‘No,’ I said.
And then she did something so unexpected it shocked me deeply. She spat in my face. She jerked her head and ejected her germ-laden spittle straight into my face. ‘Maquereau! You’re like all the rest. When you’ve got a man down you kick his teeth in. My father is the finest, most generous, kindly man I know, and you use him, all of you, as though he is nothing but a turd under your feet. I hate you. I hate the whole world.’ Tears were streaming down her face and she rushed to the door, pulling it open and screaming, ‘Get out! D’you hear? Allez! And tell your friends, everybody, that he is clear of you all now. He’s free, and you’ll never find him. Never.’
The door banged behind us.
‘Is not a very rewarding visit, eh?’ Barre said with a chuckle as we walked back to the car. He seemed to enjoy my discomfort, and then as we drove back down to the main road he said, ‘Nothing is what it seems to be, isn’t it so? The man you regard as a terrorist, others think of in ideological terms. So what about Choffel, eh? You see him as a wrecker, a man who has deliberately caused a tanker to go on to the rocks, but to his daughter he is a kindly, generous man who would not hurt a soul and you are the enemy.’ He glanced at me quickly. ‘How do you think he sees himself?’
I hadn’t considered that. ‘I’ve had other things to think about,’ I told him.
‘That is not an answer.’ He waited a moment, then said, ‘But why does he do it?’
‘Money,’ I said. ‘What else?’
‘There are other reasons — anger, frustration, politics. Have you thought about those?’
‘No.’
He gave a little shrug and after that he didn’t ask any more questions. It was a filthy drive, night falling and the traffic heavy after we had passed through Saumur. He seemed withdrawn then. A dusting of sleet gradually laid a white coating over everything. He had the radio on, the windscreen wipers clicking back and forth — my eyes closed, my mind drifting into reverie, no longer thinking about the girl, but about my meeting with Baldwick. It loomed closer every minute and I had no idea where it would take me, what I was letting myself in for. Suppose I was wrong? Suppose he hadn’t recruited Choffel? Then it would be to no purpose and I could find myself involved in something so crooked that not even my letter of agreement with Forthright’s would protect me.
It was just on six when we pulled up at the entrance to my hotel. ‘I’m sorry you don’t get what you want,’ he said. ‘But the girl was frightened. You realize that.’ And he sat there, staring at me, waiting for me to say something. ‘You frightened her,’ he said again.
I started to open the door, thanking him for the trouble he had taken and for the lunch he had insisted on buying me, but his hand gripped my arm, holding me. ‘So! She is right. It was your wife. I had forgotten the name. I did not connect.’ He was leaning towards me, his face close, his eyes staring into mine. ‘Mon Dieu!’ he breathed. ‘And you have no proof, none at all.’
‘No?’ I laughed. The man was being stupid. ‘For God’s sake! The chief was sick, or so he says. Choffel was in charge, and for the secondary reduction gear to go right after an engine failure… that… that’s too much of a coincidence. He was quite close to it when it happened. He admitted that.’ And then I was reminding him that, at the first opportunity, the man had stolen a dinghy, got aboard a Breton fishing boat, then flown out to Bahrain to board a freighter bound for Karachi and had finally been picked up by a dhow in the Hormuz Straits. ‘His escape, everything, organized, even his name changed from Speridion back to Choffel. What more do you want?’
He sat back then with a little sigh, both hands on the wheel. ‘Maybe,’ he murmured. ‘But she’s a nice girl and she was scared.’
‘She knew I was right. She knew he was caught up in some crooked scheme—‘
‘No, I don’t think so.’ But then he shrugged and left it at that. ‘Alors! If there is anything more I can do for you—‘ He barely waited for me to get out before pulling away into the traffic.
There was a note for me at the desk. Baldwick was back and waiting for me in the hotel’s bar-restaurant. I went up to my room, had a wash in lukewarm water, then stood at the window for a moment staring down at the shop-lit street below, where cars moved sluggishly in a glitter of tiny snowflakes. Now that the moment of my meeting with Baldwick had come, I was unsure of myself, disliking the man and the whole stinking mess of Arab corruption on which he battened. A gust of wind drove snowflakes hard like sugar against the window and I laughed, remembering the girl. If it were true what Barre had said, that she’d been frightened of me… well, now I knew what it felt like. I was scared of Baldwick, of thrusting my neck into his world, not knowing where it would lead. And the girl reminding me of Karen. God damn it! If I was scared now, how would it be when I was face to face with her father?
I turned abruptly from the window. It wasn’t murder. To kill a rat like that… Why else was I here, anyway? In Nantes. At the same hotel as Baldwick. And she’d known about Baldwick. I was certain of it, that gleam of recognition when I mentioned his name. She’d associated him with her father’s escape. And Baldwick in Sennen when that picture had been taken of the Petros Jupiter’s crew coming ashore. To recruit a man like Choffel meant he’d been told to find an engineer who was an experienced wrecker.
I shivered, the room cold, the future looming uncertain. Another gust rattled the window. I made an effort, pulled myself together and started down the stairs.
The bar-restaurant looked out on to the street, the windows edged with a dusting of ice crystals, the snow driving horizontally. The place was cold and almost empty. Baldwick was sitting at a table pulled as close as possible to a moveable gas fire. He had another man with him, a thin-faced man with a dark blue scarf wrapped round a scrawny neck and a few strands of hair slicked so carefully over the high bald dome of his head that they looked as though they were glued there. ‘Albert Varsac,’ Baldwick said.
The man rose, tall and gaunt. ‘Capitaine Varsac.’ He held out a bony hand.
‘First mate on a coaster’s as far as you ever got.’ Baldwick laughed, prodding him with a thick finger. ‘That’s raight, ain’t it? You never bin an effing captain in yer life.’ He waved me to a seat opposite. ‘Got your message,’ he said. His eyes were glassy, his mood truculent. He shouted for a glass, and when it came, he sloshed red wine into it and pushed it across to me. ‘So you changed your mind, eh?’
I nodded, wondering how far I would have to commit myself in order to catch up with Choffel.
‘Why?’ He leaned forward, his big bullet head thrust towards me, the hard bright eyes staring me in the face. ‘You good as told me ter bugger off when I saw you down at that little rat hole of a cottage of yours. Get a’t, you said. I don’t want anything to do wi’ yer bloody proper-propositions. Raight?’ He wasn’t drunk, but he’d obviously had a skinful, the north country accent more pronounced, his voice a little slurred. ‘So why’re you here, eh? Why’ve you changed yer mind?’ His tone was hostile.
I hesitated, glancing at the Frenchman who was fazing at me with drunken concentration. ‘The reason doesn’t matter.’ My voice sounded nervous, fear of the man taking hold of me again.
‘I got ter be sure…” He said it slowly, to himself, and I suddenly sensed a mood of uncertainty in him. In that moment, as he. picked up the bottle and thrust it into Varsac’s hands, I glimpsed it from his point of view, engaging men he didn’t know for some crooked scheme he didn’t dare tell them about or perhaps didn’t even know himself. ‘You piss off,’ he told the Frenchman. ‘I wan’ ter talk to Rodin ‘ere alone.’ He waved the man away, an impatient flick of a great paw, and when he’d gone, he called for another bottle. ‘Now,’ he said. ‘Let’s ‘ave it. Why’re you here?’ He was leaning forward again, the hard little eyes boring into me, and I sat there for what seemed an age, staring at him speechless, not knowing what to say, conscious only that it wasn’t going to be easy. The bastard was suspicious.