After the taxi had dropped them with their suitcases, they waited a few minutes, then separated. As soon as another taxi came along, Stephanie took it to a small hotel called the Ken-trikon, where she registered as Fraulein Anna Schmidt. Five minutes later, Robbie was on his way to an equally unpretentious hostelry called The Palladium, at which he registered as Signer Giacomo Lombardi. An hour later, they met by arrangement for lunch at a little restaurant named the Ariadne.
During the afternoon, they walked round the town. Except for the Venetian Morosini Fountain in the main square, there was nothing beautiful in it. By comparison, for its size, it had suffered far more from bombing than had London, and practically nothing had been done to restore it. Even the pavements in the principal streets were, in many places, still cracked and uneven. There were no fine shops and the now-deserted market was a maze of small streets resembling an Oriental bazaar which, indeed, for over two hundred years it had been.
Unlike the Venetians, the Moors, and the other great colonizing powers of Portugal, Spain, Britain, France and Italy which came after them, the Turks had done nothing for the peoples over whom they ruled during the long centuries of their Empire. They had taxed the populations of the Balkan countries to the limit, persecuted them on religious grounds, administered the laws through corrupt officials, and had given nothing in return. They had left behind them no fine buildings, no beautiful gardens, no hospitals or schools and not a single great work of art; only a legacy of incompetence, laziness, disease and dirt. Here, in Crete, the lamentable results of their rule could be seen even beneath the devastation caused by the bombing; for the Cretans, in spite of many gallant attempts to throw off the Turkish yoke, had not gained their freedom until 1898. Then had followed two world wars and Crete had not had the time to emerge from the dire poverty in which the Turks had left her.
Their walk led them eventually down to the sea wall at the western end of the city. Turning back along it, they skirted a small bay littered with refuse and, on reaching its further promontory, found themselves again at the Glass House. Now that, within a few days, it would be May, the afternoon sun was very hot; so they went in and spent half an hour refreshing themselves with iced orange juice. They then resumed their walk in the direction of the harbour.
To their left lay the sea, to their right the many acres oi desolation they had noticed from the bus the night before. Adjacent to the road, only one complete building was still standing. It looked like a huge barn. There were some stacks of timber alongside it and a glance between its loosely padlocked double doors showed it to be a saw-mill. Some way behind it, among the crumbling walls and heaps of rubble, stood a little house. The chimney pots were gone and the upper windows broken, but otherwise it appeared to be intact. Stephanie drew Robbie's attention to it and said:
That would be a perfect place for you to go to earth in and for me to bring Vaclav to, if he does come to Crete. Let's go over and look at it.'
On one side of the saw-mill there was a track made by lorries. This brought them to within sixty yards of the house; for the rest of the way they scrambled over the rubble alongside a low wall which ended against one side of it. The building had only two stories and looked as if it contained two or three rooms on the ground floor with, probably, four small bedrooms above. The downstairs windows were cracked and covered with cobwebs; the door stood a few inches ajar. The damp had warped it and it was stuck, but it flew open at a thrust from Robbie's powerful shoulders.
'You stay here,' he told her. 'As it's been abandoned, it is probably dangerous and may fall down.' But she ignored his warning and followed him into a narrow hall, half of which was taken up by a steep flight of stairs. A door on the right stood open. Through it, they could see lumps of plaster on the floor and peeling wallpaper, which suggested that it had been the sitting room. Robbie forced open a door on the left and they saw then why the house had been left uninhabited. A small, old-fashioned, now rusty, iron range showed that the room had been the kitchen, but beyond it there was no wall. From the road it had not been noticeable, but the whole of the wall on that side of the house had fallen out.
Robbie insisted that Stephanie should remain below, then went gingerly up the stairs. He returned to report that two small bedrooms on the sitting-room side of the house were habitable although virtually they were now one, because the plaster partition between them had collapsed, leaving only the two upright posts that had strengthened it.
'Do you think it would be safe to live in?' Stephanie asked.
'I don't see why not,' he replied. 'If the good half of it has stood up like this for twenty years, I don't see why it should fall down in another week.'
'It will be horribly uncomfortable; no electric light or gas for cooking, no water, and outside sanitation. But, at this time of year, it won't be damp or cold. And, if the police do start a hunt for you in Heraklion, they will check up on every foreigners in even the smallest lodging houses, whereas they are very unlikely to look for you among these ruins.'
The men who work at the saw-mill are bound to see me come and go.'
'Not necessarily. There's certain to be a back entrance to this place, and you could use that in the daytime. Let's go and see what it's like round there.'
Twenty yards behind the house a tall wall, with gaping windows, which had formed part of a much bigger building, was still standing. It screened the back entrance from being overlooked by houses a few hundred yards further inland which were inhabited, and just beyond it lay what had once been a narrow street but now blocked by rubble, was the end of a cul-de-sac.
'You're right,' Robbie declared. 'I should be able to lie doggo here for quite a time before anyone tumbles to it that I've moved in. And we could hardly find a better place to which you can bring Barak. I'll have to go without a bath, but I can get a shave at a different barber's every morning. I must have something to sleep on, though.'
'Of course you must. The only difficulty is to get a few things here for you without being seen. But I know what we'll do. Tomorrow I'll hire a car and in the afternoon we'll buy what you require and take it with us; after dark I'll drive it here as near as I can get and we will carry in the things.'
That night, they had dinner at another small restaurant, then, after arranging where to meet next morning, parted to sleep at their respective hotels. At eleven o'clock, Robbie stood waiting for Stephanie at the far end of King Constantine Avenue. A few minutes later, she drove up in a car she had hired. When they had exchanged information about the sort of night they had had, he got in and she drove on through Liberty Place out of the city.
'Where are we off to?' he asked.
'To Knossos,' she replied. 'I'm already sick of the sight of this dreary town, and the less we are seen about together in it the better. Besides, I felt sure you would be longing to see the ruins of the palace.'
'I suppose I ought to be,' he said with a sigh, 'but the truth is that these days I can think of nothing but what may lie ahead of us.'
'Oh, come! You mustn't let yourself get depressed,' she chided him. 'I know you were very disappointed yesterday to find that no Czech group had landed here; so you couldn't even check up on whether they appeared to be doing the same sort of job as the others. But, with any luck, my letter will bring Vaclav here in a few days' time, and you ought to be able to get a far more worthwhile dividend out of him.'