'Yes,' I said. 'He will have a full moon, tonight. They will use the American's boat. They are all in it together.'
Touch by touch I inflamed his rage and greed. 'I will report this at once to the Vali,' he said. 'You will return to your house, and remain there. You will not leave your house, Pascali.'
I obeyed him, Excellency, to the letter. Here I am. It must be somewhere between eleven and midnight. I have heard nothing. Supposing after all that I am wrong. I review the evidence in my mind: the involvement with Lydia; his meeting with Mister Smith; his talk of the day after tomorrow; full moon – he would not dare show lights; the finality of that handshake, and then the envelope under the door. No, I cannot be mistaken. Above all, there is my knowledge of him. He would never give the statue up…
Excellency, I hear sounds now, on the terrace outside, voices. They have come for me. What I have been dreading so much I could not speak of it… They will ask me to guide them… They are knocking now, calling my name.
Everything is finished, Excellency. I am outside the frame now. He is dead. Lydia too is dead. It is more than a week since I have been able to write. I go on living here in my house. No one has made a move against me; I am left alone. It is only with the greatest effort that I take up my pen again. All desire to write has left me, all that racing to keep abreast of things, that passion for recording, that has kept me writing so furiously ever since he arrived: all ended now, all stilled. The shots that killed them ended my report. What is left is epilogue; or perhaps, roughly speaking, coda.
They would not have died at all, or at least they could have been given a chance of life, if it had not been for the discovery of the murdered soldiers. I never intended his death, only his defeat, I wanted to make my failure his too, preserve the intimate connexion between us. Zusammen verbunden, as Herr Gesing said, that evening at dinner, linking his hands together. All the time, obscurely, I was worried about those soldiers. He did not seem to mind their presence there, once they were off the site itself, away from a direct view of his activities. Did he know what was going to happen to them?
They came for me, Mahmoud Pasha himself and Izzet at his heels. Appropriate of course that I should lead them to him, perform the kiss. Twelve troops. We went in two boats across the bay, keeping near to the shore to be in the moon's shadow as far as possible. They had muffled the oars. We made no noise as we crawled along the rim of the bright sea, the shadowed hills to our right. No one spoke. We beached beyond the headland in the little cove. Their ship's boat was already there, on rollers, near the water. The caique lay farther out, beyond the line of the jetty, no lights showing. If any of the crew had been left on board, they would certainly have seen us, but there was no sound, no challenge. The boat waiting there on the beach, the deserted caique, this was all the evidence that was needed. I had been right. They were up there already.
On the beach the soldiers tied cloth round their boots. I too was made to muffle my steps. I had decided to lead them by way of the stream bed, since this was the only way Mister Bowles could come down, and we would thus be able to intercept him if he finished the work earlier than expected.
We proceeded in double file, with myself and Mahmoud in the lead. Mahmoud wheezed with the exertion of the climb, but displayed a dreadful lightness of foot-I was hard put to keep up with him. The smooth stones of the stream bed led up before us white in the moonlight, glinting with mica. We made no noise, trudging steadily, eyes on the path before us, careful of the loose stones. In spite of my anguish, or perhaps because of it, because my mind clamoured for respite, a sense of unreality descended on me, I fell into a dream-like state as we went on, a condition almost of trance. There was the white defile before us, the slow climb, the need to set one foot after the other: all this precluded any sense of an issue, as if this ascent could have gone on for ever.
When we reached a level roughly similar to that at which the two lower troops had been stationed, Mahmoud despatched a man to alert them. They were some three hundred metres to the west of us, in the direction of the town, where they could overlook the approach by sea.
'It is odd', Izzet whispered to me, 'that they have seen nothing.' His face was pinched and white in the moonlight, looking narrower, more bird-like than ever below the dark turban he was wearing. 'The pigs must have been drinking,' he whispered.
We waited for perhaps ten minutes there. Then we saw the man returning, walking carefully across the slope, just above us. He was holding both hands extended before him a little, in what even at that distance seemed a stiff and unnatural manner. This was the beginning of the nightmare, Excellency, up till then merely the approaches, the moonlight reaches of the dream. As in nightmare the man was hampered, he could only approach slowly for fear of noise – he had to contain his news until he could whisper it. Slowly he clambered down towards us. He held out his hands towards Mahmoud. His broad Mongolian face was expressionless with shock. His hands were darker than his face, much darker – the blood was still moist. 'They are dead,' he said, in a harsh whisper. He raised one hand and made a sharp gesture inwards, towards his chest. 'I thought at first they were sleeping,' he said.
Mahmoud Pasha looked at the man's hands, then up towards the slope, towards the way we were going. He nodded once. 'Gelde, cochuklar,' he said. 'Come, my children, let us continue.'
There was death in the air now – I think from that moment Mister Bowles's death was inevitable. We went on in silence. From time to time we had to climb up along the sides, holding to the low branches of pines. But always we followed the line of the stream. We were now not far below the ruins, though these were not visible to us here. The cold radiance of the moon lay on the hills around and above us. The plunges of granite in the gorge beyond the headland were like streams immobilised by a thickening solution of alkali, divided into deltas by the darker scrub. Threading the slopes, the silver lines of goat tracks.
I led them up, sick at heart, thinking of nothing now but coming to the end. We quitted the track at a point well above the hollow, and very slowly, very cautiously now, came obliquely downwards across the slope. He had posted no lookout, Excellency. He would have had the confidence of his destiny upon him; but he must have known the soldiers were dead, otherwise he would surely have taken this precaution -we would have been visible as we took up our positions above them, there would have been time for them to get clear. Of course, he needed all the men for the work, perhaps even Lydia too…
Now the long claw of the headland was before us, beyond it we could see the great brimming expanse of the bay, the glimmering of the ancient jetty, the shadowed caique at rest on the calm surface. We worked our way round to a rocky terrace on the slope, some three or four yards deep. To our right the land plunged down again in a torrent of silvered rock and scrub. Slowly we worked along the terrace. Suddenly Mahmoud held up his hand, halted us. There they were, Excellency, working full in the moonlight. There were six of them, not five as I had been expecting: two below, in the hollow itself, four at the top of the slope. The statue dangled, still upright, just clear of the bank.
Mahmoud gestured us into position along the terrace, spaced at intervals, concealed among the rocks. Me he kept beside him. It was a perfect field of fire, Excellency: they had no chance, none whatever. And still they worked on, absorbed, totally heedless. Even when his men were settled in position, Mahmoud gave no order. He uttered a hiss of indrawn breath, and when I glanced at him, I saw that he was smiling. I will not forget that smile of his big white face. He waited there, withholding the order, savouring his triumph; waiting while we crouched and watched them at their work.