A Blind Man's War

by David Fiddimore

  ‘How much money?’ I asked him.

  Leonidas shrugged. ‘Not much.’

  Now one of the barn doors swung open, and Pete moved the machine gun to cover it. Leonidas said impatiently, ‘I told you that you wouldn’t need that!’

  ‘And I’m the Queen of Siam.’ That was Pete. He spoke pleasantly. Pete was always at his most dangerous when he was being nice.

  Two younger men emerged. A young woman dressed in the respectable married woman’s black shroud walked between them. Even though she kept her head down I could see that she was pretty – and blonde. Maybe that had been the trouble; natural blondes have often been highly prized in Greece. One of the young men had deep and recent parallel scratches on his cheek, and the other what looked like part of his scalp missing. They were both good-looking, presentable young men but with the girl between them they looked a bit sheepish.

  They came to a halt alongside the older folk, and the girl looked up at us. Pete let out a low whistle. She was definitely pretty in a conventional sense, but her eyes were black and venomous; even when she was smiling. I had once known a diamondback rattlesnake named Alice, who lived in a Plexiglas case and had travelled around Europe with the American forces. She had a hit list that the Compton brothers would have been proud of, and this girl had Alice’s black eyes. I wouldn’t have wanted her in my family either.

  I beckoned her over. Her smile broadened and she said, ‘Hello. You’re English, aren’t you? Have you come to rescue me?’ What was the accent? Not uneducated, but maybe northeast somewhere – Gateshead, I thought. Somewhere like that.

  ‘Yes. You’re going home now.’ Was I wrong or was there a small grimace flitting across that heart-shaped face? ‘I’m sorry if you’ve been mistreated.’

  She said, ‘It was no worse than my boarding school. I think I’ve been a bit of a bother to them.’ That sounded like a candidate for the understatement-of-the-year award.

  Warboys entered my line of vision from stage left. He said, ‘I’d like you to ride up front with us, if you don’t mind, miss – it’s getting crowded in the back.’ Then he passed a grubby handful of notes to the old man. I think it was some of the money he had had from the priest. The old man looked at me, and shrugged. Then he smiled. He was still smiling as we drove away. The hand he waved in farewell was full of money.

  Leonidas scowled. ‘You paid my family debt, you bloody bastard.’

  Warboys must have heard him, because he laughed back at him through the small cab window. ‘Yes, and by the end of the week every village in the Troodos will know about it, won’t they?’ Then I heard him tell Pat, ‘Terrible gossips, these GCs.’ Pat laughed, and I heard the girl giggle.

  Pete pushed Leonidas back behind us again, and on his side.

  ‘Reminds you of Alice, doesn’t she?’ he said to me – he’d obviously noticed it as well. I probably made a face and nodded. He made the machine gun safe, but stayed behind it all the way down to the first made-up road.

  Occasionally, on the roads back through the mountains, and down onto the lower terraces, we would pass a shepherd or goatherd with a few animals. Invariably it would slow our progress slightly, and invariably the shepherd or goatherd would be sitting on a bank alongside a bundle covered by sacking or an old coat. Invariably the shepherd or goatherd’s hand would be resting on the bundle. Pete would traverse the MG to cover them, and they would smile toothless smiles, and wave the hand that had been on the bundle. I was in no doubt that under each bundle was a gun, or grenades. Leonidas’s men were doing what they could to cover him.

  Warboys let him off a mile up the proper road to Nicosia. After we had stopped, and Warboys and Pat had walked round to let the tailboard down, Pete and I manhandled Leonidas down onto the road. He immediately sat cross-legged in the dust with his head bowed. He looked exactly like men in photographs I had seen from the war, of prisoners or Jews about to be executed by German soldiers. His head was bowed for the neck shot. I wonder if he expected it. Warboys squatted alongside him.

  ‘You think I’m going to shoot you? Is that it?’

  ‘Why not?’ Leonidas’s voice was strained and low.

  ‘Is that what you would do?’

  ‘I would probably have to, wouldn’t I? Get on with it.’

  ‘No, Leonidas, not today. I’m going to do something much worse.’ He hung a key on a string around his captive’s neck. Handcuffs. ‘I’m going to give you two days to get off the island. Will that be enough?’

  There was no reply. I asked Pat, ‘What’s going on? I thought we were supposed to let him go.’

  ‘We will, Charlie. That’s the point – nobody really expected it. Standing instructions say you catch a terrorist, under any circumstances, you bring him in. We know it and the GCs know it . . . and this pig’s wanted for several murders. If we let him go every Greek on the island will know within twenty-four hours that Mr Warboys had the notorious EOKA killer Leonidas in irons, but then paid his debts and let him go. What would you think?’

  ‘That we turned him, of course. What will happen?’

  ‘If he’s still on the island in forty-eight hours the GCs will kill him themselves – no one likes a turncoat. Athens is his only hope now. Mr Warboys is offering to hold back the news of his release for two days to enable him to get clear.’

  ‘Won’t we get into trouble then as well?’

  Pat shook his head.

  ‘It won’t be that kind of news broadcast, Charlie. It will be a word here and there, in the markets and the bazaars. There will be nothing on paper, an’ if yer asked we’ll just deny it, won’t we?’

  ‘What about the girl?’ It’s in my nature, I suppose. I like the i’s dotted and the t’s crossed. Warboys looked up from Leonidas.

  ‘She’ll be out of here on a plane tonight – after a brief but telling reunion with her family. I hope they find a stout cage to keep her in.’

  It was at that point that the girl wandered back. She looked down at the Greek and said, ‘He had me, you know, but I made him pay for it. Are you going to kill him?’

  Warboys said, ‘No, we’re going to let him go, and he’ll probably come after you. That’s why you have to leave tonight.’

  ‘Why not just kill him then?’

  Warboys turned away. Pat said to her, rather harshly I thought, ‘Get back in, love. Your father’s waitin’ for yer,’ and pushed her back to the cab in front of him. Pete and I clambered into the back, and he dismounted the MG. When we were rolling he said, ‘I told you. Just like that bloddy rattlesnake.’

  I watched Leonidas from my place at the tailgate until he was out of sight: he didn’t move, and didn’t raise his head to look at us. I suspect that Pete did as well. After a few minutes the distance and the dusk consumed him. Up in front I could hear a cheerful and animated conversation, and a lot of giggles. She was looking for allies before we dropped her off.

  Collins was waiting for us at the main gate at Wayne’s Keep. We all got down – probably they felt as stiff as me. Pat walked the girl over to Collins like a postman delivering an awkward-shaped parcel. Collins asked her, ‘How are you, miss?’

  She just nodded for the minute, and didn’t reply. He stood her by the gatehouse door, and came over to us. Fags all round. I told you I could get on with his sort of officer. He said, ‘Thank you, Tony,’ to Warboys, and, ‘Thank you, gentlemen,’ to the rest of us. And, ‘Any trouble?’

  ‘Apart from her?’ Warboys asked him. ‘No. They were glad to get rid of her. I think half of the men in the parish were fighting over her. It looks like a first-aid station after a trench raid up there.’

  ‘What shall I tell her father?’

  ‘Just tell him she’s been mistreated, and that she’ll need medical support after she’s been evacuated. She could well be pregnant, but let him find that out for himself.’

  ‘Was she mistreated?’

  ‘No idea, sir. She was laughing, flirting and joking all the way back, but that could be nerves. Time will tell,
I expect.’

  Pete gave me the look, but neither of us said anything. Pat shook his head.

  Collins asked, ‘What about the pilot?’

  Warboys said, ‘Nothing, sir. Nobody said a dicky bird, and I rather think that if they had him, or had killed him, they would have told me. It’s not their way to hide their atrocities, is it? They want us to hear all about them, so our politicians will make a quick decision to bugger off.’

  ‘But you’ll let me know?’

  ‘Of course. The first.’

  ‘I’ll get her back to her family after the doc’s certified her for travel.’ He turned away. He’d already said thank you once. It wouldn’t have been his way to repeat himself. As he reached the step leading inside the girl burst into tears and threw herself at him. He had no choice but to hug her. Pat Tobin grinned wickedly at him as we climbed back into the wagon. Once we were rolling Warboys asked, ‘What was all that about, Pat – the sudden cloudburst?’

  ‘She’d noticed something,’

  ‘What?’

  ‘That he was a captain, while you’re only a lieutenant, Mr Warboys. She was renewing her insurance policy, that’s all.’

  Pete snorted alongside me. Pat turned to look back through the small rear cab window at us. I thought he suddenly looked tired; older.

  ‘My place, OK? It’s bigger than yours, and more comfortable. I feel like doing a crate o’ beer in.’

  I don’t know where the others came from, but there must have been a dozen folk there eventually. Pat had a big quarter he had converted from an office and workshop. It was far roomier than Watson’s – I wonder why the old man never complained. I ended up on a posh leather settee with Collins’s woman Thirdlow; she had tucked her knees up between us, and smiled at me over a gin and it. I was half a dozen beers ahead of her already, and in the hazy zone.

  ‘You recovered that girl lost in the mountains. Well done. Cheers.’ She raised her glass.

  ‘Collected her, you mean. Warboys did all the work. She’d been found by some GCs who didn’t know what to do with her.’

  ‘That’s not quite what I heard.’

  ‘Are you really a policeman?’

  She said, ‘Mmm.’ Then, ‘What do you think?’

  ‘I think nobody’s who they say they are any more. We’re like all those old Venetians, wearing masks in bed so they don’t know who they’re sleeping with.’

  ‘Dominoes – I think you’ll find they called them dominoes.’

  ‘And when you pull off someone’s mask—’

  ‘You find another one underneath. Yes, I know. Who are you? I ask myself.’

  ‘I’m a radio operator, you know that. You’ve seen where I work.’

  ‘But I’ve just pulled off your radio operator’s mask, and found someone else altogether underneath. One of Mr Watson’s funnies.’ She smiled, but I noticed her shoulders shaking, so the smile was probably a laugh as well.

  ‘Is that what you think?’

  ‘No, Charlie, it’s what I know now. Maybe we should be friends.’

  ‘Why not . . . what was your name again?’

  ‘Ann.’

  ‘Why not, Ann? Wannanother drink?’

  ‘Why not?’ Almost my favourite words.

  I lost track of her after that. She went off after different game. I made a mental note to remember that she held her drink well. Pete chatted up a WAAF stores sergeant, and I didn’t see him again for days. Pat danced with that bruiser of a woman a foot taller who gazed out over his head with a glazed, dreamy look in her eyes – Watson’s new aide-de-camp. Watson himself came over for a word, but I was halfway to Berlin in my head by then. My stomach was churning with memories I hadn’t asked for. I don’t know when he turned up. He said, ‘Well done, Charlie. I knew you’d come in handy.’

  I made room for him on the settee, but he didn’t sit down.

  ‘I don’t know when I last drank this much beer,’ I told him. The sir got lost in the alcohol.

  ‘On the squadron probably, old son. We didn’t drink all that much in Egypt, did we?’

  ‘No, although I got drunk with Oliver Nansen a couple of times. Do you ever think about him?’

  I managed to play a long Jack Teagarden trombone solo in my head before he replied.

  ‘Often, Charlie. As often as you, I should think.’ He looked away.

  ‘Did they ever find the bodies?’

  ‘Not as far as I know.’

  ‘I saw him not long after he bought it, did you know that? Sitting on his camp bed as large as death, but charred a bit around the edges. He asked me to find all the photos of the girls he’d made, and to make sure their husbands never saw them.’

  ‘I wondered why you’d got mixed up in that. The MPs probably still have an open file on it.’

  ‘There you go, sir. You can call them up in the morning, and tell ’em it was me all the time.’

  ‘And lose my radio operator? Perish the thought! You look a bit shagged out, Charlie. Why don’t you go home, and sleep it off?’

  I stood up. It wasn’t as easy as it looked.

  ‘Good idea. I think I’m getting too old for this sort of lark.’ I meant partying, but I think his reply was about something else altogether.

  ‘Aren’t we all? Goodnight, Charlie, and thank you.’

  When I thought about that in the morning those last few words worried me: I might have been wrong, but I couldn’t remember him having thanked me for anything before.

  You will have noted that he didn’t query my having said that I met up with Nancy, some hours after he’d bought it in an aircraft crash. I think that was because all of us who survived the war still carried our ghosts around with us for a long time. He had his own somewhere, and maybe he’d mention them one day. Or maybe not.

  My little wooden house on the prairie was less than five hundred yards away, across the parade ground. I was halfway there when my lioness stood up from where she was lying down in the gloom, stretched, yawned and paralleled me from maybe thirty feet away. I didn’t mind her. We’d met in Egypt during my Canal Zone jaunt. She wasn’t a ghost. She was just something loose inside my head; I understood that now.

  Warboys’s voice suddenly sounded from close by: I thought it was word association. Lion: lioness.

  He said, ‘Heading off early, Charlie?’ He was alongside me. I’ve known them all my life: these bastards who move as silently as an owl flies.

  ‘Yes, Tony. Early shift tomorrow – I thought I’d get some kip. Why?’

  ‘You’re walking in the wrong direction. Come on, I’ll walk you home.’

  How had that happened?

  The last thing he said was, ‘Thank you.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘Coming up into the mountains. You didn’t have to do that, and I appreciated it.’

  ‘I worked with some Aussies like you once.’

  ‘I know, they told me.’ I was at the door of my hut now; I was so pissed that I’d walked straight past it.

  ‘Goodnight, Charlie.’

  ‘Goodnight.’

  The last person I thought of before I slept was Stephanie: Steve. I wished I was in her bed instead. Then it was dark.

  Chapter Thirteen

  The Chanctonbury Ring

  Pat picked me up again in the morning. Obviously I wasn’t old enough to walk to school on my own yet. I had a sore head, and Pete’s bed hadn’t been slept in.

  ‘Watson’s running the show, isn’t he?’ I asked him. ‘I worked it out when I was shaving. It’s not Collins, or Warboys, or de Whitt in the radio room. It’s bloody Watson again.’

  Tobin winced. Maybe his head was giving him the gyp as well, or maybe he simply didn’t want to talk about it.

  ‘He just doesn’t like to make a song and dance about it.’

  ‘Where does the budget come from? Who pays?’

  ‘Fuck knows . . . but there’s plenty of it. I think the boss has friends in low places.’ Then he threw the points on me, and put us on anot
her track. We were coming to the gate of our compound. ‘Make sure you have your pass handy – they’re running checks this morning.’

  We turned left and on to the dusty road. It was going to be another bloody lovely day, and I would miss most of it cooped up in their communications box. After the roundabout, on the track up to the operational block, Pat suddenly said, ‘I came from Sussex. Did I ever tell you that?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘The first girl I went with wasn’t that different to the one we picked up yesterday. I was fifteen, so was she. Mary Walters.’

  ‘I don’t usually talk dirty at this time in the morning, Pat. In fact, I don’t often talk dirty at all. Is this conversation going anywhere?’

  ‘I haven’t come to the point yet. We used to call her the Chanctonbury Ring. It was where we came from, see, a place called Chanctonbury. She was like me – an early starter. Her old man had a market garden there.’

  ‘I thought there was a stone circle or a burial mound called that?’

  ‘No, a hill fort. It was where she went a lot – we took our girls there when we wanted to get laid. That was the joke about her nickname. We’re cruel little beggars when we’re young, aren’t we?’

  We were approaching the gate to the ops block compound.

  I asked him, ‘What about it?’

  ‘I’ve been thinking about her since yesterday. I’ve been thinking about all sorts of things, that I wished I’d done differently.’ This was a new rueful Pat.

  The guard waved, opened a small wired picket gate for me, and Pat began to turn the Land Rover.

  ‘It sounds to me,’ I told him – I was probably grinning – ‘as if you need a few days’ hard work, to get both the booze and the women out of your system.’

  Pat smiled weakly back, but didn’t respond. He said, ‘See you at around four, OK?’

  Maybe I should have listened more closely.

  I’m sure that I’d heard that story before, but I couldn’t place it. It banged around in my head all that shift without finding a home.