Decision at Delphi (52 page)

Behind them, a car had suddenly started moving; so they, too, were prepared for emergencies. But Anastas knew his job. They turned the first corner, drove a short stretch, turned another corner, stopped by a waiting car for the brief moment it took Christophorou to make the change. Then he was speeding on, down the long stretch of street, while the car with Christophorou quickly turned around the nearest corner and seemed to be travelling leisurely back toward Dimocritos Street. It had been a very closely timed operation, but it had been well-practised for just such a necessity. On the long, roundabout, boring drive down to Xenia’s apartment, he even had time to start some rethinking about Zafiris.

He never needed much sleep, but he allowed himself three hours. Lack of it could act as a drug on the brain. By ten o’clock, Christophorou had washed, shaved, and dressed in grey flannels
and a worn tweed jacket of English cut. His emergency wardrobe was proving useful at last. The thought amused him that, with those dark circles under-shadowing his eyes and his hair not too carefully combed, he now looked like a slightly debauched Oxford don. But there was little else to amuse him.

There was still no news whatsoever from the Sparta area.

And a full report had now come in about the American girl, Cecilia Hillard. She was no longer to be found at her hotel. Some careful questioning had resulted in the discovery that she had left the hotel, about seven o’clock yesterday evening, accompanied by an American who was not Strang. The American had carried a small overnight case. They drove away in a private car. Further investigation had uncovered the owner of the car: Robert Pringle, an attaché at the American Embassy. The house, where he rented the third-floor apartment, had been placed under careful supervision since yesterday evening by police, or intelligence agents.

So the girl had been not such an insignificant question mark, after all. Now the caretaker’s story about the American and a girl, two nights ago, slipping out into another American’s car began to make complete sense. Strang. Hillard. And Pringle.

Christophorou took a deep breath. And now, too, he was remembering a telephone call from Strang, earlier on that evening, when he had been at Pringle’s apartment. A harmless conversation it had seemed, an inquiry about Beaumont’s address, but in retrospect, with the new facts to give a different perspective, had Strang only been covering up the real purpose of a call at that late hour? Now Christophorou recalled the report from the Bulgarian: Strang and Hillard had left Erinna Street only a short time before that telephone call to Pringle.

There it was: Katherini Roilos to Strang; Strang to Pringle; Pringle to Zafiris.

Downstairs, among her shelves of canned goods, her cheeses, her sacks of rice and small crates of vegetables, Xenia heard the frightening crash. She ran upstairs. Had Metsos fallen, met with an accident?

But Metsos was standing, quite still, near, the window, looking down into the narrow busy street. His breakfast tray had been swept off the table and lay in a broken mess on the floor. “Leave it,” he told her. “Get back to your shop.”

She did what she was told.

Christophorou left the window and sat down in a chair. In this last week, he had been concentrating too much on Elektra and Sideros, on their attempted manipulations, their planned take-over, their secret negotiations with lip-service Communists. It was easy, now, to see his mistake. Yes, he had been too preoccupied with them. But for a good reason: they were clever, ruthless opponents who needed such concentration if they were to be defeated. If he had not done that, the revolution would have lost its truth, become merely another façade for a power that would use and then destroy him and his followers as totally as they would destroy the bourgeois capitalists. So his mistake had not been completely stupid. Nothing necessary was ever stupid. If he had not countered Elektra and Sideros, he would not even be alive this morning.

And today was going to be such a fantastic cumulation of events that Zafiris and his colleagues would find they had merely been busy counting snowflakes while an avalanche was gathering its weight to fall on them. By the end of this week, Zafiris would be back in the army proper; he would be
needed there. If we leave him alive, Christophorou added to his thoughts.

And Strang? A most regrettable oversight. But who would have taken Strang seriously? Americans, by the very nature of the soft fat they collected around their brains along with all their comforts, their total ignorance of historical meanings, their delusion that anarchists were either comic little men plotting nothings in a dark cellar or misunderstood cranks—how could Americans be taken seriously in a world of real politics? One of their presidents had been killed by an anarchist. How many had troubled to find out more about the anarchist’s friends, about the group whose meetings he had attended regularly in America? Had no one bothered to notice that, from the same group, other men had gone back to their native Europe, with assassination as their purpose? Had no one wondered who had planned and financed it all? Or perhaps Americans assumed that penniless men, sixty years ago, could easily afford to go travelling through Europe. The English were just as incredible. There had even been a battle with anarchists right in the heart of London itself: the siege of Sydney Street. But people had been deliciously eager to explain it all away as a fantastic story concocted for political advantage. The arsenal in the house on Sydney Street, the men who had met there constantly, the hours of violence when they were trapped, only seemed to rouse little more than a sneer at Churchill and his vote-getting mind.

Yes, the Americans and the British were alike in some things. They were surface people, skimming over past history, picking out the interpretations that pleased them, never digging deep for the truths that could warn them When they found something unpleasant, they would forget it within six months. They even
prided themselves on not remembering; forget and forgive were so much easier. They evaded serious ideas, unless they approved of them. The British put their faith in compromise, the Americans in doling out largesse; by wheedling and bribing, they thought they could avoid ever having to answer the only real question in life: Who, whom? But they had never been conquered, never been occupied, never had their men carted away as slave labourers, never witnessed mass rape, never watched their children being turned into their enemies. That was their great weakness: they had merely existed while others had survived. How fortunate for the cause of world revolution, with all its varied forces remembering the bitter taste of their survivals, that the two most powerful nations in the Western clique should have had no experience in
Realpolitik.
It would not be difficult to bury them, not when they helped so obligingly to dig their own graves.

And did one of those incompetents think he could drift into my life, Christophorou thought, and wreck it? For the name of Alexander Christophorou, his convenient way of life in Athens, were now both dead. So was the name of Odysseus. Even Metsos, with its close relationship to Demetrius Drakon, was dying. But the discovery of names and identities was not a disaster; it was troublesome, annoying, time-consuming to have to build up new ones, a totally unnecessary waste of energy and planning. There was a small score to be settled with Mr. Kenneth Clark Strang.

Xenia came back into the room. It was ten minutes before noon. He has recovered his good temper, she thought,
relieved. What she had to tell him would need a very calm Metsos to hear it.

“Yes?” he asked. He had the radio turned on, its volume as low as possible.

“I have something to report,” she said, and glanced at the radio, which made her raise her voice more than she thought was discreet.

He looked at his watch. “Be quick then.” He turned down the radio to a whisper.

“Anastas has just come in to buy tomatoes.”

“Yes, yes.” What idiots women were!

“He had a message from Sparta. His man there reports rifle shots and two or three explosions, up on the mountainside. Just before dawn.”

“My God, the fools! Who told them to use rifles or grenades?” They would have the police searching all that stretch of mountains. In those last few months, Sideros had hidden an arsenal of weapons around that farmhouse near Thalos.

“Anastas says his man went up toward the farmhouse, early this morning. But he dared not go near it. There were soldiers there.”

So they had found the farmhouse. And there went another of Sideros’s ideas. Nothing Sideros had planned had gone right.

“There were soldiers in Thalos, too. Our man spoke to a girl working in the fields near the road. She said men had raided the Kladas house and tried to kill Myrrha Kladas and her brother.”

He rose, looking at her sharply. Now he understood why rifles and grenades had been used. But clumsy, clumsy. Sideros and his men had always been too quick to rely on open violence.

“They were not killed. But two of our men were shot; and one was blown to pieces when he fell from the roof with a live grenade in his hand.”

“What about the shepherd called Levadi?”

“He was taken away.”

“And the American?” His voice became bitterly sarcastic. “He walks free, I suppose. Their bullets were too valuable to put one in his back?”

Xenia bit her lip nervously. “He is free.”

Christophorou gripped the back of the chair. “Get back to your shop!”

She hesitated instinctively as she stood over the fallen breakfast tray, then retreated quickly as she saw the look in his eyes.

He turned the radio up to a volume he could hear. Two minutes to go. The small annoyances could be put aside, meanwhile. The big things were to come.

Strang woke, with the afternoon sun streaming through the small window of the small low-ceilinged room to fall directly over his face. Or perhaps the footsteps at the door had pulled him out of sleep. Or perhaps he had slept his fill. He sat up slowly, rubbing his head, stretching his back, and smiled at Myrrha Kladas.

“How’s your head?” he asked. Her bandage was neater now.

“A cut—that is all. I was at the top of the staircase when the explosion happened. And then I fell. Bruises.” She rubbed her left arm and side.

So that was all, he thought, admiring her equanimity; two inches lower and that splinter would have blinded her. “And how is everything else?”

“It looks better. We have cleaned away the dust and broken pieces. We shall soon rebuild the room. And my neighbours will help me finish the ploughing.”

“So you’ve got neighbours now?” He got up, bending his head to avoid grazing the rough beams. There was no other furniture in the room beyond the three straw mattresses on a low wooden platform.

She nodded happily.

“Took them a long time to discover they were neighbours, didn’t it?”

“But they had to wait and see,” she told him earnestly. A flicker of pain crossed her face. “I could have been another Levadi.”

So, thought Strang, as he followed her down the steep wooden stairs of this house which had given him shelter, into a room, barely furnished, empty of people now, Steve had accomplished much more for his sister than he had ever dreamed of in Naples. He need not worry about Myrrha: she had her friends here, after all.

“The others are still in the fields,” she told him. “I came back to waken you because you said you wanted to telephone. You have a bus to catch.”

“That’s right.” He laughed, standing at the door in the warm sunlight, feeling the strength of those ten miraculous hours of solid sleep. But instead of looking after Myrrha, it seemed as if she were looking after him. “Where is Petros?”

“He went into Sparta. There will be much talk in the coffee-houses.” Her smile said, you wouldn’t want to cheat him of that, would you? “The bus to Sparta passes over the bridge about five o’clock,” she warned Strang.

“I’ll telephone and get back as quickly as possible.”

“There is no need to hurry. All is well here.”

“I must telephone,” he explained awkwardly. “I have to let someone know—”

“Of course.” She looked surprised that he should even try to excuse himself. “Petros told me about your girl.”

“I’ll bring her to see you, one day soon,” he promised. “Where can I wash?”

“There is water here.” She gestured to a bucket filled to the brim.

“I’ll just wash wherever all the men wash,” he told her. Here, every drop of water had to be carried. So she took him outside and pointed to a clump of trees on the hillside. “And I’ll get something to eat in Sparta,” he added.

“Oh, no!”

“Yes,” he said. Here, every slice of bread had to be counted. “I must not miss that bus, or else I shall have to walk all the way to Sparta. Now, you get back to your friends.”

She drew the long scarf over her head and twisted it across her mouth. She clumped away in her heavy boots, the long black skirt flapping just above her bare ankles. She turned to give him a wave, a smile from the brilliant dark eyes.

He went back and found his coat, neatly folded across a chair, took out his razor and toothbrush, a handkerchief for a towel, and set out for the men’s room.

He waited forty minutes for the high, narrow bus, which was less than might have been expected from the pyramid of suitcases, parcels, and baskets, covered by tarpaulin strapped over its top. For every few miles, someone seemed to get out, or come in, and the tarpaulin had to be unstrapped, the bundles carefully inspected and selected and replaced and recovered and restrapped in place.

It had not been lonely, waiting on the road. There had been an old woman, sitting on a donkey, with both feet dangling against its right flank, while her hands spindled wool at lightning speed. And a boy with a donkey practically hidden under a beehive of long thin twigs. And a man ploughing the steep field near the bridge with a wooden plough and rope harness on his donkey. And a woman driving her donkey uphill, with cans of drinking water from a spring. And all had spoken to him. There seemed to be a polite formula, a duet of question and answer, after the opening agreement about the weather.