Tales of Adventurers Read Free

and drink, and a car to return him to the outer suburbs.
    The button aided bluff. He had no difficulty in returning to his comfortable and now well-furnished seat between the bubble trays. About six in the evening he heard a good deal of fuss around
the column. The curved plates transmitted the sounds of the outer world like a telephone receiver. He could not mistake orders, arguments, excitement and the slapping-on of labels. At dusk a
locomotive came to fetch the flatcar and dragged it ceremoniously – like, said Devenor, a choirboy walking backwards before a bishop – along the loop line round Bucharest. The
locomotive then steamed off, rocking and lighthearted, leaving the column on a remote siding in the middle of a belt of trees.
    Devenor ventured out. He and his column were alone, except for the frogs and a nightingale, upon the soft Roumanian plain. There was just enough light to read the labels on the car. They were
even more urgent, menacing and precise than before; but the destination was Constantsa instead of Ploesti. The waybill in its frame at the side of the car was resplendent with new red ink and
rubber stamps.
    “It was quick work,” Devenor admitted. “They have plenty of energy for anything utterly crazy. But it looked to me as if my damned godson had consigned us both to the salt
mines. I very nearly cleared out.”
    He didn’t, however. He got back into his refuge and had a drink from Ion’s basket, and then another. The effect was to make him less disapproving when Ion and a friend arrived, and
shoved two suitcases through the manhole.
    Uncle John was formally presented to George Manoliu of the Ministry of Mines, and was compelled by every convention of courtesy to refrain from saying what he thought. Indeed he found himself in
the position of host, extending with proper flowers of speech the hospitality of his fractionating column and showing the two undersecretaries to their rooms between the bubble trays.
    Godson Ion and George Manoliu spread out their blankets, and arranged a third compartment for the subdirector of Roumanian State Railways who would shortly join the party. Devenor began to think
that his chance of escaping death or Siberia had improved. These two young men and the third to come, able to administer between them – at any rate for twenty-four hours – the
refineries, the railways and the shipping of the State, presumably had the power to order the column to be returned to Istanbul, to move it at the expense of any other traffic, and to direct the
same or another ship to stand by at Constantsa to load it. And from what he knew of Roumania, communist or not, he was certain that the respective ministries wouldn’t catch up with what had
happened for at least the better part of a week.
    He said that while they were waiting for the sub-director of railways he would see about his cook.
    “Don’t bother, Uncle John,” Ion assured him. “That’s all arranged.”
    He hoped that it was; but the more he considered the character of his godson, the more sure he was that in the excitement of organizing his influential colleagues there could have been no time
for a visit to Traian or the Restaurant Gradina.
    Ten minutes later the subdirector of railways arrived, with no baggage but a bottle and what looked like an official cashbox. He announced that in another hour they would be on their way to
Constantsa.
    “And my cook?” Devenor asked again.
    “Look here, Uncle John, we’ll write for him,” said Godson Ion.
    Devenor crawled out of the manhole, and from the safety of the outer air addressed the undersecretaries. He told them that he was going to get his cook, that if they wanted to stop him they
would have to catch him among the trees in pitch darkness, and that if they left without him he would go straight to the political police.
    “They’re still accustomed to foreign exploitation,” he would explain. “There was nothing, really nothing, that they could do