Tales of Adventurers (15 page)

They were at the bottom of an uncomfortable valley. The clouds wreathed down it towards Greece, carrying either freezing mist or sleet. Five hundred feet higher, on the two ridges that commanded
the plain, the clouds brought snow. Up there were the Italians. To Vaclis the damp seemed colder than any imaginable snow. His section was huddled under the lee of a ruined wall with two stout
blankets, supported by stones and sticks, for shelter. They had no fire, since any flicker of light at once became the target for Italian mortars. The enemy never hit the offending unit, but scored
freely among innocent comrades who had obeyed orders and remained shivering in the dark.

The beastliness of their bivouac did not damp their spirits. They were victorious, and in the first flush of romantic patriotism. Their morale was terrific. Any one of those unlettered peasants
was ready to declare his war aims in oratory that would have dispatched a northern soldier to the cookhouse or the psychiatrist. They were full of classical allusions to Salamis and Thermopylae,
for ancient history was their own. They invoked the conquest of Greece by the Romans as if it had happened yesterday, and called on the apostles for revenge.

Kiriakos Vaclis shared the fanaticism of his fellows, and, as an educated man, added a vigorous editorial rotundity to the expression of their common feelings. He was proud to be an Athenian,
and prouder still – since it reflected glory on his city – of knowing the ways of foreigners and of speaking French. The language was not as orientally courteous as his own, but the
possession of it gave him a sense of polite internationalism which he was at pains to cultivate.

Vaclis shivered as spurts of wind trickled round the protecting wall, and stabbed into the wet wool of his uniform. He was in physical misery, warmed only by good Greek thoughts of defiance. At
first light they were to attack the western ridge. He had misgivings lest he, the townsman, should not keep pace with sure-footed peasants, but he was sure of his skill at arms. A civilized
Athenian was, he told himself, at an advantage in handling modern weapons.

He damned the Italians who compelled urbanity to leave the luxurious warmth of a café, the comfortable sweat of kitchens, to sit on an Albanian mountain in the middle of winter. He swore
aloud to bathe in their warm blood. The phrase was heroic, and had pleasing associations of steaming gravy. He rolled it out again. His mates applauded, though they knew very well that blood, up
there among the Italians, was neither liquid nor warm. One couldn’t bathe in it. One could, if so minded, pick up a lump and throw it.

The night had paled enough to distinguish a snowflake from a stab of rain. Formless bundles stirred on the ground, and rose; rocks detached themselves from rocks, bushes from bushes. The gray
bodies in the gray mist took on shape and purpose as the company, huddled in sheepskin coats, moved to the forming-up area like animals driven by the wind to gather in herd. The sleet hissed down
the valley, hiding them under an icy web of showers from each other and from the enemy.

Kiriakos Vaclis plodded up the goat track which zigzagged along the foot of the ridge. His platoon objective was the highest of all: an Italian post well out to the right flank of their main
position. He knew that there was a fierce climb ahead of him, and certainly a fierce reception waiting at the top. His Mediterranean blood was up, and he cared for neither. To get his hands on the
invader of his sacred land – that was what he wanted.

The platoon halted in dead ground, and deployed. Then his section was away, hands hauling on the tough scrub, feet searching for crannies in the rock. He squirmed upwards, flat against so steep
a slope that even the belly which remained to him was an encumbrance. Soon they were clambering upon slush and gravel, sharp frozen by the night; then at last upon an easier gradient where deep
snow slowed and silenced movement.

The wind howled over the slopes of the plateau. Vaclis realized that the enemy position was even crueler than their own. He wondered how humanity could endure to remain on the defense, inactive
in such cold, and then remembered that the Italians, so it was said, would certainly run away if they were not frequently shot by their own officers.

His heart pounded with the effort of the climb. Only his fingers were frozen, and they did not matter. There would be little trigger pulling; the Greeks went in with the bayonet. They had no
grenades.

When he topped the ridge, the snow was immediately flecked with little holes. He yelled defiance, but was practical soldier enough to drop into cover as he did so. The snow did not spurt like
dust or earth; it just received the machine-gun bullets and forgot about them. His section was pinned down. That was to be expected; but he could see the platoon Bren gun – mysterious and
effective gift of the British, if only one had enough ammo – working into position on the flank. A few bursts, and his section would rush the last hundred feet. In the excitement of his
patriotism he had no fear of death, and certainly none of the Italians.

The enemy fire became ragged. The section was up from the snow and plunging forward.

“
Aera! Aerar!
”

The effort of finding still more breath for the battle cry was too much for Vaclis. He forgot his feet, and tripped over a loose strand of wire. Cursing and damning, he picked himself up and
stumbled after his comrades who had overrun the Italian post and were storming on towards their next objective.

“
Aera!
” he yelled, and charged over the beaten track, with bayonet ready for any enemy who might be left.

Ten yards ahead a little figure in thin Italian uniform rose from the snow, shivering and weaponless. He made no gesture of surrender, but his whole body was evidence that he had had enough of
cold. Even death – if anyone could be bothered to kill in such weather – was a mere incident compared to the endless misery of cold. He regarded the terrible Greek, and smiled
nervously.

“
Monsieur
,” he stammered in excellent French, “
il fait bien froid
.”

As a greeting it was adequate; and as comment on the only fact that mattered, it called for a civilized response.

Vaclis stopped and stared. The enemy was conversational. It spoke French.

In his astonishment he answered automatically and with equal politeness.

“
Oui,
monsieur, il fait bien froid
.”

I
T WAS
the nearest he had ever come to sending an agent to his death. Her death, rather. He admitted that he
shouldn’t have taken the risk, that a man with his experience of women should have known better; but there he was with the enemy order of battle – or ally’s peaceful deployment,
according to how you look at it – all along the southern fringe of the Iron Curtain from Bratislava to the Black Sea. The list was complete, and accurate up to the previous Saturday; and
there wasn’t a chance of getting it out to the west. No handy secret wireless. No landing grounds. Not a trustworthy agent who had the remotest hope of being given a passport in time to be of
use. Theotaki had found his job much easier when operating under the noses of the Gestapo.

He was a Roumanian of Greek origin, with all a Greek’s hungry passion for the ideal freedom which had never in practical politics existed, and never could. He had also the Greek’s
love of adventurous intrigue for its own sake. One gets used to the trade, he would say. Steeple jacks, for example. They couldn’t be thinking all the time about risk. They took, he supposed,
meticulous care with all their preparations – blocks and tackle, scaffolding, belts – and then got on with the job. It was only when a man had scamped the preliminaries that he need
worry about risks.

Normally there was no need to scamp them, no disastrous demand for hurry. Cold war wasn’t like hot war, and there weren’t any impatient generals howling for immediate results. So
caution, caution, caution, all the time. It was a bit dull, he said, but the main objective had to be to keep his organization alive.

He admitted, however, that this had been an occasion for desperate measures. The only chance he could see of getting that enemy order of battle into hands that would appreciate it was D 17. D 17
was going the very next day to Stockholm to be married. She would never have been allowed to leave for less neutral territory; but it was hard, even for communist bureaucrats, to think up a really
valid excuse for preventing a citizen – an entirely useless citizen whose parents were living on the proceeds of their jewelry and furniture – from taking herself off to Sweden and
matrimony, when a firm request for her had been passed through diplomatic channels.

Alexia – D 17 – was a very minor agent: somewhat too enthusiastic, said Theotaki, for her sister had been mishandled by the Russian advance guards when they entered Bucharest and had
died the following week. The unfortunate incident had had some effect on Theotaki’s ideals of freedom, too. But he never confessed to emotion. To judge by his jowled, dead, decadent face, you
wouldn’t have thought him capable of feeling any.

Since he had moved before the war in the social circle of the parents and their two daughters, he knew Alexia very well. She had, of course, no idea that he was in any way responsible for the
occasional orders received by D 17. She couldn’t have given away more than the three names of the other members of her cell – at least she couldn’t up to the time when Theotaki
was forced into gambling against his better judgment.

He kept her under observation all the morning. She was shopping for a few clothes and necessary trifles that she could much better have bought abroad. But she didn’t know that. Alexia
visualized the outside world as seething with unemployment and economic distress. Of course she did, of course she did, exclaimed Theotaki, defending this absurd shopping. Even when you are aware
that all your news is tainted, you have to believe some of it. For all Alexia knew, the shops of Stockholm might well have been looted by starving rioters or bought out by dollar-waving American
troops.

She was obviously happy. Well, why wouldn’t she be? She was a tense and luminous woman in her middle twenties escaping to her lover and doing a bit of buying to please his eyes. When,
however, she sat down, alone, in the huge barren hall of a cheap café, she was ashamed of herself. Theotaki guessed it from her bearing, from the uncertainty of her eyes. He was clever as
any woman at guessing mood when not a word had passed. To be ashamed of yourself for being happy was, he explained, one of the most damnable, minor, nagging aches of political tyranny. Your
personal tastes and joys could not be altered by the common discontent, yet you felt they should be. Love and the flighting of duck at first light and the relish of wine to a man and the feel of
dress to a woman – they don’t come to an end because your country is enslaved and terrorized.

So that was the position – D 17 sitting in a café, thinking of her beloved with one half of her mind, and with the other her duty to hate; and Theotaki moving behind her to find a
table, not too far away, where she couldn’t see and greet him.

He took one of the café’s illustrated papers in its cane frame, and began abstractedly to write a poem across the blank spaces of an advertisement. When he had finished his drink
and his casual scribbling, he paid his bill and sent the waiter to Alexia with the paper. He then vanished from his table and stood talking to a casual acquaintance by the door, whence he could
watch in a mirror the effect of his inspiration.

The waiter suspected nothing. It was a quite normal act to send a paper to a customer who had asked for it – especially if the customer were a pretty girl. At least it appeared quite
normal when Theotaki did it. That he was alive at all was largely due to his naturalness of manner.

Alexia received the paper as if it were expected. Theotaki approved her presence of mind, and well he might. Any gesture of surprise could have led – if the waiter earned a little extra
money by giving information to the police – to prolonged questioning of both of them. He admitted that he had been apprehensive. He hadn’t been able to arrange much training for her and
her like.

She glanced idly through the coarse rotogravures of factory openings and parades, and found the doodling of some previous reader. There were girls’ heads, and jottings for a very
commonplace love poem to sweet seventeen. Among the half lines, the blanks to be filled in, the notes for promising rhymes, was a phrase
your garden at three in the morning
continually
repeated, toyed with and crossed out because no order of the words could be made to scan. Then came a row of capital D’s, as if the lovesick doodler, failing to succeed as a poet, had tried
to design the most decorative letter with which to begin his work,

D 17’s garden at 3
A.M.
– the message would have been instantly clear to Theotaki who never read anything that was misplaced, even a printer’s error,
without wondering why it was misplaced. But he didn’t expect the same alertness from D 17; he only hoped. As a man of imagination he had, he insisted, the keenest sympathy for romance, and
therefore thought it more than likely that Alexia would be too absorbed by justifiable dreams to notice his vulgar scribblings. He was very pleased with her indeed when her hand began to fiddle
with ashtray, saucer and saltcellar, arranging them into a group of three to show, if there were anyone watching her, that she had read and understood.

D 17’s garden – or rather her parents’ – was a reasonably safe spot for a rendezvous. A high but climbable wall separated its overgrown shrubbery from the
state-disciplined bushes of a public park. In happier days Alexia and her sister had been very well aware of its advantages.

High-spirited young ladies, said Theotaki. Yes, and they had had their own uproarious methods of discouraging unwelcome suitors. When he dropped over the wall that night, for the second time in
his life, he remembered that ten years earlier there had been a cunning arrangement of glass and empty cans to receive him, and a crash that woke the uneasy summer sleepers in four blocks of flats
that faced the park.