He went back and stretched out on his bed. What had the years done to her7 What had the tragedy done? Kitty, beautiful Kitty … please be all right. It was now November of 1946, Mark figured; when was the last time he saw her? Nineteen thirty-eight … just before he went to Berlin for ANS. Eight years ago. Kitty would be twenty-eight years old now.
The excitement and tension caught up with Mark. He was tired and he began to doze.
The tinkle of ice cubes, a sweet sound to Mark Parker, brought him out of a deep sleep. He rubbed his eyes and groped around for a cigarette.
“You sleep as though you were drugged,” a very British accent said. “I knocked for five minutes. The bellboy let me in. Hope you don’t mind me helping myself to the whisky.” The voice belonged to Major Fred Caldwell of the British Army. Mark yawned, stretched himself into wakefulness, and checked his watch. It was eight-fifteen. “What the hell are you doing on Cyprus?” Mark asked.
“I believe that is my question.”
Mark lit a cigarette and looked at Caldwell. He didn’t like the major nor did he hate him. “Despise” was the suitable word. They had met before twice. Caldwell had been the aide of Colonel, later Brigadier, Bruce Sutherland, quite a good
field officer in the British Army. Their first meeting had been in the lowlands near Holland during the war. In one of his reports Mark had pointed out a British tactical blunder that had caused a regiment of men to get cut to pieces. The second meeting had been at the Nuremberg war crimes trials which Mark was covering for ANS.
Toward the end of the war Bruce Sutherland’s troops were the first to enter the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany. Both Sutherland and Caldwell had come to Nuremberg to give testimony.
Mark walked to the bathroom, washed his face with icy water, and fished around for a towel. “What can I do for you, Freddie?”
“CID phoned over to our headquarters this afternoon and told us you landed. You haven’t been issued credentials.”
“Christ, you’re a suspicious bunch of bastards. Sorry to disappoint you, Freddie. I’m here on vacation en route to Palestine.”
“This isn’t an official call, Parker,” Caldwell said; “just say we are a bit touchy over past relationships.”
“You have long memories,” Mark said, and began dressing. Caldwell mixed Mark a drink. Mark studied the British officer and wondered why Caldwell always managed to rub him the wrong way. There was that arrogance about him that stamped him as a member of that quaint breed, the Colonizer. Caldwell was a stuffy and narrow-minded bore. A gentleman’s game of tennis, in whites … a bashing gin and tonic and damn the natives. It was Freddie Caldwell’s conscience or the utter lack of it that bothered Mark. The meaning of right and wrong came to Caldwell through an army manual or an order. “You boys covering up some dirty work on Cyprus?” “Don’t be a bore, Parker. We own this island and we want to know what you want here.”
“You know … that’s what I like about you British. A Dutchman would tell me to get the hell out. You fellows always say, ‘please go to hell.’ I said I was on vacation. A reunion with an old friend.”
“Who?”
“A girl named Kitty Fremont.”
“Kitty, the nurse. Yes, smashing woman, smashing. We met at the governor’s a few days back.” Freddie Caldwell’s eyebrows raised questioningly as he looked at the connecting door to Kitty’s room, which stood ajar.
“Go give your filthy mind a bath,” Mark said. “I’ve known her for twenty-five years.”
“Then, as you Americans say-everything’s on the up and up.”
“That’s right and from this point on your visit becomes social, so get out.”
Freddie Caldwell smiled and set down his glass and tucked the swagger stick under his arm.
“Freddie Caldwell,” Mark said. “I want to see you when that smile is wiped off your face.”
“What in the devil are you talking about?”
“This is 1946, Major. A lot of people read the campaign slogans in the last war and believed them. You’re a dollar short and an hour late. You’re going to lose the whole shooting match … first it’s going to be India, then Africa, then the Middle East. I’ll be there to watch you lose the Palestine mandate. They’re going to boot you out of even Suez and Trans-Jordan. The sun is setting on the empire, Freddie … what is your wife going to do without forty little black boys to whip?”
“I read your coverage of the Nuremberg trials, Parker. You have that terrible American tendency toward being overdramatic. Corny is the word, I think. Besides, old boy, I don’t have a wife.”
“You boys are polite.”
“Remember, Parker, you ate on vacation. I’ll give Brigadier Sutherland .your regards. Cheerio.”
Mark smiled and shrugged. Then it came back to him. The sign at the airport., … welcome to Cyprus: William Shakespeare. The full quote was-“Welcome to Cyprus, goats and monkeys.”
CHAPTER TWO: During the hours in which Mark Parker awaited his long-delayed reunion with Kitty Fremont, two other men awaited a reunion of a far different sort in a different part of Cyprus. Forty miles away from Kyrenia, north of the port city of Famagusta, they waited in a forest.
It was cloudy, socked-in with no light from the sky. The two men stood in utter silence and squinted through the dark toward the bay a half mile down the hill.
They were in an abandoned white house on the hill in the midst of a forest of pines and eucalyptus and acacias. It was still and black except for a wisp of wind and the muffled unsteady breathing of the two men.
One of the men was a Greek Cypriot, a forest service ranger, and he was nervous.
The other man appeared as calm as a statue, never moving his eyes from the direction of the water. His name was David Ben Ami. His name meant David, Son of My People.
The clouds began to break. Light fell over the still waters of the bay and on the forest and the white house. David Ben Ami stood in the window and the light played on his face. He was a man of slight build in his early twenties. Even in the poor light his thin face and his deep eyes showed the sensitivity of a scholar.
As the clouds swept away, the light crept over fields of broken marble columns and statuary that littered the ground about the white house.
Broken stone. The mortal remains of the once-great city of Salamis which stood mighty in the time of Christ. What history lay beneath this ground and throughout the fields of marble! Salamis, founded in times barely recorded by men, by the warrior Teucer on his return from the Trojan Wars. It fell by earthquake and it rose again and it fell once more to the Arab sword under the banner of Islam, never to arise again. The light danced over the acres and acres of thousands of broken columns where a great Greek forum once stood.
The clouds closed and it was dark again.
“He is long overdue,” the Greek Cypriot forest ranger whispered nervously.
“Listen,” David Ben Ami said.
A faint sound of a boat’s motor was heard from far out on the water. David Ben Ami lifted his field glasses, hoping for a break in the clouds. The sound of the motor grew louder.
A flash of light streaked out from the water toward the white house on the hill. Another flash. Another.
David Ben Ami and the forest ranger raced from the white house, down the hill, and through the rubble and the woods till they reached the shore line. Ben Ami returned the signal with his own flashlight.
The sound of the motor stopped.
A shadowy figure of a man slipped over the side of the boat and began to swim toward the shore. David Ben Ami cocked his Sten gun and looked up and down the beach for signs of a British patrol. The figure emerged from the deep water and waded in. “David!” a voice called from the water.
“Ari,” he answered back, “this way, quickly.”
On the beach the three men ran past the white house and onto a dirt road. A taxi waited, hidden in the brush. Ben Ami thanked the Cypriot forest ranger, and he and the man from the boat sped off in the direction of Famagusta.