‘Let’s knock on wood,’ said Cécile Goudreau, striking her clenched knuckles against one of the cross-pieces under the table, while Randolph, with a superstitious gesture, caressed the pearl-and-diamond cross hanging from his neck that his fingers encountered through the gap in his shirt.

  ‘And what is Grandsailles like?’ he asked.

  ‘He is less tall than you,’ said Cécile, ‘but your eyes are alike in their fixity. His are less blue, but almost as bright. His hair is auburn. He is very, very handsome. He is even more handsome than you.’

  ‘What is the Count doing afterwards? Is he going back to France?’

  ‘No,’ said Cécile, ‘after Malta he is leaving immediately for America.’

  ‘Perhaps I shall have something to entrust to him,’ said Randolph, absorbed, falling into a reverie. Then as if pursuing his thoughts aloud. ‘Yes, I shall have an object to entrust to him… it means a great deal to me… an object to deliver to someone in America. Tell him this from me.’

  Two days later when Grandsailles, accompanied by Fouseret, climbed into the three-motored Farman that was to fly him to Malta, Randolph was already at the controls.

  ‘This reminds me of my departures for London,’ said Grandsailles.

  ‘As a matter of fact it was these same planes that made the flight between Paris and London,’ said Fouseret, ‘only here we have a machine gun set up, with its faithful servant. Well, I congratulate you. It looks like a plane well adapted to the circumstances,’ he continued with a joviality which was his characteristic way of reacting against fear and nervousness.

  ‘What were you expecting?’ asked Grandsailles. ‘You probably imagined that a plane found by Cécile Goudreau would be a machine all covered with ivy, with old cracks between the interstices of the wings and oriental divans inside on which to recline and smoke opium.’

  ‘I should not have dared to imagine that,’ Fouseret answered, ‘but what an astonishing image of the post-war, isn’t it? – a sky covered with planes dashing in all directions at seven hundred miles an hour, filled with drowsing opium smokers who are going nowhere!’ He laughed.

  ‘This same unthinkable paradox of speed and immobility has already been invented and it takes the form of streamlined coffins!’

  ‘What a frightful idea!’ said Fouseret, turning pale. ‘Do they really exist?’

  ‘I saw them once in a catalogue. That’s really how they were announced. The coffins had the same kind of curves as appeared on the new cars a couple of years ago.’

  ‘Unbelievable!’ sighed Fouseret.

  Grandsailles continued, ‘A thing intended for eternal enforced immobility having all the characteristics of adaptation to dizzy speed…. It’s mad! It could only happen in our time!’

  Fouseret had darkened.

  ‘You shouldn’t have brought this up,’ he exclaimed in a bitter tone of reproach.

  ‘Are you superstitious?’ asked Grandsailles.

  ‘A Spanish bullfighter never goes into the ring if he passes a hearse on his way.’ Fouseret proffered by way of self-justification.

  ‘You’re neither a Spaniard nor a bullfighter,’ said Grandsailles.

  ‘But I am just as superstitious,’ said Fouseret. ‘Fortunately your presence reassures me.’

  ‘You consider me so lucky?’ asked Grandsailles.

  ‘Don’t you think this trip is rather incredible? You’re being piloted by Randolph, the best pilot in Africa; you get me to accompany you, though I had sworn never to set foot in a plane again; you are the only authority to have succeeded in gaining the confidence of all political groups, and yet you have no well-defined policy. Does any of us really know why we are obeying you?’

  The plane started across the field, and when it had left the ground Grandsailles said, ‘Flying is not an aphrodisiac sensation as one might be tempted to believe. It is on the contrary an Apollonian emotion. With this magnificent weather and not the slightest jolt, it’s as if we weren’t moving at all. On the train there are always the passing telegraph poles to give us a relative notion of our displacement; here there is nothing. You’re always left with the feeling that you’re not moving, that you’re going to get there late. The plane is a kind of anaesthesia of time and space; it is not a direction, an arrow’ – and he recited, stressing each syllable – ‘a pinned butterfly meditating its flight. It is a circle: Apollo!’

  Fouseret, with the noise of the motors, had to make an effort to catch Grandsailles’ words to which he listened full of admiration and although he only caught half of them he said to himself nevertheless, ‘There is no resisting this man’s ascendancy!’

  A radiant dawn had risen. They were now flying over the Mediterranean, which was a cerulian blue, shimmering beneath Apollo’s darts, covered with the scales of the immense, slightly curved back of the cold fish of the horizon. Light, fleecy clouds hanging very low, skimming the surface of the sea, seemed to be rising from it and floating upward, and their calmly changing forms peopled it like triumphs of blond Neptunes, violet nereids, dolphins and snow seahorses strung out in heroic poses and groups. Brief flurries of wind wrote shudders of joy in silver on the sea, and from a small torpedoed merchant ship rose a Solomonic column of very thick, pink smoke, dazzling like the colour of Venus’s flesh. All around the flaming ship the sea was sprinkled with the tiny black dots of the struggling crew. Several patches of oil spread on the water formed what looked like large, very smooth grand piano tops, reflecting the limpidness of the sky. Fouseret wanted to call attention to the drowning men, but Grandsailles had gone to sleep and he did not want to wake him up. The assistant pilot explained to Fouseret that they had received a message about the sinking before taking off, but that a hydroplane was needed for the rescue. One would undoubtedly arrive before long, but there was nothing they could do to save the men. Grandsailles awoke only when the assistant pilot came bringing the oxygen masks. They were going to fly very high to avoid meeting Italian planes that might be coming from the direction of Pantelleria. At the same time he was handed the ear-phones. Randolph wished to speak to him.

  ‘Hallo! Randolph speaking. I won’t have a second to see you when we arrive in Malta. I shall hand you presently the object Cécile Goudreau spoke to you about. This is in case I should not come back from my next mission.’

  ‘I shall never be able to repay you for the service you are doing me,’ said Grandsailles.

  Randolph now seemed to be giving orders to the radio operator, and the assistant pilot, having suddenly lost his temper for reasons which eluded Grandsailles, hurriedly helped Randolph on with his mask, then put on his own and relieved Randolph at the controls. Then the latter came and sat down beside Grandsailles, pulled from inside his thick leather coat a small wooden box that looked like a medicine box, tightly tied with several bights of red string, and handed it to Grandsailles along with a letter bearing his name on the envelope. Randolph and Grandsailles then looked at each other, and through the monstrous complication of their masks their eyes appeared alike, equally pure, and in neither case could one tell whether it was exaltation or coldness that gave them their greater lustre. With a single impulse the two men removed their gloves, and their hands clasped for a moment, like those of wrestlers. Then Randolph got up and went back to his controls and soon, as the plane dropped to a lower altitude, they were able to remove their oxygen masks. Having mussed his hair in the process, Grandsailles pulled out his gold comb and, using the glass pane at his side as a mirror, began meticulously to straighten his parting; suddenly the reflection of this white line seemed to burst into fire as if at the contact of his comb. It was a plane going down in flames only a short distance away.

  ‘What is it?’ Grandsailles asked Fouseret.

  The latter, in great excitement, was moving his mouth rapidly like a goldfish out of water. Grandsailles had difficulty in hearing him and had to pull the cotton out of his ears.

  ‘We’ve just brought down an enemy plane!’ shouted Fouseret, beside himself.

  ‘I didn’t know there had been a battle,’ said Grandsailles, finishing combing his hair. Then he asked Fouseret, ‘We didn’t forget the duplicates sent by Cordier?’

  At this moment a violent jolt made the whole plane crack, like a nut that is pressed before being finally crushed, and Grandsailles, holding his comb in the air, saw Fouseret slump at his side. The assistant pilot and the radio operator both ran over to him. He was dead. The window above him was pierced by a curved line of sharp holes, like the tail of a frost comet. Fouseret was left where he lay. They merely covered him with the reddish robe that Grandsailles had had over his knees, and as Fouseret’s hand extended beyond this improvised winding-sheet Grandsailles took hold of it in order to push it out of sight. The hand was plump and still warm. He pressed it with gratitude and held it. At this moment a hallucinating sight paralysed his whole attention. ‘Malta!’ They were flying at less than two thousand metres over the island that had just undergone a terrific bombardment. Malta the unconquerable! Brazier of British pride, edged with foam!

  Randolph now appeared as if in a halo of divinity, made incandescent by the inner flashes of his rage, but the red light that illuminated him was only the glow of the anger unleashed in the outer world, like the fire itself. He had not turned his head – did he know that Fouseret was dead? As much as fire knows of the dead! The swollen and irritated epiderm of the sky was still covered with the frightful eruption of the virulent anti-aircraft carbuncles, while the last searing machine-gun rays, hard and shiny like scalpels, flashed their deep incisions in all directions in the form of crosses, bursting the loathsome yolks of eggs fried in boiling oil with the tumours of explosions, bespattering the stars with all the thick pus of their dense and bloody smoke and smearing the clouds with the entrail-vomit of shell-bursts.

  Below lay the mutilated city, fat whorls of smoke, like shreds of brains in brown butter, emerging from the split skulls of the big buildings, the houses with their eyes scooped out by the invisible spoons of the bombs. Here and there in the empty shell of one of these gaping orbits, the remnants of a bed stuck at a crazy angle as though the pupils of the buildings had contained carbon skeletons. There it lay entire, strong as the clenched fist of England, that no one would ever loosen, a single compact mass, not hard as granite, that breaks, but on the contrary fermenting like a great victorious wound, like a colossal and Dantesque Gruyère cheese of sacrifice, sulphur-coloured, each of its holes fecundated by death, each of its holes oozing with humours and swarming with subterranean lives and each of its lives in turn shot through with holes, in their souls and in their bodies; the first filled with the prodigal barbs of vengeance, the second by the sterile and avaricious ones of tetanus.

  The Count of Grandsailles, suddenly conscious that his burning fist held a cold and disagreeable object, looked down: it was Fouseret’s hand. He pressed it harder! Randolph had just given the landing signal.

  A British lieutenant and second lieutenant came running up to receive Grandsailles. As soon as the latter stepped off the plane he said, ‘We bring one casualty.’ The soldiers stood motionless, at attention, till Fouseret’s body was lifted out and put on the ground, while the darkening sky became flooded with the calm, interwoven sheafs of powerful searchlights, drawing immense crosses in whose intricate network one seemed to read signs of reprobation and pity for the turbulent passions of men. And it was as though from the heroic depths of the history of Malta two imperturbable and gigantic legs were rising to the centre of the celestial vault, the legs of the Colossus of Rhodes, long since vanished, from the depth of whose bronze chest one could hear a feeble, plaintive voice like that of an ailing old man…. The sacrifice having been consummated, the last distant sirens ceased their moans: the alert was ended.

  The Count of Grandsailles remained one week in Malta without Fouseret’s aid, guided by d’Orminy’s prudent counsels. His plans, pursued with boldness and without the slightest outer restraint, through audacity and danger, were crowned with unqualified success. He was able to return to North Africa in triumph.

  Randolph, after having succeeded in dropping the two parachutists over Calabria, had been brought down on his return, and the wreck of his plane, picked up at sea, had been identified beyond any possible doubt. The letter that Randolph had left for the Count of Grandsailles read as follows:

  ‘I have a strong premonition that my Calabria assignment will be my last. Should this be the case I beg you, as soon as you reach New York, to deliver the cross contained in the box to Veronica Stevens, to break the news to her and tell her I had not forgotten her for a single moment. Veronica Stevens is not my mistress nor my fiancée and hardly even my friend, inasmuch as she only knew me when I was wearing my helmet and we met only casually during the repeated air-raids in the cellars of Paris. In the course of these meetings she seemed nevertheless to have developed a great affection for me. Thank you, good luck to us both.

  John Randolph.’

  Grandsailles arrived late at night at d’Orminy’s villa. The Prince and Cécile Goudreau were awaiting him in a fever of impatience.

  ‘My mission was completely successful,’ said Grandsailles on seeing his friends again. And he added, ‘Fouseret was killed on the way in our own plane. Randolph was brought down on his return from Calabria. But what’s the matter here?’ he asked, made immediately anxious by the reserved and almost indifferent manner in which d’Orminy greeted this sensational news.

  ‘An Arab revolt repressed in blood,’ Cécile Goudreau threw out tentatively.

  ‘I know,’ said Grandsailles, immediately suspecting the worst consequences.

  ‘Broussillon is in prison,’ d’Orminy sighed, deeply preoccupied and closely watching Grandsailles’ reaction.

  ‘That’s bad,’ said the latter dryly, and he added in a severe tone of reproach, ‘You didn’t have to tell me this news now. There is nothing to be done before tomorrow, and I absolutely must get some sleep. I am dead tired.’

  ‘We had to tell you, to prevent your going to sleep on the boat. You must stay here purely as a matter of safety,’ d’Orminy observed. ‘We have been suspect and followed since you left. Arabs in the pay of the police are constantly on the watch around the house.’

  ‘I’ll sleep here.’ said Grandsailles, ‘on the boat I should feel myself a prisoner of my two guards.’

  He went upstairs and retired. At eight o’clock in the morning he was up, and he went straight down to the yacht, resolved to dismiss his guards. Near the pier he found a kite lying on the sand, with its long string neatly wound by its side. Grandsailles, whose capricious character tended to manifest its eccentricities in an exaggerated form when under constraint, could not resist the temptation to pick it up. He gave a quick glance up and down the shore and, seeing no trace of the owner, seized the kite with childish avidity, got into the yawl and made for his yacht. There he dismissed the two marines, ordering them to leave their post immediately. Though they seemed surprised, they executed the order without ado, seeming to have received no superior countermanding orders.

  A brisk little morning wind had risen, and the Count of Grandsailles, after the superhuman energy he had expended during the last week in Malta, though he kept telling himself that he must give thought to the admittedly grave situation, nevertheless found himself unable to concentrate or even to interest himself in it. Half consciously he unwound several lengths of the string attached to the kite he had picked up on the sand and launched it into the favourable wind. He let it out, pulled it in, let it out further. The serenity of the sky was absolute; there was no other cloud than the rhomboidal one, like a capricious flake, which he held on the end of his string, now wavering, now suspended motionless. ‘Captive!’ exclaimed Grandsailles, while thinking of other things, and he condescended to yield several more arms’-lengths to his cloth flier, as though the latter had long been begging him for it.

  When the second mate came to advise the Count that the Prince of Orminy urgently requested to see him Grandsailles called for his canoness and told her as he entrusted his kite to her, ‘Hold it while I go ashore – and don’t get the string tangled!’

  ‘Imagine Grandsailles! – I can’t help admiring him!’ d’Orminy exclaimed, breaking into Cécile Goudreau’s room with his arms raised to heaven. ‘Do you know what he is doing? You could never guess!’

  ‘But do tell me!’ cried Cécile, half frightened, half amused by a demonstrativeness to which the Prince rarely gave vent.

  ‘Well,’ he said, sinking into a deep leather armchair from old England, ‘the Count of Grandsailles is flying a kite! Look, just look! It’s not my imagination. I am quite incapable of thinking up such a thing,’ and he pointed to the window. But Cécile Goudreau was already looking out at the yacht moored in the bay, and she exclaimed, ‘Why, it’s unheard of! But it isn’t the Count, it’s the canoness who is holding the string.’

  ‘He handed it over to her, for I have just sent word for him to come here. He simply has to know the whole danger of his situation. And we haven’t seen the end of it. This business of the kite, in fact, bids fair to drag a good, long tail. For Grandsailles took this toy without bothering to ask himself if it belonged to someone. And now we have in the kitchen a young Arab who sees his kite flying over my yacht and who is shrieking at the top of his lungs that it’s been stolen from him and I’m just wondering if this youngster isn’t one of those paid by the police and if he isn’t using his what-do-you-call-it to signal the gendarmerie just across the bay….’

  At this moment the Count of Grandsailles entered the room. ‘You’re really making a mountain out of a mole-hill,’ he broke in, ‘I’ve just given the youngster a hundred francs and he’s gone off happy as a lark.’

  There was an embarrassed silence, and d’Orminy said, ‘I didn’t want to tell you last night. The authorities have categorically refused to visa your diplomatic documents, making it impossible for you to leave with us for America. We must act quickly, for it’s tomorrow night at five that the François Coppée sails for South America. I insist, do you understand. I insist on your going with us. For you to remain here would be suicide. Neither Cécile nor I will leave you here alone, surrounded by your worst enemies!’