Vintage Stuff

Chapter 14

For the next hour the occupants of the Château Carmagnac were subjected to some of the horrors of Peregrine's literary education. The fact that they were a strange mixture, of British holidaymakers who had answered advertisements in the Lady offering a quiet holiday au Château and a small group of self-styled International Thinkers sponsored by intensely nationalistic governments to attend a symposium on 'Detente or Destruction', added to the consequent misunderstanding. The Countess's absence didn't help either.

'Haven't the foggiest, old chap,' said Mr Hodgson, a scrap-iron merchant from Huddersfield whom Peregrine had caught in the corridor trying to find the lightswitch. 'You wouldn't happen to know where the loo is, would you?'

Peregrine jabbed him in the paunch with his revolver. 'I'm not asking again. Where's the Countess?'

'Look, old chap. If I knew I'd tell you. As I don't, I can't. All I'm interested in now is having a slash.'

Peregrine gave him one and stepping over his body went in search of someone more informative. He found Dimitri Abnekov.

'No capitalist. No roubles. No nothing,' he said taking hurriedly to broken English instead of his normally fluent American in the hope that this would identify him more readily on the side of whatever oppressed masses Peregrine's anti-social action might be said to express. In his pyjamas he felt particularly vulnerable.

'I want the Countess,' said Peregrine.

'Countess? Countess? I know nothing. Countess aristocratic scum. Should be abolished like in my country. Yes?'

'No,' said Peregrine. 'You're going to tell me where...'

Dr Abnekov wasn't. He broke into a spate of Russian and was rewarded by one of Major Fetherington's Specials which left him unable to say anything. Peregrine switched out the light and hurried from the room. Outside he encountered Signor Badiglioni, a Catholic Euro-Communist, who knew enough about terrorism to have the good sense to hurl himself through the nearest door and lock it behind him. That it happened to be the door to the room of Dr Hildegard Keister, a Danish expert on surgical therapy for sexual offenders, and that she was cutting her toenails with a pair of scissors and exposing a good deal of thigh in the process, rendered Signor Badiglioni totally incoherent.

'You want me? Yes?' asked the doctor in Danish, advancing on him with a Scandinavian broadmindedness Signor Badiglioni entirely misinterpreted. Babbling frantic apologies, he tried to unlock the door but the good doctor was already upon him.

'Terrorist outside,' he squealed.

'The reciprocated sensuality is natural,' said the doctor and dragged him back to the bed.

Further down the corridor, Peregrine was engaged in an attempted dialogue with Pastor Laudenbach, the German who had been through the Battle of the Kursk Salient and whose pacifism was consequently sufficiently earnest for him to refuse to give in to Peregrine's threat to blow his head off if he didn't stop saying his prayers and tell him where the Countess was. In the end, the Pastor's convictions prevailed and Peregrine left him unscathed.

He was even less successful with his next victim. Professor Zukacs, an economist of such austere Marxist-Leninist theoretical principles that he'd spent a great many years in Hungarian prisons to save the country's industrial progress and who had been sent to the conference in the vain hope that he would defect, was too used to young men with guns patrolling corridors to be in the least disconcerted.

'I help you find her,' he told Peregrine. 'My father was with Bela Kun in the First Revolution and he shot countesses. But not enough, you understand. The same now. The bourgeoisification of the masses is detrimental to the proletarian consciousness. It is only by '

They were interrupted by the Mexican delegate who poked his head round the door of his bedroom and expressed the wish that they would shoot countesses somewhere else and said that he had enough trouble with insomnia without having proletarian consciousness added to it.

'Trotskyite,' snapped Professor Zukacs, 'imperialist lackey...' In the ensuing row Peregrine made his escape. Even to his limited intellect it was obvious the Countess wasn't in this wing of the Château. He hurried along the corridor and found a passage to the right. He was just wondering which room to enter when the matter was decided for him. Someone was moaning nearby. Peregrine moved towards the sound and stopped outside a door. The moaning was quite distinct now. So was the creak of bedsprings.

Peregrine had no difficulty interpreting them. Someone who had been gagged and tied to a bed was struggling to escape. He knew who that someone was. Very gently he tried the handle of the door and was surprised to find it opened. The room was as dark as the passage and the sounds were even more heartrending. The Countess was obviously in agony. She was panting and moaning and the depth of her despair was rendered more poignant by the occasional grunt. Peregrine edged silently towards the bed and reached out a hand. An instant later he had withdrawn it. Whatever other physical peculiarities the Countess might have, one thing was certain, she had a remarkably hairy and muscular behind. She was also stark naked.

Anyway she had got the message that help was on the way. She'd stopped bouncing on the bed and Peregrine was about to explain that he'd have her out of there in a jiffy when she moaned again and spoke.

'More, more. Why've you stopped? I was just coming.' It was on the tip of Peregrine's tongue to say that she didn't have to because he was there and would untie her when a man's voice answered.

'How many hands have you got?' he asked.

'Hands? Hands? How many hands? Is that what you said?'

'That's exactly it.'

'That's what I thought,' muttered the woman, 'at a time like this you've got to ask fool questions? How the hell many hands do you think I've got, three?'

'Yes,' said the man, 'And one of them is cold and horny.'

'Jeepers, horny! Only thing round here that's horny has got to be you. I should know. So come on, honey, lay off the gags and give it to me.'

'All right,' said the man doubtfully, 'All the same I could have sworn...'

'Don't be crazy, lover. Get with it.'

The bouncing began again though this time it was accompanied by rather less enthusiastic grunts from the man and by frantic requests for more from the woman. Crouching in the darkness by the bed Peregrine dimly understood that for the first time in his lift he was in the presence of a sexual act. He wondered what to do. The only thing he was sure of was that this couldn't be the Countess. Countesses didn't writhe and moan on beds with hairy men bouncing on top of them. All the same, he was interested to see what they were doing but he couldn't stay there when the Countess's life was at stake. He was just getting up when the mat on the floor slid away from him. To stop himself from falling Peregrine reached out and this time grasped the woman's raised knee. A strangled yell came from the bed and the bouncing stopped. Peregrine let go hurriedly and tiptoed to the door.

'What's the matter?' asked the man.

'Hands,' gasped the woman. 'You did say hands?'

'I said one hand.'

'I believe you. It just grabbed my knee.'

'Well, it wasn't mine.'

'I know that. Where's the lightswitch? Get the lightswitch.'

As her voice rose hysterically, Peregrine groped for the door-handle and knocked over a vase. The sound of breaking china added to the din.

'Let me go,' shrieked the woman, 'I've got to get out of here There's something awful in the room. Oh, my God. Someone do something!'

Peregrine did. He wasn't waiting around while she screamed blue murder. He found the door and shot into the corridor. Behind him the woman's screams had been joined by those of her lover.

'How the hell can I do anything if you won't let me go?' he bawled.

'Help,' yelled the woman.

As doors along the passage opened and lights came on, Peregrine disappeared round the corner and was hurtling down a large marble staircase towards the faint light illuminating the open doorway when he collided with the British delegate, Sir Arnold Brymay, who had been trying to think of some rational argument to the assertions of all the other delegates that Britain's colonial role in Ulster was as detrimental to world peace as the Middle East question, U.S. involvement in South America and Russia's in Afghanistan and Poland, about which topics there was no such agreement. Since his expertise was in tropical medicine, he hadn't come up with an answer.

'What on earth...' he began as Peregrine ran into him but this time Peregrine was determined to get a straight answer.

'See this?' he said jamming the revolver under Sir Arnold's nose with a ferocity that left no doubt what it was. 'Well, one sound out of you and I'm going to pull the trigger. Now, where's the Countess?'

'You tell me not to utter a sound and then you ask me a question? How do you expect me to answer?' asked Sir Arnold, who hadn't been debating the Irish question for nothing.

'Shut up,' said Peregrine and forced him through the nearest doorway and shut the door. 'Any funny tricks and your brains will be all over the ceiling.'

'Now look here, if you'd kindly remove that firearm from my left nostril we might be able to get down to the agenda,' said Sir Arnold, jumping to the natural conclusion that he was either dealing with one of the other delegates who'd gone clean off his head or, more probably, with the I.R.A.

'I said where's the Countess,' growled Peregrine.

'What Countess?'

'You know. If you don't answer it's curtains.'

'It rather sounds like it,' said Sir Arnold, buying time.

Upstairs a fresh problem had obviously arisen. 'Let me out,' bawled the erstwhile lover.

'I can't,' screamed the woman, 'I'm all tensed up.'

'As if I didn't know. And stop pulling my legs, you bastards. You want me to be disembowelled or something? Can't you see I'm dog-knotted?'

'Dear God,' said Sir Arnold, 'This is terrible.'

'Answer the question.'

'It rather depends on which countess you mean.'

'The Countess of Montcon.'

'Really? An unusually revealing name, and one that by the sound of things upstairs that young man would have found infinitely more inviting, don't you think?'

'Right,' said Peregrine. 'You've asked for it and you're going to get it.' And shoving Sir Arnold against the wall he aimed the revolver at him with both hands.

'All right, all right. As a matter of fact she's not here,' said the expert on bilharzia, deciding that, while he hadn't asked for anything, the time had come to invent something in preference to being shot. 'She's at Antibes.'

'And where's she live, this aunt?' asked Peregrine.

'Live?' said Sir Arnold, his sangfroid crumbling under this line of questioning and the discussion going on above. Some voluble woman who claimed to know all about dog-knotting from personal experience with her bull terriers had just tried throwing a bucket of cold water over the loving couple with predictably aggravating results.

'Shit,' yelled the young man. 'Get it into your stupid head I'm not a fucking bull terrier. Do that again I'll be clamped in a corpse.'

Sir Arnold dragged his attention away from this academic question and faced up to his imminent death. Peregrine had begun the countdown.

'Antibes is a place, for God's sake,' he said, beginning to gibber.

'I know that, but where?' demanded Peregrine.

'Near St Tropez.'

'And what's the address?'

'What address?'

'Aunt Heeb's.'

But the strain of being held at gunpoint by a maniac who thought that Antibes was a person while a couple who claimed they weren't bull terriers were being drowned upstairs was proving too much for Sir Arnold.

'I can't stand it. I can't stand it,' he gibbered, and proved his point by slumping down the wall. For a moment Peregrine hesitated. He was tempted to kick some life into the swine but the sound of footsteps and someone talking excitedly in the hall deterred him. Besides he fairly sure now that the Countess wasn't in the Château, and mere was no point in risking capture. Opening a window, he checked that the courtyard was clear and then jumped lightly across the flowerbed. Five minutes later he had reached the roof and was scrambling down the lightning conductor with a lack of vertigo that would have appalled Glodstone.

Not that Glodstone needed appalling. Ever since he had scrambled onto the ledge at the bottom of the cliff he had come to feel differently about adventures. They were not the splendid affairs he had read about. Quite the contrary, they were bloody nightmares in which one stumbled across miles of foul countryside carrying an overweight rucksack, spent sleepless nights shivering with cold in the rain, ate burnt corned beef out of tins, learned what it felt like to be drowned and ended up soaked to the skin on rock ledges from which the only escape had to be by drowning. Having experienced the Boose's horrid habit of sucking things down like some torrential lavatory pan, he knew he'd never be able to swim across.

On the other hand there was little enough to be said for staying where he was. The simile of the lavatory didn't apply there; it was literal. The Château's sewage system was extremely primitive and, in Glodstone's opinion, typically French. Everything it carried issued from some encrusted pipe in the cliff above and was discharged into the river. In practice, a good deal of it landed on Glodstone and he was just wondering if it wouldn't be preferable to risk drowning than be treated as a human cesspit when he became aware that something more substantial was bouncing down the cliff. For a moment it seemed to hang on the pipe and then slid forward out into the river. With the demented thought that this would teach Peregrine not to be such a stupid idiot as to climb cliffs in the middle of the night, Glodstone reached for the body and dragged it onto the ledge. Then he groped for its mouth and had already given it the kiss of life for half a minute before it occurred to him that there were one or two discrepancies between whatever he was trying to resuscitate and Peregrine. Certainly Peregrine didn't have a moustache and wasn't entirely bald, added to which it seemed unlikely that he had suddenly developed a taste for brandy and cigars.

For a moment or two Glodstone stopped before his sense of duty forced him to carry on. He couldn't let the bastard die without doing anything. Besides, he'd begun to have a horrid suspicion what had happened. Peregrine must have assumed he'd been drowned while trying to cross the river and instead of coming to his rescue had somehow got into the Château and was evidently bent on murdering everyone he could lay his hands on. Glodstone wanted to dissociate himself from the process. Rescuing Countesses was one thing, but bunging bald-headed men off the top of cliffs was quite another. In any case the blithering idiot would never make it. He'd get himself killed and then...For the first time in his life Glodstone had a glimmering sense of reality.

That was more than could be said for Professor Botwyk. Thanks to Peregrine's gruesome handling he had been unconscious during his fall and his limpness had saved him. Now he began to come round. It was a doubtful relief. For all his convictions that the future of the world depended on stock-piling weapons of mass, not to say universal, destruction, the Professor was an otherwise conventional family man and to find himself lying soaked to the skin being inflated by someone who hadn't shaved for three days and stank like a public urinal was almost as traumatic as being strangled with a lungful of cigar smoke still inside him. With a desperate effort he tore his mouth away from Glodstone's.

'What the fucking hell do you think you're doing?' he snarled feebly. Glodstone recoiled. He knew exactly what he'd been doing, reviving one of the most dangerous gangsters in the world. It didn't seem the time to say so.

'Now just take it easy,' he muttered and hoped to hell the swine wasn't carrying a gun. He should have thought of that before. 'You've had a nasty fall and you may have broken something.'

'Like what?' said Botwyk, peering at his shape.

'Well, I don't really know. I'm not an expert in these things but you don't want to move in your condition.'

'That's what you fucking think,' said Botwyk, whose memory of some of the horrors he had been through was slowly returning.

'Just wait till I lay my hands on the bastard who strangled me.'

'That's not what I mean,' said Glodstone, who shared his feelings about Peregrine. 'I'm just advising you not to move. You could do yourself an injury.'

'When I get out of here I'm going to do more than an injury to that son of a bitch. You'd better believe me. I'm going to '

'Quite,' said Glodstone to prevent hearing the gory details. He didn't want any part of that retribution. 'Anyway, it was a good thing I happened to be passing and saw you fall. You'd have been dead by now if I hadn't rescued you.'

'I guess that's so,' said Professor Botwyk grudgingly. 'And you say you saw me fall?'

'Yes. I dived in and swam across and managed to pull you out,' said Glodstone, and felt a little better. At least he'd established an alibi. Professor Botwyk's next remark questioned it.

'Let me tell you something, brother. I didn't fall. I was pushed.'

'Really?' said Glodstone, trying to mix belief with a reasonable scepticism. 'I mean, you're sure you're not suffering from shock and concussion?'

'Sure I'm not sure,' said Botwyk, whose latent hypochondria had been understandably aroused, 'the way I feel I could have anything. But one thing's certain. Some goon jumped me and the next thing I'm down here. In between being strangled, of course.'

'Good Lord,' said Glodstone, 'and did you...er...see who...er...jumped you?'

'No,' said Botwyk grimly, 'but I sure as shit mean to find out and when I do...'

He tried to raise himself onto an elbow but Glodstone intervened. It was awful enough to be stranded on a ledge with a murderous gangster without the swine learning there was nothing much the matter with him.

'Don't move,' he squawked, 'it's vital you don't move. Especially your head.'

'My head? What's so special about my head?' asked Botwyk, 'It's not bleeding or something?'

'Not as far as I can tell,' said Glodstone, edging round towards the Professor's feet. 'Of course, it's too dark to see exactly but I'd '

'So why the spiel about not moving it?' said Botwyk eyeing him nervously.

'I'd rather not say,' said Glodstone, 'I'm just going to...'

'Hold it there,' said Botwyk, now in a state of panic, 'I don't give a dimestore damn what you'd rather not say. I want to hear it.'

'I'm not sure you do.'

'Well, I fucking am. And what the hell are you taking my shoes off for?'

'Just making a few tests,' said Glodstone.

'On my feet? So what's with my head? You start yapping about my fucking head and not moving it and all and now you're doing some tests down there. Where's the goddam connection?'

'Your spine,' said Glodstone sombrely. The next moment he was having to hold the Professor down. 'For Heaven's sake, don't move. I mean...'

'I know what you mean,' squealed Botwyk. 'Don't I just. Sweet Jesus, I've got to. You're telling me...oh my God!' He fell back on the rock and lay still.

'Right,' said Glodstone, delighted that as last he'd gained the upper hand. 'Now I'm going to ask you to tell me if you feel anything when...'

'Yes, I do,' screamed Botwyk, 'Definitely.'

'But I haven't done anything yet.'

'Guy tells me he hasn't done anything yet! Just tells me my spine's broken. And that's nothing? How would you feel if you'd been strangled and dropped over a cliff and some limey at the bottom gives you mouth-to-mouth and men says you've got a broken spine and not to move your fucking head? You think I don't feel nothing? And what about my fucking wife? She's going to love having me around the house all day and not being able to get it up at night. You don't know her. She's going to be hot-tailing it with every...' The prospect was evidently too much for him. He stopped and glared up at the sky.

'Now then,' said Glodstone, getting his own back for being called a limey, 'if you feel...'

'Don't say it,' said Botwyk, 'no way. I'm going to lie here and not move until it's light enough for you to swim back over there and get an ambulance and the best medical rescue team money can buy and...'

It was Glodstone's turn to panic. 'Now wait a minute,' he said, wishing to hell he hadn't boasted about swimming across so readily, 'I've sprained my ankle rescuing you. I can't go back into...'

'Ankle yankle,' shouted Botwyk, 'you think I care about ankles in my fucking condition, you've got to be crazy. Somebody is for sure.'

'Oh well, if you feel like that about it,' said Glodstone rather huffily only to be stopped by Botwyk.

'Feel?' he yelled. 'You use that fucking word again and someone's going to be sorry.'

'Sorry,' said Glodstone, 'All the same...'

'Listen, bud,' said Botwyk, 'It's not all the same. Not to me it isn't. Your ankle and my spine are in two different categories, right?'

'I suppose they'd have to be,' said Glodstone.

'You don't need a fucking ankle to get it up and feel and all. Well, it's not that way with spines. Not the way I read it. So lay off the feeling part.'

'Yes,' said Glodstone, not too sure now if he'd been wise to raise the issue in the first place. 'All the same...'

'Don't,' said Botwyk menacingly.

'I was going to say...'

'I know what you were going to say. And I've answered that one already. It's not the fucking same. Same is out, same as feel is.'

'Even so,' said Glodstone after a pause in which he had searched for a phrase which wouldn't infuriate the blighter, 'for all we know there may be nothing the matter with your spine. The way to find out is to...'

'Take my fucking shoes off like you did just now,' said Botwyk, 'I've got news for you...'

But whatever he was about to impart was drowned by the sound of sirens. A car followed by an ambulance hurtled along the road opposite and turned over the bridge to the Château.

'For hell's sake do something,' yelled Botwyk, 'We've got to get their attention.'

But Glodstone was too preoccupied to answer. Whatever Peregrine had done had included more than dumping this foul-mouthed swine over the cliff and if he was caught...The notion horrified him. In the meantime, he had better keep on good terms, or as near good as he could get, with the sod.

'Did you notice that?' he enquired, jabbing his finger into the sole of Botwyk's foot when the professor had stopped shouting.

Botwyk sat bolt upright. 'Of course I fucking did,' he snarled, 'What do you expect me to fucking notice if you do a thing like that? I've got sensitive feet for Chrissake.'

'That's a relief,' said Glodstone, 'for a while there I thought you'd really broken your back.'

'Jesus,' said Botwyk, and sank back speechless on the rock.