by Declan Burke
Then down off the ferry into the port, Rossi pushing the suitcase rather than pulling, one of the little wheels gone wonky, Rossi steering it all over the port like he was divining for water. Puce even before they made the gate, inventing a whole new language, like he'd seen the Rapture and got Tourette's rather than the gift of tongues. Once they made it outside, the possibilities, Mel rattling them off from the guide book, opened up more or less straight away – on the right the ferry terminal for the Ionian islands, with the bus station farther along the other side of the street. The train station opposite that, backing onto the sea. The place when they got in bristling with energy, engines hissing, a PA crackling in what Sleeps presumed to be Greek.
'The next one,' Mel said, consulting the timetable that wasn't just a foreign language, Sleeps intrigued by a whole new alphabet, 'goes in ten minutes. From here, Platform 1.'
'I'm leaving,' Rossi said, 'no fuckin place from no platform fuckin anything. You ever see Michael take a train?'
'Michael?' Mel said.
'Corleone,' Sleeps clarified.
Mel rolled her eyes. 'We could always cab out to the airport,' she said, 'take a flight.'
'Because,' Rossi approved, patting the suitcase, 'there'll be no customs, x-ray machines, on internal flights.'
'I don't know about that,' Mel said. 'But that way? We don't know for sure what time we get in to Palermo. On top of that, once we touch down, we still have to get from the airport out to the cruise port.'
'And even internal flights,' Sleeps said, 'go a lot higher than whirly chairs.'
'Eight minutes,' Mel said.
Rossi kicked the suitcase.
'There's always the bus,' Sleeps said.
'The bus?' Rossi, shocked, stared at Sleeps. 'The fuckin bus?'
'You don't want to take --'
'Why don't we,' Rossi said, 'just start hitching lifts? Or walk it? I mean, am I right? We're sharking two hundred grand, muling a little coke, trying to get a connection set up. You see what I'm saying. Johnny Priest says, "So how'd you get to Palermo?" I say, "It was sweet, man. We took the bus."' He spat. 'The guy'd bust a fucking gut.'
'Why would he have to know?' Sleeps said.
'I'd know.' Rossi thumped a thumb into his chest. 'Me.'
'Six minutes,' Mel said, drowned out by the droning PA that was, Sleeps supposed, saying the same thing as Mel, only in Greek. Sleeps, okay, was buzzing on the crizz, a little lightheaded from being up thirty-six hours. But intoxicated too by all the newness, everything fresh no matter where you looked.
'In this game?' Rossi said. 'What you need to be is independent. Covering all the angles. Like, what if the train breaks down? We're in fuckin Sicily, for Chrissakes. Chickens hanging out windows, the works.'
'I don't know about that,' Sleeps said. 'Sicily is a pretty modern country.'
'It's part of the Inter-Rail network,' Mel confirmed.
'Um, excuse me?'
Rossi whirled around on the guy with the bandana, the Ramones t-shirt. 'What?'
'You guys taking the train?'
'Who wants to know?'
'Uh, me,' the guy said. Exaggerating it, Sleeps could tell. Enjoying his own joke.
'I fuckin know it's --' Rossi began.
'How can we help?' Sleeps cut in.
'I'm just wondering if you know what time the next train leaves for Athens.'
'Dunno,' Rossi snapped, turning away. 'We're for Palermo.'
'Five minutes,' Mel said quickly. 'And it goes from here, Platform 1.'
The guy shook his head. 'They're saying that one's delayed,' he said, 'or maybe cancelled. But everyone's talking Greek, so I don't know when the next one's going.'
'It's all, er, Greek to us too,' Mel said.
Rossi, fuming, mopped sweat off his forehead with the cuff of the fatigues. 'I'm not on my way to Palermo inside the next hour,' he said, 'other than on any fuckin trains or buses, I'm stabbing some fucker in the heart. I'll do it, Sleeps.'
Sleeps heaved a sigh. 'I'll see what I can do,' he said.
Ray
Ray, like practically everyone else in the Peloponnese, had heard Anna howl. Then, from across the street, watched Karen march out of the ferry terminal and turn right to where the train station was right there, convenient, practically on the docks. Karen staring straight ahead in case she might see Ray somewhere and have to admit she was maybe looking out for him. Everyone giving her a wide berth, one girl and her wolf. One thing Ray didn't have to worry about, Karen wouldn't be mugged for any khaki duffels while Anna was around.
He cut diagonally across the street, angling towards a café beside the bus depot, a place he could watch the train station and see Karen coming out if for some reason the Greeks objected to transporting a wolf on their rail network. Took a seat in the shade, ordered a frappe and asked for ice in it, sparked a Marlboro light. An oily heat from the traffic shimmering the air, the sun high and fierce.
For a while he toyed with the notion of hopping the ferry to Italy, one due in from Bari in an hour or so. Ray liked good pizza. But the idea of going back on board so soon after an overnight from Trieste was too much, and Ray wasn't fully convinced as to why he should be the one, Karen coming the prima donna, to leave the country.
This was when he saw Rossi playing sherpas, pushing a suitcase along the other side of the street, Rossi togged out like a soldier now, his ragtag platoon dandering along behind him in civvies having a ball pointing stuff out to one another, Hey, lookit that, it's a cute little train station. Ray holding his breath, willing them to keep going …
No go. A brief discussion outside, Rossi jabbing his forefinger around like he was conducting a mini-orchestra, something upbeat, Beethoven's Fifth, and then they all trudged into the dark maw.
So Ray had to decide fast, twist or stick. Except, twist and Karen'd know he was watching over her, Karen the independent type, none too keen on guys lurking in the shrubbery with her best interests at heart. Sticking, that all came down to one thing, whether Rossi was liable to try something in a public place, witnesses all over.
It was Ray, if he was Rossi, he'd have sat tight, watched Karen off the train in Athens, tailed her from a discreet distance. Except Ray wasn't Rossi. And what Ray knew of the guy, this coming from Karen, who was biased, okay, but Rossi was unpredictable. It comes to Rossi, she'd said, you need eyes in the back of your eyes …
Then there was the last Ray'd heard from Rossi, up at the lake, Ray down for the count and still in shock after shipping the round that broke bone, Rossi hunkering down to say, 'Don't try and find me, Ray. No kidding. You won't even see me coming.'
So there was that, too. Ray and threats a bad mix.
He eased his arm out of the sling, packed the sling away in the hold-all. Pulled the shirt-sleeve down over the cast, buttoned it tight, tucked a five under his frappé and shouldered the bag, zigzagged through the traffic across the street. Still no idea of what he was going to do. But pretty sure he'd have enough, busted arm or otherwise, to face down Rossi. This being the plan until he made it to the front of the station and the big guy, Rossi's muscle wearing a t-shirt with a big pink daisy, came ambling out. Ray had a quick scan to make sure Rossi wasn't toddling along in his wake and said, 'Hey.'
The big guy paused. 'Yeah?'
'Don't suppose you know,' Ray nodded at the station, 'what time the next train goes to Athens?'
'The one that was supposed to go now,' the guy said, 'that's delayed, or maybe cancelled. Anyway it's not going.' He shrugged. 'Don't ask me when the next one goes.'
'Not waiting for it, huh?'
Whatever the guy said was drowned out by a mournful blare, a long hiss, the unmistakable shunting of rolling stock. The guy looking back at the station now, frowning as he scratched his jaw.
'Thought you said it wasn't going,' Ray said.
'Was what we were told,' the big guy said. He shrugged again. 'Must be for someplace else.'
'Probably, yeah.' Ray wriggled his shoulder, getting the
bag comfortable. 'You in a hurry,' he said, 'to get to Athens?'
The big guy blinking at him now. 'Why?'
'We could rent a car,' Ray said. 'You and me. Split it two ways.'
'There's three of us,' the guy said. He jerked a thumb over his shoulder. 'Two more in there.'
'Better still,' Ray said. 'A four-way split. That'd make it about what we'd pay on the train anyway.'
'I dunno,' the big guy said. Working the angles, Ray could tell. Trying to nail the scam. He said, 'I don't have any, y'know, credit card or nothing.'
'I'll rent the car,' Ray said, 'you can sort me out with cash. Yeah? Meet you back here, say half-an-hour. Are we on?'
'Yeah, okay. Half-an-hour.'
'Or thereabouts. I'm late, don't go running off, stiffing me for the whole car.'
'No worries,' the big guy said. He put out a hand. 'I'm Gary, by the way.'
'Jerry,' Ray said. They shook. 'Nice to meet you, Gary.'
'Likewise, I'm sure.' The guy hesitated. 'Listen, there's just one thing.'
'What's that?'
'You pick us up, any chance you'd mind pretending we're on Sicily, headed for Palermo?'
Karen
'Most people,' Pyle was saying, 'everyone's got a camera these days, they're happy with photographs, nice little keepsakes to jog the memory. Others, they want more, maybe they got engaged, fell in love. Something they can hang on the wall over the fireplace.'
He'd come over in '65, twenty-one years old, to serve his obligatory year in the Greek army, help keep an eye on the perfidious Turks. Lasted two months, Pyle refusing to say why, then found he couldn't go home. The disgrace, mainly. 'That and no one would pay my ticket.' So he bummed around Greece making sketches, landscapes mostly, he never did have an eye for people. Met Cohen on Idria. 'You know Leonard Cohen?'
'Not personally,' Karen said.
'Funny guy, you wouldn't think it from the songs. And Marianne, man, she was a looker. Soul to go with it too.' Leonard persuading Pyle he had talent, was an artist. 'But he told everyone that. Mostly I think he was trying to convince himself.'
Either way, Pyle stuck at it. Rode out the whole Colonels farrago, passing for Greek, Pyle fairly fluent, courtesy of his father, from long before he arrived in Greece. Then the tourists started coming back. Pyle being bi-lingual, he kind of fell into tour-guiding, week-long excursions into the islands. Bringing the sketchpad along. People started to notice, offered to pay for his drawings, the roughs. Wasn't long before he had his own shop, a one-room gallery up a side-street off the waterfront on Paros. 'I was never going to be rich, but I was living in the islands, all that sun, the people. And the light, Christ. Lawrence Durrell, you know him?'
'Again, not personally.'
'"God's eyeball," he called it. Which,' Pyle said, 'isn't something you capture with a camera unless you're professional, and good. Ever see that View over Toledo, El Greco?'
Karen nodding along, then shaking her head. The baked earth though the windows shimmering like hot biscuits, enough to dry out her eyes just looking at it.
'Man, that's a picture. They got it in the Met, in New York, it's a force a fuckin nature. It's Spain, okay, but the light's the same … And El Greco, the Greek, was from Crete originally. Although, my own favourite? Laocoon, with the nude guys fighting snakes.'
'Nude?'
'What'd be the point of fighting snakes in togas? It's art, for Chrissakes.'
'And people email you their photos, is that it?'
'Telling me where they took it, all the details, what date. Even what time of day, if they can remember. So I can get the right angle, the light.'
'And off you go, easel under your arm.'
'Hi-ho, hi-ho,' Pyle grinned. Lying back in the seat opposite, the khaki duffel on the seat beside him, Anna's head resting on that. Gazing up at the guy now, her soulful brown eyes unblinking while he scratched between her ears.
'You don't just paint them from the photograph?' Karen said.
'Such cynicism from one so young and cynical.' He shrugged. 'I like the islands, Karen, being free to travel around. Anyway, a photograph? It's like one tile in a mosaic. I go where they were, I get to see what they saw, the whole vista, see if I can't give them more of a sense of it all. More the way they remember than how they saw it.'
'So what have you got on now?'
'Coupla things,' Pyle said. 'I generally let 'em build up, four or five, then take off for a month. One's up to the Acropolis, although a little different than usual, looking down into the amphitheatre, a nice sunset kicking in from off to your right, the west, the sky's a lovely bluey-green, like mouldy turquoise. Then there's the monastery over on Amorgos, you ever been?' Karen shook her head. 'Beautiful place,' Pyle said. 'Very peaceful. You can see why the monks hang out there. That movie, The Big Blue? They shot a lot of the exteriors there.'
Anna batting her tail against Karen's legs, making these squirmy whines way back in her throat. The girl responding, Karen believed, as much to Pyle's growly Southern drawl as his fingers scratching between her ears. He was easy on the eye too, greying but still cool, claiming one-half Greek, a quarter Spanish, one-eighth Cherokee. What she liked best was how he didn't give her the third-degree about who she was running away from back in Patras. Just rolled with it, leaving it to Karen whether she told him or not.
She said, 'I should mention, I've never seen Anna react like this before. Usually you'd be missing an arm by now, at least an arm. I mean, the girl's a killer twice over.'
Pyle grinned, chucked Anna under the chin. 'Pop was a park ranger,' he said, 'although originally a keeper at Athens Zoo, this before the Nazis came in. Anyway, when I was a kid? I wanted to be a park ranger too. Y'know, like Old Smokey?' Karen shook her head. Pyle shrugged. 'What I'm saying is, I always got on okay with the animals. Pop got posted to Alaska one time, Christ, we must've been the only Greeks in Alaska. The bears'd come in raiding the garbage, I'd be out there waving like they were Yogi and Boo-Boo. I never got this close to a wolf, though. Saw some from a helicopter once, Pop tracking these good ol' boys on Alaskan safari, so loaded they couldn't even hit their own fuckin helicopter from inside. Basically, they chased the poor bastards to death.'
Karen, a first time for everything, found herself wishing she was twenty years older, just for one night.
'So this gallery,' she said. 'Who looks after it when you're away?'
Pyle smiled. 'I had a dollar for every time I heard that question,' he said, 'I wouldn't need any gallery.'
'I'll just bet,' Karen said. 'But what I'm wondering is, did any of them ever offer to buy their way in?'
Doyle
First thing Doyle said to Sparks after kissing her cheek was, 'We're leaving.'
'But I only just got here.'
Doyle took one of Sparks' bags and marched off across the tiny terminal, out into the blinding glare to the cab she'd had wait right there at the front entrance. 'It's a volcano,' she said when they were in. 'The entire island, it's a live volcano. They've lost whole civilisations here.'
'Like, thousands of years ago.'
Doyle stared. 'You knew about that?'
'You didn't?'
Doyle was always the last to know. 'I checked,' she said. 'Last time the balloon went up was in the year of our Lord nineteen-hundred and fifty. Which sounds to me like it's well overdue another balloon.'
Sparks shrugged. 'Where're we going?'
'First place that doesn't have cataclysmic destruction.'
'What about Niko and this friend of his?'
'He'll be ringing later.'
'What if he rings the Santorini code?'
'Then we find ourselves a new Niko.'
Sparks left it until the cab dropped them off at the port. With an hour or so to kill, they took a couple of coffees over to the edge of the dock, sat with their legs dangling. 'You okay?' Sparks said.
'I don't know.'
'What's up?'
'Ever been shot at, Sparks?'
'Nope.
'
'Me neither. Not 'til Tuesday.'
'You're feeling it?'
'It's bubbling up, yeah.'
'So let it go.'
'I'm thinking I might. Soon as we're on the ferry, okay?'
'Fine by me.'
Doyle held on until the ferry cleared the rocky point that marked the last of Santorini. Then bawled. Going into it deep, barely aware of Sparks rubbing her back. The hard bubble in her chest taking a while to puncture, then easing out slow, one heave at a time. Coming out of it she heard Sparks say, 'Yeah, morning sickness. She's pregnant to some gypsy guy, he ran off last night. It's a tragedy.'
Doyle came up laughing through more tears, snuffling snot and wiping her eyes. A middle-aged Greek waiter standing there agog, tray dangling. Sparks said, 'While you're there, Zorb, I'll be having a mojito, heavy on the mint. Doyle?'
So they had a nice buzz on by the time the first island hove over the horizon. Early evening, like walking into a giant warm sponge coming down the ramp, Doyle oozing a slow sweat in the small of her back. They skirted the knot of hawkers with their day-glo signs promising swimming pools, A/C, asses milk in the bath, Doyle in no state to deal with a babble that sounded a lot like miners hawking up dust. They crossed the square and found a vacant table at the first café they came to, ordered cheeseburgers and beers. The square was lined on two sides with cafés, hostels, tourist bureaus. A life-size greeny-bronze statue on a roundabout of dusty white marble. The place quiet now the ferry was gone, the port officials in their white uniforms strolling back to base, the hawkers dispersed. Some backpackers, the stragglers, still wandering around, dazed by the heat. Across the way, in middle of the yachts moored against the dock, was one mocked up like a pirate ship, Jolly Roger and all, below that the Swiss flag, Doyle liked the combo.