Jack Higgins by Night Judgement at Sinos Page A

life—the only way, and you still get plenty of boats working the Aegean and the waters off the south-west coast of Turkey.
    So, there was still a living to be had if you knew what you were doing, but only just. I’d had three weeks of it, working out of Kyros and just managing to keep my head above water. Eating money, fuel for the boat and not much left after that.
    Morgan was having to manage on local wine which came cheap at around a couple of shillings a litre and the old lady who ran the taverna where he bought it always seemed to give him a little over the odds, so he was happy enough.
    It was a strange kind of existence. A sort of limbo between old endings and new beginnings. We had a boat, enough to eat, the sun was warm. No word from Yanni Kytros which surprised me, but we managed.
    He owned an old taverna on the waterfront at Kyros which he’d tarted up for the tourist trade. Yanni’s, he called it. It was the sort of place that looked like something out of an old Bogart movie. Fishermen and sponge divers were encouraged to use it, preferably unshaven and with knives at their belts, to give the tourists a thrill, but it was mainly a big act and the local boys were strictly on their best behaviour and got their drinks cheap. The occasional fight added a little spice and even Yanni didn’t mind that as long as it didn’t go too far.
    It was run for him by a fat, amiable Athenian namedAlexias Papas who liked the quiet life and saw that things stayed that way by providing the local police sergeant with what amounted to free board and lodging and, as far as I could see, that seemed to include assuaging a pretty deep thirst.
    As I said, there was no news from Kytros or perhaps Alexias was simply putting me off, so I gave up enquiring and concentrated on earning a living for a while.
    We’d not had much luck earlier in the day and I had decided to try the area on the north side of a tiny island called Hios on the chance recommendation of an old Turk, crippled by the bends, who’d conned a couple of drinks out of me at Yanni’s the previous evening.
    Morgan got to his feet, yawning and scratching his face as I buckled on an aqualung. “Hope you do better than we done this morning, Jack. That lot we got drying ain’t hardly worth taking in.”
    â€œYou worry too much,” I said and vaulted over the rail.
    What he had said was true enough, but it wasn’t exactly constructive. Sponges are funny things. The good and the bad often look exactly the same, nice and black and shiny. There’s a definite art in being able to tell the difference and the plain truth is that I was only fair at it.
    I paused to adjust my air supply and went down in a long sweeping curve. The water was crystal-clear and I could see so far and with such definition that it was like looking at things through the wrong end of a telescope.
    I hovered for a while to get my bearings, aware with a kind of conscious pleasure that I was enjoying this. There were fish everywhere, dentex and black bream and just below me, a group of silver and gold giltheads. Ijack-knifed and went down fast, scattering them just for the hell of it, and found myself part of an enormous shoal of tiny rainbow-hued fish. They exploded outwards leaving me alone, suspended in the blue vault.
    For a brief moment I seemed to become a part of it all and it was a part of me, fused together into something special. Man’s oldest dream, free flight, was achieved and all things were possible. I experienced again the same incredible wonder I had known on the very first occasion I had gone down in a self-contained rig.
    It had been a long time since I’d felt like that. Too long. I tried to hang on to the moment, to hold it tight. Perhaps because of that fact it simply drained out of me, leaving me wary and tense again and vaguely apprehensive.
    I touched bottom at eight fathoms. It was suddenly gloomier. For one thing, there were a