Aphrodite's Smile

by Stuart Harrison

  When we arrived back at Irene’s house a Mercedes was parked outside and the man who drove for Alkimos Kounidis was leaning against the side smoking a cigarette. He nodded to me and greeted Dimitri by name. We found Kounidis and Irene sitting on the terrace.

  ‘Kalispera, Robert,’ Kounidis said, getting to his feet. ‘Kalispera, Dimitri.’ He shook both of our hands in turn. Dimitri said hello to Irene. I noticed the quick look of surprise she and Kounidis exchanged at seeing us together, though neither of them said anything.

  ‘You have just missed Miros,’ Irene said to me. ‘He left only a few minutes ago.’

  ‘Has there been any news?’

  ‘No, I am sorry. He wished to return this.’ She handed me my passport.

  ‘I’m free to leave?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So what is he doing to find Alex?’

  ‘A description of the man she was seen with has been sent to Kephalonia. The police will contact the hotels there.’

  ‘It won’t do them any good,’ I said, and I explained everything that had happened that day. I showed them the photograph which I’d found at the Hotel Ionnis. When Kounidis saw it he became silent, his expression clouded with the memories it evoked.

  ‘I think the circled one is Eric Schmidt, but I don’t know who Kohl was or why he had this picture.’

  Kounidis handed it back. ‘The man who was seen with Alex …’

  ‘… Is Hassel’s grandson. At least that’s our guess.’

  ‘But why is he here? What is this all about?’ Irene questioned.

  ‘The Antounnetta.’ Of that much I was convinced. ‘If we can find the wreck, I think we’ll find Hassel. And Alex too.’

  ‘But how are we going to do that?’ Dimitri asked. ‘Your father spent more than twenty years looking for the Antounnetta before he found it.’

  ‘If he really did,’ Kounidis reminded us. ‘Without his journal there is no proof of that. I understand you have not found it?’

  I shook my head. ‘It’s not in the house and it’s not at the museum or on the boat.’ I turned to Dimitri. ‘But maybe there’s another way we can find the wreck. Remember what Spiro Petalas said? He saw Kohl at the marina, but he said Gregory was there too.’

  ‘But Gregory went to live with his sister on Kalamos,’ Irene cut in.

  ‘Yes, but when was that? If Spiro was right, it must have been after Kohl came back with my father from Kephalonia.’

  Irene considered this for a few moments and then agreed that she thought it was shortly before my father’s heart attack. No more than a few weeks.

  ‘Then it must be worth talking to him. If Dad found the Antounnetta maybe Gregory knows where it is,’ I said.

  Kounidis looked thoughtful. ‘It occurs to me, Robert, that if you are right then there is also another avenue we could try. Your father and Gregory were old. They could not dive the way they used to. In recent years your father would hire somebody to help them.’

  I remembered reading something to that effect in my dad’s old journals.

  ‘Alkimos is right,’ Irene said. ‘Johnny would put a card up in the dive shop in Kioni.’

  ‘I know the man who runs this place,’ Kounidis said. ‘Perhaps he may remember if your father hired anybody this year. I will go and see him.’ He looked at his watch. ‘But it is late, I will have to wait until morning.’

  ‘In the meantime, I’d like to talk to Gregory,’ I said. ‘Where is this place Kalamos where he lives?’

  ‘It is an island north of here,’ Dimitri said. ‘Near the mainland.’

  I turned to Irene. ‘Can we take the Swallow?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Then I’ll meet you at the marina first thing in the morning,’ I said to Dimitri.

  I went to bed early feeling drained, but so much was swimming in my head that I couldn’t sleep. It must have been an hour after I heard Irene go to bed when I heard the phone. I got up to answer it. As I passed Irene’s door I stopped to listen, but there was no sound from inside. It was dark downstairs and as I groped to find the phone I wondered who would allow it to ring for so long at such a late hour.

  ‘Hello?’ I said when I picked up the receiver.

  ‘Mr French?’

  I came awake immediately, recognising the accent at once. ‘Yes.’

  There was a muffled sound as the phone was passed to somebody else. ‘Robert?’

  My heart jumped. ‘Alex? Alex is that you?’

  ‘Yes, it’s me.’

  A flood of questions rose up in my mind in a tangled, jostling mass. ‘Where are you? What the hell is going on?’ I felt a stab of anger and my voice rose. ‘Do you realise I’ve been suspected of killing you?’

  ‘Mr French.’

  It was Hassel’s voice again, curtly cutting me off in mid flow. ‘Please come to the marina where your father’s boat is. Do not tell anybody where you are going and come alone.’

  ‘Put Alex back on damn it!’ I demanded.

  ‘Thirty minutes, Mr French.’

  Before I could say anything else there was a click and the line went dead. I stared at the phone and then hung up. My heart was pounding. The rush of anger I’d felt ebbed as I started to think rationally. On reflection I thought Alex had sounded tense and uncertain. With the few words she had spoken she had done no more than confirm her presence before the phone had what? Been taken from her? And Hassel’s instruction to meet him had been exactly that; an instruction rather than a request.

  I thought about calling somebody. Dimitri perhaps. I even thought briefly of Theonas, but Hassel’s warning to come alone and tell nobody rang in my mind. Time was already ticking away fast which I thought was probably intentional. I had been given a tight deadline so that I didn’t have time to consider my options. I went back upstairs and dressed hurriedly and five minutes later I was driving down to the coast road.

  There were no streetlights beyond the town. The road plunged into darkness where it passed beneath a tall avenue of gum trees which obscured the moonlight. Beyond them the harbour was cast in a ghostly grey wash. When I arrived, I parked a hundred yards from the marina and went the rest of the way on foot. Cicadas chattered from the hillside, a sound which, after a while, became almost invisible, like atmospheric static. The shifting water slapped against the hulls of the moored boats. I identified other night sounds; the rattle of rigging in the masts; the creaking of timbers and ropes straining against cleats. When I reached the buildings by the road I paused in a deep wedge of black shadow. I listened for something out of place; a stealthy footfall or a rustle of clothing, and I watched for a movement or the glow of a cigarette tip. But there was nothing there.

  The Swallow lay twenty yards ahead of me. I moved through the pitch-black alleyway between two buildings, feeling my way blindly. As I stepped into the open, cloud gathered above the harbour smothering the moon. On a boat somewhere nearby a wind chime made a mournful lament. The moon appeared again, hazy behind thin drifting cloud. I thought I saw a movement from the deck of a nearby launch, but it was only a flag fluttering in the breeze.

  Just then I heard the sound of a car approaching from the direction of the town, though no headlights were visible. I froze and listened as it drew nearer. Abruptly it stopped somewhere back along the road. My sense of disquiet grew and then I became aware of a faint buzz. As it became louder I realised that it was an outboard motor running at low revs. A boat was approaching from out on the water. Suddenly the motor was cut and that sound died too.

  My senses jangled. It occurred to me that I’d been set up and that I was trapped between unseen figures on both my seaward and landward sides. I heard a bump as something nudged the wharf and then a sound like somebody jumping ashore. I turned and ran back towards the cover of the buildings. Moonlight cast the marina in patches of grey light and dark jutting shadows and, as I darted across open space, I felt exposed. The alley between the sheds beckoned, a deep tunnel which swallowed light like a black hole. From its safety
I paused to listen as footsteps moved towards me from the wharf. Behind me, towards the road, there was only darkness, but I sensed that somebody was waiting there. I heard a scraping noise and was startled by how close it was. No more than ten feet away. Somebody was edging along the front of the shed. I turned and made for the road, but as the end of the building loomed close I snagged my foot and pitched forward, instinctively throwing out my hands to break my fall. I hit the nearest wall with a loud thud and for a moment I held my breath.

  From behind I heard footsteps moving quickly. Too many to be one person. Perhaps two. Abandoning any attempt at stealth I staggered to my feet and lunged for the corner. I tensed, half expecting somebody to jump out, but nothing happened and then I was in the road.

  A car engine started somewhere close by and in the same instant I was pinned by the sudden glare of lights. There was a shout from behind and, as I raised my arm, momentarily dazzled, everything happened at once. I saw two people. An impression of movement and then for just an instant I saw Alex’s face clearly. Her expression was fraught, desperate, but something else struck me, though it was too fleeting for me to pin down. An engine accelerated hard and I wheeled around as rubber squealed against the Tarmac. Lights bore down on me, moving very fast. Something slammed into me from behind and pitched me face-down. Acting more by instinct than anything else I rolled to avoid the car rushing towards me and, as I did, I glimpsed a figure on all fours lunging after me. It was Hassel. His face was caught in the lights for a split second before I kicked out and scrambled to the edge of the road.

  As I dived to get out of the way, the car passed close enough to clip me, the force spinning me into the air. I landed heavily and a sharp pain exploded along my left side, but I ignored it and scrambled to my feet again. Behind me the car screeched to a stop and the engine howled as it reversed at speed. The cloud slid over the moon again and in the cover of darkness I changed direction and stumbled up the hillside. The lower branches of a tree raked my face, but I barely felt it. I heard what sounded like a series of popping sounds, and when something hit a tree close by I realised with a shock that somebody was shooting at me. I crouched low and changed direction again without breaking stride and after that, though I heard a few more shots, they went well wide of me.

  I had been running for no more than thirty seconds, though it felt longer, when I heard a sound which stopped me dead. It was a woman’s scream, cut off abruptly. I hesitated, panting heavily. There was no mistaking what I’d heard. It was Alex and something had happened to her. Without thinking, I turned and started back down the hill, but almost immediately I fell. I rolled head over heels and half rose to my feet again before I slammed into a tree and crumpled to the ground. Stunned, I lay on the ground gasping for breath, my chest on fire, my heart pumping too fast.

  Eventually, after perhaps half a minute, my senses cleared and I got to my knees. Through eyes blurred with sweat I saw the harbour below. The lights of the town glittered prettily a couple of miles away. Headlights lit the road in the distance moving steadily towards the town, and beyond the wharf where the Swallow was moored I thought I saw the faint white smear of a wake on the harbour.

  I made my way down to the marina again, but I already knew what I’d find. It was deserted.

  TWENTY-TWO

  Irene dabbed at the cuts and scrapes on my face with cotton wool soaked in some foul-smelling antiseptic lotion. She didn’t speak and she wasn’t too gentle with her ministrations. Her mouth was pressed into a tight line of stern disapproval. She dabbed forcefully at a cut over my eye and put the blood-stained wad of cotton wool in a dish on the table.

  When she was finished, she regarded her handiwork with arms tightly folded across her chest. ‘There, that is the best that I can do.’

  ‘Thanks.’ I picked up a small mirror and examined myself. I looked a lot better than I had when I’d woken up earlier, my face covered with encrusted blood. I was pale and hollow-eyed, but though slightly battered, the cuts and bruises were superficial.

  ‘This is ridiculous,’ Irene said suddenly. ‘I am going to phone Miros.’

  She turned on her heel, but I leapt to my feet and caught her before she reached the phone. ‘Irene, wait. We’ve been over this. I’m fine. These are nothing more than scratches.’

  ‘Robert, you could have been killed.’

  ‘But I wasn’t,’ I pointed out. In fact my injuries were the result of my scramble up the hillside in the dark, though I was far more shaken up than I was letting on. It hadn’t really hit me until later that I had actually been shot at.

  I kept flashing back to the split second when the car had started as I stumbled onto the road and I’d turned to see Alex frozen in the headlights. If I closed my eyes I could picture her with absolute clarity. She was tense, wary, but something else had made a fleeting impression on me. It wasn’t what I saw, so much as what I didn’t see. She should have been frightened, even terrified by what she’d been through. Fear is a powerful emotion and it is expressed powerfully. There was a boy I went to school with who suffered from night terrors. He would wake in the dormitory from some terrible nightmare and sit up in bed with his eyes bugging, his face frozen in a terrible rictus of horror. Some reflection of that kind of fear should have been apparent in Alex’s expression, but it wasn’t. But there was the scream I’d heard too. I remembered the way it had ended so abruptly.

  ‘If you tell Theonas about this I’ll spend the rest of the day answering his questions,’ I said to Irene. ‘There isn’t time for that.’

  She wavered for a few moments, but then her resistance crumbled. It was beginning to get light and I rose stiffly from the chair and put on a shirt.

  ‘You are still going to Kalamos?’ Irene asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  She sighed. ‘I will make some coffee.’

  Dimitri was already on board the Swallow when I got there. ‘What happened to you?’ he asked as soon as he saw me. When I told him, he responded angrily. ‘You should not have gone without me.’

  ‘There was no time. He would have known anyway. I must have been followed.’

  ‘But you saw Alex? How did she seem?’

  I hesitated, unsure how to answer, but I told him everything that had happened, including that I’d heard her scream.

  ‘She must have tried to get away,’ Dimitri said.

  ‘Perhaps,’ I agreed, but he picked up on my uncertainty.

  ‘What is it? This proves that Hassel must have forced her to go with him from Exoghi.’

  ‘But why? And why did he want me to meet him last night?’

  ‘Because he does not want you to find the Antounnetta.’

  I wasn’t so sure that was the answer. ‘Something about this doesn’t seem right to me.’

  ‘What are you saying? That Alex is involved? You said yourself that you heard her scream. This man tried to shoot you.’

  He was right, but I was plagued by a sliver of doubt. I remembered Hassel jumping me as I was caught in the headlights of the car. I’d assumed I’d been led into a trap. But maybe I was wrong. Someone had shot at me, but perhaps it wasn’t Hassel. The night I’d met him when I was drunk he had asked if I knew Eric Schmidt. Why would he ask if I knew a youth who’d died in a long ago war? Unless, just as there was more than one Hassel, there was more than one Schmidt. Were the descendants of the people who had been here during the war finishing something that had begun then? If so, what was Schmidt’s part in it all? Come to that what was mine?

  I looked up at the hills surrounding the harbour and it struck me that nothing had changed there for thousands of years except the human inhabitants, who crawled like ants over the land. Their affairs had always been riven by intrigue and betrayal, fuelled by the emotions of love, hate and greed which had competed restlessly through the ages. And since the times of Odysseus they had brought death in their wake.

  We threw off the lines and took the Swallow out of her berth, and when we were beyond the harbour entrance I we
nt below. Years earlier when I was a boy, my father had caught a six-foot shark when we were fishing. When he’d brought it alongside the boat it was clear that it had become hopelessly fouled in the line and cutting it free would have simply condemned it to a slow death, so he’d shot it with a rifle which he kept on board. I remembered the gun was kept in a locker beside the galley. It was still there, along with a box of ammunition. It was old, with a worn wooden stock and a single bolt action, but the mechanism worked smoothly and the barrel and metal parts glistened with a thin sheen of cleaning oil.

  I went on deck and showed it to Dimitri. ‘I don’t know much about guns. But it might be a good idea if we learned to use it.’

  He took it from me and sighted along the barrel, then worked the action with a practised ease which demonstrated that he had less to learn than I did.

  The journey to Kalamos took most of the day. The Swallow wasn’t built for speed and during the morning there was no wind. When we were well underway, Dimitri found some plastic bottles in the galley and strung them together on a line. He threw them over the stern and let them drift a hundred feet behind us, then showed me how to load and fire the rifle. For the next hour or so we took turns shooting at them. The recoil initially sent all my shots high, but eventually I got the hang of it. We pulled each bottle in as it began to sink, and the last one had two holes in it for only four of my shots. I was quite pleased, but Dimitri was less enthusiastic.

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ he commented. ‘If we have to use it, the range will be much closer.’

  I thought about this later. I wondered if I could point a gun at a living human being and pull the trigger. Whatever my own reservations, Dimitri didn’t appear to share them. He went about the boat wearing a look of resigned determination.

  By midday, the sun was beating fiercely onto the deck. We passed a number of yachts, all of them making way under engine power. A little later, a slight breeze came up from the west so, while I took the helm, Dimitri went out on deck to raise the sails. He worked quickly and expertly, winching sheets to trim for maximum advantage of the wind.