Decision at Delphi

by Helen Macinnes

  Strang went back to the cab, wondering what impulse had made him behave in this way. “Sorry,” he said to Cecilia again, and was grateful for her silence. “That was Kriton Street. But don’t ask me why I got out to look. I honestly don’t know.” He hoped he didn’t seem as foolish as he felt. “Did you notice the man who came. out of that house?”

  “Your friend Mr. Christophorou, wasn’t it?”

  He nodded. So I wasn’t mistaken, he thought.

  “I like his house. But you should tell him to have those wooden storm windows taken off. It’s strange how dead a house looks with its shutters all closed, as if pennies were lying on its eyes.” She stopped and considered. “That’s a gruesome thought to take us to dinner.”

  “Cheer up,” he said, “we are going to have a gypsy orchestra all to ourselves.”

  “I thought you were looking a little worried,” she said cheerfully. “Don’t you like violins breathing down the back of your neck, either?” Good, she thought, I got a real smile out of him. But he is worried. What is wrong? When I first saw him this evening he was unhappy about something. Watching him from the doorway of the bar, I thought I was the cause of it all. It wasn’t a joke, really, when I told him I had thought of catching the first plane back to Rome: I was scared that Lee Preston had talked me into a job where I wasn’t wanted. But, when we met, I didn’t feel that way any more. I thought, then, that he must have had a quarrel with Steve Kladas in Sicily, and Steve had resigned in his own impetuous way. But I don’t feel that is true, either, now. And yet, there is something troubling him. What is it? Why doesn’t he mention Steve?

  The cab was drawing up in front of the restaurant with as much flourish as if the driver had been reining in four mettlesome horses. “This looks charming,” she said.

  “You’re the most tactful girl I’ve ever met,” he told her. But he was relieved, and generously calculated the tip in cents and translated it into drachmas.

  “What does it say?” she asked, looking at the restaurant’s name.

  “The Five Gypsies.”

  “Poached rabbit for dinner? How exotic.”

  He laughed. “Probably Maryland chicken or London grill. Time, yet, to wander on and look for something more authentic.”

  “People who are hungry can’t afford to be snobs. Besides,” she said, as they entered, “Steve did warn me not to rush too quickly into the authentic places.”

  “Steve?” The name was jolted out of him. When shall I tell her? he wondered for the tenth time. Not now, not yet... He looked down at her enchanting face and was startled to see something like very real sympathy in her eyes. His hand, quite unconsciously, tightened its grip on her arm. He led her through the subdued lights of the little entrance hall into the large and completely empty dining-room. “Well,” he said, looking at the huge, well-polished barrels lining one wall, “we at least have wine casks for company. Where shall we sit? Under that cluster of grapes or over by the draped mimosa?”

  He helped her off with her light cashmere coat. She had used every one of those ten minutes, back at the hotel, to put on a dress of blue that made her eyes devastating. Or perhaps it was the way she smiled as she looked up at him. He sat down opposite her, pretending to study the handsome menu. For a long minute he stared at it, seeing nothing, hearing nothing, his body numb, his mind paralysed. Then the revelation hit him, and he looked at her.

  This is the girl I’m going to marry, he told himself.

  12

  “Tell me,” she said, as dinner was ending, “about Athens when you were last here.”

  “In 1944?” He didn’t hide his surprise.

  “Yes. We’ve talked so much about me—” she paused, laughed—“there isn’t really much of my life story left, is there?”

  Only the most important, he thought: only about the man to whom she had been engaged, the man who had been killed in Korea. She must have been about nineteen or twenty then. “I didn’t learn so much.”

  “What? An only child, brought up in Philadelphia, father an English teacher, mother a pianist, summers in Wyoming with my grandparents; then after my parents died, New York, living in one large room euphemistically called a studio, when I’m not being sent to photograph the Grand Canyon or Mesa Verde or Rio apartment houses or Loire châteaux—”

  “Why,” he interrupted, “did you choose photography? And why do you always photograph stone?”

  “Stone?” She was startled. “Well—yes—that has become sort of my particular thing, somehow. Now let’s talk about you.”

  “How old are you, Cecilia?”

  “Twenty-seven. Twenty-eight next month, to tell you the cruel truth.”

  “You’ve come a long way, for twenty-seven years.”

  “Oh—I didn’t have many distractions.”

  “You mean you didn’t allow many,” he said gently.

  She looked at him. “It wasn’t so difficult,” she said. “You wait, and you work, and you wait. It becomes a habit. Two years slip away, three—”

  “How many now—seven?”

  She looked down at her hands, bare of rings, slender and graceful to match her slender, graceful body. “Did Steve tell you about Jim?” she asked quietly.

  “He told me that you had been engaged once.”

  She hesitated. Why should I want to tell him all this? she wondered. I don’t go around telling people... She said quietly, simply, “Jim was listed as missing in Korea.”

  Ah, that was it! Missing... Killed in action, died of wounds— these were grimly definite. But missing... And so, he thought, she waited. And she worked. And she waited. Success came and added new meaning to work, a new pattern of life. “And when do the years stop slipping away?” he asked. He regretted the question as soon as it had been uttered; that was always the danger with thinking aloud. But when he glanced at her face, he surprised a smile in her eyes.

  “Is twenty-seven such an advanced age?” The smile spread to her lips. Then she opened a little escape doorway for them both. “Tell me about Athens when you last saw it.”

  “If you really want to hear about that—” He looked at her doubtfully, but she nodded. “Then we’ll walk to the Acropolis and I can tell you on the way. But first, what about some cognac, with our coffee? Or would you risk some ouzo? It’s an apéritif, actually, but it’s definitely authentic.”

  “Ouzo,” she said reflectively. “I know a good place to go and drink ouzo. Just a moment!” She searched in her handbag and drew out a small notebook. “Travel addresses,” she told him. “Everything from darkrooms and camera shops to hairdressers.” She searched through the little book impatiently. “It was here,” she reassured herself. She turned the notebook upside down and shook it. A piece of paper fell out. “There it is! See—Steve wrote two addresses on it for me. Places where we can have Greek music and ouzo.”

  “When did Steve give you this?”

  “Last summer, when I was planning a month’s vacation in Greece. But then I got the Loire châteaux job, and I had to cancel everything else. Can you make out Steve’s writing? He jotted down all this at a party, so it’s a little high-flown.”

  It was. There was a Kilroy mark, two large round eyes over a wall, opposite one of the addresses on a street called Erinna, and a scrawled warning: “Positively no kokoretzi!” There were two other afterthoughts in the margin: “Under Acropolis wall, big tree”; and “Petros,” with a brief Greek sentence scratched after the name. The other address was somewhere down in the Piraeus, but it lacked any similar enthusiasm.

  “Petros is a very old friend,” Cecilia was explaining. “I was to ask for him, especially.”

  Strang looked at the Kilroy sign. “Steve went there a lot, did he?”

  “He lived there for eighteen months. Fantastic, isn’t it? Restaurants where you can stay. Or is it an inn of some kind?”

  “He lived there?”

  (Steve’s voice was saying, “None of Ares’s informers even guessed where I was. So I stayed alive.”)<
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  “When was that?” Strang asked.

  “Oh, years and years ago. But Steve said there was an enormous family who runs the place, so some of them were bound to the still around. Why don’t we visit them for a drink and Greek music?” She frowned at the gypsy band, a sedate group of dark-suited men, who had been stealing expertly from Brahms and Enesco, and now—as the guests started to arrive in numbers—were breaking into a song from My Fair Lady. “Poor darlings,” she said, shaking her head. “Do they think we came five thousand miles to hear that?”

  Carefully, Strang replaced Steve’s memorandum in her notebook, and handed it back to her. “All right. Let’s try Erinna.” He glanced at his watch. “It’s almost ten o’clock, though. We may not have much time left for the Acropolis tonight.”

  “Of course we shall. The Acropolis at dawn—what could be more romantic?”

  “You’ve been doing a lot of travelling—”

  “You think I must be tired? On my first night in Athens? I’m far too excited to sleep.”

  “All right,” he said, watching her radiant face. She was hard to refuse. “Just let me study this map for a moment. The lighting in the streets in this part of town isn’t too good.” He drew his map out of his pocket. “Besides, the Greeks are very polite; even if they don’t know the way to a place, they will give you directions.” He searched carefully, and at last found a small street, very short indeed, leading right up to the wall of the Acropolis and stopping blankly there.

  “We are near the Acropolis now, aren’t we? But where?”

  “Roughly, to its. north.” He showed her on the map.

  “And Erinna Street?”

  “Northwest by north.”

  “Nautical, aren’t we? But of course—” she added. “And the front of the Acropolis is from the west, more or less? So Erinna Street is on our way to the Acropolis. It’s just a kind of side shoot from this main stem or street.” She pointed to a street on the map that ran parallel with the wall. “Let’s try it. Shall we?”

  “Could you walk there? I’d like to talk.” He paused. “About Athens in 1944, and the time Steve was hunted.” She was watching him, her eyes wide, her face expectant but no longer excited, as if she sensed there was something unpleasant underlying his quiet words. “It isn’t a pretty story,” he said. But, he thought, it will lead quite naturally into the telling of Steve’s death.

  They walked slowly, taking almost an hour to cover a distance that could have been travelled in a quarter of that time. The streets were twisting, narrow, dimly lit and quiet, with only an occasional car jolting past or small groups of young men strolling arm in arm. Strang chose careful detours so that they would not be altogether lost: they returned to their route, broke away from it again, returned, retraced steps, continued once more in the right direction, while Strang talked and kept on talking. Once he had started, there seemed no end to what she could draw out of him, simply by letting her eyes question him. He had taken her arm to steady her high heels over the broken sidewalks, and he could feel the shock that sometimes hit her body or sense the sympathy even before it welled into her face. There was no disbelief, no scorn for his worry, no—and that would have been worse—politely correct remarks to conceal wandering attention. His story, in all its bits and pieces, held her as firmly as his hand on her arm. And in the end, he had told her—except for the conspiracy, which wasn’t his story to tell—just abut everything: Athens and civil war, the resistance in the mountains and Steve’s escape; Naples, Taormina, Steve’s death.

  I’ve lost all my senses, he thought in sudden alarm as he realised how much he had talked. No, I haven’t, he decided, and knew that was the truth. How else could she ever understand my doubts about Steve’s death, or the way I’m going to keep on and on until I see the murderers caught?

  She stopped, and turned to face him. “Steve—” She shook her head as if she couldn’t really believe he was dead. Then she said, “His sister—I wish she could be told all this. Otherwise, she will believe it’s suicide. And it wasn’t, was it?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “After what you’ve told me—” she gestured helplessly— ”I don’t think so, either. But surely when the police get your report—your friend Mr. Christophorou will have sent it to them, won’t he?”

  “Yes, I suppose so.” He was a little surprised by her question, for the simple reason he had thought of it.

  “Then they will take a different view, won’t they?”

  “It will have to be decided, first, what country is responsible for the investigation,” he reminded her. “There’s Italy; there’s Sicily, which has its own state rights, I think; there’s Greece, and there’s America. It may take a little time—” Too much time, he thought bitterly. “Don’t worry about the sister. I’m going to visit her, see what can be done—” He paused awkwardly, thinking of that damnable dowry which had brought Steve back to Greece. “I’ll tell her what I’ve told you, if you think that’s of any use.”

  “It will be. Truly, it will be. When will you go?”

  “This week. Soon.” He stopped to verify a street sign. He pulled, gently, at her arm. “Only one short lap to go. There’s Erinna Street, over there.”

  She went with him, slowly, then still more slowly. As they entered the mouth of the narrow street, she halted.

  “I don’t know.” she said, “if I want to go now.” She turned her head quickly away from him.

  He looked up the dim, unpaved, dusty street, no more than fifty yards long. It mounted between high even walls hiding more than gardens (there was the smell of farmyard around here, the sound of a light bell around a goat’s neck, the bark of a dog, the rustle of chickens alarmed out of sleep), and ended in a cluster of small houses. From the farthest of these—and the largest, for it boasted two stories—a pool of white light was cast, from a naked lamp attached under the rippling edge of its tiled roof, on the hard-packed earth in front of its door where a solitary tree, large and strong, grew out of the dusty road. Above the wide spread of green leaves, vivid, almost unreal in the sharp light, soared a backdrop of dark rocks, which formed the base of the Acropolis walls, so high overhead, so deeply shadowed that they became part of the clouded mystery of the sky itself.

  I’ll come back here alone, he thought. I’ll see Petros then. “All right,” he told her gently. “That’s all right.” There was the light sound of the bell’s sweet note, one small last bark, from the dog. A breeze rustled the leaves with a caressing hand, and left. Stillness and peace, darkness and sleep: night had come to this little village within a city.

  Just at that moment, on the point of turning away, he heard footsteps behind him. He swung around to face a man who had come out of a shadowed recess in the uneven wall. He was well-dressed, of good height, dark-haired, clean-shaven. He smiled pleasantly.” You have lost your way,” he said in English. “May I help you?”

  Cecilia had drawn close to Strang, but the man stopped a little distance away from them. Strang could feel her relax even as his own tension mounted. He was thinking, there is another man behind him, another man keeping hidden. He said, “We were looking for a small taverna on Erinna Street.”

  “This is Erinna. But there is nothing here.”

  “I hear music,” Cecilia said to Strang. From the farthest house, there came the faint sound of a song, sad and plaintive. “Greek music.”

  Strang, who had been letting his eyes grow accustomed to the shadows against the wall, could see the other man now—a small round shape in a light-coloured suit. He said to Cecilia, “Look—we can come here another night. You must be tired. Let’s call it a—”

  “Listen!” Cecilia said. The last notes of the song were dying away, leaving a sudden emptiness. in the night. “I’d like to hear the beginning of that song.”

  And I’d like to see Petros, he thought. But the man hidden in the shadows worried him.

  “Oh, let’s try it,” said Cecilia, and walked past the unhelpful stranger
without a glance. Strang hurried after her. “I bet,” Cecilia said, “his cousin runs that night club only three blocks from here.”

  “Sound carries,” he warned her, keeping his own voice very low.

  “Didn’t you want to come here?” she asked in dismay.

  “If I were alone, yes,” he told her frankly. “But at this moment—” He searched quickly for a cigarette.

  “That’s what I guessed,” she said, relieved.

  Sounds did carry on this calm night. He could hear the footsteps of the two men as they walked back to the main street. The small man’s voice was thin and light, as light as his footsteps, pattering like a woman’s, beside his companion’s firm tread.

  “Damn, I’ve dropped my lighter,” Strang said. He turned as he bent down to pick it up. He had a moment’s clear view of the two men. They had halted at the corner and were looking back up the hill, interested yet uncertain. Strang lit his cigarette, “Let’s put on a little show for them,” he said quietly. He slipped an arm round her waist as they began to walk, slowly, toward the lighted house.

  At first, her body had tautened. Then she relaxed with a little laugh. She slipped her arm lightly around his back. “Is this what you mean?” She laughed again, and leaned her head against him.

  “You’re good,” he told her. “You’re very good.”