The Feldwebel found that he was falling down a cliff. He screamed. The scream lasted exactly the time it took to fall two hundred feet on to sharp rocks.
On the road, the lorry stood, engine purring. Andrea helped Wills drag the driver’s mate to the side of the road and roll him over into the dark, while Clytemnestra wiped the blade of her long knife on a tuft of dry grass. The driver’s mate had bled surprisingly little. Wills possessed himself of the man’s camouflage smock and took the wheel. Clytemnestra climbed into the middle, and Andrea squeezed his mighty bulk in next to her, lit a cigarette, and slumped back, hands on the grips of his machine pistol. ‘Parmatia,’ he said.
Beyond the windscreen, the world began to move, white stone, pine and juniper, cliff and gorge, gleaming in the light of the blacked-out headlights. The dark puddle on the road behind faded into the blackness of the night.
They headed for Parmatia.
From the top of the ladder in the house by the Acropolis church, Miller could see Mallory at the door. The knocking persisted. Carstairs was up through the hole in the ceiling now. Miller hauled up the ladder, fast. As he pulled its foot through the hole, the door opened, loosing a flood of blue-white light into the squalid ground floor. It picked out straw, rubbish, and Mallory. Mallory with his hands on his hips, glaring at the three soldiers outside, Schmeissers levelled: Mallory shouting in German, walking towards them, out into the light …
And that was the last Miller saw of him, because the ladder was up and he was lifting it to the next ceiling, where there was another hole. The floor creaked alarmingly as Spiro headed for the ladder. Miller picked out the joists with a pencil flashlight, shooed Carstairs to the ladder foot, then went after him. Spiro was already climbing, at a speed truly remarkable in one so recently bedridden. Carstairs went after him, more groggily.
At the top, they were in a low attic, whose ceiling was the underside of the roof tiles. ‘Leave the ladder,’ said Miller, and started to push aside the heavy clay half-cylinders. After five minutes’ steady work, his head broke through, and he was spitting worm-eaten beam and ancient bamboo lining into the night air.
In front of him was a low white parapet. Beyond the parapet was the roof of the church, sweeping at one end up to the cupola, and at the other to a belfry, open to the air, with a three-foot parapet running around its edge. The belfry would be accessible from the church, as well as over the roof.
Miller very much liked the look of the belfry.
He took off more tiles, scrambled through the roof, and pulled the other men after him. Then he replaced the tiles, and led them across the parapet to the dark slope of the church roof.
‘Shit,’ said Spiro. ‘I don’ likes highness.’
‘It’s not high,’ said Miller.
‘Looks high to me,’ said Spiro.
‘Go,’ said Miller.
‘No,’ said Spiro.
It was quite obvious to Miller that the Greek meant what he said. Hard to blame the guy, really. He had done plenty already, and everyone drew the line somewhere.
Pity it was right here, though.
Something barged Miller aside. It was Carstairs: Carstairs with something held out in front of him, something with a faint sheen under the stars. A very faint sheen: the sheen of the blued-steel blade of a killing knife, nine inches of razor-sharp unpleasantness. ‘Ow!’ said Spiro.
Carstairs said, ‘Listen, greasy boy. You heard what he said.’ His arm moved slightly.
‘Ow!’ said Spiro again.
‘We don’t really need you any more,’ said Carstairs. ‘So you give me one good reason to stop me carving out your nasty yellow liver.’
Miller was shocked. He did not, however, intervene.
Spiro became lost in deep thought for about three and a half seconds. Then he started to scuttle up the church roof like an overweight monkey.
Carstairs went after him. Miller followed, moving slow and careful. The roof seemed to be in doubtful condition. There was a nasty springiness to it, a suggestion of sag. Mindful of the fifty-foot drop to a hard stone floor that lay below it, Miller found himself holding his breath.
The belfry parapet loomed invitingly ahead. But they were moving out of the shadow now, and between them and the parapet lay a brilliant wedge of floodlit tiles. Spiro did not like the look of it. His pace was slowing perceptibly. He had chosen a bad place to slow down, because they had moved some distance along the roof, and below the eaves of the church was no longer the crumbling shelter of the priest’s house, but the village square. And in the village square, a squad of German soldiers was standing. All it took was for one of them to look up –
‘Go!’ said Carstairs.
Spiro froze.
Carstairs pulled out his dreadful knife and prodded the Greek’s foot. Spiro squeaked, scuttled like lightning up the roof and hauled himself over the parapet. His short legs waved for a moment in the air. Then he vanished. Safe.
Not safe.
In his last frantic scuffle, Spiro had dislodged a tile. It started slowly. It accelerated, rattling down the floodlit section of the roof. Miller stuck out a hand and made a grab for it. For a moment he thought he had it. But Greek roof tiles are heavy affairs, made with plenty of good solid clay, and no human fingertips can restrain one once it has got the bit of gravity between its teeth.
Miller watched that tile loop out into space and fall, tumbling over and over, towards the cobbles of the square where the squad of soldiers stood, only needing to look up.
When Mallory opened the door, light flooded in. There were three soldiers outside, rifles at the ready. Mallory looked them scornfully up and down. ‘What the bloody hell is all the noise about?’ he said, in a German pregnant with the accents of Heidelberg University, where in his pre-war climbing days he had indeed spent six months.
‘Orders to search the house,’ said one of the privates, squinting at this nasty-looking SS Leutnant, with shadowy hollows on his face and a rifle slung negligently over his shoulder.
‘I’ve already searched it,’ said Mallory. One of the soldiers opened his mouth to speak. ‘Give me that gun,’ said Mallory.
The man handed over his rifle without hesitation. Mallory looked it over with the scorn of an epicure who has found a dead rat in his soup. He pulled the bolt out of the rifle and threw it on to the ground. ‘It stinks!’ he said. ‘Clean it! Now get out of my way!’ He marched into the square.
There were a lot of soldiers: a terrible lot of soldiers. Mallory found himself seriously worried. A good search would certainly land them all in trouble. Carstairs he had little confidence in, besides which the man was woozy from his bang on the head. Spiro was a charming personality, but not what you would call a natural athlete. Miller would look after himself. But with that much dead weight round his neck, he was going to need all the help he could get.
Mallory marched briskly across the square, up the street towards the village gates, and turned sharply into Athenai Street where they had made rendezvous. The houses were dark and ruinous. At the end, the cliff face was a pit of blackness in the night. Settling the rifle firmly on his back, Mallory started to climb.
The cliff was steep but pocked with steps and holds where stone had been cut to build the village. Mallory went up until he was looking down on the rooftops illuminated by the blue-white lights mounted on the cliff face. He considered getting above those lights, sixty feet above him now. But he had a feeling that just for the minute, he might be better off below them. He moved along a ledge — a ledge to him, anyway; to anyone else, it was no more than a thread-fine irregularity in the face of the rock — until he came to a broad crack, sunk in black shadow. Into this he fitted himself, and stood invisible.