Donald Westlake: The New Black Mask ( No 3 )

It had taken one look at this young French girl to show him what he had been searching for so hungrily and failing so sadly to find.

At this point common sense took charge. It said to him in the flat, unemotional voice that common sense always uses, “It’s not a young girl that you’re craving for. It’s your own lost youth. And that’s something that no amount of wishing is ever going to bring back. If you can’t grasp this simple fact, you’re stupider even that I took you for.”

At this point he realised something else.

He had been looking at the reflection of the girl in the glass. The man had been looking at him. It was not a look of hostility. Rather one of dawning recognition. Now that he came to consider it there was something in the man that touched a chord of remembrance. The square forehead, the long, straight nose that turned very slightly at the tip giving the face a whimsical look, the set of the chin. And surely he could see — or was his imagination playing tricks? — a zigzag line down the left side of his face, from cheekbone to chin, white against the sunbrowned skin.

None of this had occupied more than a few seconds. The man had made up his mind. He said something to the girl, pushed back his chair, and came across. He was smiling. He said, “I run the risk of having made a stupid mistake, but is it not the young lieutenant?”

“It is,” said Andrew, “and you are the young farmer.”

“Neither of us so young now,” said the man. He spoke in French as though he realised that Andrew would answer him in the same tongue.

“It was a long time ago,” said Andrew.

Nearly forty years. Half a lifetime.

By influence of his father, and by virtue of his excellent French, Andrew had infiltrated the army at an illegally young age. He had celebrated his eighteenth birthday on the ship which took him and the rest of the Armoured Reconnaissance Regiment to Algiers for the Torch landings. Their job had been to find the German army. They had found them in the little farm in the hills above Bou Arada.

It was not a strong or well-organised part of that army. Three panzer-grenadiers on a foraging expedition for eggs and wine. The farmer and his seventeen-year-old son had been foolish enough to refuse them and to add some uncomplimentary comments on the German character. The old man had been knocked unconscious. The youngster had been tied to a chair and one of the men was busy with a knife teaching him good manners. He was carving the symbol of his regiment, a lightning flash, on the left-hand side of his face.

They were so preoccupied with what they were doing that they had not heard the armoured car stop in the lane at the far end of the farm. Andrew, standing outside the open window, had drawn the army revolver which he had never used before, and shot one of the Germans in the foot. That was the end of the battle. The three soldiers had surrendered to superior force, and had been taken away. Andrew and his section had been billeted at the farm for a week, and had become friends with the craggy M. Rocaire and his young son Louis. Then the battle had moved on. He had often meant to go back, but had had no chance to do so until after the war, when he was on holiday in Algiers and had driven out to the farm. The Rocaire family was no longer there. Like many French settlers, they had seen the writing on the wall and returned to their own country.

“This is most evidently the hand of fate,” said Louis Rocaire. “That out of a thousand tables in Cannes we should have chosen this one. One must never contest the decrees of Providence. You are here yet for some days?”

“My business is finished, and it had been in my mind to spend a little time exploring the countryside.”

“Then you have a car here? Not an armoured car this time.”

“No. A faithful old Humber.”

“A most distinguished vehicle. You will drive out in it, if not tonight then tomorrow morning and will consider yourself our guest for the rest of your visit. I am forgetting myself. I have not introduced my daughter. Marie-Claude. This is the young lieutenant.”

“The man who shot the German in the foot,” said Marie-Claude. “You are a figure of mystical importance in the history of the Rocaire family. I am delighted to meet you in the flesh.”

“No more delighted than I am,” said Andrew.

“Then all that remains is to give you directions. Our house is in the hills, in the valley of the Loup. You have a map with you. Excellent. An officer of the Reconnaissance Corps, my love, never travels without a map. I will mark the place. So. It is a little isolated but not difficult to find.”

“I can’t impose on you for more than a day.”

“It will not be an imposition, I assure you. It will be a pleasure. We see very little company, Marie-Claude and I. We will drink the wine we make ourselves, and will fight old battles. My little girl will be bored, but for her father’s sake she will pretend not to be.”

Marie-Claude said, quite seriously, “You must stay longer than one day, or we will think you do not like us.”

“That would never do,” agreed Andrew. He hoped he did not sound as breathless as he felt.

When, on the following morning, he drove his fifteen-year-old Humber up into the hills, following the course of the Wolf River, he wondered what sort of place he would find. He had pictured something between an old Provençal stone house and a converted farm. As he turned the final comer in the long, winding approach road he dismissed both ideas. This was a very considerable residence. Newly built, on a platform cut into one side of the hill, there was a solidity about it that spoke of money and taste. A solemn dark-haired boy opened the door for him, and took charge of his luggage. A second one led the way to his room. Andrew guessed that they were brothers and might be Corsicans, and this was confirmed by the slurred consonants when the second boy spoke: Mamzelle and her father, he said, were by the pool. He would inform them of monsieur’s arrival.

It was the start of a five-day fantasy. Andrew had forgotten that such a life could still be lived. The house staff could not have been less than five, and there was a chauffeur, and a gardener as well. The food and the wine would not have disgraced a three-star hotel. His clothes were washed and ironed daily, and his original intention of staying for a day and a night was neatly thwarted when both his suits were removed and sent down to Cannes for cleaning and pressing.

By day there was riding with Marie-Claude and tennis against her father, who turned out to be a formidable player. All three of them swam in the pool, a cunning piece of engineering, fed by a stream coming in at one end and overflowing into a waterfall at the other. In the evenings, after dinner, they sat on the terrace, the bullfrogs competing with the cicadas, and talked about every thing and everybody except themselves.

Only once did Louis touch on their own circumstances. He said, “You may have noticed that one or other of my boys makes a circuit of our property every evening. They are both armed. It is a necessary precaution. In this part of France we are still fighting a war that most people have forgotten.”

Andrew said, “I noticed OAS signs on some of the houses. I did wonder.”

“The OAS against the SAC — the Service d’Action Civique. De Gaulle’s spies and butchers. There are many of us Pieds Noirs in this area. We have not forgotten. And the SAC has not forgotten. Recently, not many miles from here, a police officer and all of his family were butchered one night.”

This was said when they were sitting by themselves. The arrival of Marie-Claude had switched the conversation to more suitable topics.

It was on the fourth night, when Andrew had at last convinced his host that he must leave, that the suggestion was made.