Beautiful Animals

by Lawrence Osborne

  It was for His reasons. He thought of creeping out of the room with all his belongings, letting himself out of the hotel, and driving away quietly. But he had suddenly found himself attracted to the Nazarene woman’s attentiveness as they were kissing, but not making love. He considered that since God had thrown this woman in his path he should not be so hasty in discarding the gift. Another two days, perhaps, and then he would go back to being alone. But who could say? Life was undeniably more agreeable with her at his side. And so far she had not shown any inclination to expose him. She wanted something from him as much as he wanted something from her. Jayid jiddaan thumm. One didn’t have to be a fool about it.

  Satisfied without sex, he slept much better. But when he woke, he found that it was he who was alone, and that it was Benedetta who had slipped unnoticed out of the room. Nor was she at breakfast. The owner, bringing his coffee, simply said, “No one saw her. Did she go out for a swim?”

  “A swim?” Faoud said.

  Slowly, it dawned on him.

  He went to the car and found that the money was gone. To his own surprise, he didn’t fly into a rage; he was merely glad that she hadn’t taken the car as well. It was the way of these thieving Europeans. One had to face them down with a calm resolve and a capacity for revenge. He went back inside the hotel as if nothing had happened, for after all the last thing he could afford was a scene and a brush with the police. She must have guessed as much.

  Therefore, he sat instead on the terrace in view of the azurite sea of the Romans and drank his coffee with the owner’s homemade croissants. Afterward he walked calmly around the compact village of Castellabate and dried the sweat at his temples. Heat blew in from the olive fields. He forced himself to forget about the affront and to contemplate only the future: that, and the cool stone arches of the dead Christians and the smell of their pasta boiling in pots nearby. Their world didn’t matter anyway—it was nearly a ruin.

  DAIMONIA

  SEVENTEEN

  Rockhold woke punctually at the Bratseras in a room full of dried sponges. Hours of nightmares flooded his mind still as he groped for the glass of water by the bed and tried to see the sun glimmering behind the slats of the shutters. He called his wife in England at once.

  “Minnie? Don’t forget to water the sunflowers.”

  “Did you have a nightmare?” the little voice at the other end asked, by way of brushing his injunction aside.

  “I was being eaten by dolphins.”

  “How horrible. Poppy, make sure you eat your grapefruit.”

  Obediently, he ate a grapefruit alone by the hotel pool. He dressed up even for this humble occasion, because military habits die hard, especially when they have been acquired over many years and at considerable psychological expense. In this respect he was unlike Jimmie. The panama laid to one side, the plump linens, the suede drivers easy on his feet. I shall grow old, I shall grow old, went his mantra, I shall smoke my cigarettes rolled. All the worst expectations had come brilliantly true, as they always must.

  The wealthy foreigners staying at the Bratseras got up later than he did and so he had an hour by himself next to the ripening lemon trees with only the Russian waitress to talk to. He read his e-mails, emptied his mind of the night’s unpleasant dreams, and went over the notes he had made the evening before over a lonely dinner. Days had gone by with no word from Jimmie. It was an unprecedented aberration. He had explained it to Minnie, because he was showing signs of insomnia and anxiety about Jimmie’s disappearance and she had noticed. Finally, she had suggested that he take a plane down to Athens and sort it out on the ground. It was the only way to resolve something difficult, and with that he had wholeheartedly agreed. His old friend paid him, and paid him handsomely, to look over his shoulder and ward off the dangers, the inconveniences and the sudden disasters that are always waiting to happen to a man like Jimmie Codrington. He was “the sword,” as Jimmie had called him, the old man who sorted out the young ones. There was a great and secretive bond between them, formed by a long friendship, that had ended by being a form of patronage when Rockhold had fallen on hard times. Jimmie’s business dealings were far-flung and lacking in all transparence; he dabbled in things that attracted him because they were dangerous. Rockhold was like the bodyguard one never sees or hears, though his function was not a physical one most of the time. He was too old for that. “You’re my eyes and ears,” Jimmie often said to him to reassure him that he was always needed, and he would add, “My intuitions and hunches, too.” They talked every day, or almost. When his friend didn’t answer his phones for days, Rockhold knew that it was time to move and search and resolve.

  He had only been to Greece once before, many years earlier. It was an unfamiliar theater of operations. He decided not to jump to any conclusions nor to panic, and so he took it one day at a time, with an open mind. But the situation was baffling. It was eccentric, for one thing, for Jimmie and Funny to not even be on the island; the girl was as distant and remote as her father had often portrayed her. Though a “quisling”? That was a little too sharp. She was just a smooth actor, though a smooth actor is certainly not to be underrated. He went down to the port after his breakfast and ambled slowly among the idle yachts to see if he could “pocket” any early risers on the decks or the quays, mariners manning small boats who might recognize the photograph he carried of Naomi. Day after day he did this, until he found the old Greek who had rented her the boat in which she had gone to Palamidas.

  It was understood that Naomi had paid for his silence, but he gave this precious silence up for a slightly greater sum. His English was fragmentary, but it was enough. Rockhold got the word “Palamidas” out of him.

  He went back to the hotel and asked the two middle-aged ladies manning the desk if he could hire a translator for the week. One of them had a nephew who would be glad to make a few euros, and he was at the hotel within an hour. It was a boy of about sixteen whose English was good enough, and they went together back to the port and rented the boat. Since neither of them knew how to use it, they rented the owner as well.

  Through the boy, Rockhold asked him to take them to where he had taken Naomi. It was an easy request to fulfill. The sail to Palamidas passed along the coastline that Rockhold had heard about many times from Jimmie. The villas, the steps, the burned-dry hills. But it didn’t impress him as much as he had expected. The odor of foreign wealth lay upon it. At Palamidas they left the boatman at the shore, and Rockhold and the boy climbed up the hillside where the boatman said the girl had gone many times. Surely, he added, to Episkopi. They reached it at about ten o’clock.

  To Rockhold’s eye it looked to be a different world from the villas of the coast. It was abandoned and windswept, and he liked it better. A thoroughly miserable place, but miserable precisely because it was beautiful—and vice versa. The south, he thought. They knocked at some houses.

  Before long they saw two men smoking pipes and reclining at their ease on a grass slope. The old shepherds had turned intransigent gazes upon the newcomers, but they made no motion of acknowledgment or welcome. Rockhold and the boy struggled up to them and the boy made the first greeting.

  “This gentleman is looking for a girl,” he said to them. They glanced up at the strangers with a cool, even flagrant, disregard. “Here is her photograph.”

  The picture of Naomi brought a quick snort to one of the men.

  “Ah, that one!”

  The boy translated, but Rockhold betrayed no feeling.

  “He recognizes her?”

  After the translation the man said, “She was up here to see her lover. I rented him the shack.”

  “Which shack?”

  “Up there.” The man flicked a hand toward a run-down hovel higher up.

  “Lover?” Rockhold said.

  “Eh, she had an Arab in there. He was there a few nights. It’s against the law, but I didn’t say anything.”

  “What was his name?” Rockhold asked.

  “How should I
know? I didn’t invite him round to tea.”

  “How do you know he was an Arab?”

  “I can tell them a mile off. I saw his boat arrive. They dropped him off, then left. That was unusual.”

  “You didn’t tell the police?”

  The men looked away finally, and the pipes absorbed them.

  “She must have paid them,” the boy said quietly to Rockhold in English.

  So that’s how it works here, the Englishman thought.

  You paid a man off, he held his tongue, and secrets went to ground.

  “Can you ask him if she did?” he persisted.

  But the boy shook his head. Such questions were extremely impolite.

  Rockhold asked if he could go up and have a look at the hut, and the man agreed without visible reluctance.

  “I haven’t touched it since he left,” he said to the boy.

  Rockhold went up there alone. The hut was a shambles, but there was nothing in it that betrayed the presence of a stranger. He went through it quickly and then came back out into the sun. So Naomi had had a lover up here. Had she told Jimmie and Phaine?

  When he went back down, the Greeks were laughing all together. He had the feeling, unconfirmed, that they were laughing at him. Undeniably, he was no longer a dashing figure, but he was annoyed that the boy had apparently joined them in their mockery. He took out his notebook by way of retaliation.

  “When did Naomi last come up here?”

  Predictably, the man was vague.

  “A few weeks ago. I can’t remember. They left together.”

  “She and the lover?”

  “They went down to the resort. My cousin says they checked in there together.”

  “And she never came back?”

  “Why would she? She wasn’t coming to see us.”

  “Well, then we’ll go to the resort,” Rockhold said to the boy.

  When they got there the receptionist wanted to know who he was and why he was asking questions. Rockhold said that he was trying to find a young friend, a man who had stayed there with an English girl.

  “The man in room 34?”

  “I don’t know what room it was.”

  He showed them Naomi’s face and it was agreed: room 34.

  “When did he leave?”

  The girl looked through the book and saw that it had been only ten days earlier.

  Rockhold wrote everything down in his notebook. He wanted to go and look at the room. He asked her if the young man had left his ID with them to photocopy. But it had been Naomi who had done so.

  “And the young man,” he kept trying, “do you know where he went from here?”

  The girl shook her head slowly. “Guests don’t tell us where they are going.”

  When he had finished his interview, he gave the boy forty euros and told him to take the boat back to Hydra with the boatman. He wanted to return on foot himself. There was only one path winding its way to the port and it was impossible to get lost on it. In truth, he was relieved to be alone again. Being a great hiker, he was always inclined to hit the road alone.

  When he had climbed out of sight of Palamidas he felt more contemplative. He walked slowly, never letting himself get out of breath, and he took the inclines with care. An hour later he was at Kamini. He sat in Kodylenia’s and watched the sea. Something told him that the sea was the key to the mystery with which he was confronted, because the lover had emerged from it and it was likely that he now had to track the lover. Jimmie had left a last message on his phone and it had not been quite “right.” Call me back. It was the kind of message that the irascible and confident millionaire might well leave, but there was something wrong about its timing. The early hours of the morning, Greek time.

  Farther along the path he passed a few of the villas with their blue shutters and their porches filled with amphorae. Donkeys in the surrounding fields stood untethered in their own pools of midday shadow, the verges conquered by dark blue flowers. A family sat eating lunch with wind chimes tinkling around them. They looked up; he doffed his hat in his courtly way and one could see why the Codringtons lived here, because despite the new wealth and its trash it was, just under its shiny skin, the old Europe still. A few shreds of manners survived from the old days. He had learned to say “Kalo apogevma” and smile, and at the Bratseras he took a siesta and then swam in the hotel pool with a feeling of detachment from which the traces of religion had not been entirely withdrawn. That feeling was imposed on all living things by a Mycenaean sky and a scent of lemons.

  —

  At the villa, Naomi had spent several days by herself. She slept in the salon because she couldn’t bear to go upstairs to the bedrooms, and there, like a squatter, she lived on bread, feta, and the robust tomatoes that she bought every morning in the port market. Rudderless, day by day she sunbathed on the terrace and her nightmares came by noon’s terrible light. This left her nights unusually empty and free of worry. She ate at the same table where she used to eat with Jimmie and Phaine. She served herself wine and afterward mixed a cocktail while listening to Jimmie’s jazz. Above the record player there was an old photograph of him sitting inside Ronnie Scott’s in London with a Castro-size cigar, staring out at the unfriendly future that would eventually erase him. She rolled a joint after a few squares of chocolate, and all in all it was not what she had wanted or planned; it was just what had happened.

  In the afternoons she sometimes walked down to Mandraki and beyond, taking care not to cross paths with the Haldanes. She lay alone on the hot slopes and waited for the girl in the rowing boat to appear. She was glad to talk to someone in Greek and exchange a few euros for the precious weed. Someone who didn’t know her or Jimmie and Phaine. Dorinda was surely not the girl’s real name, but she was not in any way duplicitous. The girl tethered the boat and they sat together among the burning rocks.

  “I see the Turk left and went to the mainland,” Dorinda said.

  “He’s not Turkish.”

  “He came from there. My boyfriend told me about it.”

  “They all come from there.”

  “Maybe they do, by God.”

  “By God” was lovelier in Greek: apo ton theo.

  “I thought it was a shipwreck.”

  “Maybe it was, apo ton theo. What do you think?”

  “Me?” Naomi said. “I don’t care about anything anymore.”

  “It’s a good attitude. Are you staying for the summer?”

  “For a while. I always stay for the summer.”

  “I have some new clients here—from Athens. If you come this way I’ll be here every day. I’ll be a millionaire by September!”

  The weed that Naomi smoked on her terrace was earthy and hard-hitting, and it laid her low for the nights when she couldn’t sleep. On rare occasions, Sam joined her and they played checkers and danced together to Jimmie’s records. The American girl was becoming leaner and more tanned. Her hair had begun to show sun-dried streaks, and Naomi knew that she was hanging out with a boy about whom she never spoke.

  “But where is Carissa?” Sam asked. “Isn’t she supposed to be back by now?”

  “She comes back tomorrow morning. But I’ve decided to let her go. There’s nothing for her to do now. She’ll be upset, though.”

  “She won’t turn on you?”

  Naomi had been considering exactly this.

  “Anyone can turn on anyone. But she won’t.”

  “She’s loyal to the family?”

  “Something like that.”

  Sam snorted scornfully. “That’s a good one!”

  “It’s the way we are here, little Sam.”

  They got drunk together on mastika, and in the night’s heat their skin became lustrous. Sam told her that her father had become curious about the whereabouts of the Codringtons, and had asked whether they had left the island for good. She’d told him that for all she knew they had. There was some time yet before they returned to New York, and the nightmare was going to consist in keeping
up the lie.

  “I know, Sam. But we just have to go on as we are. Everyone leaves the island in September. The place is deserted. At that point we’re home safe. You just have to believe.”

  —

  At seven Naomi went down to the port to meet Carissa on the ferry. She dressed in black like a young widow, with sunglasses and red lipstick, and sat at the cafe closest to the dock where the boat would arrive. Carissa saw her at once as she came down the gangplank: healthy-looking, slightly plumper, having gorged on mama’s cooking for a few days. She wore a new dress and looked, to Naomi’s eyes, completely different—suaver and less demoralized. It was the effect, too, of not having to endure Phaine’s bullying and Jimmie’s priapic antics. She had gone back to her people and she had thrived. Perhaps it would make her more difficult to deal with.

  It was the first thing that occurred to Naomi, and it turned out to be true. They rented a donkey to carry Carissa’s lone bag up to the villa, and on the way they stopped in leisurely fashion at a bar. The employer-employee relation had disappeared completely. They had always liked each other and had always been complicit. But now that the Codringtons were dead the pivot had shifted and Carissa had lost her mild subservience.

  Her Greek was rough and obscene now, and she bawled with laughter when the barmen made jokes that were directed at the two single girls. Naomi was ruffled, but she held her own. She thought she might as well broach the difficult subject at once, and she asked Carissa if she really wanted to carry on working at the house now that it served no purpose.

  “I’ve been thinking about it,” the girl said without even blinking. “You know I’ve been with your family for seven years. But I saved up some money.”

  “I’m glad to hear that.”