Bloody Passage

I wasn’t sure whether Gatano had heard him or not for he was obviously enjoying himself. He put his boot into me, not very scientifically, three or four times, grunting with effort and then Langley said, ‘All right, that’s enough!’ and pulled him off.

They put the hose on me again and the two Italians picked me up between them and we followed Langley and Gatano up the stone steps. Gatano opened the door and we went out into bright morning sunshine.

I was beginning to function again, well below par, but enough to get by for the moment. We had emerged into a cobbled courtyard surrounded by stone walls. There was a gate at the far end and on the right, steps up to ramparts.

I negotiated them with some difficulty because of the leg irons, but the view was worth it. Massive cliffs, a calm blue sea shimmering in the heat haze, and above us at an even higher level, a citadel standing in a garden.

There was the scent of wisteria and I could smell almond trees as we passed through an iron gate into a semi-tropical paradise. There was the sound of water everywhere, splashing in fountains, gurgling in the conduits as it dropped from terrace to terrace between the palm trees.

We climbed a final flight of steps and emerged on to a broad terrace at a point where the ramparts came together like the prow of a ship. The view was really quite astonishing. There was a table beneath an awning, white linen cloth, silverware, a couple of bottles of wine in a bucket, a waiter in a neatly starched coat at the ready, napkin folded over one arm.

His master stood at the ramparts, an immensely fat man in a white linen suit, long, dark hair flecked with silver. When he turned I saw that he had a walking stick in each hand and leaned heavily on both of them.

It was a strange face, dark, hooded eyes that seemed to look through and beyond you. A brutal, rather sensual mouth and overall a kind of total arrogance. And it was a familiar face, that was the most disturbing thing of all, yet for the life of me I couldn’t remember where I’d seen him before.

He examined me for a long moment, those strange, brooding eyes giving nothing away, then he shuffled across to the table and eased himself down into a wicker chair. He nodded to the waiter who took one of the bottles from the bucket and filled a glass. I was immediately aware of the distinctive aroma of anis.

‘Your health, Major Grant,’ he toasted me.

He had a deep bass voice, totally American, nothing of Europe in it at all. I said, ‘You want to watch it. Too much of that stuff in the heat of the day can freeze your liver. I’ve seen it put strong men on their backs for a week.’

Langley started to say something, but my fat friend waved him down with one hand. He stared at me intently, a frown on his face, then smiled. ‘By God, you know where you are, sir. Confess it!’

‘I think so.’

He slapped his thigh in high good humour and turned to Langley. ‘Didn’t I tell you I’d picked the right man?’

Langley twirled the golden bauble between his fingers. ‘He has a big mouth, I’ll give you that.’

The fat man turned his attention back to me and leaned forward, hands folded over the handle of one of his walking sticks. ‘Come, sir, don’t let me down.’

‘All right.’ I shrugged. ‘The architecture of this fortress for a start. Walls are Norman, probably twelfth century. Most of the rest is Moorish. Then there’s the garden. Papyrus by the main pool, another Arab innovation, and the wine you’re drinking. Zibibbo from the island of Pantellaria. I can smell the anis.’

‘Which all adds up to?’

‘Sicily.’ I squinted up at the sun. ‘Somewhere on the southern coast.’

‘Southeast,’ he said. ‘Capo Passero to be exact.’ He shook his head solemnly, sipped a little of his wine and said to Langley, ‘Remarkable is it not, what the trained mind is capable of?’

Langley looked sullen, picked up a wineglass and held it out to the waiter who filled it for him. The fat man chuckled. ‘Justin is not impressed, Major Grant, but then he likes to be first in the field always. It comes of having been educated at Eton.’

‘You mean the reformatory?’ I said. ‘In Northern Nebraska?’ I shook my head. ‘Poor kid, I don’t suppose he ever really stood a chance.’

Strangely enough Langley reacted to that one with apparent indifference, but his fat friend rocked with laughter. ‘I like that. Yes, I really like that.’ He wiped tears from his eyes with a large white pocket handkerchief. ‘You know who I am, Major Grant?’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘Stavrou, sir. Dimitri Stavrou.’ He expected a reaction and seeing it in my face, grinned slyly. ‘You know me now, I think?’

‘I should,’ I said. ‘Your picture was on enough front pages nine or ten months ago when they deported you from the States.’

‘An affront to justice.’ He seemed angry for the moment, though whether this was genuine or assumed, it was impossible to say. ‘Although I was born in Cyprus, I lived in America for forty years of my life, Major Grant. I had legitimate business interests.’

‘Like gambling, drugs, prostitution?’ I said. ‘Front man for the Syndicate or the Mafia or whatever they call themselves these days, wasn’t that it?’

There was a hot spark of anger behind those dark eyes. ‘The pot, sir, calling the kettle black, isn’t that how the English would put it?’ He snapped his fingers. ‘The file, Justin, there’s a good boy.’

There was a briefcase leaning against the back of Stavrou’s cane chair. Langley opened it, took out a buff coloured folder and laid it on the table in front of him.

Stavrou put a hand on it. ‘Oliver Berkley Grant. In detail.’

‘What, warts and all?’ I said.

‘I must know it by heart by now.’ He pushed it away ostentatiously and closed his eyes. ‘Father, colonel in the Marine Corps, killed in action in Korea in 1951. Mother English. You were educated at an English public school, Winchester. That was to please her, then West Point. You first went to war the year your father was killed. By the end of the Korean conflict you had collected a D.S.C. and Silver Star and a wound which put you in hospital for nine months. It was the last time you fought in any conventional sense as a soldier.’

Most of this had been delivered in a rather flat monotone at some speed and now, he opened his eyes. ‘How am I doing?’

‘Now I know where I’ve seen you before,’ I said. ‘Gypsy Rose. You had a tent two summers ago on the boardwalk at Atlantic City.’

He was not provoked in the slightest. ‘For the next seven years, Special Services Executive, Major Grant. Military Intelligence. You became especially expert at getting people out of places. After the Bay of Pigs fiasco the Cubans got their hands on an American colonel named Hurwitz. They intended to stage a show trial that would expose America to the world and then on the night of …’ He hesitated. ‘The 31st October, am I right? You landed with half a dozen special service troops and spirited Hurwitz away from an apparently impregnable fortress.’

I was shaken now, rocked straight back on my heel, because what he was giving out was classified information at the highest level.

‘You must be on good terms with the President.’

‘A brilliant operation which made you famous in the Pentagon, at least in a discreet way and one you repeated seven or eight times over the ensu-ing years. Cuba once again. Cambodia, twice in Vietnam and then Albania. An American U2 pilot named Murphy was to be put on trial as a spy. You got him out of the top state security prison in Tirana.’

‘It’s just a knack,’ I said. ‘Something my old grannie taught me when I was in short pants.’

‘And now we come to August, 1966,’ he said. ‘Sylvia Gray, a seventeen-year-old student from Boston, daughter of a friend of your grandfather. An impulsive young lady who went to Prague with a group of other students during the Czechoslovakian revolt and was sentenced to life imprisonment for the murder of a Russian soldier. She shot him in the back three times.’

‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘He was trying to rape a fourteen-year-old girl at the time.’

‘You went to your superiors and asked permission to get the girl out and they refused.’

Strange that I could feel the same impotent rage so many years later.

‘So you went anyway, entered Czechoslovakia illegally and with the help of an underground organization broke the girl out of jail and got her safely home after a rather public gun fight on the Austria–Czech border.’

‘You seem to know it all.’

‘But I do. Everything. A General Court Martial, all highly secret, but just as nasty. They stripped you bare and dumped you in disgrace, well and truly on your ass, if you’ll excuse such an uncouth expression.’

And now I was worried because he really had got too close for comfort and I waited for the axe to fall.

‘Which left you in one hell of a fix because you had responsibilities. The year your father was killed, your mother died in childbirth leaving a little girl, your sister, Hannah. Twenty years your junior. A grave responsibility. Your maternal grandmother raised her in London. You provided for both of them. More than essential in view of the fact that your sister is totally blind, but then, her musical gifts make up for that to some extent. She studies piano at the Royal College of Music, I understand.’

‘All right,’ I said. ‘It’s been fun, really it has, only let’s get to the point.’