Levkas Man (32 page)

‘He'd still have wanted a son.' Her voice sounded infinitely sad.

We were halfway across the platform then and I saw Kotiadis down by the tent. He came to meet us. still wearing the same light grey suit, his face impassive behind his dark glasses. He ignored Zavelas's greeting, walked right past him and thrust one of the notebooks at me. ‘You see this before?'

I nodded, surprised at the violence in his voice.

‘Is written in Russian. Connaissez-vous? What for is he writing in Russian, eh?' His voice was literally trembling, so intense was his feeling at this discovery.

It didn't matter to him that the writer of those notes was dead. He didn't believe it, anyway, convinced that my father had disappeared ‘for convenience' as he put it. As for the suggestion that the notes were written in Russian for reasons of scientific security, he simply ignored it, firing questions at me in a steady stream—about the old man, about where he had been and where we were planning to go. I suppose he was under pressure, his superiors and the Middle East tension, but I wasn't in the mood to make allowances. To me he was a stupid, bloody-minded bastard, a typical bureaucrat, and I told him so.

‘You are under arrest,' he shouted at me. ‘All of you.' He pointed up the channel. ‘You go with the boat to Vathy now. Then I take you to police headquarters at Levkas.'

Anger exploded in me then, exploded into violence, my hands reached out to grip him by the collar and shake some sense into him. Soaia called to me and I hesitated, and in that moment my arms were seized and pinned to my side in a great bear-hug, Zavelas talking over my shoulder, fast and urgent in Greek. Unable to move, I let the torrent of words pour over me. They were both of them shouting now, the violence of their altercation drumming at the rocks, so that it sounded as though they were having a furious row. Then suddenly it was all over and Kotiadis was smiling, holding out his hand to me. ‘Pardon,' he said. ‘I did not understand. Please to accept my sympathies.' Zavelas released me then and Kotiadis added, ‘Now we must recover Dr Van der Voort's body.' The way he said it, the watchful, wary look in his eyes, I knew the future depended on that—the finding of my father's body.

Sonia's hand touched mine, a gesture of understanding, of sympathy, but I shook her off. I didn't want sympathy. I just wanted me clock turned back, the years in Amsterdam again. Atonement for my own callousness. I felt unutterably depressed. Not so much at the old man's death, but because of the wasted years.

It was in this mood that I took Kotiadis up to the cave and began clearing the loose debris of the new fall, Sonia working beside me, both of us for our own individual reasons endeavouring to lose ourselves in the hard physical work of shifting rock. Holroyd returned, bringing Cartwright, Hans and Vassilios with him. They had tools and a pressure lamp, but no wheelbarrow, so that everything still had to be taken out to the rubble pile by hand. It was hard, back-breaking work, fine rock dust hanging in clouds, clogging our nostrils.

By one-thirty the whole outline of the rhinoceros was clear on the wall again and we had progressed to the point where the cave was almost as deep as when I had surprised my father working in it late that night. We broke for lunch then, Sonia having come back with Florrie and a great pile of sandwiches they had cut on board. Apparently Bert had located a shelf of rock and the boat was moored bows-on to the shore with an anchor out astern. ‘He's planning a dive this afternoon.' Florrie was looking tired and strained.

‘Well, tell him to be careful,' I said, conscious still of the atmosphere of this place and not wanting another tragedy.

She gave me a wan smile. ‘You don't have to worry about Bert when it comes to diving. It's something he's really good at.'

I knew that. I'd watched him dive in the harbour at Patmos. And then later, under his instructions, I'd gone down myself in shallow water off Leros. I wouldn't have done that if I hadn't had complete confidence in him. But to start diving now … ‘It would be more help if he came ashore and gave us a hand.'

‘He's not thinking of helping you,' she said. ‘It's just to take his mind off things.'

It was shortly after the lunch break that Hans uncovered the end of the crowbar. We felt we were near then, but time passed as we worked more carefully at the face and we found nothing. It was all broken rock and the roof unsafe, the ceiling fractured so that you could pull great chunks of limestone away with your hands. Zavelas had brought three men from Spiglia and by evening we were in a distance of about eight yards. For the last hour Kotiadis had stood watching us. It was not difficult to guess what he was thinking.

We packed it in at sunset and, apart from the crowbar, all we had found was the old man's watch and a tin filled with carbide. They were not more than a foot apart. It would seem that, after refilling his acetylene lamp and lighting it, he had laid the carbide tin down and then, perhaps because he knew he had some hard, jarring work ahead of him with the crowbar, he had removed his watch from his wrist and put it down beside the tin. The watch was a write-off, of course, the face and works completely shattered. It had a stainless steel case and the leather strap was almost black with sweat. Sonia said he had bought it in Russia, but marks on the case showed that it was Swiss-made.

The only man who was satisfied that night was Holroyd. What looked like the head of a deer superimposed on the rump of some larger animal had been uncovered, and on the opposite wall the vague outline of a very complex drawing was just beginning to emerge. He was impatient for the morning when Zavelas had promised to bring more men and also at least one wheelbarrow. With a wheelbarrow the work would go much faster and he was sure that they would break through into an undamaged gallery beyond the fall.

Bert, too, was not unhappy. He had started diving shortly after three in the afternoon and had worked his way steadily along the underwater face of the Levkas shore below the cave. He described it as ‘very broken, with deep crevices between what looked something like the flying buttresses supporting a medieval cathedral.' He had explored every one of those crevices, some of them over 50 metres in depth and most of them very narrow. In only one case had he failed to reach the end. This was more a cave than a fissure, the curved sides suggesting that it had been worn by water over a very long period. About 30 metres in it had been partially blocked by a fallen slab. There was a gap, but it was small. He had gone in about 2 metres with his aqualung scraping rock all the time.

‘I was running short of air by then,' he said. ‘Also I'd only got a small hand torch, so I backed out. I'll have another go at it tomorrow.' He wasn't sure whether that was the end of the cave or whether it opened out further in. ‘There wasn't much light, you see. If I could anchor over it and take down a spotlight … it's a bit tricky like, 'cos if it don't open up you've got to back all the way out.'

Back at Vathy he was still talking about it. The row with his wife, the harsh words said, seemed wiped from his mind. And for her part, Florrie seemed to take it for granted that nothing had changed. Sonia was on board with us and when I told her what had happened between them earlier, all she said was, ‘What did you expect? Only a fool would go into marriage with her eyes shut to the sort of man she was tying herself to for life, and Florrie isn't a fool.' She was looking at me very directly as though to say ‘and nor am I.'

She had supper with us and then I rowed her ashore. She sat in the stern, her face a pale oval in the starlight, and she didn't speak until we were close in to the quay. ‘Bert seems very excited about that hole he's found.'

‘It's a challenge,' I said. ‘An object for doing something he likes doing.'

‘Yes, but he seemed to think if he could get through he'll find the cave continuing.'

‘With pictures of animals painted in brilliant colours, I suppose.' That was what the old man had hoped and the cave was Holroyd's now.

She caught the note of bitterness in my voice, for she said gently, ‘Surely to prove him right—wouldn't that be something worth while?'

‘Not my department,' I said, thinking of Holroyd starting at crack of dawn, intent on breaking through to the cave beyond. ‘I'll get his body out and then I'll go.' And I added, without conscious thought, ‘There's something about that place, a voodoo, something—I don't like it.'

The bows touched and she sat there for a moment, staring at me, silent. Then she jumped for the quay, and with a quick goodnight she was gone like a shadow into the night. I leaned on the oars, wondering what the hell she expected of me. The old man was dead, and though his death might mean more to her than it did to me, she surely couldn't be childish enough to think that I could carry on where he had left off.

When I got back to the boat, Bert was on deck to take the painter. ‘Can you give me a hand at the workbench?' he said. ‘I'm rigging a battery-operated spotlight. It'll be better than trailing a long cable, but I need help with the water-proofing.'

I suppose you could call it a displacement activity. Give a man like Bert a technical problem and he lost himself in it completely, everything else forgotten. It took us just over two hours to fix and test that spot, and all the time he was talking about how he'd get through the crevice if he found the cave opening out beyond it.

Afterwards we tuned in to Radio Athens and listened to the English news broadcast. Florrie had gone to bed and we were alone in the wheelhouse, a drink in our hands and the announcer telling of gun duels across the Suez Canal, air strikes and Cairo in an uproar of militant demonstration. The Security Council of the United Nations was meeting in the morning. ‘Florrie used to get tracts from an outfit called the British Israelites,' Bert said as he switched the radio off. ‘That was when we were in Great Yarmouth. Bloody queer stuff, too; prophecies based on the pyramids and the Bible, that sort of thing. Didn't go for it myself, but one thing I remember—they were convinced Armageddon would start in the Middle East.' He raised his drink, his battered face creased in a smile. ‘It's times like this I'm glad I'm just a simple bloke with a boat of my own and things to occupy my mind. Give me a cave to explore or a bit of engineering to do and I don't give a damn whether the human race is hell-bent on self-destruction or not. There's so much in the world, why the hell aren't we content with what we've got? We go to the moon. Space platforms next. And yet we can't sort out a little matter like the Jews and the Arabs living together. And right here beneath our keel a whole underwater world, virtually unexplored, full of marvels and so bloody beautiful. Makes you sick, don't it?'

That was the longest speech I had heard him make in the two months I had been with him. ‘Well, to hell with the human race!' He grinned and downed his drink. We went to bed then. Tomorrow they would dig out my father's body, and then I'd have to bury it again and we'd sail for Pantelleria. I lay in my bunk, sleepless, thinking about the future, and about Sonia. A new dimension. I'd never had to think about anybody but myself before.

2

We were up at seven next morning, and after tea and a cigarette, began winching in the anchor chain. A boat put out from the quay, and by the time we had got the anchor stowed, Zavelas was alongside with Kotiadis. ‘You do not mind if I come with you?' He climbed on board, smiling politely. The patrol boat had returned to Levkas and he was taking no chances.

The day was overcast, hot and very humid, the sea a sheet of glass. Bert and I took it in turns to go below for breakfast. Kotiadis had coffee, nothing else, and he didn't talk much, his eyes watching us warily. By eight forty-five we were in the Meganisi Channel, and as I wolfed my bacon and eggs, I wondered what he'd do if we continued straight through it, heading for the open sea. He came on deck with me as the engine slowed and we coasted in to the shore below the brown gash of the overhang. A boat lay in the gut, nobody in it and no sign of life on the rocks above. ‘They are working in the cave,' Kotiadis said. Today we discover the truth.'

I turned on him angrily. ‘You won't be satisfied till you see his body, will you?'

He looked at me, his eyes hooded against the cloud-glare. ‘No. The evidence of my own eyes—that is important in my business.'

Bert was manœuvring close in, positioning
Coromandel
over the shelf to the south of the gut. I dropped the kedge over the stern and then, after taking the bow warp ashore in the dinghy and making it fast to the rock it had been looped over the previous day, Kotiadis and I hauled her in close while Bert paid out astern. When everything was fast,
Coromandel
was lying as before, bows-on to the shore with lines out fore and aft. Moored in this way, she was broadside to the direction of the channel and this had a bearing on what happened later.

‘Don't be too long,' Bert said as I got into the dinghy with Kotiadis. ‘Conditions are ideal and it may not last.' His mind was set on the dive he had planned. It was a tricky one and Florrie had very sensibly insisted that he waited till I was back on board.

‘I'll be right back,' I told him. They're not likely to have discovered anything yet.'

But I was wrong there. The three of them had been working since first light, and when we reached the cave, Holroyd met us, stripped to the waist, his pale, almost hairless torso glistening with sweat. ‘I think we're almost there.' He said it flatly, but there was a gleam of excitement in his eyes as he set the rock fragments he was carrying down on the pile, examining them almost automatically before going back into the darkness of the cave.

Kotiadis was not interested in prehistoric caves and he had clearly mistaken the gleam in the Professor's eyes. ‘You have found Dr Van der Voort's body?'