Ramage & the Guillotine (32 page)

“What's happening?” Ramage asked sleepily and with suitable nervousness.

“Burglars!” the landlord said, using Ramage's appearance to leave the other two men to run into the Lieutenant's room. “My daughter found them and raised the alarm!”

“What was she doing up here?”

“She had written a
billet doux
for the Lieutenant and crept up to put it under his pillow, I think. Then she saw all these men. Half a dozen or more, she says …”

Ramage murmured sympathetic noises as he listened. A few moments later the Lieutenant strode out, chest puffed with importance. “There is no one there—and the despatches are safe—” he waved the satchel he was holding. “The window is wide open—the villains escaped. Landlord! Fetch the gendarmes—we must start a search for them. Six men!”

The landlord scurried down the stairs.

“Did you see anything, M'sieur?” the Lieutenant asked Ramage.

“Nothing—I heard screaming. It woke me up.”

Louis said, “M'sieur still looks half asleep, for all that!”

Ramage took the hint. He rubbed his eyes. “I am, too. Did they get away with anything valuable?”

“Nothing that I can see,” the Lieutenant said complacently. He held up the satchel. “This is all that matters. That is still firmly locked, as you can see—” he tugged at the flap. “The only keys that will open it are in Boulogne and in Paris. The Admiral's despatches to the Minister of Marine.”

“Do you think the burglars were after that?” Louis asked innocently.

The Lieutenant shook his head vigorously. “Not a chance. Who could know that I carry despatches? And anyway, the satchel is always concealed. I rely on your discretion, gentlemen,” he said confidentially.

“Just common thieves,” Louis said. “They probably looked through the window and saw we were playing cards. Why,” he exclaimed, “they'd have seen me, too! Here, lend me your lantern, I must see if I've been robbed!”

Louis fiddled with the key for a few moments—Ramage remembered he had left the door unlocked and obviously wanted to conceal the fact from the Lieutenant—swung the door open and went inside.

“Everything is all right,” he said when he emerged. “They must have decided to search your room first. They recognized you as a man of substance,” he added slyly.

“You are winning at cards,” the Lieutenant grumbled. “Second time running. A month's pay you've taken off me so far—”

He broke off. Strange voices were coming up the stairs and Ramage saw two gendarmes, each with a lantern. They clumped along the corridor and stopped.

“Which of you is the Italian, di Stefano?”

Ramage stepped forward, puzzled.

“Get dressed,” one of the gendarmes snapped, “you are under arrest.”

T
HE police headquarters were on the south side of the square, looking out across the
pavé
to the guillotine under the plane trees on the far side. The two gendarmes pushed Ramage through the open door with a series of oaths and one of them kept him covered with a pistol while the other went along a corridor and knocked on a door. A minute or two later he called and the man with the pistol gestured to Ramage to follow.

Sitting at the desk in the middle of the room was a man in an officer's uniform whose thin face was heavily lined. Every few moments his right eye suddenly closed momentarily, as though he was winking, followed by a spasmodic jerk of his right shoulder. For a moment Ramage was reminded of a puppet, some of whose strings were broken.

The man pulled his lips back, as though about to bite something juicy, and exposing a mouthful of yellowed teeth. “Passport,” he hissed.

Ramage dug into his coat pocket and then handed it over.

“Gianfranco di Stefano, eh? You speak French? You are Italian?”

Ramage nodded.

“What are you doing in Amiens?”

“Travelling to Paris. I was taken ill.”

One of the gendarmes whispered to the officer.

“Paris? You were travelling to Boulogne. You have a carriage ordered for tomorrow. You and two other men.”

“I have been to Boulogne and was going back to Paris when I was taken ill,” Ramage explained with a nervousness far from feigned. “Before I recovered, word came from Boulogne that there was still some unfinished business there and asking me to return.”

“What business? Who asked you?”

Ramage guessed that he was trapped if this man was thorough. He could bluff it out for a few days, but the moment the police checked with the Port Captain in Boulogne, they would find out that there was no such person as Signor di Stefano; that his documents were genuine but the blank spaces had been filled in with a false name. And then the fun would start: they would set to work on him to find out what it was all about. “Set to work”—he was avoiding using the word “torture,” but that was what he meant.

“I have nothing to say,” Ramage said crossly. “Why am I under arrest?”

He had to keep his mouth shut for long enough for Louis to get the despatch to Boulogne, and be sure the
Marie
had sailed for the rendezvous. Once he could be sure that the despatches were in Lord Nelson's hands, his job was done. Then he could talk as freely as he wanted—making sure not to incriminate Louis and his comrades—or remain silent. The final result was likely to be the same: he would swing over on the
bascule
and the executioner would let the blade drop.
Le Moniteur
would probably print some florid announcement that an English spy had been executed at Amiens (or an Italian one, if he stayed silent), and eventually someone in the Admiralty in London might connect the execution with the fact that Lieutenant Ramage had disappeared after sending a final report from Amiens …

“You have nothing to say, eh? Well, I have,” the officer said. “You are under arrest because your man—your foreman, I believe?—was seen by the daughter of the landlord in the room of another guest. An officer of the Republic,” he added ominously.

“I thought she said she saw
several
men.” It was a glimmer of hope but no more.

“She may have done; what concerns you is that your foreman is the one she definitely recognized.”

Ramage shrugged his shoulders. “That's what she says. I was asleep and have no idea what was going on. Was she in the room with my foreman? Did they have an assignation?”

It was a weak enough answer, but for the moment he was trying to gain time to think. Where the devil was Stafford now—obviously he had escaped out of the window, but how long could he avoid recapture? He did not speak a word of French, had no money and no map to help him get back to Boulogne. The only thing on his side was a natural Cockney shrewdness.

“What was your foreman doing?”

“Seducing her, perhaps? How should I know—I told you, I was asleep.”

Where was Louis now? Had he escaped before anyone checked up on his story that he was acting as the spy-cum-guard to the Italian travellers? Ramage could not remember seeing him from the moment the gendarmes said, “Get dressed … “ On the other hand he might still be at the hotel, pretending to be as puzzled over Stafford's behaviour as the gendarmes. That would make sense! At the moment the only thing the gendarmes knew was that Stafford had been seen in the Lieutenant's room. Nothing had been stolen so there was nothing to incriminate either Signor di Stefano or Louis. If Louis suddenly vanished it would be taken as proof of complicity.

In fact he and Louis would be cleared completely if the gendarmes accepted that whatever Stafford was doing had nothing to do with his employer or Louis. Let's see what happens, Ramage thought. For the moment I remain the Italian shipbuilder outraged that he should be lodged in jail for the night … All that gaunt-faced policeman knows is that my foreman was in someone else's room: no one has challenged my story that I was asleep at the time. With a bit of luck they'll release me tomorrow with suitable apologies!

Ramage thought of asking to be allowed to write to his own country's ambassador in Paris protesting at his arrest, but he remembered, just in time, that the Republic of Genoa, whence he allegedly came, was now Bonaparte's Ligurian Republic. Then the officer, who had been staring at the top of his desk for several moments, looked up.

“If he was trying to seduce her with her consent,” he said coldly, his voice sounding to Ramage like that of every outraged father or cuckolded husband, “why did she scream?”

Ramage shrugged his shoulders expressively. “How should I know? Perhaps she changed her mind.”

“She is in love with the Lieutenant,” the officer said doggedly. “It is impossible that she went to the room to meet your foreman.”

“Very well,” Ramage said in a bored voice, “she had an assignation with the Lieutenant in his room. Clearly not a very virtuous young lady, eh?”

“She did
not
have an assignation with the Lieutenant in his room,” the officer said angrily, his right eye winking and his shoulder jerking.

“What was she doing in the room, then? Meeting my foreman instead?”

“She had written a note for the Lieutenant and was leaving it in his room. Where is your foreman now?” Again the wink and shoulder twitch.

“I don't know,” Ramage said impatiently. “Perhaps he has an assignation with the young lady's mother—have you inquired?”

It must be midnight by now. Had Louis managed to get that damned loaf to the courier? If Ramage could be sure that the report—he found himself trying to avoid even thinking of the name Bruix, as if the police officer might read his thoughts—reached Jackson on board the
Marie,
it would make it worthwhile.
What
worthwhile, he found himself asking. Stop thinking in euphemisms. If I know that my copy of Vice-Admiral Bruix's report on the state of the
Flotille de Grande Espèce
has reached Vice-Admiral Lord Nelson safely, then tipping over on the
bascule,
and staring down into the basket which will catch my head a fraction of a second after the guillotine blade lops it off, will be a little easier to bear.

It must be easier to die when you know you have achieved something. On the average, Ramage had gone into action four times a year, for the past three years, never expecting to come out of it alive. There had been a good chance that a French or Spanish roundshot would knock his head off or—involuntarily he reached up and rubbed the scars on the right side of his brow—he would be cut down by a cutlass or skewered on a boarding-pike.

For Lieutenant Ramage, there was no difference between having his head knocked off by roundshot or lopped off by guillotine. Yet, in a bizarre sort of way, there was. If the copy of Bruix's despatch reached Lord Nelson safely, there could be nothing more in his career (even if he lived to become an admiral) that could match it in importance. The sort of things that involved the risk of having your head knocked off by a roundshot were relatively trivial: it is only when you play for the very highest stakes that you risk “marrying the Widow.”

The officer was staring at him and when he caught Ramage's eye he asked curiously: “What were you thinking about?”

“That if my foreman
did
have an assignation with the landlord's daughter, I envied him. Pretty girl—have you seen her?”

The officer flushed, a redness that stained his lined and wrinkled face like wine soaking through
lasagna,
and Ramage realized that the man must have been speculating about her.

“The other man you were with—the Frenchman: who is he?”

“You mean to say you don't know?” Ramage was scornful.

“Why should I?” the officer asked defensively.

“One of your ministries sent him along to spy on me wherever I go, that's all I know!” As soon as he saw the officer nodding, as though the information was credible, Ramage decided to embellish it. “I can tell you, I've had enough of his company. ‘Won't you have another bottle of wine, M'sieur?' he says … And I have half a glass and he finishes the whole bottle. Who pays, eh?
I
do. Liqueurs—you tell me why all the liqueurs go on my bill? And the brandy—
Mama mia,
how much that man can drink! I pay for it, every drop. Not—” Ramage added hastily, as though suddenly nervous, “that I'm saying anything against him, you understand.”

The police officer nodded sympathetically. “He was sent from Paris, no doubt.”

“Yes, he joined me in Paris after my visit to Boulogne was arranged.”

Nothing said about Louis up to now could incriminate either of them. This local police officer might accept that Louis was working for some ministry or committee—he would be used in secrecy—without checking up. He might well think that arresting a foreigner who was being supervised by the employee of a ministry or committee would leave him open to an accusation of interfering … it was a faint hope.

“Where is he, anyway?” Ramage asked crossly. “Let him speak for himself—he's always very secretive, although he keeps a sharp enough watch on me.”

“Probably writing a report on this affair for his superiors,” the officer said. “I expect he'll be in to see me later.”

“Well,” Ramage said calmly, “he can tell you all about everything, so there's no need for me to stay. You'll find me at the hotel.”

He had not walked two paces before the officer was shouting. Ramage turned to find himself covered by the pistols of the two gendarmes.

“You are going to a cell!” the officer said angrily. He pulled a large book towards him, a book that reminded Ramage of a ledger in a counting-house. “Now, I want your full name and address, and all the details of why you are in France …”

The cell was square, five paces along one side and five paces along the other. It had a chill of its own, something which had nothing to do with the outside temperature, for it was a warm night. Ramage only saw the inside for a brief moment, in the light of the guard's lantern, before being pushed in and having the door slammed behind him. As his eyes became accustomed to the darkness he saw that there was a single small window high in one wall, and although it was barely large enough for a man to put his head through, there were iron bars.