Vodena, which used to be called Edessa and was once the seat of the kings of Macedon, is some fifty miles west of Salonika. It hangs, amid lush growth of vine and wild pomegranate, fig, and mulberry trees, in the foothills of Mount Chakirka six hundred feet above the Yiannitsa plain. Sparkling mountain streams cascade lyrically down the hillsides into Nisia Voda, the tributary of the Vadar which flows swiftly past the town on its way to the parent river. The old tiled houses glow in the sun. There are no tourist hotels.
George and Miss Kolin were driven there in a car hired in Salonika. It was not an enjoyable trip. The day was hot and the road bad. The condition of their stomachs denied them even the consolations of a good lunch and a bottle of wine at their destination. While the chauffeur went off heartily in search of food and wine, they went into a café, fought the flies for long enough to drink some brandy, and then dragged themselves off dispiritedly in search of information.
Almost immediately luck was with them. A sweetmeat pedlar in the market not only remembered the ambush well, but had actually been working in a near-by vineyard at the time. He had been warned to keep clear by the andartes, who had arrived an hour before the German trucks came.
When the chauffeur returned they persuaded the pedlar to leave his tray of flyblown titbits with a friend and guide them to the scene.
The fuel dump had been near a railway siding about three miles out of Vodena, on the side road to Apsalos. The trucks had been caught about two miles along this stretch of road.
It was an ideal place for an ambush. The road was climbing steadily and at that point made a hairpin turn below a hillside with plenty of cover for the attackers among its trees and thickets. Below and beyond the road there was no cover at all. The mines had been placed well past the turn so that, when the first truck hit, it would block the road for those following at a point where they could neither turn their vehicles nor find cover from which to reply to the fire from above. For the andartes concealed on the hillside the business must have been easy. The remarkable thing was that as many as two of the eleven Germans in the trucks had managed to get back down the road alive. They must have been exceptionally nimble or the fire from the hillside very wild.
Those who had died had been buried lower down the hill in a patch of level ground just off the road. According to the pedlar, the ground had been damp with rain at the time. The neat row of graves was still discernible in the undergrowth. Lieutenant Leubner and his men had piled stones in a small cairn on each. George had seen wayside German graves in France and Italy and guessed that originally each grave had also borne its occupant’s steel helmet, and perhaps a wooden stake with his number, name, and rank. It depended on how much time there had been to spare for such refinements. He looked for the stakes, but if they had ever existed, there was now no sign of them. Under a near-by bush he found a rusty German helmet; that was all.
“Seven graves,” remarked Miss Kolin as they walked up the hill again; “that is what one would expect from the Lieutenant’s letter to Frau Schirmer. Ten men and the Sergeant went. Two men return. The bodies of the Sergeant and the driver of the first truck are missing. Seven are buried.”
“Yes, but Phengaros said that there was only one prisoner-the driver. So where was the Sergeant? Look! The driver was wounded when the truck hit the mine, but not killed. Most likely the Sergeant was in the cab beside him. Probably he was wounded too. Lieutenant Leubner said he wasn’t a man to surrender without a fight. Supposing he managed somehow to get clear of the road and was hunted down and killed some distance from it.”
“But how, Mr. Carey? How could he get clear?”
They had reached the place of thte ambush again. George walked along the edge of the road away from the hillside and looked down.
The bare rocky ground fell away precipitously to the valley below. It was absurd to suppose that even an unwounded man would attempt to scramble down it under fire from the hillside and the road above. The two men who had escaped had been able to do so because they were in the last truck and unwounded. The Sergeant had been a full two hundred yards farther away from cover. He had had no chance at all of getting clear.
George climbed a short way up the hillside to look at the scene from the attackers’ point of view. From there, the plight of the men in the trucks seemed even more hopeless. He could imagine the scene: the trucks grinding up the hill, the ear-splitting detonation of the mine, the rattle of machine-gun and rifle fire, the thudding explosions of grenades lobbed on to the road, the hoarse shouts, the screams of the dying.
He clambered down to the car again.
“All right, Miss Kolin,” he said; “what do you think happened?”
“I think that he was taken prisoner with the driver and that both were wounded. I think that the Sergeant died of his wounds or was killed trying to escape on the way to the andartes’ rendezvous with Phengaros. Naturally Phengaros would think that only one prisoner had been taken.”
“What about the Sergeant’s papers? They would have been taken to Phengaros.”
“They would also take the papers of those they had killed here.”
George considered. “Yes, you may be right. At least it’s a reasonable explanation. There’s still only one way we can find out for certain though, and that’s by getting hold of someone who was there.”
Miss Kolin nodded towards the pedlar. “I have been talking to this man. He says that the andartes who did this were from Florina. That agrees with the Colonel’s information.”
“Did he know any of them by name?”
“No. They just said they were from Florina.”
“Another dead end. All right, we’ll go there tomorrow. We’d better start back now. How much money do you think I should give this old man?”
It was early evening when they arrived back in Salonika. Something unusual seemed to have happened while they had been away. There were extra police on duty in the streets and shopkeepers stood in the roadway conferring volubly with their neighbours. The cafés were crowded.
At the hotel they heard the news.
Just before three o’clock that afternoon a closed army truck had driven up to the entrance of the Eurasian Credit Bank in the rue Egnatie. It had waited there for a moment or so. Then, suddenly, the covers at the back had been flung open and six men had jumped out. They had been armed with machine-pistols and grenades. Three of them had immediately stationed themselves in the entrance portico. The other three had gone inside. Within little more than two minutes they had been out again with several hundred thousand dollars’ worth of foreign currency in American dollars, escudos, and Swiss francs. Ten seconds later, and almost before the passers-by had noticed that anything was wrong, they had been back in the truck and away.
The affair had been perfectly organized. The raiders had known exactly which safe the money was kept in and exactly how to get to it. No one had been shot. A clerk, who had courageously tried to set off an alarm bell, had received no more than a blow in the face from a gun butt for his audacity. The alarm bell had not sounded for the simple reason, discovered later, that the wires to it had been disconnected. The raiders had saluted with the clenched fist. Quite clearly they had had a Communist confederate inside the bank. Quite clearly the robbery was yet another in a series organized to replenish the Communist Party funds. Quite naturally suspicion as to the identity of the confederate had fallen upon the courageous clerk. Would he have dared to do what he did unless he had known in advance that he was running no risk? Of course not! The police were questioning him.
That was the receptionist’s excited account of the affair.
The hotel barman confirmed the facts but had a more sophisticated theory about the motives of the criminals.
How was it, he asked, that every big robbery that now took place was the work of Communists stealing for the Party funds? Did nobody else steal any more? Oh yes, no doubt there had been political robberies, but not as many as people supposed. And why should the brigands give the clenched fist salute as they left? To show that they were Communists? Absurd! They were merely seeking to give that impression in order to deceive the police by directing attention away from themselves. They could count on the police preferring to blame Communists. Everything bad was blamed on the Communists. He himself was not a Communist of course, but …
He went on at length.
George listened absently. At that moment he was more interested in the discovery that his appetite had suddenly begun to return and that he could contemplate without revulsion the prospect of dinner.
Florina lies at the entrance to a deep valley nine miles south of the Yugoslav frontier. About forty miles away across the mountains to the west is Albania. Florina is the administrative centre of the province which bears its name and is an important railhead. It has a garrison and a ruined Turkish citadel. It has more than one hotel. It is neither as picturesque as Vodena nor as ancient. It came into existence as an insignificant staging point on a Roman road from Durazzo to Constantinople, and far too late to share in the short-lived glories of the Macedonian Empire. In a land which has contained so many of the springs of Western civilization, it is a parvenu.
But if Florina has no history of much interest to the compilers of guidebooks, it has, in the Edwardian sense of the word, a Past.
In the summer of 1896, sixteen men attended a meeting in Salonika. There they founded a political organization which in later years was to become the most formidable secret terrorist society the Balkans, or for that matter Europe, has known. It was called the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization; IMRO, for short. Its creed was “Macedonia for the Macedonians,” its flag a red skull and crossbones on a black ground, its motto “Freedom or Death.” Its arguments were the knife, the rifle, and the bomb. Its armed forces, who lived in the hills and mountains of Macedonia enforcing IMRO laws and imposing IMRO taxes on the villagers and townspeople, were called comitadjis. Their oath of allegiance was sworn upon a Bible and a revolver, and the penalty for disloyalty was death. Among those who took this oath and served IMRO there were rich men as well as peasants, poets as well as soldiers, philosophers as well as professional murderers. In the cause of Macedonian autonomy it killed Turks and Bulgars, Serbs and Vlachs, Greeks and Albanians. It also killed Macedonians in the same cause. By the time of the First Balkan War, IMRO was a serious political force, capable of bringing considerable influence to bear upon events. The Macedonian comitadji with his cartridge belts and his rifle was becoming a legendary figure, a heroic defender of women and children against the savagery of the Turks, a knight of the mountains who preferred death to dishonour and treated his captives with courtesy and forbearance. The facts, harped upon by cynical observers, that the savageries of the Turks were generally committed by way of reprisal for atrocities committed by the comitadjis, and that the chivalrous behaviour was only in evidence when there was a chance of its impressing foreign sympathizers, seemed to have little effect on the legend. It persisted remarkably and has to some extent continued to do so. In the main square of Gorna Djoumaia, the capital of Bulgarian Macedonia, there is even a monument to “The Unknown Comitadji.” True, it was put up in 1933 by the IMRO gangsters who ran the city; but the Bulgarian central government of the time did not object to it, and it is almost certainly still there. If IMRO is no longer served by poets and idealists, it remains a political force and has from time to time sold itself with nice impartiality to both Fascists and Communists. IMRO is and always has been a very Balkan institution.
Florina was one of the “founder” strongholds of IMRO. Soon after the momentous Salonika meeting in 1896, an ex-Sergeant of the Bulgarian army named Marko began recruiting an IMRO band in Florina, which rapidly became the most powerful in the area. And the most distinguished. The Bulgarian poet Yavorov and the young writer Christo Silianov were among those who chose to join it, and (though Silianov, the writer, disgraced himself by showing an effeminate aversion to cutting his prisoners’ throats) both saw much active service with the Florina men. Marko himself was killed by Turkish soldiers, but the band remained an effective unit and played a prominent part in the rebellion of 1903. The irredentist techniques of sabotage, ambush, kidnapping, intimidation, armed robbery, and murder are part of Florina’s cultural heritage; and although it now takes invasion and a war to induce the law-abiding inhabitants of the province to turn to these old skills, there are always, even in times of peace, a few daring spirits ready to take to the mountains and remind their unfortunate neighbours that the traditions of their forefathers are still very much alive.
George and Miss Kolin arrived by train from Salonika.
The Parthenon Hotel was a three-story building near the centre of the town. There was a café beneath it, and a restaurant which could be entered directly from the street. It was about the size of a third-class commercial hotel in a town like Lyon. The rooms were small and the plumbing primitive. The bedstead in George’s room was of iron, but there was a wooden frame round the springs. At Miss Kolin’s suggestion, George spent his first half-hour there with an insufflator and a canister of D.D.T., spraying the crevices in the woodwork. Then he went down to the café. Presently Miss Kolin joined him.
The proprietor of the Parthenon was a small, grey-faced man with grey hair cut en brosse and a crumpled grey suit. When he saw Miss Kolin appear, he left a table by the bar counter, at which he had been standing talking to an army officer, and came over to them. He bowed and said something in French.
“Ask him if he’ll join us for a drink,” George said.
When the invitation had been interpreted, the little man bowed again, sat down with a word of apology, and snapped his fingers at the barman.
They all had oyzo. Politenesses were exchanged. The proprietor apologized for not speaking English and then began discreetly to pump them about their business in the town.
“We have few tourists here,” he remarked; “I have often said that it is a pity.”
“The scenery is certainly very fine.”
“If you have time while you are here you should take a drive. I shall be happy to arrange a car for you.”
“Very kind of him. Say that we heard in Salonika that there was excellent hunting to be had near the lakes to the west.”
“The gentleman is intending to go hunting?”
“Not this time, unfortunately. We are on business. But we were told that there was plenty of game up there.”
The little man smiled. “There is game of all sorts in the neighbourhood. There are also eagles in the hills,” he added slyly.
“Eagles who do a little hunting themselves, perhaps?”
“The gentleman learned that in Salonika, too, no doubt.”
“I have always understood that this is a most romantic part of the country.”
“Yes, the eagle is a bird of romance to some,” the proprietor said archly. Obviously, he was the kind of person who could not let the smallest joke go, once he had got his teeth into it.
“It’s a bird of prey, too.”
“Ah, yes indeed! When armies disintegrate, there are always a few who prefer to stay together and fight a private war against society. But here in Florina the gentleman need have no fear. The eagles are safe in the hills.”
“That’s a pity. We were hoping you might be able to help us to find one.”
“To find an eagle? The gentleman deals in fine feathers?”
But George was getting bored. “All right,” he said, “we’ll cut the double-talk. Tell him I’m a lawyer and that we want, if possible, to talk to someone who was in the ELAS band led by Phengaros in 1944. Explain that it’s nothing political, that we just want to check up on the grave of a German Sergeant who was killed near Vodena. Say I’m acting for the man’s relatives in America.”
He watched the little man’s face as Miss Kolin translated. For a moment or two a quite extraordinary expression came over its loose grey folds, an expression compounded of equal parts of interest, amazement, indignation, and fear. Then a curtain came down and the face went blank. Its owner picked up his drink and drained the glass.
“I regret,” he said precisely, “that that is not a matter in which I can be of any assistance to you at all.”
He rose to his feet.
“Wait a minute,” said George. “If he can’t help me, ask him if he knows of anyone here who can.”
The proprietor hesitated, then glanced across at the officer sitting at the table by the bar. “One moment,” he said curtly. He went over to the officer, and bending over the table, began talking in a rapid undertone.
After a moment or two, George saw the officer look across quickly at him, then say something sharply to the proprietor. The little man shrugged. The officer stood up and came over to them.
He was a lean, dark young man with lustrous eyes, very wide riding-breeches, and a waist like a girl’s. He wore the badges of a captain. He bowed to Miss Kolin and smiled pleasantly at George.
“I beg your pardon, sir,” he said in English. “The patron tells me that you are here making inquiries.”
“That’s right.”
He clicked his heels. “Streftaris, Captain,” he said. “You are an American, Mr.-?”
“Carey’s my name. Yes, I’m an American.”
“And this lady?”
“Miss Kolin is French. She is my interpreter.”
“Thank you. Perhaps I can be of assistance to you, Mr. Carey.”
“That’s very kind of you, Captain. Sit down, won’t you?”
“Thank you.” The Captain spun the chair round, swung the seat between his legs, and sat down with his elbows resting on the back. There was something curiously insolent about the gesture. He smiled less pleasantly. “You have made the patron feel very uneasy, Mr. Carey.”
“I’m sorry about that. All I asked him was to put me in touch with someone who was in the Phengaros band in 1944. I told him there was nothing political about my business.”
The Captain sighed elaborately. “Mr. Carey,” he said, “if I were to come to you in America and ask you to put me in touch with a gangster wanted by the police, would you be prepared to help me?”
“Is that a true comparison?”
“Certainly. I do not think you quite understand our problems here. You are a foreigner, of course, and that excuses you, but it is very indiscreet to inquire into matters of this kind.”
“Do you mind telling me why?”
“These men are Communists-outlaws. Do you know that Phengaros himself is in prison on a criminal charge?”
“Yes. I interviewed him two days ago.”
“Pardon?”
“Colonel Chrysantos in Salonika was kind enough to arrange for me to see Phengaros in prison.”
The Captain’s smile faded. He took his elbows off the back of the chair.
“I beg your pardon, Mr. Carey.”
“What for?”
“I did not understand that you were on official business.”
“Well, to be exact-”
“I do not think we have received orders from Salonika. Had we done so, of course, the Commandant would have instructed me.”
“Now, just a moment, Captain, let’s get this straight. My business is legal rather than official. I’ll explain.”
The Captain listened carefully to the explanation. When George had finished he looked relieved.
“Then it is not on the advice of Colonel Chrysantos that you are here, sir?”
“No.”
“You must know, Mr. Carey, that I am military intelligence officer for the district. It would be most unfortunate for me if Colonel Chrysantos thought-”
“Sure, I know. A very efficient man, the Colonel.”
“Ah, yes.”
“And a busy one. So, you see, I thought it might be better if I didn’t trouble the Colonel again, but just got the names of some of these people unofficially.”
The Captain looked puzzled. “Unofficially? How unofficially?”
“I could buy the names, couldn’t I?”
“But from whom?”
“Well, that was what I was hoping the patron might be able to tell me.”
“Ah!” The Captain at last permitted himself to smile again. “Mr. Carey, if the patron knew where the names that you want could be bought, he would not be so foolish as to admit the fact to a stranger.”
“But haven’t you a line on any of these people? What happened to them all?”
“Some were killed with the Markos forces, some are across the border with our neighbours. The rest”-he shrugged-“they have taken other names.”
“But they’re somewhere about here, surely.”
“Yes, but I cannot recommend you to go looking for them. There are cafés in this town where, if you asked the questions you asked the patron here tonight, there would be much unpleasantness for you.”
“I see. What would you do in my place, Captain?”
The Captain thought carefully for a moment, then he leaned forward. “Mr. Carey, I would not wish you to believe that I am not anxious to give you all the assistance I can.”
“No, of course not.”
But the Captain had not finished. “I wish to help you all I can. Please, however, explain to me one thing. You wish simply to know if this German Sergeant was killed or not killed in the ambush. Is that right?”
“That’s right.”
“You do not specially wish to know the name of the person who saw him die?”
George considered. “Well, let’s put it this way,” he said finally; “the probability is that the Sergeant did die. If he did and I can be reasonably certain of the fact, then that’s all I want to know. My business is finished.”
The Captain nodded. “Ah. Now let us suppose for a moment that such information could be obtained in some way. Would you be prepared to pay perhaps three hundred dollars for that information without knowing where it came from?”
“Three hundred! That’s rather a lot isn’t it?”
The Captain waved the subject away deprecatingly. “Let us say two hundred. The sum is not important.”
“Then let’s say one hundred.”
“As you will. But would you pay, Mr. Carey?”
“Under certain conditions, yes.”
“What conditions, please?”
“Well, I can tell you right now that I’m not going to pay out a hundred dollars just for the pleasure of having someone tell me that he knows somebody else who knows a man who was in that ambush and says that the German Sergeant was killed. I’d want some kind of evidence that the story was genuine.”
“I understand that, but what evidence could there be?”
“Well, for one thing, what I’d want is a reasonable explanation of the fact that the Sergeant’s body was not found by the German patrol that came along afterwards. There were dead men there, but the Sergeant wasn’t among them. A genuine witness ought to know the answer to that one.”
“Yes, that is logical.”
“But is there any chance of getting the information?”
“That is what I have been thinking about. I see a chance, perhaps, yes. I can promise nothing. Do you know anything of police methods?”
“Only the usual things.”
“Then you will know that when one is dealing with criminals, it is sometimes wise to give the less dangerous ones temporary immunity, and even encouragement, if by doing so one can know a little of what is going on among the rest.”
“You mean paid informers?”
“Not quite. The paid informer is rarely satisfactory. One pays and pays for nothing and then, when he is about to be useful, he is found with his throat cut and the government’s money is wasted. No, the types I am discussing are the lesser criminals whose activities can be tolerated because they know and are trusted by those whom we may wish to put our hands on. Such types will not inform, you understand, but by seeming to be friendly and ready to overlook their little games one can learn much of what goes on that is interesting.”
“I understand. If there were money in it and nobody risked incriminating himself, such a person might find out what I wanted to know.”
“Exactly.”
“Have you someone in mind?”
“Yes, but I must make a discreet inquiry first to see if an approach can safely be made. I think that Colonel Chrysantos would be very annoyed with me, Mr. Carey, if I put your life in danger”-he flashed a lustrous smile at Miss Kolin-“or that of Madame.”
Miss Kolin looked down her nose.
George grinned. “No, we mustn’t annoy the Colonel. But all the same it’s very kind of you to take all this trouble, Captain.”
The Captain raised a protesting hand. “It is nothing. If you should happen to mention to the Colonel that I was of some small assistance to you, I should be well repaid.”
“Naturally I shall mention it. But who is this person you think might fix it up?”
“It is a woman. Outwardly she is the proprietress of a wineshop. In fact she deals secretly in arms. If a man wishes a rifle or a revolver, he goes to her. She gets it for him. Why do we not arrest her? Because then someone else would begin to deal, someone we might not know and could not so easily keep under surveillance. One day, perhaps, when we can be sure of stopping her sources of supply, we will take her. Until then, things are better as they are. She has a love of gossip and for your purpose is most suitable.”
“But doesn’t she know she’s under surveillance?”
“Ah yes, but she bribes my men. The fact that they take her money makes her feel safe. It is all quite friendly. But we do not wish to alarm her, so she must be consulted first.” He rose to his feet, suddenly businesslike. “Perhaps tonight.”
“That’s good of you, Captain. Won’t you stay and have a drink?”
“Ah, no, thank you. Just now I have various appointments. Tomorrow I will send a note to you here to give you the address to go to if she has agreed, and any other necessary instructions.”
“O.K. Fine.”
There was a lot of heel-clicking and politeness and he went. George signalled to the barman.
“Well, Miss Kolin,” he said when they were served again, “what do you think?”
“I think that the Captain’s various appointments are almost certainly with his mistress.”
“I meant do you think there’s anything in this. You know this part of the world. Do you think he’ll do what he said about contacting this woman?”
She shrugged. “I think that for a hundred dollars the Captain would do almost anything.”
It took a moment or two for George to appreciate the implication of this statement. “But the Captain’s not getting the money,” he said.
“No?”
“No. That’s for the wineshop woman, if she comes through with the information.”
“I do not think he will give her a hundred dollars. Perhaps twenty. Perhaps nothing.”
“You’re kidding.”
“You asked me for my impression.” “He’s the Keen Young Executive type. All he wants is a pat on the back from the boss. You see.” Miss Kolin smiled sardonically.
George did not get much rest that night. The precautions he had taken against bedbugs had somehow served to convince him that the mattress frame must be alive with the creatures. In the darkness he had soon begun to imagine that he was being attacked by them. Useless now to remind himself of the D.D.T. he had applied; Balkan bugs probably ate the stuff like ice cream. After a fourth panic inspection failed to reveal even one attacker, he became desperate, stripped the bed, and made a further assault on the mattress with the insufflator. A rose-coloured dawn was glowing among the mountain peaks before he succeeded in going to sleep.
He awoke, resentfully, at nine o’clock. While he was at breakfast in the café downstairs, a letter arrived from the Captain.
DEAR SIR [George read]:
The woman is Madame Vassiotis at the wineshop in the rue Monténégrine. She will expect you, but not until this afternoon. Say that you come from Monsieur Kliris. Do not refer to me. She has been told what you want and might have an answer for you. The price will be U. S. dollars 150, but do not give it to the woman herself or speak of it. I wish to be assured personally that you are satisfied before you pay. If, when I have seen you this evening, you tell me that all is well, I will see that the money goes to her by Monsieur Kliris.
The letter was written on plain paper and unsigned. George did not show it to Miss Kolin.
The rue Monténégrine proved to be a steep, refuse-strewn lane in the poorer quarter of the town. The houses were broken down and ugly. Lines of dingy washing were strung across the lane between some of the upper windows; others had bedding hung out over the sills. There were a great many children about.
The wineshop was near the top of the lane by a builder’s yard. It had no display window. There was a bead-curtained doorway in a wall, and two or three steps led down to the interior. George and Miss Kolin entered and found themselves in a kind of cellar, with wine barrels stacked on their sides against the walls, and a massive wooden bench in the centre. Light came from an oil lamp on a shelf. The air was cool and there was a smell of stale wine and old barrels that was not unpleasant.
There were two persons in the shop. One of them, an old man in blue denim trousers, sat on the bench drinking a glass of wine. The other was Madame Vassiotis.
She was amazingly fat, with huge pendulous breasts and a vast lap. She was sitting on, and almost completely enveloping, a low stool by a doorway at the back of the shop. When they entered, she rose slowly to her feet and waddled forward into the light.
Her head was small for her body, with dark hair drawn tightly away from the brow. The face seemed as though it ought to belong to someone younger or less gross. It was still firm and delicately shaped, and the eyes under their heavy lids were dark and clear.
She murmured a word of greeting.
Miss Kolin replied. George had briefed her in readiness for the interview and she did not trouble to interpret the preliminaries. He saw Madame Vassiotis nod understandingly and glance at the old man. He prompttly finished his wine and went out. Then she bowed slightly to George and, with a gesture of invitation, led the way through a doorway at the back into a sitting-room.
There, there were Turkish carpets on the walls, a divan with plush cushions, and a few pieces of rickety Victorian furniture. It reminded him of a fortune-teller’s booth in a travelling fair. Only the crystal ball was missing.
Madame Vassiotis poured three glasses of wine, sank down heavily on the divan, and motioned them to chairs. When they were seated, she folded her hands in her lap and looked placidly from one to the other of them as if waiting for someone to propose a parlour game.
“Ask her,” George said, “if she has been able to get any reply to the questions put to her by Monsieur Kliris.”
Madame Vassiotis listened gravely to the translation and then, with a nod, began to speak.
“She states,” said Miss Kolin, “that she has been able to speak with one of the andartes who took part in the affair near Vodena. Her information is that the German Sergeant was killed.”
“Does she know how he was killed?”
“He was in the first truck of the German convoy. It exploded a mine.”
George thought for a moment. He had not mentioned either of those facts to the Captain. It was promising.
“Did the informant see the Sergeant dead?”
“Yes.”
“Was he on the road?”
“He was where he fell when the truck was hit.”
“What happened to the body afterwards?”
He saw Madame Vassiotis shrug.
“Does she know that the body was not there when the German patrol came along afterwards?”
“Yes, but her informant can offer no explanation of this.”
George thought again. This was awkward. An experienced man would probably know that the N.C.O. in charge of a German column would ride in the leading truck; and certainly anyone who had taken any part at all in the ambush would know that the leading truck had hit a mine. The informant might well have been farther down the road, firing on the other trucks. With the prospect of earning a few dollars for his trouble, however, he would be ready to oblige with a reasonable guess.
“Ask her if her friend knows what the Sergeant’s injuries were.”
“She cannot say exactly. The Sergeant was lying in a pool of blood.”
“Is she absolutely sure in her own mind-?” Then he broke off. “No, wait a minute. Put it another way. If the Sergeant were her own son, would she be satisfied in her own mind that he was dead from what her friend has told her?”
A smile appeared on the delicately curved lips and a chuckle shook the massive body as their owner understood his question. Then, with a grunting effort, she heaved herself up from the divan and waddled to a drawer in the table. From it she took a slip of paper, which she handed to Miss Kolin with an explanation.
“Madame anticipated your doubts and asked for proof that her friend saw the body. He told her that they stripped the dead Germans of their equipment and that he got the Sergeant’s water bottle. He still has it. It has the Sergeant’s number and name burned into the strap. They are written on this paper.”
Madame Vassiotis sat down again and sipped her wine as George looked at the paper.
The army number he knew well; he had seen it before on several documents. Beneath it in block letters had been written: “SCHIRMER F.”
George considered it carefully for a moment or two, then nodded. He had not mentioned the name Schirmer to the Captain. Trickery was quite out of the question. The evidence was conclusive. What had happened afterwards to the body of Sergeant Schirmer might never be known, but there was no shadow of doubt that Madame Vassiotis and her mysterious acquaintance were telling what they knew of the truth.
He nodded and, picking up his glass of wine, raised it politely to the woman before he drank.
“Thank her for me, please, Miss Kolin,” he said as he put the glass down, “and tell her that I am well satisfied.”
He got out a fifty-dollar bill and put it on the table as he stood up.
He saw an expression of hastily concealed amazement flicker across the fat woman’s face. Then she rose to her feet bowing and smiling. She was clearly delighted. If her dignity had permitted it she would have picked up the bill to have a closer look. She pressed them to have more wine.
When, eventually, they were able to bow themselves out of the shop, George turned to Miss Kolin. “You’d better tell her not to mention that fifty dollars to Monsieur Kliris,” he said; “I shan’t mention it to the Captain. With any luck she may get paid twice.”
Miss Kolin was on her sixth after-dinner brandy, and her eyes were glazing rapidly. She was sitting very straight in her chair. At any moment now she would decide that it was time for her to go to bed. The Captain had long since departed. He had had the air of a man of whose good nature unfair advantage had been taken. However, he had not refused the hundred dollars George had offered him. Presumably he was now celebrating the occasion with his mistress. For George, there was nothing more to be done in Florina.
“We’ll leave tomorrow morning, Miss Kolin,” he said. “Train to Salonika. Plane to Athens. Plane to Paris. All right?”
“You have definitely decided?”
“Can you think of one reason for going on with the thing?”
“I never had any doubt that the man was dead.”
“No, that’s right, you didn’t. Going to bed now?”
“I think so, yes. Good night, Mr. Carey.”
“Good night, Miss Kolin.”
Watching her meticulous progress to the door of the café, George wondered gloomily if she kept her rigid self-control until she got into bed or whether, in the privacy of her room, she allowed herself to pass out.
He finished his own drink slowly. He felt depressed and wished to account for the fact. According to the lights of the ambitious young corporation lawyer who, only a few weeks back, had been pleased to watch his name being painted on an office door in Philadelphia, he should have been delighted by the turn of events. He had been given an irksome and unrewarding task and had performed it quickly and efficiently. He could now return with confidence to more serious and useful business. Everything was fine. And yet he was deriving no pleasure from the fact. It was absurd. Could it be that, in his heart, he had hoped, ludicrously, to find the Schneider Johnson claimant and take him back in triumph to that juvenile dotard, Mr. Sistrom? Could it be that what was now troubling him was merely an idiotic feeling of anticlimax? That must be it, of course. For a moment or two he almost succeeded in convincing himself that he had discovered the reason for his state of mind. Then the even less palatable truth of the matter dawned on him. He had been enjoying himself.
Yes, there it was. The talented, ambitious, pretentious Mr. Carey, with his smug, smiling family, his Brooks Brothers suits, and his Princeton and Harvard degrees, liked playing detectives, liked looking for nonexistent German soldiers, liked having dealings with dreary people like Frau Gresser, disagreeable people like Colonel Chrysantos, and undesirables like Phengaros. And why? For the value of such experiences in a corporation law practice? Because he loved his fellow men and was curious about them? Rubbish. More likely that the elaborate defences of his youth, the pompous fantasies of big office chairs and panelled boardrooms, of hidden wealth and power behind the scenes, were beginning to crumble, and that the pimply adolescent was belatedly emerging into the light. Was it not possible that, in finding out something about a dead man, he had at last begun to find out something about himself?
He sighed, paid the bar bill, got his key, and went up to his room.
It was in the front of the hotel on the second floor, and at night the light streaming down from unshuttered windows across the street was almost strong enough to read by.
When he opened the door, therefore, he did not immediately look for the light switch. The first thing he saw as he took the key out of the lock was his briefcase lying open on the bed, with its contents scattered about the covers.
He started forward quickly. He had taken about two steps when the door slammed behind him. He swung round.
A man was standing just beside the door. He was in the shadow, but the pistol in his hand was clearly visible in the light from across the street. It moved forward as the man spoke.
He spoke very softly, but, even for George’s scattered senses, the strong Cockney accent in the voice was unmistakable.
“All right, chum,” it said. “Gently does it. No, don’t move. Just put your hands behind your head, keep absolutely quiet, and hope you won’t get hurt. Got it?”