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The sand at the bottom of the lagoon had churned into a great cloud and he clamped the mouthpiece of his breathing tube between his teeth and struck out for the surface. Above him there was a tremendous disturbance, limbs thrashing together in a violent struggle.

He came up into the center of it, pulling his knife from his sheath, and struck out at a dim, khaki-clad shape. The soldier bucked agonizingly, shoving Chavasse away so that he broke through to the surface.

A couple of yards away from him, a fifteen-foot motor boat bumped against the dinghy. He was aware of Francesca struggling in the grip of two soldiers, of Orsini floating against the hull, blood on his face.

A soldier rushed to the rail, machine gun leveled, and a man in a dark leather coat with a high fur collar ran forward and knocked the barrel to one side, the bullets discharging themselves harmlessly in the sky.

“Alive! I want him alive!”

For one brief moment Chavasse looked up into Adem Kapo’s excited face, then he jackknifed and went down through the water, his webbed feet driving him toward the edge of the lagoon. He swam into the reeds, forcing his way through desperately. A few moments later he surfaced. Behind him he could hear voices calling excitedly, and then the engine of the motor boat coughed into life.

He broke through into the main channel, moved straight across it into a narrow tributary and started to swim for his life.

TEN

T
HE MOTOR BOAT TURNED OUT OF A
side channel into the main stream of the Buene River, the dinghy trailing behind on a line. In the stern, four soldiers huddled together, smoking cigarettes and talking in low tones. The bodies of their two comrades, killed in the lagoon by Chavasse, lay under a tarpaulin beside them.

Orsini was handcuffed to the rail and seemed half unconscious, his head roughly bandaged where a rifle butt had struck him a glancing blow. There was no sign of Francesca Minetti, but Adem Kapo paced the foredeck, impatiently smoking a cigarette, the fur collar of his hunting jacket turned up.

Orsini watched him, eyes half closed, and after a while, another man appeared from the companionway. He was as big as Orsini with a scarred, brutal face and wore the uniform of a colonel in the Army of the Albanian Republic with the green insignia of the Intelligence Corps on his collar.

Kapo turned on him, eyes like black holes in his small face. “Well?”

The colonel shrugged. “She isn’t being very helpful.”

The anger blazed out of the little man like a searing flame. “You said it would work, damn you. That all we had to do was wait and they’d walk right into the net. What in the hell am I supposed to tell them in Tirana?”

“What do you think he’s going to do, swim out of here?” The big man laughed coldly. “We’ll run him down, never fear. A night out on his own in a place like this will shrink him down to size.”

“Let’s hope you’re right.”

Kapo walked across to Orsini, looked down at him for a moment, then kicked him in the side. Orsini continued to feign unconsciousness. Kapo turned away and resumed his pacing.

 

A
S THE MOTOR BOAT ROUNDED A POINT OF
land jutting from the mist into the river, Chavasse parted the reeds carefully. He stood up to his chest in water no more than fifteen yards away as it passed and his trained eyes took in everything—Orsini and the soldiers, Kapo standing in the prow, the cigarette holder jutting from a corner of his mouth.

The most interesting thing was the presence of Tashko. When Chavasse had last encountered him, he had been dressed like any seaman off the Taranto waterfront; now he wore the uniform of a colonel in the Albanian Intelligence Corps, which explained a lot. Beyond him, through the deckhouse window, Chavasse could just see the head and shoulders of Haji, the knife man, standing at the wheel.

The motor boat passed into the mist and he waded onto a piece of comparatively dry land to take stock of the situation. The stench of the marsh filled his nostrils and the bitter cold ate into his bones.

There was a hell of a lot about the whole affair that didn’t make any kind of sense, but the basic situation was obvious enough. Adem Kapo was no ordinary agent, but someone a lot more important than that. Probably a high-ranking sigurmi officer. He’d have to be to have a colonel of Intelligence taking orders from him.

In any event he was a man who knew what he was doing. He’d obviously sailed straight for the Buene from Matano and his twenty-four-hour start had given him the time he’d needed to reach Tama and organize a suitable reception.

The
Buona Esperanza
must have been under observation from the moment it hit the coast, and tracking the dinghy would have been no great trick to men who knew the marshes.

He wondered what had happened to Carlo. He too was probably on his way to Tama by now. It was the only sizable town in the area and certain to be Kapo’s base.

The engine of the motor boat faded into the distance and he slid into the water and started to swim after it. Within an hour at the outside, they’d be out in force looking for him, probably concentrating their search toward the coast.

Under the circumstances, Tama would probably be a whole lot safer. At least there would be houses scattered along the riverbank, and where there were houses there was dry clothes and food. There might even be a chance of doing something about the others, although he didn’t hold out much hope of that.

 

A
BOUT FIFTEEN MINUTES LATER THE AIR IN
his Aqua-lung ran out. He surfaced quickly and waded from the river into the reeds. He pulled off his rubber flippers, unbuckled the heavy Aqua-lung and let it sink into the ooze.

He went forward through the reeds and the wildfowl called as they lifted from the water, disturbed by his passing. After a while he came out on higher ground and moved on through the mist, keeping the river on his left.

It was hard going through mud flats and marsh, and constantly he had to wade across narrow creeks, often sinking up to his waist in thick, glutinous mud. The saltwater stung his eyes painfully and the intense cold steadily drove every trace of warmth from his body until his limbs had lost all feeling.

He moved into the gray curtain and the ground became firmer, and he found himself stumbling across firm sand and springy marsh grass. He paused on a small hillock, head turned slightly to one side. He could smell woodsmoke, heavy and pungent on the air, drifting before the wind.

A narrow arm of the river encircled a small island and a low house looked from the mist. There was no sign of life and no boat was moored at the narrow wooden jetty. Probably the home of a fisherman or wildfowler out at his traps. Chavasse moved upstream, disturbing a wild duck, and walked into the river, allowing the current to sweep him in toward the island.

He landed in the reeds and moved through them carefully, drawing his knife. The house was no more than twenty yards away, a poor enough looking place of rough-hewn logs with a shingle roof and stone chimney.

Two or three scrawny hens picked apathetically at the soil and scattered as he moved across the patch of open ground. The back door was simply several heavy wooden planks nailed together, and it opened with a protesting groan as he unfastened the chain that held it.

He moved into a small dark room that was obviously some sort of kitchen. There was a cupboard, a rough table and a pail of fresh water at the side of the door. The living room was furnished with a table and several chairs. There were two or three cupboards, and a skin rug covered the wooden floor in front of the stone hearth on which logs burned fitfully, heavily banked by ashes.

He crouched to the warmth, spreading his hands, and a cold wind seemed to touch the side of his face. A voice said quietly, “Easy now. Hands behind your neck and don’t try anything stupid.”

He came up slowly. There was a soft footstep and the hard barrel of a gun was pushed against his back. As a hand reached for the hilt of the knife at his waist, he pivoted to the left, swinging away from the gun barrel. There was a cry of dismay as they came together and fell heavily to the floor. Chavasse raised his right arm to bring down the edge of his hand.

He paused. His opponent was a young girl, perhaps nineteen or twenty, certainly no more. She wore a heavy waterproof hunting jacket, corduroy breeches and leather knee boots, and her dark hair was close-cropped like a young boy’s, the skin sallow over high cheekbones, the eyes dark brown. She was not beautiful and yet in any crowd she would have stood out.

“Now there’s a thing,” he said softly and sat back. For a moment, she lay there, eyes widening in surprise and then, in a flash, she was on her feet again like a cat, the hunting rifle in her hands.

She stood there, feet apart, the barrel steady on his chest and he waited. The barrel wavered, sank slowly. She leaned the rifle against the table and examined him curiously. Her eyes took in his bare feet, the shirt and pants that were clinging to his body.

She nodded. “You’re on the run, aren’t you? Where from? The chain gang at Tama?”

He shook his head. “I’m on the run all right, angel, but not from there.”

She scowled and reached for the rifle again. “You’re no
gegh
, that’s for sure. You speak like a
tosk
from the big city.”

Chavasse was aware of the enmity that still existed between the two main racial groups in Albania. The geghs of the north with their loyalty to family and tribe, and the tosks of the south from whom Communism had sprung.

There were times when a man had to play a hunch and this was one of them. His face split into that inimitable charming smile that was one of his greatest assets and he raised a hand as the rifle was turned again.

“Neither gegh or tosk. I’m an outlander.”

Her face was a study of bewilderment. “An outlander? From where? Yugoslavia?”

He shook his head. “Italy.”

Understanding dawned. “Ah, a smuggler.”

“Something like that. We were surprised by the military. I managed to get away. I think they’ve taken my friends to Tama.” She stood watching him, a thoughtful frown on her face, and he made the final gesture and held out his hand. “Paul Chavasse.”

“French?” she said.

“And English. A little of both.”

She made her decision and her hand reached for his. “Liri Kupi.”

“There was a gegh chieftain called Abas Kupi, leader of the Legaliteri, the royalist party.”

“Head of our clan. He fled to Italy after the Communists murdered most of his friends at a so-called friendship meeting.”

“You don’t sound as if you care for Hoxha and his friends very much?”

“Hoxha?”

She spat vigorously and accurately into the fire.

ELEVEN

C
HAVASSE STOOD ON A RUSH MAT BESIDE
the large bed and rubbed himself down with a towel until his flesh glowed. He dressed quickly in the clothes Liri had provided; corduroy pants, a checked wool shirt and knee-length leather boots a size too large so that he took them off again and pulled on an extra pair of socks.

The clothes had belonged to her brother. Conscripted into the army at eighteen, he had been killed in one of the many patrol clashes that took place almost daily along the Yugoslavian border. Her father had died fighting with the royalist party, in the mountains in the last year of the war. Since the death of her mother she had lived alone in the marshes where she had been born and bred, earning her living from wildfowling.

She was crouched at the fire when he went back into the living room, stirring something in a large pot suspended from a hook. She turned and smiled, pushing back the hair from her forehead.

“All you need now is some food inside you.”

He pulled a chair to the table as she spooned a hot stew onto a tin plate. He wasted no time on conversation, but picked up his spoon and started to eat. When the plate was empty, she filled it again.

He sat back with a sigh. “They couldn’t have done better at the London Hilton.”

She opened a bottle and filled a glass with a colorless liquid. “I’d like to offer you some coffee, but it’s very hard to come by these days. This is a spirit we distill ourselves. Very potent if you’re not used to it, but it can be guaranteed to keep out the marsh fever.”

It exploded in Chavasse’s stomach and spread through his body in a warm glow. He coughed several times and tears sprang to his eyes.

“Now this they wouldn’t be able to offer, even at the London Hilton.”

She opened an old tin carefully and offered him a cigarette. They were Macedonian, coarse, brown tobacco loose in the paper, but Chavasse knew how to handle them. He screwed the end round expertly and leaned across the table as she held out a burning splinter from the fire.

She lit a cigarette herself, blew out a cloud of pungent smoke and said calmly, “You’re no smuggler, I can see that. No seaman, either. Your hands are too nice.”

“So I lied.”

“You must have had a good reason.”

He frowned down into his glass for a moment, then decided to go ahead. “You’ve heard of the Virgin of Scutari?”

“The Black Madonna? Who hasn’t? Her statue disappeared about three months ago. The general opinion is that the central government in Tirana had it stolen. They’re worried because people have been turning to the church again lately.”

“I came to the Buene looking for it,” Chavasse said. “It was supposed to be on board a launch that sank in one of the lagoons in the marsh toward the coast. My friends and I were searching for it when the military turned up.”

He told her about Francesca Minetti, or as much as she needed to know, and of Guilio Orsini and Carlo and the
Buona Esperanza
. When he was done, she nodded slowly.

“A bad business. The sigurmi will squeeze them dry, even this smuggler friend of yours. They have their ways and they are not pleasant. I’m sorry for the girl. God knows what they will do with her.”

“I was wondering whether it would be possible to get into Tama,” Chavasse said. “Perhaps find out what’s happened to them?”

She looked at him sharply, her face grave. “We have a saying. Only a fool puts his head between the jaws of the tiger.”

“They’ll be beating the marshes toward the coast,” he said. “That stands to reason. Who’s going to look for me in Tama?”

“A good point.” She got to her feet and looked down into the fire, her hand on the stone mantel above it. She turned to face him. “There is one person who might be able to help, a Franciscan, Father Shedu. In the war, he was a famous resistance fighter in the hills, a legend in his own time. It would hardly be polite to arrest or shoot such a man. They content themselves with making life difficult for him—always with the utmost politeness, of course. He hasn’t been here long. A couple of months or so. I think the last man was taken away.”

“I could make a good guess about what happened to him,” Chavasse said. “This Father Shedu, he’s in Tama now?”

“There’s a medieval monastery on the outskirts of the town. They use it as local military headquarters. The Catholic church has been turned into a restaurant, but there’s an old monastery chapel at the water’s edge. Father Shedu holds his services there.”

“Would it be difficult to reach?”

“From here?” She shrugged. “Not more than half an hour. I have an outboard motor. Not too reliable, but it gets me there.”

“Could I borrow it?”

“Oh, no.” She shook her head. “They’d pick you up before you’d got a mile along the river. I know the back ways—you don’t.”

She took down an oilskin jacket from behind the door and tossed it to him together with an old peaked cap. “Ready when you are.”

She picked up her hunting rifle and led the way out through the front door and down toward the river. There was still no boat moored at the little wooden jetty. She passed it, moving through dense undergrowth and emerged on a small cleared bank that dropped cleanly into the water. Her boat, a flat-bottomed marsh punt with an old motor attached to the stern, was tied to a tree.

Chavasse cast off while she busied herself with the motor. As it coughed into life, he pushed the punt through the encircling reeds and stepped in.

 

L
IRI
K
UPI CERTAINLY KNEW WHAT SHE WAS
doing. At one point, they hit rough water where the river twisted round sandbanks, spilling across ragged rocks, and she handled the frail craft like an expert, swinging the tiller at just the right moment to sweep them away from the worst hazards.

After a while, they left the Buene, turning into a narrow creek that circled through a great stagnant swamp, losing itself among a hundred lagoons and waterways.

When they finally came into the river again, it was in the lee of a large island. The mist hung like a gray curtain from bank to bank, and as they moved from the shelter of the island to cross over, he could smell woodsmoke and somewhere a dog barked.

The first houses loomed out of the mist, scattered along one side of the river, and Liri took the punt in close. She produced the tin of cigarettes from her pocket and threw it to Chavasse.

“Better have one. Try to look at home.”

“Home was never like this.”

He lit a cigarette, leaned back against the prow and watched the town unfold itself. There were fewer than five hundred inhabitants these days, that much he knew. Since the cold war had warmed up between Yugoslavia and Albania, the river traffic had almost stopped and the Buene was now so silted up as to be unnavigable for boats of any size.

The monastery lifted out of the mist, a vast sprawling medieval structure with crumbling walls, several hundred yards back from the riverbank.

The Albanian flag, hanging limply in the rain, lifted in a gust of wind, the red star standing out vividly against the black, double-headed eagle, and a bugle sounded faintly.

A little farther along the bank, forty or fifty convicts worked, some of them waist-deep in water as they drove in the piles for a new jetty. Chavasse noticed that the ones on the banks had their ankles chained together.

“Politicals,” Liri said briefly. “They send them here from all over the country. They don’t last long in the marshes when the hot weather comes.”

She eased the tiller, turning the punt in toward the bank and a small ruined chapel whose crumbling walls fell straight into the river. At the foot of the wall, the entrance to a narrow tunnel gaped darkly and Liri took the punt inside.

There was a good six feet of headroom and Chavasse reached out to touch cold, damp walls, straining his eyes into the darkness, which suddenly lightened considerably. Liri cut the motor and the punt drifted in toward a landing stage constructed of large blocks of worked masonry.

They scraped beside a flight of stone steps and Chavasse tied up to an iron ring and handed her out. Light filtered down from somewhere above and she smiled through the half darkness.

“I shan’t be long.”

She mounted a flight of stone steps and Chavasse lit another cigarette, sat on the edge of the jetty and waited. She was gone for at least fifteen minutes. When she returned, she didn’t come all the way down, but called to him from the top of the steps.

He went up quickly and she turned, opened a large oak door and led the way along a narrow passage. She opened another door at the far end and they stepped into the interior of the small chapel.

 

T
HE LIGHTS WERE VERY DIM AND
,
DOWN BY
the altar, the candles flickered and the Holy Mother was bathed in light. The smell of incense was overpowering and Chavasse felt a little giddy. It was a long time since he had been in church, too long as his mother was never tired of reminding him, and he smiled wryly as they moved down the aisle.

Father Shedu knelt in prayer at the altar, the brown habit dark and somber in the candlelight. His eyes were closed, the worn face completely calm, and somehow, the ugly puckered scar of the old bullet wound that had carried away the left eye seemed completely in character.

He was a man, strong in his faith, certain in his knowledge of that which was ultimately important. Men like Enver Hoxha and Adem Kapo would come and go, ultimately to break upon the rock that was Father Shedu.

He crossed himself, got to his feet in one smooth movement and turned to face them. Chavasse suddenly felt awkward under the keen scrutiny of that single eye. For a moment, he was a little boy again at his grandfather’s village in Finistere just after the war when France was free again, standing before the old, implacable parish priest, trying to explain his absence from mass, the tongue drying in his mouth.

Father Shedu smiled and held out his hand. “I am happy to meet you, my son. Liri has told me something of why you are here.”

Chavasse shook hands, relief flowing through him. “She seemed to think you might be able to help, Father.”

“I know something of what happened to the statue of Our Lady of Scutari,” the priest said. “It was my predecessor, Father Kupescu, who gave it into the charge of the young man who was later killed in the marshes. Father Kupescu has since paid for his actions with his life, I might add.”

“The girl who was with me was the young man’s sister,” Chavasse said. “She was the one who guided us to the position of Minetti’s launch.”

Father Shedu nodded. “She and an Italian named Orsini arrived in Tama earlier this afternoon. They were taken to the monastery.”

“Are you sure?”

“I was visiting sick prisoners at the time, one of the little privileges I still insist on.”

“I’m surprised you’re allowed to function at all.”

Father Shedu smiled faintly. “As you may have noticed, my name is the same as that of our beloved President, something for which the average party member holds me in superstitious awe. They can never be quite sure that I’m not some kind of third cousin, you see. There are things they can do, of course. We had a wonderful old church here. Now, it’s a restaurant. They use the altar as a counter and the nave is crammed with tables at which the happy workers can consume
kebab
and
shashlik
to the greater glory of Enver Hoxha.”

“All things in their own good time, Father,” Chavasse said.

The priest smiled. “As it happens, I
can
help you, Mr. Chavasse. Your friends are at the moment imprisoned in the back guardroom, which is inside the inner wall of the monastery. A colonel of Intelligence and a high sigurmi official named Kapo, who brought them in, left again almost at once with every spare soldier they could lay their hands on.”

“To look for me.”

“Obviously. I shouldn’t think there will be more than one man on duty at the guardroom—perhaps two.”

“But how could we get in, Father?” Liri demanded. “There are two walls to pass through and guards on each gate.”

“We go under, my dear. It’s really quite simple. The good fathers who built this monastery thought of everything. Come with me.”

He led the way out of the chapel and back along the passage to the door that led down to the landing stage. He took an electric torch from a ledge on which an icon stood and went down to the water’s edge. When he switched on the torch, its beam played against the rough walls of the tunnel, which ran on into the darkness, narrowing considerably.

“The monastery’s underground sewage system comes down through here to empty into the river,” he said. “Not a pleasant journey, I’m afraid, but one that will take you inside the walls without being seen.”

“Show me the way, that’s all I ask, Father,” Chavasse said. “You can leave the rest to me.”

“To require you not to use violence against violent men would be absurd,” Father Shedu said, “but you must understand that I myself could not possibly take part in any such action. You accept this?”

“Willingly.”

The priest turned to Liri. “You will stay here, child?”

She shook her head. “There may be a use for me. Please, Father. I know what I’m doing.”

He didn’t bother to argue, but hitched his trailing robes into the leather belt at his waist and stepped into the water on the left-hand side of the tunnel. It was no more than ankle-deep and Chavasse followed along a broad ledge, his head lowered as the roof dropped to meet them.

There was a strong earthy smell and a slight mist curled from the water, fanning out against the damp roof. The tunnel stretched into the darkness and gradually the water became deeper until he could feel it swirling about his knees.

By now the stench was appalling and he stumbled on, his stomach heaving. Finally, the priest turned into a side passage that came out into a cavern about fifty feet in diameter.

It was some three feet deep in stinking water and at least a dozen tunnels emptied into it. The Franciscan waded across and counted from the left.

“I think the eighth will be the one.”

BOOK: The Keys of Hell
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