Decision at Delphi

by Helen Macinnes

  The Colonel was quite impassive. It would be impossible for him not to recognise the name of Ares, Strang thought; everyone, even people like Tommy, knew that name. So it was also possible that he recognised the other aliases, too. Strang searched in his pocket and drew out the sheets of paper from Cecilia’s notebook. “You’ll find all that, and more, written down here.”

  The Colonel took the sheets of paper. “Your handwriting?”

  And Strang, who hoped he had managed very neatly to keep Cecilia’s name out of all this, looked at him and said, “No.”

  “Whose writing?”

  “Miss Hillard’s.”

  “Ah!” The Colonel seemed to know about Cecilia. He frowned at her notes. “Don’t worry,” he said, “we shall arrange for someone to guard her, of course.”

  Strang looked at him. “Thank you,” he said very quietly. “Is it necessary to ask her any questions?” He glanced at his watch. “I’d like to get Miss Hillard back to the Grande Bretagne. She is dropping with exhaustion. If you need me, I’ll come back and fill you in on any of these details.” He pointed to the notes in the Colonel’s hand, tried to conceal his own fatigue.

  The Colonel studied the American’s face. “I have enough to work on, tonight, both here and at my office.” He gave his first smile. “Do not be so depressed, Mr. Strang. We may know more than, you think we do.” His brown eyes were bland, friendly, sympathetic. “Who told you about the conspiracy?” he asked.

  “Christoph—” Strang began. He took a deep breath. “He was explaining the urgency of the situation to me. That’s how I heard. No details. Or very few. Just enough to let me know that—” he paused again—“everything was very urgent,” he ended lamely.

  The Colonel’s eyes showed a brief gleam of sardonic humour. “Indeed it is,” he murmured.

  Strang glanced at the men, hands carefully gloved, who were quickly searching the room with complete absorption. They had opened every drawer and closet, examined every bookshelf, picture frame, chair. Not that there was so much to search: the apartment was a stilted place, barely furnished, characterless. The only thing that didn’t attract any attention, now that pockets had been examined, was the two bodies.

  The Colonel said, as if he had been following Strang’s thoughts, “They are police business, now.”

  “Double murder,” Strang risked guessing.

  A heavy dark eyebrow was raised. “Execution,” the grave voice corrected him.

  Strang hid his surprise. “Drakon must be pretty desperate if he’d kill them right here, in his own special hideaway.”

  “It might be the only place where he could get them together without any suspicion of danger. They obviously expected nothing.” He glanced down at the wrist of Nikos Kladas’s outstretched arm. “He didn’t even have time to throw that knife.” It was true; the hilt of a knife had been slipped out of Nikos’s cuff, but not quickly enough. “This is all very far removed from your world, is it not, Mr. Strang?” the Colonel asked, watching the American’s amazement. “I think you should return to it. Your friends will be anxious. By this time, Mr. Pringle will have joined them.” He paused, then said, “Do not worry so much about these two. They would never have worried about you. We have been spared much trouble. If they had come to trial, there would have been organised protests; and they would have been described as great patriots during the Nazi war. Their guilt would have been covered in a cloud of doubt, so that those who had proof of their treason would have been made to look tyrants. It is strange, is it not, that the real patriots of the war, who were killed by these two and their friends, should so seldom be remembered? I had a friend. Colonel Psarros. He was murdered by them. On Mount Parnassos.” The Colonel looked down at Nikos Kladas. “There we have complete justice: the traitor betrayed, the murderer murdered.” He seemed to have forgotten Strang.

  A car drew up outside the house.

  “That is the police coming to take charge,” the Colonel said, steering Strang decisively toward the kitchen door. “Come and see me tomorrow at ten o’clock. Elias will bring you. He will meet you in your hotel lobby, fifteen minutes before.” The neat little man who was superintending the search of the apartment, with as much grave concern as he had watched Strang in the basement corridor, looked up briefly, nodded, and concentrated on his job again.

  “Ten o’clock,” Strang said, and made some quick calculations; with luck, he might get five hours of sleep. Then he remembered the Colonel’s work “here and at my office.” He halted at the door. “Tell me one thing, Colonel. When do you sleep?”

  He left a startled look behind him, and an unexpected smile. Even colonels liked sympathy.

  Strang found Tommy’s kitchen door wide open, with Cecilia and Tommy at its threshold and Bob Pringle, determinedly nonchalant by contrast, sitting on a corner of the small table. Strang closed the door and bolted it.

  “Thank heavens!” Tommy said.

  “And about time, too!” said Pringle. “Don’t you ever look at your watch, Strang?”

  Cecilia said nothing at all. Her face was pale, tense. He took her hand and held it. He asked Tommy, “How long have you had that door open?”

  “We thought we heard a woman scream. It wasn’t the girl?”

  “No.”

  “Then I arrived,” Pringle said, “or they would both have been down there, complicating the Colonel’s life still further. What happened?”

  “We found the Duval woman and Nikos Kladas in Drakon’s place. Both dead.”

  Pringle’s nonchalance vanished. “Murdered?”

  “Here—in this house?” Tommy asked, equally aghast. Neither of them could quite believe it. “And the murderer?”

  “Slipped out by your back gate.”

  “This is appalling,” Tommy said, “appalling.”

  “I told you these boys play rough,” Strang reminded him gently.

  “But who could have done this? Drakon? But the man is never here. The caretaker tells me he travels constantly. He seems to keep that apartment simply to put up friends when they visit Athens.”

  “Let’s move toward a chair,” Pringle said, leading the way to the room. “Now, what happened?”

  Strang said, “I’ll tell you later. I must get Cecilia back to the hotel. Colonel’s orders.”

  “But,” Tommy protested, “am I only to hear a little bit of the middle of a story; no beginning and now no end?”

  “We’ll come back some afternoon and have that cup of tea you promised us.”

  “How’s the Colonel taking all this?” Pringle wanted to know.

  “I guess he has been defeated before and come up winning.”

  Pringle nodded. “And just when everything was going so well,” he said thoughtfully. “He had one terrific success tonight. Well, you can’t win all the time, I suppose.”

  “What success?” Strang had found Cecilia’s coat, where she had dropped it by the sofa. He began finding the right armholes for her.

  “Oh, that’s what kept me from calling you back at once. The Colonel got a telephone message just after you spoke to me. It seems there was a burglary over in his office while he was visiting me, a very neat little job. Those photographs were lifted—”

  “Steve’s?” Strang asked, unbelieving, horrified. “Steve’s?”

  “Now, now—” Pringle said soothingly, “no need for tremors.” He looked so unperturbed that Strang’s horror changed to amazement. Pringle didn’t give him any chance for questions, though. “Good night, Tommy,” he said. “I’d better see these two safely back to the Grande Bretagne and justify my existence. Thanks for taking care of them.”

  It was such a well-mannered good-bye under decided control that Tommy could only say, “There’s no rush, really. I don’t usually go to bed until three o’clock.”

  “It’s nearer four now,” Pringle said, took Cecilia’s arm, and led her toward the front door.

  “Good-bye,” she called back to Tommy. “We’ll come and see you—” She gave hi
m, tired as she was, one of her warmest smiles.

  “Don’t forget,” Tommy said. He seemed a little crest-fallen, after all, at the sudden end of this extraordinary visit. “Well—” he said to Strang.

  “We shan’t forget,” Strang promised.

  “And”—Tommy’s voice dropped to a conspiratorial whisper— “I’ll get in touch with Ottway. First thing tomorrow morning. Indeed, yes.”

  Strang paused at the front door. “You know, if Ottway liked to get in touch with Colonel Zafiris, he could do a lot of good.”

  “How?”

  “He could identify these two bodies, for one thing. Clear up all doubts about them. He knew them, I think, in the old days.”

  “That doesn’t seem too much to ask him.”

  “It might be asking him to lay his head on the block.”

  Tommy pursed his lips. “Did you tell Colonel Zafiris to expect him?”

  “No. Didn’t mention his name.”

  Tommy nodded approvingly. “No good putting people into difficult situations. Much better to let them decide for themselves.”

  Pringle was standing by the elevator door, listening to its approaching drone. “Nearly here,” he warned Strang. “What are you two whispering about?”

  “We’re starting a conspiracy of our own,” Strang told him. Pringle looked shocked. Tommy laughed delightedly. A good host, thought Strang, should always be presented with something to cheer up his suddenly empty living room. He stepped into the elevator quickly, took Cecilia’s arm away from Pringle’s charge, and said as they started down, “We’ll find police in the hall, no doubt. I’ll leave it all to you, Talleyrand.”

  The distance to the hotel was short, so Pringle drove his ancient Buick around several streets. His mood, away from Tommy, had changed. He was serious, worried. “And so the girl disappeared—” he began, frowning at the sleeping city.

  “Now, now—” Strang reminded him, “no need for tremors.”

  “How?”

  “She left a sort of testament behind her.”

  “You gave it to the Colonel?”

  “I have a few brains, if scattered.”

  “But why did she leave? My God, she may get herself killed.”

  “Several reasons, probably. There usually are.”

  Cecilia said softly, “They mount up. They usually do. If only I had had the sense to stop her!”

  “How?” asked Strang. “By force? I don’t see any of us holding a struggling girl. When a woman makes up her mind, boy—it’s made up. But”—he still felt a little aggrieved, not so much as before, but still a little—“she didn’t have to sneak out like that. She could have walked out, any time.”

  “Except her world didn’t let people walk out when they felt like it. That was why her brother, and father, too, died on the Megara road.”

  Pringle looked at Cecilia quickly.

  “Keep your eyes straight ahead,” Strang advised him. “And her name is Roilos, if that means anything to you, too.”

  It did. Pringle recovered his poise. “How things come out, and start fitting together! And Steve Kladas—where is he?”

  “He’s either still a prisoner, in which case he’s a dead man; or he’s free, and in hiding.”

  “They’d kill him, now?”

  “Because of the fact that I handed over an envelope, last night. Until then, they needed Steve alive to find out from him where it was. Now, they know. And they’ve got the envelope, too.” Strang’s voice was bitter.

  “Hold it, hold it—” Pringle said. “The theft went according to plan.”

  “It was a trap? They caught the thief?”

  Pringle glanced at Cecilia.

  “I’m asleep,” she told them, her eyes closed.

  Pringle said, “It was a trap. The thief is being followed. Also, there was a concealed camera registering every step of his little operation in the Colonel’s room.”

  “But the envelope?”

  “Listen, will you? The Colonel had been expecting some general skullduggery. I told you we underestimated him. He had copies made of everything in that envelope—the old negatives carefully printed, blown up. The technicians have been working on that steadily since this morning.”

  “But why ‘since this morning’?”

  “That was when his colleagues decided that a lot of 1943 photographs taken of life in a guerrilla camp were of little use in 1959 if Steve Kladas wasn’t around to say who the people were and why he had taken their photographs. So, this morning, the Colonel took charge of Steve’s envelope. His way of looking at these old photographs was this: they had to be important, simply because at least one man had been murdered because of them. The Colonel takes murder as a more serious omen than most civilians, it appears. Then he got some of the best men from Military Intelligence to start working on the photographs. They’ve got something, I hear. And the thieves have got a false sense of success. Neat tactics.”

  “Just a minute,” Strang said. “Is the Colonel in Military Intelligence?”

  “He was at one time. Some months ago, he was lent to a civilian counter-intelligence unit to work with them on illegal border crossings. There’s been a good deal of that recently, you know. Communists returning secretly after spending the last ten years or so in special training schools and camps in Bulgaria and Albania.”

  “Any link between them and the conspiracy?”

  Pringle would give neither a yes nor a no to that question. “All the Greeks can do is to make sure that doesn’t happen. If they can eliminate the conspiracy, it obviously won’t happen. That’s the dangerous thing about those extremist groups: they join forces, not because they love each other, but simply because they are willing to use any help to get power. And they always think that their group can control the others, and come out on top. They gamble on that, the criminal fools. All they do is create so much violence and bloodshed that the extreme right can step in to seize control. Then bang goes an elected government, predominantly left of centre but moderate, at least, and what happens? Dictatorship.”

  “What are the Colonel’s politics?”

  “He was one of the old Venizelist army group: liberals, strongly republican, antiroyalist, but what the English call ‘loyal opposition.’ That’s the reason Zafiris and his fellow officers spent several years in exile before the war, when the old rightist Metaxas dictatorship was in power. No opposition, loyal or otherwise, was allowed then.”

  “That’s a strange inversion: army officers who were republicans.”

  “This is Greece, and politics are strange. For instance, who were indirectly responsible for putting a king back on the throne after the war? The Communists. They shocked people into being royalist. And if they are planning any more terrorist trouble, this time they may well put back a rightist dictatorship in power.”

  “I can see how the Colonel and his republican friends are very loyal opposition. If that trouble started, they might have to go into exile again.”

  “If he were lucky. There’s no love lost between the liberals and the extreme right or the extreme left.” Pringle took a deep breath and shook his head slowly. “Don’t get me wrong. I love the Greeks. But, sometimes, they can break your heart.” He drew the car up beside an arcade of shuttered shops. “Your hotel is just around the corner to your right. It would look better if you arrived on your own two feet. What are your plans for tomorrow?”

  “I’m being taken to see the Colonel at ten o’clock.”

  “And after that?”

  “I’m waiting to hear news of Steve.”

  “Let me know when you do hear.”

  “Sure.” Strang glanced quickly at Pringle’s set face. “But don’t cut me out then. I’m still in the game, Bob.”

  Pringle said, “You’ve done your stint. Retire gracefully. It’s my job to make sure Stefanos Kladas is all right. See?”

  “No, I don’t see,” Strang said equably. He rubbed Cecilia’s cheek gently. “Come on,” he told her, wakening her fully
—she had drowsed almost into sleep.

  “You’re a stubborn man,” Pringle told him. “You’ll add to all my headaches, blast you.”

  “I hope not. And I’m not stubborn, either. Just someone who doesn’t like being played for a sucker,” Strang said with a grin.

  “Look—” Pringle began worriedly.

  “Good night, my friend.” Strang helped Cecilia out of the car. Then, thinking that he owed Pringle more of a warning than that, he ducked his head inside the car again to say, “And don’t believe everything that Alexander Christophorou tells you.”

  “Oh?” The question was sharply pointed.

  “No answer to that—as yet.”

  “You and Zafiris make a strange pair,” Pringle said slowly. “That’s why he came to my apartment, you know: to warn me sideways.” His normally pleasant and amiable face was hardened by an ugly frown. “I don’t believe either of you,” he said flatly, “but I’ll listen.”

  And that is something, Strang thought. “Thanks, anyway, for rallying round,” he said. He slipped his arm through Cecilia’s and headed toward the hotel.

  The hotel porter handed Strang both bulky keys. “I hope you had a pleasant evening,” he said politely.

  Strang was equally polite. “Very pleasant,” he assured the porter cheerfully, and led Cecilia across the half-lit lobby to the darkened elevator.

  For a brief moment, the porter’s eyes followed them with tired approval; it looked as if they had had a very pleasant evening. He was now quite accustomed to that look of bland triumph combined with disarming innocence: people were always so convinced that no sharp eye could guess. He shook his head over the dissimulations of lovers—if only men would put as much energy into their business as they did into disguising their adventures, there would be a surfeit of millionaires—switched off some more light in the lobby, and went back to adding up his stamp receipts.

  * * *

  “There’s no need,” Cecilia protested, but not too hard, as Strang got out at the second floor with her. “Only twenty yards to go. I’ll manage that.”

  “I’ll just make sure you do.”

  He unlocked her door and recognised the little room, “So they gave you the Petit Trianon? Well, you’ll have pretty pink dreams. Do you mind if I look around?”