Enemy and Brother
Authors: Dorothy Salisbury Davis
“Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and Josephine Tey … Dorothy Salisbury Davis belongs in the same company. She writes with great insight into the psychological motivations of all her characters.” —
The Denver Post
“Dorothy Salisbury Davis may very well be the best mystery novelist around.” —
The Miami Herald
“Davis has few equals in setting up a puzzle, complete with misdirection and surprises.” —
The New York Times Book Review
“Davis is one of the truly distinguished writers in the medium; what may be more important, she is one of the few who can build suspense to a sonic peak.” —Dorothy B. Hughes,
Los Angeles Times
“A joyous and unqualified success.” —
The New York Times
on
Death of an Old Sinner
“An intelligent, well-written thriller.” —
Daily Mirror
(London) on
Death of an Old Sinner
“At once gentle and suspenseful, warmly humorous and tensely perplexing.” —
The New York Times
on
A Gentleman Called
“Superbly developed, gruesomely upsetting.” —
Chicago Tribune
on
A Gentleman Called
“An excellent, well-controlled piece of work.” —
The New Yorker
on
The Judas Cat
“A book to be long remembered.” —
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
on
A Town of Masks
“Mrs. Davis has belied the old publishing saying that an author’s second novel is usually less good than the first. Since her first ranked among last year’s best, what more need be said?” —
The New York Times
on
The Clay Hand
“Ingeniously plotted … A story of a young woman discovering what is real in life and in herself.” —
The New York Times
on
A Death in the Life
“Davis brings together all the elements needed for a good suspense story to make this, her fourth Julie Hayes, her best.” —
Library Journal
on
The Habit of Fear
“Mrs. Davis is one of the admired writers of American mystery fiction, and
Shock Wave
is up to her best. She has a cultured style, handles dialogue with a sure ear, and understands people better than most of her colleagues.” —
The New York Times Book Review
on
Shock Wave
Dorothy Salisbury Davis
TO THE MEMORY OF MY FATHER,
Alfred Joseph Salisbury
I
F THE C.B.S. CORRESPONDENT
George L. Polk had not been murdered during the Greek Civil War in 1948, it is true, I should not have written this book. In the beginning I read what I could find and talked with many people about Polk, and at one time I was almost persuaded to attempt a book of non-fiction on the case. I found the areas of sensitivity very great and the truth of his death, I came to believe, beyond captivity in our times. I am one of a legion, and many of them far better informed than myself, who have turned away in the helpless conviction that, despite the official records, an earnest and open-minded reporter died for reasons we are not to know.
But having turned away, to the best of my knowledge I have left no vestige of resemblance to people or circumstance involved in the Polk case. The Greek guerrilla leader “Markos” is the only actual person who appears in the book, and he is more an idea than a character. I hope I have written entertainment. But because I care deeply for the Greek people, and because I believe all war, all violence, abomination, I would like to think also that my probe has taken me to some little revelation of the wounded hearts of men.
1—
Dorothy Salisbury Davis
F
OR ALMOST EIGHTEEN YEARS
I had been telling myself that I would go back to Greece, that when the time was right I would return and chance again the jeopardy from which, those lengthening years ago, I had been so ignominiously rescued.
But self-promises are the most delusory of all promises. Too often they are the means by which a man justifies himself in not taking the very action he prepares for. I came to enjoy my study of demotic Greek and to relish the company in which I practiced it, sailors, dish-washers, stonecutters, priests. I liked their wine, I liked their music and I liked their women. Above all, I liked their saying to me, “But you are a Greek!” And when I would return to my far different life than theirs, I would always ask myself: If I had known the language then; if, sitting on the backless bench which was my dock in the Epirus District Courtroom, I had been able to grasp the testimony against me as it passed the lips of my accuser, would my defense have been more adequate? Would it have been sufficient to convince the jury of my innocence? To this day I believe them all to have been honorable men. But they no less than I were pawns in a trial that mocked justice the more for its rigid adherence to the forms of justice.
My life’s work—I suppose I should say the work of my second life—bears further witness to the earnestness of my intentions. I settled into a career as a teacher of literature, but I bent my particular study toward Lord Byron, the British poet whom the Greeks are wont to consider an honorary citizen, legend having made him a hero of their War of Independence. That such study would someday justify the scholar’s journeying to Greece to explore firsthand the Byronic legacy was at the core of motive. I’m sure it was. But as the time for my possible return drew near, I felt myself seeking within the pretext itself further escape. If indeed I succeeded in returning, would not my rooting in the personal past betray my present work and therefore the foundation sponsoring it?
In a way it was Byron’s story which had beguiled me to Greece in 1947, the scene then of civil war. But at the time—I was only twenty-three—I dared not risk the onus such an admission might cast on me in the company I sought to keep, that virile fellowship of foreign correspondents. I would rather have admitted to bigamy than to Byron. Much rather. Which but capped the irony that in returning to Greece I would have to proclaim my Byronic scholarship.
I was, on the eve of the journey I am about to relate, in excellent physical condition. I’m reluctant to be omniscient now about what I was within—not whole, even as I knew too well, but not altogether hollow either. A bachelor—marriage was too risky for a person born at the age of twenty-three as it were—I was a man of affairs not quite so numerous as Byron’s perhaps, but conducted with infinitely more discretion. My students modeled my image to their tastes, my mentors to their needs, the publishing scholar whose presence at the university enhanced their own prestige. I was involved in many things with many people, but in my own mind committed to none.
I must say one more word on my preparation, and it may do me a little of the honor I supposed to have been otherwise lacking. During those years I had also studied every word written by and about the man of whose murder I had been convicted, Alexander Webb. You will remember that name, hearing it. It has become a by-word for American journalism at its best. Does the name Jabez Emory mean anything to you? I doubt it. When the bell tolls for the mighty, the name of the toller is soon forgotten. But I confuse the truth attempting poetry. I did not kill Alexander Webb. Therefore, who did? And why? He did not die for the sordid reasons testified to at my trial. I had come to believe very few people thought he did. And yet no seeker after the truth had ever found it. Would I?
I have been told by historians that he was the soundest chronicler of Balkan politics reporting World War II, its prelude and aftermath. I always asked my informants—as though the information had slipped my mind—what ever happened to him.
“To Webb?” This answer is graven in my mind: “He was murdered during the Greek Civil War. Some say the Communists did it, some say the Greek government had a hand in it. There was an American involved. I’ve forgotten now, but I think he disappeared afterwards behind the Iron Curtain….”
How odd it was to hear those words while sitting in the Faculty Club lounge, smoking a cigar, sipping brandy, and then to walk out into the night across the campus of an American university to my own office. “Suppose,” I was sometimes tempted to say to my informant, “just suppose that American…” but I never said it.
“You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free.” So I commenced my journal on the morning I received my American passport in the name of Professor John Eakins.
I had been technically honest in filling out the application: no passport had been previously issued to John Eakins, and the purpose of his journey was to follow Byron’s trail. That once I had carried such a document issued at the Paris Embassy to former Lieutenant Jabez Emory had long since lost relevancy. Emory was dead to everyone except himself. And the United States Department of State had assisted at his demise.
I want to tell this part of the story without bitterness. If I have not married, if I have no roots, if I have never returned to the small Midwestern town where I was born and where my mother died while I was on trial, I consented to the divorcement and thereby acted out a fate it seemed impossible for me to turn. I remember something my court-appointed lawyer said when we were both in despair of my defense: “When your gods forsake you there is no more hope.”
Before going into the army I had wanted to be a writer, so that, obtaining my discharge overseas, I thought the quickest way to try my pen was to dip it in the bloody residue of war and revolution. There had been something lacking in my military career: I had never reached the front. I had never killed an enemy. I remembered Byron seeking his salvation among the warring Greeks. My hometown newspaper provided me with credentials and every week paid my mother my salary, ten dollars, which she deposited to a bank account in my name. I shouldn’t think the account has ever been closed.
The
County Citizen
got its money’s worth in my weekly dispatch, my mother a moment of pride before disaster. I made my bread and beer in Athens as legman for several of the name correspondents who, to a man, were bored and restive. Somewhere in the country a civil war was being fought and they were corralled like sheep by the Athens government which fed them daily handouts on what was going on. They called me “the kid” and sent me off on rumors—to the palace, to Parliament, to the docksides, to wherever I could go before the military turned me back. For every lead I turned up to a story worth a byline, I got a pocketful of drachmas—three dollars’ worth.
I was a “kid,” younger by far than my years, and, oh, dear God, how innocent. Stupidity would not have sufficed. Only innocence could have rendered me so vulnerable.
One of the questions that will recur throughout this narrative is why Alexander Webb took me along in the first place. At the time, mine wasn’t to reason why: I was too damned glad to be asked to go anywhere with him, under any conditions. And, of course, when we left Athens I did not know where we were going.
It was at Patras that I first met Paul Stephanou, the young
Elasite
who was to be our guide and translator and who in time became the State’s chief witness against me. I knew by then that we were heading for the northern headquarters of the Greek guerrillas because it was arranged that should we be intercepted by the government, our story was that Markos himself had offered Webb the interview.