The Black Mountain

overheard talking with me.' 'I suppose so,' I conceded reluctantly. 'I'd like to take a crack at it, but I guess you're right. Are we going to Galichnik?' 'Good Heavens, no. There was a time when sixty kilometers through those hills was only a frolic for me, but not now. We'll go across to a spot I used to know, or, if time has changed that too, to one that Paolo ?' The phone rang. I was up automatically, realized I was disqualified, and stood while Wolfe crossed to it and lifted it to his ear. In a moment he spoke, so it was Telesio. After a brief exchange he hung up and turned to me. 'Paolo. He has been waiting for Guido to return from an excursion on his boat. He said he might have to wait until midnight 101 or later. I told him we have decided on a plan and would like to have him come and discuss it. He's coming.' I sat down. 'Now about my name ...' 102 FR1;Chapter 6 There are boats and boats. The Queen Elizabeth is a boat. So was the thing I rowed one August afternoon on the lake in Central Park, with Lily Rowan lolling in the stern, to win a bet. Guido Battista's craft, which took us across the Adriatic, was in between those two but was a much closer relative of the latter than of the former. It was twelve meters long, thirty-nine feet. It had not been thoroughly cleaned since the days when the Romans had used it to hijack spices from Levantine bootleggers, but had been modernized by installing an engine and propeller. One of my occupations en route was trying to figure out exactly where the galley slaves had sat, but it was too much for me. We shoved off at three P.M. Monday, the idea being to land on the opposite shore at midnight or not long after. That seemed feasible until I saw the Cispadana, which was her name. To expect that affair to navi- 103 gate 170 miles of open water in nine hours was so damn fantastic that I could make no adequate remark and so didn't try. It took her nine hours and twenty minutes. Wolfe and I had stuck to the stuccoed hideout, but it had been a busy night and day for Telesio. After listening to Wolfe's plan, opposing it on various grounds, and finally giving in because Wolfe wouldn't, he had gone again for Guido and brought him, and Wolfe and Guido had reached an understanding. Telesio had left with Guido, and I suppose he got a nap somewhere, but before noon Monday he was back with a carload. For me to choose from he had four pairs of pants, three sweaters, four jackets, an assortment of shirts, and five pairs of shoes, and about the same for Wolfe. They weren't new, except the shoes, but they were clean and whole. I picked them more for fit than looks, and ended up with a blue shirt, maroon sweater, dark green jacket, and light gray pants. Wolfe was tastier, with yellow, brown, and dark blue. The knapsacks weren't new either, and none too clean, but we wiped them out and went ahead and packed. At the first try I was too generous with socks and underwear and had to back up and start over. In between roars of laughter, Telesio gave me 104 sound advice: to ditch the underwear entirely, make it two pairs of socks, and cram in all the chocolate it would hold. Wolfe interpreted the advice for me, approved it, and followed suit himself. I had expected another squabble about armament, but quite the contrary. In addition to being permitted to wear the Marley in the holster, I was provided with a Colt .38 that looked like new, and fifty rounds for it. I tried it in my jacket pocket, but it was too heavy, so I shifted it to my hip. I was also offered an eight-inch pointed knife, shiny and sharp, but turned it down. Telesio and Wolfe both insisted, saying there might be a situation where a knife would be much more useful than a gun, and I said not for me because I would be more apt to stick myself than the foe. 'If a knife is so useful,' I challenged Wolfe, 'why don't you take one yourself?' 'I'm taking two,' he replied, and he did. He put one in a sheath on his belt, and strapped a shorter one to his left leg just below his knee. That gave me a better idea of the kind of party we were going to, since in all the years I had known him he had never borne any weapon but a little gold penknife. The idea was made even clearer when Telesio took two small plastic tubes from his pocket and handed one to Wolfe 105 and one to me. Wolfe frowned at it and asked him something, and they talked. Wolfe turned to me. 'He says the capsule inside the tube is a lullaby -- a jocose term, I take it, for cyanide. He said for an emergency. I said we didn't want them. He said that last month some Albanians, Russian agents, had a Montenegrin in a cave on the border for three days and left him there. When his friends found him the joints of all his fingers and toes had been broken, and his eyes had been removed, but he was still breathing. Paolo says he can furnish details of other incidents if we want them. Do you know what to do with a cyanide capsule?' 'Certainly. Everybody does.' 'Where are you going to carry it?' 'My God, give me a chance. I never had one before. Sew it inside my sweater?' 'Your sweater might be gone.' 'Tape it under my armpit.' 'Too obvious. It would be found and taken.' 'Okay, it's your turn. Where will you carry yours?' 'In my handiest pocket. Threatened with seizure and search, in my hand. Threatened more imminently, the capsule out of the tube and into my mouth. It can be kept in the mouth indefinitely if it is not crushed 106 with the teeth. The case against carrying it j is the risk of being stampeded into using it prematurely.' 'I'll take the chance.' I put the tube in my pocket. 'Anyway, if you did that you'd never know it, so why worry?' The lullabies completed our equipment. It was considered undesirable for Telesio to be seen delivering us at the waterfront, so we said good-by there, with the help of a bottle of wine, and then he took us in the Flat to the center of town, let us out, and drove away. We walked a block to a cab stand. I guess we weren't half as conspicuous as I thought we were, but the people of Ban didn't have the basis for comparison that I had. To think of Wolfe as I knew him best, seated in his custom-built chair behind his desk, prying the cap from a bottle of beer, a Laeliocattleya Jaquetta sporting four flowers to his left and a spray of Dendrobium nobilius to his right, and then to look at him tramping along in blue pants, yellow shirt, and brown jacket, with a blue sweater hanging over his arm and a bulging old knapsack on his back -- I couldn't help being surprised that nobody turned to stare at him. Also, in that getup, I regarded myself as worth a glance, but none came our way. The hackie showed no sign of interest when 107 we climbed into his cab and Wolfe told him where to go. His attitude toward obstacles was somewhat similar to Telesio's, but he got us into the old city and through its narrow winding streets to the edge of a wharf without making contact. I paid him and followed Wolfe out, and had my first view of the Cispadana sitting alongside the wharf. Guido, standing there, left a man he was talking to and came to Wolfe. Here where he belonged he looked more probable than in the pink living room. He was tall, thin except his shoulders, and stooped some, and moved like a cat. He had told Wolfe he was sixty years old, but his long hair was jet black. The hair on his face was gray and raised questions. It was half an inch long. If he never shaved why wasn't it longer? If he did shave, when? I would have liked to ask him after we got acquainted, but we weren't communicating. Telesio had said that with the three hundred bucks I had forked over he would take care of everything -- our equipment, Guido, and a certain waterfront party -- and apparently he had. I don't know what kind of voyage it was supposed to be officially, but no one around seemed to be interested. A couple of characters stood on the wharf and 108 watched as we climbed aboard, and two others untied us and shoved the bow off when Guido had the engine going and gave the sign, and we slid away. I supposed one or both of them would jump on as we cleared, but they didn't. Wolfe and I were seated in the cockpit. 'Where's the crew?' I asked him. He said Guido was the crew. 'Just him?' 'Yes.' 'Good God. I'm not a mariner. When the engine quits or something else, who steers?' 'I do.' 'Oh. You are a mariner.' 'I have crossed this sea eighty times.' He was working at the buckle of a knapsack strap. 'Help me get this thing off.' My tongue was ready with a remark about a man of action who had to have help to doff his knapsack, but I thought I'd better save it. If the engine did quit, and a squall hit us, and he saved our lives with a display of masterly seamanship, I'd have to eat it. Nothing happened at all the whole way. The engine was noisy, but that was all right, the point was, it never stopped being noisy. t No squall. Late in the afternoon clouds be109 gan coming over from the east, and a light wind started up, but not enough to curl the water. I even took a nap, stretched out on a cockpit seat. A couple of times, when Guido went forward on errands, Wolfe took the wheel, but there was no call for seamanship. The third time was an hour before sundown, and Wolfe went and propped himself on the narrow board, put a hand on the wheel, and was motionless, looking ahead. Looking that way, the water was blue, but looking back, toward the low sun over Italy, it was gray except where the sun's rays bounced out of it at us. Guido was gone so long that I stepped down into the cabin to see what was up, and found him stirring something in an old black pot on an alcohol stove. I couldn't ask him what, but a little later I found out, when he appeared with a pair of battered old plates heaped with steaming spaghetti smothered with sauce. I had been wondering, just to myself, about grub. He also brought wine, naturally, and a tin pail filled with green salad. It wasn't quite up to Wolfe's production the day before, but Fritz himself wouldn't have been ashamed of the salad dressing, and it was absolutely a meal. Guido took the wheel while Wolfe and I ate, and then Wolfe went back to it and 110 Guido went to the cabin to eat. He told us he didn't like to eat in the open air. Having smelled the inside of the cabin, I could have made a comment but didn't. By the time he came out it was getting dark, and he lighted the running lights before he went back to the wheel. The clouds had scattered around, so there were spaces with stars, and Guido began to sing and kept it up. With all the jolts I had had the past two days, I wouldn't have been surprised if Wolfe had joined in, but he didn't. It had got pretty chilly, and I took off my jacket, put on the sweater, and put the jacket back on. I asked Wolfe if he didn't want to do the same, and he said no, he would soon be warming up with exercise. A little later he asked what time it was, my wristwatch having a luminous dial, and I told him ten past eleven. Suddenly the engine changed its tune, slowing down, and I thought uhhuh, I knew it, but it kept going, so evidently Guido had merely throttled