Decision at Delphi (61 page)

Kenneth Strang reached the meadow by the road in the late afternoon. He got out of the car, stretching his shoulders, exchanging a quiet nod with Costas. Between them, they had made good time. “Record time,” Elias acknowledged, forgetting—in the excitement of their arrival—the qualms he had endured in silence during their wild ride on to the mainland and through the hills toward Parnassos. He made his way quickly to the two cars parked ahead of them at the meadow’s edge.

Strang waited, looking around him. It seemed as if a small field headquarters had been set up at this point. There were three uniforms—army, or perhaps police—and two grave-faced civilians grouped around one car. A little distance away, there were a few interested spectators—two old women sitting on donkeys, a girl guarding a small herd of silk-bearded goats, some children.

There must be definite news to have brought us here, Strang thought. At Corinth, Elias had been told to head for Levadia. At Levadia, he had been told to take the Delphi road. And here they were, still about fifteen miles away from Delphi, with not a village in sight. Behind him were bare hills, through which their road had travelled. In front of him was the beginning of the Parnassos slopes, which stretched west and east and up as far as he could see: a pleasant meadow, with a stream at one side, a wood climbing behind it on to a steep hillside; more hillsides to the east; and to the west, high above the Delphi road, a buttress of precipices, meadows, more hillside. God, he thought in despair, if this place is where they brought her, where do we begin to look? Grimly, he eyed the wreaths of grey-white mists that blotted out the topmost peak. Were they lifting? Or were they settling lower?

Elias came back, followed by a man in police uniform. “They are expecting Colonel Zafiris immediately.” He looked pleased for a moment. “We got here before him.”

“Why here?”

Elias spoke to the policeman, who produced a key wallet and a hotel key. “You recognise these?”

Strang took them. He nodded.

“The key wallet was found, at the side of this road, by a farmer on his way to Arachova. The hotel key was found halfway across the meadow, just after the hut over there was discovered to be on fire.” He pointed to a heap of black ashes beside a grey stone sheep fold. “The wallet was found at half past six. The fire was seen, much later, by a boy and his sister, herding goats. The boy went to Arachova for help. The girl stayed here, and one of her goats tried to eat the hotel key. The
police came, just after ten o’clock. They searched all around, found a motorcycle hidden behind some bushes. When its owner came out of the woods, he was detained. Naturally. He had a revolver. Two bullets had been fired.” Elias paused, trying to search for non-alarming words. “The girl with the goats said she had heard two shots while she waited for her brother. She couldn’t say where, exactly. But the shots may mean very little.” He looked away from Strang. “The man who was detained for questioning has a very simple story. He was travelling to Athens. He stopped to rest in the wood. He saw a man running away from the hut—a rough shepherd, he thought. Then he saw the hut was on fire, so he followed the man. He tried to stop him by firing twice in the air. That is his story. And he does not change it.”

Strang said bitterly, staring up at the hillside, “Do men carry revolvers when they travel to Athens?”

“No. And when men travel by this road to Athens, they must pass through Delphi and then Arachova to reach here. No motorcycle was heard or seen in Delphi. Yet one was heard, just before dawn, passing through Arachova. Interesting.” Elias took the wallet and key from Strang, and looked at them for a moment before he handed them back to the policeman. “These things, by themselves, seemed not important—just strange little events, until—”

“What action was taken?” Strang asked sharply.

“At first, as I was saying,” Elias reminded him, “there seemed no action that was necessary. But Colonel Zafiris put the Parnassos district under a special alert after I telephoned from Tripolis, and the strange happenings here began to fit into a pattern.”

“Yes, yes,” said Strang, trying to control his impatience. Elias and his patterns... The hell with them. Where is Cecilia? “Who is out searching?”

“Two parties. Local men who know this terrain well. The wood has been searched, the hillside above it, too. They are now working over the hill slopes, there.” He pointed to the east. “That seems more likely than to the west.” He pointed to the open hillside above its sweeping buttress of precipices.

“Why?”

“There is more cover to the east. That is what the kidnappers want. Also, there is a good path; some huts; some summerhouses, now closed. Remember,” Elias said gently, “they are not climbing along any hills blindly. They are taking her some place. So we must search all the huts and the houses. You understand?”

But Strang kept looking up at the western slopes. “What’s there, above the precipices? After that open hillside—what?”

Elias turned to the impassive man who waited patiently beside them, listening to a conversation of which he could not understand one word. Now, as Elias spoke in Greek, he was delighted, and gave a long, detailed, and enthusiastic answer.

“High meadows,” Elias reported back to Strang. “No houses, no villages. Shepherds have just taken up their flocks, there, for the spring. Later, they will go to higher meadows, farther to the west. They—”

“Shepherds?”

“The kidnappers will keep far away from the shepherds. They do not want to be seen. Besides, shepherds do not like people very much. That is why they are shepherds.” As Strang said nothing, but simply looked up towards the meadowland lying beyond
the precipices, Elias added, “This search is extremely difficult. The searchers cannot call out. It might be dangerous for Miss Hillard, if the rescuers could not reach her before—that is to say, the kidnappers might take very stupid action if they thought that they were being tracked—what I mean is that—” Elias stopped, completely defeated in the battle of truth against tact. It would be so easy, he thought unhappily, to get rid of any evidence quickly on these hills. Didn’t the American understand that? “If only the man who came out of the woods would talk!” he said angrily.

Strang’s face looked suddenly ugly. “Where can I see this son of a bitch?”

“He is locked up in Levadia. Colonel Zafiris is probably talking to him, at this moment.”

“I’m going up that hillside,” Strang said, and pointed to the west.

“Wait until Colonel Zafiris arrives. Then I shall go with you. It is not wise for one man—”

“I’ll manage. Ask your friend if there is only one path. If there are several, which is the quickest?”

“Wait for one of the search parties to come back. It is not wise for a stranger to go near the shepherds. Their dogs are—” he shrugged, and then admitted the fact—“savage. Sometimes, quite wild.”

“Have you a gun you could lend me?”

Elias looked worried. He spoke to the policeman, who looked even more worried. Elias said to Strang, “If you hurt one of those dogs, the shepherds may hurt you.” He kept glancing toward the road to the southeast that led to Levadia, Thebes, Athens, as if he were willing Colonel Zafiris to appear. But there was no car speeding along between the bare hills. From the opposite direction there were only two rustic types, coming leisurely down the hill from Arachova.

“Okay,” Strang said, and began walking toward the burned-out hut, where the path into the wood seemed to begin. Behind him, he heard Elias call. He didn’t look around. The call turned into a shout, two shouts. He turned, almost at the little heap of charred ashes, and glanced backward. Elias was sprinting after him, the police officer was waving his arms wildly.

His first impulse was to go right on, into the wood. But he waited, as Elias let out another yell. “A shepherd!” Elias called, and pointed toward the man who was now talking to the policemen. “News—”

Strang hesitated, looking back at the growing group. Everyone was crowding around the wild-haired man, who stood leaning on his long shepherd’s staff.

“Or,” said Elias, regaining his breath, “he would not have left his meadow and gone down to the village. Or walked here—” He took Strang’s arm and urged him back.

News? Strang wondered. He wouldn’t let himself count on that. Yet the word “news” had a magic quality. News...

The group was silent around the shepherd. He was pointing to the western hill slope, talking in short phrases. Strang could not follow the man’s dialect.

“What is it?” he asked in frustration. Everyone could listen and understand except himself. “Elias—”

Elias said, “He came to tell the police that two outlaws— brigands, he calls them—are on that hillside.”

“And Cecilia—”

“One moment,” Elias said, listening intently. You could not hurry this shepherd. He had come to tell about brigands and that
was what he would talk about until his message was complete. Either he would describe today as he had seen it or he would become bewildered and start repeating his story, thinking that his listeners were the stupid ones. The shepherd was looking at the hut now and saw its ruins. He stopped speaking altogether. Then he let out a cry in anger, and began speaking again. He pulled a small book from inside his shirt.

“He says people were there, last night,” Elias translated quickly. “He found this book near the hut. He heard two women talking. Climbers, he thought they were.”

Strang knew Cecilia’s notebook at once. He reached for it. But the shepherd would not give it up.

Strang said in very slow Greek, “Did you see the women today?” He pointed up to the hillside. “Women?” he asked again.

The shepherd held up one finger.

Elias began questioning him. The man seemed surprised. What was all this excitement about a young woman? She was safe enough. He answered Elias gruffly, and went back to his story about the two brigands wandering so far into peaceful territory.
That
was something to worry about.

Elias said to Strang, “There is a young woman up in the ravine. Alone. She is safe.”

“What ravine?”

“Between the hillside and the western meadows.” Strang turned and ran.

“Wait—” called Elias. “It may not be Miss Hillard. There were two women—” But nothing was stopping Strang now. It was Cecilia, he knew. It was Cecilia.

It was easy to follow the path through the wood, and where it forked—one spur to the left, one to the right—it was easy
to choose the trail that mounted to the west. At the cascading stream and its little pool, he hesitated between the two tracks that diverged at the boulders. He chose the higher one; it climbed over open ground, it would give him a better view. He started up it as he heard men’s voices from the wood behind him. He didn’t wait for them to catch up with him. High up on the hillside, he paused to gain his breath and loosen his collar and tie. Then this inexplicable sense of urgency drove him on.

His eyes could see no one on the side of the hill. She must still be in the ravine. Safe, the shepherd had said. But how did the man know that? He must have taken an hour or more to walk to Arachova, another hour or so, perhaps, to tell his story and be sent to the policemen down at the roadside meadow. Safe. Anything could happen to a stranger on this hillside, once she was off the path. Anxiety and urgency, that was all Strang could feel. He couldn’t even explain them. And that, itself, drove him on.

Ahead of him, he saw a gully. Was this the ravine? A shallow place, shallow enough for the path to cross on to the meadows that sloped away on the other side. He stopped, breathing hard, looking down the gully. It twisted and deepened, deepened dangerously. It must end at the precipices he had seen from the road. His anxiety returned. And then he heard a dog barking, barking wildly, far down the ravine.

“Cecilia!” he yelled. “Cecilia!” He began to run.

It was still too early to leave, Cecilia had thought. The sun was well over to the west, the shadows from the steep wall of the ravine had fallen across the stream’s rocky bed and were moving up to where she lay on the other side. But the light was good. She would be seen very easily if she came out of cover. She had heard nothing at all, neither feet on stones nor far-off voices, for several hours. They must have gone. Yet she couldn’t believe that the woman had given up the search. Anastas, perhaps. But Xenia, no. In the last extreme, Xenia wouldn’t hesitate to shoot—if she could be sure of killing. Not as a criminal, Xenia would say. Simply as a matter of necessity, which—in Xenia’s cold-eyed world—justified everything. It hadn’t been any touch of compassion, Cecilia realised now, that made her throw me a slice of bread, or allowed me to drink from the stream, or kept her from drugging me in the car, or let her leave my legs and hands unbound. It was necessity, her kind of necessity: I had to be able to walk. Did Xenia really have so much contempt for ordinary people that she thought they’d walk, at the point of a gun, so despairing and lost and hopeless, right into their own graves? But then, Xenia had not known I wanted so very much, more than I’ve ever wanted, to live. She chose the wrong day.

Sharply, Cecilia looked up at the sky line to the west. Above the rim of cliff opposite, there was the dark shape of the dog. It was racing now, uphill, toward the shallower banks of the gully.

Where’s the shepherd? she thought, as she rose in sudden panic. See where the dog is going first, she told herself. It may be only on the trail of a fox. But, no, it was crossing the gully at the path, turning to run down this bank of the ravine.

She moved quickly, over the bed of the stream to the steeper side of the ravine, to the cliff she had thought she could never manage. Her hands felt desperately for every possible fingerhold. She pulled herself up, her fingers searching, her body straining, her feet bracing themselves against every small ledge. A stone slipped and clattered into the stream bed underneath. She
dragged herself up another stretch of cliff. Now, she could hear a strange, eager whining. Suddenly, something hit the rock below her and fell back. There was a yelp of pain, an angry bark.