Decision at Delphi (37 page)

The Colonel listened without comment. There was no change of expression on his face. But, halfway through, his eyes left Strang’s face and fell, quite casually, on the two sheets of paper lying before him. Strang had almost forgotten them. Now, quietly, unobtrusively, the Colonel was reading their contents as Strang talked. Yet, he was listening. Strang was disconcerted enough to stop and light another Papastatos. The two things are connected, he decided as he snapped his lighter closed: what he is reading, what I am talking about. Strang continued, recounting Christophorou’s visit to his room at the Grande Bretagne and the disclosure of the conspiracy, the news of Steve’s death and the surrender of Steve’s documents. But when he described the following evening with Cecilia, the Colonel was no longer reading. Now, he seemed to be listening with doubled intensity; perhaps his comparison between what he had read and what he had heard had made him twice as interested.

“And so we arrived at Tommy’s doorstep,” Strang ended. “He took us inside. I telephoned Pringle. You know the rest.”

There was a pause. The Colonel frowned at his desk, then looked at the interpreter. “We need more coffee, Yorghis, and more cigarettes.”

Yorghis, a tall, thin man with a highly intelligent nose and a receding hairline which turned his high brow into a formidable
precipice, took the coffee-pot and said, “I shall fill the cigarette box, too.” He left, with extreme speed, carrying the box carefully. So thought Strang, the recording session has been completed.

“My right-hand man,” the Colonel said, watching the door close. “Not at all like the Yorghis you mentioned.” He laughed. “Did you see his face when you talked about your Yorghis?” Then his amusement was over. He picked up the two sheets of paper.

“I noticed you gave me only the facts. No opinions. No judgments. Why?”

“I don’t know enough of the facts to start making comments.”

“But you must have formed some opinions. A man must ask the reasons why. Is that not so?”

“Yes.”

“What is your opinion of Alexander Christophorou?”

Strang lit another cigarette very carefully.

The Colonel said, “You must have asked why you saw him yesterday evening leaving a house on Kriton Street which Katherini Roilos identified as the one rented for her aunt by Evgenia Vasilika. Miss Hillard saw him, too? There is no doubt that it was he?”

“None.”

“Then, why? You asked yourself that question, I am sure. What was your answer?”

“I keep thinking Christophorou must be a double agent.” He looked up quickly and surprised a look of astonishment.

“That could have been a good answer, if Christophorou had been working for us.”

“But isn’t he attached to—to some intelligence unit?”

The Colonel asked sharply, “Did he tell you he was?”

“No,” Strang said slowly.

“Did he give you that impression?”

Strang hesitated. “Perhaps I was too quick in picking it up. He told me, actually, that he was a journalist.”

“And that is what he is, neither more nor less.”

“But why was he in Sicily? Where did he get all his information?”

“Very interesting questions.” The Colonel didn’t answer them, though.

“Why,” tried Strang again, “did you listen to him when he told you I had documents to deliver? Why did he even—”

“He is a good journalist. And good journalists are detectives, too. They have informants, they check the stories they hear, they can discover vital facts. And when they come across something of great importance that deals with state business, they make contact with official sources. Their discoveries, in other words, can be too dangerous to be treated as ordinary news. Supposing you were a journalist, Mr. Strang, and discovered a serious plot to assassinate your president. What do you do? Burst into headlines and become famous? Or do you give that information to your Secret Service and F.B.I.? And let them find out the whole plot, and arrest the plotters, and end the danger to your country, before you publish what you know? It is a matter of ethics. Personal gain or public service? That is the question. So, two nights ago, when Christophorou made contact with me and my colleague, we were interested, curious. But not astounded. Any reliable journalist would have followed the same course. You understand?”

“Yes. But what puzzles me is the fact that the documents
were
handed over to you. It would have been easier just to
take them—” He halted, remembering that there had been one attempt to steal them.

“Easier in some ways. But more dangerous, too. The sudden death of another American would have caused serious complications. You did not give up those documents easily. You were very tenacious.” The Colonel paused. “Why? You were not in a trusting mood, last Monday. I think you had some doubts about Alexander Christophorou, even then. Am I right? Please do not look so embarrassed, so very unhappy. After all, in your work with ancient ruins you are something of a detective, too. Perhaps you like to make reconstructions of people as well as of temples? Tell me frankly, off the record as you say in America: do you think Drakon is only another name for Christophorou?”

The Colonel, thought Strang, had his own technique for the raw wound: first, the lanolin; then, the sudden jab of iodine. He said, “Does it matter what I think? My ideas won’t interest any court of law. I’ve no proof.”

“Thinking is the beginning of the search for proof,” the Colonel said coldly. “If we do not think, we do not find reasons for doubt. If we do not doubt, we do not start the search for proof. Oh, we’ll find the proof of either innocence or guilt, if we work hard enough and have enough time. But without thinking. doubting, we would not know even where to begin our work. You understand?”

“Katherini Roilos could give you the proof. Let her meet Christophorou. She can tell you whether he is Drakon or not.”

The Colonel looked at him searchingly. Then he sighed, and stretched out his arm to a bell on his table. He frowned, as he jabbed its button. He said sadly, “It is a little more complicated than that, Mr. Strang.” Yorghis opened the door at once. He
had the copper coffee-pot in his hand. “Is it cold?” the Colonel wanted to know. “No? Good. Set up the screen. Get the photographs.” The orders were almost conversational.

Strang drank the hot, sweet coffee cautiously. You had to be careful to leave almost an inch of liquid at the bottom of the little cup if you didn’t want a last mouthful of delta mud. He watched the Colonel with equal care. Those two sheets of paper were still in his hand.

Casually, the Colonel held them up. “This is the report made to us, yesterday, by Alexander Christophorou. It is a statement of how he became interested in Stefanos Kladas, and discovered that certain documents, which might be of some importance to us, were in your hands.” The Colonel studied the two sheets of paper for a long moment. “Not one word of your story, Mr. Strang, coincides with his.”

The coffee silt touched Strang’s teeth. He put down the cup hastily, and found his handkerchief to clean his lips.

“You must not drink our coffee so trustingly, Mr. Strang.”

“Not one word?” Strang echoed.

“Oh, perhaps a few words—where he says he was visiting Taormina and renewed an old friendship. But after that—” The Colonel consulted the top sheet again. “You were extremely worried about the nonappearance of Stefanos Kladas. You asked Christophorou’s advice, and in return, over several drinks, you told him everything that Stefanos Kladas had confided in you. Including—” the Colonel raised his eyes, opened them wide, and smiled—“all that Stefanos Kladas knew about a conspiracy in which his brother, Nikos, was implicated.”

Strang said softly, “And that is how Christophorou came to know about the conspiracy?”

The Colonel nodded and sipped his coffee.

Strang could only stare at Christophorou’s report. My word against his, he thought grimly.

“Only,” the Colonel said, slapping the two sheets down on the table, “how could Stefanos Kladas, in New York, have known such vivid details about the murder of the Roilos father and son on the Megara road? He was not in contact with his brother, Nikos. That is obvious from the two letters from the sister, Myrrha Kladas, to Stefanos Kladas in New York that were among the documents he gave you. The first letter was written last November, after she had received a secret visit from Nikos. She was worried about Nikos then. In a letter written last February, she seemed to have become frightened about Nikos. She hoped Stefanos could persuade him to stay clear of his old friends, who always led him into trouble.”

“Yes,” Strang said bitterly, “he always was a good boy.”

The Colonel, who probably had little time to read New York newspaper reports on juvenile delinquents and their doting mamas, looked momentarily perplexed. Then, “Yorghis—are we ready?”

Yorghis was ready. The screen was in place over the blackboard. The projector was pointing at it. He closed the window’s shutters completely. The small room was dark and warm, smelling of aromatic coffee, delicate cigarettes, starched shirts, and hair oil. “But first,” said the Colonel, now that the shutters were closed, “perhaps you should see the actual photographs, before our experts went to work on them.” He switched on the table lamp, scattered some small snapshots from an envelope into the little pool of light. Strang rose and examined them: the usual ageing snapshots, not too defined,
not much variety in light and shade, not too clear. But, even then, Steve’s sense of composition had been good.

“Do they make any sense to you?” the Colonel asked.

“None.” Just people under trees, a group beside a burned out house. “What’s this fellow doing? Cleaning a rifle?”

“You’ll see.” The Colonel was delighted. He switched off the table light; they sat down; Yorghis took command.

On the screen was flashed a series of photographs, blown up to enormous proportions, coarsened in texture, but with outlines and shadows skilfully sharpened. Faces had become real, actions understandable. Yorghis, in the dispassionate voice of a research scholar, first analysed the backgrounds to suggest the possible localities (Steve had been clever at using the shape of a mountain, a ruined church, a high-perched village above a precipice, even eagles circling over cliffs, to identify the scenes), and then explained the groups of men in the foregrounds. The photographs seemed to deal with one small district of Greece: the slopes of Mount Parnassos and the area surrounding them. The men were
andartes,
the guerrilla fighters, bundled into bulky shapes by strange mixtures of clothing—captured uniforms, tattered civilian jackets, sheepskin tunics as wild as their hair and beards, wool caps, twists of knitted scarves, anything to keep out the savage cold of the mountains. Sometimes they were returning from a raid, sometimes jubilant around a few captured weapons. They were usually in small bands, five or six lonely men, straggling as they climbed a rough mountainside, or resting as they lay under a sheltering tree.

“These photographs were included,” Yorghis was saying, “presumably to identify the area of operations against the Nazis. Here is one, dealing with a less-heroic operation in this same
area. The season is different, you will note from the trees and the hillside. There are other differences. The commander of this band of guerrillas is Ares. There he is, with his men. The bodies which are lying scattered on the sloping meadow are Greeks, too. Their commanding officer, Colonel Psarros, lies with them. The few survivors stand with hands held up in surrender.”

The photograph flashed on the screen. The dead were scattered; the survivors, in a pathetic small group; the victors, in considerable force. To get this scene, Steve had taken a distance shot. Only the gestures of the men were discernible. In clothes, they were the same. Faces couldn’t be distinguished.

“Here is one detail,” Yorghis said. And now four of the survivors were on view: three ghostlike, bewildered faces; the fourth head, with a battered old cap pulled down rakishly over his brow, was bent slightly as the man lit a cigarette. He wore, so it looked, an officer’s long coat.

“And now,” said Yorghis as he flashed another photograph on to the screen, “the survivors who refused to join Ares are executed. One changes his mind just before he is shot, and breaks away to join the victors. They find it amusing.” The man did not. He was weeping. He was a big man, powerful. His face was contorted with anguish and tears. “A shepherd in ordinary life, perhaps,” Yorghis’s calm voice went on. “So we have been told. Name unknown as yet, but identified by his light hair, height, and that sheepskin tunic which he always wore. And now, in the next picture, those who are willing to join Ares are marched away.”

“March” was scarcely the word. The new photograph showed a straggle of men, melting away from the meadow with its abandoned dead. It had focused on that rakishly tilted,
tattered old cap again. (Steve must have taken a dislike to its owner.) And again the head had avoided a clear picture. “Until we saw these photographs,” Yorghis said, “we had thought no officer had surrendered. But this one did. Notice that the shepherd is following him faithfully. Notice, too, that one of Ares’s men has come over to talk to that officer. They walk together. Look carefully: the friendly man is Sideros.”

Indeed it was. Sideros had not had much success with a beard. The face of Nikos Kladas, turning towards, the camera in surprise, was not too difficult to recognise.

“And last of all, a picture taken at a rest camp some months later, judging by the clothes. Locality undiscovered. But this is not a usual camp. The men seen here are known to have been closely associated with Ares. Most of them died with him, in 1945.”

The men had left off their bulky clothing, except for the shepherd, who still wore his sheepskin tunic. Most of them were smiling as they sat around a glade, except for the shepherd again, a desolate crag of a man, who stood in the background. One had even stripped, and was lying asleep, face down in full sunlight. “Sideros, the sun-worshipper,” Yorghis said bitingly. “Notice that mark below his right shoulder blade. Definitely identified by a British liaison officer who knew Sideros before he joined Ares’s special unit.”