Decision at Delphi E-Book

Helen MacInnes

• Herausgeber: Titan Books
• Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

Trust, thought Strang, is more than a delicate business when involved politics are at stake. When Kenneth Strang, a young New York architect, is dispatched to the Mediterranean to sketch ancient ruins for a national travel magazine, he believes the trip is just another routine assignment. However, during his journey from Athens to Sparta - and at last to Dephi - he becomes involved with a dangerous conspiracy that threatens both Strang and his photographer companion, Cecilia Hillard. For Strang, danger is no object, but when he fell in love with the beautiful Cecilia, he gave his enemies the one weapon they needed

Leseprobe

DECISION AT DELPHI

ALSO BY HELEN MacINNES AND AVAILABLE FROM TITAN BOOKS

Pray for a Brave Heart

Above Suspicion

Assignment in Brittany

North From Rome

The Venetian Affair (October 2012)

The Salzburg Connection (November 2012)

Helen

MacINNES

DECISION AT DELPHI

TITAN BOOKS

Decision At Delphi

Print edition ISBN: 9781781161548

E-book edition ISBN: 9781781161609

Published by Titan Books

A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

First edition: June 2012

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

© 1960, 2013 by the Estate of Helen MacInnes. All rights reserved.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group Ltd.

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For G, as ever

Contents

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Acknowledgments

Author’s Note

About the Author

Also Available From Titan Books

1

Now there’s a pretty girl, Kenneth Strang thought, as he relaxed his efforts to open the porthole of his cabin and glanced down at the cluster of upturned faces planted along the pier’s edge. For a moment, he wondered who was the lucky fellow on the deck above who had won that smile and wave. Then, quickly, he renewed his attack. The porthole swung open with a surprised shriek, letting the cold March air pour into the overcrowded cabin.

“Oh, Ken! Must you?” his sister Jennifer called, pointing his pen-knife, which she had borrowed to spread caviar, at the open window. “This is still New York, you know. You aren’t in the Mediterranean yet!” Josephine, his other sister, had her own comment. “You are breaking all the rules and regulations, Kenneth,” she warned him, exchanged her usual isn’t-that-like-him glance with husband Carl Underwood, and went on listening in her peculiarly intent way to Mason Farmer. Farmer must have been astounded twice in a row, which was quite a record for a publisher, when Josephine again interrupted her understanding nods and extreme concentration on his smooth prose to say, “To whom were you waving, Kenneth?” But that was Josephine, correct to the last dative.

“A pretty girl,” Strang told her. No one believed him, of course.

Except Lee Preston, who had left his own pretty girl—a beauty, this one, an astounding smooth-haired brunette, and why had he brought her to this party?—in the austere care of Jennifer’s husband, Philip Beecham, and was making his way determinedly through the packed cabin toward Strang. He glanced at the heavy window and shook his head. “Forceful, aren’t you? I thought you were about to lose your right hand there. If it isn’t valuable to you, it’s valuable to me,” he reminded Strang with a smile. Lee Preston was a small man with an energetic body and a restless head, a generous mouth, sharp eyes under black eyebrows. His hair was, appropriately, iron-grey. “Perhaps we ought to have insured it with Lloyd’s,” Preston was saying, still smiling easily, but there was a brief uneasy flicker in his watchful eyes: perhaps, in all his carefully arranged plans for Kenneth Strang’s assignment, he had forgotten something.

“There are only two ways to deal with an inanimate object,” Strang told him. “Either you sneak up on it when it isn’t looking or you double the charge of explosive and use a hammer.” He studied Preston unobtrusively, wondering what had brought him down to the ship. Lee Preston had a reputation, certainly, for carrying all his projects through, from his first bright idea for a three-part series right up to the supervision of layout and colour reproduction. He was more than editor of Perspective, a monthly magazine dealing with architecture and its decorative arts: his proper title, Strang had often thought, should be inspector-in-chief. But to pay a last-minute visit to a man he had commissioned to travel to southern Italy and Greece was a refinement of efficiency.

Strang’s briefing was long since complete: suggestions and discussions had been exhausted in those last four months of hectic preparation; his research was finished, all carefully compressed into a thick sheaf of notes, now lying between the absolutely necessary reference books in his heavy brief case. He had carried the brief case and his specially constructed portfolio on board ship himself, trusting only his suitcase to someone else. His job for the next five months was to visit the ruins of ancient Greece and its western empire, to reconstruct in his drawings—based on the facts that were known, bolstered by his own close guesswork—the temples and theatres as they had once stood. These drawings were to be published in three major instalments in Perspective, along with photographs of the temples and theatres as they appeared today, in all their stark ruin.

Stefanos Kladas was to be the photographer. He was flying next week to Italy, to start his part of the job. Unlike most Greeks, he was a bad sailor. Besides, he had become so accustomed in those last few years of success to fly to Peru, or Alaska, or Bali, complete with all his elaborate gear, that the idea of taking a ship would have astonished him as much as travelling by covered wagon to reach Chicago. In any case, as a photographer, Steve Kladas had no need of the specialised knowledge that Strang had had to accumulate to make his reconstructions of the past. He didn’t need the peace of ten nicely anonymous days at sea to review his homework and get his notes into order. Perhaps I ought to have become a photographer, Strang thought, instead of an architect who has never been freed from his ambition to paint, and is now trapped by archaeology. Steve’s career seemed so pleasantly simple and assured.

Lee Preston glanced again out of the porthole at the increasing bedlam of good will on the dock, then at his watch. “Ken,” he said urgently, “just one final point—”

Strang had been watching the dark-haired girl who had come to this party with Preston. She was still standing near the door of the cabin. Shy? Poised for flight, if only the corridor behind her were not so jammed with laughing people and worried stewards? Or simply trapped? She was listening, anyway, to Philip Beecham. (Who would have thought the old boy had so much talk in him?) “And what’s that?” he asked Preston now. He was amused. Had Preston come here to give him one of those little afterthoughts that plague the perfectionists?

“About Kladas—” Preston began, and then stopped, watching Jennifer Beecham in dismay. “There’s your sister bringing us some of that stuff she’s been spreading.”

“What about Steve Kladas?” Strang asked quickly.

“He left yesterday for Italy.”

“Did he? I thought he was flying next Friday.”

“So did I.”

Well, what of it? Strang thought. Steve had probably wanted to dodge any send-off parties like this one. “Hello, Jenny,” he said to his sister’s round flushed face. “Keep your mink out of the caviar, will you?”

“Thank you, no,” Preston said.

“He doesn’t like small black eggs tasting of fish oil,” Strang explained. “I’ll tell you what, Lee, I’ll trade. You don’t eat caviar. I don’t like champagne. Have my glass, untouched, with beaded bubbles winking at the brim. It was standing just behind me here—” He turned to search for the ledge where he had set his glass before his assault on the window.

“It gave one wink too many,” the practical Jennifer said.

“Be an angel and bring Lee another glass.”

“And if you find some way of steering Miss Hillard over here,” Lee Preston added to that, seeing a chance to have at least two minutes more alone with Kenneth Strang “—oh, not immediately but in a little while. After all, she came to meet Ken.”

“Did she?” Strang was startled for a moment. Then he smiled. Preston’s excuses always had the ring of truth. He had almost believed that one.

“You know what?” Jennifer asked. “I don’t think you want me around. And I had a poem of farewell all ready to deliver. I learned it especially.”

“I’ll hear The Isles of Greece later.”

“Oh, Ken—how could you guess? You won’t have time later,” she said gloomily. “The first warning has gone; didn’t you hear it? The second is due any minute. Where’s the rest of your luggage?”

“There’s only a suitcase still to come.”

“Heavens, don’t tell me that’s all you’re taking for five months. Ken, I warned you! Just wait until you find yourself in one of those bathrooms with no shower-curtain rod—then where will you hang any drip to dry?”

“I’ll hammer a nail into the wall.”

“I believe you would.”

“What about that drink for Lee?”

“I’m getting it, don’t you see?”

“I see.”

“Beaded bubbles. Coming up, sir,” she called back over her shoulder. (But the beautiful brunette might be more difficult to deliver on time. Behind Philip, those two mad friends of Ken were already lining up, in position to pounce once Philip stopped talking about his fishing trips.)

Lee Preston said thoughtfully, “I never had any sisters.” He looked grateful for a moment. Then he was back to business. “Kladas—I like him. Don’t misunderstand me, Ken. Steve Kladas is first-rate. I know that. Does splendid work. Those studies he brought back from Yucatan, two years ago, when you made the drawings of the Mayan sites—excellent, yes, excellent. He works well with you, Ken. That’s why I agreed to get him for the Greek assignment when we started talking about this trip. If you remember—” He paused delicately.

“Yes, I remember. You suggested Johnnie Kupheimer or C. L. Hillard for the job. But Kladas and I have worked together. I know his ways, he knows mine. We like a certain amount of freedom, of independence, not always breathing down the back of each other’s neck.” Strang could pause delicately, too.

Preston said, with a touch of stiffness, “I have little interest in a man who is not independent. But—” his worry humanised him into a quick rush of words—“it’s just that we must have dependable men, too. Are we going to have the photographs we want by this summer? The end of July is the absolute deadline. We must have his first prints by then. And your first sketches. It’s a matter of planning layouts and space. You can finish the sketches we choose, later. But we’ve got to see the general shape of this series by the end of July.”

“You’ll see it. But if it would help you stop worrying, I’ll remind Steve about July when I meet him in Taormina.”

“Taormina? Aren’t you seeing him before that?”

“I doubt it. We thought we’d each work on our own in Sicily, following our joint plan, of course. Then, before we leave Sicily, we’ll meet at Taormina and compare notes on what we’ve done. Steve has the name of a first-rate photographer in Taormina who will rent him his dark room, so he can make some test prints and—well, make sure they are just what he wants.” He gave Preston’s shoulder a reassuring pat. “Steve won’t slouch on the job. You’ll have his prints and my sketches by July.”

Then, as Preston still frowned at the floor, Strang said sharply, “What is worrying you, Lee?”

“Kladas has other things on his mind besides our assignment.”

“You think he’s doing work for other publications on the side?” There was no written law against that. Some might consider an all-expenses-paid trip, and a rousing fee, as a natural restraint on any other work until Perspective had got all the material it wanted; others, however, did not see things in that light. Provided he did the job for Perspective and did it well, Steve might feel free to tackle a few other projects on the side.

“Perhaps. Greeks are keen businessmen. I was prepared for that,” Preston said.

“Then what weren’t you prepared for?”

“A young woman who came to the office this morning, saying that she had something urgent to tell me about Steve Kladas, that she had only a few minutes... Miss Taylor believed her, and got me out from an editorial meeting. The girl was terribly upset. No doubt about it. And frightened. But her words were quick and clear, as if she had been rehearsing what she had to tell me, as if she did indeed have only a few minutes. She said she couldn’t telephone Kladas. But he had to be warned. He must cancel his visit to Greece. Or postpone it. For two months, at least. And then, as I stared at her, she looked at the clock on my desk, said, ‘Oh!’ and ran out. Ran! Miss Taylor, in the office outside, followed her. She didn’t wait for the elevator—she kept on running down the stairs.”

“What was she like?”

“Small, slender, expensively dressed. But no coat, no hat or gloves. A chiffon scarf over her head. Miss Taylor said her hair was in pins under the scarf.”

“In pins?” Strang restrained an impulse to laugh.

“The kind of torture females endure in a beauty parlour.”

“Oh!” Strang thought over the strange array of little facts. No coat in early March, pin curls. “Is there a hair-dressing place in your building?”

“Two floors below.”

“Oh!” Strang said again.

“Miss Taylor agrees with you. She went downstairs, made some excuse to get into the beauty salon, or whatever fancy name the damn thing is called. No luck, though. About twenty cubicles, some with curtains drawn across them. But she did notice there was a back entrance to the place beside the washroom. The staircase is just outside the back entrance. You follow me?”

Strang nodded.

“What do you make of it?”

Strang thought for a moment. “You’ve got a very efficient secretary.”

“That’s all we’ll ever know about this whole thing,” Preston agreed gloomily. “I had Miss Taylor send off a letter to Kladas, telling him someone seemed very much against his trip. If there was any real reason for the girl coming to worry us like that, I thought Kladas could fill in the details for himself.”

“But you took the girl seriously enough to write Kladas. Where?”

“At the first address on his itinerary. Naples. But you know Kladas,” Preston added fatalistically. “He probably won’t even go there. Probably, he’ll decide to stay at Sorrento, or someplace...”

“Perhaps you’d have done better to hire Johnnie Kupheimer or C. L. Hillard, after all,” Strang said dryly. The truth was that Kladas and Preston had respect for each other’s talent but little liking for each other’s personality. It was a case of complete emotional incompatibility, and Strang began to wish he had never even tried to act as the hinge between a door and a wall that were off-angled.

“He is the best man for the job,” Preston said generously.

“And he speaks Greek,” Strang said with a grin. “That’s no small accomplishment, let me tell you. After my struggles with the language this winter, I begin to think that all Greek two-year-olds are geniuses.”

“How is your own Greek coming along?”

“A little more bite in the consonants and rasp in the vowels, and I’ll make the eighth grade.” So, Strang thought, as he watched Preston’s tight lips relax, we end our little talk with smiles all around. That was much better. “And there is sister Jennifer with the last bottle of champagne,” he added. Jennifer was really a very good girl in many ways. She had, for instance, timed the end of their conversation quite neatly. Now, she was detaching the dark-haired girl from Wallis and O’Brien, no mean accomplishment. Strang said to Preston, “Your Miss Hillard is attractive. Any relation to C. L. Hillard?”

“She is C. L. Hillard.” Unashamedly, he enjoyed the jaw-dropped look on Strang’s face. “And she is not mine, I am sorry to say. We were lunching together—discussing an assignment for her in Mexico, this April—and I thought it might be amusing to bring her along to the ship.”

“Amusing for whom?” Strang asked wryly. His idea of C. L. Hillard had been—and why did men jump to conclusions about successful women they had never seen?—one of those tremendously capable battle-axes who chopped their way to success. From the tantalising distance of fifteen feet or so, partially blocked by other people’s heads and annoyingly screened by other people’s voices, Miss Hillard had looked young, serenely beautiful, quietly elegant. Within handshaking distance, she still was young, serenely beautiful, quietly elegant. But now were added the sudden warmth of her wide-set dark-blue eyes, the smile on her lips. Weeks later, he still couldn’t remember what he said to her as they shook hands.

“I wanted to tell you—” she began, almost shyly, but her voice was blotted out. There was a wild beating of gongs, a procession of stewards calling their warnings in high Italian fortissimo, raised voices, more gongs echoing down the corridor, a rush, a bustle, a surge of people outside the cabin door, the frenzied excitement of expected departure. The girl laughed and looked at Strang helplessly. The crushing weight of noise lifted. She was about to speak.

“Second warning bell has gone,” Josephine interrupted. “Kenneth, I didn’t get a minute to talk to you!” She began making up for lost time. Behind her, husband Carl was saying decided good-byes to everyone. He was a hale, explosive type, with prematurely white hair, who had done very well on Madison Avenue with his capacity to make up other people’s minds for them. Now he had decided it was time to get off this ship, and everyone here was going to get off this ship, too; he’d see to that. He thumped Strang’s shoulder. “What a racket you’re in!” he told everyone. “Five months’ vacation, while all the rest of us are chained to the desk! Tell me”—he turned to Lee Preston—“is there really any demand for the kind of stuff Ken does?” He gave a genial nod of dismissal and passed on to say good-bye to Mason Farmer, signalling Josephine to follow.

Josephine finished her advice about brucellosis, gave a cheek to kiss, a jangle of bracelets as a farewell salute, and then said, “Oh, I nearly forgot—the rest of your luggage came. Carl had it put under your bed, out of the way. He took care of the two stewards.”

Strang, now shaking Mason Farmer’s hand, looked startled. “Two?”

“They came separately.” And as he stared at her, she added a little sharply, “Yes—your two cases. The large one and the little one. They’re under your bed. You’ll remember that?”

Strang looked at his sister’s retreating back, then at Farmer in amazement. But the publisher had his own immediate problem. In his quiet, diffident way, he was saying, “You won’t forget that we’d like very much to see your work when it’s completed? I think you’ll have a book there.”

“I shan’t forget,” Strang promised, a little dazed by the hint of Farmer’s real interest. Normally, such a moment would have rocketed him through the ceiling, but now he was still half thinking about some fellow passenger’s small suitcase stowed neatly under his bed. Carl’s brisk efficiency was often self-defeating: why hadn’t he looked at the labels to make sure?

“After our three instalments are published,” Preston was reminding Farmer with professional friendliness.

“Of course, of course. By the way, Strang, why not take in Asia Minor? There’s a good deal of Greek remains at Pergamum and—”

“Not this trip,” Preston said firmly. “Ken has enough on his plate as it is. We’re leaving the Greek eastern empire for another year. You’ll just have to plan a two-volume job, Mason.” He enjoyed the worry on his friend’s brow. “Cheer up. If you charge fifteen dollars a volume, you’ll clear all expenses. Time you had a prestige book.”

“My, my, and is this how it’s done?” Jennifer asked, lining up in turn for her good-bye hug. “You do know how to parlay your talents, brother.” She looked a little triumphantly at her husband. Philip. Of all the family, Jennifer had been the only one not to take a dim view of Kenneth Strang’s change in career. Philip, even with the evidence all around him that his brother-in-law was not exactly destitute, still had regret in his eyes for Maclehose, Mitchem and Moore, the firm of architects where Kenneth’s career would have been so nicely assured. Still, they’d always take Kenneth on again, if he decided to return to architecture once he got these mad ideas out of his system. Too bad Kenneth had not married the Bradley girl; there was nothing like a wife and a first mortgage for keeping a man’s feet firm on his own piece of ground. Then Philip put these thoughts aside and shook hands warmly. He liked his young brother-in-law despite the fact he never quite knew what to talk to him about. He wished him well.

Then came the others—Jerry Garfield, from Perspective; Judith Robbins, from Maclehose, Mitchem and Moore; Tom Wallis and Matt O’Brien, old friends from Strang’s Navy days.

O’Brien was saying, “Wouldn’t mind seeing Athens again myself. At least you won’t be dodging machine-gun bullets this time, Ken.”

“What’s that?” Preston asked quickly. “Machine-gun bullets?”

“After the Germans cleared out,” Wallis explained, making everything still more bewildering.

“December, 1944,” added O’Brien. “Boy, what a Christmas that was! Everyone starving and shooting each other.” He shook his head, remembering his introduction to power politics in action. “And the British caught in the middle—trying to chase the Communists back into the mountains without blowing Athens or the Athenians to pieces.”

“Wonder if that Greek is still alive?” Wallis speculated. He ignored the worried steward who had suddenly appeared at the cabin door. “The one who smuggled us through the street-fighting back to the ship. What was his name again? Chris— Chris something—”

“Christophorou,” Strang said. “Alexander Christophorou.”

“All visitors must leave, all visitors ashore!” the steward announced loudly. “All—”

“That’s it! Christophorou,” said Wallis. “Quite a guy. As crazy as they come. Took Ken right up to the Acropolis walls to let him get a close look at the Parthenon by moonlight. We could have wrung both their necks.”

“Not so much by moonlight,” Strang said, giving the steward a reassuring signal. “It was more by the rocket’s red glare. Just coming, steward.”

But the man was crossing, much perturbed, to close the opened porthole. He kept saying, “It is not permitted. Vietato—”

“I know, I know,” Strang said in Italian, “but this lady fainted, and so...” He shrugged helplessly. The steward eyed Miss Hillard doubtfully, and she restrained the beginning of a laugh. Did she understand Italian? Strang wondered, and was caught off balance. He turned quickly back to the steward. “There is a small case under the bed. It isn’t mine. Take it to the right cabin, will you?” And then he was finishing the last good-byes. “I’ll walk to the gangplank with you,” he told Lee Preston and Miss Hillard. I’ll have that one small chance to talk with her, he thought, to watch these incredible eyes.

But, as they all left the cabin, the steward called to him urgently. “Signore Strang! Signore Strang!” The man was bending over the small case he had pulled out from under the bed. “This is your case, signore.”

Strang halted at the door. “Can’t be. I know what I packed,” he told Miss Hillard. Then, as the steward pointed at the label, he came back into the cabin. The label, in heavy block letters, all too clear, said KENNETH C. STRANG. It was the regulation label for the Italian Line, first class, main deck, with the correct cabin number most definitely marked. “All right, all right,” he said, completely defeated. “I’ll straighten this out later. Thanks.” He turned back to the door. The others had gone.

Preston was waiting outside in the corridor. Miss Hillard was far away, escorted by Wallis and O’Brien. Too late now, Strang thought: Wallis and O’Brien would not give her up so easily. There’s a general conspiracy, he told himself, to keep me from talking to that girl.

“Don’t forget, Ken, to tell Kladas about my strange visitor,” Preston was saying as they reached the promenade deck, where the covered gangplank was secured. “And when you see the temple at Segesta, give it a salute from me, will you? It’s a beauty, almost intact in spite of the Carthaginians. Been standing there for twenty-five hundred years and still—” He stopped shaking Strang’s hand, looked past him. “By God,” he said in a startled voice, “she’s sailing!”

“Who?”

From above their heads, the siren’s blast seared every eardrum, even set the deck tingling under their feet.

Preston waited, frowning, impatient. “The profile,” he could say at last. “The girl who was frightened. The girl in my office. Don’t look now, you damn fool, she’s got her duenna right at her elbow.”

“Did she recognise you?”

“Sure. She froze. No pin curls now, but plenty of mink. Platinum, at that! Yes, yes, officer, I’m just leaving.” He waved and ran, barely reaching the pier before the gangway was being swung off. His exit, thought Strang, was scarcely what Preston had planned. The final bon mot about Segesta was for ever silenced. The siren gave a last and triumphant blast, overwhelming the babel of voices on the pier, the shouts, the laughter. He couldn’t see Preston, any more. Where were the others? His eyes searched the mass of faces and waving handkerchiefs. Was he expected to stay and wave? Possibly. Before beginning that duty, he turned to light a cigarette. Now he could look at the girl in the platinum mink coat. Yes, that profile would be hard to forget. Standing beside her, a small squat woman, in sombre black, was speaking in a torrent of sharp syllables.

“That is all that is to be seen,” the woman was saying in Greek. “You will catch cold, and your aunt will blame me. Come!” She stumped away on her sensible, black leather shoes. “Katherini!” she called over her shoulder. And the girl, who had been looking at the laughing crowd below, her with an expression of—yes, it had been sadness—turned obediently and followed. She passed two feet away from Strang. She glanced at him for a brief moment. Her eyes flickered as if she had identified him, known who he was. Suddenly they were blank again. Her face had become a cold, impersonal mask. She was very young, he saw, probably no more than twenty; much too young to need any mask on that bale, dark-eyed face.

So she is Greek, he thought, as he took his position at the rail. Lee Preston had not guessed that; her English accent must be good. Well educated, travelled, mink, pearls, expensive gloves holding a large crocodile handbag, a vague perfume of roses. The very best roses. Her father must own three shipping lines, at least.

Strang couldn’t find any face he could recognise on the pier below him. Hundreds were pressing forward from under the roof of the shed, to see and be seen; but there was no one he knew. Then, just as, unexpectedly, he felt a chill of loneliness among all the warmth of emotion sweeping around him, he saw O’Brien’s red hair and Wallis’s semaphoric arm. And, between them, he saw the Hillard girl. He gave a shout and waved wildly. Suddenly, she was waving too. It was very pleasant, after all, to have someone to whom you could wave.

The bustling tugs hauled and pushed and prodded the towering ship, until its prow pointed down the Hudson toward the ocean. Then, with chests proudly out and heads held high, they gave a piercing hoot of farewell before they sped, skirts gathered up and around them, back to the long row of piers on the Manhattan shore. From Jersey, the late-afternoon sun turned the high windows of the tall buildings into flaming gold. Strang stood, collar turned up against the cold Hudson wind, watching the midtown sky-scrapers, shadow behind shadow, wheel and recede into a world that was both a dream and a reality.

He went back to his cabin for his overcoat. The steward had worked a miracle—the place had been cleared of glasses and bottles and cigarette stubs. The telegrams were stacked neatly on his dressing table beside the penknife Jennifer had used. It smelled of caviar, the one witness left to the noise and confusion of an hour ago. Oh, yes, there was that damned suitcase, too. He stood looking at it, the intruding stranger sitting so calmly on his floor with his name tied round its neck. He’d see about that. He rang for the steward.

The man came, bringing three more telegrams and a special-delivery letter with a receipt to sign for the purser’s office. The letter was addressed to him in Steve Kladas’s handwriting. It felt as if something solid were enclosed. He slit the envelope with his knife. Yes, there was a key inside, a very small key which would fit the lock of a small suitcase. And a sheet of cheap yellow paper filled with Steve’s large letters. “Knew you were travelling light,” Steve had scrawled. “I’m weighed down with more excess baggage than usual. Can you help me out? The extra film is necessary, or I wouldn’t bother you. Be seeing you. Stefanos.”

“Everything all right, signore? “the steward asked anxiously. Strang nodded, and began opening the last telegrams. The steward hesitated. The small suitcase no longer seemed to trouble the American. Signore Strang must have made a mistake; it was understandable—all that champagne, and scarcely a half-bottle left.

But when the man had gone, Strang dropped the telegrams, took the key, and opened Steve’s small case. It was packed with rolls of colour film, each in its sealed yellow box. They were the type he could use in his own Stereorealist camera. For that he was thankful. Otherwise, how was he going to explain them through customs? So he locked the small case—it was the size of an overnight bag, easy to handle, and for that he was thankful, too—pushed it back under the bed with his foot, attached its key to his own ring, tore up the letter, found his coat, remembered to remove his camera from its pocket, and went upstairs again. He’d get some exercise and air until the three-mile limit was passed. This might be an interesting sea voyage, after all. It shouldn’t be too difficult on this ship to find an excuse to talk to Miss Katherine (how would a Greek say that?—oh, yes. Despoinis Katherini) and find out why she was so frightened. After all, duennas did not dance.

2

Duennas did not dance. But neither did Katherini. Nor did she sit and read in any of the deck chairs around the pool. Nor play shuffleboard, nor write letters, nor take the air, nor go to the movies, nor visit the library. Nor did she eat: not once did she, or the duenna, or the aunt, appear in the dining-room for meals. And not even the romantic moment of sailing among the islands of the Azores in a strange effect of cloudburst and sunset—where one huge mountaintop, rising blackly from dark waters, was almost blotted out by rain while the island opposite, across a short stretch of sea, lay golden and placid under flame-tinged skies, with whitewashed houses scattered on green hillsides—brought any of the three women into view.

Apart from an entry in the passenger list that might possibly refer to the invisible travellers (“Signora Euphrosyne Duval, of Athens; and niece, Signorina Katherini Roilos, of Athens”), and a second glimpse of the girl herself one evening, when everyone was crowding into the cocktail bars or dressing for dinner, the women might have been only something he had dreamed up to break the monotony of the interminable, grey Atlantic.

Strang had worked dutifully that afternoon, and at six o’clock had come up to the emptying decks for a brisk walk. Eight times around the ship, or some such nonsense, made a mile, it was said. But that gave him a feeling of imitating a phonograph needle, and so he preferred to climb stairs as he came on them and twist his way vertically through the layers of decks. He had reached the topmost stretch of scrubbed white wood, where the suites of rooms had doors that opened out on to the deck itself, as private a veranda as one could have on a public carrier. He might not have noticed the girl, so still was she standing at the rail’s edge in the shelter of a lifeboat, had the blue chiffon scarf round her head not streamed wildly out in the wind. It escaped her hands and blew toward him. She turned quickly—this time she was wearing a voluminous dark fur coat, no doubt one of the little old minks she kept for horizongazing—and saw him.

The scarf had whipped round the line on the davits of the lifeboat near him. By standing on the lower bar of the open rail, holding on to the lacings of the tarpaulin covering the lifeboat, Strang could just reach the fluttering tip of the scarf. He played it free slowly, bracing, his thighs against the upper bar of the rail, telling himself he’d look a damn fool bobbing around in the white froth of cut waves far below him. He stepped back on to the solid deck with admitted relief. The girl had vanished. A round small man in a long dark overcoat, hands in pockets, was standing at the side of the lifeboat with a look of sardonic amusement on his sallow-skinned face. Now where had this particular little goblin, with the sharp black eyes, well-oiled black hair, and thin black moustache, been hiding? Strang wondered. Probably something that crawled out from under the tarpaulin.

The man took one small hand from his pocket and held it out for the scarf. The smile under the thin moustache grew more irritating. Strang stretched out his arm politely, and just as the man was about to grasp the scarf, he let it go. The wind was a perfect ally: it caught the transparent piece of silk and blew it high and around and over and higher and away. It ended its flight on a taut rope, high on the rigging above the swimming pool. “Too bad,” Strang said. “Now it’s your turn, I think.” He resumed his steady pace along the empty deck:

“Private. Private,” the man said, pattering after Strang on quick, small feet. His pointed shoes were as light and thin as his high-pitched voice.

“Who says so?”

“Private, private,” the little man repeated. He spoke the word with excessive care, in an accent Strang couldn’t place.

“This is getting monotonous,” Strang told him, as the magic word was repeated twice again. “Is that all the English you know? Never mind, you’ve learned it well. I’ll give you a big E for effort. Now go away. Stop dancing at my heels. Where’s your hair net?” For emotion, or the wind, was raising long strands of oiled-together hair. Strang kept his voice easy, his pace steady. He had passed three doorways to private suites of rooms, a series of real windows heavily curtained. The pattering footsteps stopped, as if reassured. Strang kept walking until he reached the short flight of stairs that led to the radio room. Now this is really private private, he told himself, but the little gate saying Vietato l’ingresso could easily be stepped over.

Before he entered the narrow doorway leading to the radio room, Strang gave his first glance back at the little man, still watching. He looked uncertain, baffled, drooping. Either his unsuccessful struggle with the English language or his overlong coat weighed heavily on his shoulders. Strang gave him a cheerful wave and stepped out of the wind.

The radio operator was having a cosy little chat with a Portuguese freighter. He looked more annoyed at the interruption than startled by such an abrupt entrance. “I want to send a cablegram,” the American told him. “This way?” He was already walking into the passage toward the cable room before the radio operator could answer. “Sorry,” he told his Portuguese friend, “just another passenger lost at sea.” But later, he wondered about the American with the broad smile— what had entertained him so much? He even looked out of his door, checked the locked gate, and noted that the rich woman’s chauffeur was still standing his watch on the windswept deck. So there was nothing to report. There could have been, he thought with some disappointment; for why did anyone travel with so much security unless she expected trouble?

Strang actually did send a cable. To Lee Preston. FORTRESS IMPREGNABLE. DRAWBRIDGE UP, PORTCULLIS DOWN. ADVISE WE CONCENTRATE ON GREEK TEMPLES. There’s a limit to curiosity and wasted time, he thought as he paid for the cable and went down to the bar. Like all men who value their own personal independence, he disliked meddling in the private affairs of other people. In the last five minutes, he had decided that the girl and Steve Kladas could work out the difficulties between them. There would be plenty. The very rich knew how to protect their investments, and a marriageable daughter was a big one.

The little tables in the bar were crowded. (Cocktail Lounge, it was called, but euphemisms had a tendency to curdle Strang’s blood.) The blue-haired ladies were in full regalia, ear-rings and fur scarves and beaded bags and dependable lace. The few younger women were already welcoming the Mediterranean in brightly flowered, low-cut dresses; it was amazing how pretty shoulders could keep a girl warm even in the cold Atlantic draughts. The men were mostly retired, if not retiring, coaxed into that little trip which they had been promising their wives for the last ten years. Some of them, sitting carefully in new dinner jackets, feeling their empty hands, watchful, wary, were going back, along with their completely silenced wives, to their native villages for the triumphal visit. It was just a pity that their friends could not see them travelling, right in the Bella Vista Cocktail Lounge.

Captain’s dinner tonight, Strang remembered: tomorrow, the ship would be reaching Gibraltar. He chose a seat at the small bar itself, keeping company with a Hollywood actor who seemed to spend most of his waking time in self-imposed silence on that same high stool, and ordered a Scotch. He studied the decorative panel behind the rows of bottles—the Italians were good at that kind of graceful abstract design—and, in order to keep the actor from realising he had been recognised, got lost in his own thoughts again.

It was his guess that Miss Katherini, in her startling visit to Lee Preston’s office, had been terrified by her aunt’s warning: stop that man from following you to Europe, or else your father and your brothers and your sisters and your aunts will find a way to discourage him permanently. And. Strang, remembering the Greeks he had seen in action back in Athens on that grim Christmas of 1944, did not underestimate their capacity to even the score. The avenging Furies were a Greek invention. Surely Steve Kladas hadn’t become so Americanised in the last ten years that he had forgotten that.

Hardly, Strang decided, and ordered another drink. The Hollywood star was watching him covertly. Don’t worry, friend, I shan’t ask for your autograph or describe all the finer points in your last picture; I shan’t even exchange a glance with you. Doesn’t that make you happy? What’s your problem? Can’t be money, can’t be women; you have plenty of both. But one thing is certain: if people don’t have problems, they do. their best to invent them. You’re in good company, chum. I invent mine hard. All I have to do is to persuade myself that Steve Kladas can take care of his own troubles, and I begin to think and think, just little driblets of thought, nothing to worry Erasmus or Einstein that a new star is swimming up in the heavens to outshine them. Odd, isn’t it? Here we are sitting, with a background of satisfied customers all congratulating themselves that the seasick days are over and that, tonight, they even can risk all the free champagne, caviar, and pressed duck. And there will be balloons, and cute paper hats, and miles of streamers, and isn’t that all such merry, merry fun? And there you are, profile, worrying in case people don’t recognise you, hating them if they do. And I am just worrying, period.

I wish to heaven I knew why. Perhaps I’ve been thinking too much about Athens as I last saw it. Perhaps, too, if I’d stop trying not to think about it, and just let the pictures take hold of my mind, I’d work this whole damned thing out of my system. Not very happy pictures, actually. It is never a happy sight to watch brave people crucifying themselves...

You know what? I’ve just talked myself out of the captain’s dinner. Who am I, anyway, the man who never can find room in his suitcase for a dinner jacket, to lower the tone of an haut monde evening with my simple little tweed?) I’ll settle for a ham sandwich and a pot of coffee in my cabin. Because Gibraltar is going to swing into view tomorrow, and I have a letter to write. Sure, it’s an important letter. I ought to have written it before this. Why didn’t I? Now that’s a question without an answer. But I’ll write it tonight. To a man called Alexander. Alexander Christophorou. It’s possible he won’t remember a very young seaman from a United States destroyer. On the other hand, he is the kind of man who might just remember.

Wallis, back in New York, was wondering if Alexander were still alive. I hope so. I’d like to look at the Acropolis with him again. This time, we wouldn’t be pressing our bellies into the cold hard ground on a little rock-covered hill, shivering in the bitter night wind from the north, listening to random blunt-nosed bullets striking the southern colonnade of the Parthenon instead of the British paratroopers who were garrisoned up there. Yes, the Brits and the Parthenon, with sandbags piled high around them both. I kept hoping the sandbags were high enough. And I’d give a silent cheer when a mortar bomb hit the rock face itself instead of the temple above. I guess there were some good Athenians among the artillery-men: they aimed low, at least. And above us all rose the white marble pillars turning to red in the glare of burning buildings in the city below.

Remember that, will you, if you ever visit the Parthenon? Sure, it’s true. December, 1944. A Christmas of siege and civil war and savagery. You can’t believe it? No; nor could the Athenians. The ones who spoke English would stop me on the street when they saw my American uniform. “It isn’t Greeks who are doing this,” they told me. They’d catch me by the arm to make me listen, as if some—oh, sure, laugh at me, but that’s what I saw in their eyes—as if some agony inside them drove them to talk to the stranger who was seeing their city in a way no city should ever be seen. A place of hate and hurt and vengeance; “It’s the Bulgarians,” they said. “Bulgarians and Albanians and German deserters. It can’t be Greeks.” Then they’d leave me. And there was something in their haunted faces that even an embarrassed kid of nineteen couldn’t shake himself free from. These were proud people, and proudest of their civilisation. They had just discovered that barbarians lived among them.

Perhaps there was guilt mixed with shame, too. Some of them, you see, had welcomed the barbarians only four weeks before, thinking of them as heroes of the resistance, men of force and action who would straighten out the eternal quarrels and talk talk talk around the Athenian café tables. So the quarrels were straightened out, and corpses lay in the streets. I remember what a Greek reporter said, I can’t forget it: “It is not only bodies lying in the gutters. It is not only people who have been mutilated with axes or torn to pieces by human hands. It is also our beliefs and our pride. A Greek does not enjoy the taste of shame in his mouth.” The Greek didn’t enjoy saying that, either. But it is only the civilised who can feel the taste of shame. A barbarian wouldn’t even know what it was...

I’m getting too serious? You know, I just can’t raise a smile over barbarians. And what is a barbarian, you ask? A man dressed in skins? Not in this century, friend. He’s the type who likes to destroy. That’s all. He wants to be boss-man, whether it’s with a hatchet or a gun or a bomb, or with nice cold-eyed justifications such as “You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs.” As if we were only something laid by a clucking hen for breakfast.

Strang’s lips tightened. He stared at the last inch of Scotch and melted ice. He caught the actor’s side glance, and raised his glass. “Down with all barbarians!” he said crisply, and finished his drink. As he left, the actor was looking—for the first time— directly at him.

Well, I broke through his boredom for at least a minute, Strang thought as he went down to his cabin. And don’t thank me, pal. I thank you—for letting me talk my head off to myself. A man needs that, every now and again. But it would be better if I could talk out loud to someone who’d listen; and then she could talk her head off, and I’d listen; and then we’d go to bed and make love, and fall deep asleep and wake up happy. That’s my recipe for a good marriage. When I meet a girl who can listen, and talk, and make love, all equally well, then I’ll get married so damned quick that sisters Jennifer and Josephine won’t even have time to raise a pencilled eyebrow.

The steward Gino, like most Italians, was desolated at the idea of anyone missing a party. So he brought an elegant tray with cold turkey and fruit and sweet cakes and a half-bottle of champagne smuggled out of the dining room. When someone was taking so much delight in providing champagne, it was totally impossible—for Strang, at least—to ask for a Scotch and soda. Or a bottle of beer And he listened while Gino talked about his native Genoa and the little farm outside the city which his wife worked while he sailed the Atlantic. It was a hard life, but Italy was a poor country. Yes, Strang was thinking as the flood of English helped out by Italian poured over him, we are now sailing into a world of poor countries—the Mediterranean, where most people have to scrabble for a very bare living. Yet ask anyone in America or England or the northern countries of Europe what the Mediterranean conjured up for them, and you’d be given sweet dreaming for an answer: sunshine and beaches and yachts in the harbours, music and flowers, long meals and lazy siestas.

Gino left, and Strang could eat some supper, and begin his letter to Christophorou.

He kept it as brief as possible. First, a piece of self-identification; next, the purpose of his visit to Sicily and Greece, mentioning Perspective and Stefanos Kladas. Then, the dates in April when he expected to be in Athens. He would be staying at the Grande Bretagne. It would give him the greatest pleasure if Christophorou were able to dine with him. He was, most sincerely...

He reread the page he had written, grateful that Christophorou’s excellent command of English saved him from floundering into beginner’s Greek. His letter was brief, all right, and clear enough. Then he wondered if Christophorou were still living in Athens. Had he gone back to teaching law at Athens University? It would be pretty silly if Strang found he had missed Christophorou by twenty miles or so, on his visit to the Peloponnese or one of the islands, simply because neither had known the other was there. So, as a safeguard, he added a postscript: “If you will not be in Athens around the middle of April, I hope you’ll drop me a note and let me know where I might possibly see you somewhere along my itinerary. Any letter reaching the San Domenico Hotel, Taormina, Sicily, will find me there until April 6. After that, the Spyridon Makres Travel Agency in Athens (Churchill Street) will forward all my mail to me. Yours, K.C.S.”

He hoped the postscript was clear enough, too. He would have been astounded to hear that it was the most important part of the whole letter.

Then it was only a matter of finding the small notebook he had carried around with him during the war—it contained sketches, innocuous enough to avoid a censor’s disapproving eye, of people and places which had caught his imagination; and a scattering of addresses, of names now mostly half-forgotten. Christophorou’s address was jotted on the corner of his sketch of the distant Acropolis as he had watched it when he sailed away from the Piraeus, Athens port. Its white columns gleamed on top of its high hill in a sudden shaft of sunlight piercing the cold winter sky, serene and beautiful, aloof from the occasional belches of artillery fire on the other hills of Athens or from the black pillar of smoke sent up by a burning building in Piraeus itself.

As he copied the address carefully, he had another pessimistic moment wondering if perhaps Alexander Christophorou’s family had moved. But this whole attempt to get in touch with Christophorou was a gamble; what had he to lose? So he sealed the envelope, picked up his coat for a late stroll on deck, and made his way to the purser’s office.

One of the assistant pursers was still on duty, filling up another batch of forms, looking doggedly martyred as he worked to the muffled throb of music from the ballroom. “Gibraltar,” he explained, pointing to the small pile of passports and landing cards on his desk, and he. sighed. “Let us hope it will be calm, and the passengers for Spain will leave us gracefully. A little ferryboat comes out to take them away. But perhaps you have seen it?”

“No, I’ve never seen it.”

“You have never seen Gibraltar?”

“Yes, I’ve seen Gibraltar.”

The assistant purser was puzzled, and then blamed it on the difficulties of the English language. “This time, you must go on deck and watch. It can be very amusing.”

“I’m sure it is. Sorry to trouble you about this airmail stamp. Are you sure it is sufficient?”

“You would like to pay more?” The young man reweighed the letter. “I am sorry. I must disappoint you.”

“Molte grazie.”

“Prego. And do not miss Gibraltar tomorrow!” Then he looked concerned as he noticed Strang’s overcoat. “You are not going to dance?”

Strang shook his head, smiled reassuringly to show he had no criticism of the band or the floor or his hosts’ indefatigable hospitality, and bade the assistant purser goodnight.

On deck, there was a freshening western wind which seemed to blow the ship through the darkness toward the narrow gap between Europe and Africa. This was a journey he had made, on convoy duty, at least half a dozen times during the last year of the war. Oil tankers, ships with food and clothing and medical supplies, had moved like a straggling herd of arthritic sheep poked and prodded by their darting escorts through the narrow passage into the Mediterranean. As he looked over the black rolling water of the Atlantic, wave swallowing wave, he admitted why he had chosen to come by ship. Not for any of the reasons he had given his friends so easily that he had almost come to believe them himself; only for one, hopelessly sentimental reason. He was no longer nineteen years old, on board a small destroyer trying to outwit a pack of German submarines. But looking at the cold, impersonal sea covering this giant stretch of burial ground, he tried to ignore the lighted deck, the rise and fall of distant music. Gradually, the dark horizon lined up before his eyes; and, watching the constant surge of water beat against the wall of black sky, he could almost recapture the emotions of fifteen years ago. Almost. Emotions could be remembered only vaguely, at best. All the variables, the textures, the proportions of feeling that made them so overwhelming once became blurred with time. Too much happened to most of us: the clouds of glory and the vision splendid died away.

He turned on his heel and went below. It was always a mistake to try to breathe life into the past; the man of thirty-four was not a youth of nineteen. He wished now that he had never mailed that letter to Alexander Christophorou. He actually did go back to the purser’s office, but it was closed. The letter was beyond recall.

He overslept next morning, and arrived on deck almost at the end of the Gibraltar halt. The liner was anchored in the wide circle of bay, with the Rock rising bluntly at one end of the horseshoe of land, while the flat Spanish coastline curved back and around. Overhead, small soft white clouds chased like tumble-weed across the blue sky. The strong breeze chopped the water, but had not discouraged the little bumboats, bobbing around the ship with their tourist cargoes of garish scarves, tawdry ornaments, and dubious sherry. The clear cool air was filled with raucous cries and harsh Spanish curses as the rowers kept their boats in place until their baskets of souvenirs, pulled up to the ship’s open decks by high-flung ropes, could be lowered back to them with the dollar bills they had bargained for so strenuously.

Strang, watching the pantomime of the bumboats as the rowers astutely jockeyed a competitor aside or tried to edge in closer to the ship only to be turned back by a watchful police launch, had paid little attention to the disembarkation from a lower deck, where a small steamer dipped and swayed as it hugged the liner’s side and waited to carry the passengers to Algeciras across the bay. But, suddenly, a white cabin cruiser with red leather cushions, brass that glittered, windows that gleamed, two white-uniformed sailors at stiff attention beside a pile of trunks on its afterdeck, swept away from the liner’s side, made a wide curve, elegant and disdainful, between the clusters of bumboats, and headed for the Algeciras side of the bay. As Strang’s eyes were following it, admiring its compact lines and powerful drive, the assistant purser came to stand beside him at the rail.

“I told you it would be amusing.” The assistant purser indicated the heaving deck of the ferryboat below them. Then he noticed the direction of Strang’s eyes. “That is the way to travel! You see the yacht, over there?” He pointed across the bay. “They say she has two of them, so that one is always ready while the other is being overhauled. She travels much. I wonder when she can enjoy her five houses?”

“She?” Strang asked sharply.

“Signora Duval. They say that if she would only tell how much she owns, she could call herself the richest woman—well, in the Levant at least, perhaps in the whole Mediterranean. I do not think that even in America you have such a fortune.”

“In America, we pay our income taxes,” Strang reminded him dryly. So the dragon aunt and her frightened niece had left, servants and baggage complete. They had faded out of his life as quickly as they had stepped into it. His cable to Preston had shown some sense, after all.

He watched the cabin cruiser become a little white arrow darting across the water. By comparison, the yacht must be of quite a respectable tonnage. “A very cautious woman,” he remarked, “if she wouldn’t trust that yacht to the Atlantic.”

“Very cautious. She never travels by air, either.”

“Is that what makes so much money—caution?”

“Women don’t make money,” the assistant purser said with a touch of bitterness. “They spend it. It was Etienne Duval who made the fortune. A Frenchman who lived in Syria. He took Syrian nationality to protect his investments. But you must have heard about him. His suicide, two years ago, was in every newspaper. You did not read about it?”

“I guess I had other things on my mind, two years ago.” Yucatan, for instance, and Mayan tombs.

“A pity. It was a very strange end to a romantic life. He had a palace in Syria, a villa on Rhodes, a palazzo in Venice, a castle in Spain, a fortress in Casablanca.”

“Adequate. No chateau in France, I suppose.”

“None.” The assistant purser caught the joke and explained it. “But of course not. To protect his investments.” He enjoyed it, too. “Ah, well,” he said at last, “I, for one, am glad to see Signora Duval leave.” His lips tightened, his eyes narrowed broodingly.

“Was there trouble?” Strang asked sympathetically. He could guess the kind of difficulties that someone like Madame Duval could stir up.

The Italian was silent, but he must have remembered something that had stung his pride, for he looked at the distant yacht and his brown eyes, normally pleasant and gentle, hardened with anger. He said bitterly, “Trouble?” And then, to cover the momentary indiscretion, “Nothing important for anyone—except me.”

“What on earth did you do?” Strang asked in surprise. Had the handsome young purser slipped past Mr. Private Private, and managed to meet Miss Katherini? If so, it was good to hear the girl had at least a few minutes of pleasure before the prison walls had closed in on her again. “Don’t tell me they caught you kissing the niece’s hand.”

The assistant purser was horrified. And now he must end such a story before it started. “No, no,” he said urgently. “Nothing such as that, but nothing. It was only the little matter of their names on the passenger list.”

“You got them wrong, did you?”

“No. They were correct.”

“Then why—”

“Signora Duval did not want them on the list at all.”

“And she complained about that? Well, some people—”

“Complained?” The assistant purser gave a short and mirthless laugh. “You should have heard her! You should have seen her face! She is not a woman. She is a tornado.”

“She actually sent for you?” Strang was incredulous.

“She sent for the captain. The purser was told to go. He sent me.” The young man sighed deeply.

Strang said with a smile, “They owe you a medal for facing the old tornado.”

“She is not old.” The assistant purser had both a literal mind and some professional discretion, for the lady’s age and any other interesting details that her passport must have entrusted to him were held secret. His face even cleared, as if he were a little cheered by the idea that someone thought him worthy of a medal. He said, less mournfully, “But the niece was grateful. She stood behind her aunt, and her eyes thanked me.”

“For what?”