Pascali's Island (16 page)

Izzet came punctually to the hotel. We sat amid the potted palms, beneath the scenes of Jove's loves, in the otherwise deserted lounge. The abundant charms of the nymphs above his head made Izzet, in fez and alpaca jacket, seem even more shrunken and diminutive than usual. After the usual polite preliminaries Izzet offered to buy back the lease for double what Mister Bowles had paid – or not paid, rather, since in fact he has paid nothing so far but the ten liras deposit.

Mister Bowles rejected this offer very firmly. 'That just isn't good enough,' he said. 'They really cannot expect me to -' His blue eyes full of expostulation, a note of strong indignation in his voice. 'My research,' he said. 'The whole progress of my book has been held up. And then, you know, there is the disappointment… I mean, I should have liked my name to be associated with these finds. They could affect our knowledge of the whole period.'

Had I not known the truth I would have sworn he was in earnest. There was a blaze of true feeling, true injury in his tone, in his whole manner. Obviously he is a perfectionist, a true artist, allowing no vulgar admixture of triumph or cynicism, even in these crowning moments. Or, the disturbing suspicion came to me as I watched his face, could he be serious?. Did he in some way believe what he was saying?

'No, my dear chap,' he said. 'I must have seven hundred liras, at least.'

I was reassured, though not completely, by the exorbitance of his demand. As for Izzet, his eyelids fluttered with agitation. He stood up, as if to go. 'How can I return with such an offer?' he said. 'It is out of the question.'

'Well,' Mister Bowles told him, 'that is my figure. And by the way,' he added, as Izzet still hesitated, 'I have been up there this morning and I see you have stationed two soldiers on the site.'

Izzet at once denied that he knew anything about this.

'Be that as it may,' Mister Bowles said. 'It is hardly a mark of trust, is it? There was nothing in our agreement about a military presence.'

Izzet sat down again. He is highly strung and was quite distinctly trembling by this time. He looked like a vulture under powerful stress. 'Tell him,' he said to me, 'that the Vali has authorised me to offer six hundred liras, but fifty liras must be deducted, because that is the proportion of the lease. That is the final offer.'

'Five hundred and fifty?' Mister Bowles reflected for a moment or two. Izzet saved what dignity he could by refraining from looking at the Englishman's face, or at mine. 'Very well,' Mister Bowles said. 'I will accept that. It isn't enough, really, but I don't want to haggle.'

'He agrees,' I said. I did not translate the final remarks out of pity for Izzet.

'The money will be ready this evening,' Izzet said.

'Shall we say seven o'clock, then? Good.'

'The effendi will have the documents?'

'Oh yes,' Mister Bowles said. 'I'll have the documents all right.'

'Until this evening then.' Izzet departed, beneath the lofty gaze of the Prussian whoremaster.

'This calls for a drink,' Mister Bowles said. He gave his slow smile, and his eyes widened, in that attractive combination of effects that was becoming familiar to me.

It was not a smile of triumph. There was nothing gloating about it. It seemed rather to express a kind of calm vindication, as if Mister Bowles had made a bold stand for truth and right, and been justified.

'One would almost say,' I said, 'that you had been through this kind of thing before.'

He did not stop smiling, but he looked at me with a more particular attention. 'Good heavens, no,' he said. 'Hardly the kind of thing… Why do you say that?'

'Oh, I don't know,' I said. 'The way you handled it. What about the soldiers?'

'Albanians, by the look of them. They are bivouacked up there, overlooking the site. They didn't lose much time, did they?' He paused. His face had suddenly assumed a look of indignation and contempt. 'They're terrified in case I'm going to cart the stuff off,' he said.

'You wouldn't do that,' I said.

'No, of course not. But you know what these people are like. How about a drink?'

I chose aniseed brandy again, again because of the mezedes. Mister Bowles asked for white wine.

'I am grateful to you for your help,' he said. His eyes looked into mine directly, candidly. 'When things are finally settled,' he said, 'I will see that you are not the loser by it.'

The moment had come. We were sitting opposite each other, with only the narrow table between us. There were other people in the room now, but no one within earshot. Still I hesitated. I was afraid of him, physically afraid. Besides that, in a curious way I was in awe of him, because of his monumental hypocrisy. When people transgress violently against one's conception of them, Excellency, they assert themselves with peculiar vividness, they oblige us to look at them with washed eyes, so to speak. He was so far not what I had thought him that he awed me. Other pictures, former impressions, still clung to him, confusing my mind: the tall stranger momentarily bareheaded among the haggling Greeks; the amphibious lover; the conjuror with the Gladstone bag. His manner was the same as on the evening we met. He showed the same capacity for moral indignation, the same awkward bursts of speech. But it had all to be interpreted somehow differently now. I felt constrained, shy almost, as one would with a stranger.

I am aware that I am about to incriminate myself in your eyes. I should have reported Mister Bowles already. He has changed me. Today, Kourban Bayram, in the year of the Prophet 1286, sitting opposite Mister Bowles the trickster, aware of the commerce of the town proceeding outside, noting with approval that Biron has brought bread with the squid, I knew that this was a turning point in my life. My poor stratagems of the past paled before this one. And it was this knowledge that kept me still silent. I remarked on the heat. I mopped with monogrammed handkerchief the sides of my neck. I drank some of the water that had been brought with my aniseed brandy.

'These people,' Mister Bowles said, and the contempt was back on his face and in his voice. 'They are so absolutely, totally mercenary. There is no spark of… Well, I know it's an old-fashioned word these days, but there doesn't seem to be any concept of honour, among them. It's no wonder the Ottoman Empire is breaking up, if what I've just seen is an example?

It was this piece of insolence that emboldened me, Excellency, drove me to speech. He was taking me for as great a fool as the others.

'That head,' I said. 'You brought it with you.'

'I beg your pardon?'

I speared another pink crisp sliver of squid on my fork. My hands were unsteady. I am the most pacific of mortals, and Mister Bowles is a man acquainted with violence. 'You brought it with you,' I said. 'You didn't find it here.'

Our eyes met now, really I think for the first time fully, my solipsistic brown ones, his enterprising blue. Across the narrow table, across chasms of difference, I saw my image. Then with sudden shyness I glanced away. 'You needn't keep up this pretence with me,' I said.

'Pretence?' he said. 'What are you talking about?' He had paled, or so I thought, under the tan, and I saw his chest move with the deep intake of his breath.

'That head,' I said, 'the head you produced from your bag, with the air of a conjuror if I may say so, that self-same head was in your possession when you set foot on this island, and so by inference were all the other objects which you laid on Mahmoud Pasha's desk.'

I put down the fork and clasped my hands together under the table, in an effort to control their trembling. I kept my eyes away from Mister Bowles, I think out of some kind of tact – I was allowing him time to find a suitable face. When I did look his way again I found him regarding me closely.

'You must have a reason for saying this,' he said.

I told him how I had found the head in his room that evening. Naturally I did not mention the revolver or notebook.

'What were you looking for?' he asked. 'Are you a police agent?'

'I am nothing to do with the police.'

'Some kind of informer, anyway,' he said, with the same contempt.

I felt the blood rush to my face. It was not shame, Excellency – I am proud of my calling. It was partly that even now, perhaps particularly now, I wanted him to like me, to think well of me, and so I was wounded by his disparaging tone. But it was more than this. In those moments, as I paused before replying, all my frustration, all the pain of unjust neglect, rose up in me, led me to betray myself. In a voice I could barely control, I said, 'No, not some kind – the best kind, I am the best kind.'

'An informer,' he said again.

'And you are a swindler,' I said, trying to master my agitation, 'and the laws against that kind of thing are severe in the domains of the Sultan, not to say savage. As in all societies where malpractices are rife. Not to mention the fact that a word from me would certainly be sufficient to spoil your game here, and lose you the money.'

'Swindler?' he said. 'You understand nothing about it. They have impeded my research.'

It was astonishing, even in the rush of my feelings I was checked – he was the same, Excellency: the angry candour of those blue eyes, as if at some impatience with the world for failing to be adequate to his conception; honesty like a sort of suppressed rage in him; the halting yet curiously eloquent manner of his speech, with its awkward pauses and sudden blurts of assertion. It was difficult not to believe all this was genuine, even now.

'You understand nothing,' he repeated. 'I am simply an instrument.'

I did not pay much attention to this remark at the time, being too eager to drive home my advantage. But I remembered it afterwards, and his face saying it.

'At the moment,' I went on, 'time is working in your favour. Time and their greed and what they think of as your stupidity. They are obliged to gamble on your honesty – which I have helped you to establish. Any doubt of this and your scheme falls flat. And so do you. I want two hundred liras.'

He was silent for a full minute. He looked briefly round the room, then his eyes returned to my face, steadied there, as if he was aiming. I did riot like this look of his.

'Have you told anyone else?' he said. 'About finding the head, I mean.'

Fortunately I had anticipated this question. I had, in fact, learned from him. 'No,' I said, 'but I have left a written account of everything, from start to finish, in a sealed envelope, with forwarding instructions in the event of my disappearance or death.'

'I very much doubt it,' Mister Bowles said. 'Still… I'll give you a hundred. You are entitled to something, anyway.'

'A hundred and eighty,' I said, with relief – while bargaining one is safe. 'I won't take a piastre less.'

We argued for some time with that spurious intimacy, a kind of imitation friendship, which such negotiations induce. In the end I exacted a promise of one hundred and fifty liras, contingent of course on the deal with Mahmoud Pasha going through. I promised in my turn to act as intermediary with Izzet this evening, when he comes with the money. And so we parted, he to retire to his room, I to make my way back here.

One hundred and fifty liras! I can hardly believe it. I shall get some new clothes in Constantinople. A couple of silk shirts, a new suit. Then, suitably dressed, I can make my approaches to your officials. A new pair of spectacles too. My present ones do not suit my eyes, as I have explained, and besides the frame has been broken and repaired with wire, so they are unsightly in every sense. Once I have the money I can be on the next boat.

This report will be finished then, of course – my departure will bring it to a natural close. Mister Bowles too will be leaving, and the report has centred on him. This brings us to a very delicate juncture, Excellency. My whole situation has changed in the course of the last few hours, and our relationship, yours and mine, has changed with it. I have realised from the beginning that when you receive this report you will see that my usefulness is over. As an informer, on this island, I am finished. Moreover, in my rage for completeness, in my passion for your acknowledgement, I have revealed to you that on one level-though not the deepest – I have been falsifying my reports for many years. And now, by failing to report Mister Bowles, by turning the situation to my own advantage, I am compounding a felony. If these things became known to you, you would be displeased, you would have me arrested, all access to the archives would then be denied me.

I thought it didn't matter, you see. I thought my life was at an end. One final shape, as perfect as I could make it, wrought at the edge of the abyss, then my body toppling over. But everything is changed now, my life is opening up before me. Some small clerical post perhaps. My needs are few. The remaining years devoted to the collating and editing of my papers… You see how things are, Excellency, I cannot send you this report yet, if ever. For the moment I must simply shelve the question. Out of habit and piety I shall continue to address my words to you. And for the sake of unity of form, of course.

The smell of blood hangs over the island. On my way back I could smell it, thick and heavy in the midday heat. It seems to me that I can smell it still. Here and there blood-sodden patches on the roads. Below the market place a small group had gathered, among them children with round eyes. In their midst a sheep, mute, combed and dressed for death, horns gilded, fleece dyed red with henna. Twisted into the wool were amulets, ribbons, little coloured streamers of paper. She stood for the last time on her four legs, head down, exhausted with terror. I hurried past, to avoid the sight of the killing. But I was helpless to avoid the picturing of it, saw them force the beast over, kneel on her to keep her down, turn her dyed head to the east; saw the cut, and life-blood welling thickly out. Once the cut is made they die without a sound and without a struggle, eyes gently closing.

I was waiting for death like that sheep, until today. Red morocco and gilt lettering. Dedicated of course to you, Excellency.

He did not come. He was not in his room, either. Izzet and I were there punctually at seven, but no Mister Bowles. Izzet had the money in a cloth bag, all ready to hand over. We sat there for ten minutes, making uneasy conversation. Then Mardosian approached us and handed me a sealed envelope. Nothing on the cover. Inside a note for me, very brief, without salutation. 'Unavoidably detained,' he said. 'The troops are still on the site. Tell them I refuse to negotiate until these troops are removed. Tell them it is a matter of principle.' Small neat writing. His signature at the end. I looked up dazed from this to meet Izzet's peering gaze. 'He can't come,' I said.