“My brother will pay you if it is worth buying.”
I took the box from him and opened it. There was a yellowed wedding certificate, a letter postmarked Konitsa, and a soiled, folded piece of notebook paper.
“God in heaven,” I said.
“You have the journal?” Paul asked.
“No.” The paper broke apart as I opened it, but I knew what it was even before I saw my own handwriting. “It’s the promise I wrote out for Webb before we left Athens.”
“Where did you get it, uncle?” Paul demanded.
“It was in the hole under the house. After Maria went to the Sisters, I wanted to fill up the hole, but first I looked to see underneath.”
“What else was there?”
“Nothing. I swear by the Virgin.”
On the paper I could see the rusty mark left by a paper clip. “It would have dropped out of the notebook, Paul. She might not even have known, but now we can be certain that Maria was once in possession of Webb’s journal.”
I picked up the letter which was also in the silver box. It was postmarked “Konitsa.”
“That is my letter!” the old one cried.
“Read it anyway,” Paul said to me.
I took it out of the envelope. The script was fine, delicately fine, but while I could understand most of the characters, some of the words had no meaning for me. “I can’t read it, Paul. It’s not Greek as I know it.”
“Oh, Christ! It is in Vlak. Is it, uncle?”
“Yes.”
“Read it to us, uncle. I will understand.”
The old one shook his head. “I cannot read.”
Paul put his hand to his eyes. “God’s curse on Demetrios!”
The old one cringed and drew away. “I am nothing and you abuse me. I know nothing and you beat me. God will punish you.”
“God has already punished me.”
“And me,” the old one said, rocking beneath his hump, “for being born I am punished a lifetime.”
“He is old and frightened and deformed,” I said. “Be kind to him, Paul.”
“To kill him would be a kindness.” But to the old one he said more gently, “You know what is in the letter, uncle. Tell us.”
“The priest from Kalpaki who took Maria to the Sisters brought it to me—with the blanket. It was from the Sisters. They said she had gone mad and thrown herself into the river. It was better, she was now at peace with God.”
“Peace!” Paul said contemptuously.
“The priest told me I could stay here and if I gave six lambs to the church every spring, he would be responsible for me to the tax collector.”
“Let us have the letter, uncle. A thousand drachmas and you may also keep the box.”
“A thousand drachmas,” the old one repeated, his withered lips quivering. “They will say I stole it.”
Paul gave me his wallet. “I have older money than you, Professor. Count it out for him in the smallest denominations.”
Between Paul’s funds and mine I was able to give him ten fifty-drachma notes, a hundred in coins and four one-hundred-drachma notes. Fingering the money, the old one agreed.
“Do you have the letter?” Paul asked me.
“Yes.” I also kept my note to Alexander Webb, preserving it carefully in my passport case.
“Tell no one we were here,” Paul said, “and we shall tell no one.”
“Do you think, my blind friend, the sheep will be interested? But do you know, now I am going to have a dog. I am going to have a dog of my own.”
“Do that, uncle. A good dog.”
“A very good dog, and I will name him after the priest in Kalpaki.” The old one wheezed with laughter.
“I once had friends in Kalpaki,” Paul said. “But the priest was not my friend either.”
23
IT WAS TEN-THIRTY BY the time Paul and I got back to the car. We had not spoken. There is this about a solemn stillness: one senses listeners everywhere, the night itself has ears. So much for poetic nuance. The practicality was that his walking and my guidance of it took all our concentration. It always did. To speak of anything else we had to stop, and neither of us then wanted to.
Whatever prompted the precaution, having put him in the car, and going round, I stepped up on the back bumper and looked over the crest beyond the shrine to the road up which we had come from Ioannina. A twinkle of light shone from a cottage here and there, but not a car was on the road south. There was one coming from the north, however, at what looked even from a distance to be high speed. I called to Paul that I would be back in a moment and ran to a place of vantage where I could yet remain beyond the scope of the car’s headlights. I lay down behind a shield of grass, parting it only so that I could see. The car’s sudden slowdown as it approached the shrine stiffened me, but it was only caution on the part of the driver approaching the top of the hill. A long, black limousine, a Cadillac I was fairly sure, passed and sped on. I had seen only one like it in Ioannina, which was not to say there were not more, especially with the festival, but it seemed unlikely that one should come from the north and at this hour of the night.
I returned to the car and told Paul.
“I could smell him!” he cried. “As sure as hell reeks of brimstone!”
“Then perhaps you can also catch the scent of where he came from,” I said with sarcasm.
“I will think about it.”
I maneuvered the Vauxhall out onto the road.
“Go north,” Paul said. Then: “For me it is possible to hate as it is not possible for you. We are most unlikely men to be brothers.”
“The word was yours,” I said.
“Unlikely, but so, nonetheless.”
“Where are we going, Paul?”
“To Kalpaki and beyond, unless there are impediments.”
We drove on, the road like a black marker in the moonlight. I slowed down very shortly as we approached a sign, and read aloud: “Kalpaki, one kilometer.”
“There is a road to the left?”
“Yes.”
“And no soldiers, no traffic?”
“None.”
“Drive that way.”
A few kilometers on I saw something that raised a lump in my throat: shining plainly in the moonlight and of such dimension as to cover the entire hillside was the placement of many rocks to form the numerals 1940.
“Paul…” I told him what I saw.
“It is so. Here we turned the Fascists back, and for a little while there was glory in modern Greece. Now we must watch for a cave on the left. There will undoubtedly be a memorial marker. If there is a guard, tell me and I will pretend to be asleep and you will stop and ask the road to the village as though we had missed the sign back there.” He shoved his white cane under the front seat. “If there are questions, let us say we are to join a party of fishermen in the morning. It is believable.”
It might have been believable, but I was grateful not to have to tell the story. I found the cave entrance by the widening of the road at that point. I pulled off into the dusty siding and stopped. There was no one anywhere to be seen. An iron gate closed the mouth of the cave.
“It was the army headquarters during the war,” Paul said. “We do not have a flashlight, do we?”
“The moonlight is very bright.”
“One would like to know what the ground could tell you. A limousine such as you describe would leave distinctive tracks, would you not say? And if they went inside, I think there would be fresh markings from their feet.”
“I’ll look in any case,” I said, opening the car door.
“Put my hand on the button to the car lights. I shall listen for a car and signal. The story will be the same. You are looking for a sign, having lost your way.”
I got out, cursing myself for failing to have a flashlight. We had not driven at night and I kept forgetting to buy one. I went slowly, acclimating myself to the moonlight and staying on the road surface. Almost immediately Paul signalled with th
e lights. I went back to the car.
“Professor, there is a singing of electric wires. Perhaps there is a light switch.”
I looked up. A line ran from the roadside pole to a pole near the cave and, now looking for it, I saw the floodlight over the entrance. “You are right. There will be a switch box.”
I got one of the tire tools from the trunk and walked to the cave, circling the area where the car might have parked. I could see what looked to be fresh tire tracks. The padlock hasp on the switch box was easily pried loose. I looked back to be sure Paul was not signalling and then threw one of the two switches. A light went on, perhaps a series of them—I could see only one—within the cave. I could see nothing except the passageway beyond the gate and that soon curved into an area beyond sight. I threw the other switch. The spotlight went on, flooding the entranceway with light as sharp as day. I at least had had the presence not to look into the face of the light when it came on. The dust of the parking area was loose, the tire marks ending in a skid. But to that point, they were quite clear, the tread sharply defined. A large-gauge tire. I could have photographed them: I had equipment for detail photography in the car but there seemed little point to it. After all, I had not seen the limousine sufficiently close to identify it. I traced the tracks to and from the road. There were older tracks also, but silted with dust. Only those of one large car were clear. And there were footmarks from where the car had stopped near the mouth of the cave. At the gate I could see a cluster of footprints where two or more men would have waited while another unlocked the gate. They had all gone inside and into the passageway, then back. What I did have in my pocket was a small magnifying glass. I carried it for the study of manuscripts. I got down on my knees and examined the shoeprints. One man had worn pointed toes, which to me suggested an Italian-made shoe: I did not permit my imagination to pursue its possible significance; many a Greek might wear an Italian shoe. One set of heels had borne a trademark: I was a moment figuring it out—the letters were backwards, of course—Goodyear, an American-made shoe, or at least heeled with an American product. An expert would have been able to tell more, the prints were so clear. There was not a boot among them, and all save the American make were new shoes, I thought, from the evenness of the heels. I took the shoestring from my own shoe and measured all the prints in the area by the gate. It came to only three pairs of shoes. Three men: Demetrios-Frontis? Braschi, the titled husband of Margaret Webb? One dared not make that leap, I thought, and yet…. And the other? A man with a preference for American moderate-priced gear. Odd, I did not sanction for a minute the possibility of the Colonel’s wearing Goodyear soles.
The sound of the car horn startled me. Paul was flashing the lights off and on. I ran to the fuse box and threw off both lights, shut the box, and ran back to the car.
“Turn back quickly,” he said, “and the same story if we are stopped.”
We had just managed to swing into the road and to pick up a little speed when we closed onto two sets of headlights. I brightened and dimmed mine. An army truck did the same, and then another, the soldiers in the back calling out, “Yassos!” They did not stop.
“The military?” Paul asked.
“Yes.”
“They will be part of the border guard,” he said.
“How far is it?”
“Twenty kilometers. Well? What did you find?”
I told him of the tire tracks and footprints and my own conjecture.
“Twenty kilometers from the Albanian border,” he murmured.
“We call them Northern Epirots,” I said, remembering the woman at Byron’s house.
“What?”
I told him what she had said when I mentioned Byron’s Albanians.
“We are onto something, Professor. I have felt it from the moment I rode into Ioannina.”
I lit a cigarette. It cut its way inside me. I said, “I’ve not had a bite of food since two o’clock. My belly is rubbing my backbone.”
I caught the flash of his teeth. “In Kalpaki there may be a taverna.”
“We’d better go back to Ioannina, Paul. In so small a place we could not help attracting attention.”
“When are we to see the priest about Maria?”
“I don’t know that we should see the priest unless we have to. The fewer people we need to question the better.”
“You are right. Priests are gossips and they are paid by the government.”
“Tomorrow we’ll find the convent. But first I want to know as much as I can about the nature of our enemy. If we do find the journal, then I know I shall be afraid.”
“I understand,” Paul said. “Very well I understand.”
I was remembering the deference shown me, an American, by the two policemen in Ioannina. “Paul, if it is as I conjectured and the third man was an American, who would it be?”
“You ask because you have an answer,” he said.
“I am wondering if it might not be a member of the CIA.”
“American Intelligence?” he said after a moment.
“Yes. Roughly comparable to the OSS during the war.”
“Is it true they foment revolutions?”
I answered indirectly. “They would not disapprove a change of government in Albania.”
“And they would have money?”
“Yes.” And then, not because I cherished the Albanian ideology—I have long since declared myself here to be non-political and that by necessity as well as choice—but because I saw the bloodshed and the maiming which once I had been wistful at not having seen, and I saw Demetrios the hero—I blurted out despairingly, “Yes! They would have money. It seems to be what we have most.”
We were both silent for some miles after that. Then Paul said, “How will you find out more about the nature of our enemy?”
“As you said before, we ought to know when Demetrios reverted into Colonel Frontis. I have told you about the people I met at Dr. Palandios’, particularly the woman, Elsa Storme.”
“Ah, yes, the one with the mummified husband.”
I had not put it that way, but it would do. I went on, “She arrives for the festival in the morning. She has a way of finding out things. And I would trust her.”
“And the husband?”
“He will not be here.”
“A most trustworthy man,” he said solemnly.
I glanced at him. His head back, he was grinning broadly. “What in hell has put you in such high spirits?”
“I am alive!” he cried. “I am a functioning, contributing human being. I have survived, and if I die tomorrow I will have started on the road to a good eternity.”
“Yes,” I said, “but I am going to try to keep us both on this side of it for some time longer.”
Paul could not repress his mood of exaltation. “If we are visiting the nuns tomorrow—I have never seen a convent. They are rare in Greece. Will they admit two stallions like us?”
“Perhaps we shall take Elsa with us.”
“Is she one of your strong women, Professor?”
“She is not an Amazon,” I said somewhat sourly.
Paul laughed and began to sing. It was the ballad of the Souli women which Vasso had sung the night he made his own way to the restaurant. He broke off the song and said, “Vasso will be proud of me, and I shall be master in our house.”
And lover? I wanted to know but would not ask. Had it been the other way round the question would have tripped off his tongue. I wanted most deeply for him to love her, probably because in my sense of fitness my own and lonely guilt would be assuaged.
I told him when the lights of Ioannina came into view. We arranged to meet at the lakefront at one o’clock the next day. He felt it was important for him to “see” the parade.
“Leave me now at Lord Byron Street,” he said. “It is a few doors from there, the place where I am staying. There will be singing tonight. Perhaps I shall listen.”
“It’s almost midnight,” I said, holding my watch to the d
ashboard.
“That, my brother, is the best hour for listening.”
24
THE TWIN ENGINE COMET put down from Athens at eight-thirty in the morning. I was waiting. The moment Elsa saw me her pace quickened and she came toward me faster and faster until she was almost running. I held out both my hands to her. To see us one might have thought we had been lovers long before and cherished a lingering if quieter affinity. Yet I had met her but the once and had wondered while I waited if I would remember her face. It was a good face, rather too long but delicately molded and dominated by the frank grey eyes. The lines crinkled round them when she smiled.
“How splendid, John! You don’t mind my not calling you Professor?”
“I’m ten years younger for it,” I said, holding her hands until she drew them away.
“Too young, too young,” she said.
“Do you have baggage?”
“A sensible amount.”
“I’d counted on that. Let me have the ticket.”
In the car as we drove into town she said, “And has it been Lord Byron all the way?”
“Not all the way,” I said.
“I shouldn’t have thought so. The sky of Greece and all its lovely people—what a shame not to see them for turning stones and sifting bones.”
“I have a friend I want you to meet presently,” I said, for her words reminded me of Paul.
“Man or woman?”
I glanced at her: she was beautifully dressed, a grey silk suit, blue gloves and purse.
“I’m being gauche again,” she said, but smiling, at ease with me as I was with her.
“No. I was admiring you. You look lovely.”
She inclined her head to the compliment. “Then it’s a man.”
“Yes. Quite an extraordinary one.”
She waited but I was not ready yet to tell her about Paul. She said then, “I dined again with the Palandioses last night. They send their love. He wagered you would be here. And I have a bit of information which may or may not interest you. Remember I said I was writing a friend at the British Museum, a genealogist, about Count Braschi—you know of whom I’m speaking?”
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