The Donkey Rustlers

by Gerald Malcolm Durrell

  “Let’s go up the hill where we can see the road and watch for them coming back,” said David, “because I should think they’ll come back by taxi.”

  So they trooped up to the top of the hill and Yani climbed up into the branches of the olive tree (where he had watched for the arrival of the children) and the children lay in the shade below. After what seemed an interminable time, Yani suddenly said: “They’re coming! I can see the dust! They’re coming!”

  He scrambled down out of the olive and the children made their way hurriedly to the main square of the village.

  “The Mayor’s coming back. The Mayor’s coming back,” shouted Amanda and immediately the villagers flocked into the square.

  The police car drew to a shuddering halt in the centre of the square with an impressive screaming of brakes and discharged its motley cargo.

  “Now,” said the Inspector, patting the brief-case that he had brought with him, “I must have a suitable place where I can interview witnesses.”

  Two café tables were immediately joined together and a white cloth procured which was spread over them. The Inspector took his place at these and carefully unpacked from his brief-case a magnificent array of criminal-catching devices, which greatly impressed the villagers. There was his magnifying glass, a small ink pad and some paper for taking finger-prints, a camera for photographing clues and — perhaps the best of all — six pairs of handcuffs, The three policemen had, meanwhile, been busy tying up the two hunting dogs. They then relaxed in the shade and were plied with drinks by the villagers, while they listened reverently to Inspector Prometheous Steropes conducting the case.

  “Now,” said the Inspector, “to question the witnesses.”

  “But there aren’t any witnesses,” the Mayor pointed out, “nobody saw it happen.”

  “But there was this fellow Kouzos,” said the Inspector, narrowing his eyes. “Didn’t you say he saw something?”

  “But he saw Vyraclos,” protested Papa Yorgo. “That was quite different.”

  The Inspector leant forward and fixed Papa Yorgo with a piercing gaze.

  “And how do you know,” he inquired, “that this Vyraclos he saw wasn’t a Communist disguised as Vyraclos?”

  A ripple of delight spread through the crowd. What astuteness of mind! What brilliance of detection! Why hadn’t they thought of that? The Inspector smiled a small, grim smile, the smile of a detective from whom nothing was hidden.

  “That hadn’t occurred to you, had it?” he said with satisfaction. “Bring the man Kouzos here.”

  Eager hands pushed Kouzos from the back of the crowd to the front where he stood in front of the table trembling slightly with awe at the majesty of the law.

  “Now,” said the Inspector, “tell me exactly what happened.”

  “He heard a noise late at night —” began Papa Yorgo.

  “If you please,” said the Inspector holding up a hand, “I would like the witness to tell his own story.”

  “I heard a noise late at night,” began Kouzos in a trembling voice, “and being a man of intrepid disposition I immediately seized my shotgun and my lantern and went out to investigate.”

  “What kind of shotgun was it?” inquired the Inspector.

  “A double-barrel twelve bore,” said Kouzos.

  The Inspector wrote this down with every evidence of satisfaction.

  “It’s important,” he said, “not to overlook a single fact in a case like this. For all we know, the shotgun might turn out to be a vital clue. Well, go on.”

  “I shouted out, ‘Who’s there? Stand still or I’ll drill you full of holes’,” said Kouzos.

  “It would have been very unwise of you to do that,” remarked the Inspector severely, “I might have had to arrest you for murder. Go on.”

  “From behind a tree leaped this — this thing,” said Kouzos, “with huge horns and a huge tail and shaggy legs like a goat.”

  “Did it have hooves?” inquired the Inspector. “Yes,” said Kouzos eagerly. “Huge hooves,” The Inspector made a note of this.

  “And then?” he said.

  “And then it said, ‘Kouzos, I have come for your soul and to suck your blood’,” said Kouzos, crossing himself.

  “To which you replied?” inquired the Inspector.

  “Saint Polycarpos preserve me from Vyraclos,” said Kouzos.

  “Very right and proper,” said the Inspector. He sat back and pulled his curved pipe out of his pocket and tapped it thoughtfully against his teeth.

  “It was obviously a good disguise,” he said at last. “Otherwise you would have known it was a Communist. Wouldn’t you?”

  “But of course,” agreed Kouzos. “My family have always been well known for their eyesight.”

  “Well now,” said the Inspector, “the first thing to do is to go and examine the place where you saw it.”

  Picking up his magnifying glass he strode off towards Kouzos’s house, closely followed by the entranced villagers of Kalanero.

  The way he had conducted the case so far had fascinated the children. Indeed, Amanda was hard put not to have a fit of giggles. When the Inspector, accompanied by the entire village, got to Kouzos’s house, he clenched his pipe between his teeth and surveyed the area majestically.

  “Whereabouts,” he inquired of Kouzos, “did you see it?”

  “Just there,” said Kouzos, pointing to an area beneath the olives on which were standing some one hundred and fifty villagers.

  “Fools!” roared the Inspector. “Get back! You’re standing all over the clues!”

  Hurriedly the villagers retreated and the Inspector, with great care, got down on his knees and with his magnifying glass examined a large area beneath the olive tree, making little grunting noises to himself periodically. The villagers stood and whispered among themselves about how brilliant the Inspector was, how you could see it from the way he was conducting the case and how they were absolutely positive that if anybody could get their donkeys back, he could. Presently the Inspector got to his feet and dusted his knees.

  “There are no footprints,” he said, with every evidence of satisfaction, and made a note of it in his book.

  “How does he expect to find footprints?” whispered David to Amanda. “The ground is as dry as a bone.”

  “If we’d only thought of it,” said Amanda, “we could have put some there for him.”

  The Inspector stalked back to the village and sat down once again at the table.

  “Now,” he said. “This case has some very curious aspects. Very curious indeed. However, rest assured that I will leave no stone unturned in my endeavours to capture these Communists and have your donkeys returned to you. I, Prometheous Steropes. promise you this.”

  There was a murmur of approval from all the villagers. “I have brought with me, as you will see,” continued the Inspector, pointing proudly at the two mongrels who were panting under the café table, “two extremely fine tracking dogs and with their aid we should have no difficulty at all in tracing the whereabouts of the donkeys. However, as it is more than likely that the Communists will be with the donkeys when we locate them, I would like to ask for six volunteers to come with me and my men in case the robbers should put up a fight for it, or, indeed, in case they should outnumber us.”

  Six young men of the village stepped forward eagerly. There was no shortage of volunteers. Indeed, from the general surge forward, it appeared that everybody in the village wanted to volunteer. However, the Inspector took the six young men. They felt very proud and happy because they knew now that whenever they walked down the street, the people would say, “Do you see him? He’s one of the people who caught the Communists who stole our donkeys.”

  “Now,” said the Inspector, “the first thing to do is to give the dogs a scent. Mr Mayor, would you be so good as to lend me one of your saddle-cloths which we can give to the dogs to sniff?”

  Mayor Oizus sent his youngest son running off to his house and he returned bearing a gaud
y piece of woven cloth. This the Inspector proceeded to wave under the noses of the two dogs, who sniffed at it, sneezed violently and then sat there panting and wagging their tails.

  “They sneezed,” said the Inspector with satisfaction. “That shows they’ve got, the scent.”

  He untied the two dogs and, holding on to their leash, proceeded through the village with them, followed by Menelous Stafili. the three policemen from Melissa and the six village boys. The villagers let them get a hundred yards or so ahead and then followed en masse.

  The dogs had at first looked upon the whole afternoons’ outing as being rather enjoyable. They had liked riding In the car, for example, although one of them had got so excited that he had been sick on a policeman. But they had been sitting for a long time in the hot sun under the café table, and so now were not unnaturally somewhat bored. Yet here was the kind Inspector willing to take them for a walk. They were delighted. They put their noses to the ground and sniffed all the lovely smells that dogs can smell and frequently dragged the Inspector to one side so that they could cock their leg on a doorway. They sniffed and snuffled round and round in a circle.

  “I think they’ve got the scent,” said the Inspector excitedly.

  By this time they had left the village and were some distance into the olive groves. The dogs cast about in a circle whining and wagging their tails vigorously, and suddenly they both set off in the same direction.

  “Forward, men!” cried the Inspector. “They’re hot on the track.”

  The dogs were now straining eagerly at the leash and the Inspector was having to run to keep up with them and his gallant band of men ran behind him. The dogs ran through the olive groves in a wide circle and then reentered the village. They dragged the panting Inspector back through the main square, down several side turnings, up the flight of steps by the village well and then, to the astonishment of everybody (not least the Inspector) they rushed to the door of the Mayor’s house and started scratching at it and whining and wagging their tails delightedly. The Mayor grew pale. He had heard of miscarriages of justice and he could see that if the dogs were taken as evidence, he was going to be implicated in the donkey-stealing plot. The Inspector frowned as he watched the dogs scratching at the door.

  “Tell me, Mayor Oizus,” he inquired, “why should dogs have led me to your house?”

  “I have absolutely no idea,” said the Mayor, sweating. “I assure you, I have absolutely no idea whatsoever.”

  “Don’t be silly,” said Mrs Oizus suddenly. “Don’t you know our bitch is in season?”

  A roar of laughter from the assembled villagers greeted this statement and the Inspector flushed a dark red.

  “You should have told me that before,” he said curtly. “It could almost have been described as obstructing the law in the execution of its duty.”

  “I am very sorry, Inspector,” said Mayor Oizus, casting a malevolent look at his wife. “But I was unaware of this.”

  “Well,” said the Inspector, “we will have to try again. We’ll take them farther away from the village where there won’t be so many distractions.”

  So they set off through the olive groves until they were a quarter of a mile or so away from the village and then once more the dogs were made to sniff the donkey’s saddle-cloth. Having been deprived of paying a social call on a bitch in such an interesting condition, the dogs philosophically accepted what they imagined to be an ordinary hunting trip. On these (with their own master) they were used to wandering blindly about the countryside until they stumbled upon a hare or flushed a woodcock from under an olive tree, and they could see no reason for varying their performance for the sake of the Inspector. They led him and his men up and down the hillsides, in and out of cane brakes and across small streams, sniffing and wagging their tails, thus giving their human companions constant encouragement. It was not long before they approached a very steep and stony hillside where the Inspector missed his footing and fell into a gully, grazing his shin badly and breaking his magnifying glass. It was here he decided that it would be best to let the dogs off the leash.

  It was, as it turned out, an extremely unwise thing to do. Within a very short space of time, the Inspector and his men had lost all contact with the dogs, and, spreading out in search of them, soon lost all contact with each other as well. The dogs continued gaily over the hills and then, finding that their human companions were not, apparently, any longer interested in the hunt — since they had not joined them — they decided to cut back to the village and pay the social call on the Mayor’s bitch that they had been deprived of earlier.

  Gradually it grew dark and the villagers of Kalanero started to get worried. First the dogs had arrived back, closely followed by Menelous Stafili, who said he had lost all contact with the main body and, as he was not prepared to arrest an unknown quantity of Communists single-handed, he had thought it only sensible to return to the village. Shortly after this, the young men of Kalanero started to trickle in with the same story, that they had got separated from the main body and thought it useless to continue on their own, but still there was no sign of the Inspector and the three policemen from Melissa.

  “What on earth do you think’s happened to them?” asked David. “I do hope nothing serious.”

  “I shouldn’t think so,” said Amanda, “they can’t come to much harm up in those hills.”

  “I don’t know,” said David worriedly, “you could fall and break a leg in one of those gullies.”

  “Oh, don’t be so gloomy.” said Amanda, impatiently. “I’m sure they’ll be all right.”

  “David is right,” said Yani seriously. “Until the moon comes up, it’s very difficult to see on those hills and there are some places which are quite dangerous.”

  “Well, what can we do?” asked Amanda. “We can’t go and look for them.”

  “We could suggest to Papa Yorgo that some of the villagers went with lanterns to look for them,” said David.

  “That’s an excellent idea,” agreed Yani, “because then they’ll see the lanterns and know which way to go.”

  So the children went to Papa Yorgo and suggested to him that a search party be sent out. The villagers immediately acclaimed the children for their astuteness of mind, and presently a crowd of people with lanterns went off up into the hills and an hour or so later, grimy, tattered and torn, the Inspector and his three men were led ignominiously back into the village. The Inspector sank wearily on to a chair in the café, and the villagers tenderly poured him wine and anointed his various cuts and abrasions, but they could do nothing about his wounded soul, for the Inspector realised that his stock in the village had sunk almost as low as that of Mayor Oizus.

  “We came,” he announced, clearing his throat, “within an ace of success.”

  “Yes, yes, you did,” chorused the villagers, who felt sorry for him.

  “Within an ace of success,” he continued, thumping the table with his fist. He gulped angrily.

  “If it hadn’t been for those damned sex-mad dogs and that bitch of yours,” he said to Mayor Oizus, “we would probably now have both the donkeys and the Communists.”

  “Yes, yes,” chorused the villagers. “It was Mayor Oizus’s bitch that did it.”

  They glared at the Mayor as though he personally was responsible for his bitch coming into season.

  “I shall not, however, give up,” said the Inspector. “I’ll spend the night here, if you, Mayor Oizus, can spare me a bed, and to-morrow we’ll try again. Rest assured that we’ll meet with success.”

  “Yes, yes,” said the villagers soothingly. “Of course you will.”

  Leaving the Inspector giving the entranced villagers a brilliant account of one of Sherlock Holmes’s better-known cases (which, for some reason, the villagers thought had been solved by the Inspector) Amanda and David made their way back to the villa for supper.

  “Ah, there you are, dears,” said Mrs Finchberry-White. “I was just coming to look for you. Supper’s
ready.”

  Supper was from many points of view a difficult meal. The children were worried because they felt that if the villagers did go on searching, they must inevitably find the donkeys and that suspicion would fall on them, because they were the only ones who ever used Hesperides. Major-General Finchberry-White had spent the afternoon, in between painting, in perfecting some messages of the Congo talking-drum on his leg, and kept asking for things like salt and pepper and bread by this method. As Mrs Finchberry-White could not translate the Congo talking-drum messages, she became increasingly distraught and the Major-General increasingly irritable. However, at length the children had finished their food and they slipped down through the moonlit olive groves and swam over to Hesperides to feed the donkeys.