The Keys of Hell (3 page)

E
NRICO
N
OCI LAY STARING THROUGH
the darkness at the ceiling, smoking a cigarette. Beside him the woman slept, her thigh warm against his. Once, she stirred, turning into him in her sleep, but didn’t awaken.

He reached for another cigarette and there was a slight distinctive rattle as something was pushed through the letter box in the outer hall. He slid from beneath the blankets, careful not to waken the woman, and padded across the tiled floor in his bare feet.

A large buff envelope lay on the mat at the front door. He took it into the kitchen, lit the gas under the coffeepot and opened the envelope quickly. Inside there was a smaller sealed envelope, the one he was to take with him, and a single typed sheet containing his movement orders. He memorized them, then burned it quickly at the stove.

He glanced at his watch. Just before midnight. Time for a hot bath and something to eat. He stretched lazily, a conscious pleasure seeping through him. The woman had really been quite something. Certainly a diverting way of spending his last evening.

H
E WAS WALLOWING UP TO HIS CHIN IN HOT
water, the small bathroom half full of steam when the door opened and she came in, yawning as she tied the belt of his silk dressing gown.

“Come back to bed,
caro
,” she said plaintively.

For the life of him he couldn’t remember her name and he grinned. “Another time, angel. I must get moving. Scrambled eggs and coffee like a good girl. I’ve got to be out of here in twenty minutes.”

When he left the bathroom ten minutes later, he was freshly shaved, his dark hair slicked back, and he wore an expensive hand-knitted sweater and slacks. She had laid a small table in the window and placed a plate of scrambled eggs in front of him as he sat down.

As he ate, he pulled back the curtain with one hand and looked down across the lights of Bari to the waterfront. The town was quiet and a slight rain drifted through the yellow street lamps in a silver spray.

“Will you be coming back?” she said.

“Who knows, angel?” He shrugged. “Who knows?”

He finished his coffee, went into the bedroom, picked up a dark blue nylon raincoat and a small canvas grip and returned to the living room. She sat with her elbows on the table, a cup of coffee in her hands. He took out his wallet, extracted a couple of banknotes and dropped them on the table.

“It’s been fun, angel,” he said and moved to the door.

“You know the address.”

When he closed the outside door and turned along the street it was half past twelve exactly. The rain was falling quite heavily now and fog crouched at the ends of the streets, reducing visibility to thirty or forty yards.

He walked briskly along the wet pavement, turning confidently out of one street into another and, ten minutes later, halted beside a small black Fiat sedan. He opened the door, lifted the corner of the carpet and found the ignition key at once. A few moments later he was driving away.

On the outskirts of Bari, he stopped and consulted the map that he found in the glove compartment. Matano was about twelve miles away on the coast road running south to Brindisi. An easy enough run, although the fog was bound to hold him up a little.

He lit a cigarette and started off again, concentrating on his driving as the fog grew thicker. He was finally reduced to a cautious crawl, his head out of the side window. It was almost an hour later when he halted at a signpost that indicated Matano to the left.

As he drove along the narrow road he could smell the sea through the fog, and gradually it seemed to clear a little. He reached Matano fifteen minutes later and drove through silent streets toward the waterfront.

He parked the car in an alley near the Club Tabu as instructed and went the rest of the way on foot.

It was dark and lonely on the waterfront, and the only sound was the lapping of water against the pilings as he went down a flight of stone steps to the jetty.

It was quiet and deserted in the yellow light of a solitary lamp and he paused halfway along to examine the motor cruiser moored at the end. She was a thirty-footer with a steel hull, probably built by Akerboon, he decided. She was in excellent trim, her sea-green paintwork gleaming. Not at all what he had expected. He examined the name
Buona Esperanza
on her counter with a slight frown.

When he stepped over the rail, the stern quarter was festooned with nets, still damp from the day’s labor and stinking of fish, the deck slippery with their scales.

Somewhere in the distance the door of an all-night café opened and music drifted out, faint and far away, and for no accountable reason Noci shivered. It was at that moment that he realized he was being watched.

The man was young, slim and wiry with a sun-blackened face that badly needed a shave. He wore denims and an old oilskin coat, and a seaman’s cap shaded calm expressionless eyes. He stood at the corner of the deckhouse, a coiled rope in one hand, and said nothing. As Noci took a step toward him, the door of the wheelhouse opened and another man appeared.

He was at least six feet three, great shoulders straining the seams of his blue pilot coat, and wore an old Italian navy officer’s cap, the gold braid tarnished by exposure to salt air and water. He had perhaps the ugliest face Noci had ever looked upon, the nose smashed and flattened, the white line of an old scar running from the right eye to the point of the chin. A thin cigar of the type favored by Dutch seamen was firmly clenched between his teeth and he spoke without removing it.

“Guilio Orsini, master of the
Buona Esperanza
.”

Noci felt a sudden surge of relief flow through him as tension ebbed away. “Enrico Noci.”

He held out his hand. Orsini took it briefly and nodded to the young deckhand. “Let’s go, Carlo.” He jerked his thumb toward the companionway. “You’ll find a drink in the bar. Don’t come up until I tell you.”

As Noci moved toward the companionway, Carlo cast off and moved quickly to the stern. The engine burst into life, shattering the quiet, and the
Buona Esperanza
turned from the jetty and moved into the fog.

The salon was warm and pleasantly furnished. Noci looked around approvingly, placed his canvas grip on the table and helped himself to a large whisky from a cabinet in one corner. He drank it quickly and lay on one of the bunks smoking a cigarette, a warm, pleasurable glow seeping through him.

This was certainly an improvement on the old tub in which he had done the run to Albania before. Orsini was a new face, but then there was nothing surprising in that. The faces changed constantly. In this business it didn’t pay to take chances.

The boat lifted forward with a great surge of power, and a slight smile of satisfaction touched Noci’s mouth. At this rate they would be landing him on the coast near Durres before dawn. By noon he would be in Tirana. More dollars to his account in the Bank of Geneva, and this was his sixth trip in as many months. Not bad going, but you could take the pitcher to the well too often. After this a rest was indicated—a long rest.

He decided he would go to the Bahamas. White beaches, blue skies and a lovely tanned girl wading thigh deep from the sea to meet him. American for preference. They were so ingenuous, had so much to learn.

The engines coughed once and died away and the
Buona Esperanza
slowed violently as her prow sank into the waves. Noci sat up, head to one side as he listened. The only sound was the lapping of the water against her hull.

It was some sixth sense, a product of his years of treachery and double dealing, of living on his wits, that warned him that something was wrong. He swung his legs to the floor, reached for the canvas grip, unzipped it and took out a pistol. He released the safety catch and padded across to the foot of the companionway. Above him, the door opened and shut, creaking slightly as the boat pitched in the swell.

He went up quickly, one hand against the wall, paused, and raised his head cautiously. The deck seemed deserted, the drizzle falling in silver cobwebs through the navigation lights.

He stepped out and, on his right, a match flared and a man moved out of the shadows, bending his head to light a cigarette. The flame revealed a handsome devil’s face, eyes like black holes above high cheekbones. He flicked the match away and stood there, hands in the pockets of his slacks. He wore a heavy fisherman’s sweater and his dark hair glistened with moisture.

“Signor Noci?” he said calmly in fluent Italian.

“Who the hell are you?” Noci demanded.

“My name is Chavasse—Paul Chavasse.”

It was a name Noci was completely familiar with. An involuntary gasp rose in his throat and he raised the pistol. A hand like iron clamped on his wrist, wrenching the weapon from his grasp, and Guilio Orsini said, “I think not.”

Carlo moved out of the shadows to the left and stood waiting. Noci looked about him helplessly and Chavasse held out his hand.

“I’ll have the envelope now.”

Noci produced it reluctantly and handed it across, trying to stay calm as Chavasse examined the contents. They could be no more than half a mile from the shore, no distance to a man who had been swimming since childhood, and Noci was under no illusions as to what would happen if he stayed.

Chavasse turned over the first sheet of paper and Noci ducked under Orsini’s arm and ran for the stern rail. He was aware of a sudden cry, an unfamiliar voice, obviously Carlo’s, and then he slipped on some fish scales and stumbled headlong into the draped nets.

He tried to scramble to his feet, a foot tripped him and then the soft, clinging, stinking meshes seemed to wrap themselves around him. He was pulled forward onto his hands and knees and looked up through the mesh to see Chavasse peering down at him, the devil’s face calm and cold.

Orsini and Carlo had a rope in their hands and, in that terrible moment, Noci realized what they intended to do and the scream rose in this throat.

Orsini pulled hard on the rope and Noci lurched across the deck and cannoned into the low rail. A foot caught him hard against the small of the back and he went over into the cold water.

As he surfaced, the net impeding every movement he tried to make, he was aware of Orsini running the end of the line around the rail, of Carlo leaning out of the wheelhouse window waiting. A hand went up, the
Buona Esperanza
surged forward.

Noci went under with a cry, surfaced on a wave, choking for breath. He was aware only of Chavasse at the rail watching, face calm in the fog-shrouded light and then, as the boat increased speed, he went under for the last time.

As he struggled violently, water forcing the air from his lungs, he was aware of no pain, no pain at all. He seemed to be floating on soft white sand beneath a blue sky and a beautiful suntanned girl waded from the sea to join him, and she was smiling.

C
HAVASSE 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.”