John Sweeney - The Useful Idiot

Opening his knapsack, he produced some bread and hard cheese, cut the latter into wafer-thin slices with a curved blade and passed the food around.

Evgenia asked about the origin of the labyrinth. The city had been a boom town under the Tsars, the tramp explained, the fourth biggest in the whole of the Russian Empire after Moscow, St Petersburg, and Warsaw. But wood was scarce and manufacturing brick in kilns ruinously expensive. The solution was to dig down and hew out the local yellow limestone, made of out sea shells millions of years old. They call it coquina.

“The result?” he said. “Odessa sits on top of the biggest labyrinth in the world. That makes it a very special place for smugglers, ne’er-do-wells like me – and the kind of people who have their own reasons to avoid the nosey parkers, eh?”

“What did you do, before?” asked Jones.

He sighed and said: “I was a professor,” then fell silent. Jones’ candle spluttered out.

“Have you another candle?”

“One hundred roubles.”

“Come on.”

The tramp leaned forward and blew out Evgenia’s candle, then his own. Suddenly they were locked inside a darkness, absolute and entire. Not a word was spoken, not a movement made. The only sound was the three of them breathing.

“Two hundred rou…”

The tramp didn’t get to finish the new price, because at that moment, Jones lunged for him – or the place where he thought he’d be. But the man wasn’t there and Jones ended up flailing into the stone.

Something shifted and then, from the darkness, came the sound of triumphant mocking.

“Three hundred roubles for a candle,” the tramp said. “And a lot more if you ever want to see the sun again.”

Jones felt Evgenia’s hand on his leg. In the darkness, he leant forward. Their hands met and she passed him something squarish, metal…

Crowley’s lighter.

It fired at the very first attempt.

Jones was onto the tramp in a flash, tossing the lighter back towards Evgenia. It went out in mid-air but, despite the blackness, Jones had his target, pummelling him with his fists, finding his gut, his jaw, his temple, left and right, right and left. The tramp kneed Jones in the groin, then punched him on the cheek and tried to skip away – but Jones caught an arm and piled punch after punch in where his neck and head ought to be.

Once again, the tramp lunged at Jones, clobbering him with a punch to the side of his neck. Jones rolled to one side, recovered, grabbed the tramp by his hair and bashed his head against the rock wall, again and again and again…

The tramp was by the far the bigger man, but Jones was fired by a blind fury. Behind them, Evgenia scrabbled around on the rock floor, searching for the lighter. Her fingers came across a knapsack, the tramp’s. Frantically she delved into it, before coming across a box of matches. She opened the box, caught one – but it didn’t light. The second failed too. Then a blind kick from the tramp knocked her sideways and she dropped the box, the matches scattering across the ground. Scooping a bunch up, she scraped them against the side of the matchbox and, suddenly, there was a flare of brilliant light.

Jones cried out, “Oh God, no!”

Evgenia lit another match and, with that, the stub of her candle.

“I never meant to,” said Jones, the words from his bloodied lips trickling to a halt.

Evgenia stared at the mess of blood and bone that had been the tramp’s face. He was quite dead.

“I couldn’t see,” said Jones. “I couldn’t see how he was. I… I… I…”

They sat in the candlelight, their heads down, alone and afraid. After a time, Evgenia’s hand reached out to Jones’s and gripped it firmly. “I’m sorry.”

“It is done.”

Evgenia shushed him and, holding a candle with one hand, went through the tramp’s knapsack. She found two more candles, long and thin, two more boxes of matches, two bottles – one of water, one of vodka – a ball of string, a piece of chalk, a wallet bulging with rouble notes and, folded neatly, a piece of paper. She unfolded the paper and on it was scribbled, in tiny print, a map of an extraordinarily complicated labyrinth. She stared at it hopelessly.

“If that’s a map of the tunnels, then that is our way out of here,” said Jones.

“It’s a map. But there’s no way of knowing where we are on it.”

“Listen, Evgenia, I hate the dark, I hate being trapped underground, more than anything I hate being in the same chamber as a man I have just killed. So let’s go. Let’s trust to our luck. Ariadne, she gave Theseus a ball of twine when he went down into the labyrinth to defeat the Minotaur. We do the same trick. Let’s go.”

Tying one end of the string to the tramp’s leg – there was nothing else to fix it to – they walked out of the exit they had come in by, Evgenia leading the way with the first of the candles, Jones stumbling on behind her, loosening the ball of string as they walked. Every time they came to a fork they turned left until they came to an enormous hall, so big that the candle couldn’t light it. In the distance came the unmistakeable sound of waves breaking against a beach, then the long withdrawing roar as the wave withdrew. Excited, Jones hurried forward, plunging into the darkness outside the pool of light made by the candle.

“Idiot!” Evgenia cried.

Jones stumbled and almost fell. Following the noise he was making, she too raced out across the cavern – and there she found Jones, holding a broken thread. In his haste to get away, the string had snapped. They tried to find the other end but gave up, taunted by the sound of the breaking sea, taunted by the possibility of seeing the sky at last.

They hurried through the subterranean dark towards the smell of the sea, the blackness edging dark grey. Somewhere near here was a source of light.

Fortune had favoured them at last. Jones and Evgenia stood on the shores of an underworld lagoon, on its pebble beach an ancient rowing boat.

“Shall we?” Jones said

Evgenia didn’t need asking twice.

They set off, Jones at the oars, the lagoon narrowing into a tunnel where they had to use their hands to push against the low ceiling to propel the boat forward. Then, before they truly understood where they were and how far they had come, they were out among the breakers, the open vault of the sky overhead. Jones pulled them steadily towards a secluded, sandy cove and the rowing boat came to a rest in the gathering dusk.

Stripping off their filthy clothes and holding hands, they half-ran, half-danced into the frigid sea, and tried to wash away the coal dust that had infiltrated every pore.

Once out of the water, Evgenia said, “Perhaps it would be best to row back. The catacombs are the safest place for us.”

“No more holes in the ground, ever again,” Jones replied.

There was a place underneath an uprooted tree at the back of the beach. It wasn’t much but it afforded some protection from the weather. Evgenia told him that it was best if she went into the city on her own, to try to buy new clothes for him and her, to see if she could find a ship that would take them away. Jones tried to argue with her but knew that she was right and watched her disappear off into the night.

After she had gone, it started to rain and, with that, he felt a growing sense of desolation.

After an agony of time, Evgenia returned a different woman. Gone was the filthy deckhand, in her stead young Soviet woman, hair washed, dressed in the very latest fashion: jacket, red blouse and skirt, and in her hand a suitcase.

“How did you do that?”

“Winnie, I met her quite by accident. She’s been singing for some bigwigs in Odessa. Without her it would have been impossible. Here, she gave me some cheese, a bottle of Ukrainian wine, fresh clothes for you too. She’s been a godsend.”