Greek Fire (8 page)

She passed the tip of her tongue over her lips. “ My friend, if you would be advised by me, I think you would be a happier man if you confined you interests to your publishing.”

“I've always found happiness rather an abstract thing to worry about.”

She picked up her cigarette-case and opened it and took out a cigarette, but then she put it down without lighting it and snapped the case shut. On the back of the case were some words George

had had engraved when he gave it to her.
'
Εκ
τоυˆ ὁρaˆυ γίγυετaı τὸ

ἐρaˆυ
.

“Hullo,” he said.

“Hullo.”

“I thought for a moment you had hung up.”

“No.”

“I would like to see you again.”

“Perhaps sometime we can arrange it.”

“There are some things I'd like to say to you.”

“Well, I am listening.”

“Don't be impossible, please.”

Her Italian maid, Edda, came into the room with some red roses in a bowl and put them on the piano. She was going to say something but Anya nodded and dismissed her.

Gene said: “I shall be here probably for another week, and …”

“And there are some things you would like to say to me.”

“As you remark.”

She said: “You still want to meet George Lascou?”

There was a brief pause. “Yes, I do.”

“Then come there tonight. He is giving a small dinner party—eight or ten. I can arrange it.”

“You can arrange it.…”

“Does that surprise you?”

“No.…”

“Then you will come?”

“Thank you. I'll come.”

“At nine. Heracles House, the seventh floor.”

“What will George Lascou say?”

“He'll do what I ask.”

“I don't wonder.”

“Then will you do what I ask?”

“What do you ask?”

“Stop sending me red roses.”

“It's just a simple whim I have.”

“If you wish to be a fool I cannot be responsible for that.”

“Why should you be?”

“No. I should not be.”

“Or why should you care?”

“I don't.”

“Neither do I,” he agreed.

When she had put back the receiver she got up from her chair and walked across to the window. Sunshine fell diagonally through it and warmed her arm and side. She turned away, frowning, and moved to the bookshelf, putting back two books she had taken out, went to the chair, picked us the daily newspaper. Edda was in the bathroom running her bath water. She lit a cigarette and stood for a few moments motionless with the cigarette case in her hand. George's inscription made a roughness under her thumb. “
From seeing comes loving
.”

The Tower of the Winds, an octagonal building put up in the first century
B
.
C
. by Cyrrhestes, was losing its sharp outlines in the quick Athenian twilight when Gene came to it, walking like a mean-natured cat expecting trouble. He was about to make a cautious circuit of the place when a woman broke away from one of the ruined Doric pillars and came to him. A vivid scarf over her hair was like a badge of identity
.

“Ah,” he said, taking off his hat. “ You're alone?”

“Yes. This morning I left the message.”

“All this week I've been hoping you'd send word.”

She said: “ I saw you at the police inquiry. Also Philip tells me you have been trying twice to make his acquaintance.”

“He wouldn't play.”

“He thinks you are a reporter.”

“I doubt if he ever did believe that.”

Maria looked at him. “You suspect him of not being fair with me?”

“What have you came to tell me?”

“Something it may be very necessary to tell you if that is true.”

“Will you come back to my lodgings?”

“No. It is safe here. I—I don't know how it is to begin.” Her thick lips, made for laughter, were pouting and strained. “You know that Juan was trying to—make money?”

“Yes.”

“I am not quite so ignorant of it as I pretended. You know. If a man and a woman are in love, as we were, they do not have complete secrets. But it is true that I do not know much. He said it is better that I did not know much. I do not know what Juan had to sell. But I know of the—arrangements. He was crazy to paint; he didn't wish for the life of a cabaret artist; he loved Spain and wished to settle in comfort in a small fishing village in Andalusia and spend the rest of his life there. You know. That was why he did this thing. I told him often in the last weeks, go carefully; it is better to work for one's living in honour than to go to prison for a dishonourable thing. But he would not listen. He would say, this is my one chance; if I miss this one chance I shall be dancing until I am old.”

“So you came to Greece?”

Maria Tolosa untied the knot of her scarf and pulled it off. Then she shook out her hair, scowling at the sculptured reliefs below the cornice of the tower, which were becoming harder to distinguish against the whitening evening sky. “He had made arrangements. These papers he had deposited in the Banca d'Espagna in Madrid. In the bank he has a cousin. Juan was to ask from this person in Greece that a large sum of money shall be paid into his account in Madrid. As soon as that was paid in, his cousin had agreed to send these documents to him here.”

“Your husband was expecting the other side to trust him?”

“I don't know. It is that he may have had some surety which he could give them. You know. I told him; I warned him; I said, you are playing a risk.”

“Was Philip Tolosa in this?”

“He knows the attempt to get this money is to be made. He does not know who is the man or what it is that Juan has to sell.”

“Has something else happened now?”

“Yes.”

Her bracelets jangled as she sat down on a piece of fallen masonry, and after a minute he squatted beside her. The noise and glitter of the city was not far away but seemed as remote as the sea on a frosty day.

“On Wednesday I have talked this over with Philip. We have agreed that now no question of money comes in. We are no longer wanting to sell the papers, we wish to
use
them. You know. That way we can get some revenge. We are agreed on that. And the only way to use them is while we are here.”

“So what have you done?”

“I have sent for the papers.”

“To be posted here?”

“Yes.”

Gene bit his lip. She was watching him closely. “ Was this your idea or your brother-in-law's?”

“Philip's.”

“And why have you come to me now?”

“Because, now I have done it, I am not happy about it.”

“You think Philip wants the papers to sell himself?”

“I am not sure if my suspicion of him is my own or whether you have planted it. But there is something very wrong with him. He is—going to pieces while I watch. Always he has been the high-strung kind; but now … While he was persuading me to do this I thought he was upset because he was burning for revenge. Now I do not know what to think. He lies on his bed smoking all day. He has fits of trembling, trying to keep still. You know. He will not even touch his harp. At night I hear him walking about.”

“And so?”

“It may be grief for his brother that is destroying him, but if so it is not the sort of grief that is mine. What use will he be when the letter comes, if such is his condition? I am worried and don't know how to turn. That is why I have come to you.”

“You think I'm worth trusting now?”

“You have sad eyes, M. Vanbrugh—as if they have seen many things they would like to forget. But I think you are a man of honour.”

Darkness had come like a curtain drawn. Bats were circling over the tower.

“When do you expect the papers?”

“Not until early next week. I cannot cable for them, for it is certain our cousin will not send them without a signature in writing which he can recognise. But in my letter I ask him to cable back. I have that cable tonight.” She clasped and unclasped her fat strong hands; they seemed to need something to take hold of. “The cable says he receives my letter yesterday afternoon, that is Friday. The cable says sending today.”

“Saturday.… They might be here Monday. No, that's barely possible. Tuesday at the earliest.”

“That is what I thought.”

“Philip knows of the cable?”

“Yes.”

“But the letter will come addressed to you—if it is not tampered with.”

“Yes.”

“Can you be sure of getting it first?”

“The letters are usually put just inside the front door of the house where we live. I can do my best to be about in the hall when the postman comes.”

“Do that.”

“And then?”

“Can you bring them straight to me?”

She hesitated. In a two-storeyed house nearby someone had switched on a light in an un-shuttered upper room, and Gene's face showed clearly. This time it had no expression.

“And you?”

“If they are what I suppose they may be, then I can help you to make use of them in the most effective way.”

“What do you suppose they may be?”

“There's no point in guessing when we shall be sure so soon.”

The light went out and they were left in a greater darkness.

‘
What
was the name of the man my husband mentioned in Paris?”

“Avra.”

“Why are you interested in him?”

“I think when you get these papers it may explain that to.”

“I
have
to trust you,” she said. “ If you let me down …”

“I'll not let you down.”

It was just on nine when he got to Heracles House. He knew he was taking a risk in going, but a ‘ must' within himself made the risk necessary.

There was no one about when he stepped into the self-operating lift and pressed the button for the seventh floor; lights winked and the lift sighed and took him up with a carefully graded acceleration; after a very few seconds it sighed again and let him out. The lobby upstairs was empty and he pressed the bell at the door at the end and a manservant showed him into a small ante-room where half a dozen people were talking.

Some he already knew; Maurice Taksim, the Turk; General Telechos; Gallanova, the Yugo-Slav ballerina; others he knew by sight, like Jon Manos. George Lascou came towards him, grey waistcoated, gold glinting like a welcoming smile from the bridge of the pince-nez. For a short moment their hands touched and eyes met; conventional gestures of welcome and the empty words—good-of-you-to-come, kind-of-you-to-have-me. Almost at once Anya appeared through another door, in a dress that glittered as she walked across the room.

It was a small dinner-party, candle-lit at table, in a handsome high-windowed dining-room; two menservants, black-clad and silent, hovered like benevolent ghosts. On Gene's right was Mme Telechos; on his left was Gallanova, a fine-boned Slav with an imperious chin, in a Molyneux gown of slashed crimson. Beyond her was a stout moustached little man called Major Kolono whom Gene felt he had seen somewhere before and who stared fixedly at him. Mme Lascou was not present. Anya sat on George's right, some distance from Gene. They had only spoken a few words in private, when Gene had said: “I've hired a car for tomorrow.”

“What to do?”

“To take you to Delphi, if you will come.”

“Thank you, no.”

… They fed on caviare, coq au vin, fresh woodland strawberries flown in from Corfu; and the conversation was as cultured as the meal. There were three or four very good talkers present; but Gene, speaking Greek now, rose to the mood and held his own. Perhaps only Anya, withdrawn tonight and communing more with herself than other people, perceived the paradox, saw the off-hand wit stemming from the eastern seaboard of the New World, expressing itself in the tongue of Aristophanes.

And George watched them both. George watched everyone with his soft fluid movements and sharp astigmatic eyes. No one could ignore that he was master of the evening: he led the talk, fed it, conducted it down safe and popular avenues, the perfect chairman you'd say, perhaps that was how be had come to lead his party, and then perhaps not, the velvet glove was not empty.

The number was small for splinter groups; when Maurice Taksim asked Gallanova about her early years as a ballerina, everyone listened to her story of the Yugo-Slav ballet after the war. She spoke of her own poverty and early struggles, and Mme Telechos said: “Ah, d'you remember the inflation here? When I sent my son to school he went with his pockets crammed with bank-notes to pay his tram fare. Do you remember when a newspaper cost ten thousand million drachmae?”

“That time must never come again,” said Jon Manos, but conventionally as if he didn't believe it ever could, for him.

“We had our troubles in Istanbul,” said Taksim, “but of course they do not compare. Were you here, George?”

“It is always interesting to hear how a rich man became rich,” said Gallanova, turning her much photographed profile to the candle-light. “ Would it bore you to tell us how it happened to you, M. Lascou? Or have you always been wealthy?”

“Happened is the correct word. It happened to me. After the war I borrowed money and invested it in real estate. Regrettable though it may seem, the successive inflations helped me, and I built more and more flats and offices. Then I was able to buy factories in Piraeus and Salonika. It was all very easy once the start was made.”

Everyone murmured in polite disbelief.

“I don't ever quite understand,” said Taksim, “ why you have bothered to enter politics. Why grub in the gutter now you have money to live on the heights?”

George shrugged. “After a white, when you have enough of it, money becomes unimportant. Then you seek something else—an outlet possibly for idealism.”