Decision at Delphi (19 page)

“So,” Christophorou was saying with some of his old lightness, “a Greek
can
see a joke against himself.” With evident relief, he added, “And I also see that you can keep information to yourself. That is a very pleasant reassurance for me. My lapse of discretion tonight won’t give me any bad hours tomorrow.”

There certainly had been no lapse of tact, thought Strang. What could have been a more gentle reminder that Aleco’s story must be considered as dead and buried as the two terrorists who had started it all? “You don’t have to waste any worry on me. I’ll—”

The telephone rang.

“Strang?” an American voice said.

“Speaking.” He nodded good-bye across the room to Christophorou, who was just about to leave. “Pringle?” he echoed, giving all his attention to the voice on the telephone.

“We met today. Your friend Beaumont introduced us. At Tommy’s table.”

“Of course—a long conversation about Long Walls.”

“That’s right.” Pringle seemed relieved. “Could I see you?”

“That’s a good idea. Tomorrow for lunch?”

“Tonight?”

“Something wrong?” Strang asked quickly. He looked over at Christophorou, waiting at the doorway, alert, worried.

“You could say that. Have you had dinner?”

“Not yet.” Strang glanced at his watch. It was now almost ten o’clock. “I could see you around eleven fifteen or eleven thirty.” Christophorou had crossed quickly over to him. Strang covered the mouthpiece. “There’s some trouble,” he said.

Pringle was saying, “Why don’t you drop over to my apartment? It is just across the street and up the hill. Take Voucourestiou Street—that’s also called Jan Smuts. My apartment is—”

“Just a moment. Voucourestiou?” Strang turned to Christophorou, who had touched his arm. Christophorou held out a slip of paper. “Find out what trouble,” Strang read. “Right,” he told Pringle, “I’ve got all that. But tell me—what’s the trouble?”

“Time enough after you’ve eaten.”

“My dinner is ruined, in any case. Can you tell me what’s wrong? Is it something about Steve?”

“Yes. He has been found.”

“Where?”

“I am afraid it’s very bad news,” Pringle said heavily.

Strang looked at Christophorou. “Steve is dead,” he said. Half prepared as he had been, the finality of his own words, three
small words, caught him in shocked surprise. Christophorou took the phone from him.

Christophorou was saying to Pringle, “Bob? Aleco, here. Sorry you couldn’t find me. There was a slight alteration in my engagements. But here I am now. I’m listening.”

Christophorou listened for four full minutes. “The documents are here,” he said at last. “Yes, Strang has them. No, I haven’t seen them. It would be better if we three got together right away. You can be our witness of transfer. Just a moment—” He looked across at Strang, sitting very still on the arm of a chair. “Anything you want to add, Kenneth? Pringle says eleven fifteen at his place would be all right.”

Strang said, “Why not follow Steve’s idea? Tell Pringle I’ll meet him at the American Embassy. We’ll do it the way Steve wanted.”

Christophorou hesitated. He shrugged, and talked to Pringle again. “Yes, yes,” he insisted. “I’ll get in touch with the right department at once. They’ll send two of their experts over to the embassy tonight. That’s what Strang wants. Let’s say half past eleven?”

Strang stared down at Steve’s small case. They didn’t silence Steve, he thought. He turned away, opened the door on to his dark terrace and stepped out into the cool, crisp night. High above the quietening street, looking over the broken succession of flat roof tops opposite him, the neon signs, the scattering of lighted rooms, the glow from the main avenues, he forgot the city. He was remembering another dark night, the gale-swept causeway at Naples, the mounting wave and Steve yelling as they ran, defiant and triumphant.

Strange that, of all the memories of Steve, the one that would always stay with him would be that moment.

At his elbow, Christophorou said quietly, “Here is my telephone number. Memorise it. Don’t keep it.” He handed over a slip of paper. “Two Intelligence officers will take charge of the Kladas documents tonight. You can rely on them to take appropriate action. Don’t be surprised if you see me around, somewhere in the background. And don’t be surprised, either, if you see a man dressed in a dark suit and striped tie staying close to you at dinner—he is a friend.”

Strang shook his head. Nothing would surprise him very much any more. “There’s no need for that,” he said.

“Pringle is responsible for that idea. He’s a pleasant fellow, but he is inclined to double-lock the stable door once the horse is stolen. If only he had listened to me when I told him Stefanos Kladas was in grave danger!” Christophorou touched Strang’s arm for a moment. “I am sorry,” he said, and was gone.

Strang came back into the room. He finished the brandy, memorised Christophorou’s telephone number, and burned the scrap of paper. Now, he thought as he looked at his watch, I’m supposed to get some food inside me. The idea was nauseating, but when had he last eaten? Nine, ten hours ago. Better make the effort. There was a long night ahead of him.

The large dining-room was aglitter with light, well filled with sedate guests, astir with polite murmurs. He found a small table, impressed on a horrified captain the fact that he really wanted something light, something quick, swallowed some soup and choked down mouthfuls of omelette. He would long remember his first dinner in Athens. At a table near the door, a small dark man in a dark-blue suit and striped tie seemed to be adept at
making one very small cup of coffee last, in the Athenian way. Was all this really necessary? Strang wondered with irritation.

Yet, as he signed at the reception desk for the envelope containing Steve’s strange legacy, it was—oddly enough—most comforting to see the small dark man in his neat dark suit waiting in the lobby with an expertly detached and aimless air. Strang looked inside the envelope to make sure, and was sure: that worry could at least be crossed off his little list. The last problem was only to get to the embassy. Suddenly, he felt no longer annoyed by the grave-faced, dark-suited man so close on his heels, but only grateful. He took back his hard feelings about Pringle’s misplaced efficiency.

This will all end in an anti-climax of complete ignorance, he told himself as he waited for the doorman to signal a taxi. I shall be conveyed carefully to the embassy, I’ll make my little explanation to Pringle, I’ll hand over this envelope; a couple of Greeks in dark-blue suits will bow gravely, take charge of it, and vanish; I’ll probably have to sit in a small office and talk some more to Pringle about Steve, Aleco may come in, and they’ll tell me how Steve died, or they may not; and that will be all I shall ever know, except what I read in the newspapers. That’s the way it will be. Anti-climax. Thank you, Strang; now good-bye, good-bye...

And it was very much like that. Except that one of the Greeks wore khaki with four rows of close-packed ribbons on his solid chest.

When he left Pringle, the first threat of dawn was streaking the placid sky grey-green. The white and yellow houses were softly luminous ghosts behind still trees. “Put this all behind you,”
Pringle had said sympathetically. “You have your own job to do, you know.” That was the voice of good sense and quiet reason. But when had emotions listened to logic?

The bar at the Grande Bretagne was open, but the large room was empty, the lights reduced to one faint chandelier, the long counter without anyone at all. That certainly solved one problem: there was no place to go but bed, with bitter thoughts for company.

Next morning, apart from sleeping until the lazy hour of ten, Strang found everything almost back to routine. He shaved, showered, and dressed briskly, had breakfast in his room after a bleak attempt to sit on the terrace in the thin, wind-cooled sunlight of early spring, read the English-language papers which had arrived along with bacon and eggs, and made a determined if gloom-filled effort to follow Pringle’s advice.

He became increasingly restless. He looked at his portfolio, and closed it again. He picked up his notes on the Acropolis, and put them down. A pleasant little waiter, brisk and friendly, came to wheel away the breakfast table. The elderly, sensible-looking maid peered in, and retreated, but not too far from his room. He was glad to take her cue. He needed fresh air, some exercise, anything to end this restlessness. He laid aside the book he was trying to read, didn’t even look for his sketch pad or pencils, and left. He passed quickly through the crowded lobby,
out into the noisy street. It was half past eleven. Athenians were already homeward bound towards their midday meal.

He began walking along Venizelou, a broad and busy thoroughfare with a mixture of shops and cafés on one side and public buildings, more or less, on the other. Smaller side streets fed it so that it bulged with traffic of all kinds—speed seemed to be the only common denominator—and resounded with all varieties of honks and screeches, as if wild geese and night owls were competing overhead. Overfilled trolley buses, bristling with dark moustaches (high fashion, evidently, for the grey-suited young men) and the hatless heads of serious-eyed women, asserted their lawful rights among the quick flowing traffic. A certain independence of spirit was very evident, adding to the gaiety of the battle against the pedestrian whose wits had to be as quick as his feet. Strang, at least, achieved one purpose of this excursion: he wasn’t given much time to think about anything else than having his tail lopped off by a speeding taxi or being sideswiped by an impatient bus.

He had explored what might be called the main-street section of Athens—for Athens, he had decided, was a collection of towns, from city towns to country towns, self-contained and yet interwoven like the patches of a New England quilt—and now he was back on the smarter end of Venizelos Street, only two or three blocks from his hotel. Here the sidewalk was broad and paved and the bigger cafés had rows of tables and chairs under their awnings for the usual collection of hop-skip-and-jump tourists (four-day visit, with Delphi and Sunium thrown in); Greek dowagers in flowered hats and smooth gloves; stay-and-see visitors (two weeks’ residence, at least); and some young men, with short haircuts, rebelling against the coffeehouse ritual
of their elders by enjoying ice-cream sodas. And just as Strang was debating whether he would cut down the next side street to a coffeehouse where he could sit indoors in a large bare room with a dusty floor and close-packed tables jammed tight with men sitting over a thimbleful of fine ground coffee, or whether he’d flop here and enjoy a beer and have some more breaths of exhilarating carbon monoxide, he saw Caroline Ottway. She had seen him, too. She gave a wave of her hand beckoning him toward the table where she sat. With her other hand, she said good-bye to a man in grey, small, dark-haired, black-moustached, who bowed over it with great politeness. He turned to bow to Strang, too, before he left, saying in his sibilant English, “I hope Mr. Strang is enjoying himself? Such a fine spring day!”

“Who’s that?” Strang asked, watching the man’s retreating shoulders. “Oh, yes, he’s the fellow who didn’t meet me at the airport.”

“Yorghis,” said Caroline Ottway.

“That’s the character.” Strang shook her hand and sat down.

“He is teaching me Greek.”

“Good heavens—does the Spyridon Makres Agency run classes, too?”

“Oh, this is only some extra work that Yorghis does on the side. I got his name through a friend of a friend.
You
know... He’s really very good, I think. And not expensive.”

“He has original ideas in classrooms.”

“But where else, meanwhile? We are still searching for a flat—I think we’ve got one, actually—and I couldn’t have Yorghis in our hotel bedroom, and I certainly couldn’t go to his room, and we tried the hotel lobby, and so we came here.” She pushed over a notebook for Strang to admire. “See what I
learned in one hour—all about streets and traffic and people. It’s really a very practical way of doing things.”

“You don’t waste time, do you?” He signalled to a waiter.

“Well, I haven’t much time to waste. I have to know how to manage a household in Greek, you know.”

“Unless you got an English-speaking cook.”

She shook her head. “George likes to speak Greek. We are going to get a maid from one of the islands.”

“That’s much more authentic,” he agreed. “I hope she comes from an island strong on decorative costume.”

She looked at him, and then decided to smile. “And how are you?”

“All right.” He signalled again for the waiter. “Don’t they want people to order?” he asked.

“Now,” she said gently, “you know that time doesn’t matter here.”

“Oh, so that’s the explanation for all that slow traffic. I wondered.”

“Now,” she said again, a little anxiously, “you don’t sound like yourself at all. Are you feeling all right?”

“Fine, just fine.”

“How is your work?”

He was amused in spite of himself. Whenever George’s work was going badly, his temper must obviously shorten. “I’ve just had too little sleep. And I’m thirsty,” he said. “And how have you found Athens?” There was no need to ask how she felt. She was glowing. Today, she was wearing black, but nothing could dull down her skin and eyes.

“I’ve never met so many people so quickly and all at once. They’re terribly hospitable, aren’t they? I didn’t quite expect
all this—Cyprus, you know. However, lots of people seem to remember George. And that’s nice.”

“So you’ve been partying like mad.” He looked once more for the waiter.

“George is too busy. I have to go and make excuses for him, so no one feels we aren’t grateful. Two on Sunday, three yesterday. Imagine!”

“You love every moment of it, so don’t expect sympathy,” he told her. “But didn’t you just arrive on Sunday?”

“Yes,” she said delightedly, “and there were the invitations, all waiting for us. George, of course, was hauled away to a meeting, scarcely had time to wash his hands, one of those all-evening-intonight sessions.” She lowered her voice. “Cyprus. It’s all settled, but it isn’t settled, if you know what I mean. Terribly worrying. I’ve scarcely seen George in those last two days —There’s a waiter now!” she said quickly.