him. Oh oh. There was another road, damn it,
as well the National Ten, that skirted Hendaye and crossed the Bidassoa a kilometre lower down, the type of road described by guidebooks as ‘picturesque stretch'. Which it was: here the foothills of the Pyrenees came down towards the narrow coastal strip where one squeezes through the Irun. A thick Mediterranean vegetation with cork oaks and umbrella pines was looking very springlike in the hot sunshine, though at the thousand metre level the snow was still waist deep. As the Mercedes slowed for the frontier post Van der Valk was realizing uneasily that the shooting cover was perfect. Nothing had happened, and nothing happened now. Yet the idea had taken possession of him in a way he recognized, for instead of a vaguely troubling theory he had a sudden wave of fierce feverish certainty: somewhere, somehow, there had been eyes along that road, eyes along a gun barrel.

He stopped the auto before the frontier. There had been no sign of the grey Opel, which could perfectly easily have passed into Spain. Here the hills took a dip into the valley of the Bidassoa, and the river, swollen now by the melting snow, passed under the bridge that formed the frontier. There was a tiny centre of activity around the customs house, where three or four autos were parked, a tricolour fluttered lazily in the puffs of pine-scented air off the hill, and the striped trousers of two customs men leaned together over the guardrail at the shoulder of the bridge, probably speculating about trout. Van der Valk backed the Renault on to a flattish strip of uneven ground, turned it, and felt sweat creeping down his spine, though it was not hot here. The sun was warm, yes, but a little breeze offshore was making the pine-trees whisper, and it came from the higher ground, where the snow still lay. There was goose-flesh on his bare arms: he wondered whether it came from the chilly little breaths of air, or that terrifying feeling of complete certainty. He was very tired, and was not certain whether his judgement was good. His shirt was soaking under his arms, which was a disagreeable feeling; he took his binoculars and tried to think coldly.

All along the road there were flat patches, a mixture of gravel, old pine-needles and a thin sprinkling of earth with coarse grass:
people in summer parked their autos there and climbed up to one of the ledges for a picnic. At the curves the road had been cut into the hillsides, and the shoulders were revetted with stone. The little watercourses running in irregular stony streaks down the slope vanished under the road in culverts that would all be dry in summer but were now active and talking.

As he looked he was not impressed by the possibility of a shot at an auto stopping for the frontier. It was a long shot, and blocked from too many angles. To get a clear sightline one would have to go too far back and too high, he thought. He was trying to see how he would have done it himself. Suppose that I were looking for a good place …

There was time in front of him. Canisius would not be back for several hours and one would have leisure to find a good spot. But he knew obscurely that the good spot had been found. It was not only the feeling of eyes somewhere that had made him sweat: he knew too that these plans cannot be carried out spontaneously. They need rehearsal. If he had been behind the gun he knew he would have let the big Mercedes pass unhindered too; the important thing was to get a good notion of how fast it went, what sort of target was presented, whether any unforeseen factor blocked the view and the shot. The woman was a skier; she knew something about terrain, about slopes and dips and humps of ground. She had the right blend of cold judgement to add to her boiling fury.

He started the motor and swung the boxy little Renault back the way he had come. There was little traffic on the road; it was too early in the year. The road led nowhere but into Spain, and plenty of people, especially the local people who had business over the border, took the coast road by the railway line. Duller but more direct. It was only later in the year that the floods of little cars like his and the big broad-bottomed touring coaches would be tempted by the ‘pretty road'. People then would clamber in quantities up the dried watercourses and pick the aromatic leaves that smelt of turpentine and eucalyptus, and throw greasy bits of paper and beer cans around, and set the woods on fire too, no
doubt. There were notices in curly French lettering every couple of hundred metres. ‘Fire is the woods' worst enemy. Your cigarette or your match can cause death and devastation. Negligence is criminal.'

At this time of year, the road was not even perfectly secure; the melting snow coursing down the steep slope that ran up in places almost vertically above the road could cause accidents that would not occur in summer. The falling water brought away loose stones and pebbles, bits of dead branch – occasionally even a tree might come down. Nothing really unsafe, of course; that would be seen to by Eaux et Forêts or Ponts et Chaussées or whoever the French authority was.

There … Coming up a slope, and swinging out for a sharp bend, quite a large stone suddenly crashed on the roadway in front of him at a spot where the hill went up abruptly in a tangle of thin undergrowth. He braked and stopped. A stone the size of his two fists. There were a few pebbles and dead twigs on the road surface – but if that stone had landed on his bonnet … He got out and went to look at the slope. It ran up for some fifteen metres over his head with little flat heathery bushes – some kind of broom? It was perfectly sound and safe, not crumbling or insecure looking in any way. It was hard to see where the stone had come from. He picked it up and tossed it over on to the valley side. He was walking back to the auto when the sweat started all over his body and he put his hand up in an unconscious gesture to his neck. He had stopped his car! Anybody within a hundred metres of him anywhere could have had a shot at him. He got into the driving seat and pressed his body hard back against the cushion, feeling his leg muscles strain and his shirt sticking to him. With an awkward hand – his fingers seemed difficult to articulate – he lit a cigarette. Then he got out of the auto again with a jump. The shot would not have come from anywhere within a hundred metres. It would come from where the stone had fallen.

The stone had not fallen: it had been thrown.

He stood still a long moment, the cigarette forgotten in his hand. The metal of the bonnet was warm and dusty under the other hand.
Anne-Marie Marschal could have been watching where the road forked in St Jean, she could have followed at her leisure. She would have seen the little Renault behind the whale-like Mercedes, but she had not looked at it: there were ten thousand such in France. There was nothing to connect him with it; when he had accompanied her it had always been in her own auto. When it had come back along the road it had meant nothing either. The stone – it had been a rehearsal …

But he had got out, and she had certainly seen him. The plan had been a good one; to throw a stone in front of the Mercedes – not big enough to cause a revolution, but enough to cause comment. Curiosity. Anybody would stop, slightly indignant, a little frightened – the chauffeur too would walk up and look in a puzzled way to see where it could possibly have come from, before tossing it over off the road, so as not to incommode other people. It had been well thought out, there would be a delay of two minutes, enough to lie down, take a careful unhurried sight – and send a bullet straight into Mr Khruschev's cream tussore bosom.

A sudden cold anger flamed in him. She had seen him – and he was the last person she wanted to see, the last person she would have chucked a stone at. Very well: the yob, the clot, the Dutch peasant, the illiterate nosy parker from the police was going to climb that slope.

He got into the auto, backed it with a grind and a tearing noise of little stones clear of the stream running along towards the next culvert, and let it go till he reached a patch where he could get it off the road altogether. He took his binoculars and started to walk forward, looking for a good place to climb, and stopped suddenly, thinking he heard a sound. It was hard to tell; the chuckle of water and the whisper of the wind in the boughs covered anything but a loud noise. A person moving would not necessarily be heard. He was not much of a scout; he hadn't even a gun. Old Shatterhand Van der Valk. He puffed and crashed through the undergrowth on the steep in a very un-Apache way.

But it was not difficult to find the place; all he had to do was to keep turning till he saw the road from exactly the right height and
distance. Near enough to toss a stone weighing a kilo or more, far enough back to have a comfortable shot – the range was not more than about forty metres. There were three more biggish stones collected, so that his was not, probably, the last rehearsal. She had practised too with pine cones, to get the exact moment at which to throw, to get the auto to stop at the right spot. Ten metres either way on the road did not make the shot more difficult; he could have been shot five times, and tossed over into the bushes on the other side. Quite likely he would have been. But she must have been disconcerted at seeing him. Would anyone even have heard the shots? She could have taken his auto. Where would hers be? Anywhere along the road – likely a kilometre away.

Nothing showed her presence; the pine needles had been scuffled, a twig broken. There was a handy branch to rest the gun barrel on. Sitting would be the best shot; one cannot lie well pointing downhill. A naughty little boy might have made the signs he found, a naughty little boy with a catapult. But he knew it was her; his sense there at the frontier, where he had spent an hour with his skin crawling had been so strong.

She must have gone uphill – there was no way back on to the road, or he would have noticed. She had had plenty of start. Behind the trees of the ridge that stuck out, forcing the road to make a loop, there was a higher, barer hill. If he went up that way he might see something. As long as he could keep her moving … He looked at his watch – it was after eleven already. Canisius would be back about three.

‘Anne-Marie,' he shouted. ‘Anne-Marie. It's useless. You won't get anything done this way.' His voice sounded thin and impotent, and higher up it might not even be heard: the wind was blowing against him, down the slope. Stalking from leeward – pretty inefficient, he told himself. But the underbrush was thinner already. He stopped, panting; he must be three hundred metres above sea level already, and working inland all the time.

As he thought, behind the ridge the ground went upwards at a much gentler angle but much longer. There were trees still but scattered. There were patches of tough grass that sheep or goats
could graze on, and patches of rock showing at the steeper parts. Up at the top would be the snow line, probably – the timber was thicker again up there. He went on climbing, stopping to use his binoculars wherever he got a patch of open ground to look across. It was warmer up here, where the sun was not filtered through trees, and at the same time colder. The breeze was blowing straight off the snow line.

He never saw her at all; it was a wink of sudden intense light that caught his eye. It might have been metal, but it was more likely the lens on the telescopic sight that caught the sun for an instant and caused a reflection like a mirror. He looked through the binoculars but saw nothing: it must be her, though, he told himself. He had no idea of what he was doing and no particular fear: it was not as it had been on the road. He had forgotten the rifle altogether, very nearly, and when the shot came it took him by surprise in a way he would never have thought possible. There was physical surprise, if you can call it a surprise when something like a huge iron hand takes you full swing from nowhere in the middle of your body, and sends you crashing ten metres down the slope in a huddle of limp clothes with no breath or feeling left in you. Yet before he lost consciousness he had time to register the mental surprise of being shot. She's shot me, he told himself in a querulous, old-maidish voice. The stupid, stupid bitch. He felt pain from a graze on his nose and forehead – he had scraped himself falling.