A Fine Night for Dying pc-6

by Jack Higgins

  Chavasse surfaced in a maelstrom of white water, struggling for breath, still buoyant, thanks to the old life belt. Mrs. Campbell was twenty or thirty feet away, Darcy Preston swimming after her. Hamid was over to the right, and Chavasse kicked out toward him.

  The old man looked badly shaken. He had lost his turban and his long iron-gray hair had come loose and floated on the water as he lay back, obviously exhausted. As Chavasse reached him, the wind tore a gap in the curtain of mist and he saw land low down on the horizon, no more than a mile away at most.

  So Jacaud had been overcautious in his estimate? Either that or they had come in a damned sight faster than he had realized. He turned toward Preston, who was still swimming after Mrs. Campbell, and shouted, “Land! No more than a mile!”

  Preston raised an arm to signify that he understood and continued to swim after Mrs. Campbell. The curtain of mist dropped back into place. Chavasse reached the old man and pulled him close.

  “Not much longer now. I saw land.”

  Hamid smiled wanly, but seemed unable to speak. Chavasse got the bottle of rum out of his pocket and pulled the cork out with his teeth. “Drink some of this.”

  He forced the old man’s mouth open and poured. Hamid coughed, half-choked and pulled his head away. “It is against my religion,” he said with a gasp.

  Chavasse grinned. “Allah will forgive you this once, old man,” he said in Urdu, and swallowed the rest of the rum.

  Strangely enough, the old man’s only reaction to being addressed in his own language was to reply in the same tongue. “If I live, it is because Allah wills it. If I am to die-so be it.”

  Another half-hour and Chavasse was really beginning to feel the cold. He had taken off the belt of his raincoat and had used it to secure himself to Hamid, who floated beside him. There was no sign of Darcy Preston or Mrs. Campbell-hadn’t been for some time now.

  Old Hamid was still, eyes closed, his face a death mask, blue with cold. Chavasse slapped him a couple of times and the eyes opened to stare blankly. A kind of recognition dawned. The lips moved, the words were only a whisper.

  “Ali-Ali, is it you, my son?” he asked in Urdu.

  “Yes, my father.” It took everything Chavasse had to make the correct reply. “Not long now. Soon we will be home.”

  The old man smiled, his eyes closed, and suddenly a wave took them high into a sky of lead, holding them above the water long enough for Chavasse to see cliffs through driving rain no more than a couple of hundred yards away. Between them and the land lay wave after wave and white water crashing in to meet the distant shore.

  From that moment, they moved fast, helpless in the grip of the current that carried them before it. Chavasse gripped the old man tightly as water broke over them, and then another great wall of water, green as bottle glass, smashed down on them.

  Chavasse went deep, too deep, and found himself alone, fighting for life like a hooked fish. His life belt was gone, Old Hamid was gone, but strangely, no panic touched him. If he was to die, he would die fighting.

  There is a behavior pattern common to all animals and known to psychologists as the critical reaction, a phrase that describes the fury with which any living creature will fight for survival when there is no other way, either backed into a corner by his enemies or alone in a sea of white water, as Paul Chavasse was now.

  He broke surface, sucked air into his lungs and went under again, tearing at the buttons of his trench coat. He got it off, and then the jacket, and came up for more air. The shoes took a little longer, probably because his feet were swollen from their long immersion in cold salt water, but suddenly he was free of those, too, and swimming again, his rage to live giving him strength drawn from that hidden reserve that lies dormant in every man.

  And then his foot kicked sand and he went under again. A wave took him forward across a great rounded boulder streaming with water and he found himself knee-deep in seaweed.

  Another wave bowled him over. His fingers hooked across a rib of rock, and he held on as the waters washed over him. As they receded, he staggered to his feet and stumbled across the rocks to the safety of a strip of white sand at the base of the cliffs.

  He lay on his face, gasping for air, then forced himself to his feet. Hamid-he had to find Hamid. The sea was in his mouth, his ears, his throat; it seemed to sing inside his head as he turned and picked his way through the rocks to the main beach.

  He saw Hamid at once, thirty or forty yards away, lying in the shallows, the water breaking over him. Chavasse started to run, calling out in Urdu, “I’m coming. Hold on! Hold on!”

  Stupid, really. The old man would be dead, he knew that. He dragged the body clear of the water, turned it over and, greatest of all miracles, the old eyes opened.

  Hamid smiled, all fatigue and pain washed from his face. “Ali, my son, I knew you would come,” he whispered. “Bless me now.”

  “You are blessed, old man, hold my hand,” Chavasse said in Urdu. “Blessed and thrice blessed. Go with Allah.”

  The old man smiled contentedly, his eyes closed, and the life went out of him.

  Chavasse crouched there beside him for quite a while, unaware of the cold, staring blindly into space. When he finally stood up, Darcy Preston was waiting a few yards away, watching him gravely.

  Like Chavasse, he was down to shirt and pants and his life jacket was gone. There was a cut on his face, another on his left arm.

  “What about Mrs. Campbell?” Chavasse asked.

  Preston shrugged. “I tried to catch her when that big wave split us all up, but the current was too strong for me. She was still floating when I last saw her. She could still make it.”

  Not that he believed that-neither of them did, and Chavasse said wearily, “Okay, let’s get out of here.”

  “Aren’t we going to move him?”

  “Let’s put it like this,” Chavasse said. “The way things are at the moment, it would make a lot more sense if you and I didn’t hang around to be found with him. If we take him higher up the beach, they’ll know someone put him there.”

  “But what in the hell are we going to do?” Preston demanded.

  Chavasse looked at his watch. “It’s a quarter to five. We find the road and the nearest phone box. I put through a call to my people, then we get behind the nearest hedge and wait. You’ll be on the way to London in an hour.”

  Darcy Preston shook his head. “Well, one thing’s certain. Whatever else you are, you can’t be the police.”

  “Full marks,” Chavasse said. “Now let’s get out of here,” and he turned and moved toward the cliffs through the gray morning.

  CHAPTER 9

  London

  “Montefiore-Enrico Montefiore.” Mallory turned from the window, filling his pipe from an elegant leather pouch. “One of the richest men in Europe, though very few people have ever heard of him. Dosen’t like having his picture taken, but you’ll find one or two in his file. He’s the kind of big financier who’s almost gone out of style. A shadowy figure somewhere in the background, with his finger in so many pies you lose count.”

  “And Hellgate?” Chavasse asked. “What about that?”

  Mallory shook his head. “Doesn’t mean a thing. As I recall, Montefiore has a place on Lake Lucerne and a palazzo in Venice. Actually, he’s rather dropped out of sight during the past three or four years.” He shook his head. “This doesn’t make any kind of sense at all. Why on earth would a man of Montefiore’s background be mixed up in a thing like this?”

  There was a knock at the door and Jean Frazer came in. She handed Mallory an envelope. “More material from S2, sir, courtesy of the C.I.A. China Section.”

  She went out and Mallory opened the envelope and took out several record cards, each with a photo pinned to it. “Better look at these, Paul. See if anyone strikes a chord.”

  Cheung was number five, only his name was Ho Tsen and he was a colonel in the Army of the People’s Republic of China. It was an excellent likeness and Chav
asse passed it across.

  “That’s our boy.”

  Mallory checked through the card and nodded, a slight frown on his face. “Quite a character. One of their best men, from the looks of this. Rather stupid to pass him off as a military attache in Paris for three years. The C.I.A. was bound to catch on to him.”

  The telephone buzzed, and he picked it up and listened for just over a minute. When he replaced the receiver, he looked thoughtful.

  “That was Travers calling in from this place, Fixby. It’s a little village on a creek near Weymouth. There’s a broken-down boatyard just outside it, run by a man named Gorman. He’s missing at the moment. Last seen moving out to sea at about six this morning in a thirty-foot launch he uses to take people big-game fishing.”

  Chavasse looked at his watch and saw that it was almost noon. “They’ll be almost there by now, if the weather holds.”

  “Saint Denise?” Mallory nodded. “Yes. I’m inclined to agree with you, and our friend from the People’s Republic will have returned with them if I’m any judge. For one thing, he’s going to need some kind of medical attention, and for another, he won’t want to hang around now that things have turned sour. Very practical people, the Chinese.”

  “What about Rossiter?”

  Mallory picked up a flimsy and examined it. “Now he really is an amazing character. I can’t get over him. Stoneyhurst, a double first at Cambridge, five years at the English College in Rome and then Korea. The Chinese had him for four years-four years behind the wire. That must have been hell.”

  Remembering his own experiences in a similar position for only a week, Chavasse nodded. “You can say that again. But why did he throw up Holy Orders? What was the given reason?”

  “Difficult to discover. The Church doesn’t exactly fall over itself to discuss this sort of thing. However, I’ve pulled a few strings and they’ve reluctantly given me the address of a priest who was in captivity with Rossiter. His parish is right here in London, which is convenient.”

  Chavasse examined the card Mallory passed across. Father Henry da Souza. Portuguese, which would probably turn out to mean that his family had been living in England for at least five hundred years. “Was there ever the slightest suggestion that Rossiter had turned Red?”

  Mallory shrugged. “Anything is possible in this worst of all possible worlds, dear boy. They certainly did a good job on him. Of course, a priest has something to hang on to; something to fight them with. Having said that, there’s no question that ministers held by the Chinese for a period and later released have sometimes needed psychiatric help on their return, that’s how complete the brainwashing process has been. They’ve done research into it at Harvard, I understand. Anyway, you go and see Father da Souza and see what you can get out of him.”

  “What about Darcy Preston?”

  “No problem there, as long as he behaves himself and keeps his mouth shut. We’ll put him on a plane for Jamaica tomorrow.”

  “Is it all right if he stays at my place in the meantime?”

  “I don’t see why not.” Mallory shook his head. “Saint Paul’s by day and Soho by night. What a strange, mixed-up life that boy must have had.”

  Chavasse got to his feet. “He seems to have survived it well. I’ll be in touch later this afternoon.”

  He was halfway to the door when the phone buzzed again. Mallory called him back with a gesture and picked up the receiver. He put it down again with a sigh. “The body of a middle-aged woman wearing a life jacket was pulled out of the sea off Weymouth by a fishing boat an hour ago. Paul, I’m sorry-damned sorry. Especially in view of what you told me.”

  “So am I,” Chavasse said, and went out quietly, murder in his heart.

  THE Church of the Immaculate Conception was not far from the East India Docks, an area that was anything but salubrious. Chavasse parked his car on the opposite side of the road and switched off the engine. He took a cigarette from his case and offered one to Darcy Preston.

  “Graham Mallory would hang, draw and quarter me if he knew I’d brought you along. On the other hand, he did tell me to keep an eye on you, and I can’t very well be in two places at once.”

  “You could try, but I wouldn’t recommend it,” Preston said, and he got out of the car.

  The church backed onto the river, a small, rather grimy pseudo-Gothic building of a kind that had been built extensively during a certain period of the nineteenth century. They went in through a porched entrance to a place of candles and shadows, incense and quiet peace. It was empty except for the man who knelt by the altar rail in a priest’s cassock, white hair flaming like a halo in the candlelight.

  Chavasse crossed himself and dipped a knee instinctively, although he had not practiced his religion for years, and they moved down the aisle. The priest got to his feet and was about to go toward the vestry, when he saw them and paused, smiling faintly.

  “Can I help you, gentlemen?”

  His eyes were those of a man who loved the whole world, a rare enough breed. A bad scar ran from the right eye into the hair, but otherwise he had a face as calm and untroubled as that of a two-year-old child.

  “Father da Souza? My name is Chavasse. I believe you were expecting me? This is Mr. Preston, an associate.”

  “Ah, yes.” Father da Souza nodded. “Something to do with Leonard Rossiter, wasn’t it?” He smiled. “Why don’t we go outside? It’s rather pleasant at the moment.”

  At the rear of the church, a cemetery ran down to the Thames, spiked railings fringing a low wall. There was plenty of activity on the river and the priest had been right-it was pleasant in the pale sunshine.

  He sat on a tombstone and accepted a cigarette from Chavasse. “This is nice-very nice. I often come out here to think, you know. Somehow it has the right atmosphere.” He bent his head to the match Preston held out to him and leaned back with a sigh of content. “Now then, what was it you wanted to know about Leonard?”

  “Before we go any further, Father, I think I should make it clear that this is a serious business and highly confidential. In fact, a matter of national security.”

  Da Souza didn’t seem perturbed in the slightest. “Go on.”

  “Would you say it was possible that Leonard Rossiter had turned Communist?”

  Father da Souza examined the end of his cigarette with a slight, abstracted frown and sighed. “As a matter of fact, I shouldn’t think there was much doubt about it.”

  “I see. Have you ever spoken of this to anyone before?”

  “No one ever asked me.”

  Chavasse nodded. “All right, Father, tell me all you can.”

  “I was sent to work in Korea just after the Second World War. I was taken prisoner by North Korean forces a few days after the Korean War started.”

  “And Rossiter?”

  “Oh, I didn’t meet Leonard for quite some time-nine months later, when I was moved to a special camp in Manchuria. An indoctrination center run by the Chinese.”

  “And you think Rossiter was brainwashed there?”

  Father da Souza laughed gently. “Good heavens, it isn’t as easy as that, you know. They have an extraordinarily simple technique, and yet it works so very often. The original concept is Pavlovian. A question of inducing guilt or rather of magnifying the guilt that is in all of us. Shall I tell you the first thing my instructor asked me, gentlemen? Whether I had a servant at the mission to clean my room and make my bed. When I admitted that I had, he expressed surprise, produced a Bible and read me that passage in which Our Lord speaks of serving others. Yet here was I, allowing one of those I had come to help to serve me. Extraordinary how guilty that one small point made me feel.”

  “But your faith, Father?” Preston said. “Wasn’t it of any help at all?”

  The old priest smiled beautifully. “My son, my faith was triumphant; it overcame all odds in spite of everything that was attempted with me. I have never felt more certain of God than I did during those dark days.”

 
“And Rossiter?” Chavasse said. “What about Rossiter’s faith?”

  The old priest looked genuinely troubled. “I am in a difficult position here, gentlemen. I was Leonard’s confessor at Nom Bek, and he mine. The secrets of the confessional are sacred. Let me say that he had problems long before he fell into Communist hands. From their point of view, he was fruit that was ripe for the picking.”

  “What kind of problems?”

  “If I may use Marxian terminology, each man has his thesis and his antithesis. For a priest, his thesis is everything he believes in, everything he and his vocation stand for. His antithesis, on the other hand, is his darker side-the side that is present in all of us. Fears and hates, violence, aggression, the desires of the flesh. Leonard Rossiter was racked by guilt long before the instructors at Nom Bek got to work on him.”

  “But why did he give up Holy Orders?”

  “The official explanation was that he had experienced a crisis of faith-that he could no longer continue. This happened three or four years after his return.”

  “But you think he’d fallen for the party line?”

  Father da Souza nodded. “I think it seemed to offer him what he was searching for-a strong faith-a faith that would support him.”

  “You say seemed to offer him, Father?” Darcy Preston said.

  Father da Souza smiled gently. “One thing I can tell you with certainty. Leonard Rossiter is a soul in torment. He is like the man in Thompson’s poem, pursued endlessly by the Hound of God, fleeing from the one certain hope of salvation, hell-bent on destruction because of his own self-loathing.”

  Chavasse nodded slowly. “That’s all, Father. I think you’ve made your point.”

  “I hope I’ve been of help. A pleasure, gentlemen.”

  He shook hands and they left him there on the cracked tomb, finishing his cigarette.

  “Quite a man,” Darcy Preston said, as they got into the car.

  “And then some.”

  Mallory listened to what he had to say, a strange abstracted look on his face. “I’ve spoken to NATO intelligence since you were last here.”