The room was plainly furnished with a brass bed, a washstand and an old wardrobe. As elsewhere in the house, the walls were whitewashed and the floor highly polished.
Francesca stood just inside the door, one hand to the neck of her dress, holding it in place, and looked around approvingly.
“This is nice. Have you been here long?”
“Almost a week now. My first holiday in a year or more.”
He opened the wardrobe, rummaged among his clothes and finally produced a black polo neck sweater in merino wool. “Try that for size while I get you a drink. You look as if you could do with one.”
She turned her back and pulled the sweater over her head as he went to a cupboard in the corner. He took out a bottle of whisky and rinsed a couple of glasses in the bowl on the washstand. When he turned she was standing by the bed watching him, looking strangely young and defenseless, the dark sweater hanging loosely about her.
“Sit down, for God’s sake, before you fall down,” he said.
There was a cane chair by the French window leading to the balcony and she slumped into it and leaned her head against the glass window, staring into the darkness. Out at sea, a foghorn boomed eerily and she shivered.
“I think that must be the loneliest sound in the world.”
“Thomas Wolfe preferred a train whistle,” Chavasse said, pouring whisky into one of the glasses and handing it to her.
She looked puzzled. “Thomas Wolfe? Who was he?”
He shrugged. “Just a writer – a man who knew what loneliness was all about.” He swallowed a little of his whisky. “Girls like you shouldn’t be on the waterfront at this time of the morning, I suppose you know that? If I hadn’t arrived when I did, you’d have probably ended up in the water after they’d finished with you.”
She shook her head. “It wasn’t that kind of assault.”
“I see.” He drank some more of his whisky and considered the point. “If it would help, I’m a good listener.”
She held her glass in both hands and stared down at it, a troubled look on her face, and he added gently, “Is this something official? A Bureau operation, perhaps?”
She looked up, real alarm on her face, and shook her head vigorously. “No, they know nothing about it and they mustn’t be told, you must promise me that. It’s a family matter, quite private.”
She put down her glass, stood up and walked restlessly across the room. When she turned, there was an expression of real anguish on her face. She pushed her hair back with a quick nervous gesture and laughed.
“The trouble is, I’ve always worked inside. Never in the field. I just don’t know what to do in a situation like this.”
Chavasse produced his cigarettes, put one in his mouth and tossed the packet across to her. “Why not tell me about it? I’m a great one for pretty girls in distress.”
She caught the packet automatically and stood there looking at him, a slight frown on her face. She nodded slowly. “All right, Paul, but anything I tell you is confidential. I don’t want any of this getting back to my superiors. It could get me into real trouble.”
“Agreed,” he said.
She came back to her chair, took a cigarette from the packet and reached up for a light. “How much do you know about me, Paul?”
He shrugged. “You work for us in Rome. My own boss told me you were one of the best people we had out here and that’s good enough for me.”
“I’ve worked for the Bureau for two years now,” she said. “My mother was Albanian, so I speak the language fluently. I suppose that’s what first interested them in me. She was the daughter of a gegh chieftain. My father was a colonel of mountain troops in the Italian occupation army in 1939. He was killed in the Western Desert early in the war.”
“Is your mother still alive?”
“She died about five years ago. She was never able to return to Albania once Enver Hoxha and the Communists took over. Two of her brothers were members of the Legaliteri in North Albania, which had royalist aims. They fought with Abas Kupi during the war. In 1945 Hoxha called them in from the hills to a peace conference at which they were immediately executed.”
There was no pain on her face, no emotion at all, except a calm acceptance of what must have been for a long time quite simply a fact of life.
“At least that explains why you were willing to work for us,” Chavasse said softly.
“It was not a hard decision to make. There was only an old uncle, my father’s brother, who raised us, and until last year my brother was still in Paris studying political economy at the Sorbonne.”
“Where is he now?”
“When I last saw him, he was facedown in a mud bank of the Buene Marshes in Northern Albania with a machine-gun burst in his back.”
Out of the silence, Chavasse said carefully, “When was this?”
“Three months ago. I was on leave at the time.” She held out her glass. “Could I have some more?”
He poured until she raised her hand. She sipped a little, apparently still perfectly in control of her emotions, and continued.
“You were in Albania not so long ago yourself. You know how things are.”
He nodded. “As bad as I’ve seen them.”
“Did you notice any churches on your travels?”
“One or two still seemed to be functioning, but I know the official party line is to clamp down on religious observances of any sort.”
“They’ve almost completely crushed Islam,” she said in a dry, matter-of-fact voice. “The Albanian Orthodox Church has come out of it a little better because they deposed their archbishop and put in a priest loyal to Communism. It’s the Roman Catholic Church that has been most harshly persecuted.”
“A familiar pattern,” Chavasse said. “The organization Communism fears most.”
“Out of two archbishops and four bishops arrested, two have been shot and another’s on the books as having died in prison. The Church has almost ceased to exist in Albania, or so the authorities hoped.”
“I must admit that was the impression I got.”
“During the past year there’s been an amazing revival in the north,” she said. “Headed by the Franciscan fathers at Scutari. Even non-Catholics have been swarming into the church there. It’s had the central government in Tirana quite worried. They decided to do something about it. Something spectacular.”
“Such as?”
“There’s a famous shrine outside the city dedicated to Our Lady of Scutari. A grotto and medicinal spring. The usual sort of thing. A place of pilgrimage since the Crusades. The statue is ebony and leafed with gold. Very ancient. They call her the Black Madonna. It’s traditionally said that it was only because of her miraculous powers that the Turkish overlords of ancient times allowed Christianity to survive at all in the country.”
“What did the central government intend to do?”
“Destroy the shrine, seize the statue and burn it publicly in the main square at Scutari. The Franciscan fathers were warned and managed to spirit the Madonna away on the very day the authorities were going to act.”
“Where is it now?”
“Somewhere in the Buene Marshes at the bottom of a lagoon in my brother’s launch.”
“What happened?”
“It’s easily told.” She shrugged. “My brother, Marco, was interested in a society of Albanian refugees living in Taranto. One of them, a man called Ramiz, got word about the Madonna through a cousin living in Albania at Tama. That’s a small town on the river ten miles inland.”
“And this society decided to go in and bring her out?”
“The Black Madonna is no ordinary statue, Paul,” she said seriously. “She symbolizes all the hope that’s left for Albania in a hard world. They realized what a tremendous psychological effect it would have upon the morale of Albanians everywhere if it were made public in the Italian press that the statue had reached Italy in safety.”
“And you went in with them? With Marco?”