Decision at Delphi (4 page)

Wallis, back in New York, was wondering if Alexander were still alive. I hope so. I’d like to look at the Acropolis with him again. This time, we wouldn’t be pressing our bellies into the cold hard ground on a little rock-covered hill, shivering in the bitter night wind from the north, listening to random blunt-nosed bullets striking the southern colonnade of the Parthenon instead of the British paratroopers who were garrisoned up there. Yes, the Brits and the Parthenon, with sandbags piled high around them both. I kept hoping the sandbags were high enough. And I’d give a silent cheer when a mortar bomb hit the rock face itself instead of the temple above. I guess there were some good Athenians among the artillery-men: they aimed low, at least. And above us all rose the white marble pillars turning to red in the glare of burning buildings in the city below.

Remember that, will you, if you ever visit the Parthenon? Sure, it’s true. December, 1944. A Christmas of siege and civil war and savagery. You can’t believe it? No; nor could the Athenians. The ones who spoke English would stop me on the
street when they saw my American uniform. “It isn’t Greeks who are doing this,” they told me. They’d catch me by the arm to make me listen, as if some—oh, sure, laugh at me, but that’s what I saw in their eyes—as if some agony inside them drove them to talk to the stranger who was seeing their city in a way no city should ever be seen. A place of hate and hurt and vengeance; “It’s the Bulgarians,” they said. “Bulgarians and Albanians and German deserters. It can’t be Greeks.” Then they’d leave me. And there was something in their haunted faces that even an embarrassed kid of nineteen couldn’t shake himself free from. These were proud people, and proudest of their civilisation. They had just discovered that barbarians lived among them.

Perhaps there was guilt mixed with shame, too. Some of them, you see, had welcomed the barbarians only four weeks before, thinking of them as heroes of the resistance, men of force and action who would straighten out the eternal quarrels and talk talk talk around the Athenian café tables. So the quarrels were straightened out, and corpses lay in the streets. I remember what a Greek reporter said, I can’t forget it: “It is not only bodies lying in the gutters. It is not only people who have been mutilated with axes or torn to pieces by human hands. It is also our beliefs and our pride. A Greek does not enjoy the taste of shame in his mouth.” The Greek didn’t enjoy saying that, either. But it is only the civilised who can feel the taste of shame. A barbarian wouldn’t even know what it was...

I’m getting too serious? You know, I just can’t raise a smile over barbarians. And what is a barbarian, you ask? A man dressed in skins? Not in this century, friend. He’s the type who likes to destroy. That’s all. He wants to be boss-man, whether it’s with a
hatchet or a gun or a bomb, or with nice cold-eyed justifications such as “You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs.” As if we were only something laid by a clucking hen for breakfast.

Strang’s lips tightened. He stared at the last inch of Scotch and melted ice. He caught the actor’s side glance, and raised his glass. “Down with all barbarians!” he said crisply, and finished his drink. As he left, the actor was looking—for the first time— directly at him.

Well, I broke through his boredom for at least a minute, Strang thought as he went down to his cabin. And don’t thank me, pal. I thank you—for letting me talk my head off to myself. A man needs that, every now and again. But it would be better if I could talk out loud to someone who’d listen; and then she could talk her head off, and I’d listen; and then we’d go to bed and make love, and fall deep asleep and wake up happy. That’s my recipe for a good marriage. When I meet a girl who can listen, and talk, and make love, all equally well, then I’ll get married so damned quick that sisters Jennifer and Josephine won’t even have time to raise a pencilled eyebrow.

The steward Gino, like most Italians, was desolated at the idea of anyone missing a party. So he brought an elegant tray with cold turkey and fruit and sweet cakes and a half-bottle of champagne smuggled out of the dining room. When someone was taking so much delight in providing champagne, it was totally impossible—for Strang, at least—to ask for a Scotch and soda. Or a bottle of beer And he listened while Gino talked about his native Genoa and the little farm outside the city which his wife worked while he sailed the Atlantic. It was a hard life, but Italy was a poor country. Yes, Strang was thinking as the flood of English helped out by Italian poured over him, we are now sailing into a world of poor countries—the Mediterranean, where most people have to scrabble for a very bare living. Yet ask anyone in America or England or the northern countries of Europe what the Mediterranean conjured up for them, and you’d be given sweet dreaming for an answer: sunshine and beaches and yachts in the harbours, music and flowers, long meals and lazy siestas.

Gino left, and Strang could eat some supper, and begin his letter to Christophorou.

He kept it as brief as possible. First, a piece of self-identification; next, the purpose of his visit to Sicily and Greece, mentioning
Perspective
and Stefanos Kladas. Then, the dates in April when he expected to be in Athens. He would be staying at the Grande Bretagne. It would give him the greatest pleasure if Christophorou were able to dine with him. He was, most sincerely...

He reread the page he had written, grateful that Christophorou’s excellent command of English saved him from floundering into beginner’s Greek. His letter was brief, all right, and clear enough. Then he wondered if Christophorou were still living in Athens. Had he gone back to teaching law at Athens University? It would be pretty silly if Strang found he had missed Christophorou by twenty miles or so, on his visit to the Peloponnese or one of the islands, simply because neither had known the other was there. So, as a safeguard, he added a postscript: “If you will not be in Athens around the middle of April, I hope you’ll drop me a note and let me know where I might possibly see you somewhere along my itinerary. Any letter reaching the San Domenico Hotel, Taormina, Sicily, will find me there until April 6. After that, the Spyridon Makres Travel Agency in Athens (Churchill Street) will forward all my mail to me. Yours, K.C.S.”

He hoped the postscript was clear enough, too. He would have been astounded to hear that it was the most important part of the whole letter.

Then it was only a matter of finding the small notebook he had carried around with him during the war—it contained sketches, innocuous enough to avoid a censor’s disapproving eye, of people and places which had caught his imagination; and a scattering of addresses, of names now mostly half-forgotten. Christophorou’s address was jotted on the corner of his sketch of the distant Acropolis as he had watched it when he sailed away from the Piraeus, Athens port. Its white columns gleamed on top of its high hill in a sudden shaft of sunlight piercing the cold winter sky, serene and beautiful, aloof from the occasional belches of artillery fire on the other hills of Athens or from the black pillar of smoke sent up by a burning building in Piraeus itself.

As he copied the address carefully, he had another pessimistic moment wondering if perhaps Alexander Christophorou’s family had moved. But this whole attempt to get in touch with Christophorou was a gamble; what had he to lose? So he sealed the envelope, picked up his coat for a late stroll on deck, and made his way to the purser’s office.

One of the assistant pursers was still on duty, filling up another batch of forms, looking doggedly martyred as he worked to the muffled throb of music from the ballroom. “Gibraltar,” he explained, pointing to the small pile of passports and landing cards on his desk, and he. sighed. “Let us hope it will be calm, and the passengers for Spain will leave us gracefully. A little ferryboat comes out to take them away. But perhaps you have seen it?”

“No, I’ve never seen it.”

“You have never seen Gibraltar?”

“Yes, I’ve seen Gibraltar.”

The assistant purser was puzzled, and then blamed it on the difficulties of the English language. “This time, you must go on deck and watch. It can be very amusing.”

“I’m sure it is. Sorry to trouble you about this airmail stamp. Are you sure it is sufficient?”

“You would like to pay more?” The young man reweighed the letter. “I am sorry. I must disappoint you.”

“Molte grazie.”

“Prego.
And do not miss Gibraltar tomorrow!” Then he looked concerned as he noticed Strang’s overcoat. “You are not going to dance?”

Strang shook his head, smiled reassuringly to show he had no criticism of the band or the floor or his hosts’ indefatigable hospitality, and bade the assistant purser goodnight.

On deck, there was a freshening western wind which seemed to blow the ship through the darkness toward the narrow gap between Europe and Africa. This was a journey he had made, on convoy duty, at least half a dozen times during the last year of the war. Oil tankers, ships with food and clothing and medical supplies, had moved like a straggling herd of arthritic sheep poked and prodded by their darting escorts through the narrow passage into the Mediterranean. As he looked over the black rolling water of the Atlantic, wave swallowing wave, he admitted why he had chosen to come by ship. Not for any of the reasons he had given his friends so easily that he had almost come to believe them himself; only for one, hopelessly sentimental reason. He was no longer nineteen years old, on
board a small destroyer trying to outwit a pack of German submarines. But looking at the cold, impersonal sea covering this giant stretch of burial ground, he tried to ignore the lighted deck, the rise and fall of distant music. Gradually, the dark horizon lined up before his eyes; and, watching the constant surge of water beat against the wall of black sky, he could almost recapture the emotions of fifteen years ago. Almost. Emotions could be remembered only vaguely, at best. All the variables, the textures, the proportions of feeling that made them so overwhelming once became blurred with time. Too much happened to most of us: the clouds of glory and the vision splendid died away.

He turned on his heel and went below. It was always a mistake to try to breathe life into the past; the man of thirty-four was not a youth of nineteen. He wished now that he had never mailed that letter to Alexander Christophorou. He actually did go back to the purser’s office, but it was closed. The letter was beyond recall.

He overslept next morning, and arrived on deck almost at the end of the Gibraltar halt. The liner was anchored in the wide circle of bay, with the Rock rising bluntly at one end of the horseshoe of land, while the flat Spanish coastline curved back and around. Overhead, small soft white clouds chased like tumble-weed across the blue sky. The strong breeze chopped the water, but had not discouraged the little bumboats, bobbing around the ship with their tourist cargoes of garish scarves, tawdry ornaments, and dubious sherry. The clear cool air was filled with raucous cries and harsh Spanish curses as the rowers kept their boats in
place until their baskets of souvenirs, pulled up to the ship’s open decks by high-flung ropes, could be lowered back to them with the dollar bills they had bargained for so strenuously.

Strang, watching the pantomime of the bumboats as the rowers astutely jockeyed a competitor aside or tried to edge in closer to the ship only to be turned back by a watchful police launch, had paid little attention to the disembarkation from a lower deck, where a small steamer dipped and swayed as it hugged the liner’s side and waited to carry the passengers to Algeciras across the bay. But, suddenly, a white cabin cruiser with red leather cushions, brass that glittered, windows that gleamed, two white-uniformed sailors at stiff attention beside a pile of trunks on its afterdeck, swept away from the liner’s side, made a wide curve, elegant and disdainful, between the clusters of bumboats, and headed for the Algeciras side of the bay. As Strang’s eyes were following it, admiring its compact lines and powerful drive, the assistant purser came to stand beside him at the rail.

“I told you it would be amusing.” The assistant purser indicated the heaving deck of the ferryboat below them. Then he noticed the direction of Strang’s eyes. “That is the way to travel! You see the yacht, over there?” He pointed across the bay. “They say she has two of them, so that one is always ready while the other is being overhauled. She travels much. I wonder when she can enjoy her five houses?”

“She?” Strang asked sharply.

“Signora Duval. They say that if she would only tell how much she owns, she could call herself the richest woman—well, in the Levant at least, perhaps in the whole Mediterranean. I do not think that even in America you have such a fortune.”

“In America, we pay our income taxes,” Strang reminded him dryly. So the dragon aunt and her frightened niece had left, servants and baggage complete. They had faded out of his life as quickly as they had stepped into it. His cable to Preston had shown some sense, after all.

He watched the cabin cruiser become a little white arrow darting across the water. By comparison, the yacht must be of quite a respectable tonnage. “A very cautious woman,” he remarked, “if she wouldn’t trust that yacht to the Atlantic.”

“Very cautious. She never travels by air, either.”

“Is that what makes so much money—caution?”

“Women don’t make money,” the assistant purser said with a touch of bitterness. “They spend it. It was Etienne Duval who made the fortune. A Frenchman who lived in Syria. He took Syrian nationality to protect his investments. But you must have heard about him. His suicide, two years ago, was in every newspaper. You did not read about it?”

“I guess I had other things on my mind, two years ago.” Yucatan, for instance, and Mayan tombs.

“A pity. It was a very strange end to a romantic life. He had a palace in Syria, a villa on Rhodes, a
palazzo
in Venice, a castle in Spain, a fortress in Casablanca.”

“Adequate. No chateau in France, I suppose.”

“None.” The assistant purser caught the joke and explained it. “But of course not. To protect his investments.” He enjoyed it, too. “Ah, well,” he said at last, “I, for one, am glad to see Signora Duval leave.” His lips tightened, his eyes narrowed broodingly.