by Eric Ambler
“But doesn’t she know she’s under surveillance?”
“Ah yes, but she bribes my men. The fact that they take her money makes her feel safe. It is all quite friendly. But we do not wish to alarm her, so she must be consulted first.” He rose to his feet, suddenly businesslike. “Perhaps tonight.”
“That’s good of you, Captain. Won’t you stay and have a drink?”
“Ah, no, thank you. Just now I have various appointments. Tomorrow I will send a note to you here to give you the address to go to if she has agreed, and any other necessary instructions.”
“O.K. Fine.”
There was a lot of heel-clicking and politeness and he went. George signalled to the barman.
“Well, Miss Kolin,” he said when they were served again, “what do you think?”
“I think that the Captain’s various appointments are almost certainly with his mistress.”
“I meant do you think there’s anything in this. You know this part of the world. Do you think he’ll do what he said about contacting this woman?”
She shrugged. “I think that for a hundred dollars the Captain would do almost anything.”
It took a moment or two for George to appreciate the implication of this statement. “But the Captain’s not getting the money,” he said.
“No?”
“No. That’s for the wineshop woman, if she comes through with the information.”
“I do not think he will give her a hundred dollars. Perhaps twenty. Perhaps nothing.”
“You’re kidding.”
“You asked me for my impression.” “He’s the Keen Young Executive type. All he wants is a pat on the back from the boss. You see.” Miss Kolin smiled sardonically.
George did not get much rest that night. The precautions he had taken against bedbugs had somehow served to convince him that the mattress frame must be alive with the creatures. In the darkness he had soon begun to imagine that he was being attacked by them. Useless now to remind himself of the D.D.T. he had applied; Balkan bugs probably ate the stuff like ice cream. After a fourth panic inspection failed to reveal even one attacker, he became desperate, stripped the bed, and made a further assault on the mattress with the insufflator. A rose-coloured dawn was glowing among the mountain peaks before he succeeded in going to sleep.
He awoke, resentfully, at nine o’clock. While he was at breakfast in the cafe downstairs, a letter arrived from the Captain.
D EAR S IR [George read]:
The woman is Madame Vassiotis at the wineshop in the rue Montenegrine. She will expect you, but not until this afternoon. Say that you come from Monsieur Kliris. Do not refer to me. She has been told what you want and might have an answer for you. The price will be U. S. dollars 150, but do not give it to the woman herself or speak of it. I wish to be assured personally that you are satisfied before you pay. If, when I have seen you this evening, you tell me that all is well, I will see that the money goes to her by Monsieur Kliris.
The letter was written on plain paper and unsigned. George did not show it to Miss Kolin.
The rue Montenegrine proved to be a steep, refuse-strewn lane in the poorer quarter of the town. The houses were broken down and ugly. Lines of dingy washing were strung across the lane between some of the upper windows; others had bedding hung out over the sills. There were a great many children about.
The wineshop was near the top of the lane by a builder’s yard. It had no display window. There was a bead-curtained doorway in a wall, and two or three steps led down to the interior. George and Miss Kolin entered and found themselves in a kind of cellar, with wine barrels stacked on their sides against the walls, and a massive wooden bench in the centre. Light came from an oil lamp on a shelf. The air was cool and there was a smell of stale wine and old barrels that was not unpleasant.
There were two persons in the shop. One of them, an old man in blue denim trousers, sat on the bench drinking a glass of wine. The other was Madame Vassiotis.
She was amazingly fat, with huge pendulous breasts and a vast lap. She was sitting on, and almost completely enveloping, a low stool by a doorway at the back of the shop. When they entered, she rose slowly to her feet and waddled forward into the light.
Her head was small for her body, with dark hair drawn tightly away from the brow. The face seemed as though it ought to belong to someone younger or less gross. It was still firm and delicately shaped, and the eyes under their heavy lids were dark and clear.
She murmured a word of greeting.
Miss Kolin replied. George had briefed her in readiness for the interview and she did not trouble to interpret the preliminaries. He saw Madame Vassiotis nod understandingly and glance at the old man. He prompttly finished his wine and went out. Then she bowed slightly to George and, with a gesture of invitation, led the way through a doorway at the back into a sitting-room.
There, there were Turkish carpets on the walls, a divan with plush cushions, and a few pieces of rickety Victorian furniture. It reminded him of a fortune-teller’s booth in a travelling fair. Only the crystal ball was missing.
Madame Vassiotis poured three glasses of wine, sank down heavily on the divan, and motioned them to chairs. When they were seated, she folded her hands in her lap and looked placidly from one to the other of them as if waiting for someone to propose a parlour game.
“Ask her,” George said, “if she has been able to get any reply to the questions put to her by Monsieur Kliris.”
Madame Vassiotis listened gravely to the translation and then, with a nod, began to speak.
“She states,” said Miss Kolin, “that she has been able to speak with one of the andartes who took part in the affair near Vodena. Her information is that the German Sergeant was killed.”
“Does she know how he was killed?”
“He was in the first truck of the German convoy. It exploded a mine.”
George thought for a moment. He had not mentioned either of those facts to the Captain. It was promising.
“Did the informant see the Sergeant dead?”
“Yes.”
“Was he on the road?”
“He was where he fell when the truck was hit.”
“What happened to the body afterwards?”
He saw Madame Vassiotis shrug.
“Does she know that the body was not there when the German patrol came along afterwards?”
“Yes, but her informant can offer no explanation of this.”
George thought again. This was awkward. An experienced man would probably know that the N.C.O. in charge of a German column would ride in the leading truck; and certainly anyone who had taken any part at all in the ambush would know that the leading truck had hit a mine. The informant might well have been farther down the road, firing on the other trucks. With the prospect of earning a few dollars for his trouble, however, he would be ready to oblige with a reasonable guess.
“Ask her if her friend knows what the Sergeant’s injuries were.”
“She cannot say exactly. The Sergeant was lying in a pool of blood.”
“Is she absolutely sure in her own mind-?” Then he broke off. “No, wait a minute. Put it another way. If the Sergeant were her own son, would she be satisfied in her own mind that he was dead from what her friend has told her?”
A smile appeared on the delicately curved lips and a chuckle shook the massive body as their owner understood his question. Then, with a grunting effort, she heaved herself up from the divan and waddled to a drawer in the table. From it she took a slip of paper, which she handed to Miss Kolin with an explanation.
“Madame anticipated your doubts and asked for proof that her friend saw the body. He told her that they stripped the dead Germans of their equipment and that he got the Sergeant’s water bottle. He still has it. It has the Sergeant’s number and name burned into the strap. They are written on this paper.”
Madame Vassiotis sat down again and sipped her wine as George looked at the paper.
The army numbe
r he knew well; he had seen it before on several documents. Beneath it in block letters had been written: “ SCHIRMER F.”
George considered it carefully for a moment or two, then nodded. He had not mentioned the name Schirmer to the Captain. Trickery was quite out of the question. The evidence was conclusive. What had happened afterwards to the body of Sergeant Schirmer might never be known, but there was no shadow of doubt that Madame Vassiotis and her mysterious acquaintance were telling what they knew of the truth.
He nodded and, picking up his glass of wine, raised it politely to the woman before he drank.
“Thank her for me, please, Miss Kolin,” he said as he put the glass down, “and tell her that I am well satisfied.”
He got out a fifty-dollar bill and put it on the table as he stood up.
He saw an expression of hastily concealed amazement flicker across the fat woman’s face. Then she rose to her feet bowing and smiling. She was clearly delighted. If her dignity had permitted it she would have picked up the bill to have a closer look. She pressed them to have more wine.
When, eventually, they were able to bow themselves out of the shop, George turned to Miss Kolin. “You’d better tell her not to mention that fifty dollars to Monsieur Kliris,” he said; “I shan’t mention it to the Captain. With any luck she may get paid twice.”
Miss Kolin was on her sixth after-dinner brandy, and her eyes were glazing rapidly. She was sitting very straight in her chair. At any moment now she would decide that it was time for her to go to bed. The Captain had long since departed. He had had the air of a man of whose good nature unfair advantage had been taken. However, he had not refused the hundred dollars George had offered him. Presumably he was now celebrating the occasion with his mistress. For George, there was nothing more to be done in Florina.
“We’ll leave tomorrow morning, Miss Kolin,” he said. “Train to Salonika. Plane to Athens. Plane to Paris. All right?”
“You have definitely decided?”
“Can you think of one reason for going on with the thing?”
“I never had any doubt that the man was dead.”
“No, that’s right, you didn’t. Going to bed now?”
“I think so, yes. Good night, Mr. Carey.”
“Good night, Miss Kolin.”
Watching her meticulous progress to the door of the cafe, George wondered gloomily if she kept her rigid self-control until she got into bed or whether, in the privacy of her room, she allowed herself to pass out.
He finished his own drink slowly. He felt depressed and wished to account for the fact. According to the lights of the ambitious young corporation lawyer who, only a few weeks back, had been pleased to watch his name being painted on an office door in Philadelphia, he should have been delighted by the turn of events. He had been given an irksome and unrewarding task and had performed it quickly and efficiently. He could now return with confidence to more serious and useful business. Everything was fine. And yet he was deriving no pleasure from the fact. It was absurd. Could it be that, in his heart, he had hoped, ludicrously, to find the Schneider Johnson claimant and take him back in triumph to that juvenile dotard, Mr. Sistrom? Could it be that what was now troubling him was merely an idiotic feeling of anticlimax? That must be it, of course. For a moment or two he almost succeeded in convincing himself that he had discovered the reason for his state of mind. Then the even less palatable truth of the matter dawned on him. He had been enjoying himself.
Yes, there it was. The talented, ambitious, pretentious Mr. Carey, with his smug, smiling family, his Brooks Brothers suits, and his Princeton and Harvard degrees, liked playing detectives, liked looking for nonexistent German soldiers, liked having dealings with dreary people like Frau Gresser, disagreeable people like Colonel Chrysantos, and undesirables like Phengaros. And why? For the value of such experiences in a corporation law practice? Because he loved his fellow men and was curious about them? Rubbish. More likely that the elaborate defences of his youth, the pompous fantasies of big office chairs and panelled boardrooms, of hidden wealth and power behind the scenes, were beginning to crumble, and that the pimply adolescent was belatedly emerging into the light. Was it not possible that, in finding out something about a dead man, he had at last begun to find out something about himself?
He sighed, paid the bar bill, got his key, and went up to his room.
It was in the front of the hotel on the second floor, and at night the light streaming down from unshuttered windows across the street was almost strong enough to read by.
When he opened the door, therefore, he did not immediately look for the light switch. The first thing he saw as he took the key out of the lock was his briefcase lying open on the bed, with its contents scattered about the covers.
He started forward quickly. He had taken about two steps when the door slammed behind him. He swung round.
A man was standing just beside the door. He was in the shadow, but the pistol in his hand was clearly visible in the light from across the street. It moved forward as the man spoke.
He spoke very softly, but, even for George’s scattered senses, the strong Cockney accent in the voice was unmistakable.
“All right, chum,” it said. “Gently does it. No, don’t move. Just put your hands behind your head, keep absolutely quiet, and hope you won’t get hurt. Got it?”
9
George’s experience of extreme danger had been gained in the cockpits of heavy bombers and in circumstances for which he had been carefully prepared by long periods of training. Of dangers such as those which lurk behind doors in Macedonian hotels, dangers unrelated to the wearing of a uniform and the organized prosecution of a war, he had had no experience, and neither Princeton nor Harvard Law School had done anything to prepare him for one.
As, therefore, he raised his hands obediently and put them behind his head, he was suddenly aware of an overwhelming, unreasoning, and quite impracticable desire to run away somewhere and hide. He struggled against it for a moment; then the man spoke again and the desire went as suddenly as it had arrived. The blood began to pound unpleasantly in his head.
“That’s right, chum,” the voice was saying soothingly. “Now just go over to the window there and pull the shutters to. Then we’ll have a little light on the scene. Slowly does it. Yes, you’ll have to use your hands, but watch what you do with them or we’ll have an accident. Don’t try calling out or anything, either. All nice and quiet. That’s the ticket.”
George pulled the shutters to, and at the same moment the light in the room went on. He turned.
The man who stood by the light switch, watching him, was in his middle thirties, short and thickset, with dark, thinning hair. His suit was obviously a local product. Just as obviously he was not. The rawboned, snub-nosed face and the sly, insolent eyes originated, as did the Cockney accent, from somewhere within the Greater London area.
“That’s better, eh?” the visitor said. “Now we can see what’s what without the neighbours across the street getting nosy.”
“What the hell’s the idea of all this?” said George. “And who the hell are you?”
“Easy, chum.” The visitor grinned. “No names, no pack drill. You can call me Arthur if you like. It’s not my name, but it’ll do. Lots of people call me Arthur. You’re Mr. Carey, aren’t you?”
“You should know.” George looked at the papers strewn over the bed.
“Ah, yes. Sorry about that, Mr. Carey. I meant to clear it up before you came back. But I didn’t have time for more than a glance. I haven’t taken anything, naturally.”
“Naturally. I don’t leave money in hotel rooms.”
“Oh, what a wicked thing to say!” said the visitor skittishly. “Tongue like a whiplash, haven’t we?”
“Well, if you’re not here for money, what are you here for?”
“A bit of a chat, Mr. Carey. That’s all.”
“Do you usually come calling with a gun?”
The visitor looked pained. “Look,
chum, how was I to know you’d be reasonable-finding a stranger in your room? Supposing you’d start yelling blue murder and throwing the furniture about. I had to take precautions.”
“You could have asked for me downstairs.”
The visitor grinned slyly. “Could I? Ah, but maybe you don’t know much about these parts, Mr. Carey. All right”-his tone suddenly became businesslike-“I’ll tell you what I’ll do with you. You promise not to start calling up the management or getting Charlie with me, and I’ll put the gun away. O.K.?”
“All right. But I’d still like to know what you’re doing here.”
“I told you. I want a little private chat. That’s all.” “What about?”
“I’ll tell you.” Arthur put his gun away inside his jacket and produced a packet of Greek cigarettes. He offered them to George. “Smoke, Mr. Carey?”
George produced a packet of his own. “No, thanks. I’ll stick to these.”
“Chesterfields, eh? Long time no see. Mind if I try one?”
“Help yourself.”
“Thanks.” He fussed about the business of giving George a light like an over-anxious host. Then he lit his own cigarette and drew on it appreciatively. “Nice tobacco,” he said. “Very nice.”
George sat down on the edge of the bed. “Look,” he said impatiently, “what exactly is this all about? You break into my room, go through my business papers, threaten me with a gun, and then say you only want a private chat. All right, so we’re chatting. Now what?”
“Mind if I sit down, Mr. Carey?”
“Do anything you like, but for Pete’s sake come to the point.”
“All right, all right, give us a chance.” Arthur sat down gingerly on a cane-backed chair. “It’s a private sort of a matter, Mr. Carey,” he said. “Confidential, if you know what I mean.”
