The Heart of Hell

by Alen Mattich

  He squeezed the Citroën into the barn and was walking back up, alongside the Fiat’s beams, when they suddenly went out. One had been flickering, so he assumed there’d been some electrical short. For a moment he was blinded, and his eyes tried desperately to adjust to the near complete darkness.

  “What’s going on?” he called, worried that she’d set him up somehow.

  “Be quiet,” she said. “Wait.”

  He heard her steps approach on the loose rocks.

  “There’s a car,” she said.

  “What?”

  “A car. It’s coming up the hill.”

  He listened hard. He heard the sound of an engine in low gear.

  “It’s coming up the track that runs to my farmhouse,” she said. “You almost never get cars going up there at night. Not unless they’re coming to see me, and nobody comes to see me this late.”

  “I did.”

  “I know.”

  They waited in the spot behind the trees. The car’s engine grew louder and then they saw unsteady headlights breaking through the darkness, disappearing, and then breaking through again.

  Suddenly the lights became sharp and bright as they swept past their little side road, and the car went farther up the hill.

  “I’m starting to wonder whether a thousand marks is enough, Mr. della Torre.”

  He said nothing.

  He squeezed into the front passenger seat of the Fiat, his knees pressed against the dashboard. The night smells — wild thyme and rosemary, pine resin and the faint fragrance of the sea — were overwhelmed by the fumes from the jerry cans in the back seat. Miranda started the engine again, turned on the small side parking lights, and drove slowly back to the junction and onto the track.

  She turned the car down the track, in the direction from which the other car had come. She let gravity do much of the work, keeping her foot on the clutch so that the engine was near-silent as it idled. When they got down to the main road, she switched the headlights back on and put the Fiat into gear. One of the lights flickered like a strobe, distracting della Torre. He turned to look at the woman next to him. Her profile in the glow of the dashboard lights was severe, patrician.

  “Don’t go straight to the boat,” della Torre said.

  “Why?”

  “Drive past. Just in case. Pull over around a hundred metres past the entrance and let me out.”

  “Mr. della Torre —”

  “I’ve paid you the thousand marks already.”

  “That was for getting you to Dubrovnik. I should be charging you separately for getting you to my boat.”

  “We’ll discuss it later.”

  He craved a cigarette but knew better than to light one with the fuel in the back of the car.

  She drove past the turning to her boat, staying on the main road until she found a wide verge under some broad pines. Here there was some traffic; the occasional car still passed during the night. Without drawing attention to what he was doing, della Torre removed the Beretta from his shoulder bag and slipped it into his coat pocket. He took her big black Maglite flashlight from the footwell on his side of the car.

  “I’ll be back in fifteen minutes at the most,” he said.

  “And if you’re not?”

  “You go home a thousand marks richer.”

  He eased the car door shut and walked back along the road towards the turning. It was hard not to stumble, but he hurried. He was worried that the car that had gone up the hill would be returning soon, catching him in its headlights.

  But he was in luck. More by feel than anything else, he found the little turning down to the cove where Miranda’s boat was moored. He edged his way down the incline.

  He moved at the speed of a stalking cat, careful not to make any noise, not to stumble or kick loose rocks. It was painfully slow going, and he realized he would be in plain sight to anyone with night-vision goggles. In his experience, this sort of American came well equipped.

  His patience and his caution were rewarded.

  He spotted a faint light, so fleeting that he wasn’t sure he’d seen anything. But then there it was again, an almost imperceptible green glow. Della Torre guessed it was the luminous dial of a watch.

  He crept closer. Small waves brushed against the rocky shore. Above, a faint breeze combed through the pines. From somewhere came the distant sound of a car’s gears shifting, and even farther away a dog barked. He thought he heard a low booming sound far away, but that could have been his senses filling in the emptiness of night.

  He picked up a stone and tossed it in the general direction of the watch and heard the dull noise it made as it hit a tree or a branch. Whoever was attached to that phosphorescence moved sharply, breaking twigs underfoot.

  One man, a single source of sound. Della Torre assumed the sentry didn’t have any special night-vision equipment. If it was Grimston’s people in the car, they might have dropped someone off to intercept him in case they flushed him down from the hill, which meant they’d be coming this way soon enough.

  He took the Beretta out of his pocket, irritated that he hadn’t put a bullet in the chamber earlier. But pulling back the slide would make an unmistakeable click, so he held off.

  The man with the green watch froze again, listening. Della Torre knew he’d be wondering whether he’d heard a small animal dislodging a pine cone, or something more threatening.

  Della Torre wondered how they’d known, how they’d figured it out so quickly. He was sure his flight from the hotel had been silent.

  Grimston’s professionalism and thoroughness were unsettling. Della Torre had an inkling that the freedom he’d been given since leaving Zagreb was illusory, that he’d always been on a short tether.

  He could no longer wait to see what their next move would be. He had to act, knowing everything would move quickly from now on. This called for the sort of aggression he’d left behind him in the army, fifteen years ago. He’d been called up to the Yugoslav commandos because of his fluent American-accented English and had been trained to infiltrate behind the lines should there be an American invasion of the country. The irony didn’t escape him.

  He’d never been a particularly good soldier. And he’d probably been the worst Yugoslav commando junior officer in its history. But some of the training had stuck.

  He threw another pebble, a little farther away from the man with the luminous watch. This time the man swung sharply and turned on his flashlight, pointing the beam away from della Torre and towards the water. Della Torre momentarily saw the tender to Miranda’s little boat, upside down under the pine tree, as it had been earlier in the day.

  The distance between him and the man was less than ten metres, too far to launch a surprise attack. But as the man swept the beam of his flashlight across the undergrowth, della Torre continued to creep forward. Each step he took sounded to him like a mountain cascade.

  He was within five metres when the man turned abruptly, swinging the light towards della Torre.

  In one motion della Torre flipped on his own torch and shone it straight into the man’s eyes, simultaneously working the slide back on the Beretta.

  “Don’t move,” he said in English. “I can’t miss from here.”

  The man froze — the same man who’d followed him in Korčula the previous day, though looking less smug now.

  “Switch off your flashlight,” della Torre said.

  The man did as he was told. “I just stopped to take a piss,” he said, his tone assured but conciliatory. “On my way back to town.”

  “An American tourist out for a midnight walk?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Well, Mr. Tourist, drop the flashlight and get on your knees.”

  “You can have everything in my wallet,” the man said. “It’s just here.” He reached towards his back pocket.


  “Don’t —”

  The man pulled a gun from a holster in the small of his back. He fired in della Torre’s general direction, but the bullet missed, slicing wildly into the trees. Della Torre threw himself sideways. As he did, he squeezed the trigger on the Beretta.

  “Oh fuck,” the man grunted, scrambling into the undergrowth.

  Della Torre switched off the torch and crouched by the side of the path. He heard the other man move noisily away.

  And then came the high whine of a car engine turning into the track with a quick downshift. The headlights swung down and della Torre shaded his eyes with his forearm.

  Small stones scattered as the car braked sharply. The sentry’s sprint was caught by the light, but then he disappeared into the darkness again.

  “What —” Miranda started to say as della Torre stepped out of the beams.

  “Ms. Walker, we need to get going. Right now,” he said.

  “Why have you got a gun, Mr. della Torre?”

  “Because I thought I saw a pheasant.”

  “The season hasn’t started yet.”

  “I was poaching.”

  “Mr. della Torre, if you expect my cooperation —”

  “Ms. Walker, you have a thousand Deutschmarks to get me to Dubrovnik. You start now and get me there, I’ll throw in another five hundred. Not including any passengers we take out.”

  “And if I don’t like that deal, you’ve got a gun to make it sound more appealing.”

  “You know as well as I do that I can’t force you to take me the whole way there by threatening you with a gun.”

  “Okay, Mr. della Torre, I suppose if I’m in for a penny, I’m in for a pound. Can you take the things out of the car and bring them down to the beach while I get the tender ready? The jerry cans and the water jugs and the various bags.”

  He did as he was told, wary lest the Americans return, while she launched the boat, all done under the illumination of the Fiat’s headlights.

  He was sure he’d wounded the other man, though not badly enough to fell him. The man didn’t seem to present any immediate danger, but his colleagues would, once they came looking for him.

  Laden, the little rowing boat sat low in the water, but Miranda assured della Torre that it wouldn’t sink. He went back, switched off the car’s lights, and locked it. Then he removed his boots, rolled up his trousers, and stepped gingerly through the cool, shallow water, rocks sharp underfoot, into the tender. It rocked wildly, and for a moment he thought it would overturn as he settled onto the bench in the stern. In the darkness, Miranda rowed with the ease of a practised sculler, making for the sailboat, which della Torre picked out with the flashlight.

  They tied up the dinghy at the mooring buoy and got all their things aboard.

  “There are some waterproofs hanging below that ought to fit you. They’ll help keep the chill of the night air off,” she said.

  She’d lit a kerosene lamp down below and was pulling on plastic bib overalls and a rain slicker as he stepped down. The cabin berthed two and had a tiny galley that consisted of a gimballed stove and burner.

  “It’s a bigger boat than I thought,” he said.

  “Twenty feet at the waterline. She doesn’t really have a keel, just a couple of fins to keep her stable, but it means she can travel in very shallow water. She draws only about a foot and a half unless she’s laden, and I can take her out of the water when need be. She gets around, which is why she’s called Gypsy.”

  “How soon can we get going?”

  “Daybreak.”

  He climbed into the little cockpit at the back of the boat. “We’ll need to move before then,” he said, watching the beams of car headlights breaking through the trees that lined the main road, a modulated Morse code that took no deciphering.

  The lights stopped for a time. Della Torre figured they were collecting the wounded man. Soon after that, he watched the car turn down the little path towards their cove.

  “We need to get going,” he said. “Now.”

  She didn’t question him but instead flipped up a control panel behind the tiller, tinkered with the dials, and then started the engine. From there she went up front and undid the mooring rope.

  She’d only just returned to the cockpit when Gypsy was lit up from the shore. Della Torre ducked low into the cockpit, turning to face the lights.

  “Mrs. Walker. Mrs. Walker, we would like to speak to you.” Grimston’s voice carried over the water. “Please don’t make the mistake of setting sail.”

  Miranda ignored him, throttling up and nudging the tiller so that Gypsy slipped past its mooring buoy.

  “Mrs. Walker, as you sail away tonight, keep an eye on the hillside. Your house is up there, your car is down here. How much are you being paid for this trip? Will you make enough to cover what you lose?”

  They heard the sound of glass breaking. And then there was a glow from among the trees, bright and orange-yellow at first, like a campfire, flickering, fading, and then suddenly billowing out in a fireball that silhouetted the big Mediterranean pine by the water in frozen agony.

  “The trees will catch,” Miranda said.

  And then came bright rosettes from the side of the burning car, followed by the crack, crack of pistol shots. But Gypsy had moved steadily away from shore, and the torchlight on them weakened and faded. There were no sounds of the gunfire hitting its target.

  “I’m sorry,” della Torre said at long last.

  “I’ve thought for a while that the war would come to me eventually,” she said, her voice quiet, thoughtful. “It will touch everyone here. I don’t know why I should be spared.”

  “But this isn’t the war,” della Torre said.

  “Isn’t it?”

  He thought for a while and realized he didn’t know. “Maybe it is.”

  “I don’t know what’s going on, Mr. della Torre . . .”

  “Marko.”

  “Marko. Please call me Miranda.”

  “Miranda.”

  “I suppose I was getting too comfortable.”

  “Your art, your possessions . . .”

  “My art was stale,” she said. “I don’t own anything else up there. Nothing that can’t be replaced for a few hundred Deutschmarks.”

  Della Torre shook his head in the darkness. Small waves slapped the boat’s bows. The engine muttered like an old man in the corner of a pub, unceasing but joyless and mortal.

  “We’d better get as far as we can,” she said. “I wouldn’t be surprised if they found a fishing boat to follow us in the morning. They won’t do it now without lights — anything with lights attracts the Yugoslav navy’s attention. I won’t be able to put up the sails until daybreak, though. There are too many islands around to risk sailing blind.”

  “Thank you,” della Torre said. And then, after he’d listened for a while to the small waves tapping a rhythm against the wooden hull, the engine muttering: “You can’t be doing this just for the money.”

  “I wonder.”

  THEY’D BEEN ON the water for an hour when della Torre saw the light on the Korčula hillside. It was a single point at first, and then two, three, four. The fire, at first an indistinct smudge, spread into a broad, flickering palette of citrus colours.

  Miranda looked up and he heard her gasp: “Oh.” Then, in the faint green light of the boat’s binnacle compass, she turned away, facing the direction Gypsy was taking them, towards the mainland, towards the war. Della Torre turned to face the same way, and he saw other, similar glows in the distance, some solitary, others clustered in small groups. Fires were burning again that night, as they burned every night, like stars fallen to earth.

  The chill in the air was made colder by the adrenaline seeping out of him.

  “Can you sit here and hold the tiller while I brew us some coffee below,” Miranda sa
id. “Keep your eyes on the compass. The course we’re on now will be safe until dawn.” He took her place at the back of the boat while she descended the four steep steps into the dim cabin.

  She brought up the hot, bitter drink in plastic mugs and sat next to della Torre. “People talk about Sir Fitzroy,” she said. “He was heroic, but so was Lady Maclean. Her first husband died. He was a naval officer, killed in a cave in Crete during the war. She had two small children. After the war, Sir Fitzroy became a spy in Turkey, as he’d been in Russia before, though it’s not commonly known. But she was there with him. By that time she had four children. Even so, she put her neck on the line.”

  “I didn’t know.”

  “Well, now you do. Some of us don’t scare easily, even if we spent our youth learning which way to pass the port or how to address a bishop.”

  “You sound like a Victorian adventurer,” he said. “You were born a hundred years too late.”

  “Only if I were a man. But I’m not, so the present suits me just fine,” she answered. “I learned to drive in an ancient Austin 7 built in 1928, top speed of thirty miles an hour. That was before I’d turned ten. It was my grandfather’s car from when he was young. I used to drive it around the grounds. There was a narrow paved terrace between the house and its moat, no railing. It’s tricky, double-declutching when you’re barely tall enough to see the end of the car.”

  “They let you do that?” della Torre asked, incredulous.

  “My grandfather encouraged me. My cousin once rode a motorcycle into the moat. They just fished him out. The Austin didn’t have a roof, and I could swim. They figured they’d do the same with me if they needed to. Anyway, it wasn’t nearly as dangerous as some of what Grandfather had us do. He used to send us climbing the beams of the barn, a good thirty feet up, to chase away the bats. The bats annoyed him but they’re a protected species, and he couldn’t shoot them or smoke them out. He used to say that if we were sensible, we wouldn’t break our necks. And if we weren’t, we deserved to. I suppose I’m trying to tell you I understand risk. I’ve taken risks all my life, one way or another. So don’t feel too sorry for me, or that somehow you’re the agent of my circumstances.”