Treacherous eyes follow smiles and slaps on the back. Who can tell that the film isn’t going to happen? Elsewhere, people are waiting for reports.
Chapter 52
Between Mljet and Sipan, 30 April
Two in the morning. President Tito left Mljet less than four hours ago. The garden of the villa is so quiet you would think you could hear the tide lapping in the distance.
The shadow emerges furtively from the back door. It creeps past boxwood bushes and palm trees, before crouching down between the hedge and the statue of Hermes, which is smothered in climbing plants.
On its knees, a little case. The shadow opens it carefully, takes out a pair of headphones and puts them on. Expert fingers fiddle with slides and dials. A faint hiss comes from the headphones. Eyes stare alertly at trembling gauges and decipher each oscillation. One hand works delicately to position the circular antenna and the telescopic aerial. The other picks up a receiver and brings it to the shadow’s mouth.
‘Fish in the sea, Varna, fish in the sea. ’ The long-wave beep pierces eardrums. The shadow repeats insistently: ‘Fish in the sea, Varna.’
Broken words. Whistles. A sound like wind in a microphone. The hand adjusts the circular antenna. Indistinct phrases. Thumb and index finger stroke a dial.
The shadow whispers into the receiver: ‘It doesn’t matter if the trawler comes here. There are more fish in the sea around
Sipan, repeat, Sipan, Mediterranean zone, uninhabited, landward side. Tomorrow morning, time unspecified, at least three swordfish, maybe four. The tuna has migrated, only sea bass and swordfish. Roger and out.’
The shadow throws back its head and blows a mouthful of tension at the stars.
It slips off the headphones, closes the case and lightly makes its way back across the park.
The prow of the dinghy scrapes on to the sand, impelled by the last stroke of the oars. Four men jump into the sea and pick it up before dropping it on the beach.
Andrei Zhulianov glances nervously around. He has never liked changing plans at the last minute. Even when the changes seem to make everything easier. He would rather have a big risk calculated down to its tiniest details than a linear action filled with unpredictable possibilities. Mljet was a big risk.
Sipan looks easier, but they’re still going to have to improvise the whole thing.
The map of the place, found on the Varna, doesn’t add a great deal. A nautical chart of southern Dalmatia. Like trying to find a restaurant on a globe.
Zhulianov glances at his watch. Four o’clock. Better act immediately.
First of all, unload the dinghy.
Then hide it.
Finally, find a good observation point, to sight the yacht arriving from Mljet.
Don’t let all that confuse you. In one rucksack, all the scubadiving equipment. In the next, binoculars and telescope. In the third, the instruments. Never forget, I’m looking for a place to hide the dinghy.
Three hours later, twenty or thirty metres along the beach and just a bit more to the east, Pierre will wake up in his father’s bed after a night spent tossing and turning. The first sun of the morning will fill the room, with the promise of a hot day, ideal for swimming.
Pierre will reach the window on bare feet. He won’t be able to keep from thinking about Bologna, the day he left, still cold, damp, wrapped in the last fog, drenched by soft rain, a whitish sky hiding the sun.
He will hear the sounds of his father in the next room, and go and stand in the doorway, leaning against the frame.
‘You can hardly complain about the weather and the landscape, dad. End of April and you’d think it was summer. At home I get up, I open the window, and every morning I see the footpath, two or three bicycles and some old woman with her shopping bag. You have the rocks, the sea, the islands. ’
‘Well, that’s true,’ Vittorio will reply with a half-smile. ‘But isn’t that exactly what’s wrong? Small pleasures rather than big dreams. A beautiful view, sun and the best ricotta cheese in the world.’
‘I was trying to look on the bright side.’
‘The bright side? There is one, I’m aware of that. You can live well here, if you want to. But I don’t. I want something else, can’t you see that?’
Pierre will shake his head and turn away in silence, resolving not to put himself in a bad mood. There is no more impregnable fortress than pessimism whatever the cost.
Better to forget the whole thing and hurry down to the beach.
President Tito’s private yacht crosses the waves at a steady rate. Cary, sitting at the prow, dangles a hand over the side and collects spray to wet his head, as empty of thoughts as the sky is empty of clouds.
The only annoyance: the three bodyguards, heedful of his every movement, always alert, always armed. Never a moment to relax.
Relax. Swim, read, sunbathe, stroll along the beach. The day’s schedule is all there, a cure-all before the exhaustions of a new, long journey. Before going back to Palm Springs and then meeting up with Hitch and Grace Kelly on the Côte d’Azur. Better than staying at home, a wealthy pensioner, yoga, Ayurvedic massages and David Niven’s wisecracks.
Until then, however, Cary has made up his mind not to think about it, and just wants to be left to his own devices.
He puts on his sunglasses, makes himself comfortable and opens the book at Chapter 23.
The lens of the spyglass frames the scene.
Zhulianov adjusts the focus and sees the yacht dropping anchor about a hundred metres from the beach. The dinghy lands in the water with three men on board. The bodyguards are in military uniform. Grant is wearing a blue polo-neck and a pair of swimming trunks the same colour. He has sunglasses on, and is holding something in his hand. Perhaps a book.
*
They are called the Elaphites, a group of about ten small islands between the eastern end of Mljet and the port of Dubrovnik. The name has something to do with deer, but it isn’t clear whether it is down to the presence of those animals, all of which have now disappeared, or the appearance of the archipelago as a whole, which recalls, as a constellation might, the features of a deer.
Sipan, Lopud and Kolocep are the only inhabited islands. On Sipan, the largest one, there are two settlements, Sipanska Luka and Sudurad, on the other side.
Halfway between the two villages, hidden between rocks and gorse bushes, a shabby house looks down upon a stretch of uninhabited and inhospitable coast.
Perhaps that is why Vittorio Capponi, who has been living there for about two months, has never seen anyone drop anchor around here. At most a passing fishing boat, early in the morning, or at night off the coast, fishing with a lamp for squid. But a yacht of those dimensions, never. So big it can carry, hoisted by two pulleys at the stern, a four-seater motor-powered sloop.
Tourists? Hardly. Do you think anyone with a boat like that would come and swim there, at the most deserted point of the whole island? The kind of thing really posh people get up to is being seen all over the place, in the most fashionable places, on famous beaches, not halfway between
Sipanska Luka and Sudurad, amidst the goats and the squid fishermen.
And yet. Vittorio narrows his eyes and puts a hand to his forehead to shield his eyes from the sun. And yet they are, Radko, look. They’re lowering the sloop into the sea, heading for the beach.