"We're going now," he said. "You got any luggage?" Selina nodded at the pile of cases on the deck, and the other gunman lowered them into the powerboat.
"Okay," said the gunman. "Let's go."
"What about my father?" Craig asked in Greek.
The gunman said: "You'll get him. Just stay quiet." Then to Selina: "Lady, we got to go."
Selina turned to face Craig and spoke in Arabic.
"You will not forget what I told you," she said. 'You are a man and a warrior. You have no need of lies. Goodbye."
The Arabic words were grave, dignified, and not in the least out of place. She turned and went down into the powerboat.
"What did she say?" the gunman asked.
Craig tried to look bewildered.
"I don't know," he said. "Good-bye, I suppose."
"I hope you didn't get out of line," said the gunman.
"She's pretty," said Craig. "Money's prettier."
The gunman laughed.
"Listen very carefully," he said. "You and I are going to leave here now—and you're never coming back. Start your motor."
Craig obeyed, and the caique, escorted by the powerboats, sailed out into the Aegean until behind them Menos dwindled and faded into nothing.
"You never come back," the gunman said, and walked up close to Craig, shook a cigarette from a pack, and held it out to him. Craig took it, and fumbled for a match. "I mean never," said the gunman, "or you'll get what your father got. And I wouldn't call him pretty."
Craig looked up, and the barrel of the Steyr swung and glittered in the sunlight. Pain exploded on the side of his head, and then the sun went out; he dived into welcoming darkness.
· « «
The first thing he noticed was the noise; a choking, popping sound that was familiar, but wrong. His mind struggled to find an answer, but the effort was too much. Gratefully, he felt the blackness engulf him once more. The second time, all he knew was the pain, a searing agony in the pit of his stomach, a rhythmic throbbing on the left side of his head, that gradually synchronized with the popping noise he had heard before. The engine. There was something wrong with the engine. Craig groaned, and opened his eyes. He was lying on his stomach on the deck. Slowly, every inch an agony, he rolled over and sat up. He observed that there was blood from the knife wound seeping through his shirt. The fact neither frightened nor impressed him. It was simply a fact. Somehow Craig got to his feet and lurched toward the engine hold by the tiny bridge.
Serafin lay on the deck. Craig looked at him, stiffened, then looked down again to where the blood still flowed. He was weak and getting weaker. He could do nothing until the bleeding stopped. Somehow he fumbled his way into the cabin, pressed the lips of the cut together and re-bandaged it, cleaned up the mess on the side of his face, then allowed himself one drink and went up topside to work once more at Serafin.
The old man was a mess. His face and body were covered in enormous bruises, and his right arm was broken. Craig felt the old man's pulse, which was fluttering and fast. Groaning with weakness, Craig set the old man's arm, taped his ribs, put a pillow under his head and wrapped him in blankets, then switched off the engine. Getting down into the engine hold was an agony, searching for the faults in the diesel a chess match with a grand master. At last he heated the engine with a blow lamp, the only sparking plug a caique diesel possesses, swung the handle, his whole body one great pain, then staggered over to the wheel. Someone had lashed it so that the caique sailed in a great circle, half a mile in diameter. Craig set a course that would take him to Serafin's wife's brother. When he found him he sent him at once to Athens for Serafin's son, then held course for Andraki, staying up now by willpower alone, his body drained far beyond the point of collapse, and only the savage drive of his will to keep him going.
When he reached the island he fired the Verey pistol, and at once a boat put out for him, and men picked them up, carried them into the boat, and at last to the hut on the beach, where Serafin's wife stood waiting.
Craig said: "I'm sorry, mother. I—"
"No," said the old woman. "Your turn will come."
"Yes," Craig said. "I promise you that."
Then he fainted.
38
B ME RICH
» Chapter 5 «=*
Dr. Stavros Kouprassi was small, chubby, voluble. That his father and mother should be Serafin and Maria was a minor miracle to Craig. It seemed to him that Stavros must have lived at least three lives in Athens to achieve so high a degree of sophistication, so conscientiously urbane an attitude to everything that happened to him and to the world. He had been fifteen when Craig first met him, in 1943, working on his father's boat, as Craig had once worked with Ms father. Even then he had been a sophisticate, fussy about his shirt, his fingernails, his one pair of shoes. In all of Andraki there was no one who looked and acted so like an Athenian as Stavros; plump, sleek, and hard as a seal. Except for one thing. Even at fifteen, Stavros was an artist with a knife. There was no one on the island to touch him. That was why he had been chosen to kill the sentry outside the prison.
The prison held one man, a schoolteacher called Andreou, and it was guarded like the vaults of a bank. Andreou, in 1943, was intelligence officer for the Andraki Resistance movement, and the Germans knew this. It was vital that Andreou should be freed before the Gestapo arrived from Athens to learn his secrets, so vital that a message had been sent to the Special Boat Service, and a caique manned by experts had been sent to help. Among them had been Craig, and a small, dark, dangerous man called Rutter. Craig had been young then, not all that much older than Stavros, and yet he had frightened Stavros from the very beginning. He moved so swiftly, and yet so carefully; his decisions were so accurate, his weapons so apt. He handled them as a painter might handle his brushes, familiarly yet with care, almost with love. In Andraki Stavros had seen death many times; he had never seen anyone who used it as Craig used it, and he feared him.
When they went to rescue Andreou, they were betrayed. The sentry was there all right—an expendable Pole —and Stavros reached him and killed him, clinically, neatly, but then the world went mad and panzer grenadiers seemed to grow out of the ground, coming in for the kill. One had grabbed him, twisted his knife wrist, rammed his arm behind his back, and Stavros, in his nightmares, remembered to perfection how he had straddled the Pole when it had happened, how the nightingales stopped singing as a cloud covered the new moon, how Craig had appeared behind the panzer grenadier, pulled back his steel helmet, gripped its rim in his hands, spun it like a steering wheel and broken his neck, then let him drop, still twitching, and gone to help the little dark man kill Germans. They had done it like terriers killing rats, then blasted their way into the prison as alarm bells gonged and a rocket climbed, burst, in the rich dark bloom of the sky. They had found Andreou too, and carried him out—his left leg was broken—while Serafin and the others kept up the fight, and lorry loads of grenadiers came into action.
Stravos adored Andreou. The schoolteacher had taught him so much, encouraged him to believe that for him to be a doctor was not only possible, but essential, until Stavros, too, believed it, and learned all that the schoolteacher could teach him. Without Andreou he was nothing. And that night he watched the man he adored carried out by strangers. They carried him carefully, but without feeling, Stavros remembered, as if he were an object whose value might diminish at any minute. The German reinforcements arrived, and Stavros's father and the rest of the Andraki men were pushed inevitably back. Stavros stood where he was, and stared at Andreou, and the noise of battle grew louder. Stavros didn't hear it. All he heard was Andreou saying, "Can you get me out?"