The Company of Saints (24 page)

‘I don't know.'

His arm went like a vice round her shoulders and he hustled her quickly away from the crowd that was gathering. A siren sounded, getting closer, followed by another. Ambulances, police. Blood was beginning to puddle in the street. He hurried her down into the Metro. At the bottom of the stairs she stiffened and started to resist. He debated whether to hit her and pretend she'd fainted.

‘Who are you?' she said in French. ‘What are you doing?'

‘I've just saved your life,' Lomax said. ‘That car was aiming for you. You must come back with me. You'll be safe there.'

‘I'm going home,' she muttered. ‘I'm not going anywhere.'

It was a chance he had to take. ‘Okay,' he said. ‘We'll go to your home. Then you can choose.'

She didn't ask what he meant. She was grey with shock, but there was a tough resilience about her that was hardly usual in a girl who'd just escaped violent death. When they came to her door she turned to him. ‘My aunt will be at home. Who are you? What do I say?'

‘You tell the truth,' he said quietly. ‘You were in a street accident. I brought you home. Then get rid of her so we can talk.'

‘We haven't got time to argue,' Lomax said. He was standing by the window of the sitting room, watching the street. Behind him, Hélène Blond sat hunched on the sofa. He was right and she knew it. She had gone to Ma-Nang for help and they had sentenced her to death. That car was a weapon, as deadly as the gun she had used on the Duvaliers. She knew this because she had learned how to hit and run as part of her training. She had felt physically sick at first. Fear and the boiling hatred for her betrayers made her sit and listen while the Englishman talked. Now there were two lots of enemies: her own organization and what this man represented.

‘By now,' Lomax said curtly, ‘they'll know you got away. You heard the news flash – two dead. It won't take them long to find out you're not one of them. Or the injured. And then, mademoiselle, they'll come calling round here. Which is it to be? You come with me and save your life or you wait here for them?'

Hélène stood up. ‘I wouldn't be any safer with you. We have people everywhere.'

‘I'm sure you do,' Lomax answered. One of them was at the Albert Hall not long ago, but he didn't say so. ‘But I am in a position to hide you where nobody will be able to get at you. And to arrange a deal for you, if you cooperate.' He looked at his watch. ‘I'll give you five minutes.'

She turned her back on him. The release was upstairs. All she had to do was pretend to agree and go and get it. Take the way out that she had promised when she first joined Ma-Nang.

‘I don't need five minutes,' she said in English. ‘I will come with you.'

Lomax didn't sound surprised. ‘Get your passport,' he said. ‘And don't bother to pack anything. We're not going to have time for luggage.'

The bloodstained car with its shattered lights and damaged radiator was hidden in a garage. Within a few hours it would be dismantled and taken out in sections to be scattered on the metal dumps outside the city. In the operations room at the Ma-Nang meditation centre, the principal received the list of casualties from the accident. He spoke in their curious tonal language. It sounded staccato and angry. ‘France' had escaped. They must retrieve the error that night. Before their failure was reported to Moscow.

Hélène's aunt watched them go. She stood by the window where Lomax had kept watch only a few minutes earlier. She was shaking and she found it hard to breathe.

She had met them in the hall, her niece carrying a shoulder bag, making for the front door. And when she intervened to ask them where they were going, the girl had rounded on her. The effect was so horrific that the woman literally shrank away from her until she felt the wall at her back. The language was a hail of filthy epithets, the vilest insults couched in the crudest terms. And the girl's face close to hers, contorted with hatred.

The Englishman put an end to it. He said, ‘I don't know what you're calling her, but you stop it! Stop it!' He gave Hélène a rough push towards the front door. Then he said to her aunt in slow French, ‘We have to go, madame. She is in danger. Don't talk to anyone. Don't answer the door till I telephone you.' And then, seeing the stricken look on her face, he added, ‘Whatever she said, she didn't mean it.'

Then they were gone. The door opened and shut after them, and the girl didn't even say anything. The aunt ran to the window in the sitting room and saw them hurry down the street. The man was holding Hélène's arm, urging her forward. She closed her eyes for a moment. She felt sick and dizzy. The names she'd called her, the naked loathing on her face.… She didn't know what to do. She sat down, still trembling, and tried to understand what the man had meant. In danger? In danger from whom or what? She recovered herself after a few minutes. Anger and disgust were driving out shock. She reached for the telephone, and dialled the police.

Lomax hailed a taxi. ‘Charles de Gaulle airport,' he said.

‘Where are we going?' the girl said sullenly.

Lomax didn't look at her. ‘England.' He heard the gasp of surprise beside him. ‘You'll be safe there from your friends.'

She'd said it all in her aunt's sitting room, made the confession that would have taken months of trained interrogation to extract. ‘We have people everywhere.'

‘You don't mind if they hurt your aunt?'

She sniggered. ‘Why should I? Do her good.'

Lomax didn't say any more. ‘We.' She was a member of the group who had just mowed down innocent people on the pavement in their effort to get to her. No, she wouldn't mind what happened to her aunt. As they sat in the speeding taxi, threading their way through the traffic towards the airport, he thought, what a pity I have to take her back. My instinct tells me to push her out onto the street. Let them get rid of her. But he tapped on the driver's glass and asked him to make up speed if he could. He had already calculated on getting the six o'clock plane to London.

The police arrived very quickly. She congratulated them on their efficiency when she opened the door. There were two of them, polite young men. One took down everything she said, while the other made notes. Her niece had vanished with a man she thought was English. By his accent, of course. Saying she was in danger. That was very disturbing. They didn't say where they were going – no indication at all? No luggage? No. Where did she keep a passport? Upstairs. Perhaps madame would take them up and they could check. If she had taken her passport that would prove she was leaving the country.…

She went up the stairs with them. There was no passport in Hélène's desk drawer. They were sympathetic, but seemed in a hurry. They'd put out a general call for her. They stood back to let her go downstairs ahead of them. The one taking notes had put his pad away. He hit her hard on the back of the neck and she was dead even before they threw her down the stairs. They stepped carefully over her body and let themselves out. The car with the local gendarmes inside pulled up at the house ten minutes after they'd gone.

They reported back to the room in the rear of the house on the square. An Englishman. The same man who had dived on her and rolled her to safety when the car drove at her. The driver had lost concentration and hit the crowd. An Englishman who had followed her and tricked her into revealing her connection with Ma-Nang. By now she would be on her way to London. To the interrogators of the SIS. There was nothing to do, it was decided, but admit what had happened and pass the initiative to Moscow. It was no longer their responsibility.

Hélène sat slumped in her seat. They had caught the flight with only minutes to spare. It was British Airways and her companion had waved a card under the nose of a harassed young man at the ticket office. It worked so quickly that she knew immediately that her first impression of him was right. The enemy. The official enemy, with the power to commandeer seats on an overbooked plane. The power to hide her away from her colleagues. She sighed, looking out of the window at the grey clouds that flew past them. Her head ached and her pulse was uneven. She didn't like flying. It made her tense and uneasy.

The man beside her didn't speak. She could feel his hostility. That didn't worry her. She knew how to harness hatred better than he did. She was afraid, yes, for the first time, except for the blinding moment of panic when that car screeched after her like an avenging angel. Now she was afraid of what was at the end of the flight. Afraid of the cool, impersonal forces of the enemy who would come forward like a Roman phalanx and surround her as soon as she left the plane. Hate and courage wouldn't avail her now. Now she had to rely on nerve and cunning. Just as she did after the Duvaliers were killed and the cold-eyed bloodhounds of SEDECE were asking questions. If she could fool them she had a chance with her new adversaries. What had the man said that alerted her? Something that had made her stomach lurch long before the plane took off.… In the taxi on their way to the airport. ‘Your friends.' That was it. She'd made a slip somewhere, or was it just a guess? Never mind. She took several deep breaths, calming herself, slowing her pulse, silencing the jangling bells in her nervous system. He might know that she belonged to the organization, but he didn't know she'd murdered the Duvaliers. That was what she had to conceal, at all costs. And she could buy her way out by betraying the comrades at Ma-Nang, by explaining how it worked, how they were chosen from the other students. The killers, that is. Not simple converts to the idea of nuclear disarmament and world peace like herself. She was setting up the answers to imagined questions, her mind darting back and forth like a rat in a puzzle cage, looking for exits.

She wouldn't give in. No, she'd made up her mind to live and escape if she could. But the hate burned in her like a coal. Killing the Duvaliers hadn't extinguished it. Probably, she thought as they came in to land, nothing would, but death. Only in darkness was it possible to find real peace. They had taught her that at Ma-Nang.

Lomax nudged her. He hadn't spoken once during the flight. ‘Put on your seat belt.'

Hélène fastened it. She wanted to say something provocative, but there was something about him which didn't invite challenge. It was an odd sensation, being hated. New to her, who thrived on her hatred of other people. She said nothing. She followed him out of the plane and onto the airport bus. Nobody was waiting for them, nobody came forward when they passed through customs on the production of his card. He gripped her tightly by the arm while they pushed their way through into the main hall. He stopped at a telephone cubicle, pushed her in front of him so that she was wedged in the upper half, found change and dialled a number. The conversation was too quick for her to follow any of it.

‘Good,' said Lomax. ‘Let's go.'

It was just getting dark as they turned into the little cul-de-sac in Anne's Yard.

7

‘How did they find you?' Modena asked. Two days and two nights, with brief snatches of sleep for both of them. Food on trays, endless cups of coffee, air stale with cigarette smoke, some wine for him, to keep his energy from flagging. He had forgotten how much older he was and how the tension could exhaust him. He could understand how some men would have dispensed with patience and started using other means. Sometimes he felt sorry for her. Sometimes he saw the haggard face and hollow eyes as belonging to a frightened child. A child condemned to a living death in the notorious prison on its island. All chance of life and love forfeited. For what?

But now she was breaking up – the façade was peeling away, and this gave him the energy to go on, chipping and probing her. And it made him pity her, which he knew was a mistake. But if he lost that capacity, then what difference was there between them? What right had he to judge if he wasn't any better? ‘How did they pick you?' he said again.

She sighed, brushed the lank hair back from her forehead. ‘They gave me tests,' she said. ‘Everyone who went to the institute filled up forms, answered a lot of questions. They said it would help to decide what sort of meditation and relaxing exercises we needed.'

‘And you did this?' he prompted. Getting her to describe the way the institute categorized its students had been like drawing teeth. She'd resisted so strongly that he detected some kind of mental block. From defiance at first she changed to evasion, twisting and turning in her effort to avoid answering.

And then at last she gave way, and the answers started coming, hesitantly, almost furtively. ‘I filled in the form,' she said.

‘What sort of questions were they? Intimate?'

She looked away from him. ‘Some of them. They said it was to find the sources of tension.'

‘And were you tense? Frustrated? Repressed, perhaps? Is that what made you look for a place like this?'

‘I felt I was going to explode. I hated everything: my college, my parents, my life. I didn't know where to turn. There'd been a man.'

‘Ah,' said Modena. So must the priest feel in the confessional. But compassionate, determined to be compassionate. Not like him, a man committed to hunt down and punish. ‘Tell me about the man.'

‘No.' The voice was sharp, the spot too tender to be touched. ‘I was ten,' she said after a pause. ‘Nobody knows.'

‘You don't have to talk about it.'

There was a long pause.

‘After the questionnaire?' he prompted.

‘I was given a helper,' she muttered. ‘A woman. They said I needed a woman to guide me.' Of course, Modena thought.

But just to satisfy the curiosity of his own mind he asked, ‘Did you have lovers?'

‘No.' The dark eyes were glazed with tears. ‘I couldn't bear it. That made it worse for me. But afterwards, I did.'