The Heart of Hell (14 page)

He counted the houses. It was hard to be sure. He scrambled to the one he prayed was right, and after a long search by feeling in what had become almost complete darkness, he found the roof hatch.

It was bolted from below.

“Fuck,” he muttered, wondering where he might find a lever to pry it open.

He got his fingers underneath the lip and heaved. The hatch groaned but didn’t give. It was a modern replacement: he could feel the raw zinc edges bite into his flesh. He was cautious about the force he used, knowing that if it gave way suddenly, he’d likely pitch himself down the roof and over the edge.

But accidentally cracking a tile at the edge of the hatch gave him an idea. Once he’d worked that one loose, he eased the next one free, and then the one after that, until he’d made a big enough hole to get his arm underneath, between the wooden battens, and unbolt the hatch.

He slid into the roof space, careful to stay on the ceiling rafters. He flicked his cigarette lighter for a quick look around and found the hatch into the main part of the house. From there he slowly let himself down so that he was hanging above the floor below.

His arms weakening, he dropped as softly as he could, but he couldn’t avoid making a thump. He stood dead still for a long time, hoping the noise had passed unnoticed, but he was out of luck. Torchlight shone from the floor below; footsteps followed. The beam blinded him after the darkness, and he smiled as fetchingly as he could.

“Signor della Torre?”

“Nonna, my apologies for dropping in at this late hour. I’d forgotten something, you see.”

“But how did you get in?”

“You gave me the key, remember? I’ve left it downstairs. I forgot this little bag,” he said, patting the holdall.

“But why are you up here? Your room is downstairs.”

“It’s the dark,” he whispered soothingly. “I was disoriented.”

“Ah, yes,” she said. “I have that sometimes. Not knowing if I’m going down or up. It’s a shame you missed the
brodetto
. It will be good tomorrow too.”

“I will be sure to come back. The meal we had at the hotel was terrible.”

“Oh, serves you right. Foreigners cook at those hotels. They don’t know anything about food.”

“But I think it’s time I went, Nonna. It wasn’t my intention to disturb you.”

“Before you leave, I must give you back the money you and Signor Anzulović left. It is foolish to be throwing that kind of money at an old lady. You young need it more than I. I have my widow’s pension, and that’s sufficient.”

“You hold on to it, Nonna. And tomorrow get a workman to look at your roof. I think there are some loose tiles. Spend the money on that.”

“Oh,
mamma mia
, you got all the way up there?”

“Maybe you should guide me out.”

“But won’t you stay the night? It’s so late.”

“I really must leave. My apologies for waking you.”

She led him to the front door, where he again whispered his apologies while she waved away his intrusion, as if such things happened all the time.

Della Torre had hardly stepped out of the house when he tripped over a cat making a dash across the alley. It yowled as he stumbled, falling heavily onto his knees. He swore and then laughed with relief that it hadn’t happened up on the roof. He guided himself by running his hand along the walls and carefully toeing his way to avoid raised cobblestones and doorsteps.

He found the Citroën where he’d left it at the edge of town. For a while he wondered whether the Americans might be watching it. But this wasn’t a big island. There wasn’t really anywhere to run, and they couldn’t have been expecting him to make an escape from the hotel.

He drove out of the town and along the coast road, and then found the rough track. He parked at the gate to the little farmhouse, and then for a long moment sat in car, wondering what exactly he was doing.

The iron gate creaked as he pushed it open just wide enough to slip into the courtyard. The gravel crunched underfoot. There was barely a ghost of light, only enough that he could make out the house in the darkness.

Far away, where the peninsula joined the mainland, he saw points of brightness, the small red twinkling of distant fires, and it struck him that the Serbs were burning houses.

He found the door and knocked on it. There was a window cut into it, the pane protected by a grille of wrought-iron foliage. A light shone on him almost immediately.

“I have your thousand Deutschmarks,” della Torre said.

THE BEAM OF
light was on him for a long time before she said anything.

“Are you alone?”

“Yes.”

She unbolted the door and opened it, switching off the flashlight. A feeble kerosene lantern glowed in the stark hallway. “There’s no power at night up here,” she said. She wore a heavy linen dressing gown over her long linen nightshirt. Her hair was loose and untidy with sleep. “Come into the kitchen.”The room made up much of the ground floor, with a tall ceiling, a fridge, an old-fashioned wood-burning stove, and a table covered with the blue-checked oilcloth found in almost every household in the country. Pots and pans hung from butcher’s hooks along an iron rail fixed to the wall.

“I heard your car. Not many come along here at night.”

“I’m sorry for showing up so late, but I want to take you up on your offer. Straight away,” he said.

Her chin jerked up slightly with surprise. “We couldn’t go now. We’d have to wait for daybreak.”

“Can we get set up so we can leave at first light?” he asked.

“It depends on the wind. And I’d need to stock up with petrol and water. A few provisions, too. It’s hard to know what we’ll need.”

“Petrol?”

“In case the wind dies or we get hit with a storm. It’s useful to have access to the engine.”

“We could siphon some out of the Citroën, if that’s good enough. How much would you need?”

“Thirty or forty litres.”

“Seems a lot.”

“That’s what I need.”

“I’m sure I’ve got that much left in the tank. We filled up before Ploče and I haven’t driven the car much.”

There was something odd about the conversation. About how coolly she was accepting his sudden appearance.

“You don’t seem particularly surprised that I’ve come back, or at how late I’ve shown up,” he said.

“Since the war started, the unusual has started to become rather routine.” She looked at him with detachment. “Not that long after you left yesterday, a couple of men came around. The one who talked spoke Serbo-Croat badly and with a strange accent. Russian, maybe. His English was better. He didn’t introduce himself, just asked why you’d come.”

“Did you tell him?”

“Yes. A few people know I’ll sail them places for a price.”

“Not in the militia or the police.”

She shrugged. “No one would have suggested me if you asked to be taken to Dubrovnik. Everyone assumes it takes a fast boat.”

“But it doesn’t?”

“No, you just need darkness, silence, and a decent wind.”

“Have you done it before?”

“I told you, Mr. della Torre, I’ve sailed that route many times.”

“Since the blockade?”

She didn’t answer him.

“So what did you tell my American friend?” he pressed.

“He didn’t sound like much of a friend. More like a policeman,” she said. “I told him that it was foolish and dangerous enough to try the trip in a speedboat. He seemed satisfied with the answer, but he asked me to let him know if I heard that you’d found somebody to take you. He said to call him at the hotel and that he’d make it worth my while. Tempting, except I haven’t got a phone.”

Della Torre pulled his pack of cigarettes out of his breast pocket. “Do you mind?”

“No.”

“Would you like one?”

She hesitated and then pulled one out. He lit both. She went to the crockery shelf for a china saucer, which she placed between them as an ashtray.

“I’d offer you a cup of tea or coffee, but it’ll take a while to get the stove going,” she said.

“That’s okay.” He would have loved a hot cup of coffee. Or some sleep.

“I’ll brew some up on board the boat. It has a little kerosene stove,” she said. “Assuming you have the money.”

From the inside pocket of the shoulder bag, he dug out the thousand Deutschmarks his father had given him, fanning them out across the table. She counted, checking the notes against the light, feeling them for the quality of the paper. “This will get you there and back, not including incidentals.”

“I’ll make sure you’re paid the rest when we find our other passenger,” he said. “And I’ll cover whatever expenses we accrue on the way.”

“You said there would be someone else coming with us from Korčula.”

“I changed my mind. It’s just me and the fellow we’re picking up in Dubrovnik.”

She sat, smoking silently, apparently lost in thought.

He could see the outline of her breasts against the thin material of her nightshirt. She noticed and gave him a critical look. He averted his eyes, but she made no move to pull the dressing gown more tightly around her. She seemed un-shy.

He got up as if to stretch and looked around the room. There was a shelf laden with pots, bowls, and jugs. The forms were rough and looked as if they were still part of the earth. The glazes had been allowed to run, mingling in earthy oranges and reds, deep greens, and the grey blue of winter skies.

On a table in the corner was a small stack of precise drawings of Dubrovnik and Korčula townscapes, finished in washes of watercolour. Propped up on the floor were a couple of paintings, landscapes in rich, deep colours, nearly abstract in their composition but still recognizable.

The two styles — the precise draftsmanship of the architectural drawings and the raw pottery and paintings — stood in sharp contrast.

“Yours?” he asked at last.

“The pen-and-watercolour drawings sell, the rest I just do. I have a kiln in the back, fire it with wood. The pottery studio’s in a shed. When I say ‘sell,’ I mean used to,” she added. “Lately my output has slowed to mostly pen-and-ink drawings on ordinary paper. Materials are hard to come by . . . and expensive.”

“I guess the money you make from me will come in handy,” he said.

“Mr. della Torre, the money will be the difference between my staying here and having to leave. For at least the next few months.” She smiled back at him.

“Call me Marko. Maybe we should get started.”

“I’ll find you a couple of jerry cans and a hose. You can siphon petrol into them from your car while I get myself organized here.”

“Is there somewhere I can hide the Citroën where it won’t be obvious that I’ve come here?”

“There’s a grove down the hill with an old barn. It has a roof and was reasonably clear the last time I looked. You can leave the car there.”

By the time he got back to the house, his mouth tasted of gasoline fumes. He’d filled both twenty-litre metal jerry cans nearly to the top. He didn’t have to wait long for her to get ready.

“I’m a little short of food. I’ll bring some cookies, crackers, and salami, but that’ll have to do until we can find a shop,” she said. She added a couple of heavy ten-litre plastic jugs full of water to the bags that were by the door. “Right. We’ll put these things in my car. Follow me down to the barn, and then you can ride with me after that.”

The Citroën trundled slowly down the track behind Miranda’s Fiat. She indicated at the turning, drove behind a clump of pines and cypresses, and pulled over.

“In there,” she said, pointing to an old cinder-block barn in the path of her headlights. Its doors were missing, but the corrugated iron roof remained.

He squeezed the Citroën into the barn and was walking back up, alongside the Fiat’s beams, when they suddenly went out. One had been flickering, so he assumed there’d been some electrical short. For a moment he was blinded, and his eyes tried desperately to adjust to the near complete darkness.

“What’s going on?” he called, worried that she’d set him up somehow.

“Be quiet,” she said. “Wait.”

He heard her steps approach on the loose rocks.

“There’s a car,” she said.

“What?”

“A car. It’s coming up the hill.”

He listened hard. He heard the sound of an engine in low gear.

“It’s coming up the track that runs to my farmhouse,” she said. “You almost never get cars going up there at night. Not unless they’re coming to see me, and nobody comes to see me this late.”

“I did.”

“I know.”

They waited in the spot behind the trees. The car’s engine grew louder and then they saw unsteady headlights breaking through the darkness, disappearing, and then breaking through again.

Suddenly the lights became sharp and bright as they swept past their little side road, and the car went farther up the hill.

“I’m starting to wonder whether a thousand marks is enough, Mr. della Torre.”

He said nothing.

He squeezed into the front passenger seat of the Fiat, his knees pressed against the dashboard. The night smells — wild thyme and rosemary, pine resin and the faint fragrance of the sea — were overwhelmed by the fumes from the jerry cans in the back seat. Miranda started the engine again, turned on the small side parking lights, and drove slowly back to the junction and onto the track.

She turned the car down the track, in the direction from which the other car had come. She let gravity do much of the work, keeping her foot on the clutch so that the engine was near-silent as it idled. When they got down to the main road, she switched the headlights back on and put the Fiat into gear. One of the lights flickered like a strobe, distracting della Torre. He turned to look at the woman next to him. Her profile in the glow of the dashboard lights was severe, patrician.

“Don’t go straight to the boat,” della Torre said.

“Why?”

“Drive past. Just in case. Pull over around a hundred metres past the entrance and let me out.”

“Mr. della Torre —”

“I’ve paid you the thousand marks already.”

“That was for getting you to Dubrovnik. I should be charging you separately for getting you to my boat.”

“We’ll discuss it later.”

He craved a cigarette but knew better than to light one with the fuel in the back of the car.

She drove past the turning to her boat, staying on the main road until she found a wide verge under some broad pines. Here there was some traffic; the occasional car still passed during the night. Without drawing attention to what he was doing, della Torre removed the Beretta from his shoulder bag and slipped it into his coat pocket. He took her big black Maglite flashlight from the footwell on his side of the car.

“I’ll be back in fifteen minutes at the most,” he said.

“And if you’re not?”

“You go home a thousand marks richer.”

He eased the car door shut and walked back along the road towards the turning. It was hard not to stumble, but he hurried. He was worried that the car that had gone up the hill would be returning soon, catching him in its headlights.

But he was in luck. More by feel than anything else, he found the little turning down to the cove where Miranda’s boat was moored. He edged his way down the incline.

He moved at the speed of a stalking cat, careful not to make any noise, not to stumble or kick loose rocks. It was painfully slow going, and he realized he would be in plain sight to anyone with night-vision goggles. In his experience, this sort of American came well equipped.

His patience and his caution were rewarded.

He spotted a faint light, so fleeting that he wasn’t sure he’d seen anything. But then there it was again, an almost imperceptible green glow. Della Torre guessed it was the luminous dial of a watch.

He crept closer. Small waves brushed against the rocky shore. Above, a faint breeze combed through the pines. From somewhere came the distant sound of a car’s gears shifting, and even farther away a dog barked. He thought he heard a low booming sound far away, but that could have been his senses filling in the emptiness of night.

He picked up a stone and tossed it in the general direction of the watch and heard the dull noise it made as it hit a tree or a branch. Whoever was attached to that phosphorescence moved sharply, breaking twigs underfoot.

One man, a single source of sound. Della Torre assumed the sentry didn’t have any special night-vision equipment. If it was Grimston’s people in the car, they might have dropped someone off to intercept him in case they flushed him down from the hill, which meant they’d be coming this way soon enough.

He took the Beretta out of his pocket, irritated that he hadn’t put a bullet in the chamber earlier. But pulling back the slide would make an unmistakeable click, so he held off.

The man with the green watch froze again, listening. Della Torre knew he’d be wondering whether he’d heard a small animal dislodging a pine cone, or something more threatening.

Della Torre wondered how they’d known, how they’d figured it out so quickly. He was sure his flight from the hotel had been silent.

Grimston’s professionalism and thoroughness were unsettling. Della Torre had an inkling that the freedom he’d been given since leaving Zagreb was illusory, that he’d always been on a short tether.

He could no longer wait to see what their next move would be. He had to act, knowing everything would move quickly from now on. This called for the sort of aggression he’d left behind him in the army, fifteen years ago. He’d been called up to the Yugoslav commandos because of his fluent American-accented English and had been trained to infiltrate behind the lines should there be an American invasion of the country. The irony didn’t escape him.