Greek Fire (29 page)

He had little enough energy to look round the place. There was a courtyard and various other doors, one of which he found unlocked. It led into kitchens and then downstairs into queer cell-like rooms with the sound of water lapping close under the windows. In one of the rooms was a bed. He stripped off and lay down on the bed. In a few minutes he was asleep.

He woke to the sound of someone whistling. It wasn't a jolly tune but three or four notes repeated over and over again in a monotonous and depressing way. He got up, knowing at once where he was but not realising it was full daylight. He pulled on the clothes he had, which had lost some of their wetness in five hours.

A man was coming down the steps carrying a bag. He was short, square shouldered, red haired and walked with a limp. He didn't seem to notice the eye at the door, but when he got to the bottom step he put his bag down and said:

“Your health. There's clothes here and food. And Carlos will be here for you tonight.”

Gene came slowly out. “ Your health. What time is it? My watch has stopped.”

“Nine o'clock. I'm later than usual, but last night was the Festival, so one is up later today.”

The man had a queer neck as well as a limp; the bones were deformed and he held his head as if looking round a corner. Gene bent to the bag and pulled open the string.

His suit and his shoes were inside.

“The food will cost you eighty-four drachmae. Meat is not cheap in Greece today. And there is bread and fruit and wine.”

Gene gave him two hundred. “ I should not have heard you but your whistle woke me.…”

“You slept well?”

“Like a log.”

“Just so. Just so.” Angelos gave him a peculiar smile. “You a foreigner?”

“Why d'you ask?”

“It says so in the paper.”

“I have some Greek blood.”

“Ah. But your eyes are too light.”

“What about your own?”

Angelos laughed. He laughed silently with his head on one side and his mouth open. It was like a man having a fit.

“The police are looking for you,
koubare
. They've not found you yet. You were last seen at Argos. That true?”

Gene nodded as he got into his suit. He was used to summing people up quickly. Young Salamis had been as clear as day. Not so this man. One was in muddy water from the first word and the first glance.

“Have you looked around the castle?”

“No. I came straight in here.”

“Instinct—that's what it was—instinct.” Angelos had his convulsion again. “Well, there's nothing to the castle. But I warn you if you move about keep off the skyline, for someone will be sure to notice you, and the police don't believe in ghosts even if we do.”

Gene followed the man up the stone steps. Outside the sun was blinding. They were not on view in this enclosed courtyard.

Gene said: “Someone is coming for me tonight?”

Angelos looked at him round the corner of his shoulder. “Tomorrow morning. Carlos will pick you up, and I shall be glad to see the back of you, I can tell you; but he cannot do so till the moon has set, which will be at four. You'll see his boat leaving the harbour at sundown. A handsome boat. I wish I had one like it.”

“You do?”

“Yes. It's a blue one, and if there's a breeze 'twill carry a red sail. In the night 'twill come back for you. You'd best be ready on the little quay. There'll be no light but you'll hear the engine. Once you're off you'll be in their hands.”

Gene walked with the man across the courtyard and found himself limping in company. Angelos looked at him suspiciously and Gene had to say: “ I caught my foot on the rocks when I landed.” He slipped his shoe off again and looked at his heel.

Angelos twisted himself with laughter. “Sea urchins. They're all over these rocks. They'll give you trouble. Once in they'll never come out. They'll fester and weep. Only way is to cauterise 'em. Red hot needle. Something for you to do this afternoon.”

“I can't wait to try,” Gene said.

As they came to the outer door Angelos stopped again and looked at Gene over his shoulder like something he'd forgotten. “I'll have to have the key, mind. Leave the door unlocked when you go. I'll come early tomorrow morning and lock up.”

“It's a queer place to live.”

“Think so? Oh, some people like it. My uncle liked it.”

“Was he the owner?”

“He lived here. He was called Angelos too. On the side of the angels, eh? That's what I always say.”

“Have you ever lived here?”

This amused Angelos. “ No. It was all finished before I grew up.”

“What was?”

“This place. You know what it was?”

“No.”

“I thought not. Some people don't mind. Some people do. Hundreds of years ago it began. This part belonged to the Italians. Venice, you know. Up there, on the cliff, that's the prison, see? They had a hangman, of course, ready when needed. But we Greeks didn't like a hangman in our midst—and a foreigner at that—in the town, hobnobbing. Wasn't nice. And dangerous for him. He'd get his throat slit. See? So he lived here. Lived here for centuries. And even when there was independence, when Greece belonged to the Greeks, they still kept the hangman here. This was his house. And this was where they did the dirty work. That was where the gallows used to be—up there. My uncle was the last executioner. They've moved it away from here now. Pity, for by rights the job would have been mine.”

“Pity,” said Gene.

“Yes. Comical you being here really, considering what you're wanted for. Very apt when you think of that room you slept in. I suppose you went there just as if you'd been guided.”

“Guided to what?” said Gene.

Angelos opened his mouth and laughed silently sideways. “ That used to be the condemned cell.”

Gene lay in the hot sun, his damp shirt steaming, and watched Angelos row away across the pale water of the bay. Gene was no surer of him than after the first word. He had gone off limping, sly, peering, gusty, lustful, full of slightly obscene laughter, leaving his prisoner where he could get at him any time. There were eighteen hours yet during which Angelos might call at the police station and earn the reward. A sobering thought.

As the heat of the day grew, the prickles in his foot began to throb and he tried to dig them out. The sea urchins clustered all round this island like a second fine of defence, evil black pincushions showing through the glass-green water. Perhaps one had grown for every man hanged. Difficulty about getting the prickles out was that they constantly broke, and he gave it up half done to eat some of the food Angelos had brought.

After he had eaten, and with a rag round his foot, he looked over the castle. The island was tiny, no more than a rock jutting out of the bay, the castle a round keep with a central tower, a few dungeons, an enclosed parade yard. He went down again to the room where he had spent the night. It was only six or seven feet above the sea. There were still the marks to be seen where the window bars had been removed. The walls had been re-plastered, and he wondered what scrawls and last messages the new plaster covered up.

It was cool here after the heat upstairs and he felt sleepy again. The bed still bore the impression of where he had lain almost unmoving through the night. He lay down in the same place and allowed his mind to slip back into its preoccupying groove. Everything in his life and future seemed now to be coloured by thoughts of Anya.

Presently he fell asleep.

He got the last prickles out of his foot just before the sun set. He bathed his swollen heel in cold water, wrapped it in a strip of handkerchief and then limped to a point of vantage to watch for his boat. He saw it leave just as dusk was falling; there was a little wind and the red sail was set aslant. As it went out, its engine chugging, it came quite near the island and Gene saw two men aboard. They didn't glance at the island. He watched the boat until it was out of sight round the south headland, then he crouched where he was for another half hour watching the lights winking on all over the town. Some broken cloud had drifted up just before dark, but the moon, now three quarters full, was brilliant.

Dry clothed and rested, he went back to the kitchens and ate some supper. He saved some of the wine for later. He had slept so well that there was now no sleep in him; in any case, although there was still seven hours to wait he could not take the risk of lying down again. This especially so because of the onset of cloud and an increase in wind. If the night grew dark enough they might come for him before his time.

Or if the wind grew strong enough they might not come for him at all.

By midnight there was no moon and a light drizzle was falling. The wind had veered and freshened but was still nothing more than a strong breeze. The water slapped against the rocks in little spiteful wavelets as if the castle were a ship pushing against the tide. He wandered occasionally about the place, but after sitting for an hour in darkness in an easy chair in one of the two living-rooms he found the moon cast disturbing shadows, so he went quietly down to the kitchens and thence into the condemned cell. He had six cigarettes left but he would not light a match in case some reflection showed.

Then when lying on his bed in the cell he heard what sounded like a footstep outside. In a quick but silent movement he was up and had opened the door, and for a moment thought he glimpsed some shadow of a figure at the top of the stone stairs. He went after it, but when he got to the enclosed courtyard there was nothing to be seen. Then the door of the cell below creaked as the wind pushed it to behind him.

Thereafter he began a systematic search of the place. Through shadowed rooms constantly lit and darkened by cloud and moonlight he made his way, backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards, watching and listening.

Eventually satisfied there was nothing inside at all, he began a tour of the few battlements, crouching whenever the moon shone, moving again at the next cloud. The drizzle had stopped and shadows were lengthening; he looked at his watch. If they were prompt only another seventy minutes. But they might not be prompt. They might be hours late.

He squatted beside the place where the gallows had been, a cigarette between his lips for company, though unlighted. Maybe the footsteps he had heard were echoes of an earlier time, someone leaving the cell and climbing the stone steps. Through the generations, through the centuries, this island had borne its one-way freight. All had come here for the axe or the hangman's rope: the patriot, the criminal, the fanatic. Walking courageously, dragged here fainting or screaming, head on block or head in noose. If anything lingered here, an ambience, a flavor.…

The moon went slowly down, swelling as it neared the mountains. A great black canopy of cloud stretched almost across the sky, and it was from under this that the moon flung its last light slantwise across the bay and town. The houses climbing the hill on one side were white as if caught in a car's headlights. As one watched, the reflected light faded as the moon was misted by the vapours from the land and turned yellow and then orange.

Gene stirred his cramped limbs and moved to go down. As he did so somebody whistled faintly, a flat two notes, cautious, inquiring.

Not only were they prompt, they were a few minutes early. A Chinese lantern shaped like a deflated football was still showing between two humps of the land. Gene moistened his lips and whistled back.

The boat had come in under sail, gliding undetected across the bay, making use of the breeze and the slap of the sea to come alongside the jetty without even Gene noticing it, though he had been on the alert.

He slipped his heel in his shoe, fastened it, and then padded down the steps to the stone courtyard, opened the great door and stepped through on to the rough gravel approach to the tiny quay. The boat was there and the two men were standing beside it. Gene walked up to them. As he got near he saw the vessel had a short stubby mast, and his eyes, acute beyond ordinary because of the long hours in the dark, saw two other men crouching in the shadow of the jetty.

So Angelos had earned his new boat.

Gene turned to run, to jump off the low rocks into the sea, but one of the policemen, nervous in the dark, stood up quickly and shot him in the back.

The small whitewashed room had tumbled down upon him in irregular intervals of consciousness throughout the first thirty hours. Walls moved in landslides over continual precipices that hurt his eyes and his back and left him glad to return to the darkness of the pit. Only in the daylight of the second day did he recognise his identity again and the separateness of movement about him. A woman was with him, an old woman and sometimes a man, inside the cage that the whitewashed room periodically became, a wire fence woven between castle turrets; attention reaching him through it like messages passed into a concentration camp.

At the foot of his bed was a slip of paper that the man sometimes wrote on and then put back, some record of progress or betrayal. The woman washed him and gave him liquid to drink; even her hair was like wire, rusted with streaks of grey. Once he heard what the bearded man said. It sounded like ‘he'll do' or ‘ we'll do.'

Thereafter a period of sleep, and it was waking fully conscious and completely aware of his position for the first time that he saw the bars across his window as the cause of the illusion of the cage.…

After that it was dark for a long time, and the unshaded electric bulb hurt his eyes when someone switched it on. The nurse came in, and with her were the doctor and Major Kolono.

The doctor said: “ I'll give him another transfusion in the morning. It will strengthen him for the journey. More than anything it's a matter of rest and recuperation now.”

“Can he walk?” said Kolono.