Decision at Delphi (3 page)

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.

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. F
ORTRESS
I
MPREGNABLE
. D
RAWBRIDGE
U
P
, P
ORTCULLIS
D
OWN
. A
DVISE
W
E
C
ONCENTRATE
O
N
G
REEK
T
EMPLES
. 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.