and handed it back. George held it through the grille.
Phengaros had been standing there with a faint smile on his face. His eyes met George’s. With an ironic bow he took the cigarettes. As he did so be began to speak.
“I understand the feelings of embarrassment that prompt you to offer this gift, sir,” translated Miss Kolin. “If I were a criminal, I would gladly accept them. But the fate of my comrades at the hands of the fascist reactionaries already rests too lightly on the conscience of the world. If your own conscience is troubling you, sir, that is to your credit. But I am not yet so corrupted here as to allow you to ease it for the price of a packet of cigarettes. No. Much as I should have enjoyed smoking them, sir, I think that their destination must be that of all other American aid.”
With a flick of his wrist he tossed the cigarettes to the warder behind him.
They fell on the floor. As the warder snatched them up, the official began shouting to him angrily through the grille and he hastened to unlock the door.
Phengaros nodded curtly and went out.
The official stopped shouting and turned apologetically to George. “Une espece de fausse-couche,” he said; “je vous demande pardon, monsieur.”
“What for?” said George. “If he thinks I’m a lousy crypto-fascist-imperialist lackey, he’s quite right in refusing to smoke my cigarettes.”
“Pardon?”
“He also had the good manners not to heave the cigarettes right back in my face. In his place, I might have done just that.”
“Qu’est ce que Monsieur a dit?”
The official was looking desperately at Miss Kolin.
George shook his head. “Don’t bother to translate, Miss Kolin. He won’t get it. You understand me, though, don’t you, Lieutenant? Yes, I thought so. Now, if you don’t mind, I’d like to get the hell out of here before something very in-inconvenient happens inside my stomach.”
When they got back to the hotel, there was a note from Colonel Chrysantos awaiting them. It contained the information that a search of all the relevant lists had failed to discover anybody named Schirmer who had been either killed or captured in the Markos campaign; nor had an amnesty been granted to anyone of that name.
“Miss Kolin,” George said, “what can you drink when you have this stomach thing?”
“Cognac is best.”
“Then we’d better have some.”
Later, when the experiment had been tried, he said: “When we were in Cologne my office gave me permission to go on with the investigation for three more weeks if I thought we were making progress. One of them’s gone, and all we’ve found out is that Franz Schirmer most likely didn’t get taken prisoner by the people who shot up the trucks.”
“Surely, that is something.”
“It’s mildly interesting at best. It doesn’t get us anywhere. I’m giving it one more week. If we’re no nearer the truth by then, we go home. O.K.?”
“Perfectly. What will you do with the week?”
“Do what I have an idea I should have done before. Go to Vodena and look for his grave.”
8
Vodena, which used to be called Edessa and was once the seat of the kings of Macedon, is some fifty miles west of Salonika. It hangs, amid lush growth of vine and wild pomegranate, fig, and mulberry trees, in the foothills of Mount Chakirka six hundred feet above the Yiannitsa plain. Sparkling mountain streams cascade lyrically down the hillsides into Nisia Voda, the tributary of the Vadar which flows swiftly past the town on its way to the parent river. The old tiled houses glow in the sun. There are no tourist hotels.
George and Miss Kolin were driven there in a car hired in Salonika. It was not an enjoyable trip. The day was hot and the road bad. The condition of their stomachs denied them even the consolations of a good lunch and a bottle of wine at their destination. While the chauffeur went off heartily in search of food and wine, they went into a cafe, fought the flies for long enough to drink some brandy, and then dragged themselves off dispiritedly in search of information.
Almost immediately luck was with them. A sweetmeat pedlar in the market not only remembered the ambush well, but had actually been working in a near-by vineyard at the time. He had been warned to keep clear by the andartes, who had arrived an hour before the German trucks came.
When the chauffeur returned they persuaded the pedlar to leave his tray of flyblown titbits with a friend and guide them to the scene.
The fuel dump had been near a railway siding about three miles out of Vodena, on the side road to Apsalos. The trucks had been caught about two miles along this stretch of road.
It was an ideal place for an ambush. The road was climbing steadily and at that point made a hairpin turn below a hillside with plenty of cover for the attackers among its trees and thickets. Below and beyond the road there was no cover at all. The mines had been placed well past the turn so that, when the first truck hit, it would block the road for those following at a point where they could neither turn their vehicles nor find cover from which to reply to the fire from above. For the andartes concealed on the hillside the business must have been easy. The remarkable thing was that as many as two of the eleven Germans in the trucks had managed to get back down the road alive. They must have been exceptionally nimble or the fire from the hillside very wild.
Those who had died had been buried lower down the hill in a patch of level ground just off the road. According to the pedlar, the ground had been damp with rain at the time. The neat row of graves was still discernible in the undergrowth. Lieutenant Leubner and his men had piled stones in a small cairn on each. George had seen wayside German graves in France and Italy and guessed that originally each grave had also borne its occupant’s steel helmet, and perhaps a wooden stake with his number, name, and rank. It depended on how much time there had been to spare for such refinements. He looked for the stakes, but if they had ever existed, there was now no sign of them. Under a near-by bush he found a rusty German helmet; that was all.
“Seven graves,” remarked Miss Kolin as they walked up the hill again; “that is what one would expect from the Lieutenant’s letter to Frau Schirmer. Ten men and the Sergeant went. Two men return. The bodies of the Sergeant and the driver of the first truck are missing. Seven are buried.”
“Yes, but Phengaros said that there was only one prisoner-the driver. So where was the Sergeant? Look! The driver was wounded when the truck hit the mine, but not killed. Most likely the Sergeant was in the cab beside him. Probably he was wounded too. Lieutenant Leubner said he wasn’t a man to surrender without a fight. Supposing he managed somehow to get clear of the road and was hunted down and killed some distance from it.”
“But how, Mr. Carey? How could he get clear?”
They had reached the place of thte ambush again. George walked along the edge of the road away from the hillside and looked down.
The bare rocky ground fell away precipitously to the valley below. It was absurd to suppose that even an unwounded man would attempt to scramble down it under fire from the hillside and the road above. The two men who had escaped had been able to do so because they were in the last truck and unwounded. The Sergeant had been a full two hundred yards farther away from cover. He had had no chance at all of getting clear.
George climbed a short way up the hillside to look at the scene from the attackers’ point of view. From there, the plight of the men in the trucks seemed even more hopeless. He could imagine the scene: the trucks grinding up the hill, the ear-splitting detonation of the mine, the rattle of machine-gun and rifle fire, the thudding explosions of grenades lobbed on to the road, the hoarse shouts, the screams of the dying.
He clambered down to the car again.
“All right, Miss Kolin,” he said; “what do you think happened?”
“I think that he was taken prisoner with the driver and that both were wounded. I think that the Sergeant died of his wounds or was killed trying to escape on the way to the andartes’ rendezvous with Phengaros. Naturally Phengaros would think that only one prisoner had been taken.”
