Vintage Stuff (17 page)

'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.'