Greek Fire

by Winston Graham

  “They’ve caused a lot of trouble.”

  “Yes, I suppose they have. None that I looked for, I assure you, Vanbrugh.”

  “You should teach your subordinates not to keep such dangerous evidence.”

  “He wasn’t my subordinate,” Lascou said. “He was my brother.”

  Gene came slowly forward. “That’s something I didn’t know.”

  “Even the omniscient find gaps in their knowledge.”

  “I’m not omniscient and I’m not armed. D’you mind if I sit down?”

  “I was going to suggest it.”

  Gene took a corner of a seat about ten feet from the Greek. The table was between them. They stared at each other, men from different worlds. Although violence was implicit in their meeting, the moment they confronted each other it was as if combat had to be on a rational plane.

  “Which was the right name, yours or his?”

  “Avra means nothing. Many Communists have pseudonyms.… Anton was fifteen years older, was trained and indoctrinated in Russia. Mine was a local culture.”

  “Which differs from the party line?”

  “A little.”

  “Was that why Avra kept the letters?”

  “For him they became the big stick which would keep me faithful. Seriously, how did you get in here?”

  “Through the windows. I’ve told you.”

  Lascou shrugged. “ You can read these letters when you want, but of course I shall burn them in a few minutes.”

  “Well, you might as well put your gun away. You wouldn’t use it in here.”

  “I wouldn’t wish to.”

  “Mind if I smoke?”

  “Get one from the table, not out of your pocket.”

  Gene did as he was told. He offered one to Lascou but the Greek shook his head. They were still studying each other.

  Lascou said: “ I wish you’d be honest with me. What do you want out of all this? Is it just money?”

  “No.”

  “Then what?”

  Gene said: “You pretend to hope for some sort of a majority at this election, but you know the only way it could happen would be if you came to power with the help of the ten or more splinter parties you’re at present tied up with. That would be like driving a car with ten men holding the wheel. So either way, win or lose at the election, you need General Telechos and the army.”

  “Telechos is right wing, Vanbrugh. If you knew the slightest thing about him——”

  “I know that he owes the Bank of Greece a million drachmae and that you’re guaranteeing the loan. Not that Telechos, even to save his wife and family, would co-operate with a Communist. But I think it will persuade him to play along with a man he doesn’t trust.”

  Gene lit his cigarette. He knew that time was on Lascou’s side, but he was taking the chance.

  “Telechos,” he said, “is one of the last of the old guard. They’re thrown up, his type, all over the world from time to time: the senior officer who has always been above politics, the man the army can trust, and the nation too. He’s immensely popular just now with the army—you’d call him the last of the Papagos line.”

  “And in what way do you suppose he is going to cooperate with me?”

  “A coup d’état after the elections. There hasn’t been one since the war and it’s time Greece was true to her traditions. You haven’t the power to do it on your own, and if Telechos did it on his own he’d split NATO and lose the American loans. But you can give just the right democratic flavour to it all. You have the tongue, the easy diplomatic explanation, a parliamentary party which will have more seats by then if not a majority; you’ll make the reassuring pronouncements, you’ll go and see the ambassadors and the sentimental Grecophiles and explain apologetically how it is. Then, when you and Telechos are firmly settled in there’ll be a gradual shifting of power. Once you get your fingers on things, Telechos will be squeezed out with the other officers who’ve helped him, and the right centre will edge further and further left.”

  Gene stopped. During his last words he thought he had caught a glimpse of something moving, reflected in the polished wood of a table halfway down the room. He carefully hadn’t turned his head; but now he shifted his position to put a leg over the arm of his chair and allowed his eyes to wander idly. There was nothing.

  Lascou had not spoken. He had only moved once, to sip his glass of marc.

  Gene said: “Were you ever a true Communist? I don’t reconcile it. It seems to me that you covet power for its own sake.”

  “I covet power for the use I can make of it, as any honest man does. The fact that I want to build something on more ideal lines doesn’t make it a worse undertaking.”

  “Can you ever build something good on murder and bloodshed and lies? Can you found an ideal state by seizing it and ruling it against the wishes of the majority?”

  George’s pince-nez suddenly caught the light: contact was cut off by a series of glints and refractions.

  He said: “The majority often doesn’t know what it wants—certainly it hasn’t an idea in the world what is good for it;—and I mean truly good for it, economically, socially, culturally. Violence as an instrument of policy I dislike: it should always be the last and not the first resort. But when it has to be used, then I agree with Thrasymachus, that it can help to win all the power and the glory of the world.”

  “How many will die in the coup? And how many before and after? Tolosa was one. Am I next? And then, when he’s served his purpose, General Telechos?”

  “I assure you that in the end there will be far less bloodshed and corruption in my state than in Washington D.C. You accuse me of egoism. What of yours? You remind me of a Christian missionary who goes abroad to convert the natives to a creed nine tenths of his own parishioners don’t practise. Why don’t you clean out your own stables? There’s plenty of room for proselytising in Washington D.C.”

  Something moved again in the reflection of the table. Perhaps it was Mandraki re-summoned by the pressing of a secret bell.

  Gene said: “I’ve no particular creed. I’m not here to spread any gospel. But you forget I was here in 1944 and 1945. That’s why I’ve come back now. I’ve seen Communism at work. I’ve seen the cold mass slaughter, the children dying, the brutality to women, the absolute ruthless callousness in gaining one set objective. Above all I’ve seen the lies—so that no words have any meaning any more. Nothing that’s worth living for has any meaning any more.” He stopped and said quietly: “You asked me what I wanted out of all this. That’s what I want. Just to stop you. Just to stop that ever happening in Greece again.”

  “Does it occur to you that that is my aim too?”

  “You go a queer way——”

  “Has it ever occurred to you that by trying to stop me you are trying to arrest the course of history?”

  “Is that how you consider yourself?”

  “I’m swimming with the stream. Face up to the facts, Vanbrugh; look at the truth. The present Greek state is a house of cards, kept in being by money from the West. Everyone who knows anything admits that. It can’t go on for ever. Already the Americans are getting tired, as the English got tired. When the money stops, Greece will slip into its proper place in the new pattern of the Balkans, which is a Communist pattern. The only way to save it from the pogrom, the mass starvation, the kind of imposed brutality which has happened farther east is that before then it should possess its own native Communism well established and rooted in its own ancient traditions. As Jugo-Slavia has, but much better, more subtle in its workings. Only a man like myself who understands the mystique through and through can see how to wed the individualism of the Greek with the collectiveness of the modern state.”

  It was a hand and it had moved for a moment round the base of the Hermes statue.

  Gene said: “ You’re being frank tonight.”

  “With a reason.”

  “Oh, I’m sure of that.”

  Lascou picked up one of the letters
and crumpled it into a ball, nicked it into the fireplace. “That’s where they’re all going; but now that you’re here, now that you’ve given yourself up of your own free will, I want to tell you my point of view.…”

  In a mirror Gene saw a woman move behind the statue, a peasant woman in a black shapeless dress and with a black doth covering her head. But you could not mistake her build or her eyes. It was Maria Tolosa.

  “… You presume to think that you’re the only patriot,” Lascou was saying. “You protest you love Greece. Well, so do I; I want to serve her too, and who’s to say which of us knows best? You say Communism is bad. I know, good or bad, that it’s inevitable in his part of the world. So did Tito. Stop me now and you lay up a far worse fate for Greece in the future.”

  “I can’t stop you, it seems.”

  “Happily not.”

  Maria Tolosa had moved, was about as far from the Greek as Lascou was from Gene. Something glinted in the light. Gene’s eyes, caught in a sort of magnetic field, could not stay on the Greek. On his last visit he had seen and admired the thing she held. The blade was of bronze, very ancient, with a lion hunt inlaid on it.

  He fumbled with words, they knotted on his tongue. “N-now that I’ve—that I’ve failed—what d’you propose to do about it?”

  “It must all wait until after the election—even later than that. There’s no other way I can shut your mouth——”

  “Drop it!” Gene said, the words spilling now, as if he had swallowed too many. “You—won’t get anywhere … Revenge isn’t… Maria! understand, you——”

  “Sit down,” George said. “ If this is——”

  “Maria!” shouted Gene, starting up.

  Lascou didn’t shoot him because he heard the movement behind him and half got up as the knife slid in. It went in as easily and as undramatically as a knife into a cake. It encountered no bone, no opposition. The small gun wavered away from Gene as he stretched up, but it still didn’t fire. The trigger finger had slipped out of its hold. Lascou looked up in surprise at Maria, a strange woman he had never seen before.

  Maria screamed: “ That is for Juan!”

  He was standing now, the knife handle sticking out of his back like a Christmas joke. There was a dreadful sense of unreality. He put the tiny gun on the table and fixed his pince-nez. Then he wobbled slightly, steadied himself with the back of his chair, straightened. “Get a doctor,” he said to Gene.

  “For Juan!” panted Maria, her hair and lips suddenly loose as if blowing in a wind. “For Juan! For Juan! For Juan!”

  “Where’s the phone?”

  “No, not phone. A doctor—ground floor. Get Otho. Bell!”

  Gene made a move and then stopped. Lascou had put a hand to his mouth and to his obvious surprise it came away slightly stained. Always neat, he fumbled to take out the folded handkerchief from his breast pocket, and while he did so a trickle of blood suddenly ran down his chin, leapt from chin to floor. His eyes flickered upwards as if reaching for something they couldn’t find; he snatched at the table with the letters on. Gene jumped to hold him but the table went over and he slithered down dragging Gene with him. A new sign was written on his face. He said with terrible incredulity: “I mustn’t die.…” And while he spoke he was already going, sliding over the edge of life, clinging and slipping at the same time while the world tilted against him.

  He choked the blood out of his throat and said: “ Burn the letters.”

  Gene nodded.

  The pince-nez slipped. “Tell Anya …”

  And then he was no longer with them. Only one finger flexed as if still groping for the trigger it would never find.

  Chapter Twenty Two

  They were alone together in the great salon while the French clocks ticked and the traffic mumbled far below. The room had become very still: and thought had stopped with movement. Time went round them, passed them by.

  Then Maria Tolosa fell on her knees. “Santa Maria, Mother of God, Holy Mary, Queen of Heaven, Santa Maria, Mother of God, Holy Mary, Queen of Heaven,” and a jumble of Latin words slurred together, over and over again, like beads told in terror without thought or meaning, just a talisman to hold on to in the void her own act had created.

  Some of Lascou’s own incredulity still lingered after him: it couldn’t happen so quickly. No noise; no blood; the human envelope, punctured in a single vulnerable spot, had deflated like a tyre. Gene bent over him; but during the civil war he had seen too many such. He straightened up, wiped his hands on his coat to quiet them. He went to the outer door. No sound outside. Another door, open, led into a sort of butler’s pantry—this way Maria had come. He shut it, came back.

  He scraped together the scattered letters, the membership card—a phrase caught his eye: ‘so don’t upset yourself; one stays, however reluctantly, faithful to the general scheme of things.’ The miniature revolver. That in his pocket too. It was ten past nine. They had three or four minutes. Maybe.

  Lascou had stayed faithful to the general scheme of things. Gene went to the praying woman.

  “Maria, where did you get in?”

  “Holy Mary, Queen of Heaven, Santa Maria, Mother of God——”

  “Maria, listen to me!”

  She stopped, stared at him without recognition.

  “Maria!”

  Her eyes weren’t even seeing him. He caught her shoulders and shook her.

  “Maria!”

  “Yes?”

  “Where did you get in?”

  “Through her flat. She was out.”

  “Did anyone see you?”

  “There was a little boy.”

  “Did he see you?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “When I ring the bell he runs out into the passage and I am able to slip in without—without him seeing me.’

  “Listen,” he said. “ Can you listen?”

  She wiped the back of her arm across her face. “Yes.”

  “There is a way out—not going back that way. No one must see you. Understand?”

  “I saw the dagger as I came in. God gave it into my hand. Then I heard this man talking. I have to destroy him.… It is God’s will.”

  “We must leave separately. Can you walk?”

  “…Yes.”

  “See that door? Go through the vestibule beyond it, to a passage outside this flat. Go past the lift to the end of the passage: at the end there’s a door behind curtains. Understand?”

  “I think so.”

  “It will be locked on your side. It leads to the fire escape. Go down that. The last flight, to the street level is weighted so that you have to stand on it to swing it down. Understand?”

  “Yes.” Her balance, her possession was returning. She kept filling her lungs with trembling air and blowing it out through her thick pouted lips.

  “It will land you in a yard. The door into the street will be bolted on the inside. It’s on the left of the fire-escape. Now then this is more difficult. You have to remember a street.”

  He paused and waited. He could not go too fast.

  “Yes?” she said.

  “Go to the kiosk at the end of the square—remember it?—Papa André. Ask for number 12, Eleuthera Street. Got that? Then do what you’re told. Do exactly what you’re told and ask no questions.”

  She was still on her knees. “You think I am wrong to do what I have done. I know you do! But it was God’s will! God put it into my hand!”

  “Leave that now. Do you want to get back to Spain?”

  “What does it matter?”

  “I can’t help you unless you’ll help yourself.”

  She tried to get up, swayed, stood with his help. “I will do what you say.”

  He took her firmly by the arm, led her to the door. She said: “ It was he who killed Juan. He——”

  “Yes. Now then.…”

  He opened the door into the vestibule. There was no one about. They crossed to the further door. As they did so, a boy�
�s voice came, calling. “That is the boy,” she said. “If he——”

  “Now.” He pushed her out.

  She swayed across to the other wall of the corridor, glanced at him out of pain-dulled eyes. Then she put out her hands against the wall, set her jaw, stiffened and began to walk down the corridor, swaying as if she was drunk.

  He could not wait to see if she remembered; he shut the door and slid back through the vestibule into the salon.

  Quieter than ever now. The clocks said fourteen minutes past nine. Out with his handkerchief. Handle of the knife first. Sounded easy, but in practice not so: blood had oozed out round the hilt; a spot or two got on his handkerchief. Now the table he’d grasped. There was brandy spilt on it; he picked up the fallen glass, then had to wipe that. More haste etc. His own cigarette end. How many handles had she touched? The boy calling again. The door of the study. Up and down it. Difficult to be sure where one had had one’s hands.

  “Papa! Papa!” said a boy. “Are you there?”

  The door from the pantry was opening. Gene flew across to it, got to it as a small dark boy came in.

  “Otho said you were back—” He broke off. “ Oh, I thought … Who are you?”

  Gene said: “ Your father isn’t here. He’s gone out again. Have you a——”

  “But Otho said he was back. I want to show him——”

  He made a move to go round but Gene barred his way. “Where is Otho now?”

  “Back there. Do you want him? I’ll fetch him. What if——”

  “No.” Gene caught the boy’s arm. “Is dinner ready?”

  “Dinner?”

  “Yes. Your father said he wanted it when he came back. Will you go and see.”

  The boy’s suspicious dark eyes were fixed on Gene. He was seeking and sensing something wrong. There was a contagion of tension.

  “Why can’t I go in?”

  “You can, when you’ve seen about dinner.”

  “It’s nothing to do with me—I had my supper an hour ago. Where has Papa gone?”

  “I don’t know. Hurry up, now.” He gave the boy a push.