Levkas Man

by Innes, Hammond;

  ‘We’re still at least a hundred and fifty feet above sea level,’ I said.

  ‘Aye. Just what I was thinking. And if it’s water down there, then I’m afraid there’s not much hope.’ He had moved back and was turning himself round. Facing Cartwright, he said, ‘I suppose that light nylon of ours is with the Land-Rover?’

  ‘We’ve plenty of rope on board,’ I told him.

  ‘Then the sooner we have it, the sooner we’ll know what’s down there.’ He was already moving back up the tunnel.

  Daylight and the sight of sea and sky was a welcome relief after the claustrophobic confines of that cave. Sonia came with me back to the boat, her last hopes pinned to Bert’s dive. He was waiting for us, pacing impatiently up and down the deck. ‘Have you found him?’ And when I shook my head, he said, ‘Then what the hell have you been up to all this time? I warned you conditions might not stay like this.’

  ‘Well, they have,’ I snapped; no breath of air and the boat riding to her reflection, as still as if she were moored in a dock. ‘We want about fifty fathoms of rope, that’s all. I’ll take it to them and then I’ll be right back.’ And I explained what it was for.

  ‘So you think he’s still alive?’

  ‘I know he is,’ Sonia’s voice was intensely determined.

  ‘There’s a chance,’ I said, and we looked out the rope. It was under the life jackets in a deck locker, 60 fathoms coiled on a light wooden drum, and I rowed across with it while Sonia stayed to help Bert get started on his dive. Hans had come down to the gut to collect the rope. I handed it to him and backed the dinghy out, and as soon as he saw me coming back Bert climbed over the side on to the ladder. He looked big and ungainly with his flippers and the cylinder on his back, his stomach bulging where the belt carrying the weights caused the flesh to sag. He wasn’t wearing his wet suit for fear of snagging it on the rocks. I saw him slip his mask down over his eyes, settle the mouthpiece in place, and then Florrie passed him the spot, and with a wave in my direction, he flipped backwards to disappear under the oil-flat surface of the sea. Before I was halfway back to Coromandel the line of his bubbles passed me headed for the shore.

  Sonia took the painter, and as I swung my leg over the low bulwarks Florrie came out of the wheelhouse. ‘Bert said to tell you the engine’s all set to go if you need it.’

  I looked at her. ‘Why should I?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Her face looked worried, lines of strain showing at the corners of the eyes. ‘He’s been in a state about this dive all morning. It was the waiting, I think—when you didn’t come back for so long. It made him nervous.’

  I looked up at the sky and south to the open sea, a weather check that was so automatic, so routine that I was barely conscious of it. I was thinking of the blow-hole, the rock pipe twisting into the bowels of the earth with one of them slithering down it, the rope taut around his waist, and of Bert, deep underwater, following the beam of his spotlight into the cave’s darkness. One of them should be able to produce the answer. An hour at most and we should know for certain.

  I went into the wheelhouse and got the glasses. From our mooring the platform below the overhang was just visible. If they found him, they’d try to hail me from there. There was nobody visible at the moment. Sweat dripped into my eyes. The heat was heavier than ever. I wiped my face, envying Bert in the cool depths. ‘Would you like some coffee?’ Florrie asked.

  I shook my head.

  ‘It’s iced. I’ve had it in the fridge since breakfast.’

  Iced coffee! I nodded. ‘Please.’

  ‘I’ll get it.’ Sonia left us quickly.

  Florrie caught my eye. ‘She needs to keep herself occupied.’ And she added, quietly, ‘So do I. But there’s nothing to be done, is there? Just wait.’

  ‘He’s a bloody good diver,’ I said.

  She nodded.

  ‘Then what are you worrying about?’

  She gave an exaggerated shrug. ‘It’s the heat, I suppose. If we were in Malta I’d say it was sirocco weather.’

  The hot wind from the Sahara sucking up humidity as it crossed the sea. I nodded and raised the glasses. I had seen a movement on the platform. It was Kotiadis, pacing up and down, smoking a cigarette. Zavelas appeared and they talked together for a moment, standing with their faces turned towards me. Then Kotiadis nodded and they came on to the rock path, descending quickly towards the gut. A few minutes later Zavelas’s boat shot out into the channel, the hornet noise of its outboard fading rapidly in the thick air as it headed north.

  Sonia arrived with the coffee. It was ice-cold, black and sweet, and we drank it waiting in the sultry heat of the open deck. Florrie glanced at her watch as she put her glass down. ‘He’s been gone a long time.’

  ‘How long?’ She always kept a check on the time he was down.

  ‘Twelve and a quarter minutes.’

  ‘Stop fussing, you old hen,’ I said. It was extraordinary how possessive she was. She could call him a failure, spit in his face, cuckold him even, but she couldn’t do without him—couldn’t bear him out of her sight.

  ‘I’m not an old hen.’ She was smiling, warmth in her eyes, a fondness. ‘A young one perhaps.’ She giggled. And then, suddenly serious again, ‘Bert’s a cautious type. You can’t have failed to notice that.’ An impish gleam in her eyes now. ‘Not like you. He likes to weigh things up, mull over every problem. Most things he thinks over so long somebody else has to make up his mind for him. But not when he’s diving. He doesn’t think under water; he just reacts. He’s reckless as hell.’ There was a note of pride in her voice and I glanced at Sonia, wondering if she would behave with such extraordinary inconsistency.

  ‘He’s got just over an hour of diving time in that tank, and that’s not allowing for the time he might be above water exploring inside the cave.’

  She nodded. ‘I know all that. But I still worry.’

  Time passed slowly, the three of us sitting around on the foredeck, no sun, the air thick, and its thickness plucking at our nerves. Nobody hailed us from the area of the overhang. There was nobody on the platform and no news. Bert had started his dive at 11.17. Before half an hour was up Florrie was looking uneasily at her watch. By midday she was voicing her anxiety. I was getting worried, too, wishing I had insisted on going down the blow-hole myself, anything rather than sit here doing nothing.

  ‘He’s only three minutes’ air left.’ Florrie’s voice was taut.

  Once again I reminded her that inside the cave he probably wouldn’t need his aqualung. But I knew it didn’t satisfy her. She was standing up now, leaning against the wheelhouse, the spare diving watch clumsy on her slender wrist as she stared at the sweep hand ticking off the seconds, occasionally stealing a quick glance at the rocks. ‘Paul, I think you should go and see what’s happened.’

  ‘He wanted me here on board.’

  ‘I know that, but he’s been a long time. Too long.’ Her voice was urgent, the dark eyes suddenly pleading. ‘You’ve been down twice with him. You know how to do it.’

  ‘I think so.’ By then some of her anxiety had rubbed off on me. ‘I’ll get the gear up anyway,’ I said reluctantly.

  It was whilst I was below in the workshop that I felt the slight movement, Coromandel coming alive, rocking gently at her moorings. And then, when I was coming up with the spare diving equipment, Sonia’s voice called to me. There’s somebody on the rocks, hailing us.’ I dumped the cylinder on the wheelhouse floor and seized the glasses. It was Vassilios. He was pointing towards the open sea. And then he was leaping down the rocks.

  I turned, moving quickly to the port side. A dark line showed in the sticky haze, and beyond it, towards Ithaca, the sea white with broken water. My reaction was immediate, instinctive. I reached for the engine switch, turned it on, and then pressed the starter button. The big diesel thudded into life.

  ‘No. No, Paul.’ Florrie was screaming at me. ‘You can’t leave him.’ But then the black line reached us and the wind hit, a
wild howl in the rigging. The ship heeled. A wave caught us and she lifted at the bow like a horse rearing and snubbed on the warp with a jar that nearly knocked me off my feet. I dived out of the wheelhouse, fighting the sloping deck and the weight of the wind to throw off the bow warp. Florrie was there before me. ‘Mind your hands!’ Released, the warp took charge, smoking as the turns whipped across the cleat, the wood charring.

  White water on the shelf now and all along the shore rocks, and the boat swinging stern-on to the wind. But still too close. Much too close. The noise of the sea and the rocks, a great cacophony of sound like the roar of rapids made that clear. ‘I’ll let go aft,’ I shouted at Florrie. ‘You take the helm. Head for the centre of the channel.’ I saw her eyes wide, her mouth agape, and then, thank God, she headed for the wheelhouse. Sonia was already crouched over the anchor warp when I reached the stern. ‘It’s jammed,’ she shouted.

  I thrust her hands away, not gently. The nylon line was stretched so taut it looked no thicker than a piece of heavy string. ‘Have to cut it,’ I shouted in her ear and ran for the diver’s knife that was amongst the gear I had lugged into the wheelhouse. Just the sharp edge of it on the stretched nylon and it stranded and zinged away over the stern like a broken violin string. And Coromandel, released, went roaring up the channel with the wind. Florrie tried to bring her round, but the waves, beating back from the Meganisi shore, knocked her head off, and the wind held her. I tried myself, but it was no good. And anyway it didn’t matter. Even if we could have got her round, we could never have stayed there, stemming the storm, for the whole channel was rapidly becoming a maelstrom as the waves, piling in against the narrowing rock walls, were flung back to meet in chaos in the middle. I piled on power and ran for the north end of the island, where the down-draughts blattered at us, the whole ship shivering; but here at least the sea was flat, close under the lee of the cliffs.

  By the time we were anchored in Port Vathy, Florrie was in a state of shock, moments of hysteria alternating with long periods in which she just sat, keening quietly to herself, her eyes staring into space. She was convinced Bert was dead, and having seen the mill-race running through the channel, I didn’t rate his chances of survival very high, particularly as the wind didn’t start to ease for a good four hours. By nightfall it had gone completely, everything still and the sky clear.

  But long before that I had weighed anchor and tucked the ship in under the cliffs west of Spiglia, within sight of the channel, waiting for the sea to moderate. Shortly after 17.00 hours I poked our bows round the corner. There was still a steep sea running, but with the wind taking off it was lessening rapidly. As we came abreast of Tiglia a boat put out from the shallows behind the island—Vassilios waving to us frantically.

  Florrie grabbed the glasses. ‘He’s pointing back to the cove. It’s Bert. I’m sure it’s Bert.’ She was laughing, almost crying, as I swung the wheel to port. I caught Sonia’s eye, both of us wondering how she’d take it if we found him dead there on the beach. Broadside to the waves the boat rolled wildly, and then we came under the lee of Tiglia and Vassilios was alongside, shouting excitedly, a flood of Greek lost in the din of the engine.

  ‘Livas,’ Sonia said. ‘He keeps on repeating the word livas. I don’t understand what he means.’

  Vassilios was scrambling on board. Florrie, crouched by the bulwarks, bulky in her scarlet oilskins, took the painter. He said something to her and then ran for’ard, barefoot on the spray-wet deck. ‘It’s Bert,’ she called, her face white. ‘He’ll guide you in and handle the anchor.’ And she disappeared aft to make fast the painter.

  He took us close in to the island and let go the anchor in a patch of still water, the echo-sounder showing barely three feet under our keel, pale sand and the rocks of the island towering above our mast. Bert’s aqualung cylinder lay on the sloping sand of the cove; his flippers, too—a lonely, tragic pile of gear.

  Vassilios came aft as Florrie brought his boat alongside. He spoke to her, quickly, urgently, and her face cleared. ‘He’s all right.’ She sat down suddenly on the rail capping, half laughing, half crying, relief flooding through her. ‘Wounded, he says. I think his arm is broken. But he’s alive.’ And she added, ‘He was caught inside the cave by the livas. He swam all the way across the channel—sunder water with a broken arm. Isn’t that wonderful!’ She was a bundle of emotion, pride and excitement shining in her eyes.

  Vassilios had made him as comfortable as he could in the lee of some rocks at the back of the cove. When we reached him, the excitement had gone from Florrie’s eyes, in its place love and a great tenderness. She was like a mother with him then as we carried him down to the boat and ferried him across to Coromandel.

  He was in considerable pain, the bone of his left forearm broken between wrist and elbow and showing white through the raw, bruised flesh. He’d lost a lot of blood and his face was pallid under the dark suntan. But he was conscious and whilst I got the morphine ampoule out of the medicine chest, he gritted his teeth and made an effort to tell me what had happened to him down there in that flooded cave.

  He had arrived off the crevice entrance at 11.21. Depth 38 feet. The spotlight showed the crevice continuing, no block, and it seemed to widen out about five or six yards in. He described the entrance for me in detail, so that I could find it again, he said. The gap below the fallen slab was barely 2 feet high, and after scraping his cylinder and nearly ripping his air pipe on a snag, he had turned on his side. About two yards in he had been forced to turn into the normal position, and a little further in, the rock cleared from above him and he was able to use his flippers. A few more yards and the spot showed the walls receding on either side. He appeared to have entered a big cavern. The depth gauge showed 36 feet. Following a bearing of 240°, which was roughly the direction in which the entrance had run, he swam across the cave and was brought up by a solid wall of rock on the far side. The distance across he reckoned at about 20–25 yards. With no sign of any continuing tunnel, he had then circled the walls, maintaining a depth of between 35 and 40 feet.

  ‘I thought I’d see what the height of it was then,’ he said, holding his right arm out so that I could roll his sleeve back to make the injection. ‘I hit the roof about fifteen to twenty feet up and that’s when I found the continuing gallery, a gaping hole slanting up quite steeply.’ He sucked in his breath as I jabbed the needle into his flesh none too skilfully. ‘Then I was out into another sort of expansion chamber, the water obscured by sediment and my gauge reading virtually nil. In fact, my head came out of the water almost immediately. It was quite a big cavern, shaped like a lozenge, with continuing galleries at each end and a hole in the roof, quite a small hole with a rope hanging down from it.’

  ‘Was that the bottom end of the blow-hole?’

  He nodded. ‘Looked like the rope we lent them—nylon, you see, and the same size, the end of it trailing in the water.’

  ‘Did you call to them?’

  ‘Yes, but I didn’t get any answer. And there was nobody in the cave that I could see, which didn’t surprise me—you could come down the rope easily enough, but getting back up again would have been bloody near impossible.’

  ‘Too high?’

  ‘No, it wasn’t that. About ten or twelve feet, that’s all. But the blow-hole was sloping, so that the rope lay flush against a smooth lip of rock. You’d never get your fingers round it, not with the whole weight of your body dragging on the rope.’

  ‘They could have knotted it at intervals; or simply tied it round their body and been hauled up.’

  ‘Well, they hadn’t done either.’ He said it irritably, his voice a little weaker. ‘But there was somebody down there.’

  ‘Who was it? Did you see him?’

  ‘No, I didn’t see anybody.’

  ‘Then how do you know somebody was there?’

  ‘I just felt it. The way you sense when there’s a shark around. A sort of presence.’

  The morphine was taking effect muc
h quicker than I had expected, his eyes drooping, his voice tailing off. ‘And then the spotlight, you see. I’d swum to the western end. At that end the floor of the cave rose out of the water in a dark curve like the back of a whale. Very slimy. But I managed to climb out and up to the ledge leading to the gallery. It was low. Sloping up in a curve. I put the spot down and got the cylinder off my back. I was unfastening my belt. I didn’t want weights or flippers hampering me as I clambered around in that gallery. And then the spotlight shifted. I grabbed at it and the beam swung wildly as my flippers slid from under me. That’s when I fell. I fell about six feet—into darkness.’ He was drowsy now, his voice fading. ‘No spotlight. It had gone. I swear it had been switched off.’ His words were slurring, his head beginning to loll.

  ‘Somebody took it—is that what you mean?’

  He nodded vaguely. ‘You don’t believe me …’

  ‘You hit your head. Everything went black.’ It was the only possible explanation.

  ‘Of course. Knocked out. And then the surge.’ His head dropped. ‘Scared me. That’s what scared me. And the body.’

  ‘What body?’

  ‘In the water … something … it touched me.’

  ‘My father? Was it my father?’

  ‘Don’t know. Dark, you see, and the surge and this bloody arm.’ His voice trailed off. ‘No light. I was a long time—getting the cylinder back on—then feeling my way—remembering …’ His eyes closed.

  Florrie’s hand touched his brow, smoothing out the grooved lines. ‘He’s out of pain now?’ I nodded and went back up to the wheelhouse and started the engine. We got the anchor up and then I backed her out of the shallows and turned her bows to the north.

  ‘Where are you making for?’ Sonia asked. ‘Levkas? There’s sure to be a doctor at Levkas.’