Decision at Delphi (8 page)

He went out to investigate. The key to his room measured a foot. “The keys are left in the locks,” a quiet voice said behind him. “I am always on duty.” He looked at the maid who stepped out from the shadows of the broad corridor, her feet silent on the heavy carpet. “All right,” he said, and hoped it was all right. “I need another lamp, more light, more light for working at night. Another lamp. You understand?” She nodded. But he left, wondering.

He found his way on to the terrace with only two mistaken turns. (This whole place was one vast stretch of museum pieces and unexpected doorways; a guest might be lost for days until a search party found him babbling by a seventeenth-century chest or a sixteenth-century wood carving.) The hill slope, on which the hotel was perched, dropped steeply to the sea far below. To his left, the little town spread along, a ledge cut into the hills. To his right, more falling hills; and Etna, towering.

“It’s too much,” he told himself regretfully. There were palm trees and almond trees, and orange trees bearing both fruit and blossom, just to please everyone. And the flowers—spring and summer bloomed at the same time, it seemed Roses and hyacinths, violets, and geraniums and freesia. Too much, far too much. Back to your cell, Brother Kenneth, he told himself gloomily. He left the terrace, with a glance of pure envy at the guests who had nothing to do but enjoy it.

There was no one in his corridor when he did find it again. Always on duty, was she? His door was ajar; the maid was inside, studying the labels on his suitcases. She looked more astounded by his quick return than by his silent entry.

“The lights are good. I tested them,” she told him. She pointed to the bulb set into a wrought-iron decoration on the ceiling, and to the bed lamp.

“Yes, they are good.” All twenty-five watts of them. “I need another light here. And here.” He pointed to the writing and dressing tables. “Okay?” She left, nodding. He still wondered.

He turned the writing table away from the window so that he wouldn’t be distracted by the view. He pulled the dressing table nearer to his chair, and propped several of his sketches against its looking glass. Now, slave, back to your galley! But before he began
work, he gave himself ten minutes with Steve’s photographs. (He would be going over them, in detail, with Kladas himself.) They were excellent. He looked across at his sketches, then back at the photographs. We’ll manage this job, he thought, we’ll manage it. With a feeling of purest pleasure, he began to work.

But there was a discreet knock at the door, and a housekeeper entered with the maid. The housekeeper spoke English. “Your maid says you cannot make the lights work.” She switched them on and off. “See, it is very simple. This one is for the ceiling. That one is for the bed.”

“I want one here, and here.” He pointed. “For this work.”

“In daylight?” She frowned at the opened shutters which let the flies come into the room, and then noticed his sketches.

“I work at night, too.”

“Ah—you are a painter?”

He had given up arguing about that He nodded.

“I shall send the lamps to you.”

“Thank you.”

She pushed the maid out of the door and followed. She stopped to say, “It would be pleasanter to work on the terrace.”

He looked hard at the door she had closed, and repeated to himself, “I do like women, I do like women,” until his temper cooled, and he could resume his thin-line architectural drawing of a Doric temple.

The rest of the day was peaceful, except that, when he returned from an early dinner rather more quickly than might be expected and entered the long corridor that led to his room, he saw the solemn-faced maid locking a door some distance away. It could be his door. He was still too far away to be sure. The girl saw him, stopped, and—to his surprise—hurried toward him. But the boot boy, in white shirt sleeves, black waistcoat, and green apron, had entered the corridor just behind Strang, and the maid halted abruptly. She said, “The two lamps are in your room.
Buona notte, signore.”

“Thank you. Good night.”

She turned and walked quickly away to the other end of the corridor. Very obliging, Strang thought, to come out of her way to tell me what will be obvious as soon as I open the door. He reached it and began the usual battle of the strange lock. The boot boy passed him quickly, giving him a polite good night, and hurried to overtake the maid. “You are late going off duty,” Strang heard him say. “You are late coming on,” she replied. Their voices faded as Strang entered his room and closed the door.

The two lamps had been installed, all right. But he shook his head at their size: long on charm, short on strength. Travel had its delights, but at this moment he would have given a lot for a simple hundred-watt bulb, and a screen for the window.

Then he saw that someone had been looking at the work he had left on the desk. The top drawing, in a set of three, had been shifted askew. He swore, and studied the heavy sheet of paper for any ruinous thumbmarks. But the drawing and those beneath it were as clean as he had left them. He relaxed. Yet, instinctively, he went over to his luggage and examined each case. All were locked. He took the trouble, though, to open them and check. Nothing was out of order. He became half annoyed, half amused by his suspicions. Everyone loved to look at pictures: the maid had just the same curiosity as all the
rest of us. He remembered the small boys who had materialised out of nowhere on a lonely hillside, did not even try to cadge a cigarette for at least five minutes while they grouped round his elbow and chattered in Sicilian dialect; the black-haired, black-moustached labourers who had stopped heaving a pick-axe to become equally energetic art critics; the peasants who pulled their long-suffering donkeys to a halt while they sat silently watching a fellow artist from their bright, hand-painted carts.

Suddenly, he saw that Steve’s bundle of photographs had been moved from the dressing table. For a moment, he really panicked. Then he caught sight of them, neatly arranged, of all places, on his chair behind the desk. Neatly arranged, yes. But the first one was missing. His lips closed in a grim line as he hoped someone’s love of pictures hadn’t tempted her to take a pretty pin-up for her room. He began checking the photographs, and relaxed when he found the missing one in third place. On top of it was a sealed, unaddressed envelope.

He counted the photographs to make sure they were all there, placed them back on the dresser, and then, baffled and bewildered, ripped the envelope open. The page of narrow pointed writing was signed, simply, “Aleco.” Aleco. What Aleco? The letter began quite abruptly. “My thanks for your invitation to dinner in Athens, which I accept with pleasure.” (Alexander Christophorou, he thought, astounded. Here, in Taormina?) “Perhaps we may even meet for dinner when my business is completed in Taormina. On Sunday? Meanwhile, if you could help me in a most urgent matter? I must see S. K. but discover he has left Taormina for a few days. Where can I find him? If you would let me know his address early tomorrow morning, I would be in your debt. Please leave the message
where you found this note. I am sorry this matter needs so much urgency and discretion. Aleco.”

There was a very small postscript. “How are your two friends? Wallace and the Irishman with red hair?” And that, Strang decided, was a most tactful piece of identification. He hadn’t mentioned either Wallis or O’Brien by name in his letter to Christophorou. So Aleco was Alexander, in short, and no fake.

Why should he have even thought of a fake? Only because the surprise of discovering Christophorou in Taormina was almost too big to swallow at one gulp. Or because Christophorou wanted to see Steve Kladas? Why not? Lawyers could turn publishers or editors of magazines. Kladas was a photographer in demand. What more in keeping with good Greek business sense than to combine a holiday at Taormina with signing up Kladas for some photographs before any competitor could make contact with him in Athens? Except that most Greeks with vacations headed straight for their own islands; and most people didn’t send their letters by a chamber-maid with elaborate, instructions (and a tip to match) for such fantastic secrecy.

Yes, he was puzzled. He reread the letter thoughtfully. Aleco was the diminutive, familiar, and affectionate for Alexander. He wasn’t quite on Aleco terms with Christophorou. And yet the letter’s phrases were too precise, too calculated, to slip into Aleco at the end without a purpose. It was as if Christophorou were telling him, “I am your friend.” And friends trusted each other—all right, all right—and had dinner with each other. But not until Sunday. He had to smile. He caught sight of himself in the looking glass. And a damn fool he looked, grinning by himself in an empty room. This was one hell of a way to get his work done.

So he wrote a brief note. It said, “S. K. is in Syracuse until Friday. Don’t know his address. Sunday will be fine. Ken.” He added a very small postscript as his own piece of identification: “Hope the sandbags on the Acropolis did their job:” He was smiling again as he slipped the note (in a sealed, unaddressed envelope) into the neat pile of Steve’s photographs. He didn’t bother to disarrange them. The maid knew where to look for his note when she came tomorrow morning. His smile broadened in spite of himself, and he ended in a fit of laughter. It was difficult, sometimes, even with all the good will in the world and lavish applications of international understanding, not to find foreigners comic. And how they must find him, sitting in here, when everyone else was dancing or drinking or walking a pretty girl on the. terrace, was something he didn’t even want to imagine. They’ll think I fancy myself as the reincarnation of the old monk who once lived in this cell, he decided. And settled to work.

Late on Friday afternoon, the siege was lifted. All-or-nothing Strang, he reflected, looking around the battlefield. The bedroom was in complete chaos, not one horizontal surface uncovered, not one vertical that wasn’t a prop. But he had won, only six hours later than the deadline he had set himself, which wasn’t too bad. Neither were the drawings. He looked at them again, anxiously, critically; then felt the stirring of excitement. They were all right, they were very much all right. All right, so they’re all right, he told himself sharply, all right! Keep your hat on and your overcoat buttoned, Strang. But it gave him sweet pleasure to file the finished job carefully away in the waiting compartment in his portfolio.

He looked as much a mess as the room. He had been needing a haircut for a week. Now, too, he needed some exercise and sun. But most of all he needed some empty hours, doing what he damned well wanted to do, and no more must’s, don’t
forget’s, or have to’s. For two days he’d have a holiday.

He shaved and showered quickly, chose a crisp blue shirt (bless the Sicilian laundress who made a traveller’s life worth living) and a dark red tie to lend a festive touch to his grey suit. He was going to walk out, quite aimlessly, not even a sketchbook to bulge the pocket of his newly pressed coat, and look at the town and the people. For the first time in weeks, he felt free. This was the evening he had been looking forward to.

He stopped at the porter’s lodge to see if there was any message from Kladas. There was none. So Steve had not yet returned from Syracuse. That was not surprising; Steve’s sense of timing was a little haphazard. If you asked him to come round and have a drink at six, he would arrive at half past seven and think he was early.

Strang passed through the gate at the lodge into a small courtyard sloping up towards a broad street, almost a square, of quiet houses and walled gardens and a long row of empty tourist buses from practically every country in Western Europe. He closed his eyes, and turned away to open them at a more pleasing prospect: the rising tiers of old buildings and Norman towers laced together by flights of worn stone steps. He began to climb up into a compact little world of many centuries, and reached the next ledge on the hillside—a narrow, main street, broadening into a piazza: three sides for cafés and teashops, the fourth for a magnificent view towards the sea, if one could see the view for the hillocks of sun-pink shoulders and the forest of reddened thighs. It was a pity that people thought they had to start undressing when they went travelling; few were built for it.

Nothing, thought Strang as he sat down at a table and ordered a beer, would have pleased him more than to see a lot
of beautiful girls with bare shoulders and pretty legs; but the beautiful girls were few and wore masses of skirt. There was a cruel twist, apparently, to the simpler enjoyments of life. He had another beer, listened to the snatches of six or seven languages drifting into one unintelligible human voice, and then decided to continue along the main street and find a barbershop.

The Corso was narrow, crowded, lined with small shops. Everything from embroidered blouses to cheese and wine, but he must have missed the barber’s. A car drove slowly past, and the pedestrians either flattened out against windows and walls or dodged into doorways. Strang was doing just that— fortunately, it was a bookshop with a good display of foreign periodicals and newspapers on the racks by the door—when a woman’s voice said, “Excuse me.” She had been coming out of the shop, with a selection of magazines under her arm, and he, trying to decide between
Harper’s
and
The Atlantic Monthly,
had blocked her way.

“Sorry,” he said, stepping aside. She was young, no more than twenty-four or five, dressed in cool green linen. She didn’t walk past him. She stood, her large eyes widening (almost green they were in colour, and not violet, after all) as she recognised him. She was the Englishwoman with golden hair and a perfect skin, now lightly tanned into what Italians called, not peaches and cream, but carnations, who had stood in the lobby of a Naples hotel and watched Steve Kladas cut her husband dead.

Some of the embarrassment that Strang had felt now came flooding back over his face. She noticed it. She said, “How do you do? We were nearly introduced once. Or don’t you remember?”

“Naples,” he said, recovering himself, “on a cold and empty night.”