For obvious reasons I am not giving my address, so send a reply to this addressed to Madame Polacek, c/o G.P.O. Heraklion. If you agree to my terms and give me the date and number of your flight from Athens, I will be at the airport with a car to meet you.
When she had finished, she gave Robbie the letter to read through. He said that he thought it a little masterpiece, for Barak could not show it to the police without incriminating himself for attempted murder. Even if he informed them only that he had good reason to believe that the man they wanted was in Crete, they would still, from the way Stephanie had put things, have to look for a needle in a hay-stack.
‘All the same,’ he added glumly, ‘this means that after Monday I won’t even be able to see you until you come to tip me off if Barak takes the bait, and I’m going to miss you desperately.’
She smiled at him. ‘Things won’t be so bad. We’ll have to live apart, of course, but that bit was put in only to give Václav the impression that there is very little chance of catching up with you unless he comes over to do the job himself. If he does go to the police, which I think very unlikely, the only way they could pick me up is by lying in wait for me to go to the G.P.O. to collect his reply. But there is no charge upon which they can arrest me and, naturally, I should say I hadn’t the faintest idea where you had got to. So, until that happens—if it ever does—there is no reason why we shouldn’t continue to spend most of our days together, provided we are not seen too much in the town.’
By then it was past ten o’clock, but posting the letter that night would ensure its getting on the morning flight to Athens. Robbie got a stamp from the hall porter and went out to post it at the G.P.O., while Stephanie went upstairs and undressed.
On the Sunday Robbie woke early; but the window curtains were of very flimsy material, so light was already flooding the room. In the other bed, barely a yard from him, Stephanie was still sleeping peacefully, her face turned towards him. Her chestnut curls made a halo for her head against the white background of her pillow, her eyelashes made little fans upon her pink cheeks and her full red lips were slightly parted.
He had kept faith with her only by forcing himself to think of something else every time the fact that they were together in the same bedroom consciously entered his mind. Now, he wondered if he had been a fool to be so scrupulous. He had heard it said that women who extracted from men promises to behave themselves never expected those promises to be kept, and rarely wanted them to be. Stephanie had never again referred to the episode by the pool and, from her attitude during the past week, had shown that she harboured no resentment against him on account of it. That she liked him was beyond all doubt. Indeed, the lengths to which she had gone for his protection showed that, apart from being grateful to him for having saved her life, she had come to regard him with real affection. Yet she had given him no shadow of encouragement to break his word and attempt again to make love to her.
This, he knew, was his last chance. From now on, they would no longer be sleeping in the same room, and even their separate rooms would be in different hotels. For five nights he had exerted all his willpower to exclude the nearness of her presence from his senses; in another hour or two the opportunity would be gone of feeling his arms again round her strong-limbed yet deliciously soft-skinned little body and, so far as he could possibly foresee, it would have gone for ever.
He got out of bed and stood staring down at her, his heart pounding in his chest so hard that it hurt and made him breathless. Then, with sudden resolution, he turned away, choked back a sob and tiptoed swiftly out of the room to the bathroom next door. He had undressed there the previous night; so he shaved, bathed and dressed himself. When, three-quarters of an hour later, he returned to the bedroom to collect his wallet, he found Stephanie awake.
Normally, whenever he was in the room, she kept the bedclothes up to her chin; but this morning she was sitting up against her pillows with her plump bare arms, shoulders and neck freely displayed. As he came in, she said in surprise: ‘I thought you were only having a bath. Why have you dressed so early?’
‘It’s nearly half-past-eight, so not all that early,’ he replied. ‘And I thought I’d walk down to the harbour. Barak may ignore your letter. Even if he doesn’t, while we are waiting to hear from him I can’t just sit about doing nothing. I mean to find out when the Bratislava docked here and, if possible, whereabouts the group she landed is operating. There is at least a chance that I might be able to get in touch with them, as I did with that first party at Patras, and maybe I could pick up something.’
‘But this is Sunday,’ she protested. ‘There will be nobody at the harbour office, anyhow not at this hour.’
‘Oh, by nine o’clock there will be plenty of longshoremen about, and probably a few Customs officers off duty. Not many ships call at a small port like this, and a Czechoslovakian ship must be quite an exception. I’ve no doubt plenty of people who frequent the docks will remember her.’
Stephanie gave a little moue. ‘As there is no restaurant downstairs for you to breakfast in, and this being our last morning together, I had thought that we might both have had our breakfast on trays in bed, while we talked over what we mean to do later in the day. But since you have dressed and are going out, it doesn’t matter.’
Turning over, she gave her pillow a thump, thrust herself down in the bed, pulled the sheets up round her shoulders and shut her eyes again. Robbie cast an unhappy look at her, as he wondered if that idea of hers had been due to the trust she now placed in him or if, with feminine unpredictability, she had suddenly been seized with an impulse to make an overture to him. But he thought the latter unlikely and her attitude made it plain that, now he had dressed, she certainly did not expect him to undress and get into bed again.
Downstairs, he found that he could get coffee and rolls in the bar. Twenty minutes later, he walked down the depressing main street to the harbour. At the extremity of the mole it had a castle very similar to that of St. Nicholas at Rhodes, and on the inland side of the port there were still to be seen the outlines of large, vaulted berths. These forerunners of the modern submarine pens had housed the Venetian galleys during the four-hundred-and-fifty-year-long occupation of Crete by the Serene Republic—from the thirteenth to the seventeenth century—until the Turks, after a siege lasting twenty-four years, had wrested the island from that great seafaring nation.
There were plenty of people about: women and old men hawking fruit, Turkish delight, roast nuts and hot rings of dough sprinkled with sugar, and the usual collection of loungers to be found in any small port. For an hour Robbie moved about, entering into conversation, on one excuse or another, with more than a score of them; but not one could tell him anything about a Czechoslovakian ship that had berthed there early in the month. A number of them assured him that, had the Bratislava called there, they could not possibly have missed her. Much puzzled, but convinced at last that she could not have put in at Heraklion, Robbie returned to the Astir about half-past-ten.
He found Stephanie dressed and packing. She had already telephoned down to the hall porter and found out about bus services. There was one to Khania, the principal town at the western end of the island, that left from the main square of the town at twelve o’clock. The bus would get them to Khania about five o’clock, so she had said they would take it.
It would have been easier to have covered their trail by having themselves dropped at a railway station; but there were no railways in Crete, so they would have to manage as best they could at the place where the long-distance buses picked up their passengers. As this was only a few hundred yards up the street, the head porter urged them to walk and would have sent one of his underlings with them to carry their bags. But Robbie insisted on having a taxi. By doing so, they freed themselves of the underling who would have waited to put their bags on the bus, and prevented his telling the hall porter later that they had not, after all, gone to Khania.
After the taxi had dropped them with the
ir suitcases, they waited a few minutes, then separated. As soon as another taxi came along, Stephanie took it to a small hotel called the Kentrikon, where she registered as Fráulein Anna Schmidt. Five minutes later, Robbie was on his way to an equally unpretentious hostelry called The Palladium, at which he registered as Signor Giacomo Lombardi. An hour later, they met by arrangement for lunch at a little restaurant named the Ariadne.
During the afternoon, they walked round the town. Except for the Venetian Morosini Fountain in the main square, there was nothing beautiful in it. By comparison, for its size, it had suffered far more from bombing than had London, and practically nothing had been done to restore it. Even the pavements in the principal streets were, in many places, still cracked and uneven. There were no fine shops and the now-deserted market was a maze of small streets resembling an Oriental bazaar which, indeed, for over two hundred years it had been.
Unlike the Venetians, the Moors, and the other great colonising powers of Portugal, Spain, Britain, France and Italy which came after them, the Turks had done nothing for the peoples over whom they ruled during the long centuries of their Empire. They had taxed the populations of the Balkan countries to the limit, persecuted them on religious grounds, administered the laws through corrupt officials, and had given nothing in return. They had left behind them no fine buildings, no beautiful gardens, no hospitals or schools and not a single great work of art; only a legacy of incompetence, laziness, disease and dirt. Here, in Crete, the lamentable results of their rule could be seen even beneath the devastation caused by the bombing; for the Cretans, in spite of many gallant attempts to throw off the Turkish yoke, had not gained their freedom until 1898. Then had followed two world wars and Crete had not had the time to emerge from the dire poverty in which the Turks had left her.
Their walk led them eventually down to the sea wall at the western end of the city. Turning back along it, they skirted a small bay littered with refuse and, on reaching its further promontory, found themselves again at the Glass House. Now that, within a few days, it would be May, the afternoon sun was very hot; so they went in and spent half an hour refreshing themselves with iced orange juice. They then resumed their walk in the direction of the harbour.
To their left lay the sea, to their right the many acres of desolation they had noticed from the bus the night before. Adjacent to the road, only one complete building was still standing. It looked like a huge barn. There were some stacks of timber alongside it and a glance between its loosely padlocked double doors showed it to be a saw-mill. Some way behind it, among the crumbling walls and heaps of rubble, stood a little house. The chimney pots were gone and the upper windows broken, but otherwise it appeared to be intact. Stephanie drew Robbie’s attention to it and said:
‘That would be a perfect place for you to go to earth in and for me to bring Václav to, if he does come to Crete. Let’s go over and look at it.’
On one side of the saw-mill there was a track made by lorries. This brought them to within sixty yards of the house; for the rest of the way they scrambled over the rubble alongside a low wall which ended against one side of it. The building had only two stories and looked as if it contained two or three rooms on the ground floor with, probably four small bedrooms above. The downstairs windows were cracked and covered with cobwebs; the door stood a few inches ajar. The damp had warped it and it was stuck, but it flew open at a thrust from Robbie’s powerful shoulders.
‘You stay here,’ he told her. ‘As it’s been abandoned, it is probably dangerous and may fall down.’ But she ignored his warning and followed him into a narrow hall, half of which was taken up by a steep flight of stairs. A door on the right stood open. Through it, they could see lumps of plaster on the floor and peeling wallpaper, which suggested that it had been the sitting room. Robbie forced open a door on the left and they saw then why the house had been left uninhabited. A small, old-fashioned, now rusty, iron range showed that the room had been the kitchen, but beyond it there was no wall. From the road it had not been noticeable, but the whole of the wall on that side of the house had fallen out.
Robbie insisted that Stephanie should remain below, then went gingerly up the stairs. He returned to report that two small bedrooms on the sitting-room side of the house were habitable; although virtually they were now one, because the plaster partition between them had collapsed, leaving only the two upright posts that had strengthened it.
‘Do you think it would be safe to live in?’ Stephanie asked.
‘I don’t see why not,’ he replied. ‘If the good half of it has stood up like this for twenty years, I don’t see why it should fall down in another week.’
‘It will be horribly uncomfortable; no electric light or gas for cooking, no water, and outside sanitation. But, at this time of year, it won’t be damp or cold. And, if the police do start a hunt for you in Heraklion, they will check up on every foreigner in even the smallest lodging houses, whereas they are very unlikely to look for you among these ruins.’
‘The men who work at the saw-mill are bound to see me come and go.’
‘Not necessarily. There’s certain to be a back entrance to this place, and you could use that in the daytime. Let’s go and see what it’s like round there.’
Twenty yards behind the house a tall wall, with gaping windows, which had formed part of a much bigger building, was still standing. It screened the back entrance from being overlooked by houses a few hundred yards further inland which were inhabited, and just beyond it lay what had once been a narrow street but now blocked by rubble, was the end of a cul-de-sac.
‘You’re right,’ Robbie declared. ‘I should be able to lie doggo here for quite a time before anyone tumbles to it that I’ve moved in. And we could hardly find a better place to which you can bring Barak. I’ll have to go without a bath, but I can get a shave at a different barber’s every morning. I must have something to sleep on, though.’
‘Of course you must. The only difficulty is to get a few things here for you without being seen. But I know what we’ll do. Tomorrow I’ll hire a car and in the afternoon we’ll buy what you require and take it with us; after dark I’ll drive it here as near as I can get and we will carry in the things.’
That night, they had dinner at another small restaurant, then, after arranging where to meet next morning, parted to sleep at their respective hotels. At eleven o’clock, Robbie stood waiting for Stephanie at the far end of King Constantine Avenue. A few minutes later, she drove up in a car she had hired. When they had exchanged information about the sort of night they had had, he got in and she drove on through Liberty Place out of the city.
‘Where are we off to?’ he asked.
‘To Knossos,’ she replied. ‘I’m already sick of the sight of this dreary town, and the less we are seen about together in it the better. Besides, I felt sure you would be longing to see the ruins of the palace.’
‘I suppose I ought to be,’ he said with a sigh, ‘but the truth is that these days I can think of nothing but what may lie ahead of us.’
‘Oh, come! You musn’t let yourself get depressed,’ she chided him. ‘I know you were very disappointed yesterday to find that no Czech group had landed here; so you couldn’t even check up on whether they appeared to be doing the same sort of job as the others. But, with any luck, my letter will bring Václav here in a few days’ time, and you ought to be able to get a far more worthwhile dividend out of him.’
‘Perhaps; but I’m not looking forward to the way in which I shall have to get it.’
‘No decent man would. Still, it will be your one big chance to save yourself and, if that is not enough inducement, you must think of the much greater things that are at stake. Do you know, I heard a rumour at my hotel this morning that the conference in Delhi has broken down.’
‘Yes, I heard the same thing, while I was being shaved at a barber’s. It’s said that last night the Russians walked out. I suppose something has come through on the wireless. All the same, neither side
can be quite so crazy as to go to war. If they did they would blow one another to pieces, and they know it.’
While the car ran on past the back lots and dusty buildings in the suburbs, they fell silent. Soon they reached more open country and, some twenty minutes’ drive from the city, ran down a hill to the valley in which Knossos is situated. The palace occupied the whole of a low, extensive hill in the valley. There was no fine view in any direction and it was some distance from the sea; although it was believed that, at one time, the sea had come up to it and its site had been chosen for that reason. However, the contours of the country had since been radically changed by violent earthquakes.
A first palace had been in existence there in two thousand B.C., as the centre of a brilliant civilisation which had lasted two or three hundred years. It had then been destroyed by an earthquake. From the sixteenth century B.C., a second great civilisation had arisen, and Crete, under the Minoan Kings, had become a sea power of the first rank, trading with distant lands and drawing tribute from many coast towns in the Eastern Mediterranean. But again, towards fourteen hundred, another terrible earthquake had destroyed Knossos and the other principal buildings throughout the island. The Minoans had never recovered from this second, devastating blow.
It was believed that the palace originally had five stories; but the ruins of only the two lower ones remained, and these had lain undiscovered until the colossal labours undertaken by Sir Arthur Evans in the early nineteen hundreds. No photographs could give an adequate impression of the vastness of the ruin, because there were no lines of tall pillars or lofty archways. It was simply a huge, man-made mound, riddled with passages, staircases and chambers. Owing to the prevalence of earth tremors the rooms were small, but there were said to have been no fewer than one thousand three hundred of them.
Mayhem in Greece Page 48
