Something was happening.
Wills checked the clip in his Schmeisser. Then he hunkered down in the black pit of shadow between a wall and a cypress tree, and waited.
Time passed. There was only the thyme-scented breeze, and the night, and whatever devilry they were hatching on the other side of the marshes. Earlier, in his dazed wanderings, Wills had not cared whether he lived or died. He had lost his ship, and his men, and he was far, far out on the most precarious of limbs.
But since he had recovered enough to notice Clytemnestra, he was interested in living again. Of course it was never easy to work out how women thought, not if you had gone straight from Wellington to Dartmouth and then active service. But he did have the definite impression that she was not … well, averse to his company. She was a remarkable girl. A really spiffing girl –
Something descended on his mouth like a huge, soft leather cushion. A hand. Another hand came on the nape of his neck, and his chin was lifted until it would lift no further, and it dawned on Wills in a spasm of absolute horror that these hands did not care that this was as far as the chin went, they were going to go on lifting until his neck broke, and that would be the end of him –
‘Hands up!’ said a voice in Greek. A woman’s voice. There was the metallic sound of a cocking lever. The hands relaxed.
Wills fell forward on to the parapet, groping for his Schmeisser. ‘Back off,’ he said. Then, remembering, ‘Jolly boating –’
‘Captain Wills,’ said a voice he recognized: a soft voice that might have been a purr or a growl, there was no way of being sure. Andrea’s voice. ‘Captain Wills, you should not sit in a place where you can be seen against the sky.’
‘Go away,’ said the woman’s voice. Clytemnestra’s voice. ‘Leave him alone, you great stupid ox.’ She was beside Wills now, cradling his head in her hands. ‘Can’t you tell who is on your side and who isn’t? Are you blind?’
‘Understandable error,’ said Wills, checking that his head was still there. ‘Bit of luck you were coming out of the church, though.’
Clytemnestra snorted. ‘Do you think I would leave you alone in the night?’ she said. ‘I have been watching you for the past two hours.’ She put an arm around his waist. ‘If you can’t look after yourself, someone else will have to.’
Andrea cleared his throat. ‘I hate to interrupt,’ he said. ‘But tell me, how much did you know about the life and habits of your late brother?’
In the view of Josef Koch, this island was a filthy place. Only a week ago, he had been pleased. After a winter chasing partisans around Yugoslavia the prospect of a little sun, sand and sea had been very enticing. But once he was actually here it had all gone wrong, thought Koch, hauling at the wheel, dragging the lorry’s bonnet round yet another hairpin bend. The people on this island had the temperament of angry hornets, and most of the women had moustaches. If they were not fighting you, they were fighting each other. The Wehrmacht were bloody useless. The boffins were boffins: bloody useless too. Josef Koch’s mind floated back to happier times: Bosnia, a wood with half-a-dozen partisans wired to the trees, him and a couple of privates slinging a rope over a branch, setting up the seesaw: a novelty, the seesaw, a thing of Josef’s own invention. The idea was that the terrorist stood on one end of the seesaw, and Josef stood on the other. Josef was a big man: fat, some called him, if they dared. The terrorist, of course, had a noose round his neck tied to the branch above. The idea was that the private soldiers would tell Josef jokes, and try to make him laugh so he lost his balance, and the terrorist’s end of the plank went down, leaving the terrorist kicking, but not alive, not after five minutes, anyway. The other thing Josef liked to do was walk towards the terrorist, so the terrorist’s weight brought the plank down slowly, slowly, tightened the noose round the neck, while all the while Josef explained the error of the terrorist’s ways, and the terrorist died, twisting and jerking on the rope, looking into Josef’s thick-lipped grin and bulging, pink-veined eyes. It was fantastic, the fun you could have with a simple plank. Though obviously the terrorists did not enjoy it so much.
Josef sighed. He liked hanging people. He had had a goodish time in Parmatia last week, but that had been a small-scale operation. It sounded like there would be more such work soon, though. There had been fighting in the mountains, and trouble at the works, and … well, the Boss was severely ticked off, and when the Boss was ticked off, the best place to be was far away. So it was absolutely no hardship for Josef Koch to be driving this truck, on the Boss’s orders, down the coast road to Parmatia to bring back some suspected partisan sympathizers from the lockup.
Next bend. Haul the wheel, change down a gear, foot flat on throttle –
There was a stone in the road. More a boulder, really. Josef stamped on the brake. The lorry halted. That was another thing you got, on this island. Lumps of mountain all over the road. There was a crowbar in the back. Sighing, Josef opened the door, swung his legs out, and slid down from the cab.
That was when the peculiar thing happened.
As his boots hit the road, he found himself grabbed from behind, scruff of neck and seat of pants. All of a sudden he had no control over his own destiny. A boot landed with shattering violence on his back, and the dark ground was passing at horrid speed under his eyes as he headed for the verge.
Not that there was a verge.
At the edge of the road was a strip of loose stones, on which the Feldwebel bounced once, face first. Beyond the strip of stones was silence, moving air, and far below, the shift of the sea.
The Feldwebel found that he was falling down a cliff. He screamed. The scream lasted exactly the time it took to fall two hundred feet on to sharp rocks.
On the road, the lorry stood, engine purring. Andrea helped Wills drag the driver’s mate to the side of the road and roll him over into the dark, while Clytemnestra wiped the blade of her long knife on a tuft of dry grass. The driver’s mate had bled surprisingly little. Wills possessed himself of the man’s camouflage smock and took the wheel. Clytemnestra climbed into the middle, and Andrea squeezed his mighty bulk in next to her, lit a cigarette, and slumped back, hands on the grips of his machine pistol. ‘Parmatia,’ he said.
Beyond the windscreen, the world began to move, white stone, pine and juniper, cliff and gorge, gleaming in the light of the blacked-out headlights. The dark puddle on the road behind faded into the blackness of the night.
They headed for Parmatia.
From the top of the ladder in the house by the Acropolis church, Miller could see Mallory at the door. The knocking persisted. Carstairs was up through the hole in the ceiling now. Miller hauled up the ladder, fast. As he pulled its foot through the hole, the door opened, loosing a flood of blue-white light into the squalid ground floor. It picked out straw, rubbish, and Mallory. Mallory with his hands on his hips, glaring at the three soldiers outside, Schmeissers levelled: Mallory shouting in German, walking towards them, out into the light …
And that was the last Miller saw of him, because the ladder was up and he was lifting it to the next ceiling, where there was another hole. The floor creaked alarmingly as Spiro headed for the ladder. Miller picked out the joists with a pencil flashlight, shooed Carstairs to the ladder foot, then went after him. Spiro was already climbing, at a speed truly remarkable in one so recently bedridden. Carstairs went after him, more groggily.
At the top, they were in a low attic, whose ceiling was the underside of the roof tiles. ‘Leave the ladder,’ said Miller, and started to push aside the heavy clay half-cylinders. After five minutes’ steady work, his head broke through, and he was spitting worm-eaten beam and ancient bamboo lining into the night air.
In front of him was a low white parapet. Beyond the parapet was the roof of the church, sweeping at one end up to the cupola, and at the other to a belfry, open to the air, with a three-foot parapet running around its edge. The belfry would be accessible from the church, as well as over the roof.
Miller very much lik
ed the look of the belfry.
He took off more tiles, scrambled through the roof, and pulled the other men after him. Then he replaced the tiles, and led them across the parapet to the dark slope of the church roof.
‘Shit,’ said Spiro. ‘I don’ likes highness.’
‘It’s not high,’ said Miller.
‘Looks high to me,’ said Spiro.
‘Go,’ said Miller.
‘No,’ said Spiro.
It was quite obvious to Miller that the Greek meant what he said. Hard to blame the guy, really. He had done plenty already, and everyone drew the line somewhere.
Pity it was right here, though.
Something barged Miller aside. It was Carstairs: Carstairs with something held out in front of him, something with a faint sheen under the stars. A very faint sheen: the sheen of the blued-steel blade of a killing knife, nine inches of razor-sharp unpleasantness. ‘Ow!’ said Spiro.
Carstairs said, ‘Listen, greasy boy. You heard what he said.’ His arm moved slightly.
‘Ow!’ said Spiro again.
‘We don’t really need you any more,’ said Carstairs. ‘So you give me one good reason to stop me carving out your nasty yellow liver.’
Miller was shocked. He did not, however, intervene.
Spiro became lost in deep thought for about three and a half seconds. Then he started to scuttle up the church roof like an overweight monkey.
Carstairs went after him. Miller followed, moving slow and careful. The roof seemed to be in doubtful condition. There was a nasty springiness to it, a suggestion of sag. Mindful of the fifty-foot drop to a hard stone floor that lay below it, Miller found himself holding his breath.
The belfry parapet loomed invitingly ahead. But they were moving out of the shadow now, and between them and the parapet lay a brilliant wedge of floodlit tiles. Spiro did not like the look of it. His pace was slowing perceptibly. He had chosen a bad place to slow down, because they had moved some distance along the roof, and below the eaves of the church was no longer the crumbling shelter of the priest’s house, but the village square. And in the village square, a squad of German soldiers was standing. All it took was for one of them to look up –
‘Go!’ said Carstairs.
Spiro froze.
Carstairs pulled out his dreadful knife and prodded the Greek’s foot. Spiro squeaked, scuttled like lightning up the roof and hauled himself over the parapet. His short legs waved for a moment in the air. Then he vanished. Safe.
Not safe.
In his last frantic scuffle, Spiro had dislodged a tile. It started slowly. It accelerated, rattling down the floodlit section of the roof. Miller stuck out a hand and made a grab for it. For a moment he thought he had it. But Greek roof tiles are heavy affairs, made with plenty of good solid clay, and no human fingertips can restrain one once it has got the bit of gravity between its teeth.
Miller watched that tile loop out into space and fall, tumbling over and over, towards the cobbles of the square where the squad of soldiers stood, only needing to look up.
When Mallory opened the door, light flooded in. There were three soldiers outside, rifles at the ready. Mallory looked them scornfully up and down. ‘What the bloody hell is all the noise about?’ he said, in a German pregnant with the accents of Heidelberg University, where in his pre-war climbing days he had indeed spent six months.
‘Orders to search the house,’ said one of the privates, squinting at this nasty-looking SS Leutnant, with shadowy hollows on his face and a rifle slung negligently over his shoulder.
‘I’ve already searched it,’ said Mallory. One of the soldiers opened his mouth to speak. ‘Give me that gun,’ said Mallory.
The man handed over his rifle without hesitation. Mallory looked it over with the scorn of an epicure who has found a dead rat in his soup. He pulled the bolt out of the rifle and threw it on to the ground. ‘It stinks!’ he said. ‘Clean it! Now get out of my way!’ He marched into the square.
There were a lot of soldiers: a terrible lot of soldiers. Mallory found himself seriously worried. A good search would certainly land them all in trouble. Carstairs he had little confidence in, besides which the man was woozy from his bang on the head. Spiro was a charming personality, but not what you would call a natural athlete. Miller would look after himself. But with that much dead weight round his neck, he was going to need all the help he could get.
Mallory marched briskly across the square, up the street towards the village gates, and turned sharply into Athenai Street where they had made rendezvous. The houses were dark and ruinous. At the end, the cliff face was a pit of blackness in the night. Settling the rifle firmly on his back, Mallory started to climb.
The cliff was steep but pocked with steps and holds where stone had been cut to build the village. Mallory went up until he was looking down on the rooftops illuminated by the blue-white lights mounted on the cliff face. He considered getting above those lights, sixty feet above him now. But he had a feeling that just for the minute, he might be better off below them. He moved along a ledge – a ledge to him, anyway; to anyone else, it was no more than a thread-fine irregularity in the face of the rock – until he came to a broad crack, sunk in black shadow. Into this he fitted himself, and stood invisible.
Below, the roofs of the village shone livid in the floodlights. The streets were stripes of violet-black, except for the square, a handkerchief of naked white under the stars.
In that white rectangle little black shapes moved, precise, mechanical movements, pairs attaching to other pairs to make bigger blocks, which in turn fragmented …
Mallory knew that what he was watching was a search of the town. And what was being searched for was him, Spiro, Carstairs, and Miller –
Something caught his eye. Behind the church was the priest’s house, leaning against the bigger building like a small, drunken man holding on to a fat wife. There was movement on the church roof.
Mallory watched the little figures wait by the parapet, saw the first of them – Spiro, it was – move haltingly towards the triangle of light that lay over the tiles. He unslung the Mauser and put it to his shoulder. Spiro swam into the sight’s circle; Spiro hesitant, Carstairs at his heel, jabbing. Mallory saw the tiles rock as Spiro pressed on. He saw the tile come free, accelerate, check as Miller got his fingers to it, carry on. The palms of his hands were suddenly damp with sweat. He panned the sight down. A line of German soldiers stood under the eaves of the church, at attention, listening to some officer or other, barking orders. The cross-hairs of the sight settled on the helmet of the soldier closest to the church wall. Mallory squeezed the trigger.
All hell broke loose.
The steel helmet flew off the head and smacked into the church wall. The soldier slammed flat on the cobbles, a dark patch of blood spreading around his ruined head. The report of the rifle rolled like thunder on the flat, hard faces of the buildings. Even before the echoes died, Mallory had his Schmeisser in the firing position and was hosing the square with bullets, the stabbing spear of flame from the gun’s muzzle saying here I am, here I am, up here on this cliff.
Down in the square grey bodies rolled and crawled and shouted, taking cover. There was fire coming up from the square now, sporadic bursts, ill-directed, but focused loosely on the crevice in which Mallory was hiding.
But Mallory was no longer there. He had moved away, upwards, in the shadows. Now he was approaching the lights. Below, the village seethed and muttered like a cauldron. Seventy feet above the place he had fired from, he paused and looked down. In the belfry of the church, he glimpsed three heads; visible only from above, those heads.
And what with one thing and another, nobody had noticed anything as trivial as the fall of a tile from a church roof.
Mallory moved on, shoulders and feet, up the crack in the rock. Above him the cliff soared for ever into the wild, cool dark. Below him, the village swarmed like an ants’ nest stirred with a stick. Someone was firing tracer, the rounds smacking the
rock face and spinning away into the dark until it must have seemed that there were forty men up here, so more men opened fire from the town …
Really, thought Mallory, climbing fast and steady, it was a deplorable lapse of discipline. But he had no illusions. Soon the brilliant organization of the German army would reassert itself, and life would become even more difficult and dangerous than it was at the moment.
For him, anyway. The men in the village should be left alone: the Germans would assume that the whole squad was on the cliffs of the Acropolis. All he had to do was keep moving, draw away the pursuit.
Keep moving.
For a moment he hung on the face of the cliff and thought of the precipice above him, crag on crag, a couple of thousand feet to be conquered against gravity. He could taste the old cigarettes in his throat, feel the grit of sleeplessness in his eyes, feel the weary ache of continuous action in his bones. The Benzedrine had worn off. If he took any more, he would be seeing things …
Better to see things than to fall off.
Mallory took two of the pills out of the foil and swallowed them. Then, wearily, he began to haul himself up the wall. Forty feet above, he found what he was looking for.
He was on a level with the lights. Bullets still whined and spanged around him, but nobody was aiming. Between the spots of brilliance was only darkness, and it was in that darkness that he existed, anonymous.
He paused, eyeing the face. He could already feel the jump of the Benzedrine at his stomach, his blood beginning to fizz.