Decision at Delphi

by Helen Macinnes

  She sat down in the nearest velvet chair, slipped off her shoes, and sighed with pleasure. Next time I go exploring in the Plaka, she thought, I shan’t wear three-inch spikes for heels. Strang didn’t take long with his tour of inspection.

  “You’re sure there’s no one under the bed?” she teased him. “Ken—you really have to stop worrying about me.”

  “That’s my pleasure, ma’am.”

  “Besides, there’s a balcony, right over the main street, outside my bedroom. If anyone scares me, I just run out there and scream.”

  “You’d be quite a sensation,” he said with a broad grin. Particularly in that gossamer nightdress which had been so artistically draped by an enchanted maid over the turned-back sheet of her bed. Then, brusquely, partly to shake off the memory, “Two things before I go, Cecilia. You said something, tonight, about the reason why Katherini’s father and brother were killed. What was it, exactly?”

  Oh, dear, she thought, we’re back there again. She said, “Her brother had a girl in Athens. When he returned from Yugoslavia with his father, they were told to stay out of sight in a house near Delphi. But he came secretly into Athens. The father followed his son, tried to get him back to Delphi instead of reporting him right away. So they were liquidated. I’ve got the place where the bodies were found written down in the notes. And the dates of their mission into Yugoslavia. Katherini didn’t know much more about it than that, though.”

  So, Strang thought, the Roilos son had risked breaking security, the Roilos father had lost control of his son, both had become liabilities, and they were dead. “That’s strong discipline,” he said. But was that how their organisation had remained so secret? Where, then, did Madame Etienne Duval stand when she lost control of her niece? Where did Nikos Kladas, whose name had been placed on the police files ever since the Megara road murders, and who could be identified as Sideros by Ottway and Steve? Yet, neither Duval nor Nikos Kladas had been expecting death tonight. Or perhaps terrorist leaders had one set of rules for their followers, another for themselves. They could always persuade themselves that they were too important, too necessary for the ultimate success of their plans. But someone tonight had thought they were more of a liability than they were indispensable.

  “And the second thing?” she reminded him gently. And then, she thought, I can get to bed and sleep and sleep and sleep... The word was too soothing, with all those sibilants and soft sounds. She smothered a yawn and concentrated on sharper consonants: keep awake, keep awake!

  “In your notes about Drakon, I saw some place names.”

  “Syria, where he visited her aunt, twice, for long periods. They also met in Alexandria, in Paris, and—about a week ago—in Taormina.”

  “In the house where Katherini was staying with Maria and a chauffeur? Who was the chauffeur, did she say?”

  “Nikos Kladas.”

  “The house with the almond tree in its garden,” he said softly. No wonder Ottway had been so interested in it. But even Ottway had to sleep. “I suppose the meeting there was by night?”

  “Yes. Madame Duval drove in from Messina, where she was staying on board her yacht. Drakon was staying somewhere in Taormina.”

  “Somewhere?”

  “Katherini didn’t know exactly.”

  He sat, staring at the pink-velvet chair in front of him, remembering a monk’s converted cell in Taormina.

  “I wonder where she is,” Cecilia said.

  He kept wondering about that, too. He forced himself to sound confident. “Any girl who can slip away as expertly as she did has a pretty good chance of survival. She has quick brains and a lot of courage.”

  “But you were worried about her—or you wouldn’t have gone down that staircase after her.”

  “She got away safely. That was the main thing.”

  “You really thought she might have been caught?” There was an unexpected note of alarm in Cecilia’s voice.

  “If there had been a guard at Drakon’s back door—yes, she’d have had it.”

  “And what good would you have been, Kenneth Strang, without a weapon or anything?” She was almost angry. “Oh, you men!” she said. “You all think you are indestructible!” He looked at her in amazement. “You know,” she said, trying to sound very matter of fact, “we have a job of our own to finish.” But C. L. Hillard wasn’t able to take over. Cecilia tried to smile. “Or do we?” She didn’t sound too sure about that.

  “Yes,” he said. “We’ll finish it.” He gave an encouraging grin, and rose. “I’ve an appointment at ten tomorrow morning. What about lunch together?”

  “If I’m awake by that time,” she said doubtfully as she followed him to the door. “Tell you what, I’ll meet you for lunch at five o’clock.”

  “Getting into proper Mediterranean habits, aren’t you?” That’s better, he thought, watching her face. “Keep this door locked,” he said. “I don’t want you, walking in your sleep.” Good, he thought again, as she nodded seriously and then began to smile. For a moment, his hand on the door, he looked down at her. Without her shoes, she didn’t even reach his shoulders. “You have very pretty feet,” he told her, and bent down and kissed her cheeks. She had a very pretty mouth, too, but this was hardly the night to start anything he couldn’t stop. “That’s what the French do when they pin a medal on you. I’m pinning a very big one, right now.” He stepped quickly through the narrowly opened door, and drew it quietly closed behind him. For almost a minute, he waited, listening. There wasn’t a sound from the other side of the door. Had she forgotten to lock it, after all? Then he heard the safety catch click sharply, and she moved away. He started along the corridor to the staircase.

  As he passed the half-closed pantry door, not far from Cecilia’s room, the mild clatter of plates halted him. He looked inside the pantry, where a waiter was arranging breakfast trays. “Are you on duty all night? I wonder if you’d keep an eye—” he began, and noticed the quietly dressed man sitting in the corner behind the pantry door. With its dark grave eyes, thick black hair, thin black moustache, it was a face he had seen a thousand times in Athens; but with its slight hint of polite amusement around the lips and its small warning of recognition in the quick twitch of an eyebrow, it was the face that had studied his wallet in the hall of Tommy’s house. “That’s all right,” he told the waiter adding “Good night!” and left. Perhaps, he was thinking as he slowly climbed the staircase through the silent hotel, I’ll be able to spend the next four and a half hours in some real sleep. It was a blissful prospect.

  18

  Colonel Zafiris seemingly, and rather surprisingly, had his office within walking distance of the Grande Bretagne. It was a sparkling, clear morning with a benign spring sun touching lightly on the bare heads in the crowded street. Strang, only half awakened by his shower and shave and quick breakfast, found that twenty deep breaths of the cool, golden air had lifted his headache, opened both his eyes, and put him into an almost amiable mood, something that had seemed totally impossible three quarters of an hour, ago. Elias, keeping thirty paces or so ahead, cut his way quickly through the streams of people. Strang just managed to stay within seeing distance of the neat, dark bobbing head. Suddenly, the head vanished, swept away in the current, through a colonnaded entrance into an arcade of shops.

  Strang entered the arcade. I’ve lost him, he was thinking worriedly. But Elias was standing in front of a tobacconist’s highly polished window. As Strang appeared, he went into the shop. All right, thought Strang, I buy some cigarettes, too. He followed Elias. “You first,” Elias said politely to Strang, and nodded to a door at the back of the shop. The owner of the shop didn’t even seem to be aware that Strang existed, busy as he was with arranging the flat boxes of Greek cigarettes into neat stacks. Strang obeyed Elias, and went quickly through the door. After that, there was only one direction to follow: up. A circular iron staircase was all that was contained behind the door.

  Up he went, curiosity and humour beginning to reassert the
mselves. At the top of the round-and-round, come-and-be-found staircase there was a bleak corridor. And this, decided Strang, is where I stop. He leaned against an unprepossessing buff-coloured wall, studied the long empty passage lit by a window at its far end, decided that the window looked out on to an interior courtyard judging by the dimness of its light, listened, could hear not even the distant clack of a typewriter, gave up trying to guess. Four minutes later, he heard light footsteps running up the stairs toward him. It was Elias, all right, with a nod of approval for the patient American. It was fortunate, at that moment, that Elias, with all his innumerable gifts, hadn’t the knack of mind reading.

  After another corridor and one more flight of stairs, Elias seemed to be quite content with an unpretentious brown door marked AMFISSA OLIVES EXPORT COMPANY. Inside, there was a small room, windowless, green-shaded light bulbs over two men at large typewriters, two telephones on their desks, a wall of filing cabinets, two wooden chairs, and another brown door leading into an inner room. “Sit!” said Elias, and disappeared through the plain brown door. It was exactly one minute before ten o’clock. Elias was not only careful; he delivered on time.

  The two typists inspected Strang politely (or memorised?) and went back to their work. Elias appeared at the brown door and led him through the inner office (three walls of filing cabinets, several telephones, one man writing at a desk) into a third room. In the middle of the bare wooden floor was a large table covered at one end with paper folders which a clerk seemed to be arranging for a game of solitaire. Three wooden chairs stood at attention beside it. Around the cracked plaster walls, once cream-coloured, stood a shoulder-high safe, a small filing cabinet, another door (which looked much more important than the one Strang had used), a collection of large-scale maps of Greece and adjacent countries, a blackboard, and—tucked into a corner—a low army cot with a neatly folded, grey blanket on its thin mattress. There was a window in this room, but the outside shutters were propped at an angle that would discourage any curious eyes from across the courtyard. The rest of the floor space was occupied with people—the clerk at the table; another man bringing in a tray of coffee cups; Colonel Zafiris, looking remarkably wide awake, carefully shaven, crisp in a fresh khaki shirt; Elias, unexpectedly nervous; and the slightly embarrassed Strang. For it was a strange feeling, like standing in the centre of one of the rooms at the Benaki Museum, to have four pairs of Byzantine eyes all focused on him at once. Then the clerk and Elias left, and there were only two pairs of eyes.

  The Colonel’s morose and heavy face was lightened by a fleeting smile. He edged around the loaded table and shook hands with polite formality. “Our interpreter,” he said, waving a hand to the man who was grouping the three chairs beside the coffee cups. Strang nodded, noted that the interpreter was offering him the chair nearest to an outsize wooden cigarette box, smiled, and said, “Hardly necessary. Your command of English is excellent.”

  “Thank you. It was one of the few compensations for six years of exile. Now, are we all ready?”

  Indeed we are, thought Strang as he took the offered chair and glanced away from the wooden box almost at his elbow. What if I ask for a cigarette and reach out to lift that lid? But the Colonel took care of that by pulling out a neat white cardboard box of Papastratos cigarettes from the table drawer and pushing it over to Strong along with an ash tray advertising a Dutch airline. “Now,” he said again, enjoying a delicate sip from his small cup of coffee, lighting a Papastratos, looking down at a page of typescript in front of him, taking quiet but complete charge.

  They had gone crisply over Katherini’s information, point by point. Strang enlarged where he could, keeping his own additions as brief as possible, while the interpreter listened intently and the Colonel scribbled occasional notes of his own on the broad margin of the typed page in front of him. At the end, he handed the page to the interpreter. “Have copies sent to the others, at once,” he said in Greek. The interpreter rose and left. “And bring more coffee,” the Colonel called after him. Then he looked at Strang, relaxed, and stretched his arms to fold his hands behind his head. “That wasn’t so bad, was it?” he asked. “Not so long, either,” he added, and Strang, who had been stealing a quick glance at his watch, gave a broad grin.

  The Colonel took one arm down from the back of his head, and reached casually for one of the paper folders. As he opened it and selected a couple of sheets from the top of its file, he was saying,” Can we believe Katherini Roilos? What was her reason, or her motive, for breaking with her aunt?”

  Strang told him.

  “And how did you come to meet her, in the first place?” Strang told him that, too.

  The Colonel said, in the same quiet voice, his body still relaxed, his face placid, “Why don’t you take off your jacket, Mr. Strang, and make yourself comfortable? It’s a very good American habit. And now, tell me—I am sometimes slow to understand so many involved details—all the little things that happened and brought you, one by one, to my office here this morning”

  Strang looked at him quickly. “Just what do you want to know?”

  “Everything to do with Stefanos Kladas, or the yacht Medea, or Taormina...” His voice drifted away. “You must forgive me, Mr. Strang. There are many questions I must ask out of sheer curiosity. Perhaps the easiest and quickest way to answer them would be simply to tell me your story.” His hand, upturned, weighed that suggestion. “After all, Mr. Strang, I did meet you in rather strange circumstances last night. Do you blame me for being curious?”

  “No,” Strang admitted frankly. “But I’ll have to go a long way back—to New York harbour, in fact. Just after I had heard about the girl who came to Perspective’s office—”

  “Our stories always start a long way back. Longer,” the Colonel said sadly, “than most of us realise.” He frowned as the door opened, but relaxed into approval.

  The interpreter had returned, bringing a large discoloured copper coffee-pot. The Colonel poured carefully, settled himself at another angle in his hard wooden chair. “Now,” he said once more.

  The telling was fairly simple, partly because he had already told this story—or most of it—to Cecilia, partly because he had been eating, drinking, breathing it for the last forty-eight hours.

  The Colonel listened without comment. There was no change of expression on his face. But, halfway through, his eyes left Strang’s face and fell, quite casually, on the two sheets of paper lying before him. Strang had almost forgotten them. Now, quietly, unobtrusively, the Colonel was reading their contents as Strang talked. Yet, he was listening. Strang was disconcerted enough to stop and light another Papastatos. The two things are connected, he decided as he snapped his lighter closed: what he is reading, what I am talking about. Strang continued, recounting Christophorou’s visit to his room at the Grande Bretagne and the disclosure of the conspiracy, the news of Steve’s death and the surrender of Steve’s documents. But when he described the following evening with Cecilia, the Colonel was no longer reading. Now, he seemed to be listening with doubled intensity; perhaps his comparison between what he had read and what he had heard had made him twice as interested.

  “And so we arrived at Tommy’s doorstep,” Strang ended. “He took us inside. I telephoned Pringle. You know the rest.”

  There was a pause. The Colonel frowned at his desk, then looked at the interpreter. “We need more coffee, Yorghis, and more cigarettes.”

  Yorghis, a tall, thin man with a highly intelligent nose and a receding hairline which turned his high brow into a formidable precipice, took the coffee-pot and said, “I shall fill the cigarette box, too.” He left, with extreme speed, carrying the box carefully. So thought Strang, the recording session has been completed.

  “My right-hand man,” the Colonel said, watching the door close. “Not at all like the Yorghis you mentioned.” He laughed. “Did you see his face when you talked about your Yorghis?” Then his amusement was over. He picked up the two sheets of paper.

  �
�I noticed you gave me only the facts. No opinions. No judgments. Why?”

  “I don’t know enough of the facts to start making comments.”

  “But you must have formed some opinions. A man must ask the reasons why. Is that not so?”

  “Yes.”

  “What is your opinion of Alexander Christophorou?”

  Strang lit another cigarette very carefully.

  The Colonel said, “You must have asked why you saw him yesterday evening leaving a house on Kriton Street which Katherini Roilos identified as the one rented for her aunt by Evgenia Vasilika. Miss Hillard saw him, too? There is no doubt that it was he?”

  “None.”

  “Then, why? You asked yourself that question, I am sure. What was your answer?”

  “I keep thinking Christophorou must be a double agent.” He looked up quickly and surprised a look of astonishment.

  “That could have been a good answer, if Christophorou had been working for us.”

  “But isn’t he attached to—to some intelligence unit?”

  The Colonel asked sharply, “Did he tell you he was?”

  “No,” Strang said slowly.

  “Did he give you that impression?”

  Strang hesitated. “Perhaps I was too quick in picking it up. He told me, actually, that he was a journalist.”

  “And that is what he is, neither more nor less.”

  “But why was he in Sicily? Where did he get all his information?”

  “Very interesting questions.” The Colonel didn’t answer them, though.

  “Why,” tried Strang again, “did you listen to him when he told you I had documents to deliver? Why did he even—”

  “He is a good journalist. And good journalists are detectives, too. They have informants, they check the stories they hear, they can discover vital facts. And when they come across something of great importance that deals with state business, they make contact with official sources. Their discoveries, in other words, can be too dangerous to be treated as ordinary news. Supposing you were a journalist, Mr. Strang, and discovered a serious plot to assassinate your president. What do you do? Burst into headlines and become famous? Or do you give that information to your Secret Service and F.B.I.? And let them find out the whole plot, and arrest the plotters, and end the danger to your country, before you publish what you know? It is a matter of ethics. Personal gain or public service? That is the question. So, two nights ago, when Christophorou made contact with me and my colleague, we were interested, curious. But not astounded. Any reliable journalist would have followed the same course. You understand?”