Levkas Man

by Innes, Hammond;

  I shrugged it off and turned to the tent. It was still there and when I peered inside the first thing I saw was the stone lamp. He wouldn’t have gone without that surely? There was his camera, too, and his notebooks, and the sleeping bag was neatly spread as though it hadn’t been slept in that night. I called his name then, but there was no answer except the sound of my voice echoing back from the cliff above. And when I had clambered to the top of the rubble, I could see at a glance that he wasn’t in the cave. It was in dark shadow, of course, but I could see right to the rock fall and there was no way through.

  I went back to the platform then and searched about for some way by which he could have climbed to the heights above or made his way to the end of the promontory. But the cliff was almost sheer, the great scooped-out hollow in it sealing the platform off entirely. There was no possible way of leaving the place except by the path up which I had climbed. And here, at the south end of the channel, it was a long swim across to Meganisi. To get away he would have to have had a boat.

  Zavelas and the Customs official had arrived by the time I got down to the gut again and Holroyd was talking to them. ‘God knows,’ I heard him say, and Zavelas nodded: ‘We will see Pappadimas, but first we must wait for Kotiadis.’ He saw me and his eyebrows lifted. ‘You don’t find him, eh? Then you must go back to your boat and tell your skipper he is to stay here. I guess Kotiadis won’t be long now.’

  ‘We can’t anchor here,’ I said. ‘It’s too deep.’

  He conferred with the Customs official. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Then you must go back to Vathy and wait there. You cannot leave without your transit-log. You understand?’

  I could hear the chug of Coromandel’s diesel very close, and once I had manœuvred the dinghy out of the gut, I had only a few yards to row. Seeing me come off alone Bert knew something was wrong and his face, behind the glass windshield, looked sullen and angry as he backed out into mid-Channel and cut the engine. ‘Well, what’s happened? Where is he?’ And when I told him, he shouted at me, ‘Then find him, for Christ’s sake. The bloody old fool!’ And he rounded on Florrie. ‘Why the hell did you persuade me to come back this way? If we’d gone direct to Pantelleria—’

  ‘Paul had to come.’

  ‘Why? Why did he have to come this way?’ And he added, his words coming wildly, ‘Paul wants this.’ Paul wants that. And this daft old man buggering up the whole trip.’

  ‘You’re behaving like a child,’ she said stiffly.

  ‘So I’m like a child, am I? Well, I’ll tell you this—if we lose the boat, I’m through. I’ll leave you and go back to the Persian Gulf. Make some real dough before I’m too old.’

  ‘You’re too old now,’ she said. ‘You’ll always be too old.’ And she turned and went below, leaving him with a shocked look on his face.

  ‘Christ!’ he breathed. ‘I should have left that bitch years ago. All the things I’ve done to keep her happy …’ His face had crumpled, a sad, tired face on the verge of tears. ‘To hell with her! You, too—to hell with you both!’ And he went into the wheelhouse, standing there, staring at the chart, anything to drive out the loneliness that was in him.

  He was a failure and he knew it, and I was sorry for him. ‘I’m going ashore again now,’ I said.

  He nodded, not saying anything, not looking at me, a shut look on his face. God! I thought. Loneliness must be a terrible thing, the loneliness of a marriage gone wrong. And I had contributed to it. Without thinking I had thrust them over the edge of neutrality into open hostility. I felt guilty. But there was nothing I could do about it. If it hadn’t been me, it would have been somebody else. Probably had been. Probably she’d thrown herself at other men.

  I got back into the dinghy then and rowed towards the Levkas shore, leaving Coromandel drifting, with him standing there alone in the wheelhouse, not caring any longer. There was only Vassilios in the gut now. The others had gone up to the cave. He helped me ashore, and when I reached the platform I found them clustered around the tent, the old man’s notebooks lying on the ground and Holroyd standing with the stone lamp in his hand. ‘Do you know what this is?’ he asked me and there was an undercurrent of excitement in his voice.

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘Where did he get it?’ He was looking at me intently, holding the thing in his two hands carefully as though it were some fragile piece of glass. ‘Brought it with him, I suppose—like those skull fragments.’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘No?’ He sounded doubtful. ‘I’ve seen stone lamps like these in the museum at Les Eyzies and at the Grotte de la Mouthe.’ He turned it in his hands, looking down at it with extraordinary intensity, like a connoisseur examining some precious antique. ‘Are you sure he didn’t bring it with him?’

  ‘Why are you so interested?’ I asked.

  He stared at it a moment longer, and then he put it down on the ground, carefully, and with obvious reluctance. ‘Do you know what it was used for?’ he asked.

  ‘To light their cave-shelters, I imagine.’

  He nodded. ‘But in the Vézère—at de la Mouthe and in some of the other caves—their cave artists used these lamps to light their work. That’s how they painted in the dark recesses of their cave temples.’ He had turned and was staring towards the shadowed hollow of the overhang. ‘We’ll go up there, shall we, and have another look?’

  ‘There’s nothing there,’ I said. ‘Just the cave blocked by a rock fall.’

  He was looking at me, trying to read a motive behind my words. ‘Winters tells me Dr Van der Voort was working night and day to clear it. Why?’

  I shrugged, not wishing to excite his interest further. There was the sound of an outboard in the channel, a small boat headed for the gut. I could see Sonia in the bows so it must be Pappadimas. ‘I’ll be up at the cave,’ Holroyd said, and he started up the slope, his white shirt flapping round his legs.

  ‘It don’t make sense to me,’ Zavelas said, ‘leaving his camera and his notes.’ He bent down and picked up one of the notebooks. ‘Know what language this is?’ he asked, handing it to me. I opened it to see the familiar spidery writing, but no meaning to the words. ‘It sure ain’t English.’

  ‘No,’ I said, sensing his uneasiness. As an ex-policeman he was intrigued by the mystery of my father’s disappearance, but overlying that was his political responsibilities, and the notebooks worried him. They worried me, too, for I knew they weren’t written in Afrikaans.

  He glanced at his watch and then at the channel. The white of a bow wave showed beyond the northern tip of Meganisi, ‘Kotiadis?’ I asked.

  He nodded. ‘I think so.’ He sounded relieved, anxious to hand the problem over to higher authority.

  Sonia’s reaction to the news, which she had heard from Vassilios, was one of absolute disbelief that my father’s disappearance was deliberate. ‘Something happened—an accident. He would never have left this place till he had got through that rock fall. You know that, Paul. You said last night that he was obsessed by the need to break through it. How could you possibly think he would abandon it?’ She was breathless from her hurried climb, her voice coming in quick gasps. ‘Have you searched the rocks?’ And she added, ‘I sent Pappadimas to search the channel, just in case.’

  I did my best to calm her. He’d disappeared once before. Why not again? With Holroyd in the vicinity I thought anything was possible. As for an accidental fall, he was as surefooted as a goat. But she didn’t believe me. ‘You say Professor Holroyd was already here when you arrived. Have you thought what might have happened when he met Dr Van der Voort? Suppose …’ she stared at me, her meaning obvious.

  ‘Then we’d have found his body floating in the water.’

  ‘Not if he was unconscious. And Professor Holroyd may have been here before—during the night.’ It was what she wanted to believe—anything, even murder, rather than face the alternative that the old man’s mind had given way.

  ‘Holroyd’s surprise at finding him gone w
as genuine,’ I said.

  But she wouldn’t accept that. ‘Something terrible has happened. I feel it. I feel it here.’ And she banged her hand against her firm little breasts. And then quite suddenly she turned on me as though I were to blame. ‘You don’t want to believe me, do you? You leave me money for him, and you think that’s that. You don’t want to be involved in any trouble.’ The way she said it reminded me of Florrie hitting out at her husband and it made me suddenly mean.

  ‘You tell me I’m running out on him once more, and by Christ I’ll give you a hiding you won’t forget.’

  ‘You said it, I didn’t,’ she flashed.

  Zavelas put his big hand on my shoulder. ‘I think we go up to the cave now.’

  Holroyd was down at the far end, close by the rock fall, brushing at the wall with his handkerchief. He had a torch in his hand and he moved it back and forth the way my father had done. ‘Do you see?’ he cried, turning to us as we crowded the entrance of the cave. He didn’t bother to conceal his excitement. ‘Look!’ And he began to trace it for us with his finger. It was the rhinoceros the old man had traced for me—the rump, the tail, the two hind legs. ‘Some sort of animal,’ he said. ‘Do you see it?’

  ‘Yes, I see it,’ Sonia said and her voice seemed to mirror his own excitement.

  ‘That lamp,’ Holroyd went on, addressing himself to me. ‘Now we know what it was used for and that he found it here.’

  But all I could think of was the rhinoceros. Some sort of animal. Holroyd didn’t know what it was—couldn’t know, for the forelegs, all the head, were hidden by the rock fall. Or was this another outline? Had the old man found more animals etched deeper in the cave? ‘Give me the torch,’ I said and grabbed it from him, peering along the wall. But there was the elephant, a few feet nearer the entrance and coated thick with a new layer of dust. I heard Sonia’s voice behind me exclaim, ‘Lieve help! Surely that’s an animal. I can see the dome of its head.’ She caught hold of my arm. ‘It’s what I told you—he’d never have left this place of his own accord.’

  I brushed her hand away and turned the torch on the cave end, on to the fall itself. The rocks were pale-coloured, sharpedged, but that didn’t prove anything. A new fall would look no different from the old fall opened up. But he’d a crowbar here and his geological hammer. The beam of the torch revealed no sign of any tools, and when I directed it above our heads it showed the roof, badly cracked and faulted. ‘Epikindynos—sighá!’ Zavelas exclaimed. ‘Is dangerous.’

  ‘It must have been that earth tremor,’ I said, and I swung the beam of the torch back to the lines marking the rump of the rhinoceros. ‘Two nights ago he showed me the whole outline. He had just cleared it—the head, the horn, the whole animal. Now look at it, and he was working here all day yesterday.’ I turned to Holroyd. ‘Better collect Cartwright and Hans and start digging. Can you get some of your own people down here?’ I asked Zavelas.

  He nodded, quick to grasp my meaning, but not moving. ‘No hurry now,’ he said gently, and, with the two first fingers and thumb of his right hand together, he touched his forehead from right to left in the Orthodox manner. I saw Sonia’s face very white in the beam of the torch. She didn’t say anything. She knew as well as I did that Zavelas was right—the old man couldn’t possibly have survived under the weight of that fall.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Holroyd said, and to give him his due I think he meant it. Probably this was something anthropologists feared, an occupational hazard. ‘I’ll move camp up here and we’ll start work right away.’ His eyes strayed towards the rhinoceros and I knew the incentive to dig was not the recovery of my father’s body. His gaze shifted to the roof, squinting up at the cracks as though assessing the danger, measuring it against the scientific potentials. ‘We’ll be back here with all our gear in about an hour.’ And he walked quickly out towards the bright gleam of sunlight beyond the rubble.

  Zavelas patted my arm. ‘We all have to go some time, fella. And that way it is quick.’ The sympathy in his voice was real. But then he said, ‘Now I go and tell Kotiadis.’ And I knew he was relieved, the old man’s death solving a problem that had worried him.

  I followed him out of the cave, Sonia’s hand in mine, her fingers clasping tight. I didn’t look at her. I knew if I did she’d burst into tears. ‘He’s right,’ she whispered as we came down off the rubble into the hot sun. ‘It must have been very quick.’ There was a catch in her voice as she added, ‘He wouldn’t have liked to linger. Better to go whilst he was still driving towards something he believed in.’

  I could feel her nails in the palm of my hand. ‘You and I,’ I said. ‘We should have been switched at birth. You’d have understood him.’

  ‘He’d still have wanted a son.’ Her voice sounded infinitely sad.

  We were halfway across the platform then and I saw Kotiadis down by the tent. He came to meet us. still wearing the same light grey suit, his face impassive behind his dark glasses. He ignored Zavelas’s greeting, walked right past him and thrust one of the notebooks at me. ‘You see this before?’

  I nodded, surprised at the violence in his voice.

  ‘Is written in Russian. Connaissez-vous? What for is he writing in Russian, eh?’ His voice was literally trembling, so intense was his feeling at this discovery.

  It didn’t matter to him that the writer of those notes was dead. He didn’t believe it, anyway, convinced that my father had disappeared ‘for convenience’ as he put it. As for the suggestion that the notes were written in Russian for reasons of scientific security, he simply ignored it, firing questions at me in a steady stream—about the old man, about where he had been and where we were planning to go. I suppose he was under pressure, his superiors and the Middle East tension, but I wasn’t in the mood to make allowances. To me he was a stupid, bloody-minded bastard, a typical bureaucrat, and I told him so.

  ‘You are under arrest,’ he shouted at me. ‘All of you.’ He pointed up the channel. ‘You go with the boat to Vathy now. Then I take you to police headquarters at Levkas.’

  Anger exploded in me then, exploded into violence, my hands reached out to grip him by the collar and shake some sense into him. Soaia called to me and I hesitated, and in that moment my arms were seized and pinned to my side in a great bear-hug, Zavelas talking over my shoulder, fast and urgent in Greek. Unable to move, I let the torrent of words pour over me. They were both of them shouting now, the violence of their altercation drumming at the rocks, so that it sounded as though they were having a furious row. Then suddenly it was all over and Kotiadis was smiling, holding out his hand to me. ‘Pardon,’ he said. ‘I did not understand. Please to accept my sympathies.’ Zavelas released me then and Kotiadis added, ‘Now we must recover Dr Van der Voort’s body.’ The way he said it, the watchful, wary look in his eyes, I knew the future depended on that—the finding of my father’s body.

  Sonia’s hand touched mine, a gesture of understanding, of sympathy, but I shook her off. I didn’t want sympathy. I just wanted me clock turned back, the years in Amsterdam again. Atonement for my own callousness. I felt unutterably depressed. Not so much at the old man’s death, but because of the wasted years.

  It was in this mood that I took Kotiadis up to the cave and began clearing the loose debris of the new fall, Sonia working beside me, both of us for our own individual reasons endeavouring to lose ourselves in the hard physical work of shifting rock. Holroyd returned, bringing Cartwright, Hans and Vassilios with him. They had tools and a pressure lamp, but no wheelbarrow, so that everything still had to be taken out to the rubble pile by hand. It was hard, back-breaking work, fine rock dust hanging in clouds, clogging our nostrils.

  By one-thirty the whole outline of the rhinoceros was clear on the wall again and we had progressed to the point where the cave was almost as deep as when I had surprised my father working in it late that night. We broke for lunch then, Sonia having come back with Florrie and a great pile of sandwiches they had cut on board. Apparently Bert had located
a shelf of rock and the boat was moored bows-on to the shore with an anchor out astern. ‘He’s planning a dive this afternoon.’ Florrie was looking tired and strained.

  ‘Well, tell him to be careful,’ I said, conscious still of the atmosphere of this place and not wanting another tragedy.

  She gave me a wan smile. ‘You don’t have to worry about Bert when it comes to diving. It’s something he’s really good at.’

  I knew that. I’d watched him dive in the harbour at Patmos. And then later, under his instructions, I’d gone down myself in shallow water off Leros. I wouldn’t have done that if I hadn’t had complete confidence in him. But to start diving now … ‘It would be more help if he came ashore and gave us a hand.’

  ‘He’s not thinking of helping you,’ she said. ‘It’s just to take his mind off things.’

  It was shortly after the lunch break that Hans uncovered the end of the crowbar. We felt we were near then, but time passed as we worked more carefully at the face and we found nothing. It was all broken rock and the roof unsafe, the ceiling fractured so that you could pull great chunks of limestone away with your hands. Zavelas had brought three men from Spiglia and by evening we were in a distance of about eight yards. For the last hour Kotiadis had stood watching us. It was not difficult to guess what he was thinking.

  We packed it in at sunset and, apart from the crowbar, all we had found was the old man’s watch and a tin filled with carbide. They were not more than a foot apart. It would seem that, after refilling his acetylene lamp and lighting it, he had laid the carbide tin down and then, perhaps because he knew he had some hard, jarring work ahead of him with the crowbar, he had removed his watch from his wrist and put it down beside the tin. The watch was a write-off, of course, the face and works completely shattered. It had a stainless steel case and the leather strap was almost black with sweat. Sonia said he had bought it in Russia, but marks on the case showed that it was Swiss-made.