I went back up the hill, into the trees and scrub and worked my way along the slope until I found a little open space, nicely screened from the sea. I sat down and pulled my field-glasses out of the nylon string bag I had borrowed from Vérité. In it, besides the field-glasses, I had my cigarettes, a flask of whisky, and a pullover in case the day should cloud over and make it too cold just for shirt-sleeves and light drill trousers. Inside the pullover I had wrapped the ·22 Le Chasseur.
I snapped off a few branches of the bush ahead of me, and had a good view of the little bay. Pomina was more or less below me and I could see my woman friend, back in her yard, hanging up strings of tomatoes against the house wall to dry. I kept the glasses on her for a moment and she jerked her head over her shoulder and looked up the hill, as though some instinct told her that the madman was still about. She had a fine, very thin line of black hair above her upper lip. I shifted the glasses away. On my left hand a longish promontory ran out protecting the south side of the bay. Away to the right, on the north of the bay, were a couple of islands, white limestone boulders thrusting up through the green shrubs on their summits. Anchored in the bay, a couple of hundred yards off Pomina, was a yacht. It was lined up dead ahead of me, so that I got the nice smooth white run of its rather bulbous stern square on in the glasses. In black letters her name and home port were painted just below the rail: KOMIRA, BRINDISI.
There was no sign of life on deck. An Italian flag flapped a few loose folds now and then over the stern, and water was being pumped out of some sluice port just above the water-line. She was a nice boat, long, low, single funnelled, radar basket above the bridge, and I didn’t bother to work out how many months’ work I would have had to do for Herr Spiegel to save up enough to buy her. A companion ladder ran down the starboard side and there was a small white launch moored at its foot.
I lit a cigarette and kept my eye on the rough road down to Pomina. For an hour the sun and I idled the time away.
Then there was a movement on the yacht. Two men appeared on deck and came down the companion-way to the launch. The launch moved away from the Komira and headed towards Pomina. It tied up at the jetty and the two men stepped ashore. I held them through the glasses. One of them was an elderly deckhand type, singlet, canvas trousers and a black thatch of hair with a bald patch dead in its centre. He was carrying, somewhat surprisingly, a couple of golf clubs and a bulging white linen bag. The other was a tall, much younger man, wearing a black silk shirt, wide open to show a façade of muscles that would have made Tarzan feel like something that had crawled out of a crack behind the bath, black trousers and black sandals. His hair was blond, close-cropped, and his face was square, regularly featured, good looking in the way that the dummies in the windows of Austin Reed’s and Simpson’s are, very masculine, guaranteed to crack if the smile became half an inch wider. His reflexes were perfect. As he stepped ashore the sleeping yellow dog uncoiled, resenting the intrusion, and went for his leg. He caught it with his right toe in the groin, hefted it into the water to cool off, and strode ashore without giving any impression that he had been aware of the incident.
Both of them came along the shore and then headed up the hillside towards me. I stubbed out my cigarette.
They came out on to a small grassy plateau about fifteen yards below me and halted there. Flat on my paunch, I stuck my head through a bush to get a good look at them. They were talking in German so nothing they said made any sense to me, except the occasional ja, ja, nein, nein, which didn’t help.
The deckhand tipped up the linen bag on the grass and about three dozen golf balls tumbled out. The blond Siegfried took one of the golf clubs – it looked like a seven iron, or something in the mashie niblick range – and helped himself to a few practice swings. It whistled through the air at the lowest point of his swing with a swish like a rocket going off. Then he nodded at the deckhand, who began to set the balls up for him.
He swung at a ball and my heart bled for the polyurethane painted cover and the labyrinth of rubber guts inside it. It went off, straight and true, howling with pain and fell thirty yards short of the Komira, dead in line with the stern. He smacked another dozen after it and you could have covered the fall of them all with a large table cloth. I lay with my eyes popping out and wished Arnold Palmer could have been there. It would have made him take up smoking again.
Having loosened himself up with the iron, he passed to the wood, a spoon, and began to bombard the yacht and make pretty patterns of water spouts around and beyond it. One fifty yards to port. The next fifty yards to starboard. A nice bit of draw, and another curling in and beyond the bows from
