Partisans (20 page)

She smiled faintly. ‘Maybe you're not even a monster at all.'

‘You're going to sleep, now?' She nodded so he said goodnight and closed the door behind him.

Almost an hour elapsed before Petersen, George and Josip were left together in the dining-room. The others had been in no hurry to depart. The night's events had not been conducive to an immediately renewed slumber and, besides, they were secure in the knowledge that there would be no early morning start.

George, who had returned to his red wine, was making steady inroads on his current uncounted bottle, looked and spoke as if he had been on mineral water all the time. There was, unfortunately, not the same lack of evidence about his cigar-smoking: an evilsmelling blue haze filled the upper half of the room.

‘Your friend, Major Cipriano, didn't over-stay his welcome,' Josip said.

‘He's no friend of mine,' Petersen said. ‘Never seen him before. Appearances mean nothing but he seems a reasonable enough character. For an intelligence agent, that is. Have
you
known him long?'

‘He has been here twice. As a bona-fide traveller. He's no friend. Thanking me for my help was just an attempt to divert suspicion from whoever tipped him off. A feeble attempt, he must have known it would fail but probably the best he could think up at the time. What was his object in coming here?'

‘No mystery about that. Both the Germans and Italians are suspicious of me. I have a message to deliver to the leader of the
etniks. On the boat coming across from Italy one of his agents, an unpleasant character called Alessandro, tried to get this message from me. He wanted to see if it was the same as a copy he was carrying. He failed, so Cipriano got worried and came across to Plo
e. He was tipped off as to our whereabouts, came up here – almost certainly by light plane – and, when we were herded down here, went through our possessions, steamed open the envelope containing my message, found that it was unchanged and resealed it. Exit Cipriano, baffled but satisfied – for the moment anyway.'

George said: ‘Sarina?'

‘Someone got into her room in the early hours of this morning. That was after she had been doped. Her radio was used to call up Cipriano. Sarina says she trusts me now. I don't believe her.'

‘It is as always,' George said mournfully. ‘Every man's – and woman's – hands are against us.'

‘Doped?' Josip was incredulous. ‘In my hotel? How can anyone be doped in my hotel?'

‘How can anyone be doped anywhere?'

‘Who was this villain?'

‘Villainess. Lorraine.'

‘Lorraine! That beautiful girl?'

‘Maybe her mind is not as beautiful as the rest of her.'

‘Sarina. Now Lorraine.' George shook his head sadly. ‘The monstrous regiment of women.'

Josip said: ‘But how do you know?'

‘Simple arithmetic. Elimination. Lorraine went for a walk tonight and returned very hurriedly. She didn't go for the walk's sake. She went for something else. Information. You went with her, Josip. Do you recall her doing or saying anything odd?'

‘She didn't do anything. Just walked. And she said very little.'

‘That should make it easy to remember.'

‘Well, she said it was odd that I didn't have the name of the hotel outside. I told her I hadn't yet got around to putting it up and that it was the Hotel Eden. She also said it was funny that there were no streets signs up, so I gave her the name of the street. Ah! So she got the name and address, no?'

‘Yes.' Petersen rose. ‘Bed. I trust you're not going to stay here for the remainder of the night, George.'

‘Certainly not.' George fetched a fresh bottle from behind the bar. ‘But we academics must have our moments for meditation.'

At noon that day, Petersen and his six companions had still not left the Hotel Eden. Instead, they were just sitting down to a lunch which Josip had insisted they have, a meal that was to prove to be on a par with the dinner they had had the previous evening. But there was one vacant seat.

Josip said: ‘Where is the Professor?'

‘George,' Petersen said, ‘is indisposed. In bed. Acute stomach pains. He thinks it must have been something he had to eat last night.'

‘Something he had to eat!' Josip was indignant. ‘He had exactly the same to eat as anyone else last night – except, of course, a great deal more of it – and nobody else is stricken. My food, indeed!
I
know what ails the Professor. When I came down early this morning, just about two hours after you went to bed, the Professor was still here, still, as he said, meditating.'

‘That might help to account for it.'

That might have accounted for it but it didn't account for George's appearance some ten minutes after the meal had commenced. He tried to smile wanly but he didn't look wan.

‘Sorry to be late. The Major will have told you I was unwell. However, the cramps have eased a little and I thought I might try a little something. To settle the stomach, you understand.'

By one o'clock George's stomach seemed to have settled in a most remarkable fashion. In the fifty minutes that had intervened since his joining the company he had consumed twice as much as anyone else and effortlessly disposed of two large bottles of wine.

‘Congratulations are in order, George,' Giacomo said. ‘One moment at death's door and now – well, an incredible performance.'

‘It was nothing,' George said modestly. ‘In many ways, I am an incredible man.'

Petersen sat on the bed in George's room. ‘Well?'

‘Satisfactory. In one way, not well. There were two items that one would not have looked for in such an aristocratic young lady's luggage. One was a very small leather case with a few highly professional burglarious tools. The other was a small metal box with some sachets inside, the sachets containing a liquid. When squeezed, the liquid turned into a gas. I sniffed only a very tiny amount. An anaesthetic of some kind, that's certain. The interesting thing is that this little box, though smaller than Alessandro's, was made of and lined with the same materials. What do we do with this young charmer?'

‘Leave her be. She's not dangerous. If she were, she wouldn't have made so amateurish a mistake.'

‘You said you knew the identity of the miscreant. She's going to wonder why you haven't disclosed it.'

‘Let her wonder. What's she going to do about it?'

‘There's that,' George said. ‘There's that.'

SIX

It was snowing heavily and the temperature was below freezing when Petersen drove the stolen Italian truck out of Mostar shortly after two o'clock that afternoon. The two girls beside him were silent and withdrawn, a circumstance that affected Petersen not at all. Relaxed and untroubled, he drove as unhurriedly as a man with all the time in the world and, after passing unhindered through a check-point at Potoci, slowed down even more, an action dictated not by any change of mood but by the nature of the road. It was narrow, twisting and broken-surfaced and urgently in need of the attentions of road repair gangs who had not passed that way for a long time: more importantly, they had begun to climb, and climb quite steeply, as the Neretva valley narrowed precipitously on either side of the river which sank further and further below the tortuous road until there was an almost sheer drop of several hundred feet to the foaming river that lay beneath them. Given the unstable nature of the road, the fact that there were no crash-barriers or restraining walls to prevent their sliding off the slippery road and the fact that the river itself increasingly disappeared in the thickening snowsqualls, it was not a route to lighten the hearts of those of an imaginative or nervous disposition. Judging by the handclenching and highly apprehensive expression of Petersen's two front-seat companions, they clearly came well within that category. Petersen had neither comfort nor cheer to offer them, not through any callous indifference but because on the evidence of their own eyes they wouldn't have believed a word he said anyway.

Their relief was almost palpable when Petersen abruptly turned off the road into a narrow gully which suddenly – and to the two girls, miraculously – appeared in the vertical cliff-side to their right. The road was no road at all, just a convoluted, rutted track that offered only minimal traction for the almost constantly spinning rear wheels, but at least there was no way they could fall off it: high walls of rock pressed in closely on both sides. Perhaps five minutes after leaving the main road, Petersen stopped, cut the engine and dropped down.

‘This is as far as we go,' he said. ‘As far as we can go in this truck, anyway. Stay here.' He walked round to the back of the truck, parted the curtains, repeated his words and disappeared into the swirling snow.

He was back within a few minutes, sitting beside the driver of a peculiar open vehicle which looked as if it might once have been a small truck that had had both its top and rear sliced off. The driver, clad in British warm – a thick, khaki, woollen overcoat – could have been of any nationality: with a fur cap pulled down to eyebrow level, a luxuriant black beard and moustache and a pair of hornrimmed sunglasses, there wasn't a single distinguishable feature of his face to be seen except for a nose that could have belonged to anyone. Petersen stepped down as the vehicle came to a halt.

‘This is Dominic,' he said. ‘He's come to help us along a bit. That's a four-wheel-drive vehicle he's got there. It can go places where this truck can't, but even then it can't go very far, perhaps a couple of kilometres. Dominic will take the two young ladies, all our gear and all our blankets – I can assure you we're going to need those tonight – as far as he can, then come back for the rest of us. We'll start walking.'

Sarina said: ‘You mean to tell us you expected this friend of yours to meet us here? And at just this time?'

‘Give or take a few minutes. I wouldn't be much of a tour guide, would I, if I got all my connections wrong?'

‘This truck,' Giacomo said. ‘You're surely not going to leave it here?'

‘Why ever not?'

‘I thought it was your custom to park unwanted Italian trucks in the Neretva. I saw some lovely parking spots in the god-awful ravine we just came through.'

‘A sinful waste. Besides, we might even want it again. What matters, of course, is that our friend Major Cipriano already knows we have it.'

‘How would he know that?'

‘How would he not know it, you mean. Has it not occurred to you that the informer who tipped him off to our presence in the Hotel Eden would also have given him all the details of our trip from the torpedo boat, including those of this vehicle? Either by radio or before being apparently dragged from an hotel bedroom, it doesn't matter. We passed through a check-point at Potoci about an hour ago and the guard didn't even bother to slow us down. Odd, one might think, except that he had already been given details of our vehicle, recognized it at once and obeyed orders to let us through. Let's get that stuff out quickly. It's turned even colder than I thought it would be.'

It had indeed. A south-east wind had sprung up, a wind from which they would have been sheltered in the Neretva valley, and was steadily strengthening. This would not normally have been a cold wind but this was a wind that paid no attention to meteorological norms: it could have been blowing straight from Siberia. The four-wheel-drive vehicle was loaded with passengers and gear and drove off in a remarkably short time: there could be no doubt that Dominic's sunglasses were, in effect, snow-glasses.

The five men set out on foot and were picked up some fifteen minutes later by the returning Dominic. The ride along an even more bumpy and deteriorating track was, because of the increase in snowdepth and incline, uncomfortable and haphazard to a degree, and only marginally better and faster than walking. None of the passengers was sorry when the truck pulled up at the track's end outside a ramshackle wooden hut which proved to be its garage. Inside, the two girls were sheltering from the snow. They were not alone. There were three men – boys, rather – in vaguely paramilitary uniforms and five ponies.