The Yellow Room Conspiracy by Peter Dickinson Read Free Book Online Page A

there?”
    â€œShe’s gone north for a family wedding. Lamb chops and a bottle of burgundy. Oh, no, of course …”
    â€œA glass of decent wine would be agreeable. Possibly two. My head has grown a little stronger with the years. But if I venture on a third you’ll need to hire a barrow and wheel me back to the hotel.”
    â€œI hope not. Your people will assume that I’ve been trying to get you to tell me things they’d rather you didn’t.”
    â€œIsn’t that your job?”
    â€œNot really. I’ve seen a rather uninformative file. You’re in liaison with a group of pretty intransigent Reds on the Albanian frontier. That’s all. This way. There’s supposed to be a car for us.”
    I was living in the Armenian quarter, on an upper floor of one of those yellow, apparently unplanned vast shambling houses above an alley too narrow for vehicles. The driver dropped us at the corner. I could sense Gerry’s wariness as I led him between two bead-workers’ stalls and into the courtyard, where I shouted for Farzi. Farzi’s eldest daughter, a demure fourteen-year-old, appeared and explained that her father had not expected me back and so was smoking and already sleepy. I gave her the chops I’d bought on the way home and told her what I wanted. She nodded and stalked off to see to it herself. Gerry didn’t relax till I had settled him into a chair, facing eastward out over rooftops and a minareted skyline.
    â€œYou’re looking a bit worn,” I said.
    It was true. The changes of puberty are the ones that get the literary attention, but there is another set between adolescence and manhood which I find more interesting. Though the muscles harden and the mouth firms up, more takes place in the character and mind. Between one page of a notebook and the next a poet stops writing his Juvenilia and finds his own voice. Or whatever. For those of my exact generation the war became a rite of passage, marking and reinforcing this change. The effect in the case of Gerry was to my eye very marked. He was obviously fit and well. He walked with a spring, and his body, when I had lurched against him as the driver took a corner Cairo-style, had felt as hard as a wooden idol, but the lines of his large face were deeper-etched than a normal three years would have worn them, and even when he smiled I sensed that he had every face muscle under control.
    â€œWith cause,” he said. “You described my cohorts as intransigent Reds. The epithet at least is correct. They are elemental thugs. The more intelligent of them want power, because they want power. The others just like killing people. I spend my time persuading them to kill Germans, rather than the set of elemental thugs on the next mountain.”
    â€œIt sounds hairy.”
    â€œThey’ve had me in front of a firing squad only once, and that wasn’t serious. They wanted to see how easily I scared. Things are more comfortable now. We’ve brought off a couple of useful operations, saved each other’s lives a few times, and so on. But it doesn’t mean that if things took a certain kind of wrong turning it mightn’t be the firing squad in earnest.”
    He stopped, having heard the movement on the stair before I did. Farzi’s daughter and her younger sister brought in peppermint tea and served it solemnly. Gerry looked out at the yellowing sky and I studied him. His file had been more detailed than I’d implied. One of the operations he’d referred to had been the complex ambush of an armoured column, with three feuding partisan groups having to be persuaded to cooperate. The risks, not only from German bullets, must have been appalling. It was clear that to achieve anything the liaising agents had had to lead from the front. One of them had died. Gerry didn’t speak again till the girls” soft tread had fluttered down the stair.
    â€œLet’s get it