There were two men still intact enough to be making desperate phone calls. Lars didn’t know any more than that, as he swiftly unscrewed the silencer, then the barrel, thrust the rest of the equipment into the pack, and headed back down the steps. The shadows had crept over the stone steps beneath his feet, changing their colour from honey to grey.
At the foot of the stairs, he gently pushed the bolt back and unlocked the door. The two Americans saw him exit. The woman with her pinched face stared at him; the man looked embarrassed, afraid even, as if he knew they had no business looking. Lars pinned the No Entry tape back over the door. There was a different group entering now, from another run of the bus across the isthmus. At least they hadn’t seen him on the bus, as the American couple had. They stared at him, but he lowered his eyes and walked past them.
He crossed himself briefly in front of the Virgin’s picture, avoiding Her eyes too, and walked out of the monastery’s entrance into the blinding sunshine. He heard a distant sound: engines starting. Passing the small chapel of Saint Sava, under the cypress, where the chickens had a new sprinkling of food to pick at, he headed to the south shore.
On the pile of rocks that made up the southern breakwater of the island, he unslung his backpack, reached inside, and removed the small air bottle, then the micro aqualung and a pair of fins. The engine sound was growing. He looked back over his shoulder and saw that a helicopter had left the deck of the
Lars carefully descended through the tumbled rocks to the water, dragging the backpack with him. He picked out two of the smaller rocks under the water, broken off from the huge ones, and put them into the pack, then towed it and himself into the sea. He glanced back. He couldn’t see the launches down here, but he saw the helicopter sweeping towards the island. Stumbling down the rocks, he slid under the water.
He swam heavily and clumsily with the pack in one hand down to the lowest of the piled rocks. He drew a waterproof packet out of the pack—his passport and money—and then shoved the pack under a rock until it was wedged fast. He rolled several other smaller rocks over it until it was invisible.
Then he set out beneath the sea.
Only now did he try to slow his panicked breathing, to conserve the precious air. He had only five litres, not enough for his liking. He wouldn’t make the three and a half miles to the promontory, that was certain, not with all the exertion. He’d have to come in to land earlier.
Chapter 9
ANNA SAT ACROSS A blue-painted wooden table in the Restaurant des Alpilles and took a sip from the glass of Sancerre Willy had ordered.
“Cheers,” Willy said, and they drank together. “Happy birthday, my dear.” He looked at her. It had been only three weeks since they’d last met, but he was always looking to make a compliment. “You’re looking so French, Anna,” he said, and smiled. “After just a year in the village. Like one of those women in the magazines. Chic, and as beautiful as ever. Happy birthday!” He raised his glass, and they drank.
“Thank you, Willy. You should see me normally,” she replied. “Dungarees and grass in my hair.”
“You look good whatever you wear,” he insisted. “You look well too.” He put his hand over hers on the table and squeezed it.
Willy was a good man. “A dependable Hungarian”—that was how Finn had described him before she and Willy had met, with a heavy emphasis on “dependable.” And he was smart too. “You know what they say about the Hungarians, Anna,” Finn had once said to her. “They come into the revolving door behind you and come out ahead of you.”
She noticed that still, two years after Finn’s death, she continued inwardly to refer to Finn’s opinions.
She, Finn, and Willy had lived through a lot together. She didn’t need Finn’s opinion of Willy to know she could rely on him. He was the last thing left standing after the hurricane of Finn’s death; a man rooted into her life, into the earth itself. In his seventy-two years, more than fifty of them in the West, he had developed a tanned leanness, with a fierce sparkle in his eyes that looked directly at her out of a face lined like a woodcut. He had supported her in the past two years, and before that too, before Finn died even. He had been an undemanding friend and father figure, always there for her if she called. Just as he’d always been there for Finn.
She tried to imagine him as the handsome youth of more than fifty years before, when he’d fled from Hungary after Russian tanks entered Budapest in ’56. Back then, his country’s brief leap for freedom was crushed. He had fought on the barricades, retreated, fought again until it was almost too late, survived, and escaped intact.
In the West, the British had eventually recruited him. He’d made more than twenty trips across the Iron Curtain, Finn had told her, but he swiftly became disillusioned. Willy had thought the West was fighting for Hungary’s freedom, but, like other refugees from the East, he was to be disappointed. Hungary was just a walk-on part in the geopolitical game of the Cold War.
Willy was important to her, she realised, not for the first time. He wasn’t just her last link to Finn; he was a mirror for her own survival as an exile.
“How’s my godson?” Willy asked.
“He’s loving life, Willy. Every minute of it. Maybe he’s a little self-absorbed sometimes, but I consider that to be a good thing. He finds out things for himself.”
“He needs a man in his life, Anna. He’s surrounded by women. You, the school . . .”
She laughed. Willy was always trying to get her fixed up with various “safe” men under the guise of it being right for Little Finn. He had a straightforward view of the relationship between men and women, but without the arrogance she knew in many men from the East.
She and Willy had married shortly after Finn had died, but it was only for her security. He was more than thirty years older than her, after all. But she’d easily agreed that their friendship justified this arrangement. She was able to have a new name, a new identity, until she’d been able to broker the deal with the French and do it properly.
“I mean it. He needs a man,” Willy repeated adamantly.
“But not any man,” she stated.
His eyes narrowed. She knew the look. It preceded something artful.
“What about you, then? Get yourself a new man, why not?” Willy changed tack, his easy smile not quite concealing the old-fashioned attitude behind it. “You’re young, you’re beautiful, you shouldn’t be alone all the time,” he pressed her.
“Like . . . get a new sofa, you mean?” she said. “Or get a new car?”
“Well . . .” Willy wasn’t sure this wasn’t such a bad comparison.
“Look, Willy, I’m happy as things are. And if I weren’t, why would a man be the antidote?”
“Are you angry with Finn? Is that it? Do you feel he betrayed you?”
“Finn never betrayed anyone but himself.”
“And you and the boy were collateral damage.”
She smiled at the aggressive chess game of his thoughts, always pushing the pieces out at her.
“Not necessarily, Willy,” she replied. “It’s all a matter of how you perceive it. Do I look damaged?”
“No. But you’re tough, Anna. Maybe you’re too tough sometimes for your own good. You can sit there and tell me, ‘It’s just a matter of how you perceive it.’ What kind of thinking is that? It’s not reality.”
“Reality is exactly what it is. It’s that kind of thinking, Willy.”
“But romance . . . !” Willy protested. He was off again, a new tack, new methods of persuasion. “What about a little physical comfort? What’s wrong with some fun? Eh?”
She laughed. “You’re the old devil, Willy, not me.”
“Romance never let me down,” Willy insisted. “It’s been like water in the desert.”
“So it’s some unalloyed good then, is it?” she replied. “No, Willy. There’s good romance and bad romance, same as anything else. Read the poets. Anyway, maybe you should ask some of your exes how great their romances were. Or would it take too long?”
“You’re cheeky and you are tough,
