Jack Higgins - The Keys Of Hell

“All you need now is some food inside you.”

He pulled a chair to the table as she spooned a hot stew onto a tin plate. He wasted no time on conversation, but picked up his spoon and started to eat. When the plate was empty, she filled it again.

He sat back with a sigh. “They couldn’t have done better at the London Hilton.”

She opened a bottle and filled a glass with a colorless liquid. “I’d like to offer you some coffee, but it’s very hard to come by these days. This is a spirit we distill ourselves. Very potent if you’re not used to it, but it can be guaranteed to keep out the marsh fever.”

It exploded in Chavasse’s stomach and spread through his body in a warm glow. He coughed several times and tears sprang to his eyes.

“Now this they wouldn’t be able to offer, even at the London Hilton.”

She opened an old tin carefully and offered him a cigarette. They were Macedonian, coarse, brown tobacco loose in the paper, but Chavasse knew how to handle them. He screwed the end round expertly and leaned across the table as she held out a burning splinter from the fire.

She lit a cigarette herself, blew out a cloud of pungent smoke and said calmly, “You’re no smuggler, I can see that. No seaman, either. Your hands are too nice.”

“So I lied.”

“You must have had a good reason.”

He frowned down into his glass for a moment, then decided to go ahead. “You’ve heard of the Virgin of Scutari?”

“The Black Madonna? Who hasn’t? Her statue disappeared about three months ago. The general opinion is that the central government in Tirana had it stolen. They’re worried because people have been turning to the church again lately.”

“I came to the Buene looking for it,” Chavasse said. “It was supposed to be on board a launch that sank in one of the lagoons in the marsh toward the coast. My friends and I were searching for it when the military turned up.”

He told her about Francesca Minetti, or as much as she needed to know, and of Guilio Orsini and Carlo and the Buona Esperanza . When he was done, she nodded slowly.

“A bad business. The sigurmi will squeeze them dry, even this smuggler friend of yours. They have their ways and they are not pleasant. I’m sorry for the girl. God knows what they will do with her.”

“I was wondering whether it would be possible to get into Tama,” Chavasse said. “Perhaps find out what’s happened to them?”

She looked at him sharply, her face grave. “We have a saying. Only a fool puts his head between the jaws of the tiger.”

“They’ll be beating the marshes toward the coast,” he said. “That stands to reason. Who’s going to look for me in Tama?”

“A good point.” She got to her feet and looked down into the fire, her hand on the stone mantel above it. She turned to face him. “There is one person who might be able to help, a Franciscan, Father Shedu. In the war, he was a famous resistance fighter in the hills, a legend in his own time. It would hardly be polite to arrest or shoot such a man. They content themselves with making life difficult for him – always with the utmost politeness, of course. He hasn’t been here long. A couple of months or so. I think the last man was taken away.”

“I could make a good guess about what happened to him,” Chavasse said. “This Father Shedu, he’s in Tama now?”

“There’s a medieval monastery on the outskirts of the town. They use it as local military headquarters. The Catholic church has been turned into a restaurant, but there’s an old monastery chapel at the water’s edge. Father Shedu holds his services there.”

“Would it be difficult to reach?”

“From here?” She shrugged. “Not more than half an hour. I have an outboard motor. Not too reliable, but it gets me there.”

“Could I borrow it?”

“Oh, no.” She shook her head. “They’d pick you up before you’d got a mile along the river. I know the back ways – you don’t.”

She took down an oilskin jacket from behind the door and tossed it to him together with an old peaked cap. “Ready when you are.”

She picked up her hunting rifle and led the way out through the front door and down toward the river. There was still no boat moored at the little wooden jetty. She passed it, moving through dense undergrowth and emerged on a small cleared bank that dropped cleanly into the water. Her boat, a flat-bottomed marsh punt with an old motor attached to the stern, was tied to a tree.

Chavasse cast off while she busied herself with the motor. As it coughed into life, he pushed the punt through the encircling reeds and stepped in.

LIRI KUPI CERTAINLY KNEW WHAT SHE WAS doing. At one point, they hit rough water where the river twisted round sandbanks, spilling across ragged rocks, and she handled the frail craft like an expert, swinging the tiller at just the right moment to sweep them away from the worst hazards.

After a while, they left the Buene, turning into a narrow creek that circled through a great stagnant swamp, losing itself among a hundred lagoons and waterways.

When they finally came into the river again, it was in the lee of a large island. The mist hung like a gray curtain from bank to bank, and as they moved from the shelter of the island to cross over, he could smell woodsmoke and somewhere a dog barked.

The first houses loomed out of the mist, scattered along one side of the river, and Liri took the punt in close. She produced the tin of cigarettes from her pocket and threw it to Chavasse.

“Better have one. Try to look at home.”

“Home was never like this.”

He lit a cigarette, leaned back against the prow and watched the town unfold itself. There were fewer than five hundred inhabitants these days, that much he knew. Since the cold war had warmed up between Yugoslavia and Albania, the river traffic had almost stopped and the Buene was now so silted up as to be unnavigable for boats of any size.

The monastery lifted out of the mist, a vast sprawling medieval structure with crumbling walls, several hundred yards back from the riverbank.

The Albanian flag, hanging limply in the rain, lifted in a gust of wind, the red star standing out vividly against the black, double-headed eagle, and a bugle sounded faintly.

A little farther along the bank, forty or fifty convicts worked, some of them waist-deep in water as they drove in the piles for a new jetty. Chavasse noticed that the ones on the banks had their ankles chained together.

“Politicals,” Liri said briefly. “They send them here from all over the country. They don’t last long in the marshes when the hot weather comes.”

She eased the tiller, turning the punt in toward the bank and a small ruined chapel whose crumbling walls fell straight into the river. At the foot of the wall, the entrance to a narrow tunnel gaped darkly and Liri took the punt inside.

There was a good six feet of headroom and Chavasse reached out to touch cold, damp walls, straining his eyes into the darkness, which suddenly lightened considerably. Liri cut the motor and the punt drifted in toward a landing stage constructed of large blocks of worked masonry.

They scraped beside a flight of stone steps and Chavasse tied up to an iron ring and handed her out. Light filtered down from somewhere above and she smiled through the half darkness.

“I shan’t be long.”

She mounted a flight of stone steps and Chavasse lit another cigarette, sat on the edge of the jetty and waited. She was gone for at least fifteen minutes. When she returned, she didn’t come all the way down, but called to him from the top of the steps.

He went up quickly and she turned, opened a large oak door and led the way along a narrow passage. She opened another door at the far end and they stepped into the interior of the small chapel.