Free The Burning Sky by Jack Ludlow Page B

commanders come and go, one through cracked nerves, the rest in death, as had a dozenfellow lieutenants. Lanchester had been there that day, as filthy and mud-caked as he, carrying the same physical complaints, cursing the idiocy of granting the Germans a peaceful end to a bloodstained conflict.
    It should have been enough, that war, but it was not.
     
    He decided on a night in Paris, and that meant dinner at Taillevent, one of the oldest restaurants in the city. After a sumptuous meal it was a taxi to the Gare de Lyon to catch up with Le Train Bleu , running south to the Côte d’Azur. Leaving behind the smoking industrial chimneys of outer Paris it was hard to imagine this country he was passing through, with night falling, as one in the grip of political turmoil, but it was, the left and right at riotous loggerheads, the Popular Front versus Action Française.
    He went to sleep in his wagon-lit as it raced past grey stone buildings and woke when it was passing the red-tiled roofs and houses with sun-bleached walls that formed the outskirts of a city he knew well, teeming Marseilles. He had spent part of his childhood here and loved it: how much more romantic to read was The Count of Monte Cristo when you could actually look out and see the Château d’If from the Corniche?
    Lunch was five wonderful courses as the luxury train followed the coast, the sky that deep Mediterranean blue, the landscape burnt scrub backed by high hills, with occasional fields of lavender on one side, beaches and sea opposite, on through what had been the playground of the rich until the Depression either wiped out the fortunesof the wealthy visitors – Churchill had been one – or so lowered the value of the pound that not even wealthy Brits could afford a four-month stay to avoid their national winter.
    The home of Sir Basil Zaharoff was, like many dwellings in Monte Carlo, built into the side of a hill. He was not a man to call upon unannounced and Jardine had sent him a letter before going to see Amherst, though given he had dealt with the old man before, he was sure he need not wait for a reply. Reputedly the richest man in Europe, Zaharoff had many soubriquets, the least attractive that he was the original ‘Merchant of Death’. Cal Jardine had always found the infamous arms dealer courteous, of lively mind and a person of wide interests and strong personal attachments.
    He was shown into a large study overlooking the yacht-filled harbour to find his man sat behind an enormous desk, before open windows. ‘Captain Jardine?’
    ‘That, Sir Basil, is not a title I use, quite apart from the fact that my fellow officers, serving and retired, think it infra dig to use any army rank in civilian life below major.’
    ‘Why would that be?’
    ‘Captain is a naval rank and vastly superior to its army equivalent.’
    ‘Ah, your English habits, so strange to we foreigners, regardless of how much time we spend in your country.’
    God he’s aged, Jardine thought: the moustache was dropping, the goatee beard straggly and the skin falling from his cheeks, but that was not a comment one wouldmake to anyone, and certainly not to a person of his eminence.
    ‘You will forgive me not standing to greet you, my legs are not what they once were.’ An arm was waved to invite him to sit, to which Jardine agreed; he was offered an iced cocktail, which he accepted, and then engaged in twenty minutes of polite conversation, which he enjoyed. ‘But you have not come to see me for the chit-chat, I venture.’
    ‘No. I have been engaged to see if I can get some modern weaponry into Abyssinia.’
    It was hard for such a wracked face to fall but his did. ‘Oh dear, Jardine, that is not, I think, very wise.’
    ‘When was what you and I do wise?’
    ‘You hoist me, as you say, on the petard.’ That was nonsense, of course, Zaharoff being one of the wisest men he had ever encountered: he might be an arms dealer, but he was knowledgeable and no hypocrite.