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.
Chapter Thirty Five
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.
“I suppose he could, well strapped up. It’s chiefly weakness now from loss of blood. But the obvious thing is an ambulance if you intend to take him tomorrow.”
“He’s got to go tomorrow,” said Kolono, fingering his moustache. “We want him for interrogation.”
“I shouldn’t advise interrogation for a day or two. It might cause a relapse.”
“We want him for interrogation,” said Kolono. “It makes very little difference to us whether he has a relapse or not.”
“That’s just as you say,” said the doctor, looking annoyed. “It’s my duty to point out these things.”
He left the room, but Major Kolono went to the window staring out with his hands clasped behind his back. The nurse gave Gene a milk drink in which some drug was rather unsuccessfully disguised. Then she asked him if he could eat anything and he said he could. When the nurse left the room to get him food Kolono came and stood by the bed. He watched Gene for a while in silence.
“So you are still alive, eh?”
Gene didn’t answer. His strength needed conserving.
“The bullet missed all vital parts,” said Kolono. “Pity. It might have saved us the trouble of taking you back for trial.”
Gene said: “ I thought—you would enjoy that.”
Kolono took out a cigar and fitted it into a short yellow holder. “It is my duty to tell you that the woman calling herself Maria Tolosa has been arres
ted in Thessaloniki.”
“What? …” He was too weak even to pretend. “What are you talking about?”
“She was taken on Saturday as she was trying to board a ship. We have been on the look-out for her, you know. She was seen leaving Heracles House on the night of the murder.”
There seemed to be grit in Gene’s teeth. He tried to speak but could not. Kolono’s words carried conviction, and they carried defeat too, ultimate defeat, turning to mockery all his efforts of the last five days. After this nothing was left, not even credit, not even a justifiable memory.
Kolono said: “Of course it will make no difference. Whatever her testimony may be, we shall make specially sure of convicting you. Whichever of you actually used the knife does not matter. You will be charged jointly. Our taking her won’t have helped your case at all.”
Through the day that followed Gene gained strength, but it was slow, and in a way it was like the recovery of a very old man: one climbed laboriously back to life only to find that life had nothing left. He had never felt so down. There was a gap in his usually purposive mind, like a rift caused by an earth tremor, across which as yet the usual communications did not reach.
The nurse, who was under orders not to talk to him, told him only that it was Monday, that he was still in Nafption, in the prison on the hill, and that so far as she knew he would be leaving that evening for Athens. At noon he was able to sit up and eat the meal that she brought him, and from then, almost in spite of himself, his strength came back quickly. During the afternoon he slept a little and dreamed of Lascou’s death and the gallows at Bourtzi and of Anya calling to him from far off.
The doctor came in at four and inspected the two wounds in his side. He prodded them a good deal too much and then injected Gene in the thigh. From the feel of things it wasn’t the first injection he’d had there. Another official came in and they talked in low tones in a corner of the room while the nurse re-dressed his side.
The slanting sun was falling in through the window, and the bars were shadowed like a prophecy across the floor. The nurse’s sunken eyes followed the movement of her hands, which were gnarled and whitened with work, as if they had spent long years over a scrubbing board. She was not good at her job and fumbled and let the bandage slip.
The official was signing something. Signature, gaol delivery, passing of custody, of responsibility from one official to the next; the death penalty still existed in Greece, but life imprisonment was probably as likely; strange if he came back here to serve it; he’d already seen the inside of the gaols of Athens; the Germans had crowded them with offenders; so had the revolutionaries, so had the counterrevolutionaries; it was Mr. Wet—Mrs. Fine during the years after the war. Would they allow him to choose his own defence lawyer? Anya must keep out of this. Contact with him now would ruin her. He must get her word, through Mme Lindos perhaps, warn her she could not help now and must not try.
Major Kolono came into the room and the conference continued in the corner. Presently the two other men left and Kolono waited until the nurse had done. When she too had gone he stayed by the window for a while, hands behind his back in his favourite attitude, the sun glinting on the bristles of his moustache.
Gene waited. Several minutes passed in complete silence. Kolono turned, his face half-lit now, the other half shadowed. He said: “You will leave at seven this evening for Athens.”
“Whatever you say.”
“Can you walk?”
“I haven’t tried.”
“I will drive with you personally. Then there will be no chance of escape.”
“I couldn’t get far at present.”
Gene watched the man’s regular false teeth gripping the cigar holder. He badly wanted to smoke.
He said: “I don’t know if it’s any good appealing to your sense of chivalry, Major Kolono.”
“What d’you mean?”
“Well, why don’t you drop this charge against Maria Tolosa and let her go? She’s not much more than a girl and it’s me you want really, isn’t it.”
“It is you we want really,” Kolono agreed.
“She saw her own husband killed. She was half crazy with grief. She didn’t know what she was doing. Why can’t you be lenient with her and concentrate on me? I came to Greece to get Lascou and I got him. Isn’t that enough for you?”
“What is enough for me, Vanbrugh, is beside the point. The law of the land must now take its course.”
“But you’re not without influence. The prosecution might even refuse to believe her story, turn her off without bothering about her. I’m quite willing to make a full confession.”
“That you did it?”
“That I did it.”
Kolono’s eyes were like dark olives freshly moistened. “I wish I could make use of that.”
“Can’t you?”
“Unfortunately, no.”
The spiral of smoke was going straight up. Kolono did not seem to be drawing on the cigar.
Gene said: “Put it to your superiors. It would save time, trouble, publicity. On the one hand you’d have two people in the box fighting all the way; you’d have us both making accusations—it wouldn’t help. On the other you have one man with a full confession, trial over in a day, and the Spanish woman shipped off without being allowed to become a nuisance. Don’t you think that’s worth considering?”
Silence fell.
Kolono said: “Unfortunately I may not consider it. I have another proposition altogether to put to you.”
“What is that?”
“What would you say if we offered you your freedom?”
Dressed in the now frayed and stained suit he had bought in the Plaka, Gene was helped to the door of the ambulance and got in. He was glad enough to lie on one of the bunks after the effort of getting there; but on the whole his strength was not bad. Major Kolono climbed in and sat on the opposite bunk, and the ambulance drove out of the gates of the prison. It was not quite dark yet but the sun had set.
Gene said for the fourth time: “ What’s the catch in all this?”
Kolono lit another cigar. “ In a few minutes from now this ambulance will stop with engine trouble. While we are stopped you will leave the ambulance and go.”
“D’you like it better that I should be shot again while trying to hobble away?”
“It would give me great pleasure to be able to do that personally.”
“And that’s the arrangement?”
“I am here to tell you the arrangement. Where we stop will be at an inlet on the coast between—well, no matter—at an inlet. A boat is waiting there to take you to Brindisi. Once you reach Italy it will be your personal concern to return to Paris.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Maria Tolosa has not yet been publicly interrogated. But she was privately interrogated by me this morning. She is prepared, under pressure from us, to swear that the man who was seen leaving Heracles House with her on Tuesday night was her brother-in-law, Philip Tolosa.”
“Philip To … But he’s …” Gene stopped.
“He is dead.”
There was a pause. Gene said: “Do you mean you intend …”
“I can promise you nothing absolutely—except your freedom tonight. And that on conditions.”
Gene said: “ The boy——”
“I am not Chief of Police. I am not the Public Prosecutor. I cannot influence them. But I am in charge of this case, and I will do what I can. On conditions, we are prepared to prove that Philip Tolosa, not you, killed Lascou. It can be done. You are alike in build, figure, colouring. Manos, who was in the flat within three minutes of the murder, and M. Lascou’s secretary, are prepared to identify Philip Tolosa as the man who committed the crime. It is a case of mistaken identity by a boy of eight. From there on you will be free.”
After a time Gene said: “That may be; it may be possible, what you propose; but I don’t begin to understand why you’re proposing it. Who is behind this?”
?
??There are two conditions, as I have said. One is absolute secrecy. You return to Paris and keep your mouth shut. No reporters. No interviews. No idle talk with friends. In no circumstances do you say anything about your visit to Greece.”
“And the second?”
“The second is that in no circumstances do you ever return here.”
“That’s more difficult.”
“Murderers can’t be choosers.”
They jogged along for some way in silence. Gene felt glad for a moment that the conversation had stopped; it gave him time to relate it to common sense, to breathe.
“And Maria Tolosa?” he said.
“That is for the law to decide. If this proposition is carried through, she will appear rather as a witness than as a collaborator. That is not because we care what happens to her but because it is necessary to our case. She might get off; she might at worst go to prison for a few months. Again I cannot promise anything.”
“And if I refuse to go?”
“It will be very much worse for Maria Tolosa if you stay, since the need for us to use her mainly as a witness will have disappeared. Just as I have pointed out to her that it will be much worse for you if she insists on telling the truth.”
The ambulance lurched and rattled over the rough road.
“Why am I so dangerous to keep?”
“Perhaps you will learn that before you leave.”
“From you?”
“Not from me.”
“We are meeting someone?”
“It maybe.”
“Who?”
“You will see now,” said Kolono, stubbing out his cigar and putting away the end in his case.
Chapter Thirty Six
The ambulance came to a stop. The driver got down and opened the doors. It was clear that he was a party to the arrangement. Gene pushed himself into a sitting position and allowed himself to be helped out. Kolono followed.