They went up it and on to a flat place. Clytemnestra took his hand and squeezed it, signalling silence. They walked past the dark shape of a German sentry, all the way past until he realized that she was still holding his hand and he hers, which he put down to forgetting to let go. Then they were off, heading north, as far as he could tell, over a dizzy and bewildering series of paths and precipices, tending gently downhill. After perhaps two hours they burst from a maze of boulders on to a ledge or cornice of rock, spiked with black cypresses. They walked through a small area of grass, on which daisies glittered faintly under the stars, and into a plain white building. Nailed double doors swung open as they approached a church. A small figure, black as the sky and wearing a hat like a pygmy oil drum, flitted away into the night without speaking.
‘What was that?’ said Wills, unnerved.
‘The Patriarch,’ said Clytemnestra, and drew him in through the door, and closed it.
At first, there was darkness, musty with incense. Then there was the little yellow glow of a sanctuary lamp. Clytemnestra had taken her hand away from his. As his eyes got used to the gold-tinged gloom, Wills saw that she was kneeling, head bowed in prayer.
Wills had done a bit of praying himself, in chapel at school with the other chaps, and then less formally but more sincerely on lonely nights at sea with the E-boat tracers floating out of the dark at him. But up here in this strange, musty place, he felt there were more important things to do than pray.
He opened the door and slipped out.
There was a low parapet around the churchyard. Below it, the valley lay spread like a dark map. There were lights down there: runway markers flicking on, the roar of a plane landing, the markers flicking off again. The village on the Acropolis was lit, too, with the smaller yellow lights of candles. Then suddenly the airfield had become a blue-white square, dazzling in its intensity, and all over the Acropolis floodlights had leaped into being. And floating across the intervening gulf of air there came the sound of klaxons.
Something was happening.
Wills checked the clip in his Schmeisser. Then he hunkered down in the black pit of shadow between a wall and a cypress tree, and waited.
Time passed. There was only the thyme-scented breeze, and the night, and whatever devilry they were hatching on the other side of the marshes. Earlier, in his dazed wanderings, Wills had not cared whether he lived or died. He had lost his ship, and his men, and he was far, far out on the most precarious of limbs.
But since he had recovered enough to notice Clytemnestra, he was interested in living again. Of course it was never easy to work out how women thought, not if you had gone straight from Wellington to Dartmouth and then active service. But he did have the definite impression that she was not … well, averse to his company. She was a remarkable girl. A really spiffing girl –
Something descended on his mouth like a huge, soft leather cushion. A hand. Another hand came on the nape of his neck, and his chin was lifted until it would lift no further, and it dawned on Wills in a spasm of absolute horror that these hands did not care that this was as far as the chin went, they were going to go on lifting until his neck broke, and that would be the end of him –
‘Hands up!’ said a voice in Greek. A woman’s voice. There was the metallic sound of a cocking lever. The hands relaxed.
Wills fell forward on to the parapet, groping for his Schmeisser. ‘Back off,’ he said. Then, remembering, ‘Jolly boating —’
‘Captain Wills,’ said a voice he recognized: a soft voice that might have been a purr or a growl, there was no way of being sure. Andrea’s voice. ‘Captain Wills, you should not sit in a place where you can be seen against the sky.’
‘Go away,’ said the woman’s voice. Clytemnestra’s voice. ‘Leave him alone, you great stupid ox.’ She was beside Wills now, cradling his head in her hands. ‘Can’t you tell who is on your side and who isn’t? Are you blind?’
‘Understandable error,’ said Wills, checking that his head was still there. ‘Bit of luck you were coming out of the church, though.’
Clytemnestra snorted. ‘Do you think I would leave you alone in the night?’ she said. ‘I have been watching you for the past two hours.’ She put an arm around his waist. ‘If you can’t look after yourself, someone else will have to.’
Andrea cleared his throat. ‘I hate to interrupt,’ he said. ‘But tell me, how much did you know about the life and habits of your late brother?’
In the view of Josef Koch, this island was a filthy place. Only a week ago, he had been pleased. After a winter chasing partisans around Yugoslavia the prospect of a little sun, sand and sea had been very enticing. But once he was actually here it had all gone wrong, thought Koch, hauling at the wheel, dragging the lorry’s bonnet round yet another hairpin bend. The people on this island had the temperament of angry hornets, and most of the women had moustaches. If they were not fighting you, they were fighting each other. The Wehrmacht were bloody useless. The boffins were boffins: bloody useless too. Josef Koch’s mind floated back to happier times: Bosnia, a wood with half-a-dozen partisans wired to the trees, him and a couple of privates slinging a rope over a branch, setting up the seesaw: a novelty, the seesaw, a thing of Josef’s own invention. The idea was that the terrorist stood on one end of the seesaw, and Josef stood on the other. Josef was a big man: fat, some called him, if they dared. The terrorist, of course, had a noose round his neck tied to the branch above. The idea was that the private soldiers would tell Josef jokes, and try to make him laugh so he lost his balance, and the terrorist’s end of the plank went down, leaving the terrorist kicking, but not alive, not after five minutes, anyway. The other thing Josef liked to do was walk towards the terrorist, so the terrorist’s weight brought the plank down slowly, slowly, tightened the noose round the neck, while all the while Josef explained the error of the terrorist’s ways, and the terrorist died, twisting and jerking on the rope, looking into Josef’s thick-lipped grin and bulging, pink-veined eyes. It was fantastic, the fun you could have with a simple plank. Though obviously the terrorists did not enjoy it so much.
Josef sighed. He liked hanging people. He had had a goodish time in Parmatia last week, but that had been a small-scale operation. It sounded like there would be more such work soon, though. There had been fighting in the mountains, and trouble at the works, and … well, the Boss was severely ticked off, and when the Boss was ticked off, the best place to be was far away. So it was absolutely no hardship for Josef Koch to be driving this truck, on the Boss’s orders, down the coast road to Parmatia to bring back some suspected partisan sympathizers from the lockup.
Next bend. Haul the wheel, change down a gear, foot flat on throttle –
There was a stone in the road. More a boulder, really. Josef stamped on the brake. The lorry halted. That was another thing you got, on this island. Lumps of mountain all over the road. There was a crowbar in the back. Sighing, Josef opened the door, swung his legs out, and slid down from the cab.
That was when the peculiar thing happened.
As his boots hit the road, he found himself grabbed from behind, scruff of neck and seat of pants. All of a sudden he had no control over his own destiny. A boot landed with shattering violence on his back, and the dark ground was passing at horrid speed under his eyes as he headed for the verge.
Not that there was a verge.
At the edge of the road was a strip of loose stones, on which the Feldwebel bounced once, face first. Beyond the strip of stones was silence, moving air, and far below, the shift of the sea.