Eric Ambler - The Schirmer Inheritance

“Certainly.”

“So that if the German soldier I’m interested in managed to get away alive after that ambush, it would not be fantastic to give him a fifty-fifty chance of staying alive?”

“Not at all fantastic. Very reasonable.”

“I see. Thanks.”

Two days later George and Miss Kolin were in Greece.

“Forty-five thousand killed, including three thousand five hundred civilians murdered by the rebels and seven hundred blown up by their mines. Twice as many wounded. Eleven thousand houses destroyed. Seven hundred thousand persons driven from their homes in rebel areas. Twenty-eight thousand forcibly removed to Communist countries. Seven thousand villages looted. That is what Markos and his friends cost Greece.”

Colonel Chrysantos paused and, leaning back in his swivel chair, smiled bitterly at George and Miss Kolin. It was an effective pose. He was a very handsome man with keen, dark eyes. “And I have heard it said by the British and the Americans,” he added, “that we have been too firm with our Communists. Too firm!” He threw up his long, thin hands.

George murmured vaguely. He knew that the Colonel’s ideas of what constituted firmness were very different from his own and that a discussion of them would not be profitable. Monsieur Hagen, the Red Cross man, who had given him the letter of introduction to Colonel Chrysantos, had made the position clear. The Colonel was a desirable acquaintance only in so far as he was a senior officer in the Salonika branch of Greek military intelligence, who could lay his hands on the kind of information George needed. He was not a person towards whom it was possible to have very friendly feelings.

“Do these casualty figures include the rebels, Colonel?” he asked.

“Of the killed, yes. Twenty-eight of the forty-five thousand were rebels. About their wounded we have naturally no accurate figures; but in addition to those we killed, we captured thirteen thousand, and twenty-seven thousand more surrendered.”

“Do you have lists of the names?”

“Certainly.”

“Would it be possible to see if the name of this German is on one of those lists?”

“Of course. But you know we did not take more than a handful of Germans.”

“Still it might be worth trying, though, as I say, I don’t even know yet if the man survived the ambush.”

“Ah, yes. Now we come to that. The 24th of October ’44 was the date of the ambush, you say, and it was near a petrol point at Vodena. The andartes might have come from the Florina area, I think. We shall see. So!”

He pressed a button on his desk and a young Lieutenant with horn-rimmed glasses came in. The Colonel spoke sharply in his own language for nearly half a minute. When he stopped, the Lieutenant uttered a monosyllable and went out.

As the door shut, the Colonel relaxed. “A good boy, that,” he said. “You Westerners sometimes pride yourselves that we cannot be efficient, but you will see-like that!” He snapped his fingers, smiled seductively at Miss Kolin and then glanced at George to see if he minded having his girl smiled at in that way.

Miss Kolin merely raised her eyebrows. The Colonel passed round cigarettes.

George found the situation entertaining. The Colonel’s curiosity about the nature of the relationship between his visitors had been evident from the first. The woman was attractive; the man looked passably virile; it was absurd to suppose that they could travel about together on business without also taking advantage of the association for their pleasure. Yet, of course, the man was an Anglo-Saxon and so one could not be sure. In the absence of any positive evidence as to whether the pair were lovers or not the Colonel was beginning to probe for some. He would try again in a moment or two. Meanwhile, back to business.

The Colonel smoothed his tunic down. “This German of yours, Mr. Carey-was he an Alsatian?”

“No, he came from Cologne.”

“Many of the deserters were Alsatian. You know, some of them hated the Germans as much as we did.”

“Ah, yes? Were you in Greece during the war, Colonel?”

“Sometimes. At the beginning, yes. Later I was with the British. In their raiding forces. It was a type of Commando, you understand. That was a happy time.”

“Happy?”

“Were you not a soldier, Mr. Carey?”

“I was a bomber pilot. I don’t remember ever feeling particularly happy about it.”

“Ah, no-but the air is different from soldiering. You do not see the enemy you kill. A machine war. Impersonal.”

“It was personal enough for me,” George said; but the remark went unheard. There was the light of reminiscence in the Colonel’s eyes.

“You missed much in the air, Mr. Carey,” he said dreamily. “I remember once, for example …”

He was off.

He had taken part, it seemed, in numerous British raids on German garrisons on Greek territory. He went on to describe in great detail what he obviously felt to be some of his more amusing experiences. Judging by the relish with which he recalled them, he had indeed had a happy time.

“… splashed his brains over the wall with a burst from a Bren gun … put my knife low in his belly and ripped it open to the ribs … the grenades killed all of them in the room except one, so I dropped him out of the window … ran away without their trousers, so we could see what to shoot at … tried to come out of the house to surrender, but he was slow on his feet and the phosphorus grenade set him alight like a torch … I let him have a burst from the Schmeisser and nearly cut him in two …”

He spoke rapidly, smiling all the time and gesturing gracefully. Occasionally he broke into French. George made little attempt to follow. It did not matter, for the Colonel’s whole attention now was concentrated on Miss Kolin. She was wearing her faintly patronizing smile, but there was something more in her expression besides-a look of pleasure. If you had been watching the pair of them without knowing what was being said, George thought, you might have supposed that the handsome Colonel was entertaining her with a witty piece of cocktail-party gossip. It was rather disconcerting.

The Lieutenant came back into the room with a tattered folder of papers under his arm. The Colonel stopped instantly and sat up straight in his chair to receive the folder. He looked through it sternly as the Lieutenant made his report. Once he rapped out a question and received an answer which appeared to satisfy him. Finally he nodded and the Lieutenant went out. The Colonel relaxed again and smirked complacently.

“It will take time to check the lists of prisoners,” he said, “but, as I hoped, we have some other information. Whether it will be of help to you or not, I cannot say.” He glanced down at the bundle of torn and greasy papers before him. “This ambush you mention was most likely one of several operations undertaken in that week by an ELAS band based in the hills above Florina. There were thirty-four men, most of them from Florina and the villages about there. The leader was a Communist named Phengaros. He came from Larisa. A German army truck was destroyed in the action. Does that sound like the case you know of?”

George nodded. “That’s it. There were three trucks. The first hit a mine. Does it say anything about any prisoners?”

“Prisoners would not be reported, Mr. Carey. Fortunately, however, you can ask.”

“Ask whom?”

“Phengaros.” The Colonel grinned. “He was captured in ’48. We have him under lock and key.”

“Still?”

“Oh, he was released under an amnesty, but he is back now. He is a Party member, Mr. Carey, and a dangerous one. A brave man, perhaps, and a good one for killing Germans, but such politicals do not change their ways. You are lucky he has not long ago been shot.”