Bloody Passage - Jack Higgins [52]
He got out and went round to the rear. Simone heard him shouting at the women, the chorus of catcalls he received in reply. She slipped out of the cab, pulled the burnous over her head and waited in the shadows.
The women from the second truck started to move forward to join the others. Zingari went round to the other side of the cab and reached inside to switch off the lights.
"Signorina?" he called softly. "Get in among the women. Lose yourself in the crowd and pray. There is nothing more I can do for you."
She felt calm then for no reason that made any kind of sense. Ice-cool as she pulled the hood of her burnous about her face, she moved round the tail of the truck and joined the other women.
They were as foul as she had imagined. Many of them partly drunk, some completely. Most of them were old or looked old, ravaged by years of squalor and disease. There were very few Arabs as was to be expected, but a considerable number of Italians, the sweepings, from the sound of their accent, of the slums of Naples.
Simone pressed on into the center of that jostling throng. No one took the slightest notice of her, most of them being totally occupied in calling to soldiers up on the wall above the gate. A large, fat woman in front of Simone with hair so red that it could only have come out of a bottle, stumbled drunkenly as she crossed the raised railway line outside the gate and fell flat on her face. She tried to get up and failed and the others flooded past, several of them trampling on her.
It was a heaven-sent opportunity. Simone got her to her feet, not without considerable difficulty, an arm around her shoulders and moved on with the crowd, the woman moaning drunkenly.
The onward rush slowed down for a while as the women passed in through the narrow gate, two or three at a time. Sergeant Husseini stood watching, the great bearded face expressionless and yet Simone felt that there was nothing that escaped him. That he saw everything there was to see. The eyes seemed to fasten on hers, she turned her face down and moved on, clutching the other woman tightly. A moment later and they were through the narrow gate and moving along a dark tunnel, finally emerging into an enormous courtyard.
The women milled around in an unruly mob, but staying together. Beyond them were the soldiers, a gap of thirty or forty yards between the two groups. The women jeered and catcalled, shouting obscenities and the men replied in kind.
Simone looked around the square quickly, taking everything in. The ramparts, the great iron-barred gate to the main building which presumably housed the prisoners. The railway train Grant had mentioned stood on the far side, beside the main building. There were half a dozen boxcars, two or three flat-tops, as far as she could see, but the locomotive itself was standing inside what was obviously an engine shed.
Most surprising of all, in the far corner of the compound a pleasant villa in the Italian colonial style stood in a lush garden surrounded by a low wall.
To the right of her were several small buildings, presumably storehouses, and several trucks were parked, all in an area of deep shadow. She eased her arm away from the woman beside her, leaning her against the wall and started to edge away through the crowd toward the concealing darkness and, suddenly, everyone went silent.
It was really quite remarkable. As if someone had turned off a switch. An iron gate in the wall surrounding the house had opened and a man was walking across the courtyard.
Like the other soldiers present he wore a camouflaged uniform. The only difference was that he was bareheaded and wore no badges of rank and yet Simone knew there was only one person this could be.
Colonel Masmoudi paused in the center of the courtyard between the two groups. He had a swagger stick in one hand which he tapped restlessly against his right thigh. Sergeant Husseini moved in smartly and saluted. Colonel Masmoudi raised the swagger stick briefly. He was a handsome man with a heavy