Seven Tears for Apollo

by Phyllis A. Whitney

  “Did anything seem odd to you about the head when we saw it at the museum?” she asked.

  “I can’t say that it did,” Johnny said.

  Dorcas studied the card. “At home my father had an especially fine book of Greek photographs. There was a picture of this head in the collection and I always loved to look at it as a child. I made up stories about the little boy and what he was crying about. I’d looked forward to seeing the original. But when they brought it out at the museum something seemed wrong, though I didn’t know what. It troubled me.”

  “I wondered about all that to-do at the museum,” Johnny said. “Have you figured it out?”

  She was staring at the picture in sudden realization. “I know what it is! Though it hardly seems possible. At the museum the tear was on the wrong cheek—the left cheek. I’m sure of it. It’s on the right cheek in this picture. The negative hasn’t been reversed. I can tell by that temple lock of curly hair on the same side as the tear.”

  Johnny’s interest heightened. “Come to think of it, I believe you’re right.”

  Something was falling into place in Dorcas’s mind. The meaning of certain words. An electrifying meaning.

  “I don’t believe the head they showed us in the museum was the real one at all. This is the real one.” She tapped the card. “The one we saw was a copy. Do you suppose the real head could be missing?”

  Johnny took back the card and looked at it. “I don’t see how such a mistake could come about. The tear, I mean. It would be too obvious an error. The sculptor making a copy would never make a slip like that.”

  Johnny’s words were reasonable, yet she knew certain things that he did not. She knew that Gino had been trying for a coup of some sort just before his death. And there was something else that drew all the pieces into place and tied them together.

  Dorcas picked up the leather bag beside her chair and opened its brass catch. She took out her passport case and slipped a thin envelope from beneath the passport.

  “This letter from Greece came to our apartment after Gino died. It made no sense to me at the time and I put it aside when I’d read it. A week or two later a man who had known Gino came to ask about his mail. I didn’t tell him of this letter. After that the housebreaking began. It happened once before I moved out of Gino’s apartment, and again while I was living with Fernanda. Each time the intruder left a queer marking behind him. Two chalked circles—like the eyes of an owl. Although I didn’t place the resemblance right away.”

  “An owl?” Johnny sounded skeptical.

  “Wait—there’s more. I thought I’d lost the letter, but Beth had slipped it into a book and it turned up here the first day I was in Rhodes. Read it, Johnny.”

  He read the words softly aloud. Dorcas threw an uneasy look around the little restaurant, but the German couple was absorbed in paying their bill, and the proprietor and a second waiter were busy seating new arrivals. She listened as he read.

  “The bride of Apollo mourns her loss. Done is the fearful deed. Gone the Princess from her Castle. At the hour of devils shadow lies upon the grave. Dolorosa, dolorosa, dolorosa.”

  His look met hers in frank puzzlement.

  “Who else could be meant by the ‘bride of Apollo’ but the nymph Rhoda?” Dorcas asked. “The very island of Rhodes itself—which has suffered a fearful loss. Johnny, did you know anything about Gino’s work?”

  “Not much,” he said doubtfully. “I gathered that he was scouting around for chances to pick up treasures in the art line. And I found him out on that smuggling deal.”

  She nodded. “I think he didn’t care how he came by the things he got for wealthy buyers.”

  Johnny regarded her thoughtfully, even a little appraisingly. Now was the moment. She had to make him understand.

  “Twice I tried to run away from Gino,” she said. “He wouldn’t let me go. Sooner or later I would have tried again. He wasn’t good for Beth or for me. He wasn’t a—a decent person, Johnny.”

  The words were hard to say and she was afraid to look at him. She did not want to see that chill appraisal in his eyes. He touched her hand lightly and she went on without meeting his gaze.

  “Excuses aren’t much good, but for whatever they’re worth, I was foolish and very young. I fell in love with an idea I imagined to be Gino. Beth is the one good thing to come out of a marriage that was completely wrong from the start.” She could not tell him just how wrong it had been.

  “I’ll admit that it’s been hard to see you as Gino’s wife,” Johnny said, and the chill was gone from his look. “It has made me wonder.”

  “I hoped I could start over by coming to Greece,” she said ruefully. “But there’s been no starting over. I feel as though something is still holding me to the past. Some unfinished business of Gino’s. Perhaps something to do with Constantine Katalonos. When I ran away the first time, Gino sent a man to bring me back. When I saw a portrait of Constantine at Madame Katalonos’s house, I knew he was the man who came after me that time. His wife told Fernanda that he had gone to America recently to see Gino. So something is up.”

  Johnny whistled softly. A new thought had come suddenly into her mind, and she went on before he could speak.

  “How valuable do you think this marble head of the weeping boy would be?”

  “How do you set a price on the priceless?” Johnny asked. “If you mean that it has been stolen to sell, who would dare buy it?”

  “Not a legitimate buyer,” Dorcas reminded him. “Gino often dealt with wealthy men in various parts of the world. A millionaire with a slight kink in his thinking might like to own such a piece. He might even pay a fortune for it.”

  “That’s possible enough,” Johnny agreed. “Art treasures have turned up in strange places before this.”

  “Constantine Katalonos is a sculptor,” she said. “Vanda Petrus knows him. She told me he had done a head of her. So she is in this thing somewhere, too. Do you suppose a sculptor as gifted as this man seems to be could make a convincing copy of a piece like the weeping boy?”

  “And place a tear on the wrong cheek?” Johnny asked.

  She had to agree that so fantastic a mistake weakened her speculation, but she persisted.

  “Look at the symbol at the bottom of that note. It seems to be a little owl with big round eyes. And that ties in, too. The chalk circles I told you about are like an owl’s eyes. Fernanda didn’t believe in the chalk marks I found on my balcony the first night. Perhaps if I’d seen them before I smudged them with my hands, I’d have found they were circles, too.”

  “Isn’t that stretching things pretty far?” said Johnny.

  Dorcas shook her head vehemently. “I think someone here in Rhodes wants this note as much as it was wanted at home. Someone is trying to tell me something, to frighten me into giving it up. Neither you nor Fernanda believed in that man on my balcony. But Johnny, while I was out today someone went into my room at the hotel and marked two soap circles on the glass in the bathroom. I’ve left them for you to see. Will you believe me now, Johnny?”

  She could see that he wanted to believe, that the mood of sympathy was right between them, the current strong. Yet she knew that doubt persisted.

  “It’s not that these things haven’t happened,” he said finally. “But you may have put the wrong interpretation on some of this. I’ll admit I don’t like these marks you’ve just found on your mirror. But all the same you’re leaping over too many gaps.”

  “The note,” she said. “What about the note?”

  He read it again. “‘The hour of the devils’—that could be noonday, couldn’t it? When evil is abroad in the isles of Greece.”

  He was trying to humor her, but she caught up his words with new eagerness. “That would be when all shadow goes straight down. So the ‘grave’ must be at the foot of something.”

  “What grave?” Johnny asked.

  She was impatient with him now. Impatient with the very quality of calm good sense that drew her
to him.

  “The place where the marble head is buried,” she told him earnestly. “What else can it mean than the spot where the real head is hidden? Gino would have known. But Gino is gone. So perhaps the only clue is this letter and someone is desperate to get hold of it.”

  “So far, so good,” Johnny said, still humoring her. “But who is the Princess and why is she gone from her Castle? What’s all this ‘dolorosa’ business?”

  “And who is the owl?” Dorcas added. “Johnny, it means something. Something important. Maybe something dangerous to know.”

  For a moment there was tension in the air between them, touching Johnny Orion as well as Dorcas. For a moment he almost believed. Then he grinned, and the feeling was gone.

  “What a story for Fernanda! She’ll swallow this letter hook, line, and sinker.”

  Quietly Dorcas replaced the envelope beneath her passport. He thought she was exaggerating, embroidering. He could smile because he had not felt the terror—at noonday, or otherwise.

  “I’m not going to tell Fernanda,” she said.

  His eyebrows went up a little. “Oh?”

  “Fernanda never wanted to see Gino as he was. She won’t want to now.”

  “Maybe you’re right, at that,” he said.

  Their waiter brought bowls of luscious Greek cherries for dessert and small cups of bitter Greek coffee. Dorcas thrust down her growing sense of disappointment. Johnny’s skepticism shook her own belief and she could not afford that. To be lulled was too dangerous. She knew. But there was nothing more she could offer him by way of proof. Not until they returned to the hotel and she could show him the circles soaped upon a mirror. He would not think now that she had put them there herself. Fernanda might, but not Johnny.

  Part of the barrier between them had gone down through the telling of her story and she found herself drawn to him and once more curious.

  “That morning when we first went to the old city you gave me a challenge,” she said. “You asked me what I was getting out of Greece. I still don’t know exactly what you meant. But do you have an answer for yourself? What are you getting out of Rhodes? How are you going to use all this?”

  He told her cheerfully. “I’ll use it with my kids in school, of course. And for my own satisfaction. I grew up curious, wanting to know about things. It’s a sort of disease, I guess.”

  “What do you mean—use it with your kids? How?”

  “To make things I’m trying to teach come to life.” He was serious now. “I can talk about history in the abstract till I’m blue in the face and hardly make a dent. But after my last trip to Greece I found I could make them understand these things more clearly. I could make them see a rough mound of earth, not so very high, standing up there, dry and hot in the Peloponnesian sun. There’re no marble columns there—only low crumbling stone ruins all over its top—the foundations of a palace where men and women used to live. It’s empty country—the plain of Argos, the low hills, deep, rocky chasms dropping to the bed of the river, lending wonderful protection to a good part of the mound. Up there where the earth is brown and dead you can smell the very dust of history. Mycenae! Only a word in a book to those kids, till I made them see it.”

  He was making Dorcas see it, too, and she waited for what came next.

  “I could even make them feel that moment of wonderful astonishment I felt in the museum in Athens when I came upon the gold mask that Schliemann found there and believed was the face of Agamemnon. Telling them, I could make them believe in all those book words. I could make them know with their feelings that such a place existed and what had happened there. I showed them a picture I’d snapped of the Lion Gate—and it was real to them. Once I can get them to feel I can get them to think. Once I’ve found a springboard into their imaginations I can even get through to them with ideas about places I’ve never seen myself where history has happened. What went on in Greece says a lot to us today. I want to make these kids listen.”

  He had warmed to the telling and his eyes were bright.

  “Is teaching the thing you want most to do?” Dorcas asked.

  “When you like to teach, what more is there?” he said. “I like what I’m doing. I suppose I worry about kids. Not about most of them. Most of them are pretty swell. But about the few that are getting into the kind of trouble I might have got into if it hadn’t been for my dad. Maybe I owe it to him to do a good job.”

  She pounced on his words. “A sentimental pilgrimage?” she reminded him.

  He laughed aloud. “I think there’s a difference. I’m not trying to be like my father. I’m not trying to see things as he did, or be what he was. There’s something in me that needs to be satisfied on its own ground. I suppose it’s the old question—what are we here for if we don’t do something with what we have? Kids are my job. Maybe there are other jobs that would make me richer, but this is the one I like.”

  “And I like you, Johnny Orion,” she said warmly, and meant it with all her heart.

  When they were back in the car, there was a good feeling between them. Before he turned the key in the ignition, he pulled her over in the seat so that her cheek was against his arm as he drove. There was a healing and a comforting in this physical closeness. She watched his hands on the wheel and thought of how different they were from Gino’s. Gino’s hands had possessed a sinewy strength. They had been long and thin, and as often as not their touch had brought pain.

  Neither she nor Johnny spoke on the way back to the hotel, and it was best like that. No challenge lay between them, but only this sense of being together and understanding each other without words. She was sorry when the drive ended and they reached the hotel. Upstairs on a mirror two white circles waited for her and they could not be ignored. Until the answer to the note was found, the answer to this tormenting, she could not relax into a new happy companionship with Johnny.

  “I’ll come up and have a look at those soap marks,” he said as they climbed the steps.

  They took the small elevator and she unlocked the door of her room. Everything seemed as it should be. Beth lay asleep and a light burned in Vanda’s room through the crack of the open door. Dorcas flicked on the bathroom light and she and Johnny stared at the mirror together. It had been wiped clean of any markings whatsoever.

  For an instant doubt of herself assailed her. Had she once more seen what did not exist? But she could not accept that.

  “Someone’s washed them off!” she cried, and ran to Vanda’s door to call her into the room. “Did you wash off the marks on the mirror in my bathroom?” she demanded of the woman.

  Vanda shook her head in denial. She had seen no marks. She had come into the bathroom both before and after dinner to wash Beth’s face and hands. There had been nothing at all on the mirror. There was scarcely veiled contempt in her eyes, but Dorcas could not tell whether she was lying or not.

  “Never mind,” Dorcas said. If it was Vanda who had marked the mirror and then washed off the soap, she would never admit the truth.

  Johnny waited until the woman had gone back to her room. “Too bad,” he said. “I’d like to have seen just what was there.”

  “Probably one of the maids saw them and washed the mirror,” Dorcas said limply.

  “Probably,” Johnny agreed.

  She followed him to the hall door and before he went out he tilted her head with a finger and kissed her on the mouth, lightly, reassuringly. Then he was gone, and she leaned her forehead against the closed door and stood there for a moment. For years a kiss, a touch on the chin, had meant the prelude to fear and pain. But Johnny’s kiss had brought only a longing to respond to him openly, freely. Yet something stood between them and she was afraid.

  She returned to the bathroom and stared at the bright, clean surface of the mirror. A familiar throbbing had begun again at her temples. She pressed her fingers to the place where it hurt and stared at herself in the glass. Certainty and conviction were fading. The old dreadful question was there in her mind, t
he vacillating self-doubt How much was real, how much unreal? Did she really know the difference? She did not dare to turn to Johnny unless she was sure. Had she again seen what did not exist in reality?

  When she turned from the mirror and went into the bedroom, she felt depressed and more than a little frightened. Absently she pulled off a gold earring as she moved toward the bed table. Something shiny lay beside the telephone. She picked it up and saw that it was a disk slightly smaller than a fifty-cent piece. It seemed to be a flat, irregularly formed silver coin. A profile had been stamped upon it—the face of a Greek woman in a plumed helmet. Pallas Athena, no doubt. She turned the coin over and stared at the reverse marking. Pressed into the silver was the figure of a small owl with huge round eyes.

  Her fingers closed over the coin with a sense of shock. Strangely, there was reassurance in the feeling as well. Here was no soap marking to be easily washed away. Here was tangible proof that someone had come to her room and left this symbol of the owl where she could find it.

  With the coin in her hand she went again to Vanda’s door and tapped on it sharply. The woman opened it and Dorcas held out her palm, the owl facing up.

  “Do you know what this is?”

  Vanda looked at the coin without touching it. The black opacity of her eyes betrayed nothing; her face was empty of expression.

  “I do not know,” she said.

  “Tell me where it came from!” Dorcas insisted. “I found it just now on the bed table. Who put it there? Who was in this room while I was gone?”

  “No one comes here,” Vanda said evenly. “I take the child to dinner. We go for a short little walk after. The key I take with me. No one comes here.”

  She would get nothing from Vanda Petrus. Dorcas returned to her own room and went through the shuttered balcony doors. Light from Fernanda’s doorway fell in a wide bar across the next section of balcony. She knocked on the partly opened shutters.

  Fernanda came at once to let her in. “Hello there. Come on in. Johnny and I are looking over possibilities for a trip to Petaloudes tomorrow. That’s the Valley of the Butterflies, you know. Unfortunately, the famous butterflies don’t appear until July, but there’s a beautiful woodsy ravine and—” The look on Dorcas’s face must have reached her, for she stopped abruptly. “What is it now? Is something wrong?”