left to give when it came to Albania’s turn.”
Chavasse nodded. “Not exactly a happy history.”
“A succession of conquerors, more than any other country in Europe. Greeks, Romans, Goths, Byzantines, Serbs, Bulgars, Sicilians, Venetians, Normans and Turks. They’ve all held the country for varying periods.”
“And always, the people have struggled to be free.” Chavasse shook his head. “How ironic life can be. After centuries of desperately fighting for independence, Albania receives it, only to find herself in the grip of a tyranny worse than any that has gone before.”
“Is it really as bad as they say?”
He nodded. “The sigurmi are everywhere. Even the Italian Workers’ Holiday Association complain that they get one sigurmi agent allocated to each member of their holiday parties. Even at a rough estimate, Hoxha and his boys have purged better than one hundred thousand people since he took over, and you know yourself how the various religious groups have been treated. Stalin would have been proud of him. An apt pupil.”
He took out his cigarettes and offered her one. She smoked silently for a while and then said slowly, “Last year, two of your people who were operating temporarily through the Bureau in Rome went missing. One in Albania, the other in Turkey.”
Chavasse nodded. “Matt Sorley and Jules Dumont. Good men both.”
“How can you go on living the life you do? That sort of thing must happen a lot. Look how close you came to not getting out of Tirana.”
“Maybe I just never grew up,” he said lightly.
“How did it all begin?”
“Quite by chance. I was lecturing in languages at a British university, a friend wanted to pull a relative out of Czechoslovakia and I gave him a hand. That’s when the Chief pulled me in. At that time he was interested in people who spoke Eastern European languages.”
“An unusual accomplishment.”
“Some people can work out cube roots in their heads in seconds, others can never forget anything they ever read. I have the same sort of kink for languages. I soak them up like a sponge – no effort.”
She lapsed into fluent Albanian. “Isn’t it a little unnerving? Don’t you ever get your wires crossed?”
“Not that I can recall,” he replied faultlessly in the same language. “I can’t afford that kind of mistake. If it’s any consolation, I still can’t read a Chinese newspaper. On the other hand, I’ve only ever met two Europeans who could.”
“With that kind of flair plus your academic training, you could pick up a chair in modern languages at almost any university in Britain or the States,” she said. “Doesn’t the thought appeal to you?”
“Not in the slightest. I got into this sort of work by chance, and by chance I possessed all the virtues needed to make me good at it.”
“You mean you actually enjoy it?”
“Something like that. If I’d been born in Germany twenty years earlier, I’d probably have ended up in the Gestapo. If I’d been born an Albanian, I might well have been a most efficient member of the sigurmi. Who knows?”
She seemed shocked. “I don’t believe you.”
“Why not? It takes a certain type of man or woman to do our kind of work – a professional. I can recognize the quality, and appreciate it, in my opposite numbers. I don’t see anything wrong in that.”
There was a strained silence as if in some way he had disappointed her. She reached for the tray. “I’d better take these below. We must be getting close.”
The door closed behind her and Chavasse opened the window and breathed in the sharp morning air feeling rather sad. So often people like her, the fringe crowd who did the paperwork, manned the radios, decoded the messages, could never really know what it was like in the field. What it took to survive. Well, he, Paul Chavasse, had survived, and not by waving any flags, either.
The door swung open and Orsini entered, immense in his old reefer coat and peaked cap on the side of his head. “Everything all right, Paul?”
Chavasse nodded and handed over the wheel. “Couldn’t be better.”
Orsini lit another of his inevitable cheroots. “Good. Shouldn’t be long now.”
Dawn seeped into the sky, a gray half-light with a heavy mist rolling across the water. Orsini asked Chavasse to take over again and consulted the charts. He checked the cross-bearing Francesca had given him and traced a possible course in from the sea through the maze of channels marked on the chart.
“Everything okay?” Chavasse asked.
Orsini came back to the wheel and shrugged. “I know these charts. Four or five fathoms and a strong tidal current. That means that one day there’s a sandbank, the next, ten fathoms of clear water. Estuary marshes are always the same. We’ll go in through the main outlet of the Buene and turn into the marshes about half a mile inland. Not only safer, but a dammed sight quicker.”
THE MIST ENFOLDED THEM UNTIL THEY were running through an enclosed world. Orsini reduced speed to ten knots and, a few moments later, Carlo and Francesca came up from below.
Chavasse went and stood in the prow, hands in pockets, and the marshes drifted out of the mist and their stench filled his nostrils. Wildfowl called overhead on their way in from the sea and Carlo moved beside him and crossed himself.
“A bad place, this. Always, I am glad to leave.”
It was a landscape from a nightmare. Long, narrow sandbanks lifted from the water, and inland mile upon mile of marsh grass and great reeds marched into the mist, interlaced by a thousand creeks and lagoons.
Orsini reduced speed to three knots and leaned from the side window, watching the reeds drift by on either side. Chavasse moved along the deck and looked up at him.
“How far are we from the position Francesca gave?”
“Perhaps three miles, but the going would be too difficult. In a little while we must carry on in the dinghy. Much safer.”
“And who minds the launch?”
“Carlo – it’s all arranged. He isn’t pleased, but then he seldom is about anything.”
He grinned down at Carlo, who glared up at him and went below. Chavasse moved back along the deck and joined Francesca in the prow. A few moments later the launch entered a small lagoon, perhaps a hundred feet in diameter, and Orsini cut the engines.
They glided forward and grounded gently against a sandbank as he came out on deck and joined them. He slipped an arm around Francesca’s shoulders and smiled down at her.
“Not long now, cara. A few more hours and we’ll be on our way home again. I, Guilio Orsini, promise you.”
She looked up at him gravely, then turned to Chavasse, a strange, shadowed expression in her eyes, and for some unaccountable reason, he shivered.
NINE
FRANCESCA COOKED A HOT MEAL, PERHAPS the last they would have for some time, and afterwards Carlo and Chavasse broke out the large rubber dinghy, inflated it and attached the outboard motor.
When they went below for the Aqua-lung, Orsini was sitting on the edge of the table loading a machine pistol. The top of one of the salon seats had been removed and inside there was a varied assortment of weapons. The submachine gun, a couple of automatic rifles and an old Bren of the type used by the British infantry during the war.
“Help yourself,” he said. “A selection to suit all tastes.”
Chavasse picked up one of the automatic rifles, a Garrand, and nodded. “This will do me. What about
