Enemy and Brother (23 page)

“In my heart I may have feared that this was so. I was very easily convinced that the case could be tried in criminal court—outside the jurisdiction of the military.

“In confessing myself an accessory I strengthened the prosecution’s case. I said that in giving you the gun I was aware of the purpose for which you might want it, that I assumed although you had not said so, that given the chance you might kill Webb.”

“And you believed this?”

Stephanou moistened his lips. He was holding the arms of the chair so tightly the bones of his hands shone white through the skin. “No. I did not believe it. But by then I believed something else that made it imperative that I survive and someday go free. I believed that Captain Demetrios killed Webb and mutilated the woman, the latter of which to me was the greater crime.”

I had often wondered how I would feel if ever the day came when I would hear Paul Stephanou admit to falsely testifying. I felt nothing. If personal vindication had been my goal, I felt in no way vindicated. I said, “Your freedom was a long time coming.”

“A long time,” he repeated.

“And you convicted a man of a murder he had not committed.”

“I might have killed you as I had been commanded,” he said angrily. “And you were less than dirt to me. You tried to accuse me. You had your chance to match your story against mine. That you are here today is proof that you were believed where I was not, for all the jury’s pious deliberation. That trial was a mockery and you and I were feathers on the winds of its oratory.”

“But why, Paul? Why?”

“Because the good Greek government and its American advisers hated Alexander Webb as much as they did the Communists. According to them he should not have been there. I am sure it has been said before: in time of war truth is the first casualty.”

We sat in silence for a moment or two. I had turned in my chair so that I could watch the sun’s setting. I remembered its rising the morning I was being churned away from Greece on a fishing boat in the care of a gold-toothed man I took to be Italian.

I said again, “The name of Demetrios never came up at all.”

“They did not want it to come up.”

“You are convinced of that?” I am.

“You have been convinced of other things and proved wrong—for example, that I was rescued from the jailhouse by your sympathizers.”

He sat for a moment, saying nothing. Somewhere off a bird was singing his heart out.

“What you are saying, Professor, is: I believe only that which I want to believe.”

“Something like that,” I murmured.

“Then I must be converted,” he said almost brightly. “I proclaim my mind open to any and all truth.”

“You and the birds,” I said, for the songbird persisted in its own blithe gospel.

“What?”

“Nothing really.” I got up. “I’m going to ask for some hot tea. Will you have a cup?”

“You wish to be alone,” he said. “I understand. I will be all right here, and if I call someone will come.”

“For a little while,” I said.

“Professor?”

I turned back.

“Will you see the former Margaret Webb?”

“Probably, if she is in Ioannina, and I rather think she may be for the theater festival. Going there, I might not be able to avoid it even if I wanted to.”

“You will be traveling among the same people, in the same class.”

I did not like his tone, faintly ironic.

“We may have acquaintances in common,” I said coldly.

“Perhaps she will be able to tell us where Demetrios is,” he said.

I did not realize at first why the words more angered than surprised me: it was their implicit admission of a prejudice no less than that of which he accused me in my judgment of the woman of the camp. But sudden insight can be as blinding momentarily as the long darkness it illuminates. I said, “Now I understand how it was possible for you to testify against me.” And I left him.

I
HAVE REMARKED HERE
before on my faculty—let me call it cowardly: it is close to that—for diverting myself short of the real issue by the contemplation of something remotely associable. When I left Stephanou I walked out and along the road proposing to think about “the man of culture,” Demetrios, and wound up thinking about Byron, the aristocrat, plunging himself and his fortune into the Greek struggle for independence. The problem that had plagued him most was which of the Greek revolutionaries was the most trustworthy, which could be counted on to put the cause ahead of personal ambition, indeed, in one case, of vanity. That Byron should have had to cope with another man’s vanity added a certain piquancy.

I left the road and hiked across the open country, through grazing land and past the rubble of long-abandoned habitations. I let my mind wander with as little aim. The issues might be clearer when it found its own way back to them.

I came on a cemetery and a soldiers’ monument at the bottom of which lay a withered wreath. Beyond was a church much of which seemed to have sunk into the ground. There was thereabouts, I knew, a sixth-century church, and I supposed I had happened on it. The door no longer fit properly, the hinges loose and awry, but it was padlocked. The windows were boarded. Slants of daylight shone through the rotting boards. The door’s large keyhole afforded me a view of the iconostasis and the altar on which a faded cloth still hung, scarred with mould and dust. Several candles drooped obscenely in ancient candelabra. I got up from my squat position, about to leave, and thought how often I had been content with what I could see through a keyhole. Proximity, involvement had always tortured me. “It was as though he was afraid to know—as though it might contaminate him”—Paul’s first indictment of Jabez Emory.

I was clear now of the charge of murder, assuming Paul Stephanou would repeat his admission before a proper witness. Which, I realized at once, was an unwarranted assumption. He could revert to the silence of stone.

Demetrios. My mind simply could not cope: the memory was too fragmentary. It was like trying to understand physics without mathematics. I thought how vivid my recollection of Paul Stephanou had been over all the years, conjured always from that moment of hatred. Such would be his memory of Demetrios, but prisoned forever behind the iron curtain of blindness. Blindness calculated and achieved. It took more than a little daring to accomplish that. Power and money and access.

I saw then, as in a kaleidoscope, the connection between past and present, and I could almost see why Alexander Webb had died, but it came to the solution I would not credit. Therefore I would not tolerate even the fragments of it in my mind until piece by piece they were forced upon me, tested and documented.

I went back to Paul both fearful and resolute. I found him where I had left him; someone had brought him his coat. It hung over his shoulders. The sun had set. I got my sweater from the car and came back to the chair beside him.

“Paul, do you think Demetrios is in Ioannina?”

“It is possible. Professor, we must not be angry with each other. I want to tell you—it is about Varvaressos again. In prison he was questioned many times concerning the money he had stolen. It was an army payroll. He was questioned by the military. I know how they can question, and the night they broke him down, he cried. It was terrible to hear and he was taken away to be confined by himself, but that is not what is now important to us. The military would have used every persuasion. Therefore, they would have known all there was to know about his father.

“I will tell you now I believe Demetrios to have been an agent of the Greek government in Markos’ camp….”

This was one of the fragments: it had become implicit to me that there had to have been such an agent.

“And I believe it is an inescapable conclusion that this same man is now a ranking officer in the Greek army.”

Even as I had concluded.

“I have wondered,” Paul went on, “if my blindness could be arranged, why not my death? I have always believed the prison authorities to have been entirely innocent of any complicity. For me to have been murdered, the investigation would have been much deeper and more public. As it was—the act of temper, vengeance—and my blindness was not immediate—it was a matter for prison discipline, not public investigation. And it was sufficient to this man’s need that I simply must not recognize him. Which is peculiar. He would not know I had seen the woman, Maria—or felt as I did about it. Even so—a man in his position could say, ‘Yes, I was in the
Andarte
camp when Webb came, I was there under instructions from the Greek government.’ And who would believe it if I said now, ‘You murdered Webb?’ Or if they believed it and he said, ‘I had to kill him. He was a Soviet agent,’ who would not justify him?”

This was the piece on which I had turned back. I said nothing.

“Professor?”

“Yes.”

“You do not believe it, I know. But it is something you and I will have to discover if it is not so.”

I held to the logic, piece by piece: “Go on, Paul, to the reason you were blinded.”

“It can only be that he is now engaged in some enterprise where the merest association with the Webb death would be—more than awkward—perhaps fatal to it.”

I took a deep breath. “And so we come to the presence at Margaret Webb’s wedding of one Colonel Alexis Frontis who happens also to be in charge of the left-wing purge of the army.”

“It is so.”

“And so, as my students would say, we are going where the action is.”

“What you say is expressive,” Paul said, “and it may be so.”

“At this point it is of considerable relevance to me to ask what Demetrios thinks became of Jabez Emory.”

“To me also, my brother. And we must not assume that what we think is actually so—if you understand me.”

“I do. The same answers are available to him if I were to identify him. Except that, unlike you, I would not have been able to accuse him. I could only say that he was there. And if in time he had been informed of my return to the United States and my change of identity…. But, Paul, why were you instructed to kill me that morning? Webb was dead. What was to be the purpose of my death?”

“And why did Markos consent to it? We do not know as much as for a time it seemed we knew…. Professor, I was watching your cottage that night, a vigil set by Markos himself. Whatever Webb wrote down in that hour or so before he went to the woman—Demetrios would not have known he was writing. He would have thought that Webb might have told you, confided in you what transpired between Markos, Webb and him. Remember Markos said to me of Webb that night, ‘You have brought me a friend.’”

“Then I would have been killed for the same reason as Webb.”

“I should think it likely.”

I enjoyed a brief, very brief, moment of personal satisfaction, for Paul went on: “It is to be wondered what would have happened to Webb—and to you—if Webb had not gone down with the woman. But we must not even think of that. He did go with her.”

Which led me to ask, “Would Demetrios have suspected he was going? Did he precede or follow Webb to the crossroads?”

“He would have had to follow, I think,” Paul said. “He was not himself a man familiar with the trails. And of course, the little alarm we raised. Remember, the watch of the night asked me and I told him Webb was with the woman. For him to have said that to Demetrios, Demetrios would have then known the true meaning of their having been found together.”

So that for all my righteous pretext of innocence in Webb’s death, it was my moral judgment—my willing, hasty and selfish judgment—that informed the killer on his prey. Small wonder fate had permitted the image of that instant to have haunted me down the years.

Paul let out a cry that was half-pain, half-triumph. It turned toward us the eyes of the woman who had come out with a tablecloth to the small patio.

I said, “There is someone near us, Paul.”

“God is near us,” he said fervently. “Is it all right to talk?”

“Yes. It is only the woman setting the table.”

“I told you of going through the pockets of Webb’s coat. I had not thought about it for years, but while you left me here I was going over and over in my mind the things I found there. You will remember the long walk—it does not matter where—the blister on your foot? And Webb, the great roll of adhesive tape? You said he was a walking pharmacy?”

“Yes.”

“There was no tape in his pockets—soap, yes, and other things, but the tape was gone. Why would he have taken that? Oh, my friend, I think I know. The woman was naked. And as I have said, I came to think he had flung her down and thrown himself upon her to deceive us at the door. He was making sure that if he died the document he wrote would survive him and his killer. Why else should he have written unless to document what he would not live to tell? He taped it to her body—and told her what to do with it if they were ambushed.”

“And what would she have done with it?”

“One does not know, for she was mad. Perhaps they took it from her in the Ioannina infirmary. But I will tell you, Professor, if she is alive today in Epirus, I will find her.”

W
E ATE OUR DINNER
early and alone on the terrace. It had been our practice throughout the journey to avoid the classified hotels, to stay wherever possible in homes that ordinarily might have been recommended by the tourist police when other accommodations were filled up. So it was that night. The woman in whose house we stayed served us an excellent soup and chicken potted with vegetables. The wine was light and tangy, on the edge of effervescence. We were both, I think, suppressing the urge to pursue our separate memories, and we both knew now that there was much we were simply not aware of knowing. We spoke with a kind of inquiring hesitancy as though the slightest, most mundane comment might prime something of stunning relevance. I remember vividly the kind of tingling expectancy I felt throughout the meal.

Paul said that it was a very good meal, not Vasso’s, but very good for a woman who was not Vasso.

I spoke of the wine. “To have tasted it with my eyes closed,” I said, “I’d have thought it Italian.”