I went up on deck and stood there in the pleasant warmth of late evening looking out across the harbour. In some strange way life began again and I was alive again.
Ciasim called to me from the beach and when I turned I saw that the Seytan was drawn up out of the water and he was standing bare-foot in the shallows. I climbed to the jetty, moved towards the stone steps that would take me down to join him, but he was too quick for me. He embraced me, finishing off with a kiss on each cheek, then held me at arm’s length.
“What do you want—a hand, my right arm?”
It was an old Turkish saying and meant pretty much what it implied.
“Maybe you’ll listen to me another time,” I said. “I told you that wreck was bad news.”
“I was unlucky, that’s all. It can’t happen twice.”
“So you’re going to try again?”
“Why not?”
Any attempt at argument would obviously have been a complete waste of time so I accepted one of his cheap Turkish cigarettes and we sat on the low stone wall.
“You feel all right now?” he asked. “Okay for a man who’s supposed to have lost his nerve.”
“Don’t let’s start digging into that one.”
He didn’t attempt to pursue it, but said instead, “The girl—the English milady—she loves you, Jack, the way a woman should love a man, with everything she has.”
For some reason I felt uncomfortable. “Oh, I don’t know. She’s young, You know what they’re like. This time next week, she’ll fancy someone else.”
“Not that baby.”
Another of those quaint Americanisms of his and yet it was what I wanted to hear. Why, then, did I feel so restless? So uncertain?
But such thoughts were swept away completely when an old three-ton truck turned on to the jetty and rolled towards us. When it braked to a halt, Kytros got down from the passenger seat. He was wearing a white linen suit and a smile on his face to rival the Cheshire Cat’s as he advanced on me.
“So, the dead can walk after all, Jack?”
Behind him, half a dozen labourers got out of the back of the truck and started to unload the cases of rum.
Just before we left, I went along to Yanni’s place by arrangement to collect my thousand dollars in advance. We’d already filled the tanks at his expense which was part of the agreement and when I got back to the jetty, Morgan had the engines ticking over ready for a quick departure.
It was already dark and a slight drizzle drifted down through the yellow light of the lamp at the end of the jetty. Faintly in the distance as a door opened I heard the sound of a bouzouki that was as suddenly stilled. It was as if no one else in the world existed and in the yellow light, Morgan looked like a walking corpse, old and used up and past everything there ever was.
He seemed nervous and strangely jumpy and that worried me. Maybe he really was getting past it. Had I the right any longer to involve him in this kind of affair where the consequences, if anything went wrong, could be disastrous?
I pushed her hard for the first couple of hours running north-east into the Dodecanese against a freshening east wind that brought rain to rattle against the wheelhouse windows like bullets.
It was your own small world in there, enclosed, cutoff from everything and a world I liked, the wheelhouse a place of shadows, the only light the glow from the instrument panel and the compass. Things became sharper, clearer, problems, even the more serious variety, less important or perhaps it would be closer to the truth to say that the sea cut them down to size.
I sat back in the seat, my hands on the wheel when I could have had her on automatic pilot and didn’t because I enjoyed handling her in conditions like this. In fresh weather, she came alive, like a woman does under practised hands and it was a good feeling—a feeling that the one was a part of the other.
Morgan had gone to make tea and I was thinking of Sara, a subject which tended to occupy my mind most of the time then. When the door opened, I didn’t turn my head until I sensed the perfume, heavy and quite unmistakable on the fresh salt air.
“Two sugars or one?” she said, and put the tray down on the table.
She was wearing an old reefer coat of Morgan’s, I could make that much out, and her hair was tied back. So now his agitation back there on the jetty was explained.
“I’ll have the old soak’s scalp for this,” I said.
“Oh, no you won’t. I told you he’d do anything for me. He was frightened to death—but just as afraid to say no. He’s like a child.”
I switched on to automatic pilot and took the mug of tea she passed to me. “All right, so I take it out on you.”
“Now that sounds much more interesting.” She pulled down the other seat from the wall. “First I’ll have a cigarette, then you can tell me what you’re up to.”
Which I did and when I was finished, she said, “So now you’re what they call a rum-runner?”
“Prohibition,” I said. “The twenties. You’ve got the wrong decade.”
“The same thing when it comes down to it. What will they give you if you’re caught?”
“Seven or eight years with hard labour.”
“And for this you get all of a thousand dollars?”
I managed a small laugh. “All right, rich girl, so some of us have to work a little harder than the rest.”
“I’m glad you can joke about it.”
“Like Yanni said, easy as falling off a log. We go in, we come out. No trouble—no trouble at all.”
“Which is why you keep this little lot so handy, I suppose?”
She reached under the chart table, pressed the button and the flap containing my small armoury dropped down.
“What have we got?” she went on. “A sub-machine gun, an automatic pistol and a revolver. Nothing like the quiet life. No self-respecting motor yacht complete without this interesting collection.”
I shoved it back into place with the toe of my boot. “Are you going to rattle on like this at breakfast every morning?”
Which appealed to her and she struck out in that sudden wild way of hers, laughing, punching me on the shoulder. “All right, but I just don’t want to lose you. It’s been one hell of a day, that way, or had you forgotten?”
And now it was my turn. “So what do I do for money? Live off you?”
“And why not? Would it offend your peasant conscience?”
So now we were scratching. But she was right, of course. Money, as the economists would say, was only a medium of exchange. Hers or mine? What difference did it make? And these were special circumstances after all. Time was limited and not just for her. For the both of us.
But the awkward silence remained, the constraint was there. For the first time we had clashed—really clashed, with something important underlying it. It was the sort of situation where mutual pride is involved and best solved by going to bed, but this was neither the time nor the place and after a while, she went out quietly and left me to it.
Five miles on the other side to Nisiros on the inner curve of the Dodecanese, I hove to and gave the agreed signal. A white light flashed five times, a clear interval of a second between each light. The reply was instantaneous. Three red flashes repeated twice.
We waited, the Gentle Jane rolling considerably in the heavy swell and the other vessel slid out of the darkness, her deck lights on.
She was larger than I had anticipated, a fifty-footer, with diesel engines from the sound of it. There were five men on deck, all Turkish fishermen, another leaning out of the window of the tall and rather old-fashioned wheelhouse. A trawl was set up in the stern and there were nets festooned all over the place. Either they were genuine, which was possible, or else it was a damned good front.
They slipped alongside surprisingly neatly for such a large boat in that sea and the man in the wheelhouse came down and clambered across. The others stayed where they were for the time being, presumably waiting for credentials to be established.
The one who
had boarded us was large and squat and wore a black oilskin jacket that glistened in the rain. I didn’t like him and not just because of the greasy moustache and pockmarked face. It was the eyes mainly. Restless, cunning, constantly moving.
He said in good English, “I am Amer—Captain Rasi Amer,” and held out his hand.
I didn’t like the feel of it, soft and warm and the look on his face as Sara moved out of the shadows didn’t do anything to improve matters. His tongue flipped along the edge of his lips and then he smiled and it was entirely the wrong sort of smile.
“You have the cases ready?”
“In the hold,” I said. “You can start unloading as fast as you like. I want to get out of here.”
“But why bother, my friend? To unload, I mean,” he added by way of an explanation.
“I don’t follow you,” I said although I was already most of the way there.
“The boat.” He tapped the rail. “It is a fine boat. And the girl.” He grinned, looking about as depraved as any human being could reasonably expect to do. “I can find a use for the girl, too.”
He raised his right hand and snapped his fingers negligently and the two men who had been standing aft of the wheelhouse on the Turkish boat whipped some nets aside and disclosed a light machine gun mounted on a tripod. One of them got behind it as if he knew what he was doing.
The other three came over the rail to cover me and Morgan, who looked as if he might pass out at any moment. Sara had stayed exactly where she was in the entrance of the wheelhouse, her hands thrust deep into the pockets of her reefer coat. Her face was very calm, even when Captain Amer advanced on her.
He put a hand under her chin. “Beautiful,” he said. “Exquisite.”
His other hand got about as intimate as it possibly could. Her mouth lifted in that superbly contemptuous way of hers and she backed into the shadows of the wheelhouse. Amer, shaking all over from what I could see, went after her.
He gave a sudden cry of dismay and came out backwards very, very slowly, the barrel of the Walther rammed up under his chin and from the look on Sara’s face, she had every intention of using it.
The boys with the machine gun were in something of a quandary. I solved it for them by moving across quickly and relieving her of the Walther. I got a strong grip on Amer’s greasy hair and shoved the barrel another half-inch into his throat.
“Tell them to toss that machine gun over the side fast or I’ll blow the top of your head off.”
He was no hero which helped because there were still six of them to deal with. The machine gun went into the water with a splash and I told Morgan to take the controls and move us apart.
By then I had Amer and the other three lined up at the rail. As our engines rumbled into life, the gap between the two boats widened. I waited till it was a good twenty yards and told them to start jumping.
Amer was the last to go, shaking like a leaf, sweat on his face. I think he believed to the end that he was going to get a bullet in the back of the skull which was, after all, exactly what he would have given me.
I rammed the barrel of the Walther into the back of his neck just to frighten him some more, then said in his ear, “I hope you can swim, you bastard.”
I put my foot to the base of his spine and shoved him over the rail. Morgan had been watching from the wheelhouse, and now he boosted the engines and started to take us away.
Sara crossed towards me and at the same moment, one of the men on the trawler’s deck, dropped to one knee, produced an automatic rifle from beneath the nets and started firing.
I pulled Sara down fast and fired three times in reply, just to keep his head down for considering the range and conditions. I couldn’t expect to do much else with the Walther.
He managed to get ten or twelve rounds off. One of them shattered a couple of panes of glass in the wheelhouse and several more chipped the woodwork here and there, but that was all. By that time, Morgan had taken her past twenty knots anyway and we were streaking into the darkness.
“Can I get up now?” Sara asked from beneath me.
“It’s a nice position, but if you insist.”
She stood up and leaned on the rail, breathing deeply as if to steady herself. “Straight in and straight out, the man said. Easy, like falling off a log.”
“See this little item?” I tapped the side of the Walther with my fingernail. “It’s called a safety catch. Next time you want to shoot somebody under the chin, I’d make sure it was off if I were you.”
I was at the wheel and alone again an hour later when for the second time that night, she appeared with tea on a tray. We were making time, the sea was calm and still and only a feather of spray came over the rail pushed by a small wind.
“How’s Morg?” I asked.
“Not too bad. He’s only had three drinks. I made him promise. What happens now?”
“To the rum? That’s Yanni’s headache. I got paid in advance.”
“That seems fair enough.”
She sat there sipping the scalding tea, holding her cup between both hands. I said, “You know something, you’re quite a girl. You handled a gun as to the manner born back there, safety catch or no safety catch.”
“I had my thumb on it the whole time,” she informed me. “My father had me out with a shotgun when I was barely strong enough to lift it.”
“Grouse on a Yorkshire moor is one thing. What you’ve just been through back there, quite another. You’ll never be as close again to being raped. The most I can say is that our good friend Captain Amer would probably have kept you to himself.”
She said quietly, “The first time we met you made a few cracks about the kind of life I’d probably been leading and you couldn’t have been nearer the truth. I got kicked out of a very superior school for young ladies near Geneva when I was sixteen and I jumped into the swinging London scene so hard, I went in over my head. I’ll miss a hell of a lot out and move to the morning after my eighteenth birthday when I woke up in bed with someone I didn’t even recognise. I suddenly started wondering what it was all about.”
“What was your answer?”
“As always with me, I went to the other extreme. Social work in an East End mission. Drop-outs, junkies, meths drinkers wetting the bed five times a night. The terrible thing was that it didn’t move me. Not one little bit. I just found it disgusting so I looked elsewhere.”
“And did you have any luck?”
“Oh, I think you could say that. My step-mother has a cousin, a Church of England bishop, God bless him. He was organising a group of relief workers to go to Biafra. People who would be willing to turn their hands to absolutely anything that needed doing.”
“And you went?” I said incredulously.
“I spent nine months there. Only came back because I began to show the first signs of my illness. Believe me, poor old Amer back there with his sweaty hands and bad breath was very small beer compared to some of the things I saw out there.”
She went out, closing the door behind her. A small wind lifted the charts like a sail, then died. Not for the first time, I began to wonder what life, the whole cockeyed business, was all about.
We were back in Kyros just before dawn and the first thing I did was to get Morgan to run Sara across to the Firebird in the dinghy in spite of her protests. I told her she needed a bath and at least ten hours’ sleep which was partially so, for she was looking drawn and tired. The truth was that I wanted her out of the way before I saw Yanni Kytros, just in case there was any trouble.
I marched up to his place with blood in my eye and had him out of bed double-quick. Surprisingly, the whole thing was something of an anticlimax. He was horrified at my story. Unfortunately, the quality of the hired help at that end was not under his direct control, but he would certainly see that Captain Amer was dealt with as he deserved.
He insisted that I have an early breakfast with him while Papas rounded up a few of the boys and afterwards, I drove down to the jetty with them in a
n old truck and watched while his men emptied the hold of the cases of rum.
I felt a whole lot better as the truck moved away along the jetty. Admittedly in daylight, there were one or two more bullet holes in the superstructure than had been apparent during the night, but I was still one thousand dollars in pocket. It could have been a great deal worse.
I felt quite pleased with myself as I went down to the saloon. Morgan was already snoring in one of the bunks. I started to take off my reefer and heard a step on the deck.
“Mr. Savage, are you there?”
I went back up the companionway and found Sergeant Loukas standing by the wheelhouse. “Anything I can do for you?” I asked.
“Indeed there is, Mr. Savage.” He looked as mournful as usual. “I am afraid I must ask you to accompany me to police headquarters. I am placing you under arrest.”
twelve
FORCE OF CIRCUMSTANCE
I had a cell to myself, a fine and private place with whitewashed walls, stone floor, stray palliasse on an iron cot and a bucket of water into which I could relieve myself should the need become urgent.
There was a small barred opening in the oaken door, giving a reasonably clear view of the passageway outside. After I’d been in there for an hour, I heard steps, the drone of voices, the sound of a key in the lock.
I went to the door and looked out. A couple of constables stood by a cell at the far end of the passage. As I watched, Morgan shuffled out looking anxious and bewildered. They shoved him along in my direction. When he got close enough, I called to him.
He turned, his rheumy eyes widening and stumbled towards my cell. He was frightened, I could tell that much from the tone of his voice alone.
“What do they want, Jack? What shall I say?”
Anything I told him would have been a waste of time. He was like an old, rusting padlock, ready to snap at the first pressure of the crowbar.
Jack Higgins Page 14