The Heart of Hell (21 page)

“
Gemischt
,” he said, referring to the wine-and-water mix. “Nothing quenches the thirst better.”

They drank it down, then he poured them each another and then lit a cigarette.

“Fuck me,” Strumbić said.

“How did you get that massive plank up that house?” asked della Torre. “I can’t believe it fit the staircase.”

“It didn’t. I got one of the Albianians to hoist it up onto my terrace and then fed it across from there so that it was in the room waiting for you. Don’t worry. I tested it out before inflicting it on you.”

“You mean you walked across yourself?” Della Torre was impressed. Strumbić wasn’t one to take unnecessary risks.

“Of course not. What do you think I am, a fucking idiot? Got one of the Albanian kids to give it a try. They’ll do anything for money. Figured if he didn’t splat neither would you. Silly little bastard decided to watch his piss fall four storeys when he got halfway across. Just as well it was too early for people to be wandering around.” Strumbić wiped his hand across his face and shook his head. “Whatever happens, we’ve got to hold the fuckers off until tonight.”

“I thought the whole intention was for them to find us.”

“It was, Gringo. You were there to tease them along, make them think you’re running. But it was supposed to be a show, not a fucking edition of
Jeux sans Frontières
,” Strumbić said, referring to the absurd pan-European game show everyone watched. He smoked the cigarette down, lost in thought.

“Excuse me for a moment,” Strumbić said, stepping out of the room.

“Being chased around Dubrovnik wasn’t part of the deal,” Miranda said after he’d gone. She spoke mildly, but there was steel in her words.

“I know. Charge him more. He’ll be good for it,” della Torre said.

“He seems intent on getting us killed.”

They heard the sound of a flush from down the hall. Della Torre expected Strumbić to come back quickly, but he didn’t. Instead, his footsteps climbed the stairs and moved about in the room above. And then, with alacrity, he charged back down.

“They’re here,” he said.

“What?” Della Torre stood up, horrified.

“Up. We’re going.”

Miranda rose. Della Torre saw the anxiety briefly etched into her expression.

“How do you know?” della Torre asked.

“Because I know. Because the mirror in the bathroom is angled so you can see a crack between the shutters, and I could see enough to get me curious,” he said, in no mood to elaborate. “Up. You first, Gringo. Lady, you next. I’m at the back.”

The stairs were wooden and ancient; they complained under the unaccustomed weight of bodies. Plaster, which had fallen off in broad patches to reveal bare stone wall, crunched underfoot. The higher floors of the house had clearly long remained uninhabited.

“Back bedroom,” Strumbić said. He shut the door behind them — a flimsy defence, della Torre thought, but then he saw that it had hidden a ladder. Now that he was listening, he could hear sounds coming from outside. Somebody was working away at the shutters on the ground floor.

The back bedroom had a low ceiling built into the sloped roof. A skylight let in dirty daylight. Strumbić pushed it open and leaned the ladder against it.

“Up,” he said.

Della Torre climbed up onto the roof. The rear pitch rose from the city wall, forming a narrow gulley, which meant they were out of sight of anyone in the street or the houses opposite. Moss and grass grew in patches between the roof tiles.

Miranda followed him up, and then Strumbić, who pulled the ladder up after himself. He shut the skylight with a kick and then braced the ladder between the roof and the city wall.

The sound of splintering wood echoed up from the alleyway and through the house, an odd stereo effect that della Torre didn’t waste time contemplating.

“Go, Gringo. Just get the fuck up there.”

Della Torre climbed, uncertainly. The ladder creaked. He wondered if its rungs would hold. When he got to the wall, he swung his bag over the parapet, took a grip on the stone, and with a heave dragged himself up, his arms straining, feeling the cold, weathered stone against his face. A young couple, there to enjoy the small measure of peace afforded by the heights in the increasingly crowded city, stopped to watch. Della Torre ignored them, turning to grab Miranda’s bag and help her up as well.

When it was Strumbić’s turn, della Torre pulled until he felt the full agony of lifting the other man’s weight, fearing he’d herniate himself, that his weak elbow would give.

“Jesus, you need to go on a diet.”

“Shut the fuck up and pull.”

As he finally hauled Strumbić over, he realized he’d been lifting the ladder as well. Strumbić had hooked his foot under the top rung and now pulled it up after himself.

“God fuck their mothers, but these guys are starting to bother me,” Strumbić said, shaking the strain from his arms. Without bothering to look where it might land, he heaved the ladder over the other side of the city wall onto the rocks below.

Strumbić led the way again with a firm hold of Miranda’s wrist, half-dragging her and ignoring her complaints.

The walls rose to ever more exhilarating heights, as if they were on the edge of a chalk cliff. They pushed past people out for a morning’s stroll or there to see where the Serb gunners were now aiming their shells. At a bastion as big as the keep of a castle, Strumbić stopped at the top of a spiral staircase.

Della Torre looked around. Men running towards them from both directions along the high walk. Leaning over the parapet, he could see people running towards the base of their tower. They were being bottled up.

“Julius, they’ll be at the bottom by the time we get down the stairs,” della Torre said.

“Just do as you’re told, Gringo. Follow me. You too, miss — wouldn’t want to leave you behind.” He still had his hand on her wrist.

They wound their way down the stairs. Midway, Strumbić stopped by an iron gate covering a niche in the wall, half-hidden in the landing’s deep shadows. He let go of Miranda, took hold of the bars, and with a mighty heave dragged the gate open and stepped aside.

“You first, Gringo. Just keep going until I tell you to stop.”

The space was narrow and completely dark, smelling of salt and piss. It led deep into the city walls, back in the direction from which they’d come, descending shallowly all the while. Della Torre stooped but still banged his head with every other step, muttering imprecations the whole way. There were no hand grips, but the passage was narrow and he could steady himself by flattening his hands against the walls.

“Faster,” Strumbić said. Some shaded light reached him.

“Give me the flashlight up here,” della Torre called back over his shoulder.

“You don’t need it. You just keep going.”

Della Torre could feel they’d stopped descending. He remained in a crouch, his back aching under the strain. The sides of the passage brushed his shoulders. His bag bounced against his back as he made his jagged progression; it felt like a hand shoving him along, pushing him deeper into the unfathomable darkness. He could hear voices far behind them and knew it was their pursuers.

“Stop, Gringo,” Strumbić called. Della Torre turned with difficulty in that confined space. He could hear Miranda’s breathing, feel the warmth of her body in the dark cold of the passage.

Strumbić was on his knees next to an arched opening, shining the torch along the floor towards another, similar opening ten metres back in the direction they’d come from, trying to decide between the two. He reached into his pocket, took something out, and rolled it into the opening directly beside him. They heard the faint ring of metal hitting stone.

“Must be this one,” he muttered. “Okay, Gringo, down you go.”

“What?”

“Down, Gringo. You heard me.”

“Where?”

“Here. Go. It’ll be hands and knees. But move. Now.”

Strumbić backed off, shining the torch at the same spot. Della Torre was about to go headfirst when Strumbić stopped him.

“Backwards.”

Della Torre took a deep breath and did as he was told. He could only just crawl in the space. Any narrower and he’d have had to slither on his belly. He moved centimetre by centimetre into the darkness. The passage was smooth and smelled of damp and sea. At first there was just a gentle slope, but it quickly steepened so that he slid as much as he crawled. Sweat poured off him, stinging his eyes, making the cold clamminess of that narrow sewer bite into his bones. Fear gripped him. Had the city’s medieval rulers created these chambers in the fortress walls so that enemies could be lost forever, to starve in the darkness, to be entombed alive?

And then the passage turned suddenly vertical, and he plummeted along glass-smooth stone. He clawed at it with his fingernails, desperately searching for purchase, but there was none to be had. He was falling into the deep.

HE HIT THE
hard ground with the force of a falling brick. But somehow he avoided doing himself obvious damage. Before he’d had a chance to register what had happened, Miranda’s bag hit him, followed immediately by Miranda, who landed with a cry of surprise. An instinct of self-preservation made them roll away just in time to avoid taking the full force of Strumbić’s weight.

“That comes straight out of the fairground in hell,” Strumbić said, coughing and raising himself slowly, obviously sore.

They were on a stone ledge about five metres wide and of indeterminate length, in a half-built cave-like room suffused in a faint blue light. Della Torre crawled to the edge of the floor and saw that the light was coming up through water three metres below.

“Careful you don’t fall in. Once you’re in the water, it’s impossible to climb back out,” Strumbić said.

“Where are we?”

“Shh. We’ll talk later. Just sit back and leave it for a little while,” Strumbić whispered. He took della Torre’s and Miranda’s holdalls and positioned them on the floor directly below the hole.

They sat in complete silence, hearing only the echoes of their own pulses, the rhythm of their breathing, the smooth wash of water rising and falling against rock. And voices from far above.

After a while they heard another clink of metal on stone, and then a faint thwack as something hit Miranda’s bag. Strumbić held his hand up, commanding absolute quiet from the others. Della Torre fought not to breathe normally. They waited. Every few minutes Strumbić checked his watch, and then, after they heard no further sounds from above, he reached over and picked up the coin, shining his torch on it.

“Abraham Lincoln,” he said.

“Where are we, Julius?” della Torre asked.

“The water dungeon. It’s not widely advertised in the tourist brochures, seeing as it’s dangerous. Which is how it was intended to be. People got shoved down here. Eventually they’d get desperate enough to swim for it and drowned. Used to be an iron grille down there. The Italians yanked it out during the war. You get divers exploring sometimes. .”

“How do you know . . .” della Torre began and then stopped himself. “How do we get out?”

“We say ‘open sesame.’ Oops. Didn’t work. I guess we’re stuck,” Strumbić said. “The Italians knocked a hole in the wall. There’s a door not many people know about, just over there. Only we’re not going to use it just yet.”

“Mr. Strumbić, I get a little nervous in spaces like this,” Miranda said. “I’m not enjoying the games you’ve been playing. However much you’re willing to pay, I’m losing interest in the commission. Can we please leave?”

“Nope,” Strumbić said. “No one’s going to bother us here. It might not be as comfortable as one of the houses, but hey, this was only ever the third-choice backup to a backup. It’ll give me a little time to think about what we’re going to do.”

Della Torre lay back on the smooth, flat stone, contemplating the hole from which they’d dropped. It wasn’t much more than two metres above the floor, though the ceiling rose in an arch until it melded into the rough crags of the cave. He reached for a cigarette, but Strumbić stopped him.

“They’ll smell it up there. The acoustics are tricky, but the smoke goes right up. Or so this very nice archaeologist who gave me a private tour told me.”

Strumbić sat against the wall with his chin on his knees. “What troubles me,” he said, “is how quickly your American friends keep finding us. They were meant to take most of the day tracking you down to the first house. The second place, I was sure no one had followed. They were completely lost in the alleys on the land side of the city. Even if they had watchers on every corner of the Stradun, they’d have had their work cut out.”

“I told you they were good.”

“I have no doubt, Gringo. I think they’re very good. Probably better than you realize.” Strumbić turned to Miranda. “Lady, show us your bag.”

Della Torre sat up in surprise. “Why?”

“You keep your chivalrous instinct in check just now, Gringo. Lady, your bag, please.”

She looked from one man to the other and then shrugged, passing it over.

Strumbić opened it up and pulled out each item of clothing, one after the other, patting each down and neatly folding it onto the floor. When he’d gone through the contents, he checked the bag itself, digging his hands into the corners. When he found nothing, he replaced everything he’d removed.

Miranda gave him a drawn, irritated smile, as she might have done with a stupid shop assistant. Strumbić ignored it.

“And now, please,” he said, “all of your clothes. Off.”

She looked at him, shocked.

“Listen, Julius —” della Torre began, standing up.

Strumbić pulled out his service automatic from a holster in the small of his back.

“Gringo, in a past life, you were a lawyer. And it’s right for a lawyer to take a keen interest in the law and the rights of a defendant and all that. But I was a cop. And my interest was in making sure I wasn’t wrong before nailing somebody. My intention right now is to nail Mrs. Walker here. So please, off with your clothes or I’ll help you take them off.”

Strumbić sounded dangerous, and Miranda could tell that he was. She stripped. He checked everything she took off, feeling the seams. He stood up and made her kneel with her back to him so that he could run a hand through her hair. Then he made her lie back and spread her arms and legs and then pull her knees towards her chest, clinically shining a torch over her. Apart from running his hand through her hair, he didn’t touch her. When he was done, he allowed her to dress again.

She barely concealed her fury. She burned with anger and humiliation and moved away from the men. “Mr. della Torre, I’m afraid you and your friend are going to have to make your own way out of Dubrovnik,” she said, only just controlling the tremor in her voice.

“Oh, don’t worry, Mrs. Walker,” Strumbić said. “We weren’t going to take you up on your offer anyway.”

Della Torre felt embarrassed for her, shocked at Strumbić, and ashamed for having allowed him to put her through the ordeal.

But Strumbić merely shifted his attention to della Torre. “Your turn, Gringo,” he said.

“You going to look up my ass too?” he said defiantly.

“If I have to. But I want a look in your bag first.”

Strumbić pulled out all the items in the bag, checking each with the same attention he had given Miranda’s belongings. Then he found it, stuck with electrical tape to the inside corner of the holdall: a small black hard plastic box, half the size of a pack of cigarettes.

“Had this with you long?” Strumbić asked, holding it up between his thumb and forefinger.

“What is it?”

“It’s the thing that’s been telling our American friends where we are. Though I don’t think the signal travels very well through a couple of hundred tons of rock and masonry. I imagine they’re very irritated, having set us up so nicely.” Strumbić inspected the transmitter. With his thumbnail he slid the recessed switch to Off. And then, just in case, he also removed the batteries, four AAAs, dropping them into one pocket and the transmitter into the other.

“Now there are two possibilities for how it might have come to be in your bag. One is that you’re screwing me, Gringo, to save your own neck. But I don’t think that’s likely, seeing as what happens to me happens to you, and you know it, whatever promises those people might have made to you. The other alternative is that somebody else is setting us both up. So to find out, let’s play a little game called ‘airport security.’ Did you pack your bag yourself?”

“Yes.”

“When?”

“Last night. And I threw a couple of things in this morning.”

“And has it been in your sight the whole while?”

“Yes. I mean, no. I was asleep, and then I didn’t bring it with me when we went to watch the convoy come in.”

“Was there anyone else with access to it during those times?”

“Julius, this isn’t necessary,” della Torre said.

“Was it Mrs. Walker here?”

Della Torre shook his head, not to deny the question but rather to admit his own foolishness.

“Would you care to admit to putting this in Gringo’s bag, Mrs. Walker, or do I have to threaten to throw you over the side instead? Of course, that’s a threat I can really only use once. Once you’re in the water, there’s no getting you out without the help of a good solid rope. Which I don’t have. I think our friend Mr. della Torre here will vouch for my sincerity. Right, Gringo?”

“Yes,” della Torre said, subdued.

“So, we accept that you planted this in Gringo’s bag. And the assumption has to be that you’re working for the Americans. Can we assume you’ve been working for the Americans all along?”

She remained quiet.

“Can we also assume that’s because you work for either American or British intelligence?”

Still no answer.

“Your silences are revealing, Mrs. Walker,” Strumbić said. “Were you sent to find me? Is that why you sailed through the blockade twice before, at great risk to yourself — because you knew Julius Strumbić would want to meet anyone who had figured out how to slip past the Yugoslav navy? Who knows, you might have enticed me to work with you.”

Silence. Then della Torre spoke to Miranda, low, lost. “How much of that story you told me is true? About coming to live here on your own after splitting up with your husband. Nothing? Something? How long have you lived in Korčula? Not five years, is it. Five weeks?”

Still she didn’t reply. She sat, legs drawn up, holding them, chin on her knees, her eyes glistening in the kaleidoscopic blue half-light.

“Gringo, you keep finding them. I’m not saying they’re not good-looking, but fuck me, they’ve got venom in their fangs.”

“How did you manage to set me up so well? I guess if you were based in Korčula it was a bonus for them that I stumbled onto you.” Della Torre was talking mostly to himself. “And then when I did, you played it by ear. Why did they follow us to Šipan, though? To make sure I didn’t chicken out?”

She shrugged.

“I guess that’s why nobody in Korčula knew about you,” continued della Torre. “You were too new. But you’ve sailed around here before, haven’t you? Lots. With Sir Fitzroy Maclean? He was a spy, wasn’t he? And I suppose it’d be natural for him to help out his side even if he was retired. Did he give you tips? Open doors? Were you always based on the coast? Or did you flit between Zagreb and here? Or maybe it was Belgrade.”

“Gringo, you’re not going to get anything out of this one. She knows we’re not going to kill her. There’s no point. But we’ll figure out how to put her to good use,” Strumbić said. “Anyway, there’s a lesson for you in this: hookers are cheaper in the long run.”