Decision at Delphi

by Helen Macinnes

“Good heavens!” Tommy said.

  Cecilia’s quiet voice changed. “How can people live like that?” she asked angrily. “Lies, deceit, treason, treachery—how can they bear it?”

  Strang said, “Katherini told you everything?”

  “Just about.”

  “She’s crazy!” But why, he wondered worriedly, why did she talk?

  “No, she isn’t. She’s incredibly realistic. Even spelled out the names for me.” Cecilia handed over her notebook to Strang. “And it is safer to share such information.”

  “Safer for whom?” Strang asked angrily. “Five hours ago you knew nothing at all, and now—”

  “It’s incredible, the ignorance we can live in,” Cecilia admitted.

  “You’re crazier than she is,” he told her. He examined the list of names and places and dates. The style was cryptic, but decipherable. The information, in six well-filled pages, was considerable. Why did Katherini do this? he wondered again. “See if she is all right,” he told Cecilia, quickly. And quickly, too, he ripped out the six pages.

  “Don’t destroy—”

  “No. I’m keeping them.” Not you, my sweet, crazy darling. “Do I go into that bathroom, or do you?” He threw the notebook down on Tommy’s table, and jammed the dangerous papers into his pocket. Cecilia was already in the hall.

  “Do you think the girl—?” Tommy was too alarmed to finish his sudden thought. He was on his feet, following Strang into the hall, his face white at the notion of suicide.

  But there was no one in the bathroom. In the kitchen, they found the back door unbolted and unchained.

  “Kriton Street!” Cecilia said. “Can she have gone to help Maria?”

  “That’s just the kind of wild idea she’d have,” Strang said. He opened the door and listened. No sound of footsteps, of movement. He closed the door so that he could talk. “I’m going down to have a look. What’s the geography, Tommy?”

  “There’s a short corridor in the basement. At one end, there’s a flight up to the front hall. At the other, a door to a small back patch of ground, surrounded by walls.”

  “Any door or gate there?”

  “An old iron gate, high. Never used. Padlocked and chained. I remember it well: I had to climb over it when the Germans were coming in by the front entrance.”

  “What’s outside the gate?”

  “A rabbit warren of concrete and wood. But she’ll never climb over that gate. It’s ten feet high or more. I had a rope, hidden for such an emergency. Otherwise, I could never have managed it. As it was, I nearly broke my leg on the other side of the gate.”

  “And how did you get out of the rabbit warren?”

  “By guess and by God,” Tommy said. “There were several exits then. But that was seventeen years ago. They may be closed now—all this rebuilding, since the war, you know.”

  “Chain this door,” Strang told him. “I’ll knock three times when I get back.” He nodded reassuringly to Cecilia and stepped outside, pulling the door closed behind him to end any argument.

  Quietly, he ran down the staircase, a monotonous repetition, between bare yellow walls, of flight and landing, flight and landing; a thing of little beauty but a temporary joy, for the solid stone stairs had no creak to them. The third floor, he noted, had a high ventilation window in its kitchen, just like Tommy’s, except that Mr. Louizis Michalopoulos, dreaming of past triumphs in the wool market, had left his window open on its hinge. It would be too much to expect that Mr. Demetrius Drakon would be as generous.

  He was not. When Strang reached the second floor, he found the same type of window, but this one was covered by iron bars. The light in Drakon’s kitchen was on. But there was no sound from the apartment. The door, he noticed as he passed quickly, was the same as Tommy’s: no outside keyhole to be picklocked, everything held fast by interior bolts and chains.

  Quickly, too, he passed the back of Christophorou’s apartment on the first floor. It was blacked out, blankly silent. And then there was only a short flight of steps to the basement corridor and the door leading out into the yard. At the other end of the corridor was another flight of stairs, leading up into the main hall. From the caretaker’s door, a zone of sleeping respectability, came a softly muted mezzo-soprano snore, steadily rhythmical.

  The door into the yard was unlocked. He opened it carefully, but there was no creak in its hinges. A well-oiled door, he decided, his surprise deepening. In the cold darkness, broken by clouded moonlight, he saw a little stretch of bare earth, bounded by a high wall and a forest of buildings. The gate stood opposite him. He picked his way past a coil of rusted chicken wire, battered crates, a small hen coop. The iron gate’s padlock was open, its rusty chain hung loose. He pushed the gate; it swung open a couple of inches, quite soundlessly. Someone had been busy with his little oilcan around here.

  He pulled the gate back into position, retreated back inside the house. Katherini had had the most fantastic luck, he thought, as he closed the door carefully behind him. That was, he added, if she had used the back exit. But she might have been in too much of a hurry to waste time in exploring an unknown yard; she might have come running down the service staircase and headed straight for the front hall, a territory she at least knew. In which case, he would have quite a sprint ahead of him, trying to catch up. Or, perhaps, he wouldn’t; perhaps he would be too thankful to see that she had managed to escape out of this house alive. For that, he admitted as he walked quietly past the caretaker’s door and then started up the short flight of stairs that led to the front hall, had been the fear that had sent him rushing down from Tommy’s apartment, the fear that one of Madame Duval’s thugs had been guarding the service stairs and that Katherini had been caught. But Drakon’s apartment had been peaceful: no sound of questioning, of forced answers, of violence. Peace and unsuspicion everywhere, thank God.

  And then, just as he reached the main hall, two men stepped out from the wall on either side of him and seized his wrists in an iron grip.

  17

  Strang’s first instinct was to struggle, free himself, hit out, run. But as he looked at the grave faces of the two compact men and saw the dark mistrust in their quick, observant eyes, he hesitated. They were neither Boris nor Andreas. And if they had been guarding Madame Duval, they wouldn’t be holding him by the wrists. By this time, he ought to have been cracked over his skull with that handy-looking revolver which the smaller of the men had produced in a businesslike way. “And who are you?” the small man asked now. The tone was inimical, but the man was curious, at least.

  That decided Strang. Thugs did not ask questions. These men might not be dressed in police uniform, but they had the confidence of those who acted on the side of the law. He identified himself quickly. “Do you speak English?” he added urgently. He had a feeling that his Greek might not be adequate enough for this kind of situation.

  The small man nodded. He glanced at the front door, where two other men were entering, and nodded again, this time approvingly. “Search him,” he said to his companion.

  “Did a girl come this way in the last ten or fifteen minutes?” Strang asked, ignoring the adept hands that slapped his pockets and found them flat enough.

  “A girl?” The man’s sharp eyes were wary but not astonished. He was a neat little man with neat expressions; dark of hair, eyes, moustache, and suit; as sparing of movement as he was with words.

  “I sent a message—” Strang paused. He glanced across the hall at Christophorou’s door, and wondered for a split second if Christophorou had returned home and could hear them. He dropped his voice almost to a whisper. “Then she must have gone out through the back gate.” The searching hands were at his waist, at his ribs. He resisted the impulse to tell their owner that he never did believe in shoulder holsters. The searcher found his wallet and was studying his driver’s licence. He seemed satisfied, for he slipped the wallet back in place.

  “The gate?” the small man asked, too carefully.

  “There is
a gate from the yard at the back of the house.” And I don’t carry a knife strapped to my leg, either, he refrained from telling the man with the practised hand, who was insisting on completing his search. The man—even if he didn’t speak English could certainly understand it, for his hand froze on Strang’s ankle—looked up quickly.

  The other man let go of Strang’s wrist. He gestured down the staircase to the corridor. “Show me this gate,” he said. “You first!”

  Strang started down the stairs, trying to rub some of the paralysis out of his wrist. There was no use losing his temper; he was at this moment, quite frankly, a nuisance of an amateur who was complicating a professional man’s difficult job. He said, “The girl ran away. I came down from the top floor to see if I could find any—”

  “Sh!” the man silenced him abruptly. They both halted. There was the sound of a light footstep. From the door at the end of the corridor, there came a decided click, as if a heavy key had been turned too quickly in its lock. The Greek shoved Strang aside and leaped down into the corridor and raced towards the back door. It was looked.

  Strang tried the handle for himself. He looked at the Greek, and the Greek looked at him. Outside, in the small courtyard, there was only the silence of stealth. They heard the brief rattle of an iron chain, abruptly stilled. “That,” said Strang, “was someone locking the gate.” Now, there was no sound at all except the sudden crackle of a child’s night cough.

  The Greek moved quickly to the caretaker’s door and thumped hard on it. Then he raced back along the corridor, called sharply up to the hall, set a flurry of footsteps in motion and a quick fluster of low voices in cannon-like echo. He came running back to the caretaker’s door and crashed his fist impatiently on its panel again. “Open, open!” he kept repeating. Over his shoulder, he asked, “That gate outside— where does it lead?”

  “I don’t know. Perhaps to the next street.”

  “I have sent two men to look there.” He was still worried, and angry. “All that time wasted—with you!” he said bitterly, as the caretaker’s door opened, and a woman stood, frightened, wary, uncertain, her eyes still puffed with sleep. She screamed. The whimpering child in the room behind her burst into a terrified yell. The woman screamed again.

  That’s all we needed, thought Strang. He looked up the service staircase, listening for any sound of a door being opened. But he could hear nothing. The little man had quieted the woman and got the back-door key. Strang said, “There was only one pair of footsteps, wasn’t there?” But the Greek was already in the yard, examining the gate. Strang waited anxiously, watching the staircase, wondering who would come down first—Duval or Nikos Kladas, feeling naked with only his two bare hands to cope with that problem, wishing that he had borrowed Tommy’s stick at least, willing the Greek to come back from the gate with that revolver, which had become a most comforting object. But when the man did return, the look of deepened suspicion on his hard-set face was far from comforting.

  “Look—” began Strang, and stopped. Explanations might only confuse everything still more. He asked, “Why haven’t they come down? They must have heard the woman’s scream.”

  “We shall wait here,” the man told him. He looked at his revolver, then at the staircase.

  I suppose that makes sense, Strang thought. Two men had been sent to the other street; one man left to guard the front hall, one man here alone with an unarmed nuisance of a foreigner: that wasn’t much of a boarding party to force its way into a barricaded apartment. But wait for how long, wait for what?

  Behind him, he heard the Greek question the woman. And her answers were exactly as one might expect: she had the only key for the door to the yard, she kept it in her kitchen, it was always there unless she was using the yard: the gate was always locked; she had a key for that, too, but no one else had these keys; why should they?

  Why should they, indeed? Strang thought wryly. This whole set-up was perfect for anyone leading a double life, for a conspirator who needed an unobtrusive exit in that emergency for which all conspirators must plan.

  “Your child is crying,” the Greek told the woman severely. “Why do you stay here? Go inside. Lock the door. Let no one enter. Keep out of the way!”

  Strang said, “I’m going upstairs. You’ll find me in the Englishman’s apartment on the top—”

  “You will wait here,” the man told him, and he meant it. And then, as he heard the sound of cars from the front of the house and quick footsteps entering the hall above him, he relaxed a little. “Now,” he said, “you can lead the way. I shall follow.”

  Strang heard him stop at Christophorou’s door. He was studying it curiously. “No lock?” he said softly, almost to himself. He reached out and turned the handle gently. But the door was bolted from within. He seemed puzzled. This man is no fool, Strang thought; whoever came down the staircase and slipped into the yard must have left an open door behind him. It was so obvious the minute the Greek made his quiet check, but it was the kind of thing I’d have remembered to do by the time I reached Tommy’s doorway. And then he thought, Was that a routine check or was there any particular interest in Christophorou?

  The Greek signalled to him to wait. Behind them, four men were ascending the staircase quickly. For a moment, Strang stared in amazement at Colonel Zafiris, no less, who was leading the way. Is this usual? he wondered in surprise, and then found his answer in the look of stupefaction that showed on his companion’s face for a moment, to be quickly covered by a slightly nervous smile. He began explaining the series of small disasters in a quick, low voice. (He didn’t blame himself. But he didn’t blame Strang, either. Strang was impressed.)

  “Enough, Elias, enough!” The Colonel waved him into silence, and pointed up the stairs toward the next floor. He wasted no time, either, on greeting Strang. A brief nod, a quick sharp look, and his eyes were turned to Christophorou’s door as he passed it. He took a decided grip on its handle and tested it for himself. And that, Strang decided as he noted the Colonel’s pursed lips and drawn brow, had not been a merely routine test. Then the Colonel was ascending the staircase. Strang had to stretch his legs to keep up with him. It was surprising that a man so solidly built and compact in shape could move so quickly, so lightly.

  Nothing seemed to have changed at Drakon’s apartment. The light still shone through the barred kitchen window. The silence was complete.

  The Colonel gestured to the window, and one of his men was given a hoist up to its level. But he must have seen and heard nothing, for the expression on his face as he looked around at the Colonel was blank. They have gone, the woman Duval and Nikos have gone, Strang thought worriedly; they slipped through that confounded gate while I sat upstairs and waited for a telephone call. And then Drakon went out, after them, carefully locking door and gate behind him. They’ve gone, that’s certain; there is no one in there. Strang looked at the Colonel and wondered how this volcano would erupt when he heard the witness had vanished as well. He watched the men fan out on either side of the door, while one of them tried its handle gently. The door was not bolted. It moved a cautious inch. The gap widened to six inches. The door wasn’t chained, either. The men looked at the Colonel. And at that moment the silence was cracked by the sharp clack of loose slippers overhead.

  Strang looked upward. An elderly man, sparse hair fuzzed into a grey mat above a long and doleful yellowed face, his hands clutching his dressing gown around him, peered down. “Did a woman scream?” he asked Strang. His eyes travelled to the group of men around the door. His toothless gums gaped. He turned and scuttered back to his own apartment. “Police!” he was screaming in a piercing falsetto. “Police! Get the police!” His door rattled shut. Silence returned.

  Well, thought Strang, we can now all break into a song and dance. Anyone inside, if there is anyone there, has certainly been fully briefed on this situation by now. “Civilians are always so helpful,” he said very quietly. The Colonel heaved a deep sigh, walked briskly over to the door as he
unbuttoned the flap of his gun holster, kicked the six-inch gap into a wide open sweep and drew sharply aside for a few moments. Strang counted silently, in the photographer’s formula: one bloody second, two bloody seconds, three bloody seconds, four—and the Colonel was in the kitchen. Impatient fellow, Strang thought, or very brave. Or a man with all his hunches in good working order. For the Colonel had been right: there was no resistance. And Strang had been wrong: the apartment was not empty.

  Nikos Kladas was lying in the hall, spread-eagled and stiff, face twisted sideways, mouth open in a last protest, a neat hole between his eyes. Madame Duval, in the sitting-room, was resting permanently in a high-backed chair. One side of her face was unrecognisable. There was a small revolver at her feet, dropped—it could have been—from the hand that hung limply by her side.

  Strang turned away.

  “Can you name them?” the Colonel asked.

  “Madame Etienne Duval. Nikos Kladas. So Duval’s niece said, at least.”

  “And what is her name?”

  “Katherini Roilos.”

  The Colonel was surprised enough to say “Ah!” Then his eyes became expressionless again. “Is she the witness you have upstairs?”

  “She was. She left.”

  “You let her go?” There was the hint of real anger in the careful voice.

  “She slipped out by the back door. That is why your men found me downstairs. I thought she might still be in the building, or in the street outside.”

  The Colonel took a deep breath. “So you let her escape,” he said. He sounded sad now, and fatalistic, as if so many disappointments had come his way that one more was not too hard to bear.

  “She wasn’t a prisoner. She could have walked out any time. She didn’t have to leave like that.” Strang’s own anger was showing. He muzzled it. “At least, they didn’t get her.” He looked at Nikos Kladas. “Katherini said he was also known as Sideros. And Duval used the name of Elektra. The man Drakon was known as Odysseus. They all worked with Ares, during the war.”