“A bad business. The sigurmi will squeeze them dry, even this smuggler friend of yours. They have their ways and they are not pleasant. I’m sorry for the girl. God knows what they will do with her.”
“I was wondering whether it would be possible to get into Tama,” Chavasse said. “Perhaps find out what’s happened to them?”
She looked at him sharply, her face grave. “We have a saying. Only a fool puts his head between the jaws of the tiger.”
“They’ll be beating the marshes toward the coast,” he said. “That stands to reason. Who’s going to look for me in Tama?”
“A good point.” She got to her feet and looked down into the fire, her hand on the stone mantel above it. She turned to face him. “There is one person who might be able to help, a Franciscan, Father Shedu. In the war, he was a famous resistance fighter in the hills, a legend in his own time. It would hardly be polite to arrest or shoot such a man. They content themselves with making life difficult for him – always with the utmost politeness, of course. He hasn’t been here long. A couple of months or so. I think the last man was taken away.”
“I could make a good guess about what happened to him,” Chavasse said. “This Father Shedu, he’s in Tama now?”
“There’s a medieval monastery on the outskirts of the town. They use it as local military headquarters. The Catholic church has been turned into a restaurant, but there’s an old monastery chapel at the water’s edge. Father Shedu holds his services there.”
“Would it be difficult to reach?”
“From here?” She shrugged. “Not more than half an hour. I have an outboard motor. Not too reliable, but it gets me there.”
“Could I borrow it?”
“Oh, no.” She shook her head. “They’d pick you up before you’d got a mile along the river. I know the back ways – you don’t.”
She took down an oilskin jacket from behind the door and tossed it to him together with an old peaked cap. “Ready when you are.”
She picked up her hunting rifle and led the way out through the front door and down toward the river. There was still no boat moored at the little wooden jetty. She passed it, moving through dense undergrowth and emerged on a small cleared bank that dropped cleanly into the water. Her boat, a flat-bottomed marsh punt with an old motor attached to the stern, was tied to a tree.
Chavasse cast off while she busied herself with the motor. As it coughed into life, he pushed the punt through the encircling reeds and stepped in.
LIRI KUPI CERTAINLY KNEW WHAT SHE WAS doing. At one point, they hit rough water where the river twisted round sandbanks, spilling across ragged rocks, and she handled the frail craft like an expert, swinging the tiller at just the right moment to sweep them away from the worst hazards.
After a while, they left the Buene, turning into a narrow creek that circled through a great stagnant swamp, losing itself among a hundred lagoons and waterways.
When they finally came into the river again, it was in the lee of a large island. The mist hung like a gray curtain from bank to bank, and as they moved from the shelter of the island to cross over, he could smell woodsmoke and somewhere a dog barked.
The first houses loomed out of the mist, scattered along one side of the river, and Liri took the punt in close. She produced the tin of cigarettes from her pocket and threw it to Chavasse.
“Better have one. Try to look at home.”
“Home was never like this.”
He lit a cigarette, leaned back against the prow and watched the town unfold itself. There were fewer than five hundred inhabitants these days, that much he knew. Since the cold war had warmed up between Yugoslavia and Albania, the river traffic had almost stopped and the Buene was now so silted up as to be unnavigable for boats of any size.
The monastery lifted out of the mist, a vast sprawling medieval structure with crumbling walls, several hundred yards back from the riverbank.
The Albanian flag, hanging limply in the rain, lifted in a gust of wind, the red star standing out vividly against the black, double-headed eagle, and a bugle sounded faintly.
A little farther along the bank, forty or fifty convicts worked, some of them waist-deep in water as they drove in the piles for a new jetty. Chavasse noticed that the ones on the banks had their ankles chained together.
“Politicals,” Liri said briefly. “They send them here from all over the country. They don’t last long in the marshes when the hot weather comes.”
She eased the tiller, turning the punt in toward the bank and a small ruined chapel whose crumbling walls fell straight into the river. At the foot of the wall, the entrance to a narrow tunnel gaped darkly and Liri took the punt inside.
There was a good six feet of headroom and Chavasse reached out to touch cold, damp walls, straining his eyes into the darkness, which suddenly lightened considerably. Liri cut the motor and the punt drifted in toward a landing stage constructed of large blocks of worked masonry.
They scraped beside a flight of stone steps and Chavasse tied up to an iron ring and handed her out. Light filtered down from somewhere above and she smiled through the half darkness.
“I shan’t be long.”
She mounted a flight of stone steps and Chavasse lit another cigarette, sat on the edge of the jetty and waited. She was gone for at least fifteen minutes. When she returned, she didn’t come all the way down, but called to him from the top of the steps.
He went up quickly and she turned, opened a large oak door and led the way along a narrow passage. She opened another door at the far end and they stepped into the interior of the small chapel.
THE LIGHTS WERE VERY DIM AND, DOWN BY the altar, the candles flickered and the Holy Mother was bathed in light. The smell of incense was overpowering and Chavasse felt a little giddy. It was a long time since he had been in church, too long as his mother was never tired of reminding him, and he smiled wryly as they moved down the aisle.
Father Shedu knelt in prayer at the altar, the brown habit dark and somber in the candlelight. His eyes were closed, the worn face completely calm, and somehow, the ugly puckered scar of the old bullet wound that had carried away the left eye seemed completely in character.
He was a man, strong in his faith, certain in his knowledge of that which was ultimately important. Men like Enver Hoxha and Adem Kapo would come and go, ultimately to break upon the rock that was Father Shedu.
He crossed himself, got to his feet in one smooth movement and turned to face them. Chavasse suddenly felt awkward under the keen scrutiny of that single eye. For a moment, he was a little boy again at his grandfather’s village in Finistere just after the war when France was free again, standing before the old, implacable parish priest, trying to explain his absence from mass, the tongue drying in his mouth.
Father Shedu smiled and held out his hand. “I am happy to meet you, my son. Liri has told me something of why you are here.”
Chavasse shook hands, relief flowing through him. “She seemed to think you might be able to help, Father.”
“I know something of what happened to the statue of Our Lady of Scutari,” the priest said. “It was my predecessor, Father Kupescu, who gave it into the charge of the young man who was later killed in the marshes. Father Kupescu has since paid for his actions with his life, I might add.”
“The girl who was with me was the young man’s sister,” Chavasse said. “She was the one who guided us to the position of Minetti’s launch.”
Father Shedu nodded. “She and an Italian named Orsini arrived in Tama earlier this afternoon. They were taken to the monastery.”
“Are you sure?”
“I was visiting sick prisoners at the time, one of the little privileges I still insist on.”
“I’m surprised you’re allowed to function at all.”
Father Shedu smiled faintly. “As you may have noticed, my name is the same as that of our beloved President, something for which the average party member holds me in superstitious awe. They can never be quite sure that I’m not some kind of third cousin, you see. There are things they can do, of course. We had a wonderful old church here. Now, it’s a restaurant. They use the altar as a counter and the nave is crammed with tables at which the happy workers can consume kebab and shashlik to the greater glory of Enver Hoxha.”