The priest was absorbed in his singing; he was about a quarter of the way around the circuit before he saw the woman in the center. He stopped; for a minute I was afraid the procession was going to pile up behind him like a multiple collision. But he collected himself and went on, taking a few quick skipping steps to get out of the way of the shrine, which was bearing down on him. It might have looked comical, but it didn’t. There was something rather ugly about the incident. I can’t explain why it struck me that way. Maybe it was the way the priest started, as if he were recoiling from something dirty or dangerous; or the fact that the woman was the only one in the plaza who didn’t acknowledge the saint’s passage, not even by the slightest inclination of her head. She stood there unmoving, and as the procession went on its way it almost seemed as if they were paying homage to her, the central figure in the drama.
After circling the plaza three times, the priest led the crowd off into one of the side streets. Gradually the singing died away; but the twinkling lights, twining in and out like a luminous snake, marked the saint’s passage through the fields.
I looked at Jim. He was still staring fixedly at the unmoving figure in the plaza.
“Hey,” I said. “Now that the excitement is over, how about some food? Or is it too early?”
“It’s too early.” Jim turned his head. “But if you’re hungry, maybe I can… Oh, oh. What wasthat you said about the excitement being over?”
I turned to see what he was staring at with that apprehensive expression. Frederick was heading straight for our table.
“Oh, hell,” I said.
“Don’t worry.” Jim lowered his voice. “I’m not going to lose my temper. Whatever he says, I am not going to lose my temper. You have a right to have dinner with me. Greece is the home of democracy, isn’t it?”
“Uh-huh,” I said gloomily.
But our fears were groundless. As Frederick approached, I realized that he was going to be pleasant-for him. He greeted us with a nod and, without waiting for an invitation, pulled out a chair and sat down.
I thought of asking him how he felt and decided I had better not. He looked okay.
“I presume your workmen insisted on a holiday too?” he said to Jim.
Jim’s face brightened. Poor boy, he was an ingenuous soul; the slightest gesture of goodwill brought out all his kindly nature.
“That’s right, sir. All these holidays and church festivals are a nuisance, but I guess there’s no use fighting them.”
“None whatsoever. How is your work progressing?”
There was nothing ingenuous about Frederick. He wasn’t subtle, but he wasn’t ingenuous. I could see what had prompted his affability. I suppose Jim could too. He gave me an amused side-long look, and answered without reserve. He had no reason to be secretive.
“Pretty well, considering. The site seems to be a villa of considerable size. Sir Christopher is hoping for frescoes, but we haven’t hit any yet. Of course we haven’t been at it long. Tunneling is slow work.”
“And what,” said my father, with his usual indirection, “is your background?”
Poor Jim. It reminded me of the old days, when a prospective suitor was quizzed by Papa on his prospects-past, present, and future. Of course Frederick didn’t give a damn about Jim as a matrimonial prize; he cross-examined him about his training. He forgot himself once or twice, making rude comments about Jim’s professors, but on the whole he was reasonably courteous.
Finally he said, “Yes, your training is not bad. Not too bad. But you are without experience. How did you persuade Sir Christopher to hire you? He has graduate students of his own. You aren’t even British.”
Jim had kept his temper quite well. He got a little red at this last comment, but managed to smile.
“Personal connections. My mother is English. Oh, I agree, sir, I’m not especially highly qualified, but how can I become qualified without experience? I’m working my-that is, I’m working damn hard. I may have used a little pull to get the job, but I intend to deserve it.”
These noble sentiments did not impress Frederick, not so you could notice.
“As I remember Chris, he is not that difficult a taskmaster. What made him select that site? There is nothing for him there. The palace is in my area. He’ll find a few houses, that’s all.”
“You’ll have to ask him that,” said Jim politely. “I just work here.”
Frederick didn’t answer. Apparently he had found out what he wanted to know, and he was not the man to indulge in idle chitchat. I exchanged a glance with Jim. He grinned at me. The quirky eyebrows had a cocky look, as if he were saying, “See, I didn’t lose my temper, did I?”
It was almost dark now. The woman was still standing by the tree. The center of the plaza was heavily shadowed, but I could see her silhouette, shapeless as a pillar or one of those archaic Greek statues. All the café tables were filled and people were sitting in chairs in front of many of the shops. They were all men; Greek women don’t lounge around public places. I recognized one of the men; it was Nicholas, our foreman. I waved. He waved back.
“Who are you waving at?” Frederick asked suspiciously.
“Nicholas. He’s sitting over there.”
“With all the other lazy louts,” Frederick grumbled. “They had better be on the dig early tomorrow, after wasting a day.”
He turned in his chair so he could glare at Nicholas. The glare was wasted. Nicholas wasn’t paying attention. He and most of the other men were casting sidelong glances at the silent figure by the tree. It was no longer motionless. Slowly, with a majestic stride, it advanced toward the hotel and the terrace where we were sitting.
Frederick continued to grumble.
“Come along, Sandy. There is a good deal of work to do tonight, and I mean to start early tomorrow. It was inconsiderate of you to run off this way. I had no idea where you had gone, and-”
It was as if somebody had chopped him across the throat. His voice caught in a painful grunt.
The woman had stopped a few yards away. The lights on the facade of the hotel shone directly on her, as if she stood in the center of a brilliantly lighted stage. She was looking at Frederick.
If the two of them had been professional actors they could not have communicated emotion more effectively. In fact, there was something decidedly theatrical about the woman’s performance. Her head was thrown back, in the gesture adopted by aging ladies who want a smooth, youthful throat line. Frederick wasn’t putting anything on, though. His face had gone a queer sickly gray. He looked his full age and older. The bones in his cheeks and forehead stood out, skull-like.
Finally, as if some signal had passed between them, they both moved at once. The woman turned, her draperies whirling out around her, and walked away. Frederick shoved his chair back so abruptly that it toppled over. He headed blindly across the plaza, in the opposite direction from that which the woman had taken-away from the street that led to our house. I thought he was going to bump into the tree, but at the last minute he swerved, exaggeratedly, like a drunk, and vanished into the darkness.
Chapter 5
“WHAT THE HELL WAS THAT ALL ABOUT?” JIM ASKED blankly.
“I-” My voice cracked. I cleared my throat and went on. “I would say that they recognized each other.”
“That was more than recognition, Sandy. It was like some old-fashioned farce. You know what I mean: ‘Good God, it is my husband, back from the dead, the man I thought I murdered thirty years ago!’ Bette Davis and Ronald Colman.”
“Joan Crawford,” I corrected. “Only she didn’t murder him. It was the other way around.”
“Not Ronald Colman, then. He was too noble to murder wives. Broderick Crawford?”
“Robert Montgomery, maybe. He was a smooth murderer in one old movie.”
“Night Must Fall?”
“I don’t remember. Jim, it really isn’t funny.”
“Neither of them seemed to be amused.”
“But-”
<
br /> “But that’s no reason why we have to get uptight. It’s not our problem. Listen, I don’t even brood about my own past sins. Why should I stew about other people’s? The present-the here and now-is complicated enough without going out of your way to find additional worries.”
He leaned forward, his elbows on the table, his face serious.
“What is that?” I asked. “Some kind of creed? Your philosophy of life?”
“I guess it is.”
“Keep out of other people’s lives,” I repeated. “Don’t get involved.”
Jim frowned. His eyebrows made an elongated, flattened capital M.
“I didn’t mean it that way. Sure you should get involved. You have to get involved; people don’t live in a vacuum, their lives get wound up with other people’s. But why go out looking for trouble? Both these people are strangers to you. You’ll never be a friend of Frederick. He doesn’t have friends. And he sure as hell wouldn’t thank you for worrying about him.”
I sat back in my chair, hoping I didn’t look as startled as I felt. I kept forgetting Jim didn’t know I was Frederick ’s daughter. To him I was a casual acquaintance of Frederick; there certainly was no excuse for my concern about him. There was no excuse in any case. He was right. I would never be a friend of Frederick. I didn’t want to be one.
“So I’m nosy,” I said. “People interest me.”
“So be interested. From a safe distance. The farther away from him, the safer.”
“Are you trying to tell me something?”
“I’m trying to tell you that Frederick is bad news. Maybe you ought to find some other place for a vacation.”
“Thanks a lot.”
“Oh, hell, I didn’t mean I want you to leave.” Jim gestured helplessly. “I don’t know why I keep saying the wrong things to you. Normally I’m considered a very smooth conversationalist. Let’s change the subject. Have some more wine.”
“No, thanks. I really had better get back to the house. If I remember my guidebooks, they don’t eat dinner in these parts till nine or ten o’clock. Usually I’m tucked into my little sleeping bag at that hour, reading heavy tomes about Minoan archaeology.”
“Stick around, please. Angelos will have some food ready pretty soon. I want you to meet Chris.”
“Why?” I had started to rise. Now I sat down again. “So he can give me some more dire warnings about Frederick?”
“I don’t like your being up there alone with him,” Jim said.
I stared at him for a minute. Then I laughed.
“You don’t really think-”
“No! Listen, I’d worry less if that were what I thought. The man doesn’t have a spark of normal warmth in him. Chris says he’s been on the ragged edge of sanity for years. He may slip over anytime and decide you’re his hated mother or the reincarnation of Helen of Troy, or something.”
He reached for my hand. I pulled it away and stood up.
“I never heard of anything so ridiculous in my life,” I said coldly. “Who was it who was giving me that line about noninvolvement?”
Jim’s eyebrows made alphabetic convolutions. Then they went back to their normal shape and he grinned sheepishly.
“‘Consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds,’” he said.
How can you stay mad at a man like that? I grinned back at him.
“Okay,” I said. “No hard feelings, but I really had better go. I’ll have dinner another night. Please?”
“Sure. What about that swimming date? We don’t work on Sunday.”
“Sunday at ten. I’ll meet you here.”
Before leaving the plaza, I stopped at one of the shops and bought some tomatoes and a fish. The woman cleaned and gutted the fish for me and wrapped it in a piece of newspaper.
There was no moon, and it was dark as pitch once I had left the lighted windows of the village behind. I kept stubbing my toes, and I cursed myself for not having thought to bring a flashlight. Frederick had several. But I hadn’t expected to be gone so long.
Finally I saw the light ahead. A candle in the window, to guide the wandering child… No, Frederick wouldn’t light a candle for me. He was probably reading.
Now that I could see where I was going and did not have to concentrate on walking, a wild confusion of ideas crowded into my mind, all the new facts and impressions the day had brought. I stopped a few feet from the house. Before I went inside, I had some things to sort out with myself.
Most of them were disturbing things. Frederick ’s strange reaction to the woman-his incredible news about the sunken ships… For the firsttime the enormity of that idea engulfed me. Either he was crazy, or there really were wrecked Minoan ships down in the bay. No, but he was insane either way, because he would have to be out of his mind to tackle a project like that with just me. Even I knew that a trained archaeologist doesn’t grab with both hands when he excavates. And that was all I could do. I didn’t know how to map a site or keep proper records. I didn’t even know what to look for. Minoan ships were about three thousand years earlier than my Spanish galleon. Did they carry anchors? If so, what kind? How about ballast-masts… And there was theproblem of equipment. A camera was an absolute necessity. Did Frederick have an underwater camera? I doubted it. The customs officials would have checked his equipment carefully, and an item like that would have been a dead giveaway. I couldn’t have used such a camera in any case. I didn’t even know how. The more I thought about what I didn’t know, the more I felt like groaning out loud.
Then an idea hit me. I was dazzled by the brilliant simplicity of it. It made a sort of syllogism. Frederick was a first-rate archaeologist. No first-rate archaeologist would mess up a discovery as big as this one. Ergo-no discovery.
So it wasn’t a very good syllogism. It made sense to me. Frederick was fantasizing, the result of years of frustration in his field. He didn’t really believe in his dream ships, but the dream was so glorious he couldn’t give it up. And if there were no ships, there was nothing for me to do except swim around for a couple of hours a day and report no results. I wouldn’t say there was nothing down there, I would just say I couldn’t find it. In a few weeks we would pack up and go home. At least I would go home. Frederick could go to-wherever he was going.
Somewhat cheered by this reasoning, I went on to the next problem. Frederick and…Medea. That was a good name for that dark, ruined beauty. She looked like a Medea-quite capable, in my estimation, of killing her children to get back at a man who had betrayed her. As Medea had slaughtered her sons to revenge herself on their father.
Medea was a born constitutional psychopathic inferior. At the very beginning of her career, when she fled from her father’s court with Jason, after helping him steal the Golden Fleece, she had committed a horrendous crime, chopping up her young brother and throwing the pieces overboard to delay the pursuing galleys of her father. The poor old king had stopped to collect the fragments and Medea had escaped with her lover. The story had given me a chuckle at the time, it was so corny and melodramatic, like the Tom Lehrer song:
One day when she had nothing to do
She cut her baby brother in two
And served him up as an Irish stew…
In the pitch-black night of a far-off Greek island, the story wasn’t funny. It was horrible. No wonder Freud got the names of his classic psychoses out of Greek legends. Maybe I was getting a little psychotic myself, seeing ancient Greeks all over the place… Medea wasn’t Greek, though, any more than Theseus and Ariadne were. They came from further back in time, back in the dark abysses of prehistory when people still believed in human sacrifice and killed the king every nine years and sprinkled his blood around to bring back the spring.
I said a word out loud, a vulgar four-letter word. This was not the time, and it was certainly not the place for gruesome fantasies like the ones that had seized my mind. The point was that Frederick and Medea-yes, use the name, use it and go on-had nothing to do with me. Maybe she was an old girl friend. Mayb
e she was an old mistress. The key word was “old.” It was all in the past and it had nothing to do with me.
So that took care of two worries. The third one wasn’t so easy to solve. It had to do with Jim.
Not that Jim was a depressing thought. Far from it; he was the only bright spot in a dark world. The worrisome part was my relationship with him. I had lied to him, and I hated having lied. I took it for granted that he would find out. I always get caught when I try to lie, that’s why I gave it up years ago…till I met Frederick. Mostly I was in the habit of being honest. And if I didn’t break down and confess, he was sure to find out some other way. Sir Christopher, for instance-if he knew Frederick, he must know that Frederick had a daughter. Maybe he had dandled me on his knee when I was an infant and he and Frederick were bright young beginners in the field.
I had a feeling that Jim wouldn’t like it if he found out I had lied to him. His eyebrows might be crooked, but his mind wasn’t.
Off in the blackness behind me something made an odd moaning sound. It was probably a goat or a bird or some other equally natural phenomenon, but it made my hackles rise. There was no solution to the third problem, none that I could think of at any rate, and in spite of my resolution to forget the Greek myths, the night was beginning to swarm with monsters. I stumbled on toward the house. I had mashed one of the tomatoes and it was dripping down the front of my fancy dress, which, I suspected, would not wash very well. The fish was leaking too.
By the time I reached the kitchen I was in a rotten mood. The sight of Frederick hunched over his book and the remains of some awful-looking mess in a saucepan did not improve my humor. I dumped the fish in a pan along with some olive oil and started peeling tomatoes. No point in changing my dress, it was a wreck anyhow.
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