Greek Fire

by Winston Graham

  “It’s not my taxi. I stole it from the rank while the driver had gone to ease himself.”

  “You’re a man of resource.”

  “But naturally.”

  They were coming rapidly into the busy section of the town.

  Gene said: “Then what are your plans?”

  “Soon, when we have gone a little further, I will get out and leave the automobile to you. What you do with it then is your own concern; I am glad I shall not know. You are right that this taxi will be noticeable if you drive in it all the way to Nafplion.”

  “It will be noticeable before then,” said Gene, thinking of Mandraki.

  “There is a train leaves the station for Nafplion at six.”

  “And the station will be very carefully watched by the police.”

  “Maybe. But there are other stations. The train stops at Eleusis and at Megara. They are not so many miles out of Athens, and I do not suppose they will be picketed.”

  “I think Corinth will be watched.”

  “Maybe. But by then you should be on the train.” The young man, having exhausted his ingenuity, was becoming slightly less interested.

  Gene glanced behind. It was impossible to be absolutely sure in this busy street, but he could see nothing suspicious.

  The young Greek mopped the back of his neck. “ Do you know your way out of Athens?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then I will turn down at this next corner and leave you. It is best to do it in the centre where it will not be conspicuous.”

  They swerved into a side street and stopped. The driver jumped out and made a pretence of going round and examining a rear wheel. Gene got out and joined the driver. They put their heads together a moment, and then Gene straightened up and in a leisurely manner strolled to the driver’s seat and got in. The other man kicked the tyre a couple times and presently went into a shop for some cigarettes. Gene felt for the pedals, restarted the motor glanced behind him, then drew out into the traffic and moved off.

  A hunted man is like a man at the centre of a cyclone; there are periods of calm when it’s impossible for him to assess the strength of the storm around him. Gene tried hard to take an impersonal view of his chances.

  Police of course would keep a special watch at docks and stations and airports. What else? Road blocks? Trains stopped and searched? Special checks at appropriate places on identity cards and passports? Hardly likely unless he was deported on a particular route. For a man in his position it was almost as dangerous to take too few risks as too many.

  The homicide rate in Athens was probably the highest of the European capitals. But this was a special murder, of a statesman and a millionaire. How far could EMO put pressure on for extra measures?

  The taxi had to go early. Mandraki would soon let the police know how he had left. But again, to be too timid would be to lose an initial advantage.

  This was the same road so far as they had taken to Delphi cutting across the peninsular through Daphni. He was well away from the railway line now but the two ways would converge at Eleusis, as the young Greek said. Already one or two people were staring at the old taxi. Not that this mattered much—people always did stare in Greece—but if one of them remembered.…

  Short of Daphni he slowed to a crawl. Two or three kilometres beyond the little town he remembered there was a fork in the road: if he turned left there he would be doubling back to Piraeus. The police might expect him to do that.

  Almost in sight of Daphni he saw a side-lane turning sharp to his left and climbing up into the narrow mountain range separating the road from the sea. He swung the car up it and changed down, grinding the unfamiliar gears. The old taxi began to lurch and grunt up the hill.

  It was half a mile before he came to cover, and he beat the guts out of the engine getting there. Thin low scrub of laurel and myrtle grew beside what in wet weather might be a rushing stream but now was a rubble of small stones, white and smooth as skulls.

  He drove the car off the road, bumping between two boulders, and grounded it hard in the middle of the river bed. When he got out he found it was hidden from the road. He tipped his own clothes out of his bag, dropping Anya’s bread, rolled the clothing in a ball and hid it under a rock, retrieved the bread and shut his bag.

  He ran back as far as the main road, then walked more slowly through Daphni. People in doorways stared at him, but unspeculatively, as they would have stared at any moving object that came into their line of vision. Once out of the town he went on more quickly. It was ten minutes to six and his chances of catching the train at Eleusis—even if he decided to take the risk—were small. Eight or ten kilometres yet.

  The road here was downhill and uninteresting but in a little while would run beside the sea. A peasant cart turned out ahead but it was moving no quicker than he was walking, in fact he began to catch it up. Then he saw a little knot of people standing at the side of the road, two or three of them carrying baskets and one with a child in arms. He joined them. Several of them stared and two nodded a good evening, but everybody was talking too animatedly to notice him for long. Not that there was anything in their talk to get animated about, but it was their nature to make the best of indifferent material.

  Roads were so few that no vehicle going in this direction could be making for anywhere but Eleusis; but when the bus came up five minutes later it was marked Megara, which was 20 kilometres beyond.

  He crowded into it with the others. He stood near the back between two black-dressed women, one with a basket with live fowls. A man in a sombrero hemmed him in in front and a boy with a dog rubbed against his legs. Everything smelt of garlic and old sweat. The bus jolted into movement and the conductor fought his way through to get his fares. Everybody was talking, and somewhere at the front a young man was trying to play a mouth organ. Gene took a ticket to Megara. He worried for Anya, how she had faced the police when they came, what she was doing now.

  At ten past six the bus lurched into the narrow streets of Eleusis. It stopped near the waterfront while sixteen people fought their way off and another twenty got on. There was a policeman at the stop watching the crowd but he took no special interest in them. Gene thought of the Greek phrases, ‘ It does not matter. Let us do it tomorrow.’

  A hand touched his arm. “Are you from Argos, patrioti?”

  He looked down at the man with the sombrero, who was peering up at him. “No, from Lavrion.” It was his usual reply, to pick the opposite side of Greece.

  “Well, well, I thought your cloth came from Argos. I am a tailor there.” He looked more like a brigand with his fat body, a nose jutting like a scimitar from under his hat, a stubble of beard.

  “It may be that it did,” said Gene. “My own suit was damaged in an accident and I bought this second hand in Athens.”

  “Ah, that explains it, if you will pardon me. The koukoulariko comes of course from Kalamai, and I rather think.… You’ll pardon me.” The Greek put out a black-nailed finger and thumb and felt the edge of the cloth “Yes, that’s it. There was not much of this heavier type, and it was made up locally.”

  Everyone in the bus lurched as it began to move. A faint welcome air stirred the heat and the smell.

  “Are you going to Argos tonight?” Gene said.

  “I hope to. I have something to pick up at Megara and then I intend to catch the automotrice.”

  “That’s the diesel train?”

  “Yes.” Swinging and lurching, the little man got out a watch. “One has to be hasty but I have caught it before. I am in Argos then by nine-thirty.”

  Gene said: “I too am going to Argos—or near there.”

  “By the train?”

  “I had thought so. But I have never been before. That’s the best way?”

  “It’s the only way if you wish to get there tonight. And the steam trains tomorrow morning—they barely crawl.”

  “I am a radio mechanic,” said Gene. “ I have business ultimately in Nafplion.”

  �
�Well, the train will take you there tonight. You will be there before ten. Permit me to introduce myself. My name is Diomedes Cos.”

  Gene gave a name he had used during the war, and the bus lurched on towards Megara. Everybody talked, and M. Cos was full of information. He was also full of curiosity about Gene—a common characteristic in the country districts; it was a candid, unassuming curiosity, giving and expecting to receive a free exchange of information as a way of enlarging one’s acquaintance and passing the time. Gene was forced to keep his wits at stretch.

  The sun was low in the sky, and the water of the bay had become a willow pattern blue, brimming so full it seemed as if it was going to over-spill and flood the land. Megara loomed up climbing its two low hills; they bumped and rattled through the squat white concrete hovels on the outskirts and then lurched through the town and came to a stop in the main square. The doors of the bus opened and people were spewed out upon the cobbled street. Children cried, dogs barked, street sellers offered sweetmeats in bags and grilled mutton on wooden sticks.

  “The station is over there,” said M. Cos. “I shall hope to join you in a few minutes.” He went off across the square on fat purposive legs.

  Soldiers here, talking in listless groups, squatting around some sort of a gambling game, sitting on the walls. Gene walked to the station. He was in time for the train. There were a few people on the platform and a number around the booking office. No evidence of police; but one couldn’t be sure. He didn’t go in.

  There was a kiosk near, and he bought a bottle of wine, a baclavá cake, a magazine about radio. He was still reading when Diomedes Cos came hurrying back across the square with a big parcel under his arm. Gene followed the tailor into the station and caught him up at the booking office. They exchanged nods and Gene said: “ I was hungry but I was afraid there wasn’t time before the train came in.”

  They bought tickets. There were two men in the booking office but neither had the interest to raise his eyes. They pulled tickets out of cubby holes, accepted money and shoved masses of dirty small notes back through the grill.

  On the platform Cos said: “ You see, there was just time. The train is signalled.”

  Two crones whispered together in the long slanting sunlight. A priest with a black beard paced up the platform ostentatiously reading his Bible. A small almost yellow-skinned boy clung to his mother’s skirts waving a blue and white Greek flag. At the end of the platform an oleander tree gleamed, its leaves brilliant and undusty. There was a hoot in the distance, and a small diesel train slid into the station.

  Only two carriages, and those connected with a continuous passage down the centre. Gene stuck close to the fat little tailor; a man on his own would be more to look at. There were a few seats and they got two with their backs to the engine near the middle of the train. Opposite were a young man and a girl.

  The train moved off at a good speed, whining like a big vacuum cleaner. After a time Gene offered Cos wine from one of the two cardboard cups he had bought, and felt for the penknife he’d been presented with at the Aegis offices. But he couldn’t find it.

  “I’m sorry. I thought I had a corkscrew.”

  “No matter. We will ask the guard. He will have one.”

  The guard had not got one, but he said he would ask the driver who always carried one.

  As they neared Corinth the sun dipped flaming behind the great Peloponnesian mountains. The light flared from behind them; rocks and cliffs and cypresses stood up with startling blackness against the glow; for a few minutes it was unearthly, as if the events of four thousand years were burning behind the hills—Hercules was hunting his lion and Agamemnon riding out to war. The train stopped at a squalid station and then moved slowly off and crawled across the viaduct spanning the Corinth canal. Almost every passenger in the train stood up to peer out of the windows at the long narrow slit of water. As they ran into Corinth station twilight was already clustering over the lower hills.

  Bustle and movement. Gene saw two policemen walking slowly along the platform peering in the train. This was the testing point, the obvious place to come in, asking people for their papers.

  The policemen came down, revolvers tap-tapping in holsters. The child with the Greek flag waved it at them. Gene poured more wine into the tailor’s glass. Cos was a supporter of Karamanlis, and Gene asked him whether he thought the government would go back. That gave them conversation while the policemen went past.

  The train began to moan again, and moved off. Gene leaned back and slowly allowed his grip to relax on the cardboard cup. ‘It does not matter. Let us do it tomorrow.’ He bit into the almond cake. It was very sweet and rather dry.

  He wondered if Anya was all right. The loss of the penknife worried him. Already this afternoon seemed a week ago. Now the recollection of it came back like a floodlight on a dark day.

  Everyone still talked in the train, talked in high voices above the whine of the diesel; but Gene found his eyes shutting. He tried hard to hear what the fat tailor was saying but the words began to blur. He nodded and came half awake to look through bleared eyelids and see Mandraki sitting opposite him.

  He jerked his head up, fighting something stronger than sleep, drugged wine perhaps; shook his body, tried to get to his feet, was bound hand and foot, struggled, raised his hand to strike; and then the fat white face blurred again and became the bristly chin and hawk nose of the tailor.

  Night had fallen while he dozed. The train ran along swaying gently, a ship on a dark sea. There was a feeling of ostracism, and of being exposed to peering faces that could not be seen.

  Half asleep, half awake, he thought of Maria Tolosa. With a mixture of illusion and clairvoyance, he saw her on a small Turkish steamer, sitting in the steerage holding some bundle of clothes she had got together, lonely like himself and lost. The memory of her as a talented vulgar good humoured night club singer and dancer was overprinted by the memories of her since the bereavement, the tight dragged head shawl, the determination and the bruised face.

  Through the rest of the journey he talked and dozed. They stopped two or three times at tiny wayside stations. The Greek tailor talked animatedly to the girl opposite him who, young and pretty though she was, already had the beginnings of a dark moustache. The train hooted and began to slow again.

  “I leave you here, patrioti,” said Cos, breaking off suddenly and speaking to Gene. “In a little while now you will be in Nafplion. Remember the restaurant where I recommended you. And when you want silkcloth like that again.…”

  Gene shook hands with the tailor and also with the young man and the girl although he had hardly spoken to them. It was all very friendly and homely; the alarms and pursuits of Athens were far away. It had been a feeling he had often known before, as if Athens were a state within a state, having its own frontiers and its own aggressive tin-foil civilisation; outside the city and beyond its boundaries one came into the essential eternal land of Greece, slow moving, warm-hearted, hard, convivial, courteous, sincere. One was already beyond pursuit.

  The train stopped and his friends got out. He waved to them through the window. Many people were leaving the train here, and the guard said there would be a ten minutes stop, so he got out and walked slowly along the platform stretching his legs and trying to blink the sleep from his eyes. Another train came muttering in on the opposite platform, a steam train going the other way. The engine had been built by Krupp’s, probably for shunting work, seventy-three years ago. The carriages might have come from an old nineteenth-century print. As it shuddered to a stop, doors opened and crowds streamed out, many young people laughing and joking, a few carrying blowers and wearing paper hats.

  As they went past, Gene said to the guard of the steam train: “What is it? What has been happening?”

  “The festival at Nafplion. It’s held every year.” He moved on, furling his flag.

  “Those police on the platform,” said a girl laughing as she went past. “ Why were they there?”

>   “To look after us,” said her boy friend, and blew his paper blower in her face.

  Gene stood still. There were a lot of children on the train and they were taking a time to be got off. Police on what platform? he wanted to hurry after the girl and ask. But did he need to ask? Like a lump of heavy driftwood in a shallow stream, Gene began to move slowly with the crowd. As he did so he saw two men making for the waiting automotrice. They were not in uniform, but you couldn’t mistake them. They stopped at the centre door of the train and one of them drew back and glanced up and down so that he could keep the whole train in view. He had his hand in his pocket. The other man got on the train.

  The driftwood, as if it had come into deeper water, began to move more easily with the stream. At the barrier there was a cluster of people waiting to go through, children, black-clad women, boys laughing. It was a toss up—either that way or a dart across the railway lines. But always he had avoided the panic move.

  The man at the barrier was snatching tickets as the people went through. There did not appear to be anyone with him, anyone watching. Gene went through squeezed between a fat woman with a basket of oranges and two short-trousered bare-legged boys. The ticket was taken from his hand. He glanced over his shoulder and saw that one of the men who had gone to the automotrice was walking back to the barrier.

  Outside the station dim street-lights and a narrow rutted square. Walk in the same direction as most of the crowd. A man in a taxi, seeing him better dressed than most, called out to him but he hunched his shoulder and went by. It seemed a long walk but he did not look round again. Twenty steps to the corner, ten, five. A long street. People were spreading out, this way and that, giving him less chance of cover. A darker street to his right, leading back in the direction of the railway lines. He took it.

  Chapter Thirty Three

  He got to Nafplion just after midnight. He had walked all the way. In the dark and along the country roads there was little danger; even if the police were sure he was in this area they would not have great forces at their disposal. No doubt the taxi had been found, and at once the police had been alerted along the various routes he might have taken, south towards Piraeus, north in the direction of Levadhia and the main railway line to the Balkans, west into the Peloponnese with obvious attention to the only train feeding the area that night. It was his luck that he had got so far.