Aphrodite's Smile

by Stuart Harrison

  ‘Possibly,’ Kounidis agreed.

  ‘I don’t suppose this American is still around?’

  ‘Unfortunately no. After your father’s heart attack the young man left to find another job. He said he was going to try Crete or perhaps Rhodes. But he did say that the place he had been diving was a bay to the south.’

  ‘Pigania?’

  ‘Perhaps.’

  ‘Did he say what they were looking for?’

  ‘Only that it was something of archaeological interest. I imagine that he was paid to be discreet. Possibly your father did not reveal the truth to him anyway.’

  ‘I’m beginning to wonder what the truth is,’ I said as I looked at the chart on the table. ‘Maybe they weren’t looking for the Antounnetta after all.’ The pattern of crosses and dates which marked the progress of my father’s search over the years was nowhere near Pigania Bay. Everything that was known about the last hours of the ship suggested that it had set a course eastwards towards the mainland after it left Frikes. I pointed to the large cross on the chart toward the mainland coast which I had first noticed the day I’d taken Alex out on my father’s boat.

  ‘Do you know what this is?’ I asked Kounidis.

  ‘It is the place where the survivors from the Antounnetta were picked up by another ship.’

  It was this reference point along with calculations estimating speed, tidal charts and weather records that had given my father a broad search area, taking into account also where Kounidis had eventually come ashore on the southern tip of Kephalonia. I turned my attention to Pigania Bay. It was the largest bay on the southern coast, though Kounidis said it was rocky and inhospitable. There were no beaches marked on the chart, and that entire part of the island was mountainous and completely uninhabited.

  ‘Whatever they were looking for, it must be here,’ I said. I started to get up, ready to leave, but Kounidis stopped me.

  ‘Wait. There is something else I must tell you. The reason I asked the harbourmaster to contact you is that I have received some other news.’ He paused. ‘It is about Alex.’

  Some inner part of me lurched at his hesitant manner and I envisaged the worst; Alex washed up dead somewhere. In my mind’s eye I saw her pale face bleached by the seawater, her hair entwined with seaweed. I glanced at Dimitri. He gripped the table edge tensely.

  ‘Please,’ Kounidis said anxiously, raising both hands in reassurance. ‘I did not wish to alarm either of you. She is not hurt. Yesterday afternoon Alex went to the house where she had been staying, to collect her things. She told the woman who owns it that she was returning to England.’

  I was stunned. ‘There must be some mistake.’

  ‘I am afraid not. The woman was quite certain. Alex left a note for the police.’ Kounidis took a folded sheet of paper from his pocket and placed it on the table. ‘Miros Theonas allowed me to take a copy so that I could show you both.’

  I read what she’d written with a sense of growing confusion. The note was short. She apologised for any trouble that she had caused the police, explaining that she had left Exoghi so suddenly to avoid another confrontation with me. She wrote that she had met somebody who invited her to his yacht and they had not been aware of the clamour surrounding her disappearance until they returned from Zakynthos, an island to the south, where they had been for the past few days.

  ‘This is ridiculous,’ I said after I had quickly read it through once. I turned to Dimitri. ‘Is this her writing? Do you recognise the signature?’

  He nodded heavily.

  ‘It must be a forgery,’ I insisted. ‘Surely Theonas spoke to her. He didn’t just let her go.’

  ‘After she collected her things, Alex caught a ferry to Sami,’ Kounidis said. ‘The travel company confirmed that she had bought a ticket, and also a ticket for a flight to London from Argostoli. Theonas phoned the airline and they confirmed that she had checked in. Under the circumstances he has officially called off his investigation.’

  ‘And I suppose the fact that somebody tried to kill me the other night was my imagination,’ I said cynically.

  ‘When Irene told me what happened I of course mentioned it to Miros Theonas. He wondered why you had not reported such a serious matter to the authorities.’

  ‘Because I didn’t have time to spend the entire day answering his questions,’ I protested.

  ‘Which I again explained to Theonas on your behalf,’ Kounidis said. ‘He made the comment that perhaps it was understandable that you did not wish to waste time as no doubt you were eager to prove your conviction that your father had indeed made a discovery of some value.’

  ‘Theonas thinks I’m looking to cash in, is that it?’

  ‘He believes you are convinced that your father planned to smuggle something he had found out of Greece.’

  ‘And now I’m looking to take up where he left off? And what about Kohl?’

  ‘A coincidence. Theonas is of the opinion that his original theory is correct, that the murder was the result of a bungled robbery. He points to the fact that the only other people at the monastery that day were the tourists on the bus. Also the body has now been tentatively identified as that of Johann Kohl, a retired builder from Hamburg. A man with no connection with the dealing of antiquities, and with no criminal record.’

  I shook my head in disbelief. ‘He was in the photograph with my father at the museum, for Christ’s sake! I suppose Theonas thinks my father’s death was another coincidence? No doubt an unfortunate accident.’

  ‘He insists there is no evidence to the contrary.’

  Suddenly I saw Alex’s appearance, her note and convenient departure for what it really was; a means to fool the police. And in this case, Theonas was all too ready to accept it at face value. But there were too many questions, too many inconsistencies.

  ‘Alex hasn’t left,’ I said. ‘I’m sure of it.’

  ‘I believe that you may be right,’ Kounidis agreed and smiled at my surprise. ‘Unlike Theonas, I share your concerns, Robert, and so I spoke to somebody that I know who works for the airline. It seems that, upon examination, the passenger numbers for the flight Alex bought a ticket for do not tally with the number of people who actually checked in.’

  ‘Let me guess,’ I said. ‘The numbers were out by one.’

  Kounidis’s news had unsettled me. I no longer presumed to know what was going on. After we had eaten the breakfast Eleni had made for us, Dimitri and I prepared to leave for Pigania Bay. Dimitri was certain that Hassel had somehow forced Alex to go through the charade of pretending to leave, but I couldn’t see how he had managed it. Kounidis told us that when she had collected her things from the house where she had been staying she was alone. Even if Hassel had threatened her, surely she could have taken her chance to escape or at least tip the police off. But then I thought of the scream I’d heard at the marina. I had no doubt that it had been Alex.

  The coast around the south of the island was quite different from the north. The sea surged against barren rocks and, though there were numerous inlets and coves, most of them were fringed with vertical cliffs topped with dense, impenetrable vegetation.

  A wall of rock surrounded Pigania Bay and the water was still and deep green, more like a fjord than a bay. The headland on the western side jutted out to sea and formed a prominent point. Along its shoreline there was a platform of smooth, flat rock where a small boat could easily land. It was the only place where my father and Kohl could have gone ashore.

  Dimitri steered the Swallow in close until we were less than fifty yards away then hit a switch to drop the anchor over the side. Half a minute later we were motionless, the winch and engine turned off. Around us the water shifted in a single molten mass. We took the dinghy ashore, where I clambered up onto the rocks and secured a line. A trickle of fresh water dripped down a narrow ravine in the cliff above, where a rough goat track vanished into the tangled undergrowth. When we followed it, we found ourselves climbing alongside the ravine. In places the gro
und was dry and covered with loose rock which made it difficult to get a foothold, but higher up the slope levelled out. A few pine trees had gained a hold marking the edge of a wood where we walked through a world in permanent twilight. Even so, by the time we emerged onto the flat open ground of the headland high above the bay, we were both soaked in sweat. Far below us we could see the Swallow as she lay serenely at anchor in the bay.

  Straggly clumps of grass scorched brown by the sun grew in the thin soil near the cliff edge. To the south, the sky and sea merged in a smoky haze on the horizon, and to the west, Kephalonia rose from the strait.

  At first sight there was nothing to indicate if this was where my father and Kohl had come, but then, near a lightning-struck burned out stump at the edge of the trees, we came across a circular depression in the ground. It was perhaps ten feet across and three or four deep. At the bottom, the ground cover had been cleared exposing loose earth. Though fresh growth was already regaining a foothold, it was clear that somebody had dug there recently. As I stood on the lip of the hollow, what I had at first thought to be a natural feature took on a different interpretation. There was a low hump of similar proportions to one side. At first the growth of many years had tricked my eye, but now I could see that the hollow was in fact man-made, the earth which had been removed from it forming the hump. It had been dug a long time ago, probably decades earlier, though the evidence of fresh earth at the bottom was much more recent. I guessed that it had to have been disturbed by my father.

  I hunted around for a stick, and then went down and used it to scoop out the loose earth. It was easy work but dirty and hot and another pair of hands would have made it easier still, but when I looked for Dimitri he had vanished.

  ‘Thanks for your help,’ I muttered to myself.

  Even without him, within half an hour I had removed the loose earth to reveal the shape of a hole a few feet deep and about six feet long. But whatever had been buried there was long gone. As I regarded the result of my efforts, wiping the sweat and dirt from my face and trying to make sense of it, Dimitri reappeared.

  ‘Did you find anything?’ he asked.

  I ignored him. Something caught my eye in the dirt. It was small and round, too regular in shape to be natural, and I bent down to pick it up. It was made of some kind of metal, though it was pitted and rusted. I turned it over in my fingers and tossed it up to Dimitri.

  ‘What do you make of that?’

  He examined it, then said, ‘Come with me. I want to show you something.’

  It was only then that I noticed that he was as sweaty and dirty as I was. Intrigued, I followed him toward the point of the headland. As we got closer I saw a pile of earth heaped next to a single tree, its trunk bent almost at right angles away from the winds to which it was constantly exposed. The hole Dimitri had uncovered was about a third of the size of the one I’d just dug out. A pile of stones lay close by. Beside them he’d laid out the bones he’d found. There were two almost complete skeletons.

  ‘How did you know they were here?’ I asked.

  He gestured to something he’d propped by the tree. It was a rudimentary cross, formed by two lengths of pine lashed together. He lit a cigarette and squatted by one of the skeletons. He picked up the skull to show to me. There was a small round hole at the back, and a much larger one at the front which had obliterated much of the forehead. He put his finger in the one at the back.

  ‘What does this look like to you?’

  ‘A bullet hole?’

  He nodded. ‘This is where it entered.’ Then he indicated the jagged mess at the front. ‘This is the exit.’ He showed me the second skull, which was unmarked, and then he gestured to the rest of the remains. ‘I looked for some other injury, but I could not find anything.’

  Two people. One shot at close range in the back of the head, execution style. The other possibly also shot, but the bullet having hit only soft tissue.

  ‘The earth was loose,’ Dimitri said. ‘But the bones are old.’ He showed me a small pile of objects, some similar to the round piece of metal I had found. These too were rusted and pitted. ‘They are buttons,’ he said and showed me a rusted hollow square of metal which I recognised as a buckle. ‘They are from a uniform I think.’

  ‘Soldiers?’

  I looked back to the treeline, trying to figure it out. ‘Somebody dug these up from the bottom of the hollow over there. Presumably my father and Kohl. And then they reburied them here. Why?’

  With a sweep of his arm Dimitri indicated the view across the sea. ‘It is a nice place to be buried.’

  He was right, of course. But why go to so much trouble? There was a certain ritual aspect to it, though my father had not been a religious man. What was more puzzling was that the hollow they had come from had obviously been dug many years before and left for nature to reclaim. Why would anyone dig a large hole only to bury two bodies at the bottom and leave the rest uncovered?

  Like everything else, it made no sense.

  That evening we returned to Kounidis’s house as he had suggested earlier, and after dinner I saw the glow of a cigarette tip outside near the cliff. Somebody else who couldn’t sleep. The faint sound of music drifted on the air. I recognised it as the same haunting rhythm I’d heard when I was there with Alex. Because I couldn’t sleep and because I was curious, I left my room and went downstairs to the terrace. Dimitri emerged from the darkness at the same time and together we listened. The music appeared to come from the far end of the terrace where a sliver of dim light escaped the shuttered windows of a room.

  ‘Do you know what it is?’ I asked.

  ‘A traditional song,’ he said. ‘It is about a young shepherd who falls in love with a beautiful girl. A stranger arrives in the village and he steals the girl away. The shepherd is heartbroken.’

  I wasn’t sure if he was serious. His face was shadowed, making it difficult to read his expression. Was I imagining it, or was he alluding to Alex? Was I the stranger?

  ‘What happens?’ I said.

  ‘There is a fight between the stranger and the shepherd. One of them is killed.’

  I was almost afraid to ask. ‘Which one?’

  He stared at me for a moment then shrugged, the tiniest movement of his shoulders. ‘I don’t remember.’

  As if on cue the music abruptly ended. Without another word he passed me by and went into the house.

  In the morning at first light I turned the wheel towards the open sea and we motored out of the cove. We made the short journey to Kioni where there was a place to rent diving tanks, and then headed south. By the time we reached Pigania it was only mid-morning but it was already hot, though much of the bay itself was shaded from the morning sun by the steep hills surrounding it. The water was dark and green, unruffled by even a tremor of breeze.

  We dropped anchor and dragged the scuba gear up from below. I had taken a five-day course once years ago during a holiday in Malta, but hadn’t done any diving since then. I’d been keen on the idea, but I soon found I hadn’t liked the reality much. Once the initial novelty of swimming among multi-coloured fish had worn off, I’d spent most of the time worrying about sharks and constantly checking my oxygen gauge.

  Nevertheless, I volunteered to go down first and Dimitri reminded me how to check the gauges and make sure air was flowing through the mouthpiece. When everything seemed to be working, I started pulling on a wet suit.

  The charts showed that the depth in the bay was fairly uniform at between fifty and sixty feet until the beginning of a trench about a quarter of a mile out. We planned to search the seabed methodically out to the trench, working on the assumption that whatever my father and Kohl had found was still down there. If we were right, it wouldn’t be long before Hassel showed up.

  When I was ready for my first dive, Dimitri handed me a line and told me to tie it on my buoyancy vest. ‘If you get into trouble, tug it twice like this.’ He demonstrated, giving two sharp but long pulls which gave a clear signal. ‘Then I
will pull you up.’

  ‘And if you see anything up here do the same,’ I said.

  My safety was in his hands. I was uncomfortably aware that if anything went wrong I had to rely on Dimitri for help, and I tried not to think about our conversation the night before. If he knew what I was thinking he gave no sign of it, however.

  ‘If you find anything, tie the line on to mark it,’ he said.

  Finally I climbed down into the water and rinsed out my mask. Dimitri watched from the boat as I put the mouthpiece in and began to breathe air from my tank. I gave him the thumbs up sign then I opened the valve to let some air out of my vest and quickly sank beneath the surface.

  For a few minutes I trod water several feet down, getting used to the sound of my own breathing and the feel of the rubber in my mouth. In Malta I’d had an illogical desire to rip it out. The water was clear and sunlit near the surface, but when I looked down it was dark and I couldn’t see much. I wondered what might be lurking down there. My heart was beating too fast and I was breathing too quickly. I told myself to calm down and take slower breaths.

  At a depth of ten or twelve yards I paused to look back toward the Swallow. The line tied to my vest trailed reassuringly like an umbilical cord back to the comforting presence of her hull. Below me the rocky terrain was cut through with valleys and ravines where the darkness was only pierced by the beam of my torch. I continued down perhaps another seven yards or so. Schools of fish cruised around me, some as small as my thumb, others that must have weighed ten pounds or more. Plant life floated exotically in the current, the colours mostly browns and greens and yellows.

  Other than the sound of my breathing it was a silent world. I was out of my element. I kept panic at bay only by a conscious act of will. Every time I saw a movement in the periphery of my vision my heart rate quickened. I peered around anxiously, shining my torch beam back and forth, forever expecting something from Jaws to materialise out of the gloom.

  When I checked my watch, only ten minutes had passed, though it felt like half an hour. I began swimming slowly eastwards across the bay searching for anything out of place. Having something to concentrate on helped take my mind off imagined dangers, and after a while I even stopped looking over my shoulder every fifteen seconds. Take it easy, I repeated endlessly. Stay calm. Breathe.