“Do you think for one minute that they wouldn’t think that he’d pinched the donkeys if he went to claim the reward?”
“That’s true, Amanda.” said Yani, “for all the village knows that Mayor Oizus is threatening me.”
“I don’t think it matters,” said Amanda. “We can claim the reward and then give it to Yani. I think the villagers’ll be so glad to get their donkeys back that they won’t care who took them.”
“Well, don’t let’s get too excited about it,” said David. “I wouldn’t trust that Mayor for all the tea in China. He might try and back out of it.”
“I don’t think he would be able to do that,” said Yani. “I think he’s too frightened of what the villagers would do to him if he did that.”
“Well, we’ll wait and see,” said David.
The following morning the police car once more returned from Melissa and from the back of it, with great pride, the Inspector produced a huge pile of posters tastefully printed in scarlet on a white ground, and with the sum of twenty thousand drachma written extra large (both in words and figures) in case, as he pointed out, it should be a Communist who could not read.
The posters were an immediate success. Apart from anything else, they were so pretty to look at. The Inspector’s cousin was not a very expert printer and so the lines of writing went up and down like the waves of the sea, but everybody agreed that this enhanced rather than detracted from the charm of the posters and, in fact, as Mama Agathi pointed out, they were so beautiful it was really a shame to hang them up in places where only Communists could see them. The villagers all agreed, so they set one aside which they pinned up carefully on the café door. Then the posters were distributed with much arguing and shouting, for they were so beautiful that even those people of Kalanero who had no donkeys and therefore had had no donkeys stolen, wanted to have a poster.
The children watched with glee as the villagers spent the morning carefully and proudly tacking up their posters on olive trees, vine supports and to the little bamboo fences that divided all their fields. Mama Agathi was so entranced by her two posters that she even went to Mrs Finchberry-White and borrowed a feather duster so that she could go out periodically and dust them, to make sure not a speck of dust marred their pristine brilliance. Amanda and David were almost hysterical with laughter by the time they got back to the villa for lunch.
“Oh, there you are, dears,” said Mrs Finchberry-White. “I was just coming to look for you. Lunch will be a little late. We had a slight accident over the soup. I asked Agathi to serve it and for some obscure reason she poured it down the sink. She was very upset, poor thing.”
The children made their way out on to the terrace where the General was standing squinting malevolently through his monocle at his latest masterpiece.
“Mother says lunch will be a little late,” reported Amanda. “She says that for some obscure reason Mama Agathi poured the soup down the sink.”
“The reason,” said the General, “is not obscure at all. It’s just simply that your mother, with her gift for tongues, told her to throw it away instead of to bring it out here. with the not unnatural result that she poured it down the sink.”
“Oh,” said Amanda, giggling, “I didn’t realise it was that.”
“By the way,” said the General, leaning forward and adding a touch of colour to his picture, “I trust you are giving those donkeys enough to eat.”
Amanda and David, who had just spread-eagled themselves on the warm flagstones, sat up as though they had been shot.
“What donkeys!” asked Amanda cautiously.
The General added another touch of colour to his picture.
“Donkeys,” he said. “You know, quadrupeds, beasts of burden; those things with long ears that bray.”
David and Amanda glanced at each other.
“I . . . I don’t know what you mean,” said Amanda.
“I mean,” said the General patiently, “all the donkeys of Kalanero which you have got carefully hidden on Hesperides.”
The children looked at each other in horror.
“How on earth did you know about that?” asked Amanda.
The General put down his palette and brush, took out his pipe and lit it.
“I told you the other day.” he said, “that I don’t disclose my sources of information as a rule. However, on this particular occasion I will tell you. Coocos was my informant.”
“Coocos?” chorused the children incredulously. “Coocos told you?”
“Yes,” said the General. “He has kept me informed of the matter from the very start.”
“But, he couldn’t have,” said Amanda, “Not Coocos! Why, he can’t even talk.”
“On the contrary,” said the General, “Coocos can talk very well, It is an impediment of speech, not of mind, that he suffers from. It’s just that everybody is so impatient they won’t stop to let him talk. Coocos loves talking, but nobody ever lets him.”
“Poor Coocos,” said Amanda slowly, “I’d never thought of that.”
“I, however,” continued the General, “have the patience to listen to him and so, whenever he can, he comes up here and I paint and he talks. You needn’t think, however, that he let you down by telling me. He was under the impression that I was master-minding the whole plot, as a matter of fact, since you had said something about asking my advice.”
“Oh, yes.” said Amanda, “that was about the kidnapping.”
“Yes, I thought it was that,” said the General. “However, I didn’t disillusion him, but I received, with interest, a constant stream of reports from him as to how the plot was going.”
“But why didn’t you stop us?” asked David.
“My dear David,” said the General, “you are quite old enough and have a sufficient quantity of brain to be able to organise your own lives. If you wanted to get yourselves into trouble it was your affair, not mine. In any case, as you were doing it for the best possible motives, I saw absolutely no reason to interfere.”
“But then, what did you tell the Inspector?” asked Amanda.
“Ah,” said the General, puffing at his pipe. “there I must say I did interfere slightly. It struck me that you had committed no grave criminal offence by stealing the donkeys, since you intended to return them. However, if you had sent a ransom note (which I presumed was going to be your next step) then I am afraid I would not have been able to save you from the wrath of the law. So I suggested to the Inspector that his best method was to offer a reward.”
“Father, you are clever!” said Amanda admiringly.
“I am frequently dazzled by my own brilliance,” said the General modestly.
“Well, what do you think we ought to do now?” asked Amanda.
“I would suggest that you wait until to-morrow,” said the General, “discover the whereabouts of the donkeys and then claim the reward.”
He tapped out his pipe on the edge of the terrace and hummed a few bars of “The Road to Mandalay” to himself.
“I might even,” he remarked, “walk as far as the village square for the sake of seeing Oizus pay up. You see, I don’t like him any more than you do and I happen to like Yani very much.”