“You didn’t like him? He was very helpful and obliging.”
“Yes, no doubt. It soothes his vanity to be helpful. There is only one thing that pleases me about that Colonel.”
“Oh?”
She walked on several paces in silence. Then she spoke quietly, so quietly that he only just heard what she said.
“He knows how to deal with Germans, Mr. Carey.”
It was at that moment that George received the first intimations of coming discomfort in his stomach and intestines. At that moment, also, he forgot about Colonel Chrysantos and Germans.
“I begin to see what you mean about the food and the flies,” he remarked as they turned the corner by the hotel. “I think, if you don’t mind, that we’ll call in at a drugstore.”
The following day the Colonel’s Lieutenant arrived at their hotel in an army car and drove them out to the prison.
It was a converted barracks built near the remains of an old Turkish fort on the western outskirts of the city. With its high surrounding wall and the Kalamara Heights across the bay as a background, it looked from the outside rather like a monastery. Inside, it smelt like a large and inadequately tended latrine.
The Lieutenant had brought papers admitting them and they were taken to the administration block. Here they were introduced to a civilian official in a tight tussore suit, who apologized for the absence of the commandant on official business and offered coffee and cigarettes. He was a thin, anxious man, with a habit of picking his nose, of which he seemed to be trying, none too successfully, to break himself. When they had had their coffee, he took a heavy bunch of keys and led them through a series of passages with steel doors at both ends, which he unlocked and relocked as they went along. They were shown eventually into a room with whitewashed walls and a steel grille running down the middle from floor to ceiling. Through the grille they could see another door.