Partisans. Alistair MacLean
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flat-bottomed wicker basket holding the far from humble nucleus of a small but well-stocked bar. In addition to spirits, wines and liqueurs, Pietro had even gone to the length of providing a soda syphon and a small ice-bucket.
‘Pietro hasn’t yet graduated to bartender and I’ve no intention of leaving this chair,’ Carlos said. ‘Help yourselves, please. Thank you, Pietro. Ask our two passengers to join us at their convenience.’ The boy saluted and left. ‘Two other Yugoslav-bound passengers. I don’t know their business as I don’t know yours. You don’t know theirs and they don’t know yours. Ships that pass in the night. But such ships exchange recognition signals. Courtesy of the high seas.’
Petersen gestured at the basket from which George was already helping the von Karajans to orange juice. ‘Another courtesy of the high seas. Lessens the rigours of total war, I must say.’
‘My feeling exactly. No thanks, I may say, to our Admiralty who are as stingy as Admiralties the world over. Some of the supplies come from my father’s wine cellars—they would have your three-star sommeliers in raptures, I can tell you—some are gifts from foreign friends.’
‘Kruškovac.’ George touched a bottle. ‘Grappa. Pelinkovac. Stara Šljivovica. Two excellent vintages from the Neretva delta. Your foreign friends. All from Yugoslavia. Our hospitable and considerate young friend, Pietro. Clairvoyant? He thinks we go to Yugoslavia? Or has he been informed?’
‘Suspicion, one would suppose, is part of your stock-in-trade. I don’t know what Pietro thinks. I don’t even know if he can think. He hasn’t been informed. He knows.’ Carlos sighed. ‘The romance and glamour of the cloak-and-dagger, sealed-orders missions are not, I’m afraid, for us. Search Termoli and you might find a person who is deaf, dumb and blind, although I much doubt it. If you did, he or she would be the only person in Termoli who doesn’t know that the Colombo—that’s the name of this crippled greyhound—plies a regular and so far highly dependable ferry-service to the Yugoslav coast. If it’s any consolation, I’m the only person who knows where we’re going. Unless, of course, one of you has talked.’ He poured himself a small scotch. ‘Your health, gentlemen. And yours, young lady.’
‘We don’t talk much about such things, but about other things I’m afraid I talk too much.’ George sounded sad but at once refuted himself. ‘University, eh? Some kind of marine school?’
‘Some kind of medical school.’
‘Medical school.’ With the air of a man treating himself for shock George poured some more grappa. ‘Don’t tell me you’re a doctor.’
‘I’m not telling you anything. But I have a paper that says so.’
Petersen waved a hand. ‘Then why this?’
‘Well you might ask.’ Momentarily, Carlos sounded as sad as George had done. ‘The Italian Navy. Any navy. Take a highly skilled mechanic, obvious material for an equally highly skilled engine-room-artificer. What does he become? A cook. A cordon bleu chef? A gunner.’ He waved his hand much as Petersen had done. ‘So, in their all-knowing wisdom, they gave me this. Dr Tremino, ferryman, first class. Considering the state of the ferry, make that second class. Come in, come in.’ A knock had come on the door.
The young woman who stepped over the low coaming—she could have been anything between twenty and thirty-five—was of medium height, slender and dressed in a jersey, jacket and skirt, all in blue. Pale-complexioned, without a trace of make-up, she was grave and unsmiling. Her hair was black as night and swooped low, like a raven’s wing, over the left forehead, quite obscuring the left eyebrow. The pock-marking, for such it seemed to be, high up on the left cheekbone, served only to accentuate, not diminish, the classical, timeless beauty of the features: twenty years on, just as conceivably thirty, she would still be as beautiful as she was at that moment. Nor, it seemed certain, would time ever change the appearance of the man who followed her into the cabin, but the sculpted perfection of features had nothing to do with this. A tall, solidly built, fair-haired character, he was irredeemably ugly. Nature had had no hand in this. From the evidence offered by ears, cheeks, chin, nose and teeth he had been in frequent and violent contact with a variety of objects, both blunt and razor-edged, in the course of what must have been a remarkably chequered career. It was, withal, an attractive face, largely because of the genuine warmth of his smile: as with Carlos, an almost irrepressible cheerfulness was never far from the surface.
‘This,’ Carlos said, ‘is Lorraine and Giacomo.’ He introduced Petersen and the other four in turn. Lorraine’s voice was soft and low, in tone and timbre remarkably like that of Sarina: Giacomo’s, predictably, was neither soft nor low and his hand-clasp fearsome except when it came to Sarina: her fingers he took in his finger and thumb and gallantly kissed the back of her hand. Such a gesture from such a man should have appeared both affected and stagey: oddly enough, it did neither. Sarina didn’t seem to think so either. She said nothing, just smiled at him, the first genuine smile Petersen had seen from her: it came as no surprise that her teeth would have been a dentist’s delight or despair, depending upon whether aesthetic or financial considerations were uppermost in his mind.
‘Help yourselves,’ Carlos gestured to the wicker basket. Giacomo, leaving no doubt that he was decisive both as to cast of mind and action, needed no second urging. He poured a glass of Pellegrino for Lorraine, evidence enough that this was not the first time he had met her and that she shared the von Karajans’ aversion towards alcohol, and then half-filled a tumbler with scotch, topping it up with water. He took a seat and beamed around the company.
‘Health to all.’ He raised his brimming glass. ‘And confusion to our enemies.’
‘Any particular enemies?’ Carlos said.
‘It would take too long.’ Giacomo tried to look sad but failed. ‘I have too many.’ He drank deeply to his own toast. ‘You have called us to a conference, Captain Carlos?’
‘Conference, Giacomo? Goodness me, no.’ It didn’t require any great deductive powers, Petersen reflected, to realize that those two had met before and not just that day. ‘Why should I hold a conference? My job is to get you where you’re going and you can’t help me in that. After you land I can’t help you in whatever you’re going to do. Nothing to confer about. As a ferryman, I’m a great believer in introductions. People in your line of business are apt to react over-quickly if, rightly or wrongly, they sense danger in meeting an unknown on a dark deck at night. No such danger now. And there are three things I want to mention briefly.
‘First, accommodation. Lorraine and Giacomo have a cabin each, if you can call something the size of a telephone box a cabin. Only fair. First come, first served. I have two other cabins, one for three, one for two.’ He looked at Michael. ‘You and—yes, Sarina—are brother and sister?’
‘Who told you?’ Michael probably didn’t mean to sound truculent, but his nervous system had suffered from his encounter with Petersen and his friends, and that was the way it came out.
Carlos lowered his head briefly, looked up and said, not smiling, ‘The good Lord gave me eyes and they say “twins”.’
‘No problem.’ Giacomo bowed towards the embarrassed girl. ‘The young lady will do me the honour of switching cabins with me?’
She smiled and nodded. ‘You are very kind.’
‘Second. Food. You could eat aboard but I don’t recommend it. Giovanni cooks only under duress and protest. I don’t blame him. He’s our engineer. Everything that comes out of that galley, even the coffee, tastes and smells of oil. There’s a passable café close by—well, barely passable, but they do know me.’ He half-smiled at the two women in turn. ‘It will be a hardship and a sacrifice but I think I’ll join you.
‘Third. You’re free to go ashore whenever you wish, although I can’t imagine why anyone should want to go ashore on a night like this—except, of course, to escape Giovanni’s cooking. There are police patrols but their enthusiasm usually drops with the temperature. If you do run into any, just say you’re from the Colombo: the worst