Cause for Alarm (26 page)

“What is it?”

“You’ll see.”

He handed me two heavy parcels and we pushed our way through to the clearing behind the bushes. There he sat down with a sigh of relief. I saw that his face was drawn and tired. He looked up at me and smiled wearily.

“First,” he said, “I’ve got you some breakfast.”

From his overcoat pocket he drew a large bag of buttered rolls. As I took the parcel from him I felt that they were still warm from the bakery. I tore the bag open and started to eat ravenously. Hot rolls! You couldn’t help liking Zaleshoff!

From his other pocket he got out a bottle of milk. I extended the bag to him. He shook his head.

“No, thanks. I ate while I was waiting for the shops to open. Thank goodness, we’re in the country. They opened early. I’d have brought you some coffee, but it would have been cold by the time I’d got it here.”

“What’s the name of the place?” I said with my mouth full.

“Reminini. It’s small and a good half-hour’s walk from here. I …” He broke off suddenly. “Would you like to see what I’ve got in the other parcels?”

I nodded, and he opened the two heavy parcels and displayed the contents. I goggled at them.

“Boots?”

“Yes, a pair for each of us and some thick woollen socks. I
noticed you had a bit of a limp this morning and when we stopped along the road I measured your foot against mine. We take the same size.”

I regarded the huge, hob-nailed soles and heavy uppers with some misgiving. He interpreted my look correctly.

“We’ve got a whole lot of walking to do and they’ll be less tiring than blisters.”

“I suppose so. What’s in the other parcel?”

“A muffler for one thing. You need one. And a hat.”

“But I’ve got a hat.”

“Not like this one. Have a look.”

I had a look and what I saw did not please me. It was a very cheap Italian soft hat, black, with a high crown and flat brim.

“What on earth is this for?”

He grinned. “To make you look less conspicuous. That hat of yours is very natty but it shrieks English to high Heaven. There’s nothing like a new hat for making you look different.”

I tried on the hat. To my surprise it fitted me.

He nodded. “I had a look at your size in hats last night.”

I felt it gingerly. “I can’t help feeling,” I said crossly, “that I shall look a damn sight more conspicuous in a low comedy affair like this than in my own hat.”

“That’s only because you’re not used to it. Here, give it to me.”

I gave it to him with pleasure. The next moment he was wringing it between his hands like a dish-cloth. He then proceeded to clean his shoes with it. Having done that he rubbed it vigorously on the ground until it was filthy. Then he shook the leaves off, punched it into shape again, dinted the top and handed it back to me.

“That’s a bit more like it should be. No, don’t dust it any more. Stick it on and give me your own.”

I obeyed him. He surveyed me critically.

“Yes, much better. It’s a good thing you’re dark. That unshaven chin goes swell with the hat.”

I lit a cigarette and yawned. The food had made me sleepy. My eyelids felt very heavy.

“Well,” I said, “I feel like a sleep. What about it? Shall we stay here or try to find somewhere else?”

He did not answer immediately and I looked up from my cigarette. He was looking at me steadily.

“There’ll be no sleep for us to-day,” he said slowly. “We’ve got to get on.”

“But …”

“I didn’t tell you before because I thought I’d let you eat your breakfast in peace, but we’re in a pretty tough spot here.”

My heart sank. “What do you mean?”

“There are patrols out on all the roads.”

“How do you know?”

“I ran slap into one just outside the village. Police and a couple of Blackshirt militiamen. We’re still in the Treviglio area, you see. I had to show my passport and permit, and they were suspicious. I made up a story on the spur of the moment about having started out early from Treviglio to get to a business appointment in Venice and having the car break down. It wasn’t very good, but it was the best thing I could think of to explain what I was doing along this road at this time and in these clothes. They let me by but they took a note of my name and the number of my passport. They also told me where the nearest garage was. I couldn’t very well go back along the road with all those parcels—that
would
have wanted a bit of explaining—so I had to make a detour through the fields. If they remember me and it occurs to them to check up with the garage man they’ll be beating the bushes before long. And there’s another thing.” He pulled a folded newspaper out of his inside pocket. “Take a look at this. It’s this morning’s.”

I took the paper and scanned the front page. It was an early edition of a Milan sheet. It did not take me long to see what he wanted me to see. There, in the middle of the page were two squared-up half-tones, each about three inches deep. Both were pictures of me.

Above them were the words, “A
TTENTI
, L.
10,000
,” in heavy black capitals. Below, also in bold type, was the message, slightly altered, that had been given over the radio the previous night. I examined the pictures carefully. One had obviously been taken from the prints I had supplied for my permit. It had been a “flat” photograph with hard, sharp lighting. The result was a reproduction that, in spite of the poor paper, was almost as clear as the original. It was easily recognisable as a picture of me. The other was less clear but it interested me very much for it had obviously been made from a photoprint of the photograph on my “lost” passport. I could see faintly where the black impressions of the British Foreign Office stamps had been painted out. I looked up.

“Well,” said Zaleshoff; “now you know why I didn’t want the ticket collector to see your face yesterday. The other papers have got those pictures too.”

“Yes, I see.” I paused. Again I felt fear gripping at my stomach. “What the devil are we to do? If they’re patrolling the roads and everybody’s got these pictures, there’s nothing we
can
do. You know, I think …”

He interrupted me.

“Sure, I know! You think the best thing you can do is to give yourself up. Don’t, for Heaven’s sake, let’s waste our strength talking all that over again.” He got out the map. “We’re not done yet. All the roads are patrolled but they can’t patrol the fields as well. Now Reminini isn’t marked on this map—it’s too small—but according to my reckoning it’s just about here”—he jabbed the paper with his finger—“and that means that we’re only about thirty kilometres south of the railway line from Bergamo to Brescia. If you’ll
look at the map you’ll see that all the major roads run almost due north in this area. In other words, if we go north crosscountry we ought to be able to reach the railway to-day without much risk of running into a patrol.”

“But in daylight …”

“I told you. The only roads we’ll have to worry about are those we cross and they’ll be secondary roads. As for the rest, all we’ve got to do is keep our eyes open.”

I pounced bitterly on the last phrase. “Dammit, Zaleshoff, I can hardly keep my eyes open now. I’m all in. And so are you by the look of it. We shall never do it. It’s no use your sticking your jaw out like that. It just isn’t reasonable to think that we can do it. Anyway, supposing we
do
get to the railway; what then?”

“We can jump a goods train that’ll take us to Udine.”

“Supposing there isn’t one?”

“There will be. It’s the main goods line from Turin. We may have to hide out until it’s dark, that’s all. And as for feeling tired, you’ll find that if you sprint a bit the tiredness’ll wear off.”

“Sprint!” I could hardly believe my ears.

“Yes, sprint. Come on, change your shoes for the boots and let’s get going. It’s not healthy here.”

I had not the strength to argue any more. I took off my shoes, pulled the coarse woollen socks over my own and then put on the boots. They were very stiff and felt like diving-boots look. My hat and shoes and the bottle and wrappings we buried under the leaves.

We walked through the trees to the fields on the opposite side of the wood to the road: then Zaleshoff produced a small toy compass he had bought in the village. After some trouble with the compass needle which, until we found that the glass was touching it, seemed willing to indicate north in any direction, we marked as our objective a group of trees on the brow of a slope about a kilometre away and set off.

For a minute or two we walked. Then, suddenly, Zaleshoff broke into a sharp trot.

“Race you to the end of the path,” he called back to me.

I detest at the best of times people wanting to race me to the ends of paths. I flung an emphatic negative after him, but he seemed not to hear. Feeling murderous, I picked up my heels and pounded after him. At length we slowed down, panting, to a walk.

“Feeling better?”

I had to admit that I was. The morning breeze had cleared away the remnants of the clouds. There was a suggestion of haze in the middle distance that presaged heat. We could hear a tractor working somewhere nearby, but we saw nothing on legs but cows. For a time we stepped out briskly. Then, as the sun became hotter, I felt my exhaustion returning.

“What about a rest?” I said after a while.

He shook his head. “We’d better keep going. Do you want some cognac?”

“No, thanks.”

We plodded on. It was open farming country with few trees and no shade. Swarms of flies, awakened by the heat, began to worry us. By midday I was feeling horribly thirsty and had a bad headache. For most of the time we seemed to be miles away from any sort of habitation. According to Zaleshoff we should have been near a secondary road running from east to west, but there was no sign of it ahead. The new boots had “drawn” my feet and become intolerably heavy. My legs began to feel shaky. The situation was not improved by our having to waste twenty minutes cowering in a dry ditch out of sight of a labourer who stopped to eat his lunch by the side of a cart track we had to cross. When at last we were able to push on, my feet and ankles had swollen. Our pace became slower. I found myself straggling behind Zaleshoff.

He waited for me to catch up with him.

“If I don’t have a drink of water soon,” I declared, “I shall pass out. As for these damn flies …”

He nodded. “I guess I feel that way too. But we should make the road almost any time now. Can you keep going a bit longer?”

“I suppose so.”

But it was two o’clock before we reached the road. It might have been an oasis in a desert instead of a dry strip of dusty flints. Zaleshoff uttered a husky exclamation of satisfaction.

“I knew we weren’t far away. Now you get among those bushes and lie low while I see what I can find in the shape of a drink. Don’t move away.”

The exhortation was unnecessary. Nothing but the direst necessity could have induced me to move. Through the pumping of the blood in my head I heard Zaleshoff’s footsteps crunch slowly away into the distance.

Looking back now on those days with Zaleshoff one thing makes me marvel above all else—my complete and unquestioning belief in Zaleshoff’s superior powers of endurance. It was always Zaleshoff who coaxed me into making a further effort when no further effort seemed possible. It was always Zaleshoff who, when we were both at the end of our strength, would walk another kilometre or more to get food and drink for us both. That it was safer for Zaleshoff to do so was beside the point; and, in any case, it soon became as dangerous for Zaleshoff as it would have been for me. My acceptance of the situation was based on the tacit assumption that Zaleshoff would naturally be in better shape than me. It is only now that I realise that Zaleshoff’s was not physical superiority, but moral. I remember now, with a pang of mingled conscience and affection, the grey look of his face when he was tired, his habit of drawing the back of his hand across his eyes and one little incident that happened later. He had
stopped suddenly to lean against a tree. With weary irritation I had asked him what the matter was. His eyes were shut. I remember now seeing the muscles of his face tighten suddenly. Then he looked angry and said that he had a stone down the inside of one of his boots. That had been all. He had pretended to extricate the stone and we had walked on. No, you could not dislike Zaleshoff.

I was nearly asleep when he got back. He shook me. I looked up and saw his face near mine. The sweat was trickling down in rivers through the dust and grime on his unshaven cheeks.

“Something to drink and eat,” he said.

He had bought some bread and sausage and a bottle of water mixed with a little wine from a woman in a cottage about a quarter of a mile away. Her husband had been at work in the fields. He had seen nobody else but the driver of a passing lorry.

“I’d have preferred plain water myself,” he added; “but she said it was safer with a little wine in it. I didn’t argue the toss about it. We don’t want to add stomach trouble to the rest of it.”

I was feeling too tired to eat much. When we had finished, we put what was left in our pockets, together with the now half-empty bottle, smoked one cigarette each and set off again.

The afternoon was worse, if anything, than the morning. It was the first really hot day I had known in Italy. We marched with our overcoats and jackets slung over our shoulders. The flies pestered us almost beyond endurance. Twice we had to make wide semicircular detours over rough ground to avoid being seen by labourers. We crossed another secondary road. Towards four o’clock Zaleshoff called a halt.

“If we go on like this,” he panted, “we shall kill ourselves. We can’t be so very far from the railway now. For God’s sake let’s have a drink and wait for the sun to cool off a bit.”

For an hour we rested in the shade of a tree, talking inanities to prevent ourselves going to sleep. When we got to our feet again the sun had started to dip down towards the trees on the western horizon. The flies seemed less attentive. Zaleshoff suggested singing as we went to keep a good marching rhythm. At first I was inclined to regard the proposal as a piece of very shallow heartiness, but to my surprise I found that the dingy humming that we managed to produce cheered me considerably. My legs seemed to be moving automatically as though they did not belong to me. All I could feel of them was the aching thigh muscles and the burning soles of my feet. We began to descend a long gentle gradient.