Decision at Delphi

by Helen Macinnes

  “No!” Strang said sharply. “Get him down to the house!” He looked away from Levadi. The man’s emotion was too painful to watch.

  Levadi stumbled past him, his left hand resting on top of his head in surrender, his right arm half raised in pain. And at that moment, Strang remembered the photograph: the surrender on the slope of Parnassos; the man whose blind instinct to live separated him from those he left to die, the shepherd who wept tears of shame and followed Odysseus into the enemy camp.

  Elias, his hair ruffled in the wind, his thin face tired and anxious, was waiting for them at the low stone wall. “Who’s this?” he asked.

  “The fourth man,” John told him, his sharp eyes watching Levadi’s every movement, his rifle ready.

  “The shepherd,” Strang said, and Elias looked at him sharply, then back at the man slipping and stumbling toward him. Now Elias was studying the face coming toward him. “Yes,” he said coldly, “the shepherd from Mount Parnassos.”

  Levadi climbed over the wall and stopped as he saw a group of men waiting down at the bottom of the field near the house.

  Elias told Petros and John, “See that nothing happens to him!”

  “What? We protect him?”

  “We need him alive.” In English, Elias said to Strang, “If he will talk, that is to say.” He shrugged his shoulders. “Can he talk?”

  “He isn’t an idiot. Ask him why he once rebelled against Odysseus.”

  Elias’s eyebrows were raised. But he fell into step beside Levadi and began talking to the man. Halfway down the field, Elias waited for Strang to catch up. “It was a personal matter. Something about Elektra.”

  “Tell him Odysseus has killed Elektra.”

  Elias stared in horror. “Certainly not! Don’t even say that to anyone. Not yet! I forbid you!”

  “All right, all right,” Strang said, and fell back to join Petros.

  “It is enough to show him what Odysseus ordered to be done here,” Elias said gruffly, and hurried Levadi on toward the house.

  “Who are the men?” Strang asked Petros, watching the tight group that waited at the bottom of the field. Their weapons, he saw, were axes.

  “From the village. You saw them rush across the stream when the captain blew his little whistle.” Petros was delighted with the look of surprise on Strang’s face. “What did you think I was doing when I left you and Myrrha? I went to waken my friends. We needed them, didn’t we?”

  “And Elias brought back no reinforcements?”

  “Sure. They are on their way.” Petros’s smile broadened. “Arriving any moment.”

  Strang looked at the row of quiet little houses, and apologised to them. “When I climbed this field, I wondered why they lay so still.”

  “When you climbed this field, how were you so sure that I would follow you?”

  “Because,” Strang said, “you weren’t going to let me escape—if that was what I had been doing.”

  Petros rubbed the scar on his brow, looked sideways at the American, and laughed softly. “There could have been a fifth man,” he said, threw an arm across Strang’s back and matched his step. He was still smiling broadly as they reached the group of embattled villagers around Elias and his prisoner. Strang left Petros explaining that the captain must know what he was saying, and headed for the broken door of the shed at the back of the Kladas house.

  He skirted two bodies, stretched just outside the door. In the shed, where the animals had been sheltered at night, he halted. The place was a shambles, its roof torn wide by a grenade. The donkey had been put out of its misery; one goat was dead, the other would soon be. He ploughed through a mass of mangled chickens to the small door that connected the shed to the house. It had been weakened by the explosion, a panel smashed to let another grenade be thrown into the downstairs room. The fireplace wall was a ruin, the rest of the place a desolate mess of fragments and dust. The wooden staircase still hugged the far wall, and there, on one of the broken treads of the lower steps, Myrrha Kladas was sitting, staring at nothing, while three women tried to comfort her. Her small face, streaked with dust, looked smaller under the bandage tied roughly around her forehead. She nursed one shoulder. She was silent, but the tears were streaming down her face leaving furrows of grime.

  “Myrrha!”

  Her eyes turned to him in deep despair. “They killed my animals,” she said. “They killed—”

  “Steve? Where is Steve?”

  She pointed to the front door, wide open, the grey light of early morning stealing across its threshold.

  And there, at last, was Steve.

  He was huddled in a grey blanket, his feet bandaged, hobbling into the back seat of the Chrysler. Costas was already at the wheel. Behind the Chrysler was an army car, and then an open truck with a platoon of fresh-faced boys in uniform now filing out into the village street. Elias and his prisoner, still intact, were standing by the army car while Elias explained vehemently to the lieutenant in command.

  Strang went forward to the Chrysler, and leaned on its back door. “Hi there!” he said. There really didn’t seem much more to say.

  Steve’s haggard white face stared at him. Steve tried to smile, but the usual furrows wouldn’t deepen round his mouth. He put out his hand and gripped Strang’s.

  Costas said, “He is going to Athens. Urgent business.”

  I can believe that, Strang thought. “But is he fit enough to travel?”

  Steve said, “I am going. Ken—I’ve got to go.”

  “Fine. Just hand me that coat on the back seat, and you can stretch out there. I’ll ride beside Costas.” Strang put on his coat thankfully and turned up his collar. “Perishing cold by the dawn’s early light,” he said.

  “Ken—will you do something for me?”

  Strang waited. He could almost feel what was coming.

  “Stay with Myrrha. Until I get back.”

  “I promised to be back in Athens by—” Strang began, and then stopped.

  We must leave,” Costas broke in, and looked pointedly at his watch.

  “Stay with her for a day, at least. Just keep an eye on things, Ken. Will you?”

  Strang nodded, stepped back from the car, smiled to get that anxious look out of Steve’s face. “All right,” he said, and waved. Costas turned the car with an expert flourish, the eyes of the village upon him, saluted Elias as he passed and roared along the straight street in a cloud of dust.

  Strang stood there, watching them go. He felt so tired, so agonisingly tired and depressed that he couldn’t even make up his mind to start walking back to the house. Elias came over to him. “I am taking Levadi to Athens. There will be trouble if we keep him around here. Besides—he may decide to talk. He might be very useful.”

  “When he saw the house, and Myrrha—what did he say?”

  Elias shrugged. “He was sorry. He was very sorry.” Elias paused. Very carefully he added, “The name Elektra seems to upset him a great deal. Very strange. I do not suppose she even noticed him.”

  “Nor did the sunrise,” Strang said. He added briskly, “Good luck, Elias! And don’t leave me stranded here.”

  “Certainly not. I shall send a car for you, at the earliest, tomorrow.” Elias shook hands very formally, and hurried back to the army car. He had commandeered a driver and an extra man from the lieutenant, too. He saluted as he got in beside Levadi. That’s going to be one hell of a journey, Strang thought, as he watched another cloud of dust. He buttoned his coat to his chin.

  Petros was beside him. “We’ll find you a place to sleep. I have a cousin, a widower, no women to start lamenting. Some food and some sleep. Right?”

  It sounded pretty wonderful. “I’ll see Myrrha first,” Strang said, “and then—” Sleep. And more sleep. He looked at the sky to the northeast, where Athens lay, and Cecilia. Cecilia, sweet susurrus, the name could mesmerise him into sleep, standing right here on this soft earth road, the whisper of trees around him, the murmuring stream. Then two smooth-cheeked rec
ruits carried a body past him and heaved it into a farm cart. A girl, bare feet in unlaced boots, her long wide skirt falling to her ankles, her hair and forehead and ears enveloped in a yellow scarf twisting around her neck and over her mouth to leave only her bright, curious eyes to wish him good day, paused to stare into the cart, and then—as the two soldiers joked with her—retreated, in a fit of muffled giggles and a light hop, skip, and run, after the laden donkey she was driving toward the fields.

  “Another day, another backache,” Petros said cheerfully, and took Strang’s arm to lead him to the Kladas house. “That’s where I lived as a boy,” he said, and pointed to some burned-out ruins now partly mounded over with grass, where two goats grazed. “More than half the village was stretched out dead that morning. Not a man or boy left. Funny thing, if I hadn’t been away fighting, I’d have been stretched out on this street, too.”

  As they reached the house, Petros looked at the nasty mess of earth and shredded clothing and a single boot, lying on the path near the doorway. “If he had managed to throw this grenade down the chimney—” Petros pursed his lips, shrugged his shoulders. “Well, it’s a fine dawn, anyway,” he said,

  23

  The dawn was spreading over the sky of Athens as Alexander Christophorou came back to his apartment. He came quite openly, driving up in a taxi, ascending the steps without any haste, searching carefully for his keys, nodding to the two men who had been stationed outside the house since the police had discovered the bodies in the Drakon apartment. “What,” he said, “no sign yet of Mr. Drakon?” His mock concern was well received. Anything to cheer up our gallant policemen, he thought, pursuing their entirely thankless, pointless, and useless duty.

  In the hall, the smile on his lips vanished. He noticed with irritation that one of the two meagre electric bulbs had failed. As his keys unlocked his door, he was thinking how very strange this all was: here was the day beginning, at long last beginning, and he felt no excitement, no exhilaration, only irritation over a faded light bulb. Strange, and yet— not strange: he was exhausted with those last six hours of meetings, of final reports, of business and discussion; of the bogus decisions appointing temporary replacements for Elektra and Sideros to the Committee; of the fake regrets concealing personal ambitions, of the search for explanations that could be used against the enemy. But it was one thing to create and use propaganda, quite another to believe it yourself. That had been the great weakness of Elektra: one month, she would help to invent, or would accept an invention knowing it was false; three months later, she believed it as an established truth. There was no future for a revolutionary in self-delusion. Leaders did not swallow the sugar-coated pills that they prepared for the open mouths of the masses.

  He passed through the small entrance hall of the apartment without turning on its light, threw his coat on the couch, slumped into his arm-chair, stared through the windows at the half-light of dawn spreading over the city. Yes, he was tired. But mostly tired of waiting. He had lived with the plan too long. Fifteen years. Ten years alone with it—his eyes turned instinctively to the rows of books that covered a wall of his room—bringing it from seed into sapling into tree. Five years of long, bitter discussion, of sharing the theory with a selected few, of watching the theory develop into a plan, of nursing, shaping, pruning, feeding the growing organism. At last, today, the fruit was ripe. And Elektra had thought she could seize it, hand it over to the men who would use revolution for their own cynical extension of national power.

  Yes, that was the weakness of believing your own propaganda: Elektra and her clique had forgotten what revolution really meant. Those hypocrites, he thought contemptuously, with their talk of “revolution” and “the people,” merely substituting one élite group for another, freeing people into slavery, turning the masses into an ant heap, installing a new brand of imperialism. But revolution was revolution, complete, absolute, not to be qualified and distorted by national pride, politics, or greed. What difference was there between the capitalist boss and the Communist or fascist commissar except in the carefully cultivated myths of their dogma? All of them were manipulators, parasites, exploiters. All were in search of power. And whether power was less distasteful if it was built on gold or on fanatic nationalism—that was one of those absurd questions over which only the impotent socialists, the self-congratulating neutralists would try their favourite gymnastic: the far-stretched straddle. But all of them—Communists, socialists, capitalists, liberals, fascists, Nazis, neutralists—and what a dreary bunch they were with their egos and their ids—all had one attribute in common: man’s infinite capacity for self-delusion. It would be a pleasure to see them destroy each other.

  Why, he wondered, was he even bothering to justify Elektra’s death? (Strange how quickly he forgot Sideros: a useful man once, efficient, discreet, coldly calculating, turned into part braggart and part gigolo, Elektra’s new favourite: bed and board had inflated his vanity; he had become a blunderer, an encumbrance. Sideros’s handling of the Roilos affair, father and son, could have been disastrous.)

  Why justify? She had earned her death. He had been expecting her treachery, or else he would not be here this morning, alive to meet this dawn. He would have been the suicide in Drakon’s apartment. He had forestalled Elektra by thirty seconds. No more than that. She and her tamed terrorist had been so sure of themselves, so sure that his usefulness was over. But what he could forgive them least was their calm assumption of his stupidity.

  Sitting in this unlighted room, looking out at the smug, placid street and the filtering daylight, he felt tired and cold. No exhilaration, no sense of triumph; only a vague depression, a strange sense of worry. He dismissed the feeling, as he had dismissed it earlier that evening. There was no rational explanation for it. He had not been followed. There was no suspicion. Drakon, a mere word, had vanished as easily as it had been conjured into life. Alexander Christophorou was unknown in the world of Odysseus or of Metsos. The plans were well made. The essential people were well prepared. The final reports had come in, and everything that was really important was secure, everyone in position, waiting. In Yugoslavia, a dictator killed and the old-line Communists ready to seize power (but with Elektra gone, how long would they keep it, the fools?) and direct the national vengeance against Greece who would be accused of the assassination. In Cyprus, the Western imperialists would betray the people again, conniving with a hated minority to kill the leaders of the freedom movement. From Turkey, political exiles, slipping back into their native Syria, would bring revolution and monty easily traceable to America. Three small fires, to be sure. But three small fires lit beside three mountains of gunpowder did not need much wind to fan their flames. A beginning at least.

  But Elektra had wanted more than a beginning. She had wanted to control the end, too. “We have offers of help, real help,” she had told him. “All we have planned can be useful to them.” He had replied, “And when have you been talking with them? And where?” She did not have to answer. He had known, at that moment, that she had talked with her old comrades (was she giving up her Stalinist convictions or were they moving back to them again?) and was following their orders once more. It was her chance to be reinstated in favour, to be accepted back into that comforting circle where thinking was no problem, but a set of long-established clichés. She had said, laughing, “You nihilists! You wild dreamers! Where are your armies?” But he had had the final word: “Wherever there is hate and vengeance, there are our armies: They are everywhere. Yes, even in your Russia.” Those were the last uncomforting words she had heard.

  He had shot her first, then Sideros. Then he had taken the handbag from her lap. She had been opening it, as she laughed, her fingers searching for the small revolver inside it, her eyes holding his. So natural, so tender had she seemed, that Sideros did not even sense what was happening. Too much bed and board were bad for a man’s reflexes.

  Hate and vengeance... Together, they formed the one force that was neither meaningless no
r absurd, the only answer to life’s stupidities.

  He rose. He might as well go to bed, sleep until noon, hear the first reports on his radio. Across the street, a match flickered near a window. He stood still, watching. A match had flickered; What of it? A man with insomnia had lit a cigarette, soon he’d switch on the light, pick up a book. But no light was switched on.

  Christophorou drew to the side of his own window. Yes, there was a man over there, standing just behind the thin curtains—they moved slightly as he peered out—watching the street. In a few moments, the man would get tired of watching an empty street; he would go away. But he did not go.

  Christophorou stood at the side of his window, waiting for the man to leave, timing him. His thoughts were cold, critical.

  Watching me? But if Zafiris had any suspicions, he would have had me brought in for questioning. At once. Zafiris had so little to go on that he could not have afforded to leave any suspect unquestioned. So little to go on? Since the photographs and negatives had been stolen, less than little. And all the contents of that envelope, which Kenneth Strang had guarded so stubbornly, were now safely in ashes.

  Kenneth Strang... If the American had received any information from Katherini Roilos, he had made little use of it. He had not visited any government office. No member of the Colonel’s staff had visited his room. And if he had anything to communicate to Zafiris, he could not do it now. He would stay in Sparta, in close custody, until the crisis was over. He would have plenty of time to think, there; but his thoughts would incline more toward the beautiful Hillard than to anything else. To each man, his weakness.

  Cecilia Hillard... No. The girl was nothing; a smaller question mark than Strang. There had been no response to the note signed “Katherini”; The name had meant less than little to her. She and Strang could not have met Roilos, after all.