Partisans. Alistair MacLean
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you in Yugoslavia. I will not jeopardize my mission for a couple of disobedient children who won’t do as they’re told.’
‘Children!’ Michael actually clenched his fists. ‘You have no right to—’
‘He has every right to.’ Lunz’s interruption was sharp. ‘Major Petersen was talking about garden parties. He should have been talking about kindergartens. You’re young, ignorant and arrogant and are correspondingly dangerous on all three counts. Whether you’ve been sworn in or not, you’re now members of the Royal Yugoslav Army. Other rankers, such as you, take orders from officers.’
They made no reply, not even when Petersen again regarded the ceiling and said: ‘And we all know the penalty for the wartime disobedience of orders.’
In Lunz’s staff car Petersen sighed and said: ‘I’m afraid I didn’t quite achieve the degree of rapport back there that I might have. They were in a rather unhappy frame of mind when we left.’
‘They’ll get over it. Young, as I said. Spoilt, into the bargain. Aristocrats, I’m told, even some royal blood. Von Karajan or something like that. Odd name for a Yugoslav.’
‘Not really. Almost certainly from Slovenia and the descendants of Austrians.’
‘Be that as it may, they come from a family that’s clearly not accustomed to taking orders and even less accustomed to being talked to the way you did.’
‘I daresay they’ll learn very quickly.’
‘I daresay they will.’
Half an hour after returning to his room, Petersen was joined by George and Alex. George said, ‘Well, at least we know their name.’
‘So do I. Von Karajan. What else?’
George was in no way put out. ‘The reception clerk, very old but sharp, told us he’d no idea where they’d arrived from—they’d been brought there by Colonel Lunz. He gave us their room number—no hesitation—but said that if we wanted to see them he’d have to announce us, ask permission and then escort us. Then we asked him if either of the rooms next to the number he had given us was vacant and when he told us those were their bedrooms we left.’
‘You took your time about getting back.’
‘We are accustomed to your injustices. We went round to the back of the hotel, climbed a fire escape and made our way along a narrow ledge. A very narrow ledge. No joke, I can tell you, especially for an old man like me. Perilous, dizzying heights—’
‘Yes, yes.’ Petersen was patient. The von Karajans had been staying on the first floor. ‘Then?’
‘There was a small balcony outside their room. Net curtains on their French windows.’
‘You could see clearly?’
‘And hear clearly. Young man was sending a radio message.’
‘Interesting. Hardly surprising, though. Morse?’
‘Plain language.’
‘What was he saying?’
‘I have no idea. Could have been Chinese for all I knew. Certainly no European language I’ve ever heard. A very short message. So we came back.’
‘Anyone see you on the fire escape, ledge or balcony?’
George tried to look wounded. ‘My dear Peter—’
Petersen stopped him with an upraised hand. Not many people called him “Peter”—which was his first name—but, then, not many people had been pre-war students of George’s in Belgrade University where George had been the vastly respected Professor of Occidental Languages. George was known—not reputed, but known—to be fluent in at least a dozen languages and to have a working knowledge of a considerable number more.
‘Forgive me, forgive me.’ Petersen surveyed George’s vast bulk. ‘You’re practically invisible anyway. So tomorrow morning, or perhaps even within minutes, Colonel Lunz will know that you and Alex have been around asking questions—he would have expected nothing less of me—but he won’t know that young Michael von Karajan has been seen and heard to be sending radio messages soon after our departure. I do wonder about the nature of that message.’
George pondered briefly then said: ‘Alex and I could find out on the boat tomorrow night.’
Petersen shook his head. ‘I promised Colonel Lunz that we would deliver them intact.’
‘What’s Colonel Lunz to us or your promise to him?’
‘We want them delivered intact too.’
George tapped his head. ‘The burden of too many years.’
‘Not at all, George. Professorial absent-minded-ness.’
The Wehrmacht did not believe in limousines or luxury coaches for the transportation of its allies: Petersen and his companions crossed Italy that following day in the back of a vintage truck that gave the impression of being well enough equipped with tyres of solid rubber but sadly deficient in any form of springing. The vibration was of the teeth-jarring order and the rattling so loud and continuous as to make conversation virtually impossible. The hooped canvas covering was open at the back, and at the highest point in the Apennines the temperature dropped below freezing point. It was, in some ways, a memorable journey but not for its creature comforts.
The stench of the diesel fumes would normally have been overpowering enough but on that particular day faded into relative insignificance compared to the aroma, if that was the word, given off by George’s black cigars. Out of deference to his fellow-travellers’ sensibilities he had seated himself at the very rear of the truck and on the rare occasion when he wasn’t smoking, kept himself busy and contented enough with the contents of a crate of beer that lay at his feet. He seemed immune to the cold and probably was: nature had provided him with an awesome insulation.
The von Karajans, clad in their newly acquired winter clothing, sat at the front of the left-hand unpadded wooden bench. Withdrawn and silent they appeared no happier than when Petersen had left them the previous night: this could have been an understandable reaction to their current sufferings but more probably, Petersen thought, their injured feelings had not yet had time to mend. Matters were not helped by the presence of Alex, whose totally withdrawn silence and dark, bitter and brooding countenance could be all too easily misinterpreted as balefulness: the von Karajans were not to know that Alex regarded his parents, whom he held in vast respect and affection, with exactly the same expression.
They stopped for a midday meal in a tiny village in the neighbourhood of Corfinio after having safely, if at times more or less miraculously, negotiated the hazardous hair-pin switch-backs of the Apennine spine. They had left Rome at seven o’clock that morning and it had taken over five hours to cover a hundred miles. Considering the incredibly dilapidated state of both the highway and the ancient Wehrmacht truck—unmarked as such and of Italian make—an average of almost twenty miles an hour was positively creditable. Not without difficulty for, with the exception of George, the passengers’ limbs were stiff and almost frozen, they climbed down over the tailboard and looked around them through the thinly falling snow.
There was miserably little to see. The hamlet—if it could even be called that, it didn’t as much as have a name—consisted of a handful of stone cottages, a post office store and a very small inn. Nearby Corfinio, if hardly ranking as a metropolis, could have afforded considerably more in the way of comfort and amenities: but Colonel Lunz, apart from a professional near-mania for secrecy, shared with his senior Wehrmacht fellow-officers the common if unfair belief that all his Italian allies were renegades, traitors and spies until proved otherwise.
In the inn itself, the genial host was far from being that. He seemed diffident, almost nervous, a markedly unusual