Decision at Delphi

by Helen Macinnes

  He studied her face. He said, “I gave him Katherini’s letter.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s a fake.”

  She looked at him, instantly on the alert.

  “Let’s sit here and talk,” he suggested. It was a sunny, sheltered spot, both from the vagrant breeze and the wandering tourists. The olive tree, even one that stood on the spot where an olive tree had grown long before the Parthenon was built, and had survived as a symbol of hope when everything else on the ancient Acropolis had been destroyed by the Persians, could not compete on home movies with the Portico of Maidens or the Parthenon itself. A visitor, now, looked over the wall curiously (tourists always hopefully believed that others might lead them to a good thing) and called disappointedly to his friends, “There’s only an old tree!” And then he was gone. A guard looked over, too, and seemed content that no damage was being done. Elias was walking slowly back toward the main gateway. They were alone, with the sweet smell of thin grass and dark-blue wild flowers around them, the gnarled olive tree outlined against Pentelic marble. Cecilia sat on a fragment of pedestal, Strang on a broken pillar.

  “Give me the bad news first,” Cecilia said. Then, as he hesitated, she added, “That way, I know that there is nothing worse to come.”

  “All right,” he said. “I gave that letter to Elias so that he could get it to Colonel Zafiris, right away. So the woman, or whoever is going to meet you this evening, can be arrested. It won’t be Katherini who is going to keep that appointment. She is dead.”

  Cecilia said nothing. Her face had whitened, grown expressionless. She sat very still. She could have been carved out of marble, like the maidens high behind her.

  He told her what the Colonel had described to him. “That is the bad news,” he said. His voice was bitter as he added, “If Drakon is only a name to cover Christophorou, then I am to blame. I told Christophorou—” He stopped speaking.

  “What was the rest of the news?” she asked quickly. “What else had the Colonel to say?”

  They were both silent for a little when he had ended. Then he came back to Katherini’s death again. “I wondered at the time why the Colonel told me so much. Now, of course, I begin to see. There was a reason behind everything he said, everything he showed me: the fact, for instance, that Katherini was being questioned when his men entered the Kriton Street house. That was his way of warning me that they might have got some information out of her about you and me. They did, obviously.” He paused. “If I had used my brains, I would have expected something like that letter.” He fell silent again, wondering what else he had missed in that morning’s interview.

  Cecilia broke her long silence. She pushed back her hair, away from her face, then shook it free from her fingers. “No,” she said, as if she had decided something, “they didn’t learn much from Katherini. She wouldn’t tell—”

  “Look, Cecilia, they were questioning her,” he said, his voice harshening. “Do I have to go into details?”

  “She wouldn’t break. Not so soon, not so quickly. She had strength, that girl.”

  “I know that. But even the bravest—” He didn’t finish.

  “Yes, I know,” she said. “I’ve heard about such things.” She frowned, fighting back her emotion. “But Katherini—she wouldn’t tell them anything that would hurt us. I’m sure of that, somehow. She—” Cecilia bent her head to hide her tears. She stirred a fragment of marble with her foot. “We can still bluff them,” she said determinedly. “They still don’t know, exactly.

  If they believed we really had learned so much—” She looked around her, then, thinking that perhaps she never would have seen the Acropolis at all. But Ken is the one who may really be in danger. Why do they want to get hold of me?

  “I told you too much,” he said suddenly. “I wish to God you knew nothing—nothing at all.”

  She began removing the filter from her camera lens, and placed it in the neat little leather pocket in her case. “I’m thankful you did,” she said calmly. “Ignorance is too dangerous. If the Colonel hadn’t told you about Katherine, we would really have been in trouble.” She shut the case into her handbag, closed her camera carefully.

  “Thank God,” he said, watching her, “you don’t panic easily.”

  You’re a better actress than you thought, she told herself. He helped her to rise. Nearly everyone else had left. In the far distance were only some stray students, a few solitary Greeks.

  They began walking slowly toward the gateway. A vast bare silence lay around them, the deep-blue canopy stretched overhead. The western sun was stretching the shadows of the ancient gateway toward their feet. Strang paused and looked back at the Parthenon. The warm rays set it glowing gently, high on its grey slope of rock, as if a fire had been kindled inside it. Cecilia had turned to watch it, too. Her lips were parted a little, in the beginning of a surprised look of complete delight; her eyes were as blue as the sky, as radiant as the sun.“There’s something I want to tell you,” Strang said.

  She looked around at him. Then her eyes widened anxiously. She had never seen him look so worried, so tense.

  “I’m in love with you.” He caught her hands. “Will you marry me?”

  For a moment, she stood very still. She could say nothing. She tried to speak. She shook her head.

  “Cecilia,” he said, desperately now, “you can’t say no. It has got to be yes. It has got to be.”

  “Yes,” she said slowly.

  His arms went around her, bringing her close. He kissed her.

  At last, he let her go. And now, as he looked at her, he could say nothing at all. He picked up the handbag and camera, which had dropped at her feet, and then they started toward the gateway. They passed through its chill shadows and came to meet the sun again at the top of the giant steps.

  “Why did you say no?” he asked. That had been a bad moment, a moment of loss, complete loss: everything thrown away on a wild impulse.

  “I didn’t say no.”

  “You shook your head.”

  “That was sheer wonder. ‘This can’t be me,’ I was saying, ‘this can’t be me.’” And it isn’t, she thought: I’m the girl who was going to run farther away than Sparta.

  “It is you, and it is me, and that is all there is to it.”

  “But it’s madness.” She was smiling, though. “Ken—we are both mad.”

  “Then this is the kind of madness that keeps men sane.”

  “But you don’t know me. We don’t—”

  “Don’t we?” He kissed her again. She didn’t argue any more about that.

  They started down the high steps, Strang leading, her hand on his wrist to steady her. “Back to earth,” he was saying, descending carefully. He wasn’t too steady himself. He could blame it on the dazzling light, on the steep pitch of the staircase, except neither glare nor height had ever made him feel like this before. “Take it easy,” he told her, and tried to follow his own advice. He caught her by the waist at the last step and lifted her down on to the path. The two guards up at the high gateway had come forward to the edge of the portico, and were looking down with quiet interest. “We’ll disappoint them, this time,” he told her, and they began walking to the small office at the admission gate in the high wire fence.

  Cecilia glanced back, up at the portico. “You do choose your moments,” she said softly.

  “Not that moment. It chose me.” And that was the unexplainable truth. He had been going to wait, had he, until this trouble was over and their job for Perspective finished? Yes, that was the way it seemed best last night.

  “I may have rushed things a bit,” he admitted, “but I suddenly realised I had wasted enough time in my life.” He glanced at her, to see if a shadow had crossed her face. He could be jealous of even the ghost of a memory. And that was a startling new feeling, too.

  But there was no shadow, no ghost. She was looking at him, as if she had guessed his emotion. “At least,” she said slowly, carefully, “we did meet be
fore we wasted any more years.” Then she looked at him with horror, “Oh, Ken, we might never have met!”

  And Elias, waiting impatiently in the doorway of the small office beside the admission gate, shook his head. The two guards beside the gate had been following the Americans’ slow progress with sympathetic interest, but Elias, brisk from the quick telephone call he had made, could only think of all the unnecessary delay, the complications, the added danger. How strange were American reactions to a threatening note! Romantic love was one Western invention that Greece could leave well alone.

  Strang halted as he saw Elias. “Back to earth we are,” he said quietly. “Have a look at the post cards, Cecilia. See what competition you have got.” As she went forward to the display of photographs, he picked up an illustrated guidebook from the counter at the ticket window.

  Elias said, “Six o’clock in Miss Hillard’s room. Six o’clock.”

  “In Miss Hillard’s room?” That puzzled Strang.

  “It is easier.” Elias turned away as if to say, “Now stop asking idiotic questions and get back to the hotel as I told you.”

  Strang put down the price of the guidebook, and joined Cecilia. “Found anything?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Another time, then. Come on.” He took her arm and led her through the gate.

  She saw something had nettled him. “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing. We are just being sent back to your room, that’s all.” He glanced at his watch and his lips tightened. “They don’t give us much time, these boys.” Not much time alone, either, he thought angrily.

  “But why in my room?”

  “I asked that question and got very little answer.” Easier for whom?

  “They’re probably trying to help us,” Cecilia said.

  “Probably,” he agreed, to please her. But he was still annoyed. He never had enjoyed the feeling that his life was being arranged for him.

  Then two small boys, near one of the ash-tray-and-bogus-vase booths, saw them coming and ran to wake up a taxi driver sleeping peacefully in his cab. The man stretched and yawned happily. “It was good I waited?” their driver asked. “Is very beautiful the Parthenon.” And all the energy, gathered in his two-hour sleep, poured into a long discussion of the Acropolis: the foreigners all admired it; but rich and powerful as foreigners were, had they ever been able to produce anything like that? No, agreed Strang, and tactfully didn’t suggest that no one in Greece in the last two thousand years had ever equalled it, either. Instead, he put forward the idea that now he had better translate all these interesting observations for the benefit of the lady. That seemed a reasonable request and was politely granted. So Strang returned to Cecilia for the remaining six minutes of the ride.

  “When are we getting married?” he asked.

  She looked startled. “But we’ve just got engaged.” She began to laugh. “Right on top of the Acropolis...”

  And we’d have been married there, too, if it could have been managed, he thought. “You didn’t answer the question.”

  “Well—there’s the Perspective job to finish. Isn’t there?”

  “Yes. But it won’t get finished if you don’t marry me.”

  “But wouldn’t that be—”

  “No, it wouldn’t.”

  “But, darling—”

  “It’s quite simple,” he told her. “I can do this job in two ways. Either without you or with you. There’s no half-and-half business possible. First, you’re too beautiful. Second, you’re too pretty. Third, you’re too distractingly lovely. So that’s the choice, and there is none, because I’m not doing this job without you.”

  “And to think,” she said, “I imagined you proposed to me because of the brilliance of my intellect.” She smiled, one of her warmest and truest smiles. She reached toward his cheek and kissed it gently.

  * * *

  The hotel lobby was more than usually crowded. “There is a reception in the ballroom,” the porter told them with lowered voice. The flowered hats were out in full bloom, the green-khaki uniforms showed their medals, young diplomats concealed light thoughts under dark suits, older men stooped under their load of boredom.

  “Big guns,” Strang said to Cecilia, as he recognised two faces from newspaper photographs. “No place for light artillery.” He hurried her into the elevator, glancing at his watch. It was quarter to six. He took her to her room door. “I’ll be back here in eight minutes,” he told her, and kissed her a temporary goodbye. Love in snatches, he thought wryly, as he hurried upstairs to his room. As he washed at lightning speed, changed his shoes and shirt and tie, he remembered the long lonely hours he had had to himself in Taormina. But that was only to be expected: the minute you got your girl, everything started conspiring to separate you.

  He was startled to see, in the bathroom mirror, what a cheerful face he was wearing. Love, he decided, made all men look like idiots. His grin widened. All right, he told himself, it feels wonderful, but sober up, for God’s sake, or you’ll blast off into orbit and stay there. He prepared to leave, checking his wallet, fresh handkerchief, keys, giving a last look at his sketchbook abandoned on his desk. “Just wait,” he told it, “I’ll add drawings to your collection that you won’t be ashamed of. I’ll do the best work I’ve ever done.” Then, just as he opened his door, with thirty seconds to get down to the second floor, the telephone rang. “Damn!” he said, started to close the door, hesitated, opened it again. He went back and picked up the receiver. The call was from Sparta.

  “Waiting,” he said, ready for Petros’s voice. There was a good deal of crackling and fizzing, and at last a woman’s voice asking “Mr. Strang?”

  “Waiting,” he said again.

  “Myrrha Kladas,” the voice said, and came in a little more clearly. “I am Myrrha Kladas. The sister of Steve.”

  Strang strained to catch the distant, hesitant voice. “More slowly, please,” he told her. Greek was difficult enough without a long-distance call to add to his troubles.

  “Steve’s sister,” she repeated. “Do you understand?”

  “Yes, yes.”

  “Please come. At once.”

  “At once?”

  “It is urgent.” The voice had strengthened.

  “But where?”

  “I must see you.”

  “Where?”

  “Near Thalos there is a bridge, a path that leads to my house, one kilometre past the village. I shall wait there.”

  “Tomorrow? About noon?” If he left at six in the morning, that ought to let him reach Thalos by that time.

  “Tonight,” she said.

  “But it is almost six o’clock now.”

  “I shall wait.”

  “I cannot leave until seven.” Seven at the very earliest, he thought, and even that would be difficult.

  “I shall wait,” Myrrha Kladas said, her sad voice fading again, and, this time, into silence.

  21

  Strang took only thirty seconds to get down, by staircase, to Cecilia’s door. She opened it, a little subdued. “I’m late, you should keep this door locked, sorry darling, there was a telephone call,” he said all in one quickly gathered breath as he put his arms around her and kissed her. Then he saw that there were others there. Damnation, he thought, and closed the door and turned to face them all. Pringle, in subdued and diplomatic grey, seemed a little startled. Elias, an eyebrow raised, looked at his watch. Colonel Zafiris, resplendent in full decorations, appeared to notice nothing at all. He shook Strang’s hand politely, offered Cecilia a chair with a gracious wave of his hand, selected the pink velvet sofa for himself, and lit a cigarette.

  “I have ten minutes,” the Colonel said. He allowed himself a slight gleam of a smile. “Unless, of course, Mr. Strang receives other telephone calls.”

  It might have been a neat reminder that Strang hadn’t yet apologised to anyone except Cecilia; or it could have been subtle curiosity. I’ll take it as curiosity, thought Strang. “It was a call from
Sparta,” he said bluntly. He was too worried to be polite. “From Steve’s sister, Myrrha Kladas.” That got everyone’s attention. Elias even stopped looking at his watch.

  “Sparta—” the Colonel said softly. “By that, do you mean the town of Sparta itself?”

  “I assumed it was from Thalos.”

  “There is no telephone in Thalos.” The Colonel looked at Elias, who burst into a rush of suggestions. Elias seemingly knew the situation at Thalos. And it was his feeling that the call, for the sake of privacy, would be made from the town of Sparta itself.

  “If it was a very private call,” the Colonel agreed with him. And then to Strang, “Was it?”

  “Yes. She said it was urgent. Wants me to leave at once. She said she would be waiting at a bridge, one kilometre past the village.” He frowned. “One odd thing, though. She was talking in Greek, but she identified herself as the ‘sister of Steve.’ Not of Stefanos. Would she use Steve?” That was still puzzling him.

  The Colonel exchanged a brief glance with Elias, and then studied the half-inch of firm white ash on the end of his cigarette. He shrugged his shoulders for an answer. Then he said, “Are you going to Thalos?”

  “Yes,” Strang said. He looked over at Cecilia reassuringly. “It won’t take long,” he told her. Cecilia tried to smile, but the worry in her eyes kept growing.

  The Colonel nodded. “It would be a pity,” he said, “to miss this opportunity of finding out the reason why she telephoned you. She was not very communicative yesterday morning when Elias visited her with the news we had just received of her brother’s death.”

  Cecilia drew a deep breath. It was all very well for the Colonel to take such a cold, objective interest; he wasn’t going to keep any midnight appointment on a lonely mountain road. There was open fear in her eyes. “Ken,” she said softly, “may I go with you? As you had planned?” If I’m with him, she thought, he will take fewer chances. But she knew from his face what he had decided for her: it was that plane for Rome, with Pringle seeing her safely on board.

  The Colonel, even if he had seemed to pay her little attention since the first moment of politeness, said, “Quite impossible, Miss Hillard. But don’t worry. Mr. Strang will not be travelling alone.” He signed to Elias. “Tell Spyridon Makres that Mr. Strang needs that car right away. Seven o’clock punctually at the hotel entrance. Make sure they send you a Cadillac or a Chrysler—” He noticed the amused flicker on Strang’s face. “It is not a matter of snobbery,” he told Strang; “it is a matter of horsepower and of weight. Our mountain roads are more easily managed in a car that will hold the curves. It is about—” he considered for a moment—“one hundred and sixty miles to Sparta from here. With a powerful car, and a driver who knows each turn on the road, you will not keep Myrrha Kladas waiting much past midnight.” He nodded to Elias. “Miss Hillard may possibly not object to having your instructions telephoned from her bedroom. You would permit him, Miss Hillard? Thank you. Make all arrangements, Elias.”