Caravan to Vaccares. Alistair MacLean

hit in and had the key turned before Ferenc could twist the door handle from his grip.

      He spent no time on brow-mopping and self congratulation but ran to the back of the apartment, opened the window and looked out. The branches of a sufficiently stout tree were less than six feet away. Bowman withdrew his head and listened. Someone was giving the door handle a good going over, then abruptly the sound ceased to be replaced by that of running footsteps. Bowman waited no longer: if there was one thing that had been learnt from dealing with those men it was that procrastination was uninsurable.

      As a piece of arboreal trapeze work there was little enough to it. He just stood on the sill, half-leaned and half-fell outwards, caught a thick branch, swung into the bole of the tree and slid to the ground. He scrambled up the steep bank leading to the road that encircled the hotel from the rear. At the top he heard a low and excited call behind him and twisted round. The moon was out again and he could clearly see the three of them starting to climb the bank: it was equally clear that the knives they held in their hands weren’t impeding their progress at all.

      Before Bowman lay the choice of running downhill or up. Downhill from the Baumanière lay open country, uphill lay Les Baux with its winding streets and back-alleys and labyrinth of shattered ruins. Bowman didn’t hesitate. As one famous heavyweight boxer said of his opponents – this was after he had lured the unfortunates into the ring – ‘they can run but they can’t hide.’ In Les Baux Bowman could both run and hide. He turned uphill.

      He ran up the winding road towards the old village as quickly as the steepness, his wind and the state of his legs would permit. He hadn’t indulged in this sort of thing in years. He spared a glance over his shoulder. Neither, apparently, had the three gypsies. They hadn’t gained any that Bowman could see: but they hadn’t lost any either, maybe they were just pacing themselves for what they might consider to be a long run that lay ahead: if that were the case, Bowman thought, he might as well stop running now.

      The straight stretch of road leading to the entrance to the village was lined with car parks on both sides but there were no cars there and so no place to hide. He passed on through the entrance.

      After about another hundred yards of what had already become this gasping lung-heaving run Bowman came to a fork in the road. The fork on the right curved down to the battlemented walls of the village and had every appearance of leading to a cul-de-sac. The one to the left, narrow and winding and very steep, curved upwards out of sight and while he dreaded the prospect of any more of that uphill marathon it seemed to offer the better chance of safety so he took it. He looked behind again and saw that his momentary indecision had enabled his pursuers to make up quite a bit of ground on him. Still running in this same unnerving silence, the knives in their hands glinting rhythmically as their arms pumped to and fro, they were now less than thirty yards distant.

      At the best speed he could, Bowman continued up this narrow winding road. He slowed down occasionally to peer briefly and rather desperately into various attractive dark openings on both sides, but mainly to the right, but he knew it was his labouring lungs and leaden legs that told him that those entrances were inviting, his reason told him that those attractions were almost certainly fatal illusions, leading to cul-de-sacs or some other form of trap from which there could be no escape.

      And now, for the first time, Bowman could hear behind him the hoarse and rasping breathing of the gypsies. They were clearly in as bad shape as he was himself but when he glanced over his shoulder he realized this was hardly cause for any wild rejoicing, he was hearing them now simply because they were that much closer than they had been: their mouths were open in gasping exertion, their faces contorted by effort and sheened in sweat and they stumbled occasionally as their weakening legs betrayed them on the unsure footing of the cobblestones. But now they were only fifteen yards away, the price Bowman had paid for his frequent examinations of possible places of refuge. But at least their nearness made one decision inevitable for him: there was no point in wasting any further time in searching for hiding-places on either side for wherever he went they were bound to see him go and follow. For him now the only hope of life lay among the shattered ruins of the ancient fortress of Les Baux itself.

      Still pounding uphill he came to a set of iron railings that apparently completely blocked what had now turned from a narrow road into no more than a winding metalled path. I’ll have to turn and fight, he thought, I’ll have to turn and then it will be all over in five seconds, but he didn’t have to turn for there was a narrow gap between the right-hand side of the railing and a desk in an inlet recess in the wall which was clearly the pay-box where you handed over your money to inspect the ruins. Even in the moment of overwhelming relief at spotting this gap, two thoughts occurred to Bowman: the first the incongruous one that that was a bloody stupid set-up for a pay-box where the more parsimoniously minded could slip through at will, the second that this was the place to stand and fight, for they could only squeeze through that narrow entrance one at a time and would have to turn sideways to do so, a circumstance which might well place a swinging foot on a par with a constricted knife-arm: or it did seem like a good idea to him until it fortunately occurred that while he was busy trying to kick the knife from the hand of one man the other two would be busy throwing their knives at him through or over the bars of the railing and at a distance of two or three feet it didn’t seem very likely that they would miss. And so he ran on, if the plodding, lumbering, stumbling progress that was now all he could raise could be called running.

      A small cemetery lay to his right. Bowman thought of the macabre prospect of playing a lethal hide-and-seek among the tombstones and hastily put all thought of the cemetery out of his mind. He ran on another fifty yards, saw before him the open plateau of the Les Baux massif, where there was no place to hide and from which escape could be obtained only by jumping down the vertical precipices which completely enclosed the massif, turned sharply to his left, ran up a narrow path alongside what looked like a crumbling chapel and was soon among the craggy ruins of the Les Baux fortress itself. He looked downhill and saw that his pursuers had fallen back to a distance of about forty yards which was hardly surprising as his life was at stake and their lives weren’t. He looked up, saw the moon riding high and serene in a now cloudless sky and swore bitterly to himself in a fashion that would have given great offence to uncounted poets both alive and dead. On a moonless night he could have eluded his pursuers with ease amidst that great pile of awesome ruins.

      And that they were awesome was beyond dispute. The contemplation of large masses of collapsed masonry did not rank among Bowman’s favourite pastimes but as he climbed, fell, scrambled and twisted among that particular mass of masonry and in circumstances markedly unconducive to any form of aesthetic appreciation there was inexorably borne in upon him a sense of the awful grandeur of the place. It was inconceivable that any ruins anywhere could match those in their wild, rugged yet somehow terrifyingly beautiful desolation. There were mounds of shattered building stones fifty feet high: there were great ruined pillars reaching a hundred feet into the night sky, pillars overlooking vertical cliff faces of which the pillars appeared to be a natural continuation and in some cases were: there were natural stairways in the shattered rock face, natural chimneys in the remnants of those man-made cliffs, there were hundreds of apertures in the rock, some just large enough for a man to squeeze through, others large enough to accommodate a double-decker. There were strange paths let into the natural rock, some man-made, some not, some precipitous, some almost horizontal, some wide enough to bowl along in a coach and four, others narrow and winding enough to have daunted the most mentally retarded of mountain goats. And there were broken, ruined blocks of masonry everywhere, some big as a child’s hand, others as large as a suburban house. And it was all white, eerie and dead and white: in that brilliantly cold pale moonlight it was the most chillingly awe-inspiring sight Bowman had ever encountered and not, he reflected, a place he would willingly have called home. But, here, tonight, he had to live or die.

      Or they had to live or die, Ferenc and Koscis and Hoval. When it came to the consideration of this alternative there was no doubt at all in Bowman’s mind as to what the proper choice must be and the choice was not based primarily on the instinct of self-preservation although Bowman would have been the last to deny that it was an important factor: those were evil men and they had but one immediate and all-consuming ambition in life and that was to kill him but that was not what ultimately mattered. There was no question