“It’s no good, Zaleshoff, I…”
But he misunderstood me. “We’ll talk later,” he bellowed. “Get on with it.”
He got down on to the step above me. I could feel his knees pressing against my shoulder-blades. I moved down to the bottom step. Now I could see the wheels as they ran screaming over the rails of the curve. I watched them, fascinated. They reminded me irresistibly of bacon-slicing machines. As a boy I had seen a man cut off half his thumb with one of those machines. Grease was oozing out of one of the axle-boxes. Something poked me sharply in the back. It was Zaleshoff’s toe.
“Go on!” he yelled.
I straightened my back, flexed my legs and swung one foot forward slightly. Then I hesitated again. No, I couldn’t do it. We were going too fast. If the train would slow down a little more… but it seemed to be gathering speed now. Then Zaleshoff’s toe jabbed me again. I drew a deep breath, clenched my teeth and jumped.
The next moment the ground was flailing the soles of my shoes with astounding force. I felt myself pitching forward on my face and put out my arms to save myself. My legs strove madly to reach the speed of the rest of my body. But not for long. A bare second later I had tripped. Just in time I remembered Zaleshoff’s advice and let myself go limp. I saw the ground sliding past sideways. Then I hit the edge of the embankment.
The impact nearly stunned me, and before I could stop myself I was tumbling down the side of the embankment. I came to rest at the bottom of it against the concrete stanchion of a barbed-wire fence. For several moments I stayed there, winded. Then, very gingerly, I got to my feet and began to dust myself down. Zaleshoff came scrambling diagonally down the embankment from the point at which he had finished up twenty yards or so away.
“Are you all right?”
I was still short of breath, but I managed a rather quavering affirmative.
“Through the fence,” he panted urgently, as he came up, “we can clean up as we go.”
“What’s the matter?”
“The guard saw us,” he said curtly; “that means that he’ll report the fact at Brescia. We daren’t go into Treviglio.”
“Well, where are we going?”
“We’ll see when we get there. Come on.”
We wormed our way through the fence and set off in silence to skirt the ploughed field. The sun was beginning to go down behind the trees on the horizon when we eventually got on to a road. We turned right, away from Treviglio. Twenty minutes later we walked into a small village. Next to the post office there was a caffe-ristorante.
“This’ll do,” said Zaleshoff.
We went inside and sat down.
“Well,” I said, “what now?” I was feeling tired and shaken.
“We eat and we share a decent bottle of wine if they’ve got one. Then we get down to business.”
The place was small and not too clean. There was a zinc-topped bar and four marble-topped tables covered with white paper napkins. The wall behind the bar consisted of shelves packed tight with bottles. On the other walls were Cinzano posters, a lithograph of Mussolini and a poster advertising Capri. The proprietor was a phlegmatic middle-aged man with a long, greying moustache and amazingly grimy hands. He did not seem in the least surprised by our presence, a fact which I found curious until it came out in the course of our brief conversation with him that he assumed that we were something to do with a mineral water factory close by. We did not correct this impression.
We ate spaghetti and a great deal of bread and drank a tolerable Barbera. By the time the coffee arrived I was feeling very much better. Zaleshoff summoned the proprietor and ordered a bottle of cognac.
“We can’t drink all that,” I protested.
“We’re not going to drink any of it now. But we shall be glad of it later.”
I did not understand him, but I nodded.
“What about sleeping? Do you think this man can put us up? You know, you might just as well have chucked the case overboard just before we jumped off ourselves. We should have had at least one pair of pyjamas between us.”
He dropped three lumps of sugar into his coffee one by one. “We aren’t going to need pyjamas. To-night we’re walking.”
“Walking? Where?”
“Listen. By the morning this district will be thick with police in and out of uniform. We wouldn’t be able to move a yard. If we put up for the night anywhere they’ll want to see your passport. You haven’t got one.”
“I’ve got my permit.”
He snorted. “And a fat lot of good that’ll do you. Don’t you realise that the particulars on that permit, including your name, go straight to the police?”
“Dammit, we’ve got to sleep somewhere?” I cried.
“Maybe we can have a nap somewhere to-morrow.”
“Thanks very much,” I said sarcastically. Then I became serious. “Look here, Zaleshoff, it’s very decent of you to try to help me like this, but I do think that my original idea was better.”
He sighed. “I’ve told you once. Your Consulate won’t lift a finger to help you. If they did, they might compromise themselves. If you were innocent and the victim of an obvious frame-up, they might do something. But you’re not innocent-at least, technically you’re not. You’re as guilty as hell, and they can rake up the evidence to prove it.”
“But supposing there’s no question of a charge of espionage?”
“Do you think,” he said patiently, “that they’d bother to issue a warrant for your arrest just for bribery? Don’t make me laugh! If they started anything like that, the prisons would be overflowing in a week and most of the top men would be in them. Look here: we know that they’ve got on to that poste restante set-up of yours with Vagas. There’s very little doubt that Madame Vagas gave them the whole works. That means that they’ve got hold of the report I wrote. Do you remember that you didn’t think much of it? Well, I told you it was dynamite and dynamite it is. You saw how Vagas reacted to it. Well, believe me, that would be nothing to the way the contra-espionage department of the Organizzazione Vigilanza Repressione Anti-fascismo would react when they saw it. I’m not a good gambler, but I would not mind betting heavy money that at this very moment there’s enough sweating going on among the big boys in Milan and Rome to float that new battle-cruiser of theirs. And they let Vagas slip through their fingers. They must be kicking themselves good and plenty. But they’re not going to make the same mistake twice. They’re going to get you or bust themselves trying.”
“I don’t see why I should be so important.”
“No? The first thing they’d do, they’ve certainly done it by now, is to descend in a cloud on the Turin factory where those aircraft lifts are being made, to discover just how the leakage of information took place and how much you found out.”
“But I haven’t even been there.”
“Just so. You haven’t been there. You must have got the information from somewhere else. And the rest of the information in that report was stale before you arrived in the country, so you couldn’t have got that by yourself either. In other words, they’re going to tumble like a sack of potatoes to what’s being put across them. That’s why you’ve got to get out of the country, and pretty damn quick.”
For a bit I said nothing. I was impressed; very much so. I could feel something cold gripping at my insides. “Pretty damn quick.” There was a horrible urgency about those three ugly little words. I saw, suddenly, the naked realities of the mess I was in. My mind involuntarily turned away from them. Heavens, what a mess! If only…
I began to regret, to try and rearrange things in a more pleasing pattern. Finally I began to argue with Zaleshoff in an effort to get him somehow to modify his conclusions. I wanted him to minimise the danger. It was a plain case of funk, and it deceived him not at all.
“It’s no use,” he said at last. “I’m not going to call black pale-grey just because you’d like it better that way. You’re in a spot. I think I can get you out of it. I’ll do all I can to do so because I reckon I did a good deal to get you into it. But you’ll have to do as I say. It isn’t going to be easy. If we have to lose a night or two’s sleep it’ll be just too bad, but you’ll have to put up with it. If that’s all we lose before we’re through, I reckon we shall have done swell.”