was cold and damp and very dark. I was walking, supported on either side, descending some steps that seemed to go on forever. When we finally stopped, there was only a narrow circle of light. I was aware of Langley’s face looming very large, serious now and two men on their knees levering a round iron grid out of the floor. It was very dark down there and quiet.
Langley slapped my face. It didn’t hurt at all. He said, ‘Still with us?’ And then he turned and nodded to the others. ‘Down he goes.’
I didn’t attempt to struggle, I was incapable of that. A rope or a strap of some sort was looped around me and I was lowered perhaps ten or fifteen feet into darkness. There was a clang as the iron grid was replaced, footsteps echoed away.
I became aware of two things almost in the same instant. That I was only wearing the bathing shorts I had put on that morning and that when I stretched out my arms on either side, I immediately touched damp stone walls.
Not that it mattered, not then, for as yet, nothing touched me. I slumped down in a corner, knees to my chest in the fetal position and drifted back into my drugged sleep.
2
The Hole
It was the cold which brought me awake more than anything else and I crouched there in the dark corner, trying to get my bearings. A ray of sunlight drifted out of a channel in the stonework high above my head. I squinted up at it, tried to get to my feet and lost my balance for the excellent reason that I was wearing leg irons and the foot of steel chain between my ankles restricted movement more than a little.
I lay there in the darkness thinking about it for a while, considering the possibility that the whole thing was simply a particularly vivid nightmare, when the iron grating at the top of the shaft was removed and Justin Langley peered in.
Gatano’s battered face appeared at his right shoulder, something which at that stage of the game didn’t surprise me in the least. He laughed hoarsely. ‘He don’t look so good to me, Mr Langley.’
‘A good hot meal inside you, that’s what you need, old stick,’ Langley called. ‘Try this for size.’
He lowered a large biscuit tin on a length of string. It contained a bottle of water and a plate of some kind of cold stew that smelled like a newly opened tin of inferior dog food.
I crouched there like some dumb animal, helpless with rage. Gatano called, ‘Hey, you down there.’
When I looked up he was urinating into the hole. I tried to toss the plate up in his general direction, a futile gesture as I got most of the dogmeat back on my own head.
Langley chuckled. ‘You’ll change your mind, old stick. Tomorrow or the next day or the day after that, you’ll eat it. I promise you.’
My voice, when I answered him, was so calm, so much outside myself that I hardly recognized it as my own. ‘All right,’ I said. ‘What’s it all about?’
The iron grid clanged into place shutting out all light and I sank down into the corner. Some sort of complicated revenge for that evening in Almeria? But that didn’t make any kind of sense. The divers, the seaplane, this place. It was all too elaborate. There was some hidden meaning here, a deeper purpose and I drifted into sleep again thinking about it.
Most men spend their lives trying to claw their way out of one kind of a hole or another, but mine was something very special indeed. A stone shaft fifteen feet deep and four feet square and unclimbable, especially in those leg irons. It was only possible to lie down corner-to-corner, but it was so damn cold that I usually preferred to curl up in as tight a ball as possible.
No blankets and definitely no sanitary arrangements so that by the third day, the stench in that confined space had to be experienced to be believed. I could mark the passage of time simply enough by the light which filtered in through the narrow channel in the stonework above my head and there was always the daily ration lowered in the biscuit tin, although after that first day, it was never possible to see who was up there. I tried calling a few times, but nobody ever answered, and after a while I gave up, for it was obviously the intention to isolate me from any kind of human contact.
It was always the same – a bottle of water and the dog food and Langley was right. By the third day I was cleaning the plate, but boredom was the main problem. There was always sleep, but the cold didn’t help too much there so I tried passing the time by undertaking a kind of personal psychoanalysis.
Freud would have been proud of me. I actually made it back to my third birthday; for the first time since that happy event recalled burying a box of scarlet-coated Grenadier Guards in a cornfield at the back of my English grandfather’s Dorset farmhouse and the feeling of utter desolation at forgetting where. And the next day my father, who was a captain in the Marine Corps stationed at the American Embassy in London …
The grating clanged above my head and Langley peered in. I got to my feet and looked up at him. By my reckoning it was exactly a week since that first morning.
‘My God,’ he said. ‘Something must have crawled in and died. Hose him down.’
The jet of water which followed was cold, but really quite pleasant. It stopped after a while and Langley leaned over and lowered a rope with a loop on the end.
‘All right,’ he said. ‘Up with you.’
I came up out of the darkness and found myself in some sort of vault, stone pillars supporting the roof. It was neatly whitewashed and lit by electric light and stone steps in one corner led up to a stout oak door. Two men had the other end of the rope, peas out of the same pod, dark, swarthy looking, wearing identical heavy fishermen’s sweaters, capable of most things if appearances were anything to go by.
They released the rope and one of them said to the other in Italian, ‘Mother of God, he stinks like a dung heap.’
Justin Langley came forward, Gatano at his back. His blond hair hung to his shoulders. He wore a black nylon shirt, skin tight and open at the neck. The broad belt at his waist had a round brass buckle that must have been four inches in diameter and he wore a gold chain round his neck with a bauble on the end which he twirled between his fingers.
I said, ‘You look sweet – honestly.’
‘I wish you wouldn’t, old stick.’ He sighed. ‘It brings out the worst in me.’
He nodded to Gatano who moved forward, a look of what might be termed eager anticipation on his face. When he was close enough he put a fist into my belly. As I doubled over, he hooked his foot under the chain between my ankles and pulled me down.
Langley said sharply, ‘Don’t mark his face!’
I wasn’t sure whether Gatano had heard him or not for he was obviously enjoying himself. He put his boot into me, not very scientifically, three or four times, grunting with effort and then Langley said, ‘All right, that’s enough!’ and pulled him off.
They put the hose on me again and the two Italians picked me up between them and we followed Langley and Gatano up the stone steps. Gatano opened the door and we went out into bright morning sunshine.
I was beginning to function again, well below par, but enough to get by for the moment. We had emerged into a cobbled courtyard surrounded by stone walls. There was a
