“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.
4
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 wal
ls, 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.
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 photo
grapher 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.
Decision at Delphi Page 6