Cause for Alarm (24 page)

“Do you
want
to go to jail?”

“Of course not. But there’s surely no question of jail. There may be a fine, possibly a heavy one, and I shall probably be given twenty-four hours in which to leave the country. All very unpleasant, no doubt, but that’s the worst of it. Good gracious, man, I’m a British subject, known to the Consulate, and fairly respectable, I …”

“The British authorities,” he interrupted, “would, in the ordinary way, see you through anything from petty larceny to murder. But a charge of espionage puts the thing in a different category. They’ll drop you like a hot cake as soon as they know about it.”

“But you yourself said that the charge was bribery.”

“Until they catch you. Then you’ll get the whole packet.”

“Well,” I said disgustedly, “even if you are right, I still don’t see any alternative for me.”

“The only place you’ll be safe is out of the country, and that’s where we’re going.”

“You seem to forget,” I said witheringly, “that I have no passport.”

“I hadn’t forgotten.”

“Well then!”

“I said we’d talk later.…”

“And in the meantime, I suppose …”

“In the meantime,” he interjected, “you get wise to yourself and do as I tell you.”

I shrugged. “Well, I suppose it doesn’t make much difference.”

“It makes a lot of difference. Have a cigarette. It’ll steady your nerves.”

“My nerves,” I snapped, “are perfectly all right.”

He nodded calmly. “That’s good. You’re going to need them in a minute. We’re going to drop off this train when it slows down for the curve at Treviglio.”

I did not answer. Things were moving too quickly for me. Twenty minutes before, I had been a comparatively composed Englishman returning from doing what I was conscious of being a sound piece of work. I had been looking forward to a quiet dinner, a couple of hours in a cinema and an early bed with a new book to read. Now I was a fugitive from the Italian secret police, hiding in lavatories, cheating ticket collectors and contemplating leaving a train in an unconventional and illegal manner. It had all happened far too suddenly. I couldn’t adjust my mind to these new and fantastic circumstances. I found myself wondering seriously whether perhaps by pinching myself I might wake up to find that I was, after all, still in bed in Rome. But no: there was Zaleshoff smoking and gazing intently out of the window and in my pocket there was a safety-razor, a leaking tube of shaving cream and a pair of American underpants. I looked down on to the track by the side of the train. It looked a long way away and dangerous. The train was going too fast for me to see whether the track was of small or large stones. It was a long, even grey-brown smear. It seemed to me that the train had begun to make a curious thumping noise. I tried to
separate the noise, identify it, and realised that it was the sound of the blood pumping in my head. I knew suddenly that I was scared, scared stiff.

Zaleshoff touched me on the arm.

“We’re beginning to slow down. We’ll give it another minute, then we’ll get outside on the steps, ready. Don’t forget to let yourself go limply if you can’t keep your feet when you land.”

I nodded, speechless, and looked down again.

To me it seemed as if the train were going as fast as ever. It was running along the top of a steep embankment between ploughed fields. I looked again at the ground streaming past. Then I saw Zaleshoff put his hand on the latch of the door. It was madness, I told myself, madness! We should both break our legs or our arms or we should get flung under the wheels of the luggage van behind us and mangled to death. Suddenly there was a grating noise below us.

“They’re braking,” said Zaleshoff, “come on. You’d better go first.”

He opened the door and the roar of the steel coach seemed suddenly to be lost in the blustering wind.

“Down with you,” said Zaleshoff. “Make it snappy, now.”

I looked down. There were four steps down, then the track. I clutched the rail and went down three steps. The wind tore at my hat. With my free hand I jammed it down over my ears. Then I swung myself round facing the direction we were going. I could see the engine now as it began to round the curve. The smoke was flying in a long cone from the funnel. Below me the ground seemed to be going at a sickening speed. I felt suddenly giddy and retreated a step. I looked up. I had to shout against the wind.

“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
caffè-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.”

I did not like the sound of that at all.

“Well, anyway,” I said with feeble heartiness, “the worst that can come of it is a nice stay in prison.”

It was as much a question as a statement. I was afraid, as soon as I had said it, that he would answer the question, and he did.

“Prison? Yes—maybe.”

“What do you mean by ‘maybe’?”

“They have a formula for these things hereabouts. It’s called ‘shot while attempting to evade arrest.’ ”

“And if you don’t attempt to evade arrest?”

“Then,” he said calmly, “they make you kneel down. Then they put a bullet through the back of your neck and call it ‘shot while escaping.’ ”

I laughed, not very convincingly, but I laughed. I decided that he was trying to frighten me.

“Newspaper talk!” I said.

He shrugged. “My friend, when you’re above the law,
when you
are
the law, the phrase about ends justifying means has a real meaning. Put yourself in their place. If you felt that the state which you worshipped above your God was endangered by the life of one insignificant man, would you hesitate to have him shot? I can tell you that you wouldn’t. That’s the danger of Fascism, of state-worship. It supposes an absolute, an egocentric unit. The idea of the state is not rooted in the masses, it is not of the people. It is an abstract, a God-idea, a psychic dung-hill raised to shore up an economic system that is no longer safe. When you’re on the top of that sort of dung-hill, it doesn’t matter whether the ends are in reality good or bad. The fact that they are your ends
makes
them good—for you.”