robbery?”
“I remember something about it. Why?”
“Next day, in the train to Florina, I read the newspaper reports of it. It gave an exact description of the truck that was used.”
“What about it?”
“We came here in that truck tonight.”
“What? You’re kidding.”
“No.” She drank some more brandy.
“You’re mistaken then. After all, there must be dozens, hundreds maybe, of these British army trucks still about in Greece.”
“Not with slots for false number-plates.”
“What do you mean?”
“I noticed the slots when he was shining the flashlight for me to get in. The false plates were on the floor in the back of the truck. When we stopped, I put them where the moonlight would shine as we got out. The part of the number I could see was the same as the one in the newspaper report.”
“Are you absolutely sure?”
“I do not like it any more than you, Mr. Carey.”
But George was remembering something that Colonel Chrysantos had said: “They are clever and dangerous and the police do not catch them.”
“If they get half a suspicion we know anything-” he began.
“Yes. It could be most disagreeable.” She raised her glass to drink again and then stopped.
There was the sound of footsteps coming down the stairs.
George drank his brandy down quickly and got out a cigarette. The learned judge, whose secretary he had been, had once said that it was impossible to practise law for very many years without learning that no case, however matter-of-fact it might seem, could be considered entirely proof against the regrettable tendency of reality to assume the shape and proportions of melodrama. At the time, George had smiled politely and wondered if he would be given to making such half-baked generalizations when he became a judge. Now he remembered.
The door opened.
The man who came into the room was fair and deep-chested, with heavy shoulders and big hands. He might have been any age between thirty and forty. The face was strong, with muscular cheeks, a determined mouth, and cool, watchful eyes. He held himself very erect and the bush-shirt he wore stretched tightly across his chest. With the revolver belt at his waist he looked almost as if he were in uniform.
He glanced swiftly from George to Miss Kolin as Arthur, who had followed him in, shut the door and bustled forward.
“Sorry to keep you waiting,” Arthur said. “Mr. Carey, this is my chief. He speaks a bit of English-I taught him-but go easy on the long words. He knows who you are.”
The newcomer clicked his heels and gave the slightest of bows.
“Schirmer,” he said curtly, “Franz Schirmer. I think you wish to speak with me.”
10
The German forces which withdrew from Greece in October 1944 were very different in both numbers and quality from the field army which had invaded the country just over three years earlier. If the Twelfth Army of General von List, with its crack panzer divisions and its record of success in the Polish campaign, had epitomized the irresistible strength of the Wehrmacht, the occupation forces, setting out to make their way home while there was still a road home left open to them, epitomized no less strikingly the Wehrmacht’s ultimate exhaustion. The earlier practice of resting troops from the fighting fronts by giving them tours of occupation duty had long been abandoned as a luxury. The Lines of Communication Division which garrisoned the Salonika area in 1944 was, for the most part, made up of men who, for one reason or another, were considered unfit for combatant duty: debilitated survivors from the Russian front, the older men, the weaklings, and those who, because of either wounds or sickness, were of low medical categories.
For Sergeant Schirmer, the war had ended on that day in Italy when he had obeyed the order of an inexperienced officer to make a parachute jump over a wood. The comradeship of fighting men in a corps d’elite has meant a great deal to a great many men. To Sergeant Schirmer it had given something that his upbringing had always denied him-his belief in himself as a man. The months in the hospital which had followed the accident, the court of inquiry, the rehabilitation centre, the medical examinations, and the posting to Greece had been a bitter epilogue to the only period of his life in which he felt he had known happiness. Many times he had wished that the tree branch which had merely broken his hip had pierced his breast and killed him.
If the Ninety-fourth Garrison Regiment at Salonika had been the kind of unit in which a soldier like Sergeant Schirmer could have come to take even a grudging pride, many things no doubt would have been very different. But it was not a unit in which any self-respecting man could have taken pride. The officers (with a few exceptions such as Lieutenant Leubner) were the army’s unemployables, the kind of officers whom unit commanders hasten to get rid of when they have the chance and who spend most of their service lives held on depot establishments awaiting postings. The N.C.O.’s (again with a few exceptions) were incompetent and corrupt. The rank and file were a disgruntled and decrepit assembly of old soldiers, chronic invalids, dullards, and petty delinquents. Almost the first order which the Sergeant had received from an officer on joining had been an order to remove his paratrooper’s badge. That had been his introduction to the regiment, and as time went by, he had learned to fortify and console himself with his contempt for it.
The German withdrawal from Thrace was an ignominious affair. The depot soldiers responsible for the staff work had had little experience of moving troops in the field and still less of supplying them while they were on the move. Units like the Ninety-fourth Garrison Regiment, and there was more than one, could do little to make good the deficiencies. The knowledge that British raiding forces were advancing rapidly from the south in order to harass the retreat, and that andarte bands were already hovering aggressively on the flanks, may have lent urgency to the withdrawal, but, in doing so, it had also added to the confusion. It was traffic congestion rather than any brilliant planning by Phengaros that led to the ambushing of Sergeant Schirmer’s convoy.
He was one of the last of his regiment to leave the Salonika area. Contempt for his regiment he might have, but that did not prevent his doing his utmost to see that the fraction of it that he controlled carried out its orders properly. As headquarters weapons-instructor, he had no platoon responsibilities and came under the command of an engineer officer in charge of a special rear-guard party. This officer was Lieutenant Leubner, and he had been detailed to carry out a series of important demolitions in the wake of the retreat.
The Sergeant liked Lieutenant Leubner, who had lost a hand in Italy; he felt that the Lieutenant understood him. Between them they organized the party in two detachments, and the Sergeant was given command of one of them.
He drove his men and himself unmercifully and succeeded in completing his part of the work in accordance with the time-table issued with the movement order. During the night of the 23rd of October his detachment loaded the trucks they were to take with them and moved out of Salonika. They were exactly on schedule.
His orders were to go through Vodena, deal with the gasoline dump on the Apsalos road, and then rendezvous with Lieutenant Leubner at the bridge by Vodena. It had been anticipated that the laying of the demolition charges for the bridge would call for the united efforts of the two detachments if it were to be done to schedule. The time of the rendezvous had been fixed for dawn.
At first light that day Sergeant Schirmer was at Yiannitsa, only a little over halfway along the road to Vodena, and trying desperately to force a way for his detachment past a column of tank transporters. The transporters should have been fifty miles further on, but had themselves been held up by a column of horse-drawn wagons which had debouched from the Naoussa road twelve hours behind schedule. The Sergeant was two hours late when he passed through Vodena. Had he been on time, Phengaros’s men would have missed him by an hour.
It had rained during the night, and with the rising sun the air became stiflingly humid; moreover, the Sergeant had had no sleep for thirty hours. Yet, as he sat beside the driver of the leading truck, he had little difficulty in
