by Eric Ambler
“It’s no good, Zaleshoff, I…”
But he misunderstood me. “We’ll talk later,” he bellowed. “Get on with it.”
He got down on to the step above me. I could feel his knees pressing against my shoulder-blades. I moved down to the bottom step. Now I could see the wheels as they ran screaming over the rails of the curve. I watched them, fascinated. They reminded me irresistibly of bacon-slicing machines. As a boy I had seen a man cut off half his thumb with one of those machines. Grease was oozing out of one of the axle-boxes. Something poked me sharply in the back. It was Zaleshoff’s toe.
“Go on!” he yelled.
I straightened my back, flexed my legs and swung one foot forward slightly. Then I hesitated again. No, I couldn’t do it. We were going too fast. If the train would slow down a little more… but it seemed to be gathering speed now. Then Zaleshoff’s toe jabbed me again. I drew a deep breath, clenched my teeth and jumped.
The next moment the ground was flailing the soles of my shoes with astounding force. I felt myself pitching forward on my face and put out my arms to save myself. My legs strove madly to reach the speed of the rest of my body. But not for long. A bare second later I had tripped. Just in time I remembered Zaleshoff’s advice and let myself go limp. I saw the ground sliding past sideways. Then I hit the edge of the embankment.
The impact nearly stunned me, and before I could stop myself I was tumbling down the side of the embankment. I came to rest at the bottom of it against the concrete stanchion of a barbed-wire fence. For several moments I stayed there, winded. Then, very gingerly, I got to my feet and began to dust myself down. Zaleshoff came scrambling diagonally down the embankment from the point at which he had finished up twenty yards or so away.
“Are you all right?”
I was still short of breath, but I managed a rather quavering affirmative.
“Through the fence,” he panted urgently, as he came up, “we can clean up as we go.”
“What’s the matter?”
“The guard saw us,” he said curtly; “that means that he’ll report the fact at Brescia. We daren’t go into Treviglio.”
“Well, where are we going?”
“We’ll see when we get there. Come on.”
We wormed our way through the fence and set off in silence to skirt the ploughed field. The sun was beginning to go down behind the trees on the horizon when we eventually got on to a road. We turned right, away from Treviglio. Twenty minutes later we walked into a small village. Next to the post office there was a caffe-ristorante.
“This’ll do,” said Zaleshoff.
We went inside and sat down.
“Well,” I said, “what now?” I was feeling tired and shaken.
“We eat and we share a decent bottle of wine if they’ve got one. Then we get down to business.”
The place was small and not too clean. There was a zinc-topped bar and four marble-topped tables covered with white paper napkins. The wall behind the bar consisted of shelves packed tight with bottles. On the other walls were Cinzano posters, a lithograph of Mussolini and a poster advertising Capri. The proprietor was a phlegmatic middle-aged man with a long, greying moustache and amazingly grimy hands. He did not seem in the least surprised by our presence, a fact which I found curious until it came out in the course of our brief conversation with him that he assumed that we were something to do with a mineral water factory close by. We did not correct this impression.
We ate spaghetti and a great deal of bread and drank a tolerable Barbera. By the time the coffee arrived I was feeling very much better. Zaleshoff summoned the proprietor and ordered a bottle of cognac.
“We can’t drink all that,” I protested.
“We’re not going to drink any of it now. But we shall be glad of it later.”
I did not understand him, but I nodded.
“What about sleeping? Do you think this man can put us up? You know, you might just as well have chucked the case overboard just before we jumped off ourselves. We should have had at least one pair of pyjamas between us.”
He dropped three lumps of sugar into his coffee one by one. “We aren’t going to need pyjamas. To-night we’re walking.”
“Walking? Where?”
“Listen. By the morning this district will be thick with police in and out of uniform. We wouldn’t be able to move a yard. If we put up for the night anywhere they’ll want to see your passport. You haven’t got one.”
“I’ve got my permit.”
He snorted. “And a fat lot of good that’ll do you. Don’t you realise that the particulars on that permit, including your name, go straight to the police?”
“Dammit, we’ve got to sleep somewhere?” I cried.
“Maybe we can have a nap somewhere to-morrow.”
“Thanks very much,” I said sarcastically. Then I became serious. “Look here, Zaleshoff, it’s very decent of you to try to help me like this, but I do think that my original idea was better.”
He sighed. “I’ve told you once. Your Consulate won’t lift a finger to help you. If they did, they might compromise themselves. If you were innocent and the victim of an obvious frame-up, they might do something. But you’re not innocent-at least, technically you’re not. You’re as guilty as hell, and they can rake up the evidence to prove it.”
“But supposing there’s no question of a charge of espionage?”
“Do you think,” he said patiently, “that they’d bother to issue a warrant for your arrest just for bribery? Don’t make me laugh! If they started anything like that, the prisons would be overflowing in a week and most of the top men would be in them. Look here: we know that they’ve got on to that poste restante set-up of yours with Vagas. There’s very little doubt that Madame Vagas gave them the whole works. That means that they’ve got hold of the report I wrote. Do you remember that you didn’t think much of it? Well, I told you it was dynamite and dynamite it is. You saw how Vagas reacted to it. Well, believe me, that would be nothing to the way the contra-espionage department of the Organizzazione Vigilanza Repressione Anti-fascismo would react when they saw it. I’m not a good gambler, but I would not mind betting heavy money that at this very moment there’s enough sweating going on among the big boys in Milan and Rome to float that new battle-cruiser of theirs. And they let Vagas slip through their fingers. They must be kicking themselves good and plenty. But they’re not going to make the same mistake twice. They’re going to get you or bust themselves trying.”
“I don’t see why I should be so important.”
“No? The first thing they’d do, they’ve certainly done it by now, is to descend in a cloud on the Turin factory where those aircraft lifts are being made, to discover just how the leakage of information took place and how much you found out.”
“But I haven’t even been there.”
“Just so. You haven’t been there. You must have got the information from somewhere else. And the rest of the information in that report was stale before you arrived in the country, so you couldn’t have got that by yourself either. In other words, they’re going to tumble like a sack of potatoes to what’s being put across them. That’s why you’ve got to get out of the country, and pretty damn quick.”
For a bit I said nothing. I was impressed; very much so. I could feel something cold gripping at my insides. “Pretty damn quick.” There was a horrible urgency about those three ugly little words. I saw, suddenly, the naked realities of the mess I was in. My mind involuntarily turned away from them. Heavens, what a mess! If only…
I began to regret, to try and rearrange things in a more pleasing pattern. Finally I began to argue with Zaleshoff in an effort to get him somehow to modify his conclusions. I wanted him to minimise the danger. It was a plain case of funk, and it deceived him not at all.
“It’s no use,” he said at last. “I’m not going to call black pale-grey just because you’d like it better that way. You’re in a spot. I think I can get you out of it. I’ll do all I can to do so
because I reckon I did a good deal to get you into it. But you’ll have to do as I say. It isn’t going to be easy. If we have to lose a night or two’s sleep it’ll be just too bad, but you’ll have to put up with it. If that’s all we lose before we’re through, I reckon we shall have done swell.”
I did not like the sound of that at all.
“Well, anyway,” I said with feeble heartiness, “the worst that can come of it is a nice stay in prison.”
It was as much a question as a statement. I was afraid, as soon as I had said it, that he would answer the question, and he did.
“Prison? Yes-maybe.”
“What do you mean by ‘maybe’?”
“They have a formula for these things hereabouts. It’s called ‘shot while attempting to evade arrest.’ ”
“And if you don’t attempt to evade arrest?”
“Then,” he said calmly, “they make you kneel down. Then they put a bullet through the back of your neck and call it ‘shot while escaping.’ ”
I laughed, not very convincingly, but I laughed. I decided that he was trying to frighten me.
“Newspaper talk!” I said.
He shrugged. “My friend, when you’re above the law, when you are the law, the phrase about ends justifying means has a real meaning. Put yourself in their place. If you felt that the state which you worshipped above your God was endangered by the life of one insignificant man, would you hesitate to have him shot? I can tell you that you wouldn’t. That’s the danger of Fascism, of state-worship. It supposes an absolute, an egocentric unit. The idea of the state is not rooted in the masses, it is not of the people. It is an abstract, a God-idea, a psychic dung-hill raised to shore up an economic system that is no longer safe. When you’re on the top of that sort of dung-hill, it doesn’t matter whether the ends are in reality good or bad. The fact that they are your ends makes them good-for you.”
But I was scarcely listening to him. I was trying to sort out the confusion of my thoughts. Claire! what would she have done? But Claire was not there. In any case, she would have been too wise to have involved herself in such an affair. I tried to strike out along a new line, but eventually I found that it turned back on itself. I was thinking in circles. In desperation I turned again to Zaleshoff.
He was busily crushing a lump of sugar in the bottom of his coffee cup.
“Tell me what you propose.”
He looked at me quickly. Then he put the spoon down, put his hand in his pocket and drew out a small map of Northern Italy. He spread it on the table in front of me. With his pencil he indicated a point north-east of Treviglio.
“We’re just about here. Now we could make for Como and the Swiss frontier. But if we did that we’d be doing precisely what they’ll expect us to do. Even if we got as far as Como, the lake patrols would get us. I propose that we make for the Yugo-Slav frontier between Fusine and Kranjska. We can go most of the way by night trains, so that we can sleep. In the daytime we can double on our tracks across country and pick up the railway at another point. Now, that’s going to cost money. Trains here are expensive unless you have the tourist discount, and we can’t very well claim that. I’ve got a bit more than you, but it only makes about fifteen hundred lire between us. That’s not enough. Before we leave here I shall telephone Tamara and tell her to get some money to Udine. Then we’ll make cross-country for the railway where it runs south of Lake Garda at Desenzano. What do you think about it?”
There was a pause.
“Well,” I said grimly, “if you really want to know, I think it’s one of the most remarkable pieces of understatement I’ve ever listened to. It sounds like a Sunday-school treat. Auntie Alice will distribute the buns at Udine.”
His brows knitted. He opened his mouth and drew breath to speak.
“But,” I went on firmly, “we’ll leave that side of it out for the moment. What I want to know is why on earth you should choose the Yugo-Slav frontier. What about the French? What about the German?”
He shrugged. “That’s precisely what they’ll say.”
“I see. The French, Swiss and German frontiers are going to be stiff with guards, but the Yugo-Slav frontier’s going to be like the Sahara Desert. Is that right?”
He frowned. “I didn’t say that.”
“No,” I retorted angrily, “but you wish you could. I suppose the fact that we’re going to make for the Yugo-Slav frontier wouldn’t have anything to do with the fact that Vagas is in Belgrade would it? or with the fact that, as I haven’t got a passport, I could not get into Yugo-Slavia from France or Switzerland or Germany without swearing affidavits and heaven knows what else in London first?”
He reddened. “There’s no need to get hot under the collar about it.”
I spluttered furiously. “Hot under the collar! Dammit, Zaleshoff, there are limits…”
He leaned forward eagerly.
“Wait a minute! Don’t forget that you’ve got close on two hundred and fifty dollars to collect from Vagas. It would look perfectly natural for you to make for Belgrade to collect them. For all he knows, you may be flat broke. You will be, anyway, by the time you get to Belgrade. Besides, what difference does it make? If they catch you, you won’t get much change out of them by explaining that you’d decided, after all, not to cause them any more trouble. You started a good job of work. Why not finish it?”
I regarded him sullenly. “I made a fool of myself once. I see no reason why I should do so again.”
He stared at the tablecloth. “You realise, don’t you,” he said slowly, “that without me to help you, you’ll be sunk? You haven’t got enough money. You’ll be caught inside forty-eight hours. You do realise that?”
“I’m not going to wait to be caught.”
He still stared at the tablecloth.
“Nothing will induce you to change your mind?”
“Nothing,” I said decidedly.
But I was wrong.
The proprietor was out of the room, but in the corner of the bar a radio had been quietly churning out an Argentine tango. Suddenly the music stopped. There was a faint hiss from the loudspeaker. Then the announcer started speaking:
“ We interrupt this programme at the request of the Ministry of the Interior to request that all persons keep watch for a foreigner who has escaped from the jurisdiction of the Milan police. He is wanted in connection with grave charges of importance to every loyal Italian. A reward of ten thousand lire, ten thousand lire, will be paid to anyone giving information as to his movements. He is believed to be in the vicinity of Treviglio. He may attempt to pass himself off as an Englishman named Nicholas Marlow. Here is a description of the man…”
Zaleshoff walked over to the instrument and twisted the dial to another station. He returned to the table but did not sit down.
“That’s not a bad price, Marlow, not at all a bad price! They’re doing you proud.”
I did not answer.
He sighed. “Well, I suppose you’ll be wanting the local police post. I wish you joy of it.”
Except for the radio, there was silence in the room. I was conscious that he had walked across the room and was examining the Capri poster.
“If you’re going to telephone your sister before we leave,” I said slowly, “you’d better do it now, hadn’t you?”
I was staring at my empty plate. When I felt his hand on my shoulder, I jumped.
“Nice work, pal!”
I shrugged. “I have no choice.”
“No,” he said softly, “you have no choice.”
14
CROSS-COUNTRY
Zaleshoff was not gone long.
“There’ll be five thousand lire for us at Udine when we get there,” he said when he got back.
“But what about your sister?”
“She’s got some things to clear up, then she’s leaving for Belgrade to keep a line on Vagas. She’ll meet us there.”
“You’ve got everything planned beautifully, haven’t you?” I said, not wi
thout bitterness.
“Naturally. It’s better that way.”
He paid the bill and we set out.
For a quarter of a mile or so we retraced our steps; then we struck out in a north-easterly direction.
It was a cold night and cloudy. I was wearing a thin overcoat and I had no scarf; but the pace that Zaleshoff set soon made up for those deficiencies.
To begin with we exchanged a few desultory remarks. Soon we fell silent. Our footsteps grated in unison on the flinty road. My mind seemed with my fingers to have gone numb. I felt emotionally exhausted. All that I was conscious of for a time was a dim, unreasoning resentment of Zaleshoff. He was responsible. But for him, I should be sleeping comfortably in my room at the Parigi. I thought, absurdly, of a favourite shirt I had left among my things there. I should never see that again. I tried to remember where in London I had bought it. Perhaps they wouldn’t have any more shirts like that. Zaleshoff’s fault. Useless to tell myself that Zaleshoff had done no more than make suggestions, that what I was paying for now was the fit of bravado, of temper which had led me that night in Zaleshoff’s office to telephone Vagas. Zaleshoff was the villain of the piece.
Out of the corners of my eyes I glanced at him. I could see him in dim outline, his hands in his pockets, his shoulders hunched, plodding along beside me. I wondered if he was conscious of my dislike, of my mistrust of him. He probably was. He did not miss very much.
And then I had a sudden revulsion of feeling. It was not true to say that I disliked him; you could not dislike him. I felt suddenly that I wanted to put out my hand and touch his arm and shake it to show that I bore him no ill-will. I wondered idly, unemotionally, if, had Vagas already received my second report, or had Zaleshoff been able to transmit it to him in any other way but through me, I should have been helped in this way. Probably not. I should have been left negligently to my fate. Zaleshoff was a Soviet agent-I had come without effort to take that fact for granted-and he had his work to do, he had the business of his extraordinary government to attend to. I supposed that, strictly speaking, I, too, was a servant of that government. Oddly enough, I found that idea no worse than curious. Vagas’ suggestion that I was a servant of his government I had found highly-distasteful. Perhaps that was because I liked Zaleshoff and disliked Vagas, or because one had paid me and the other had merely offered to do so. Still, it was odd. After all, I had no particular feelings about either of their countries. I knew neither of them. When I thought of Germany I thought of parades, of swastika banners flapping from tall poles, of loudspeakers, of stout field marshals and goose-stepping men with steel helmets, of concentration camps. When I thought of Russia I thought of dark, stupid Romanoffs, of the Winter Palace, of Cossacks, of crowds streaming in terror, of canopied priests swinging censers, of Lenin and Stalin, of grain rippling in the breeze, of the Lubianka prison. Yes, it was odd. I found suddenly that we were slowing down. Then Zaleshoff cleared his throat and muttered that we turned right. We passed the fork in the road and increased our speed again. The moon shone for a moment through a thin patch in the drifting clouds, then disappeared again. In the darkness the silence walked with us like a ghost.
