Winter's End (14 page)

What was more, they had said to each other, how could they leave Catharina Pancek and Basil behind them, imprisoned in detention cells? Their sacrifices called for something better than just hiding.

Bart couldn’t get the secrets revealed by Basil out of his mind. After all, the terrifying Van Vlyck was only a man, and an order from him would surely be enough to open the doors of all the boarding schools. They had to find the man and make him give that order. How? They had no idea, but at least they would have tried. They’d have fought back.

It was with this crazy hope that they had made up their minds: they would stop trying to escape and go to the capital city in the south of the country. Neither Bartolomeo nor Milena had ever been there.

They walked for a long way, came to the river, stole a small boat tied up to a dock, and let themselves be carried downstream, stopping only to sleep and stretch their legs. The great river seemed ready to protect them, offering them its soft murmuring and its slow waters. It cradled them.

“Sing,” Bartolomeo sometimes said, and Milena let the lines appear on the little patch of skin between her nose and her forehead for him.

In the middle of the third night, they passed under a bridge. The clear sky was sprinkled with stars. Bart recognized the four stone horsemen.

“Wake up, Milena! It’s our little town. Look, there’s your school!”

Milena, sleeping under a blanket at the bottom of the boat, put her chin above it and sat up to see better. “You’re right. It feels funny going under the bridge, when I’ve walked over it so often. Look, there are people crossing it now! They look like students from the schools with those coats. What on earth are they doing here at this time of night?”

Sure enough, two figures were hurrying toward the hill. The first seemed to be carrying something heavy on his back, perhaps a sack. The second, who was a little smaller, no doubt a girl, was following close behind. But as the current swept the boat on, they were unable to see any more.

P
astor got out of the bus in a very bad temper. Three of his five dogs had been vomiting for half the journey, and they’d had to drive with the windows open to let in some fresh air. The other passengers, already terrified by the presence of their strange traveling companions, had been freezing cold all night, and couldn’t sleep. The horrible, sour stench made them gag. The other two dog-men, Cheops and Teti, weren’t much better than their comrades. Green in the face, they had been belching disgustingly the whole time, not even bothering to wipe away the saliva slobbering down their chops. Only Ramses had behaved decently. He was sitting beside Mills, and they had both managed to sleep, heads close together like a pair of lovers.

“Told you so,” muttered Pastor, kicking the wheel of the bus. “These creatures don’t travel well. Amenophis threw up all over my jacket. I’ll be stinking right through the hunt.”

“No worse than usual, I can assure you,” said Mills dryly.

When Pastor asked the bus driver why he hadn’t reported the two fugitives last week, he said one of the consolers had told him to “leave them alone,” and he for one didn’t go asking for trouble. The big dog-handler, who had a bump on his head to remind him of an unpleasant experience, had no difficulty in understanding the man’s meaning. They went into the café, where the manager greeted them with a sleepy “Morning.” He confirmed that yes, he had certainly seen the young couple. They’d been sitting at that table by the window over there. Where had they gone after that? No idea. Pastor ordered a large basin of coffee for “his dogs.”

“Your dogs?” asked the surprised manager. “Dogs taken to drinking coffee these days, have they?”

“Mine have, yes,” said Pastor, jerking his head in the direction of the stooping figures visible beyond the curtain over the glazed door.

“Oh, I . . . yes, I see,” stammered the café manager, and he went off with his fat face shaking.

Less than ten minutes later, the two men and their pack were off along the mountain road. Mykerinos had sniffed Milena’s scarf together with Chephren and Ramses, and he led the others with his nose raised to the wind. Mills had given the other three dogs — Cheops, Amenophis, and Teti — Bartolomeo’s boot to smell again, and they too immediately set off.

“Good,” said the police chief. “They went along
the road on foot. We can take shortcuts and save time.”

Although the two young people had a head start, he didn’t doubt for a moment that he would catch up with them before they were over the mountains. He had seen the same thing happen more than ten times before: fugitives lost their way, suffered injuries, gave way to exhaustion. Sooner or later they were always tracked down, and then . . . well, official instructions might be to bring them back alive, but Mills had never been able to resist the dubious pleasure of taking a different line. He and Pastor had known each other so long that they didn’t need to discuss it when the time came. Mills would merely nod, and the big dog-handler understood and whispered a single word into the ear of one of his beasts. A word of just two syllables, very simple, but pitiless and deadly: “Attack!” The sight of the kill disgusted Pastor, and he put his jacket over his head rather than watch. When it was all over, he called his dogs to heel and congratulated them. By then he couldn’t even recognize the bodies. Mills, on the other hand, made himself watch to the very end, with his stomach heaving but his eyes wide open. All he had to say in the report was that the fugitives had been armed, their behavior had been threatening, and the police party had been forced to defend themselves.

They started along the uphill path on their right. After a hundred yards, Pastor was sweating profusely. “Bombardone,” he muttered, “I’m telling
you, just so’s you know, this is my very last hunt. You’ll never get me going up this damn mountain with you again.”

“You’ve said that before, and you were always right there with us next time. You love the hunt — admit it!”

“I hate it. Anyway, I’m retiring in six months’ time. You know I am. My wife and I are off to live in the south. You know what kind of pet we’ll keep then?”

“No.”

“A cat! A nice, big, neutered kitty-cat who’ll sit on my knee and purr. Ha, ha, ha!”

Three hundred yards lower down the mountain, Helen and Milos heard Pastor’s laughter ringing through the air, echoing back from the rocks. They stopped.

“If he laughs like that often enough, we’re in no danger of losing them!” said Helen.

It had been a hard night for them both. They had taken Emily’s advice to leave their school coats at her house and caught the same bus that Bart and Milena had taken a week before. They sat at the back to attract as little notice as possible. But there had been a terrifying moment as they left: a massively built man had stationed himself in the middle of the road to stop the driver, who opened the bus door. The huge man had gotten in, followed by the alarming pack of dog-men.

“Don’t be afraid, ladies and gentlemen,” Mills
had boomed at the frightened passengers. “They won’t hurt you.”

“That’s right, don’t worry,” Pastor had added. “They obey my slightest word. In theory.”

And he had made his dog-men sit in the empty seats.

Two of them, addressed as Cheops and Teti by their master, sat down just in front of Helen and Milos. From behind they were an intriguing sight, with flat skulls that seemed to have no room in them for any brain.

Then the unhappy animals’ ordeal began. The stink of their vomit, the constant stops, and the icy air coming in through the windows had made the journey seem endless, but Milos had a chance to notice something that he thought could come in very useful later. Apart from the dog-man sleeping against Mills’s shoulder, the others seemed to obey only one man: their master, the handler whom Mills called Pastor. The police chief had been obliged to use him as a go-between several times when he wanted the pack to do something: tell them this, make them do that, and so on.

“If I could just manage to — how can I put it? — overpower him,” Milos had whispered.

“Overpower him?” Helen had replied. “You think you’re on a wrestling mat or something?”

For the rest of the night, the two fugitives had kept quiet, sometimes dropping off to sleep for a few minutes, but always woken by the cold. Toward morning one of the two dog-men turned and looked
at them for a long time, vacant-eyed. His pale, expressionless face looked as if he had just emerged from a nightmare. Helen almost screamed.

Now they themselves were hard on the heels of the pack, and the climb was beginning. Up above, the autumn sun was bathing the crest of the mountains in color.

“Nice day for an outing!” said Milos. “Know any good walking songs?”

Mills, Pastor, and their dogs went rapidly ahead for two days. It was a forced march, and they ran when the terrain was good enough. Whenever they could take a shortcut, Mills didn’t hesitate to lead his pack along steep or overgrown paths. They came to the mountain refuge on the second evening, scratched and grazed, exhausted, stupefied by the open air. Pastor could go no farther. The dogs were starving. As for Mills, he was in seventh heaven as he kicked the door of the refuge open and went in.

“Hey, take a look at this little love nest, will you? They went at it right here on this mattress! Bet you it’s still warm!”

“Could be,” grumbled Pastor. “But they’ve burned all the wood, the vandals! I’ll go and find some for the night. Ramses, Chephren, come and help me, you lazy brutes!”

The two dog-men followed him. The others lay down on the floor, waiting for their master’s next orders.

“Move over, will you?” Mills snapped at them. “I can’t get by.”

They looked at him as if he’d spoken in Hebrew.

“Move, I said! It’s not that difficult to understand!”

They didn’t budge. It made Mills feel vaguely uneasy, and he left the room until Pastor was back. Raising his eyes, he saw that the weather had changed within a few hours. Low gray clouds covered the sky.

That night snow began falling, heavily and steadily, and it didn’t stop. It wrapped the hut in silence, like cotton balls, and soon they felt a long way from civilization, as isolated as if they were in the middle of the ocean. From time to time Mills went out on the doorstep and came back at once, covered with snowflakes.

“We’ll leave tomorrow at dawn. Just think how infuriating it would be if they freeze to death before we catch up with them.”

They lit a fire, ate some bread, and drank a little of the spirits that Pastor had brought. The big dog-handler would have liked the snow to prevent them from going on at all the next day, but you couldn’t count on Mills agreeing to that. He would track his prey as far as hell itself, even at the risk of his own life. The two men lay down side by side on the mattress, fully dressed. Mills had merely hung his jacket on the hook behind the door. The dogs slept on the floor a little way off. Mykerinos seemed to
be galloping in his dreams; under his jeans, his thin legs jerked convulsively.

For the first time since they had left, it occurred to Helen that she shouldn’t have gone with Milos. She had ventured on this crazy expedition, and now they were going to freeze to death a hundred yards from a refuge with a fire burning in it. A hundred yards from its door, and they couldn’t knock at it. She had lost all feeling in the fingers of her left hand. She’d blown on them, tucked them inside her shirt. Nothing helped. And now she couldn’t stop her teeth from chattering. Milos, kneeling behind her, was holding her close and trying to warm her by rubbing her with his own large hands, but he wasn’t in a much better state himself. He was shivering all over too, and he didn’t know what to say to cheer her up.

They had approached the mountain refuge as night was falling, exhausted, and the smoke coming from the chimney told them that the hunters were already there. They had hidden behind rocks, then it began snowing. The cold, their discouragement . . . what could they do? Move away from the refuge and lose themselves in the night? That would mean certain death. Knock on the door and ask for shelter?

“Don’t expect them to feel sorry for us,” said Milos. “No chance. They’re barbarians, and don’t forget it.”

They had seen Mills appear in the doorway three
times to breathe in the night air, and then go back to the fire that was keeping them all warm in there, men and dogs both.

“It’s the other one I need,” Milos said at last. “The other man, the dog-handler. He has to come out eventually.”

“Suppose he does? What will you do to him?”

“I’m not too sure. But it’s our last chance. I’m going to leave you alone for a few minutes. If I can’t manage anything, I’ll come back to you and then — well, too bad, we’ll knock at the door. OK?”

“OK,” said Helen. “But be careful. Promise!”

“I promise,” he said. He hugged her, dropped a kiss on her hair, and went toward the refuge, skirting it and going around behind the building.

Helen wondered what Milos was planning. In spite of the cold and her fear, she couldn’t help smiling when she saw him reappear on the roof three minutes later. Milos must have been a cat in a former life.