I was talking by then to keep my own courage up. I had seen the launching rack on the deck out there from the bedroom window. It looked like an office-furniture designer’s idea for an umbrella stand made out of a bundle of drain pipes. The firework man had been using the glare from the volcanoes to see by. He wanted no mistakes with that lot.
‘Coming back, if you don’t mind, to the subject of relief columns,’ said Henson; ‘you did say something about a need for concerted action when the right moment came and you gave the word. Aren’t you leaving it a bit late?’
‘No.’
I didn’t try to elaborate. It would have been silly to tell her that there wasn’t, after all, going to be any word. Allies are notoriously unable to understand why, when the time comes, they are quite often no longer needed.
Besides, at that moment the rockets were fired.
Visually, they had nothing to offer; no graceful arcs of coloured fire, no pretty second-stage bursts to surprise delighted onlookers, no candelabrum flares on parachutes, none of the ooh-aah stuff that was dished out in Monte Carlo. As the first salvo went up, all we saw were the jets of orange flame that lifted the things out of the umbrella stand.
Then, with apologetic plopping sounds, they seemed to give up and disappear.
The explosions on and near the terrace were not big, but they were far from apologetic. I doubt if there were more than a few ounces of HE in any of the charges. That’s about what there would be in a modern hand-grenade; just enough to create a really jolting anti-personnel blast-wave with a radius of three or four yards. The shallow hole gouged out of a patch of Bermuda grass could have been made by a dog burying a bone. The stonework of the terrace suffered no more than pock-marks. There were several broken windows though.
No one was hurt, but the effect on Krom was remarkable. With him, the noises seemed to act like the traditional snap of the fingers employed by a stage hypnotist to bring his subject out of a trance.
I must say, too, that for a man of his age with half a bottle of brandy in the bloodstream, his reflexes were amazing. When the first salvo exploded, he did a racing dive on to the flagstones. He had found cover behind the pedestal of a marble-topped table before I had even started to move. By the time the second lot arrived, he was already wriggling and rolling his way over the broken glass by the drawing-room windows towards the comparative safety of the room itself.
‘You see? You see?’ he was saying as he went.
We did see; at least, we saw that it was necessary to get off the terrace. The third salvo, which broke another pane of glass and left one of the outside chair-cushions smouldering, was followed by a brief silence. Melanie broke in.
‘Those people must be insane!’
‘Of course they are insane,’ Krom was lying curled up on the floor, busy searching the front of his shirt for slivers of glass. ‘They have been insane for years. They were driven insane by our host.’
He may have snapped out of a trance, but all spells were still in full working order.
‘Are you suggesting,’ Connell demanded in the most disrespectful tone I had yet heard him use to Krom, ‘that the middle-aged jerks playing with explosives on that boat are Kleister and Torten?’
‘Who else would fire mortar shells to maim or kill their tormentor?’
‘Those beer-bellied cretins out there are in their forties.’
‘And they are not firing mortar shells,’ said Melanie; ‘anyone who has ever been near a mortar bombardment would tell you that. Those were signal maroons, defective ones.’
‘Not defective,’ said Yves; ‘only modified for aiming. They have death there. That was a rehearsal. Do you want to wait for the real thing? Take no notice of what Firman says. Get up and go, while you still can!’
Yves was a tryer; no doubt of that. He had much to lose.
I had begun to move and was almost at the door when Henson noticed the fact. As it was important just then that I shouldn’t have further attention drawn to me, I gave her a meaning nod. I hoped that she would interpret it as the promised ‘word’ and as a sign that the time had come for a diversion.
She did not disappoint me.
‘How do we know that the telephone lines are cut?’ she asked Connell accusingly. ‘Have you tried them? Has anyone tried them? Because if they haven’t, I don’t feel like taking the man Firman’s unsupported word for it. There may be one line still working. If so, I think that Professor Krom should immediately call the police on all our behalfs.’
A good effort. Melanie moved in at once to cover the sound of my opening the door.
‘If anyone is to telephone the police it must be me. Professor, because I am the official tenant here in this villa. It is I also who must telephone the gérant acting for the owners so that the damage can be reported and assessed. Please remember, too, if there is a telephone working, which I doubt, that the name of the tenant and present occupier here is not Firman or Wickey-Frey. It is Oberholzer.’
‘Aha!’ said Krom happily. ‘Be sure I shall remember. Oberholzer! How could I forget?’
The jerrican was of metal and a real World War II veteran, not one of the plastic imitations they make nowadays. It had probably been sitting there in the corner of that garage for years; since one of those times when it had been thought prudent to keep a little gasoline put by for emergencies in case the local pumps ran dry. After which Middle East war had it been filled? The 73? The 67? The Suez fiasco of 56?
I hoped that it hadn’t been the Suez, because a top-sergeant who used to flog the stuff had once told me that gasoline stored for years gradually loses its potency: I also hoped that the man had merely been rationalizing his misconduct. Neither of the two cars had much left in its tank, and I wanted an event not an incident; it had to be a huge blaze, one that would quickly be seen and reported but not easily put out.
I was worried, too, about the roof problem. Before I had known that Mat was going to oblige me with fireworks, I had rigged the thing to look like a short-circuit following insulation failure in antique wiring. It wouldn’t have deceived an arson investigator, but I had been prepared to face that difficulty later in return for the presence, when needed, of some fire trucks and their crews along with a back-up force of police cars and gawking spectators. The fireworks had given me a cover story potentially better than the one about antique wiring; but would it in fact be better if there were no hole in the roof to show where the firework had smashed through? Wouldn’t that look fishier than a short-circuit? Even fishier than the remains of The Device?
I thought for a few moments of taking a hammer up to the loft and breaking one or two roof tiles. I didn’t in the end; partly because I couldn’t find a hammer, but mainly because I was, I have to admit, beginning to panic.
The rocket-firing could well have been accompanied by a signal to the waiting clean-up team. ‘That’s zero, kids. Start counting. Give them ten minutes to get themselves together. If the bastards haven’t begun to come out by then, you go right in and start earning your money.’
Or words to that effect. Besides, I didn’t even know if The Device I’d cobbled together would work. I might even have to waste valuable time finding out. Someone — Yves, for instance — might come looking for me while I was doing so. If, through having sweaty hands and being in too much of a hurry, I botched the job, I might end up having to go in there and try blowing myself to bits with lighted matches.
The passage that led to the garage ended at the inner door of what had obviously once been a cubby-hole, with lavatory adjoining, for chauffeurs. Now, it was cluttered with such things as water-skis, old schnorkel masks, a wickerwork chair with a broken seat and a set of golf clubs with hickory shafts. On the wall by the far door were two switches, one controlling the passage lights, the other the lights in the garage. That second switch was necessary because there were no windows or skylights in the garage. When the big outer doors were closed it was pitch-black inside. I made sure that the second switch was in the ‘off’ position.