Decision at Delphi (7 page)

“No challenge in that?” Strang shook his head. “And there I was, imagining that nothing got stolen from me—so far, that is—because I kept things locked up. Which reminds me—” He began to unhook from his own collection the key that Steve had sent him.

“Would you do me a favour, Ken? Another one?”

Strang waited, half expecting the bad news.

“You haven’t much baggage, and you should see the stuff I’m groaning under. The load will get easier, though. By Athens—” He could look very pleading.

“You want me to cart that damn case around until Athens? What if some sneak thief thinks a trusting guy is a challenge, after all?”

“It will be safer with you than with me.” Steve paused. Then, in desperation, “Come over here, come on!”

Kenneth Strang rose, the key in his hand. “Here it is,” he said, polite but definite.

Steve Kladas didn’t take it. “Look for yourself.” He opened the case again. “No heroin, nylons, furs, or diamonds. Only film, honest-to-goodness film, and this envelope.” He drew it out from under the first row of films, and opened it. “It just holds a couple of private letters. From my sister. But they are important.”

“And these neat little yellow boxes—there are no crisp twenty-dollar bills folded and wrapped round the spools instead of film?” Strang was joking, but Steve did not react with any of his usual quips.

He shook his head slowly. “No, Ken. On my honour, no!”

Strang believed him. When Steve brought honour into his conversation, you could trust him.

Impulsively, Steve said, “All the film is fresh, waiting to be used. Except these three boxes.” He searched for them. “See, I made a small ink blot on each of them. They contain negatives of pictures I took in Greece. Years ago. But they are important.”

“Like the letters?”

“Look, Ken, they are only personal documents, I swear. On my honour.”

Strang rehooked the key to his ring. “What about dinner?” he asked. He watched Steve lock his case carefully and drop it beside the rest of the luggage.

“It’s a family matter,” Steve explained with a last glance at his small suitcase, “just a family matter.” He fell completely silent.

Steve was still silent as they left the elevator and came into the red-carpeted lobby. In summer, this hotel would be as busy as a hill of ants at a picnic. Tonight, one could even notice the white-and-gold-panelled walls, the silk lamp shades, majolica vases, mirrors, showcases of coral jewellery and cameos and Sorrento lace flowers, the grey-uniformed bellboys standing as idly as the potted plants just inside the huge glass entrance door. The few guests were either in the restaurant or watching television in the darkened ballroom, hypnotised by a ghostly voice explaining the grace, the delight, the beauty of a vacuum cleaner’s spare parts. People paid the hard way for their amusements nowadays.

“We could eat here,” Strang said as they walked the half-mile of carpet toward the door, “but I’d like to try one of those little fish restaurants on the island just across the causeway.” Steve said nothing. “That is,” Strang went on, “if you don’t object to wave-dodging. Or have you any better ideas?”

Steve halted abruptly, his eyes on the entrance. The bellboys started into life as the glass doors opened to let a wild gust of wind blow two guests into the hall. They were a middle-aged man, handsome in a thin-faced way, and a young and attractive woman, well dressed, but bedraggled like all new arrivals on such a night, cold, probably hungry, and certainly a little dazed by the
sudden blaze of warmth that threw its welcoming arms around them. He was helping her remove her coat, and she looked up at him and laughed at something he had said in a grave way.

Nice picture, Strang thought approvingly, a nicer picture than that of two lonely men going out to find a place to eat. “Come on, Steve,” he said sharply. “That rain seems to have stopped. Only your sea breezes left to battle.”

But Steve had turned his back on the door. He was walking to the porter’s desk. “Better collect my mail while I’m here,” he said.

Waiting for Steve, Strang found he was watching the newcomers. The man had checked the luggage, but he refused to give up his brief case to any helpful hands. He was walking with large strides, a little noticeable in a man of less than medium height, toward the reception desk. He had taken off his narrow-brimmed felt hat; his grey hair was closely brushed to his neatly shaped head. Everything about him was neat and restrained, from the well-built dark suit and striped tie to the narrow shoes so carefully and firmly set down on the bright-red rug. English, thought Strang, and was amused at himself for starting to play the old guessing game so early on his travels. But it was a game, once started, that was difficult to stop. Probably ex-army, Strang made his next guess. Or present army in mufti, trying to look like a diplomat? The wife was obviously English—pink-and-white complexion, soft golden hair, and, no doubt, violet eyes. She had set the bellboys’ rows of polished buttons bristling.

He wondered what could be keeping Steve. There appeared to be some kind of argument at the porter’s desk. Steve was looking round—he was angry, Strang could see by the way his brows came down in that thunderous straight line—and signalled for help.

Strang went forward. It was only a matter of identification. “Yes, this is Mr. Stefanos Kladas. His plans were unavoidably altered and he had to cancel his reservations, much to his regret. I believe there is a letter waiting for him. Would you be good enough to look again? Yes, I think that’s it. From
Perspective
magazine...? Thank you.” He led his simmering friend away, “Why the hell don’t you carry your passport around?”

“Do you?” Steve tore open the envelope roughly. “Thanks for all the four-syllable words. When I get mad, all I remember are the four-letter ones. That damned Italian!”

“He’s probably Swiss. Come on, you Greek. You can read that over a plate of red mullet. Say, do you know that Englishman? He has looked over in your direction twice. And that’s once too often for that type.” The man had left the registration desk and veered toward them.

“No,” Steve said gruffly, thrusting the letter in his pocket, not looking at anyone, suddenly in a hurry to reach the door and that plate of red mullet.

“Yannis!— It is Yannis, isn’t it?” The man was English, all right. His thin face softened with the moment of recognition. He put out his hand. Delightedly, he said, “Yannis—my dear fellow!”

“Sorry.” Steve’s voice and face were quite expressionless. “You are mistaken.” He walked on; stiffly, Strang noted, as he caught up with Steve. Steve’s walk, Steve’s voice were both a very simple-minded attempt not to be Steve. They went into the blustering night.

“The rain has ended,” Strang said, giving Steve time to recover. In the darkness, Steve’s face grimaced with pain. “Some things won’t stay buried,” he said thickly, and cursed.

“Over here.” Strang led the way across the wide, deserted, gust-torn street that edged the bay. As they reached the beginning of the causeway which would take them on to the little island, he added, “The dinner and drinks are on me. We’ll have a bachelor’s evening—all hiccup and happiness.”

The phrase caught Steve’s fancy and fetched him half out of his black mood. “All hiccup and happiness,” he repeated.

“Not mine. Credit Byron. But all good things have been said before. It’s like women—the pretty ones are already married” Strang remembered C. L. Hillard, the girl with the misleading name; not married, seemingly, but most certainly engaged ten times over. He concentrated on the problem of the wave-swept causeway. “Now the idea is this: we’ll time the waves. And calculate. And make a bet on it. And run like hell.”

Steve’s wide grin came back. Leaning forward, against the force of the wind, they waited, watching the waves smash against the rocks on their right and hurl their broken crests at the narrow causeway. On its lee side, to their left, was the little Santa Lucia harbour, surging and restless as its swollen waters rose and dipped almost to a level with the restaurants’ front doors. Steve said, “I hope you calculate right. One second out, and we’ll end up there.” He looked at the harbour’s straining tide. As he watched, he could see the water spill over the narrow sidewalk toward the restaurants’ steps.

“Then we’ll have to swim for our supper.” Strang counted three more seconds. “Now!” he yelled.

They raced across the dripping causeway, staggering once against a sharp buffet of wind, carried along by Steve’s war cry, which began as a shout and ended in a sustained, piercing scream. They reached the shelter of the fort’s huge gateway,
and collapsed, fighting for breath, against its wet rugged stones. When the breath came back into their lungs, they began to laugh and kept on laughing, collapsing now against each other, now against the enormous wall.

Then sanity, and appetite, prodding them, they took the back road around to the service side of a restaurant. The cook and his enormous collection of family looked up in surprise, as the two strangers, hair and coats soaked with spray, came into the kitchen.

“I hope you don’t mind us using the back door tonight,” Strang said. “We don’t like getting our feet wet.” No joke is a poor one in Italy. This one, as usual, paid off handsomely. Surprise gave way to laughter, a burst of welcome, a dozen hands helping them out of their wet coats. They had five waiters, three musicians, the full lights turned on in the empty dining-room to do them honour, and the most carefully cooked dinner in all of Naples.

After that, they talked until three in the morning, mostly about Greece.

Casually, impersonally, as if he were speaking about a stranger, Steve Kladas lifted the curtain he had dropped around his life in Greece. The curtain was lifted just here and there, a quick glance in that, direction, a brief look in this: no complete unveiling, just a broken sequence of memories which he described quietly, without emotion, making them still more painful to hear.

Tomorrow, thought Strang, I’ll take a quiet hour and try to piece these anecdotes together, and make them into the pattern that Steve thinks he’s giving me. It is all clear and logical to Steve. He thinks he is telling me something. And yet, if I were
to interrupt him and say I wasn’t quite following—would he explain this or that more clearly?—he would probably stop altogether, and I’d hear no more. That’s the way he is: take what he gives but don’t try to force out anything more than that. Tomorrow, I’ll piece this jigsaw puzzle together. No, tomorrow would be spent at Paestum, and tomorrow and tomorrow. Then, someday, Strang promised himself, someday, when I’ve a quiet hour. But now, it was enough to let Steve talk some of the memories out of his mind.

“So you see,” Steve ended, “why I must go back to Greece. It’s now a great necessity. I’m the head of the family. There is no one else to take charge, to kill this threat, to see that no more dishonour comes to our name.” He had sounded more and more Greek as he talked, as if he were making a translation into English.

“Threat?” Strang picked up the word, in spite of his self-warning. “What threat?” There had been no talk of the future. All Steve’s words had been of the past. Threats dealt with the future.

Steve looked at his watch. “Good God, it’s almost three. Let’s get moving.”

The storm had spent itself, the tide was ebbing. They could walk out of the restaurant’s front door and along the sidewalk edging the harbour to the causeway. They crossed it in silence. The bay was still sullen, but no longer raging.

“One thing I meant to ask you, Steve—” Strang stopped, noticing Steve’s guarded look. He smiled and went on, “Do you know anything about C. L. Hillard?”

Steve Kladas relaxed “A damned good photographer.” He grinned widely. “Almost as good as I am.”

“She’s prettier than you!”

“So you’ve met Hillard! When?”

The use of the second name jarred Strang unexpectedly. “Very briefly. Didn’t even have the chance to ask her what the initials stand for.”

“She isn’t married, if you’re wondering about that, too.”

“Oh?” Strang responded most casually. “That seems strange.”

“She was engaged, once. The guy got killed. Korea.”

“Korea is a long time ago.”

“Well, that’s the way she sees it, I guess. Some, of course, say it’s all part of her line. But I like her, so the hell with them.” They had reached Strang’s hotel. Kladas stopped and put out his hand. “See you in Taormina, Ken.” He added, with a laugh, “And I’ll make sure you meet little Hillard when we get back to New York. She is just offbeat enough to please you.” He left. The sharp echo of his brisk footsteps faded into nothing.

It was Strang who arrived two days late in Taormina. Steve Kladas had already been there, spending almost a week developing negatives and making prints, and then had left for a retake job of the theatre at Syracuse. He explained it all in a sprawling note left at Strang’s hotel with a parcel of his photographs. “Got trapped, this time, by telephone wires. Thank God, Greece doesn’t have those modern improvements near
her
ruins. Hope you like the rest of the prints. Will be back to receive congratulations. This Syracuse trip will take no more than three days. Stefanos.”

Strang read the letter, standing in the porter’s lodge of his hotel. “When was this delivered?” he asked one of the battery of black-suited men, serious-faced, keen-eyed, who stood behind the desk. This morning, he was told. So Steve would be back by Friday. And three days would give Strang a lot of working time on his own sketches. Too bad, though, that he had missed Steve:
other retakes, in spite of Steve’s enthusiasm, might be necessary. It was a pity Steve hadn’t waited to make sure. Unless, of course, he liked jaunting around Sicily. That could be true, too. Steve was usually adept enough at discovering telephone wires long before his finger pressed down on his camera’s release. However, three days of peace were welcome; doubly welcome in a place like this after all the varied hotels he had stayed at. Even the flies looked as if they would be thoroughly tame here.

He followed the boy carrying his luggage around the long stretch of sixteenth-century cloisters (the pillars were now glass-enclosed, the flagstones carpeted) to the front wing of the old monastery. The Dominicans in Taormina had given themselves plenty of room between the thick walls. The passages were broad. The cells, each with a monk’s name still painted above its carved door, now made comfortable bedrooms with whitewashed walls, dark massive furniture and—once he had opened the tall shutters—a view. He stood at a window which was framed by the shocking puce of bougainvillaea climbing over the front of the hotel. Below was a broad terrace, a long terrace, laid out with flowers and shrubs, benches and tables. There was enough room there, too, to please him. He might find a working corner, hidden behind that row of orange trees.