Decision at Delphi (47 page)

And then the storm broke. The man crouching behind the corner of the bridge leaped up on to the road and looked after the car. The other, at the tree by the bridge, yelled back toward the shadows, “He has gone! He did not stop! He did not stop!”

“Shut up. He’ll come back!”

“He’s gone,” the first man reported. “He isn’t coming back. He’s going down.” He stood well over to the edge of the road, his hands on his hips, a broad-backed figure in a heavy coat, staring into the valley.

There was a sudden stirring, and the others came out from cover. The three men clustered together on the road, the woman waited beside the tree.

A man turned toward her, speaking angrily. The woman answered sharply.

The man jumped back off the road and came toward her. She retreated up the path, just across the stream from the olive tree under whose shadows Strang and Elias lay. “You were beside me when I telephoned. You heard,” she was
saying contemptuously. “I gave the right directions.” She halted and faced him.

The man spoke angrily. “That is right,” she said scornfully, “blame me! Waste your time blaming me! He is an American. He doesn’t know this road. Perhaps he did not see the signpost to Thalos. Perhaps he cannot read the Greek letters. How slow you are to think of the real reason!”

The man was silenced.

“Why did you not let me step on to the bridge?” the woman demanded. “He would have known where to stop, then.”

“Yes. And you could have warned him—”

The woman laughed. “Why should I die for an American?”

The others left the bridge and came up the path. The three men stood together, looking at the woman.

“Stupid!” she taunted them. “An American will not spend the night searching for a little road. He will sleep in Sparta, and come back here in daylight. That is the practical thing. Americans are practical. They do not waste time looking for a road they cannot find in the dark.” She turned and left them, walking up the path by the stream, slowly, with dignity.

The angry man took a step after her. But another caught his arm. After a little more argument, the three went back to the road, angry, baffled, straggling, as if they still had not made up their minds what to do. But when they reached it, they started down its slope.

Well, thought Strang, moving a numbed leg, if our Costas is too eager and doesn’t wait a full half-hour in the valley, we have another problem. He glanced at Elias. He, too, was worried. Strang pulled up his jacket collar. The cold was sharp, striking into his bones like a knife. Let’s move,
he thought irritably, and half rose. Elias caught his arm and pulled him back.

They heard a car, which must have been parked not too far down the road, start up with a hacking cough. At last, the motor turned over smoothly. Headlights swept over the bridge, pointing northward up the long hill. The car passed. Its motor pulled heavily, droning into a faint hum, lessening gradually into nothing.

“Now!” Elias said, rising. He started at a quick pace up the glen, in the direction of the Kladas house.

It was a small house, standing alone, low in spite of its two stories, nestling against the hillside as if the winter winds were still blowing from the north. Its front was in shadow, with only deeper shadows to suggest windows. They were few, and all tightly shuttered. In contrast to the dark front, the rippling tiles of the gently sloping roof seemed almost white in this moonlight. There were wide eaves, a square blackened hole which might have been a chimney. It was a peaceful house, a sleeping, house, completely innocent. To one side, there was a stretch of ploughed field, enclosed by a stone wall, rising steeply, ending in rough harsh boulders. And past the front door went the path, widening now, still following the stream, curving round to run straight into an earth road bordered with several dwellings.

It was something of a surprise to Strang to find the village so close. The road from the main highway and the path from the
bridge were not parallel, as he had supposed: they converged into this broad stretch of bare earth, edged by a row of buildings on one side, by the stream and a scattering of trees on the other. Everything here slept deeply. Even the stream, flowing along the broad ledge of land on which the houses had grown, silenced its busy chatter to a soft murmur.

Elias had stopped, just as they had climbed out of the little glen and had come upon the Kladas place. In spite of the fast pace they had kept, they had not caught up with Myrrha Kladas. They were on the wrong side of the stream, too. They’d have to cross it, step out of the shelter of the trees, and risk that moonlit stretch of bare path before they could reach the black shadow of the house.

Elias cursed quietly as he looked across at the door, closely barred and bolted for the night. He had been so very sure that they would overtake Myrrha Kladas before she could reach it.

“Only one entrance?” Strang whispered.

Elias shrugged his shoulders. Perhaps he had not been allowed to see any other entrance on his visit yesterday. Uncommunicative, the Colonel had called Myrrha Kladas.

“How do you get across this stream?”

“Now?”

“Yes.” Strang’s eyes were searching the stream for some footbridge: no village let itself be cut off from its fields.

“There is Costas, too, to be considered,” Elias was saying, frowning with worry. He looked at his watch. “Soon he will start uphill from the valley. Those three may be patrolling the road. He must be told what to expect.”

“Perhaps they’ve gone back to where they came from.”

“To Tripolis? And then here again, in the morning? No.”

The frown deepened. The men had come from a town: their clothes were not those of peasants. Or were they staying in a village to the north? Elias sighed. He looked at his watch again. “Will she open that door?” he asked. His tone doubted that.

“Perhaps for me, if I’m alone,” Strang said. “You get back to the bridge and start down toward the valley.” Then, as Elias kept silent, he added, “If anything happens to that car, it’s a long walk back to Athens.”

Elias gave a fleeting smile. “You stay here,” he said.

“No. I go over there.” Strang pointed at the house.

“But those men may decide to come back. Did you not hear them arguing?”

“Then all the more reason I should be with Myrrha Kladas.”

Elias looked at him.

“It’s warm, over there,” Strang said. “I like my comforts.” He took a step away. “Where’s the nearest crossing? Or do I have to swim?”

“There is a small footbridge,” Elias said, pointing near them. He was converted.

“Good.” Strang couldn’t see the footbridge for the shadows of the trees at that part of the stream.

“Ask her—” Elias had a new set of worries.

“I’ll ask her plenty,” Strang said grimly. “Signal when you get back—”

But Elias was gone.

Strang waited for a few moments, admiring Elias’s technique: the man melted into the shadows, moving quickly, silently. It would take him about five minutes, at that rate, to travel back downhill to the bridge. Strang glanced at his own watch. Speed was certainly needed; Costas would soon be starting
up from the valley. Arguments, arguments, Strang thought with annoyance; everyone wants to get his own way in this country—including me. He looked over at the silent house, glanced along the village street. All was quiet. He started toward the trees where the footbridge ought to be. It was there, all right, a couple of long planks balanced on some rocks, a simple but practical peasant’s reply to inevitable spring floods. Strang crossed, carefully, his eyes concentrating on the middle of the planks. On his right, the stream gathered speed through a scattering of small boulders and then—so his ears told him— plunged into its race through the glen.

He reached the other bank, and then, past an outcrop of rock and bushes, the path. There was a small stretch of thin wood here, slender-trunked, silver-barked trees rising out of the dark undergrowth. He halted. Sheep? Had one strayed down from the hillside? For now he could smell the unmistakable, strong, heavy odour of sheep, reminding him of that mutton-fat gravy tonight at Tripolis. But there was no rustle, no movement. The sheep was dead, perhaps, carried down by the stream. He started up the dark path, soft under his feet, between the ghostly white-limbed ladies.

There was a quick movement behind him, a stronger smell of sheep. An arm was round his throat, a hand was pinning his right arm to his side, and, for a moment, he was paralysed, pulled tightly against a filthy sheepskin tunic. He let himself go limp, as if he were beaten; and as he felt the arm slacken a little, sure of him, he jerked his head violently back and smashed against a face. There was a grunt of pain, the arm loosened, and Strang could turn on the man. But as his left fist shot out, a second man grappled from behind, catching his elbows in a
strong savage grip; and a third dark figure, a woman, raised a heavy stick and struck at his head. He stumbled forward, the man’s weight now on his back. There was another blow at his head, a crashing pain followed by a wave of blackness. He tried to rise, failed, and felt the first retreat from consciousness. Complete blackness swept over, and smothered him.

The woman stood looking down at Strang. “Is he dead?” she asked, tonelessly, almost listlessly.

One of the men knelt. “You did not hit hard enough,” he said angrily. Women were like that, always flinching at the last moment, always leaving a job half done.

“Which one is it?” she asked.

“The tall one, as you saw.”

“There were two who were tall,” she said sharply. She bent down and touched the man lying at her feet, and then drew back quickly. His jacket was of soft tweed. “His clothes are different.”

“He has taken off his coat. That is all. Levadi—” he looked up at the big man with the sheepskin over his shoulders, who was wiping the blood from his nose with his wrist—“shove him in the stream!”

The woman said, “More than taking off his coat. The jacket is different. Of wool, fine wool.” She knelt and touched Strang’s hair. She tried to see his face through the shadows. “A stranger,” she said. “A foreigner. Fetch Petros!”

Strang’s eyes opened. He didn’t move. His head throbbed, his throat was painful. He was lying on hard boards, in half-darkness; but he was warm, at least, with a rough blanket around him. There was the smell of a wood fire, a soft flickering light on
the low ceiling. Cautiously, he turned his head. The pain stopped him. He began to remember. He lay still, trying to think, failing. From the corner of his eye, he saw a table, and two people. A woman and a man, sitting silently by the light of the fire, waiting. Then he realised his hands and feet were free, unbound; someone had put a pillow under his head; someone had wrapped him carefully in this blanket. “Hallo, there!” he said slowly, and tried to sit up. The dim room swung round him, but he got his feet on the floor and kept them there. Now if he could just manage to sit this way for a couple of minutes, no sudden movements, no efforts, he might be able to raise his head, too, and look normal.

The woman exclaimed, moved to light a candle. The man came over to the bed and looked at Strang, who slowly raised his head. “How do you feel?” he asked in English.

Like the way one of those wobbly-headed, three-month-old infants must feel, thought Strang. “Fine,” he said. He looked up carefully. It was Petros, grinning broadly. “Was it you who hit me?”

“Myrrha did that. Fortunately.”

“Fortunately?”

Petros said, “I would have cracked your skull properly.” He gave an encouraging pat to Strang’s shoulder, a good-natured thump which echoed right up through the roof of his head. Then Petros sat down beside him, on the wooden platform of a bed. “In fact, you nearly ended in that stream.”

“Spectacular exit,” Strang said, seeing himself being hurtled in the fast-moving waters under the road and out on to the valley’s slopes. He laughed. And stopped. And held his head.

Myrrha Kladas exclaimed again, this time in sympathy. She offered him a glass of water.

Petros started explaining, “She thought you were one of them. And you chose the darkest shadows. She saw a man moving, but she couldn’t see the man clearly. What were you doing out there?”

“Watching the bridge.” The water was sweet and clean and cold.

“More?” she asked, politely, anxiously.

He said, “Please.” He looked at her as she poured the water, and he wondered if this could really be Myrrha Kladas. She ought to be a woman a little younger than himself. But only her eyes, dark and glowing, were young. The skin, tanned into wrinkled leather by sun and wind, the lines at the sad mouth, the gaunt cheeks, the coarsened hair, the veined hands, all these belonged to age. She was of medium height, but she looked small: her body was so thin, stripped of all fat right down to its fine bone and muscle, that the cotton dress hung from her slight shoulders as a shapeless piece of cloth. And he thought of her father, of her two brothers, of Christophorou, who had all abandoned her in their own fashion: some women had not much to thank men for. “This water is very good,” he said, and pleased her.

“Your head?” she asked politely, in turn.

“As thick as ever.”

She didn’t quite understand.

“As good as this bed.” He rapped on the solid piece of wood, then rapped on his head, and said, “Ow!”

She laughed, her eyes inviting Petros to join in the joke. For a moment, he saw a young woman. Then her hand went quickly up to her mouth to cover it politely, shyly.

“So,” Petros said, “you were watching the bridge. And who was the man who left you to go back to the bridge?” He gestured
to Myrrha. “Sure, we can talk in English. She understands, although she won’t speak it.” He looked at Strang, his eyes narrowing. “Was he a policeman?”

“No. Counter-intelligence.”

“And what does that mean?”

Strang allowed himself a good Greek shrug of the shoulders. “He has gone to find our driver and car.”

“They will come back here?”

“Yes.”

“Do you trust them?”

“Yes.”

“Hm,” said Petros. “What do they want?”