I said to Astrid, whispering: “Stay here in the car. Keep the engine running, and at the first sign of anything you don’t like the look of, head for home, fast. You know how to drive with a stick shift?”

She nodded. “But can’t I...can’t I come with you? I’m scared.”

I hesitated. The danger was nebulous, inexplicably worrying; there’d been no evidence that anything was really wrong, and yet...I had a nasty feeling that someone, somebody, knew of my interest in whatever it was I was supposed to be interested in here. I couldn’t explain it, even to myself; but I always play my hunches, it’s wiser. I wished I’d brought the General’s tough little servant with me to look after Astrid.

I said, a little dubiously: “All right. Stay close to me, all the time.”

She said fervently: “I will, don’t worry about that.”

I reached into the glove compartment and took out the flashlight, and we went quickly down the steep slope of the sandy bank towards the broken rocks of the beach.

The Bocca do Inferno, the Mouth of Hell, is well named. When the wind is in the southwest, as it was not now, thank heaven, the driven sea beats into a monstrous complex of caves that lead from a tight funnel at sea level down under the hundred-foot cliff. There’s a gorge that cuts through the middle of it all, well-wired off at the top to keep the curious tourists away, and the sides of the gorge are pitted with smaller caves and tunnels, some of them boring deep down into unexplored recesses deep under the cliff.

A party of spelunkers had been there last year to explore the deepest of these. They reached a depth of four hundred and eighty feet before the ground gave way beneath their feet and buried all six of them, five young students from the geology class at the University and their teacher. Now, this tunnel too has been wired off.

We gave it all a very wide berth and moved along the beach to where the lagosteria is. It is part of the same complex of caves, but far enough away from the Bocca itself to be quite harmless, unless you’re fool enough to lose your footing. Here, there’s a deep slice into the cliff that is man-made, a squared off passage that was cut by hand, no one knows how long ago or why, that opens up into a huge chamber, some eighty feet square and fifteen feet high, with a smooth floor of ancient cement. When the cavern was first discovered, they found that the cement used was made with egg whites, which presupposes the work was done by the Romans; but some say that the Phoenicians carved it out while they were on their way to build Gadir, the “wall fortification” in Spain, that later became known as Cadiz; that was eleven hundred years before Christ.

Be that as it may, some of the minor caverns, the safe ones, have now been put to a more prosaic use; lobsters are bred there. The owners of the various lagosterias have cut great square holes in the concrete floor, below which—and a few feet down—the water of the sea is gentle and subdued, in surprising contrast to the fury of the turmoil just round the corner, where the waters of the Bocca are driven up sky-high through the deep cleft in the rock.

In this huge backwash, several hundred square yards in area, the young lobsters come by the hundreds, and they are trapped here by a series of heavy wire grills and left to feed on the thousands of dying fish which are trapped by the rise and fall of the tide. It is as though a false floor of concrete had been built across the uneven floor of the ocean, some two or three feet above it—a great deal more above it in parts, where the bottom drops away into natural reservoirs—so that there is easy access from a sensibly stable platform into the dark and murky depths below. The cut holes, in turn, are covered with massive slabs of concrete which are moved aside, when collection time comes, with a simple rope and winch, and as many lobsters as are required can then be hauled up by hand. It is a profitable business, and the heavy slabs are there to make sure no inquisitive explorer goes home with his rucksack full of lobsters at twenty escudos a head.

These are not true lobsters, of course, not the Homaridae whose major legs terminate in crushing claws; these are the Palinuridae, the spiny lobster or crawfish that taste so well when they’re cooked in a mixture of court bouillon and cognac, or grilled over an open hearth and brushed with black butter. But they crowd their confined homes here by the hundreds, scarcely moving in the darkness except when the rising tide deposits their food for them and then falls back to leave it there.

I shielded my eyes against the glare of the big lamp at the top of the cliff and waited for someone to yell out and ask what I was doing there; there was only the boisterous sound of the sea, and I wondered where the watchman was; down there himself?

I went quickly down the sand-blown concrete steps that have been cut into the side of the cliff, with Astrid nervously following, and the spray coming up and soaking us both, and landed in the relative quiet at the bottom to find the wooden door that leads to the cavern ajar; the padlock was open with the key still in it. I turned the bright beam of the flashlight over the cavern and studied it.

High in the roof, the water was dripping slowly; we could hear the sound of the wash below our feet, and the flashlight showed me why—one of the huge concrete slabs had been pulled away on its winch to open up a trap. We skirted it carefully, peering down into the murky depths of the water below, and swung the light down each of the many tunnels that led God knows where, one after the other. There was a sign on the rock wall, painted in red letters on white near the entrance to one of the many subsidiary tunnels that lead down into the black silence there; it said: Caution, the roof is unstable, do not make noise. I called out none the less: “Guarda! Watchman!” Some rubble trickled down from the roof, and my voice echoed back a dozen times, the sound dying away slowly, reluctantly. I called again, louder; only the echoes came back; and more rubble.

I swung the beam of the light slowly over the walls. An electrical cord ran along the ceiling, with bare bulbs hanging from it at intervals, and I followed its line and found the switch and flicked it on. The bulbs lit up and cast their eerie shadows over the red and yellow rocks.

And there, swinging from an iron support in the ceiling, swaying still at the end of a rope, was the body of General Queluz.

CHAPTER 4

Astrid’s scream reverberated through the chamber, a scream that went on and on and on as she clutched at me and buried her face in my chest.

I said: “For God’s sake!” I tried to stifle the sound, and before I could say another word, another small shower of stones and rubble fell from the ceiling. She gasped.

I said gently: “There’s nothing we can do, and screaming won’t help. You’ll just bring the roof down on us.” She turned back to stare at the swaying body, staring as though hypnotized, and I said roughly, trying to throw some sense into her: “You’ve seen dead men before, in your business.”

Her voice was a whisper: “Yes, but not...not like that.”

I broke away from her and went to the body and touched it; it was cold. And then, in the terrible silence, I became aware of something that shouldn’t be there. I moved swiftly to the light switch and flicked it off, and in the darkness I heard Astrid gasp; she whispered urgently: “No, no, not the darkness.”

I felt for her and took her arm and guided her carefully back the way we had come. She began to say something, and I put a finger on her lips and held it there, feeling her freeze. I put my mouth very close to her ear and whispered: “No sound at all.”

Very carefully, very slowly, we moved together, step by slow step, towards the iron gate; I tried hard to visualize just where that gaping hole was in the floor, and reached out an arm to search for the rope of the winch in the darkness. I found it, and we skirted the entrance to the trap and moved on.

The scent that had alarmed me was stronger now; the ripe, sweet scent of tobacco.

I don’t smoke, myself, and I can smell a cigarette a long way away. The General was a nonsmoker too, and if it was the watchman, why hadn’t he answered my call?

There was no alien sound, just the murmur of the water, a faint lap-lap in slow cadence. The darkness, after the bright flare of the lights, was impenetrable, and Astrid’s lithe body was stiff as she walked beside me, trying hard not to make a noise, walking on the tips of her toes and the leather scuffling the concrete floor. And then, suddenly, the lights went on again.

We’d come to within a few feet of the wooden door, and there they were, two of them, with their weapons pointed straight at us.

One of them was a tall, gangling man, with cadaverous cheeks and an unhealthy pallor to his skin, a man with lank hair falling over his forehead and dark, resentful eyes. He wore an off-white sweatshirt and khaki trousers, with a broad leather belt and a loosely-cut jacket of worn-out Bedford cord, and he carried a sawed-off shotgun very easily and nonchalantly in one hand, with the butt tucked under a bony elbow and the barrel pointed straight at my stomach.

The second man was quite different, a slight, stolid looking man with fair hair and a very bronzed complexion wearing a blue Naval coat and a pair of dirty white trousers, with dark blue sneakers on his feet. To my astonishment, he carried a bow and arrow.

It was not an ordinary bow, but a small, brightly shining bow of what looked like brushed steel, not much more than thirty-six inches long, small enough to slip down a trouser leg if need be to hide it from watchful, curious eyes. The string was drawn back, but only a trifle, and his thumb was hooked over it in the old Mongolian draw—almost the first time I’d seen this. The arrow was about twenty inches long, and quite heavy, an unusually thick arrow made from steel rod with a hunting head on it, what looked like the Howard Hill broadhead, and instead of feathers it was fitted with a fur fletch. There was a quiver across his back, high up at his neck, with another twelve or fifteen shafts in it. It startled me to see so unusual a weapon, and I wondered what sort of man he was.

I turned round to see who was at the light switch, and there he was, a thick-set, burly man with close-cropped hair and pale blue eyes, well over six feet tall and looking very tough indeed, with huge, well-developed forearms under the tightly rolled up sleeves of his khaki shirt. He, too, carried a sawed-off shotgun, and there was an indescribable air of affinity among the three of them; they looked like a wolf pack together, as though each were part of the others. The close-cropped hair gave him the look of a soldier, and the tan was straight out of Africa.

There was a look of controlled impatience on his face, like the face of a schoolmaster who’s found one of the boys in the pantry in the middle of the night. He looked quickly at Astrid and back to me, his expression not changing, and he said, quite quietly and with no sort of expression in his voice:

“Well, who are you, and what are you doing here?” There was no anger in his voice at all; it was as though the question were purely academic, as though, almost, he didn’t really expect an answer.

I said mildly: “My name’s Cabot Cain, and I came looking for General Queluz. Simple enough.”

He didn’t waste any time on more formality. He held his shotgun loosely in his hand and moved to one side a little, a move that seemed on the surface to have no meaning at all till I looked back again at the two men by the door. They had moved out, each to one side, and the third man had merely moved instantly and casually out of their line of possible fire. I looked back at him, and he jerked his gun towards the hanging body and said:

“How did you know he was here?”

I shrugged. “We had a dinner appointment. His servant said he’d come down here, so we came looking for him.”

“Just the two of you?”

I didn’t expect to deceive him, but I thought that at least I might try. I said: “Just the two of us and my driver. He’s outside somewhere.”

The man with the bow laughed, a sudden, inexplicably queer sort of laugh. He held the bow and the arrow in one hand, the index finger of the left hand curled round the shaft to hold it still in position, and made quick, elusive gestures with his right. So we’d been watched as we arrived. The third man nodded, accepting the signal. He jerked his head towards the open hole in the floor that was the lobster trap and said briefly:

“Get down there, both of you.”

I said: “No.”

A flicker of impatience crossed his face. Still no anger, just a touch of irritation. He said roughly: “In there, or I’ll blow both your heads off.”

I looked up at the sign on the wall. “And bring the whole lot down on us?”

Staring at him, Astrid whispered: “Did you...kill him?”

Now there was a curious look in his eye, and I knew why. We’d been talking Portuguese—his accent was Angolan—and Astrid spoke it badly. He looked at her sharply and switched to English, with a strong Scottish accent:

“Och, so you’re Americans then. Aye, and it’s a natural characteristic, is it not, minding everybody’s business but your own? Now, get down there, the both of you.”

I said again: “No.”