“Of course. My only worry is that I must return to Paris this evening.”
The little Greek said, “But Colonel Zafiris has sent his car to save time! It is over there!” He pointed to a space filled with cars and waiting taxis. A small car, dark brownish-green in colour, was already making a wide turn to reach them. Its driver was in khaki uniform.
This may be the way things are done in Greece, thought Duclos, but I don’t want any part of it. It is too official. He smiled genially as he moved off. “See you at the hotel,” he said quietly.
“Fine,” Tillier said. “If you prefer it that way—”
He shrugged, walking beside Duclos. “Just one thing,” he added, “have you got a room definitely at the King George? That’s where I am and it’s crowded. If you can’t get it there, where can we meet you?” He halted as he stepped in front of Duclos, blocking his way. “Or perhaps you’d leave word at the desk for me where you’ve found a room? I must make tonight’s flight back to Paris. I’m a day late as it is.”
It was reasonable. It was time-consuming, just enough moments spent to let the official-looking car drive right up to the kerb where they stood. “Oh, why not take this and save all trouble?” Tillier asked now, as the Greek opened the car door. He reached for the nearer suitcase most helpfully.
“No need,” began Duclos, ready to crash through the crowd pressing around them—there was a terrace, a restaurant, just beyond the thick stream of people. But Tillier’s hand switched from the suitcase to the wrist that held it. Duclos felt a sharp and painful bite as a needle pressed deep into his flesh. His voice came in a desperate gasp. “Help me, help, in the name of God, help—” But the foreigners’ faces only stared blankly, briefly as his words trailed into a drunken blur. His eyes turned towards two children and their grandmother who had halted near him, closed. His legs buckled as his head dropped on his breast and Tillier’s arms pushed him into the car.
Tillier propped up Duclos against the seat, held his weight in position with his own body. “Quick!” he told the Greek who was handing in the suitcases.
“Not too quickly,” the Greek said softly, slipping into the seat, closing the door.
The small boy tugged at the black skirt of his grandmother. “Was that man sick?” he asked.
“What man?” She pulled the skirt free from his hand, took a large grip on the paper parcel she carried. “Stop looking at strangers,” she said, her voice harsh with her own worries, “and watch out for your mother. She said she would meet us here. Where is she? Keep hold of your sister, now!”
The small boy did as he was told. He only let his eyes wander once back to the car but it was already moving away. It went so quietly, so smoothly. Not like his uncle’s truck on the farm.
The car left the low cluster of airport buildings, continued its steady pace down towards the highway. It swept slowly past flower beds and fluttering flags, past tourist police and flocks of airline hostesses; past people arriving, departing, enjoying a Sunday outing; past parked cars and waiting buses, until it readied the main road that skirted the bay of blue water. It turned left and gathered speed at last. It was travelling away from Athens.
The man who had called himself Tillier took a deep breath, pushed Duclos farther into the corner. “Soon now—just past the fish restaurant and the filling station. We’ll change cars there,” he told the driver, “and you can get rid of that uniform.” He removed his revolver from his pocket as he pulled his coat off and dropped it at his feet. “Don’t forget the suitcases,” he warned the Greek. “I need them.”
The Greek nodded, glanced at his watch. “Four and a half minutes from here to there, all told,” he said with considerable satisfaction. He looked at Duclos. “How long will he sleep?”
“Until we reach Cape Sunion.”
“I would not advise taking the new shore road—too crowded on Sunday. Better strike inland a little—come round by Lávrion—”
“I know, I know,” the Frenchman said impatiently. He sat forward, watching the stream of cars on the road ahead, all out on their Sunday picnics. “There’s the restaurant! Get ready—” He tapped the driver on the shoulder. “Now!”
* * *
Duclos came out of his stupor as they skirted the mining town of Lávrion. He had enough returning sense to keep slumped in his corner, changing neither balance nor position. He listened to the Greek and Frenchman arguing, a faint jangle of phrases at first, then words becoming clearer as his own mind began working. All he could see through the carefully opened slits of his eyes was a desolate hillside, a few rows of workmen’s houses, low and strung out over grassless earth. Where was this? Greece? The hideous smell, constant, persistent, made him think of Hades. But it wasn’t sulphur—was it manganese, lead?
“Those filthy slag heaps!” the Frenchman said, and reached angrily past Duclos to shut the window. Duclos jolted forward, but was caught and held, and propped back into his corner. He had had time, though, to see the hilltops on his right where chimney stacks were perched.
“You should smell them during the week,” the Greek was saying, “when the smoke belches out. That’s why they’re built up there, to keep people from being poisoned. They say they get lead and silver out of that slag. It’s a French company that started working the mines—they take the profits and leave us with the stink.”
“You know everything. Could you stop that yapping just for the last ten minutes?” the Frenchman asked sharply.
The driver laughed softly, taking no sides. He was a man who enjoyed other people’s bickering.
A happy trio, thought Duclos, and wondered if there could be any dividend for him in that. He felt sick and tired, perhaps with the drug that had been pumped into him, perhaps with his own stupidity; he had expected nothing and that was the greatest of all stupidities. Now, he lay seemingly helpless in his corner while he let his brain start functioning again.
The rows of houses were gone, replaced by moorland. No sign of people here. The ground was too open to risk anything. Ahead of him he saw the beginning of trees. Perhaps there he could quickly get the door unlocked and jump and run for shelter. But the hope was too optimistic. He still felt weak; the Frenchman was holding a revolver on his lap; and when they reached the trees they were thin, giving way to more moorland. Then more trees, thicker trees, came into sight. Snatch the revolver first, he told himself, before you open the door.
The Greek was pointing to a large villa, boarded and shuttered, explaining that it was the first of many country places along this road where the rich from Athens came for the summer and shot doves in August. “He should have been a schoolmaster, this one,” the Frenchman was telling the driver when Duclos reached for the revolver. But his body was slower than he had thought. It was only a vague, unco-ordinated movement that came from his arm. The Frenchman cursed and hit him a crashing blow over the head with the revolver butt.
“You’ve killed him!” the Greek said in alarm.
“Not him. Bretons’ heads are made of teak.”
“The orders were not to injure him, to keep him well until—”
“He’ll be well enough to answer our questions.”
“He may take a little persuasion,” the Greek said, with a spreading smile. “I remember in ’forty-five—”
“Keep your eyes open!” the Frenchman told the driver.
“Just as you catch first sight of the pillars at Cape Sunion, there’s a big house and two cottages on your left towards the sea. Stop at the second cottage. Got it?” He looked at the Greek beside him, wondering why he had to have this kind of guy along. Always talking of the civil war, he must have been only a kid of eighteen when he left villages in flames and snatched the children and carved up the men with his knife. You’d have thought he might have forgotten those things in those years in Bulgaria, but no, here he was back, looking like a bank clerk but still nursing his dreams of glory. “Keep your mouth shut when the boss arrives. We’ve changed our methods, didn’t you know?”
br />
“We nearly won,” the Greek protested angrily. “We were closer to winning than you ever were.”
“And what happened to your leaders? Heads cut off by the peasants and displayed in the market place! Signs still painted on the barns all over Thessaly calling us murderers! You ‘nearly won’ brilliantly.” And that will shut up this know-all for the next hour at least, the Frenchman thought. I’m in charge here and he’d better understand that. If it had not been for me, who could have identified Duclos at the airport so quickly, so quietly?
“There’s the sea,” the driver said. And far off, there was a glimpse of a ruined Greek temple on its high headland in stark silhouette against the western sun. Mission accomplished, the Frenchman thought with considerable satisfaction. We got him here, and there’s no escape for him now.
* * *
It was dusk when Duclos regained consciousness. The room was square and small, half-filled by the low wooden platform on which he had been thrown. The walls were of rough stone, once whitewashed, now grey-streaked in the fading light. There was a small window high above his head, unglassed, barred. The one low, narrow door looked solid and heavy. He put his feet on the hard-packed earth floor, carefully, testing his balance. He could stand. And walk. He made his way slowly across to the door. Yes, it was as strong as it had looked. And he could hear nothing through it.
Yet the room was not quiet. Through the window came the distant fall and surge of the sea. The air smelled clean, and it felt cool, almost cold. He crossed the room again and stood on the low platform—a communal bed, he guessed, there would be space for four rough mattresses on it—and reached for the bars. He could grasp their lower edge. Painfully, he pulled himself up to let his chin reach the stone sill, held on with his arm muscles tearing, and looked out. A bare, rocky field sloping downward to cliffs, beyond that a flat stretch of dark grey water reaching to a dark grey sky. No houses, no lights; nothing except the steady beat of waves. He dropped back on to the wooden bed, his arms trembling with the strain. He was still weak, much weaker than he had thought.
He sat on the bed, his back propped up against the heavy stone wall, and considered his position. They had taken away his tie, his belt, his shoes. They had taken his jacket and emptied his trouser pockets. They had taken his watch and his ring. From the papers in his passport-wallet, they would know that he had reservations for the Grande Bretagne. What would they do—have someone placed there to watch for any person asking about Yves Duclos, for anyone leaving a message for him? They wouldn’t get much, that way. Mimi was staying at the Hilton and wasn’t even going to get in touch with him until they sailed on the same boat for Mykonos on Thursday. Four days away... Then he froze: his tickets for the steamer, his cabin reservation, would be left for him at his hotel. It had been necessary to book ahead to get a cabin and have Mimi in the one next door.
But how in the first place had they known where to pick him up? An informant? Or had they followed him to Rome, and, learning his destination there, jumped ahead of him to Athens? But why wait until then? They could have made an attempt on him in Milan or Florence or Rome itself. Perhaps they wanted to make sure he was heading for Greece before they moved. Yes, that could be it. Greece was the danger signal to them. But that could also show, perhaps, that they did not know too much about his mission or else they want me for information, he thought sombrely. That’s why I’m still alive. Information to fill in the gaps in their suspicions. And I could give them a lot... He had no illusions about human capacity to withstand physical persuasion. In the last extreme they’d use torture, that unpleasant word which so many pleasant people discarded as fantastic nonsense.
I’ll have to play this carefully, he thought. When they question me reasonably, I’ll have to be ready with answers that will give them no lead to Mykonos and the rest of us there. But when that type of questioning is over, then—He felt inside the waistband of his trousers and pulled off one of the buttons. He cracked it open with his fingers, and took out a small flat pellet wrapped in its thin saliva-proof coating. He clicked the two pieces of button together again, and threw it under the bed. The pellet, he placed in the breast pocket of his shirt. At the first sound of the door opening, he’d transfer it to his mouth. It could lie quite unobtrusively, he had heard, against the cheek. He would have to trust the waterproof coating—better that than finding his arms held or his hands tied when he needed the capsule. If he needed it, he added with a determined attempt at optimism.
It was dark now, and the wind must have risen, for the surge of sea had a heavier rhythm. Cold, too, in here. And he was thirsty. Not hungry—some of the awakening nausea still clung to his throat. He tried to forget his thirst by thinking about the Frenchman who had used the name of Tillier. That was the man who had placed him, he was convinced. What could the Frenchman know, and how much? He had seen that face, briefly, and only once. Where? Not on his visit to police headquarters, of that he was sure now. Not on Tuesday morning, then, but very close to that time. Tuesday afternoon had been the meeting at Mimi’s, with Rosie and Jim Partridge. No, later than that, but still around Tuesday... The evening, the late evening—at the club called Le Happening? Stagehands, waiters, doorman... and the man who had come from the rear of the building, when the narcotics raid started—a janitor of some kind, fair-haired, wearing torn overalls over a dirty undershirt. Yes, that was the man. He had mixed into the crowd of employees being gathered together backstage. I was just leaving, Duclos remembered. If he had quick-enough eyes to note my face and a good-enough memory to report it once the raid was over and he was freed, then one thing is sure—he was no ordinary janitor.
My God, he thought, how could one small thing like that trip me up? There must have been something else to add to it. Where did I make another mistake? Or was it chance?
He had plenty of time to try to think his way through that puzzle. For most of the night in the cold black room, he sat hunched over his thoughts. Now and again he would break away from them, rise, walk around, bend and stretch to get the chill out of his bones. Twice he lifted himself up to window level, but there was nothing to see; no lights, not even a night animal. He couldn’t even guess where he was.
He must have dozed off. He awoke in bright daylight to find that a hunk of brown bread and a paper cup of coffee had been left on the floor just inside the door. It was the closing of the door that had wakened him. He ate some of the bread—it tasted sour—and drank the lukewarm coffee, heavy with its fine grounds. Still, it was liquid of a kind. His thirst was half-quenched. But in five minutes he slumped into sleep. The drug lasted twenty-four hours. When he awoke, he saw the same bright sunshine coming through the small barred window. At first, he thought he had been asleep for an hour or so, perhaps less, and that it was still Monday morning. Then he had his doubts; he had slept too deeply. He felt too exhausted.
Outside, there was nothing but the lonely field, a few sea gulls wheeling with their harsh cries over the edge of the land, and far off-shore two ships and a fishing boat. They disappeared out of his view as he clung to the strong bars, and then there was nothing on the shimmering blue water. Greece could be as lonely as Brittany, he thought, as he lowered himself back on to the wooden bed. Lonelier, he added grimly. There was no escape from this room. His only chance might come when they took him out for questioning, or when that door was opened again. He sat down facing it, to wait and get some strength back into his body.
In the late afternoon, when the sun had left the room but still struck sidewise across the field and the sea, the door opened just enough to let food and drink be set on the floor. Duclos jumped for the handle, tried to force the door farther open but it was chained from the outside. He heard the Greek call out a warning, “André! André!” The Frenchman answered angrily as he rushed to help pull the door shut. So they were both on guard, still bickering with each other, and the Frenchman was called André. That was all he had achieved, Duclos thought, that and the spilling of the coffee.
&
nbsp; The dark liquid lay thick and puddled at his feet. He knelt, dipped a finger in the mudlike grounds and tasted gingerly. Yes, something had been added to the coffee, something to scatter his brains still more. There was a lump of goat cheese on the bread, this time. It smelled so sour that it could disguise anything, so he threw it out the window. The bread—was it also doctored? They might leave one thing uncontaminated, just to entice him to trust everything. But hungry as he was, he didn’t risk it. He threw the bread out, too, and ended all temptation. The only weapon he had was his brains. He had better keep them working.
He had guessed right about the prepared supper, for when the sun had set and the dusk was darkening into night they came to get him. As the door was unlocked and the chain rattled, he had time to slip the pellet carefully into the side of his mouth between the cheek and the lower gum. It was comfortable enough, hardly noticeable even to him. The Greek came into the room, nodded as if he had expected to find Duclos inert and helpless, pulled the Frenchman to his feet. This is how I will play it, Duclos thought. He staggered, let himself be supported unresisting to the door.