by Eric Ambler
“I know what you mean.”
“I wouldn’t like it to go any further,” he persisted maddeningly.
“I’ve got that.”
“Well now”-he cleared his throat-“I have been given to understand by certain parties,” he said carefully, “that you, Mr. Carey, have been making certain inquiries of a confidential nature in the town.”
“Yes.”
“This afternoon you had a certain conversation with a certain woman who shall be nameless.”
“Madame Vassiotis, you mean?”
“That’s right.”
“Then why say she shall be nameless?”
“No names, no pack drill.”
“Oh, all right. Get on.”
“She gave you certain information.”
“What about it?”
“Easy does it, Mr. Carey. Your inquiries were re a certain German N.C.O. named Schirmer. Correct?”
“Correct.”
“Do you mind telling me why you are making the said inquiries, Mr. Carey?”
“If you were to tell me first just why you wanted to know, I might tell you.”
Arthur digested this reply for a moment or two in silence.
“And, just to make matters simpler, Arthur,” George added, “I’ll tell you that, although I’m a lawyer, I’m quite capable of understanding ordinary English. So what about letting your hair down and coming to the point?”
Mr. Arthur’s low forehead creased with the effort of thinking. “You see, it’s confidential, that’s the trouble, Mr. Carey,” he said unhappily.
“So you explained. But if it’s so confidential that you can’t talk about it, you’d better go home and let me get some sleep, hadn’t you?”
“Now, don’t talk like that, Mr. Carey. I’m doing my best. Look! If you were to tell me what you want to know about this chap for, I could tell certain persons who might be able to help you.”
“What persons?”
“Persons with information to give.”
“You mean information to sell, don’t you?”
“I said give.”
George examined his guest thoughtfully. “You’re British, aren’t you, Arthur?” he said after a moment. “Or is that confidential?”
Arthur grinned. “Want to hear me speak Greek? I speak it like a native.”
“All right, then. You’re a citizen of the world, then, eh?”
“Goldsmith!” said Arthur unexpectedly.
“Pardon?”
“Oliver Goldsmith,” repeated Arthur; “he wrote a book called The Citizen of the World. We had it at school. Lot of crap about a Chinaman who comes to London and sees the sights.”
“What part of London do you come from, Arthur?”
Arthur wagged a finger coyly. “Ah, naughty, naughty! That would be telling!”
“Afraid I’ll check up on the British War Office lists of troops reported missing in Greece and find out which ones came from where you came from?”
“What do you think, chum?”
George smiled. “O.K., Arthur. Here it is. This man Schirmer I’ve been inquiring about was entitled to some money left by a distant relative of his in America. He was reported missing. I came here really to get confirmation of his death, but I’d also like to know if he ever had any children. That’s all. I found out today that he’s dead.”
“From old Ma Vassiotis?”
“That’s right. And now I’m on my way home.”
“I get it.” Arthur was thinking hard now. “Much money, is there?” he said at last.
“Just enough to make it worth my while coming here.”
“And that little bit of homework you’ve got with you?”
“Miss Kolin, you mean? She’s an interpreter.”
“I get you.” Arthur came to a decision. “Supposing-just supposing, mind-that there was a bit more information you could find out about this German. Would it be worth your while to stay another couple of days?”
“That would depend on the information.”
“Well, supposing he’d had a wife and kids. They’d be in line for the cash, wouldn’t they?”
“ Did he have a wife and kids?”
“I’m not saying he did and I’m not saying he didn’t. But just supposing-”
“If there was clear, legal proof of that to be had, I’d certainly stay. But I’m not staying just in order to listen to a lot of unconfirmed hearsay, and I’m not paying out another cent to anyone.”
“Nobody’s asked you to, have they?”
“Not so far.”
“Nasty suspicious nature you got, eh?”
“Yes.”
Arthur nodded gloomily. “Can’t blame you. Tricky lot of sods in this part of the world. Look, if I give you my sacred word of honour that it’ll be worth your while to stay a couple of days, will you do it?”
“You’re asking rather a lot aren’t you?”
“Listen, chum. You’re the one that’s going to get a favour done. Not me!”
“That’s what you say.”
“Well, I can’t do more. Here’s the proposition. Take it or leave it. If you want the information my friends have got, stay here and do what I tell you.”
“And what might that be?”
“Well, first of all, you don’t say one word to that little bastard of a Captain you were chin-wagging with last night. O.K.?”
“Go on.”
“All you do is go to that big cafe with the yellow blinds next door to the Acropolis Hotel between four and five tomorrow afternoon. Just sit there and have a cup of coffee. That’s all. If you get no message from me while you’re there, it’s all off. If you do get a message, it’ll be an appointment. Just say nothing and keep it.”
“What about the interpreter?”
“If she keeps her mouth shut she can come too.”
“Where would the appointment be?”
“You’d be taken to it by car.”
“I see. Just one question. I’m not exactly timid, but I would like to know a bit more about these friends of yours before I do anything about meeting them. Would they be ELAS people, for instance?”
Arthur grinned. “Ask no questions and you’ll be told no lies. You don’t have to come if you don’t want to.”
“Maybe not. But I’m not half-witted. You say these friends of yours don’t want money for their information. O.K., what do they want? For that matter, what do you want?”
“Sweet Fanny Adams,” said Arthur cheerfully.
“Let’s quit kidding.”
“All right. Maybe they want to see justice done.”
“Justice?”
“Yes. Ever heard of it?”
“Sure. I’ve heard of kidnapping too.”
“Oh, blimey!” Arthur laughed. “Look, if you’re as nervous as that, chum, forget it.” He stood up. “I’ll have to be getting along now. If you want to come, be at the cafe tomorrow like I said. Otherwise-” He shrugged.
“O.K. I’ll think about it.”
“Yes, you do that. Sorry to mess up all your papers like that, but I expect you’d sooner tidy them up yourself, really. Bye-bye for now.”
“Good-bye,” said George.
Almost before the word was out of his mouth, Arthur was out of the room and shutting the door noiselessly behind him.
It was not his uncertainty about bedbugs that kept George from sleeping soundly that night.
The cafe with the yellow blinds was in an exposed position on a busy corner, and everyone sitting in it could be clearly seen from anywhere in the main square: It was, George thought, the very last place he would have associated with the transaction of clandestine business. But then, he was not a practised conspirator. The cafe’s air of having nothing to conceal was probably its greatest asset. In Arthur’s world, no doubt, such matters were elaborately calculated.
Miss Kolin had listened blandly to George’s account of his interview with Arthur and accepted without comment his decision to postpone their departure. When,
however, he had gone on to say that, in view of the possible risks involved, he would leave her to decide for herself whether she would accompany him or not, she had been quite obviously amused.
“Risks, Mr. Carey? But what sort of risks?”
“How should I know?” George was irritated. “The point is that this isn’t exactly the most law-abiding part of the world and this guy Arthur’s way of introducing himself for a cozy chat wasn’t exactly according to Emily Post, was it?”
She had shrugged. “It served its purpose.”
“What do you mean?”
“Frankly, Mr. Carey, I think that it was a mistake to give the Vassiotis woman so much money.”
“From my point of view, she’d earned it.”
“Your point of view, Mr. Carey, is that of an American lawyer. The points of view of the Vassiotis and her friends are different.”
“I see. You think that this Arthur proposition is just another shakedown then?”
“I do. You gave that Captain a hundred dollars and the Vassiotis fifty. Now Mr. Arthur and his friends would like some dollars, too.”
“He emphasized that there was no question of money involved. I told you.”
“You believed him?”
“All right, then, I’m the prize sucker. But, for some reason, I did believe him. For some reason, equally idiotic no doubt, I still do.”
She had shrugged again. “Then you are right to keep the appointment. It will be interesting to see what happens.”
That had been over breakfast. By lunch-time his confidence in his first estimate of Arthur’s intensions had completely evaporated. Sitting in the cafe with the yellow blinds, glumly sipping coffee, he had only one consoling thought in his head: no matter what happened, no matter what they did, neither Arthur nor any of Arthur’s friends was going to get one red cent for his trouble.
It was after five o’clock now. The cafe was three parts empty. Nobody who looked as if he might conceivably have a message to deliver had been near them.
George finished his coffee. “All right, Miss Kolin,” he said, “let’s pay and go.”
She signalled to the waiter. When his change came, George noticed a fold of grey paper underneath it. He put it in his pocket with the change. When they had left the cafe, he took out the paper and unfolded it.
The message was written in a careful schoolboy hand and in pencil:
A car with the registration number 19907 will be waiting for you outside the Cinema at 20.00 hrs. [it said]. If anyone wants to know where you are going you are going for a drive to get some air. The driver is O.K. Ask no questions. Do what he tells you. Wear comfortable shoes. Arthur.
The car was an old open Renault that George remembered having seen once before in the town. On that occasion it had been piled high with furniture. Now it was empty, and the driver stood beside it, cap in hand, gravely holding open the door for them. He was a fierce, sinewy old man with a long white moustache and skin like leather. He wore a patched shirt and a pair of old striped trousers belted in at the waist with lighting flex. The back of the car showed signs of having recently carried vegetables as well as furniture. The old man scooped up a handful of decaying stalks and threw them in the road before getting into his seat and driving off.
Soon they had left the town and were on a road with a signpost pointing to Vevi, a station on the railroad east of Florina.
It was getting dark now and the old man turned on a single headlight. He drove to save gasoline, coasting down the hills with the ignition switched off, and starting up again only just before the car rolled to a standstill. The battery was down, and when the motor was not running, the headlight dimmed until it was useless. With the disappearance of the last of the daylight, every descent became a hair-raising plunge into blackness. Fortunately, they met no other traffic, but after one particularly sickening moment George protested.
“Miss Kolin, tell him to go slower down the hills or keep the motor running for the light. He’ll kill us if he’s not careful.”
The driver turned right round in his seat to reply.
“He says the moon will be up presently.”
“Tell him to look where he’s going, for God’s sake!”
“He says that there is no danger. He knows the road well.”
“All right, all right. Don’t say any more. Let him keep his eyes on the road.”
They had been driving for nearly an hour, and the promised moon had begun to rise, when the road joined another coming from the north. Ten minutes later they turned to the left and began a long, steady climb through the hills. They passed one or two isolated stone barns, then the road began to get steadily worse. Soon the car was bouncing and sliding along over a surface littered with loose stones and rocks. After a mile or two of this, the car suddenly slowed down, lurched across the road to avoid an axle-deep pot-hole, and stopped dead.
The lurch and the sudden stop flung George against Miss Kolin. For a moment he thought that the car had broken down; then, as they disentangled themselves, he saw that the driver was standing there with the door open, motioning them to get out.
“What’s the idea?” George demanded.
The old man said something.
“He says that this is where we get out,” reported Miss Kolin.
George looked round. The road was a narrow ledge of track running across a bleak hillside of thorn scrub. In the bright moonlight it looked utterly desolate. From the scrub there came a steady chorus of cicadas.
“Tell him we’re staying right here until he takes us where we’re supposed to go.”
There was a torrent of speech when this was translated.
“He says that this is as far as he can take us. This is the end of the road. We must get out and walk on. Someone will meet us on the road beyond. He must wait here. Those are his orders.”
“I thought he said it was the end of the road.”
“If we will come with him he will show us that he speaks the truth.”
“Wouldn’t you prefer to wait here, Miss Kolin?”
“Thank you, no.”
They got out and began to walk on.
For about twenty yards the old man walked ahead of them, explaining something and making large dramatic gestures; then he stopped and pointed.
They had indeed come to the end of the road; or, at least, to the end of that stretch of it. At some time a big stone culvert had carried a mountain stream beneath the roadbed. Now the remains of it lay in a deep boulder-strewn gully that the stream had cut for itself in the hillside.
“He says that it was blown up by the Germans and that the winter rains have made it bigger every year.”
“Are we supposed to cross it?”
“Yes. The road continues on the other side and there we will be met. He will stay by the car.”
“How far on the other side will we be met?”
“He does not know.”
“That advice about comfortable shoes should have warned me. Well, I suppose that now we’re here we may as well go through with it.”
“As you wish.”
The bed of the stream was dry and they were able to pick their way over the stones and between the boulders without much trouble. Clambering up on the far side, however, was less easy, as the gully was deeper there. The night was warm and George’s shirt was clinging stickily to his body by the time he had helped Miss Kolin up to the road.
They stood for a moment getting their breath and looking back. The old man waved and went back to his car.
“How long do you think it would take us to walk back to Florina from here, Miss Kolin?” George asked.
“I think he will wait. He has not been paid yet.”
“ I didn’t hire him.”
“He will expect you to pay all the same.”
“We’ll see about that. We’d better do what he says, anyway.”
They began to walk.
Except for the chirruping of cicadas and the grating of their own footsteps, there was
no sound on the road. Once they heard the faint tinkle of a distant sheep bell, but that was all. They had been walking steadily and in silence for some minutes when Miss Kolin spoke quietly.
“There is someone on the road ahead.”
“Where? I can’t see anyone.”
“By those bushes we are coming to. He moved out of the shadow for a moment and I saw the moonlight on his face.”
George felt his calves tightening as they walked on. He kept his eyes fixed on the bushes. Then he saw a movement in the shadows and a man stepped out into the road.
It was Arthur; but a rather different Arthur from the one George had talked to in the hotel. He wore breeches, a bush-shirt open at the neck, and a peaked cap. The thin pointed shoes had been replaced by heavy ankle boots. There was a pistol holster on the broad leather belt round his waist.
“Evening, chum,” he said as they came up to him.
“Hullo,” said George. “Miss Kolin, this is Arthur.”
“Pleased to meet you, miss.” The tone was humbly respectful, but George could see the shrewd, insolent eyes summing her up.
Miss Kolin nodded. “Good evening.” Her hostility was clearly audible.
Arthur pursed his lips at the sound. “No trouble getting here, I hope, Mr. Carey?” he asked anxiously. He was suddenly like a week-end host apologizing for the inadequacies of the local train service.
“None to speak of. Will that old man wait for us?”
“Oh, you don’t want to worry about him. Shall we go?”
“Sure. Where to?”
“It’s not far. I’ve got transport. Just up the road here.”
He led the way. They followed in silence. About a quarter of a mile further on, the road ended again. This time the obstruction was due to a landslide from the hill above, which had obliterated a section of about fifty yards. However, a narrow track had been beaten out over the debris, and they stumbled along this cautiously until the road reappeared. That is, George and Miss Kolin stumbled; Arthur went forward as sure-footedly as if he were on a city street. He was waiting for them when they got back to the road.
“Only a little way now,” he said.
They walked on for another quarter of a mile. There were tamarisks growing out of the hillside here, and the moonlight cast their distorted shadows across the road. Then the shadows became solid and Arthur slowed down. Parked on a section of road which was wide enough for a vehicle to turn was a small covered truck.
