The Secret War (16 page)

“God knows!” Lovelace burst out, but he added, his voice suddenly sinking to a whisper, “unless—unless he's one of those people you spoke to me about—the
Millers of God
!”

“I ain't don' nothin' and I ain't nobody,” wailed the miserable Mr. Green, but Lovelace saw the very faintest tremor run through Zarrif's frail body.

Next moment Zarrif's hand was raised in a swift gesture towards the negro. “Seize him” he cried to the two men behind his desk and before the quivering wretch could get out another word the gunmen had him by the arms.

Zarrif sat back again with a little sigh. His quick eyes flickered from one to the other of his prisoners and he seemed to be considering his next step. At last he spoke quietly to Cassalis: “Take them away. It would be best to put them both in the cistern, I think.”

“Mercy boss, mercy! I ain't don' nothin' an' de Lawd am ma witness,” screamed the black man, now utterly frantic with terror at the thought that they meant to drown him, but Lovelace allowed himself to be led away quietly. He knew something about eastern houses. In a place outside the town like this there would be no water-mains so the basement would be used to store an adequate water-supply. They were to be imprisoned in the cellar, or cistern, as it was called in all the older houses which had no tanks in their roofs. It was certain to be full of rats, and probably leeches; but it was doubtful if there would be more than a couple of feet of water in it. Whatever the discomfort it was better than death. There might even be a way out to the river if he could find it. At all events it meant a temporary respite and now the worst had been avoided he sagged with unutterable relief as his captors lugged him out into the hall and along a corridor.

In the servants' quarters at the back of the house one of them lifted a heavy trap in the flooring while the other held him covered with his pistol.

A flight of wooden steps was revealed, leading down to still, glassy water which dully reflected the patch of light. Something scurried in it, rippling the surface for a second. Lovelace was given a push and, with
a sigh of resignation, he stumbled down the steep steps. When his feet reached the water level he went cautiously but he touched the bottom after another couple of steps. As he had suspected it was only about eighteen inches deep.

The sound of shouts, curses, prayers, came from above. Suddenly the square of light was obscured by a falling body. Lovelace stepped quickly aside and Mr. Green came hurtling down beside him with a resounding splash. The water did little to break the negro's fall. He lay there groaning, gasping, sobbing. Lovelace picked him up and propped his quivering body against the steps as the trap descended with a thud and they were plunged in total darkness.

The place was silent as the grave and pitch black. He spent the next few moments trying to restore his companion to some degree of sanity. At last, although still inarticulate, the negro recovered sufficiently to prop himself up without being supported. Then Lovelace left him to make a tour of inspection.

Wading slowly through the water he advanced with his hands outstretched before him into the Stygian blackness. After he had gone a couple of yards he found a pillar. Leaving it on his right he proceeded a few more steps and ran into another. They were the supports of the house and he guessed the place to be full of them, knowing that the majority of these subterranean cisterns were constructed on similar lines.

Another moment and he came up against the wall. It was smooth and slimy. Moving sideways step by step he kept touching the damp stones here and there so as not to miss a foot of their surface up to the highest level that he could reach. He came to a corner and passed on, another, another and another. Eventually he was at the place where he had started. There was no opening, such as he had hoped to find, connecting the cistern with the river.

By the sound of Green's incoherent prayers, which
had now become a continuous muttered whispering, he made his way back to the steps. He was frightened—now—just a little. There was no way out? How long would Zarrif keep them there? The dank still darkness … the rats … the heavy silence! But, of course, they were only being kept there as prisoners. Just until Zarrif could satisfy himself as to which of them was really Jeremiah Green. All sorts of things might happen before that. He fought to reassure himself and began to consider the possibility of bribing their guards.

It was then that he noticed a new sound. A low steady rhythmic beat coming faintly from above.

“Stop that!” he exclaimed sharply, giving Green's shoulder a push. “Listen! Is that an electric pump?”

The negro ceased his whimpering. Lovelace stood stock still, almost up to his knees in water. The thud, thud, thud, of the engine was perceptibly louder.

He remained motionless, a new terror gradually forming in his mind—and then he knew. He knew that the water was rising. An engine had been turned on which was pumping it up into the cistern from the river. It would rise and rise until it reached their thighs, their waists, their armpits, until their gasping mouths were pressed against the ceiling.

Zarrif believed
him
to be the spy, but what was the life of a wretched nigger to a man like the Armenian, whose golden harvest depended on the death of millions? Mr. Zarrif was one who had a great aversion to accidents. He meant to take no chances. Lovelace knew now that both he and the wretched Green had been condemned to die there in the close, black darkness.

The water in the cellar was only rising very gradually but the rhythmic thud, thud, thud, of the electric pump sounded with inexorable regularity. There was no way, other than the trap-door, out of that underground cistern and Lovelace knew that, as it filled, he might keep floating until his head was forced against the roof but then he must surely drown.

The negro began to mutter huskily again.

“Oh Lawd, Lawd! Oh Lawd Jesus heah ma prayer! I'se a po' sinner. I knows I done wrong. I knows it. But git me out o' this. Oh Lawd Jesus git me out o' heah!”

With an impatient shove Lovelace thrust his fellow-prisoner aside and stumbled up the steep ladder. In the pitch darkness he misjudged the height and hit his head a stunning crack against the trap-door, slipped, slid, and fell into the knee-deep water.

For a moment he lay there unconscious; his head resting on one of the slimy steps just above the waterline. When he raised it again he did not realise for a few seconds where he was and in that brief span of time a dozen scenes from his past life flashed through his disordered mind.

He saw again the green lawns of his house in England and the beauty of the well-kept gardens as he had known them when a boy. Old Beetle, the butler, was welcoming him home, when he had returned after his father's death, and addressing him for the first time as Sir Anthony. He was the tenth Baronet; and his next of kin was a distant girl cousin whom he scarcely knew. Fronds would be sold, under his present will,
when he died. Suddenly he regretted intensely that he had never married and had a son.

As he moved his head a stabbing pain shot through it and he thought himself back in India, just coming round after a murderous struggle he had had years before with a dacoit. Other memories of his travels flickered before his mental eyes. The poor little Chinese girl who had had both her legs blown off at the knee when he was doing relief work behind the lines in Manchukuo. The human devil who was selling water by its weight in silver to the refugees dying of thirst in a Bolivian forest when he had turned up there with his ambulance. The drunken crowd of white-clad savages who had yelled their heads off with excitement when Haile Selassie was crowned Emperor of Abyssinia in 1930.

Abyssinia! Something clicked in his brain and the reason for his present desperate plight flooded back to him. The fanatical Christopher's association with the
Millers of God
and their abortive attempt to assassinate Paxito Zarrif in Athens. The
Millers
were madmen or were they all terribly sane? Anyhow, it was murder and he would never have lent them his help unless—yes, unless Valerie Lorne had overcome his better judgment—and she was Christopher's fiancée.

Now they were in Egypt; the other two half a dozen miles away in Alexandria without the least idea where he was, and he himself at Zarrif's lonely villa on the fringe of the desert; caught out, captured, and flung down into this underground cistern to die.

At the thought he staggered to his feet, dashed up the steps again, and began to batter on the underside of the trap with his clenched fists. Yet, even as he bruised his knuckles on the unyielding wood until they bled, he realised the childish futility of his effort. It was impossible to break out and, even if he could, Zarrif's gunmen would promptly throw him back again.

He rested for a moment, panting slightly. Below
him the negro's supplications had risen to a more exalted note. “Oh, Lawd, Lawd … I ain't nobody … I ain't don' nothin' … Oh, Lawd Jesus git me out o' heah—git me out o' heah.”

In spite of the heavy darkness which wrapped them round like a black velvet cloak, Lovelace could picture the unfortunate Mr. Jeremiah Green. The smart white linen lounge suit, which had doubtless been the envy and admiration of his Baptist Brotherhood in Gainesville, Fla., now soiled and sodden from his having been flung, head foremost, down into the rat-infested water.

Suddenly the white man was filled with a monstrous impatience at the black's snivelling prayers and ordered him to be silent.

Green's voice came again, whimpering now, “Oh, Mister. I ain't harmed nobody an' I wouldn't be heah if yo' hadn't said yo' was me. Let me pray, Boss—let me pray. Dere ain't no hope for us ‘cept in de Lawd!”

Instantly Lovelace was smitten with a terrible feeling of guilt and pity. It was true enough. He had said he was Jeremiah Green in order to get into Zarrif's house. Then, when the rightful owner of the name had turned up so unexpectedly, he had accused the poor wretch of being an impostor. Worse, he had even suggested that the black might be a
Miller
about to make an attempt on Zarrif's life. Only to confuse the issue and gain time in which to think, of course, and never imagining for one moment that Zarrif, unable to make certain which of them was the enemy within his gates, might decide to do away with them both.

“All right,” he said. “I'm sorry—terribly sorry. Pray if it helps. I only wish I could.”

As he spoke he came down the steps. He felt he could not possibly stay still waiting for death to creep up to him with the rising waters. Instead he splashed through them to make a more thorough examination of their prison.

The darkness was a heavy handicap. His own matches
had been taken when Zarrif's men had searched his pockets and if Jeremiah Green had any on him they must have been soaked and rendered useless.

For nearly half an hour he searched feverishly among the slimy stone pillars; hoping to find some contraption by which the water was drawn up from the cistern to the rooms above and which might be utilised as a way out. By the time he had satisfied himself there was nothing of the kind, and that it must be pulled up through the trap-door in a bucket to be filtered in the kitchen, the water had risen to his thighs.

Jeremiah's prayers now alternated with psalms. He chanted them in a deep, musical voice which quavered now and then as his faith was nearly overcome by terror.

Lovelace wished fervently that he would stop. That endless monologue made it almost impossible to think; and think he must unless he was prepared to die.

Suddenly it occurred to him that if he could locate the spot where the water was being pumped into the cellar they might be able to stop its rising by plugging the inlet with their clothes. With renewed hope he began another tour of the walls fumbling hastily about below the water line. At last he found the place but, instead of it being a small round hole, as he had hoped, it was a four-foot-long iron grating through which the flood was filtering at a steady pressure. The space was too big to stop up, even if they had been able to get up the grating, so he had to abandon the idea. When he returned to the steps the water was eddying round his waist.

“I won't drown,” he told himself fiercely. “I can't. I'm not even middle-aged yet. I've got years of life to look forward to. I won't choke my life out like a rat in a trap.” Yet, even as he fought to reassure himself, he knew that he would, unless he could think of some way to save himself.

Jeremiah was babbling away quite incoherently. His muttering was the only sound perceptible in the chill,
dank darkness, and as Lovelace listened involuntarily to his ravings he realised that the negro was making his supplication in Bambara or something like it: anyhow a dialect used on the west coast of Africa. Evidently he had deserted the Christian God for Voodoo incantations in the tongue handed down to him by his forebears of a few generations back when they had been shipped as naked slaves to the American plantations.

Lovelace wiped the sweat out of his eyes and went up the steps once more. With his finger-tips he made a minute examination of the trap. It was evidently bolted on the upper side since it would not shift a fraction to the utmost pressure of his shoulder. The hinges too were on the upper side, although, even if they had been on the lower, he had no means of unscrewing them. The trap consisted of three solid planks and between them he could just make out faint ribbons of light by applying his eye to the cracks.

Cursing the negro into silence he held his ear to the wider of the two apertures and listened intently. The murmur of muffled voices came faintly from above. By their tone, more than any actual words which he could catch, he judged them to be those of the Egyptian servants rather than Zarrif's gunmen.

After a little he abandoned the attempt to hear what was happening in the room above and sat, his head buried in his hands, crouched on the top step of the ladder, his brain whirling wildly.