A taxi took us over the hill from Dubrovnik and down to the port of Gruz, where we went aboard one of the small coastal steamers. Vérité went below and laid claim to a small corner of the saloon for us. I stayed on deck and watched the local cargo for the small islands being packed on the foredeck. There was everything from fertilizer to furniture cream, lubricating oil to lavabos, and the odd coop of chickens, eyes already jaundiced with mistrust of the sea.
There was a good stinging breeze coming in from the sea, healthy, and full of red bauxite dust from the dumps farther along the quayside, and a group of young boys and girls were singing and playing mandolins and harmonicas as though it were not six o’clock in the morning.
Michael Oglu came aboard just before the ship pulled out and handed me a note.
“Came through this morning,” he said. “Couldn’t catch you before you left the hotel. Read it later.” He drifted off.
When the boat was well away from the quay I went below and joined Vérité. She had ordered eggs and bacon and coffee. The eggs came, swimming in lagoons of olive oil, and we shared a table with two young sailors going home on leave to one of the islands and a young girl with a month-old baby, her first – both sailors combined to tell us this – which she had produced at the maternity hospital in Dubrovnik. Her husband was a schoolmaster on the island of Sipan. The baby was quietly sick every ten minutes and I can’t say that I enjoyed my eggs, but the coffee was very good. Vérité had ordered it to be laced with brandy. When I commented on it, she nodded and said, “It settles the stomach against mal de mer.” The French are a great race when it comes to health.
I went to sleep for an hour and when I woke she was nursing the baby while the mother went off to powder her nose. When it was sick, she handled the situation with a couple of tissues as though she were an old hand at the game, and she smiled as she looked down into its face.
I picked up my copy of Stigmata and, under its cover, read the note which Michael Oglu had passed to me. It ran:
Vadarci may try unexpected exit Yugoslavia. If contacted left-thumbless give all help. Mother Jambo compromised. Now Ringmaster. R.A.D.I.
I sat there, trying to think of anyone I knew who had lost a left thumb, but nothing came.
CHAPTER EIGHT
BRUNHILD IN A BIKINI
We arrived at Mljet in mid-afternoon. We had run up the coast on the inside of a long string of islands, stopping now and then to set down and pick up passengers and cargo. The young mother disembarked at Sipan and was met by her husband, a young man in a stiff navy-blue suit and open-necked shirt. Mother and child were set on the back of a donkey and led proudly off up the hill, followed by a string of aunts and uncles.
After Sipan came Lopud and Kolocep, and I sat on deck and gave up Stigmata in favour of Fodor. Inland, on our starboard hand, was the great grey-white run of the mountains, and seawards always the low run of green islands. According to Fodor, Mljet’s chief claim to attention was that it was the only place left in Europe where the mongoose still roamed at liberty. Apparently they’d been imported long ago from the East to rid the island of snakes – and there was an argument still going on that Mljet and not Malta had been the place where St Paul had been shipwrecked and bitten by a snake. Snakes, mongooses, Katerina and St Paul. I couldn’t wait to get there.
We eventually hit a small port on the north side of Mljet called Polace, humped our cases ashore, and caught a small bus that took us up over the shoulder of a mountain and down to the side of the main lake – the Veliko Jezero. Jezero meant lake (Fodor). A waiting motor-boat hauled us across to the far side of the lake where there was a small island, about the size of a football pitch, on which stood the Hotel Melita – formerly a thirteenth-century Benedictine monastery. There was a wide, gravelled run of quayside in front of the hotel set with tables and coloured sun umbrellas. The first person I saw was Katerina, wearing a yellow bikini, lying stretched out in a deckchair, eyes shut, her face turned up to the sun. Alongside her sat Mrs Vadarci, in a coffee-coloured tea dress and a big flopping brimmed hat, looking as though she had just got back from a Buckingham Palace garden party. She was knitting something on large wooden needles that looked as though it might end up as a saddle blanket.
A girl, in a working black dress that was tight about the bust and short above the knees, carried our cases up the outer stairway of the hotel, into a run of cloisters and then through a narrow doorway into a small reception hall. As I turned to enter the cloisters I looked back and saw Katerina, eyes open, watching me. We looked at one another for a moment, then she gave a little yawn – for Mrs Vadarci’s benefit, I hoped – and flopped back into her chair.
We had rooms on the first floor at the front of the building, and they opened on to a long, vaulted corridor with great arched windows that looked out over the hotel quay and to the nearside of the lake which was about two hundred yards away.
There was a notice in three languages on the inside of my door stating that the hotel
