Death of an Elgin Marble (7 page)

But here, Johnny felt, was a place where he might be able to catch the hidden pulse of the Greek community in London, their secret hopes, their dreams of home, the things from Athens and Thessaly and the islands the exiles missed the most. Sometimes he felt so much of an outsider, speaking no Greek, unaware of the nature and origin of the drinks they so kindly pressed upon him, that he wanted to go home right away and never come back. But these exiles from the Aegean saw something of a kindred spirit in the Irishman, his lust for travel, his sense of adventure, his love of fun. They nicknamed him the Green Odysseus behind his back. He reminded them, he was told one evening, of a famous character, well known to all Greeks in London, Sokratis Papadopolous, ostensibly a former art dealer, but believed by his fellow countrymen to have been a smuggler of antiquities, and a pirate in his better days. He was believed to have seen the interior of prisons in France, Italy and England. The Greeks from the Fox and Hounds took Johnny to see him in the hospital where Sokratis was dying, his liver now a thing of the past, his other organs shutting down one after another like flowers closing at the fading of the light. Only one visitor was allowed at a time. Johnny asked the emaciated figure about the theft of the Caryatid. Johnny didn’t think the man was in a position where he would be able to tell anybody anything ever again. An Irish nurse by the side of the bed was making clucking noises as if her patient should be left to die in peace.

The man was muttering to himself and thrashing about in the sheets. ‘Remember the Riddle of the Sphinx, remember.’ A pair of mad staring eyes bored into Johnny’s skull. A violent coughing fit seized Sokratis at this point. Sometimes he shouted and pointed dramatically at the ceiling. Johnny knew some of the symptoms from the worst excesses of his own past, the voices in your head, the vivid flashes of lightning so intense you felt your head would burst, the spiders on the bedclothes crawling all over your skin, the rats hanging upside down from the ceiling above. Time had no meaning in this alcoholic half world, the only consistent feeling one of acute fear and terror. Sometimes the walls and the ceiling would start spinning round and continue even after you had closed your eyes. On one occasion, and even now Johnny was still ashamed of his younger self, he had to crawl to the bathroom with the decorations on the carpet and the pictures in the hall hurtling through his brain like a series of shooting stars. Sometimes Sokratis spoke in Greek. On other occasions a phrase would leap out and seem to hold some special meaning known only to the speaker. ‘The Isles of Greece’ occurred over and over again, spoken with a series of nods as if Sokratis expected his listeners to share his meaning. Fragments of poetry seemed to crop up time after time. ‘I hear the Echoes through the mountains throng, The Winds come to me from the fields of sleep,’ came five times in a row. It was followed by ‘where is it now, the glory and the dream’. After that a short burst of weeping and then, raising himself up till he was semi-upright in his bed, he screamed, ‘shades of the prison-house, shades of the prison-house,’ and sank back on his bed. The breathing was shallow and very fast. Beads of perspiration glistened on his forehead and ran down the side of his face. The nurse continued to hold his left hand as if he were a small child in the middle of a nightmare. Now Sokratis looked as though he might pass out or pass away. Johnny had to lean forward to catch the next words, ‘Got to go to the High City,’ got to go to the High City, the High City.’ Then he turned onto his side and spoke no more.

The nurse showed Johnny to the door as quickly and as quietly as she could. ‘Let us all remember our God, whoever and wherever he is,’ she whispered, ‘now and in the hour of our death, amen.’

Inspector Kingsley had not yet heard of the Isles of Greece when he met with Deputy Director Ragg the following day to discuss the Booklet for the Young, as the policeman now referred to it.

‘Capital idea, capital!’ cried Ragg, rubbing his hands together. ‘Why didn’t we think of it ourselves? The Director will be so pleased, he’s always keen to involve the next generation. Our Head of Greek and Roman Antiquities should be back from the Alps in a couple of days, he too will be delighted. I shall issue instructions for everybody to give you their full cooperation. Perhaps you could wait twenty-four hours before you embark on your enquiries? That would be splendid.’

‘Thank you so much,’ said Inspector Kingsley. ‘I have some disappointing news, I fear, Mr Deputy Director. Not that I find it disappointing, for I had few hopes of success, but it does not take us any further forward.’

He paused and drew a couple of letters from his pocket. ‘You will recall that my superiors wished to send the blackmail letter to a couple of so-called handwriting experts?’ It sounded as though he thought his superiors should have been arrested immediately and locked up in Newgate for even harbouring such an idea.

‘You will not be surprised to hear,’ Kingsley went on, ‘that their reports are totally without value.’ He looked down at them distastefully. ‘There’s a whole lot of nonsense about pressure of downward strokes, upward inclination of the line indicating an optimistic temperament, decisive dottings of the i’s and so on. The upshot, to conflate the two reports, is that the author is a middle-aged man, possibly with violent temperament, of determined and decisive character who may stop at nothing to get what he wants. Bravo, say I. Tom Thumb himself could have told us as much as that.’

‘Never mind,’ said Deputy Director Ragg, ‘I thought it might be unprofitable. But tell me this, Inspector. Your men are patrolling my house and watching over my family day and night. I am most grateful. Today or tomorrow, by my calculations, we should hear from the blackmailer again even though the museum has followed your Commissioner’s advice not to get in touch with him at all. Do you think I shall receive another letter? That the blackguard will write again?’

‘I’m sure you’ll hear from him again, Mr Ragg. Let’s just hope a letter is all we get.’

Johnny Fitzgerald was rewarded with a large glass of Brunello di Montalcino, a new recommendation from Powerscourt’s wine merchant, when he brought the news of the Isles of Greece and the other Delphic messages from Sokratis Papadopolous to Markham Square shortly after 6.30 on the evening of his trip to the hospital. Lady Lucy had observed to her husband only the day before that Johnny seemed to be drinking much less than usual. She had heard a whisper from a distant outstation of her relatives in Warwickshire that Johnny was romantically involved with a rich and attractive widow resident in that county and in Flood Street, Chelsea, but no mention had been made of the putative love affair.

‘What do you think it all means, Lady Lucy? Shades of the prison-house and the other stuff comes from a poem by Wordsworth as far as I know. The High City probably means Acropolis. Half the bloody cities in ancient Greece had their own acropolises, didn’t they? I can’t make any sense of either of those. But “The Isles of Greece”, I mean, like the fellow said. What was he on about?’

‘It could be anything, Johnny, he was a very strange man that Lord Byron who wrote it. Some long dead relation of mine was supposed to have been in love with the poet, you know,’ said Lady Lucy. ‘Your dying friend did say it was a riddle, didn’t he? Like the Sphinx and what walks on four legs in the morning, two at midday and three in the evening.’

‘Could be a pub, the Isles of Greece,’ said Johnny hopefully, contemplating perhaps the long reconnaissance mission needed to identify such a place.

‘Or a restaurant,’ Powerscourt chipped in, ‘roll up, roll up for the freshest seafood in London.’

‘How about a nightclub?’ asked Lady Lucy. ‘Dusky Greek maidens dancing to the music of the lyre and the pipes of Pan perhaps?’

‘Seven veils?’ asked Johnny. ‘Six? Eight? Ten?’

‘That would depend on the time of the evening, I think, Johnny,’ Lady Lucy replied. ‘The later the hour, the fewer the number of veils, I imagine.’

‘How late before the veils disappear down to zero?’ asked Johnny.

‘What about a shop?’ suggested Lady Lucy, keen to escape from the veils. ‘Posh sort of place in Knightsbridge perhaps, selling luxury produce from the Greek islands, olives from Rhodes, toy bull dancers from Crete, a better class of ouzo from Mykonos, warm jumpers for seafarers in the winter months, hand-knitted by Greek grandmas by the fire in their peasant cottages while the wind howls round the Aegean.’

‘It could all have been a bluff, of course,’ said Powerscourt. ‘Maybe the fellow meant that the secret of the Caryatid’s disappearance actually does have to do with the Greek Islands. It wasn’t really a riddle at all.’

‘There are a couple of verses at the end of “The Isles of Greece” about Samian wine,’ said Lady Lucy. ‘They might appeal to you, Johnny. I looked it up earlier. Here we are: “Fill high the bowl with Samian wine! Our virgins dance beneath the shade – Place me on Sunium’s marbled steep, Where nothing, save the waves and I, May hear our mutual murmurs sweep; There, swanlike, let me sing and die: A land of slaves shall ne’er be mine – Dash down yon cup of Samian wine!”’

‘Sounds good to me,’ said Johnny, ‘I bet those rogues at the Greek pub near the Orthodox cathedral have some Samian filth hidden in the cellar. Do you think I should go to Samos, Francis? Check out the wine and the veils and the maidens?’

‘He said “The Isles of Greece”, mind you,’ said Powerscourt. ‘Surely if he wanted to refer to Samos, he’d have said Samos, wouldn’t he?’

‘There must be hundreds and hundreds of Greek islands,’ said Lady Lucy, feeling that the riddle wasn’t going to yield up its secrets very easily.

‘How long did it take that fellow Odysseus to get home to his island from Troy?’ Johnny Fitzgerald put his glass down and didn’t help himself to a refill. Lady Lucy looked meaningfully at her husband. ‘Ten years, wasn’t it? Should have taken him a couple of months or so at the most. I reckon it could take you as long to check out all those bloody islands. I’m not usually averse to a glass or two, even of Greek if you twist my arm, and a spot of sun and sea air and a few birds. Normally I’d volunteer like a shot but I’ve got rather a lot on at the moment so you’ll have to count me out of the expedition, I’m afraid.’

‘It looks to me as though the riddle has won the first round,’ said Powerscourt. ‘The way things look at the moment, it’s going to win the second and third rounds as well. Greeks with riddles are just as bad as the ones bearing gifts.’

The message from the Corfu telegram office down in the port was hand delivered by a barefooted ragamuffin who couldn’t have been more than ten years old. The stones of the harbour were still cold on his feet at half past nine in the morning. Captain Dimitri was on his second glass of ouzo since breakfast. He was not yet tired of waiting for news. The taverna was still producing its rather greasy moussaka, served by the pretty daughter, and his small crew was kept entertained by the bars and bordellos of the city centre some six hundred yards away. His ship was swaying slightly at her mooring on the harbour, the mangy lion fast asleep, the querulous monkeys staring sadly out to sea.

The message was very brief. Thirty or thirty-first October, it said. Half past four in the afternoon. Brindisi railway station. So, the Captain said to himself,
I have six days to get from the Greek to the Italian side of the Mediterranean. If I take on stores today and leave first thing tomorrow I should have plenty of time
. The Captain stared up at the sky with its wheeling gulls and decided that the weather would not trouble him on his journey. There was a widow he knew in Brindisi who ran a laundry in the town. Other services could be purchased for cash. Maybe she would be pleased to see him again.

Precisely what he was meant to pick up at the end of his journey, he did not know. All he knew was that it would be heavy and that he might have to hire a crane or a hoist of some kind to bring it aboard.

Over the next week Powerscourt and Lady Lucy opened relations with the upper layers of the Greek Establishment in London. They took morning coffee with the Greek Ambassador, Anastasias Papadikis, a former merchant who had made his fortune buying and selling new and second-hand boats of every description. Powerscourt’s cover story was that his publishers had asked him to write a short guide book on the glories of ancient Greece. He brought with him as a gift to the Ambassador a presentation copy of his own first volume on the cathedrals of England. What advice would the Ambassador give to one about to embark on such a venture in his native land? Sipping his sugary coffee very noisily through his great black beard, the Ambassador gave Powerscourt his blessing.

‘I don’t need to tell a man of your education about the principal sites, Lord Powerscourt, you will know them as well as I do. And Greece will always be grateful to this country for British assistance in money and diplomacy in the long battle for the independence we enjoy today. But I could perhaps make a few small suggestions of my own? The site in Anatolia believed to be the location of the ancient city of Troy, Homer’s Troy, is well worth a visit. But even you English know little of the key role played by an Englishman who advised the ghastly German Schliemann where to dig, and was a first-rate archaeologist in his own right. Calvert, Frank Calvert, is, or rather was, the man’s name, as he died a couple of years ago. The Greek government sent a cabinet minister to represent the Greek nation at his funeral. Your fellow countrymen should know more about the man. And, of course, there is Missolonghi at the mouth of the Gulf of Patras where the poet Byron gave his life for Greek freedom. Maybe your readers would like to pay their respects?’

Powerscourt noted that there was a famous portrait of Lord Byron in Albanian dress above the fireplace, holding an Eastern sword and with a great storm about to break out behind him. The Ambassador informed him that this was on loan from the British Government Collections as a gesture of friendship to Greece from the British people. When asked if there were any points of disagreement, any areas of conflict between the two nations, one an empire of the past, the other an empire in the present, the Ambassador simply laughed.