Robbie's heart lightened a little. He thought it unlikely that they would take him out more than four or five miles and, unless there was a very strong current against him, he felt sure he could swim that distance back.
Next moment his hopes were dashed. With another slightly twisted smile, Barak went on: 'Miss Stephanopoulos tells me that you are a very powerful swimmer; so naturally we shall take precautions against any chance of your swimming ashore. In that, too, we must be careful not to leave tell-tale marks on your body. A loop of hose under your armpits, with its end stoutly wired so that you cannot undo it with your fingers, will serve. By it we shall troll you behind the boat, just as one trolls a hooked fish. Now and again we shall haul you in, to find out how you are standing up to the treatment. It will be interesting to see how long you take to drown. When we are quite satisfied that there is no longer life in your body we shall cut the wires at the neck of the loop of hose and cast you off.'
As Robbie listened his eyes were lowered and, when Barak spoke of trolling him in a noose of hosepipe, he noticed that his wrists were secured to the elbows of the chair in which he was sitting by short lengths of smooth, rubber hose. That ensured that, however much he wriggled his wrists, the skin would not become broken and cut as it would have against rope or cord. In consequence, when he was thrown out of the motor-boat, the only mark on his body would be a bruising where Barak had hit him under the chin and that, when he was washed up, would be taken as one of the bruises that a body normally receives through being tossed by the waves on to a beach. All this made it obvious to him that the manner of his death had been carefully planned in advance and, as he thought how idiotically foolhardy he had been to come to Pirgos again after Stephanie had returned to her employers, Barak gave him the final details of their arrangements.
'Of course,' he said, 'we shall collect your car and drive it a few miles further down the coast. Then we shall leave your clothes and an unmarked towel on a quiet stretch of beach. When your body is washed up and identified, the authorities can take their choice. Either that fine swimmer, Mr. Grenn, became bored with bathing in a pool of the river Alfios, so decided to run down to the sea for a real swim and had the misfortune to swim too far out; or that Mr. Grenn had been desperately in love with his pretty secretary, and her desertion had disturbed the balance of his mind, so he had chosen this way of putting an end to his life.'
This mocking reference to Stephanie turned the knife in Robbie's mental wound, and he was about to hurl curses at Barak when Cepicka, who had so far remained silent, gave a titter and added: 'How such a high-spirited girl survived three weeks of boredom with this fool, I cannot imagine. I congratulate you, Comrade Barak, on her fine sense of duty in not leaving him before she had to.'
So that, thought Robbie, was the impression of him that Stephanie had given these friends of hers. He could have wept with rage and humiliation, but managed to control himself by the thought that, if he showed how deeply he was hurt, they would only bait him further.
Barak gave an abrupt laugh and said to Cepicka: 'Come along, we will leave him now.' Then, when they had stepped out through the doorway, he glanced at his wrist-watch, turned and said to Robbie:
'It is now a little past three o'clock, Mr. Grenn, so you have just about twelve hours to live.'
A minute later, the door was shut and padlocked, and Robbie was left to his bitter thoughts, fears and self-reproaches. He realized now that he had been mad to pay another visit to Pirgos. He should have left Olympia and gone down to Kalamai, or across to Crete, where other groups of Czechs would not have been expecting him.
Thinking it over, he decided that the shock of finding out that Stephanie was betraying him, and all that followed, must have robbed him temporarily of all sense in handling the affair. Evidently, though, she had counted on his being fool enough to come there again, otherwise they would not have been waiting in ambush for him. How they could have found out that he intended to pay a second visit to the factory that afternoon remained a mystery. He could only suppose that their secret was of such importance to them that they had decided to lie in wait between one o'clock and four every day, in the hope of capturing him.
The fact that they had succeeded had, at first, dismayed but not particularly frightened him. But as Barak had given particulars of their programme for the coming night, it had become more and more clear that the Czech was not simply trying to scare him and that, in the end, he would get off with a very nasty beating up. By the time they had left the shed, he no longer had any doubts that they really meant to murder him. As his mind grasped the fact, real fear caused the sweat to break out on his palms and forehead.
As soon as he had regained consciousness, he had automatically attempted to free himself, only to find that he could move neither his wrists nor ankles more than half an inch. In addition, the chair to which he was bound appeared also to be made fast to a stout wooden crosspiece, immediately behind it, that formed part of the framework of the shed; for he could jiggle the chair about, but not stand up with it still tied to his back.
A more careful examination of his bonds showed that through each length of hose there ran a wire, the protruding ends of which were twisted together a dozen times below the elbows of the chair and a good six inches beyond the reach of his finger tips, however hard he stretched them. His ankles, secured to the chair legs, were even more impossible to get at. For five or six minutes he jerked the chair back and forth, hoping that he might loosen it from the wooden strut, but at the end of that time it was as firmly fixed as ever.
By squinting upward, he could see the big rent in the corrugated iron roof of the shed. Evidently several sheets had been brought down in the earthquake, and the roof had never been repaired; but as long as he remained bound to the chair it was futile to think of getting out that way. Apart from a heap of sand in one corner and a few old wooden boxes, the shed was empty; so, even if he could have moved his chair, there was no sharp metal angle in it against which, by rubbing his bonds, he might have worn them through.
In less than a quarter of an hour, he had examined and exhausted every possibility for regaining his freedom. At last he sat quiet, endeavouring to resign himself to the fate in store for him. Although Barak had said he intended to drown him, and he knew that the Czech meant that, his brain still refused to accept as a fact that in a few hours his lifeless body would be drifting about in the sea, and that he, Robbie Grenn, would be finished and gone from this world for ever.
Hour after hour through the long afternoon he sat there, his mind forming an endless series of pictures with thoughts appropriate to each: Stephanie laughing with him across a dinner table; his uncle's anger on hearing that he had got a job with the Czechs; the wan face of his beloved Aunt Emily as she lay in bed during her last illness; Stephanie naked and bending forward with one foot raised and the other through the leg of her bathing skirt just before he had seized her; the square head and pale blue eyes behind the pince-nez of the tutor whom Aunt Emily had engaged to help teach him German; the back of Nejedly's bald head and Barak's face beyond it, as they had sat lunching together that fatal day at Toyrcolimano; Stephanie wearing an absurd piece of blue veiling on her chestnut curls as he had first seen her; the sacred olive tree up on the Acropolis; old Nanny Fisher peeling an apple for his breakfast; and so on, and so on, until, in spite of the threat that hung over him, he dropped off to sleep.
For how long he slept he had no idea, but when he awoke night had fallen, and his limbs felt very stiff. As the realization of his position flooded back to him, he panicked and made frantic efforts to break free; but his bonds were unbreakable. After a few minutes of futile struggling, he slumped back exhausted and, from fear of what might now happen to him at any moment, began to weep.