The Keys Of Hell

FOUR

CHAVASSE WAS TIRED AND HIS THROAT was raw from too many cigarettes. Smoke hung in layers from the low ceiling, spiraling in the heat from the single bulb above the green baize table, drifting into the shadows.

There were half a dozen men sitting in on the game. Chavasse, Orsini, Carlo Arezzi, his deckhand, a couple of fishing boat captains and the sergeant of police. Orsini lit another of his foul-smelling Dutch cheroots and pushed a further two chips into the center.

Chavasse shook his head and tossed in his hand. “Too rich for my blood, Guilio.”

There was a general murmur and Guilio Orsini grinned and raked in his winnings. “Bluff, Paul, always the big bluff. That’s all that counts in this game.”

Chavasse wondered if that explained why he was so bad at cards. For him, action had to be part of a logical progression from a carefully reasoned calculation of the risk involved. In the great game of life and death he had played for so long, a man could seldom bluff more than once and get away with it.

He pushed back his chair and stood up. “That’s me for tonight, Guilio. I’ll see you on the jetty in the morning.”

Orsini nodded. “Seven sharp, Paul. Maybe we’ll get you that big one.”

The cards were already on their way round again as Chavasse crossed to the door, opened it and stepped into a whitewashed passage. In spite of the lateness of the hour, he could hear music from the front of the club and careless laughter. He took down an old reefer jacket from a peg, pulled it on and opened the side door.

The cold night air cut into his lungs as he breathed deeply to clear his head and moved along the alley. A thin sea fog rolled in from the water and, except for the faint strains of music from the Tabu, silence reigned.

He found a crumpled packet of cigarettes in his pocket, extracted one and struck a match on the wall, momentarily illuminating his face. A woman emerged from a narrow alley opposite, hesitated, then walked down the jetty, the clicking of her high heels echoing through the night. A moment later, two sailors moved out of the entrance of the Tabu, crossed in front of Chavasse and followed her.

Chavasse leaned against the wall feeling curiously depressed. There were times when he really wondered what it was all about, not just this dangerous game he played, but life itself. He smiled in the darkness. Three o’clock in the morning on the waterfront of any kind of port was one hell of a time to start thinking like that.

The woman screamed and he flicked his cigarette into the fog and stood listening. Again the screaming sounded, curiously muffled, and he started to run toward the jetty. He turned a corner and found the two sailors holding her on the ground under a street lamp.

As the nearest one turned in alarm, Chavasse lifted a boot into his face and sent him back over the jetty. The other leapt toward him with a curse, steel glinting in his right hand.

Chavasse was aware of the black beard, blazing eyes and strange hooked scar on the right cheek, and then he flicked his cap into the man’s face and raised a knee into the exposed groin. The man writhed on the ground, gasping for breath, and Chavasse measured the distance and kicked him in the head.

In the water below the jetty there was a violent splashing and he moved to the edge and saw the first man swimming vigorously into the darkness. Chavasse watched him disappear, then turned to look for the woman.

She was standing in the shadow of a doorway and he went toward her. “Are you all right?”

“I think so,” she replied in a strangely familiar voice and stepped out of the shadows.

His eyes widened in amazement. “Francesca – Francesca Minetti. What in the world are you doing here?”

Her dress had been ripped from neck to waist and she held it in place, a slight smile on her face. “We were supposed to have a date on the terrace at the Embassy a week ago. What happened?”

“Something came up,” he said. “The story of my life. But what are you doing on the Matano waterfront at this time of the morning?”

She swayed forward and he caught her just in time, holding her close to his chest for a brief moment. She smiled up at him wanly.

“Sorry about that, but all of a sudden I felt a little light-headed.”

“Have you far to go?”

She brushed a tendril of hair back from her forehead. “I left my car somewhere near here, but all the streets look the same in the fog.”

“Better come back with me to my hotel,” he said. “It’s just around the corner.” He slipped off his jacket and draped it round her shoulders. “I could probably fix you up with a bed.”

Laughter bubbled out of her and for a moment she was once again the gay exciting girl he had met so briefly at the Embassy ball.

“I’m sure you could.”

He grinned and put an arm round her. “I think you’ve had quite enough excitement for one night.”

There was the scrape of a shoe on the cobbles behind them and he swung round and saw the other man lurching into the fog, hands to his smashed face.

Chavasse took a quick step after him and Francesca caught his sleeve. “Let him go. I don’t want the police in on this.”

He looked down into her strained and anxious face. “If that’s the way you want it.”

There was something strange here, something he didn’t understand. They walked along the jetty and turned onto the waterfront. As port towns went Matano was reasonably tame, but not so tame that pretty young girls could walk around the dock area at three A.M. and expect to get away with it. One thing was certain. Francesca Minetti must have had a pretty powerful reason for being there.

The hotel was a small stuccoed building on a corner, an ancient electric sign over the entrance, but it was clean and cheap and the food was good. The owner was a friend of Orsini.

He slept at the desk, head in hands, and Chavasse reached over to the board without waking him and unhooked the key. They crossed the hall, mounted narrow wooden stairs and passed along a whitewashed corridor.

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?”

“It’s an easy passage and the Albanian navy is extremely weak, so getting into the marshes is no problem. We picked up the statue at a prearranged spot on the first night. Unfortunately, we ran into a patrol boat next morning on the way out. There was some shooting and the launch was badly damaged. She sank in a small lagoon and we took to the rubber dinghy. They hunted us for most of the day. Marco was shot toward evening. I didn’t want to leave his body, but we didn’t have much choice. Later that night, we reached the coast and Ramiz stole a small sailing boat. That’s how we got back.”

“And where is this man Ramiz now?” Chavasse asked.

“Somewhere in Matano. He telephoned me in Rome yesterday and told me to meet him at a hotel on the waterfront. You see, he’s managed to get hold of a launch.”

Chavasse stared at her, an incredulous frown on his face. “Are you trying to tell me you intend to go back into those damned marshes?”

“That was the general idea.”

“Just the two of you, you and Ramiz?” He shook his head. “You wouldn’t last five minutes.”

“Perhaps not, but it’s worth a try.” He started to protest but she raised a hand. “I’m not going to spend the rest of my life living with the thought that my brother died for nothing when I could at least have tried to do something about it. The Minettis are a proud family, Paul. We take care of our dead. I know what Marco would have done and I am the only one left to do it.”

She sat there, her face very pale in the lamplight. Chavasse took her hands, reached across and kissed her gently on the mouth.

“This lagoon where the launch sank, you know where it is?”

She nodded, frowning slightly. “Why?”

He grinned. “You surely didn’t think I’d let you go in on your own?”

There was a look of complete bewilderment on her face. “But why, Paul? Give me one good reason why you should risk your life for me?”

“Let’s just say I’m bored stiff after a week of lazing around on the beach and leave it at that. This man Ramiz, you’ve got his address?”

She took a scrap of paper from her handbag and handed it to him. “I don’t think it’s far from here.”

He slipped it into his pocket. “Right, let’s get going.”

“To see Ramiz?”

He shook his head. “That comes later. First we’ll call on a good friend of mine, the kind of friend you need for a job like this. Someone with no scruples, who knows the Albanian coast like the back of his hand and runs the fastest boat in the Adriatic.”

At the door, she turned, looked up at him searchingly. Something glowed in her eyes and color flooded her cheeks. Quite suddenly, she seemed confident, sure of herself again.

“It’s going to be all right, angel. I promise you.”

He raised her hand briefly to his lips, opened the door and gently pushed her into the corridor.