The Two Faces of January (3 page)

Rydal walked slowly back to Niko and bought two lottery tickets. “Who was your friend?” Rydal asked.

“Who?” asked Niko, smiling and showing his lead-framed front tooth, next to it a gap.

“The American who just bought a sponge,” Rydal said.

“Ah. I don't know. Never saw him before this morning. Nice guy. Gave me extra twenty drachs.” Niko shifted and the sponges swayed. The broad, dirty-white gym shoes, all that was visible of him below the panoply of sponges, did slow ups and downs like the feet of a restless elephant. “Why you ask?”

“Oh, I dunno,” said Rydal.

“Plenty lettuce,” said Niko.

Rydal smiled. He had taught Niko the word lettuce, and a lot of other slang words for money, a subject Niko was very interested in. “But you couldn't get rid of the hot stuff to him?”

“Reed?” asked Niko, puzzled.

Niko knew “hot stuff,” but not “rid.” “Couldn't sell him any jewelry?”

“Ah!” Niko waved a barely visible hand among the sponges, laughing with a sudden and uncharacteristic embarrassment. “He think it over, he say.”

“What was it?”

“Pearls.” After a glance to either side of him, Niko pulled a hand out and displayed a circle of pearls, a two-row bracelet on his wide, soiled palm.

Rydal nodded, and the pearls disappeared again. “How much?”

“To you—four hundred dollars.”

“Ugh,” Rydal said automatically, though they were worth it. “Well, good luck with the rich American.”

“He be back,” said Niko.

And Niko was probably right, Rydal thought. Niko had been a fence or a messenger for fences since childhood, and he could size people up. Then Rydal realized that there had been something vaguely dishonest looking about the ruddy American, even in the few seconds Rydal had seen him talking to Niko. Rydal could not quite say what it was. At first glance, he looked a jolly, talkative type, open as a child. But he'd certainly had a furtive manner as he walked towards his hotel. The man probably would come back and buy the bracelet from Niko, and what honest or even reasonably cautious person would buy real pearls from a street peddler of sponges? Perhaps the man was a gambler, Rydal thought. It was a funny incongruity, to look so much like his father, Professor Lawrence Aldington Keener of the Department of Archaeology at Harvard, who had never dreamt of doing anything faintly illegal, a veritable pillar of respectability, and to be possibly a gambler, a crook of some sort.

It was three days before Rydal saw the ruddy American again. Rydal had forgotten about him, or if he had thought of him once in that time, had supposed he had moved on somewhere; and then, one noon, Rydal ran into him at the Benaki Museum among the costume exhibits. He was with a woman, a young and quite chic American woman, almost but not quite too young to look like the man's wife. From the way the man solicitously and affectionately touched her elbow now and then, the good-natured way he strolled about and chatted with her as she looked, with obvious pleasure, at the embroidered skirts and blouses on the glass-enclosed dummies, Rydal thought that they were either married pretty recently or were lovers. The man carried his hat in his hand, and Rydal could see the shape of his head now, high at the back like his father's head, the hair above his temples receding as his father's hair had receded, like an ebbing tide following the contour of a shore. His voice was deep and resonant, a bit more taut than his father's. He chuckled easily. Then, after perhaps five minutes, the woman looked directly at Rydal, and Rydal's heart stopped for an instant, then beat faster. Rydal blinked and looked away from her, but looked at the man, who, seeing him, frowned slightly, his lips parted in surprise. Rydal turned, slowly walked to a case full of jeweled scimitars and daggers, and bent over it.

Less than a minute later, the man and woman were gone. The man certainly thought he was trailing him, watching him, Rydal thought; he'd made the man uneasy, and Rydal had an impulse to go to the King's Palace Hotel, wait for him, just to assure him he meant him no harm and that he wasn't and hadn't been shadowing him. Then that struck him as, after all, uncalled for and a bit silly, and Rydal decided to do nothing about it. Rydal walked slowly out of the museum, feeling suddenly lonely, sad, and vaguely discouraged. He knew now what had struck him about the young woman, but it was irritating and disturbing that his heart had known before his brain, or his memory. She had the same sexy comehitherness, the same soft, plumpish charm that his cousin Agnes had had at fifteen.

“Son of a bitch,” Rydal whispered as he walked down a broad avenue. “Son of a bitch,” to no one, and with no one in particular in mind.

The woman had blue eyes, anyway, and Agnes's were brown. Agnes's hair was dark brown, and this woman's was reddish. But there was something. What was it? The mouth? Yes, a little bit. But most of all just the expression in the eyes, he thought. He hadn't fallen for it since, Rydal assured himself. But had he seen it since? No, he hadn't. Well, it was a funny thing, a man who looked like his father's twin brother, in the company of a woman who had called up Agnes to him, straight and fast as a light turned on in his face, or a knife that laid his heart wide open. It had been ten whole years ago. He had been fifteen. So much had happened in the ten years since. Now he was supposed to be a mature man. He remembered Proust's remark, that people do not grow emotionally. It was a rather frightening thought.

That night, the night of Pan's party in his family's house over by Hadrian's Library, Rydal drank a few more glasses of ouzo than he needed, and found himself thinking of the ruddy-faced American—his father twenty years ago—making love in bed to the plump woman whose reddish hair and blue eyes kept changing to Agnes's brown hair and brown eyes. But the soft red lips were the same. Rydal was inclined to be ill-tempered at the party. He tried to be very careful in the last hour to make up for a cutting remark he had made to Pan's girl friend. The next morning, with a slight hangover, he wrote a four-line poem about “the marble ghost” of his boyhood love.

Monday, he went by bus for the fifth or sixth time to Delphi and spent the day.

The memory of the pink-cheeked American and his beddable wife still nagged at him. He was exaggerating the resemblance, he was sure, especially the resemblance of the woman to Agnes. He decided that he should see them once more, look at them straight on from a distance of just a few feet, and he felt that something would happen, the spell would be broken, the illusion dispelled. If he asked their hotel clerk, he would find out they were Mr. and Mrs. Johnson from Vincennes, Indiana. Or Mr. and Mrs. Smith of St. Petersburg, Florida. They would never have heard of anybody named Keener.

3

Chester had been reassured on his third day in Athens by a letter that came from his man in Milwaukee, Bob Gambardella. It said, in part:

Dear Mac,

No news is good news and that's the way it is. Seven new subscribers this week and the proceeds as usual deposited, less my commission. Shall be expecting your dividend instructions shortly on Canadian Star's semi-annual. . . .

It meant that Bob had had no trouble as yet from the police. This was the second letter from Bob, and he'd had one in Paris from Vic, his salesman in Dallas. The police hadn't come around to Vic or Bob asking them if they knew a Howard Cheever or a William S. Haight or, thank God, a Chester MacFarland. Wm S. Haight was the name Chester stamped on his dividend checks as Treasurer of the Canadian Star Company, Inc. Seven new subscribers was quite good, Chester thought, considering he had written Bob last month not to make any effort to get new people until further notice. Bob might have taken in fifty thousand dollars from the seven people, perhaps more. Certificates were issued to the stock buyers, dividends were paid in modest but regular amounts, and if the stock never did quite get on the Canadian exchange in the newspapers, so long as the stockholders got their dividends, why should they complain? Bob and Vic, when talking a prospect into buying, always said they were letting him in on a new thing that was going to be listed in a few months, when the stock would certainly start skyrocketing. So it went, too, with Unimex, Valco-Tech, Universal Key—sometimes Chester could not remember them all. Once in a while, if a stockholder asked too many questions in his letters, Chester would instruct one of his representatives in Dallas, St. Louis or San Francisco to get on the telephone to the man and offer to buy his stock for more than he paid for it, and to give a pitch for some new stock. Nine times out of ten, the suspicious people would hang on to their old stock and buy the new also. Physically, the land on which the Canadian Star stock was founded did exist, it was simply worth very little, and very probably had no uranium in it. It was up in northern Canada—Chester or his boiler-room men could tell the customers just where to look for it on the map—and they made it sound as if uranium was going to come pouring out as soon as the engineers made a few more calculations as to where to dig. Actually, on the back of the stock contract, some very fine print near the bottom stated that the land was “being explored at present”, and it did not say for what. And the stock company could not be prosecuted for its intentions or hopes, which were certainly to find uranium.

The Unimex Company was a non-existent offshore oil concern around the Texas and Mexico border. It had brought in over a million dollars on stock Chester offered over the counter at eight dollars per share. Chester had certified financial statements showing Unimex's assets to be worth six million dollars, and he had even had New York brokers sent to inspect certain sites in the Gulf of Mexico, which, however, were owned by other people. Chester had bought a very small abandoned site, but he laid claim to a hundred square miles around it. Unimex and Canadian Star were now Chester's chief sources of income.

After a few days in Greece, Chester found that he breathed more easily. He enjoyed the strange meals at tavernas, the little oily dishes of this and that, washed down with ouzo or a bottle of wine that usually neither of them liked, though Chester always finished it. Colette bought five pairs of shoes, and Chester had a suit made of English tweed in a fraction of the time and for less than half what it would have cost him in the States. Still, it was a habit, a nervous habit, for him to glance around the hotel lobby to see if there were anyone who looked like a police agent. He doubted if they would send a man over for him, but the F.B.I. had representatives abroad, he supposed. All they would need was a photograph, the collected testimony of a few swindled people, and, by checking with the passport authorities, they could discover his name.

In their six days in Athens, Chester and Colette had gone twice to the Acropolis with their
Guide Bleu,
had taken a bus to see the sunset at Sounion and Byron's famous signature in one of the marble columns of the ruined temple there, had done the main museums, gone once to the theatre—just to go, because they hadn't understood a thing about the play—and had made their plans for the rest of the country. The Peloponnesus was next, with Mycenae and Corinth, for which they planned to rent a car, and then Crete and Rhodes. Then back by plane to Paris for another week or so before going home. They were apartmentless in New York now, did not want to live in Manhattan again, and they planned to buy a house either in Connecticut or northern Pennsylvania.

Around six o'clock of the evening before their departure for Corinth and Mycenae, Chester went out of the hotel for a few minutes to buy a bottle of Dewar's. When he walked back into the lobby, he noticed a dark man, in a grey overcoat and hat, standing with his hands in his overcoat pockets near one of the cream-colored columns that supported the ceiling. The man had thick black eyebrows, and Chester could not be sure the man looked at him, but he thought so. Chester looked away, glanced around him quickly, and noticed the young man in the dark overcoat he had twice seen before, standing now near the door and smoking a cigarette. Agents, Chester thought. His eyes had been drawn to the man in the grey overcoat as a result of conditioning, he knew; though because he had felt so secure the last couple of days, his habit of glancing around the lobby had left him. He'd suspected that the younger man was an agent, and now he was sure. Chester went casually over to the hotel desk and gave the message he had intended to give when he came in:

“We'll be leaving tomorrow pretty early. Can you make up our bill so we can settle it tonight? That's MacFarland in six twenty-one.” His voice lowered involuntarily, but only a little, on “MacFarland”.

As Chester walked on to the elevator, the older man moved, following him. The elevator arrived and the door slid open, and, being closest, Chester went into the elevator first. The man followed, removing his hat. Chester kept his on.

“Six, please,” said Chester.

The boy running the elevator glanced at the man.

“Seex,” said the man.

A Greek, Chester thought. He felt perhaps one degree better. The man had a thick, somewhat Semitic nose, black and grey hair, and his face was pock-marked. Chester got out at the sixth floor and the man followed him. Chester was just raising his hand to knock on his door, when the man said:

“Pardon me. You are, I think, Richard Donlevy?”

The name meant Atlanta to Chester. The Suwannee Club. “No,” said Chester blankly.

“Or—Louis Ferguson?”

That was Miami. Chester shook his head. “No. Sorry.”

“You are travelling with your wife, yes? May I have a few words with you in your room, sir?”

“Why? What's all this about?”

“Perhaps nothing,” the man said with a smile. “I represent the Greek police. I should like to ask you a few questions.”

Chester looked down at the billfold the man had opened. In a window of it was an authentic-looking card covered with Greek print and signatures, and, in heavy black letters in the middle of it,
GREEK NATIONAL POLICE
. If he refused to talk to him, Chester thought, it might make matters worse. “All right,” Chester said indifferently, and knocked.

The door opened at once, but only a crack. Colette was in her dressing-gown.

“Excuse me, dear,” Chester said. “I'm with a gentleman who wants to talk to me a moment. May we come in?”

“Why, of course,” said Colette, but her face had gone a little pale.

They went in. Colette wrapped her dressing-gown closer about her, and stepped back near the chest of drawers.

The Greek agent bowed to her. “Madam. Forgive my intrusion.” He turned to Chester. “May I ask under what name you are registered here?”

Chester drew himself up and frowned. “What's this about? What right have you to ask me that?”

The man pulled from his overcoat pocket a small looseleaf notebook, opened it to a certain page and extended it to Chester. “This is not you?”

Chester's heart stumbled. It was a photograph of himself, fuzzy from enlargement but still recognizable, laughing, with a highball glass in his hand. It was from a group photograph of the dinner guests at the Suwannee Club maybe three years ago, when he'd been Richard Donlevy, with more hair and no moustache then, and he'd been selling some kind of stock. Selling what? He'd forgotten. Chester shook his head. “That's not me. I see some resemblance, but . . . I don't know what you're trying to say.”

“It is in regard to various—how do you say—investment matters in the United States,” said the agent, still calm and pleasant. “I have not the details with me, and it is not my place to say them now, if I knew. I am only working in cooperation with the American authorities, who suspected you were in Europe.”

A chill of panic passed over Chester and did not quite leave him. They were on to him in the States. Someone had tried to put up his stocks as collateral or something like that, and had been told they were phony. Or perhaps it was even the Walkie Kar. He looked at Colette and saw his own fear leap to her face for an instant, then she controlled herself and gave him a quick smile. “But you're looking for somebody with another name, you told me,” Chester said.

“Various names. It does not much matter. You will please to come with me, anyway, to answer some questions, will you?” the man asked with an air of being very sure that Chester was going to come with him.

“No. Why should I? It's your mistake,” said Chester, taking off his overcoat.

Colette came forward, lifted the notebook in the agent's hand, studied the picture, and said, “Why, that's not my husband.”

“Madam, under what name are you both registered here? It is the easiest thing in the world for me to find out. I shall simply call down and ask who is in room six twenty-one.”

Colette looked at him, and said in her high, young voice, “I don't think that's any of your business.”

“I would like you to know that I am armed. I should not like to have to take you away at gun-point.” The Greek agent's black eyebrows came down in a puzzled way as he looked at Chester.

Chester shrugged, not moving from where he stood. He was glancing around the room, however, as if he might find a weapon in some corner with which to defend himself.

The Greek walked quickly towards the telephone.

Chester darted for the bathroom.

“Stop!” the agent said. “I have a gun!”

Chester glanced behind him, saw the man running towards him with a gun pointed, and calculated that he wouldn't use it. He leapt to the tub edge and yanked the window up. It was sticky and moved only about eight inches.

“Chester!” Colette cried.

The man pulled at Chester's jacket tail, and Chester looked over his shoulder, raised his left foot and kicked backward, catching the fellow in the pit of the stomach. He got down from the tub edge, and, before the man could straighten up, Chester hit him on the back of the neck. The man's forehead banged against the rim of the basin. Chester swung him up again, hit him on the jaw and knocked him into the tub. He started to pull him up for another blow, and realized he was out cold.

Chester stood with his fists clenched, panting.

“My God!” Colette was standing in the bathroom doorway. “You're all right, darling?”

Chester nodded. He picked up the agent's gun, which had fallen on the bathroom floor. A drinking glass had been knocked down, and there were pieces of glass on the tiles. Chester kicked one nervously with the side of his shoe.

“I'll clean that up,” Colette said.

“Got to get him out of here,” Chester murmured, “before that other agent—there's another one downstairs.”

“Really?” Colette gasped. “Let's see. The balcony?”

There was a balcony outside their windows that ran the length of the hotel. “No. He's going to come to in a couple of minutes. I'll think of something. Start packing us up, will you, honey? We've got to get out of here tonight.”

Colette hurried out of her dressing-gown, pushed it into a suit-case and grabbed the skirt of a dark suit that was hanging over a chair.

“I've got it!” Chester said, and took one of the man's limp arms.

“What?”

“There's a store-room down the hall.” Chester heaved the man across his shoulder. “Red light over it. Saw it one night when I was looking for a loo and you were in the tub. Uff! Guy's heavy.” Chester staggered across the room with him. “Take a look in the hall. See if there's—”

Colette nodded and quickly opened the door an inch or two. “Someone at the elevator.”

“Damn,” Chester said, and tightened his hold on the man's wrists. “He's going to come to before I can—” But that tub was hard, Chester realized, and so was the basin. In fact, the fellow could be dead. With this thought, Chester's strength ebbed, and he let the man down gently to the carpet. He was about to say something to Colette about feeling for a pulse, when Colette said:

“It's okay now. Nobody in sight.”

Chester summoned his strength and hoisted him again. Dead or not, he thought, the store-room was the best place for him. If he were dead—Well, Chester had never seen him before. Someone else had killed him. The man had never knocked on his door, never said a word to him. Chester went on towards the door with the little red light over it, praying it would be open as it had been before.

Then, from around the corridor corner in front of him, the other agent appeared, and stopped short in surprise. Chester stared at him, paralyzed. The young man's mouth had opened slightly, and Chester saw the start of a faint smile—of satisfaction, sarcasm? Chester expected him to pull a gun. His right hand hung empty, his left carried a newspaper. The young man advanced.