by Alan Evans
Balestra smiled. ‘I talk with him. He volunteers.’
Zacco shook his head, still unable to believe it.
Smith wondered why Lombardo was willing to risk his life in this. But why would Balestra? Because he believed in his outlandish contraption. Smith felt guilty at thinking of Seahorse like that but had to be honest; that was how he felt about it. Only Balestra’s confidence was persuading Smith to let him make the attempt — that and the demands of his orders, and the war.
He asked, ‘What news of the war?’
Zacco answered, ‘The line holds all along the Piave. There is heavy fighting around Zenson. There are rumours that the Germans got across the Piave there but I don’t know if that is true.’
‘Zenson?’ That had an unpleasantly familiar ring to it. ‘Where is that?’
‘About twenty-five kilometres up river.’ Zacco saw Smith frown. ‘Something wrong?’
‘Miss Blair went there today.’
‘I do not think that is a good place for her.’ Zacco was frowning now and the others shook their heads.
Smith asked, ‘How could I get there?’
Zacco hesitated, then: ‘It will be difficult. I think you will have to ask the army to take you, maybe in a supply convoy.’
Balestra asked, ‘You can drive?’
‘Yes.’ Smith had learned during those lazy weeks of leave in England in the summer after the fighting off Ostende. There had been a girl then...
Balestra spread his hands. ‘You take my car. It is at Mestre. You have a pencil, paper?’ Smith produced note-book and pencil. Balestra scribbled rapidly on a blank page and handed it back to Smith. ‘There is a workshop outside the station at Mestre. You ask for Emilio Ossena. He is the owner and he works on cars. He is a very old man, very nice, very good with cars.’
‘Thank you.’ Smith wanted to get away now. He told himself he was taking fright at shadows, that Helen had often visited the rear areas and anyway the army would not allow her into a danger zone. If they were able to stop her. If they noticed her, just one more car in the traffic behind the lines. He said, ‘Then at noon tomorrow, gentlemen.’
They saluted and he hurried away. The boat took him back to Hercules and there he shouted for Buckley and Davies. ‘Shift out of your working rig. You’re going ashore with me.’ Davies because of his knowledge of Italian. Buckley because he was Buckley.
They walked to the station, Davies leading the way through narrow streets and suddenly opening piazzas, across bridges. Everywhere were the stacked sandbags protecting the city’s treasures of stone against the bombing and now — maybe — the shelling. But the line still held on the Piave.
They took the train to Mestre. The lagoon was a dirty grey tinged with the rust red of the mud it carried. It was a cold, wintry lake with little islands standing bleakly out of it and in the distance the green of the marshes. Rain was falling and the clouds came down to merge with the mist. Outside the station at Mestre they found the workshop. Smith asked a boy for Emilio Ossena and he came out from the shadows at the back of the shop, walking quickly between the benches where his men worked. He was a dried up, long, thin stick of a man. When he saw Balestra’s note he showed them to a car standing in a corner of the shop and dragged off the dust-sheets that covered it. The car was American, a Model T Ford, a four-seater without doors — you just stepped in. There was a leather hood folded down behind the rear seats and Emilio helped them to rig this, easing it out over the car and clipping it to the windscreen. All the time he talked, obviously curious at the arrival of the young Royal Navy commander and the two bluejackets.
Davies, scowling with concentration said, ‘He’s asking about Mr. Balestra, sir. He seems to be popular with the old feller.’
Smith said, ‘Tell him Mr. Balestra is well and happy.’ That was stretching the truth: with what lay ahead of Balestra, he was only happy in so far as he was doing what he wanted to.
Emilio Ossena shook hands with all of them and then they were in the Ford, Smith driving it out of the workshop. They wound through the narrow streets and turned northeastward onto the road to San Dona di Piave. Buckley sat beside Smith with the map and Davies was in the rear seat. Whenever they came on soldiers on the road Smith halted the car, got down with Davies and asked the soldiers if they had seen La Contessa. Davies laboured the question at first in his halting Italian — ‘Avete vista la Contessa?’— but became more fluent with repetition. There were men who knew La Contessa but had not seen her that day. Others wore puzzled expressions as they shook their heads. ‘Quale Contessa?’ They had obviously never heard of her.
With one of these Smith told Davies, ‘Ask him where he’s come from?’
The man answered, ‘Bologna,’ and waved a hand to the south.
So some of these men had come up from the south and so would not know Helen Blair. As he drove on Smith thought that he should have brought a photograph, though if any man had seen Helen Blair in this rain-soaked waste she would have stuck in his memory. The country was sodden under the rain and because of the mist you could not see more than two hundred yards. There were farms in the flat fields, the now familiar green-shuttered houses and the roofs with humped red tiles. The vines in the fields were planted in rigid lines, each vine trained out on either side of its supporting pole so each looked like a crucifix. They were bare and black and dripped rain.
Davies said, ‘Looks like one graveyard after another.’
Smith snarled, ‘Shut up!’ He did not believe in omens and portents, but Davies made him uneasy.
Near Meolo there was a regiment resting by the road, big men in grey-green uniforms with the crimson and white flashes of grenadiers on their collars. Smith spoke with their colonel who was tall and bony-faced, black-moustached, brown as the cigar between his teeth. He said his regiment had been in reserve but had now been ordered to Zenson. He was very angry because he had heard stories of deserters and said his men would not desert or run. He had not seen Helen Blair, and did not know La Contessa because he was new to this part of the line. He was sorry. He shouted an order and the non-coms passed it on, bawling it down the road. The regiment of grenadiers climbed to their feet and fell in. Smith drove on.
But at last, when the gunfire was a continuous thunder, their luck changed. They came on a dressing station by the roadside, a number of large tents emblazoned with the red cross. Outside a number of walking wounded sat patiently in the rain, presumably awaiting transport to the rear. As the car halted a motor ambulance bumped down the road from the front, but only to discharge more wounded on stretchers to be carried into the tents. Then it turned around and drove back up the road towards the gunfire. Meanwhile Davies had been pacing among the wounded, asking his question, Smith at his shoulder. ‘Avete vista la Contessa?’... ‘Avete vista la Contessa?’
Until they came to a bearded corporal, a hooked pipe dangling from his clenched teeth. He nodded, spoke around the stem of the pipe. ‘Si... mi ha dato it tabacco…’
Davies listened, said, ‘He saw her only a few hours ago. She said she was going to a place called Fassolta di Piave. That’s on the way to San Dona but off the road.’ He listened again, chewing at his lip, then told Smith: ‘He says she shouldn’t have gone there. It’s bad. They’re shooting deserters and spies.’
And it was close to the front line. San Dona was on the other side of the Piave river and in the enemy hands. Smith said, ‘Come on.’ He returned to the car and pored over the map with Davies and Buckley, marked his route. They were only a mile or so from Fassolta across country but a tank could not have crossed it. They would have to make a circle to come to it by road, something like three miles. Smith turned the car around and they set off. They had little time. Soon it would be dark and then Smith knew their search would be ten times more difficult.
As it was, dusk was closing around them as they rocked up the road to a village standing on a T-junction, just a cluster of houses. Their road led into it like the cross-piece of the T and another trac
k, the leg of the T, came in from the left.
Buckley said, ‘I make it Fassolta is about a quarter-mile up the road, sir.’
Towards the front line. The howl and thump! of falling shells were close now, the flames of them bursting and the long, licking flames from the answering Italian guns
lighting the near horizon, silhouetting the ragged roofs of the houses of the village. The car had now come up with the tail of a convoy slowly creeping towards the front, mules loaded with supplies or hauling wagons under the cracking whips and hoarse yells of their drivers. This was not Fassolta but there were troops busy among the houses and two sentries with rifles, their bayonets fixed, stood outside the biggest house, which had tall windows closed with sturdy green-painted shutters. Smith turned the car off the road and stopped it, leaving the engine running. ‘We’ll ask here.’
The house stood apart from the others, a lane leading down the side of it to a big yard at the rear enclosed by a high wall.
There were shell-craters near the road and the roof and upper floor of the house were smashed in, the beams ragged against the sky. Smith did not like the look of it. This place was a junction on the supply route up to the line. It had been shelled and would be again. Soldiers were digging a trench on the other side of the house from the lane, away from the front line.
The sentries at the door lifted their rifles and peered suspiciously through the gathering gloom. One of them shouted a challenge as Smith, Davies and Buckley got down.
Davies answered, ‘Il capitano Inglese della marina!’
An officer appeared at the door, a lieutenant of infantry. Smith and Davies approached him and Davies asked him if the Contessa was in the village. Had he seen her?
The lieutenant shook his head. A field telephone rang in the house behind him and he turned, threw a sentence over his shoulder as he went back into the house.
Davies translated. ‘He says they’ve only got one woman here and she is a spy.’
Smith pushed past him and went in after the lieutenant. An oil lamp burned on a rough deal table. It showed the tall windows had not been saved by the shutters, blast had left the glass in fragments on sill and floor. The lieutenant stood at the table, the telephone to his ear, his shadow huge against the wall. He nodded. ‘Si... Si.’ He put down the receiver, stared at them. A small wood stove hissed and crackled in one corner. Two carabinieri stood before it in their wide cocked hats, rifles at the ready. They watched the three Englishmen as suspiciously as had the sentries outside.
Smith said to Davies, ‘Ask him: this woman, is she young, pretty, smartly-dressed? Is she English?’
He waited, listened to Davies’ laboured Italian, the lieutenant’s rapid reply, saw the contemptuous flap of his hand. Davies said, ‘She’s young and well-dressed and claims she is English but that is a lie. She is a spy.’ The lieutenant was speaking again, voice high with anger only barely held in check. His eyes stared and a muscle twitched high in his cheek, jerking one corner of his mouth as he spoke. Davies interpreted as best he could, sometimes managed to halt the tirade and have a phrase repeated impatiently.
Smith listened, fear growing in him. The woman had been caught talking with a group of Austrian prisoners. One of their guards, hidden from her by a tree, had heard her speak to the prisoners in German. This had convinced him that she was just one more of the many spies behind the lines. The lieutenant was waiting for three other officers who would form a court. They would try her and shoot her, here and now.
Buckley muttered, ‘It can’t be Miss Blair, sir? Surely?’
‘Ask her name.’
Davies did. The lieutenant looked irritably in his note-book, then answered, ‘Elena Blair.’
Smith was sweating in the chill of the shadowed room where rain dripped through the ceiling into puddles on the floor. He said, ‘Ask if we can see her. This woman might be an impostor.’ She might. He could not believe it but surely it was possible. He prayed that it was.
The lieutenant scowled, then shrugged. He spoke to the carabinieri and they followed with their rifles as he led Smith, Buckley and Davies through a door at the back of the room. It gave on to a narrow passage and another door at the end of it, heavy and solid. The lieutenant took his pistol from its holster with one hand, a key from his pocket with the other. He unlocked the door and swung it wide but stood in the opening between Smith and the girl inside.
The room was a lean-to built of timber against the back wall of the house, a store-room with an earth floor on which lay a pile of old grain sacks. The only light came from a narrow window that only a cat could have slipped through, outside it the yard at the rear of the house. There was a small stool set under the window. On it sat Helen Blair.
She rose when she saw Smith and started forward but the lieutenant barked at her, swung the pistol menacingly and she halted. Her silk dress and the cape over it were splashed with mud, her fragile shoes now shapeless lumps. The once-piled hair now hung loose to her shoulders. Her face was pale, the eyes wide and frightened. She whispered, ‘David? Oh, David!’
Smith took a pace towards her but came up against the pistol. The lieutenant spat angry words at him, the muscle jumping and pulling at the corner of his mouth. From the corner of his eye Smith saw the carabinieri training their rifles on him and he stood still. He asked the girl, ‘What happened?’
‘They won’t listen to me! You tell them, David!’ Her voice shook as she pleaded.
‘What happened?’
She lifted a hand to push the hair from her face. ‘I was on the road. I saw the soldiers. Gave them some cigarettes, chocolate — I don’t remember. There was a crowd of prisoners, Austrians, and I gave some to them, tried to tell them I was English, that now their war was over, they were safe. Then some guard jumped out of nowhere and shouted at me, dragged me here. They said I was talking German. I told them I was English but they wouldn’t listen. The carabinieri came and said I was a spy. They put me in here. David — what are they going to do?’
He tried to sound confident. ‘It’s all a mistake. I think they’ve had a bad time.’ He was certain they had: the lieutenant looked near breaking point. ‘I’ll explain.’
The lieutenant was glancing sharply from one to the other, obviously distrustful of these exchanges he could not understand. He snapped at Davies, who said, ‘He wants to know if this is the woman you were looking for.’
Smith nodded at the lieutenant. ‘Yes! Si!’ And to Davies: ‘Tell him he’s making a terrible mistake. Tell him —’
But Davies barely got out the first phrase when the lieutenant shook his head angrily and slammed the door in the girl’s face, turning the key in the lock. He threw a comment at the two carabinieri and their manner changed from suspicion to open hostility. Davies muttered, ‘He told them we’re friends of hers, sir. They don’t like it.’
The carabinieri escorted them back to the other room. Smith said, ‘Tell them they can check our credentials with Captain Devereux, the liaison officer at Naval head-quarters, or with Capitano Bruno Garizzo of the regimento marina.’
The lieutenant and the carabinieri listened but remained hostile until Garizzo’s name was mentioned. Then there was a laboured exchange between the lieutenant and Davies, the tension eased and the latter told Smith, ‘I said the lady spoke English to the prisoners, not German. He asked how long we’d known her, I said a few weeks an’ he said that was no time at all and she’s fooled us. He asked about the battle we were in with Captain Garizzo. I told him and he knew about it already so at least they believe we’re genuine. But not Miss Blair.’
The lieutenant shouted at the sentries outside the door and they bawled in their turn, calling a name. He turned on Davies and launched into another tirade, finger jabbing towards the front line then at the store-room, hand curling into a fist to pound the table. He broke off as the telephone jingled again, snatched at it.
Davies was sweating now, concentration furrowing his brow. ‘Doin’ the best I can, sir. Near as I can m
ake out they were rushed up from the south an’ they’d not been long in the line when Jerry crossed the river at Zenson and got a foothold. He says he lost a lot of men and the Germans knew just where to hit them. He says it’s been like that all the time, that it has to be the spies doing it. There’s a lot more I missed but I think that’s the story.’
The lieutenant put down the telephone as a soldier came in at the door. He was a private, short and stocky, sullen.
He looked at Smith and the bluejackets without interest, then at the lieutenant who rattled a question at him. He nodded. Another question brought a shake of the head, a slow answer, contemptuous, with a twist of the mouth. Davies muttered, ‘This is the feller that heard Miss Blair. He says she spoke German and not English. He’s certain.’
Smith stared at the soldier, who returned the stare stubbornly. He was wrong but he would not admit it. Smith was sure of that — the man’s mind was made up, and so was the lieutenant’s. Smith said, ‘Tell him I’m going to find a senior officer, that he must do nothing till I return.’
But the lieutenant turned his back on that, threw his answer over his shoulder as the telephone rang again and he reached for it. Davies interpreted, ‘He says the war won’t wait. They are fighting for their lives here.’
Smith hurried out of the house to where the car stood with the engine still running. It was pitch dark now but the firing of an Italian field battery in the field close by the village lit the road with a flickering light. There was a nightmarish quality to the whole situation — the wild, wide-eyed, twitching stare of the lieutenant, the menacing background of gunfire, the stilted, rambling explanations and misunderstandings... Smith felt as if he were groping round a dark cell from which there was no escape.
But the cell was real, no dream, and Helen was in it.
As he swung into the Ford another car skidded off the road, spraying mud from its wheels, and halted before the house. The driver jumped out, opened the door and three officers got down and splashed across to the house, filed in at the door: the members of the court.